On psychedelic cults & SXSW

Plus a new publication on the risk of "ethics washing" underground lineages

Why critique the psychedelics industry?

Hand on heart, I would rather be doing so many other things with my time than pointing out bad behavior and preventable harms in the psychedelics space. I got into the field because I wanted to study literary trip reports — but I learned there were shady things happening that needed to be talked about, unfortunately.

(Although I’ve been finding myself needing to put out fires over the past few years, I hope that this mailing list can gradually trend towards my true interests over time. In the psychedelic lingo, you could even say that I’m putting this out as an intention. A better [less dumpster-fire] psychedelic field is possible!)

For the time being, if those of us who care about psychedelics don’t talk about risks and harms, then we’re leaving it to the prohibitionists to bring up these inevitable conversations. If that happens, it will look incredibly bad, and it will only be used as ammunition against reform. Along the way, people will get hurt.

It’s a lot better if those of us who appreciate psychedelics are the ones to raise concerns.

In the past, powerful organizations in the psychedelic space have engaged in an undeniable pattern of framing those who speak up about harms as jeopardizing a psychedelic future of “mass mental health.” This signals that when people experience harms, the right thing to do is keep quiet. It’s the opposite of harm reduction. 

Since so many people believe that psychedelic medicine can save the world, the industry’s success often seems existentially important. When the stakes are that high, it can be easy to justify cutting corners, covering up harms, and suppressing critique—even for those with good intentions.

It’s my position — and the position of a growing minority of scholars in the psychedelics field — that MAPS and MAPS PBC (now Lykos) have been leading a cultic and theological project behind a medical, scientific veneer. For a number of reasons, I’m not convinced that the MAPS protocol for psychedelic therapy is safe or particularly effective. MAPS’s claims about “inner healers” paving the way to “net-zero trauma” are not grounded in evidence, and their utopian ideology has already been used to downplay real harms and to promote unsafe models for psychedelic use.

There are plenty of well-intentioned, friendly people who work for MAPS. I’m sure they all believe in what they’re doing, and I don’t believe they’re trying to cause harm. But as MDMA approaches FDA approval, I think it’s important to ask hard questions about what MAPS claims is effective psychedelic therapy, and about the basis for those claims. As I heard someone say on stage at the recent Harvard conference, Lykos means wolf, and “maybe Lykos is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

If psychedelics are so important, maybe we need to make sure we get this right, before we rush off the cliff hitched to the fastest game in town.

Gather Well and the problem with underground lineages

Over the past year, I’ve been traveling between psychedelic ethics conferences, giving presentations that critique the MAPS protocol’s hegemony. Although that topic was my reason for being at these events, I began noticing something else that concerned me.

Since the psychedelic medical industry is now popping off, a lot of “green” ethicists are now coming into the field — many of whom are highly credentialed, with the backing of prestigious academic institutions. While their expertise in bioethics is generally exceptional, the psychedelics industry contains risks that aren’t covered by conventional bioethics education, to the extent that bioethicists new to the field might not know what they don’t know (i.e., that there are “unknown unknowns”).

One of those risks is “cultogenic” — psychedelics have historically given rise to cults, where suggestibility is magnified by charismatic leaders. It was clear to me that many cultic groups with power in the psychedelic field would be sidling up to these ethicists with their best face forward, hoping to make a great impression that could land a “seal of approval” for their organizations and practices.

This inevitability was compounded by another refrain: to make amends for past epistemic injustices and appropriations, the psychedelics field (including bioethics) would need to accommodate Indigenous ways of knowing, in deference to the communities that long stewarded these medicines. Although I am completely in favor of genuine relationality, I recognized that this discourse was superficial — there was no apparent critical vocabulary or “immune system” alert to the possibility of harmful cultic groups with claims to an Indigenous lineage. From this perspective, it seemed like it was only a matter of time before one or another of these bioethicists unintentionally laundered (i.e., accidentally “ethics washed”) harmful cultic practices, while thinking they were enacting the change (i.e., “epistemic justice”) that the field was calling for.

Fast forward to a future ethics event, and I started hearing about a new group with a multi-generational Indigenous lineage that was developing a model for psychedelic ethics across the field. This group was described as embodying the very thing that I’d been hearing bioethicists advocate for: a merger of an authentic Indigenous lineage with the principles of Western biomedicine. Although this group — Gather Well — was just launching, its lineage went back through the Center and then School for Consciousness Medicine to Aharon Grossbard and François Bourzat. 

 The harms associated with this lineage had kicked off the initial reckoning with psychedelic therapy abuse in 2021, in Will Hall’s essays in Mad in America and on Medium, Katie MacBride’s Inverse reporting, and Psymposia/New York Magazine’s Cover Story: Power Trip podcast. 

