SXSW recap: Counter-Narratives for the Psychedelic Status Quo
While FDA decides on MDMA therapy, the cracks are showing in MAPS’s official story.
As a quick tl;dr: Here’s the link to listen to my SXSW panel (audio only) on YouTube. For excerpts from the transcript, skip down to the final section below.
The talks themselves are psychoactive
I used to be pretty anxious about presentations. I tended to read my talks verbatim from a script, since I was worried about forgetting what I wanted to say. (Here’s one example, from my 2017 talk at the Horizons conference.) And with my particular brand of neurodivergence, I occasionally struggle to string words together, or forget otherwise obvious words and names.
My usual approach began to shift last April, when — two weeks before Breaking Convention — I was invited to join a second panel on the topic of psychedelic hype. I had enough time to throw some slides together, but I didn’t have enough time to write a new script. Still, I felt like I had something important to say — a perspective that I wasn’t hearing much about during psychedelic conferences — so it seemed worth taking the chance, and improvising. The result was my talk titled “You Can Be Both Pro-Psychedelics and Anti-Hype,” which is viewable on Breaking Convention’s YouTube channel.
Off-script, it’s sometimes still evident that I’m nervous from how I talk too fast. But during that presentation, I also felt myself stepping into something that I can only really describe as — electricity. In my field of literary studies, we might characterize it as raw affect. It was like the entire room became electrified.
I was speaking from a place of deep love for the psychedelics field, and a conviction that we need to talk more about how the corporadelic empire has no clothes. And as I spoke, it was like I could feel the audience sensing the care and the urgency in my words. I could also hear it, since I kept being interrupted by spontaneous cheers and applause.
That electricity was an effect of speaking truth to power.
It had never happened to me before Breaking Convention, but then it kept happening — first at PhilaDelic at UPenn (in the same room where I organized the first Psychedemia conference in 2012), and then again at the Harvard Medical School conference last month.
And now, most recently, at SXSW.
After the panel ended, one person had to pause while they were midway into asking me a question. They apologized for physically shaking slightly, since they’d been so affected by the panel discussion. It reminded me of each of those previous conference presentations, when some people were noticeably buzzing when they walked up to ask me a question. I could have sworn that I caught a few slightly dilated pupils.
For some portion of the audience, it’s like the talks themselves are psychoactive.
Psychedelic medicalization as literary foil
A few people mentioned to me that the evident authenticity of my panel contrasted sharply with the many corporadelic talking points at SXSW.
For years, Rick Doblin (MAPS’s Founder & President) has assured people that psychedelics would inevitably instill prosocial, liberal values by inducing mystical experiences of interconnection. Throughout those years, this claim was central to the pitch that MAPS was paving the way to “net-zero trauma” through a “mass spiritualization” of humanity.
His comments at SXSW were — frankly — damning for the entire premise of MAPS’s original project:
Rick Doblin: “What Dan Crenshaw says [is that] psychedelics don't change the personality of veterans, it's just like they've had a reset.... I heard a story yesterday of a very prominent conservative person who...had done LSD when they were young, and I’d never thought about that. I was shocked to hear that! But they're still a conservative person. So, uh, you know.... *uncomfortable laughter* Wh-, wha-, what it means is what Dan Crenshaw is saying, is that — You know, we do have hopes that once you realize that we’re all connected, you will be less prejudiced, and less willing to scapegoat others. And I think in large part, that there is something to that. But, um, Dan Crenshaw was just trying to make this point, that it doesn’t automatically [work that] you give it to a veteran, and now they’re peace and love, and put down their guns, and — you know. If only! *large laugh* Um, so, um, Dan [Crenshaw] was really terrific to be one of our supporters…. Um, [and] this is Rick Perry, he was the opening talk at, uh, our Psychedelic Science conference in June. It was the largest psychedelic conference ever in the world — 12,400 people. And we also had Governor Jerry Polis from...Colorado.... And one of my favorite moments of the entire conference was that, when Rick Perry is speaking — and...he’s been inspired by a lot of veterans that have gone down to Mexico for ibogaine, a lot of Navy Seals. But Governor Polis leaned over, and he said, ‘How much did you have to pay this guy to speak?’ And I’m like, we didn’t pay him anything. You know, he believes in it. He’s doing it on his own! And it was just this wakeup call for Governor Polis, like, ‘God! Governor Perry is speaking about this?’”
