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What happens when psychedelic therapy is introduced into a society in which both the set and setting is capitalism? Derek navigates the hope and hype of psychedelics in a for-profit healthcare system with two leading researchers, Neşe Devenot, PhD and Brian Pace, PhD.
Show Notes
Beyond the psychedelic hype: Exploring the persistence of the neoliberal paradigm
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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.
And today, we return to the emerging landscape of psychedelics in the American economy.
I'm Derek Barris.
A reminder that we're on Instagram at ConspiritualityPod and you can access all of our episodes ad-free and our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or you can just subscribe to our Monday bonus episodes on Apple Podcasts.
As independent media creators, we appreciate your support.
So a few weeks ago, I had three members of the psychedelics media platform, Symposia, on to discuss psychedelic capitalism.
Now as it turned out, one of those researchers, Neche Devineaux, published a paper that very week alongside another Symposia researcher, Brian Pace.
And I wanted to have them on to discuss this paper, which I'll get to in a moment in the interview.
I want to flag one thing that Brian says during our discussion.
The term set and setting, which was popularized by the famous and some would say infamous cosmonaut Timothy Leary, describes the mindset and the environment that you are in as you undergo a psychedelic experience.
Brian mentions that the set and setting of the modern psychedelics movement in America is capitalism.
Now, as I've often said on this podcast, I'm all for what works when it comes to therapeutics of any form, be it for mental health treatments, we can talk about benzodiazepines, SSRIs, psychotherapy, or psilocybin.
But I'm also critical of any intervention that's overly hyped or manipulated because its ultimate utility is seen as profit-generating.
Now that's the basic mindset that I assumed when entering into this conversation today for this Conspiratuality Brief, Neoliberal Psychedelics.
Alright, about our guests.
Nashay Devino, PhD, is a postdoctoral associate at the Institute for Research in Sensing at the University of Cincinnati, and a Society and Culture Research Fellow at Symposia.
Her scholarship examines bioethical approaches to psychedelic medicine, and she conducts research on the function of metaphor and other literary devices in narrative accounts of psychedelic experience.
That's awesome!
Also awesome is Brian Pace, PhD, who's a lecturer who teaches psychedelic studies at The Ohio State University.
Brian was trained as an evolutionary ecologist specializing in phytochemistry, ethnobotany, and ecophysiology.
Brian believes in the psychedelic society movement and other grassroots decriminalization efforts to find alternative policies to the imperial drug war, and he's conducted fieldwork in southern Mexico, the U.S.
Midwestern Prairie, and the Ecuadorian Amazon.
And now, on to our discussion.
Nishay, we touched upon some of the ideas I'm going to talk about today in an episode
we ran a few weeks ago called Psychedelic Capitalism.
I got a really good response and I was very happy that the Symposia crew could make it.
Today we're talking about a paper that you wrote with Brian and James Davies, a third author on this.
It's called Beyond the Psychedelic Hype.
Exploring the Persistence of the Neoliberal Paradigm, and that actually came out just around the same time as our Psychedelic Capitalism episode, so I wanted to have you back because this paper, we could have talked about it then, but I'm glad we get to talk about it now.
But I do want to start with a 101 here because I've noticed that some of our listeners and followers on social media confuse neoliberal with liberalism.
And I've often had to kind of jump in and say they are not the same thing.
So can you just frame the paradigm that you're discussing here?
Yeah, well, it's really, I mean, focused around a market-based, profit-based orientation to structuring society.
So neoliberalism started as an economic system purely in terms of free trade and open markets and that sort of thing.
Allowing the market to make decisions about the best way to distribute resources and kind of organize society.
But then over time, it's also kind of percolated out into kind of structuring the ways that people even conceive of themselves as like little micro entrepreneurs, kind of with their personal brand and needing to kind of market themselves.
So it's really a kind of a way of prioritizing Money and sort of certain kinds of material success in terms of how we're orienting society.
So in this case, it's related to, you know, health care and the provision of health care.
A neoliberal approach to health care is focused around, you know, a profit and not just on the well-being of individuals in society.
I would just add briefly that historically situated, one easy way of thinking about neoliberalism is a reaction to the New Deal programs, any kind of social welfare, Keynesian economics.
