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@ Cabaret Voltaire
The Psychedelic Salon Zürich
About Ketamine: A panel with Dr. Edgar Mestre, Dr. Kasia Kopanska, Jan (a patient) and Stafenie Pfändler
Accordiing to the latest statistic of Drug Information Zurich, ketamine is steadily gaining in popularity in the party scene. Next to its therapeutic use, we will discuss what it is and what its use implies, both medically, and individually.
Edgar Mestre specialises in general internal medicine and presides over a wholistic clinic in Lucerne, Kasia Kopanska has been our guest before and is an experienced ketamine therapist as well. Her patient Jan will tell us about his treatment, and Stefanie Pfändler, the initiator of substanzielles.ch will inform us about ketamine’s recreational use.
Zürich / Cabaret Voltaire | Spiegelgasse 1, Thursday, 12. March 2026, 18-21 h | CHF 20/15
Tickets here
Ramón Oliveras & Sivan Schipper – A Certain Darkness Is Needed to See the Stars
In Zusammenarbeit mit dem Psychedelic Salon spielt Ramón Oliveras auf einem einzigartig präparierten Schlagzeug, ohne Loops oder Overdubs. Dr. Sivan Schipper (Leitender Arzt Palliativzentrum Spital Uster und Leiter der LPC-Studie: LSD in der Palliative Care) rahmt die Performance mit Reflexionen ein, die von seinen eigenen Begegnungen am Sterbebett und Erfahrungen mit Menschen in Momenten erweiterten Bewusstseins geprägt sind.
Zürich | Altes Krematorium Sihlfeld | Sonntag, 29. März 2026 |19.00 Uhr–20.30 Uhr
Related
Psychedelic Culture 2026
Psychedelic Culture 2026 will explore cutting-edge themes that are largely absent from the mainstream psychedelic conversation, all related to our main initiatives: Indigenous Reciprocity & Decolonial Dialogues, Psychedelic Justice, Protection of Sacred Plants & Cultural Traditions, and voices from the Global South.
San Francisco, CA | Brava Theater Center | Friday 17 – Sunday 19 April 2026
good to see
Art rocks
What the ‘Louvre of the desert’ reveals about the human story
With more than 4,500 paintings preserved on rock faces across just 10 square kilometers, the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana contain one of the highest concentrations of rock art in the world.
good to hear
In Memoriam Ebo Taylor
Come along
Ebo Taylor passed away on 7 February. He was a guitarist, composer, bandleader, record producer and arranger who influenced African music for over six decades. “Deroy Ebow Taylor was born on Jan. 6, 1936, in Cape Coast, the capital of the British Gold Coast colony, the future Ghana. He was the son of Samuel Taylor, the choirmaster at St. Augustine’s College in Cape Coast, and Sarah Taylor. Ebo, as he was called, started playing the piano at 6 and the organ at 9.” (The New York Times) He learned to play the guitar at St. Augustine, joined ever bigger local groups until, in Ghana, he broke through with the Stargazers. His career included partnerships with Fela Kuti, Ludacris, Black-Eyed Peas and many others. Ebo Taylor’s love of highlight and afrobeats defied set terms.(SGG)
Essiebons
Harry Styles
Aperture
Harry Styles will release his fourth album on March 6, my birthday. Thanks. The advance track presented here is well done and contains some nice surprises. Not bad for someone who entered the music scene via The X Factor and joined the boy band One Direction in 2010. Styles’ career has been meteoric. He has a clear baritone singing voice and has been compared with the young Sinatra or David Bowie. His videos regularly win prizes and charm audiences worldwide. Harry Styles is also an impressive art collector, someone who seems to know what he’s doing. Welcome back! (SGS)
Columbia
Gorillaz
The Mountain
Gorillaz, the virtual British band founded by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewett, has made its long-awaited comeback. Their new record stands out for its immersive music. Gorillaz live in a universe represented in media such as music videos, interviews, comic strips and short cartoons. Gorillaz’s projects have included collaborations with a wide range of musicians and featured artists, with Albarn as the only permanent musical contributor. Gorillaz has presented itself live in a variety of different ways throughout its history and received a number of important awards.
Parlophone
Barbican Quartet
Poem for String Quartet
Amarins Wierdsma, violin, Kate Maloney, violin, Christoph Slenczka (viola), Yoanna Prodanova, Cello – the Barbican Quartet is an original voice on the international chamber music scene. Praised for their unique sound and character, as well as for intensely personal and intelligent performances, the Barbican Quartet celebrates the individual strengths of its members and at the same forges these into a homogenous entity, exploring with fervour both the great string quartet repertoire as well as contemporary music.
