10 January 2022
Event Date(s)/Period(s)
10 January 2022
Organised by
Centre for the Humanities and Medicine
Medical science and drug policy approaches have often been based on essentialist definitions of drug action and dichotomous distinctions between licit drugs and drugs of abuse. In recent years, though, a growing awareness of the context-dependency and socio-cultural situatedness of drug effects has opened up the prospect of rethinking medical drug research and drug policy in light of social constructivist insights into drug effects, which place the emphasis on the crucially of set and setting (context) rather than chemical essentialism. Based on Ido Hartogsohn’s
American Trip: Set, Setting and the Psychedelic Experience in the 20th Century (MIT Press, 2020), the talk will use the story of mid-twentieth-century American psychedelic research and culture as a backdrop for an examination of social-constructivist insights into the context-dependency of drug effects and their implications for medical research and drug policy.
Speaker:
Dr Ido Hartogsohn, Assistant Professor, Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Society, Bar Ilan University, Israel
Discussants:
Professor Gordon Mathews (麥高登), Professor, Department of Anthropology, Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Dr Alex Gearin （木言）, Assistant Professor, Medical Ethics and Humanities Unit, HKUMed
Moderator:
Dr Priscilla Song （宋柏萱）, Associate Professor, Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, HKU
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