Psychedelic Tag

Photography and illustration by LUZ (Edwin L. Harmon IV) This story appears within the November/December issue of ESSENCE, available on newsstands now. Festival-loving hippies, bro slackers, and, more recently, trendy “woo-woo” White women come to mind when we predict of people that partake in psychedelics. But before their adoption by the White counterculture, researchers say entheogens like mushrooms also had a spot in Black and Brown indigenous communities, where that they had been used for hundreds of years to access elevated mental and spiritual states. But they were made illegal in 1968 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a bill outlawing them, ostensibly due to safety concerns— effectively halting all medical studies of psilocybin mushrooms as a -treatment for trauma, depression,...