Speaker biographies and abstracts follow the schedule below.

Schedule

Friday, September 24, 2010

8:00pm	Reception opens
9:00pm	John Perry Barlow	Book Reading from, ‘The Birth of a Psychedelic Culture’
9:15pm	Don Lattin	Book Reading from, ‘The Harvard Psychedelic Club’
9:30pm	Music & Performance	TBA
1:00am	Reception closes

Saturday, September 25, 2010

10:00am	Welcome
10:15am	Torsten Passie, M.D.	The History and Special Sociology of Psychedelic Studies
11:15am	Matthew W. Johnson, Ph.D. and Mary P. Cosimano, MSW	Psilocybin in Smoking Cessation: A Pilot Study
12:15pm	Lunch
1:15pm	Jeffrey Guss, M.D.	The NYU Training Program in Psychedelic Psychotherapy for Cancer Related Anxiety
2:15pm	Clare S. Wilkins	Four-Hundred Ibogaine Sessions: Data on Detoxification, Recidivism, and Quality of Life
3:15pm	Break
3:30pm	Jill Harris	Challenges in Changing the Legal Status of Entheogens
4:30pm	Neal M. Goldsmith, Ph.D.	Psychedelics, Psychotherapy, and Change
5:30pm	Break
5:45pm	Rick Strassman, M.D.	Old Testament Prophecy: A Western Model of the Psychedelic Experience
6:45pm	All Speakers	All-Speaker Open Panel
7:30pm	Saturday close

Sunday, September 26, 2010

2:00pm	Welcome
2:15pm	Erik Davis	Psychedelics: Between Natural and Supernatural
3:15pm	J.P. Harpignies	Psychedelics, Utopianism, and Psycho-Spiritual Inflation
4:15pm	Break
4:30pm	Annie Oak	Women Who Work with Psychedelics: Healers, Artists, Rangers, and Priestesses
5:30pm	Dale Pendell	Psychedelics, Deep Ecology, and the Matter of Entities
6:30pm	Sunday close

Biographies & Abstracts

John Perry Barlow

“The Birth of a Psychedelic Culture”

John reads from his incendiary forward to Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner’s just-published memoirs, The Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harbard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties (Synergetic Press, 2010) (with Gary Bravo).

Biography

John Perry Barlow is an American poet, essayist, retired Wyoming cattle rancher; a political activist who has at times been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as articulating many Libertarian political sympathies; and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead.  He is also known to be a cyber-libertarian and was one of the founding members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  Since May of 1998, he has been a Fellow at the Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Erik Davis

“Psychedelics: Between Natural and Supernatural”

Setting aside the growth of MDMA into one of the most popular controlled substances on the planet, the most dynamic and meaningful development in underground psychedelic use over the last fifteen years has been the explosion of an explicitly spiritual ayahuasca culture in the West.  In contrast to earlier waves of Euro-American interest in “ethno-botanically active” substances like peyote and psilocybe mushrooms, today’s “tea” drinkers largely operate within a ritual and imaginative context grounded directly in shamanism, mestizo or otherwise, as well as syncretic South American religious sects. At the same time, with the important but problematic exception of Roland Griffiths’ 2008 Johns Hopkins study, the current wave of above-ground medical studies of psychedelics derives their legitimacy from the adoption of strictly secular and naturalist frames of reference drawn from Western medicine and psycho-pharmacology. What does this tension tell us about the challenges and promise of integrating psychedelics into contemporary culture?

Biography

Erik Davis is one of the most articulate writers and speakers on spirituality and contemporary alternative religion.  He is the author, most recently, of Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica, and also penned The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape, the cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Information Age, and a critical volume on Led Zeppelin.  A frequent speaker at universities and festivals alike, Davis has contributed to dozens of books and journal and has taught at UC Berkeley, Pacifica, and the California Institute of Integral Studies.  He also hosts the weekly net radio show Expanding Mind on the Progressive Radio Network, and posts at www.techgnosis.com.  He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Rice University.

Neal M. Goldsmith, Ph.D.

“Psychedelics, Psychotherapy, and Change”

Is psychedelic therapy a useful tool for lasting change in adults?  Specifically, can psychedelic therapy:

• Repair malfunctions in natural development?
• Speed up the natural developmental process?
• Trigger immediate transformative change into novel areas?

