Drug-craft On the configurations of psychedelic efficacies

Psychedelic drugs are seeing a major comeback, especially in the West, where their potential to revolutionize psychiatry is gaining attention amid a global ‘mental illness epidemic.’ Medico-scientific practices are underway to test their pharmaceutical and therapeutic relevance; practices that shape future pathways for psychedelic efficacies that may be legitimized by state regulators. However, psychedelics are often enrolled in practices that fall outside or emerge alongside institutionally credentialed forms of drug efficacies. Swasti Mishra ethnographically explores a diverse range of practices that include psychedelic drugs. For instance, microdosing for work, music festivals, advocacy, psychotherapy oriented clinical studies, amateur research; interdisciplinary conferences and public health efforts to establish regulations and care for users.
Mishra demonstrates how these practices generate their own norms and produce their own forms of collective self-regulation with elements of shared knowledge across various sites of use. She argues that when considering drug effects, the configurations through which efficaciousness of drugs is crafted be taken into account. These provide more nuanced and potentially more effective ways of handling drugs, which are better adapted to the diversity of contexts and locally specific concerns in which drug effects emerge. In a time when both the pharmaceuticalization of mental health and the ‘war on drugs’ against non-medical uses remains a dominant and increasingly critiqued approach to controlling substances, Mishra provides new tools to approach how drugs come to matter. These tools offer empirically guided creative ways to think about, provisionally support, or intervene, in the continuously reshaping drug configurations across society.