DM - The crackpot countess (who drills holes in her head to get high) using £...

edgarshade

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The crackpot countess (who drills holes in her head to get high) using £550,000 of YOUR cash to prove magic mushrooms are healthy

By Catherine Ostler
PUBLISHED: 01:30, 13 April 2013

With reader comments

  • Countess of Wemyss and March - aka 'Lady Mindbender' - is best known for her belief in the health benefits of magic mushrooms
  • She set up Beckley foundation in 1998 to campaign for legalisation of drugs
  • On committee is Prof David Nutt, who was sacked as Government's drug tsar in 2009 for claiming Ecstasy was less dangerous than horse riding
  • Nutt has been given £550,000 of public money for a project backed by her foundation to see if magic mushroom compound might help treat depression

She has been known to wander around her home in floaty clothes with a tropical bird — possibly a parakeet — sitting on her shoulder. Perhaps such eccentricity is not surprising since the Countess of Wemyss and March is best known for her belief in the health benefits of magic mushrooms and trepanning (drilling a hole in one’s head to ‘expand the consciousness’). Preferring to call herself plain Amanda Feilding, she lives in Beckley Park, a hunting lodge built in the time of Henry VIII which was used as a backdrop in a Harry Potter film.

It is her Oxfordshire hereditary seat, from which she runs the Beckley Foundation, an outfit she set up in 1998 to campaign for the legalisation of drugs and to help research their potential beneficial effects for medicine. She has tried so many drugs — including cannabis, magic mushrooms and LSD — that she says when it comes to her research, ‘I have always considered myself my own best laboratory’. Yet one visitor warns that her ‘research’ has taken its toll, saying: ‘Though articulate, she is not a particularly good advert for drug use because she looks so fragile and shakes a lot.’ Beckley Park has nevertheless become a second home to a number of high-profile scientists who are on the committee of Amanda’s foundation.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...gh-using-550-000-YOUR-cash-prove-healthy.html
 
Argumentum ad Hominem.

Quality journalism as always, daily fail.

Yeah why is this news? Gentry classes the world over have long been known for wild behavior and decadent lifestyles that the common people could only dream of. In fact, I sometimes wonder if these anachronistic social strata are only kept around for the vicarious amusement of the masses, kind of like rockstars.
 
This "trepanning" doesn't sound good at all. Otherwise, psilocybin certainly does have its medical uses (in my personal opinion), as shown by studies and anecdotes. Not so sure about MDMA, though.
 
London Evening Standard

The psychedelic Countess on a mushroom mission to free your mind

Nick Curtis
15 April 2013

With reader comments

Lady Neidpath, who once drilled a hole in her own head, is dead serious about drugs. Nick Curtis hears why our fear of illegal highs means we could be missing out on cures for depression.

I do not doubt for one moment the absolute sincerity of the drugs campaigner Amanda Feilding, aka Lady Neidpath, Countess of Wemyss and March. Nor the good sense in her argument that narcotics should be scientifically studied, decriminalised, and licensed and regulated by the state for medical or recreational use as appropriate — a “sensible” alternative to the vast waste of lives and money in the unwinnable War on Drugs. But I can see how easy it is for her opponents to demonise the 70-year-old as a batty aristo.

The ex-artist and mother of two is the product of one grand family, traceable back to Charles II, and she married, aged 53, into another, richer one, which gives her clipped pronouncements on social policy a distinct whiff of de haut en bas. A pivot-point in her bohemian life came when she drilled a hole in her own skull in 1970: her long-term partner and father of her sons, Chelsea gallerist Joseph Mellen, and her husband Jamie Charteris, Lord Neidpath, have also had it done. Feilding still believes trepanation is an important tool in the study of consciousness, which is the root of all her work, but prefers not to talk about it in case it gives ammo to her political enemies.

More...
http://www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle...shroom-mission-to-free-your-mind-8573178.html
 
I saw her speak 10 years ago & was quite intrigued and impressed by her. Very youthful, sharp, and lucid. I had no idea she was a countess. Her bird is amazing, too, from what I recall.
 
What?!

This is the first I've heard of this woman and her "self-trepanning". She was apparently inspired by a man by the name of Bart Huges who trepanned himself 5 years earlier, and who also happened to be an advocate of LSD.

Fuck, no wonder the public has a negative image of psychedelic drugs!

Huges came to believe that trepanation, by creating an opening akin to a baby’s fontanelle, would allow the blood to freely pulse around the brain with every heartbeat, thereby creating a permanent high. In an eight-foot scroll articulating his ideas, Huges declared that those with holes in their skulls would be representatives of the new species Homo sapiens correctus.

This almost makes me want to stop taking acid, FFS.
 
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