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In psychedelics circles the term ‘dieta” is often referenced but rarely understood. It is not a diet understood in the classical American manner. The word comes from the Spanish, but the practice is older than Spanish colonization of the Amazon and older than anyone in the tradition can reliably date. It is, at its core, a protocol for making yourself available to a plant. And in the traditions that birthed it, that is not a metaphor.

Among the Shipibo-Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon, one of the traditions most closely associated with ayahuasca and plant medicine, the dieta is the foundational training of a healer. An apprentice curandero who wants to work with a particular plant doesn’t just take it a few times and call themself a shaman. They enter into a relationship with it. The dieta is what that relationship looks like from the outside. From the inside, it’s something else entirely.

Here is what it involves. The apprentice retreats to an isolated space, often traditionally a small hut at the forest’s edge, away from the community. For a prescribed period, which can range from a week to several years depending on the plant and the tradition, they follow a strict set of restrictions. No salt, sugar, or alcohol. No pork or other fatty meats. No sexual contact and some traditions even restrict physical contact with others and often no social interaction beyond what’s necessary. The diet itself is bland almost to the point of punishment. The specifics vary by lineage and plant, but the principle is consistent with the goal to remove everything that might obscure the signal.

That brings us to the question of the signal. That’s the part that takes some sitting with. Within the Amazonian cosmological framework, plants are not passive organisms. They are beings with intelligence, personality, and the capacity to transmit knowledge. The Shipibo call these teacher plants “maestros,” and they take the designation seriously. Ayahuasca is the most famous but the canon of plant teachers is long. Each dieta is tailored to the plant being worked with, and each plant has its own demands.

The logic of the restrictions, once you understand the framework, is not arbitrary. Salt and sugar are believed to interfere with the subtle energetic processes the plant initiates. Sexual energy, in many Amazonian traditions, is considered a powerful force that competes with or contaminates the spiritual work. Social contact disperses the concentrated interiority the apprentice is trying to cultivate. A space is being built within the apprentice who then waits to see what comes to fill it.

What often comes, practitioners report, are visions, songs, and direct transmissions of knowledge. The icaros, the healing songs at the heart of Shipibo ceremonial practice, are not composed. They are received. A healer who has dieted deeply with a plant can call that plant’s spirit into a ceremony through its song. The song is the relationship made audible. This is not poetic language among the people who practice it. It is a technical description of how the tradition works.

Breaking the dieta is not a minor infraction. In traditional contexts, it is considered genuinely dangerous not in a vague karmic sense but in the specific sense of causing illness. The Shipibo concept of “saladera”, a kind of spiritual contamination that manifests as chronic bad luck and physical malaise, is one of the described consequences. More serious violations, particularly involving sex during a dieta with a powerful plant, are said to cause psychological destabilization that can be difficult to reverse. Whether you frame this in terms of spirits or in terms of the neurological effects of combining intense plant medicine work with boundary violations, the warning is consistent across traditions. The message is clear that the integrity of the container matters.

Here’s where things get complicated. The global explosion of ayahuasca retreats over the past two decades has brought the concept of the dieta into contact with an audience that has almost no cultural scaffolding for it. Most retreat centers in Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia ask participants to observe a pre-ceremony dieta in the days or weeks before drinking ayahuasca. No pork, no alcohol, no recreational drugs. Sometimes no sex. The reasoning offered varies and some centers frame it in the traditional spirit-relationship terms, others in more Western language about serotonin interactions and MAOI contraindications. The two explanations sit in an uneasy coexistence.

More serious practitioners, those pursuing extended apprenticeships rather than a weekend retreat, often commit to long-form dietas lasting months. Some Western students of Amazonian plant medicine have spent years in isolation, working through the full curriculum of plant teachers under a master curandero’s guidance. The accounts they return with are not easily categorized. They describe personalities in the plants, lessons received in dreams, voices that came unbidden and left them changed. You can call that psychology, you can call it neurochemistry, you can call it the spirits of the forest. The tradition predates all three frameworks, and it doesn’t need our permission to keep working.

What the dieta represents, at its simplest, is an act of respect. A relationship is being entered with something that the tradition regards as powerful, intelligent, and deserving of full attention. The restrictions are not punishment. They are preparation. They are the work done before the work begins. In a culture saturated with stimulation, noise, and the compulsive need to consume everything immediately, the dieta asks you to do the opposite and to subtract, to slow, to wait. The plants, according to the people who have worked with them for centuries, will meet you there.

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There’s a particular irony in the psychedelic renaissance. The substances that defined a generation of youthful rebellion in the 1960s are now circling back to the people who once passed the pipe at Woodstock, or who, for entirely different reasons, never did. Across research clinics and underground ceremonies, a quiet wave is building. Older adults are reaching toward psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine, and LSD with something they didn’t have in their youth. They reach with intention. They reach with loss at their backs and time running out.

The research is beginning to catch up with the reality. But so are the questions about who these older explorers are, what they stand to gain, and what hazards come with the territory.

Seniors didn’t materialize in psychedelic circles by accident. Numerous forces converged. It could be the death of a spouse, a cancer diagnosis, or a retirement that stripped away identity. It might be chronic pain that conventional medicine never quite reached or coping mechanisms that have calcified over decades.

Many older adults carry what clinicians call “treatment-resistant depression”. For this group, the early findings from psilocybin trials at Johns Hopkins and NYU have felt like a door opening in a room they’d stopped believing had exits.

Then there’s end-of-life anxiety. No population has more reason to confront mortality than people in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. Studies of psilocybin in cancer patients facing terminal diagnoses have produced some of the most striking results in the entire field. These studies report reductions in existential dread, increased feelings of connectedness, and a reorientation toward meaning that participants described not as forgetting death, but as becoming less afraid of it.

For MDMA-assisted therapy, the draw for older adults often involves trauma. Veterans in their sixties with treatment-resistant PTSD have shown remarkable responses in Phase 3 trials. Survivors of childhood abuse who have carried wounds for over half a century have experienced MDMA’s unique capacity to lower defensive walls. This can create conditions where old pain can be approached and metabolized.

None of this is simple. The older body is not the younger body, and the differences matter enormously. Physiology changes everything. Liver function declines with age, which means psychedelic compounds are metabolized more slowly. Blood pressure and cardiovascular reactivity, both of which can spike during a psychedelic experience, are more significant concerns in someone with hypertension or a history of cardiac events. Psilocybin is generally considered physiologically safe, but “generally” is not “universally,” and older adults need thorough medical screening before any session.

The brain itself changes. Older adults often have reduced neuroplasticity compared to younger people, though psychedelics appear to temporarily restore some of that flexibility. What this means clinically is still being studied. It may mean the therapeutic window operates differently, or that integration requires more time and support.

Drug interactions are a serious concern. Many people over 60 take daily medications like SSRIs, blood pressure drugs, statins, and anticoagulants. Certain antidepressants, particularly SSRIs and SNRIs, can blunt the effects of psilocybin. Any older adult considering this path needs to have a frank and detailed conversation with a physician knowledgeable about psychedelic medicine.

This group’s psychological terrain is different. Older adults often arrive with a lifetime of defenses, highly structured belief systems, a stronger ego identity, and sometimes a deeper resistance to “letting go.” This is neither a flaw nor a virtue; it’s simply a different landscape. A challenging psychedelic experience can be disorienting for anyone, but for someone with existing cognitive fragility like early-stage dementia that disorientation carries higher stakes. Screening for cognitive decline is essential and must be taken into consideration.

Isolation is another underappreciated risk. Younger psychedelic users often have built-in integration support with friends who understand, communities online, and therapists who are increasingly trained. Older adults may lack all of these. Coming home from a profound, world-reordering experience to a quiet house with no one to process it with can turn a gift into a wound.

The potential rewards are real and in some ways more profound for this age group than any other. Older adults tend to arrive at psychedelic experiences with greater intentionality. They are, by and large, not chasing euphoria. They have tried other things and they know what they’re looking for. This seriousness of purpose correlates with better outcomes in the research literature and reinforces the knowledge that set and setting are everything.

There is also the gift of perspective. A sixty-five-year-old sitting with a five-hour psilocybin experience carries sixty-five years of memory, loss, love, and pattern into that room. When the medicine opens a door, what waits behind it is not abstract, it is specific, personal, and often deeply ready to be seen.

Grief, the defining companion of later life, has found an unexpected ally in psychedelic therapy. The loss of a partner, a child, or a former self are experiences that older adults carry quietly, often without adequate support. Psilocybin has shown early promise in grief work, creating a kind of psychic spaciousness in which loss can be held differently.

Most clinical trials have underrepresented adults over 60 so the data is promising, but thin. The risks are real, but manageable with proper screening and support. What’s clear is that older adults deserve to be part of the psychedelic conversation as a population with distinct needs, distinct gifts, and a particular kind of urgency.

Time has a different texture at sixty-five than at twenty-five. If these medicines can help people live their remaining years with more presence, less fear, and deeper peace with who they have been that is not a small thing. That is, perhaps, everything.

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In November 2000, federal agents surrounded a decommissioned Minuteman missile silo near Wamego, Kansas, and arrested Leonard Pickard. The DEA alleged he was the architect of the largest LSD manufacturing operation in American history. The bust made headlines. The conviction, two life sentences handed down in 2003, made history. But the story that the psychedelic community is still picking at, over 20 years later, is a quieter and uglier one. Who talked, and what did they say?

The primary informant in the Pickard case was Gordon Todd Skinner, a figure so strange and corrosive he almost defies description. Skinner was the man who owned the silo, who befriended Pickard, who invited him in, and who was simultaneously feeding information to the DEA. He later pled guilty in an unrelated case involving kidnapping and torture. The government’s star witness, in short, was a man who would go on to commit atrocities. But Skinner was not the only name attached to this case that generated controversy in psychedelic circles. The other was John Halpern, MD.

Halpern, at the time of Pickard’s arrest, was a psychiatrist at McLean Hospital affiliated with Harvard Medical School. He was one of the most respected researchers working in legitimate psychedelic science. He had done serious work on peyote use among the Native American Church. He was a credible, careful scientist operating in a field that desperately needed both. He was also, by multiple accounts, a personal acquaintance of Leonard Pickard.

The two men moved in overlapping worlds and according to the documented record, in overlapping finances. Between 1996 and 1999, Halpern accepted at least $319,000 in cash from Pickard. The exact purpose of those payments was never definitively established. Rumors persist that the money represented laundered drug proceeds. What is not in dispute is the amount, the cash nature of the transfers, or the timing. The cash payments were years before the arrest, while Pickard was allegedly running the largest LSD operation in American history. Hold that fact in mind because what happened next is where the story turns.

Within a month of Pickard’s arrest in November 2000 Halpern had signed on as a cooperating witness for the DEA. He went on to sign nine such reports through May 2002. He was also required, as part of that cooperation, to surreptitiously record phone conversations with associates who were suspected of involvement in the missile silo case. The man who had received nearly a third of a million dollars in cash from Leonard Pickard was now, by documented record, feeding information about Leonard Pickard’s world back to federal investigators.

