LAUGHING AND LEARNING ABOUT PSYCHEDELICS – Dope Magazine

Comedian Shane Mauss started writing jokes at age 15, around the same time he first experimented with psychedelic drugs. Today hes mined those experiences to create his most popular show yet, A Good Trip, using insights both comedic and scientific to discuss the myths and merits of psychedelics like LSD, DMT and psilocybin mushrooms.

Shane Mauss: I like doing themed shows. Ive been using psychedelics for 20 years, so I had the material to do a whole show, but I was nervous about outing myself as a psychedelic user. Then I performed at a show in Houston with no one there except other comics, so I started doing all the psychedelic jokes I could think of, and suddenly, an hour had gone by. So I started trying the show out.

A: At first it was focused on the jokes, so it was a little nerve-racking every time I would add more information. After a year-and-a-half of performing it live and getting feedback from people who like the thought-provoking information, it got easier. Sometimes fans will bring their parents because they want them to understand this stuff, and that usually works really well. I get awesome responses from people who brought their parents, and now their parents understand what their kids are intotheyre not doing crack, theyre actually trying to better themselves.

A: It gets a predominantly intellectual crowda lot of people like me that arent your typical stoners. The stoner crowd and psychedelic crowd overlap a lot, but there arent as many dreadlocks in the crowd as youd think. I wasnt sure what to expect when I started, but maybe because my science podcast [Here We Are], I get a fair amount of people who work in science. Theyre definitely the most intelligent audiences Ive ever performed for, by a long shot.

A: So many. Some people think of all drugs as an escape, but to me theyre more an exploration of the mind rather than an escape. I think they can actually help some peoples mental well-beingand I say some because theyre not right for everybody. And the majority of bad trips are usually people expecting a party drug, but then things can get real and that panics them.

A: I think they gave me a lot more empathy when I was a young Midwestern teenager, raised in a community with a lot of macho mentality and bigotry. When I started putting this show together a few years ago, I started doing psychedelics and writing about them more, and I realized a lot of the benefits came from processing the experience afterward rather than the experience itself.

Since the age of 10, Ive had chronic, almost daily depression, but last year I had an amazing experience taking mushrooms in a sensory deprivation tank. Then, for about two months, I was doing mushrooms once a week. Somehow my depression just went away, and it hasnt come back since. I dont want to encourage anyone with depression to take a whole bunch of mushrooms, but if mushrooms didnt play a part in my recovery, Im exceptionally confused.

Also published on Medium.

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LAUGHING AND LEARNING ABOUT PSYCHEDELICS - Dope Magazine