Telling our stories of psychedelic healing is more important than ever, but sometimes, those stories aren’t so clear cut. Can applying the classic archetype of the Hero’s Journey to your narrative help you find your story?
She discusses her path to wanting to create the film: how she always felt like something was wrong with her but didn’t know exactly how to start her healing path, how seven ayahuasca trips didn’t give her the breakthrough experience she wanted, and how she realized over time that she didn’t have a hidden moment of trauma to overcome, but rather, lots of “little t” trauma – something that a lot of us have, without necessarily knowing it. She saw the true power of people sharing their stories of becoming healthier, and has found that aligning our stories to the classic framework of the Hero’s Journey and Carl Jung’s concept of individuation is the perfect formula for self-awareness, growth, and finding more meaning in life.
She talks about:
How the Hero’s Journey makes sense of the abyss, and how the abyss helps us to see how much we’ve been programmed
Her formula for a good story: who you were before the event, the event, and how it changed you
Her Sphinx project, where she aims to bring giant sphinxes (from “The NeverEnding Story”) to Burning Man, as a way for people to determine if they are “worthy”
Her “Talk Box” art installation, which involves strangers meeting in a confession booth to engage in meaningful conversations based on a wheel of questions
The power of group coherence and how much stronger a healing container can become over time
and more!
Stertz is passionate about creating a culture that celebrates healing, and believes the biggest thing we can all do is to share our stories. She’s offering a course on finding where the Hero’s Journey is in each of our lives: “Emerge: A Journey of Self-Authorship” begins on October 29. Click here for more info.
Researching the true history of substances deemed illegal can lead to surprising results. In the case of LSD, does its history include a connection between Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the roots of MKUltra?
In this episode, Joe interviews award-winning novelist and screenwriter, Norman Ohler.
Following in the footsteps of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, his newest book, Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age, tells the story of how the Nazi’s passion for methamphetamine turned into a curiosity about LSD, and how their experiments with trying to harness LSD as a truth drug eventually led to the CIA continuing their research under their MKUltra program. The book came about from trying to understand why LSD never became medicine – a question posed by his father, when discussing how LSD could help with his wife’s progressing Alzheimer’s symptoms.
He discusses:
His path to becoming a “gonzo historian” and how his early psychedelic research was inspired by a friend’s discovery of methamphetamine tablets from the 40s
Henry Beecher’s LSD experiments with students at Harvard, and how researchers often didn’t know they were contributing to MKUltra
His recent appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience and Jesse Watters Primetime
His mother’s experience with microdosing LSD and why police showed up at his father’s door with a warrant
Why he believes psychedelics will be legalized in the U.S. in the next 10 years
In the communities of the Shipibo people in the Peruvian Amazon, there are healers known as onayas and witches known as yubés. During ayahuasca ceremonies, onayas will attempt to alleviate the suffering of participants who have been cursed by yubés, through cleansing rituals and songs. In doing so, the onayas risk their lives, according to Alonso del Rio, the founder of retreat center Ayahuasca Ayllu.
An energetic battle between the onaya and the yubé soon ensues, he says. The onaya may not sleep for an entire week, under constant attack from the yubé in another plane of consciousness.
“There have been many high-level healers who have died from confrontations with these so-called witches,” del Rio claims, saying that such skirmishes take place in the metaphysical realms between most Amazonian communities. This possibility was previously noted in the 1998 book, The Cosmic Serpent, among other texts.
Del Rio – who was born in the Peruvian capital Lima and studied for 13 years in the Shipibo tradition to become a psychedelic facilitator – accepts that this is a controversial topic, which is unlikely to be taken seriously by many educated people. But he says that a serious, lengthy illness and the destruction of his house some years ago is evidence of this sinister reality. Only when del Rio began to understand the nature of a curse placed upon him in 2005 by a disgruntled sorcerer, was he able to learn how to cure himself and prevent his likely demise.
The Risk and Responsibility of Preserving Ancestral Psychedelic Knowledge
As part of this ongoing quest, del Rio – a self-described “consciousness activist” who holds ayahuasca ceremonies in Peru and across the world, where it is permitted – has collaborated with Psychedelics Today to develop a course titled “Ancestral Teachings for the Psychedelic Renaissance” to help psychonauts and practitioners deepen their understanding of the nebulous nature of shamanism. He refers to ayahuasca, peyote, huachuma and other plant-based psychedelics as “power plants.”
“Because power is something neutral,” del Rio says. “It depends on who uses it and what for.” The consumption of plants like ayahuasca, or lab-based psychedelics like LSD, he adds, does not automatically improve people. Contrary to the belief held by many who work in the field, he believes they should not be called “medicine,” because psychedelics are not inherently medicinal.
The course illustrates how complex and testing a life dedicated to sharing psychedelic plants ceremonially is.
“I believe that the deeper one goes into this path, the more you realize how infinite it is, and the care and responsibility you have to take to preserve your life and the lives of the people attending a ceremony,” he says.
Beyond Science: How Ancestral Psychedelic Knowledge Offers a Deeper Understanding of Healing
Del Rio – who studied under a Shipibo onaya named Benito Arevalo who encouraged him to share the teachings more widely – feels the best path to responsible administration of power plants is achieved by undergoing a comprehensive apprenticeship with an elder.
“I believe that there are many people who put many people at risk because of their poor training,” he says. “This is not something you really learn, not even in ten years, [but] it is a lifelong path in which we are being formed and each time we understand more how to serve better.”
Stripping psychedelic medicine of its 10,000-year-old Indigenous history and framework of use in order to make it fit within a Western allopathic healthcare system is short-sighted, he contends. It seems that being dispensed psilocybin in a medical setting in the U.S. could be safer than risking being cursed by a yubé in Peru during an ayahuasca ceremony, but del Rio says that the psychedelics cannot only be understood within a scientific paradigm.
“The same amount of substance will work differently for different people,” he maintains. “The substances are not actually what heals, within our tradition, the energy of the healer contributes as much as the substance itself.”
Integration of Ancestral Psychedelic Knowledge into Modern Psychedelic Practices
Little by little, there is an increasing appreciation that Western medicine can learn from the ancient history of psychedelics. In September, an article published by the BBC reported on how it is essential for Western society to develop an understanding of how Indigenous communities have “very different belief systems for interacting with and interpreting the world around them.”
The bulk of clinical psychedelic research thus far has been focused on the individual, as opposed to the group. Any possible interaction with the natural or spirit worlds is completely overlooked. Del Rio urges modern-day researchers to integrate traditional knowledge, “so we don’t repeat mistake after mistake, which, above all, would put many people at risk.”
The Role of Nature and Community in Preserving the Ancestral
Indigenous peoples in the Americas “have maps, guides, a deep familiarity with altered states of consciousness,” Jules Evans, a psychedelics researcher at Queen Mary University of London, who directs the non-profit Challenging Psychedelic Experiences, told the BBC. “Secular people, on the whole, do not. As a result, people can be bewildered by the experience and confused as to how to integrate it into a materialistic worldview. This existential confusion can last months or years, and the person who comes out on the other side may be very different to the person before.”
Central to the process of integration of ancestral psychedelic knowledge is a sense of community, but participants in psychedelic retreats can be left wanting when they return to the urban silos and experience isolation even after transcendent, healing experiences. Even more important is a connection with nature, according to Francisco Rivarola, who worked with del Rio to produce the course.
“The daughter of a Shipibo chief told me that she believes … that what is really sickening society is the disconnection that they have from nature and the source of the divine,” he says.
“The psychedelic [experience] is a portal through which maybe, if you’re lucky and you do this the right way, you can touch upon that connection.”
A failure to make secure that enduring connection – in tandem with the sense of community experienced within ceremony – explains why many people persist in regularly taking high doses of psychedelics in group rituals without reporting long-term improvements in their health, Rivarola adds.
“Working with sacred plants within a ceremonial space allows you to understand something that the West does not understand,” says del Rio, “which is the intelligence of plants and how they can act selectively.”
The folly of Western science – and the psychedelics researchers who do not investigate plants and drugs outside of a “reductionist scientific paradigm that only sees matter without its interaction with other energy levels” – will soon become clear, he claims. “In ten or twenty years we will laugh at this model.”
Are you eager to increase your ancestral knowledge? In Ancestral Teachings for the Psychedelic Renaissance, you’ll experience an introduction to the depth of training that a traditional Peruvian curandero goes through and a roadmap for the life-long practices that anyone relating to psychedelic medicine and practices can benefit from. Over 20 hours of recorded classes, three live group calls,and two complimentary e-books are included. Secure your space today – seats are limited!
After years of work, MAPS/Lykos was finally able to present MDMA to the FDA as a possible tool in the fight against PTSD, only to be denied in devastating fashion. Just why did the FDA reject MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD?
In this episode, Joe interviews Ingmar Gorman, Ph.D.: clinical psychologist and co-founder and CEO of Fluence, a psychedelic education company.
Gorman served as a co-principal investigator and study therapist on MAPS’ Phase II and III clinical trials for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, and works with drug sponsors: training, developing the components for clinical trials, and designing therapy manuals. With his insider’s perspective, he discusses the reasons why he believes the FDA rejected MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD: from ICER’s 2.1 section of the report giving legitimacy to allegations they don’t have the authority to research, to Lykos not being able to defend some accusations due to confidentiality, to the damage caused over time (which likely influenced the decision) from attacks against Lykos from dissenters.
He discusses:
How, despite abuse claims, the main allegations in the report were actually about the mishandling of data or influence of investigators on participants
The complications of needing to follow study frameworks: Should your adverse experience be in the report if it happened outside the study window?
How easily opposition can attack and demonize a faceless company, while forgetting the humanity of the people behind it
Inner healing intelligence and the proposition that people have been indoctrinated into this concept by MAPS
The need for journalists to research more and not just jump on a narrative
As more people have experiences with non-ordinary states, integration becomes more important than ever. But if there isn’t one in your area, how can you create your own psychedelic integration circle?
In this episode, David interviews Daniel Shankin: psychedelic integration coach, Vital instructor, and founder and director of Tam Integration.
He talks about the underrated importance of integration circles, how he created Tam Integration out of a personal need for them, how simple it can be for people to create their own groups, and how open-ended newly formed groups can be. He also discusses his “fractal inquiry” coaching method, and how the best coaching involves simply asking questions that lead clients to their own realizations and wisdom. He is offering courses that teach both of these skills: a course called Creating Community Psychedelic Integration Circles, and the newly-launched, year-long Mt. Tam Psychedelic Integration Coaching Program, beginning in October.
He discusses:
The importance of learning how to focus on your breath, especially during a tough experience
Hugging the Hindu spiritual leader, Amma (Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi), and the special energy that some people have
The benefits of knowing when a mind path isn’t worth exploring
The difference between judgment and curiosity
The weirdness of psychonauts, and how maybe getting a little weirder is what’s needed for your healing
In an age where technology has made it easier than ever to reach each other, humanity faces a glaring paradox: people are more disconnected than ever before, and the need for togetherness has never been greater.
Disconnection isn’t just a social or personal issue – it’s a driving force behind the multiple, interconnected crises we’re facing today. This “polycrisis” is a term that speaks to a complex web of global challenges like climate change, social inequality, and political instability, which are deeply intertwined with the alienation we feel from each other, our environment, and even ourselves. We find ourselves caught in a vicious cycle that erodes our ability to innovate, collaborate, and maintain the relationships necessary to solve enormous problems.
But there is hope in psychedelics. As powerful tools that can heal fractures, psychedelics can restore our sense of belonging and connection with ourselves, each other, and the planet. By addressing the roots of alienation, psychedelics can offer a solution to not only individual and collective repair, but also a way to tackle the global polycrisis threatening our future.
Understanding Modern Alienation: Fuel for Fragmentation
Around the world, people are feeling a profound sense of disconnection – socially, culturally, environmentally, and from themselves. Over 60% of adults are chronically lonely, and this number continues to rise. Modern alienation has led to widespread isolation, division, and perhaps most disturbingly, a loss in the meaning in life for many people. It isn’t just harmful for individuals; it also fuels the larger polycrisis we face by undermining our ability to collaborate, innovate, and sustain a healthy relationship with our world.
Here are some of the most prevalent forms of modern alienation:
Social Alienation
Many people feel increasingly disconnected from the social groups that used to give them a sense of belonging. While social media seems to connect us, it actually deepens these divides, creating echo chambers where different perspectives aren’t usually celebrated. This divide makes it hard – if not impossible – to create the collective will that’s required to solve global problems. The ripple effect of failing to solve one issue, like social isolation, intensifies parallel issues, like political unrest or “othering.”
Cultural Alienation
As the world becomes more globalized, many people feel estranged from their cultural roots, especially if they live in environments where their culture is underrepresented or misunderstood. Losing your cultural identity can cause people to feel confused and like they don’t belong, weakening the social fabric that’s crucial to building cultural identity worth preserving. The erosion of cultural identity doesn’t just impact people, but it weakens our ability to draw on each other’s perspectives, which is crucial to navigate complex global problems.
Environmental Alienation
Urbanization and modern living have distanced us from the natural world, contributing to a growing environmental crisis. Many people feel disconnected from nature, leading to a lack of appreciation for the environment and a sense of being out of place in the world. This is a particularly deadly example of alienation: when people don’t feel connected to the earth, they’re less likely to try to protect it. We’re now caught in a vicious cycle, in which environmental destruction is perpetuating social and economic instability, and obliterating quality of life for many.
Personal Alienation
On a more intimate level, many people feel disconnected from themselves, and are living lives that don’t align with their values, wants, or actual needs. We can see it all around us, in each other, and ourselves, manifesting as depression, anxiety, and a deep sense of unfulfillment. When we’re disconnected from our inner selves, we’re less likely to engage in our world, weakening our capacity for empathy, creativity, and resiliency in the face of glaring global problems that need solving now.
Psychedelics as a Solution: Reconnecting to Combat a Global Polycrisis
Psychedelics offer a powerful solution. These compounds have shown remarkable potential in healing the mind and restoring crucial lost connections: socially, culturally, environmentally, and personally. By repairing these connections, we begin to lay the groundwork for solving some of the most destructive problems plaguing our planet today.
Repairing Social Connections: Building Resilient Communities and Relationships
Psychedelics can break down the barriers that fragment our communities. In communal settings, such as retreats or group ceremonies, psychedelics foster a sense of unity and shared experience.
Psychedelics can play a major role in mending fractured relationships: in families, between romantic partners, or even between nations. In romantic relationships, MDMA-assisted therapy has been shown to help couples reconnect and deepen their understanding of each other. On a larger scale, psychedelics could be used to overcome entrenched national dogmas, fostering mutual understanding and peace between nations. The historic Soviet-American science conference at Esalen is a prime example, when new age practices led to a vision of peace during the Cold War.
By rebuilding social connections, psychedelics can strengthen the communal ties necessary to address global challenges together.
Reviving Cultural Identity: Protecting Diversity in a Polycrisis World
Culturally, psychedelics are helping people all around the world reconnect with their roots and heritage.
Indigenous communities have used psychedelics like peyote and ayahuasca in ritualistic and medicinal contexts for centuries. And today, they’re being used to help ensure that Native American youth do not lose the connection to their heritage. Peyote remains a central sacrament to the Native American Church, and has been used successfully to reconnect Native Americans to their language through song and chanting (and reliable religious experiences). In addition to reconnecting many Indigenous people with their spirituality, ceremony is reconnecting them with their language, which is really important because it was lost for so many people as a result of colonization.
Reconnecting to your cultural identity doesn’t just help heal personal alienation, but also improves the diversity of perspectives and solutions needed to navigate the complexities of a globalized world facing multiple crises.
Psychedelics can foster a deep reconnection with the natural world. When people adopt a deep love of nature, it is, in theory, possible to solve colossal environmental problems.
Many who take psychedelics outdoors report a heightened awareness of their connection to the earth. It can inspire people to live more sustainably and commit to protecting the planet. By rekindling our connection to nature, psychedelics can help reverse the environmental destruction that fuels global polycrisis, promoting behaviors and policies that prioritize ecological balance, sustainability, and even regeneration.
A famed 2019 study by researchers Sam Gandy, Robin Carhart-Harris and others known as the Nature Relatedness Study. The findings suggest that psychedelic experiences can lead to significant and lasting changes in personality, particularly in terms of increased openness and nature relatedness. These changes may also be linked to shifts in political views, promoting more liberal and pro-environmental attitudes. This underscores the potential of psychedelics not only for individual growth but for broader societal impacts.
A 1966 study, Psychedelic Agents in Creative Problem-Solving, demonstrated how psychedelics helped scientists solve complex problems, leading to significant technological advancements. Imagine the potential if psychedelic-inspired innovation were applied to environmental sustainability or the development of new, greener technologies. By unlocking new ways of thinking, psychedelics can help us develop solutions that address the root causes of environmental crises, rather than just treating the symptoms.
Personal Reconnection: Empowering People For the Good of the Planet
On a personal level, psychedelics offer a powerful tool for self-reconnection, particularly in therapeutic settings. They can help individuals explore their shadow, confront unresolved trauma, and rediscover their true selves. This process of self-discovery and deep healing isn’t just transformative for the person, but has ripple effects that improve our capacity to address global challenges. When we’re more connected to ourselves, we’re more likely to engage meaningfully with the world around us.
Take the opioid crisis, for example. Psychedelics offer a promising alternative or addition to traditional pain management, and may drastically reduce chronic pain without the need for opioids. This could lead to a significant reduction in opioid use and addiction, alleviating the strain on healthcare systems and helping to reinvigorate families and communities.
We see the ripple effect of personal reconnection and doing deep inner work all over the psychedelic field; using the principles of Stan Grof, Carl Jung, and Internal Family Systems to help individuals participate in this adventure of self-discovery.
In fact, we’re offering our Vital students the chance to specialize in Somatics, Jung and Depth Psychology as part of their certification for the upcoming September cohort. We’re the first education program to offer this kind of specialization, which we think will be really crucial to helping people heal themselves and others.
The Transformative Global Potential of Psychedelics
The potential of psychedelics to heal and reconnect us, both personally and collectively, is immense. But we can only do it if we approach these substances with responsibility, respect, and a deep understanding of their power.
Philosopher Buckminster Fuller once said, “You do not belong to you. You belong to the universe.” Our role is to use our experiences to help others, and psychedelics provide us with the tools to do it.
Psychedelics can indeed reconnect us, inspire innovation and creativity, and help us solve complex polycrisis problems we face as a society. But most importantly, psychedelics remind us of our interconnectedness: that we are all part of a larger whole, and that our actions have ripple effects that extend far beyond ourselves.
It’s no secret that psychedelic experiences can make people think differently, resulting in more open-mindedness and connection. How can that concept be applied to corporate culture to create more connected leadership?
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Rachelle Sampson, Ph.D.: researcher and founder of Blue Prism Coaching; and Bennet Zelner, Ph.D.: researcher, speaker, and creator of the Pollination Approach. They are both Vital instructors and Associate Professors at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland.
Based on a passion for regenerative economics (how we might be able to apply patterns of nature to socioeconomic systems), they are co-leading the Connected Leadership Study, a research project tracking how psychedelic experiences can facilitate change in people in leadership positions. They believe that a shift from a mechanistic attunement to a more synergistic recognition of our interconnectedness should lead to new ways of thinking, resulting in more creative leaders with better decision-making and team-building skills, and corporate culture caring more about values, regenerative models, equity, and sustainability – all while still being successful. They wonder: Can psychedelic experiences create better leaders? Can capitalism become more conscious?
They discuss:
The structure of the study, what they learned in the first cohort, and why they track participants for a year
How change happens over time, and why they believe it to needs to happen from the bottom up
The concept of emergence and emergent change illustrated by the shifts in movement of a flock of birds
How synergistic attunement can be traced back to the cellular level
The challenge of balancing the therapeutic aspect of psychedelics with the more corporate strategy/professional side
and more!
The study’s next cohort begins in October, so if you’re a business leader interested in being a participant, head to Leaders.study for more info. And if you’d like to learn more about these concepts, the new Regenerative Business and Leadership specialization path in this year’s cohort of Vital digs deep into this world. And we’ve just extended the applications to Sept. 2, so you still have time to apply!
As the psychedelic renaissance continues to spread throughout the West, we learn more about these substances and experiences every day. But are we losing the important ancestral teachings and Indigenous knowledge that got us here?
Together with translator, Francisco Rivarola, they have developed a course called “Ancestral Teachings for the Psychedelic Renaissance,” which aims to be both an honoring of knowledge that has safeguarded these traditions, and a bridge between that wisdom and our Western frameworks, teaching ancestral traditions (largely Shipibo and Incan-Peruvian), the roles and function of dietas, the less talked-about dangers of brujeria (witchcraft), holistic frameworks for dealing with mystical experiences, and the connection between spirituality and responsibility towards nature. The course features 20 hours of Del Río’s teachings (with subtitles) and is the first time they’ve been made available to the general public.
He talks about:
The importance of following guidelines when working with ayahuasca, and how Westerners often don’t respect the rigor required to do it right
The different types of healers in the Shipibo tradition, from good and bad to the “Ascended Master,” who transcends physical limits and is incapable of causing harm
The potential for ayahuasca to be weaponized, how often this happens, and the risks for Westerners who aren’t aware
How the consciousness level of a person can be related to the emotions that that person allows themselves to have
How the expansion of consciousness is healing in itself
and more!
Ancestral Teachings for the Psychedelic Renaissance is a self-paced course that can be taken at any time, so if you’re interested, take advantage of early bird pricing and check it out in the Psychedelic Education Center now!
A recent report estimated that four million people in the U.S. started microdosing in the last year, with many microdosing at work to improve their leadership skills. But most people start their practice alone, which leads to the question: How much do preparation and peer support change the microdosing experience?
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Tiffany Hurd: microdosing coach, speaker, business leadership advisor, and student in our current cohort of Vital.
After 15 years in the corporate healthcare industry and several years on antidepressants, she started microdosing psilocybin and saw an immediate change in her life, tapering off antidepressants within a few months. She realized that she could blend her background in business development and strategy with microdosing, helping companies (and specifically company leadership) become more vulnerable, heart-centered, and innovative. She has found that the changes in people have (not surprisingly) led to improved employee mental health, better team relationships, and more open-mindedness and authenticity, and likely, a large reason for that is not the microdosing itself, but the increased attention to preparation and integration – two huge factors often not discussed with microdosing.
She talks about:
Why mentorship/coaching has not been seen as an integral part of a microdosing practice, and why it should be
Her drive to normalize the use of low-dose psychedelics, especially in our Western ‘go all in’ culture
The benefits of pairing microdosing with other healing modalities, and how microdosing can help you embrace more of them
Why she signed up for vital and how she feels about the course half way through
How she deals with the illegality of substances in the corporate world
and more!
Microdosing is one of the new specialization tracks featured in our next cohort of Vital, beginning September 16. If you want to know more, send us an email or attend one of the next Vital Q+As!
What are bad trips, or adverse, negative, or challenging experiences? Can a definition truly define the power they have to create intense distress and sometimes life-defining moments? Why do they happen, and how do you deal with them?
In this episode, Joe interviews Erica Rex, MA: award-winning journalist, past guest, thought leader on psychedelic medicine, and participant in one of the first clinical trials using psilocybin to treat cancer-related depression.
She tells the story of her recent harrowing experience, brought on by 6 times the amount of Syrian rue that was recommended: from entities threatening her, to a sense of terror she was going to die, to finding her way out of it with time, and most importantly, context to process and a strong support system. She and Joe emphasize the reality that bad trips can happen at any time, with any dose, for any reason, and that – if you can make your way through the experience without being traumatized – you can learn a lot about yourself during those states.
Her book, “The Heroine’s Journey: a woman’s quest for sanity in the psychedelic age” will be published by She Writes Press in the spring of 2026.
She discusses:
Methods to help others having a bad experience
Her skepticism about psychedelic therapy being in a medical context at all
Her thoughts on the recent ICER recommendation against approving MDMA and the multiple topics not addressed
Possible complications from MDMA use nobody talks about, from cytotoxic effects to even sudden-onset psychosis
The pathologizing of anything outside the ordinary, to the point that we’re trying to suppress natural human emotions and reactions
In this episode, Joe interviews Jon Reiss: critically acclaimed filmmaker, author, and host of the Plantscendence podcast, which tells people’s psychedelic stories and is beginning its second season soon.
He talks about his early days of directing Nine Inch Nails and Type O Negative videos, and how Plantscendence was born after he realized that the conversations he was having with people about their most transformative experiences were perfect for a podcast. He discusses his first psychedelic experience with ayahuasca, how microdosing is helping him today, and his realization that people can get to these big experiences in many different ways.
He discusses:
The two episodes of Plantscendence that stand out the most to him
Using the term, ‘plant medicine’
His 30 years of meditation practice and how it likely helped him to integrate his first psychedelic experiences
The concept of plant intelligence and how plants can stop you from being a “consciousness tourist”
Kabbalah, Kashmir Shaivism, non-duality, and his Shaktipat experience
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Sara Reed: Vital instructor, lecturer, and lead psychedelic research therapist at Imperial College London; and Alex H. Robinson: Vital student, integration coach and psilocybin facilitator for Heroic Hearts Project, and distinguished Army SOF combat Veteran with a decade of active duty service.
Reed has worked with MAPS to make clinical trial populations more diverse and is creating culturally sensitive Clinical Research Forms for future research trials, and Robinson spearheaded her unit’s Cultural Support Team program and contributed to policy changes to help place women into traditionally male-centric Special Operations roles. Representing marginalized groups themselves, they’re both passionate about making psychedelic therapy more inclusive and representative of the general population, and getting more practitioners up to speed to be able to deliver culturally competent care.
They discuss:
The importance of having difficult conversations and calling out bad behavior
The fallacy of zero-sum thinking: Doing something special for a smaller community doesn’t take away from the main goal; it adds to it
The benefit of being able to self-reflect and personalize content when most psychedelic education consists of one-sided lectures
The challenge of getting people who don’t feel represented to enroll in clinical trials, and how personal stories go a long way
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Johanna interviews Erika Dyck: author, professor, historian, Vital instructor, and research chair in the History of Health & Social Justice at the University of Saskatchewan.
Dyck talks about the book she co-edited: Women and Psychedelics: Uncovering Invisible Voices, which was released in March as a Chacruna anthology, and collects pieces from several different authors highlighting the untold or lesser known stories from women throughout psychedelic history. Albert Hofmann was the first person to intentionally ingest LSD, but who was the first woman to do so? Who were the women assisting in research or sitting with experiencers in the early days who never got the credit for their contributions? Who were the women supporting some of the biggest psychedelic names in history?
She talks about:
The contrast in societal attitudes towards psychedelic exploration based on traditional gender roles
Some of her favorite stories from the book, including a woman diagnosed with manic depression becoming one of the first guides in LSD trials
The use of psychedelics in pregnancy and birthing practices across other cultures
Traditional gender attributes: Are women more wired to care for others? Is there something about the psychedelic experience that’s inherently feminine?
The importance of moving past the gender binary and implementing more diversity in research – with the challenge of needing to universalize medicine at the same time
In this episode, Joe interviews Lia Mix, LMFT, CPTR: founder and CEO of Delphi, a consulting firm dedicated to the healthy growth of the psychedelic movement.
After many years of working in community mental health and 15 years in the commercial health insurance industry (where she helped to establish coverage for autism), Mix was one of the first graduates of CIIS’s training program, and after a very distinct MDMA-assisted therapy session, she wondered: “How can I be of service?” She’s since helped to launch The Board of Psychedelic Medicines and Therapies, the American Psychedelic Practitioners Association, and Enthea, and is working every day toward a more unified and uniform psychedelic space, with healthcare frameworks, official boards and certifications, consumer protections, and a general consensus that this is our responsibility to manage – not some outside regulator’s. So how can we, as a scattered psychedelic community, come together?
She discusses:
Her path to psychedelics and how nobody was talking about how to bring psychedelics into healthcare
The need for a unified code of ethics for any practitioner of psychedelic therapy
The FDA, Lykos Therapeutics, and how the recent advisory committee’s recommendations on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy were largely based on fear
How there actually is a lot of financial possibility if we can all agree on what is absolutely essential right now
Psychedelics have been a part of Australia’s cultural landscape for decades, gaining renewed interest for their potential for healing and self-exploration. If you’re considering or pursuing a career in psychedelics in Australia or want to understand how we got to where we are, you need to know where we’ve been.
The Deep Past and Early History of Psychedelics in Australia
It’s worth noting this article was written from a non-Indigenous perspective. So, even with the best intentions, any discussion of pre-European psychedelic history given here is inherently incomplete.
Australia has a long and rich history of customs, traditions, and knowledge that pre-dates European colonization by many tens of thousands of years. So, it’s natural to ask about the Indigenous use of species such as Psilocybe subaeruginosa.
Anthropological and historical records don’t support that Indigenous Australians used plants or fungi as classic psychedelics. But we don’t know what natural medicinal knowledge was lost through the widespread displacement, genocide, and destruction of culture that First Nations in Australia have experienced since colonization began in 1788. So, we can’t know for sure.
Some people believe there is secret Indigenous knowledge of psychedelics. If there is, maybe once we collectively acknowledge that modern Australia is built on stolen land, we’d finally be deserving of it. A great deal more reconciliation work needs to be done to improve understanding of Indigenous culture and connection to plant medicine generally.
Regarding psychedelics, Australia was quiet for the next hundred and fifty years after colonization. But during that time, we developed a voracious appetite for mind-altering substances, particularly alcohol, opium, and cocaine. Sadly, we were also relatively early adopters of racially and politically motivated laws prohibiting drugs (other than alcohol, of course). So, when psychedelics finally came onto the scene, we were primed to adopt them enthusiastically and make the same legal and social mistakes as basically every other country attempting to manage drugs in their respective societies.
The Counterculture Psychedelic Explosion
Two factors primarily drove the emergence of psychedelics into popular culture in Australia. One was the Vietnam War. American service personnel based here or visiting on leave bought many novel ideas – one of them was LSD (along with heroin and cannabis).
The other was the rise of surfing culture over the ’60s. This attracted surfers, including many from California, who knew about Psilocybe cubensis. In 1969, the Sydney Sunday Telegraph and the Canberra Times claimed that people in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales were eating Psilocybe cubensis for its psychedelic effects. Mycologists, J. Picker and R.W. Rickards reported psilocybin in the native P. subaeruginosa in 1970, and awareness of the potency of this native mushroom spread quickly.
