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sonoramo
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Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop
#26489602 - 02/17/20 08:16 AM (3 years, 11 months ago) |
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Original article at The Guardian
Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop
John Semley
Mushrooms used to be the territory of hippies, explorers, indigenous people and artists. Now tech bros and wellness gurus have taken over
Mon 17 Feb 2020 04.00 EST
On a June evening in 1955, an investment banker and amateur mycologist named Robert Gordon Wasson found himself in an adobe house high in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico, encountering the divine. That night, Wasson, his wife, the photographer Allan Richardson and about 20 local indigenous people took part in a Mazatec ritual involving psilocybe mexicana, a species of hallucinogenic mushroom. As Wasson recounted in Seeking the Magic Mushroom, his 1957 Life magazine photoessay: “We chewed and swallowed these acrid mushrooms, saw visions, and emerged from the experience awestruck.”
In the first episode of The Goop Lab, a new Netflix docuseries tied to actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle and e-commerce enterprise, several of Paltrow’s employees fly to a Jamaican resort, in search of some modern analogue to Wasson’s psychedelic ceremony.
The volunteers for Goop’s psilocybin ritual – a hodgepodge of hand-me-down indigenous liturgy, weekend-long Pilates retreat, and hollow self-help blather – are all described as being “deeply successful” people. Gone are Wasson’s visions of “the archetypes, the platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life”. In their place: the clinking of coffee mugs filled with mushroom tea; giggling and group-hugging on yoga mats; tearful sobbing by participants listening to music through wireless Apple AirPods; and people sinking into Patagonia vests repurposed as makeshift pillows.
Back in the Goop headquarters (or “lab”), Paltrow speaks of psilocybin as the newest, hottest “healing modality”. Mushrooms, as one researcher tells the Gooper-in-Chief, “are back”.
And in their current iteration, they’re also totally uncool.
For most people, psychedelic drugs like psilocybin and LSD are singularly associated with the 1960s American youth culture. The English psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond coined the term “psychedelic” – meaning, roughly, “mind-manifesting” – in 1956 to describe the effects of hallucinogenic drugs taken in a clinical context. The word, for Osmond, was “clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations”.
But the history of psychedelics and psychedelia (that is, the culture that has coalesced around the drugs and their usage) can itself feel somewhat contaminated by certain associations. Even the phrase “psychedelic 60s” slips so naturally off the tongue, encouraged as much by the pleasing (euphonious, even) sibilance as the cliches conjured in the collective memory: San Francisco, Sgt Pepper, Woodstock, tie-dye, and Timothy Leary urging youngsters to “turn on, tune in, and drop out”. Beyond these more obvious, ready-made cultural signifiers, psychedelics helped catalyze the 80s British rave scene, facilitate Bob Dylan’s more introspective lyrical turn, and helped Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Dock Ellis throw a legendary no-hitter.
Whether these things are at all fascinating or “cool” is, perhaps, a matter of taste – dependent on one’s tolerance for kaleidoscopic tapestries, all-night dance parties, woolly talk about self-transcendence, and freeform electric guitar jamming. But the so-called “psychedelic renaissance” that Goop seized upon feels like part of a larger, concerted attempt, to break free of these associations. It’s part reset, part rebranding effort.
Recently, Canadian businessman and TV personality Kevin O’Leary (the no-nonsense Mr Wonderful from ABC’s entrepreneurial cavalcade Shark Tank) announced that he had invested in a neuro-pharmaceutical company dedicated to exploring the clinical benefits of psychedelics in treating addiction. Like Paltrow, who waxes on the potential of psychedelics in a process she calls the “optimization of self”, O’Leary – an investor who has spoken to the role Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged played in shaping his business acumen – doesn’t exactly seem like an avatar of free love, mind-expansion, and other platitudes of the psychedelic sixties. And that’s precisely the point. If we are now expected to take psychedelics seriously, they must appear, well, serious.
Parsing Goop’s sundry claims to pseudoscience and utter quackery feels like low hanging fruit. (Paltrow’s company had to pay damages in 2018 after a court ruled that the benefits of a $66 jade egg, advertised on the Goop website for its role in supporting vaginal health, were unsupported by “competent and reliable scientific evidence”.) In the case of magic mushrooms, however, the science seems solid. Researchers at NYU, London’s Imperial College, and Johns Hopkins University, have produced reams of reputable evidence pointing to psilocybin’s role in easing depression, PTSD, anxiety, and even addiction.
Such research marks a resurgence of these substances in a clinical context – a resurgence arguably unseen since the ’60s cocktail of hedonistic recreational excess and resulting social panic stripped psychedelics of any lingering reputability. If the current surge of serious interest in psychedelics is, in any meaningful way, a “renaissance”, then it’s not reviving the cultural heyday of hippies, Hell’s Angels, campus protests and free outdoor rock concerts, but an earlier period in these drugs’ history. Before these powerful substances fell into the hands of hippies, they were largely evangelized by doctors, executives, and academics – including the above-mentioned Osmond, and author Aldous Huxley, who firmly believed that the psychedelic experience be made available only to an elite coterie of achievers.
Even Wasson, one of the earliest known white Americans to partake in a psychedelic sacrament, returned to work as a high-level executive of an investment bank. Like Goop’s Gwyneth Paltrow, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, and other current vanguards of the contemporary psychedelic vogue, such early evangelists were very much part of the establishment the ’60s cohort opposed: deeply successful people whose minds required, if not perspective-shattering expansion, then just a little optimization.
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O_Dweeds
Humanitarian Magician


