I had a rough Friday night and arrived to the conference late on Saturday afternoon. I missed the opening two lectures, which was a shame because that included Bill Richards' talk and he is a fascinating individual. Still, I arrived during the lunch break which meant I had a chance to get a great seat for Alicia Danforth's presentation of her experience with the UCLA terminal cancer anxiety project, treating terminal cancer patients with psilocybin. She made many excellent points, especially that this kind of a study goes against a) the basis of many health professional's perception of the hippocratic oath (that do no harm means keep people alive) and b) the motivations of the pharmaceutical industry in that the goal of a study such as this is not to keep people alive and pumped full of drugs but to help them come to terms with their deaths.
I want to share with you a couple of stories in particular because, after all, the point of this conference was for us all to commune and then spread back into our lives and tell what we had heard.
One woman who had no prior yoga or meditation experience was in the study because she wanted to deal with some OCD issues that had arisen due to her inability to cope with her inevitable death. During the psilocybin experience she was patting certain parts of her body with both hands repetitively and the doctors realized that rather than be expressions of OCD, that she seemed to be engaged in self-reiki-healing, and that she was systematically touching each of her chakras. She later assumed a hindu mudra pose that signals openness to reception of divine energy/communication. All of this came to her as second nature.
I found this very profound because long before I began taking yoga classes and developing my own yogic practice (which is still essentially in its infancy), I found that at the tail end of many DMT and LSD experiences I would be most comfortable assuming poses that, later on I would realize were yoga poses. These came to this research subject as second nature.
There was another woman who had tongue cancer and her face was completely fried on the lower portion from focused chemotherapy. It was incredibly painful for her to talk. In order to undergo the therapy, she had to take herself off of SSRI's and she realized a couple weeks off of them what they had been doing for her - she was terribly depressed. After the psilocybin experience, she called the doctor to tell her over the phone - keep in mind, speaking for her is an incredibly painful experience but she wanted to speak to the doctor with her voice to tell her this - she decided not to go back on SSRI's and stayed off of Zoloft until her eventual death.
Powerful testimonials.
Steve Ross followed with a presentation on the rigors and trials of setting up a clinical study. His NYU study has 2 subjects now, a third on the way, and will swell to somewhere between 20 and 40, also terminal cancer anxiety studies. His projections for the future studies and prospects for psilocybin were optimistic indeed. He said he believed the next step would be to get psilocybin not to Schedule II, but to Schedule III, such as ketamine.
After a break, Valerie Mojeiko from MAPS presented on how to approach a bad trip - essentially, the message was, you don't talk someone down from a bad trip and tell them they're fine as if you are defining their experience, you help them talk through it, work through it.
After Valerie came the incredible presentation by Earth and Fire Erowid, whose talk I can barely even do justice. They were *incredible*.
Finally there was a panel discussion that I think exposed one weakness in the psychedelic community...namely, crackpots in the audience. I may be one of them - I asked my own crackpot, rambling question today and felt embarrassed about it! Anywho, great panel discussion anyway.
Today, Sunday, had three speakers and a panel discussion. First was Dr. Andy Letcher, a charismatic British researcher and author who wrote Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom. I wish the entire Shroomery had heard his talk, and I plan on reading that book.
What Dr. Letcher warned against, and what so many people on this website and in the forum I moderate are guilty of, is looking for evidence for something you want to be true - namely the idea, widely espoused in psychedelic circles and deeply ingrained at this point, that mushrooms are at the heart of the development of all religion. He spent a lot of time debunking a lot of myths regarding mushrooms and their interplay with society and with religion. He also pointed out something I had no idea about. We're all familiar with this image, correct?
THis image was popularized by Terence McKenna and put forth as a reproduction of an actual rock carving from the Tassili plateau. HEre's the thing - it's a re-drawing of a very faint actual drawing from the rock plateau. Do you know who made the above drawing? Kat McKenna, Terence's wife a fact not hidden or anything, it's right there on the image.. But he showed us the original image. And a lot of the psychedelic swirls and accentuated mushroom shapes are her own interpretive additions. Truth.
He also expressed my own feelings on 2012 rather perfectly when expressing his own, namely not only discrediting the apocalyptic talk as hogwash but also saying that his personal relationship with spirituality and with psychedelics is one trying to get away from the sort of Millenarian Judeo-Christian gloom that we've all been raised in, and towards a vision of the future that is constantly growing and positive.
After him was Bob Jesse - Bob Jesse is a hero of mine, both for what he's done, founding the Council of Spiritual Practices, and also for the way he carries himself and speaks about very difficult things, namely spirituality and religion. I urge you all to get to know the CSP - http://www.csp.org - and utilize their resources, reading material, in your own explorations of your relationships to entheogens.
Finally there was Bob Wold, founder of Clusterbusters. For reasons I won't go into here, this really made me smile, but it was also very informative. I had very scant ideas about the true torment of Cluster Headaches, and also about the efficacy of indole alkaloids in their treatment. A highly informative session.
There was one more panel discussion after that. I asked the panelists to riff on the idea of counter-culture vs. working with existing frameworks/systems, but none of them had much to say on that topic.  Oh well.
The whole thing left me wanting to become much, much more involved. It was an absolute inspiration seeing and listening to and talking to people who are truly involved in the current psychedelic resurgence, and are helping make people's lives better and the world a better place through their participation.
Namaste!
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Acid doesn't give you truths; it builds machines that push the envelope of perception. Whatever revelations came to me then have dissolved like skywriting. All I really know is that those few years saddled me with a faith in the redemptive potential of the imagination which, however flat, stale and unprofitable the world seems to me now, I cannot for the life of me shake.
-Erik Davis
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rock!
.
There are crackpots in any organized movement (and to my mind you aren't one of those!), and they add their own dynamic to the fabric of it for better or worse.
I wanted to attend, but there was a Buddhist retreat this weekend that I had been looking forward to for a year. I left feeling inspired and optimistic in the same way. 
Irradiated_Feces
Learyfan
mjshroomer
Corporal Kielbasa
SoulSurfer