I immediately texted a photo of Doblin’s Dan Crenshaw slide to my colleague Brian Pace, who co-wrote “Right-Wing Psychedelia” with me back in 2021. That entire paper was an effort in harm reduction, since we’d seen how corporate actors were citing spurious claims — that psychedelics would necessarily usher in an age of prosocial and pro-environmental values — to justify why the psychedelics industry needed to “move fast and break things.” (In this case, “things” are actual people.)
As we argued in that paper, psychedelics are “politically pluripotent,” meaning that they can amplify any number of political ideologies across the left-right spectrum. Going further, we argued that authoritarian and fascist ideologies are especially primed to interpret psychedelic phenomenology as interconnection to hierarchy. This primary identification with hierarchy can serve to justify the protection of existing status hierarchies, at any cost.
As Pace messaged me in response to Doblin’s pivot: “Now that it's been established that psychedelics do not have a deterministic effect on ideology, Doblin has turned this into a selling point for his project.” Pace also observed that — despite this new recognition — Doblin still doesn’t acknowledge the full implications of how ideology can influence psychedelic experiences. The same suggestibility that can encourage conservative interpretations of psychedelic experience can also create vulnerabilities for other kinds of influence, with outcomes ranging "from the potentially therapeutic to cult indoctrination, radicalization, and sexual exploitation."
Ultimately, Doblin’s claim that he had “never thought about” an archconservative taking LSD and staying conservative highlights the superficiality of his expertise in psychedelics. This superficiality should lead us to question Amy Emerson (the now-Lykos CEO) when she later claimed of Lykos (formerly MAPS PBC) — on a SXSW panel immediately after mine — that “The people who know the most about [psychedelics] need to be the ones who control how this goes out.”
It’s been clear to many of us watching this industry that the people “in charge” have disqualified themselves according to their own standards, based on their own claims. They are not the peerless experts and honest brokers they claim to be, and they’ve been happy to talk out of both sides of their mouths.
Their entire corporadelic machine is premised on the notion that they are experts on trauma, when it’s clear to impartial observers that they aren’t engaging with the systemic and coercive root causes of trauma. Although I acknowledge that psychedelics have a lot of positive potential, I actually think that MAPS’s and (and now Lykos’) approaches are less likely to lead to prosocial and pro-environmental outcomes than other possible psychedelic contexts (as I discussed on my own panel).
Ultimately, the desire to realize a global psychedelics industry does not justify the rapid scaling of a therapeutic approach that increases the likelihood of harm. In addition to my concerns with the MAPS therapy itself (which I summarized in my last mailer), Doblin’s vision of serving maintenance therapies to the imperial war machine would likely worsen the root causes of global trauma and inequality. (If you haven’t read it yet, check out Russell Hausfeld’s series for TruthDig, which has been tracking MAPS’s tightening alliance with the military.)
(I wondered if Doblin had stopped to ask why military recruits have disproportionate rates of childhood trauma in the first place. As published in the Journal of Affective Disorders in 2016, “Childhood poverty is…associated with entrance into military service.” Maintenance therapies that grease the wheels of empire can lead to worsening inequality.)
The psychedelic expertise claimed by Emerson was further undermined when she enthusiastically nodded along to fellow panelist Scott Omelianuk — Former Editor In Chief of Inc. Magazine — as he shared already-debunked industry propaganda from the stage. Describing the 2023 incident when an off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot tried to crash a plane after taking psilocybin mushrooms, Omelianuk insisted that the episode “had nothing to do with psychedelics” and “was just about [the actions of] one person,” and that any association with psychedelics was caused by the media’s perpetual quest for clicks and views.
