The market for psychedelics is projected to grow from $2 billion in 2020 to $10.75 billion by 2027—a growth rate that could outpace the legal US cannabis market. Many high-profile investors and celebrities are entering the space, often under the pretense of funding breakthrough mental health interventions.
But…is that the real concern? Microdosing to help depression, anxiety, addiction, or suicidal ideation are all laudable goals. But is that what’s really happening in the psychedelics space?
Derek is joined by Psymposia co-founder, editor, and producer, Brian Normand; medicine, society, and culture research fellow, Neşe Devenot, PhD; and managing editor and harm reduction advocate, David Nickles. This far-reaching discussion about the history and future of psychedelics touches upon numerous aspects of this burgeoning industry.
Show Notes
Psymposia
Church of Psilomethoxin, Part 1: Sacramental Skepticism. Is the Church in Denial?
Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
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Conspiratuality.
Psychedelic capitalism with Symposia.
The market for psychedelics is projected to grow from $2 billion in 2020 to almost $11 billion by 2027.
And that's a growth rate that's projected to outpace the legal U.S.
cannabis market.
Now recently, Blake Mycoskie, the founder of Tom's Shoes, announced that he's dedicated $100 million to psychedelics projects.
And that's being split between 70% non-profit organizations and 30% for-profit companies.
This follows many other high-profile investors and celebrities entering the space, and it's often done under the pretense of funding breakthrough mental health interventions.
But this week, I'm going to wonder, is that the real concern?
Now, microdosing to help depression, anxiety, addiction, or suicidal ideation are all important goals if they are possible with these substances.
But is that what's really happening in the psychedelics space?
As my guests mentioned today, all psychedelics researchers and entrepreneurs enter this space recreationally.
So why is there this intense focus on clinical trials?
And what does that mean for recreational use or ritual use?
And what does the patenting of molecules mean for indigenous communities that have relied on, for example, the peyote cactus in their religious ceremonies?
How about new groups popping up filing as religions in order to get their drugs?
How are we supposed to navigate a world of supposed net-zero trauma, as proposed by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, and spiritual equity credit?
A term devised by the Austin-based Church of Sacred Synthesis, which is selling a chemical that might not even exist, and which they actually admit might not exist.
I've been thinking and writing about the potential problems of the legalization of psychedelics in a capitalist society for years, and that was highlighted in my 2020 book, Hero's Dose, The Case for Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy.
I began experimenting with psychedelics nearly three decades ago, and they have had a profound impact on my life and career, and I think they play an important role in being human.
But I'm skeptical about all the money pouring into psychedelic capitalism, and that's why I wanted to talk to people far more knowledgeable about this phenomenon than myself.
And that is three members of the non-profit organization and amazing website, Symposia.
Today, I'm joined by Symposia co-founder, editor, and producer Brian Normand, medicine, society, and cultural research fellow Nashay Devinow, and managing editor and harm reduction advocate David Nichols.
As I say early in our roundtable, Symposia does similar work in the psychedelic space as we at Conspiratuality do in the wellness space.
And that is taking a critical eye to the practice and actions of people in our fields because we hope to make that field better, more honest, and less charmed by charismatic charlatans.
I've really appreciated Symposia's work for years.
I've connected with them on social media before.
I love their reporting and their podcasting.
and I'm thrilled that they agreed to join me for this far-reaching discussion about
the history and future of psychedelics.
So our podcast, Conspiratuality, takes a critical look at the broader field of wellness and
conspiracy theories, and there's a lot wrapped up in that.
And you all have done a great job of taking, I think, a parallel and similar path with Symposia because you take a critical eye at many aspects of the burgeoning psychedelics industry and practices.
Given that we are often very critical on this podcast, I think for good reason, but we also like to talk about some of the good things.
So I actually want to start with a positive note.
And Brian, we can start with you.
I want to hear about something you're excited about in the field of psychedelics.
Overall, I would say now, the thing that I like now, and I don't want to be a Downer here, but the thing that I like now is the various kind of decriminalization efforts that are going on.
I think that I would point to them as kind of a good movement right now in the space.
Got a lot of issues with it, but overall it's nice to see that that is kind of developing in parallel with the push towards medicalization.
Nice.
Yeah, that's a great question.
I mean, I'm personally, I guess what got involved, got interested in psychedelics in relation to was just the possibility of reconsidering what we assume To be true about reality or society, just inherited truths, some of which like, you know, like Mark Fisher talks about in relation to capitalism, you know, a lot of people approach capitalism as an example as something that's just part of the way the world is.
And so the ability to reconsider our concepts, paradigms, what it is that we think to be
true about reality in general, I find to be really interesting. But that's a really
different type of perspective in question than the strictly medical orientation towards
psychedelics.
Yeah, I'm inclined to agree with Brian that the decrim movements are probably,
you know, if I was going to put excitement on anything, it would probably be that.
I mean, I agree with NeShea, like those larger questions of what are we doing here as humans with regards to civilization or products, projects of community or existence more largely, like those questions are interesting.
I think psychedelics give a lot of food for thought about them.
But also, I don't, there's not a whole lot of that going on.
And it's, you know, like, those are the things that I was initially so excited about.
And yeah, I would say they're largely absent.
So, so seeing people getting into drugs in the sense of like, hey, there shouldn't be criminal penalties for growing, using whatever, it would be nice to see that extended to all drugs.
But I think right now, as far as like sparks of excitement, particularly in a decommodified or less commodified context, that stuff is exciting.
We're coming up on the 30th anniversary of when I began my own journey with these substances.
And I remember part of the challenge where I was in New Jersey at the time at Rutgers, I wanted to be outside all the time.
And sometimes it was in an ecological preserve, but sometimes it was in New Brunswick in the city walking around.
And there's an anxiety around doing these sorts of substances when you're trying to have this experience and yet you're in the public and you can't fully Embrace it because you're concerned.
And so that stress response around it, I think often weighed it down.
So I'm very happy with the idea of decriminalization.
How do you feel about the way it's going?
I'm in Portland and Oregon is the first state to embrace it in this sense.
Are they doing it right?
Or are there some red flags?
I think it's a complete mess.
It's tracking a lot of the problems with cannabis.
Yeah, I think, too, Oregon is instructive in that it put forward sort of two simultaneous measures, right?
So, you had 109 and 110.
So, basically, you know, almost like a Portugal-style decrim of small amounts with regards to all drugs and possession, etc., etc.
And then you had this sort of pseudo-therapy bill where, you know, psilocybin available as a therapeutic option for adults And then you had this weird PR campaign, sort of initially, that it was this therapeutic option and the measure says therapeutic option.
And then you have a bunch of people running around saying, it's not, it's not therapy.
It's, you know, it's something else.
And so the way that that's, that's been done not only creates a public perception mess, but also it begs larger questions about What does the science show?