All of that was essentially rejected and continues to be rejected in this hyper-individualistic, hyper-capitalist neoliberal paradigm.
I'm reading the book Coke Land right now about the Coke industries and family.
And one thing that Christopher Leonard, the journalist who wrote it, brings up early in the book is that Richard Nixon was actually somewhat progressive in the sense that he was still at least Following the New Deal and starting the EPA and different organizations that were actually helpful for society, it was only post-Nixon and in a lot of ways due to the Koch brothers, specifically Charles, that the neoliberal paradigm really set in.
In terms of the healthcare aspect, shortly after I read Michael Pollan's article, Trip Treatment, I noticed that there was a lot of venture capital flowing into psychedelics companies.
It's not like investors are benevolent.
You know, some of them are wealthy and they're donating money to non-profit psychedelic companies, and I think that's a good thing.
But for the most part, that doesn't seem to be what's happening in this space.
Is that a correct assumption?
I mean, they want to return on their investment.
And one of the things that's been interesting, particularly in the wake of psychedelic science, is that MAPS built its brand as a sort of a non-profit pharmaceutical company and said, we're going to do this psychedelic renaissance with donations.
But as the shroom boom got underway, investors pretty much stood around and looked at each other and said, why should we donate when we can invest?
A lot of the investors will give this win-win-win logic to their investment and say, yeah, we want to make money, but we believe that making money in this way is going to be best for everyone and that it will be good for mental health, too.
They will say that it's not just about money, but really, money is the object here.
So are they taking a triple bottom line approach, I think was the term they used to use in wellness spaces?
John Mackey was really big on that 15 years ago.
I was thinking of Mackey.
Social entrepreneurship.
And conscious capitalism, these kinds of logic.
But a lot of the work that we've done at Symposia has been to really push back against You know, the idea that there can be a psychedelic exceptionalism within capitalism, that capitalism's tactics are the tactics and that they're ultimately in conflict with things like well-being and health.
Yeah.
Elsewhere, we've argued, you know, that as writ large, you know, the set and setting of the The psychedelic renaissance is capitalism.
And ultimately, the idea that psychedelics are going to revolutionize the economy or our current paradigm rather than vice versa is something that we tend to point out.
My previous book before Conspirituality was Hero's Dose.
It was self-published.
It was about psychedelic therapy.
I've been partaking in psychedelics for almost 30 years, you know, on varying levels, and I am both very for any therapeutic applications, but like you guys, I'm a bit of a skeptic.
In certain ways of this.
We went over that a lot in the last episode.
And what I realized when I was writing it, as I started writing it, is if I'm talking about this as a potential therapeutic that's replacing something, I had to sort of go into the history of what it's replacing.
So that led me to textile dyes becoming anesthesia and tranquilizers, which led to SSRIs eventually.
So I kind of covered the 20th century.
I'm not anti-antidepressants, to use a double negative, because some people are really helped by them, but I've always found it troubling that the insurance industry incentivizes script writing over talk therapy, and there's a lot of reasons for that.
Do you think that psychedelics are going to run into the same issue, and how far away are we from psychiatry-approved mail-order microdosing?
Some of these are specific policy issues, you know, so I think that there's a lot of enthusiasm for what happened over COVID, where there was an opening up of telemed for, you know, ketamine therapy.
And so you send a lozenge, you meet a doctor over There's some possibility that what's going on in Colorado will create leeway for people to take away, but most of the things going through the FDA, all the things going through the FDA right now are
Like a medical-assisted therapist or psychologist is in the room with you while you're under the influence.
And so, yes, Capital would very much like to do that as soon as possible.
But in terms of How or when that would happen.
There's definitely investment in like AI and apps for integration, essentially trying to hack away any of the human elements to cut costs.
So we'll see more of that.
Do you know of any of the AI?
Just having watched Sam Altman's presentation yesterday, and that is another industry that I'm fascinated by both In terms of the possibilities, but also what's going to happen.
So what are some of the psychedelic patents going through?
Compass Pathways has a system called Chanterelle.
It's a real-time way for therapists to interact with a central hub.
So if you're at a Compass Pathways clinic, this would be In the room with you, I would imagine.
It would be analyzing in real time what kind of interaction is going on, but they don't really share a whole lot of information about it.
