In a move barely noticed in the West, more than three years ago, Iran's Grand Ayatollah Rohani issued a formal legal ruling -- a "fatwa" -- declaring that the use of entheogens and psychedelics was permissible ("ḥalāl") for Shi'i Muslims for purposes of treatment and spiritual growth.

Grand Ayatollah Rohani's fatwa specified that such use should be undertaken under the direction and supervision of qualified experts, but it did not specify which psychoactive substances were meant to be included. The fatwa, however, was delivered after long discussions with petitioners about the effects of DMT, ayahuasca, haoma (or soma), LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, ibogaine, and marijuana.

Sufi mystic, Islamic scholar and psychedelic practitioner Wahid Azal explained what happened in an interview with Reality Sandwich. Another Shi'i scholar approached him about opening a dialog with the Shi'i religious establishment in an effort to get some sort of formal legal opinion about the approach to the therapeutic and spiritual use of entheogens:

To make a long story short, after well over a year and a half of back and forth discussions and correspondences between my friend (and one other individual) with the office of Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammad Sadeq Hussaini Rohani in Qom, Iran; in mid-March 2014, via email, the Grand Ayatollah issued a formal legal ruling (that is, a fatwa) determining the use of entheogens and psychoactive substances to be licit and thus permissible (ḥalāl) for Shi'i Muslims provided it be under the direction and supervision of qualified experts (ahl al-ikhtiṣāṣ), and that, moreover, such plant substances as a rule do not impair the mind. In the final missive before the decision, the questioner specifically underscored the issue of the visionary component of these plants, where people have reported visions of paradise and hell, and Grand Ayatollah Rohani's fatwa finds no objections here either.

 

Rohani could have been open to mind-altering drugs because the psychedelics have a resemblance to Esfand, also known as Syrian rue (peganum harmala), which contains the psychoactive indole alkaloid harmaline, a central nervous system stimulant and MAO inhibitor used for thousands of years in the region. According to at least one Shi'i tradition, the Prophet Mohammed took esfand for 50 days.

Whatever the precise theological reasoning behind the Rohani's fatwa, with it, Iran could leapfrog Western nations when it comes to psychedelic research. Although psychedelics are seeing a research renaissance in the West, research here is limited by their criminalized legal status, as well as lack of funding. But the Islamic Republic has cleared the way.

This article was produced in collaboration with AlterNet and first appeared here.

This year's United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) on Drugs is notable for the increasing inclusion of non-governmental voices, with civil society being represented for the first time within the session itself. In this case, civil society refers to non-governmental organizations, most of which seem to oppose the existing international drug prohibition regime.

But as the UNGASS proceeds this week, civil society is making itself heard not only inside the UN, but outside the formal structures of the meeting, too. At Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, in the very shadow of UN headquarters, demonstrators are showing up daily to promote a variety of drug reform-related causes.

On Monday, the Latin American Caravan for Peace, Life and Justice, Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP), and Moms United -- a group in which many members have lost children to prison, violence, or drug overdoses -- rallied hundreds of people to call for repealing global drug prohibition. On Wednesday, April 20, the cannabis culture contingent was out in force to call for marijuana legalization.

But the demonstration on Tuesday, April 19, was to promote a slightly more esoteric position: support for access to psychedelic drugs. The date is known by psychonauts as Bicycle Day, to commemorate April 19, 1943, the date Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann intentionally ingested his new creation, LSD-25, took off for home on his bicycle, and began tripping brains, inaugurating the modern psychedelic era.

The ride was a bit bumpy, with Hofmann reporting wavering vision, a sense of motionless, and a "weird, unfamiliar world." But it got better, as he wrote in his notes on the hallucinogenic trip:

Now, little by little I could begin to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted behind my closed eyes. Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me, alternating, variegated, opening and then closing themselves in circles and spirals, exploding in colored fountains, rearranging and hybridizing themselves in constant flux.

Welcome to the psychedelic age. Between then and the late 1960s, LSD was the subject of much fascinating and provocative research, especially on its therapeutic uses for dealing with issues such as alcoholism, trauma, and depression. But that scientific interest was squelched by the prohibition of the drug (and its insertion into Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act in the US) after its use spread from scientific and research circles into the population at large, especially the hippies.

Still, interest in LSD and other psychedelics never went away, and now the mind-altering substances are making a comeback, both in the research community and in popular culture. Earlier this month, scientists examined the brains of people on acid using cutting-edge nuero-imaging techniques to show exactly what LSD does in the human brain. And further research on LSD and other psychedelics for therapeutic purposes is ongoing.