You know, is there actually like effective or meaningful psychedelic therapy?
What what is taking place in these clinics?
Who's overseeing them?
Who's, you know, people have sort of reframed it as adult supervised use.
But I think as Brian points out again, like it's a mess.
It tracks with cannabis, but it also adds a whole other layer of absurdity.
There are many parallels with cannabis in terms of the marketing, in terms of the deregulation or decriminalization.
And living here and seeing the effects of it, they are mimicking the Portugal or maybe even the Vancouver, Canada bills, but the infrastructure isn't in place to actually support the needle share programs, for example, or people who want to go to addiction recovery.
So it's almost like being lumped together with fentanyl and other substances has been really challenging on so many different levels.
There's also sort of like the class warfare component of it where it's like, yes, I understand it's only a hundred dollar fine, but who is most likely to get fined or, you know, sent to, what is it?
You have to have some sort of counseling or there's like the potential for like a counseling something or other under the decrim.
It's been a while since I've looked at it.
Yes.
And so it's like, who, who ultimately ends up, what is the selective enforcement look like?
Who, who bears the brunt of that?
I'm glad it's all drugs that have, you know, that fall under that.
It's not a more sort of psychedelic exceptionalism.
In regards to psychedelic decriminalization, most of the localities who have enacted some kind of policy around that, it's not like true decriminalization.
It's technically deprioritization, which is not the same.
And it'll likely be like cannabis, where you have tons of states who still don't have anything.
There's still people being arrested.
Once industry got kind of what they wanted out of it, a lot of the advocacy groups who were being funded by industry or donors, they pulled the money out.
That's happened with a bunch of cannabis groups.
It's happening with psychedelic groups.
You're seeing that in the industry overall, where philanthropic dollars are being pulled.
And, you know, it's left to smaller groups or very centralized groups who are pushing very specific agendas, you know, while really not considering What the local groups in those certain states actually want.
That's kind of a newer thing that's happening now.
Also, if you want to look at how the measure came about and like the involvement of some of the people behind the scenes, very quickly you wind up in cult territory.
You wind up with, you know, and we've covered some of these folks, but there was, there is, it still exists, I guess, a sizable and long lasting called the Center for Consciousness Medicine, run by Francoise Bourzat and Aharon Grossbard.
We covered some of their history and abuse on a podcast that we produced with New York Magazine called Cover Story Power Trip.
You know, you had David Brawner, who's one of these MAPS board members, the CEO, or sorry, yeah, Cosmic Engagement Officer of Brawner Soaps, right, who's promoting Francoise, who's this Figure with all sorts of allegations against her, who's descended from a lineage of abuse that goes back to, you know, torture for the Mexican government using psychedelics.
I mean, it's truly bonkers stuff.
And when you when you start talking to some of the people behind the scenes about what was promoted and sort of who was going to be involved before we broke some of those stories, I mean, it was a cesspit.
I mean, it was the kind of people who should be nowhere near this stuff were ultimately steering this from behind the scenes without any sort of proper oversight.
I mean, Bronner, again, sort of acknowledged that there were these shadow committees where they were making decisions and people were being brought on simply because they were in the fold.
Some proper conspiratorial and, like, well-documented sketchiness.
One of the things that separates The psychedelic movement from the cannabis movement, I would say, just for someone who doesn't really kind of understand the context of what this whole psychedelic movement looks like right now, I'd say one of the main differences, imagine the cannabis movement
But there's very strange new age magical religious beliefs that surround the cannabis movement.
You don't really see that.
Maybe there are here and there like kind of strange ideas and belief systems.
Within psychedelia, there's sort of a religion that Yeah, that's something I picked up on.
Nishay, can you take it from there?
One thing I'm noticing, having come from the yoga world, and we've often talked about how the only product that yoga and wellness really sells is aspiration.
And I'm noticing some of those trends.
I think there is real utility with using psychedelics for mental health, and I'm really excited about that.
But when I see a yoga teacher who's done an ayahuasca retreat and is now leading ceremonies and offering it, I get a little worried that they're not going to really be able to, quote unquote, hold space for people.
And yet it seems to be going through this pipeline.
Have you noticed any of those correlations between Yeah, well, I mean, just the topic of, you know, religion and what kind of spiritual beliefs are fueling the psychedelic medicalization movement.
We've been chatting about this.
core idea is this like perennial philosophy idea which is that all different religions have like hints or intimations of some core mystical truth that's behind all of them.
For people who believe this perspective, psychedelics are a tool to kind of like help everyone realize that we're all connected to the same essential source And so a lot of people who are in the psychedelic field right now feel like this is not just run-of-the-mill going-to-church sort of like religion, but that we're at this crucial time of planetary-scale transformation, that the climate changes and all these other crises that are going on
are the birth pangs of a labor process that we are evolving into a new stage of evolutionary consciousness.
And so people are often who are kind of maybe receptive to ideas of evolutionary spirituality, which can be adjacent to things like yoga.
A lot of people are taking psychedelics often with people who are already sort of inducted into this belief system, and then they feel that they are Kind of conscripted into as the new kind of foot soldiers to spread this awareness even wider around the planet and with the idea that we need to get this up and running quickly in order to navigate through the
Planetary cosmic changes that are unfolding all around us and there's a sense of real mission that can appeal to people who are already interested in these sorts of spiritual, unitive, cross-cultural types of experiences, but that is kind of blending with the enthusiasm And kind of transcendent type phenomenology of the psychedelics to kind of convince people into this shared perspective.
So there's a lot of that going on behind the scenes, even in the scientifically facing side of the field.
We were actually talking about this the other day a little bit too, like as far as the mental health sort of narrative, and I would assume Derek, like, 30 years ago, when you were getting into this, that wasn't sort of front and center the way it is now.
I mean, I can say, you know, whatever it was, 15 plus years ago, when I was helping to run the DMT Nexus forums, you know, the people who were coming there, They might have stories about healing, or they might, you know, talk a little bit about how it addressed certain issues for them here or there, or they found certain relief.
You know, people were coming because they liked the weird, or consciousness expansion, or exploration, or philosophical debates, or they liked, you know, the way music sounded when they altered their consciousness.
If we think about what some of those health effects are, like when you go into the woods, when you take a day off out of capitalism and you go out and you eat a bunch of mushrooms with your friends and you've set aside the time and space to actually just be without the sort of daily stressors, you know, how much of that sense of like connection and joy and freedom is tied to the drugs versus tied to the fact that you've actually carved out some space for you and some, you know, Close, intimate friends to just sort of be with each other.
And then on the flip side, as I think Nishe was talking about, with some of the things that undergird what's going on in research contexts, I mean, it's not so much that You know, psychedelics have like infiltrated into wellness or wellness has infiltrated to psychedelics.
