Over fifty years since the criminalization of LSD brought medical research on the drug to a halt, researchers in Europe have reopened investigations into the possible therapeutic benefits of the controversial substance. 1 This might come as something of a surprise to those who remember the public outcry against psychedelic drugs in the 1960s, when the American media echoed with sensational stories of LSD-induced violence and psychosis. 2 But before it became 'the nation's newest scourge', LSD was hailed as a 'wonder drug' by medical researchers and psychotherapists convinced of its therapeutic potential. This paper investigates how and why psychedelic drugs made the remarkable transition from medical tool to countercultural sacrament, and from panacea to medical, legal, and cultural pariah. Jordan Goodman, Paul Lovejoy, and Andrew Sherratt have already done much to demonstrate the fluidity of the boundary between licit and illicit drug use. They argue for the need to deconstruct the dominant western discourse on drugs, which artificially distinguishes between nutritional, medicinal, and recreational drug consumption. Instead, they look to 'the social contexts in which particular substances are consumed' in order 'to understand the meanings which they have for their users'. 3 Deconstructing the prevailing drugs discourse, however, requires more than replacing hegemonic definitions of drugs use with the meaning it has for consumers, as this meaning is itself highly contested and far from ideologically neutral.
Often repeated but little understood, the injunction to “take religion seriously” is as ubiquitous today as it is vague. As the phrase itself suggests, such a project is defined first and foremost by what it is not. It represents a reaction against a moment when religion was not “taken seriously” by historians, a moment when the dominance of Marxian approaches consigned religion to the status of an epiphenomenon whose truth lay outside itself—an expression of more fundamental social or economic forces. But beyond rejecting this form of demystification, what does it mean to “take religion seriously”? Does this entail an affirmation of the truth claims professed by the religious actors we study, or at least a “suspension of disbelief,” in the memorable words of Amy Hollywood?1 What political commitments, if any, are implied in the admonition to “take religion seriously,” and what role does it prescribe for religion in the presumptively secular public sphere? More vexing still is the question scholars of religion are now asking with increasing urgency: does the term “religion” in fact denote a coherent entity?2 Precisely what, in other words, are we being asked to “take seriously”?
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