I am intending on going to this. I have tickets to Europe booked.
Anybody else going to be around?

http://www.psychedelic.info/index_2_eng.html

I'll watch from here rather than there, tho if I miss anything important I'll be sure not to get too excited....

Closed minded.com
I'd go if I wasn't so busy with house move and such.

I would love to go if I wasn't poor

Sarcasm will get you everywhere.... are you trying to flirt with me? Playing hard to get?

You're so cute.

Sarcasm....moi? It won't get me to Basel, but then I've been there.

i have recordings of most of the english talks from the forum, i will post them up here when they come out

I s'pose I should report back on this at some stage, although at the moment I'm a little to busy to go completely through it, so this will probably be it.

First the good parts:
There is finally some reasonable research going on in the world at the moment investigating psychedelic's (used loosely including mdma, psilocybin, ketamine, etc) potential therapeutic use into diseases like PTSD, end of life anxiety, addiction therapy etc. I knew this before, and I am in support of what MAPS is trying to accomplish (even though I might disagree with some aspects of their experimental designs and procedures). There's also some good more basic research going on into these compounds.
Dennis McKenna I thought was terrific.
The Shamanistic and holistic use of these compounds seemed quite interesting in its own right.
I support the notion that people should be given their own choice to use these compounds to find out whatever you can find out about yourself with these compounds. Rather than mire it in clouds of illegality were it does not belong.

Bad parts:
There seems to be a big cloud of delusion hanging over a lot of these people. What was most striking was the largely uncritical acceptance of theories and paradigms which have no concrete evidence to support them. It is as as though if someone came up with a an incredibly fantastic idea, that was enough to make it true. A principal exponent of this was Stanislav Grof. The man's ideas are truly incredible and fantastic, but they have no evidence to support them. This is lazy considering the man has been around for so long, is a psychiatrist and presumably understands the scientific method, his holotropic breathwork therapy is spreading and is affecting lots of people, and he has enough followers to conduct some kind of study to at least make sure his speculations lie in some kind of ball park of reality. As it is, I can't see much of what he actually espouses is consistent. It suffers from the same problems of Freudian psychology which he is trying to improve upon, in that anything can mean anything as long as you're creative enough with the answer.

To go with this, I can't really leave out the New Agey, hold your hands together, and lets send love out to the universe activity that also went on. Which isn't so bad, it can just be a little irritating (enough people do it, that it should actually be studied. And the studies of prayer have shown up squat).

Nice report. I would expect that research into psychedelics and entheogens would continue to open new ideas into the altered states of the mind.
I find it a big stretch to include altered states as enlightened states of consciousness, especially when no enlightened state of consciousness is established as a drug induced state of euphoria maintained and supported by chemical enhancement.
The most recent post /forum/index.php?showtopic=19015&hl= concerning brainwave patterns consistent with meditation and permanently established states of mental conditioning and or states of awareness may lead some to the study of brain chemicals to see if there are certain alterations that can be made artificially to create some similar condition, but the fact remains that if the body hasn't achieved the condition on its own, any alteration is going to be temporary as the body returns itself to its previous condition based on both the mental and physical conditioning that has dominance by force of habit.

I suppose the idea of enlightenment by prescription is not too far fetched for some of the believers in the idea that God created psychedelics for Gods children as the doorway to God vision, but then you might say God created death as a natural doorway too. I personally don't believe either one of those ideas is a viable approach to stable awareness of reality, but rather temporary distractions from the rut people create in limited vision and awareness of the pure potential that exists in the present universe and its mechanics.

The new agey thing is pretty consistent with the hopes and dreams for a better universe or at least a better world order more consistent with love, and expansion of love rather than the neglect and ignorance of the mental conditioning that perpetuates victim consciousness or the dogmatic belief in some higher power that must come rescue the weak and righteous from the wicked and the evil powers that be.

I believe there will always be a follower for every idea of relative truth, because man must know through experience how he participates in creating illusions from reality.