If we look at some of the more institutional actors, it's if we track the trajectory of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which, as you know, is like seen as the leader in the field.
We can trace this back to meetings at Esalen in the mid-80s around the time of MDMA criminalization where they were basically like, look, we are going to get MDMA made into a medicine.
We are going to get the therapeutic potential acknowledged so that we can secure a medical legalization.
And I'd say they've sort of pursued that with a religious fervor by any means necessary.
You know, the research is almost in service to that goal rather than in service to, you know, high quality, you know, gold standard peer reviewed research.
I'm going to start a new podcast called Take a Day Off Capitalism.
That is perfect.
You know, and I think about this space.
Well, first off, NeShea, what you were talking about, because when I was doing all these psychedelics, I was also studying comparative religion, which is what my degree is in.
So then I hear people saying, Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, they all taught the same thing.
And I'm like, no, they didn't.
These are wildly different systems.
I get the impulse that there's this transcendent quality to the feeling of psychedelics, so you want to make believe that.
But there's a lot of cultural baggage with assumptions like that that is really kind of dangerous to me.
When you reached out to us to be on here, the question that you wanted to address was, how is the language of wellness infiltrated and potentially co-opted the psychedelic field?
On one hand, that was already present within this space already.
So if you kind of look at it from, say, from the inside and from the outside, on the one hand, That's sort of the root of a lot of psychedelia is kind of this wellness language already.
I don't really know how long the whole mental health thing has been around now.
It's not too long, but just several years ago we were You know, the phrase started coming about psychedelics for mental health.
You could start seeing that that was going to be where the marketing went.
It hadn't gone there yet.
And then around 2018, kind of colliding a few years prior to that, Michael Pollan's book coming out.
Things started getting aligned that, of course, it's psychedelics for mental health.
It's always been psychedelics for mental health.
It kind of got mainstreamed through that little PR kind of slogan, right?
So I think a lot of it already existed here.
And I think that, you know, the new wave of capitalism that's just looking, you know, it's going from Whatever psychedelics to AI to the metaverse to cryptocurrency.
It's always moving around.
I think there was an alignment already in this space for kind of corporate wellness.
Of course we, of course psychedelics fit into that.
So how do you feel about that in terms of, I think we're all in alignment that at the very least decriminalization if not full legalization is probably a good thing for society.
But what are some of the dangers of presenting psychedelics through that lens of capitalism For people who maybe are turning to it for PTSD or for some other mental health affliction.
The vast majority of psychedelia, it's generally kind of the psychedelic medicalization movement.
I don't really think they're focused on issues regarding social justice.
Psychedelic medicalization to me is a gigantic distraction to actual drug policy reform.
It's veered off course entirely.
It's abandoned that concept entirely.
It's these are our drugs, we want our drugs.
We want to be validated in In society's eyes, I think it's taken away.
You know, similarly, John Pfaff in his book Locked In, if you look at prison reform, one of the things that activists kind of messed up on a critique that he has there is they overly focused on private prisons versus public prisons.
Private prisons are very, very tiny percentage of all people who are incarcerated.
But yet when we focus on private prisons, we lose sight of the actual problem.
In public prisons and within a institution that we can actually have oversight and reform.
I kind of feel that's what psychedelia has done.
They've just gone off in this very strange direction.
Now, with the FDA and medicine and just all these new corporations that are involved, I just find that conversations around actual social justice or ending prohibition, they're quite rare.
And when I do encounter someone who is actually talking about things that matter, like
either civil asset forfeiture or ending the Controlled Substances Act, abolishing certain
systems. It's quite refreshing to me.
The spiritual beliefs behind psychedelic medicalization are fueling some of the like
capitalist appropriations that we're seeing. And Dave, I think, were you the one who was saying
that the like describing the like dose the water 2.0 in terms of like what MAPS is?
Yeah.
So basically, right, like, Dose the Water 1.0 was, like, this joke by Abby Hoffman at the, what was it, the 68 convention about, like, oh, we're going to put LSD in the water supply and that's going to ripple out as political change.
And now it's become this idea that if we can just get psychedelics into every therapist office, that somehow that is ultimately going to affect widespread societal change.
And to Normie's point, it's a distraction from the structural change, right?
You want to have a serious talk about psychedelics for mental health, or you want to have a serious talk about improving mental health.
Let's talk about how people are getting food, clothes, shelter, you know, medical care.
Like, you know, these are, people are living in such precarious contexts.
And earlier, Nashae, you mentioned Mark Fisher.
He's got this great quote talking about how, you know, even if we can say mental illness is neurologically instantiated and we can show all of the different receptor pathways and this, that, and the other, It doesn't tell us ultimately what it is about our setting, about the world that we live in, that is triggering those neural instances of depression or mental illness or PTSD or the need to look at the social context and the material realities.
is, I think that's crucial.
You brought in terms of social justice and one other aspect of this that comes up often
is the idea of certain groups having access to, say, mescaline, whereas some people don't
feel everyone should have access.
We're talking a little bit about the laws and prison reform.
Have you seen talk or how do you feel about this idea of siloing these substances to stay with indigenous groups as compared to being used more broadly?
Most people that I've seen engage with this topic are not saying that mescaline should be reserved for indigenous groups.
They say more specifically that peyote should be protected for indigenous groups, which I think there's a real case you can make for that given the awful history of like persecution around like the use of peyote that and also the the way that the mainstream interest in peyote has is exacerbating access and supply to it especially because there are other alternative ways of accessing mescaline like the San Pedro cactus.
So I think like for the time being while there are still unresolved inequities with like the Native American and other indigenous groups.
I think that it is fine to personally that, you know, let's like, let's just leave peyote for now and kind of focus on other issues.
But there's there's differences of opinion around that.
But usually it is specifically about peyote.
Well, and there's real ecological issues, you know, whether we're talking about peyote or if we're looking at iboga and its, you know, native habitat in Gabon and the degree to which that has been over-harvested and poached and exported into industrial markets for people who are looking to use it, say, in context of opiate addiction.
And so in some of those contexts, right, you'll see that there are plantations in Southeast Asia that are growing it.
There's nurseries in Australia that are growing it.
So I think there are also like broader, important ecological conversations to be had around if we're talking about preserving species and diversity, like what does that look like?
What sort of serious initiatives and who gets to steward those, right?
Like these are like broad sort of biopiracy conversations that stem into, you know, that require some multidisciplinary engagement.
I would just add that if you didn't have prohibition there and everybody could grow their own, you might see more peyote around.
And I find the interesting, because Paulan brings this up, about synthetic mescaline.
Like if we could cultivate it, but then some people don't think it's coming from a pure source then, and then you run into another issue as well.
Mescaline is super easy to extract.
You can get columnar cacti that are easy to grow that you can pretty much just ignore, turning it into a tea and then getting the goodies out of it.
