Dr Hannah Farrimond is a Senior Lecturer in Medical Sociology at the University of Exeter, UK. She analyses the socio-cultural shifts in meanings concerning drugs and pharmaceuticals (e.g. alcohol, smoking/vaping, cannabis, psychedelics, sleeping medications). At the moment, she is thinking about how stigma changes and mutates over time, how histories of drugs affect these possibilities and how unexpected events and connections remake the meaning of drugs time and time again.

Why does stigma (still) matter for psychedelics?

Stigma can be understood as the moral and social devaluation of an individual or group. I examine how psychedelic stigma is changing over time, looking at three dimensions; a) stigma lineage or history b) stigma variability in different contexts and c) stigma strength. It is arguable that the stigma attached to using psychedelics is weakening. However, with stigma, context is everything. Stigma is unlikely to be problematic at Breaking Convention. In wider society, beliefs such as psychedelic therapies are ‘not for people like me’ or fears about disclosure deter use. Psychedelic stigma is still an active problem in the renaissance.