When I first entered the world of psychedelics over 15 years ago, there wasn’t necessarily any industry or sector, but the increase in attention on psychedelic therapies, as well as an increase in access to psychedelic retreats, has opened up the conversation to wider sections of the global population. This opening up of the psychedelic conversation has now found its place within a mapped-out psychedelic sector, where public and private companies are now aiming to ‘revolutionise’ mental health treatments.
As more people become aware of the problematic side effects associated with some pharmaceutical drugs, particularly those intended to treat depression, they are looking more towards alternative therapies as serious contenders for managing these types of conditions long-term.
I often find the way this all gets presented to us is in glowingly positive terms, where these companies have come in to save us from the impending mental health crisis. Tech billionaires such as Peter Thiel are increasing investments in psychedelic biotech companies such as Atai Life Sciences and Compass Pathways, and perhaps this is just the way things go. It might have been naive to think that these plant and fungi therapies wouldn’t have eventually been commodified to this extent.
I do think the speed at which certain substances have gone from being stigmatised to now having the backing of tech billionaires is intriguing. This is especially so when you consider some of the previous connections that some of these billionaires, like Christian Angermayer, have had with world leaders – the most notable being Paul Kagame, who has been President of Rwanda for 25 years, where he has presided over a “well-camouflaged dictatorship”.
Peter Thiel, on the other hand, might have more of a trickier involvement with repressive regimes, having co-founded the tech firm Palantir, which, among many things, has provided support for Israeli defence and national security interests – although it denies being involved in the targeting of individuals using AI during the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
From my personal experience with psychedelics and the culture surrounding them, these kinds of connections don’t sit particularly well with what I have understood to be lessons of oneness, unity, and peace. I was attracted to the psychedelic world largely for its seemingly rebellious energy, where creative types would push the boundaries of art, music, and writing to create some kind of counterculture that challenged the ethos of the dominant political and social institutions. This mindset has often been perceived as a fantasy since the 1960s, and trying to go about accessing psychedelics today in any other paradigm besides capitalism might just be seen as wishful thinking or idealistic.
It’s probably fanciful to think we could ever prevent the commodification of traditional plants and fungi, especially if those of us who are advocates of their benefits want to see more people have the opportunity to find healing through these different avenues. I’ve spoken to some of my fellow psychedelically-minded friends over the past few years, and some have said that they expected things to go this way…while others have said they didn’t expect psychedelics to be so radically swept up by the capitalist paradigm when they’ve previously been so marginalised.
When I was promoting the UKC Psychedelic Society at freshers’ fayres during my time at university, I was often aware of how much certain types of students from the more straight-edge corners of society would come up to the stall and be baffled that this society existed. We’d get questions such as “Oh, so do you all go into the woods and take drugs together?” But now it seems that similar kinds of people are becoming interested in the potential for these substances to be commodities that we can utilise to treat mental health problems.
There’s no denying the genuine ability of different psychedelics to treat a wide range of mental health conditions, but is there a danger of thinking about these plants and fungi within the context of commodities? My own personal experience with magic mushrooms on countless occasions has not been one where I am the subject and the mushroom is the object – it is more in line with the idea of the experience being one of subject-subject.
It is what researcher Luis Eduardo Luna calls ‘relational epistemology’, which is the idea that we should regard the power of these plants and fungi as extending further than simply the healing potential within our own individual experiences:
There is the danger that they will be turned into therapies that put the emphasis only on the individual—the individual’s fear, the individual’s trauma. There is a kind of narcissism in this. Healing can happen, and it’s fantastic. But I think of more importance is that these plants or substances put us into contact with community, with other humans, and with the larger-than-human world.
My experience with mushrooms in particular has always made me think that they’re the ones in control of all of this – when we used to go picking liberty caps, it was like they would only reveal themselves at a certain time of the year when the conditions were just right. It created a sacred pilgrimage-like experience, where you would really feel the magic when you notice the first one, which then allows you to see all the others. There was something special about waiting for the right time and joining in with the communal energy of the season. The restrictions surrounding picking (let alone home cultivation) gave the whole experience more of a secretive energy, where you almost felt like you had to be initiated into the world of the mushroom.
Now it seems we’re constantly bombarded by the desperate need to find alternatives to manage the impending mental health crisis, and just allowing people to harvest or cultivate psychedelics such as magic mushrooms isn’t necessarily seen as the right avenue to be going down. I recently had an exchange with Psilocybin Access Rights (PAR), who said that their campaign is “focused on the medical rescheduling of psilocybin, rather than decriminalisation or declassification, as this is strategically where things are most likely to move forward. It’s an immediate need and the science clearly backs the rescheduling, making it hard to argue against.”
But what does access look like if we’re not allowing people to naturally harvest or cultivate mushrooms at home? Will we see the development of synthetic psychedelic substances for use in clinical settings while we still don’t have widespread access to the plants and fungi themselves?
This actually seems to be well underway, with Compass Pathways having developed a synthetic, proprietary formulation of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression known as COMP360, which is being used in ongoing phase 3 clinical trials. University of California Davis Institute for Psychedelics and Neurotherapeutics has also successfully synthesised the molecule ibogaine, derived from the African plant Tabernanthe iboga, which has shown a lot of promise in treating opiate addiction as well as traumatic brain injury.
While it feels a bit weird to be synthesising proprietary formulations or just extracting one molecule from psychedelic plants or fungi, is there an argument to be made for providing these benefits when access to the actual organisms themselves is still restricted? Mental health problems don’t wait for legislation to change, and we certainly need to find ways to create access in the face of nonsensical laws, but can this be done without engaging in acts of biopiracy?
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