The public reckoning came more than five years later. On January 13, 2006, at a LSD Symposium in Switzerland attended by much of the serious psychedelic research community something happened during Halpern’s presentation. An attendee interrupted Halpern’s talk and proceeded to read from a document detailing Halpern’s DEA cooperation. He read it from in front of the room and asked Halpern directly whether he had worked as a DEA agent. Halpern’s response did not satisfy the crowd. The moment was captured on video and is available on YouTube at https://tinyurl.com/2cne8fn2. The psychedelic community had a name for it almost immediately: “Halperngate.”

Inside that community, the reaction was swift and severe. Trust is the bedrock currency in a subculture that has spent decades operating on the margins of law, and the specifics made it worse. There were those nine reports, the recordings, and the timeline. Two days before Pickard and Apperson were found guilty in May 2003, Halpern had submitted a grant application to the National Institute on Drug Abuse to study MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. That grant was approved in September 2004, roughly ten months after sentencing. Whether there was any connection between the cooperation and the funding was never formally established, but the proximity was noted throughout the psychedelic community.

There’s a familiar tragedy in this dynamic. The people doing legitimate psychedelic research have always depended, at least partly, on the goodwill and trust of the underground. It was the outlaw chemists, guides, and practitioners who kept knowledge alive when it was illegal to study it. When that trust broke, it didn’t just damage relationships, it sent a chill through the entire ecosystem.

Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS, tried to thread the needle publicly. MAPS had funded some of Halpern’s above ground research and Doblin said he had been aware of the DEA work. He told the Basel audience that he had spoken to Pickard by phone in prison and that Pickard himself had said he understood what MAPS was trying to do with Halpern and was supportive of the work. It was an unusual defense, and a revealing one as the man serving two life sentences was being cited to excuse the cooperation that helped put him there. Some in the community accepted it but many did not.

What makes the Halpern situation complicated is that the $319,000 cuts both ways. On one reading, a man who had taken that much cash from a suspected drug manufacturer had enormous legal exposure once the DEA came knocking. Federal investigators don’t always give you a choice about whether to cooperate. They come at you with documents and records of financial transfers. With the weight of prosecution hanging in the air. cooperation may not have felt optional. On another reading, a man who had taken that much cash from a suspected drug manufacturer and then helped build the case against him was doing something more calculated than survival. What Halpern knew, what he said, what he was asked, and what he was promised remain unanswered in the public record. Conveniently, perhaps, for everyone involved.

Leonard Pickard has maintained that the government’s case against him was substantially built on the work of compromised and self-interested informants. His novel, The Rose of Paracelsus, published while still incarcerated, is partly a meditation on betrayal and the peculiar ethics of the psychedelic underground. In 2020, he was granted compassionate release with the court citing his advanced age and medical condition in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. He walked out of federal prison after nearly twenty years.

The informant question doesn’t go away because it points at something permanent and unresolved in the psychedelic world: the cost of operating, even legitimately, in the shadow of prohibition. Halpern went on to continue his research career. Pickard went to prison for life, then got out. Skinner, the man who built the trap, remains the most clearly villainous figure, yet he was also the most structurally predictable one. The government found him, used him, and discarded him.

The harder question is what it means when someone from inside the research community with standing and credentials, who had accepted $319,000 in cash from the man who would become the defendant, ends up on the same side as the DEA. Is it betrayal? Self-preservation? An arrangement that was always more transactional than it appeared? The purpose of the $319,000 was never formally adjudicated. The money laundering inference appears in community accounts, but Halpern was never charged with money laundering.

Is this tale a parable of humanity itself? Are we neither sinners nor saints but a mixture of the two? Can our entire lives be judged by the worst decisions we make on a dark day? And what about forgiveness and second chances? If our actions harm others, what are the steps to make amends to those that we have wronged? That first step might be to admit that we regret our actions. Granting second chances is a sign of openness and moving forward but maybe the transgressor needs to first take the step to admit that their actions caused harm. Bob Dylan sang “to live outside the law you must be honest”. In this case we can see that all hell can break lose when that moral guardrail is violated.

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There is a particular kind of cruelty to Alzheimer’s disease. I’ve watched it closely as it took away the person that once was my brother. It does not kill you all at once. It takes the person first, slowly and methodically, leaving the body behind to carry on without them. Decades of pharmaceutical research have produced drugs that can, at best, slow the forgetting by a few months. Nothing stops it. Nothing reverses it. The standard line from neurologists has long been that once the damage is done, it is done.

A growing number of researchers now believe that line may be wrong. And the compounds they are pointing to as evidence are the same ones that spent the better part of fifty years classified as Schedule I substances with no accepted medical use. They are psilocybin, LSD, and their chemical relatives, the psychedelics.

This is not fringe science as the research is being conducted at Johns Hopkins, published in peer-reviewed journals like Frontiers in Neuroscience, and funded through legitimate academic channels. In 2024, a team of researchers published a detailed analysis of psilocybin’s potential as an Alzheimer’s treatment. What they found was not a marginal effect. They found something that looked, at the molecular level, like a direct assault on the mechanisms that drive the disease.

What Psilocybin Actually Does to the Brain

Alzheimer’s is a story of structural collapse. The brain loses its ability to build and maintain connections. Dendritic spines, those the tiny protrusions on neurons that receive signals from neighboring cells, wither and disappear. Synaptic proteins break down. The architecture of memory and personality is dismantled, piece by piece, over years.

Psilocybin appears to do the opposite. Studies on cortical neurons have shown that even low doses of psilocybin and LSD significantly increase the complexity of dendritic branching and raise the density of dendritic spines. The drugs stimulate the brain to rebuild the very structures Alzheimer’s tears down. The mechanism runs through a receptor called TrkB which is the primary receptor for a protein called BDNF. Psychedelics bind to TrkB with roughly one thousand times greater affinity than standard antidepressants.

This is why a single supervised dose of psilocybin appears to produce measurable neurological changes that can persist for months or more. This is not how conventional medicine works. Conventional medicine requires daily dosing to maintain effect. What researchers are seeing with psychedelics is closer to a reset.

The Fire That Destroys the Brain From the Inside

There is a second front in this story, and it may be even more important than the neuroplasticity findings. Neuroinflammation, the chronic, low-grade immune activation in the brain, is now understood to be a central driver of Alzheimer’s progression. The brain’s immune cells, microglia, go haywire. They stop cleaning up cellular debris and start attacking healthy tissue. Inflammatory chemicals called cytokines flood the environment. These are the markers of a system that will not stand down.

Laboratory studies have found that psilocybin-related compounds can suppress the production of each of those inflammatory markers. Simultaneously, they appear to reduce levels of APAF-1, a protein involved in triggering neuron death, while upregulating neuroprotective factors including BDNF and GDNF. The same drug that rebuilds the brain’s architecture appears to also douse the fire that is consuming it. That dual action is something the pharmaceutical industry has been chasing for decades with conventional compounds and has not achieved.

The Trials That Are Actually Happening

Johns Hopkins is running a pilot study, registered as NCT04123314 with the U.S. government, specifically testing psilocybin in patients with mild cognitive impairment or early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. The initial focus is depression, which affects up to forty percent of Alzheimer’s patients, accelerates cognitive decline, and has no good treatment options within that population. If psilocybin can address both the mood disorder and the underlying neurological damage in the same session, that is not an incremental advance. That is a different category of medicine.

A 2025 paper in Frontiers in Dementia pushed the research further in an unexpected direction. Researchers exposed human brain organoids, those miniature structures grown from human stem cells that mimic the architecture of a developing brain, to psychedelic compounds, then analyzed protein related response. The early results pointed to specific molecular pathways where psychedelics appear to be most active, providing a roadmap for more targeted clinical investigation. The science is moving faster than most people realize.

What Is Actually Standing in the Way

Psilocybin is still a Schedule I controlled substance in the United States. That classification was not based on scientific evidence of harm. It was a political decision, made in 1970 under the Controlled Substances Act, and it has never been revisited in any serious formal way. The FDA has granted psilocybin Breakthrough Therapy designation for treatment-resistant depression but no approval covering neurodegeneration has been sought.

There are also practical challenges that honest researchers acknowledge openly. Alzheimer’s patients, particularly those in moderate or late stages, may be vulnerable to the disorienting perceptual effects that these compounds produce. Running a safe, supervised psychedelic session requires trained guides, controlled environments, and hours of preparation and integration. Scaling that to the tens of millions of people affected by the disease is a problem that nobody has solved. For now, the trials are small, the sample sizes are modest, and the findings remain preliminary.

A Different Kind of Reckoning

The history of psychedelics and the history of Alzheimer’s research have, until recently, been entirely separate stories. One was the story of counterculture, of Leary and McKenna and the DEA and the war on drugs. The other was the story of pharmaceutical failure, of billions of dollars spent chasing amyloid plaques with compounds that worked beautifully in mice and did almost nothing in humans.

Those two stories are now converging. The same cultural suppression that pushed psychedelics underground for fifty years also delayed by decades the scientific investigation of what these compounds actually do to the brain. We are only now beginning to find out. And what we are finding out, according to a growing body of research from serious institutions, is that the brain they said was already gone might not be as far gone as anyone thought.

Psychedelics do not just represent a new drug for an old disease. They represent a challenge to the entire framework through which we have been trying to understand and treat neurodegeneration. The silent architects of that challenge are not distributors or chemists or countercultural icons. They are researchers working in universities and publishing papers that almost nobody outside the field is reading.

The brain they said was already gone, may still have something left to say.

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I saw the best minds of my generation illuminated by lysergic visions, naked in the cosmic light, dragging themselves through mushroom forests looking for the infinite connection,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly dissolution of ego in the machinery of night, who dissolved their boundaries in psilocybin cathedrals contemplating the eternal Om,

who sat in rooms full of incense and breathing exercises waiting for the DMT chrysanthemum to bloom behind their eyelids showing them the diamond truth of molecular consciousness,

who thanked the sacred cactus for peeling back the veil, blessed be the peyote, blessed be the ayahuasca vine twisting through Amazonian darkness carrying messages from plant intelligence to human soul,

thank you magic mushroom growing from cow dung and forest floor, you democratic teacher available to peasant and poet alike, growing freely in the fields of consciousness,

thank you LSD-25 discovered by accident in a Swiss laboratory, you microscopic key unlocking the doors of perception Huxley wrote about, showing us the mind is larger than we thought, infinitely larger,

thank you for the ego death, the cosmic rebirth, thank you for showing us we are not separate from the trees or the stars or each other, we are the universe experiencing itself,

thank you for the terror and the ecstasy, the difficult trips that taught us what we needed to learn, the beautiful trips that showed us paradise was always here,

and thank you for bringing us back, always back, to the ordinary world now seen extraordinary, the kitchen sink gleaming with divinity, our lover’s face suddenly recognized as God wearing a familiar mask,

holy the mushroom! holy the acid! holy the DMT! holy the mescaline! holy the door that opens! holy the mind that walks through!

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In the annals of American psychedelic history there is one tale that emerges from the dark corner of backstabbing and betrayal. Bob Dylan had it right: “To live outside the law you must be honest.” Billy Hitchcock didn’t get the memo. Dear Reader, here is one story of what can happen when that code is violated.

