People & Psychoactive Plants

Welcome to the Magic of Psychoactive Plants

About PPP

Promoting the use of psychoactive plants is not a task we engage in lightly, knowing full well the risk and the powers that they contain. If we do, then only because the benefits from informed and socially embedded use vastly outweigh the social wreckage that has and is being caused by Prohibition, a policy and series of practices that have become a defining features of modern governance. Prohibition, the pursuit of profit, and the relentless march of Public Health have come to dominate our perception and consumption of the plants and the substances that are derived from them. What is lost is why we come to enjoy them in the first place, the pleasures that are their gift and the ways of feeling, seeing and being they open to us. In our efforts we try to capture, celebrate and share the magic that made us into a species of drug takers in the first place.

Image: Albert Maignan’s painting of “Green Muse” (1895) shows a poet succumbing to absinthe’s mind-altering effects. Courtesy of the Musée de Picardie, Amiens

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Latest News

Problem generation. Says who?

There are two ways of accounting for the rise reported in the Economist on illegal substance use among the over 55s, both should give rise to concern. First, the demographic shift as another cohort growing up with a wider assortment of available substances are getting over the line. That they

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Latest Webinar Series

Cookies, gummy bears and juices – normalising cannabis

Date: tbc 2025

The popularity of cannabis continues to grow exponentially with new applications and modes of delivery. Finding new modes of delivery has been the key in detaching the plant from it’s counter-cultural, subversive connotations. Most importantly both for health and for habit forming has been the dissociation of cannabis and tobacco

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Tobacco and Nicotine

Date: tbc 2025

The market for tobacco products is diverging between a small but rising number of dedicated cigar aficionados, often with deep pockets and the vaping community.  

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Khat Chews: a celebration of sociality

Date: tbc 2025

Theresa May was the Home Secretary who decided to roll back decades of forbearance and impose a ban on khat. The decision led to the overnight disappearance of the mafrish, the gathering of khateurs, places where up to fifty men would come together to socialise around a shared pleasure, the

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Kava Royale – lifting legislative restrictions on kava in the UK

Date: 14 March 2025

Kava (Piper methysticum) is a mildly intoxicating drink that has for centuries been drunk in the Pacific islands including Tonga, Samoa, Fiji and Vanatu. The active ingredient, known as kavalactones are extracted from the root and mixed with water and drunk from bowls often fashioned from coconut shells. Its mildly

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