Genuin
Immanuel Wilkins
Emanation /Don’t Break – from the album The 7th Hand
“The music of saxophonist and composer Immanuel Wilkins is filled with empathy and conviction, bonding acts of melody and lamentation to gestures of space and breath, Listeners were introduced to this riveting sound with his acclaimed debut album Omega, which was named the number one jazz album of 2020 by the New York Times. The album also introduced his remarkable quartet with Micah Thomas on piano, Daryl Johns on bass, and Kweku Sumry on drums: a tight-knit unit that Wilkins features once again on his stunning sophomore album, The Seventh Hand.”
Blue Note Records
goodnews editorial
a love bomb
This year’s Bicycle Ride promises to be the largest to date, with local participants as well as friends from Europe and as far as the United States. We’ve grown steadily over the last years. Again, we commemorate the original Bicycle Ride of Albert Hofmann on LSD with his loyal lab assistant Susi Ramstein by largely following the same route they took to bring the confused chemist home safely. For this, we are getting together in Basel on Sunday, 19 April 2026. If you wish to participate, please register here.
Onboarding is possible at various times and locations from Saturday onward, but we will all meet up at 5 pm at the former factory gate of Sandoz Laboratories, located at one end of the Novartis Campus. Further details will be provided upon registration. What we can tell you already is that we have a broad variety of events set up that weekend. And on Sunday evening, we’ll all meet on the party boat Gannet, where a series of kaleidoscopic acts will entertain us.
Albert Hoffman would have been 120 years old this year, an age but few people have reached yet. He would have shaken his head and chuckled a little at all the commotion around his person and his invention on this day. We mustn’t forget that he saw LSD as a sacrament and a medicine first, and he only later in life reconciled himself with the fact many more people took it for other reasons. By then he understood that many of these reasons were also spiritual in nature, a matter of attitude. It amazed him how people wrote him to tell him they took their marriage vows or even birthed children on LSD. That Aldous Huxley chose 100 milligrams of LSD to be his companion when he found himself on the threshold of death touched the chemist deeply.
Albert Hofmann was a kind and mild-mannered man who won many hearts in Switzerland with his modest and straightforward ways. It is partly thanks to him that the Swiss government and a growing proportion of the Swiss population have adopted a pragmatic attitude towards psychedelic therapy. Since 1986, thousands of patients in our country have been treated with LSD, psilocybin, ibogaine or ayahuasca, as well as MDMA or ketamine, and it is no longer necessary to be desperate before the Federal Office of Public Health approves such treatment. Every single case is officially reviewed and approved, meaning we haven’t had any unpleasant surprises so far, let alone fatalities.
All of this would have made Dr. Hofmann happy, With love and appreciation for him and Susi Ramstein we are setting off on our little bike tour again this year. If we chose to call our event a Love Bomb, it is to honour the free spirit of LSD and to counteract the negativity around us: the wars, the strife, the inequality, the lack of justice and all the terrible news that haunts us every day. Amor vincit omnia! So do bring a big smile, and feel very welcome to join us in next month’s endeavour.
With love,
Susanne Seiler
P.S. I am travelling until March 12, when the Psychedelic Salon takes place at Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich with with a panel on ketamine. Mark the date!
Come and visit us in our library:
WIDE OPEN BOOKS
Library, Sat/Sun 2-6 pm. (next on 14 & 15 March)
Film Talk, Tuesday 6-9 pm
Kunstraum Walcheturm, Kanonengasse 20, 8004 Zurich
https://walcheturm.ch/
good to read
The Book of Cannabis: The History and Future of the Plant and the Drug
Jeremy Narby
Do you know how many millions of years Cannabis has been around? When it began to be cultivated for its medicinal properties? Why the Assassins were not likely to have smoked hashish? Why the members of the Club des Haschischins in Paris got higher than we ever did, and how come Baudelaire hated Cannabis? We know about the prohibition, but do we know when the demonisation of a weed called hemp (and later many other names) started? How the growth boom of the eighties evolved, and with which players? No matter the field, Jeremy Narby approaches marijuana and hashish from a pragmatic angle. Meticulously researched. (SGS)
St. Martin’s Press
A World Appears
Michael Pollan
The early 1990s marked the birth of a new science of consciousness, based on the assumption that the phenomenon could be explained in terms of brain activity, but that effort is faltering, and wilder ideas, such as panpsychism, are now getting a hearing. Indeed, there is now reason to doubt that ‘objective science’ as we have known it since Galileo has the right tools to plumb first-person experience. A story that begins in a brain lab in Seattle ends, of all places, in a cave in the mountains of New Mexico.
Penguin Books
Invoking the Wild Soul of Music
Hélène Grimaud
Internationally acclaimed piano virtuoso and founder of the Wolf Conservation Center, Hélène Grimaud shares her musical life’s journey and inspiring insights on the connections between music, nature, and spirituality. Invoking the Wild Soul of Music reveals paths to rebirth, spiritual growth, and the re-enchantment of life. This memoir shows how to honour the call of the wild even in the heart of civilised modernity.
