Grounded in Biology: Why the Context-Dependency of Psychedelic Drug Effects Means Opportunities, Not Problems for Anthropology and Pharmacology.

The context in which psychedelic drugs are taken—setting, expectations, and cultural framing—shapes their effects, a phenomenon known as context-dependency. Rather than posing a problem for scientific study, this variability offers opportunities for both anthropology and pharmacology to better understand how biology and environment interact. The authors argue that context-dependency is not a flaw but a feature that can be leveraged to design more effective therapeutic interventions and to enrich ethnographic accounts of altered states.

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Abstract

Grounded in Biology: Why the Context-Dependency of Psychedelic Drug Effects Means Opportunities, Not Problems for Anthropology and Pharmacology.