How Goa, India became a hub of trance music: Sask. researcher explores global psychedelic history

After years of studying the rich history of psychedelic drug research in Saskatchewan and Canada, historian Erika Dyck’s latest book explores the impact of these novel substances across the world.

“They’re not addictive, but studying them might be,” she told CTV News on Thursday.

Dyck’s first book, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD on the Canadian Prairies, covers the pivotal role Saskatchewan played in the introduction of psychedelic drug research into the field of psychiatry.

She says the latest work, a collection of essays from different authors exploring the diverse history of psychedelics across the globe, “really sort of blossomed from my fascination with the stuff here.”

“The word psychedelic was coined in 1957, here in Saskatchewan,” said Dyck.

“But if we move past the idea of psychedelic — which meant ‘mind manifesting,’ or to bring to light, to bring the unconscious to light — if we move past that and we look at the way sacred plants have been used to change people’s consciousness, that stretches back millennia.”

In Expanding Mindscapes: A Global History of Psychedelics, Dyck and her co-editor Chris Elcock assemble stories that adopt perspectives beyond the usual suspects.

“The authors in this collection explore everything from LSD psychotherapy in communist Czechoslovakia to the first applications of LSD-25 in South America to the intersection of modernism and ayahuasca in China,” a statement from the publisher MIT Press said.

Dyck said it was fascinating to learn how the prohibition of psychedelic drugs in North America impacted other communities.

“So, in the 1970s when acid became illegal … underground dealers went further underground and some of them went further away,” she said.

One of those clandestine chemists that was regularly producing millions of hits of LSD decamped to India, “and within a few years, Goa becomes one of the sites of trance music and intersections of psychedelics.”

“So one of the stories I found fascinating is the prohibition may have actually enhanced other areas to receive psychedelics in different ways.”

Expanding Mindscapes is out now.