But the people in the plaza on Tuesday were, for the most part, not scientists and researchers but enthusiasts and psychedelic explorers. Led by Psymposia and the Psychedelic Society of Brooklyn (one of at least 50 city-based such societies around the world), they took on the question of why use, support, or call for the legalization of the consciousness-changing drugs by providing their own answers under the format of "Psychedelics Because…"

"The science has been there for 50 years, but that doesn't change hearts and minds," began event MC Lex Pelger as he urged a popular push for psychedelic acceptance. "When used properly and with intention, these drugs can be tremendously beneficial," he added, citing the recent (and not so recent) research on their therapeutic potential.

Pelger urged others in the audience to share their own stories, and they did.

"I was seriously depressed and then did iboga and cured myself," said someone identifying himself as Rainbow Star Guide. "Eat the plants!"

Another speaker, also citing problems with depression, said that he used ayahuasca to break free.

"It gave me a feeling of happiness, energy, and contentment," he said. "Think about the influence that psychedelic culture could have. These substances can open us up to try to build a better world, to save the world."

"The war on drugs is stealing happiness from the world!" interjected Pelger.

"Psychedelics can help shake you free of your shit," said another speaker, who identified as a shamanic practitioner who worked with ayahuasca, before playing a trippy ode to the powerful herbal concoction on a very strange drum-like instrument.

A young man who identified himself as a Muslim described his confusion and alienation growing up in the faith in America in the post-9/11 era. He told how he ate magic mushrooms at age 16 in a search for spiritual direction.

"That offered me the resilience and the head space to develop my own framework," he said.

Not everyone claimed profound, life-changing reasons for using psychedelics.

"Psychedelics because they make the music sound great and because my head doesn't belong to the state," said a long-haired man who appeared old enough to have melted his mind listening to Jimi Hendrix.

Some psychedelic researchers were present, including Neil Goldsmith, a psychotherapist and author of Psychedelic Healing: Entheogens for Psychotherapy and Spiritual Development.

"Psychedelics enhanced my practice by illuminating my insides," he said. "I do them and bring that insight and wisdom to my practice. Psychedelics should be permitted as an adjunct to psychotherapy," Goldsmith added.

Psychedelic science, medicine, and culture is undergoing a renaissance. It's breaking out all over, including this week in the shadows of UN headquarters. The nations of the world may not be listening yet, but the clamor is growing louder.

This article was written in collaboration with AlterNet and first appeared here.

A man who died after being hogtied by police in South Haven, Mississippi, earlier this year, was killed by "complications of LSD toxicity," the State Medical Examiner office announced Tuesday, ruling the death "accidental" in an official autopsy report. But given that there are no known cases of fatal LSD overdoses, the examiner's findings are hard to credit.

The family of Troy Goode isn't buying it. And they have their own, independent autopsy findings and the science of psychedelics to back them up.

Goode, his wife, and friends were in the parking lot of a Widespread Panic concert before the show when he began behaving erratically after taking several hits of LSD. His wife attempted to drive him home, but at some point, he got out of the car and began creating a disturbance. Police were called, and they chased and arrested him, hogtieing him face down on a stretcher. He was charged with resisting arrest, then taken in an ambulance to a hospital, where he died two hours later.

Last month, Goode's family and their attorney, Tim Edwards, cited an independent autopsy report that found Goode died after being hogtied and left prone for an extended period. That stress position caused him to have trouble breathing and, as his heart attempted to compensate, it went into cardiac arrhythmia.

"He was suffocating. His heart increased into what is called tachycardia," Edwards said. "There is no scientific basis to attribute his death to LSD. This was lethal force, putting someone in a prolonged hogtied position," Edwards said. "This was not a situation where a 300-pound man attacked a police officer in the dark. This was a science nerd."

At the time, Edwards said the family was asking the Justice Department to open a civil rights investigation into Goode's death and that the family planned to file a lawsuit in January seeking compensation and a ban on hogties.

The Goode family, now represented by attorney Kevin McCormack, isn't any happier today. McCormack said he was "shocked and surprised" by the official autopsy finding.

"It says the cause of death was due to complications resulting from LSD toxicity. My initial reaction when I read that was shock and surprise. As I mentioned numerous times, there's not a single reported death in all of the medical literature from the beginning of human time, not a single reported death due to LSD toxicity," said McCormack.

"In the medical literature there are cases where people took 1000 and 7000 times more LSD than Troy did and ended up fine," said McCormack. "I have no idea what they would mean by complications. What we do know is that LSD, even extremely high doses, is very unlikely to kill anyone and that hogtieing is extremely likely to kill someone," said McCormack.

"We know why Troy died, we know what caused it, and we know it was not LSD," said McCormack.

The widely-acclaimed drug information website Erowid has reviewed the evidence around LSD fatalities, and it backs up what the Goode family lawyers have been saying: "Put simply, LSD does not cause death at recreational or therapeutic doses… Fewer than a handful of human deaths have been tied in the medical literature to the pharmacological effects of LSD, and none of these deaths have been unquestionably attributable to LSD's actions."