Like the rest of the world, the counterculture era in Australia was also a time when psychedelics were used in questionable circumstances. One of the most high-profile examples centers on a cult known as The Family (also known as Santiniketan Park Association or the Great White Brotherhood). This group operated in the Dandenong area outside of Melbourne and had a small but active membership of medical professionals who practiced an eclectic mix of Christian and yogic traditions.
One of the members, Marion Villimek, owned and operated the Newhaven psychiatric hospital in nearby Kew. Many of the staff at the facility, including psychiatrists and nurses, were also involved with the cult. Officially, the hospital supplied a range of interventions, including LSD psychotherapy. Many “patients” had no official diagnoses, but their treatments were part of the group’s recruitment process.
And while Australian participation in MK-Ultra was mainly around hypnosis research, our defense department reportedly researched how to synthesize mescaline from eucalyptus sawdust (entirely innocent purposes, I’m sure).
The reaction of mainstream society and politicians to psychedelics in Australia largely mirrored the responses elsewhere. Popular culture firmly linked LSD and psilocybin mushrooms to hippie counterculture and the anti-war movement. Local media effectively used these associations to incite wide-scale moral panic. Just as we followed the U.S. into Vietnam, our politicians enthusiastically signed us up for Nixon’s War on Drugs. The party, in every possible sense, was over.
The Underground Revival of Psychedelics in Australia
In the ’80s and ’90s, most above-ground psychedelic activity languished, though isolated pockets of research continued, including Dr. Balvant R. Sitaram’s extensive investigations into the psychotomimetic nature of DMT.
But during this same time, the underground in Australia was quite different. Against a backdrop of burgeoning outdoor raves (locally known as “doofs”) and recreational MDMA, a subtle change was afoot. Entheogenic knowledge was rapidly expanding via dedicated communities of citizen scientists and enthusiastic psychonauts, many of whom were members of the world’s longest-running ethnobotanical online forum, The Corroboree.
In 1992, an enterprising University of Sydney chemistry student found scientific records that there were native acacia species that contained DMT. Their story of finding the plants, extracting, and then trying the DMT would be published in a student newspaper, then find its way onto the Lyceum and Erowid. Australian DMT had been set loose upon the world!
In one of his last journeys abroad, Terence McKenna spoke about DMT at the Beyond the Brain club in Byron Bay in 1997. He also left another B.caapi vine cutting in Australia, setting off a chain of events leading to the rise of local ayahuasca circles.
In 2004, Australia saw the first Entheogenesis Australis (EGA) conference held in Belgrave, Victoria, introducing a wider Australian audience to the study of ethnobotanical plants. The centrality of EGA to psychedelics in Australia can’t be overstated.
For example, in 2010, MAPS founder Rick Doblin attended the EGA Symposium. Discussions with him after a workshop led to the formation of Psychedelic Research in Science & Medicine (PRISM), Australia’s leading psychedelic research charity.
Around the same time as EGA was kicking off, changa appeared. Changa has a range of formulations, but it’s essentially acacia DMT recrystallized on dried B. caapi leaf or bark shavings, along with ingredients such as mullein or blue lotus. Smoking changa is gentler and longer lasting than vaporizing DMT due to the MAOI effect of the ayahuasca leaf.
By the end of 2010, the rise of MAPS and Doblin’s visit gave tapped-in Australians a sense that something bigger was happening with psychedelics. As someone who watched these events unfold from the late ’90s onward, I can tell you – we had no idea what was coming.
Recent Psychedelic Developments
The last decade has been one of unexpected growth and change for psychedelics in Australia. In terms of above-ground activities and broader community awareness, more has happened since 2000 than in the previous century. New organizations like the Australian Psychedelic Society and Mind Medicine Australia have appeared, each with their own visions for the future of psychedelics, which influenced their focus on issues like clinical access or decriminalization.
But no event was more momentous or surprising than the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) decision to add psilocybin and MDMA to Schedule 8 in February 2023, permitting their use as controlled drugs by specialist psychiatrists (albeit only under specific circumstances and with a great deal of paperwork). This change, driven in no small part by Mind Medicine Australia’s allegedly relentless lobbying, caught many of us off-guard, and has driven a massive and sustained increase in community and commercial interest in psychedelics. The first legal offerings in this area have gone live in recent months, with reported prices for a full course of treatment of up to $25,000 AUD ($16,625 USD).
The underground continues to grow in Australia as more people become aware of the potential of psychedelics to relieve suffering, to change how they relate to the world and themselves. Psilocybin use has doubledsince 2019, meaning that nearly 500,000 Australians used them between 2022 and 2023. If nothing else, this should serve as a reminder that, in terms of raw numbers at least, the mainstream of psychedelics here is very much out in the wild.
Organizations such as AMAPP aspire to be the peak body for legal psychedelic-assisted therapy in Australia. Clinical professionals are navigating new processes with regulators, for treatments they may never have administered before. Legal reform advocates continue their efforts to end the War on Drugs.
How any of this will play out is uncertain. But there’s definitely something meaningful happening with psychedelics in Australia worth paying attention to.
Are you interested in being part of the future of psychedelic therapy in Australia? Check out our comprehensive course, Navigating Psychedelics: Australia. Developed with the best of international expertise and local knowledge, it could be the first step in finding your place as a psychedelic professional.
In this episode, Joe interviews Sean Lawlor: writer and therapist specializing in ketamine-assisted therapy at Reflective Healing in Fort Collins, CO.
His first book, Psychedelic Revival: Toward a New Paradigm of Healing, will be released on June 4. Written as somewhat of a primer for psychedelics and psychedelic therapy, he talks about how he decided to write the book, how Michael Pollan was an influence, and the importance of making psychedelic literature not boring: Research and statistics are important, but how does one relate to data points when trying to understand something so rich and weird?
He discusses:
Studying philosophy, from Nietzsche and Freud to Jung and William James
When a clinical frame or license is important (but can you always trust a license?)
How context and interwoven culture matter when differentiating between plant medicines and man-made psychedelics
Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key and research into ancient Greeks using psychedelics: Why do we place so much importance on proving this?
The importance of community, rituals, shared meanings, mythology, and rites of passage
In this episode, David interviews Sami Awad: Palestinian peace and nonviolent activist and founder of Holy Land Trust in Bethlehem; and Leor Roseman, Ph.D.: Israeli neuroscientist, researcher, and senior lecturer at the University of Exeter.
They talk about Roseman’s 2021 paper, “Relational Processes in Ayahuasca Groups of Palestinians and Israelis,” which looked at what happened when people with fiercely different opinions moved beyond fear, anger, and othering, and sat together in a safe container and drank ayahuasca with the purpose of healing collective trauma. When the focus of the participants moved toward understanding each other, Roseman and Awad saw a unity that gave them a lot of hope, leading to the creation of their nonprofit, RIPPLES, which is focused on using psychedelics for peacebuilding – first in the Middle East, and hopefully soon, everywhere. As Awad says, “If it can happen here, it can happen almost anywhere.”
They discuss:
The efficacy of psychedelics as a tool for nonviolent activism, building peace, and recognizing – and healing – collective trauma
The balance between the idealistic and the practical, or ‘the irony of harmony’ – if you focus too much on the connectivity of psychedelics, do you actually exclude voices?
The concept of “my liberation depends on your healing and your liberation depends on mine”
The challenge in doing something with the hope and enthusiasm that comes after a powerful experience: How do you make sure that wave of hope continues rippling through choppy waters?
It’s no secret that psychedelics and creativity are intrinsically linked. If you look around, you won’t have to go very far to find psychedelic-inspired byproducts from visionary figures whose work has changed the world, from Yoko Ono, to Aldous Huxley, to Steve Jobs.
While psychedelics’ impact on art is well-documented, the psychedelic influence on design remains largely unexplored, despite luminaries like Jobs attributing psychedelic experiences to shaping their design ethos.
How do people working in the design world work with psychedelics in 2024? Spoiler: psychedelics are being used to foster unconventional problem-solving, inspire new empathic design systems, and lead to designs that reconnect people with each other and the planet.
Psychedelics and the Creative Process
Psychedelic experiences influence creative processes in various ways. Research and anecdotal evidence suggest that psychedelics such as LSD and psilocybin can enhance creative thinking by inducing a hyper-associative state of cognition, increasing global entropy in the brain, and reducing conventional, logical thinking while giving rise to novel thoughts and insights. A 2022 Beckley Foundation study revealed that psychedelics can lead to a shift of cognitive resources towards originality, convergence, and symbolic thinking, which are fundamental phenomena for creativity. The altered state induced by psychedelics can unlock creativity by allowing individuals to imagine things that don’t exist, experience profound visual and sensory hallucinations, and increase connectivity in brain networks associated with idea generation and evaluation.
“My current creative process is intrinsically connected to psychedelics,” said Jannyl Molina, Psychedelics Today graphic designer. As part of her role, she reads unpublished articles (including this one), to distill and visually articulate the main themes and conceptual complexities such as ‘integration,’ the ‘default mode network,’ and the ‘War on Drugs.’
“In a way, my process for design is really informed by past psychedelic experience and current research,” Molina said. A 2019 Maastricht University study found that psilocybin has several notable effects on creative thinking. It led to a differentiation of effects over time and across constructs; it resulted in higher ratings of spontaneous creative insights; it decreased deliberate, task-based creativity; and seven days after psilocybin use, the number of novel ideas continued to be elevated.
Reconnecting Nature and Humanity Through Life-Centric Design
Beyond just design, there’s a bigger idea at play. Based on our work at Psychedelics Design, a platform exploring how psychedelics and design overlap, we think the benefits of psychedelics could deeply change how designers create.
By helping us understand what people need and making us appreciate nature more, psychedelics may inspire products and systems that are innovative, beautiful, profitable, and also good for the planet.
In design, it can’t be overstated the degree to which psychedelic experiences change an individual’s view of how humans and nature are connected. These profound experiences frequently evoke a profound sense of unity and interconnectedness among all life forms.
For designers, these new perspectives can become their inspiration to use more earth-friendly methods in their work. It may inspire switching to green materials and putting nature first in the assembly of their work. Psychedelic experiences also fill the design process with more caring and respect for nature, possibly guiding designers to solutions that keep ecosystems in balance.
“You likely can’t get too far into psychedelic exploration without feeling a deeper connection to nature. As we like to remind people in our work, everything is designed – by humans or by nature. And spoiler alert: humans are, in fact, just another expression of nature,” say Tracy DeLuca, founder of the How Might We Design LLC., and Elysa Fenenbock, founder of The School of Psychedelic Design. Both are instructors of Stanford’s Psychedelic Medicine x Design course.
“More specifically, psychedelic experiences have profoundly reshaped our view and reconnected us with nature’s own creative problem-solving abilities, honed over billions of years of evolution. Psychedelics have expanded our understanding of what’s possible in problem-solving and encouraged us to consider the needs of all living beings, not just humans,” the pair wrote.
A long-term follow-up study by MAPS founder Rick Doblin of the Good Friday experiment found that participants’ appreciation for life and nature was enhanced 24 years after their psilocybin experience, suggesting long-lasting impacts on nature-relatedness. The findings from these studies align with the biophilia hypothesis, which argues that humans naturally prefer nature because we evolved in it.
Molina says she found “greater urgency to care for nature and take care of others” when under the influence of psychedelics.
“It’s as if that inner wisdom says to me, ‘you are healing and need to aid others in their healing, so that Earth can also heal.’ That becomes louder each time I journey,” she said.
This natural connection may be why many people choose outdoorsy settings for psychedelic experiences and report a deep appreciation of the world around them. Together, this research suggests psychedelics could help fix our modern disconnect from nature by making us feel more connected to and appreciative of the environment.
Creative System Changes Through Psychedelic Design
The idea of changing how we design things after having mind-opening experiences with psychedelics is exciting. Instead of only thinking about what’s best for humans, we can think about what’s best for all living things. This could help us work together better and fix big problems in the world.
This shift from human-centered to life-centered design holds promise for addressing complex issues and presents an opportunity for designers to elevate their collaborative efforts with clients and stakeholders. Rather than isolating themselves within traditional structures, designers can integrate more deeply into organizations, becoming integral parts of the growth ecosystem.
“In the realm of healthcare, psychedelic medicine shows promise not only in providing relief for individual mental health challenges but also in catalyzing a broader transformation of our broken healthcare systems,” DeLuca adds.
By embracing principles of expanded consciousness, conscious connectedness, collaboration, regeneration, and reciprocity, the Psychedelics Design Philosophy offers the potential to revolutionize the very essence of how we approach design, moving beyond mere problem-solving to co-creating harmonious and sustainable solutions that resonate with the interconnectedness of all things.
While there is plenty of room and indeed a need for the design process to evolve and benefit from an expanded state of knowing and doing, Jeff Salazar, partner at McKinsey Design, sees potential to more dramatically shift design structures.
“After 30 years of consulting experience, I’ve seen many teams have less impact than they are truly capable of by isolating themselves as the keepers of the process and/or are hampered by living within a corporate structure that puts them a Grand Canyon away from where strategy gets shaped. To this point, I’m inspired to see us open the aperture on how we might reimagine ‘design’ becoming even more a part of (not apart from) the organizations and institutions that can gain greater benefit from the practice,” Salazar said.
The chance to create new ways of designing naturally with psychedelics is a hopeful idea for the future of creativity. It lets us go past the limits of how we design things now and imagine a new way forward. This way of designing is about being open, aware, working together, helping things grow back, and being good to each other. It could change not just how we make new things but also help make bigger changes in the world.
“It is from being in an expanded-state, that designers can gain new perspectives on their role – not only in creating highly desirable, harmonious and sustainable solutions – but also to help broaden and challenge how they engage within the overall ecosystem of growth,” Salazar said.
By using what we’ve learned from psychedelic experiences, we can start to take apart old ways of doing things that don’t work anymore. We can make a system that includes everyone and lasts a long time. Ultimately, this can lead to a world where all living things live together in a fair and peaceful way.
What Creatives Can Learn From Set & Setting
Making new things can seem impressive, but it’s a lot of hard work and can be tiring for both the body and the mind. Just like in psychedelics, having the right attitude and a good environment – a.k.a. ‘set and setting’ – is essential.
Similarly for creators, who often possess heightened sensitivity, factors like sound, scent, and others’ emotions can profoundly impact their work. Creative agencies and some tech giants have known for a long time that it’s important to give their workers a place where they can flourish. A great workplace for creatives might offer different rooms to work, a variety of refreshments, places to sit quietly, opportunities to practice yoga, and special headphones to block noise in busy work spaces.
Henry Winslow, founder of Tricycleday, says psychedelics have shifted in his perspective on the creative process.
“I don’t force ideas anymore; I create space for ideas now. It might sound like a semantic shift, but it’s not. In my days working at giant agencies, we’d schedule 30 or 60-minute structured brainstorming sessions. They didn’t reliably generate anything remarkable. Now, I understand that the answers are within me. It may sound corny, but I just have to create the conditions for them to reveal themselves spontaneously,” he said.
Many creatives also experience a sense of detachment or otherness, creative blocks, and feelings of impostor syndrome driven by the pursuit of perfection, all of which can significantly elevate stress levels.
“I have noticed that if I have a ‘creative block,’ microdosing or even doing a larger dose will help me return to my usual creative self. The process of ideation has to be generative, by definition, and psychedelics are primordial for linking up parts of my brain and allowing new ideas to burst out,” Molina says.
According to UCSF researcher Robin Carhart-Harris, whose pioneering fMRI study captured images of a healthy brain under the influence of a dose of LSD capable of inducing a trip, the psychedelic experience involves a breakdown of the conventional sense of self, replaced by a profound sense of connection with oneself, others, and the natural world. Commenting on the study, Carhart-Harris notes that “[i]n many ways, the brain in the LSD state resembles the state our brains were in when we were infants: free and unconstrained. This also makes sense when we consider the hyper-emotional and imaginative nature of an infant’s mind.”
Hector Pottie, creative director of Moving Brands, believes that “maybe psychedelics are something that would help create the right conditions for us to think wider, to think differently.”
Psychedelics have the potential to alleviate tension, silence our inner critics, foster receptivity, enhance our sense of connection, and ultimately unlock intricate visions. This could help us develop new ways to design things that are just right for the complexities of our world.
“The practice of mind-expanding activities such as the taking of psychoactive substances was, I think, fundamentally interwoven with the early development of man, helping to expand the boundaries of consciousness. The mind was opened to new visions by maximizing hyperconnectivity, and spreading further the network of simultaneous associations, inspiring higher levels of creativity and spirituality.”
A placebo-controlled study by Isabel Wießner and colleagues at the University of Campinas, Brazil, found that compared to placebo, LSD changed several creativity measurements pointing to three overall LSD-induced phenomena: a ‘pattern break’ reflected by increased novelty, surprise, originality, and semantic distances; decreased ‘organization,’ reflected by decreased utility, convergent thinking and, marginally, elaboration; and ‘meaning,’ reflected by increased symbolic thinking and ambiguity in the data-driven results.
Carly Dutch-Greene, founder of Studiodelic, says: “My psychedelic experiences have given me the ability to deeply attune to my intuition and because of that, I am able to transmute thoughts and ideas into visual designs in a really meaningful way.”
For designers, psychedelics open up a new realm of creative possibility, offering a unique tool for problem-solving and innovation. By altering perception and expanding consciousness, psychedelics may unlock creative insights that were previously inaccessible, paving the way for design solutions that contribute to regenerative futures.
It is essential to acknowledge the complexities and risks associated with psychedelics – they are not a panacea for creative problem-solving, and may not be the best choice for all creative thinkers. The ongoing dialogue within the design and psychedelic communities must carefully balance the potential creative insights with potential risks. While psychedelics may offer profound experiences and new avenues for exploration, we can’t overlook that they also carry legal, ethical, and health considerations, too.
Ultimately, the intersection of psychedelics and design carries both profound opportunities and formidable challenges. By proceeding with open yet critical minds, this intersection has the potential to expand the frontiers of humanity. With wisdom and care, this resurgence could catalyze a new creative wave that redesigns our innovations and how we innovate.
Join Psychedelics Today CEO Joe Moore at PSYCHEDELICS DESIGN conference on July 11. Joe’s keynote presentation, titled: The Great Reconnector: Designing Our Way Back Together with Psychedelics will explore modern alienation, and how psychedelics can serve as catalysts to bring people back together. Additional speakers include Peter Reitano of Gwella, Dennis Walker of Mycopreneur, and others. Join us to collectively reimagine the possibilities at the convergence of consciousness and creative endeavors. *Get 15% off your ticket with code JOE15.*
In this episode, Joe interviews two members of the Heroic Hearts Project team: Director of Donor Development and founder of The Hope Project, Allison Wilson; and Director of Research and founder of Hystelica, Dr. Grace Blest-Hopley.
They discuss how The Hope Project – a nonprofit that supports spouses of veterans, Gold Star Wives, and female veterans with scholarships to psychedelic healing retreats, integration, community, etc. – merged with Heroic Hearts Project, and why this is such a necessary part of the veteran healing story: How does a family hold space for a vet returning to a suddenly alien civilian life (especially after a psychedelic journey)? How does a spouse deal with their own trauma from constant worry and isolation? Wilson and Blest-Hopley are learning that, for many spouses, having their own experience (and with other spouses) has been incredibly beneficial.
They talk about:
The concept of secondary PTSD (often referred to as ‘compassion fatigue’) and the many ways it can manifest
How Heroic Hearts is working with Imperial College London to use veteran retreats as real-world observational research
The importance of involving family in the healing process, and how positive outcomes can trickle down to children
The need for more research into how PTSD and the effects of psychedelics are different in women based on their unique physiology (as most studies have focused on men)
In this episode, Joe and Kyle interview William Richards, STM, Ph.D.: senior advisor at Sunstone Therapies, psychologist at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, contributor to Vital, and author of Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics & Religious Experiences.
He talks about the first time he experienced psilocybin in a research study in 1963, his early studies on the psychology of religion, working with Abraham Maslow, how he became one of the early psychedelic therapists, and what it was like for all of that to disappear when Nixon came into office and shut everything down. He discusses his move into psychedelics and end-of-life care after seeing patients’ fear of death completely disappear, and contemplates whether psychedelics could help people prepare for death – how would we live if we no longer feared death?
He also discusses:
How the integration of psychedelics into palliative care should be a huge step in cultural acceptance
How psychedelics could be used for education and boosting creativity, problem solving, and even new perspectives on history and classic works
The study of comparative religion and the potential for psychedelics to find the connections and commonality between seemingly disparate religions
The impact of psychedelic experiences on the perception of the sacred
How fascinating it is that the same substance, dose, and set and setting can create such incredibly different experiences
In this episode, Joe interviews Shahar Amit: psytrance musician who has created what may be the world’s first modular album for psychedelic exploration under his project, Held By Sound.
He talks about his background in the rave and festival scene, the moment he realized he wanted to make music, and the realization that he could create soundscapes specifically for journeys into non-ordinary states. And he digs into the ‘choose your own adventure’ framework of the free album: how he actually recorded 3 different albums and figured out how to transition into different moods based on which direction the listener wants to go – from more still to more expansive, to darker or more bittersweet. He has also created music for DMT trials in the UK, and talks a lot about the potential in extended-state DMT experiences.
He also discusses:
How he came up with the flow of the album related to phases of the trip
How much of a catalyst and safe container music can be, with or without a complimentary substance
How psychedelics in a fun, festival experience with lots of laughter can be extremely beneficial – you don’t need to do them the ‘correct’ way
Graham Hancock, Donald Hoffman, and the concept of consciousness as the building block of all reality
Psytrance, classical music, traditional Bwiti music, Lady Gaga, and what music he feels is best for exploration
Have you been considering taking a psychedelic journey, but want to avoid a bad trip? Do yourself a favor: don’t make the most common psychedelic mistakes.
Understanding the most common pitfalls before you engage with a psychedelic substance can have a colossal impact on the outcome of your experience. Whether you’ve just learned about psychedelics, you’ve recently begun a journey of re-discovery, you’re working to include psychedelics in your career, or you’re a seasoned psychonaut, knowing the most often-made psychedelic mistakes could mean the difference of having a positive or negative – or even dangerous – outcome.
Ignoring Set and Setting
Psychedelics are powerful tools that can amplify your inner world. Imagine a mirror reflecting back everything you’re feeling – that’s what a psychedelic experience can be like. So, if you’re anxious going in, that anxiety can intensify and make it difficult to avoid a bad trip.
Similarly, a chaotic or unfamiliar environment can create a sense of unease and disrupt the flow of your experience.
Set (Mindset): Your emotional and psychological state profoundly affects your psychedelic journey. If you’re stressed, worried, or harbor unresolved conflicts, these can manifest and become overwhelming during the experience.
Setting (Environment): The physical and social space you choose can significantly impact your trip. Some settings are inherently riskier than others.
To avoid making this mistake, consider your internal state of being, and if it’s the best time to introduce psychedelics into your life. While some may argue that a period of difficulty is the best time to use psychedelics, take the time to evaluate whether dealing with what may arise will be a wise or productive choice right now – only you can answer this question, but don’t be afraid to share with someone you trust to help you evaluate it.
Think hard about how the setting could impact your overall experience, both positively and negatively. While fun, a noisy party can be disorienting. Unfamiliar surroundings and people could become frightening during the trip, too. Whereas a safe, comfortable space with trusted companions can foster a sense of security and allow you to surrender to the experience. Thoroughly assess what level of comfort and control feels right for you, and choose your setting wisely.
Lack of Planning and Research
Ingesting a substance without stopping to understand the substance and its effects is like taking a bad trip to a foreign land without a map. You might end up lost, confused, and potentially in danger.
While psychedelics are increasingly being mentioned or portrayed casually in movies and on social media, they’re powerful substances whose effects vary wildly depending on the individual, the substance, the dosing, and what they’re combined with. Without proper research, you could have a drastically different experience than you signed up for.
Treat your psychedelic journey (and yourself) with an appropriate level of respect. Research the substance you plan to use, including its typical effects, duration, and potential risks and contraindications. Get familiar with typical experiences by reading trip reports and articles, listening to podcasts (we have many to choose from), psychedelic books, and studies.
Begin forming a plan. Decide who you want and who is able to be present, or act as a “sitter.” Make sure this person has some psychedelic experience and can provide emotional support. If you also choose your setting mindfully and have a good understanding of what to expect (while being aware that the unexpected may still arise), you can enter the experience with confidence.
Neglecting Drug Testing
One of the most common mistakes in the modern era of psychedelic use is failure to test your substance. These days, it’s increasingly risky to assume that a substance is safe, pure, or that the substance is even what you believe it to be. Because a great deal of psychedelic use still occurs outside legal frameworks, where substances are tested and verified, there could be adulterants or molecules you are unfamiliar with on board. This potential comes with a high risk of unpredictable and dangerous side effects, ranging from discomfort to death.
Fortunately, there has never been greater access to substance testing for people who are concerned about the safety of their psychedelics and avoiding a bad trip.
At-home testing kits are widely available for a wide variety of substances, with the most common testing for accuracy and adulterants. Services like GetYourDrugsTested.com offer free mail-in drug analysis for free, groups like Dancesafe, Bunk Police, and Test Kit Plus offer kits for home use. Be sure to follow the instructions, and opt for a kit that checks for a wide variety of substances.
While purchasing a test kit is an added expense, strongly consider the cost of your health and well-being: if you can afford to ingest, you can afford to test.
Misjudging Your Dose
One of the most common mistakes we see: taking an arbitrary or high dose without realizing it or understanding its potency.
Dosing is highly variable from substance to substance, and highly individualized. The dose that works best for one person may be far too much, or too little for another. Taking too much without realizing it or anticipating the level of intensity can quickly result in an overwhelming and potentially harmful situation.
To avoid this potential for a bad trip, start with a low dose and increase gradually if necessary, tailoring it to your desired experience.
If it’s your first time taking a substance – or even a new batch of a familiar substance – the safest route is to begin with a low dose. It’s far easier to increase the dose if necessary than it is to deal with an overwhelming experience when it’s too late.
Consider your intention: do you want to have a more subtle, amplifying experience, or a mystical experience? How well do you know your body, and how do you typically react to mind-altering substances? What’s been said on message boards and within your local community about the substance recently? Exercising caution, asking yourself important questions, and doing some external research can help you avoid a bad trip.
Remember: you can always take more, but you can’t take less.
Learn the Rest of the Most Common Psychedelic Mistakes
Are you feeling prepared for your journey? Maybe don’t take off just yet. While this article includes crucial information to help you stop a bad trip before it starts, there’s more to learn.
We’ve packaged an extensive list of psychedelic pitfalls (and, most importantly, what to do instead) in a FREE course designed for wherever you’re at in your journey: 8 Common Psychedelic Mistakes.
In this self-guided digital class, you’ll learn:
Why you shouldn’t overlook set and setting.
How to plan and research thoroughly.
Why substance testing is crucial.
The value of knowing your dosing.
How to begin vetting your shaman or facilitator.
How to stay present during your trip.
The importance of choosing a support team.
How to be set up for success before and after your trip.
Join thousands of other psychedelic explorers and supporters in this FREE course so you can prepare for every psychedelic journey with knowledge and confidence. Students receive a complimentary printable guide and trip checklist, and free, unrestricted access to course materials for life.
In this episode, Joe and special guest, Court Wing, interview Tommy Aceto: former Navy Seal and trauma medic, NCAA athlete, Michigan State Champion Wrestler, and now, psychedelic advocate and ambassador for the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition.
He discusses his journey from childhood to wanting to become a SEAL, and the toll that military life and its programming can take on a person: how a life built on high levels of endurance, deprivation, and constantly surviving in a fight-or-flight mindset often manifests in Operator Syndrome, chronic pain, depression, and addiction. Veterans are seeing the potential of psychedelics to rewire their brains and allow them to process pain differently, by allowing them to feel emotions they were trained to turn off: “You’ve got to feel to heal.”
Aceto discusses:
The affirmation and approval many who join the military seek, and how that often translates into needing to stay at certain levels of risk to truly feel alive
The similarities between soldiers and professional athletes and high performers
Dealing with chronic pain, and how forcing movement is often the best tactic
The Controlled Substances Act and how opioids became a business
Why the most important thing vets can do today is to tell their healing stories
What if there was a potentially life-saving drug that could relieve depression and PTSD but also, potentially, force frequent users to rush to the toilet every 15 minutes?
Well, it does exist. It’s ketamine, the most rapid-acting antidepressant in use today.
The drug has morphed in popular consciousness in just half a century from legal anesthetic, to dissociative dancefloor sniffing powder, to FDA-approved depression treatment, to addictive bladder-buster. Like heroin and cocaine, ketamine has much-needed medical uses – but it can be dangerous if abused. Rising problematic recreational use and calls from industry for greater professional accountability in therapeutic settings is showing that ketamine can be fun, restorative, and even addictive. In some cases, all at the same time.
The Ascension of Ketamine in Medicine and Culture
The commonly used anesthetic, in clinical use since 1970, was never placed under the strictest of legal controls like other drugs – partly since recreational ketamine use did not emerge until the 1990s and was rarely demonized. This enabled ketamine-assisted mental health treatment to become the first psychedelic available in therapy form, while in 2019 the FDA approved a ketamine nasal spray named Spravato for depression.
While its therapeutic usage has taken off, recreational consumption has seemingly followed suit.
“Recreational ketamine use has almost tripled over the last decade,” says Dr. Rayyan Zafar, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College’s Centre for Psychedelic Research.
In some cases, ketamine appears to be replacing alcohol, and that may broadly be positive for public health, Zafar adds. It’s not the only benefit: Ketamine-assisted therapy, “is a game changer for treatment resistant depression.”
To service the emerging therapeutic demand, ketamine clinics have opened all over the Western world over the last decade (there are a dozen in Manhattan alone).
And the party drug du jour – which along with other psychedelics is today replacing cocaine on dancefloors and at dinner parties – is making its way into pop culture: in ‘Ketflix and Chill’ memes, usage in films such as 2023’s Rotting in the Sun, and the so-called “ketamine chic” look. A song with a perhaps era-defining lyric, “Gimme ket, gimme ket,” recently made the top 20 in the German pop charts.
Naturally, plenty attest to its benefits.
“A ketamine meditation last year was one of the most profound and freeing experiences of my life,” says Bryan. “I only had awareness of peace.”
Others speak of ketamine use precluding suicidal ideations, spawning life changing realizations and facilitating mind-body connection.
For Sophie, ketamine has helped her “to zone in on what my soul purpose is” and spawned a long-overdue, radical career change. “It quietens the noise in the mind.”
