Psychedelics

Wednesday

Cockburn

Jada Pinkett Smith got her family into psychedelics

Cockburn doesn’t have any acknowledged children, but if he did, he’d like to think that he wouldn’t give them drugs. Any normal parent that gave their kids drugs would end up with a social worker, or potentially prison time. But Jada Pinkett Smith, wife of Will, isn't just any old mother.  Her son Jaden Smith recently let slip that his mom was the reason for their family’s psychedelic drug usage. “I think it was my mom, actually, that was really the first one to make that step for the family,” the rapper said at the Psychedelic Science conference in Denver this week, as reported by USA Today. He added, “It was just her for a really, really long time and then eventually it just trickled and evolved and everybody found it in their own ways.

jada pinkett smith

Monday

Birdie Hall

How LSD helped me find God

The first time I took LSD was alone on Christmas Day in a snowed-in Montana cabin. I watched my skin crawl and the walls melt. It was the first time since childhood I didn’t hate my own body, and a nice break from the depressing bioethics I was studying in school. I took deep breaths and stretched. As the effects took hold, I watched illustrations fly out from a gorgeous, tattered copy of Mark Twain’s biography of Joan of Arc. Four hours later, after smoking an entire pack of cigarettes, I was convinced I was descending to hell. I watched fake flames lick the yellow wallpaper. It was miserable and listening to Nick Cave didn’t help. At dinner with friends later that night, the elk roast resembled human meat and the bread rolls made to commemorate St.

lsd

Thursday

Jessa Crispin

Power couple

By now we know that there are creeps and abusers in pretty much any industry that exists today. In the world of podcasts, the question appears to be: are we really going to create an investigatory series detailing the horrors lurking within every single one? Yes — of course — seems like the resounding answer. New York magazine has launched a new podcast, Cover Story: Power Trip, and its first season is devoted to rooting out the predators and boundary-crossers of one extremely minor occupational field: the psychedelic therapeutic community.

power

Monday

James Jeffrey

Blowing my mind in the Electric Forest

Rothbury, Michigan exists in a similarly strange duality to the small towns of Woodstock in New York and Glastonbury in Somerset on the other side of the Atlantic. It is a village of little consequence once you separate it from the famous music festival associated with it. But when the electronic dance music (EDM) extravaganza Electric Forest happens, Rothbury — 432 inhabitants, according to the 2010 Census — gets its annual day in the sun. The hatchet-faced Michigan state troopers, standing to mark the turnoff from the main road through the village toward the festival didn’t return our eager waves from the car. But the smoldering opprobrium of The Man was soon forgotten amid the fields and woodlands of the Double JJ Resort that braves hosting the festival.

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