Erika Dyck invites you to join us for a journey through Psychedelics, their use and history in Saskatchewan
Did you ever wonder why/how Saskatchewan became the psychedelic hotspot of the 1950s? Our trapezoidal province was anything but square when it became the hub of hallucinogenic research and Indigenous ceremonial rights.
Saskatchewan was the only province in Canada to legally recognize Indigenous peyote ceremonies in 1954, and in 1956, the superintendent of the Saskatchewan Provincial Mental Hospital at Weyburn, Humphry Osmond, urged Aldous Huxley to “soar angelic” by taking a “pinch of psychedelic”. These visionary characters put the province on the map, and the legacy of their out-of-the-box-thinking continues to shape our thinking on the place of psychedelics in the modern world.
In this talk I will revisit some of this colourful history and consider how Canada might rethink its laws on psychedelics in the future.