We’re all tripping now — or at least, that’s what anyone scrolling Instagram these days might think. Psychedelics are everywhere. They’re the plotline of mainstream TV shows and buzzy documentaries, the subject of countless culture articles, and the focus of award-winning books and podcasts.
One of those books is by a gay man. Joe Dolce, a journalist and former editor of Details, has written Modern Psychedelics: The Handbook for Mindful Exploration, a plainspoken, sex-positive, beginner-friendly guide. In 2017, he published Brave New Weed, a globetrotting investigation into marijuana to “tear down the cannabis closet.” Now he’s doing the same for the drugs our culture is currently obsessed with.
Part of the reason for the new boom is clinical research. Drugs like psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms), LSD, mescaline (peyote), and DMT (ayahuasca) have been studied — sometimes legally, sometimes not — for decades as promising treatments for alcoholism, anxiety, depression, PTSD, and more. What were once sacraments for Indigenous peoples in Central and South America are now being slowly, tenuously absorbed into the profit-based, pharmaceutical model of Western medicine. Whether that’s a good thing is still an open question.
But one conversation I’m not seeing in legacy queer media is what this boom might mean for gay and queer men battling an altogether different drug.
Read on to learn how magic mushrooms may help gay addicts…
(Source: The Advocate)