Billy Hitchcock was a wealthy heir to the Mellon banking fortune and a key financial backer of the 1960s psychedelic counterculture. He grew up in privilege as part of the Hitchcock branch of the influential Mellon family that were the owners of the sprawling Millbrook estate in New York. The estate became a hub for psychedelic experimentation after the Hitchcocks acquired it.

Hitchcock provided the Millbrook property as a safe haven for Timothy Leary and Richard Albert and their growing entourage after their dismissal from Harvard. Billy’s sister Peggy played a central role in inviting Leary’s group. The site hosted LSD sessions, poets like Allen Ginsberg, musicians such as Charles Mingus and Grateful Dead members, and thinkers including Alan Watts. Some say this was the true birthplace of psychedelia in the U.S. If you wanted to find the future in 1963, you went to Millbrook.

It was during this this period that Billy met and began to personally finance LSD production and distribution by the acid chemists Nick Sand and Tim Scully. Hitchcock later underwrote expanded operations in Sausalito, California, backing Scully and Sand as they produced millions of doses of Orange Sunshine LSD.

Those operations were ultimately linked to the tribal network known as the Brotherhood of Eternal Love which facilitated the distribution of the LSD. Hitchcock acted as the financial facilitator and money handler for Scully and Sand’s LSD enterprise. He arranged and managed offshore bank accounts in the Bahamas and Switzerland, moved large sums of cash into those accounts, and used them to pay for precursors, glassware, and other materials needed to manufacture LSD. He effectively laundered the profits and insulated the chemists from direct financial exposure. For a while, it worked as the acid flowed and consciousness expanded. The revolution seemed real.

In 1973, authorities discovered undeclared profits from Hitchcock’s LSD-related activities in Swiss bank accounts, leading to an indictment that threatened him with up to 24 years in prison. Facing this leverage, and exacerbated by issues like unpaid alimony, he agreed to cooperate with prosecutors by providing evidence and agreeing to testify against the very chemists he had supported.

Boxed in by events and facing these tax evasion charges, Hitchcock turned informant testifying against Scully and Sand. ​On November 14, 1973, he took the stand in the federal trial against the triad of Tim Scully, Nick Sand, and Lester Friedman, detailing their LSD manufacturing operations, travels for precursors, and lab in Windsor, California. This secured his immunity, allowing him to walk free. Scully got a prison sentence of 20 years and Sand 15 years. Lester Friedman was acquitted of conspiracy to make drugs but later pleaded guilty to perjury.

After testifying Hitchcock received immunity from prosecution on the tax evasion charges, avoiding what could have been decades in prison. He received a five‑year suspended sentence and a fine, which allowed him to resume his life and business activities without serving significant jail time. ​After testifying and breaking the Code of the Chemists, Billy withdrew from the LSD scene and retreated to the comforts of a quiet life, though his full story has yet to be told. His deep connections to international banking and global intelligence networks are worthy of a Netflix series.

Is there a lesson to be learned here? Maybe it’s this: money doesn’t make you an outlaw and privilege doesn’t teach you how to stand up when the walls close in. The revolution always eats its dilettantes first. Billy Hitchcock proved that when you’re living outside the law, honesty isn’t a suggestion, it may be the price of admission.

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In the history of neuroscience, few concepts have been as quietly powerful as what is called the ‘critical period.’ The brain, we have been told, is pliable when young but then it hardens as childhood ends. By adulthood, the architecture is set and you get what you got. That story is now falling apart.

A growing number of researchers are arriving at the conclusion that psychedelics can reopen developmental windows in the adult brain that were supposed to be permanently sealed. This is not a metaphor in the loose sense of “opening your mind.” The implications are enormous and the scientific establishment is only beginning to reckon with them.

Let’s start with what a description of what the critical period actually is. Hubel and Wiesel mapped this in the visual cortex in 1963. Cover one eye in a kitten during a specific developmental window and the brain rewires itself around the open eye. Do it after the window closes and nothing happens. The circuits are fixed. This gave neuroscience a framework that there are times when the brain is particularly receptive to environmental input, and times when it isn’t. The windows are open, but they always close, or at least that was the prevailing belief.

This concept of the brain having a period when it is highly receptive to new input is an efficient evolutionary process, but for a significant portion of the population it is a trap. If psychiatric conditions like PTSD, major depression, and social anxiety are disorders of maladaptive learning encoded during sensitive windows then treating them requires not just managing symptoms but actually changing the encoding. The adult brain, in its stabilized state, resists this. That’s the problem.

In 2019 Gül Dölen in her laboratory at Johns Hopkins published findings that rocked the world of neuroscience. Using MDMA in adult mice, her team reopened the social reward critical period. This was the developmental window for learning and bonding that normally closes after adolescence. Adult mice treated with MDMA began exhibiting social learning behaviors that, under normal circumstances, the adult brain simply didn’t do anymore. The window, as far as anyone had known, was shut. Dölen’s work demonstrated that the closed window could be reopened. Interestingly, the duration of critical period reopening appears to parallel the length of time that people report experiencing the acute subjective effects of each psychedelic. The mice studies documented an opening of the learning window that lasted 2 days after ketamine but up to 4 weeks with ibogaine.

Meanwhile, David Olson’s group at the University of California was documenting similar effects with the classic psychedelics LSD, DMT, and Psilocybin. They found rapid, sustained dendritic spine growth. The studied brains were physically sprouting new synaptic connections. They also found the effect in a non-hallucinogenic analogue of ibogaine called tabernanthalog. The plasticity didn’t require the traditional psychedelic experience. The drug was not just changing how you felt, it was changing the physical substrate of how the brain was organized. The field is wrestling with a hard question. If the therapeutic mechanism is the plasticity itself and only about synaptic remodeling and the reopening of critical periods, do you need the subjective experience at all? Could a non-hallucinogenic compound achieve the same result in humans? And if so, what do you lose?

A reopened critical period is not simply an opportunity. It is also a vulnerability as increased plasticity means increased susceptibility. During these windows, people are more emotionally suggestible and more open to influence. The ethical demands on anyone facilitating these experiences are therefore not merely recommendations, they are hard requirements. The power dynamics in any therapeutic relationship are already significant. In a pharmacologically induced state of developmental-grade neural openness, those dynamics become something else entirely.

The conventional model of the adult nervous system being stable, largely fixed, and optimized for efficiency over adaptability is being revised in real time. Psychedelics are not the only tool implicated in this revision, but they are among the most dramatic. They temporarily return the adult brain to something resembling its developmental condition when the young brain was hungry for input, responsive to environment, and capable of genuine reorganization.

If you read the ancient literature on these substances, not the clinical trials, but the older accounts, the ritual contexts, the descriptions of death and rebirth and fundamental transformation you might have suspected this was what was happening. The science is now beginning to describe, in molecular terms, what that has always meant. The closed window can open. What you do with it is everything.

References:

· Cameron, L. P., et al. (2021). A non-hallucinogenic psychedelic analog with therapeutic potential. Nature, 589, 474–479.

· Dölen, G. (2021). Critical periods reopen under MDMA: implications for social learning and therapy. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 15, 1–8.

· Hensch, T. K. (2005). Critical period mechanisms in developing visual cortex. Current Topics in Developmental Biology, 69, 215–237.

· Hubel, D. H., & Wiesel, T. N. (1963). Receptive fields of cells in striate cortex of very young, visually inexperienced kittens. Journal of Neurophysiology, 26, 994–1002.

· Ly, C., et al. (2018). Psychedelics promote structural and functional neural plasticity. Cell Reports, 23(11), 3170–3182.

· Nardou, R., et al. (2019). MDMA reopens a critical period for social reward learning. Nature, 569, 116–120.

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The reasons people take psychedelics have changed more than the substances themselves. What began as ritual embedded in cosmology moved through experimental psychiatry and countercultural rebellion, and has arrived at today’s peculiar blend of medicalization, wellness marketing, and personal optimization.

When I was a teenager in the late sixties we didn’t need a reason to swallow a blotter of acid. Hell, forget about intentions, we didn’t even make plans. I once ended up in a restaurant tripping so hard that only the kindness of strangers brought me protection from the ravenous alligators I saw snapping at me from under the table. Psychedelics were often taken on a whim, which I do not recommend. We took acid and went to work. Once I took mescaline and went to church. That didn’t work out too well. I only raise the point that among all the reasons one might take psychedelics, one reason may be ‘no reason at all.’ Looking back, that is a bit hard to justify and the Gods of the Jungle must have been looking over me and my untethered companions.

For millennia, psychedelics were used primarily in ritualized, communal contexts for healing, divination, and initiation. The purpose was to foster and maintain a community’s relationship with spirits, ancestors, and the natural world. Motives varied from treating illness, guiding major life transitions, resolving conflict, and reinforcing social bonds. The concept of “individual therapy” is a modern invention.

In the early–mid 1900s, Western medicine reframed psychedelics as experimental tools for psychiatry, especially LSD and psilocybin. After World War II nations began research in the use of psychedelics for mind control and enhanced interrogation. Enter MKUltra. Control and surveillance joined the realm of acceptable motives alongside therapeutic ones.

By the late 1960s, use spread from clinics to the wider culture, driven by motives of personal liberation and spiritual exploration. Psychedelics became a springboard that energized political resistance to consumerism, war, and conventional norms. This was also a period during when the novel concept of taking psychedelics for just plain fun was introduced. It was all a bridge too far and deemed an unacceptable reason to trip by the general population. The impact of psychedelics was bringing change so quickly, and radically, that a push back was inevitable and thus began The War on Drugs.

After the early 1970s UN Convention and national bans, sanctioned research largely stopped, but use persisted underground in therapy, spiritual communities, and in the rave/festival cultures.

Since the 2000s, motives have re-centered around evidence-based treatment of depression, PTSD, addiction, and end-of-life distress within structured clinical protocols. Researchers and participants now emphasize psychological insight, emotional processing, and durable symptom relief. Mystical-type experiences are valued only if they support these outcomes. At the same time, the broader culture frames psychedelics as tools for “wellness”, creativity, productivity, and personal growth. Microdosing has been introduced as a novel approach to psychedelics. If you believe mass media, it seems every Tech Bro in Silicon Valley and Stay at Home Mom in Montana are microdosing.

Psychedelic use has moved from embedded, relational ritual to individualized medical treatment of diagnosable disorders. Motives have shifted from maintaining communal balance and shared mythic worlds toward personal transformation, self-knowledge, and individual symptom reduction.

We are now witnessing an entirely new reason to take psychedelics, “personal performance enhancement.” There is no greater example of this than what is offered at Eleusis on a private island in the Caribbean. Their website appeals to those who desire to “awaken to your highest potential,” “unlock human possibility,” and “shape the future.” Their promise is to “help high-performing individuals break through mental barriers and achieve peak creativity and productivity.” All this in a bespoke experience “where luxury meets serenity.” That sounds pretty damn good to me but I’m not too sure what Maria Sabin would think about all this. Her motives were to cure the sick, consult the divine, and to cleanse the soul. If you ask me, I think Senorita Maria had it about right.