You know, the Internet is a font of knowledge.
Look, I've encountered people who say that extracted DMT is no good because it's disrespectful.
You know, extracting DMT from, say, Psychotria viridis or Mimosa hostilis or whatever is an affront To the plant spirits.
And yet, ayahuasca is an extraction.
You are brewing tea.
Like, if you want to play, you know, silly games around semantics and projected conceptualizations, like, sure, if you want to have a conversation about a particular spiritual or particular context, to make that case, like, I'd be curious to hear it.
The people that I've encountered tend to have these very vague notions about, with regards to purity and tradition and this, that, and the other.
Here's one that kind of blows my mind, but I'm honestly ignorant of it because I've never done it.
The idea that the frog willingly gives up the toxin for Cambo.
Psychedelia is a very weird place.
Well answered.
I want to understand this concept of net zero trauma that maps Chris Lodecar has pushed forward, the idea that psychedelics can, it seems, alleviate or even completely abolish trauma by 2070.
It goes with that Dose of the Water 2.0 idea, the idea that people hurt each other and like the root source of trauma, whether it's through like the Holocaust or genocides or sexual assault, the idea that behind all of that are insufficiently spiritualized people, that people who haven't had that unitive mystical experience to realize we're all one and we're all connected.
There is this theory driving these slogans that if only you give people access to those perspectives, it will address the root cause of why people seek to cause harm to other people.
So as long as we just get this out as widely as possible via the Trojan horse of medicalization, We will be able to shift perspectives enough that the problems we have in the world today will no longer be the problems we have in the world by 2070.
But ultimately, it is resting on this unsupported perspective that is actually contradicted by cross-cultural historical examples.
Not everyone who has these psychedelic experiences suddenly behaves in pro-social, pro-environmental ways.
And it also is contradicted by the abuses caused during MAPS's own clinical trials.
So we know that giving people access to these experiences doesn't automatically make everyone an awesome person to others.
But it is, it's again, it's connected to this sort of evolutionary spirituality that is really behind this push to medicalize psychedelics in many quarters.
I think it also underscores the degree to which MAPS sort of set its course decades ago and has
just sort of stuck to it despite commentary, discussion, critique, what have you. Like,
there was a... Nishay and I were actually at a conference back at the end of 2017,
where at the end of my presentation, Rick Doblin asked some questions and in the Q&A,
we had some back and forth, but I had pointed out that this idea that somehow giving veterans MDMA
was going to reduce the...
the systemic drivers of militarism and war just didn't hold.
That like countries don't go to war because people's mommies and daddies didn't love them
enough or you know they have traumas in their histories. Like yes there may be a profound role of
childhood PTSD and trauma as far as like people But there's also real socioeconomic factors in that, right?
Like, at the point where the military can offer all sorts of benefits compared to, say, like, employment for folks who have, like, a high school diploma.
The on-base benefits that you can get from the PX and commissary.
The on-base housing.
Like, I pointed out sort of all the material benefits that come with enlisting in the military.
And Doblin basically said, well, I believe this will stop the systemic drivers of militarism because, you know, when veterans come out and they do psychedelics, they won't necessarily want to go back to war.
Now, Doblin has since walked that comment back in a couple of different public statements, but also it evidences to me that they don't understand What is meant by systemic drivers?
At the point where you're saying, ah, when this person has this change, then that will somehow change the system.
If that's an assertion you're going to make, you need to show how.
You need to show how giving people psilocybin for depression or MDMA for PTSD is actually going to deconstruct Some of those broader social mechanisms and economic mechanisms that contribute to enlistment.
And then as Brian was pointing out earlier, like when they didn't even know in 2016, 2017, what psilocybin was going to be prescribed for.
I mean, these are things that they're doing on the fly.
They thought they were going to get FDA approval for cancer related anxiety for psilocybin.
And then they were told, no, that's not an actual indication.
that you can get medical approval for.
And so now we're seeing, you know, psilocybin for MDD, major depressive disorder.
They have narratives about what's going on and what they're going to achieve.
And now they're sort of trying to fit the facts to that narrative, so to speak.
I had referenced you first, Brian, because your last tweet thread that I saw
that was talking about Doblin and this topic.
And, you know, he had talked about pledging to work.
working with vets. And then there was this whole quote about how happy he is to get conservatives
involved. It's felt like this sort of kumbaya, it's not just a left wing idea. How do you
feel about Doblin and how he's approaching the legalization and then the financing of
maps overall?
I think that strategy has been very effective for mainstreaming psychedelics. I think it's
disingenuous, but I think it's been very effective.
If you want to push something politically, you know, support the troops, all the sides are going to agree with you on that.
So from an effectiveness point of view, I think it's accomplished that.
If you're in this space and you're always told that the majority of soldiers who have committed suicide, the government's largest study on this, the government funded, I think it was the Department of Defense funded study on this, most of the soldiers who had committed suicide actually had never seen combat.
And to me, that kind of changed the whole thing, because I was led to believe, oh, you've received PTSD from whatever, an IED, or shooting some kid in the face, or some terrible thing like that.
But the study actually showed that the number one predictive factor going into that was a separation from your unit within something like the first year.
So if you leave the army within the first year that you're there, that was the biggest determining factor of suicidality.
Which I had a veteran point out to me.
Oh, you know, he basically said, oh, I'm not surprised by that whatsoever, because the army is the biggest, the biggest socialist institution there is.
And you have all these people coming from various socioeconomic backgrounds and now getting all of their basic needs met.
And they're having a sense of community and medicine and they're getting things met.
And then you get a rug pull.
Now you have issues to deal with.
If you were to listen to all the rhetoric within psychedelic spaces, you wouldn't even ever consider that.
And that's not surprising to me, because this space is allergic to actually talking about any systemic issues that contribute to mental health.
Because I don't think it's really serious.
It's about getting their drugs, having public approval.
That's how I feel.
Speaking of veterans, David, let's talk about the Church of Sacred Synthesis a little bit.
I'll try to say it correctly now, psilomethoxone, the The chemical that never was but is sold as being there.
Can you give a 101, basically, breakdown?
And then you did a four-part series on this and it's, I think it's a very instructive tale for how, from my perspective, psychedelics is trying to mainstream right now.
I guess in the sort of CliffsNotes version, the Church of Psilomethoxin was an organization started in part by some veterans that claimed, so there's this old letter correspondence with Sasha Shulgin, the renowned psychedelic chemist.
And somebody is basically asking questions about the way that mushrooms can modify molecules, sort of phosphorylation, all this, you know, oh, if we put random things into the mushroom substrate, is there a possibility that they'll be able to phosphorylate them and turn them into novel compounds?
And Shulkin basically says, sure, why not?
I don't see why you couldn't, you know.
