Socio-psychedelic imaginaries: envisioning and building legal psychedelic worlds in the United States
European Journal of Futures Research April 30, 2022 Claudia Schwarz-Plaschg 36 citations
After decades of criminalization, psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD are being reintegrated into Western science and culture. Based on three years of ethnographic research in the US, this article identifies four socio-psychedelic imaginaries—biomedicalization, decriminalization, legalization, and sacramental—that represent collective visions for legally and responsibly reintegrating these substances. These imaginaries diverge and converge around politics of access, responsibility, naming, assimilation and social change, and epistemic credibility. They co-evolve and amplify each other, functioning as a societal corrective to politically motivated prohibition. The radical imagination expressed in these imaginaries arises from human-psychedelic entanglements.