Opium not as interesting as money for the parliament, even as…
Reading various Blue Books and the like, parliamentary reports. This one on the East India Company struck me as typical, though the clipped coins distraction is of course…
Reading various Blue Books and the like, parliamentary reports. This one on the East India Company struck me as typical, though the clipped coins distraction is of course…
[JH comment: now if you were plying the illicit opium trade on behalf of dodgy East India Company officials, you’d also need to stop by the Tavern and…
Opium dens taking over galleries has a perfect beauty. I was reminded telling a friend about this and thought it was time once again for another promo…
I’ve developed a really nerdy, but kickass, superpower. Give me twenty minutes of one-on-one conversation time with a person, any person, and they will come out of that…
As practices associated with the use of ayahuasca grow in popularity, so do concerns about the appropriation of Indigenous traditions. Barbara Fraser Jens Kossmagk gazed into the darkness…
Apparently on sale at National Trust sites are mugs with this marking underneath. Thanks Katherine S for the pointer. My view is to welcome this as an historically…
When it kicks in, it feels like meeting an old friend for the first time. – Daniel, 34 Few drugs are as misunderstood and stigmatized as GHB (except for…
With my gaze fixed on the horizon, I stood at the bow of a ferry that carried me across the Strait of Gibraltar. One by one, the peaks…
Researchers at NYU and Johns Hopkins Universities have found that a single dose of the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, psilocybin, can diminish depression and anxiety related to…
Psychedelia is the culture and experiences of psychedelic substances. Where did all the research on psychedelic drugs go? Could psychedelics be used in psychotherapy? How are hallucinogenic drugs…
better voting projections with ethnography Anthropologist and writer for the Financial Times, Gillian Tett argues that U.S. election polling would have benefited from ethnography: “…poll…
Are balance and movement something that can be culturally shaped? Why aren’t female rats being used in drug studies? In this episode of This Anthropological Life we team…
Begging Wars. This ghastly bin-hoarding in Nottingham – truly ideological but with colour palette decisions that are more spurious than the ten levels of prejudice this Police ad…
Cool kids. On a rainy afternoon towards the end of my fieldwork in Qilin, southwest China, I sat with one of my informants, Jiao Hua – a round,…
I talked to a lot of middle-class recreational drug users for my research. None of them had any idea when they were younger that they’d end up dropping…
There’s a term that comes up pretty frequently when talking about electronic music events. A search within my interviews (excepts from which are quoted here) and field notes…
For El Señor On January 8 I followed – along with perhaps most of the world’s population connected to the net – the coverage of the recapture of the man…
NOTE: I will not be discussing my regular research topic (drug use) in this post, out of respect to the organizers of Harvest. All names have been changed.…
Like most academics, I’m obsessive. I spend a lot of my free time doing searches for new research on recreational drug use. I do this partly because there’s…
I’ve found it highly interesting to hear drug users trash talk other drugs, even while they’re high on their own preferred substance. Gina* thinks that alcohol is the…
The experience of getting inside Sound Academy for Armin van Buuren was the low point of the night. After an evening of rain and dancing at the electronic…
My heart dropped into my stomach when I first saw the announcement. Fireworks and junk during Zedd’s finale. “You’re welcome for this 3-second photo op,” thought the cleanup…
Most of what I knew about psytrance (psychedelic trance) raves before I actually went to one came from this article in Vice: Psytrance really is a counter-culture in…