So we can really only assume, but they essentially say that they've got a fully AI integrated system.
In that way, it's sort of framed as real live therapist support.
I mean, I've seen a lot of kind of pitches, you know, in terms of like using AI to like better identify people who will be like responders to certain kinds of psychedelic treatments, in addition to the therapy support.
But I mean, a lot of what I have seen It seems like it's kind of trying to ride the wave of excitement around these both all these technologies, you know, in combination and trying to attract funding.
I don't necessarily think that they are instrumental like necessary to to integrate it and I haven't seen anything that suggests that it is.
extra beneficial to integrate technology.
And you're also opening the door to all kinds of like surveillance concerns and information concerns, especially because if you're monitoring treatment interactions and then processing it through like AI, you know, analytics, then a lot of people are disclosing stuff comes up, you know, that you might not want to share and disclose.
But essentially, you're providing a way for Some of the biggest corporations to get data about what makes you tick, your deepest hopes and fears and dreams, and then all of that can be used to sell ads to you.
So it's like there are these, not only is there not a lot of evidence that AI adjuncts are going to help, but there's also a lot of concerns in terms of like data-fying psychedelic experiences.
Yeah, I mean, Better Health was recently sued for using patient data to do targeted ads for local mental health clinics.
So, I mean, we have precedent for it.
And what big data approaches typically do is they get a very large data set and then mine it for all kinds of things that were never particularly intended for, you know, or disclosed adequately to the people who Contributed to it.
So we would expect to see the same.
And I mean, I would absolutely concur with, you know, the things that Shea was saying just a moment ago, which is that, you know, there's really a lot of really sort of deep, unconscious stuff that is coming up when people are altered and talking about their biggest traumas.
And I don't want to Speculate too much, but let's just say various like dystopian science fiction scenarios of how that might be weaponized come to mind.
Right.
One thing we discuss often on the podcast is cult indoctrination and a tried and true technique is that You get information that's personal about the person and then you leverage it against them.
During the last time we had Nishay and others on the podcast, we talked a bit about the training protocols.
I'd like to get your take on how you see these emerging, Brian.
I've already seen some examples where that wasn't the case.
way or a correct way at least and do you think these trainings are robust enough
to keep away people who might take advantage of patients? I've already seen
some examples where that wasn't the case. So how are regulations going in that sense?
What's being proposed at least with MAPS is one individual is a
therapist and the other is not necessarily required to have credentials.
And so, there's a lot of ways that that has already led to harm in clinical trials.
What the trainings are and how this is all being proposed, there's actually been some recent work on these topics that are problematizing various aspects of how unstudied some of these therapeutic modalities are in the sense that FDA, as some of this was explored by our colleagues and also by Nishay as well, the therapy itself is not necessarily something that's FDA has any experience with or purview to regulate, you know, and it currently is one of these things where you have a lot of confounding variables coming from the therapist, from, you know, whether or not we're talking about how much care is given,
To people who, in these research studies, using how much care they're receiving in terms of time or effort by the therapist because they know that they are in the treatment group and not the control group, it starts to call into question some of the data that's being used to argue that this should be scaled up and turned into a regulated medical intervention.
I was thinking about this from the perspective of the FDA trials.
You're probably familiar with ketamine trials and there has been some pushback against Janssen Pharmaceuticals in the sense that a few of the people in the trial committed suicide after it was over and they submitted it as evidence that It was working, but then they went back to pre-trial suicidal ideation, even though they didn't have any suicidal ideation before the trials began.
So the idea is that they were taken off of it too quickly.
Like SSRIs, there's no real tapering protocol that anyone knows of for ketamine.
So, in one sense, the FDA is kind of fast-tracking psilocybin and MDMA studies, but do you think that it's being rushed too quickly into the current paradigm of how the FDA is structured?
That last question is yes.
Yeah, one of the things that we touched on in our paper was looking at the example of Australia, because Australia has approved MDMA specifically for PTSD and then psilocybin for, I believe, major depressive disorder.
So, only those indications, but the Therapeutic Goods Administration in Australia Specifically, they overrode their own expert panel.
They had commissioned research to be done to look into the quality of evidence
to support the approval of these drugs for these specific indications.