Of note, Bourzat and Grossbard claim their lineage traces to María Sabina via Salvador Roquet. For my literary book project (the project that is most close to my heart!), I had been writing about María Sabina’s oral autobiography, where she insists that it is actually impossible to have a “lineage” that connects back to her — not even for her own daughters, who participated in her vigils:

“Wisdom can’t be inherited. Wisdom is brought with one from birth. My wisdom can’t be taught; that’s why I say that nobody taught me my Language, because it is the Language the saint children speak upon entering my body. Whoever isn’t born to be wise can’t attain the Language although they do many vigils. Who could teach a Language like that? My daughter Apolonia just helps me to pray or to repeat my Language during the vigils. She speaks and says what I ask her to, but she isn’t a Wise Woman; she wasn’t born with that destiny.... Apolonia and Viviana, my two daughters, will never be Wise Women. They will not receive the Book from the hands of the Principal Ones.... Not anyone can be wise. I make that clear to people.... We Wise Ones don't need to learn what we know in a school. Wisdom comes from birth. It comes together with one when one is being born — like the placenta.”

To draw on a metaphor from a different culture (and a different chapter of my book), I have sometimes wondered whether María Sabina embedded this detail in her autobiography as a “poison dart” to strike down Salvador Roquet’s future attempts to monetize her ancestral practices. As Alexander S. Dawson wrote in The Peyote Effect:

“In La otra vida de María Sabina, Juan García Carrera quotes Sabina as feeling bitterness toward Roquet at the end of her life because she believed he abandoned her after the mid-1970s and grew rich from her knowledge while she suffered.”

That is the lineage claimed by Gather Well.

From the supporting documents to Cover Story: Power Trip: A screenshot of the “lineage” page of the old “Center for Consciousness Medicine” website. The genealogy connects Gather Well’s lineage to María Sabina through Salvador Roquet. The Internet Archive hosts an interactive version of this graphic.

Alarmed that my longstanding fears might be playing out in real time, I took part in a series of conversations with Tehseen Noorani and Will Hall about this issue. The initial fruit of this collaboration was just published in Harvard Law’s Petrie-Flom Center’s Bill of Health blog, in the “Critical Psychedelic Studies” symposium that I have been co-editing with Petrie-Flom’s Chloe Reichel. In this piece, titled “Bioethics, Psychedelic Therapy Abuse, and the Risk of Ethics Washing,” we lay out the basic contours of our concerns, though I still have much more to say about this issue.

A screenshot of the new blog post on the risk of psychedelic “ethics washing.”

Tehseen Noorani was the lead author for this piece, and I recommend checking out his short Twitter thread about it.

This week: Psychedelics at SXSW

At an Entheogenic Humanities meeting at Esalen over the summer, I mentioned how I’ve been working in the psychedelics field since 2010. Someone responded: “Wow, that means you could have cashed out — but didn’t!”

I’ve been thinking back to this exchange recently, after a few people thanked me for my “bravery” at the recent Harvard conference talk. I actually don’t think it’s bravery, just as I don’t think I actually could have “cashed out” and joined the psychedelic hype train as it ramped up around 2020. In both of these exchanges, my immediate internal response was: “No, I’m just neurodivergent AF!”

I don’t think I’m constitutionally capable of cashing out — in the unflattering sense of, “not even if my life depended on it.” I wouldn’t be able to hang with the for-profit crowd, and the systemic lens of my critical work is actually just how I see the world. (n.b.: A lot of the critical psychedelic folks I run into are also neurodivergent in some way — ADHD, autistic, or otherwise wandering off the well-worn path of social conventions and conveniences.)

But this week, I’m also wandering into the for-profit scene with a speaking slot at SXSW’s psychedelic conference track. (When William Leonard Pickard invites me to chime into a conversation — I chime!)

I think they mis-ordered the names on this one!

Dillan DiNardo will be moderating a conversation between me, William Leonard  Pickard, and Zach Leary. Here’s the full panel description:

Who Governs Psychedelics in 2030: Medicine vs. Mysticism

As psychedelics head toward mass adoption, two sides vie for control of their future. Investors have poured billions into the hope of safe, profitable, FDA-approved medicines, while decriminalization advocates are gaining ground in the fight for independent recreational, spiritual, and therapeutic use. In this panel, luminaries of the psychedelic world bring deep perspectives from their histories at the frontlines to explain the power struggle at the heart of the psychedelic renaissance and to paint a picture of how this clash will define our society’s new relationship with drugs.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

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A quick final word

Thank you so much to everyone who has already subscribed! I thought I’d be writing to myself for a while, but there’s already a small crew assembled.

Special thanks to those of you who paid for subscriptions! Since this list is free, I really appreciate the support for my work! It means a lot!

For this mailing list, my plan is to post updates here when big things happen, but there might be slower times of year (like when grading ramps up). And this summer, I’m going to be diving deep into getting my book project towards the finish line. I’ve been working on it for over a decade, and now that I finally have a stable job, I can’t wait to finish it.

Xoxo!