Inner Traditions
Manual for the Awakening Warrior. The Special Forces Secret Mind-Body-Spirit Training Program
Joel & Michelle Levy
Designed for elite soldiers, the practices in this training are valuable for everyone aiming to heighten focus, deploy ethical discernment, and cultivate responsive awareness and “kindfulness.” Learn how to befriend your inner enemies, avoid self-sabotage and ambush by distractions, and respond skillfully to challenges with deeper courage and compassion. With these teachings, readers can awaken the strength to transform the battlefield of daily life into a zone of peace and navigate these uncertain times with grace, wisdom, and courage.
Destiny Books
Now I Surrender
Álvaro Enrigue
Orchestrated with a stunningly imagined cast of characters, both historical and purely fictional, Now I Surrender radically recasts the story of how the West was “won.” Part epic, part alt-Western, it is Álvaro Enrigue’s most expansive and impassioned novel yet. In the contested borderlands between Mexico and the United States, a woman flees into the desert after a devastating raid on her dead husband’s ranch. A lieutenant colonel in service to the fledgling Republic, sent in pursuit of cattle rustlers, discovers he’s on the trail of a more dramatic abduction…
Riverhead Books
good to discover
The Chambers Project
Brian Chambers, deeply immersed in the psychedelic art scene since the mid-nineties, has dedicated his life’s work to bridging the gap between art and the psychedelic state. In his carefully curated exhibitions, aach piece tells a story, inviting viewers on a visual journey through the realms of consciousness and expanding their perception of reality.
Brainforest Café
A conversation with ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin
If Psychedelics are here to stay, let’s get it right!
Body, Mind Heath and Politics with Dr. Richard Louis Miller
Guest: Dr. Daniel Krüger
Marc Buckley @ Davos 2026
Regenerating Earth, AI, psychedelics, plant medicine and Indigenous Wisdom
good to know
Microdosing
psychoactive | ScienceDirect | February
Small, non-psychedelic quantities of psilocybin may help monitor obesity.
Treatment
psychoactive | The Guardian | 1 February
Ex-British Army Chief promotes the use of MDMA for PTSD treatment
Psychedelic narcissism
psychoactive | The Microdose | 2 February
5 questions for Henrik Jungaberle
A convincing solution
psychoactive | Business of Cannabis | 2 February
Swiss cannabis provider sets industrial standards
Ethics
psychoactive | Stat Years | 2 February
Should researchers disclose their own psychedelic use?
Psychedelic Catalysed Innovation
psychoactive | Psychedelic Alpha | 5 February
An Interview with astrobiologist Bruce Dammer
Dopamine
psychoactive | National Geographic | 6 February
How to get high on your own supply.
Stepping up
psychoactive | The Harvard Gazette| 9 February
Professional healthcare provided in ritual and recreational psychedecli settings.
Too high
psychoactive | The New York Times.| 9 February
America has a marijuana problem.
Rewiring the Brain
psychoactive | Live Science| 9 February
Scientists gain understanding of how psychedelics treat PTSD.
Psychedelic Therapy
psychoactive | Psychedelic Alpha | 10 February
Dosing, ritual and related Issues
Solarpunks
eco | Aeon | 10 February
Joining technology with nature to green the world
Agrovoltaics
eco | pv-magazine | 12 February
Solar installations in Spanish vineyards, looking good.
Don’t do it!
psychoactive | The Conversation | 16 February
Anal drug use is dangerous.
Experiential
psychoactive | The Conversation | 18 February
Can psychedelic therapy improve our mental health?
Psychedelic groupthink
psychoactive | NPR | 19 February
Blurring the line between spirituality and profit.
Vegetation
eco | Reasons to be cheerful | 19 February
Zurich’s rooftops are among the greenest worldwide
Religiously
psychoactive | DoubleBlind | 23 February
Getting high with the Bible
The munchies
psychoactive | Nautilus | 23 February
Why we tend to get hungry after using cannabis.
Antarctica
eco | The Conversation | 24 February
Rain is coming to the seventh continent.
Lessons in positivity
culture | The Guardian | 25 February
An Interview with the legendary Stewart Brand
Ancestry
science | Live Science | 27 February
Neanderthal males were hot for human women.
Psychedelics for fun
psychoactive | The Psychedelic Blog | 27 February
“Make no mistake: this is the future.”
good to meet
Plants of the Gods
Part 1 — Ayahuasca and Tobacco Shamanism: an Interview with Ethnobotanist Dr. Glenn Shepard
Transform Drug Policy Foundation
An independent, UK-based charity working nationally and internationally towards a just and effective system of legal regulation for all drugs.
DanceWize
Harm reduction and help for psychedelic, and/or spiritual emergencies at festivals and other peer meetings are a necessity wherever people get together in large numbers.
partner
