Rachael is a writer and environmental consultant who advises nonprofits and foundations on climate change. With an expertise in tropical forests, Rachael has conducted fieldwork in the Brazilian and Ecuadorian Amazon, Borneo, Uganda and elsewhere. After almost a decade in climate policy, Rachael has turned her attention to the spiritual implications of our current ecological crises. Rachael stumbled into psychedelics as a participant in a psilocybin clinical trial for major depression. Her writing excavates the potential risks, rewards, and societal implications of medicalizing and commercializing mysticism. Her work interrogates the intersection of the mystical and the moral, and envisions the role of non-ordinary states of consciousness in current and future forms of religion. Rachael explores these themes as a Junior Fellow at Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions.
June 14, 2016
Most of the information the “D.A.R.E. generation” was taught in school was sensationalized, exaggerated, or simply factually incorrect (typically all three).
June 21, 2016
Psychedelic users and sexual minorities are both involved in the same struggle. We both represent a valid threat to the same obsolete control mechanisms. We are on the same team.
July 6, 2016
Regardless of what conclusions we draw, the topic of psychedelics and identity politics is important at a time when public assumptions about psychedelics are transforming.
July 11, 2016
Fifteen years ago at the age of 15, I attended a house party where I was traumatically gang raped. I was so ashamed, humiliated, and terrified that I never spoke about it again. Until recently.
July 14, 2016
‘Co-production’ refers to processes in which a range of experts and non-experts are enrolled as researchers and attempt to generate knowledge together.
July 19, 2016
Pacquiao’s drive to reinstate capital punishment for drug crimes is in line with President Duterte: “If you know of any addicts, go ahead and kill them yourself, as getting their parents to do it would be too painful.”
July 21, 2016
Inspired by a scientific study showing that psilocybin mushrooms can potentially cure OCD, Adam Strauss embarked on vigilante psychopharmacology.
July 28, 2016
The LSD rushed through my gums and into my jaw at the same time the bitter drip of MDA slowly ran down the back of my throat. I didn’t exactly understand what was happening nor did I care because I was excited.
August 9, 2016
Legalization should mean everyone has the right to grow, not just some people or corporations with money looking to profit.
August 15, 2016
In this interview I talk with Dorion Sagan about whether his father Carl Sagan used LSD, his mother Lynn Margulis’s paradigm-changing theory of symbiogenesis, her thoughts on psychedelics, and his new book Cracking the Aging Code: The New Science of Growing Old-And What It Means for Staying Young.