Away from the dancehalls and art studios, there are reports of relief from depression, suicidality, PTSD and anxiety. (The author had a transformative, intentional experience with ketamine which helped him process the memories of a number of traumatic events). Many others, from model Amber Rose to average Canadians, tell of how ketamine saved their lives – wrenching them away from suicidality. “That’s the only thing that saved my life,” Rose said recently.
The Hidden Dangers of Ketamine Misuse
But the story of ketamine in 2024 isn’t all healing and happily ever afters for everyone who uses it. The scale of the harm from misuse has become so serious that hundreds on both sides of the Atlantic are undergoing therapy for addiction as ketamine support groups emerge for those who cannot afford rehab.
At a recent meeting in Oakland, California, attendees shared stories about the consequences of daily ketamine use: gastrointestinal pain, neuropathy, tingling in limbs and extremities, and leaky bladders. Tolerance to ketamine develops swiftly. In a short-sighted attempt to get around that, some people are “boofing” – rectally ingesting – several grams a day to get the hit that has become elusive nasally for them.
“Very little is known about how to recognize ketamine addiction,” says Brad Burge, founder of Integration Communications, a public relations agency serving the psychedelic industry, who was present at the well-attended meeting. He went because a friend of his recently died by suicide after more than two years struggling with pain likely caused by ketamine addiction.
Others are still living with the damage from misuse previously in their lives. Ryan was sniffing several grams a day at the height of his addiction.
“Robotripping and dissociation; it’s the ultimate escape. It was only when I moved back to my family home that I was saved.” Ketamine, at mid-to-high doses, he adds, brings about a more lucid and less warm experience than psilocybin or LSD. “It’s like getting lost in an emotional but placid sea of neuronal misfire.”
Ryan has lasting damage to his bladder as a result of ketamine overuse. So does Adam. “I did it every day for a few months years ago,” he says. “To this day I have ‘ket bladder’. I’ll go for a wee four times for every wee my mates have.”
The mental and spiritual strain of ketamine can range from hallucination persisting perception disorder, to being thrust unwillingly into “k-holes,” a dissociative ego-death realm.
“I felt like I was going to die,” Marie recalls. “I had seizure-like symptoms for about half an hour.” She and others did not know that many take ketamine purposefully to enter the k-hole for pleasure and enlightenment.
Growing Scrutiny On Take-Home Ketamine
Even lesser-known, in the enduring world of “just say no” public drug messaging, is the addictive potential of ketamine, “especially at-home ketamine use,” adds Burge.
The concerns over at-home ketamine use – for which a telehealth industry has sprung up to cater for, with slow release ketamine lozenges and prerecorded trip mixes – were blown wide open in late February when the former CEO of an at-home ketamine provider withdrew his support for at-home ketamine therapy after a female patient had a reported massive overdose and went into hypoxemic respiratory failure. It came after the death of Friends actor Matthew Perry, from “the acute effects of ketamine,” a few months earlier.
“After being at the forefront of at-home ketamine treatment, recent findings, like the case study of unintentional overdose via telehealth have led me to reevaluate,” Juan Pablo Cappello, the former CEO of Nue Life Health, tweeted. “I can no longer endorse ketamine’s prescription without stricter controls. Safety must come first.”
The Ethical Divide: Confronting Challenges in Therapeutic Practice
Some advocates of drug policy reform argue that reducing controls to accessing drugs like ketamine is the whole point – and that greater education and support from the companies purveying the lozenges should come before any knee-jerk legislative responses.
But with recreational and therapeutic use rising swiftly – bolstered by ads on social media and digital platforms from which at-home lozenges can easily be accessed – it seems like the emerging issues may only worsen, even if far more people experience ketamine’s benefits.
“There’s all sorts of ethical companies and practitioners who are doing the good work every day on the front lines, and we have to recognize that,” Cappello told Psychedelics Today in March. “We also have to be honest that it’s harder and harder for those ethical practitioners to make a living because of what unethical practitioners are doing every day in the trenches, which is slinging ketamine.”
In a letter advocating for standards that prioritize patient safety over profits – profits that seem to be fuelling the trajectory of the ketamine craze (both in the clinics and in the clubs) – Cappello proposed that those at the helm of industry have the power to safeguard the therapeutic potential of ketamine therapy for those in need.
“Do I think that it’s probably a good trade to take ketamine six times a year as opposed to taking an antidepressant every day? Yeah, that’s probably a good trade. But there’s a better trade, which is: let’s address the root cause of your depression, anxiety, or trauma once and for all.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Philip Wolf: writer, member of Rolling Stone’s Culture Council, founder of Cultivating Spirits (the first company in the U.S. to offer legal culinary cannabis experiences), and founder of CashoM, an education company offering a certificate in cannabis stewardship.
He discusses his recent Rolling Stone article about the need to divorce ourselves from the colonial mindset that pervades the psychedelic movement, and he talks about the difficult conversation that came about when he asked a very critical group of psychedelic leaders how they felt about the article, and how it taught him just how powerful having these difficult conversations can be.
He also discusses:
The importance of asking questions and not making assumptions
Why we may need to abandon the “no justice, no peace” attitude if we ever want to move forward
The idea that instead of endlessly battling the establishment, maybe it makes more sense to change our consumer mindset and allow capitalism to do its thing
The importance of reaching out to local Indigenous tribes and allocating resources to go to them, not make them come to you
The challenge of merging spirituality and science, especially for a regulatory model focused on profit
In this episode, Joe interviews Devon Phillips: Community & Partnerships officer for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).
Phillips works on strategies to tackle the questions: How do we responsibly mainstream psychedelics? And how do we get culture engaged? He’s focusing on being the bridge to psychedelics outside of research, facilitating workshops and psychedelic coming-out stories at music festivals and conferences. He talks about harm reduction and drug checking at festivals, the concept of training big names to become trustworthy resources, the differences found in a hop hop crowd compared to EDM, and the power in using psychedelics for pleasure and celebration – not just healing and growth.
He also discusses:
MAPS’ involvement with the NFL for their ‘My Cause, My Cleats’ campaign, and how the San Francisco 49ers’ Jon Feliciano is bringing awareness to psychedelic healing
Details about MAPS’ first responders training, fiscal sponsorship program, international therapist education program, and upcoming membership program (launching in June)
The success of MAPS’ Psychedelic Science and his hopes for the 2025 edition, taking place June 16 – 20 at the Denver Convention Center
Dr. Carl Hart, drug exceptionalism, and the importance of creating safe containers and inclusive drug policy
In this episode, Alexa interviews April Pride: creative entrepreneur, veteran of the cannabis space, and now, founder of SetSet, an educational platform and podcast (picking up where The High Guide left off) for women curious about psychedelics.
With Alexa about to embark on the journey of motherhood, she asks many of the questions parents working with psychedelics have to consider: How do you overcome the stigmas of being a psychedelic parent? How do you talk to your children about drugs? How do you know if a substance is ok to use during pregnancy?
Pride discusses:
Being dubbed “the weed mom” and why she embraced the nickname
Parenting children around drug use and how parents lose credibility when they lie (the kids are going to know)
The need for more research into how substances interact with women’s cycles and changing hormones
Knowing when to trust your doctor and how more conversations lead to more knowledgeable doctors
Microdosing psilocybin and the developing SetSet protocol
In this episode, Joe interviews Maria Mangini, Ph.D., FNP: researcher, educator, and midwife who has worked closely with many psychedelic innovators and was part of the original social network at Shulgin Farm – where this episode was recorded. She traces her journey from the influence of pioneers like the Wassons, Shulgins, and Grofs, and historic places like Esalen and Millbrook.
She discusses:
Her early experiences with the Grofs at Esalen and how she met the Shulgins
Gregory Bateson guiding her to become a midwife
The similarities between midwifery and psychedelic facilitation
The unsung work of Denis Berry in saving the Timothy Leary archives
How the working relationship of the Shulgins is a perfect example of the coequality society should strive for
and more!
Notable Quotes
“There is a specific skill set that midwives, for the most part, actually have to possess because it’s the matter of what they do, that is identical or very, very similar to the skills that are needed for somebody who wants to be the ground control for somebody in an unusual state of consciousness [or] for somebody who wants to sit at the bedside of someone who’s actively dying. Those skills are the most difficult part of what we try to teach in those programs. You can’t really transmit that stuff very well in the classroom, but the midwives bring it. They already come with it.”
“Medicine really, at least the way it’s practiced in this country, is mostly about curing, whereas nursing is about caring. And there’s a bigger deficit for caring than there is for curing. We need nurses.”
“I think that the personal elements of the quality of the relationship that people who work side by side in that kind of co-equality can attain is inspiring for people, and it holds out a kind of hope for the ability to move in that direction. I think it’s very important and useful for us to think of the Shulgins as a couple.”
In this episode, released on Ann Shulgin’s birthday, Joe interviews Wendy Tucker: daughter of Ann and stepdaughter to Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin.
Recorded in Sasha’s old office, she recounts her formative years, giving an insider’s look into her Mother’s openness about psychedelics, working with Sasha in the lab, how the Shulgins made a perfect team, and watching a close-knit circle of self-experimenters start to form at Shulgin Farm – and keep coming back over the years.
She talks about the energy infused into the property from the decades of research and gatherings, and how she is trying to preserve it – not just to capture its history and the pioneering research that happened there, but as a beacon for future generations. She imagines weddings, conferences, other communal gatherings, and more. Imagine taking a chemistry course in Sasha Shulgin’s lab?
To learn more about the project and to donate, head to Shulginfarm.org.
Notable Quotes
“When I met Sasha, at first, he seemed a little– I didn’t get his sense of humor. He had such a dry sense of humor, I was like, ‘Who is this guy?’ And I felt a little protective of my Mom, honestly, at first. But soon, I really started to see who he was shining through. He was so good for her.”
“He’d say, ‘You never learn anything by things going right. You only learn when things go wrong.’ And so, that really stuck with me. What a great way to live life.”
“He always left room for the mysterious, the unknown. It’s an interesting blend to be a scientist and yet have this deep knowledge that there’s something else going on. And we can’t really name it, but we feel it. We know it’s there. And that was Mom’s territory. It was really the spiritual, the psychological. That’s why they made such a great team.”
The microdosing movement is flourishing, fueled by global citizen scientists reporting transformative wellness benefits. Yet, the practice is still an experiment. Most people have no idea what a microdosing protocol entails, what the experience feels like, or how long a microdose lasts. They are simply curious to know if low-dose psychedelics could be a game-changer for their mental and physical health.
This article provides a beginner’s guide to microdosing psilocybin and LSD, exploring research, protocols, and effects, and answering the question: How long does a microdose last?
What is Microdosing?
Microdosing is the art of ingesting low, sub-threshold doses of psychedelics, typically LSD or psilocybin, for mental and physical optimization. Most people turn to the practice to paint their lives with broader strokes of creativity and focus. Others seek to soften the grip of depression, alcohol dependence, and chronic pain.
Words like sub-perceptual, sub-sensorium, and sub-hallucinogenic also describe the microdosing experience. At about one-tenth of the recreational psychedelic dose, microdosing does not significantly alter consciousness. Rather, it delivers subtle or unnoticeable effects. Microdosers who do notice changes report feeling more energized, uplifted, focused, and in tune throughout the day. Others note slight perceptual changes, like sensitivity to light.
Mushroom and LSD microdoses usually kick in within a couple of hours of ingestion and linger throughout the day. One tiny dose can produce ‘afterglow’ effects lasting at least 48 hours. A regular microdosing practice, combined with rest periods, can elicit even longer-term benefits lasting weeks, months, or years.
LSD is far more potent than psilocybin mushrooms, so microdosing amounts differ significantly.
LSD microdoses typically fall between10 and 30 mcg
Psilocybin microdoses often range from 80 to 250 mg of dried mushrooms
Microdosing may seem like a brand new phenomenon, but the modern microdosing era began shortly after 1943 when Swiss chemist and Sandoz Laboratories employee Albert Hofmann accidentally discovered LSD’s psychedelic effects.
A few years later, the first human LSD trial defined microdosing and answered the question, how long does a microdose last? Swiss psychiatrist Werner A. Stoll, MD, in collaboration with Hofmann and Sandoz, tested LSD doses ranging from 20 mcg to 130 mcg.
The team determined that 25 mcg could elicit mild psychoactive symptoms without any overwhelm.
Sandoz subsequently synthesized 25 mcg LSD tablets, determining the onset of effects occurred between 30 and 90 minutes, with a duration of 5 to 12 hours.
A few LSD trials occurred in the years following, but political and societal pressures curtailed psychedelic research until the next century.
Finally, the 2010s witnessed a microdosing resurgence, largely due to Dr. James Fadiman and renowned mycologist, Paul Stamets. Their efforts, anecdotal reports, and growing media attention fueled a global movement and reignited scientific interest.
Dr. Fadiman’s website, Microdosingpsychedelics.com, quickly became the the first massive citizen scientists’ database, compiling transformational accounts from microdosers worldwide.
Microdosing Research
In 2019, the Quantified Citizen app engaged more than 12,000 participants in the world’s most extensive mobile microdosing study. The initiative revealed that “adults who microdose psychedelics report health-related motivations and lower levels of anxiety and depression compared to non‑microdosers.”
In April 2021, one of the first randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled microdosing studies found that LSD could increase overall pain tolerance by 20% at 20 mcg doses. It also showed how long a microdose might last, determining that 20 mcg was equally impactful at 1.5 and 5 hours after dosing. The finding suggests small LSD doses provide lasting pain relief beyond the peak onset.
However, this study did not address mental health outcomes.
Double-blind, placebo-controlled studies confirming that microdosing improves anxiety and depression are scarce. The few that exist suggest benefits might arise from the placebo effect, where the person feels better because they believe they’ve taken something that should help – even if it doesn’t have active pharmaceutical properties.
However, microdosing advocates argue that double-blind studies are inherently flawed, partly because they occur in sterile medical environments that do not accurately reflect the real world. Imperfect clinical data cannot diminish people’s concrete experiences.
Microdosing Experience and Duration
Microdosers report a wide range of experiences based on their psychedelic tolerance, the substance they consume, the dosage, and their unique mental state. Emotional and cognitive shifts typically arise in 60 minutes, with noticeable impacts lasting up to 10 hours. Some people report an afterglow effect up to 48 hours after microdosing.
How long does an LSD microdose last?
One pharmacology study found that 20 to 60 mcg of LSD administered intraspinally delivers effects in less than an hour, peaking within the hour and lasting nine to ten hours. However, these results could be skewed because most people do not take LSD intraspinally. Oral and sublingual ingestion are the most common routes.
Fortunately, citizen science reports from sources like Erowid shed more light on the question of how long an LSD microdose lasts.
One Erowid contributor, Tetrisdroid, reported taking approximately 30 mcg of LSD daily for a week for his depression and anxiety.
On day one, Tetrisdroid noticed “barely perceptible” effects about an hour after consuming the dose. He felt slightly lightheaded and noticed the office lights seemed brighter than usual. About six hours later, the light sensitivity subsided.
On day two of microdosing, Tetrisdroid headed into the office for a weekly staff meeting. Such meetings normally stir up anxiety, but he reported feeling much more relaxed. He had trouble organizing thoughts but felt at ease nonetheless. Again, he reported seeing the lights much brighter than usual throughout the day.
Day three left Tetrisdroid noticeably less stressed for the entire workday, suggesting that the LSD microdose lasted at least six hours.
By the end of the week, Tetrisdroid acknowledged that microdosing LSD might have provided a placebo effect. But either way, he felt better and learned he could go a week without turning to other drugs as a way of self-medicating.
How long does a psilocybin microdose last?
Research suggests psilocybin microdoses should be noticeable within 1.5 hours of ingestion. Studies do not indicate how long the effects persist. However, personal stories reveal a psilocybin microdose can last at least seven hours.
Erowid contributor “Katalyst” experimented with microdosing psilocybin mushrooms for seasonal depression. She started with doses ranging from .2g every four days.
At .2g doses, Katalyst experienced mild euphoria, sweaty palms, and increased introspection throughout the first two hours. Lower doses of .1g, resulted in a more neutral mood without noticeable side effects.
Microdosing effects, including increased focus and mild euphoria, typically lasted up to seven hours after consumption.
After experimenting with different amounts and schedules, Katalyst found that .15g of psilocybin every two weeks was most effective in alleviating her seasonal depression. She found that .2g was too high, inducing uncomfortable hypomania.
Ultimately, Katalyst decided to continue microdosing on the bi-weekly schedule in future winters.
How Long Do Microdosing Benefits Last?
Clinical data cannot confirm microdosing benefits or their duration. However, participants of a self-blinding microdosing trial indicated that the benefits lasted up to five weeks.
During this timeframe, the microdosers experienced significant improvements in psychological measures such as well-being, mindfulness, life satisfaction, and paranoia compared to baseline. The changes might have occurred due to the placebo effect, but the outcomes were positive nevertheless.
Countless microdosers, including the Silicon Valley elite, have been utilizing intermittent low-dose protocols for years. So, microdosing benefits seem to extend much further than five weeks.
How Often Should You Microdose?
Microdosing protocols are as unique as the people who take them. Frequency and dosages will shift depending on the person and their goals. The only consistent answer to “How often should you microdose?” is not every day.
Daily psychedelic ingestion will cause the body to develop a rapid tolerance. As tolerance rises, microdosers will experience diminishing returns, requiring higher quantities to achieve the same effects.
Most microdosing protocols suggest intermittent consumption throughout the week, along with rest periods, to avoid these issues.
The Fadiman Protocol
The Fadiman Protocol, or the Beginner’s Protocol, follows a three-day cycle established by Dr. James Fadiman. It distinguishes between microdosing and non-microdosing days so people can take advantage of the two-day afterglow.
Day 1: Take the microdose.
Day 2: No microdose, allowing the body to integrate the effects.
Day 3: No microdose, continuing the break.
Repeat the cycle for four to eight weeks with a two to four-week break.
The Stamets Protocol
The Stamets Protocol, proposed by Paul Stamets, involves more frequent dosing options. These schedules aim to maintain consistent benefits while minimizing tolerance buildup.
One option includes a five-day on, two-day off regimen.
Another option suggests four days on and three days off.
Repeat the cycle for four weeks with a two to four-week rest.
The Microdosing Institute Protocol
The Microdosing Institute protocol suggests microdosing every other day for eight weeks. This method aims to enhance the effectiveness of microdosing for medical or psychological purposes such as depression, social anxiety, ADHD/ADD, migraine, or cluster headaches.
Day 1: Microdose.
Day 2: Transition day, no microdose.
Day 3: Microdose again.
Repeat the cycle for four to eight weeks, followed by a two to four-week rest period.
The Bottom Line
Microdosing offers a nuanced approach to whole-body health through the strategic consumption of low-dose psychedelics. The experience is incredibly mild, allowing people to function like normal. But, the effects are still noticeable, easing anxiety, improving emotional functioning, and minimizing pain for several hours. People who feel called to the practice should continue exploring the research and learning from citizen scientists across the globe.
Learn more about the most microdosing protocols and create your own personalized dosage plan with our Microdosing Masterclass.
She talks about her early abduction experiences, the time when she and her father realized they were both being abducted at the same time (from different locations), and the horrifying experience of six beings entering her apartment and realizing she knew one of them. These experiences led her to Budd Hopkins, and eventually John Mack (who did regression work with her) and the John E. Mack Institute, where she became a peer mentor for abductees. She talks about the validity of alien abductions, the concept of spiritual ecology, and the importance of listening to people: There’s so much we don’t know, so is it fair to label experiencers as schizophrenic just because we can’t replicate the experience?
She discusses:
The commonality of people from the same family being abducted and why some people are lifetime abductees while others are only taken once
The differences in abductions and how some seem to only be mental while others are physical and extremely painful
The story of Linda Napolitano and the famous Brooklyn Bridge abduction
Regressive hypnotherapy work: Are the memories you’re recovering accurate?
Quantum biology, the Penrose-Hameroff quantum theory of consciousness, parallel realities, time travel, and quantum jumping
and so much more! As the X-Files made famous: The truth is out there. And this episode is definitely pretty out there!
Notable Quotes
“I’m so sad about how our religions say that there’s only one being that can help you, because there are lots of beings that will help you. I’m not mad with the one being that our Western worldview says– I’m not mad with him at all, but, you know, there are lots of beings. You just have to not be afraid.”
“When you go through alien abduction stuff, especially when you first do it, the stuff that you remember is nothing that you could come up with from a movie or from your life or from what you know about life, and the physical stuff that happens is so painful that it’s nothing that you would want to come up with. It’s not like ‘I wanted to have this glorious experience.’ …How in the world could a movie make you come up with that stuff when there are no movies about it because there are no words for it and there’s no ontology for it? And it’s so incredibly painful, why would you do that?”
“We don’t understand our own minds, we don’t understand consciousness, [and] we have a religiosity around understanding what ego is. I grew up thinking that ego is this terrible thing, and now I’m like, no, it’s here to keep you in your body. …It’s all about being safe in your body. And when you work with your consciousness, it’s kind of not a thing because it doesn’t matter where your body is or if you even have one. At all these different levels of consciousness, you’re going to find bodies all over the place, and eventually, this one is just really a temporary meat sack. So, you know: Get over it, ego.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Alyssa Gursky, LPC: artist, research associate and study therapist at the Social Neuroscience and Psychotherapy (SNaP) lab, and founder of Psychedelic Art Therapy LLC, which pioneers ketamine-assisted art therapy.
She talks about her first mushroom experience and how her art and creative process instantly felt different – how the judgment and concern about where the art was going disappeared and was replaced by a freedom; a return to a more childlike way of being, where all that mattered was the fun of the creative process, and expressing her inner world in art. They realized how much the creative process related to true embodiment and the ability to be fully present, and how healing it can be to simply be with other people and create art.
She talks about:
The power of being seen in a group, and how the bravery of one person can completely shift the group dynamic
The need for mentorship in the psychedelic space
The comfort and freedom found in affinity groups
The inspiring lives of Genesis P-Orridge and avant-garde filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky
Rick Rubin’s ability to treat creativity as a spiritual act
and how attending a live wrestling event aligns with non-ordinary states.
Gursky is launching a virtual education and support group this March for anyone who wants to integrate art into client work or their own process. Visit her instagram for details.
Notable Quotes
“I used pastels pretty much the entirety of that whole first experience, and I was just so stunned at how much more freedom [I felt]. Like, there were concepts that I was learning, that your creative process is a reflection of your mind. And I felt like there was an observer really present, to where I remember drawing and there wasn’t this judgment of: ‘Well, what is this going to become?’ and ‘What am I doing with this?’ and ‘Should I have used that color?’ – this deep, neurotic, judgemental inner voice. But instead, it was just sensation.”
“When we’re not taking the time to process through what is in our bodies, we start to lose the ability to be present.”
“Psychedelics really help with this: helping people break through the veil of: just trust your impulses – that that artistic sublimation, the process of taking whatever is happening inside and allowing art to be a vehicle to have it on the outside: that is nervous system regulation. That is psychic healing, just to be like, ‘I kind of want to do that,’ and just trusting that. It seems like such a small act, but it’s such a big deal.”
“Art is helping us create the map of our psyche, and psychedelics are giving us wider access to that landscape. It feels like a match made in Heaven for me.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Matthew ‘Whiz’ Buckley: former decorated US Navy F/A-18 Hornet fighter pilot and now, founder and CEO of No Fallen Heroes Foundation, a non-profit focused on healing veterans and first responders with psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Buckley met Joe in D.C. while they were both campaigning for psychedelic therapy to any lawmaker they could speak with. He talks about how the government is spending a fortune on the military, but not paying the total cost, since so much of that is externalized onto the soldiers themselves. He points out how many of them care more about making money than saving lives, and how we need “We the people” moments to wake them up or remove them from office.
He discusses:
His time in the Navy and his transition back to civilian life, coming to terms with trauma and realizing how much was physical (including tinnitus)
His life-changing experiences under ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT with the Mission Within
How we should be teaching veterans about various mental health options (including psychedelic-assisted therapy) as part of their transition process
The signing of the National Defense Authorization Act and the disappointing amount of money reserved for psychedelic research: Was it all just lip service?
The complications that arise when trying to get benefits from the VA while also trying to move on: When honesty about mental health isn’t incentivized, when do you tell the truth?
His experience operating legally in Colorado and how he plans to stay on top of Governor Desantis to bring psychedelics to Florida
and more!
Notable Quotes
“The military does an incredibly good job of turning us into human beings that are capable of doing some pretty horrific things to another fellow human being. And then when they’re done with us, they do a pretty shitty job of transitioning us back to being a human. They pay lip service to it, but there’s no return in it: ‘Hey man, you’re getting out. You’re not our problem anymore. We’ve got to focus on the next generation of killers.’”
“If we can get our first responders healed along with our military, I think this world would be a better place. …These medicines have the potential to turn warriors into peacemakers. And maybe that’s also why they’re illegal; they need little uniform killing machines that don’t do critical thinking.”
“Veterans: it’s interesting because it’s a tough community. We don’t listen to advertising or bullshit or anything; it needs to come from another vet for anything to have credibility. So you know, a Marcus Luttrell or a me or a JT looking a bro or a sister in the eye and going: ‘Hey man, this is what happened to me.’ Even in the back of their mind, if they’re like, ‘What the? That’s insane,’ there’s still a lot more of: ‘I trust this person. They would not steer me wrong.’”
In this episode, Joe interviews Ayize Jama-Everett: author, educator, filmmaker, and therapist with a long history of work in substance use and mental health services.
When Jama-Everett was last on the show, “A Table of Our Own” – a film focusing on healing, psychedelics, and bonds within the Black community – was still in its infancy. It’s now complete, and he and others behind the film are touring with it, with showings coming up in Detroit, LA, and Boston. A free follow-up discussion hosted by CIIS’ Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research is happening Feb. 15, and, from February 15-16 only, the film is available to rent online.
He gives his full origin story: growing up around substance use, how he got into therapy and healing people through journeys, how “A Table of Our Own” came about, and how it was influenced by mushrooms. Then he discusses a lot more, with a much-needed critical eye:
His experiences with some notorious bad actors in the facilitation space
Decriminalization and how we celebrate small wins while ignoring steps back
Drug exceptionalism, the Drug War, and the demonization of crack
Power dynamics and the dangerous concept of letting go
Why the Black community is so skeptical of psychedelics
And he talks about why it’s so important to meet people where they are – that what works for one person or one community won’t necessarily work for another, and the above-ground, corporatized, overly medicalized model will never work for everyone.
Notable Quotes
“I’m about to crawl back underground after this, I think. …This above ground shit is, by and large, for the birds. …There’s so many people now doing psychedelics and stuff, right? I would assume, given the promises, that there’d be more ethical people out there. There’d be more people with less ego. There’d be more women in charge, there’d be more queer people in charge, there’d be more people of color in charge. But it just seems like the same white corporate dudes. It’s like they’re talking about an app. …I want to just be of service to the people that need it and not deal with the rest of this bullshit.”
“The whole decrim thing in general: I feel like when decrim isn’t married with all substance use, then I don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.”
“When we talk about access, we’re talking about insurance. Dude, I barely have insurance. Insurance reimbursement? You want a revolution and you start with insurance reimbursement? What? How does that make any [sense]? Was Martin Luther King marching across that bridge in Selma, being like, ‘We are going to have insurance reimbursement for [everyone]?’ No. That is not where you meet people. That is the last fucking thing. That is the blip at the end. People are dying. People are killing themselves. …People who are seriously struggling don’t give a fuck about insurance.”
“You’re sitting here, taking all of this stuff and you’re putting it in the context of pathology: Something has to be wrong in order for you to take this, so that it can be corrected. Actually, maybe things are alright, and this is the way of joining.”
He tells his story of growing up in a house where academics like John Mack and Carl Sagan regularly smoked cannabis, and being inspired by the groundbreaking books of his father, Lester Grinspoon. An outspoken advocate for drug policy reform and embracing different, non-AA paths to recovery, he talks about how he got there: his opiate addiction, fall from medicine, subsequent return, and learning just how deep the stigma against drugs goes, and how much the medical establishment is another arm of the Drug War. Seeing Through the Smoke aims to tell the truth about cannabis, especially on benefits and real and debunked harms. How can we get more physicians and lawmakers on our side if all they know is propaganda?
He discusses:
-The challenge in speaking honestly with physicians about drug use
-Why physicians are in support of researching psychedelics but not cannabis
-Stigmatized language and Drug War vibes in medical software
-The truth about cannabis, schizophrenia, and the risk of drug-induced psychosis
-Portugal and the ‘Rat Park’ model
-The importance of listening to what patients are saying – especially when we don’t have enough good data
and more!
Notable Quotes
“My dad got John Mack and Carl Sagan together so that Carl can convince John that UFOs aren’t actually real. And apparently, it got very heated, and John Mack yelled at Carl Sagan: ‘You’re being too cartesian!’ So I had a very weird childhood. I mean, all these people were smoking pot frequently in my house when I was growing up, and I grew to associate cannabis with intellectual discussion and very motivated people. I had a very different experience with it than I think it’s fair to say most people did.”
“Back then, the psychiatrists were all completely against psychedelics and people were not at all in favor of medical cannabis. I did my senior presentation as a resident on medical cannabis in the year 2000 (23 years ago), and everybody thought I was so eccentric. And they thought that this was the latest fad, like beta carotene or Omega-3 whatever. And now it’s fun because the same doctors who thought I was eccentric are referring patients to me.”
“94% of Americans support legal access to medical cannabis at this point. …Who’s against medical marijuana? I mean, come on, someone’s dying of cancer; give them some medical marijuana. And again, the AMA still puts it in derogatory quotation marks. So does the American Psychiatric Association. They put ‘medical marijuana’ in these derogatory quotation marks, like, ‘This is just something that only an ignorant patient would believe.’ …I wish they’d just have a little bit more humility and a little bit of interest in rethinking their positions.”
It was a cold, late afternoon in early January of 2022. I left my apartment as I had done countless times before. My destination was a church’s analytical lab, where I was involved in an ongoing psilocybin experiment.
Upon arriving at the warehouse, I parked my car in the familiar spot and headed into the lab. However, on this particular day, a strange feeling of impending doom crept up my spine as I approached the large roll-up door. Dismissing my intuition as an inconvenient interruption, I continued into the lab to work alone.
Inside, the deafening roar of the chemical-resistant fan that powered the fume hoods made it difficult to hear anything. But amid the noise, a destructive crash from somewhere in the building caught my attention. The sight of charred and mangled cars outside the warehouse did little to ease my growing concerns.