What do we mean by change? Maturation? Development through a series of stages?  What about transformation?  Is change even the right goal for psychedelic therapy?  Might release be a more appropriate objective?

To understand the process of personality development and how psychedelic therapy facilitates maturation, we return psychology to its origins in the study of the psyche, or soul, and outline a psychotherapy based on “psycheology” – a clinical philosophy based on development, not pathology, and focused on love, unity, and the perfect nature of the soul.

We will close with a discussion of the long-term implications for a society that embraces the psycheology worldview and integrates the mature use of psychedelics to facilitate psychospiritual development on the individual and societal levels.

Biography

Neal M. Goldsmith, Ph.D. is a psychologist specializing in psychospiritual development.  He is a therapist, author, and public speaker with particular expertise in psychedelic psychotherapy.  (A six-minute clip of Dr. Goldsmith’s “Fusion of Spirit and Science” can be found at: http://vimeo.com/751700).

Dr. Goldsmith has curated dozens of successful conferences and cross-disciplinary “meetings of minds” for corporations as well as the psychedelic community, including Horizons and this year’s MAPS Psychedelic Science conference.  He is a founder of several discussion salons on integral philosophy, media, healing, and the future of society.  He was a long-time affiliate with the Center for Policy Research at Columbia University and a co-founder of the Claremont Center for Applied Social Research.

Dr. Goldsmith has a (non-psychedelic) psychotherapy practice in Manhattan and Sag Harbor, NY and can be reached via his Web site, http://www.nealgoldsmith.com.

His book, Psychedelic Healing: The Promise of Entheogens for Psychotherapy and Spiritual Development, will be out in January (http://store.innertraditions.com/Product.jmdx?action=displayDetail&id=3632&searchString=978-1-59477-250-4).

Jeffrey Guss, MD

“The NYU Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Research Project’s Psychedelic Psychotherapy Training Program”

In September 2008, the NYU Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Research Project began a training program for study therapists, in preparation to work with individuals suffering from existential anxiety in reaction to their cancer diagnosis.  The program integrates training in palliative care with preparation to sit as a psychedelic psychotherapist.

In this presentation, I will discuss the hybrid of models necessary to conceptualize psychedelic psychotherapy training in a contemporary academic medical research setting.  The three components of training – didactic, experiential and supervision – will be presented, with attention being given to experiential aspects of the training program.  Adaptation to the context of an academic setting will be discussed as well as the question of therapists’ experiences with psychedelic agents.

Biography

Jeffrey Guss, MD is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine.  He is an Investigator, Director of Psychedelic Psychotherapy Training and a study therapist in the NYU Psilocybin and Cancer Anxiety Research Project.  Recent publications in:  Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Society and Studies in Gender and Sexuality.  A graduate of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Dr. Guss maintains a private practice of psychiatry in New York City, specializing in psychotherapy as well as the outpatient treatment of addictive disorders.

JP Harpignies

“Psychedelics, Utopianism, and Psycho-Spiritual Inflation”

Longer Synopsis

Psychedelics of course have powerful consciousness-altering effects on individuals, but their use is also a socio-cultural phenomenon that impacts the larger society, helping spawn cultural trends and aesthetic movements and influencing political ideas. These phenomena have not been studied in any depth because these drugs are proscribed and demonized in our culture, so serious mainstream sociologists and cultural observers have largely ignored their larger social impacts. In this session, J.P. Harpignies will explore one troubling aspect of psychedelic subcultures-a fairly widespread tendency toward the uncritical acceptance of a number of extremely naive utopian ideas and conversely of some very paranoid conspiratorial ones, as well as toward certain strains of spiritual megalomania-seeking to understand the reasons for these tendencies and how perhaps to mitigate some of the negative consequences these uncentered expressions can have.

Biographies

JP Harpignies, associate producer of the annual Bioneers eco conference since 1990, was formerly a program director at the New York Open Center and founded and co-produced the Eco-Metropolis conference in NYC. A consultant, conference producer, copy-editor and writer, he is the author of three books: Political Ecosystems, Double Helix Hubris, and most recently, Delusions of Normality, as well as the editor of Visionary Plant Consciousness (a collection of talks by some of the world’s leading specialists in the use of consciousness-altering plants) and associate editor of the first two Bioneers books: Ecological Medicine and Nature’s Operating Instructions. JP also taught t’ai chi chuan in Brooklyn, NY, for 25 years. A radical student activist in the anti Vietnam War movement in his youth in the 1960s and early 1970s, he studied at “Science Po” (The Institute of Political Science) in Paris in 1968, and at CCNY and Columbia.