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The history of ibogaine in the United States is a fragmented tale of obscure experimental use followed by bursts of underground innovation. A brief period of federal interest eventually gave way to the current Schedule 1 designation. This story is littered with anecdotes of fervent advocates, personal betrayal, and legal battles over patents.

Ibogaine was first isolated from the African shrub, Tabernanthe iboga, in 1901 by French researchers. It was studied mainly in Europe as a stimulant and tonic rather than in the U.S. In the mid‑20th century, researchers and federal programs briefly explored ibogaine at the infamous federal “narcotics farm” in Lexington, Kentucky. In the 1950s, researchers, including Dr. Harris Isbell, administered ibogaine to inmates under CIA-funded programs. Primary data from Isbell’s experiments, including the 1955 study on prisoners, are unavailable despite confirmation that the research occurred. This absence of records contributed to ibogaine’s early obscurity in U.S. addiction research.

The pivotal U.S. turning point came in 1962, when a 19-year-old heroin user, Howard Lotsof, took ibogaine recreationally and observed that his opioid withdrawal and craving were unexpectedly absent afterward. He was to become the Johnny Appleseed of ibogaine as he introduced his discovery to other people with opioid and stimulant dependence and began collecting anecdotal reports. He found that a single high dose could markedly blunt withdrawal and craving for heroin, methadone, cocaine, alcohol, and nicotine. His work and advocacy related to ibogaine cannot be overestimated and a deep dive into his influence is warranted.

Lotsof became the first person in the West to systematically promote ibogaine as an addiction‑interruption treatment, despite having no doctoral degree or formal medical training. He obtained a series of U.S. patents on ibogaine for the “rapid interruption” of opioid, stimulant, alcohol, nicotine, and poly‑drug dependence. In the 1980s he founded NDA International, convinced a Belgian manufacturer to produce ibogaine capsules, and supported treatments and small open trials in the Netherlands. Lotsof provided pilot human and observational data that helped persuade the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse to open a formal ibogaine research program. This eventually led to FDA clearance of a Phase 1 trial in the early 1990s.

While ibogaine still moved like a rumor through the underground, Dr. Deborah Mash and Lotsof began a collaboration based on their shared interest in ibogaine. Lotsof was the evangelist, an apostle of a West African root bark he was certain could break the chains of withdrawal. Mash was the scientist with a lab and the ability to conduct clinical trials. Lotsof brought structure with his numerous patents and a company that he had already formed. He had already staked legal claim to ibogaine as a treatment for addiction, but he needed legitimacy and data from real human trials. In 1993, the FDA authorized Dr. Mash and colleagues at the University of Miami to conduct a Phase 1 safety and pharmacokinetic trial. This represented the high‑water mark for sanctioned ibogaine research in the U.S. By 1995 NIDA review committees decided not to continue funding and terminated the ibogaine project. Any new ibogaine grant applications were labeled “Not for Further Consideration,” effectively freezing federally backed human trials in the U.S.

For a time, Mash and Lotsof moved in parallel with his mythos and her methods. She dosed subjects, drew blood, tracked vitals, and followed the drug downstream into its metabolite, noribogaine. This compound was the quieter chemical shadow that lingered after the storm of the trip. In noribogaine Dr. Mash saw something new, a candidate molecule that might one day step out from ibogaine’s long, haunted silhouette and stand on its own.

The moment noribogaine appeared as more than a lab curiosity, it became a cause of disagreement. There were patents to be written and names to be frozen forever in intellectual property documents. Mash and her colleagues showed up as inventors on one noribogaine patent while Lotsof’s company held the rights. Then came another patent from Lotsof for “Noribogaine Plus.” This one, Mash would later claim, folded in insights derived from her research, but now the inventor list shifted. Lotsof, who did not pipette or chase peaks across chromatograms, appeared as the inventor. Mash and her team were not listed. This created a fissure in the advocacy camp. The shared story of a visionary discoverer and an academic partner gave way to the more familiar American narrative. Collaboration turned into litigation. Mash sued Lotsof and NDA, arguing that her work had been repurposed into patents that erased her role while preserving the revenue streams for others.

The relationship soured into a familiar archetype. The underground prophet and the university scientist, once briefly aligned against a skeptical world, were now locked in a dispute over the spoils of a medicine that still wasn’t legal. What began as a partnership in service of a radical addiction treatment ended as a reminder that even in the psychedelic frontier, the oldest forces of control, credit, and capital, wait patiently at the gate.

Lotsof co‑authored scientific papers in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology and the American Journal on Addictions, trying to build a bridge between underground practice and mainstream addiction science. His efforts helped seed both regulated and underground ibogaine treatment networks. Even though ibogaine remains illegal for clinical use in the U.S., thousands of people worldwide have sought ibogaine detox protocols that trace directly back to Lotsof’s discovery and advocacy. He died in 2010, but within psychedelic and harm‑reduction circles he is remembered as the person who recognized and championed ibogaine’s anti‑addictive potential long before researchers took it seriously.

Within the U.S., ibogaine remains illegal, but small underground circles continue to import the drug and administer it informally. Dosing and setting is often based on both Lotsof’s protocols and West African ceremonial traditions, with varying and sometimes unsafe clinical practices. Ibogaine has become part of a broader “psychedelic renaissance” conversation in the U.S., alongside psilocybin and MDMA, but remains in a more marginal and controversial position because of its potential cardiotoxicity and demanding treatment course.

In 2025, Texas allocated a large state grant program (reported as $50,000,000) to fund clinical research on ibogaine and related compounds for opioid and other substance use disorders. A few other states are moving to fund or authorize ibogaine clinical trials, but these bills do not legalize general use. They only allow ibogaine within FDA‑regulated research programs or future FDA‑approved indications.

Colorado’s psychedelic framework allows ibogaine to be considered for inclusion in its regulated “natural medicine” program. The primary issue is related to the sourcing of ibogaine that is in alliance with the Nagoya Protocol. How above ground treatment centers will emerge in Colorado is yet to be determined. The issue of potentially lethal cardiac side effects, though extremely rare, introduces the issue of liability for any above ground treatment centers. The actual length of an ibogaine experience all but guarantees it will not become offered in an outpatient manner like the psilocybin treatment centers in Oregon.

Numerous national and regional ibogaine advocacy organizations have risen in the US with a stated goal of influencing government policy and promoting research. Well financed nonprofit Veterans organizations have emerged in support of treatment related to PTSD. Things are moving quickly in the U.S. but not fast enough for those carrying an opioid burden. How long will it be until Lotsof’s mission of safe above ground ibogaine treatment in his home country is accomplished?

Colorado is poised to be the breakthrough state but the lack of scalability based on potential costs is an immense challenge to addressing the human need. For most suffering from opioid addiction, the option of accessible and affordable ibogaine treatment in the U.S. is a pipe dream. Until that dream is realized, treatment in the underground and the gray offshore zones are the only options.

I first ready Andrew Gallimore’s book, Death by Astonishment, last year. I’ve been recommending it ever since. It’s one of those books that wants to be respectable but also radical. That is not an easy task with a subject inherently slippery. It succeeds, which is more than you can say for most psychedelic writing.

The book begins with a history lesson that starts in the Amazon with ayahuasca and its Indigenous roots. Gallimore moves us through time with the details of how DMT gets isolated, named, criminalized, and whispered about. He treats all this background as necessary groundwork, which it is.

After the history lesson things get interesting and uncomfortable. Gallimore lays out the phenomenology carefully with the geometric tunnels, the entities, the sense of being ‘somewhere else’ that doesn’t match other psychedelics. LSD bends this world. DMT seems to switch to a different one entirely. He’s good at showing you why this matters and why it’s genuinely strange that so many people, across cultures, report such similar things.

The real question with DMT is, of course, what is really happening? The conservative position is that it’s all endogenous brain chemistry creating elaborate hallucinations and pattern-recognition systems misfiring in consistent ways. Gallimore reviews these explanations and finds them incomplete. Then he goes into an area where you may or may not prefer to follow. He suggests DMT might actually be tuning the brain to receive information from somewhere else. Not heaven, not the spirit world exactly, but some kind of adjacent reality that’s always there, just not accessible through normal neural configurations.

I know how that sounds. He knows how it sounds too, and doesn’t pretend otherwise, but he also doesn’t apologize for it. The argument involves information theory and dimensional mathematics, all deployed with enough precision that you can at least see the shape of what he’s proposing, even if you think it’s wrong. That’s respectable. Most people making claims like this either get mystical and vague or try to dress speculation up as established fact. Gallimore stays in the uncomfortable middle ground. He tells us what he thinks might be happening, why it might be happening, and where the gaps are.

He’s clearly read deeply in both the ethnographic literature and the neuroscience and manages to keep both in view without the book becoming an academic slog. There’s a section on extended-state DMT infusions, basically keeping someone in the DMT space for longer than the usual fifteen minutes. I find that type of speculation fascinating, it is the kind of work that makes you think about what psychedelic research could look like if we weren’t still so constrained by the drug war’s aftermath.

Death by Astonishment is a serious, thoughtful attempt to take DMT experiences at face value. They are veiwed not as delusions to be explained away, but as data that demands explanation. This approach is rare enough to be valuable. Most psychedelic literature is either too credulous or too dismissive, either New Age mush or reductionist handwaving. Gallimore’s trying to do something harder by treating these experiences as genuinely mysterious without abandoning intellectual standards. Whether you think he succeeds probably depends on what you walked in believing, but the attempt itself feels significant.

The book is important and has earned a place on my shelf. It is worth reading if you’re interested in DMT, consciousness studies, or just how far you can push conventional neuroscience before it stops having useful things to say. The book won’t settle anything, nothing could, but it might change what questions you’re asking.

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In the history of drug prohibition, few maneuvers were as consequential, or as cynically executed, as the drafting by the United Nations of the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances (https://www.unodc.org/pdf/convention_1971_en.pdf).

To understand what happened, you must go back a decade to 1961, when the United Nations assembled what it believed to be a comprehensive framework for controlling the world’s dangerous drugs. That agreement, the Single Convention of Narcotic Drugs (https://www.unodc.org/pdf/convention_1961_en.pdf) was focused on the great botanical offenders of the colonial imagination: opium, coca, and cannabis. The kind of drugs that poor people and foreigners were known to use.

What the architects of that 1961 treaty did not anticipate, or chose to ignore, was the wave of synthetic compounds quietly emerging in the developed world. LSD, amphetamines, barbiturates, benzodiazepines. An entire pharmacopoeia of laboratory-born molecules was spreading through hospitals, living rooms, and the countercultures of Europe and North America. By the mid-1960s, that omission had become impossible to sustain. A new global treaty was needed.

The official justification was public health. UN bodies declared themselves “deeply concerned” about reports of serious harm caused by LSD and its chemical cousins. They called for strict limitations on scientific and medical purposes. The language was clinical and cautious, the intent was not. These substances, especially the psychedelics, needed to be placed beyond the reach of ordinary people. You don’t have to read between the lines. It is spelled out clearly in the documents.

The 1971 Convention divided psychoactive substances into four Schedules. LSD, psilocybin, and their relatives landed in Schedule I, the most restricted tier. These substances were deemed to have no legitimate medical use and high potential for harm. In theory this was a medical determination. In practice it was a political one. The science served as cover for a conclusion that had already been reached.

