New paper alert, "Setting, context and the regulatory atmospheres of psychedelic medicine" in International Journal of Drug Policy
@ijdrugpolicy -- a collaboration between Alex Gearin
@alex_gearin (HKU Medicine), I. Glenn Cohen
@CohenProf (Harvard Law) and Albert Garcia-Romeu (Hopkins Medicine).
View open access:
doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.202…
Psychedelic medicines are sensitive to context and setting due to their special impacts on perception and cognition. In this interdisciplinary paper, the authors examine settings and contexts of psychedelic medicine use as the "building blocks of felt atmospheres" to examine how new policy experiments in the United States and Australia are regulating new legal pathways. Regulatory atmospheres, as the authors call them, refer to how policy shapes interpersonal, sensory, and affective conditions of psychedelic use -- including by defining the who, what, and where of legal pathways -- but also how law and prohibition continue to impact underground and traditional atmospheres of psychedelic use in diffuse and uneven ways.
From the paper's introduction:
"To trace divergent possibilities for psychedelic medicine, this paper proceeds in several steps. First, it outlines how scientific experiments in setting and context stage different psychedelic atmospheres as they aim to better understand risk and efficacy. Second, it explores how this has come up against a biopolitics of medical regulation that seeks to minimize psychotherapy in favor of pharmacotherapy model. Third, it analyzes differences in setting and context codified by policy experiments in Colorado and Oregon in the United States and the Authorized Prescriber scheme in Australia. Then, it shows how law continues to cast a shadow across a wider ecology of use, where many settings are affected by prohibition in underground and traditional contexts, revealing a haunting effect of regulatory atmospheres. By paying attention to psychedelic settings, the article shows how ideas about what counts as risk and about what counts as healing—chemical, psychotherapeutic alliance, environment, culture or more—can reflect the ontological and regulatory conditions that bring them into being.
@hku_mehu @HKUCMEL @hkumed @Harvard_Law @PetrieFlom @JHPsychedelics @HopkinsMedicine
#PsychedelicMedicine #PsychedelicScience #PsychedelicTherapy #PsychedelicAssistedTherapy #DrugPolicy #PsychedelicPolicy #DrugLaw #HealthPolicy #Prohibition #SetAndSetting #TherapeuticContext #PlantMedicine #HealingEnvironment #MedicalAnthropology #MedicalHumanities #Bioethics #HealthLaw