Jill Harris

“Challenges in Changing the Legal Status of Entheogens”

The War on Drugs has shut off promising areas of research into psychedelics, and has created a draconian enforcement and punishment regime that would have been hard for the visionaries of the 60s to foresee.  What is our current hope for the role of psychedelics in our society?  What are the challenges to having them rescheduled?  Are there areas in which progress is being made?  Is there any hope of seeing a sensible regulation system for psychedelics in our lifetimes? 

Biography

Jill Harris is managing director of public policy at the Drug Policy Alliance, the nation’s leading organization working for alternatives to the War on Drugs. Based in New York, she oversees the program efforts of the DPA’s state-based offices around the country, as well as the Offices of Legal and National Affairs.

Before joining DPA, Harris worked as a political campaign manager and was the Early Vote Director for Barack Obama’s Campaign for Change in Ohio. She also spent 13 years as a public defender with the Legal Aid Society in New York City.

She is originally from Eugene, Oregon, and graduated from Harvard University and the New York University School of Law.

Matthew W. Johnson, Ph.D. and Mary P. Cosimano, M.S.W.

A promising yet inconclusive line of research from the 1950s through 1970s involved hallucinogens in the treatment of addiction.   Recent research with non-addicted individuals in our laboratory suggests that psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences with enduring personal meaning.  Embedding such experiences into addiction treatment may enhance abstinence success.  We are conducting a pilot, feasibility study in which psilocybin sessions conducted under highly supportive conditions are combined with cognitive behavioral therapy for tobacco smoking cessation in nicotine-dependent smokers.  Measures include biological verification of smoking abstinence and assessments of potential mediating mechanisms of action.  Dr. Johnson and Ms. Cosimano have jointly conducted treatment sessions including psilocybin sessions.  Dr. Johnson will describe the rationale, methods and preliminary results, and Ms. Cosimano will present in-depth case reports of volunteer psilocybin experiences and smoking cessation efforts.

Biographies

Matthew W. Johnson, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Dr. Johnson is Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  He received his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Vermont, and completed a fellowship in behavioral pharmacology at Johns Hopkins.  Dr. Johnson is the principal investigator of an NIH-funded research program to understand the mechanisms of addictive behavior, and is currently investigating the high rates of sexual HIV risk behavior in cocaine dependence.  Dr. Johnson also has expertise in investigating the effects of psychoactive drugs in humans, and has conducted human research with psilocybin, Salvia divinorum, dextromethorphan, GHB, cocaine, benzodiazepines, alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine.  He has conducted research examining the ability of psilocybin to occasion mystical experience with persisting effects on attitude and behavior.  In line with his expertise in both addictions and hallucinogens, he is the principle investigator of an ongoing pilot study examining psilocybin in the treatment of nicotine dependence.

Mary P. Cosimano, MSW

Graduate Social Worker, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

For 10 years Mary Cosimano has served as a research coordinator and study session guide in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.  During that time she has served as a session guide for all five psilocybin studies at Johns Hopkins, and has conducted over 170 sessions.  Ms. Cosimano earned her Masters of Social Work from West Virginia University.  She worked as a clinician teaching individual and group meditation to breast cancer patients in research at Johns Hopkins, as a behavior modification counselor for weight loss, a school guidance counselor, and has 15 years of experience with direct patient care as a hospice volunteer.  Ms. Cosimano has been extensively involved in all five psilocybin studies, as well as Salvia Divinorum and dextromethorphan studies conducted at Johns Hopkins.  She will present case descriptions from two volunteers in the psilocybin and smoking cessation pilot study.

Don Lattin

“The Harvard Psychedelic Club”

Don Lattin’s latest book is the story of how three brilliant scholars and one ambitious undergraduate crossed paths in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1960-61, and how their experiences in a psychedelic drug research project transformed their lives and much of American culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Huston Smith would be the teacher, educating three generations of Americans to adopt a more tolerant attitude toward other religions. Ram Dass would be the seeker, traveling to India and returning to inspiring a restless army of spiritual pilgrims. Andrew Weil would be the healer, becoming the undisputed leader of alternative medicine in America. And Timothy Leary would play the rebellious trickster, becoming the world’s most infamous  proponent of chemically-induced enlightenment. It’s a story of peace and love, but also a tale of  jealousy, self-promotion and outright betrayal.