Erowid is relying on the scientists:

"No well-documented human deaths resulting directly from the toxic effects of LSD itself have occurred, though LSD has been implicated in accidental deaths, suicides, and homicides," Haddad and Winchester noted in 1990.

"LSD is not toxic in the biological sense," Dr. Paul Gahlinger wrote in his 2001 book "Illegal Drugs: A Complete Guide to Their History, Chemistry, Use and Abuse."

"There have been no documented human deaths from an LSD overdose," a 2008 review of the scientific literature by Passie et al concluded.

Erowid expanded on the accidental death theme to note that some deaths have been associated with inebriated or combative behavior, "including falling or jumping from a height or dying after beaten by police."

Goode was beaten by police, bitten by a police dog, and then restrained. The official autopsy notes cuts to his cheek and chin, bleeding between his scalp and his brain, more cuts or scrapes on his chest, and three fractured ribs. Goode also suffered puncture wounds from a dog bite to his left arm and bruises on both wrists, both ankles, "multiple contusions on the lower left leg," and bruises and cuts or scrapes to his right thigh.

But it was the LSD that killed him, according to Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Erin A. Barnhart, M.D., who signed the autopsy report: "Based on the autopsy findings and current investigational information, the 30-year-old male died as a result of complications of LSD toxicity."

DeSoto County District Attorney John Champion is prepared to wrap it all up. He said Tuesday that, based on the evidence, there was no police misconduct. Now it's up to the family to decide whether to pursue other means of recourse.

[This article was written in partnership with Alternet, and was originally published here.]

With the holiday break coming up soon, millions of young Americans will be looking to party. And tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them will be looking to stimulant drugs, especially Ecstasy (MDMA), to help them dance to the throbbing beats far into the night. MDMA is a synthetic stimulant with a chemical structure related to both methamphetamine and mescaline. It's great at providing the energy for partying the night away with a psychedelic tinge. The new scene drug, Molly, is simply Ecstasy in powdered form.

According to the 2013 National Household Survey on Drug Use and Health, some 17 million Americans have taken Ecstasy at least once, more than a half million reported taking it within the past month, and about three-quarters of a million reported taking it for the first time that year. Those monthly-use and first-use figures have been roughly stable for the past few years.

Some of those fun-seekers are going to take too much. And some of them are going to end up ingesting something they thought was Ecstasy, but wasn't. And one or two or three of them might die. Despite breathless media reports, people dying from Ecstasy or from what they thought was Ecstasy or what they thought was a drug like Ecstasy, is not that big a problem, especially compared with the 16,000 or so people who died last year from opiate overdoses. The number of Ecstasy-related deaths each year ranges from the single digits to the low dozens.

Still it is a problem. Any avoidable death is a problem, and those deaths are largely avoidable. They occur because of varying combinations of ignorance, greed and bad public policy. Some people are working to prevent those deaths, and the work extends from the club or rave or festival door to the halls of power in Washington.

The harm reduction group Dance Safe is among those doing that work. The small non-profit offers educational services, encourages people to submit their pills for testing ("drug checking"), and has informational booths at venues that will let them.

Where 20 years ago, the Ecstasy and party drug scene was largely limited to word-of-mouth raves, things have changed, said Dance Safe executive director Missi Wooldridge.

"We've seen a real explosion in the scene that has been transformed from an underground rave culture to a real mainstream electronic dance music culture," she said. "People are likely to experiment with drugs at raves and dances, as well as with friends at parties or night clubs."

They are also likely to be ingesting either adulterated Ecstasy or other new synthetic drugs misleadingly marketed as Ecstasy. That is reflected in reports on drug checking websites such as Pill Reports and Ecstasy Data, as well as drug discussion forums like Bluelight.

Pill Reports warns that Yellow Pacman tablets found earlier this month in Kansas and Texas contain not MDMA but the synthetic methylone, a methcathinone stimulant that is a chemical analog to MDMA, but is not MDMA. And at least two different pills currently being peddled in Canada as Ecstasy are actually methamphetamine.

"A lot of what we're seeing is the new psychoactive substances infiltrating the market and the scene," said Wooldridge. "People can purchase these substances online. I see a lot of positive results for methcathinone, MDPV, methylone, and the like. Similarly, people think they're taking LSD, but it's actual N-Bomb, or maybe ketamine. People operate under misconceptions about what they're taking, and that can be serious because there are lots of differences in things like onset, duration and potency."

Educated, sophisticated drug consumers may take advantage of drug checking services, as well as have advanced understandings of drug potency, duration and the like, but they are a minority. Most people just want to party, and they want to do it with Ecstasy.

"In contrast with some places in Europe, the market for people seeking out new synthetics is very small in the US," said Stefanie Jones, nightlife community engagement manager at the Drug Policy Alliance "But that doesn't mean they're not here. Many of the people buying them are after MDMA, but here in the US, the market is young people, and many are not that well-informed or familiar with notions like drug checking to see what's in that powder. It's largely an uninformed market, so there's a lot of adulteration."