And their own expert panel and report, it came back to say that the quality of the evidence
and the research to date is not that good for some of the reasons that Brian already mentioned,
that we should expect that the way these trials are designed, that the numbers are currently inflated,
that it's not going to be 80% cure rate for.
You know, being able to quit smoking when it's actually rolled out.
So although there's lots of methodological issues that are kind of causing some doubts about how effective these are as pharmaceutical kind of interventions, specifically under the current healthcare system that we have, it's still, through lobbying in that case, it was still pushed through despite the questions about the quality of evidence.
And part of our larger point about the paper That we wrote, we co-wrote it with James Davies, who had not been writing about psychedelics, but was writing about the pharmaceutical, like SSRI, antidepressant landscape.
And we originally got in touch with him.
We invited him to our, we ran a psychedelia conference in 2022.
And we had specifically, I messaged him, or I tweeted about the parallels between his, because he was talking about it's not, it's the for-profit rollout of SSRIs that are kind of minimizing the support.
You just write a script, like you were saying, and you just have someone take a pill, that that approach to giving people SSRIs is likely undermining their effectiveness.
Because it's like just giving a pill to someone is not going to solve their life troubles, the fact that their water is full of lead, the fact that they're struggling to keep food on their plate and take care of their kids and hold down three jobs.
And that if psychedelics are rolled out with the same mentality of no support,
no addressing root causes, just here is your dose of this ego dissolution,
causing substance, and then go back to your regular exploitative life,
that that's going to likely lead to the same disappointing outcomes
that we saw with SSRIs that were rolled out in that same way.
One of the points that we try and convey is that the problems with the larger mental health system
as it currently is functioning, in that it's putting quite a bit of burden on individuals
as being the carriers and the responsible party their dysfunctional brain chemistry or their broken personalities, when much of this is fundamentally a result of being subject to systemic stressors, where you would see an improvement in a person's mental health if they joined a union and got a 20% increase in their pay and better benefits.
That you would see a much larger increase in their mental health than practically any of these pharmaceutical psycho interventions, whether we're talking about SSRIs or even the new hot ones that are being hyped right now.
You know, the example you're using with ketamine, you have experience with psychedelics.
I have experience with psychedelics.
I don't dislike psychedelics.
I've had, you know, healing experiences.
I've had confusing experiences.
They've also been fairly non-linear.
Some of those insights took years to sort through.
What we argue in this paper is that by shoehorning these kinds of relations into a medicalized neoliberal model that fundamentally is pursuing profit for the people who own and run the clinics, Many of the researchers who are arguing for this are sitting on the boards of these companies and will likely profit tremendously if the best case scenario happens.
But also that, you know, all of this is a part of a larger way that mental health is viewed in society, where you are to be a functioning worker.
And if you have the SADS and you can't work, then go in there and get that fixed.
If that is the goal with psilocybin therapy, with MDMA therapy, it's going to have the same underwhelming outcomes that we saw from SSRIs or barbiturates.
When we really think back to barbiturates and stimulants, in some ways there was a little bit more honesty.
You know, the housewife or mama's little helper.
These were people who had a lot on their shoulders.
They were running families and households, and it was literally communicated during those times in advertisements that this was to deal with the external pressures, not to fix something that's fundamentally wrong with you.
The Blas was something that Milltown was prescribed for in the 1950s.
That was the first billion dollar drug.
It's such a challenging situation.
So I've talked to people like Robert Whitaker, the founder of Madden America.
I've talked to people over at Madden America.
I talked to Lauren Slater, who's been on Prozac since the 80s.
She told me she would love to try psychedelics, but it's contraindicated to Prozac, so she can't.
And she talks about dependence issues.
And so, we're in this situation, and I talk to a lot of psychiatrists.
So, I was on a benzodiazepine.
Fortunately, I only took it like once a week because I had severe anxiety disorder, but I also knew the dangers, and I think that a lot of people, it's very easy to get hooked on Xanax.
It's a very seductive state when you're anxious, and it does calm, at least according to trials, 50% of the people down, and I was part of that.
One thing you drill home in this paper is the DSM and you write that in the 1970s there was 106 diagnostic categories and there's 365 today and there is an argument that if you can invent more and more problems, you can sell more and more solutions.
Do you fear that that's going to happen as psychedelics become legalized?
