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 psychdliques occupent un rle central dans des paradigmes mdicaux et spiritueux travers le monde.Pourtant, avec quelques exceptions dans quelques pays, ils sont presque uniformment criminalis.Les consommateurs de psychdliques font face divers barrires politiques et lgales, malgr une croissance de recherche scientifique attestant la scurit de ces substances dans les contextes culturellement-intgrs. La recherche prsente dans cette
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".