As darkness descended on the warehouse, I ventured toward the commotion. Frantic flashlight beams pierced through gaps in the large wooden roll-up doors leading to the loading bay. Through a small hole in the paneling, I witnessed a scene that sent shivers down my spine: heavily armed officers in bulletproof vests, armored helmets, and automatic weapons.
Disbelief washed over me as the officers repeatedly commanded me to open the doors. Still in shock and peering through the small hole in the paneling, I asked to see a search warrant. The response was swift and brutal, with the barrage of a battering ram shaking me from my stupor. As I was knocked to the floor along with shards of the door, the reality of the situation began to sink in.
I allowed the police inside, and the warehouse doors gradually rose to reveal a team of heavily armed officers in the loading bay. I was searched, cuffed, and placed face down on the hood of a police cruiser, surrounded by a fleet of police vehicles in the cold winter night.
Down the Rabbit Hole: How it All Began
As the cold settled into my chest, I reflected on everything that had led to this moment.
From an early age, I witnessed the tragic effects of addiction, compulsion, and mental affliction in my loved ones. This led me down a path of fascination with medicinal chemistry, introspective psychonautics, and the healing journey. I spent years immersed in laboratories, pushing the boundaries of my own limitations. But beneath my ambitions lay unprocessed trauma, and I was ultimately neglecting my own needs.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, I found connection with a community rooted in Kabbalistic Judaism. This diverse group (editor’s note: name withheld) embraced holistic practices, including holotropic breathwork, yoga, artistic expression, nature retreats, and guided ceremonies with psychedelic mushrooms as its sacrament. This religious nonprofit prioritized safety, with a doctor available at all times and thorough participant screening.
Recognizing the inherent variability in mushroom potency, the group sought to standardize their psilocybin sacrament. They launched an extensive cultivation and breeding project, and in the spring of 2021, I moved to Denver to support their efforts.
Over months, we transformed an empty warehouse into a 2,000-square-foot laboratory equipped with advanced analytical instruments. With chest freezers filled with freshly frozen, vacuum-packed psychedelic mushrooms, our goal was to extract, purify, and analyze the sacrament to determine its potency and enable consistent dosages.
Contributing to the safety of the congregation while delving into a subject close to my heart felt like a dream come true. My journey, marked by my biological father’s overdose, the study of Alexander Shulgin’s work, 18 months of immunosuppressive chemotherapy, and my near-participation in a MAPS clinical trial, had brought me full circle. I was now actively involved in a movement of compassion, community, and cooperation—a movement that offered solace and respite from the cruelties of modern life.
The Legal Conundrum
Despite my willingness to support the church’s mission, I hadn’t blindly walked into it. My legal counsel and the synagogue’s had cited multiple case precedents and interpretations of the law supporting the church’s actions as a legal and legitimate form of religious expression.
However, this thin veil of safety was torn apart as officers tore through the church’s facility, uncovering chest freezers filled with large frozen mushrooms. I couldn’t believe what I was witnessing: my arrest for sacramental mushrooms that didn’t belong to me, at a publicly registered and openly advertised religious nonprofit, in an era where psilocybin mushrooms were gaining recognition for their potential medical benefits and safety compared to alcohol or cannabis.
Despite my disbelief, the fact remained: I was bent over the hood of a police cruiser in a lab coat, surrounded by bags of mushrooms in the dead of night.
In an act of desperation, I chose to cooperate with the police, explaining the mission of the church, the foundational practices of Kabbalistic Judaism, and the purpose of the church facility they had raided.
It took two hours to fully explain my circumstances on record, and I could sense that the investigating officers were shocked by my story. Even for seasoned narcotics detectives, arresting a professional chemist with kilograms of wet psychedelic mushrooms at an advanced laboratory operated by a nonprofit Jewish synagogue was far from ordinary.
After the interview, I was told that the officers would investigate my claims by verifying the existence of the church and its community of over 300 congregants. For now, I was placed on investigative hold and sent to the city jail. As I was transported, the officer driving the cruiser expressed interest in my religious beliefs and confessed a desire to try psychedelics. I couldn’t resist informing the officer that the synagogue welcomed all without prejudice, should they ever choose to attend a ceremony.
The Reality of Incarceration
Upon arrival at Denver City Jail, I was processed, screened for COVID-19, and kept in a temporary holding room until a prison cell was ready. My court hearing was scheduled for the following morning, with release expected later that day. I changed into the orange scrubs of an inmate under the watchful gaze of a corrections officer who snickered at my visible discomfort.
Not long after I climbed into the top bunk above a fellow inmate, a nurse arrived to administer Suboxone to the man below me. Unfortunately, the inmate hit his head on the metal bed frame, opening a bloody gash, which went unnoticed by the medical staff. After administering the dose, the nurse advised the inmate to stay in jail until the effects of the Suboxone had dissipated, and then promptly left him in a sleepy stupor. He was released from prison hours later, without his glasses or cellphone, potentially unaware of the overdose risk he faced if he decided to use opiates again.
Moments after the nurse’s departure, a small wad of discarded paper appeared from underneath the cell door. It was a note from an inmate in the adjacent cell who had overheard the nurse administering Suboxone. The inmate offered coffee, sugar, and other commissary treats in exchange for more Suboxone. Although I was given a mangled pen shaft to respond, I had to disappoint the inmate by explaining that the drugs weren’t mine to give in the first place, and they were already gone.
Despite what I’d been told, I was not released the following morning. Uncertain hours dragged into days as I languished in jail, unable to speak to anyone outside.
Despite the challenges of incarceration, I found an anchor in the flimsy pen shaft I’d been given my first night behind bars. Throughout sleepless nights, I covertly journaled my experiences in the margins of my intake paperwork, holding the makeshift pen and papers out of sight from the guards. I began to notice the details of my surroundings—the layers of stained paint on the cinder block walls, the rank, humid smell of suffering and shame in the air. Desperate for news, I asked for an update from a corrections officer delivering the evening meals, but received only laughter in response.
My dreams were haunted by vivid visions of a court trial, conviction, and sentencing. Yet, amid the nightmares, I experienced a spontaneous endogenous psychedelic dream state that offered a glimmer of hope and resilience.
Pretrial Observation
Finally, I was released. Over the days that followed, the fleeting relief I felt upon leaving prison quickly decayed into anxiety and agoraphobia. Loud noises, emergency vehicle sirens, and media depictions of police officers triggered episodes of post-traumatic stress. Despite years of applying various psychotherapeutic methods for my own healing, and weekly support from a therapist, I struggled to remain emotionally present and descended into a deeply dissociative depression.
As an accused felon under mandatory pretrial observation, I was unable to leave the state of Colorado without court approval and had to check in with the assigned pretrial officer after every court hearing. Any attempts to secure employment were thwarted by the glaring red flag of a level one drug felony on my background check. Career opportunities that had been secured months prior were abandoned in light of the investigation. Even driving for Lyft was no longer an option.
In this haze of rejection and persecution, I received the support of family and friends, notably my civil attorney, Robert Rush, who connected me with Sean McAllister, a well-known champion of psychedelic and social justice local to Denver. His confidence and thorough understanding of the law were critical to the ongoing court proceedings and gave solace to my shattered sense of security in the future.
Sean and I reviewed hundreds of pages of documents and photos from discovery over the next few months. Just weeks after the arrest, I was reading various reports from officers describing their firsthand experiences arresting, detaining, and interviewing me, along with my mugshot, fingerprints, and a full transcript of the phone calls I made from prison. Working through the crippling weight of anxiety and deeply triggering nature of reviewing evidence, I attempted to offer insights and interpretations that eventually became integral to our initial argument for full dismissal of the criminal charges.
Despite seemingly insurmountable support for a guilty verdict and the shame I had internalized through the trauma of these experiences, I held onto the conviction that this criminal accusation was merely a relic of vestigial legislation. The misinformation and outright lies seeded by prohibitionist narratives since the advent of the War on Drugs had blossomed into burgeoning tendrils of prejudice and ignorance that stemmed throughout the criminal justice system and ensnared countless victims in its thorny grip.
Following his involvement in the initial campaign for decriminalization, my attorney continued to fight for psychedelic access through his work with the Natural Medicine Health Act (NMHA). This new law sought to retroactively decriminalize personal possession, storage, use, processing, transport, obtainment, ingestion, cultivation, gifting, and ancillary support services for psilocybin mushrooms and other natural psychedelic medicines, and create a legal clinical system for patients to access therapies at licensed facilities, staffed by specialists trained to state specified standards.
In comparison to my legal conundrum, this new paradigm seemed like salvation. Despite my social anxiety and traumatic episodes of police-related paranoia, I attended several events in support of the NMHA and immersed myself in the local ecosystem of fellow psychedelic enthusiasts and professionals. Stark differences in opinion over decriminalization versus legalization and regulation divided the group into clear sides: those in support of the NMHA and those opposed.
With the prospect of my freedom hanging in the balance, I was deeply confused and saddened by this conflict. Completely unable to discuss the details of the ongoing investigation, I repressed impulses to share my struggle, instead opted to thoroughly review the language of the NMHA itself and network with the incredible individuals responsible for drafting and supporting it. The guidance and expertise offered by this group was invaluable during this vulnerable time. I was humbled to receive their presence in my life and gladly accepted an invitation to host an educational psychedelic mini-conference at my home. The event included numerous presentations, talks, demonstrations, and group exercises from expert members of the local community and conjured a feeling of much-needed camaraderie in light of the glaring uncertainty surrounding the approaching election.
Despite all my efforts and attempts to support the campaign, review case evidence, and secure a path through this upheaval, I ultimately had to surrender to a lack of control. I slowly allowed a fickle feeling of freedom within myself and began to engage in my own life with renewed interest.
On a serendipitous skate down the Cherry Creek Trail into Confluence Park, I ran into a representative of the NMHA collecting signatures for the law’s inclusion on the upcoming November ballot. As I happily offered my support, I reflected upon the potency of surrender and its demonstrated ability to align me with an opportunity to support progress for the future of psychedelics and my freedom.
The Road to Redemption
Notwithstanding the inspiring support offered by compassionate communities, gaining ground with the prosecution moved at a snail’s pace. Resistance to dismiss the case outright was inherent to their initial plea offer of a level three drug felony (DF3), requiring up to four years of imprisonment and fines up to $500,000. Besides litigating the case in court, the upcoming vote for the Natural Medicine Health Act appeared to be the only way towards resolution.
After submitting my ballot in support of the NMHA as early as possible, I hit the road to visit loved ones and explore the natural beauty of the country. Over the months leading up to the November 2022 elections, I surrendered to the sweeping landscapes of North America, crossing the distance between California and New York twice before the ballots were counted. No matter what the future held for me, I was determined to bring my fullest attention to the precious days I had left and enjoy the freedom and simplicity allowed by a life rich with companionship and catharsis.
By November, the NMHA passed, marking significant progress in the psychedelic movement. Still, the prosecution remained resistant to dismissal. I contemplated accepting a plea deal to avoid incarceration, but it felt like a conviction in itself.
My legal journey took an unexpected turn in mid-December 2022 when my attorney presented a compelling argument for dismissal based on the NMHA’s language. To my astonishment, all criminal charges against me were entirely dismissed.
Reflections on Freedom and Justice
The dismissal of my case highlighted a profound shift in societal values regarding psychedelics. However, I couldn’t help but think about the countless lives affected by the War on Drugs and the thin line between freedom and persecution. My own burdens included debt, missed career opportunities, and traumatic memories.
As Colorado prepared to draft guidelines for the psilocybin industry, I continued to struggle to recover seized property. While progress had been made, the burdens of prohibitionist policies continued – and continues – to threaten the lives and liberties of many Americans.
My journey from arrest to legal redemption was a rollercoaster ride through the complexities of drug laws, personal trauma, and the evolving landscape of psychedelics. While I found freedom in the dismissal of my case, the broader fight for justice and the responsible use of psychedelics is very far from over.
In this episode, Joe speaks with Paul F. Austin: Founder & CEO of Third Wave, Founder of Psychedelic Coaching Institute, and host of Third Wave’s The Psychedelic Podcast.
Recorded in-person at this year’s reMind conference, this episode – a shared release with Third Wave – is a rare glimpse into the inner workings of both Psychedelics Today and Third Wave, with Joe and Paul reconnecting after early podcast appearances and interviewing each other about where they’ve come from and where they’re going now that they’re so many years into this. Paul breaks down Third Wave’s history and new coaching training program, and Joe discusses Vital: Why he invested in Vital over an investment raise, what we’ve learned from the first two cohorts, how we’ve handled scholarships, and why sometimes losing money can be worth it if it’s for the greater good.
They talk about the challenge of keeping the lights on while trying to create something new; the balance of running a media company while building out an educational platform; the importance of staying focused and ignoring the noise; the relationship-building they’ve seen from their students; why we need to welcome the corporate types we may be inclined to dismiss; and why seeding good actors in as many roles and communities as possible is vital to the growth of psychedelics.
Notable Quotes
“What I find time and time again, is people need way less information than they think they need. They need way more courage and just a willingness to go out and make stuff happen. And so a lot of the relationships that are then formed in these cohorts that we have; people will then go out and start to collaborate and do things together out in the real world. They’ll start retreats together. And it’s fantastic.”
“The North Star of the program or the ethos or focus is: Inner transformation leads to external mastery. And what that means is: We can give you all the theory, we can teach you what we call the five key elements (assessment, prep, experience, integration, and microdosing), we can teach you different models, different frameworks; but if you don’t actually walk the path yourself, then you aren’t really being of full service to the clients you want to potentially work with.”
“There’s no prescription, right? We often want a prescription, just: ‘Tell me what to do; what’s the cookie cutter model? If I have a client, just give me– I want to do this, this, and this, and I’m good?” I’m like: No. You’ve got to learn yourself. You’ve got to know the different aspects and elements, but at the end of the day, this has to be yours – and only yours, and fully yours, because that’s the only way to really be a great practitioner or facilitator. There are no cookie cutter models when it comes to psychedelics.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Ryan Latreille: Founder of Hearthstone Collective, which sells functional mushrooms and low-dose kanna designed for microdosing; and Kanna Extract Co., which is focused on offering high-potency kanna extracts more for ceremonial and recreational use.
He talks about how he found his way to kanna; his first psychedelic experience (kanna mixed with MDMA); how he worked with a Koi tribal leader to find high-alkaloid kanna; how they created the strain they use; and why so many people are interested in kanna and more people should try it, as he believes it’s not only a natural alternative to other substances and alcohol, but also a great entry point for people looking to experiment with microdosing.
If you want to learn a lot about kanna, this is the episode for you, as it is all discussed: How dosing should be done depending on what you’re looking for; whether or not it’s fair to say kanna is ‘MDMA-lite’; Indigenous history of usage; drug interactions and safety; the journey from seed to harvest; a breakdown of different grades of kanna; how the ratio of different alkaloids creates different experiences; and what could be possible by combining different alkaloids, different strains, and by pairing with different substances.
Notable Quotes
“When you take it, it is stimulating the release of more dopamine, more norepinephrine, more serotonin. And that on its own is going to at least contribute in part to this euphoric, empathogenic feeling that people have when they take it. So I don’t know if it’s fair to say that it’s like MDMA-lite. It definitely is an empathogen, you definitely feel a heart-opening, but it is, I would say, distinctly different.”
“A lot of people are really liking this as an alternative to alcohol; something that’s healthier when you are in a social, festive environment, and you want to feel more open, more connected, more happy and free. This is, I think, a really great alternative for people than other compounds that tend to not leave you feeling so good the next day.”
“Kanna is a very special plant. I mean, there’s 28 known alkaloids at this point, each that have distinct effects on the central nervous system. And with the right chemist, you can make really, really cool extracts with it.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Mike Margolies: community catalyst; conversation creator; Founder of Psychedelic Seminars; and Co-Founder and Co-Steward of the Global Psychedelic Society.
The Global Psychedelic Society was created for all of the different psychedelic societies that have sprung up over the world to connect, share resources and information with each other, and be housed in a central hub so people can find them more easily. He talks about Frederic Laloux’s book, Reinventing Organizations, and modeling the GPS around the “Teal” concept of organization, where employees are encouraged to show up as their true, honest, and most powerful selves; where it’s more about relationships than hierarchy; and more about embracing a mycelial – and psychedelic – way of thinking and interacting with each other. He breaks down how this way of thinking has progressed from the earliest ways of organizing, and discusses its three main principles of self-governance, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose.
He then talks about the Boom Festival: its “Liminal Village,” its inventive Kosmicare harm reduction program, and how drugs are not as decriminalized as people think in Portugal; and Burning Man: how it all came together for him this year when he didn’t even want to go, his experiences with the rain and a friend’s dreams warning of floods, what he learned from the ghost of a lost friend, and how that resulted in the concept of Batman doing a striptease to Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose.” Is the Joker simply a manifestation of Batman’s shadow material and his desire to be a hero? Yea, this one gets weird…
Notable Quotes
“It’s great that we’re here and we’re advocating for psychedelics and we’re building these psychedelic organizations, but if we’re here advocating for psychedelics and psychedelic research and policy and community, how do we actually embody that in our day-to-day life, in our work life? What does it mean to be psychedelic?”
“The key here is it’s not about the power dynamics, it’s about relationships. So if you don’t take someone’s advice seriously, they’re not going to take your advice seriously. So it’s less based on someone [having] power over someone and the hierarchy; it’s more relational. And that’s what it’s based on. In this kind of organization, you’re talking about a network of relationships. …Teal is not about everyone having equal power, it is about everyone being fully powerful.”
“If our intention is we want to help people not get hurt by drugs, then let’s take action to help people reduce the risk of drugs. Clearly, law enforcement [and] adding harm is not preventing harm.”
Do women respond differently to psychedelics than men? And, if so, how are their needs different when approaching these powerful substances?
While crucial research is still limited to help us understand how and why the psychedelic experience might vary vastly among genders, the rise of female-only retreats, clinical settings, and thoughtfully designed psychedelic products and services, are helping provide women safer, more inclusive, and empowering psychedelic experiences.
The Need to Focus on the Female Experience
In an article in MIT Technology Review focusing on women and psychedelics, Juan Pablo Cappello, co-founder and CEO of the ketamine therapy platform Nue Life said, “We started our company knowing that women over 40 are prescribed antidepressants at more than three to four times the rate of men, which has led to one in every five women taking an antidepressant to get through the day.”
Gender differences in the effects of psychedelics remain a topic of mixed evidence, necessitating further investigation. Nevertheless, gender-specific challenges persist. Safety concerns, childcare responsibilities, and the stigma linked to drug use are among women’s hurdles within the psychedelic landscape.
The redesign of healthcare services should prioritize women’s needs. Women frequently experience misdiagnosis and dismissive treatment from healthcare providers, emphasizing the urgency for a more attentive and responsive approach.
One aspect that merits attention is the potential impact of hormonal fluctuations on women’s psychedelic experiences. The menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and menopause can influence the subjective effects and therapeutic outcomes of psychedelics, underscoring the need for tailored research that considers these hormonal factors. Moreover, societal expectations and gender norms place pressure on women, shaping their experiences and interpretations of psychedelic encounters. The struggle to balance femininity, career, and family life can affect a woman’s sense of self and her ability to fully engage in the transformative potential of psychedelics. With psychedelics being non-specific amplifiers, the external setting, the internal set — the mindset and psychological preparedness of the individual — plays a pivotal role. Women may face self-doubt, fear of losing control, or concern about exposure to vulnerable emotions during psychedelic experiences. Carhart-Harris et al. have emphasized the importance of context, including internal barriers that could potentially hinder the therapeutic benefits of the journey.
Underrepresentation and Male Dominance
Historically, women have been underrepresented in clinical trials across various therapeutic areas, and psychedelics are no exception. For example, the term “inclusion of women” refers to the legal mandate outlined in the National Institutes of Health Revitalization Act of 1993, which requires the involvement of women as subjects in clinical research. This mandate applies to all clinical research funded by NIH unless it is deemed “inappropriate with respect to the health of the subjects,” “inappropriate with respect to the purpose of the research,” or “inappropriate under such other circumstances as the Director of NIH may designate.”
This gender bias limits our understanding of the specific effects, safety profiles, and therapeutic outcomes of psychedelics for women. The limited diversity among research participants has considerable implications for the generalizability and dissemination of treatments. Research suggests that women may exhibit different responses to psychedelics compared to men.
For example, a recent article examined the adverse effects of drugs targeting serotonin GPCRs in the CNS and PNS. These drugs interact with serotonin GPCRs in the brain and various peripheral areas, potentially causing side effects. Estrogen, which is more prevalent in women, influences serotonin synthesis and receptor densities, and drugs targeting serotonin GPCRs disrupt this process. The periodic increase in estrogen levels and the interference with the serotonin system mediated by estrogen could explain why women experience more adverse effects. Women also have lower serotonin concentrations and faster serotonin metabolism than men, which may contribute to the observed differences.
Biological factors, such as hormonal fluctuations, make research on women more complex and, therefore, more expensive. This highlights the necessity of considering gender as a factor in understanding the impact of psychedelics on mental health and well-being. Menstrual cycles, pregnancy, and menopause can influence the subjective effects and therapeutic outcomes of psychedelics. It is also worth consideration that many women experience disruptions in their menstrual cycles. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2022, “most females ages 18-64 (90%) have used contraceptives at some point in their reproductive years, and most have used more than one contraceptive method throughout their lifetime (76%).”
Gender disparity extends beyond research and permeates psychedelic communities, retreat centers, and therapeutic settings. Women may experience subtle or overt forms of discrimination, objectification, or microaggressions, negatively impacting their sense of safety, trust, and overall well-being. Addressing these systemic issues requires a concerted effort to challenge and dismantle patriarchal structures, promote inclusivity, and amplify women’s voices within the psychedelic landscape.
The pharmaceutical industry’s growing interest in psychedelic therapy necessitates a deliberate focus on gender equality and inclusion. As psychedelics become more accepted by the mainstream, it’s essential to ensure that the creation, promotion, and delivery of psychedelic therapies take into account the specific needs of different genders. This entails promoting gender-balanced research teams, conducting gender-sensitive clinical trials, and tailoring interventions to address the diversity of the human species.
While exploring women’s experiences in the psychedelic space, it is also essential to recognize and acknowledge the intersectionality of gender. The experiences of non-binary individuals, as well as those who do not conform to traditional gender norms, deserve attention and inclusion in research and discourse. Non-binary individuals may face unique challenges in navigating psychedelic experiences as they navigate intersecting identities and societal expectations. Let’s foster an inclusive and respectful psychedelic community.
Research into Women’s Bodies
Today, there is limited psychedelic research on factors like drug metabolism, hormonal contraceptives, and womens’ unique physiological traits, hindering the development of tailored psychedelic guidelines and creating unique safety concerns for women who take psychedelics.
Variations in drug metabolism, potential interactions with hormonal contraceptives or reproductive health conditions, and other physiological factors may influence the safety and efficacy of psychedelic experiences for women. Though complex and expensive, funding research focused on women’s bodies and tailoring medicine accordingly will be a game changer.
Certain psychedelics have been associated with increased blood pressure and heart rate, potentially posing distinct implications for women compared to men due to physiological differences. The absence of adequate data raises obstacles in providing accurate information, guidelines, and risk assessments to support women in making informed decisions about psychedelic use.
Studies highlight the relationship between estrogen and serotonin 5-HT2A receptors. Classic psychedelics work by activating serotonin, and research indicates that estrogen enhances receptor density in brain areas governing mood, emotion, cognition, and behavior. This connection may offer insights into gender-based variations in conditions like schizophrenia and depression, more prevalent in women. Additionally, disruptions in estrogen during menopause could affect the 5-HT2A and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) signalling pathway, potentially predisposing the brain to depression.
The scarcity of research on women’s experiences using psychedelics to support the process of motherhood and postpartum care poses additional challenges. The limited research perpetuates the perception that psychedelics may pose additional risks to pregnant women or those breastfeeding. Without concrete evidence, caution is often prioritized, leading to a blanket discouragement of psychedelic use during these periods. While caution is essential, the absence of research leaves the potential benefits or risks associated with psychedelic use during pregnancy or breastfeeding unclear, further perpetuating uncertainty and fear.
To address these concerns, there is a need for studies that examine the physiological, psychological, and experiential aspects of psychedelic use in women. Such studies should take into consideration menstrual cycles (including those influenced by birth control), hormonal fluctuations, and reproductive health.
Societal Expectations of Femininity and Motherhood: Safety Concerns
The societal expectations tied to femininity and motherhood can significantly influence women engaging with psychedelics, similar to how men navigate their own situations and societal pressures. These norms shape our human experiences, create additional burdens, and contribute to safety concerns and stigma surrounding psychedelic use. Women may sense societal pressure to conform to traditional gender roles, limiting their willingness to explore psychedelic experiences. Fear of judgment and stigmatization, along with challenges reconciling maternal responsibilities, can constrain their ability to fully embrace the therapeutic potential of psychedelics.
Moreover, internalized notions of femininity can lead to self-doubt, fear of losing control, or concerns about expressing vulnerable emotions during psychedelic experiences. Women may grapple with the balance between societal expectations and personal growth, inhibiting their ability to surrender to the psychedelic experience.
Sexual Assault in Psychedelic Spaces
The issue of sexual assault in psychedelic spaces has garnered significant attention in recent years, with instances of misconduct and exploitation reported within the community. Such incidents harm individuals and contribute to the stigmatization and fear surrounding psychedelic compounds. These concerns further emphasize the importance of providing safe and supportive settings, prioritizing consent and boundaries, and promoting gender equality.
While psychedelics hold tremendous therapeutic potential, the occurrence of sexual assault within psychedelic spaces remains a disturbing reality. Addressing conscious consent, creating safe environments, and implementing policies to prevent and respond to assault are crucial steps in fostering a culture of safety and respect.
After movements like #MeToo, female-only spaces have become safe havens for women to explore psychedelic experiences without fearing male dominance and sexual assault. These spaces provide a supportive and empowering environment, allowing women to navigate their journeys free from the constraints of societal expectations and potential gender-based harm. Such spaces recognize the importance of reclaiming agency, voice, and autonomy for women within the psychedelic realm.
The Rise of Women-Only Retreats
Women-only retreats create a unique and transformative space for women to explore their inner worlds, cultivate deep connections with one another, and embark on journeys of self-discovery and healing. Such retreats provide a safe space where participants can fully embrace vulnerability. The absence of men often fosters an environment where women feel more comfortable sharing their deepest fears, hopes, and emotions. This sense of safety encourages authentic exploration and expression during psychedelic experiences, helping women ‘take up space’.
Women-only retreats tend to nurture a profound sense of sisterhood and community. The shared experiences, both during and between psychedelic sessions, can forge lasting bonds and connections. These connections often lead to a deep sense of belonging and support, facilitating sustained relationships beyond the retreat experience.
Women-only retreats also provide participants with the opportunity to explore and reclaim their narratives and identities. Many women join these retreats with experiences of societal and cultural expectations, traumas, and limitations. Psychedelic experiences within this supportive environment can pave the way for self-liberation, empowering women to redefine themselves and their place in the world on their own terms.
Many of these retreats often focus on the exploration and celebration of feminine energy and aspects of the self. This journey can be deeply healing, helping women reestablish a connection with their inner wisdom, intuition, and creativity. Additionally, it can foster a deeper appreciation for the unique strengths and qualities that women bring to the world.
Held frequently in natural settings, many women-only retreats incorporate rituals and ceremonies. Reconnecting with nature and participating in rituals can deepen the psychedelic experience, helping participants feel more in tune with the cycles of life and the natural world. This reconnection can be both spiritually and emotionally enriching, assisting many women in reconnecting with the cycles of their bodies.
In her role as a psychedelic facilitator, Jessika has witnessed women emerging from these retreats with a newfound sense of purpose, self-love, and empowerment. This unique quality of women-only retreats lies in their ability to provide a nurturing and transformative space where women can explore the depths of their psyche, connect profoundly with others, and emerge as stronger, more authentic versions of themselves.
Designing Just for Women
Innovating with women-centered design in mind calls for products and services to be designed for, with, and by women, based on their specific needs. It also requires clearly conveying and enforcing guidelines for respectful communication, boundaries, and consent throughout the process.
The world we live in has been shaped by designers, and it is noteworthy that the creative industry, responsible for much of this design, tends to be male-dominated.
The seatbelt serves as the most cited example of a product designed for men but commonly used by women for safety. Using crash test dummies based on average male sizes and weights has resulted in significant safety disparities for women, making them 73% more likely to be injured in a car accident. Beyond physical safety concerns, women face ongoing challenges related to everyday comfort and practicality. Consider the dilemma faced by pregnant women when deciding whether to position the seatbelt above or below their bellies. Another everyday example is the smartphone, tailored for the average male hand, and transforming into a cumbersome object in the grasp of the average woman.
Taking into account the significant impact of these design hurdles on women’s lives, it warrants a thoughtful approach to designing specifically for women in the context of mind-altering substances. Jemma Campbell, head of U.S. creative of Moving Brands, notes “It is very easy to think that design is aesthetics and aesthetics alone. Design is about much more than aesthetics – it’s about solving real-world problems and improving lives. When done right, it gives brands the ability to build connections with people much like human relationships.”
Focusing solely on aesthetics and neglecting research, strategy, and the overall product experience means you might project your own perspective, adopt codes rooted in learned behaviors and societal norms, and follow cues that may not lead to the best solutions.
“So, when it comes to creating women-only spaces for psychedelic treatment, when patients may feel vulnerable and exposed, we need to fully understand and reflect their unique needs and experiences. And that means women designers must not only be involved – they must be leading the vision,” Campbell says.
Key Considerations in Psychedelic Design for Women
Include More Female Designers, Scientists, Researchers, and Engineers
Women buy or influence 85% of all consumer purchases, control 73% of household spending, and make 69% of household health decisions. However, research consistently demonstrates that women are not satisfied with the product and service innovations offered to them. One possible reason: 85% of product designers and engineers are men. In areas like healthcare, where setting and environment are critical, designing with empathy is vital. It’s what makes having diverse design teams so important. Therefore, actively seek the involvement of more female designers, scientists, researchers, and engineers. Diverse teams bring a broader range of perspectives and insights, essential for understanding and meeting the unique needs and preferences of women consumers.
Listen and Learn
Cultivate a culture of inclusivity and diversity within design teams, fostering an environment where women from diverse backgrounds feel comfortable sharing their perspectives and experiences. Actively listen to their feedback, concerns, and ideas, and use this input to drive innovation and product development. Establish a safe and confidential space where women can share without judgment or fear of repercussions. Start small and build it organically.
Increase the representation of women in leadership positions and decision-making roles within design and engineering teams. When women have a seat at the table, they can advocate for designs and innovations that better resonate with female consumers.