It's already happening.
And you were talking earlier about patents, but our colleagues David Nichols and Russell Hausfeld at Symposia wrote a paper that more or less the title is like Compass Pathways is trying to patent more mental health conditions than you can name.
This is psilocybin for oppositional defiant disorder, for pyromania.
And yes, those are both real examples.
And so, this is a tell, it's an indication that as psychedelic therapy is approved for, you know, treatment-resistant depression, for post-traumatic stress disorder with MDMA, there's every indication that we will see off-label use for other conditions.
And if that's not the route, then a solid push To go down the list of all of the other different conditions that they already have IP on there, there will be sort of a supply side economics, you know, strategy towards getting this into other contexts.
And just on the patent side of things, Porta Sofia is a great resource.
Our colleague Amanda Pratt has done amazing work charting the tactics that are being used
with patents, you know, that are like many things that are from the commons, from public
domain, kind of mutual aid sharing or indigenous communities, countercultural communities that
were just freely shared on the internet are being scooped up and submitted to patent offices
and claims by these companies that are just like trying to make extra money and to elbow
out the competition.
So it's not about actual novelty, it's about, you know, kind of cornering the commons and
being able to make a buck off of already known information.
And then in terms of the question about new indications.
I mean, in my other recent paper that I wrote, I was talking about the use of ketamine, Filtrip
Health, which recently folded, but they were pitching ketamine for job loss stress and
like particularly at the blue collar tech workers that were losing their jobs at places
like Amazon and these other Silicon Valley companies.
And that's a great kind of example of the sort of thing that we were interested in with
our paper where there's a lot of indications that the way that psychedelics are being rolled
out by these for profit companies in many cases are blunting the suffering and distress
that's actually caused by capitalism and labor disenfranchisement and precarity and making
this about an individual's responsibility to address their suffering in a way that's
distracting from other.
Like unions, as Brian mentioned, other forms of solidarity and actually advocating and pulling some of the power back away from these kind of centralized corporations.
And that's kind of being obscured by the language that psychedelics are being rolled out with.
Yeah, I mean, we make a similar point in this paper when we talk about a clinical trial currently run by SIBIN that is looking at using psychedelic-assisted therapy to treat frontline COVID healthcare workers and their burnout.
Now, workplace burnout is not in the DSM.
Regardless of how dubious that might be, it's just not.
And the World Health Organization recognizes that it's a response to workplace stress.
You know, anybody paying attention during the ongoing pandemic knows That frontline healthcare workers dealt with a lot, and it was due to being under-resourced, the under-investment in public health generally, and for all of the clapping, the parades, the declarations of their
Heroism, that's not something that fundamentally has changed.
And this like individual, you know, solution to what was fundamentally a systemic breakdown.
We even go further interrogating some of the common language within psychedelics and psychedelic therapy.
And that is a question and a story of heroism where, you know, by Becoming the quintessential individual archetype of a hero.
You heal yourself, and then you heal your community.
And when you listen to some of the advocates of these therapies talk, they speak in the most grandiose of terms, talking about healing the world.
You know, via psychedelic therapy.
Of course, ignoring the fact that we don't even have enough therapists or mental health care workers in the United States to diagnose the mental health distress of only the children.
Speaking of grandiose ideas, you spend a few paragraphs writing about Jordan Peterson and his seven gram psilocybin trips, supposedly.
You know, unfortunately, he has become very tethered to Joseph Campbell.
I am a huge fan of Campbell.
I do understand his monomyth has some criticisms in the modern age that are worth listening to.
But at the same time, he, for the most part, I think, pushed forward religious studies in a fascinating way.
But the Peterson stuff, on one hand, talking about how amazing psychedelics is,
and on the other hand, punching down a transgender people, it's just a reminder that psychedelics
do not make you a morally upright person.
A topic that we explored in a previous paper.
I don't spend time, we don't spend time thinking about Jordan Peterson because we want to.
But he's such a huge force.
And, you know.
Recently, we had to comment on the fact that many of the folks that are very, very prominent researchers or other cultural figures in the psychedelic movement have embraced him with open arms in, I would say, fairly cynical ways.
I live in Oregon, so I feel comfortable talking about it because things are decriminalized here.
