March/2021

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Welcome to our March Newsletter!

We have had an increase in subscribers to our newsletters and we are about to hit 10,000 likes on Facebook! We would like to acknowledge and give thanks for your support and for allowing us to embrace our community with many diverse voices while maintaining integrity in our leadership. For those of you who are new here, the Australian Psychedelic Society (APS) is a not-for-profit and registered charity. The APS seeks to connect and empower Australia’s psychedelic community to benefit, enjoy and contribute to their culture in a safe and supportive environment. The APS has chapters and groups in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, with a brand new chapter being established in Canberra. The APS is incredibly grateful for its large network of passionate volunteers from across the country. Together we host film screenings, integration workshops, psychedelic story events, mushroom day workshops and advocate for the decriminalisation of psychedelics and plant medicines.

The APS is part of a larger global movement with psychedelic societies already established in several places in the USA, UK, and other European nations. By creating a cohesive network, it is hoped that changes in drug policy, education and use will be established based on evidence-based information, rather than fear-based misinformation. Once again, we thank you for your support across Australia and the world and if you think someone else you know would benefit from subscribing to our newsletter please share it with them and encourage them, to sign up below.

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Sydney APS presents
'The Cosmic Serpent'
Book Club event

APS-Sydney is excited to bring you all our fifth instalment of Book Club after collectively deciding this time, to choose the seminal text: The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge by Jeremy Narby.

Canadian anthropologist and author. In his books, Narby examines shamanism and molecular biology, and shamans' knowledge of botanics and biology through the use of entheogens across many cultures.

The Cosmic Serpent is a fascinatingly interesting book, it's short and sweet and here is a Free PDF Copy

Where: Temple on the Park
158 Australia Street, Newton, NSW
When: 19th March
Facebook RSVP and event details here
Tickets >Here<

APS presents
New Canberra Chapter event!

APS-Canberra will host their inaugural event on Sunday, March the 14th at the sheltered BBQ area at Weston Park, Yarralumla across from Yarralumla Play Stations. Join New Chapter lead Ash & Emma for a relaxed and family-friendly picnic where people can meet other members of the community who share a diverse interest in psychedelics and the myriad of different approaches people have to them.

Please feel free to let family and friends know about this event and encourage them to come along. In order to view the Picnic event page and register your interest (this helps is maintaining gathering numbers) please send a ‘join request’ to the Australian Psychedelic Society-Canberra Facebook Page first. For further details or enquiries, you can also contact Ash or Emma through the Canberra Facebook Page too.

Establishing the direction of APS-Canberra
What the community would like to see from their local APS chapter
Looking for suitably skilled, knowledgeable and enthusiastic volunteers as the chapter inevitably grows and develops.

Where: Sheltered BBQ area at Weston Park
Yarralumla across from Yarralumla Play Station
When: 14th March
Time: 12pm
Please RSVP Via the Facebook page

Garden States Microdose Webcast - San Pedro & Merry Jane Cultivation

Tom Forrest will screen his short film on cannabis cultivation, followed by a live Q&A. In 2018, Tom Forrest CF was awarded the first-ever Churchill Fellowship for cannabis agronomy. In 2019, this research grant sent Tom to 8 different countries, 25 cities and more than 50 cannabis farms, to explore cannabis cultivation practices and learn about the cannabis community worldwide. This film, published with his paper in December 2019, also includes interviews with experts in the field, including Raphael Mechoulam, Hinanit Voltai, John Barnet, Jodie Emery, and Gianpaolo Grassi. Come with Tom on this amazing journey across the globe and see what the future of cannabis cultivation might look like.
Follow this link for more information on this online event.

"Could the psychedelic state induce a total re-evaluation of our ideas of philosophy, culture and beauty?
Thomas Roberts is professor emeritus at Northern Illinois University, where he taught the world’s first inter-disciplinary psychedelics course from 1981-2012. He is a founding member of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a former visiting scientist at Johns Hopkins, editor of Psychedelics and Spirituality and the author of the books Psychedelic Horizons, The Psychedelic Future of the Mind, and MindApps. Tom has spoken at conferences from northern Finland to southern Australia, from Iceland to Brazil, and he also originated the celebration of Bicycle Day (April 19) to honour the day that Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann discovered LSD's psychoactive effect.

Week 1 — Psychocriticism — Disney’s Snow White meets Stan Grof’s Map of our minds.
Week 2 — The Entheogen Reformation — Religious and Spiritual Growth.
Week 3 — Elders & Youngers -- A psychedelic Who’s Who
Week 4 — The Four Stages of the Psychedelic Renaissance
1) Medicines - psychedelics for mental health.
2) Entheogens - religious and spiritual use of psychedelics
3) Ideagens - psychedelics as generators of new ideas, in arts, science and philosophy
4) Mind design - how combining different substances and practices can generate totally new mind-body states and ways of perceiving.

Course Times:
4 consecutive Tuesdays from 7-9 pm UK time, on Zoom.
9th, 16th, 23rd and 30th of March

For more information --Click Here

Australian Psychedelic Society News

This past February saw the Australian Psychedelic Society committee get together to discuss the aims and values of the organisation. We worked together over a full-day event to re-establish our aims in order to reflect what we believe our psychedelic communities would further benefit from. Over the next few months, you may notice some small changes to both the newsletter content and our website as we transition into some new stages of growth throughout the APS. We are excited to have some renewed focus and drive for the coming years in regards to Psychedelics in Australia and the APS's role. We will reveal more in the newsletters and on the website over the following months.
As you may have also seen we are excited to announce the opening of a new chapter in Canberra, and we wish them luck on their first event. February saw APS-Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney making the most of the end of summer and hold well-received events, with a lot of great feedback from all chapters.
If you haven't already be sure to join your local Facebook chapter to stay up to date on last-minute events or event changes. We know that not everyone has Facebook and so we are looking at other ways in which we can stay connected off-platform :)

"The APS and Enthenogenesis Australia are also excited to announce that APS's Sydney chapter lead Jef Baker will be presenting at EGA's upcoming Garden States 2021 conference. Jef’s research has included an analysis of Ayahuasca discussion in online contexts, where he has identified a link between deep ecology, unitary consciousness and plant sentience. Jef found that these discussions challenged hegemonic anthropocentrism ‘through expressions of an expanded sense of self that accentuates the countercultural bearings of entheogenic informed ecospirituality.’"

To view more info on Jef or any of the many other important contributors to EGA’s Garden States 2021 conference we invite you to visit the web site and Facebook event page.

Join Your Local Group here!

Book club Review by Marc Devitt:

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

"Early on in the evening, we were confronted with an important issue focusing on just two of those words: consciousness and transcendence. One of our book club members expressed a deeply felt need to have some serious and quite candid discussion about the best ways to take psychedelics. He was tired of the intellectual discussion, he explained he wanted more pragmatics about actual practice. We all clarified with him that he was not asking for a discussion on sourcing, because of legal issues it is a thorny area for APS when we start talking about the best ways to ingest psychedelics – and that really sucked, having to face the same old quandary. Perhaps this ‘New Science of Psychedelics’ could sell out for chump change and push for clinical and corporate control of psychedelics for dying, addiction and depression only and not for positive exploration of consciousness (even when we are not ill), for spiritual transcendence, as the title of the book implies..."