User-Centered Design
Prioritize user-centered design principles, ensuring that products and experiences are designed with women in mind. Conduct thorough research to understand their needs, preferences, and pain points, involving women from diverse backgrounds and age groups. The experience doesn’t commence solely upon entering a clinic, retreat space, or product use; it begins with communication. For instance, inviting individuals to observe a retreat to ease them in or incorporating controlled microdosing to facilitate their entry could be part of designing the overall experience.
Collaboration
Collaborate with women’s organizations, advocacy groups, and female-focused communities to gain insights and build strong connections with potential users. These collaborations can lead to valuable co-creation opportunities.
In an ideal healthcare scenario, we envision truly bespoke care tailored to individual needs, irrespective of gender, becoming the norm. While acknowledging the historical challenges and potential future obstacles, we, as professionals, understand the complexities. Yet, as women, we recognize the oversight of subtle but crucial distinctions in female bodies and systems. The lingering patriarchal influence in Western research, product, and system development is a fact. We are now on the journey toward equal opportunities. Undertaking specialized research, embracing user-centered design, and holding space to heal past trauma, we hope to see a more inclusive and supportive psychedelic landscape, where everyone’s distinct needs and perspectives receive the recognition and respect they deserve.
In this episode, we toast to the beginning of an exciting and hopefully groundbreaking 2024 by switching things up a bit. Christopher Koddermann, Co-Founder and Chair of Board of the International Therapeutic Psilocybin Rescheduling Initiative (ITPRI) will be conducting some interviews for PT, and in this episode, he does his first – with our Co-Founders, Joe Moore and Kyle Buller.
Kyle tells the story of his fateful New Years Eve snowboarding trip that resulted in a near death experience and a complete change in his life’s trajectory, and Joe discusses his more academic roots and how he and Kyle were united through their shared passion for the work of Stan Grof, holotropic breathwork, and transpersonal psychology. Psychedelics Today was created largely with no aims other than to promote transpersonal psychology and archive the best insights from their mentors, but has obviously turned into so much more, mostly from the simple goal of trying to spread the word through interesting conversations.
They talk about the growth of PT; how they got involved in education; the harms of the drug war; why decriminalization isn’t enough; where they see ‘the psychedelic renaissance’ going; what has surprised them the most in the last few years; and what we’re most proud of: Vital – how it came to be created, what’s involved, the benefits of the retreats, the self-discovery they’ve witnessed, and what they’ve learned through two successful cohorts.
The next edition of Vital begins on January 23, and we’ve extended applications until January 14, so if you’ve been curious if Vital is the answer you’ve been looking for, now is the time to act!
Notable Quotes
“This voice kind of came over me and said, ‘You’re going home. You’re going back to the stars where we all come from and this physical life’s going to cease to exist, but you’ll continue onward, and this is just a transition. And the more that you struggle with this transition, the harder it’s going to be. So the more that you can relax into it, the easier the transition will be.’ And I just really kind of relaxed into it, and there was a lot of beauty and bliss and love, and I just remember going, ‘I’m going home. I’m going home. This is what we all wait for.’ And the doctors are yelling at me to stay awake.” -Kyle
“We chatted and we were just like, ‘How do we get this transpersonal topic to be more discussed?’ Because to us, a huge portion of the human experience was getting washed away by super dry science, and we thought it was really important to bring the human elements back in. Human experience does matter.” -Joe
“A lot of our students are taking pause to say, ‘Oh, I need to do a lot more inner work and a lot more self-discovery before I just jump in and start doing facilitation work.’ And I love that as a result. It’s maybe not what they expected coming in, but self-discovery just unfolds and [they say], ‘Okay, I need to really figure out what’s going on a little bit more for me and how I want to show up in this really strange space that is psychedelics.’ And I really love that. That’s probably not the best sales pitch, but it’s true. We want people to really do self-discovery, regardless of how that shows up for them.” -Joe
In this episode, Kyle interviews Kayse Gehret, the Founder of Microdosing for Healing, an international virtual community and coaching program supporting microdosing practice.
She tells the story of embracing microdosing and her grand mal seizure disorder going away, and how the inability to touch people during the pandemic led to the creation of Microdosing for Healing. She breaks down the details of the program, challenges she’s seen, and the importance of using every effective modality possible to align with each person’s individual experience. The next 6-Week Immersion Group course begins January 26.
She talks about how accessing the body is usually the best entry point to healing; how effective journaling and other personal development practices are to recognize change (especially with how subtle microdosing can be); the efficacy of group process; how physicians are beginning to see the power in community and connection; concerns over the “jump in the deep end” attitude of many people leading to destabilizing experiences; how regular check-ins are important to keep people connected to their original intention; and the idea that people are striving for an unattainable state of perfection – that our goal should be a constant state of improvement and aligning ourselves to who we are meant to be – and microdosing until we don’t need to microdose anymore.
Notable Quotes
“I grew up with a grand mal seizure disorder, so I had always, growing up, shied away from anything that would destabilize my brain more than it already was doing on its own. So doing high dose or experimenting with drugs was never appealing to me and kind of a bit scary to me. But when I was introduced to the concept of microdosing, there was something that just was like ding! And the idea that I could do something that felt more like a natural supplementation, a spiritual vitamin if you will, over time, as kind of an expansiveness [tool] and a healing modality – not anticipating at all it would have the effect that it it did end up happening for me – but that sounded more appealing than high dose work at the time. So I started microdosing and among other things, my seizure disorder disappeared completely, immediately upon practicing.”
“Somatics and body work is fundamental, I think, to our healing, especially where we are in society right now. I think accessing the body is, for many people, the best first access point to their own healing.”
“I really feel like the majority of the public, especially now that it’s mainstream, most people (and again, this is just my opinion) are not resourced and resilient and in a place where going straight to a high dose experience is going to best serve them. And what we have witnessed loud and clear over the last three years is when people take the time to lay the foundation and really apprentice themselves to their practice – incorporate breathwork, body work, other healing modalities first – and they lay a foundation of trust with themselves and the medicine; then they move into higher dose work with a guide and facilitator, it is a completely different experience.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Mike Finoia: standup comedian, Producer for the hit show, “Impractical Jokers,” and co-host of the Comes a Time Podcast with Dead & Company bassist, Oteil Burbridge. His new Special, “Don’t Let Me Down,” is out now.
He talks about his early days of recreational drug use at jam band shows; a powerful psilocybin experience; passing out before his first ketamine experience and how his commitment has made subsequent experiences much smoother; and how his continued work has allowed him to focus on what’s truly important. He’s seen positive results from talking about his ketamine-assisted psychotherapy experiences on stage, and he’s working on new material that will be much more focused on not just psychedelics, but the therapy, self-work, and growth he’s gone through in his journey.
He also discusses the influence of other comedians; the bioavailability in different ketamine methods; how psychedelics are like a performance-enhancing drug; the importance of having a working, attainable idea of success and not getting caught up in other people’s lives; the benefit of asking people in the audience to raise their hands if they’ve done psychedelics; and the importance of recognizing that psychedelics are absolutely not for everyone – at least if they’re not ready.
Notable Quotes
“It’s interesting because I’m trying to work out the material and figure out what’s funny, but also, some of the stuff I’m saying that’s from my gut is getting laughter and applause, and also, people are coming up afterwards and they’re like, ‘That’s really awesome that you’re talking about this.’ …I have to pay attention to that.”
“A comic, just like anything else really – you know, a podcaster, an entrepreneur, a businessman, whatever – you’re 10 different things. You’re the Director of social media, you’re the Director of advertising and marketing and promotions. You have your art and you have the thing you like to do, but then there’s a hundred other gigs that come with it, and you have to kind of stay on top of all those things. And that can get extremely overwhelming. And if you already have that imposter voice or that critic that’s beating the hell out of you all the time, it’s more ammo or more fuel for their fire. So to me, psychedelics have been– It’s almost like a vacation. It’s like a way to shut that crap off and get to what really matters.”
“When you have the anxieties and the depressions and the imposter syndrome, things like that; sometimes the most psychedelic part of a psychedelic experience is the absence of the bullshit, where it’s just: you get down to being a living being and you’re out of your own way. And that, to me, is the most valuable part.”
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Johanna interviews Daan Keiman, MA: Buddhist, Psychedelic Chaplain, and Co-Founder of the psychedelic think-and-practice tank, Communitas Collective Foundation; Aura Ahuvia: Rabbi who served five years as President of the ALEPH (Alliance for Jewish Renewal) Board and is now the Founder of Psychedelic Rabbi; and Josh Harper: Consciousness Medicine Guide who works with Ligare, a Christian Psychedelic Society.
They dig deep into the intersection of psychedelics and spirituality, focusing largely on the concept of psychedelic chaplaincy: how they each define it and how spiritual caregivers are uniquely positioned to be of service to those coming out of powerful and unexplainable mystical experiences (whether they be psychedelic or not). They discuss why being grounded in a spiritual tradition is important, but how it’s often more important to be open to mystery and exploring that which is complex and difficult, even if that means someone questioning if their religion is truly right for them anymore.
Each tell their stories of struggling with and eventually embracing their religion and how psychedelics and spirituality became part of their lives, and discuss much more: Psychedelics in religious history and the slow embrace of mysticism in today’s renaissance; the importance of truly listening to individuals’ experiences and not dismissing life-changing experiences as ‘drug-induced’; how practice (no matter what kind) is a huge benefit of religion; and the need to eventually de-center psychedelics from the narrative – that the shared experience of coming together in community and asking big questions is where the healing truly lies.
Notable Quotes
“My approach personally to working with people outside of my Jewish tradition is to know that on the one hand, I am grounded in my own tradition, but on the other hand, I carry it lightly into that space because I’m aware that our connection in that moment is going to be: We are two fellow humans and there is no need for that which grounds me to be that which grounds somebody else.” -Aura
“The vocation of the church is to see people healed and whole, but it seems like the church is more interested in defending its own version of the truth than to see the healing and wholeness of people. And for any Christian Pastors or leaders out there who are listening to this, it’s very likely that you will have people in your congregations who are coming to you with these experiences, and you have the opportunity to listen to them, regardless of your own personal feelings of psychedelics. You have the opportunity to listen, to welcome them in. And I believe that the church, with that kind of openness, can be a great place for integration.” -Josh “I think it can become potentially harmful, especially in the long run, if we start to see these places where people can come kind of exist over time; if the only way we have access to this is because we’re going to take a psychedelic substance. And I think the sooner we de-center psychedelics, the less risk we have, thinking that it’s about the experiences, and the more we start to realize it’s about the relationships that we maintain. And it’s not about the shared religion, it’s not about the shared experience, it’s about the fact that, as humans, we come together and ask ourselves: What does it mean to be alive right now? And in asking it in a community, we’re also partly living that answer.” -Daan
Though psychedelics have been used for thousands of years, modern technology is beginning to teach us more – much more – about their effects on our minds and bodies. We caught up with Apollo Neuro co-founder and neuroscientist and board-certified psychiatrist, Dr. David Rabin, to learn more about how people are using wearables to gather new insights about their trips.
Alexa: For anyone who isn’t already aware, can you give us a high-level overview of what wearable tech is for, who might want to use it, and why?
David: I think of wearable technology as a powerful tool in our health toolkits to help combat the stresses of modern life, just like mindful practices like meditation, breathwork, and exercise. The wearable technology that we’ve developed at Apollo is safe for children and adults alike, so it’s really for anyone who feels they could use a tool to help them feel more safe, in control, and calm and experience better sleep, less stress, and a brighter mood. When we feel more secure, we’re able to fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer, focus more effectively, socialize more freely, and sustain energy throughout your daily tasks
Alexa: Can you explain the synergy between technology and psychedelic treatments in achieving better mental health outcomes?
David: Psychedelic-assisted therapy can be scary or intense for people, especially during their first time. Wearables can serve as a somatic anchor for both the patient and the therapist so they can stay in tune with their bodies. It helps the therapist to remain impartial on any difficulties or challenges that the patient may be experiencing, and it helps the patient to have a smoother journey.
To date, we have never had access to modern tools to help us solve these challenges that exist within and around the psychedelic experience. Today, the Apollo wearable is the only patented technology to reduce uncomfortable experiences associated with medicine-assisted therapy. So far the results from Apollo plus psychedelic-assisted therapy in the real world have been tremendous, including reducing anxiety in advance of medicine administration for easier drop in, reduction in ‘bad’ or uncomfortable trips, and improved ease of integration afterward. Apollo represents the very first example of how wearable technology can empower us to make healing with psychedelic and non-psychedelic techniques easier and more accessible for all.
Alexa: Can you share some examples of scientific research or studies that support the effectiveness of wearable tech and its combination with psychedelic therapies?
David: Currently, the Apollo Neuroscience Clinical Research Team is running an IRB-approved clinical trial with the support of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit sponsoring the most advanced clinical trials of a psychedelic-assisted therapy. The purpose of this study is to understand how the Apollo wearable touch therapy impacts long-term outcomes and improves integration following MDMA-assisted therapy in people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Two large clinical trials evaluating the Apollo wearable in PTSD patients are currently underway and recruiting participants. The first is taking place at the Rocky Mountain VA in Denver, CO and the second, a nationwide trial, is evaluating the Apollo wearable to sustain remission from PTSD following MDMA-assisted therapy, described above. Anyone who has participated in a MAPS trial of MDMA-assisted therapy is eligible to join the MDMA-Apollo study and receive an Apollo wearable for the study.
We’ve seen tremendous results with the Apollo wearable in thousands of traumatized individuals and those who have participated in psychedelic-assisted therapy thus far. Some of the most promising responses were in people receiving ketamine-assisted therapy, particularly those new to psychedelic medicines or who have a lot of anxiety in anticipation of new experiences. We care about the outcomes, and anything we can do to help people stay in remission or feel better for longer periods of time is a big win for our field. We are very much looking forward to seeing how the Apollo wearable will contribute to the integration period following MDMA-assisted therapy.
Alexa: Have there been any clinical trials or user feedback demonstrating the positive impact on mental health?
David: The Apollo Neuro technology has been studied in over 1,700 research subjects in seven complete and 14 ongoing real-world and university clinical trials demonstrating very promising improvements in everything from sleep, pain, and fatigue to mood, anxiety, and focus. Ongoing studies of the Apollo technology include studies of PTSD, ADHD, and TBI, metastatic breast cancer pain, and severe autoimmune disorders.
Alexa: There are tons of wearable devices out there these days, could you share an overview about Apollo and how it’s different?? What specific features or technologies does Apollo employ to support mental health?
David: The Apollo wearable is different from other wearables as most wearables are trackers. They tell you what is going on with your health but leave it up to you to make decisions to improve it. The Apollo, on the other hand, actively improves your health through soothing vibrations that shift you out of “fight or flight” and into “rest and digest,” or a parasympathetic state. You can actively choose how you want to feel on the Apollo Neuro app on your phone – Focus, Social, or Unwind, for example – and the wearable plays vibrations that help to shift you into that state, much like the way certain songs pump you up or chill you out.
Alexa: What mental health benefits can users expect from your wearable technology on its own, and how does your wearable tech complement or enhance the effects of psychedelic therapies?
David: On average, users experience 40% less stress and feelings of anxiety, an 11% increase in heart rate variability (HRV), up to 25% more focus and concentration, and up to 19% more time in deep sleep. In an ongoing real-world sleep study, users get up to 30 more minutes of sleep a night. Less stress and feelings of anxiety is especially helpful in a psychedelic-assisted therapy setting, as well as an increase in HRV, as that is the biggest indicator of how well your body responds to stress.
Alexa: What does the future of this type of therapy look like? Do you collaborate with mental health professionals, therapists, or healthcare providers to integrate your technology into treatment plans?
David: The future of Apollo being used in this type of therapy is that it will be used by clinicians and patients in the office or treatment facility where medicine is administered, beginning in the waiting room or before arrival, to improve short term experiences. It will then be used, as it is today, by patients/clients after their experiences at home to improve clients engagement in treatment and enhance their outcomes from integration practices, which are the most important piece of treatment and often ignored.
Alexa: If a healthcare provider is interested in incorporating wearable tech into their practices, what is the process for going about that?
David: We work with hundreds of healthcare practitioners ranging from holistic health clinicians, centers for ADHD and autism, psychedelic assisted therapy clinics, trauma therapy practitioners, Chiropractors and more. Our goal is always to work hand in hand with them to tailor a program that meets the needs for their clinic and their patients. To learn more about partnership options with Apollo, Practitioners and Clinicians can reach our partnership team directly by filling out this form on our website.
Alexa: How do you see the intersection of technology and mental health evolving in the coming years? Are there plans for further advancements or updates to your technology to enhance its mental health benefits?
David: The future of mental health involves the convergence of technology, psychedelic techniques, and our current practices. As Apollo learns from people over time, it will personalize vibes for each individual user based on their needs at any given time today. This is already happening with Smartvibes for sleep, which is the first wearable technology AI collaboration to give us 30-60 minutes more sleep each night that is concentrated in deep and REM sleep, just by understanding our sleep signature and acting on it predictively to prevent unwanted middle-of-the-night wakeups. This will only get better over time!
Interested in trying the Apollo Neuro, or gifting it to a friend or loved one? Purchase through this link and save $50.
In this episode, Joe interviews Dana Lerman, MD: a decade-long infectious disease consultant who has since been trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy, ecotherapy, and Internal Family Systems, and is the Co-Founder of Skylight Psychedelics, where she prescribes IM ketamine and trains therapists who work with it.
Lerman tells her story: how working with kids with cancer made her want to learn medicine, what it was like working as an infectious disease expert during COVID, and how fascinating it has been to start with modern medicine and then fully embrace the traditional frameworks of ayahuasca ceremonies. She has realized that part of her role is to bring that intention, ceremony, and inner healing intelligence to modern medicine – that that will greatly benefit patients as well as clinicians who naturally want to be healers but are burnt out by the bureaucracy and distractions of the faulty container they find themselves in. Skylight Psychedelics is working on opening a clinical research division, researching psychedelics for Long COVID, and bringing in-person psychedelic peer support services to emergency rooms.
She also discusses intergenerational trauma and how psychedelics have affected her parenting; the impossibility of informed consent in psychedelics and why there should be disclaimers as well as instructions; accessibility, the need for insurance to cover psychedelic-assisted therapy, and why the price of these expensive treatments actually makes sense; why we should be sharing stories of mistakes and things going wrong during ceremonies; and why one of the biggest things we can do to further the cause is to educate our children and parents about psychedelics.
Notable Quotes
“What’s come to me recently in ayahuasca ceremony is that part of my role in this space is really to bring intention and to bring ceremony and the inner healing intelligence and that concept to the modern medicine space. I mean, there’s so many places for improvement in modern medicine, like even: We have a few minutes for a timeout so you can check to make sure that’s the right patient [and] it’s the right limb you’re going to amputate, but we don’t have a moment to talk about who this person is and the intention of this surgery and what we want for this person. We just have this disconnect, and this disconnect; obviously, it’s not just in medicine. It’s in everywhere. It’s our food. It’s our community. All systems.”
“I have three small children. A lot of why I went to ayahuasca was because I knew [beside wanting] to heal myself of all the stuff that I’ve been carrying around, I wanted to shift my parenting and to be a better parent, and I felt that if I carried my anxiety, my control, all the stuff: It just keeps getting passed down because the kids are just learning from us. But if you can address that, if you can address where does that come from, what is the work that has to be done around it, and do that work, your kids see it. My daughter: When I came home from ayahuasca (she was probably seven); she looked to me and she said, ‘Why didn’t you go there sooner?’”
“Anytime people are using these medicines, I think: There’s a huge disclaimer that should be coming with these medicines, like: ‘Your life will be changed forever. You will never look at anything the same way again, and there’s a possibility that you enter into a space where you are experiencing the vastness of the universe, and that may be very overwhelming for you when the journey is over. You need someone to talk about it with.’ The whole concept of integration is so important.”
Amidst the fervent cries of psychedelic-centric victory heard around Colorado since the passing of the Natural Medicine Health Act (NMHA), it is important to remember those less publicized, less well-funded, and less white, human beings who continue to suffer and die from various manifestations of the War on Drugs – the same political ill that prevented access to “natural medicines” in the first place.
A malignant disease afflicting the collective body of culture, the War on Drugs is among the most horrific, anti-human disasters in the history of American policy. Lack of access to psychedelics is one symptom of this disease, but there are many others; including the opioid overdose epidemic, mass incarceration, the creation of Mexico’s narco-state, the militarization of police, the erosion of personal rights, and continued institutionalized racism. Like a very expensive band-aid triumphantly placed on the skinned knee cap of a dying person by self-congratulatory doctors, the NMHA does absolutely nothing to alleviate these most malignant symptoms of the disease that is the War on Drugs. In this way, the NMHA and other psychedelic-centric drug policies paradoxically represent the continuation of oppression more than its end.
Passed on November 8th, 2022 by Colorado voters through a ballot initiative, the NMHA brought immediate statewide decriminalization and pending legalization of certain “natural medicines” including psilocybin, DMT, mescaline, and iboga. Those unfamiliar with the details of the NMHA can read about them extensively here. As far as psychedelic policy goes, the NMHA is a reasonably cutting-edge development, merging both legalization and decriminalization models. But there is no such thing as a “psychedelic policy,” only drug policy.
Dr. Carl Hart, Columbia University’s Department of Psychology Chair, defines the problem succinctly as “psychedelic exceptionalism,” “the perspective that psychedelics are somehow better and more useful than other classes of drugs like opioids or stimulants.” This rampant false belief that psychedelics can be meaningfully separated from the larger drug policy conversation enables the generally privileged and up-power “psychedelic community” to ignore prohibition itself as the core societal disease while profiting from the treatment of a single symptom. Rather ironic, really.
Gazing through the glamor and capitalist speculation currently surrounding the psychedelic phenomenon reveals a more essential truth: Psychedelics are morally-neutral substances just like any other. Our inability to see this is our responsibility, but, in part, not our fault. America has a long-standing tradition of simplistic moralistic judgments around substances which began with the Women’s Christian Temperance Movement in the 1800s and continued through programs like D.A.R.E. Our cultural soil is deeply seeded with the idea of “good drugs” used by “good people” and “bad drugs” used by “bad people.”
After decades of wrestling with this tired old narrative, we’re finally managing to change it, but only along those same dualistic lines of thinking. By highlighting the positive effects of psychedelics, we have begun to politically pry some useful substances from the realm of “bad” drugs. The DEA is now considering releasing MDMA from its unscientific schedule I clutches while states legalize and decriminalize some psychedelics. This is the entire basis of the psychedelic renaissance. What has unfortunately not been considered is the problem with assigning a moralistic value to substances in the first place.In a compensatory over-swing of the flawed rhetorical pendulum, “psychedelic people” and their “medicines” are now coming to be seen as “good.” Such thinking leads predictably to unjust policy outcomes. This is, after all, the same fallacious logic that sparked the War on Drugs in the first place.
The categorical separation of “good” drugs and “bad” drugs is synonymous with the assignment of human beings into those same categories. The prevalence of this bias in the psychedelic space, implicit or explicit, betrays a deep lack of contextual awareness leading to oppressive behavior, which is contrary to the kind of societal-level healing that the movement claims to represent. Despite the political utility of rhetorically distancing psychedelics from other substances, our “natural medicines” are still ultimately “drugs” that must be considered within the larger context of American drug policy.
The Cultural Context of Psychedelics: A Brief Reminder of The War on Drugs
To triage the symptoms of prohibition, addressing each by their lethality, reveals a clear picture of the injustice inherent in a myopic focus on psychedelic-centric policy change. While it’s true that lack of access to psychedelics is preventing untold numbers of people from receiving helpful treatments for things like anxiety, depression, PTSD, addiction, etc., these kinds of maladies are collectively overshadowed by more immediately fatal symptoms of prohibition.
Itemizing the harms of the War on Drugs is something akin to sorting through the rubble of a war-torn metropolis while bombs are still falling – an extensively horrific task far exceeding the scope of this article. Two vignettes that partially describe the scope of destruction can be found in the interwoven phenomena of the opioid epidemic and mass incarceration; two direct symptoms of the War on Drugs.
The number of people who died from opioid overdose in 2022 was the equivalent of a 9/11 attack every 2 weeks, and rising in 2023. After September 11th, 2001, the U.S. reacted swiftly to pass a series of sweeping legislation, initiate new programs, and even go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Opioids clearly kill many times more people than terrorism ever has, but no such action is being taken. We won’t even mention the fact that opium production in Afghanistan was higher under U.S. control. The solutions to the opioid problem can be clearly found in harm reduction-based policies such as those implemented in Canada and Portugal. These policies stand on much firmer empirical ground than those arguments that drove our country to war in the Middle East, so where is the commiserate response?
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Throughout alcohol prohibition in the 1920s, simple logistical realities incentivized clandestine distillers to manufacture the strongest possible concentrate of their drug, and moonshine was born. It was both easier to conceal and more profitable per gallon than beer or lesser-proof spirits. Fentanyl is the same story. One pound of Fentanyl is as potent as nearly 50 pounds of heroin, and one pound of carfentanil is as potent as 100 pounds of heroin. Which is more likely to be smuggled across a border? The manufacture and indiscriminate distribution of the most lethal substances is not stopped by the War on Drugs, it is directly caused by it.
An article published in the Journal of Law, Medicine, & Ethics titled “We Can’t Go Cold Turkey: Why Suppressing Drug Markets Endangers Society” names U.S. drug policy itself as a “key accelerant that transformed this wave of addiction into an inferno of death, disease, and personal destruction.” It’s well known that a policy approach centering harm reduction and public health over criminal punishment greatly reduces overdose deaths. Yet, we continue to quietly tolerate more than a hundred thousand American deaths each recent year.
Overdose is only one of many dark manifestations of prohibition untouched by psychedelic-centric policies. The United States, the “land of the free,” only has 4% of the world’s overall population, yet holds 20% of the prison population. Of those people in U.S. prisons, 45% are there for nonviolent drug offenses. This means that nearly 10% of human beings in prison on planet Earth are imprisoned in the United States as non-violent victims of the War on Drugs.
The outcome of American drug policy is so horrifically maligned with the logicalgoals of such policies (public health & safety) that one can’t help but question the intentions of policymakers. Far from the realm of fringe conspiracy, we have seen institutional harm inflicted intentionally on substance users in the past. In the 1920s, the U.S. Government intentionally poisoned alcohol heading for the underground market, resulting in the death of at least 10,000 people. This action was justified using logic that claimed people who use drugs are bad, morally reprehensible humans – that same tired old trick of moral conflation. If the goal of the War on Drugs was to reduce drug use and create a safer society, then it has failed horribly. If the goal is to punish “bad” drug users in some of the most severe ways imaginable, then the War on Drugs has been a resounding success.
Through the lens of trauma-informed care, which invites us to see substance use as a result of trauma, the situation becomes downright sinister. A common American story might be told as such: A traumatized person turns to substances as a momentarily helpful coping mechanism. (Those with 4 or more Adverse Childhood Experiences are 1,350% more likely to abuse opiates than the general population). As a direct result of prohibition itself, the substances they find on the street are concentrated to the highest potency imaginable. There are few, if any, harm reduction or effective mental health services available. Instead, a militarized police force backed by an 80-billion-dollar prison industry is actively seeking to put this person in a cage – that is if they don’t overdose first. It is into this maelstrom that policies like the NMHA interject: “Legalize psychedelics!”
Why Only “Natural Medicines”?
A report from the Colorado Department of Public Safety on substance use trends does not even mention psilocybin or other psychedelics as relevant factors in state public health. The report does, however, describe an increase in fentanyl-related incidents including lethal overdose, explaining that 275,569 doses of fentanyl were seized in 2021. According to the Denver Open Data Crime Catalog, only 14 people were arrested for psychedelics in 2021, and 24 people in 2020. For opioid arrests in those same years, the numbers were much higher: 236 and 348 people respectively. The numbers were even higher for the worst outcomes, with an average of about 1,000 people dying every year in Colorado from an opioid overdose. In this way, psychedelics are not an immediately pressing issue from a law enforcement or public health perspective. So why do they continue to be the sole focus of organized and well-funded political efforts such as that which birthed the NMHA? Why has this particular symptom of prohibition received so much attention, funding, and policy action?
Interest Convergence: Suddenly The Privileged Care About Drug Policy
It’s an unfortunate truth that our beloved Renaissance and all of the psychedelic research and policy are predominantly reflective of white interests. One historian asserts that “psychedelic culture [is] dominated by privileged white men.” Indeed, a recent U.S.-based survey of over 41,000 people found that more than half of the white respondents had used psilocybin or LSD, “whereas less than one-quarter of Black [people] reported lifetime psilocybin use.” A relevant meta-analysis examining 18 studies on psychedelic-assisted therapy that occurred between 1993 and 2013 revealed that “82.3% of the participants were non-Hispanic white.” Psychedelic exceptionalism appears to have firm roots in institutional racism and white privilege.
As if by design, historically oppressed groups suffer and die from the War on Drugs at higher rates than white people. Though the recent intensification of overdose deaths allows a more clear view, we have seen these same kinds of disparities for decades with little attention given. Besides MAPS, which is perhaps the first pharmaceutical company in history to explicitly oppose the War on Drugs, there have been few for-profit organizations working to fight prohibition in any way. Now we see psychedelic ticker stocks, psychedelic venture capitalists, and psychedelic certificate programs all vehemently fronting the narrative of “healing” while functionally ignoring the collective disease that is the War on Drugs.
It seems institutional racism, the at-scale death of opioid users, and mass incarceration were not enough to attract the attention of the wealthy and powerful to drug policy. Only the promise of greater wealth has been sufficient to finally stir society’s biggest players into support of limited reform. Suddenly, every venture capitalist is a psychedelic advocate, but where are the drug policy advocates? After all, the only true difference between the heroin dealer and the “psychedelic entrepreneur” is that one is on a side of the culturally created narrative which happens to be favored at this particular moment in history. Tomar Pierson-Brown puts it succinctly in saying: “It’s not irony, it’s interest convergence.”
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Healing Without Harming: Anti-Oppressive Psychedelic Advocacy
Psychedelic modalities are without-argument desperately needed as accessible tools for front-line mental health professionals, but policy efforts focused on them exclusively are oppressive. Ibram Kendi, author of How to be an Antiracist, explains that “there is no such thing as not racist, there are either anti-racists or racists.” In this same way, drug policy is either anti-oppressive or oppressive. There is no in-between. Without applying this attitude, policy and organizational efforts within the psychedelic space are destined to become embodied examples of oppression.
