The Dark Side of Psychedelic Capitalism: What Psilocybin Legalization Gets Wrong
Author’s Note: this article originally appeared on my Substack Foraging for More.
Pop quiz: Who discovered America? Who discovered psilocybin?
Did Christopher Columbus pop into your head for the first question? What about Timothy Leary for the second? Maybe some psychonauts thought of the Mazatec curandera Maria Sabina, who first allowed western researchers like R. Gordon Wasson to partake of psilocybin as religious sacrament, in which case you’re only a little closer.
Chances are you didn’t think of COMPASS Pathways, the billionaire-backed biotech company currently leading the pack in the emerging psychedelic healthcare space. Yet as the scientific literature piles up on their profound effects and authorities relax prohibitions on their cultivation and use, psilocybin and other psychedelic therapies have been adopted, promoted, and even co-opted by such corporate ventures with enough speed to make your head spin.
In 2019, for example, COMPASS filed patents attempting to claim basic components of “set and setting” for a psilocybin session like “a room with a high-resolution sound system,” or a therapist providing “reassuring physical contact” as intellectual property. With the market for consciousness-altering medicines projected to reach a value of $10.75 billion by 2027, the corporate sector is paying attention to these formerly maligned substances and angling for their share of the profits to be made off their medicalization. But all this rampant speculation and proprietary marketing hype tends to overlook the rich, fraught cultural history that psilocybin and other psychedelics carry with them.
“There’s a lot of blah blah that’s totally hyped and unreflective about the mass incarceration and prohibition we just went through,” says Penn State professor Richard Doyle. “There is no psychedelic renaissance; there is a collective decision that it’s okay now and not too weird to encourage these things.”
Doyle literally wrote the book on humanity’s coevolution with psychedelic plants — one of them, anyway — called Darwin’s Pharmacy. More recently, he coauthored with Trey Conner and Neşe Devenot of the University of South Florida St Petersburg and the University of Cincinnati, respectively, the paper Dark Side of the Shroom, about the implicit erasure of countercultural and indigenous models this new wave of “psychedelic capitalism” perpetuates.
“In the scholarly world, I’m finding a lot of pressure to legitimize a model we could call psychedelics without the psychedelic worldview,” Doyle says. “‘Can we just make sure these are strictly defined within an already failed scientific, materialist model of consciousness policing?’”
In the paper, Doyle and his colleagues critique the interdependent complex of university-funded researchers, corporate marketers, and high-profile psychedelic pundits like Michael Pollan for trying to gatekeep access to psilocybin and standardize methods of delivery before decriminalization can progress. The presumption is that any one state or corporate-funded medical institution can and should decide for how, when, and if anyone should undergo a psychedelic experience, as though a one-size-fits-all approach could be mapped onto experiences noted for their metaphysical subjectivity.
This narrative also takes for granted the fact that people have already been successfully experimenting with and treating ailments through psychedelics for centuries. Attempts by hierarchical institutions — no matter how reputedly “woke” — to control or curtail their usage have often only amplified the potential harms, with the failed War on Drugs serving as prime example.
“How is it that mainstream science deserves a monopoly on psychedelic science?” Doyle asks. “What has it done but participate in that very prohibition and reject the epistemologies that come along with it?”
At one point in Dark Side of the Shroom, the authors quote pharmacologist David E. Nichols’ insistence that there’s no way to distribute these medicines “unless you have a big industry.” Never mind that there are already much more affordable and accessible resources to grow psilocybin available at the click of a button, including Third Wave’s own Mushroom Grow Kit. While pundits, politicians, and investors engage in painstakingly slow yet highly publicized debates about how to funnel psilocybin through existing regulatory frameworks, the medicines are already getting around through a vast network of therapists, life coaches, clinics, and retreat centers, many of which can be found through Third Wave’s growing directory.
“[W]e need to build policy that allows for bottom-up healing,” says Doyle, “which sounds like a non-sequitur, because we have such an assumed monopoly of medicine that we call anything else ‘alternative medicine.’”
Among psychedelic practitioners, it’s common knowledge that “set and setting” are among the most decisive factors in determining the ongoing impacts of a psychedelic journey. In the pursuit of scientific objectivity and corporate legitimacy, official institutions can overlook how their own bias may influence how these medicines are received, for better or worse.
Marketing psilocybin like other pharmaceuticals can give the impression that they’ll work like “magic bullet” pills to cure mental illness and singlehandedly solve the mental health crisis, deemphasizing the patient’s responsibility for integrating the experience and managing their health going forward. This approach has already failed many times over, such as in the case of SSRI antidepressants like Prozac, which were presented as miracle cures when first introduced in the ’80s, with ever diminishing returns.
It’s not just the marketing that limits healing; the conventional scientific view of mental illness doesn’t necessarily help either. In multiple studies, patients who were told their depression was caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain had worse outcomes and less perceived ability to manage their moods using nonpharmaceutical strategies. In one study cited in Dark Side of the Shroom, the inflated sense of psychedelics’ efficacy influenced one participant to misrepresent their experience with MDMA to focus on only “the good stuff,” glossing over the disappointment that it wasn’t the instant transformation they’d expected.
“I was still horribly broken and it was devastating,” they admitted later. “It shattered me in a whole new way.”
Researchers themselves have also been guilty of perpetuating the hype to fit with the reductive, reactionist media narrative of psychedelics in isolation as a cure-all. For example, in an opinion piece for The Guardian, Robin Carhart-Harris, the Principal Investigator of clinical trials comparing psilocybin with a leading SSRI, extrapolated inconclusive results to imply psilocybin was definitively more successful. Contrast that to the commentary by his co-researcher Rosalind Watts, which underlines the importance of sociocultural context in determining psychedelic outcomes:
“[O]ur results show the magic of genuine care, time, presence, respect, and being part of a healing community. And that is what is sorely missing from our psychiatric system.”
