Championing ethics, community, and integrity in psychedelics

I have been thinking about writing this essay in some form for a while but have not had clarity on what exactly to say. I feel like I finally have a thesis. Here it is:

The seizing of psychedelics by capitalism has been incredibly harmful and messy and exemplifies much of what is wrong with the economy and our world — thankfully, there is an alternative path — this is what I’m working with others to help actualize.

Before I start explaining this thesis further, I’ll briefly outline who I am:

This is my third year working in the psychedelics industry. I work in startup/management types of roles.

I’m doing this work because psychedelics have shown me a lot of beautiful things about myself and the world. They also offer the potential of being a radical solution that might help a lot of the world to heal and process their trauma (in the right context, with proper intentions and lots of continued effort before and after psychedelic-assisted therapy itself).

On the contrary, psychedelics have caused me a lot of headaches, anxiety, and even deep paranoia.

Since I started going to therapy about 5 years ago I’ve had a dozen or so therapists and guides, had MDMA-assisted psychotherapy go horribly wrong, and am now in the process of doing neurofeedback to help deal with what I couldn’t manage to fix with all the therapists I worked with and techniques I’ve tried (no fault on them, I’ve been through a lot and they collectively helped me get pretty far along in terms of processing messy stuff in my conscious mind).

Now for some of the issues with psychedelic capitalism…

• Companies are charging people thousands of dollars for psychedelic therapy and paying their guides $20-something dollars to support clients while they process their darkest traumas and issues
• Lots of companies in the space with mostly white, male boards and management, and tokenization of women and BIPOC people to try and hide it. Lots of white male researchers speaking getting the majority of the media’s recognition.
• The market that was super hot up til about mid-last year has since seen a lot of disappointments — funding is drying up, companies are failing to make profits, and whole departments and teams are being laid off as a result
• Companies are getting financing from investors and being run by people who have never had a whiff of a psychedelic in their life — for some companies, these people are going to end up steering the ship and deciding “what’s best” for the company and its stakeholders
• Ask anyone at Psymposia and they will give you a laundry list of examples of how profits are being prioritized above people and how the space is full of abuse and wrongdoing, on both the underground and legal levels
• Multiple companies are being incredibly selfish and unreasonable with their patent strategies
• There is a lot of childish infighting between the people who think psychedelics should be decriminalized and the ones who think they should be legalized
• There’s been lots of lip service towards indigenous reconciliation (the act of giving back support to the indigenous communities who have been stewards of these medicines and methods of using them for millennia, many of who have been harmed by psychedelic adoption in the western world) — unfortunately, not much action from large for-profit organizations. Many companies haven’t bothered mentioning it at all
• At least one company has asked leaders of indigenous communities to come to speak on their panels about “novel molecule development” despite having little or no cultural understanding of how to engage with indigenous peoples in a conscious way that considers indigenous history and issues

I know that’s a pretty long list, and the sad truth is that there’s plenty more I’m missing here. It’s easy to understand why a lot of therapists, guides, and researchers I talk to are worried about profit-maximizing venture capitalists and big pharma whales taking over and effing the whole thing up at the expense of what could be really beautiful and revolutionary for humanity.

If you want to learn more from others who have more authority and knowledge than me about what is wrong with this space, Rosalynd Watts and Tim Ferriss have both written great articles about it.

Also, just to be clear, lots of great things have been happening at the same time, but the bad things might continue to cause a lot of painful and violent damage to this movement and its potential.

So what might we need in order to improve things?

I’m definitely not the right person to spell out the whole play-by-play of “how to fix psychedelics”, but I will offer some ideas based on what my experiences have taught me might be useful.

Adjectives that fit here include: community, integrity, transparency, access, empowerment

How they can manifest:

• Pay people fairly for their work, be transparent about who gets paid what
• Companies need to be kept accountable for their actions
• We need good systems for restorative justice so that we can help hurt people and their attackers to heal and re-integrate in healthy ways
• Reasonable cost of access to medicines and guides
• Places for thoughtful and informed dialogue
• More people from marginalized groups (women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+) to be given a meaningful seat and voice at the table
• People deserve to understand the impacts of their decisions, including how the companies they choose to buy from operate
• Options for communities and organizations to explore and implement models of self-governance and collective ownership
• Commitment to community-oriented causes and client/patient outcomes over sheer profits
• Have the courage to keep asking what else can be done

Yes, tall order, but not unrealistic.

Here are some noteworthy organizations that I and lots of others are grateful exist:

• North star
• Grow Medicine
• Chacruna IRI
• Pala
• Homecoming
• MAPS (emphasis on diversity and use of a “Public Benefit Corporation”)
• Vine.vc
• I’m sure there are more and I’m sure that you could find problems with the ones I’ve listed.

How I’m trying to do my part

Based on what I’ve learned, the way I believe I can make a meaningful difference in this space is by focusing on supporting the growth of conscious, healthy communities and fostering integrity among them.

I recently helped start an organization called Decentralize Psychedelics, the main purpose of which is to ask questions about and test out examples of what community ownership, collective governance, and radical transparency can look like at all levels of the psychedelic space. To learn more about what this impact could look like, check out my cofounder Kwasi’s article on it.

I also started building a personal growth community for people interested in psychedelics. We are being deeply intentional about including marginalized voices in how we design the organization, so that it can be inclusive from the beginning. We’re working to make our community affordable and accessible for people with limited resources. To learn more, click here.

In closing…

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. I hope this piece gave you some helpful context, and I acknowledge that this space is constantly changing and that my perspective is limited to what I have learned and experienced.

In closing, here’s a great quote from Vinay Gupta:

“You just can’t take a bunch of Ayahuasca and work for Google’s advertising departments, and somehow balance the books morally as you spend all the money flying to exotic locations to go kite surfing as you step over homeless people on your way into Starbucks, and call this spirituality. The spirituality which counts is about acting correctly, not about feeling like a demigod.”

Now go do something about it!

🙏