A Brief Psychedelic History

~5000 BC
Tassili Mushroom rock paintings, Algeria

~6000-4000 BC
1st psilocybin cave paintings at Selva Pascuala cave site, Spain

~3780 BC
1st evidence of ceremonial peyote use

~3000-1000 BC
Documented use of psilocybin mushrooms in Meso-America, including Maya, Mazatec, Mixtec and Aztec, who called them Teonanacati ‘flesh of the gods’

~3000-1000 BC
Documented use of psilocybin mushrooms in Meso-America, including Maya, Mazatec, Mixtec and Aztec, who called them Teonanacati ‘flesh of the gods’

~1000-500 BC
Miniature Mushroom Stones, Guatemala

~900 BC
“Vaso de los brujos” suggests use of ayahuasca in Peru

~650 BC-470 AD
Eleusinian Mysteries, Greece

1938
LSD first synthesized by Albert Hofmann

1954
Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception” describes his mescaline experience

1955
Magic mushrooms introduced to the USA by R. Gordon Wasson

1957
Gordon & Valentina Wasson’s article on seeking magic mushroom is published in Life Magazine

1962
Timothy Leary conducts the Marsh Chapel “Good Friday” experiment at Harvard

1963
Timothy Leary dismissed from Harvard for conducting psilocybin studies with undergraduate students

1965
Sandoz stops producing psilocybin and LSD

1967
1st Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs (ESPD) symposium in San Francisco. Richard Schultes attends and Albert Hofmann supports. The Summer of Love: psychedelic counterculture explodes

1971
The Experiment at La Chorrera, Colombian Amazon. The War on Drugs commences: psychedelic substances are banned and institutional research is significantly limited

1976
Dennis & Terence McKenna publish Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide under pseudonyms, O.T. Oss and O.N.Oeric

1983

Psychedelic Conference II in Santa Barbara, 1983

One of the few major psychedelics conferences during the dark age of the “Just Say No” Reagan regime was the Psychedelics and Spirituality Conference (aka Psychedelic Conference II), held on the campus of UC-Santa Barbara on May 13-14, 1983.

Sasha Shulgin announced his discovery of 2C-B and delivered one of his greatest talks, “Drugs of Perception.” It was also here that Terence McKenna (in his brother Dennis’ words) “marked his emergence as a public persona with his talk ‘Hallucinogens: Monkeys Discover Hyperspace, aka Return to the Logos.'”

Notable guests were Timothy Leary, Joan Halifax and Kathleen Harrison, Peter Stafford, Rick Doblin, Deborah Harlow, Robert Forte, John Palmer, Jeremy Tarcher and Shari Lewis.

1986
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science (MAPS) is founded, spotlighting psychedelic science

1990’s
Franz Vollenweider (Switzerland) and Rick Strassman’s studies (USA) bring renewed interest in human psychedelic studies, after 20 years

1991
Luis Eduardo Luna and Pablo Amaringo publish Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman

1993
Heffter Research Institute founded to support institutional research in psychedelic science

2006
Ronald Griffiths’ groundbreaking study published: Psilocybin can occasion mystical type experiences having substantial personal meaning and spiritual significance

2018
EntheoMedicine community was founded on March 3rd 2018 with it, the “Santa Barbara Psychedelic Renaissance” blossoms. Hosted live events until Covid hit.

2019

EntheoMedicine continue its community support for those wanting to experience psychedelics and entheogens, the service is called the “Psychedelic Hotline”.

2020-2021
1st psychedelic pharma companies are listed on Nasdaq and other stock exchanges. Billions flow into the field of psychedelic research for mental illness

2022

EntheoMedicine celebrated March 3, 2022 its four anniversary, its three years of community service provided (Psychedelic Hotline)