Hallucinogens and Medicine

The present revised edition of the book Encyclopaedia of World Medicinal Plants gives an account of medicinal uses of plants of all the countries on planet earth. Medicinal uses of more than 4,000 species are given in the book. The species are arranged alphabetically. Under each plant the valid name, synonyms, family, brief description (for identification), distribution in the world and India, flowering and fruiting season, Sanskrit name, local names, trade name, names in other languages, medicinal uses and chemistry are given.

The Gale Encyclopedia of Alternative Medicine presents unbiased information on alternative and complementary medical practices. Nearly 750 entries are included in the Encyclopedia covering therapies, diseases/conditions, and herbs/remedies.

In Native American Medicinal Plants, anthropologist Daniel E. Moerman describes the medicinal use of more than 2700 plants by 218 Native American tribes. Information—adapted from the same research used to create the monumental Native American Ethnobotany—includes 82 categories of medicinal uses, ranging from analgesics, contraceptives, gastrointestinal aids, hypotensive medicines, sedatives, and toothache remedies.

Researchers, program administrators, and practicing clinicians explain the most recent developments in using psychedelic substances to treat psychological, physiological, and social problems. More than a decade ago, the U.S. government lifted its ban on all testing of psychedelic substances. Winkelman and Sessa now provide updated scientific research and applications of these substances, now moving into approved categories of medicine.

The Ayahuasca Reader: Encounters with the Amazon's Sacred Vine is a panorama of texts translated from nearly a dozen languages on the ayahuasca experience. These include indigenous mythic narratives, testimonies, and religious hymns, as well as stories related by Western travelers, scientists, and writers who have had contact with ayahuasca in different contexts.

Khat, marijuana, peyote—are these dangerous drugs or vilified plants with rich cultural and medical values? In this book, Lisa Gezon brings the drug debate into the 21st century, proposing criteria for evaluating psychotropic substances. Focusing on khat, whose bushy leaves are an increasingly popular stimulant and the target of vehement anti-drug campaigns, she explores biocultural and socioeconomic contexts on local, national, and global levels.

A definitive history of mescaline that explores its mind-altering effects across cultures, from ancient America to Western modernity...Drawing on botany, pharmacology, ethnography, and the mind sciences and examining the mescaline experiences of figures from William James to Walter Benjamin to Hunter S. Thompson, this is an enthralling narrative of mescaline's many lives.

In the borderland of science and religion, Neuropsychedelia explores the tensions between the use of hallucinogens to model psychoses and to evoke spiritual experiences in laboratory settings. Its protagonists, including the anthropologist himself, struggle to find a place for the mystical under conditions of late-modern materialism.

The hallucinogenic and medicinal effects of peyote have a storied history that begins well before Europeans arrived in the Americas...For nearly four centuries ecclesiastical, legal, scientific, and scholarly authorities have tried (unsuccessfully) to police that boundary to ensure that, while indigenous subjects might consume peyote, others could not. Moving back and forth across the U.S.-Mexico border, The Peyote Effect explores how battles over who might enjoy a right to consume peyote have unfolded in both countries, and how these conflicts have produced the racially exclusionary systems that characterize modern drug regimes.

Psychedelic Drug Treatments provides information about current and quite viable investigations into reviving and progressing with neurological research that began in the middle of the 20th century and was brought to a halt when certain drugs were banned in the 1970s. Using a question/answer format, the book will introduce you to the way in which the chemical compounds known as psychedelics affect the brain, provide you with the definitions of key terms particular to the neurological and psychological vocabulary, describe the specific disorders that can realistically be helped or relieved through treatment with psychedelics, and offer information with regard to current research being conducted in the field.

Psychedelic substances present in nature have been used by humans across hundreds of years to produce mind-altering changes in thought, mood, and perception―changes we do not experience otherwise except rarely in dreams, religious exaltation, or psychosis. U.S. scientists were studying the practical and therapeutic uses for hallucinogens, including LSD and mescaline, in the 1950s and 1960s supplied by large manufacturers including Sandoz. But the government took steps to ban all human consumption of hallucinogens, and thus the research. By the 1970s, all human testing was stopped. Medical concerns were not the issue, the ban was motivated by social concerns, not the least of which were created by legendary researcher Timothy Leary, a psychologist who advocated free use of hallucinogens by all who desired. Nationwide, however, a cadre of scholars and researchers has persisted in pushing the federal government to again allow human testing and the moratorium has been lifted. The FDA has begun approving hallucinogenic research using human subjects. In these groundbreaking volumes, top researchers explain the testing and research underway to use―under the guidance of a trained provider―psychedelic substances for better physical and mental health.

Chronicling the practices, legends, and wisdom of the vanishing traditions of the upper Amazon, this book reveals the area's indigenous peoples' approach to living in harmony with the natural world.

The true story of how a renowned writer's struggle with mood storms led her to try a remedy as drastic as it is forbidden: microdoses of LSD. Her revealing, fascinating journey provides a window into one family and the complex world of a once-infamous drug seen through new eyes.

After LSD arrived in the United States in 1949, the drug's therapeutic promise quickly captured the interests of psychiatrists. In the decade that followed, modern psychopharmacology was born and research into the drug's perceptual and psychological effects boomed. By the early 1960s, psychiatrists focused on a particularly promising treatment known as psychedelic therapy: a single, carefully guided, high-dose LSD session coupled with brief but intensive psychotherapy. Researchers reported an astounding 50 percent success rate in treating chronic alcoholism, as well as substantial improvement in patients suffering from a range of other disorders. Yet despite this success, LSD officially remained an experimental drug only. Research into its effects, psychological and otherwise, dwindled before coming to a close in the 1970s. In The Trials of Psychedelic Therapy, Matthew Oram traces the early promise and eventual demise of LSD psychotherapy in the United States.