The negotiations that gave birth to the 1971 Convention reflected a theater of competing interests. What emerged was a compromise that satisfied no one fully but locked psychedelics into the most stringent controls the treaty allowed. If you have read the negotiating history, you will know that the research data was not driving the process. It was dressing it.

Across the Atlantic, the United States was running a parallel operation. President Nixon had already declared Timothy Leary “the most dangerous man in America.” In that same year The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 (https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-84/pdf/STATUTE-84-Pg1236.pdf) placed LSD and psilocybin into Schedule I. The language was almost identical to what the UN would soon codify internationally. This was not a coincidence. These were organized moves in a coordinated campaign, dressed in the neutral vocabulary of pharmacology.

What followed was the end of psychedelic research for a generation. Laboratories closed as funding dried up. Researchers who had spent years investigating the therapeutic potential of these compounds found themselves shut out. Their work was branded as dangerous. The formal justification was never cultural or political. It was always framed as a matter of safety. The effect was to freeze an entire field of medicine at precisely the moment it was beginning to produce serious results.

The hammer fell as the War on Drugs was declared. The molecules didn’t change, the politics did.

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In the long, strange history of American psychedelics, there is a question that keeps surfacing and is never quite resolved. What exactly is the relationship between the ceremonies that have been happening for thousands of years and the ceremonies that started getting invented in the 1960s? On the surface, they look similar with altered states, ritual structure, and intention. But look closer and the resemblance starts to blur.

Indigenous use of peyote, ayahuasca, and psilocybin mushrooms isn’t a practice. It’s a relationship. The plants are not tools, but relatives. The relationship between a Mazatec community and their mushrooms, or a Native American Church roadman and peyote, has been cultivated across generations and are bound to specific land, specific language, and specific mythic histories. Who leads is not a question of credentials or branding. It’s a question of years-long apprenticeship, community recognition, and demonstrated accountability. When something goes wrong in those frameworks, there are mechanisms for correction. The community is the container.

The American psychedelic scene is a recent invention. It draws eclectically from psychotherapy, from New Age spirituality, and from countercultural experiments rather than from any continuous lineage. The medicine is framed as a technology that acts like a tool on the brain. Even when retreat centers dress their sessions in ceremonial language while burning copal and playing icaros from a playlist, the underlying logic is usually therapeutic. The goal is to treat the depression, resolve the trauma, have the peak experience, and go home transformed. The session is a product. The transformation is the deliverable.

This is not a moral failing so much as a historical fact. The American psychedelic movement was born in laboratories and in exile from mainstream culture, not in living transmission from elders. Its leaders, the therapists and the “shamans” who completed three-week trainings in Peru derive legitimacy from credentials, testimonials, and branding rather than from the kind of communal recognition that takes decades to earn. Professional ethics codes are beginning to emerge, but they are uneven and often lag well behind the actual practice.

The contrast is not subtle. American access to psychedelics is widening rapidly with ketamine clinics, state-licensed psilocybin programs in Oregon and Colorado, research trials at major universities, and a booming market of high-end retreat centers where a weekend with mushrooms can run several thousand dollars. The people moving through these spaces are largely white, largely middle and upper class, and largely urban. The people whose medicines made all of this culturally and scientifically legible are often not in the room, and certainly not in the governance structures or the profit-sharing arrangements.

Corporate actors are filing patents while non-profit organizations are accumulating data and policy influence. Billions of investment dollars are moving but very little of it escapes the modern financial paradigm. The Mazatec healers who shared knowledge with R. Gordon Wasson in 1955 and the Shipibo curanderos whose icaros are now played at Brooklyn ceremony circles were foundational to everything that followed. They remain, for the most part, on the outside of the decisions being made about their own medicines.

Psychedelic tourism has made this more visible, not less complicated. Ayahuasca retreat centers in the Peruvian Amazon cater heavily to Westerners seeking healing or insight. Some revenue flows into local communities, but Indigenous commentators have documented patterns of cultural appropriation, unsafe ceremonies run by opportunists, and what can only be described as spiritual extraction. The knowledge and the aesthetics are taken while the reciprocity remains absent.

Is there anything genuine at the intersection of these two worlds? Yes. Both traditions, for all their differences, converge on certain essentials of agreement. Preparation matters, intention matters, and what happens after matters as much as what happens during. Some contemporary American groups are genuinely attempting to do this differently as they work from Indigenous-led ethical charters, experiment with land return, and sit in the discomfort of what it means to work with medicines that aren’t culturally theirs.

Whether this becomes an accountable collaboration or a more sophisticated form of extraction is still an open question as it depends on who defines the terms. Will Indigenous cultures maintain any authority over their own medicines or will they just be mentioned in a land acknowledgment read at the beginning of a ceremony before the facilitator queues up the Spotify playlist?

The medicines have their own history. The question is whether the American psychedelic movement is finally ready to reckon with it.

They burned the witches. The wizards got tenure.

Walk through any psychedelic conference or flip through the standard histories and you will find the same names recycled endlessly: Hofmann, Leary, McKenna, Shulgin. The authorized story unfolds as a procession of male discovery. We hear about the chemist who first synthesized it, the Harvard professor who distributed it, the ethnobotanist who catalogued it, and the underground pharmacologist who mapped its variations.

Women appear, if at all, as footnotes with asterisks. They are presented as wives, as muses, as unnamed participants in early clinical trials. They are the indigenous healers whose knowledge gets extracted, repackaged, and credited elsewhere. This isn’t oversight. It’s architecture.

The erasure operates through interlocking systems of patriarchy, colonialism, and academic gatekeeping that determine whose authority gets enshrined in the historical record. What we call psychedelic history is actually a highly curated artifact, assembled by and for a particular kind of protagonist.

Consider María Sabina, the Mazatec curandera whose sacred ceremonies had been transmitting mushroom knowledge for generations before R. Gordon Wasson showed up with his camera and translator. When Life magazine published his account in 1957, it positioned him as the discoverer, the brave Western explorer penetrating indigenous mystery. Sabina became a character in his story. She was exotic, authentic, and useful. The article brought tourists and seekers flooding into her village, destroying the secrecy that protected her practice. She died in poverty. Wasson got a second career.

The pattern repeats in therapeutic contexts. Ann Shulgin co-developed MDMA-assisted psychotherapy protocols and co-authored PiHKAL and TiHKAL, the massive texts that remain foundational to psychedelic pharmacology. Yet her contributions routinely collapse into her husband’s legacy. Alexander Shulgin is the chemist-shaman while Ann is the supportive wife who happened to be there.

Underneath the famous names lies a whole stratum of women whose work has been systematically downgraded from authorship to assistance. Leni Alberts in early mescaline research, Kay Parley and Gertrude Paltin in therapeutic settings. These were substantive creative and clinical contributions. Each appears now, if at all, as a minor mention referencing someone else’s breakthrough. There is no greater example of this than the story of Melissa Cargill. If she is known at all it is as the assistant to Owsley Stanley, widely recognized as the first underground chemist to manufacture mass quantities of potent LSD. But it was Melissa who had a background in chemistry from Berkeley and brought the lab techniques that made the operation successful and directly influenced the counterculture. And while we are talking about the 1960s, were there not women at Millbrook with Leary and Alpert? Why was their story omitted from the narrative?

Even when women lacked formal credentials, and they often did because institutions excluded them, they functioned as guides, confidantes, emotional anchors, and organizers. They held the social infrastructure that made male “genius” legible. Their labor was real. The credit wasn’t. This follows a familiar colonial logic. The anthropologist gets his name on the monograph and the indigenous informants get thanked in the preface. Collaboration gets reframed as hierarchy and shared work becomes singular achievement. The man with the institutional affiliation becomes the author while everyone else becomes his material.

Academic publishing and conference circuits amplify this dynamic brutally. Women’s case reports, memoirs, and community organizing work fall outside the archive of “serious” research. What gets preserved is what institutions recognize. What institutions recognize was shaped by who controlled them.

In psychedelic countercultures, the guru model reproduced the problem in a different manner. Male charismatic leaders dominated the public narrative, surrounded by women who were framed as lovers, muses, and followers, but not intellectual equals. Indigenous women, who had been transmitting plant medicine knowledge across generations, got invoked symbolically as the wise grandmother or the earth-mother healer. Meanwhile, they were structurally excluded from decision-making in contemporary psychedelic research, policy, and business.

The current “psychedelic renaissance” both repeats and contests these dynamics. Funding flows to Western institutions, biotech ventures, and clinical trials led overwhelmingly by men. The coin of the realm is still the double-blind placebo-controlled study, the peer-reviewed publication, and the venture-backed startup. These forms elevate certain kinds of knowledge holders and exclude others. Indigenous women’s expertise gets cited as legitimate but rarely compensated or centered in governance. However, something is shifting. There are more women in visible leadership roles. There is more explicit critique of the field’s colonial inheritances. More projects are attempting, however imperfectly, to redistribute authority and resources. Adding a few women to the existing pantheon will not cut it. The problem is not representation, it’s epistemology. It’s the underlying logic that treats some people’s experiences as data and others’ as anecdote. That calls one person’s vision “research” and another’s “folklore.”

Rewriting psychedelic history means recognizing women as co-authors of the knowledge, not supporting characters in someone else’s revelation. It means restructuring institutions so their authority isn’t exceptional, isn’t tokenized, isn’t erased in the next retelling.

The witches knew things. They always did. The question is whether we are finally ready to listen, or whether we’ll just burn them again and call it progress.

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There’s a pattern that keeps repeating itself, like a fractal unfolding across decades. A government, a corporation, an organization, or a clinic decides psychedelics need managing. Papers are drafted, patents are filed, protocols get written but slowly and inevitably, the thing they’re trying to contain seeps through the walls.

Labs get raided, so the mushrooms fruit in closets. Patents get filed, so the mycelium spreads into common ground. Treatment centers standardize dosing, and someone in a forest somewhere is already having the experience the protocols were designed to prevent. It’s not rebellion, exactly. It’s more like watching water find its way downhill. You can build all the dams you want.

What makes psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, DMT and all the rest so persistently ungovernable isn’t their chemistry, it’s what they do. They take the self you’ve been carrying around like a fixed thing and show you it was actually pretty negotiable all along. They dissolve the edges you didn’t know you’d drawn. And once you’ve seen that happen, once you’ve felt the floor drop out from under consensus reality, something shifts in how you relate to authority. Not because you’re against it but because you’ve glimpsed how provisional it all is.

That’s the part no regulatory framework can touch. You can criminalize possession. You can medicalize administration. You can build a billion-dollar industry around ketamine clinics and MDMA therapy. But you can’t legislate what happens when someone realizes their sense of separateness was just a persistent habit. The experience itself exists in an interior, unverifiable, fundamentally private space that rules can’t reach.

The 1960s tried prohibition. Psychedelics were banned, research was shuttered, and the door slammed shut. Except the door was never actually solid. Underground chemists kept cooking. Deadheads kept dosing. Mazatec curanderas kept serving mushrooms in the mountains. The prohibition didn’t erase the substances; it just made them mythic. Outlaw status turned them into symbols of freedom, rebellion, and consciousness itself as contraband.