And there were studies by a guy named Gartz who added things like tryptamine hydrochloride and various other things to different psilocybin cubensis mushroom substrates.
And then they analyzed the mushrooms and they showed that it had in fact produced a number of novel compounds.
I know people in the underground who have added, I think, melatonin and a couple other compounds to mushroom substrate and then had them analyzed and were able to show that there were, in fact, some sort of novel compounds there.
The Church was claiming that they added 5-MeO-DMT, 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine, to the mushroom substrate, and it was creating this novel compound that they were calling silamethoxin.
They actually trademarked the psilomethoxin name.
There were immediately a number of red flags about this.
One, they had all sorts of different stories about what they had added, whether it was 5-MeO-DMT salts or Freebase.
Had they soaked the grain in some liquid containing this?
You know, it was all very vague and nebulous.
And of course, you know, they claimed it was being done in Canada and Mexico and then imported into the United States and then sold as a ground-up powder.
So basically, what they were claiming is they produced, they grew mushrooms that contained only psilomethoxin.
No psilocybin, no psilocin.
So technically, these would be legal psychedelic or psychoactive mushrooms that didn't contain any scheduled substances and therefore, you know, Have at it, have your spiritual communion with God.
Now, one of their founders, a veteran actually, claimed that the reason they had set up the church is because the only way to protect their sacrament was through religious protections in the U.S., which raises questions about, given that they're in Texas, I think both Texas and maybe Florida, But sure enough, they never did any analysis that found novel compounds.
In fact, they were quite explicit on their website that all of the analysis they had done failed to find any of this psilomethoxin.
And every time they wrote it, it was sort of like, well, you know, good old Rumsfeld comes to mind, right?
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
But they still sold it!
That's amazing!
They still sold it and people bought it!
They're still selling it!
I mean, there's been coverage in like, you know, we did the four-part series, the article that came out, so basically a couple scientists got their, a couple chemists affiliated with the USONA Institute, got their hands on some samples sent to them by a church member, Analyzed it.
The USONA lab is great as far as like its resources and they were using ultra high purity liquid chromatography.
They didn't find anything in there that would have indicated the presence of a novel compound.
David Nichols, the sort of renowned LSD chemist, one of the only people who's been able to sort of synthesize and work with LSD during Prohibition, commented to us that no, like the methodology is sound.
There's clearly no silomethoxin there.
And yet, yes, as you point out, they sold it.
They offered, basically, you pay a membership in order to then be able to buy the powdered mushrooms from the church.
You can attend their, you know, they did some sort of one-day festival where they were, quote, serving sacrament throughout the day.
I mean, it's this pay-to-play access to the divine on the back of some falsely labeled mushrooms.
Like, that's, oh, right.
We saw this interesting bastardization of critiques of psychedelic capitalism.
I mean, things that I would say I was on sort of the cutting edge five, six years ago when the corporations emerged, you know, a decade plus for more general critiques.
And yet they're writing, they're saying the reason that these companies are coming after us Is because, you know, they're psychedelic capitalists and we're actually, you know, the sacred church that just wants everybody to have access to this.
You know, never mind that it's a distribution hub.
And they have something called the Spiritual Equity Credit Referral Program.
Yes.
I think that speaks of psychedelic capitalism more than anything.
And it's got that traditional sort of pyramid scheme aspect to it, right?
For every friend you refer to our Shroomhub, we will give you some credit towards your next purchase of shrooms.
I mean, what is that?
If not, okay, fine.
Maybe it's not a pyramid scheme.
Maybe it's an entheogen funnel.
I am going to start a podcast called Shroomhub.
Also, you're giving me a lot of ideas.
Just make sure I get my cut.
Of course, you're platinum level.
So what do you think about this, Nishae?
I mean, I don't see as much of your writing on the site, but I know you do a lot of research.
What really gets you excited to dive into this world?
What inspired you to start working on these projects?
I have this paper coming out soon, because more of my writing is on the academic, peer-reviewed journal side of things.
I do edit for our site, but in terms of my research, I have this paper coming out called Tesskreal Hallucinations.
Have you heard about the Tesskreal concept?
No.
The reason I became interested in this was I was seeing a lot of parallels between critical AI, artificial intelligence scholars, and like trying to get a certain perspective across in a highly saturated with capital field
with a lot of hype behind it.
And specifically, I was interested in the ways that AI, critical AI scholars were trying to,
were kind of dealing with people saying, oh, you just are anti-AI. Like I've seen people say
to critical psychedelic scholars, like, oh, you're just anti-psychedelics, you're just prohibitionist.
And what I was seeing on the AI side was people saying that it's not about the AI in general that we're worried, it's the AI plus capitalism that we're worried about, this profit-oriented approach to developing these tools.
And so as I started like looking into just kind of interested in the in the parallels, I started reading the work of Emil Torres, who's been publishing with Timnit Jebru, both on the AI side, And they came up with this acronym to describe a cluster of ideologies that are driving the development of AI in terms of like fueling the Silicon Valley side of that field.
And it basically it stretches from transhumanism to long termism.
So the acronym describes an overlapping cluster.
of different beliefs. But I realized as I started diving into that, that those same cluster of
ideologies is also fueling the psychedelics industry side of things. And in particular,
there's a lot of people, you know, in the billionaire funders behind the field who seem
to believe that we are going through, like I was saying earlier on in the discussion, this like
birthing process to get us off planet.
And we specifically need to extract as much wealth and funnel it to the billionaires because they're the ones that are going to be able to There's what I've been arguing is a kind of bait and switch going on where the capitalists are saying, don't question what we're doing.
We need to get psychedelics out as quickly as possible to as many people as possible to fix everything from climate change to political polarization to mental health issues.
When in reality, all of those issues that they say, don't question us or you're against all of those things, they're actually being fueled by inequality itself.
And yet at the same time, behind all of this, there is this view that psychedelics is another industry.
That can be specifically used to fuel inequality, because that hyper saturation of wealth at the top is what needs to happen to get towards this long term distant future of colonizing distant galaxies.
So although that seems preposterous, it's a very real belief system.
And I also believe that there's a lot of evidence that It's being fueled by billionaires taking psychedelics together at places like Burning Man, because they're having these insights, they're having this sense of cosmic significance and this role to play in this evolutionary scheme, and they're kind of confirming it amongst themselves.
And using psychedelics towards what would ultimately be a very kind of like anti-life and that they're working towards.
Oh, Burning Man.
I just did a brief about interviewing one of the climate change protesters.
And what a what a bookmark of this year of having them started off and then what happened to the actual burn.
What's going on at Burning Man, Brian?
I am not the person to ask about.
I have not gone to Burning Man.
I can't stand the Burning Man.
I believe that Dave, you have been to Burning Man.
Yeah, I was there in 2013.