But the last time I picked up psilocybin, I think I paid $40 for 8 grams.
It's everywhere here.
It's just part of the culture.
But in Oregon, if you want to get psilocybin-assisted therapy, it runs about $5,000.
Well, you can't call it therapy.
It's definitely not therapy in Oregon.
Okay, okay.
It's psilocybin services.
Okay, thank you.
Yes.
So, yes, obviously it will go down as more people get involved, the prices, but that is such a ridiculous disparity.
And so I'm wondering, first of all, it sets up something you've talked about in many papers, which is the disparities of who can afford it and what communities can access it.
But I'm wondering then, if all this investment money is flowing in and only a small percentage of people can afford it, how is that going to balance itself out in the eyes of these VCs?
Well, a lot of these companies are hoping that insurance is going to pay.
You know, a lot of people are thinking of ways of, you know, because if you can, they're talking about psychedelics curing people of, you know, root issues of behind mental health.
And so it's at least talked about as instead of just taking a pharmaceutical pill that addresses the symptoms day in, day out, you have like a limited set of Dosing sessions and then have some lasting benefit for however long after and so people some groups are hoping that they can demonstrate that the amount of benefit and the length of time afterwards is cost justified for insurance companies to kind of pick up the tab.
I think a lot of people are really banking on insurance companies being able to to make the difference because that you're right.
If people have to pay out of pocket, it's not realistic.
I would agree.
I would also say that, you know, some recent sort of demographic exploration looking at what is the National Substance Use Survey data has really put a finer point on some of it.
These are large population studies, you know, where you've got tens of thousands of people responding.
But they're talking about mental health, health distress, suicidal ideation in the last year and such.
And like whether or not they had taken a psychedelic in their life or in the last year.
And, you know, at first look, some of these data have indicated that like, OK, well, you're not you're actually less likely to have these kinds of mental health distress if you have.
You know, had some psychedelics.
So it's this association, right?
When they slice through this data a little bit more, looking at things like race and class income, you know, the folks with more money get more benefit.
The larger association and groups like, you know, black people and indigenous people.
You know, in the United States, they're not seeing any association at all.
I mean, I think it's very clear in the, you know, the paper, the people who are arguing who do this, these analyses, they interpreted it the way I would.
These are structural inequalities that we can see that are overshadowing any benefit that psychedelics are giving
people in these naturalistic settings.
To your point, Ne'Shay, it seems like from an investment perspective, that is such a long-term play.
Because when I go to any cannabis shop here, I still can't use my ATM.
I have to go and get cash because the banks won't touch it because it's not legal.
It's decriminalized, but it's not legalized.
And I can't imagine insurance companies touching anything that's not completely federally legalized.
All of that is hinging on FDA approval.
So, the current timelines that I've seen are, you know, next year they're hoping MDMA can pass FDA and then maybe the year after, so with at least kinds of psilocybin or proprietary formulations of psilocybin.
And so, there's people that are anticipating that working and coming through and kind of banking on it.
I mean, literally, that that will open up this new industry within which some of these organizations can be first movers.
And some of these organizations are positioning this as like, literally the future of psychiatry, like they're at least hoping that this will be the kind of go to treatment for a range of different psychological issues.
So to be a dominant actor in that space, some companies are willing to kind of make a bet in order to see A few years down the line, you know, have that kind of market share.
Yeah, there's also a bit of chess being played here where, you know, MAPS is seen as the tip of the spear and MAPS has its own, you know, strategies and that it is sort of associated PTSD with the veteran.
I think that there's a lot of people doing the math and saying, well, if the VA is on board, then essentially we have this sort of government funded industry.
And it plays out the way a lot of these, you know, folks who claim to be all about market fundamentalism, but it really looks like a transfer of public funds to private coffers.
In this case, psychedelics therapy being offered up as a service industry for the military industrial complex.
Are you aware of any of these companies partnering with pharmaceutical companies like established?
I'm thinking in terms of the lobbying power because I don't see this happening without some serious lobbying going on.
I know that there's heavy lobbying, you know, like lobbyists are paid and interacting,
interfacing with people in the capital in DC.
I don't know how much that overlaps with the traditional pharmaceutical companies.