Now we’re in the medicalization wave dressed up as respectable and clinical. The psychedelic renaissance has PowerPoint decks and peer-reviewed protocols. But even here, there’s slippage. People keep reporting things the studies weren’t designed to measure reflecting encounters with entities, experiences of death and rebirth, and revelations the intake forms have no boxes for. The medicine refuses to stay in its lane.

Biotech companies are fully in the game now as they race to patent molecules and delivery mechanisms. The desire is to turn the unruly psychedelic experience into something scalable, repeatable, and investable. It’s a reasonable impulse because people are suffering. These compounds help so why not optimize? Because the compounds themselves seem to have other ideas. Users don’t describe psilocybin as a tool. They describe it as a teacher, with its own intelligence, its own agenda. Try to reduce that to a product and something essential evaporates. You can synthesize the molecule, but you can’t bottle the encounter. The experience keeps exceeding the container, reminding the clinician, the CEO, and even the patient that they’re not actually in charge here.

Maybe the real story is older than prohibition, older than commerce, older than the 1960s. Fungi have been breaking down rigid structures and redistributing their material for hundreds of millions of years. They resolve boundaries, recycle the fixed into the fertile, and make networks out of what looked like separate things.

Psychedelics work the same way, just on consciousness instead of dead wood. They break down mental rigidities and institutional certainties. They remove the barriers we build between self and others, sacred and profane, controllable and wild. Every attempt to fence them in becomes another demonstration of what they’re trying to teach: some forces don’t submit to domination. Some things are alive in ways that slip through the grid.

What if the lesson here isn’t about better laws or smarter business models? What if it’s about recognizing that psychedelics aren’t resources to be managed but relationships to be entered? That stewardship means learning to work with their nature instead of trying to override it.

Indigenous traditions understand this already. The medicine is respected, approached with ceremony, treated as a participant rather than a substance. There’s negotiation, reciprocity, humility. The modern impulse to control starts to look less like sophistication and more like a category error by trying to own something that can’t be owned, regulate something that exists primarily as transformation itself.

The mycelium doesn’t care about your permits. The vision doesn’t check if you’re authorized. The most alive, most transformative forces in the world have always moved through the cracks in our certainties, reminding us that what we can’t control might be exactly what we need most.

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In the glossy marketing materials of contemporary psychedelic retreats, few narratives carry as much weight as “ancient lineage.” While ayahuasca ceremonies promise “10,000 years of shamanic wisdom” and ketamine clinics invoke “unbroken therapeutic traditions,” the actual history of American psychedelics is defined by rupture, appropriation, and calculated forgetting. There is no continuous lineage. There never was.

What exists instead is a fragmented genealogy of interrupted traditions, colonial violence, underground improvisation, and recent attempts to manufacture legitimacy by selectively invoking Indigenous pasts that were never unified to begin with. The language of lineage isn’t just historically inaccurate, it’s a commercial strategy that obscures who actually holds power, who profits, and whose knowledge gets converted into proprietary assets.

When a $4,500 psilocybin retreat references “Mazatec wisdom” in its branding while employing zero Mazatec practitioners, we’re not witnessing cultural transmission. We’re witnessing extraction. The retreat operators aren’t inheritors of a tradition, they are middlemen in a supply chain that runs from Indigenous communities to privileged Westerners.

The “lineage” narrative serves a specific function as it converts stolen knowledge into legitimate property. If something is ancient and continuous, the logic goes, then whoever claims to carry it forward must be trustworthy. This is the same logic that justified terra nullius, the legal fiction that allowed colonizers to claim “empty” land that was actually inhabited. Indigenous knowledge isn’t empty either, but lineage myths treat it as available for the taking, as long as you invoke the right aesthetic markers.

There are indeed traditions of working with psychoactive plants across the Americas. Mazatec veladas with psilocybin mushrooms. Huichol and Native American Church ceremonies with peyote. Amazonian ayahuasca practices. Bwiti iboga work in Central Africa. These are not variations of a single “psychedelic lineage.” They arise from distinct languages, cosmologies, land relationships, and ritual logics. Treating them as interchangeable modalities is like claiming Buddhism, Catholicism, and Islam are all just different versions of “spiritual lineage.” These traditions have been violently disrupted. Land theft severed communities from the places where sacred plants grew. Criminalization drove ceremonies underground or wiped them out entirely. The Native American Church, often cited as an example of “ancient peyote tradition,” actually took its current form in the 19th and 20th centuries as a creative response to forced relocation and cultural suppression, not as a carbon copy of pre-Columbian practice.

When elders describe seeing their “medicine relatives” converted into commodities for wealthy outsiders, they’re not being metaphorical. They’re describing ongoing theft, and who benefits? Not the Huichol or Wixárika communities for whom peyote is sacred. Not the Native American Church members who now struggle to access their sacrament. The beneficiaries are retreat centers, suppliers, and the romantic fantasies of seekers who want “the real thing.”

Another pillar of lineage rhetoric is the claim that modern psychedelic therapy stands in continuous descent from 1950s and 60s psychiatry. This is cleaner than the Indigenous appropriation narrative, but it’s still largely fiction. Mid-20^th century researchers did explore LSD and psilocybin for alcoholism, end-of-life anxiety, and depression. Methodologies varied wildly. Some used high doses to induce mystical experiences while others used lower doses integrated into ongoing psychotherapy. There was no unified protocol, no standardized training, no settled doctrine. The research was experimental and frequently sloppy by modern standards. Then it stopped. The Controlled Substances Act, moral panic over hippies, and regulatory demands for randomized trials led directly to the ending of legal research by the early 1970s. For the next two decades, clinical work was minimal, fragmented, or happening in other countries.

The current “renaissance” only gained momentum in the 2000s and 2010s. It operates under completely different scientific norms including fMRI imaging, rigorous trial protocols, FDA approval pathways, and venture capital funding. The psychiatrists conducting MAPS-sponsored MDMA trials would be unrecognizable to Humphry Osmond or Stanislav Grof. Calling this a continuous therapeutic lineage is like claiming modern Silicon Valley tech companies are in direct lineage with 1960s university computer labs. There’s influence, sure. But there’s also decades of institutional rupture, lost data, and forgotten methodologies.

Between the clampdown and today’s clinical trials, psychedelic knowledge persisted in countercultural and underground contexts. This history looks less like vertical transmission and more like a sprawling network of improvisation with Esalen seminars blending Jung with Buddhism, underground therapists adapting humanistic psychology, and self-taught facilitators pulling from whatever books and workshops they could access. It was eclectic, contested, often risky, and occasionally brilliant. But it wasn’t a lineage. It was a diaspora.

The lineage myth isn’t just historically wrong. It has material consequences. Several companies are currently seeking patents on extraction methods, formulations, and therapeutic protocols derived from Indigenous knowledge. This follows a familiar colonial pattern that involves gathering knowledge from communities that developed it over generations, converting it into intellectual property, and excluding those communities from ownership or profit. Indigenous scholars call this biopiracy. The psychedelic industry calls it innovation.

Who authorized that transmission? Which Mazatec elder signed off on their mushroom knowledge becoming a NASDAQ-traded asset? The answer, of course, is no one. Authorization wasn’t sought because the lineage myth doesn’t require it. If everyone is just channeling the same timeless “ancient wisdom,” then no one needs permission as we are all just vessels for the knowledge to flow through. This is spiritualized theft.

Meanwhile, Indigenous practitioners remain structurally marginalized. They might be invited to offer an opening prayer at a psychedelic conference. They might have their artwork used in retreat marketing materials. But leadership positions, ownership stakes, and economic benefits flow overwhelmingly to white Westerners who can code-switch between “honoring the medicine” in ceremony and negotiating term sheets with investors.

So, what does an honest genealogy look like? Abandoning the lineage myth doesn’t mean denying all continuity. It means being specific about what actually connects the past to the present and being honest about the ruptures. An accurate genealogy would acknowledge at least four distinct strands, none of them unified, none of them untouched by violence.

1. Diverse Indigenous traditions, some ancient, some relatively recent, all shaped by colonial disruption and ongoing cultural resilience. These are not our traditions to claim. They’re not available for wholesale extraction, and they’re certainly not generic “technologies” separable from the land, language, and kinship systems that give them meaning.

2. Brief mid-century psychiatric research, characterized by experimental heterogeneity and then dramatically curtailed by prohibition. This work is historically interesting, but it’s not a direct ancestor of contemporary protocols, it’s more like a distant cousin whose letters we occasionally read.

3. Countercultural and underground practices are marked by hybridization, improvisation, and uneven documentation. This is where most of the actual transmission happened in the late 20th century, but it was messy, decentralized, and often involved people making it up as they went along.

4. Contemporary institutionalized “renaissance” tied to biotech capital, venture funding, FDA approval pathways, and global markets. This is structurally different from everything that came before. It depends heavily on Indigenous knowledge and underground experimentation while often reproducing the inequities that made both necessary in the first place.

None of these strands constitute a lineage. Together, they form a genealogy, essentially a map of influence, power, theft, creativity, rupture, and survival.

The most important question isn’t “What is the true lineage?” It’s “Whose practices are being referenced, who authorized their transmission, what harms sit in the background, and who benefits materially?” Indigenous authors and activists have been saying this for years. They’re not asking for symbolic inclusion by participation in sage smudging at conference openings. They’re asking for structural change in ownership, leadership, benefit-sharing agreements, intellectual property protections, and respect for the principle that knowledge can’t be separated from the relationships and responsibilities that sustain it.

This requires giving up the fantasy of the lone seeker downloading wisdom from the universe. It requires recognizing that knowledge has sources, that those sources are specific communities who survived genocidal violence, and that using their knowledge without consent or reciprocity is just continuation of that violence by other means.

The most useful thing the American psychedelic culture could do is abandon the search for a singular authentic lineage and instead cultivate accountable relationships with specific communities, specific histories, and specific ongoing struggles for sovereignty and survival. That work is harder than invoking “ancient wisdom.” It requires ceding power, sharing profits, and accepting that you don’t automatically have a right to someone else’s medicine just because you’re spiritually curious. It means understanding that fragmentation isn’t a problem to be solved by inventing retrospective coherence, it’s the honest shape of a history marked by violence, appropriation, and resistance. If that history makes you uncomfortable, good. It should.

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The Mazatec developed and still maintain a relationship with three sacred substances that reshape consciousness. Unlike the flamboyant evangelists of the 1960s, the Mazatec curanderos operated in silence, their knowledge passed down through generations in ceremonies that outsiders rarely witnessed. The most famous of these medicines are the mushrooms the Mazatec call nti si tho, “little ones that spring forth.” These weren’t recreational drugs or tools for self-exploration. They were spiritual technology, employed in healing ceremonies that predated the Conquest by centuries.

Less known but equally significant is ska María Pastora, what botanists would later classify as Salvia divinorum. “Leaves of the Shepherdess,” the Mazatec called it, and unlike the mushrooms, Salvia never achieved mainstream fame. Perhaps that’s because salvinorin A, the compound responsible for its effects, at high doses produces experiences too strange, too dissociative, too far removed from the pleasant visuals that Westerners expected from psychedelics. The Mazatec used it for divination, for finding lost objects, for communicating with the spirit world. It wasn’t about feeling good. It was about seeing clearly.

