Psychedelic Wisdom Golden State Network

Susan Campbell, Ph.D. is a counselor and author of 12 books. When she was a professor at UMass Amherst in the 60’s and 70’s, she co-founded an alternative counseling and education center for university students seeking to integrate their psychedelic experiences and avoid bad trips and confusing after-effects.

The methods she pioneered then are still a major part of her practice today and are considered state-of-the art in psychedelic therapy. Susan trains coaches and therapists throughout the United States and Europe.

Dale has been the state director of California NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) since 1987. He wrote his PhD dissertation at Stanford on Consumer Choice and FDA Drug Regulation.

He was one of the original co-authors of California's medical marijuana initiative, Prop. 215, in 1996, and has co-sponsored and lobbied for other drug reform measures. He has published original research on medical marijuana, the history of marijuana and drug prohibition, the economic benefits of legalization, marijuana and driving safety, cannabis vaporization, CBD, and drug urinalysis.

He is a founding member of the Drug Policy Forum of California.

John Gilmore is a computer engineer, computer entrepreneur, civil libertarian, drug policy reformer, and philanthropist.

He has thirty years of experience in the computer industry, including applications programming, systems programming, language implementation, management, and investment. He was the fifth employee at Sun Microsystems, and contributed to hardware and software design and production. He co-designed the protocol that your phone or laptop uses every day to get when you connect to WiFi or Ethernet. He has contributed significantly to the worldwide free software movement, by writing many free programs, and co-founding Cygnus Support, a successful commercial free software company that is now part of IBM. He cofounded the "alt" subnet of the Usenet decentralized world forum to improve its free expression. He is a champion of civil liberties, a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a cypherpunk, an advocate for wide distribution of strong encryption systems, to provide privacy and security despite malevolent governments.

He has contributed several decades and more than $12 million to improving United States drug laws. He serves on the boards of the Marijuana Policy Project, which has enacted more than half of the adult-use and medical marijuana laws in the US; and the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which leads the psychedelic medicine movement, by running FDA-approved clinical trials to make MDMA (Ecstacy) into a legal prescription medicine for post-traumatic stress disorder.

This week I continue the series with my old friend, Dr. Martin H. Goodman.

Marty graduated from Harvard with a BA in biology in 1971, before receiving his MD from the University of California at San Diego.

He worked at the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in the 1980s and volunteered taking care of people having "bad trips" at rock concerts under the auspices of their "rock medicine" section. Marty has been a life-long fighter for social justice, and is an advocate for educating the public in the scientific method, and using evidence-based reasoning when it comes to matters of medicine and science. He is also a mountaineer (often in remote desert regions), backpacker, river rafter, long-distance cyclist, and life-long environmentalist.

Marty is a self-described "iconoclast," who has rejected the politically correct tropes of both the "right" and of the "left". He first used LSD over 50 years ago. Always with a friend, and more often than not in an outdoors (often genuinely wilderness) environment.

This week I continue my series of Confessions of the Psychedelic Elders (please subscribe and review) with an old acquaintance (and neighbor of mine in Mendocino County) – Mariavittoria Mangini, PhD, FNP.

Mangini is the author of the forward for the newly released volume of Sasha Shulgin's pharmacology lectures: The Nature of Drugs, and has written extensively on the impact of psychedelic experiences in shaping the lives of her contemporaries. Her particular interest is in the history of women in this field. In addition to her personal confessions, she will be telling us about her upcoming doctoral class at the California Institute for Integral Studies this fall on women and psychedelics.

Mangini has also worked closely with many of the most distinguished investigators in this field and is a founder of the Women’s Visionary Council, a nonprofit organization that supports investigations into non-ordinary forms of consciousness and organizes gatherings of researchers, healers, artists, and activists whose work explores these states.

Her long history with the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic includes having been a barefoot patient, a lead clinician in the medical section, and the chair of the Board of Directors – all in the same lifetime. She has been a Family Nurse Midwife for 35 years, and was in primary care practice with Frank Lucido MD, one of the pioneers of the medical cannabis movement, for 25 years. Their practice was one of the first to implement the California Compassionate Use Act of 1996, the first state medical cannabis initiative.

She is Professor Emerita of Nursing at Holy Names University in Oakland. Her current project is the development of a Thanatology program for the study of death and dying.

Richard Elliot Doblin (born November 30, 1953) is an American drug activist and executive who is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).