The Story of Psilocybin: Western Society’s Struggle with the Unknown

Kyle Giffin
11 min readMar 31, 2020

The use of psychedelics within Western Society has been plagued by controversy since the very beginning. The moniker ‘psychedelic’ translates etymologically as psyche- (the mind) + -delom (to show or reveal).

Despite millennia of deep-rooted cultural & historical use of entheogens in countries around the world, these mind-altering substances have

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Kyle Giffin

Cognitive Science @ Berkeley. Writer for the Sutarjda Center & EEG researcher at CCN Labs.