Psychedelics in context: Mapping the adaptation of an ayahuasca religion in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Psychedelic substances occupy a central role in medical and spiritual paradigms throughout the world.Yet, they have been criminalized in nearly every country over the course of the 20th century.Users of psychedelics face a host of legal and political barriers in spite of mounting evidence for the safety of these substances in culturally-integrated contexts.The research presented in this thesis focuses on a Canadian branch of Santo Daime, a Brazilian syncretic religion structured around the ritualized consumption of the psychedelic plant decoction called Santo Daime, known outside the religion as ayahuasca.Generating data with participant observation and in-depth interviewing, I employ critical discourse analysis and thematic analysismethodologies derived from qualitative research-to analyze models of spirituality and healing embedded in the discourse of members of Santo Daime, and frame the group's adaptation to the Canadian cultural context within larger trends in Canadian law and drug policy.By locating Santo Daime at a controversial intersection of mental health and culture, I bring the concepts of ontology and epistemology to bear on Santo Daime members' worlds and worldviews, and explore their construal as radically other in relation to their largely secular cultural-political surroundings.Les substances psychédéliques occupent un rôle central dans des paradigmes médicaux et spiritueux à travers le monde.Pourtant, avec quelques exceptions dans quelques pays, ils sont presque uniformément criminalisé.Les consommateurs de psychédéliques font face à divers barrières politiques et légales, malgré une croissance de recherche scientifique attestant à la sécurité de ces substances dans les contextes culturellement-intégrés. La recherche présentée dans cette
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".