Biography

Don Lattin is a freelance journalist and the author of four books, including The Harvard Psychedelic Club – How Timothy Leary, Andrew Weil, Ram Dass and Huston Smith Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America, which was published earlier this year by HarperCollins. Lattin’s work has appeared in dozens of U.S. magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the San Francisco Chronicle, where Don covered the religion beat for nearly two decades. Don’s other books are Jesus Freaks – A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge (HarperOne 2007) and Following Our Bliss – How the Spiritual Ideals of the Sixties Shape Our Lives Today (HarperSanFrancisco 2003). He is also the co-author (with Richard Cimino) of Shopping for Faith – American Religion in the New Millennium (Jossey Bass 1998). His website is www.donlattin.com.

Annie Oak

“Women Who Work With Psychoactive Substances: Healers, Researchers, Artists, Activists and Priestesses”

Since ancient times, women have worked with psychoactive substances for healing and spiritual purposes. This slide presentation will look at the history of women and psychedelics from the goddesses of myths and antiquity to contemporary women healers and researchers who investigate the therapeutic use of these substances. Images will include the work of female artists and priestesses who continue to find inspiration in heightened states of awareness. Women activists who support the rights of medical cannabis patients and the reform of drug policies will also be profiled.

Biography

Annie Oak is a journalist and businesswomen.  She founded the Women’s Visionary Congress (WVC) http://www.visionarycongress.org/, an annual gathering of psychedelic women in Northern California.  Ms. Oak serves on the board of the Women’s Visionary Council, a nonprofit organization that produces the WVC and makes grants to visionary women.

Torsten Passie, M.D., Ph.D.

“On the History and Special Sociology of Psychedelic Studies”

Discrimination against dreams, trances, and ecstatic states has a history of more than 2500 years in the West.  Only a review of the history of the human mind and human culture can tell us why discrimination against these states (and the substances which induce them) is so strong and so deep-rooted, why their users are still threatened legally, and why research is still hindered.

This lecture will give a broad overview of the history of the human mind and of human culture, from our earliest beginnings up through the present.  I will illustrate why there is no easy way out of the way these states are conceptualized and contextualized by society.  I hope to also show why we must be humble in popularizing these mind states and believing in their live-changing powers.

Biography

Torsten Passie, M.D., Ph.D. is Assistant Professor for Consciousness Studies, Hannover Medical School, Germany.  He has done extensive research over more than 20 years on the use of hallucinogenic drugs, altered states of consciousness and shamanic practices in psychotherapy and healing.

He worked at the Psychiatric University Clinic in Zürich (Switzerland) with the leading European psychopathologist, professor Christian Scharfetter, on the conceptualization of states of consciousness.  During the 1990s, he worked with Professor Hanscarl Leuner (Göttingen), the leading European authority on clinical research and psychotherapeutic use of hallucinogenic drugs.  Due to his specific interest in unconventional healing practices, he has traveled extensively in Mexico and Guatemala.  He has done clinical research with different procedures for inducing altered states of consciousness, including cannabis, ketamine, nitrous oxide, and psilocybin.  He is one of the very few European experts on the pharmacology and clinical/therapeutic use of hallucinogenic drugs.  He is also an experienced addiction therapist and researcher, and the chief physician of the German model-project of heroin-assisted treatment for opiate addicts.

He studied Philosophy and Sociology (M.A.) at Hannover University and Medicine at Hannover Medical School.  His medical dissertation was on existential psychiatry.  His psychotherapeutic education was in psychoanalysis and psycholytic therapy.

Dale Pendell

“Psychedelics, Deep Ecology, and the Matter of Entities”

Over forty years ago poet Gary Snyder noted that psychedelics have a way of tuning people in to their local environment.  Thus many with psychedelic experience were receptive to the emerging conservation and environmental movements, or became leaders in those movements.

A somewhat smaller number of people have experienced what Martin Buber called “I-Thou” encounters with non-human life forms, leading to what has been called “deep ecology.”  This goes beyond anthropocentric “conservation” or “wise use” to a realization that other beings, other life forms, exist in their own beauty for their own rights and reasons, quite apart from their use, or lack of, to human beings.