Anti-oppressive approaches “minimize the effects of structural inequalities, social hierarchies, and power differentials.” As we have seen, psychedelic-centric policies like Colorado’s NMHA actually accentuate the power of the dominant groups and do absolutely nothing for the people suffering most from the War on Drugs. Drug policies like the NMHA neglect the most destructive aspects of the War on Drugs in favor of the more profitable, ‘sexy,’ and privilege-aligned substances (like psychedelics). These kinds of policies pander to the dominant culture while ignoring the core problem.
Fervent psychedelic purists (I know because I used to be one) will argue that making psychedelic healing widely available would lead to the amelioration of addiction. While this is true to a degree, it would not happen fast enough to meaningfully stem the tide of overdose deaths and is a backward way to approach the problem; like using nicotine patches to treat lung cancer.
Anti-oppressive psychedelic advocacy must necessarily include and prioritize an end to the War on Drugs as a whole, not just psychedelic legalization or decriminalization. The systemic situation that prevents access to psychedelics is the same that has created the overdose epidemic, mass incarceration, and a slew of other hugely destructive phenomena. It’s the War on Drugs and the disease of prohibition. As beneficiaries of recent drug policy changes, psychedelic institutions of all kinds have a clear responsibility to advocate for an end to the War on Drugs writ large. To ask “How can I make a psychedelic dollar?” without simultaneously asking “What can I do to help end the War on Drugs?” is unjust and tone-deaf. Only by directly addressing the core disease itself, and not just a single symptom, can we begin to truly heal as a culture.
Khan shares his journey into the world of science and policymaking, beginning with science journalism and inspired by David Nutt’s famous ‘Equasy’ paper and subsequent firing for telling the truth. Realizing how strong the disconnect was between political and science worlds, his goal became to represent science when it comes under attack; using campaigning, lobbying, advocacy work, etc., and essentially becoming a translator between science and society – bringing these overly complicated concepts down to a level every day culture can understand. At UC Berkeley, he’s focusing on research, training scientists to be better communicators, educating the public on the benefits of psychedelics, and trying to make research more trustworthy.
He discusses the word “science” and how it’s used to describe lots of things; the hard problem of consciousness; color constancy, perception, and the influence of priors; the risk of abuse in all therapies; trust and why people don’t always “trust the science”; the risks of putting too much faith in experience insights; the word “sacred”; and more. He concludes by discussing the findings of the first UC Berkeley psychedelic survey, which revealed public sentiments and attitudes towards psychedelics, and, while mostly positive, truly proved the need for people like Khan to be out there educating the public.
Notable Quotes
“They fired [David Nutt] from his role as Independent Advisor and Chair of this Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs. So I’m sitting there as this 20 year-old that all I’m there to do is care about how science works, and how do we protect the voice of scientists in policy-making, and how do we ensure that policy is informed by the evidence rather than going in the face of it, and right in the middle of that, this very high profile scientist basically gets sacked by the government for basically just saying what the science says, which, as far as I can see, was all he was being asked to do.”
“It’s really hard to look at the experience of being human and this amazing, vivid, technicolor experience we have of walking around and doing everything from drinking coffee to walking a dog to looking at a sunrise, and not being totally bemused that that experience can be generated by this two pound lump of mostly water with a bit of fat and protein mixed in in our skulls. That just seems like an insane proposition to me. So I remember when I was learning about that in my undergraduate and kind of trying to figure out the basic principles of neuroscience, it just seemed like this amazing question of: How can this ever be possible? This doesn’t seem like it should compute.”
“Experiences with psychedelics later as well, I think lead you to a similar place in that if you disrupt ordinary waking consciousness, you can almost start to see the way in which your brain changes its production of consciousness. And the idea that that dramatic change can be induced by chemicals that we know the structure of and we can characterize and we can understand how they interact with the brain, again, just feels like an interesting kind of chink in that bigger question of: What is consciousness and who are we, and how do we relate to the rest of the world?”
He tells his personal story and how his first psychedelic experience felt like a homecoming; discusses his Rebel Wisdom media platform, where, through interviews, he tried to make sense of social upheavals and conflicts through a more flexible, psychedelic way of thinking; and digs deep into the Greek concepts of Moloch and Kairos: how Moloch represents the winner-take-all, race to the bottom, sacrifice-your-values-to-appease-the-system game playing we all get stuck in, and Kairos represents the openness that comes from psychedelics – the transitional, seize-the-moment opportunities we need to take advantage of. And he discusses much more: the power of dialectic inquiry; the corporatization of psychedelics and how we’re really in a psychedelic enlightenment; how the medicalization of psychedelics is like a Trojan horse; and the concept of technology (and specifically the internet) mirroring the switching between realms that we think is so rare in psychedelics – aren’t we doing that every time we look at our phones?
Beiner was recently part of Imperial College London’s initial trials on intravenous, extended-state DMT, testing correct dosages and speeds for the pump. He describes the details of the study, how he thought they were messing with him at first, and what he saw in his experiences: an outer space-like world of gigantic planet-like entities, and how a massive Spider Queen entity taught him about intimacy and how our metaphysical and personal worlds aren’t separate at all.
Notable Quotes
“There’s a particularly psychedelic way of thinking in my view. …I would define it as a flexibility in how we think and a looseness and a creativity and a playfulness with how we approach the world that psychedelics can open up in us. And I think that’s so deeply needed right now. So my hope is to kind of combine that ethos together with a lot of very practically important, interesting, sociological, psychological, scientific, and metaphysical insights, and use all of that to write a book that hopefully gives people new lenses in which to make sense of the world and psychedelics.”
“The process of speaking to the truth of your lived experience in the moment is deeply transformative. And it’s also, in my experience and I think the experience of many people, it’s what psychedelics encourage us to do: They encourage us to be with the truth of our experience and go into what we’ve been hiding from and avoiding, and feel it – feel the truth of what’s actually going on. And that is so, so powerful culturally because so many of our cultural shadows and our polarization and our ‘at each other’s throats’ and our ideological fixations come from these unsaid things. So there’s so many practices, psychedelics included, that can open us up into the truth of what’s going on. And I think that is just the most transformative practice or approach that there is that I’m aware of.”
Bogdan* is a 43-year-old asylee who lives in New York City. He has a Master’s degree from the University of Sussex. He used to live in student accommodation on the King’s Road near my old house in Brighton on the south coast of the UK, but he is currently homeless and living in what he calls a “ghetto.”
A series of highly traumatic ayahuascatrips with a famous ‘shaman’ led Bogdan to become seriously ill. It wasn’t helped by later trips with LSD and san pedro, either. Blighted by a debilitating mixture of chronic pain, anxiety, depression, and brain fog, he says he “feel[s] like a 100-year-old Alzheimer’s patient.” Bogdan suggests that successive traumas have left his central nervous system “fried.” He has no medical insurance, and so cannot pursue the Somatic Experiencing therapy people have encouraged him to try.
Bogdan did five sessions with ICEERS’ free integration service, but he doesn’t think “just talking with someone on Zoom will help” him. A cash handout from the local Eastern European community was helpful, yet it only lasted so long. One wonders how much processing his ‘stored trauma’ would alleviate living in a homeless shelter.
Or take Kristen*, a 39-year-old who participated in a Canadian clinical trial for psilocybin. In between each dose of psilocybin, Kristen developed debilitating spikes in anxiety that eventually manifested as a visual complaint, which in turn flowered into full-blown HPPD after two ‘therapeutic’ trips once the trial ended. What was driving Kristen spikes in anxiety? It wasn’t only the likely dysregulating effects of psilocybin’s serotonin dump. It was also significant financial stress. That didn’t just go away.
For those with severe HPPD, the visual presentation is so intense as to impair one’s ability to work. Reliance on scant welfare and disability benefits is not unheard of; I remember a phone call with one long standing HPPDer who was on the continual brink of homelessness for the destabilizing and disabling effects of his condition.
Possibly as many as 60% of homeless people have schizophrenia, and over half may have serious mental health problems. If we take seriously how dangerous psychedelics can be, these will be the outcomes. There will be many more people like Bogdan, Kristen, or those whose lives are destroyed by HPPD, increased anxiety, depression, or brain fog brought on from a challenging experience with no support, or simply the financial and life stress that continue on after even the greatest experience. Suicide is a tragic and occasional fact one cannot escape in HPPD communities – something that has been openly acknowledged by the late, great Roland Griffiths.
So what is the answer? As is hopefully becoming clear, ‘harm reduction’ is not just a matter of appropriate drug testing or set and setting and integration. It is a matter of having enough money to muffle a mental health crisis’ worst outcomes – to pay for help, stay housed, and stay healthy amid the stress and chaos that can follow a trip. Simply put, if we want to help those most affected by the challenges of psychedelic exploration, there may be a case for direct monetary transfers: giving people money to safeguard their material container.
A Cost of Living Crisis
There is a curious gap, a kind of Uncanny Valley, between our dreams of healing the ‘Mental Health Crisis’ with psychedelic mystical trips, while an arguably more primary Cost of Living Crisis is tearing apart people’s wallets. The association between anxiety, depression, addiction, and poverty is well known, and requires no elucidation. Even those who are not on the streets or actively facing homelessness in the future need money.
Have you looked at how expensive therapy is lately? $75-$150 a session is not viable for someone on a low income, so what could be a necessity becomes necessarily optional. It’s the same for gym memberships, exercise equipment, or good food and nutritional check-ups: all vital ingredients for good mental health and recovering from a psychedelic shockwave. The costs of therapy especially can add up while one shops around to find a suitable practitioner, or at least one who isn’t a weirdo – a genuine concern in psychedelic circles.
After an extremely destabilising LSD experience in September 2021 – whose sequelae included a deep depression, cannabis dependency, and suicidal ideation – I first tried a ‘psychedelic integration’ specialist based in Brighton. He wasn’t good. A couple of friends and I were wondering whether to do mescaline together, and I thought that might be a terrible idea. My ‘therapist’ urged me to wonder whether the second thoughts were perhaps the internalized voice of the “free market.” I burned through about £600 with this guy. I then burned through another £350 on another, thankfully more helpful therapist who gave me a discounted rate. It still amounted to £50 a session, or $60 USD.
Most people cannot afford to do this. And if they cannot afford to seek help while suicidal, they may die. We ought to consider the history lessons of psychiatric research. The ‘Decade of the Brain’ set in motion by President Bush in 1989 envisioned a future of revolutionary psychiatric treatments furnished by data from brain imaging and genetic research. This has not happened. Psychiatric outcomes have deteriorated. SSRI medications are of uncertain value relative to placebo and involve a staggering list of side-effects. Neurobiological markers have so far proved too wide and confounded to guide treatments – not least when our brains must exist in a world that’s crumbling.
“[W]hile we studied the risk factors for suicide, the death rate had climbed 33 percent. While we identified the neuroanatomy of addiction, overdose deaths had increased threefold,” Dr. Thomas Insel, the former Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, reflected in his 2021 book, Healing. “While we mapped the genes for schizophrenia, people with this disease were still chronically unemployed and dying twenty years early.”
In many ways, we already know what works: people need social support, housing, good therapeutic rapport, and food on the table. What will spell the difference for many people is the possession of resources that will enable them to reach for such low hanging fruit.
What Would a Harm Reduction Fund Look Like?
It is already well-known that the psychedelic movement is overwhelmingly middle- and upper-middle class and white, and has a particular representation among the aristocracy. The psychedelic movement is mainstreaming, though, and more people of color and low income are joining ranks of users. This means more people are at unnecessary risk, for lack of social and economic resources, of the worst outcomes of psychedelic drugs.
The psychedelic movement needs to own this risk, because the public sector and existing infrastructure probably won’t. As discussed above, welfare support is measly and the most vulnerable will be without medical insurance – if such packages would even cover the debilitations of drugs illegal in many parts of the United States. The Zendo Project, DanceSafe, and Fireside Project are laudable, but their applications for those struggling after their trips are limited.
It is often accepted that some proportion – usually dismissed as a merely ‘rare’ occurrence – of people will be greatly damaged by psychedelic drugs, and end up homeless, dead, or struggling with severe mental illness. What if we stopped accepting these as inevitable?
If we are really interested in harm reduction, one option may be a fund for those harmed by the effects of psychedelic drugs.
Suppose there was a fund of $500,000 – similar to the resources required in a study – which was focused on those facing suicide, homelessness, or mental health crisis after a trip. The details can be discussed and fleshed out by anyone who wants to take my proposal seriously, but it would simply provide bursaries, cash transfers, and much needed subsidies to people struggling in the wake of psychedelic journeys to seek help. Perhaps the effects of the help they seek can be recorded to collect data. Perhaps it could fund legal action against therapists and ‘Shamans’ that leave their clients in tatters, much as Bogdan is facing now. Such projects would likely mean saving or seriously changing dozens of lives. I welcome feedback on my loose suggestion.
Of course, there would be a risk of people ‘gaming’ the system, but I imagine its wastage would be comparable to a study, which has large opportunity costs in terms of the direct help such a fund could provide. Search costs would be invested to ensure the person is who they say they are: interviews, conversations with family members and friends, possible documentation. Different priorities would be made. Do we invest 80% of our budget for search costs on that 20% at the greatest risk of peril? Or ought we to prioritize creating free support in other ways, like expanding free therapies along the lines of ICEERS?Alternatively, as I suggest in a new article for Ecstatic Integration, immediate support could occur through peer support groups organized through Reddit, whose potential is, in many ways, untapped.
Certain challenges would no doubt arise through using private money, as well as exporting what should likely be a government task, such as through a Universal Basic Income – there’s a risk that some measure (number of people helped vs. number of dollars invested) would become a core indicator rather than real value provided. There’s likewise a risk that the kinds of interventions and support deemed worth subsidizing will fit with donors’ own biases, or that the pool of therapists deemed acceptable will be narrow and normative.
I would not be surprised if the data were relatively unsurprising. Income support and housing for those most debilitated would be a clear game changer. Free CBT, EMDR, Somatic Experiencing, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, membership to a local gym that has a sauna and a pool, or full blood work to scan people’s nutritional deficiencies and inform a better diet would all likely help. These are relatively inexpensive interventions, but the marginal gains are probably enormous, and could be, at the very least, comparable to the hundreds of thousands raised to fund studies – which will not necessarily translate into interventions and treatments, nor with any particular immediacy.
The Psychedelic Movement and Owning the Risk
One may wonder if a post-psychedelic fund is arbitrary. All mental health problems, including but not limited to psychedelics, vary with poverty and access to resources. Why have a post-psychedelic fund and not one concerned with mental health in general? How can we ever separate the two? I suppose similar questions can be raised about the psychedelic sector on the positive end as well. Why the interest in psychedelics, when similar experiences can be engendered by other means like meditation – including with similar risks? To focus on post-psychedelic risk is likewise only repeating the same distinction already explicit in psychedelic risk management: that psychedelic trips can meaningfully create adverse outcomes even while connected to broader life concerns.
Even if this proposal doesn’t make sense to you, something needs to be done to address post-psychedelic harm. I believe we know more than enough to do something right away – and something specifically targeted towards those worst affected, for whom every dollar of subsidy and support reaps massive gains in social benefit – and saves lives.
These are new ideas, but let’s start the dialogue.
*Names have been changed to protect the identity of sources profiled in this writing.
In this episode, Alexa interviews Dom Farnan: Founder of DotConnect; author of the best seller, “Now Here: A Journey from Toxic Boss to Conscious Connector”; and Founder and Chief Consciousness Connector of DoseConnect™, a first-of-its-kind company blending organizational strategy, systems thinking, and talent acquisition in the psychedelic space.
Farnan shares her personal journey with psychedelics, discussing her experiences with psilocybin, ayahuasca, and 5-MeO-DMT, and how the last few years of her life have been focused on slowing down and integrating those experiences. She discusses the current state of the psychedelic industry, including downsizing and company closures, but also opportunities from networking, community engagement, and volunteering. She believes that while options may not be clear now, they will be there in the future, and may be jobs we never anticipated. So get to know companies now, and pay close attention with good discernment – not everything is as it appears.
She discusses her experiences with mentors and coaches; how psychedelic journeys and integration build onto each other; the importance of journaling; the need for patience as the industry grows; her book and the concept of conscious leadership over toxic leadership; and the beauty of embracing the openness we experience after a psychedelic experience: Can we use what we’ve learned to reprogram what we’re taught about life, invest in ourselves, let go of dissenting and limiting voices, and truly redefine what success (and happiness) means to us?
Notable Quotes
“It’s not always about the substance or the plant medicine. It is underlying about the healing and being more conscious as a leader and as a human being and as a contributor to the community that we live in. And so, for me, that’s what all of this is really grounded in. As much as I’m an advocate, I’m also very much aware that not everyone can leverage these medicines, and a lot of people are still scared and don’t quite know and maybe they can’t handle it and all of that. And that’s totally fine. …I just look at life as being psychedelic, and there’s so many things that you can do in your daily life that create this beautiful experience that don’t require any other things to contribute to that.”
“When you do this exercise, the invitation is to give yourself full permission to let go of everything that you’ve ever heard from anybody else. So, like, get out of the shoulds or your parents say this or your partner thinks that, or your best friends think this or your boss says that. Let all that shit go and just drop into truly your own heart space. Like, what does success look and feel like to me? If money were not an option, what would I be doing? How would I be spending my days? And the energy that I want to feel and be in – less so even, like, the tasks and the doing stuff, but it’s like, how do you want to feel? Because that helps you to then think through opportunities that will be in alignment of you achieving that feeling every day.”
“Understand the energetics, because if you’re going to be leading from a place of fear in your life, it’s only going to attract more of that stuff. If you’re really leading from a place of faith and looking at this as an opening for something new in your life, then that is when something new will show up. You have to be in that energetic vibe.”
This episode – the last of the many recorded at Psychedelic Science 2023 – may ruffle some feathers, as Wheal is very outspoken and opinionated, focusing on what he spoke about at the conference: the pitfalls of the psychedelic movement. While his outlook is negative, he speaks with humor, and these shadow aspects are issues we need to be talking about: how the nature of capitalism and returning profits to shareholders affects the concept of set and setting; how easy it is to prescribe ketamine and the puppy mill clinics popping up everywhere; how innovators are racing to the bottom to get ahead; the designer drug epidemic likely leading us to a Prozac Nation 2.0; digital narcissism, Instagram “Shamans,” and the dangers of cults; chemists trying to take the experience out of the drug; the overuse of psychedelics creating super egos; and much more.
While he believes the hype and excitement of the psychedelic renaissance is leading us towards a trough of dissolution and that people aren’t turning their amazing experiences into net positives anywhere near enough, he believes that fewer people using psychedelics less often and more intensely – with initiatory practices, intentions, integration, and honest self-reflection – will help us all climb out of our egos and move towards a healthier society. There is hope, but we need to honestly look at all the shadow aspects in order to move towards it.
Notable Quotes
“I think that ironically, the Prozac Nation 2.0 model, the medicalization of the psychedelic experience: on the one hand, it will absolutely wring most of the magic out of the experience that has been the whole point and premise from the Eleusinian mysteries, from ancient shamanistic traditions – the whole point was the magic. Prozac Nation 2.0 will defang that, will denature that, but on the other hand, it will protect it from some of its worst excesses and abuses. I think the bottom of the trough will be resolved for psychedelic cults. …It feels like there is a rush to fill the void of fundamentally fuckwit Instagram ‘Shamans’ thinking that they have some unique and profound message, and that their insights, their metaphysics, their cosmology, their practices are somehow worthy of instantiation and followers.”
“These days, the worst people are doing the best drugs. We have a bunch of entitled, upper middle class to ultra high net worth, bougie white folks wearing big dumb hats, tripping balls on the best, most sacred substances ever available to humans, and not changing their orientations or their attitudes one bit. And they’ve just become party favors. …It’s all the beautiful people, and I haven’t yet seen one empty their bank accounts, put on sackcloth, take up a begging bowl, rework their lives, dedicate them to charity. I’ve seen lots of: ‘We’re going to set up a VC fund,’ or ‘Where’s the next amazing party that we’re jetting or boating off to?’”
“After 5-MeO-DMT, we are out of bullets. If this isn’t enough to cause us to drop to our knees and weep with gratitude for the precious burden and blessing of our incarnated humanity, and then get the fuck back up and help the least of our brothers and sisters to figure this out without further distraction or delay, we don’t have anything else. We have used up all the silver bullets, because we’ve just been praying and spraying.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Federico Seragnoli: coordinator of the ALPS Foundation, psychologist who works with patients undergoing compassionate use treatments with psychedelics, and Founder of the ALPS Conference.
This year, the ALPS Conference (which stands for Awareness Lectures on Psychedelic Science) takes place Oct. 27 – 29 at the Bâtiment des Forces Motrices in Geneva – a prime location for a conference due to Switzerland’s legality around psychedelics, where any citizen can apply for psilocybin or LSD therapy if they fall into the category of ‘treatment-resistant.’ Seragnoli discusses how the conference was originally inspired by an article on the MAPS blog about how to be a psychedelic researcher; and talks about its humble beginnings, its new location, and why it’s moved across the country each year. The conference features names like Rick Doblin and Michael Mithoefer, but he’s most excited about the smaller size of the event and the panel discussions, which gives attendees a chance to ask questions and hear some real conversations.
He discusses the vibrant field of psychedelic therapy and research in Switzerland; the importance of compassionate use and the criteria physicians need to be able to use it; the impact of students creating psychedelic associations at their universities; and Seragnoli’s new research: seeing if there is a link between cognitive science and a conceptualization of science – if you can model consciousness off neuroscience, can you model it off how you feel?
Notable Quotes
“When we deal with psychedelic therapy, with people coming as patients, we have to find ways to let them know what they are going to do and to let them integrate what happened in their own mind. So one thing that you actually do every time when you prepare people for that is to just straightaway try to understand how they perceive themselves as cognitive agents. In other terms, it would be like how do they feel about being a conscious human being? What is their narrative, what is the story that they tell themselves around what is their own consciousness, like their own naive definition of consciousness? And then basically, you try to get their own worldview on this, then you try to inform that worldview with more [pragmatic] and useful ways of seeing it so they can better use it to better regulate themselves.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Louie Schwartzberg: renowned filmmaker known for the award-winning documentary, “Fantastic Fungi”; and now, director of the new film, “Gratitude Revealed.”
He talks about his path to photography and filmmaking and how psychedelics were a huge inspiration – how his techniques of slowing down, speeding up, and zooming in were ways to capture the invisible aspects of reality – that which is “too slow, too fast, too small, and too vast for the human eye,” but is always there. He discusses the premiere of “Fantastic Fungi” and the waves it spread through the psychedelic space; The Louie Channel, his new streaming channel that will feature all his work in 4k and the work of other curated artists and friends; and the clinical trial he’s involved in to see if participants have better results in the treatment of their alcohol use disorder by watching his imagery set to music on an 80-inch screen while on psilocybin – research that hopefully leads to the concept of being able to prescribe images and music to people based on specific criteria.
He discusses his new film, “Gratitude Revealed,” which explores the power of gratitude: making it a daily practice (and especially a post-psychedelic integration practice), how resilience is one of the best benefits from practicing gratitude, and how easy it is to stop a rumination spiral by simply finding something to be grateful for. He also talks about the blessing of being a photographer and always thinking of beauty; how psychedelics make people more environmentally conscious; tripping with parents; how a shared love of nature could be the bridge between opposing sides; and how the best way to deal with the climate crisis is to start in your own yard.
Notable Quotes
“We’re talking about psychedelics on your podcast, but the truth is, I think the imagery I want to create for your community, this community, is exactly the same as I would do for a four-year-old or a five-year-old. How beautiful is that? It’s about wonder and awe. It’s about being open-minded.” “The politicians, they understand how to press that fear button. They go right to the cultural differences and press the abortion button or the gun thing or whatever it might be, and all the lies and all that. I don’t want to even spend another second talking about that, other than [to say] we have to be conscious that pressing the fear button is easy to do because that’s survival, and you get an immediate reaction. The films I’m trying to make and what we’re discussing here is making people laugh, making people cry, making people fall in love. That takes a little more talent than pointing a gun at you. …Beauty and love and gratitude is the emotional energy we can employ to overcome fear.”
“It’s a great tool. It’s not like we have to practice meditation, become a Yogi for like ten years or 20 years of practice. It’s something you can do immediately. It’s not like a meditation thing that you have to become an expert in. It’s like, how easy is it just to ask yourself in the moment: what can I be grateful for? Pretty easy.”
They explore the relationship between Judaism and psychedelics, with Margolin sharing her experiences growing up in a Hindu-Jewish family; her personal journey with her Jewish identity; and how her use of psychedelics has deepened her life. She talks about the significance of Jewish holidays and how holiday traditions connect them to nature and themselves in a very psychedelic way; the importance of intentionality; the beauty in dancing through an uncomfortable ayahuasca experience; the Jewish Psychedelic Summit; whether or not ancestors were using substances (and does that matter?), and why being in Israel feels so different – and psychedelic.
Margolin is an instructor in our new course, “Navigating Psychedelics: Jewish Informed Perspectives,” where she will be leading discussions on setting sacred time and space, particularly focusing on the significance of Shabbat and the energetic frequencies that are at play during certain holidays. The 9-week course begins next week – October 10 – so sign up now!
Notable Quotes
“I don’t think set and setting has to only apply to doing a psychedelic trip. I think it really applies to life in general: like, what are you bringing to a situation and what’s the situation bringing to you?”
“The term, ‘Yisrael’ means to wrestle with God, and I think so much of the Jewish experience is this kind of complicated relationship with the creator. …I think that’s what it is to be Jewish, is to really be seeking out this relationship. …Psychedelics offer us this opportunity to really dig into ourselves and be seekers in this way, and I find that there’s a lot of spiritual journeying and impulse in the Jewish community.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Ethan Nadelmann: author, speaker, Founder and former Executive Director of Drug Policy Alliance, host of the PSYCHOACTIVE podcast, and one of the leading voices in drug policy reform and harm reduction.
Nadelmann shares his journey from Princeton University to founding Drug Policy Alliance, to working with George Soros, encouraging Gary Johnson to push cannabis legalization, and interacting with prominent figures like Milton Friedman and Grover Norquist. He explores the motivations behind the drug war, the massive growth of incarcerations it led to, why the US spread its war on drugs abroad even when it went against our best interests, and, thankfully, the progress made in fighting the drug war – particularly with cannabis and psychedelics.
And he discusses much more: the banning of drug testing kits; the damages of our slow learning curve against the idea of a safe supply; the risks of under-prescribing opioids for people who actually need them; how libertarians, the right, and left are all starting to become against the drug war for the same reasons; why cigarette smokers should all switch to vaping; the concept of needing to pass a test at the pharmacy to prove you understand (and won’t abuse) medication; and some strong arguments for decriminalization as an incremental step. And he asks some pretty important questions that we can all simmer on for a bit: how do we find a balance between helping people and not opening the rest of society up to harm? How do we challenge abuse in a way that doesn’t hurt future harm reduction efforts? And how do we incentivize people into acting in their own best interests?
Notable Quotes
“The drug war resulted in the unnecessary arrests of tens of millions of Americans, the unnecessary incarceration of millions of Americans (oftentimes for very long periods of time), hundreds of thousands of people dying in this country with HIV/AIDS unnecessarily, tens of thousands dying of overdose unnecessarily. That was the drug war.”
“If I could snap my fingers and all of the 30, 35 million American cigarette smokers in the country today, or all of the 1.1 billion smokers around the world were to suddenly stop smoking cigarettes, and all of them were to take up vaping (the e cigarettes); …it would represent one of the greatest advances in public health in U.S. and global history, because the risks of smoking are so dramatically, dramatically greater than the risks of consuming nicotine in non-combustible forms.”
“You look at people pursuing that type of legal course of action where they claim it’s about helping bring attention, but in fact it’s having exactly the opposite results. Yes, it’s important to fix these things, but the methods and ways you go about it are incredibly important. It’s just like the same thing when you had that case involving the therapist in the MAPS training program who did stuff that was sexually inappropriate, etc. And on the one hand, you definitely need people to bring attention to that, and more credit to them for bringing attention to those abuses. On the other hand, one has to have the basic realization that that happens in all areas of psychotherapy. You can’t eliminate this stuff. It’s human nature, it’s humankind. You can minimize the incidence of it, you can bring attentions to the abuses, but make sure that what you’re advocating as the fix is not leading to doing more harm.”
Last year, Joe attended his first Burning Man, and sadly, we didn’t hear much about it. In this episode, recorded just a few days after Joe returned from his second outing of nearly 12 days on the playa, Victoria changes that, asking Joe all the burning questions we all want to know.
He talks about preparing for Burning Man and the numerous obstacles he and his partner, Ali, encountered on their very slow journey there; the media’s interpretation of the rain and mud vs. the reality of being there in the middle of it all; the bogus reports of an ebola outbreak and disaster zone surrounded by FEMA officials (and was that all a prank by Burners?); the debate over the environmental impact of such a massive event, and more.
And he talks about the many joys of Burning Man: how, despite the weather and needing to remain at camp more, the community, abundance, embracing of all that is weird, and passion to share and make the best of it all made this a better year for him in many ways. He learned the importance of patience, avoiding a frantic state, and fighting panic with positive vibes, which was made infinitely more easy with the Big Krab Car: the art car Ali built and they drove around, DJing on all week.
Notable Quotes
“We did some neighborhood block party/dance parties, we were just giving away some stuff, we had some amazing DJs. I think I, at one point, did a 5 and half hour DJ set from my phone through these gigantic sound systems, and people were over the moon about it. So it’s about: how do we fight that panic with positive, welcoming, generous vibes when we can? That’s how we did it. I know it was really hard for some people, but I’ve actually not seen anybody that I know that went that didn’t have the most amazing time at Burning Man. It was better for me this year than last year in a lot of ways.”
“That was actually the first thing I saw: the TMZ article. ‘Oh ok, this actually might make the news worldwide. Fascinating,’ which actually made the experience really interesting, to know that all the world’s eyes were on us. It made us want to show up better and do a better job.”
“Being held by a small community in your camp: if you find, luckily, a group of people that are just amazing to be with, like my camp, it’s just shocking and beautiful to be held and loved in that way and accepted in that way for a week and a half or however long it is. It’s life-shattering, life-changing, and so good. That was probably one of the biggest joys. And then just expanding your circles of friends after that’s your baseline, and you meet all their friends and it just balloons out to all these amazing new networks and connections.”
In the first-ever episode of Hyphae Leaks, Mary and Reggie sit down with Joe Moore and share their backgrounds, impetus for launching a psychedelic tell-all podcast, and what listeners can expect from the first season.
