Ed Prideaux

Psychedelics-Community • 5th August 2026

Psychedelics, Memory, and the Feeling of Truth | Psychedelics-Community

Can psychedelic drugs retrieve traumatic memories? Participants in clinical trials and therapy patients often report the spontaneous recall of childhood trauma, especially sexual abuse. Recalling these memories may engender a sense of relief that years of suffering and strange relationships may at last be explained. Yet many of these memories may be false.

Psychedelics-Community • 2nd August 2026

Psychedelic Technoaesthetics: The Material and Meaning of Psychedelic Music | Psychedelics-Community

‘The End’ by The Doors was recorded in late 1966. If a time machine were available, and an acetate smuggled from the Los Angeles recording studio to the surrounding households the year before, its effect would have been staggering. What if we played a track from 2026 to audiences in 2025? We aren't shocked anymore. Has psychedelia stopped working?

Psychedelics-Community • 9th July 2026

Is Recreational Drug Use Immoral? A Critical Look at Tim Hsiao's Argument | Psychedelics-Community

Timothy Hsiao is a controversial Christian thinker. He defends factory farming and supports the Second Amendment. He writes in support of beating children and waging the war on drugs.Hsiao holds that mind-altering drugs are unethical beyond very narrow and well-defined exceptions. He condemns all recreational use as an immoral misuse of our faculties, the ones that make us free and human.

Psychedelics-Community • 26th May 2026

The Blinding Problem: Placebos, Expectancy, and the Crisis of Evidence in Psychedelic Medicine | Psychedelics-Community

Physicians from various continents over time have sworn by the healing powers of crocodile dung, fox lung, the powder of precious stones, and moss scraped from the skulls of victims of violent death. They had reason to prescribe them: these remedies sometimes worked.

Chemical Collective • 26th May 2026

Psychedelics and the Fragmented Self

Rather than simply 'dissolving' the self, the psychedelic state may leave it fragmented — along psychological, social and economic lines.

Chemical Collective • 8th March 2026

The Subtle Harms of Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy and Facilitation (Part 2) | Chemical Collective

The Meaghan Buisson case is enough to illustrate why psychedelic therapy can be, safeguards notwithstanding, a dangerous enterprise. Is the power imbalance realised and enhanced by 'transpersonal' psychologies a recipe for harm?

Chemical Collective • 6th March 2026

The Subtle Harms of Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy and Facilitation (Part 1) | Chemical Collective

Psychotherapy is often treated as one of the unquestioned goods of modern life, such that to criticise it is to risk appearing to deny mental suffering itself. What about its dangers - and how do those interact with psychedelics?

Chemical Collective • 10th January 2026

Let’s Talk About Non-Responders in Psychedelic Therapy | Chemical Collective

For a decade, many headlines, documentaries, and investor pitch decks have sold a singular story: that compounds like psilocybin and MDMA are capable of resetting the depressed brain and resolving trauma overnight. On August 9, 2024, that narrative collided with regulatory reality.

Chemical Collective • 6th January 2026

Psychedelic Bullshit? An Evaluation of The Immortality Key | Chemical Collective

Does Brian Muraresku's bestseller 'The Immortality Key' demonstrate that early Christians - and perhaps even Jesus himself - were consumers of a psychedelic-spiked communion wine? Unsurprisingly, no.

Chemical Collective • 2nd January 2026

High on Power: How Much Does Ketamine Explain Elon Musk's Erratic Behaviour? | Chemical Collective

Does Elon Musk's alleged abuse of ketamine explain anything about his political behaviour? Is this a sign of 'drug-ism'? Or is it another symptom of a reality TV culture in which systematic problems are rendered in terms of colourful characters we watch on our phones?

Chemical Collective • 8th December 2025

The Potential Benefits of Psychedelics for Trans People | Chemical Collective

Transgender and gender-diverse people are living through an acute mental health emergency. Suicide attempt rates among American trans youth run at 40-50% in most surveys. Many are turning to psychedelic therapy for help. What are the risks and benefits?

Chemical Collective • 4th December 2025

The Philosophy of Mysticism: Perennialism vs Constructivism | Chemical Collective

Do mystical experiences reveal a shared transcendent reality?  Or, like any other category of contingent experience, are they better understood as products of their cultures? These questions mark one of the defining controversies in the modern study of religion, as well as shaping the extent to which we can co-exist in a hyper-globalised polis.

Chemical Collective • 3rd November 2025

Terence McKenna's Mega Bad Trip | Chemical Collective

What unfolded during a terrifying mushroom trip in Hawaii between 1988 and 1989 would change Terence McKenna’s relationship with psychedelics – and perhaps reshape the message he shared with the world for the rest of his life.

Chemical Collective • 1st November 2025

Order, Chaos, and Consciousness: Examining the Entropic Brain Hypothesis | Chemical Collective

How does the coordinated activity of billions of neurons give rise to the richness of subjective experience? Among the many frameworks proposed is the Entropic Brain Hypothesis (EBH). First articulated by Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues in 2014, EBH argues that the quality of consciousness can be indexed by the entropy – the randomness or diversity – of brain activity patterns. Is it true?

Chemical Collective • 8th October 2025

The Psychedelic Experience Illustrates the Appearance-Reality Distinction | Chemical Collective

What is a hallucination, exactly? What do we mean by 'real'? I consider the contributions of A.J. Ayer, Wittgenstein, Donald Hoffman and others.

Chemical Collective • 3rd October 2025

Non-Consensual Dosing in Psychedelic History | Chemical Collective

Today, we all accept that dosing people with psychedelic drugs is wrong. But this cannot be taken for granted, for it was an extremely popular practice in the 1960s. Some would theorise, for instance, that the 1960s began as a cultural phenomenon with a particular spiking incident in 1965 – around whose aftermath the whole Generation’s predatory character can be understood.

Chemical Collective • 17th September 2025

Beyond Blue Mondays: The Problem of Post-Psychedelic Depression | Chemical Collective

The day after a psychedelic trip is often described in two very different ways. For some, there’s the “afterglow”: a lingering sense of joy and clarity that can last days or even weeks. But there’s also a lesser-acknowledged counterpart: the psychedelic hangover, which may accompany an afterglow in some mitigated form. This can mean feeling drained, irritable, foggy, or emotionally flat in the hours or days after a session.  Sometimes, this dark mood doesn't stop, and people develop debilitating depressive disorders.

Chemical Collective • 13th September 2025

Cracking the Doors of Perception | Chemical Collective

Some people who take psychedelic drugs remain in prolonged psychotic states for weeks, months or years. What do we know about how it works? And what does it feel like?

Ecstatic Integration • 12th September 2025

Everything you ever wanted to know about ketamine

Ketamine is the drug of the 21st-century. Here is a guide that I contributed to, primarily authored by the philosopher and researcher Jules Evans.

Chemical Collective • 22nd August 2025

Tripping in the Material World: A Historical Materialist Analysis of Psychedelia | Chemical Collective

"It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness", wrote Marx and Engels. How much is 'the' 'psychedelic experience' shaped and conditioned by material economic forces?