Beyond encounters with other life forms, some, perhaps particularly users of ayahuasca, have had interactive experiences with what might be called “entities”—variously interpreted as spirits, gods, resonances, or interlopers from another dimension.  The reality of these encounters leads to an animistic or shamanistic world view, and is a challenge to a strictly “scientific” paradigm.  Or is it?

Biography

Poet Dale Pendell is the author of the award-winning Pharmako trilogy, a literary history of psychoactive plants.  His poetry is widely anthologized, most recently in The Wisdom Book of American Buddhist Poetry.  He was the founding editor of Kuksu: Journal of Backcountry Writing, a co-founder of the Primitive Arts Institute, and has led workshops at the Naropa Institute and the Omega Institute.  In addition to writing, Dale has been a consultant for herbal product development, botanical surveys, and a computer scientist.  His most recent books are Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown; The Language of Bird: Notes on Chance and Divination; and The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse, a novel.

He and his wife Laura and a familiar cat live in the foothills of the Sierra in California.  Their performance group, Oracular Madness, most recently appeared at Burning Man.

He may be contacted through his website, http://dalependell.com

Rick Strassman, M.D.

“Old Testament Prophecy – A Western Model of the Psychedelic Experience”

Our clinical research with the naturally-occurring human psychedelic, DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) sought to understand the relationship between the psychopharmacology of DMT and spiritual experience.  Eastern religious systems, particularly Buddhist, provided the spiritual model which I, and previous investigators, believed would be most relevant to our research.  However, unitive experiences of ego dissolution typical of enlightenment experiences were quite rare.  Rather, volunteers actively related to what appeared to be autonomous, external alternative realties, while firmly maintaining a sense of personal identity.  Old Testament descriptions of prophetic experience are replete with psychedelic content, and comport more closely with the DMT volunteers’ reports than a Buddhist model of enlightenment.  This finding provides support for utilizing Old Testament prophetic literature as an alternative, Western model by which to understand and integrate contemporary psychedelic experience.  It also suggests a means by which students of the Old Testament may access the state of consciousness out of which emerged prophetic Old Testament text.

Biography

Rick Strassman MD received his undergraduate training at Pomona College and Stanford University.  He obtained his medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, general psychiatry training at UC Davis in Sacramento, and a clinical psychopharmacology fellowship at UC San Diego.  Joining the Department of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1984, he led a research project that established the first known function of the pineal hormone melatonin in humans.  In 1990, Dr. Strassman began the first new human psychedelic drug research in a generation, studying the effects of DMT, or N,N-dimethyltryptamine.  After finishing this project in 1995, he left UNM and has worked in various clinical practice settings.  He has written DMT – The Spirit Molecule, and co-authored Inner Paths to Outer Space.  He is currently president and co-founder of the Cottonwood Research Foundation, and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at UNM.

Clare S. Wilkins

“Four-Hundred Ibogaine Sessions: Data on Detoxification, Recidivism, and Quality of Life”

Since 2006, we have administered over 400 Ibogaine treatments for patients representing a cross section of chemical dependencies. We will be presenting on data culled over a four-year period. Outcomes will be measured in terms of detoxification, recidivism, and in some patients, Quality of Life surveys. Preliminary findings demonstrate Ibogaine to be a significant tool in the recovery process, and call for more intensive aftercare, integration & follow up therapies.

Biography

Clare S. Wilkins is Director of Pangea Biomedics, Tijuana, Mexico.  She is a former IV heroin user and methadone patient who, in 2005, shed her chemical dependencies with Ibogaine, a natural extract of the African root Tabernanthe Iboga. Ibogaine is classified in the USA as a Schedule 1 drug with “no currently accepted medical use,” even though numerous clinical and preclinical studies have shown that Ibogaine reduces rates of self administration of opiates, cocaine, amphetamines, alcohol & nicotine, significantly attenuates opiod withdrawal symptoms, improves depression scores, and greatly reduces craving subsequent to detoxification.

In 2006, Miss Wilkins created Pangea Biomecics in Tijuana, Mexico where she has facilitated over 400 Ibogaine treatments, and is working with the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies to study the long-term effects of Ibogaine. As a member of INPUD and INWUD international drug user rights organizations, she is devoted to reducing stigma, promoting the health and defending the rights of people who use drugs. She passionately believes in every human’s basic right to medicine.