Want to dig in on some of the topics discussed today? Quick links:
Catch Season 1 of Hyphae Leaks streaming NOW wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every third Wednesday until Dec. 20. Rate, review, and subscribe!
In this episode, David interviews East Forest: Portland, OR-based producer, podcaster, ceremony guide, and musician, specializing in ambient, electronic, contemporary classical, and indie pop music largely to guide listeners through deep journeys.
Forest discusses his live performances and influences; how his music pairs with journeys and specific psychedelics; the difference in the connection and vibe from a live performance vs. a recording; the difference between single-artist music created specifically for sessions vs. Spotify playlists; the inhumanity of generative music; his Journey Space online music and journey platform; and the challenges of making money in a time when music is more prevalent than ever, but also more in-the-background and diluted.
He talks a lot about sound itself: the role of rhythm and sound in communication and personal transformation; how richer overtones and increased layers of sound increase effects; research into very low pulsating tones, and how more synthesized sound and the growth of AI has created a yearning for more authentic, imperfect sounds.
His newest album was just released August 18: “Music For The Deck of The Titanic,” an homage to the musicians who spent their last few hours playing songs for passengers amidst the chaos and tragedy – an album Forest sees as an offering to the chaotic moment we’re all in.
Notable Quotes
“I’m trying to make music that is intended to come directly into the foreground and pass the foreground into the place where you merge with the music, and the music becomes the sonic architecture by which you are having an experience inside, and perhaps become it, synesthetically. So I want to go way beyond it being in the background. I actually want it to be even more than a guide. It’s almost like you synthesize with it as one: like who’s guiding who? There can be a magic to those experiences that’s far beyond anything I’ve ever experienced in anything else in life, and that’s really the North Star that I want to be in service to. I don’t think, even, that that’s something that I can concoct or conceive totally. It’s more opening myself up to some kind of magic that’s way beyond anything I could decide.”
“What I love about humans’ creativity is the fact that we can be creative and we can celebrate that by making things like art. When I’m surprised by art is the best feeling. And so giving people support to create: as of now, we can’t beat that. You’re just asking yourself: how far can we go in this celebration and in this experience? I have never experienced a generative experience that’s even anywhere close to where we can go with one person sharing their humanity in a way that’s beautiful. If it’s innovative, even better.”
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Join us in the Netherlands for the Kiyumí Psilocybin Retreat & Vital Training: September 6-11, 2023. Click here to learn more and apply!East Forest performing
In this episode, Joe interviews Satya Thallam: Policy Advisor at the international law firm, Arnold & Porter; and longtime policy expert based in Washington, D.C. who previously served in senior roles at both the White House and the U.S. Senate.
Thallam was the lead author and negotiator of the Federal Right to Try Act, which grants terminally ill patients access to experimental therapies and substances that have completed Phase I testing but have not yet been approved by the FDA. He discusses its intricacies and benefits, how psychedelics were not a focus but were always obvious, whether or not it allows people to grow their own mushrooms, and more. He talks abut the implementation of the first Federal legalization of hemp under the Farm Bill in 2018, breaking down the history and detail of how it came to be, and why a difference of .3% in weight truly matters when establishing law.
He discusses the changing landscape of politicians and psychedelics; how local action creates a culture of inspiring Washington; the internal fight between different agencies and the endless lobbying it takes to get things done; how one needs to cater their argument by who is listening; risk assessment and judgment-proof operations; the concern over whether or not we got everything wrong with cannabis; and why we will likely begin seeing a lot of coalitions popping up in the psychedelic space.
Notable Quotes
“All of this, even just the traditional FDA regulatory rubric, is about a trade-off between type one and type two errors. And you can set policy in such a way that there’s 0% chance of any harm, but then you forgo any possible benefits from that. There is no drug anywhere that has 0% risk. Even Advil has risk, right? It’s all about dosage, it’s all about use, it’s about other conditions that you may have, it’s about tailoring it to the appropriate indication. …We make these trade-offs all the time, and I just happen to fall more in the camp that a greater degree of those trade-offs should be at an individual level to the degree possible than establishing a macro floor or ceiling that people have to respond to, because you may forego some incredible benefits like we’re seeing – especially in some of the psychedelics here.”
“I’m reminded of that Simpsons episode where Homer just says: ‘When will people learn democracy just doesn’t work?’ Like, this is the necessary mess of democratic institutions, right? They’re not structured to listen to the single smartest person in the room. That’s by design. That’s a feature, not a bug. But it also means progress can be slow, slower than we want it to be. …I’m newish. I’m sort of a noob to the psychedelics community, but I’m not new to policy. I think the folks that you talk to that are in your circle, that listen to this show, should be pretty encouraged. I think overwhelmingly, things are going in the direction that you would want them to.”
In this episode, recorded in-person at Psychedelic Science 2023, Kyle interviews Senator for the Mexican Green Party, Alejandra Lagunes.
Lagunes is the first Senator in Mexico to promote the use of psychedelics, and has been organizing open parliaments to foster collaboration between researchers, scientists, politicians, and Indigenous people, culminating in a groundbreaking decriminalization initiative to decriminalize psilocybin and psilocin from list 1 to list 3 (meaning they could be prescribed), create a new chapter for entheogens (and move mushrooms there), build an economically beneficial framework for Indigenous people, protect ancestor knowledge by law, and make big bioconservation moves with changes to environmental laws.
She discusses her personal journey with depression, anxiety, and a life-saving ayahuasca journey; how Covid uncovered a crisis in meaning and an openness to talk about mental health; the need for accessibility and safety in psychedelics against challenges in politics and policy implementation; our mental health crisis and the need for innovation, education, and overcoming stigma; the influence of US drug control policies on international regulations; the power of storytelling; and why we need to go back to our origins.
Notable Quotes
“The world means to go back to the beginning, to the point of beginning. And I like to think that this psychedelic revolution or renaissance is actually going back to the beginning, to the essence. And that space: you have to talk about environment, you have to talk about the planet, you have to talk about ancestors and their relationship with the planet and with the community. …The revolution is going back to that space, outside and inside. It’s like going back to the origin.”
“The medicine is as important as the places they grow in. The medicine is in the ecosystem. You have heard about the mycelium. You can grow a mushroom in your house. That’s great. But the mycelium in those places: it’s for them, the medicine. The rain, the thunder, and the earth, the soil where the mushrooms are grown: it’s the medicine. So we have to protect those areas.”
“You know what I think all the countries should do? The World Health Organization (the WHO) has these lists of substances, and as countries, we can ask our governments to ask for a revision of those lists. So we have to start. Like, there are many ways we have to work the decriminalization. I mean, the psychedelics shouldn’t be in that list, and they are in an international list. So my question is why governments aren’t moving that list?”
She shares her journey of how she became involved in the psychedelic space through her mother, and her personal experience as a patient in a clinical trial on psilocybin for the treatment of anorexia – a much more common and deadly affliction than most people realize. She discusses her involvement with the various psychedelic gatherings surrounding Davos and the World Economic Forum, as well as the work she’s doing with Tabula Rasa and some of their clients seeking to expand insurance coverage to psychedelic-assisted therapy.
She discusses the Synthesis Institute’s recent struggles that shook up the psychedelic space, what they’re doing to save the company, how Retreat Guru has helped them, and the implications for the wider psychedelic movement. And she talks about much more: the legality and vetting process for training in Oregon and Colorado; truffles in the Netherlands vs. classic psilocybin; the idea of alcohol as poison and ‘Cali sober,’ and how can we all be more collaborative and not sling mud at each other?
Notable Quotes
“The limitations are really when you’ve been in therapy, you’ve seen a nutritionist for five, ten years; you have all the tools there, you know what you’re supposed to do (this can be applied to things like depression or anxiety or any other mental issue), but those neural pathways that have been connecting and forming with those negative thought patterns for decades: for people, they’re not going to undo themselves. It takes more motivation than I have ever had to break my cycles, and I really felt stuck. I don’t think I was going to ever get better than I was at the time without something like psychedelics.”
“It could set the temperature for a lot of other psychedelic organizations and movements to say, ‘This isn’t working and let me show you why. If this goes up in flames, then what else is possible?’ And the space is already greatly under-funded and financiers look at this and they’re like, ‘I’m not touching that with a ten foot pole. This is too early, or this is too risky, or X, Y, and Z.’ So that was really the scary part of the first few weeks of what this meant for the movement at large: if we can’t pull it off, then who can?”
“This whole thing has been like a great big psychedelic trip: use our learning towards being a facilitator, towards facilitating ourselves through this chaos. There has to be chaos within to give birth to a dancing star, I think is what Nietzsche said. We’ll be that dancing star.”
He talks about how an early interest in lucid dreaming sent him down a psychedelic path, and how, as his interest in mushrooms has grown, he’s watched the culture shift from a narrative of mycophobia to one of appreciation and interest. With FreshCap Mushrooms and The Mushroom Show, he aims to provide much needed education around this vast and mysterious world of fungi.
He talks about the thriving psilocybin scene in Jamaica, and how, through filming a documentary there, he learned how much communities still don’t know about mushrooms, how much tourism supports the country, and how much of a special vibe Jamaica has for psilocybin retreats.
And he discusses much more: why lion’s mane should help with concussions and TBIs; indications mushrooms could heal, from long Covid to paralysis; concerns over over-medicalization; why Terence McKennas’ ideas weren’t as crazy as many thought; visiting mushroom shops in Canada; the secret language of mushrooms; where psychedelic people can start to learn about functional mushrooms; and why, if he could embody any mushroom, it’d be cordyceps.
Notable Quotes
“We draw these arbitrary lines as human beings between: psychedelic mushrooms are over here, functional mushrooms are over here, and poisonous mushrooms are over here. But the mushrooms don’t do that. It’s just a spectrum where they’re creating all these crazy compounds for all these different reasons and they just happen to interact with our bodies in different ways.”
“It’s not just that they change your consciousness or make you see colors or make you laugh or whatever; they do seem to have this ability to dig out very specific things or show you things in a different way that can have really profound impacts on your life afterwards. And that’s something I think we still haven’t figured out, is like: how the hell did mushrooms do that? How do they know how to find exactly what you might need to be dealing with? Not always, but they have this ability to be like, ‘Hey, here’s something you haven’t thought about in 20 years. This is important. You should look at this.’ I still can’t get over how amazing that is and how that works.”
“I thought, ‘Okay, the reason why people are going down here is just because they forgot to make it illegal and it just provided this weird niche opportunity in the world for people to go and experience mushrooms.’ But it’s way more than that. Jamaica is a very special, magical place. …The fact that they grow there, it’s just a vibe. It’s a whole thing, and I can see why. I can see why people would want to go there for psilocybin therapy or the psilocybin retreat experience, just because number one: it takes you away from your normal kind of day-to-day life, but there is something special about sitting in front of the ocean as the sun is going down in a beautiful location and feeling that profound impact of mushrooms at the same time. It’s a very special place.”
In this episode, recorded on the eve of MAPS’ Psychedelic Science 2023, Kyle interviews MAPS’ Founder and President, Rick Doblin, Ph.D.
He begins with an overview of the fast-approaching (and largest ever) psychedelics conference, emphasizing its significant growth, many features, and bipartisan opening ceremony, then discusses MAPS’ soon-to-be-released confirmatory Phase III data on MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, which should set the stage for legal MDMA and the increasing need for trained psychedelic therapists.
As the FDA is requiring studies on adolescents, he discusses this sensitive issue and questions why it’s so controversial, since teenage years are often closer to both trauma and a more malleable brain, Indigenous traditions certainly didn’t have age limits, and honest drug education – something that is absolutely necessary to fight the backlash against this quickly growing field – teaches us that it’s not the substance; it’s our relationship to it. Could not having these rites of passage be hurting us?
He also discusses the natural vs. synthetic conflict; breathwork; whether or not cannabis is truly damaging to young minds; Federal rescheduling vs. state rescheduling; why it’s controversial to give therapists MDMA in training; Gul Dolen’s work with reopening critical periods; psychedelics in couples therapy; and much more.
Notable Quotes
“We have been just astonished at the fact that we now have 11,500 people registered for this conference, and we, in our wildest dreams, thought maybe we’d get up to 10,000. But even that was just like a wild dream. The largest psychedelic conference that’s ever happened was our Psychedelic Science in 2017. …Now we’re almost four times as big. It’s a whole different cultural moment, and what I didn’t fully anticipate is how this conference would be like a magnet for the entire community.”
“I think the proper training of psychedelic therapists is different than the proper training of psychiatrists to administer any kind of pharmacological drugs, because for psychiatry; when they give SSRIs or they give other kinds of medications or they give electroconvulsive therapy or whatever: those are meant to be the treatments. In our case, the treatment is really the human relationship – the therapy – and then the psychedelics make the therapy more effective. And so it makes the most sense for people that are interested in doing psychedelic therapy, for them to have the experience of the psychedelics themselves. As we start to scale, there’s a lot of experienced trauma therapists, but they might not be experienced psychonauts, and it’s hard to describe what a drug does.”
“When you think about these rites of passage, that when you’re an adolescent or early in college, those are the ripe times for people to sort of explore: who are they? Where do they fit into the larger world? I think in many Indigenous cultures, that’s the time of initiation for a lot of people, so I think we have hurt ourselves tremendously. Now, you hear this always about marijuana: ‘kids [have] developing brains and they shouldn’t ever try marijuana.’ And I think the thing is that overuse is a problem. Daily use before you go to school: all that is a problem. It makes it difficult to learn, things like that. But we tend to make sweeping statements like ‘never use.’”
In this episode, Joe interviews Sarko Gergerian, MS, MHC, CARC: a police peer support, community outreach, and health-fitness officer; founding member of the Community and Law Enforcement Assisted Recovery Program (C.L.E.A.R.); and psychotherapist trained in ketamine- and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.
Any regular listener of the show should be familiar with how passionately Joe is against the drug war and the resulting policing of what many of us feel should be legal, so this in-person conversation with a police officer who seems to mostly be on our side is pretty refreshing to hear.
Gergerian discusses his entry into the force in his 30s, and what it was like to bring in a healthy “why is this illegal?” viewpoint on drug use and personal agency vs. the slow moving attitudes he saw in much of law enforcement. He talks about how working nightclub security taught him about safe spaces; the problems with officers not proactively moving on actionable information and building relationships with communities; and the very philosophy behind law enforcement: what do they hope to accomplish, do they want to make real change, and do they believe in the laws they’re enforcing?
And they discuss so much more: the need for diversity, cultural competency, and broadness in perspective; the criminalization of self-directed behavior; the effect critical incidents have on officers; drug war paranoia, legitimate concerns over hotlines and sensitive data, and psychedelic culture’s relationships with police; creating a culture of harm reduction within law enforcement, and what it might look like for police officers to receive psychedelic therapy.
Notable Quotes
“I think we, as a country, are more powerful by being diverse, and that includes diverse ways of thinking and that includes diverse ways of coming at challenges. And the more diverse our police departments are – I believe this with all my heart – the stronger we are for it. The stronger policing is for it. And I’m talking all types of diversity. …If we can diversify not only ways of thinking in police, but have a diversity of education and background in policing, then we’ll see some magic happen. Then we’ll see some creativity in how we respond to these very human problems that we all experience.”
“Keeping people alive has to be primary. If you don’t have a person that’s alive, you don’t have the possibility of recovery. So we’re tasked with watching out for one another, making sure people are alive, and whatever relationship they have with intoxicating substances: that’s their personal story, and they’re going to get to their healing journey and their recovery from any out-of-balance relationship in due time – their time.”
“I’ve been trained in [ketamine] and I was able to access it, so I’ve experienced it [at] very low dose (intermuscular). Magical. Magical. And the after effect for a couple of weeks, the reprieve, the relaxed feeling: it was beautiful. It was beautiful. And why shouldn’t our officers who are getting dark be able to access that before they’re pegged with depression? …Why shouldn’t they be able to access that before they put the barrel of the gun in their mouth, by themselves in their police cruiser? Why? Because you need a diagnostic label to access self-care? It makes absolutely no sense to me.”
In this episode, David interviews Dr. Gabrielle Lehigh: Co-Founder and Managing Director of Psychedelic Grad, a web-based community serving as an educational and career hub for up-and-coming psychedelic professionals; and the host of the related podcast, “Curious to Serious,” where she speaks with students and professionals about the path they took to land in the psychedelic field.
Lehigh recently earned her Ph.D. with research on something not many are looking at: the stories behind powerful and transformative psychedelic experiences specifically at music events, based on 38 interviews and over 500 surveys mostly collected at day-long festivals in the southern United States. While the goal was largely data collection in support of the clear potential for therapeutic benefit in using psychedelics in recreational settings (as many of us who have experienced this can attest), she was surprised to learn how many people still blindly trust dealers; how much festival security can affect safety; how the community often makes more of a difference than the music itself; and how many parallels exist between colder clinical models of psychedelic-assisted therapy and the completely open festival experience.
She discusses how she found her way from environmental justice to psychedelics; what people are most looking for on Psychedelic Grad; why she chose to use the word “transformative” in her research; what music she has had her best experiences with; why psychonauts shouldn’t forget about Pink Floyd; and much more.
Notable Quotes
“I went to my advisor at the time and I said, ‘Listen, I want to change the direction that I’ve been going in.’ I’m like, ‘I either want to study the anthropology of space colonization,’ (which is so out there) ‘or I want to study psychedelics.’ And my advisor was like, ‘Neither one of those is anywhere near what you were studying before. What happened?’”
“I can be somewhat frustrated sometimes when, from the clinical setting, there’s this idea that recreational use has no benefit for people, because I’ve seen it from other people’s experiences, [and] there have been experiences that I’ve had in those types of recreational settings that have been incredibly beneficial for me. Even when I started taking psychedelics, even though I was taking them at home; it wasn’t clinical, it wasn’t medical, it wasn’t necessarily therapeutic as defined by ‘therapeutic,’ so it was still considered recreational. So I was just really frustrated in seeing repeated notions that recreational isn’t necessarily beneficial. And so I set out to be like: well, if it’s not beneficial, then maybe we should go check it out and see what’s really going on.”
“When we think about the clinical setting, when we look at the MAPS protocol and everything, music is a part of it. But in the interviews, people talked about the value of live music. There’s something special and something unique about music being created in the moment, and you, as a spectator, are part of the creation of that music, and there’s something really special going on there. …It’s the music, and it’s not just the music as the music, it’s this live production of the music. There’s some type of magic in it.”
In this episode, Kyle interviews the Reverend Dr. Brian Rajcok, Lead Pastor at St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Avon, Connecticut, who recently completed his Ph.D. in pastoral counseling.
Rajcok dives into the intersection of spirituality, religion, mysticism, and how psychedelics bring these topics together, discussing a transformative peyote ceremony and the awe-inspiring moments of surrender, connection, and divine presence that left a lasting impact on him and deepened his connection to God. And he talks about his recently completed dissertation that was inspired by it all: “The Lived Experience of Professional Mental Health Clinicians With Spiritually Significant Psychedelic Experiences,” which he created to gauge the relationship between religious spiritual commitment, tolerance, and multicultural counselor competency. He shares stories from the study and reflections on how these experiences have changed the way involved clinicians work.
And he discusses much more in the realm of psychedelics and religion: why he pursued pastoral counseling and how psychedelics come into play; the balance between tradition and reason and spiritual commitment and tolerance; the legal and regulatory considerations of religious psychedelic use; the concept of a faith quadrilateral; the need for psychedelic experiences in counseling training programs; the big question of ‘when is it religion and when is it mental health care?’; and how the future of psychedelic spirituality could be humanity’s biggest evolution.
Notable Quotes
“There were moments in the night where I felt like I was looking at the fire, having a feeling of being in Hell. And then there was this shift of when I said, ‘Okay, if I’m in Hell, accept that.’ And then I accepted that, and then there was this total emotional shift to like, ‘Wow, now I’m in Heaven!’ It was just this beautiful experience of accepting the worst, and then once that work was done, it shifted into this beautiful experience. That was a very profound moment for me.”
“People who are more religiously committed tend to have a reputation for being less tolerant, and people who are the most tolerant tend to have a reputation of being the least committed. But I think that what we see from people who have (whether it’s psychedelic experiences or naturally occurring) mystical experiences, there’s a level of religious spiritual commitment and tolerance at the same time that increases. So that was one thing that I wanted to explore.”
“That was another really profound one: people who experienced different spirit guides; experiences of the divine; encounters with deceased relatives was another one; there was someone who was not a Christian who had an experience with Jesus. So there’s a lot of these profound encounters. …And they’re so healing that it’s obvious that there’s something good going on here. It’s not just your imagination running wild, there’s a real [connection] to the spirit realm or to whatever other dimensions of reality, and it’s such a mystery, but it’s clear that there’s something real going on.”
In this episode, David interviews Dr. Rosalind Watts: famed clinical psychologist, former clinical lead on Imperial College London’s first Psilocybin for Depression trial, and Founder of ACER Integration.
She discusses the awakening she had after having a child; her work at Imperial College and realizing the importance of staying in touch with patients; the challenges of balancing her work with being a mother; her ACER integration model and the interconnectedness of trees in a forest; how the Watts Connectedness Scale works (and David fills it out); and how much the outside-the-hype surrounding pieces matter – the therapy, the therapeutic relationship, the lessons learned, and the work done to integrate it all.
And she talks about another moment of awakening, at last year’s Psych Summit conference, where capitalism’s obsession with profit-over-care frameworks and “magic bullet” and “brain reset” narratives was on full display, which fully enforced what she hopes for in the future: a world where we embrace non-clinical, ceremonial, and nature-based practices; with healing centers (psychedelic and non); supportive communities; infrastructure around conflict resolution and restorative justice; and a shift towards collectivism and collaboration – and how that all starts by finding our psychedelic elders.
Notable Quotes
“I’m a tourist. I’m listening, I’m learning, but I know that I don’t have deep roots and that there are people that do. So it ties into that thing about finding the elders: as we find our elders for conflict resolution and for therapy and for healing and for psychedelic healing, I also hope we find the elders who are deeply rooted in Indigenous traditions, from Indigenous traditions all over the world, and that they can teach us and teach me, if they will, those stories and those ways, and that then, my daughter: if she can learn through her life, she can grow up with it in a way that I didn’t – so she can have deep roots in that tradition.”
“When we’re on the riverbank and we’ve had our cup of tea and we’ve warmed by the fire, we can look upstream and think: all the people that are coming down the river, what might they need? And then we can kind of run and chuck them the blankets or a chocolate biscuit or the things that they might need, or just shout to them and say, ‘Hey, you’re doing great. It’s crazy out there, there’s a riverbank soon. You can come and sit and join us.’ So it’s like, it’s also about thinking of what’s next for us, but also thinking of all the people that are coming and how we can support each other on the rapids as well.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Oliver Carlin, Founder of Curative Mushrooms, a grow kit solution company designed to produce mushrooms of one’s choosing within 30 days with little effort and no growing experience.
Carlin tells his personal story of 20 years in the Navy to a 7g psilocybin journey and the work of perfecting these grow bags; how a grow bag works; how easy it can be to grow your own mushrooms; the advantages of growing your own mushrooms vs. buying them; the legalities of grow kits and how he has been able to do this; steps growers can take to reduce their legal risks; the variety of people benefitting from mushrooms (especially in the veteran community); and how growing your own mushrooms seems to make the experience more curated and special.
Curative Mushrooms recently hired someone to create new strains for them every month, they do bimonthly live Q&As for people interested in growing, and they ship a bonus mycology book with each kit that shows how to study spores. They offer growing kits for Lion’s Mane, Turkey Tail, and Shiitake mushrooms, but his most popular option is the “All-in-One Happy Mushrooms for Sad People” kit.
Notable Quotes
“I do believe there’s always going to be a market for growers, because it’s just fun. And you can create your own strains of mushrooms if you really get into it. I mean, you can even name strains after yourself. And plus, isn’t it cool to grow your own, because now you have super fresh mushrooms, you know exactly what it is, how fresh, it’s going to be the most potent because you just grew it, and I’ll be honest, when you grow your own, it feels like the mushrooms were, like, grown specifically for you. I don’t know, there’s something special about them.”
“I didn’t take mushrooms because I was specifically doing it to overcome depression or anything like that. The reason I took mushrooms was: it was like answering questions about the world that I’ve always wanted to know. I’ve always had a problem with everything I’ve been told, and this was my opportunity to finally get some type of an answer for things that I didn’t understand. And that was my reason. And it completely changed my life.”
In this episode, Alexa interviews Rachel Clark: Education Manager for DanceSafe, a public health nonprofit specializing in serving people who use drugs and their communities.
As we move into the prime festival season, more people are going to be doing drugs, and the importance of harm reduction and drug testing becomes even more central to the experience. She discusses the complications of drug testing and how it’s more of an act of ruling substances out rather than determining purity; the fentanyl problem and its surrounding myths; how to identify and treat an overdose (and what not to do); Philadelphia’s struggles with Xylazine highlighting the problem with regional cross contamination; and DanceSafe’s “We Love Consent” and “Healing is Power” campaigns, which aim to open up the dialogue of true harm reduction and safe spaces outside of the substance alone.
Check out DanceSafe.org for more info, and use this link when you’re ready to make a purchase!
Notable Quotes
“You’re looking for red flags and not green lights. You’re not looking for confirmation that something is in your substance, you’re looking for a red flag about whether something is obviously or potentially not what you expected.” “The three major symptoms of opioid overdose are very, very slow, shallow, and or stopped breathing, reduced or absent consciousness, and pinpoint/constricted pupils. And I want everyone to understand that the cause of opioid overdose is when your respiration, your breathing slows to the point that your tissues are not being oxygenated and perfused and your heart stops. That is the sequence. …If people understood that this is about a lack of oxygen because your breathing is too slow, I think that the public understanding of fentanyl overdose and opioid overdose would change a lot, because that, in and of itself, gives you a lot of information when you’re looking at someone and evaluating if an opioid could be involved.”
“Always communicate the limitations of what you know. Assume that you are missing information, because you are. And when you are reporting on something that you witnessed, share only what you saw and what you did, including timelines. This is a major, major note for anybody, especially people who work in EMS, because there have been a lot of very well-intentioned folks who have ended up spreading misinformation like wildfire by saying things as certainties instead of sharing observations.”
Planning on hitting a festival this summer? You’re not alone. With COVID restrictions and cancellations now a thing of the past, many music lovers are heading back into the wild and hitting summer concerts and festivals all around the world with renewed energy, making up for lost time with their psychedelic communities and their favorite artists.
But with the freedom and joy that comes along with dancing, hugging, and partying with thousands of strangers until the sun comes up, also comes the potential for mishaps, and at worst, serious harm to you and your friends.
Gathered from our team at Psychedelics Today – who have decades of festival experience between them – here are some tips to help you stay safe and get the most out of your party time during this psychedelic summer.
Pre-Purchase Your Substances and Test Them
In 2023, there is no excuse for having to resort to taking whatever substances you can get your hands on at a festival. While it’s possible (and likely!) you’ll be offered psychedelics at festivals, never take anything from someone you don’t know. Should you choose to take psychedelics (or any other substances), acquire them ahead of time from sources you trust and test them before consuming any. Groups like DanceSafe, Qtests, Bunk Police, and Test Kit Plus offer a wide variety of regent testing kits to give you a better understanding of what is (and isn’t) in your substances, including fentanyl. And if you’re in Canada, you can send a sample of your substance to getyourdrugstested.com for a free analysis. You can also browse their results catalog to get a sense of what’s going around in your area, and what the lab results reveal. Many festivals partner with harm reduction groups to provide substance testing on-site, so if you can’t test ahead of time, check to see if your festival offers on-site testing – and use it.
Plan Your Transportation Ahead
Figuring out how you’re getting to – and perhaps, more importantly – from the festival grounds ahead of time is crucial. This may include public transportation, shuttle services, or carpooling, so determine which option suits your needs and budget. Assign a designated driver, don’t get in a vehicle with someone who might be intoxicated, don’t drive if you’ve been consuming, and avoid walking or biking on poorly lit roads or paths. And when in doubt, call your parents – even if you’re 35, chances are they’ll be happy to give you a safe ride home (and they might even make you breakfast).
Get Familiar With the Festival Grounds
Upon arriving at the festival, get a map of the grounds and familiarize yourself with its layout. Locate important areas such as the first aid tent, water stations, restrooms, camping area, and stages. Knowing where these facilities are will save you time and effort when you need them most. Pay attention to emergency exit points as well, ensuring you have a plan in case of an emergency.
Pack Smart: Essentials for a Comfortable Experience
Preparing a well-thought-out festival survival kit will make your experience much more enjoyable. Some essential items to consider packing include:
Energy bars or nutrient-dense snacks: these will provide quick bursts of energy to keep you going during long sets.
Toiletries: pack travel-sized toiletries to keep your body clean. Wet wipes, hand sanitizer, mouthwash, and tissues are particularly useful in festival environments where you can get real grimy, real fast.
Changes of clothes and socks: staying fresh and dry is crucial in preventing discomfort, blisters, and skin irritation.
SPF protection: apply sunscreen liberally to protect your skin from harmful UV rays.
Pain relievers: bring some over-the-counter pain relievers like Advil or Tylenol in case of headaches or injuries.
Upset stomach relief: bring TUMS or Pepto in case of heartburn or indigestion.
Phone charger or battery pack: keep your phone charged at all times to stay connected with friends and have access to emergency services if needed.
Sunglasses: shield your eyes from the sun and prevent eye strain caused by bright lights or lasers during performances.
Set Your Intention
Just like you might with a ceremony, or guided psychedelic journey, ask yourself what you’re hoping to achieve before you dose. Is it a greater connection with your friends and community? Is it a deeper exploration of your inner mind and heart? Is it appreciation for the musicians, artists, or to experience the music more intensely? Or is it simply celebration, unwinding, and feeling good? Whatever it is, big or small, it’s ok! Just try to define it, and go into your experience knowing what you hope to achieve. It also helps to tell your friends what your plan is for the evening or weekend (both the substances you plan to consume and your goals). Added transparency can help you with your psychedelic integration, but can also help mitigate any potential harms, if your friends are watching your back and know your consumption plans.
Stay with Your Friends: Safety in Numbers
Attending a festival with good friends is not only more fun, but helps keep you safe. Try to make sure you always have a sightline to your friends in the crowd, but develop a plan to find each other in case you get separated (which can happen easily). Pre-designate a central meeting point to wait for your friends if you get separated, just in case there’s no cell service or one of your devices dies. If you’re attending alone, consider joining or creating a meet-up group to connect with other people, so you’ll have at least a few festival friends. Whatever you do, don’t leave the event with strangers – even if they seem nice, or you’re hoping to hook up – you really don’t know who you’re going home with. Grab that number, and hit up the person in a few days instead.