So was I. I was there that year.
Oh, fuck.
Cargo cold.
You know, I went with a camp of psychonauts and weirdos, and it was already so commodified in ways where, like, I hadn't known what to expect.
And while it was still a phenomenal sort of playground for tripping, and like, you know, just getting out to the deep playa and seeing some of the art that people had been able to sort of pull out of their heads and put down.
I mean, at the time, I, shortly after that, I wound up writing a reply to, there were a few different articles going around about how Burning Man, you know, somebody said how Burning Man was going to ultimately present the political project that was going to present a proper alternative to capitalism and industrial civilization.
Somebody else commented that Burning Man is not a political project, and then sort of wading into that to point out that like, I'm sorry, this is open to people who can take a week off work, who have the funds to travel, who I mean, it, you know, it has this supposed ethos of leave no trace.
And even at that point, I mean, just thinking about the global footprint for all of the trinkets that are produced and, you know, gifted or sold on the road as you drive in, right?
Like, like what it is a almost similar to Google or any of these other techno hubs, right?
It's a utopia for all who can afford to make their way in, or at least that's how it's marketed.
Looking at What's happened over the last decade and, you know, frankly, like talking to people who've been around and attending for the decades prior, like it's been such a shift as far as I mean, I remember a couple of years later reading about folks that were breaking into some of the turnkey camps and sabotaging their water and just, you know, slashing tires and disconnecting generators.
And it's like, oh, class warfare on the playa.
Go figure.
You could look at it as an example of institutional ossification and what happens as something, you know, that had such noble ideals sort of gets entrenched and starts playing the various games of an institution that's just trying to preserve itself and maximize its notoriety, profit, et cetera, et cetera.
That's more what I was getting at, Brian, when I pulled that out.
Because I have gone twice, 2013.
2007 was The Green Man, all about environmentalism.
And I remember my first night standing on the ply and doing a 360 twirl and seeing everything fueled by oil and being like, how is this Green Man?
So it makes me think of bypassing.
And that's what I guess I'm really getting at here, Brian.
Psychedelic seems to give people these grandiose ideologies about what's possible that are extremely disconnected from the realities that everyone lives in on a daily basis.
They don't have to.
They definitely don't have to.
After you come down, you probably should question yourself.
I think that's super healthy.
If you have a healthy response to that, you should question the veracity of your own insights.
It's cool to know there, I have experiences that I can think about at any given time.
I don't go around then evangelizing that, you know, this is the real world.
You have them as an experience or some kind of insight, but you shouldn't believe in them fully.
I think a lot of people probably just end up believing their own bullshit, that their own hallucinations or their own whatever came up.
They think that it's real.
When you're taking psychedelics in the orbit of all these billionaires at Burning Man and everyone, not everyone, but like a lot of people are sharing this sort of evolutionary spiritual perspective on what's going on and that you've been kind of chosen to fulfill this role within a larger cosmic scheme.
It's the opposite where it's like encouraging You lean into the grandiosity and the confidence in a way that like if there was a different social setting, it could go in the other direction where it kind of checks you and you kind of culture of questioning and humility.
But it's like when you're having these big cosmic synchronicities and you look around and there's Elon Musk and, you know, all these different guys who actually hold the proverbial keys to the castle where it's like, you know, there's all this attention to We just need to get the billionaires switched on because they have the wealth to be able to steer the ship in a different direction.
It's all reinforcing that the environment and the spectacle of places like Burning Man fits into this idea of we're here for a reason.
Both of those points also point to, like, some of the flaws with the research.
I mean, in the case of Brian's comments, like, you know, don't just believe your own belief system or BS, as I guess Robert, Anton Wilson would have said, but test it, right?
Like, see, does it actually hold up in the real world?
And to Ne'Shea's point about the sort of grandiose expansions and delusions and the ideas that can take hold and then get fed, if we're talking about psychedelics in the context of medicalization, looking across all of these different peer-reviewed studies, most of which are quite tiny, We can see that these are not, as claimed, double-blind placebo-controlled studies.
The blind is broken pretty much across the board.
So what we have is we have these wildly placebo-enhancing drugs.
We have suggestibility enhancing drugs where when the therapy manual allows
for all sorts of pseudoscience and you can have somebody laying hands on you
or encouraging like hyperventilating and saying that this is a transcendental experience
that you're having and they're gonna facilitate it through reparenting and this, that and the other.
And suddenly you're saying, oh yes, in the moment I feel, I feel catharsis,
I feel catharsis.
And then afterwards, like there's no insight.
And you know, you look down the road, however many weeks or months,
and you're finding that either MAPS is doing off the books additional therapy,
that it's not reporting to FDA or to anyone, you know, not publishing in its findings,
that there's all sorts of additional support needed, that people are crashing at points in context
that are not being recorded in the research.
And suddenly it's like, yeah, I'm not surprised that in the moment people have
Narratives or feelings or senses that they are suddenly doing so much better and then suddenly outside of a support context or looking back at that and saying, wait, there was all of this dependence fostered and now I'm out on my own and what was going on in those moments and do I even remember it and how much of it is valid?
And, you know, there's a whole lot to be said about playing with Boundary-dissolving, mind-expanding drugs in therapeutic context that I think factors into those same sort of mental dynamics.
So as I said earlier, I do hope that these substances can help people in mental health distress.
I'm also all fine with recreational usage.
You know, there's kind of three camps here, really.
There's the therapeutic model that is being put forward, and we've kind of discussed that.
There's just plain recreational, and then there's this idea of ritual usage should only be used in certain spiritual contexts.
Personally, the last few times I've done psilocybin, I've played ping pong with my good friend, and we had a very close bonding experience, and that's why we like doing it.
To me, that's a spiritual experience.
So the recreational spiritual question, to me, isn't as important.
We're kind of all making it up as we go along because the psychotherapy model that's being presented is new.
We're not really sure if this is going to work.
So I'm wondering if you have any criticisms or condonements of how this model is being rolled out.
So all the people, almost all, almost all, almost every researcher who's involved in this space is here because of recreational use.
Nobody is here because of medicalized use, and yet they're pushing for a medicalized model that has very little data.
For example, in MAPS part two of the phase, well, MAPS phase three study, there's less than 100 people that were actually given MDMA.
Less than 100, it's 90 some people were actually given MDMA, and they're gonna get that through FDA.
There's arguments to be made there.
I think there's valid arguments on both sides of that.
But I'm just pointing out, that's almost nobody.
We probably can name 100 people that we know, but yet that's gonna be scaled.
So, you know, and throughout the years, and I understand the politics of it, but any of these researchers that you hear who say that, you know, I've never used psychedelics, like that's all lies.
That's not.
We all know that they that they have, including the top ones.
They all have.
Just think about that.
All these people are arguing that this needs this model is the model that must be here.
