Translated from our German original by AI. The German text was researched, written, and edited by the Psychedelia Foundation team and remains the authoritative version.
A cultural studies chapter examines how the meaning of psychedelics has shifted within surf culture, from their association with the counterculture and the so-called “soul surfing” of the 1960s and 1970s to the way they are placed today in medical and therapeutic discourse.
The chapter, published as “From Soul to Science: The Evolution of Psychedelics and the Future of Health, Healing, and Wellbeing in Surf Culture”, looks in particular at how surfers present psychedelics in public. The analysis draws on interviews, documentaries, podcasts and media coverage, including public statements by professional surfers such as Kelly Slater, Jamie Mitchell, Koa Smith and Kohl Christensen.
Historically, parts of surf culture tied psychedelics to the ideal of “soul surfing”. They were understood as a means to spiritual experience, community and cultural resistance. The chapter points to Timothy Leary and the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, among others, in that historical context.
After decades of prohibition, the discourse around psychedelics has changed, the study argues. In the twenty-first century they are increasingly discussed in connection with scientific research and psychedelic-assisted therapy, among other things in relation to depression, addiction and the aftermath of trauma.
The statements analyzed combine elements of both traditions. The surfers draw on the spiritual and countercultural meaning of the earlier “soul surfing”, and they also reach for medical and neuroscientific ideas. Psychedelic experiences appear in their accounts as therapeutic, introspective and consciousness-altering.
The study describes this as a kind of cultural synthesis, one that reinterprets psychedelic use within surf culture and gives it greater legitimacy. It comes, the author suggests, with ideas of holistic health that include mental and emotional wellbeing, and with a growing interest in communal and retreat-based practices.
The central claim is contained in the phrase “from soul to science”: today’s psychedelic surf culture builds on the spiritual and countercultural past and joins it to modern scientific and therapeutic readings.
What the work describes is above all a cultural and discursive shift. It is not a clinical study and offers no evidence that psychedelics are therapeutically effective for surfers.