Hydrate: The Key to Beat the Heat
Summer festivals often take place under the scorching sun, and staying hydrated is paramount to keep the good times flowing. Dehydration can occur a lot more easily than you might think, and can lead to fatigue, dizziness, and even heatstroke – a potentially life-threatening condition. Make it a priority to drink plenty of water throughout the day. Carry a refillable water bottle and take advantage of water stations if available at the festival grounds, and consider bringing electrolyte-rich drinks, or drink powders to replenish essential minerals lost through sweat. Pro tip: Bring an extra bottle cap with you. Refillable water stations aren’t always available and venues usually sell water bottles without caps. Being able to seal your water can make all the difference in the world.
Take Breaks From the Dance Floor
When you’re really feeling the vibe, it’s tempting to dance non-stop. However, it’s crucial to give your body regular breaks. Even though you might feel like you have the stamina to go all day or night, dancing for hours on end can exhaust you physically and mentally – and you might not realize it until it’s too late. Take short breaks between sets in shaded areas to rest and recharge. Find a spot where you can sit down and relax while enjoying the music from a distance. Taking regular breaks will pay off – it ensures that you can last throughout the festival without feeling completely drained by the end of the first day.
Pace Your Consumption
And speaking of completely wrecking yourself the first day – you don’t want to be that guy. You the one we mean – the guy who’s rolling around naked in the mud a couple of hours after the gates open. Not only is it not a great look, but if you go too hard, too fast, you could spend the rest of the weekend feeling like shit in your tent and miss out on all the great acts you wanted to see. Finally getting to that big event you’ve been waiting for feels incredible, and the urge to go completely off the rails is real (we’ve all been there!) but the best festivals are a marathon – never a sprint.
Remember to Eat
Amidst all the sets and activities, it can be easy to forget about eating, especially when substances are involved that suppress appetite. And sometimes, eating is inconvenient – vendors might run out of food before the event ends, or pricing for simple snacks or bottled water can cost a lot. However, proper nutrition is essential for maintaining your energy levels. Try to pack a variety of portable snacks like granola bars, nuts, dried fruit, or energy bars. Incorporate water-rich foods into your diet, like watermelon, oranges, or berries to help you stay hydrated while providing essential vitamins and minerals. And if you eat from the food carts, look for options that offer a balance of proteins, carbohydrates, and vegetables to keep your energy levels stable.
Are you looking for more insight into your trips? Check out this self-paced course, Navigating Psychedelics, your complete guide to understanding and integrating the psychedelic experience.
Remember: This Too Shall Pass
Sometimes, the combination of psychedelics and an intense festival environment can be extremely overwhelming. Should you find yourself in an uncomfortable headspace, surround yourself with people you trust, breathe through the emotions, and just remember – it won’t last forever. If a friend is going through a tough time, sit with them, let them know you’re there for them, and remain calm, and hold space. However, there is a difference between a challenging psychedelic experience, and a serious medical issue, so ALWAYS keep a watchful eye out for signs of drug toxicity in yourself and others (nausea, difficulty breathing, chest pain, dizziness, etc.) and seek out medical attention if necessary. When in doubt, a trip to the medical tent is never a bad idea.
Stretch It Out
Dancing and standing for long periods of time can strain your muscles and lead to discomfort. Take breaks to stretch and release tension. Stretching exercises can improve circulation, prevent muscle cramps, and help you stay flexible. Consider incorporating gentle yoga poses or basic stretching routines into your festival experience to keep you limber and feeling good on the dance floor.
Find Quiet Places: Retreat From the Chaos
Finding moments of tranquility from all the festival stimuli can be crucial for recharging and regaining focus. Seek out quiet places within the festival grounds:
Chill-out areas: many festivals have designated chill-out zones where you can relax and escape the noise. These areas may feature comfortable seating, hammocks, or shaded spaces. Take advantage of these spaces to unwind, socialize with other festival-goers, or simply enjoy a moment of solitude.
Natural surroundings: if the festival grounds allow, explore nearby natural areas. Find a serene spot under a tree, by a lake, or on a hilltop to enjoy some peace and connect with nature. Nature has a calming effect on the mind and can provide a much-needed break from the intensity of the festival atmosphere.
Silent disco or acoustic sets: some festivals offer silent discos or acoustic sets, where you can enjoy music with headphones or experience stripped-down performances. These intimate settings provide a break from the overwhelming sound levels of main stages while still allowing you to enjoy live music.
And for the Love of God – Sleep
Unpopular opinion: acting on the phrase ‘I can sleep when I’m dead’ is, while kind of true, a really great way to ruin your festival experience. Adequate sleep is crucial for recharging your body and mind, so try to establish a sleep routine if you’re on a multi-day trip. Find a quiet and comfortable place to rest, whether it’s in your tent or a designated camping area. Invest in earplugs, an eye mask, some CBD (visit our friends at HempLucid for 10% off all products with code PSYCHEDELICS10) or noise-canceling headphones to create a peaceful sleeping environment, and get some shuteye – even just for a few hours.
What are some of your top tips for staying safe and having a great time at festivals? Join in the conversation on our socials, and tell us how you make the most out of your trips.
In this episode of Psychedelics Weekly, Joe and Alexa reminisce about last week’s Psychedelic Science 2023, dubbed as the largest psychedelic conference in history.
They discuss Joe’s twoPsychedelic Morning Shows with Anne Philippi; Court Wing, Bob Wold, and the work of Clusterbusters and the new Psychedelics and Pain Association; Tracey Tee and her “Millions of Moms” gathering; Aaron Rodgers and athletes’ growing interest in psychedelics; the legality of mushroom growing kits; and the fun and overwhelming atmosphere of such a massive event. And as Alexa had her first breathwork session, they dig more into breathwork, serving as somewhat of a follow-up to our breathwork episode a few weeks ago.
They also talk about a short film they came across called “Open Up,” which looks at the party lifestyle of always seeking a new high, the potential of ketamine abuse, and what can happen when people don’t talk about their problems.
When you realize that you’re not who you thought you were, the spiritual leader Ram Dass used to say, the path to enlightenment begins. This is also the beginning of the journey for LGBTQIA+ people.
In either case, self-realization can be prompted by psychedelics. But that transition is a scary one: whether it’s your ego or the gender and sexual orientation you were assigned at birth, it requires the death of the person you’ve known. Ultimately, you break through into a place of beauty, truth, and love. But there’s usually a period of kicking and screaming first, trying to hold on as the known slips through your fingers.
For queer and gender-diverse people, it often isn’t safe to express or connect with who we are, so we learn to suppress this knowledge even from ourselves. Denying one’s authenticity causes trauma that can manifest as depression, anxiety, and PTSD. But LGBTQIA+ researchers, therapists, users, and underground practitioners are finding that psychedelic therapy has immense potential to help their communities heal from internalized queer- and transphobia.
Lxo, a London-based artist and research curator experimented with various medicines in art school when their queer, trans*, and non-binary identities began to surface, deposited by a repressive, religious upbringing and persisting through more than five years of talk therapy.
“Then I did one [dose] of s-ketamine, and something burst forward from the past, like a memory bubble” they say. “I was able to forgive and heal… the version of me that was really crying out for help.”
There Is No “Post-Trauma”
For queer and gender-diverse people, there is no “post-trauma,” says Dr. Jae Sevelius, a clinical psychologist and Professor of Medical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. Rather, it’s ongoing, and “It’s not just about experiencing violence, it’s about experiencing violence because of who you are.”
Discovering who you really are should be a joyful revelation, but is still often met with violent opposition. Most suicide attempts occur within the first five years of realizing one’s sexual identity, irrespective of age; for many, this is during youth. More than half of U.S. trans and non-binary people age 13 – 24 considered killing themselves in 2020, while queer teens attempt suicide at a rate more than twice that of their straight peers.
Most mainstream therapies, however, treat trauma as an isolated incident. “[In the West,] we don’t have great approaches to offer people,” Sevelius says. “We have medicines that can treat the symptoms… but talk therapies for trauma… can be really challenging, [with] very high dropout and [low] success rates.”
What’s more, these frameworks aren’t built to support the queer experience. On the contrary, they’re often the very sources of the trauma they aim to treat. Homosexuality was still classified as a mental illness in the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) until 1973; being transgender, until 2012. These links persist today, with gender-diverse people being required to undergo psychiatric evaluation before receiving supportive healthcare—assuming this is even an option.
I’ve experienced this firsthand: celebrating diagnoses that pathologize your identity because it means you can actually get the care you need, reinforcing cognitive dissonance and negative self-beliefs. It breeds mistrust among queer and especially gender-diverse people, especially those with intersecting underrepresented identities, such as BIPOC and sex workers, who face additional systemic barriers and are most impacted by the drug war.
Patients often have to educate their therapists and doctors in culturally relevant care, emotional labor that can be life-threatening. Even worse, queer and gender-diverse communities have been subjected to so-called conversion therapy, inhumane “treatments” that try to turn people cisgendered and straight, still legal in many places. Methods of administration have included electroconvulsive therapy — and psychedelics.
In 1950s and ’60s France, gay teens who had been institutionalized for the double “offense” of being gay and out were forced to take megadoses of LSD — up to 1200MG, three times the recommended maximum — then left alone in a room to be observed. Even Ram Dass — before his awakening, when he was still called Richard Alpert, a clinical psychologist, professor, and founding member of the Harvard Psilocybin Project — joined the likes of Timothy Leary and Stanislav Grof in similar experiments.
Playboy Interview: Timothy Leary – a candid conversation with the controversial ex-Harvard professor, prime partisan and prophet of LSD (September 1966 Issue)
In 1968, a Playboy interviewer questioned Leary about reports of LSD bringing forth “latent homosexual impulses,” to which Leary called the drug a “cure” for such “sexual perversions.” This approach scared some people into living straight lives, but most reported “relapse.” Ram Dass himself came out in the 1990s, but rarely spoke publicly about this fundamental aspect of self, struggling his whole life with internalized shame.
Rethinking Clinical Frameworks
The fact that substances known as truth agents could be used as tools of oppression speaks to the influence of set and setting – and, perhaps even more, of institutions like medicine, psychotherapy, and the university system, where outcomes must align with conclusions that satisfy funding sources.
Today, the barriers to both gender-affirming treatment and psychedelic healing remain immense. Part of the problem is that LGBTQIA+ people are underrepresented on both sides of psychedelic therapy and research, as well as the sciences more broadly, and largely feel unwelcome in all these arenas.
“We need to recognize that there are specific needs between different people within the community, and those needs arise from systemic failures,” says Alfredo Carpineti, a queer astrophysicist and founder of UK charity Pride in STEM.
Research both reflects and creates the world, as psychologist and Yale researcher Terence Ching and others have observed. Psychedelic clinical trials and research studies don’t even gather data on sexual orientation and gender identity, so there is no way to know how psychedelic therapy impacts LGBTQIA+ communities, yet the message this sends to them is clear.
Existing studies and trials are not designed to capture or accommodate queer experiences, typically using cis-het, male-female therapist dyads that are meant to mimic hetero-normative parenting frameworks. Additionally, therapists are not trained to handle complex gender and sexuality issues that may come up during sessions.
Misgendering or failing to affirm someone’s identity can be particularly wounding, Sevelius warns. Those designing studies need to ask who is training and recruiting the therapists, and where they’re recruiting participants. A study on MDMA therapy for gender-diverse populations that they contributed to found current protocols lacking, calling for explicitly gender-affirming treatment and safer, more inclusive settings.
“I get requests all the time from trans and gender-diverse people asking me how they can be included in clinical trials. And I have to say, I don’t feel comfortable referring people,” Sevelius says. “Psychedelics create a very vulnerable psychological state. When you don’t know whether the therapists are really competent to be working with our communities, it’s very likely someone will get re-traumatized.”
Psychedelic research also needs to more rigorously capture demographic data about sexual and gender identity, but most organizations don’t have the resources, Ching says. Still, it’s crucial to recruit and train more LGBTQIA+ researchers and therapists to support straight ones in building queer-inclusive clinical spaces.
“There are many ways to improve access,” Ching says. “Rethink your eligibility criteria [and] do more than put up fliers. Go to queer organizations, talk to people, … do a town hall. Tell them what PTSD is and actually get savvy with the fact that sexism, racism, homophobia, and transphobia can lead to it.”
You’re Not Who You Thought You Were
Saoirse* spent five years in the military police, presenting masculine as a means of survival. Struggling with “decades of suppression and depression as well as PTSD from growing up in cis-het society and from the military,” she had already done a decade’s worth of talk therapy through the VA, cognitive processing therapy (CPT; a cognitive behavioral therapy for PTSD), and couples counseling. Then she participated in an ayahuasca ceremony.
“Having a safe space to explore my beingness… within a [sacred container and] Peruvian Amazonian lineage… was the key for me in discovering my true essence,” she says. “The masculine persona… dropped away. The other women gathered around me in a group hug, and I felt my true self seen, held, and celebrated for the first time.”
Talk-based approaches like cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) are standard treatment for afflictions like addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but these focus on managing present symptoms rather than targeting the trauma at its roots.
During his own MDMA therapy session, Ching was visited by otherworldly animal entities that helped him reconcile his queer and Asian-American identities, which he describes as “a profound experience of unshackling myself from the confines of internalized homophobia.”
Dee Adams, a research program manager at Johns Hopkins University who studies the impact of psychedelic therapy on gender-diverse people, says, “Psychedelics unlock[ed] those pieces of me that I… didn’t have the courage in mundane reality to approach or be aware of. I don’t know of any [other] medicines that can… be directly attributed to that initial ‘aha’ moment.”
Psilocybin and LSD have huge potential in triggering these insights, Sevelius says, as they’re known to break stuck patterns. MDMA is effective for identity-based trauma because it increases self-compassion and empathy, they add, and can improve gender resiliency when combined with affirming care. Along with a New York-based clinical partner, they’re also developing the first ketamine-assisted group therapy study created by and for trans and gender-diverse people.
Yet the relief goes beyond clinical symptoms. In her ayahuasca journeys, Saoirse connected with not only her own femininity but the feminine archetype, transmitted through the spirit of her mother, who was dying of a brain tumor.
“Spirit gifted me with an experience of the female pain body… and all the feminine has held for the masculine throughout the ages,” she says, including “the damage the masculine has done to itself… in committing violence. I was shown the breadth of our journey as souls through lifetimes and the beautiful and terrible dance of the human story.”
She also experienced reconciling with her mother’s spirit from her painful first coming-out, something antidepressants and talk therapy could never provide. “Healing does not occur in the mind,” Saoirse says. “Especially [when] healing core wounds with identity and gender identity, [it] takes place in the heart, … in belonging, and sacred witnessing of our stories, held in the eyes of love.”
Three Key Words: I See You
We all need to be seen and loved exactly as we are; it’s a fundamental human need, second only to physical survival and safety. Constantly being disaffirmed by others can cause what Sevelius terms “identity threat,” manifesting in mental health issues, isolation, and substance overuse.
The cure is increasing affirmation while reducing reliance on external validation; psychedelic therapy, they explain, can do both. Affirmation comes from therapists and the sense of connection to larger, mystical forces; the medicines help people validate their own being.
But deconstructing and reconstructing your self-concept is a monumental task; often an entire life’s work. With any psychedelic journey, but especially for LGBTQIA+ users, support before, during, and after the session is essential. Shortcomings of the current clinical framework — not to mention the dubious legal status of most medicines — means many may be better-served by shamanic, Indigenous, and underground providers, something queer researchers confirm.
“Even as a scientist, I don’t necessarily always advocate that the clinical trial is better,” Ching says. “There are some ways of knowing, like gray literature [research published outside formal academic channels] or having your own personal experience, that might be more beneficial than reading it in a scientific journal.”
For Adams, the approaches go hand in hand. Psychotherapy and prescription medication might be additional tools people use for ongoing support after psychedelics bring them the initial realization.
Peer-support networks can be incredibly helpful, providing that essential component for healing: affirmation. Groups such as the Queer Psychedelic Society and Transadelic connect LGBTQIA+ people who use psychedelics through messaging platforms and integration circles. Many trans and gender-diverse people, in particular, find connecting with like-minded others crucial.
“There was a time when our culture was celebrating queerness, but [you had to be] a specific type of queer. I think people are still having and perpetuating that trauma,” says Transadelic member Casey*. “I don’t seek out queer spaces. But I’m really grateful for this one.”
For Saoirse, “hav[ing] my transition journey of self-discovery held… within a conscious spiritual community… has made all the difference for my self-acceptance, self-love, self-confidence, and my quality of life.”
A Queer Medicine
The links between psychedelics, queer culture, and esotericism trace back to spiritual traditions and early LGBTQIA+ rights movements. In the 1960s and ’70s, groups such as the Cockettes and Radical Faeries challenged social norms and blurred counter-cultural boundaries, sprinkled with consciousness-expanding practices.
In fact, the Pride flag was conceived of during an acid trip in the era when the 60’s hippie culture began yielding to ’70s club culture, and queer people found community and catharsis on the dance floor using MDMA and LSD. The myriad colors reflecting off the mirrored disco ball inspired the flag’s late creator, Gilbert Baker, as a symbol that could replace the former logo, the upside-down pink triangle reclaimed from the Nazis.
Psychedelics have inherent queerness: interwoven into Indigenous societies with fluid conceptions of gender and sexuality; inverting expectations and challenging norms; releasing rigid patterns and making new connections, from found family to community care and long-neglected parts of yourself. One species of fungi has more than 23,000 distinct sexual identities; as mycologist Merlin Sheldrake observes, it helps scientists think beyond the binary, mirroring queer theory and reflecting the world in its crystalline multiplicity.
In the psychedelic state, “the dissolution of ego boundaries becomes the dissolution of binary categories,” Lxo observes, and integration “begins to connect and unify them, bringing all the various different energies, even seemingly binary ones like masculine and feminine, into a kind of relation.”
It’s crucial for the clinical establishment to understand that queer and transness isn’t something that needs to be cured — and tying treatment to disorders and diagnoses echoes of the pathologized past. Sevelius says the focus should be healing past wounds while building coping strategies for facing continual trauma. Meanwhile, Ching wants to see psychedelic therapy “targeted to identity-affirmation processes… fostering the wellbeing and actualization of queer folks.
“Psychedelics have the power to shift the way we see and experience the world, including ourselves, remembering who we were before a traumatized culture had its way with us. As Ching says, “I know I was born this way, but it took MDMA to show it to me, to accept the emotional truth, … and live my life according[ly].”
Editor’s note: Some names have been changed to protect the identity of the source.*
There are a great many tales to be told about the countercultural years of the 1960s, but the story of tripping Rabbis whose psychedelic exploration contributed to a great Jewish Renewal isn’t found in many history books.
While the world was shaken by the Vietnam War and the ongoing Cold War, the counterculture represented a rise of a new consciousness expressed in forms of music, art, drugs, and civil disobedience. In a collective rise against the ‘American dream’ utopia built by their parents, the young generation sought to find alternatives to materialist and conservative values. For them, the counterculture was a strike of anti-establishment, in an egalitarian spirit emphasizing the value of human relationships and the individual’s quest for meaning in life.
Drugs like LSD, cannabis, and mescaline became increasingly common with renowned academics, authors and poets of the era. But they weren’t the only cultural leaders exploring the power of mind-altering substances; while the world watched Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), Aldous Huxley, and Allen Ginsberg encourage the new generation to turn on, tune in, and drop out, a few radical rabbis were quietly exploring the use of psychedelics to get closer to God, and revive age-old mystical traditions.
I was inspired to investigate the connection between liberal Jewish movements and psychedelics after encountering the article ‘Psychedelics and Kabbalah,’published in the Jewish youth magazine Response (1968) by Itzik Lodzer. Lodzer was revealed to be a pseudonym for Arthur Green, the now well-established Jewish scholar, rabbi, and influential figure in the establishment of liberal Jewish practices (for the remainder of this article, Lodzer will be referred to as Arthur Green). One of Green’s contributions was Havurat Shalom, an experimental community embracing Jewish libertarianism and alternative religious values. Through Havurat Shalom, Green met another unconventional rabbi: Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, now also commonly referred to as ‘Reb Zalman,’ founder of the Jewish Renewal movement. Schachter-Shalomi became the leading figure for the Jewish liberation theology, and his influence for the entire Jewish community is monumental.
Both Green and Schachter-Shalomi referred to psychedelics as tools to shed light onto forgotten mystical traditions. The Jewish Renewal movement was an epiphany of that realization, and strove to reinvigorate stagnant traditions by reinventing modern Judaism through Kabbalistic, Hasidic, and musical practices. The lives of these two rabbis, their encounters with psychedelic drugs, and the paths these experiences led them on, are remarkable examples of how psychedelic drugs were an integral part of reinventing Jewish theology.
From their stories we can conjecture that psychedelics were a factor in influencing certain powerful, liberal Jewish ideologies, as well as helping their users to experience Jewish mystical theology in a new light.
The Psychedelic Experience and the Kabbalah
Kabbalah is Hebrew for ‘receiving’. It encompasses a set of teachings generally distinguished from the ‘traditional’ Jewish doctrine. The term came into use in 13th century Spain, where a group of Jewish esoterics and mystics began to separate themselves from the regular Jewish practitioners. To this day, hundreds of modern Kabbalah centers have opened up all around the United States and Europe and many well-known celebrities with (and without) Jewish heritage have picked up the practice of this mystical tradition.
In the 1968 Jewish Review Response, Green draws a parallel between his psychedelic experience and the teachings of the Kabbalah. For him, the foundation of the Kabbalist teachings became vividly real during his encounter with LSD. This is also the likely reason why he chose to write about a topic which, even during the period when LSD was legal, was considered contentious for the traditional Jewish community. Green analyzed parts of the psychedelic experience corresponding to Kabbalist teachings. Many of the elements recognized today as classic psychedelic trip experiences, represented vivid manifestations of Green’s own belief system.
“That which I thought was all terribly real just a few seconds ago now seems to be a part of a great dramatic role-playing situation, a cosmic comedy which this ‘me’ has to play out for the benefit of the audience,” he said.
In Kabbalah the only ‘true’ unchanging reality is the Ein Sof, ‘the Upper Reality,’ our ways of perceiving that reality are under constant change. For Green, psychedelics opened the illusionary nature of unchanging reality and of his own self. He wrote: “Seen from beyond, however, world and ego are but aspects of the same illusion. From God’s point of view, only God can be real.”
The Paradox of Change
The second aspect Green brought forth is the paradox of the fundamental change of everything about God, the simultaneous fundamental constancy of God, and the circular coexistence of impermanence and permanence: “All is becoming moving. I blink my eyes and seem to reopen them to an entirely new universe. One terribly different from that which existed a moment ago […] If there is a ‘God’ we have discovered through psychedelics, He is the One within the many; the changeless constant in a world of change.”
God’s Gender – Maybe Not Male After All?
Having strongly experienced a feminine presence during his trip, Green questioned the prevailing Judeo-Christian assumptions of God as male, underlying that ‘the father of the heavens’ only makes sense in a context where there is also ‘the mother.’ He argued that Judaism today has become trapped by the stationary image of God as a father figure. Subsequently, the Jewish Renewal movement has been especially focused on the revival of the female Goddess. For Green, the two sides of God were as attainable for ‘contemporary trippers,’ as they had been for the mystics of the past.
Discovering God’s Fluid Essence
Typically, descriptions of divinity in Kabbalistic writings are inconsistent and fully metaphorical. Green observed the parallel of the flow of beautiful images during his trip and the fluid Kabbalist descriptions of the nature of divinity, but warned against any static statements defining God. He argued that only symbolic and metaphorical descriptions could come close to the truth. Although the process in which the voyager creates a metaphor to describe the flow of images and information can be enjoyable, he warned against taking one’s own imagery too seriously:
“Indeed, this is one of the great ‘pastime’ of people under the influence of psychedelics: the construction of elaborate and often beautiful systems of imagery which momentarily seem to contain all the meaning of life or the secrets of all the universe, only to push beyond them moments later, leaving their remains as desolate as the ruins of a child’s castle in the sand. No metaphor is permanent, one can always ascend another rung and look down on the silliness of what appeared to be a revelation just minutes before.”
Exploring God’s Authentic Nature
What Green referred to as the “deepest, simplest and most radical insight of the psychedelic consciousness” concerns the authentic nature of God. He wrote: “This insight has been so terribly frightening to the Jewish consciousness, so bizarre in terms of the biblical background of all Jewish faith, that even the mystics who knew it well, generally fled from fully spelling it out.”All reality is at one with the Divine, and therefore every human, Jewish or not, is a part of God’s divine nature, he posited. According to Green, the very sanity of the Western civilization lies in the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, to separate between God and humans. Now that this fantasy had been shattered for the young Green, the rest of his life was bound to change. “If God and man are truly one … what has all the game been for?” he questioned.
Green’s testimony of his first psychedelic voyage is a remarkable historical account of how psychedelics can operate on the consciousness of a deeply religious individual. Green’s understanding of Kabbalah provided a strong framework through which the experience could fluidly mature, and although he voiced his concerns of autonomous explorations of God through psychopharmacology, he also believed both the psychedelic and mystical consciousness can be compatible.
In his 2016 biography, Hasidism for Tomorrow, he still states that taking LSD was an important step for his understanding of Hasidic and Kabbalistic philosophies. Such states would be achievable without the substances, he says, but acknowledges taking drugs and spontaneous mystical experiences as parallel processes.
The question arises: will the revolutionary qualities of the Jewish Renewal movement prove lasting, or will Judaism shake off Liberal influences and continue its static path? Just as the Jewish Renewal movement is often seen as a minor influence on a small current, the counterculture movement is often viewed as a failed attempt of revolution, as utopia slowly sinking into disappointment. Both Green and Schachter-Shalomi held their experiences with psychedelics as major influential points in their lives. As the research on psychedelic drugs and neurotheology continues to advance, perhaps the liberation theologies of a number of religions can be understood in a completely novel way.
According to Shalom Goldman, a professor of religion and Middle Eastern studies, the impact of the Jewish Renewal movement has left a permanent mark on contemporary Jewish life.
“Schachter-Shalomi’s Jewish Renewal still remains small in comparison to the larger Jewish denominations, but its influence is wide,” he said. “And many of those influenced would be quite surprised to read that in a way, it started with LSD.”
Editor’s note: this article is an adapted version of the essay, Tripping Rabbis: The Impact of Psychedelic Consciousness in the Revival of Jewish Mystical Tradition during the 1960s Counterculture Movement, by Johanna Hilla-Maria Sopanen, originally published in Psychedelic Press Volume XXI (2017).
In this episode, Kyle interviews Liana Gillooly: Strategic Initiatives Officer at MAPS, Board Chair & Founder of the non-profit, North Star, and Advisor to Chacruna’s Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative.
While she talks about updates in MAPS’ world and how to manage and scale a rapidly growing industry while trying to change a system from the inside, she mostly talks about what she, the rest of MAPS, and a lot of the psychedelic space in general are most excited about right now: Psychedelic Science 2023, the largest psychedelic conference in history, beginning next week in Denver.
She discusses the growth of the conference; why they chose Denver as a location; and how programming has changed over the years to embrace the multiplicity of identities inside the psychedelic space, including much more business content, a culture stage that focuses on how psychedelics interact with the mainstream, various programs put on by community partners, pre- and post- workshops covering an array of topics, and an area they’re calling Deep Space, which was designed to help attendees get out of their heads and more into their bodies.
If you were thinking of attending, this episode should serve as a great inspiration to finally buy a ticket. When you do, be sure to use code PT15 to get 15% off your purchase, and when you’re there, visit us at booth 834 Wednesday through Friday. Joe is hosting a Psychedelic Morning Show with Anne Philippi on Thursday and Friday, and we’re partnering with Lounge CashoM, an all-inclusive environment designed to be a decompression space from that big conference energy. Email hello@cashom.org for more info, click here for tickets (use password MotherEarth to access tickets, and code PT20 for 20% off), click here for our guide on events we’re most excited about, and click here for a full guide of afterparties and events.
Notable Quotes
“I was 22 in 2010 when I attended the MAPS conference, and it completely changed the trajectory of my life and opened me into understanding that it was possible to have a career working in psychedelics (which was such a foreign concept back then). So when I think about what I’m most excited about, it’s the people. It’s bringing together our global community, and it’s what can come from the magic of an event; of being in connection with one another, of all the little collisions that happen and all the ways that we discover how we can support each other and work together to make this field the best that it can be.”
“All these really big topics of our time that people are interested in and chatting about: if you just flip over the rock, there you will find people who have been directly inspired by and impacted by psychedelics.”
“There’s no escaping the reality that we’re all connected. So rather than trying to dip out and create private utopias, I’m more interested in understanding how to engage with what is, and invite it into the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible.”
The global psychedelic community is taking over Denver, Colorado from June 19-24 for Psychedelic Science 2023, presented by MAPS. Psychedelics Today is an official media partner, and we’ll be on the ground with 10 team members through the duration of the entire event at Booth 834, so be sure to stop by. We’re looking forward to participating in various talks, activations, and events throughout the week. And most importantly, we can’t wait to connect with our community.
Here’s where to find us in the flesh.
Monday, June 19:
5:30 p.m. – 9 p.m.: Calling all ketamine clinicians and practitioners! Join Psychedelics Today, SoundSelf and Being True To You at Lounge CashoM to kick off the conference. This event is specifically curated for ketamine clinicians and practitioners eager to connect with other like-minds, and to learn about new tools, cutting-edge research, and resources to help support their practice.
Cost: Free Registration required: Registration is now closed.
Tuesday, June 20
4 p.m. – 6 p.m.: Join Samantha Sweetwater, Holos and Psychedelics Today at Lounge CashoM for WHOLENESS: Building Capacity for a Real Psychedelic Renaissance. An evocative book reading, panel and networking space.
Cost: Free Registration required: Registration is now closed.
6:30 p.m. – midnight: You’re invited to an intimate and educational functional mushroom culinary experience with Mount Mushmore and Fungtion, followed by a vibey after party with music by BOSA at Lounge CashoM! Tickets are on sale now, and capacity is limited.
Cost: $30 – $150 Registration required: Registration is now closed.
Wednesday, June 21
7 a.m. – 7 p.m.: Find Psychedelics Today on the expo floor at Booth 834.
Cost: Free with Conference Pass Registration not required.