The rush to convert natural medicines like psilocybin into pharmaceuticals and intellectual property only erects new barriers to access, making treatments more costly and prohibitive. By viewing them as agents for self-improvement and boosting productivity by gaming our brain chemistry, the influence of global capitalism effectively desacralizes and puts behind a paywall what many indigenous cultures have long upheld as religious sacraments accessible to all.
“As soon as we use some supposedly superior method for interacting with psychedelics as the legitimate way,” says Doyle, “we either explicitly or implicitly other all of these ways…that are actually thousands of years old and well established for how to manage a psychedelic experience and how to use these plant medicines for healing, as opposed to how to establish what the causal mechanism is of a psychedelic molecule.
“The unintended consequences of well-meaning regulatory frameworks have a strong record for cultural demolition and widespread incarceration,” he continues. “Let’s not jump to any conclusions about best practices and critically trust the counter cultural and indigenous frameworks first — they have the most experience and have somehow thrived through the prohibition.”
The larger challenge much of the official discourse around psychedelics avoids is how to categorize substances whose ingestion tends to occasion experiences of nonduality, or “ego death,” eroding such categorical separations themselves. Is a psilocybin trip a recreational, medicinal, or spiritual experience? Anyone who’s undergone such an experience would probably confirm it can be all three at once.
For this reason, Doyle recommends authorities take a hands-off, harm-reduction-based approach to decriminalizing psychedelic states, educating law enforcement and healthcare officials through grow workshops while leaving individuals and communities free to cultivate their own psychedelics and decide how best to interpret and integrate them into their own cultural practices.
“We have, as a society, chosen the spiritual context as the proper regulatory domain for psychedelics,” Doyle points out.
Indeed, there’s already precedent for state courts permitting psychedelics as a sacrament under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1994, including peyote by the Native American Church and ayahuasca by the União do Vegetal (UDV). The growing body of scientific literature is rife with testimonies that the healing potentials of psilocybin and like substances was closely tied to the perceived mystical encounters they elicited, ranked by some subjects as the most significant experiences in their lives.
Though perhaps a novel insight to Western science, these results conform with the shamanic cultures of most indigenous peoples and entheogenic theories that psychoactive substances were fundamental in the evolution of religions as well as human consciousness itself. Yet the spiritual dimension of psychedelics is often underwritten by media coverage of their reintroduction into polite society. Perhaps that’s because acknowledging them as such would limit the profits private businesses and state governments stand to make off them, and even undermine the proprietary models of interaction that enable the creation of billionaire philanthropists within the same society where others are perpetually starved for food and shelter.
“Freedom of religion, freedom to have a sacred experience, is what we’re talking about here,” says Doyle. “That freedom is often eclipsed by the narrative that, ‘of course this time around it’ll be medical.’”
Rather than a hierarchical, top-down approach, the reintroduction of psilocybin into mainstream discourse and usage should originate, like the medicines themselves, from the ground up, evolving our understanding of altered states through informed experimentation, not controlled isolation. Instead of proprietary knowledge, the reawakening to psychedelic states of consciousness should be guided by a free-flowing exchange of knowledge between cultures and time periods. That means both individuals and companies adopting an approach of humility and interdependence, not ownership and appropriation, especially after decades of demonization and disinformation.
“The nature of psychedelic experiences wants to be shared,” says Doyle. “By stepping away and decriminalizing, letting people do it themselves and sharing the open-source results, we’re likely to do less harm and less likely to fool ourselves into thinking we’re experts. Each of us can only take responsibility as adults if we have access to free and impartial information, and we’re not subject to criminalization for it.”
Now, back to the pop quiz. Consider how the wording of those questions influenced the terms of your response, as though any one person or publicly traded company could reasonably claim to have “discovered” this land, or these plants that evolved with it over eons. As though they didn’t exist before “we” — meaning the disciples of Western states and physical sciences — documented them within the past few centuries, measured by times around the sun since the purported birth of one religion’s messiah. The point is, these are commonly accepted standards of thinking about these subjects — not objective truths.
The history of psychedelics is not limited to the past century, and their healing potentials can’t be isolated in a chemical to be patented, bottled and sold and only administered under controlled conditions by doctors, clergy members, or corporate retreat centers. Yet that is what the language and financial speculation of the emerging psychedelic “industry” would lead us to believe is the best, if not only, legal path forward for healing psychedelic compounds like psilocybin. In the translation from peer-reviewed research to marketing copy and philanthropic punditry, these plants — which are not inanimate drugs or magic pills, but, at least in some sense, sentient beings — are at risk of extraction from the sacred contexts in which they’ve evolved, for the profit of the existing political and economic orders that created the ecological and mental health crises they’re now promising to solve, the same way they always have — with a product.
But for all the concerns and critiques raised in their paper, Doyle claims he’s still optimistic about the integration of psilocybin and other psychedelics into our culture. The regulatory frameworks and economic incentive systems of capitalism may confuse the issues or slow progress, but ultimately cannot prevent the spread of the wisdom entheogenic drugs have to offer: that we are not isolated beings, but deeply interconnected with our communities, human and otherwise. The momentum may be enormous, but the solutions are simple: grow, respect, and learn from our plant medicines right at home, rather than outsourcing them to a major industry extracting them en masse from the other side of the world.
“Working from the inside-out and bottom-up has to be a DIY process of awakening, where a critical mass of people recognize and integrate the truth of our interaction and interconnection with plants, and live on that basis in an everyday way,” says Doyle. “It’s an interesting thought experiment: what happens if you get even 10 out of 330 million people living a life according to not the false idol of ego, but their experience of radical interconnection with each other and with the Earth?”