Then there are the seeds, ololiuqui, or badoh to the Mazatec. The morning glory seeds from Rivea corymbosa and Ipomoea violacea, contain LSA, lysergic acid amide, the chemical cousin of the substance that would define a generation. To the Mazatec, they were another tool in the pharmacopeia, producing effects similar to but gentler than what Albert Hofmann would accidentally discover in his Basel laboratory in 1943.

What’s striking isn’t just that these three substances exist, but that the Mazatec developed a sophisticated understanding of them long before the came to the attention of the modern world. They knew which plant for which purpose, which dosage for which ceremony, which intentions required which medicine. That knowledge continues to remain largely hidden, protected by the same silence that kept it alive for centuries.

María Sabina died in 1985, poor and disillusioned by what the West had done with her sacred mushrooms. The Mazatec traditions continue, though quieter now, more careful about who they let into the circle. The three medicines remain, as they always have, not as drugs but as doorways to be used by those who remember that some knowledge is meant to be whispered, not shouted, and that the most profound substances demand more than curiosity. They demand respect.

To become a chjota chijne, a Mazatec shaman, is not a career choice. It is a calling. A destiny. A lifelong spiritual commitment that begins not with ambition, but with selection.

The path rarely begins by choice. A person is identified as a potential shaman through various means: they might be born into a lineage of healers, like María Sabina, whose father and grandfather were shamans before her. They might survive a “shamanic illness” that others interpret as divine selection. Or they might have recurring, vivid dreams that elders recognize as a call from the Holy Children (mushrooms) or Ska María Pastora (Salvia). Some enter the path in childhood, participating in ceremonies to cleanse their vision before the distractions and coping mechanisms of adulthood set in.

What follows is a rigorous, years-long process of spiritual refinement, technical mastery, and self-discipline. The Mazatec will insist that shamans are taught not by people, but by a progression of visions from and of heaven. The psychotropic plants themselves are the true teachers. The human mentor is merely a facilitator.

The training is centered on asceticism and self-denial. A trainee must prove they have the discipline to handle the power of the plants. There is a very rigid diet (la dieta) to follow. Garlic and chili peppers are restricted. Salt is avoided. Alcohol is forbidden. Sexual abstinence is considered a critical rule. Mazatec tradition holds that the spirit of Salvia is extremely jealous and pure; any sexual activity during training or before a ceremony is believed to cause madness or turn the medicine into a poison. Breaking from the dieta can make one crazy, according to oral tradition and since such obligations require maturity, one should be at least 30 years old before becoming a curandero.

Trainees spend long periods in total darkness and silence, learning to listen to the plants. The Mazatec say that Salvia speaks with a quiet voice, and one must be silent to hear her instructions.

In the mountains of Oaxaca, vision inducers are taken systematically at intervals of a week to a month. The process begins by taking successively increasing doses of Salvia divinorum to become acquainted with the “way to Heaven.” Next comes mastery of the morning glory seeds. Finally, one learns to use the sacred mushrooms, the Holy Children. This progression can last two years or longer.

The apprentice learns to arrange the ritual table which serves as a spiritual map and often includes candles, copal incense, flowers, and images of Catholic saints. They must learn to identify and handle the sacred plants. But more importantly, they learn to maintain presence while in deep trance states. Apprentices are sometimes given a high dose of psilocybin mushrooms and instructed to sit perfectly still before the altar. The goal is to keep the eyes open and the mind clear, using the altar as an anchor. This teaches the shaman to navigate the landscapes of the spirit world without becoming overwhelmed by the visions. They learn to look the monster in the eye and to confront frightening visions to gain wisdom or retrieve a patient’s lost soul.

A shaman’s primary tool is not just the plant, but their voice. During ceremonies, the shaman enters a trance and begins a rhythmic, melodic chant. Trainees learn a specific ritual language that is different from everyday Mazatec. It is a poetic, improvisational flow of words that calls the spirits of mountains, saints, and ancestors. The chanting acts as a kind of lighthouse. The shaman uses their voice to guide the patient through the visions, ensuring they don’t get lost in the “zipper” or “folding” dimensions of the Salvia experience.

In higher-level initiations, the trainee takes a heroic dose of the plant in total darkness. They are expected to receive a “visionary book” in their mind, which grants them the authority to heal. Part of the training involves using the plant to see inside a patient’s body or to locate a lost soul. The initiate must practice diagnosing illnesses while under the influence of the medicine.

There is no graduation ceremony. A person becomes a recognized chjota chijne when they can successfully diagnose illnesses, find lost objects, and facilitate healing for others. Mastery is a lifelong commitment to serving the community and maintaining the relationship with the spirit world and the plant teachers.

Once someone becomes a healer, the hallucinogenic plants are ingested much less frequently than during training. The shaman’s role implies a lifelong commitment to serving both humanity and the divine.

It’s worth noting that many Mazatec shamans incorporate alcohol into their training and drink during their ceremonies, showing some variation in practice. The secretive nature of Mazatec shamanism makes it difficult to gather comprehensive information, as shamans tend to be protective of their practices and knowledge. But what remains clear is this: the path of the chjota chijne is not learned from books or classes. It is lived. It is endured. And it is never truly finished.

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The entities are real. Or at least, they feel real. In a double-blind placebo-controlled Salvia study, all volunteers reported interacting with beings. Not some. All. This is not a hallucination in the conventional sense. It is a neurological event. Predictable and consistent. Neuroscience is beginning to understand why Salvia divinorum produces entities with such disturbing reliability.

The Architecture of the Encounter

Salvinorin A does something unusual to the brain. It targets specific regions responsible for how we define “self” versus “other.” When these systems fail, the brain does not simply produce random imagery. It produces beings.

The claustrum, a thin sheet of neural tissue responsible for binding sensory streams into a unified conscious moment, is heavily inhibited by salvinorin A. When the claustrum goes offline, the brain loses its ability to distinguish between internal and external signals. Your own thoughts, your own intentions, are suddenly interpreted as coming from somewhere else. Someone else. This may be why the entities seem to know what you’re thinking. They are you. But the brain no longer recognizes them as such.

The Shadow Self

The temporoparietal junction maintains your body schema, the internal map of where your limbs are in space. Salvia disrupts this map. When you can no longer feel where your body ends, the brain compensates by projecting that missing sense of presence into the room around you.

This is not metaphor. This is the brain creating a “double” of your body and placing it in the space you occupy. You feel watched because your brain has externalized the boundary of your own body. The Mazatec call this figure the “Shepherdess.” Scientists call this a projection of the brain.

The Hyper-Social Brain

Humans are wired to detect agency, intentional beings, in their environment. This system kept our ancestors alive. When a wall appears to fold, when a chair seems to breathe, the over-stimulated agency-detection centers interpret these movements as living beings.

Some say this is why users report “living landscapes” and “breathing machines” with personalities. The brain is doing what it evolved to do, looking for faces in the noise. At least this is what science tells us.

Lady Salvia

The most commonly reported entity is female. Often described as benevolent. Sometimes sinister. Many users report two spirits - one male, one female. The encounters follow patterns. The entities appear friendly but insistent, urging the user to “go deeper.” They show visions. They deliver messages.

One detailed report described entities that seemed to have a plan for the user, a destination in mind. The persistence is notable. The intent is unmistakable. Whether that intent originates from external intelligence or from the deepest layers of the user’s own psyche remains is the open question.

Different from DMT

DMT entities are described as “high-tech,” “interdimensional,” “alien.” Salvia entities are “familiar,” “nostalgic,” “home.” This is because salvinorin A triggers the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center. Users report interacting with people from their childhood or returning to a place they forgot existed. The entities feel like old friends because the brain is pulling from old memories. The kappa-opioid receptor activation creates a fundamentally different consciousness alteration than serotonergic psychedelics. This is not DMT’s neon circus. This is something older. Something buried.

The Mazatec Perspective

The Mazatec have used Salvia divinorum for spirit contact for centuries. It is the primary reason they use the plant. To them, the entities are not byproducts of brain chemistry. They are real spiritual beings. Who is right? The neuroscientists mapping claustrum inhibition patterns or the Indigenous practitioners who have been navigating these encounters for generations?

The Reality Question

The experiences are subjective. But they are remarkably consistent. Entity contact is not an occasional side effect of Salvia. It is a core feature. The entities are a product of the brain’s failure to distinguish self from other, body from environment, memory from present moment. But that doesn’t make them any less real to the person experiencing them.

In that altered state, the entities are as real as anything else. They speak. They guide. They command. They know things you haven’t told them. And when the experience ends, the memory of them remains vivid, persistent, and undeniable.

Whether they are neurological artifacts or genuine contact with another dimension, is a question without an answer as it all depends on your perspective. What we do know is this: Salvia creates them every time, without fail. Ancient knowledge tells us, “That which is above is like that which is below” and “As within, so without”. If guidance is received, does the source truly matter? The entities are waiting. They always have been.

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The small towns and remote villages are changing. There is money, yes, more than before, but also a kind of fever. The roads wind deeper into the forest carrying people who arrive with cash and questions, seeking something their own world cannot give them. For the communities who hold the plant knowledge, the ones who never asked to become destinations, this has meant both opportunity and violation.

The lodges and retreat centers hire locals. There are jobs now such as kitchen work, cleaning, guiding and for some families this has replaced the old dependencies of the logging crews, the coca paste buyers, and the mining camps that ate the hills. But walk through many retreats and you will see the shape of the problem. The buildings often belong to people from elsewhere, the websites are in English, the bank accounts empty into cities far away. The land gives, the people serve, the profit leaves.

In Oaxaca, in Iquitos, in the Sierra Mazateca, wherever the mushrooms grow or the vine is cut, elders are saying the same thing: “This is not right.” This same Indigenous spirit took over and occupied the stage at the closing session of Psychedelic Science in 2023. That same energy was in place at the recent International Conference on Iboga in Gabon. Attendees from the Western hemisphere were clearly told by leaders in Gabon that iboga was a gift to be shared, but it was their gift to give, not something to be taken.

The caretakers of the plants call it spiritual colonization and they are not wrong. The ceremonies that once bound a people to their cosmos are now advertised on Instagram. The curanderos who should be tending their own communities spend their nights with strangers instead, adjusting the songs, softening the rigor, performing a version of the sacred calibrated to what the foreigner expects from “authenticity.” Access for locals dwindles. The rites begin to change shape.

Ayahuasca does not grow quickly, neither does peyote. Neither do the dozens of other plants that now face extraction pressure they were never bred to withstand. The trails deepen. The vines nearest the roads are already gone. Botanists report the usual trajectory of local abundance becoming scarcity and then crisis. Add the necessities deemed necessary from visitors from the Global North, the septic systems, the cleared sites, the diesel generators humming through ceremony, and you have ecosystems folding under a weight they were not built to carry, often in places already fragile from decades of industrial harm.