You know, they were turned on or became interested in it.
And that model didn't exist.
But yet they're pushing this model on to everybody.
And then they come up with these very strange, very strange justifications.
I once asked Bill Richards, who's like a real, a real G at Hopkins and in the space in general.
And I asked him, because I thought it was ridiculous that everybody's being forced into a clinic or whatever.
And the reality is a lot of people think it's ridiculous.
But I asked him, you know, why can't someone use that outside or go on a walk in the woods?
And he actually said to me, because they might trip on a root and get hurt.
And it was just like, it was really funny to me, the lengths that they go to, you know, justify this, this very, very specific system.
It's not specific.
Like, as much as it's a specific system, this idea of therapy plus whatever drug in question, the MAPS therapy manual allows for all sorts of nonsense.
And, like, we interviewed the director of training and supervision and said, like, what's with this?
Your therapy manual allows for over a dozen different, quote, modalities, including things that are complete woo-woo.
And she said, no, it doesn't.
We said, yes, it does.
She said, no, it doesn't.
I kid you not, we had to pull it up and we showed it to her in the interview and she goes, oh.
So at the point where even the head of training and supervision doesn't know what's in the therapy model, at the point where we had, you know, MAPS had at least one participant assaulted in the trial on camera and did nothing about it, claimed that the video didn't show anything untowards.
Then later claim they didn't watch the video.
So, you know, you decide which one is true.
Just to point out to people who are not like eyeball deep in psychedelic medicalization, when you hear the phrase psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, there are no standards for the psychotherapeutic component of that.
That's not a standardized thing at all.
I was gonna say about the MAPS manual, like, at the core of that, the theory of the mechanism of action for why MDMA is effective, is this idea of the inner healer or the inner healing intelligence, which is a concept that comes from Stan Groff's psychedelic philosophy, kind of transhumanist psychology.
I think that one of the reasons why Folks at like the FDA and other scientifically oriented organizations have accepted this concept is because it sounds kind of like you would like they're talking about, oh, when you bump into a wall and you got a bruise, your body knows how to how to heal itself.
You don't have to your mind doesn't have to direct that process.
It's something that unfolds.
And so it sounds kind of like that could be what they're talking about.
But if you look into it, it's actually a again, like spiritual concept where Groff describes the inner healing intelligence as connecting you to spiritual levels of reality that are opened up by non-ordinary states of consciousness.
So it's effectively at the core of it, a model of faith healing.
It's described as non-directive, it's described as psychological therapy,
but when you really look into it at the core, it's that there are these spiritual forces
that are able to work through you once your ordinary mind gets out of the way.
The manual even says it directs adherence readers, so people who are watching,
overseeing the therapists that are leading these trials, it directs them to monitor.
The therapist's faith in the inner healing intelligence as the core mechanism here.
So it's like, from our perspective, it's like there's all kinds of woo ideas in something that is being presented to the public as very buttoned up, gold standard science.
But if you look behind the scenes, it actually is very much not that.
And even with regards to the Adherence Raiders, you know, they present the Adherence Raiders in the videotaping as though they're safety measures.
Like, don't worry, there's going to be cameras recording your session and Adherence Raiders will be watching that.
You know, we interviewed MAPS and we're basically told, oh no, we couldn't possibly afford to have our Adherence Raiders actually watch all the film.
And so when you look at the protocol, what they say they're going to do in the protocol versus what they're doing in the real world are drastically different.
And at least in some cases, it's gone horribly wrong.
Often when I think about the state of psychedelia now, I think that there's different camps.
There's sort of an East Coast, West Coast psychedelia.
Like hip-hop, all right.
Yeah.
So I've been trying to think about this a lot recently and kind of understand the state of the space.
The West Coast psychedelia is very New Age.
It's sort of like a Silicon Valley drug cult, techno utopian views on things.
MAPS is very, extremely New Age type organization, but they're very close to Silicon Valley.
So you see a lot of those Silicon Valley philanthropists pumping money into this sort of extended ecosystem around MAPS and into the PBC, various initiatives around there.
East Coast is kind of this more conservative type thing.
You sort of have Hopkins at the top of that.
It has more of this sort of Christian kind of perennialist sort of thing vibe going to it.
The New Age concepts are not excluded from the East Coast at all.
The foundation of this new thing that we call the psychedelic renaissance is the paper out of Hopkins.
Psilocybin can occasion mystical type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance.
The other thing is that often when we think about sort of these grandiose views, we look at people like Rick Doblin with spiritualized humanity, but also Roland Griffith's chairs in a lot of these things in a recent New York Times He says if we look at the long range, this could be critical to the survival of our species.
So the New Age concepts, or these spiritual concepts, are absolutely not absent from the more conservative elements.
They're present across the board, but yet when you look at the last couple decades within the space, there has always been a butting of heads between the East Coast psilocybin guys I call them like the Psilocybin Consortium guys.
It's an extended group of universities and non-profits, and they have very specific financiers.
They've clashed with Doblin and Mapps over sort of his more liberal views, recreational views, which he does have.
He's not, well, it depends where you look.
I mean, he recently, the Associated Press during Psychedelic Science I had interviewed him and got some quotes where he says that, you know, MDMA should never be used outside of a clinical setting.
So he's lying in that because it's clear that he believes in recreational.
You know, that's kind of a view of the landscape.
The spiritual aspects of it are pervasive.
There are people at Hopkins who understand, like, these sort of culty spiritual things are nonsense.
So it's not everybody that works there, but it's in the air.
Another thing that just popped up as I was listening is that, so Brian Pace and I, one of our colleagues, we've written about right-wing psychedelia, and one of the points that we talk about in that paper is that experiences of interconnection that people talk about as being common with psychedelics People often assume that that means an egalitarian interconnection where you empathize with other people and other, you know, nature in general.
But we showed in that paper the ways that it's really easy, depending on your pre-existing belief system, to interpret experiences of interconnection in terms of interconnection to hierarchy in particular.
And so you can think like, you know, I am almost like a caste system sort of role.
Like I am, we're all one, but I'm the one kind of serving the executive function.
Your place is the tongue licking the boot, you know, on the bottom of the ladder.
And all of cosmic order depends upon you being able to step in line and play your function.
And what is the most dangerous in my mind is not In general, psychedelics plus spirituality, it's psychedelics plus spiritual authoritarianism, this sort of like power differential of, I know what you need, I know what the future requires of humanity, and kind of making that
on democratic assessment for for everyone else.
And just getting back to that, that topic we were discussing earlier about community forms of access.
Yeah, I think that that recreational label really obscures how much Other stuff can go into community-based experiences, non-hierarchical experiences, incorporating psychedelics.
And in particular, a lot of the harms that we are seeing and people often come to us with sketchy stuff that's going on because they know we are pro-psychedelic but anti-hype in general.