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Re: Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop [Re: sonoramo]
#26489917 - 02/17/20 12:28 PM (3 years, 11 months ago) |
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Promoting mushrooms to be used responsibly and selling a candle marketed as "smelling like her vagina". Smiled and laughed. Her bottom line with promoting natural psychedelics is better than most in the game.
People may associate the 60's with LSD (really the 40's) but most understand mushrooms have been used throughout human history. Makes me think of the Vikings; and all the insane things they pulled off blasted on mushrooms. This article is not from the point of view of the majority's knowledge.
-------------------- Oxygen. Water. Neil Young Our word "planet" comes from the Greek word planetes, meaning "wanderer." "There ain't no revolution, only evolution, but every time I'm in Georgia I eat a peach for peace." Gregg Allman
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Barnaby
Interesting lifetime


Registered: 12/13/17
Posts: 9,136
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Re: Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop [Re: sonoramo]
#26489976 - 02/17/20 01:02 PM (3 years, 11 months ago) |
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They will always have their value. Those that get it get it. Not some stone shoved up vagina for dollars and other such garbage. Think this is my last post allowed for the day.
Edited by Barnaby (02/17/20 01:08 PM)
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O_Dweeds
Humanitarian Magician


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Re: Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop [Re: Barnaby]
#26490195 - 02/17/20 02:51 PM (3 years, 11 months ago) |
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The "vagina stone" is very comical. It is a joke; those who've taken it seriously and bought it to actually use have no sense of humor.
-------------------- Oxygen. Water. Neil Young Our word "planet" comes from the Greek word planetes, meaning "wanderer." "There ain't no revolution, only evolution, but every time I'm in Georgia I eat a peach for peace." Gregg Allman
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Barnaby
Interesting lifetime


Registered: 12/13/17
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Re: Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop [Re: O_Dweeds]
#26490251 - 02/17/20 03:10 PM (3 years, 11 months ago) |
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Yeah. I feel like a could be a shyster in so many ways but choose not to. No saint just couldn't feel ok with myself ripping off people.
Did once from the influence of another a long time ago and no. I felt like shit for a long time and will never do it again.
That is the thing with greed. Paltrow has rich parents, and is a talented actress that doesn't want to act anymore and be like a character from early times, the snake oil salesman.
Greed is good.
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GordoTEK
Underground Researcher

Registered: 01/26/19
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Re: Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop [Re: Barnaby]
#26490381 - 02/17/20 04:15 PM (3 years, 11 months ago) |
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If using psychedelics in a responsible, therapeutic way is "not cool" kind of like things were before the 60's (you know, when the "cool kids" ruined psychedelics for everyone for the next 60 years), I'd say we are headed in the right direction!!
What's NOT cool are people like this (yea I know the vid is a parody, but it also kind of reflects a real group of psychedelic users too):
I say, let psychedelics be "not cool" for as long as possible!
-------------------- GordoTEK
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Barnaby
Interesting lifetime


Registered: 12/13/17
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Re: Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop [Re: GordoTEK]
#26490436 - 02/17/20 04:43 PM (3 years, 11 months ago) |
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Nice wig and fakeness. Fake puke. Fuck off. DMT extraction that lasts a lot longer than the 10 minute one. I prefer the tea. Never puked on it and yes it tastes like shit. Whatever.
Enjoy the experience. It will teach idiots idiotic things in life. It is a sacrament meaning holy and not this bullshit M garbage I have to deal with constantly.
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Buckomcdoogle
Atypical obsessive.


Registered: 11/27/19
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Re: Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop [Re: Barnaby]
#26490839 - 02/17/20 09:13 PM (3 years, 11 months ago) |
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IMO One of the main purposes of taking psychedelics is putting your ego in check.
Reminding you of things you forget, through every day distractions.
These people think they're special....
I think its kind of like Cannabis though. The more mainstream and accepted it becomes, the more big ego assholes are going to culture vulture it.
-------------------- "Nothing is more dangerous to your creativity than comfort and familiarity" "Nihilism is the most basic truth in existence, the only consistency throughout the world, and the universe is chaos and decay" "Logic leads to nihilism"
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Buckomcdoogle
Atypical obsessive.


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Re: Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop [Re: Buckomcdoogle]
#26490847 - 02/17/20 09:16 PM (3 years, 11 months ago) |
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Its kind of like with tattoos.
20 years ago, in most places, they were very taboo.
Now, every trustfund kid with stock broker/tech parents has full sleeves.
-------------------- "Nothing is more dangerous to your creativity than comfort and familiarity" "Nihilism is the most basic truth in existence, the only consistency throughout the world, and the universe is chaos and decay" "Logic leads to nihilism"
Edited by Buckomcdoogle (02/17/20 09:20 PM)
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shroomgirl645
Microdoser extraordinaire 🍄😊🍄



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Re: Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop [Re: GordoTEK] 1
#26491105 - 02/18/20 03:19 AM (3 years, 11 months ago) |
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Quote:
(you know, when the "cool kids" ruined psychedelics for everyone for the next 60 years)
no, that was the Nixon Administration, who needed an excuse to crach down on the cool kids
-------------------- New to Shroom Cultivation | Current Status: Tubs 3/5/2020 1&2 (Fruiting)
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MikeTesserect
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Re: Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop [Re: sonoramo]
#26491129 - 02/18/20 04:03 AM (3 years, 11 months ago) |
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Im too cool to do drugs! There is a matress ad coming on so I have to go...…
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prettyhatemachine
Stranger


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Re: Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop [Re: MikeTesserect]
#26491738 - 02/18/20 01:08 PM (3 years, 11 months ago) |
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I miss the days of just taking drugs to get high and have fun
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MikeTesserect
Stranger


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Re: Psychedelic drugs have lost their cool. Blame Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop [Re: prettyhatemachine]
#26492880 - 02/19/20 06:28 AM (3 years, 11 months ago) |
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idk, those ads are pretty damn good
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