Money does strange things to a village. Suddenly some families have it and others do not. Tensions grow over who controls the ceremonies, who owns the rights, who gets to profit from traditions that were supposed to belong to the entire community. New values arrive with the tourists, ideas about consciousness, sex, and freedom that do not always align with local norms, and in the unregulated spaces of the retreat economy, where power is murky and oversight absent, this has sometimes meant harm, coercion, abuse, and exploitation dressed up as healing.

This is certainly not true of all retreats. I have witnessed shining examples of how mindful intention to the nuances of this work can be accomplished with minimal damage to the local community. But let’s admit it, there is always damage. At the very least we should strive so that negative impact is balanced by local cultural, social, and spiritual benefit.

There is another version possible. A version in which there is a deep commitment to the lineage of these wonders of nature. The research exists that when communities lead, when elders retain authority, when profits stay local and ecological limits are respected, the outcomes change. Participants leave with something genuine, a felt connection to nature, a shift away from destructive habits, a new political commitment to the places that held them. Some become advocates. Some send money back. Some fight for the forests in ways they never would have otherwise. When the structure is right with local ownership, pay fair, culture protected, land honored, then psychedelic tourism can fund the preservation it might otherwise destroy.

That version requires a reversal of the current paradigm of power to one where the energy flows back to the people who hold the knowledge, humility from those who seek it, and a recognition that the sacred is not a product. The question is whether the hunger for transformation can make space for that kind of discipline, or whether the villages will simply be consumed by the same logic that hollowed out the seekers in the first place.

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I thought long and hard before putting pen to paper and writing this.

I first encountered psychedelics in 1967 during a time that was forever branded as the Summer of Love. The Beatles had just released Sgt. Pepper and it became the soundtrack to that time of rising hope and promise. Soon the backlash began in the media with reports of chromosome damage and those blinded by staring at the sun. The media drove the narrative into the population and of course politicians fell in line. Research ended, the underground chemists were given life sentences, and the War on Drugs was declared.

For 50 years the one-sided propaganda campaign held the psychedelic movement at bay.

A rising tide can only be held back for so long and we are witness to a maturation of the psychedelic ecosystem that touches on science, culture, and regulation. There are some that believe that voices that question any aspects of the shift we are witnessing in the use of these most powerful compounds should be softened, otherwise the movement would be stopped again in its tracks. I think the movement is mature enough to stand on its own and it is time to issue address the issue head on.

I’m not just pointing out the charlatans among us. They are easy to spot. I’m just as concerned about those that just don’t know what they are doing. They are often just as dangerous as those that do. Psychedelics can reach into the deepest recesses of the brain, the mind, and some would argue the Soul itself. Psychedelics should not continue to be the latest business model.

The New Gold Rush

The shift in the psychedelic landscape can be traced to several key developments. Scientific studies revealed the therapeutic potential of psychedelics in treating depression, PTSD, and addiction. High-profile publications, documentaries, and advocacy efforts destigmatized psychedelic use, leading to legislative changes in Oregon, Colorado and soon other states and localities.

This newfound openness attracted not only researchers and clinicians but also entrepreneurs, influencers, and spiritual leaders seeking to stake a claim in the movement.

The Instagram Shamans

False leaders in the psychedelic ecosystem are individuals who pose as experts, mentors, or spiritual guides without the necessary experience, credentials, or ethical grounding. They may lack formal education in psychology, medicine, or traditional shamanic practices, yet present themselves as authorities in psychedelic healing or consciousness expansion.

Their backgrounds often include marketing, social media influence, or informal personal experience rather than rigorous training or certification. They can be found across online platforms, wellness retreats, and even in the burgeoning legal psychedelic therapy industry. They offer coaching sessions, sell products and courses, and lead ceremonies. This is a far cry from the Indigenous path to becoming a shaman. For them it is not a career choice. It is a calling, a destiny. A lifelong spiritual commitment that begins not with ambition, but with selection. The shaman’s role implies a lifelong commitment to serving both the community and the divine. With no shamanic psychedelic tradition in the US (except perhaps for peyote) it is understandable that what is emerging is a petri dish of various rituals and ceremonies. Some appear valid and are based on concepts going back to pre-history. Others are a grab bag of mismatched off the shelf props without deeper understanding.

Some genuinely believe in their mission. Others are motivated primarily by profit, status, or the allure of spiritual power.

How They Rise

The rise of false leaders is facilitated by several factors. Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube allow charismatic personalities to rapidly gain followers by sharing personal transformation stories, sensationalized claims, or aesthetically pleasing content related to psychedelics. The legal ambiguity surrounding many psychedelic substances creates a vacuum where unqualified individuals can operate with little oversight or accountability.

Many seekers, especially those struggling with mental health issues, are drawn to promises of rapid healing or spiritual enlightenment, making them vulnerable to persuasive but unqualified leaders. Some false leaders appropriate Indigenous or shamanic traditions, presenting themselves as inheritors of ancient wisdom despite lacking genuine cultural or experiential connection.

It’s the oldest con in the book, dressed in Peruvian textiles.

The Body Count

The proliferation of false leaders in the psychedelic space poses significant risks. Untrained facilitators may misuse dosages, fail to screen participants for contraindications, or provide inadequate support during and after challenging experiences.

False leaders spread inaccurate or exaggerated claims about psychedelics, undermining scientific progress and public understanding. High-profile scandals or negative outcomes associated with unqualified leaders set back broader efforts at legalization, research, and policy reform.

Spotting the Fakes

Recognizing false leaders is critical for anyone navigating the psychedelic ecosystem. Watch for grandiose claims including promises of cures, paths to enlightenment, or transformation that seem too good to be true.

Aggressive marketing of retreats, courses, or products with little evidence of efficacy or safety is a red flag. So is failure to discuss risks, contraindications, or the importance of integration and aftercare.

The Crossroads

The psychedelic movement is at a crossroads. As legal and social acceptance grows, so does the responsibility of participants to cultivate a culture of safety, integrity, and discernment. Community-led initiatives including peer support networks, ethics codes, and transparent certification processes can help set standards and hold leaders accountable.

Established organizations and experienced practitioners are increasingly vocal about the need for robust training, ongoing supervision, and respect for Indigenous traditions. Education is key: prospective participants should research facilitators thoroughly, seek out reviews, consult with medical or psychological professionals, and talk to trusted friends.

Those seeking to enter the field as guides or therapists should commit to rigorous training, mentorship, and ongoing personal development.

The Real Ones

Authentic leaders in the psychedelic ecosystem are distinguished by humility, transparency, and a commitment to service. They prioritize participant safety, honor scientific and cultural knowledge, and strive to empower others rather than build personal empires. Many collaborate with peers, Indigenous communities, and researchers to advance the field responsibly.

Supporting authentic leadership means amplifying voices with genuine expertise and encouraging critical thinking and challenging the commodification of sacred practices. It requires ongoing dialogue about what ethical leadership looks like in a rapidly evolving landscape.

What Comes Next

The rise of false leaders in the psychedelic ecosystem is a complex and pressing issue. As the movement continues to grow, it is essential for individuals, communities, and institutions to remain vigilant against exploitation, misinformation, and unsafe practices. By fostering a culture of integrity, transparency, and respect for both science and tradition, the psychedelic community can ensure that this powerful renaissance leads to healing and transformation rather than harm.

True leadership is not about self-aggrandizement, but about guiding others with wisdom, compassion, and accountability. The psychedelic movement survived 50 years in the shadows. It would be a tragedy to lose it now to opportunists in designer ayahuasca robes.

The charlatans are among us. The question is whether we’ll have the courage to call them out.

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In the shadowy history of the American psychedelic movement, few names carry as much mystery as Petaluma Al. While the 1960s had flamboyant and well-known public figures like Timothy Leary, the 1990s psychedelic underground, the era that fueled the global rave scene and the “Second Wave”, was defined by secretive figures who operated far from the public eye.

Petaluma Al was not a chemist, a philosopher, or a spiritual leader. He was the major distributor for the largest LSD operation on the planet. His role was the crucial bridge between clandestine American laboratories and the international market, ensuring that millions of doses of high-quality LSD reached seekers and revelers. He was never publicly identified, never charged, never arrested, never sentenced.

Unlike the chemists who manufactured the substances, Petaluma Al’s real identity has remained shielded by the silence of the underground. In the legal records of the United States vs. William Leonard Pickard, he is referred to primarily by his alias. I have obtained and read the transcripts of that Federal trial and Petaluma Al is mentioned as if he was a phantom. He remains so to this day.

Rumors abound that he operated out of Petaluma, California, hence his nickname. This location would have been strategically perfect as it was close enough to the San Francisco Bay Area to maintain countercultural roots, yet suburban enough to avoid the intense federal scrutiny of the city. According to government informants, Al was a “smart businessman” who maintained a low profile, avoiding the eccentricities that often drew law enforcement to other figures in the psychedelic trade.

The true significance of Petaluma Al lies in his partnership with William Leonard Pickard and Clyde Apperson. In the late 1990s, Pickard and Apperson operated what the DEA described as the largest LSD manufacturing outfit in history. The operation was a marvel of clandestine coordination. Pickard, a Harvard-educated researcher, would allegedly produce massive quantities of LSD in various locations. To protect the lab’s location, Pickard never allowed his distributors to visit the site. Instead, the product was transported to neutral zones like Denver or Boulder. This is where Petaluma Al entered the frame. He was, according to sworn court testimony, Pickard’s primary wholesale distributor.

During the trial, informants testified that Al obtained the LSD in quantities that are difficult to fathom. At one point, he was allegedly paying almost three million dollars per kilogram of LSD. That breaks down to about twenty-nine cents per 100 µg dose.

While Pickard made the drug, Al moved it. He was responsible for the “wholesale” distribution that fueled the European market. Millions of dollars in Dutch guilders and Canadian bank notes flowed through his hands, evidence of a supply chain that stretched from America to Europe. Vast amounts of money flowed back from Al to the chemists who then had to go about the tricky business of laundering that cash. In some instances, this took place at casinos in Las Vegas. In other cases, large anonymous donations were made to non-profit organizations who would then fund individuals to conduct various projects. There was almost too much money and some of it found its way into the pockets of respected academists who assisted with the money laundering. You don’t have to believe me, it is all in the court documents.

Petaluma Al’s era represents a shift in the psychedelic movement. If the 1960s were about “turning on, tuning in, and dropping out” in the public square, the 1990s were about the clandestine global network. The operation came to a crashing halt in November 2000, when Pickard and Apperson were arrested while moving laboratory equipment in a Ryder truck in the American heartland of Kansas. The man that was primarily responsible for the take down was government informant Gordon Todd Skinner who provided extensive testimony about the operation’s inner workings.

Despite the double life sentences handed to Pickard (who was later granted compassionate release in 2020) and the decades of prison time for Apperson, Petaluma Al remained a phantom. While his name appears in court transcripts and his operations were dismantled, he never became a “celebrity” of the drug war.

Petaluma Al remains a symbol of the logistical backbone of the psychedelic movement. He reminds us that the history of psychedelics isn’t just written by those who author the books or speak at the conferences; it was also written by the silent architects who were the middlemen of the distribution networks who turned psychedelics into cash.

Is Petaluma Al still alive? I have no idea. His is a tale I would love to hear. If you know him, have him drop me a line.