But as Jules Evans has already covered extensively on his Ecstatic Integration substack, this framing is inaccurate — and extremely irresponsible. Research published by Evans and colleagues demonstrated that some percentage of people experience persisting depersonalization and derealization, lasting longer than psychedelics are metabolized in the body. And yet Emerson nodded along to a narrative that is more convenient for the industry. It’s just the latest example of a longstanding pattern in public commentary: benefits are attributed to the psychedelic, while harms are attributed to something else — anything other than the psychedelic. It’s a profoundly dangerous and counterfactual position to promote.
I’m especially concerned for the vulnerable groups who are flocking to psychedelics on the winds of psychedelic hype, desperate for healing. In his talk, Doblin emphasized that MAPS has been focusing on treating the most complex and treatment-resistant cases of PTSD, which necessarily involves vulnerable groups. He also described aspirations to provide children with MDMA therapy, with the rationale that children can solidify mainstream acceptance for MDMA. (To support this point, he cited the parents — desperate for options to treat pediatric epilepsy — who mobilized to achieve medical cannabis access.)
Due to these targeted demographics, it’s also concerning that Doblin specifically chose to include Ben Sessa on his presentation slides, and that — in so choosing — he only described Sessa’s work in positive terms. This is despite the fact that Sessa recently had his license suspended for 12 months after he admitted to pursuing sex with a former patient who subsequently committed suicide. (Doblin also decided to omit the risk of boundary violations from his discussion of MDMA’s risks.) The recurring decisions of powerful people to align with predatory actors is a signal that the field is not well-equipped to protect vulnerable groups from the power imbalances that are magnified by psychedelic therapy.
MAPS was just the excuse
Meanwhile, it was very clear to the audience that I was speaking without the kinds of ulterior motives or financial incentives that might explain the (seemingly inauthentic) narrative glitches on other stages. People could tell that I was dismantling industry propaganda by speaking truth to power from a place of real caring.
For example — I received this email afterwards, which speaks to the feeling of energy in the room:
“You're saying important things that are resonating with people, and it was amazing to feel the surge of heartfelt emotion from the audience reacting [to] you. [...] I’m viscerally appreciative of many of the things you're sounding the alarm about. Let me know if I can be of service in the future.”
As another example — a friend forwarded some “live tweets” from a group chat, which included these:
I can’t [record] everything she says haha but 🔥🔥🔥
Subtweeted Rick [Doblin] for putting Ben [Sessa] on a slide 💀
“We don’t need the medical model. Psychedelics weren’t going away.”
“There is a psychedelic guiding industrial complex. I reject it.”
I really should be videotaping all this it’s amazing
“Real relationality with indigenous groups requires dismantling capitalism”
She’s burning down the room it’s amazing. [...] I can barely get 1 quote in 10
I included some excerpts from the transcript below, and you can listen to the full panel on YouTube.
Thanks as ever for your support! I felt a lot of people behind me while I was up there speaking. Thanks for having my back. xoxo
From the transcript:
[16:13 – 17:44] The fact that I’m able to now travel around the world and…talk about psychedelics in front of big audiences is itself a reflection of how profoundly psychedelics have changed my life. And honestly...when I went into this field, I wanted to study trip reports.... That’s what I want to be doing with my time. Unfortunately, having worked in this field since 2010 — and being a non-male, being less powerful, having a higher voice, not looking like the people who have the control of the resources in this space — I’ve seen some concerning things, and so I’ve needed to become a voice [for] the more critical, concerning, risk side [of psychedelics]. Not because I don’t love psychedelics — it’s because I love psychedelics, and I think they’re so important that we need to get this right.
