New Frontiers in the Study of Drugs and Religion

The use of psychedelic-assisted therapy in addiction recovery raises complex challenges regarding alterations of autonomy. Addiction narratives and ayahuasca practices both frequently involve encounters with external entities perceived as influencing one’s sense of agency. In the case of addiction these entities impede it, yet autonomy may be restored. Through processes such as surrender to a higher power in 12-Step programs and ego-dissolution in psychedelic-assisted therapy, autonomy is paradoxically restored by relinquishing control. The questions regarding agency and autonomy which these raise will require new frameworks which emphasize connectedness. These frameworks also allow for the consideration of the role of community in shaping external agents and altering autonomy. Being shaped by the wider set and setting of culture, input from the humanities is needed to adequately explore the potential clinical applications of the various communities, practices, and frameworks confronting these altered states of autonomy.

This paper investigates the emerging intersection of Buddhism and addiction recovery in the United States through ethnographic interviews with participants in Buddhist recovery communities. Twelve-Step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous dominate the American recovery landscape. But though they aim to be compatible to those with any or no religious practice, some people find AA does not work for them. For those people, Buddhist alternatives like Recovery Dharma and Hungry Ghosts United have gained traction in recent decades. This study examines how participants navigate traditional Twelve-Step concepts, adapt Buddhist principles to recovery contexts, and approach spiritual experiences—including the complex relationship with psychedelics. I argue that Buddhist recovery communities represent creative spaces where practitioners renegotiate traditional Buddhist doctrines, Twelve-Step frameworks, and countercultural values to forge distinctive recovery pathways. This research contributes to scholarly understanding of the ongoing adaptations of Buddhism in America, particularly in regard to understudied issues of drugs, addiction, and recovery.  

American psychedelic users have often taken a turn toward religious life to situate and make sense of their profound experiences. In the 20th century and into the 21st, this turn towards religion also meant a “turn to the East,” invoking either Hindu or Buddhist traditions and cosmologies to make meaning of an extraordinary experience. These patterns suggest that psychedelics entail something altogether new to elucidate their true meaning. Yet early in this period of popular psychedelic experimentation in the late 1960s, Lisa Bieberman—a veteran of Harvard’s psychedelic research and head of the influential Psychedelic Information Center in Cambridge, MA— presented an alternative philosophy of psychedelic religion, rooted in Quaker practice and a radically simply gnosis that resulted from a psychedelic experience. Drawing from her essays and unpublished memoir, this paper will outline her view of psychedelic religion for “the West” and present its implications for contemporary psychedelic religious life.

Saturday Night Live recently aired a faux commercial featuring comedian and guest host Ramy Youssef using the controversial GLP-1 Ozempic to help with fasting during Ramadan. Youssef quips, “I used to rush to eat a whole meal before dawn, but now I just grab my prayer beads and my Ozempic needle. As long as I shoot up before the sun rises, it’s halal”(Saturday Night Live, 2024). While Ramy and the other cast members are joking, this paper takes seriously the potential religious use of GLP-1 medications, and their place within a longer genealogy of asceticism and transhumanism. I argue that they function as contemporary pharmacological forms of fasting that, while secularized and technoscientific, are part of larger religious projects of (managing) embodiment and transcendence. Drawing on Christian religious, historical, and sociological perspectives, I interrogate how GLP-1s recast many religious and spiritual dimensions of fasting through a newly biomedical framework.