Don't miss this Book Club Event as author, Joanna Kempner will be joining us LIVE to chat about her book, Psychedelic Outlaws:  The Movement Revolutionizing Modern Medicine.

An award-winning sociologist unearths how a group of ordinary people debilitated by excruciating pain developed their own medicine from home-grown psilocybin mushrooms—crafting near-clinical grade dosing protocols–and fought for recognition in a broken medical system.

There will be a chance for you to chat with Joanna during our Q & A portion of the event.  

About the Book

Cluster headache, a diagnosis sometimes referred to as a ‘suicide headache,’ is widely considered the most severe pain disorder that humans experience. There is no cure, and little funding available for research into developing treatments.

When Joanna Kempner met Bob Wold in 2012, she was introduced to a world beyond most people's comprehension—a clandestine network determined to find relief using magic mushrooms. These ‘Clusterbusters,’ a group united only by the internet and a desire to survive, decided to do the research that medicine left unfinished. They produced their own psychedelic treatment protocols and managed to get academics at Harvard and Yale to test their results. Along the way, Kempner explores not only the fascinating history and exploding popularity of psychedelic science, but also a regulatory system so repressive that the sick are forced to find their own homegrown remedies, and corporate America and university professors stand to profit from their transgressions.

From the windswept shores of the North Sea through the verdant jungle of Peruvian Amazon to a kitschy underground palace built in a missile silo in Kansas, Psychedelic Outlawschronicles the rise of psychedelic medicine amid a healthcare system in turmoil. Kempner’s gripping tale of community and resilience brings readers on a eye-opening journey through the politics of pain, through the stories of people desperate enough to defy the law for a moment of relief.

NB: This is a PAC Members' Only Event. To attend please head to our Membership page & join the PAC today.

Stories are the heart of film. Documentaries reveal true stories.

Join the PAC and 3 filmmakers to learn where the intersection of film and psychedelics is found in their lives and their work.

How did psychedelic medicines influence their upcoming projects and how has their filmmaking changed since they have been immersed in the psychedelic landscape.

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A dazzling, evidence-based account of one man’s quest to heal from complex PTSD by turning to endangered coral reefs and psychedelic plants after traditional therapies failed—and his awakening to the need for us to heal the planet as well.

Professor Greg Wrenn likes to tell his nature-writing students, “The ecological is personal, and the personal is ecological.” What he’s never told them is how he’s lived out those correspondences to heal from childhood abuse at the hands of his mother.

Weaving together memoir and cutting-edge science, Mothership is not just a queer coming-of-age story. It’s a deeply researched account of how coral reefs and a psychedelic tea called ayahuasca helped Greg heal from complex PTSD—a disorder of trust, which makes the very act of bonding with someone else panic-inducing. From the tide pools in Florida where he grew up, to Indonesia’s Raja Ampat archipelago and the Amazon rainforest, this is his search for wholeness when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals did little to help. Along the way, as his ecological conscience wakes up, he takes readers underwater to the last pristine reefs on earth, and into the psyche.

Written with prophetic urgency, Mothership ultimately asks if doses of nature will be enough to save us before it’s too late.

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NB: This is a PAC Members' Only Event. To attend please head to our Membership page & join the PAC today.