BMQ

BMQ: Boston Medical Quarterly was published from 1950-1966 by the Boston University School of Medicine and the Massachusetts Memorial Hospitals

Beyond religious freedom: Psychedelics and cognitive liberty

This chapter will examine the blurred boundaries between the sacred and the secular when it comes to psychedelic experiences, and the inevitable ensuing arbitrariness involved in protecting some such rituals and not others. It will put forth the argument that there is a need to move beyond simply seeking exemptions from drug prohibition in the name of religious freedom; rather, there should be a broader right to ingest psychedelics as an aspect of cognitive liberty. Cognitive liberty is the right to control one's own consciousness. It is a concept that equates to freedom of thought, a right protected internationally by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and enforceable in Europe through Article 9 of the European Convention of Human Rights

Retheorising Emile Durkheim on society and religion: embodiment, intoxication and collective life

In this paper we argue that Emile Durkheim's sociology contains within it a theory of society and religion as a form of embodied intoxication that is implicit in his writings on effervescent assemblies but has not yet been explicated or developed fully by subsequent commentators. This holds that for social or religious collectivities to exist, the bodies of individuals must be both marked by insignia, customs and techniques that facilitate the possibility of culturally normative patterns of recognition, interaction and action, while also being excited, enthused or intoxicated sufficiently to be inhabited as collective rather than egoistic beings. Our paper begins by investigating the central features of Durkheim's theory – including his interest in the ritual steering of these processes – as developed most fully in his last major study, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. We then develop our own analysis of Durkheim's concern that modernity has stimulated a rise in ‘abnormal’ forms of embodied intoxication that fail to attach individuals to the wider societies in which they live, and demonstrate the utility of our analytical framework by employing it to assess the recent resurgence of charismatic Christian revivalism. Shortlisted for The Sociological Review, 2011, Article of the Year Prize