A lot of the harms that we're seeing are interpersonal harms caused by, you know, people in positions of power, abusing that power and exploiting people under the influence of psychedelics.
The hierarchy is dangerous.
We're also seeing the psychedelic coach industrial complex emerging.
A lot of people are saying that bad experiences happen because people didn't go in with the right intentions.
And so pay me.
To program your trip with the right intentions.
You can't do that yourself.
That's my spiritual knowledge that I will give to you with this exchange.
And as Dave and we've talked about before, this is, it plays out in such a way that if something goes wrong, that's something that you did.
And if something, if it goes right, that's because of my powers and my expertise.
But in reality, there is an elephant in the room behind all of this, which is community.
Support where people can learn through me how sharing of best practices, mutual aid approaches to sitting with your friends and learning to support and I think it's in general for most people much safer to be taking psychedelics with people you've known for years.
Who you trust, who know what music gets put on and calms you down and makes you happy, who knows where your favorite sweater is, who's able to be there for you rather than someone who has been ordained in some kind of like cult lineage that thinks that they know best what's in your interest.
Personally, I think it's kind of weird that people want to give other people psychedelics and have like some position over them.
That's, that's weird.
I mean, they're looking to meet their own needs in many of the cases that we've actually dug into.
And I think Nashay is bang on as far as the community support and peer support.
And I think there's that reality that Sort of capitalism will always seek to circumscribe new territories and frontiers into itself.
And so I just want to say explicitly that like with regards to community and peer support, like actual community and peer support, not astroturf things like the Fireside Project, where when you report harms to them, they're actually in bed with maps and therefore won't do anything with them.
Or, you know, like, like there's this whole, unless you are knee deep in the cesspit that is a lot of the institutional psychedelia, you don't see all of the behind the scenes connections, the things that are open secrets in these spaces, you know, calling them open secrets.
It's like it's open secret, just if you're not in the space.
If you're in the space, it's just open.
And so I think a lot of people get suckered into, wow, somebody institutionalized peer support.
That sounds great.
That's like, hey, NeShea was saying, that's exactly what we need as far as the peer support.
And then you actually start looking under the hood and it's like, oh my God, they've done it again.
My three experiences with Ayahuasca were with the same group and they were always fantastic, instructive, and I felt safe.
My one peyote experience was with a group I didn't know at all because the people I went with decided not to do it that night.
And I was like, well, this is my chance.
Terrible idea.
Terrible.
Like on every level, and I was basically sober the entire night until I left the group, and then it all hit me when I got outside of that place.
So I think that's very important.
All three of you have now mentioned the word cult, and I want to end with this, sort of like your own Warning signs to people, because you're in this space, you see a lot of the nefarious stuff.
You see the good stuff, too.
We've talked about that.
People who are newer to this world, and I'm sure a lot of people are, what should they be looking out for?
David, we'll start with you.
I mean, honestly, if somebody's hanging out a shingle, that is the biggest red flag.
If somebody is referring to themselves, I mean, as Brian pointed out earlier, like this desire to give other people drugs is, I would say, at the root of a lot of this.
The willingness of those people to then conflate themselves as the provider or distributor with the drug experience that you have, like, I'm sorry, that's your experience.
Like, yes, I understand that they gave you the materials, but like, fundamentally, no one gets to get between you and your receptors.
I think that desire to be the person in the room, the person who is distributing stuff, for me, like a cluster of things that I refer to as psychedelic authoritarianism.
Some of the stuff N'Shea was referring to earlier, right?
That I know what you need.
If you can't pack it, that's on you.
The sense of breaking you down in order to build you up.
If it hurts, it's healing.
Any of those narratives that allow for gaslighting and reframing your needs and desires, peer pressure, like being in circumstances where people are, where you've expressed, you shouldn't have to repeatedly express that you don't want to take the drugs or take more drugs, especially if you've said things prior to being under the influence.
People who aren't willing to have conversations about what they do or how they operate on the front end.
and then people who deviate from that once they are operating.
And it can be hard as hell to get yourself out of a situation
once you're already under the influence.
But just trying to keep, you know, people who won't let you have an observer or, you know,
a sober party present.
Running through some safety checklists about the things that would make you comfortable.
If there is somebody who is inviting you to do drugs with them and not allowing for you to do the things that
meet your level of comfort, that's a huge sign.
And I think at the end of the day, if you wouldn't otherwise do psychedelics, but you're interested in them because of mental health reasons or whatever else, especially if you are somebody who knows, like, I would have had no interest except for this, I would say go with extreme caution.
And if you're intent on it, like, find a trusted friend rather than somebody marketing themselves as whatever.
I agree with all of that.
I'll just add that, you know, we know from other contexts, non-psychedelic contexts, that people who are driven to abuse people, to have power and mess with others, Will often create life circumstances such as career choice that provides them access to vulnerable people that they can exploit a supply of people to do that with.
We've seen that in the Boy Scouts in the Catholic Church on the U.S.
Olympics team with their team doctor.
It happens again and again.
This is a perfect environment because the field is so new.
You can just get a certificate, a coaching certificate online and then Advertise that you are this shaman.
And there's so many people who are desperate for healing, who are rushing towards this area, asking, there's not enough spaces in the trials, they're being directed underground.
And it's those places that the people putting out the shingles oftentimes are people who are drawn to have these kinds of effects over other people.
It's a very dangerous situation in terms of the incentive structure of the space.
And so just proceeding with extreme caution along the lines that Dave just articulated, I think is really important.
Yeah, I agree with everything that was said.
Do your own research.
Cultivate an attitude of being critical.
Most people in this space are bullshit artists.
Tons of charlatans.
If they're trying to sell you something, stay away.
Go to Arrowhead, get some of your information.
Be critical of psychedelic medicalization.
If you're someone who believes that drug prohibition should end, the solutions are not in psychedelics.
They're in you becoming a lawyer and knowing how the law works, or doing direct action, or, you know, changing conversations that are going on.
The answer is not in psychedelics.
Be skeptical of claims that you hear.
Try to stay with more trusted people.
That's kind of hard to do though, I understand that, because some of the leading names in psychedelia are quite sketch.
It's hard actually, because I...
The people in Symposia have been doing this for, I don't know, each of us individually around 10 to 15 years.
And it took us a while to kind of break away from those kind of cult-y circles.
You have to kind of go through it to understand it.
I'm seeing some signals now from other folks who haven't been in the space for too long that it seems like some of the arguments that we've been making are rubbing off.
and kind of being integrated in some of the critiques that are out there right now if someone says that this is going to be a cure or this is the key to spiritualized humanity or the survival of our species just because it's psychedelics that they're talking about and just because you like that like question that Thank you, everyone, for listening to another episode of Conspirituality.