Dance Safe's Wooldridge concurred.

"People are taking these substances unknowingly for the most part, rather than checking them out," the Denver-based activist said. "There is a relatively small segment that is into the experimentation and the understanding, but most users are not that sophisticated and are taking these drugs without really knowing what they are."

When people die, as two people did at New York's massive Electric Zoo festival last year, the pressure is on promoters and club owners to crack down on drugs, to increase security, even to decrease or do away with harm reduction measures out of fear of appearing to encourage drug use. In large part, that's because of the RAVE Act, a 2003 law sponsored by then Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) that threatens owners and promoters with possible criminal sanctions for encouraging drug use.

"The RAVE Act is the elephant in the room," said Wooldridge. "Its intent wasn't to harm or prosecute legitimate event producers, but to expand the crack house laws and go after people solely having events for drug use or sales. But there has been an unintended consequence. People in the industry fear that if they attempt to address drug use they'll be help legally liable for overdoses or other emergencies. Their legal teams and insurance companies say to stay clear, turn a blind eye, but that increases the risks. We need to educate the lawyers and insurers on this. Show me a case where an event producer has been prosecuted for doing harm reduction."

"If the law is making owners scared, we should change the law so they are explicitly protected," said Jones. "Put the focus on the health and safety of the patrons. Including harm reduction shouldn't be seen as encouraging drug activity, but as prioritizing health and safety. Changing the law at the federal level would send a message to the industry that harm reduction is valuable and you won't get in trouble, and that could change the landscape of festivals."

One woman is working to do just that. Dede Goldsmith didn't mean to become a reformer, but when her daughter, Shelley, a University of Virginia student, died after taking Ecstasy at Washington, DC electronic music show the same weekend at the Electonic Zoo last year, that's what happened.

She told Vox in an October interview that when one of Shelley's friends told her Shelley had taken Molly, her first response was, "Who is Molly?" In her search for answers, she came to the realization that Molly didn't kill her daughter; federal drug prohibition and policies that discourage education about safe drug use did.

On the anniversary of her daughter's death in August, Goldsmith launched the Amend the RAVE Act campaign. Its goal, Goldsmith says, is "to make EDM festivals and concerts safer for our young people. Specifically, I am asking for language to be added to the law to make it clear that event organizers and venue owners can implement safety measures to reduce the risk of medical emergencies, including those associated with drug use, without fear of prosecution by federal authorities. As the law currently stands, many owners believe that they will be accused of 'maintaining a drug involved premises' under the act if they institute such measures, opening themselves to criminal or civil prosecution."

"It's not that producers don't care, it's that they're terrified," said Wooldridge. "Amending the RAVE Act can be a way to organize the community so people don't fear law enforcement if they're addressing drug use. What's more detrimental -- a fatal overdose or having harm reduction teams and medical teams on site?"

"The campaign is just getting underway," said Jones. "They're collecting signatures, and Dede is just having first meetings with legislators to try to get them on board, to try to get some bipartisan support."

In the meantime, other steps can be taken.

"One of the biggest things we can do is to educate with a true public health approach," Wooldridge said. "We need to have honest conversations and we need to implement drug testing; we have to have that opportunity to create an early warning system when these substances begin to appear."

"Education is really, really critical," said Jones. "We need to be able to get real drug education out to young people and meet them where they are. We need to be explicit about what the drugs are, what they look like, what the common dose it. Integrating harm reduction practices into the culture is also really important, and Dance Safe is great at that."

An effective means of tracking new and available drugs, such as a publicly funded, more comprehensive version of the drug checking websites would also be useful. But that requires someone willing to spend the money.

"We don't really have a surveillance system set up to track these new psychoactive substances," Wooldridge complained. "We don't have the public health monitoring. As a nonprofit, we do some of that on a small scale, but we don't have the capacity or the resources to really do the job. What are the priorities and where is the funding to collect the data?"

"Changing policy to allow for drug checking is also an important avenue to pursue," said Jones. "If we're going to be in a world where drugs remain illegal, we will continue to have problems with imitations and new synthetics, with people not knowing what they're getting. That would be the least we can do."

There is one other obvious response.

"It's unrealistic to think we can keep drugs out of clubs and bars and festivals. Trying to do that causes more harm than good," Wooldridge said. "We need to be realistic and recognize drug use first and foremost as a health concern, not a criminal justice issue. These drugs are often being sold as something they're not, and that's because of prohibition and the black market," said Wooldridge. "One obvious option is legalization and regulation. Then you'd have quality control and you wouldn't need all this drug-checking."

But we're not there yet. Until we are, people are going to have to watch out for themselves and for each other. Check those drugs, kids!