[24:46 – 25:50] I’m all for...a proliferation of experiments and studies, and — [by that I mean] experiments understood broadly, as not just scientific experiments but…[also] community experiments, artistic experiments…. Like, I think we should be exploring what psychedelics are able to do. And I’m [personally] of the opinion…that the way that we talk about psychedelics influences the types of tools that they can be. And so there is potentially a huge range of applications, but there is a real push to limit and restrict what they are, what we think that they do, and who gets to decide. And it’s that constraint that I’m [most] concerned about, and especially because the biggest harms that I’m seeing — in the psychedelic space in general — are interpersonal harms. It is profoundly dangerous to have a huge power imbalance.
[26:18 – 27:15] They want this…global net-zero trauma, [this] global spiritualization of humanity.... And then they don’t take a moment to look around, and question what it is that they’re so convinced that they have to move towards.... There’s a big play by certain powerful organizations [and] figures in this field, [who] say: ‘We need to get this right. This is our chance. We have to all stay in line and not draw untoward attention to what it is that’s potentially going wrong in this field, because this is so important’ — and I reject that completely. If psychedelics are that important, we can’t be cutting corners. We can’t be justifying people getting hurt along the way, because someone's a powerful friend of powerful people in this space. They don't want to disrupt those kinds of relationships.... I think we need to be very intentional about what it is that we think we're doing here.
[27:15 – 27:46] And I keep hearing this [idea that] we needed this medical model, and [that] we have to kind of like, bow down and praise the people who allowed medicalization to come through. And I completely reject that. I do not for a minute believe that psychedelics would have just went away. Psychedelics are here, and they’re here to stay, and they are that awesome that we did not need this specific medical model to reauthorize [them]. And I just — I really want to challenge that point, because I hear it all the time, and — No. No, my friends, psychedelics are too cool to have just gone away.
[28:12 – 28:55] When you scale these kinds of systems, you’re creating pipelines to channel the most vulnerable people in society with the least power into the hands of people who don’t have a lot of checks and balances right now. And I would feel better about that if — as a field — the people in charge were willing to step up and say very clearly [that] we’re not going to accept abuse. We’re not going to name Ben Sessa [as Rick Doblin just did] as a great leader at SXSW, right after [Sessa] admitted to sleeping with a [former] patient who then killed themselves. We [should say, as a field, that] we’re not going to stand for this. And the fact that that’s not happening does not give me a lot of confidence in the current people who are building this [medical] model.
[34:09 – 35:46] The healing experiences that I mentioned at the outset were all only experiences with friends. [The option to have] experiences with friends is being marginalized. [...] I’ve even seen people say, ‘Bad trips happen because you didn’t program your intentions correctly. Pay me the low price of $599.99 and I will...fine-tune your trip experience.’ And there is this psychedelic guiding industrial complex that is pushing this narrative that you can’t trust yourself, you can’t trust your community — you have to trust the people who are putting out the shingle. And I reject that. I think that we are completely missing out in that conversation [about] the reality that having community-based mutual aid support — where people who are already in relationship, who already care about each other, have history [of] showing up for each other [and] being able to support one another — Knowing exactly which favorite comfy sweater is in which drawer, where the favorite mug is, what the favorite music is, how to read when that person is overstimulated or needing to have, you know, some kind of arm on the shoulder. If you are with people who you love and trust already, I am way more comfortable with that — on average — compared to the people who are self-identifying as spiritual figures that you have to pay in order to access these experiences.
[42:17 – 42:39] MAPS is just the excuse, and the real important work is the psychedelic community finding each other. And then we can discard this increasingly desiccated, problematic old boys’ club [and its] medicalized, paternalistic approach in favor of more options.
You are a righteous flame. Never stop
Appreciate this so much. The quiet messaging you pinpoint here--"you can't trust yourself"--is so insidious, and so crucial to the financialization of these medicines. I've met, worked, and socialized with many figures in that side of the movement, and very few of them have actually earned my trust.