This is how Gülseren Ölcüm phrases the content of her episode in the ARD Mediathek: “Drugs as a cure for the soul? Gülseren Ölcüm meets activists who use psychedelics to expand their consciousness. And doctors who want to use them to treat the mentally ill. They are fighting for easier access. Some of them go further than the law allows.”
At INSIGHT 2021, scientists and therapists, pharmaceutical industry and anthropology, philosophers, and chemists will come together to determine the potential place of LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA, and other psychedelic substances in the treatment of mental disorders. In addition, we will discuss the use of non-pharmacological methods to alter and cultivate states of consciousness and all that it takes to build such unusual states of consciousness a legitimate and safe place in society.
“For anyone who wants to get a differentiated picture”.
Alcohol, coke, pills – the list of available drugs is long, and so is the list of addictions. “Being High” is a handbook that casts a nuanced picture on drugs of all kinds. “We have a very dysfunctional relationship with the people who use them,” author Henrik Jungaberle told Dlf.
Henrik Jungaberle in a Corso conversation with Ulrich Biermann
Ecstasy derives from the Greek and means something like “being outside oneself” and “stepping out,” which means a temporary shifting of the personal coordinate system. This holds the chance of a new perspective, but also the danger of losing oneself. The general characteristics of altered states of waking consciousness include changes in self-, world-, and time-perception, especially emotionalization, intensification of visual and auditory experience, bodily perceptions, and intensified experience of meaning. As a rule, in such states the experience shifts away from the ego-like controlled, to the intoxicating being carried in a stream of fragmentary inner events. It is precisely this passive “being carried” that can have a seductive and “habituating” quality for unstable people.
The conference “The Internationalization of Ayahuasca” combined discussions about emic and etic perspectives on Ayahuasca practices. Participants debated about the status of this Amazonian brew as it continued its expansion throughout the world.