I do know separately that there are a few companies that have, whether letters of understanding
or other kinds of formal collaborations with global pharmaceutical companies
that are conventionally situated, some of which I believe are, you know,
Japanese pharmaceutical companies and other big players with a lot of money in non-psychedelic pharmaceuticals.
I don't know the extent of what that looks like, but I do know there has been some like early interest
that those groups are looking at this space.
But right now it's my understanding of talking to people in this field.
A lot of that big money is still seeing this as too risky and too uncertain to be,
so there aren't a lot of huge movers yet based on, Right now, it's not completely clear what way things are
going to go.
Well, let's see if we can land this in a slightly good note, if possible.
I am always trying to remain helpful.
Do you see any companies or researchers that are in this space that you think are a good model for moving forward with the legalization in a therapeutic sense or in any recreational sense?
That's not like really what we do, but I will say that I've actually been heartened by some of the work.
And this is something that we've somewhat, you know, been anticipating for a while.
It's nice to see it happening.
You know, as psychedelics have been mainstreamed and hyped, they've got a little too big for their britches in some sense.
It's a little hard to convince people who aren't already a member of the choir that all of the grandiose things that the folks that are claiming psychedelics can and will do, like cure the mental health crisis, that it'll actually bear out.
And now we're seeing very serious Methodological researchers going through the body of literature, really, and pointing out statistical methodological concerns.
Other things that, you know, are pretty common to the industry and that's why, you know, we're expanding sort of an existing critique.
Of, you know, mental health and pharmaceuticals, psychopharmaceuticals.
Yes, it's 100% continuous in many ways, and we're not even just making predictions.
We're talking about things already happening.
So, those conflicts of interest maybe are smaller issues, but, you know, we're also seeing these things being laid out in ways that if somebody really wanted to make these robust, They might have a roadmap for doing the kinds of research that might lead to better outcomes.
But fundamentally, it's an open question.
As a person who has been engaging with these substances since the 90s in my teenage years, The idea that I should have a therapist riding shotgun while I'm taking psychedelic drugs, certainly if this does prove to be evidence-based and efficacious and performing better than the standard of care to a rigorous degree, I don't want to deny anybody else that.
But I still remember, if you were talking to a mental health professional while under the influence of psychedelics, you were likely involuntarily committed into a psych ward at an emergency room.
You know, how quickly things turn.
I would just say that if we're going to do medical interventions using psychedelics, then it needs to be held to rigorous standards and you can't have people who have already made up their mind as to its efficacy, setting the agenda and pushing everything through while playing fast and loose with the data.
There's many, many examples of this happening.
What am I excited about?
What am I hopeful about?
I'm hopeful that there's greater scrutiny towards this so that if there is, if there's there there, it can be sussed out.
And I would just say, because we do get asked a lot, like, who are the good, you know, the good actors, the good players in this space?
And there definitely are a lot of, you know, well-intentioned, smart people asking good questions and sticking to, like, research and being open-minded and humble and all the rest.
But there's not a lot of safeguards in place right now to prevent, like, bad actors from coming in and taking advantage of people.
Like, one example is, like, there's a lot of people who talk about, like, hurting is healing with psychedelics.
Even just recently, a few days ago, there was an op-ed in the Washington Post talking about psychedelics for climate grief.
And it was it was describing, you know, psychedelics let you go into the bad emotions, the pain that you usually avoid, and actually address that.
And I do think that there is some truth to that.
But because there's the field is so new, and there's no real standards, those kinds of like, like, talking points allow for people to come in and be really
messed up and then say, oh, well, whatever's coming up for you that you don't like, and
that's making you suffer, like that's actually good.
You're healing this pain that I'm making you feel is like a positive thing.
So that's one example of like why we're generally hesitant to kind of recommend specific groups
or places just because there's like, the nuance has not been completely developed in terms
of how some of the common talking points can be misused or can go wrong if they're not
used in the right hands, whether intentionally or accidentally.
And because of that, I would always kind of point to some of the The commons based mutual aid based sources like drug forums online, like the DMT nexus, like places where people are openly sharing stuff that they've learned and things that they've realized from making mistakes and kind of giving that not for the purposes of profit or becoming the next thought leader, but through genuine sharing and wanting people to
To be able to be safe and to make intentional, consensual decisions around their drug use in their communities.
