Preamble

For as long as there have been people, there have been people who altered their own consciousness. The practice is older than any government that has tried to end it, and it has outlasted every one of them so far.

The last century made an exception of this ancient thing. It criminalized a category of experience, imprisoned people for the contents of their own minds, and called the result public health. That era is closing. What replaces it has not yet been finalized, and it is being decided now in legislatures, in licensing boards, and in the business plans of companies that did not exist ten years ago.

These inalienable rights are not granted by this document. They are recognized by it. States, clinics, churches, and corporations may honor them or violate them, but none of them confer them. They belong to a person by virtue of their own existence.

Nothing here argues that psychedelics are safe, that everyone should take them, or that what they reveal is true. This is an argument about who decides.

This is a draft, and it is meant to be a foundation for further review, comment, and modification. Everything named below descends from lineages that were not consulted, and from communities that carried this knowledge through the centuries when it was punished.

The Rights

Article I — Cognitive Liberty

Every person holds sovereignty over their own consciousness. The interior life is not a territory any government, corporation, or institution may claim or license. All other rights in this document follow from this one.

Article II — The Right to Know

Every person is entitled to accurate and current information about what these substances are, what they do, what they cost, and how they might harm.

Article III — The Right to Refuse

No person shall be compelled or coerced into a psychedelic experience whether it is framed as a treatment or as a requirement to belong to a community. The right to decline is absolute and does not expire once a session has begun.

Article IV — The Right of Access

Lawful paths to these substances shall not be confined to a single gate. A person’s access shall not depend on an established diagnosis, the purchase of a package, or being able to afford either.

Article V — Freedom from Punishment

No person shall be imprisoned, deported, fired, evicted, denied care, or separated from their children for the fact of what they have taken into their own body.

Article VI — The Right to Continuous Consent

Consent given before a session may be withdrawn during it. Every person entering an altered state is entitled to know in advance what will be done, by whom, and where the boundaries lie.

Article VII — The Right to a Guide of One’s Choosing

A person may choose their guide, change their guide, bring a witness of their own, or proceed with no guide at all.

Article VIII — The Right to Privacy of the Interior

What is disclosed in an altered state belongs to the person who disclosed it. It shall not be sold, mined, published, used by AI, or turned into evidence by a clinic, an app, an insurer, an employer, a court, or a researcher without that person’s specific and revocable permission.

Article IX — The Right to Ceremony

The use of these substances as sacrament or rite of passage is a matter of conscience. It requires no clinical justification and no license from the state to be legitimate.

Article X — The Right at the Threshold

The seriously ill, the dying, and the old shall not be the last in line. Where these substances can ease the passage or restore meaning at the end of a life, no person’s remaining time shall be spent waiting for a clinical trial to conclude.

Article XI — The Right to Integration

The experience does not end when the altered state does. Every person is entitled to competent and unhurried support afterward.

Article XII — The Right to Redress

When a person is harmed by a guide, a clinician, a church, or a company, there shall be an avenue for accounting. That Right does not depend on the harmed person’s credibility being measured against the word of an institution.

AI Disclaimer: The author generated the underlying intellectual ideas, research questions, interpretation of the documentation, and made all other decisions about the paper’s intellectual content. The author accepts full responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of the manuscript.

AI (Claude Cowork) was used to locate the following historic documents and provide a summary that was used by the author in the creation of a draft of a proposed Psychedelic Bill of Rights: Code of Hammurabi, Cyrus Cylinder, Laws of Solon, Twelve Tables, Magna Carta, Golden Bull of 1222, Golden Bull of 1356, Petition of Right, Massachusetts Body of Liberties, Habeas Corpus Act, English Bill of Rights, Act of Settlement, Virginia Declaration of Rights, Declaration of Independence, Pennsylvania Constitution, Pennsylvania Declaration of Rights, Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, Massachusetts Constitution, United States Constitution, Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, French Constitution of 1793, U.S. Bill of Rights, Haitian Declaration of Independence, Slavery Abolition Act, Declaration of Sentiments, Emancipation Proclamation, Thirteenth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment, Fifteenth Amendment, Weimar Constitution, Four Freedoms, United Nations Charter, American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, European Convention on Human Rights, European Social Charter, International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Convention Against Torture, Convention on the Rights of the Child, American Convention on Human Rights, African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, Constitution of South Africa, Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, Arab Charter on Human Rights, United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

In the recent history of psychedelic policy, no single date was greeted with as much optimism as July 1, 2023. On that day Australia became the first country in the world to recognize MDMA and psilocybin as medicines. The coverage was euphoric and the media called it a watershed. For a movement accustomed to losing, it looked like the levee had finally broken.

Three years on, the number of Australians who have received the treatment is less than two hundred. This was roughly during the same period when over 20,000 psilocybin sessions were held in Oregon. What the hell happened in Australia?

The failure of the rollout in Australia did not happen through any reversal of policy. What defeated it were the requirements. As someone who has spent a working career in federal health regulations, it is not the first time I’ve seen sensible rules strangle the things they were written to permit.

Let’s start with what Australia did, because nearly every headline got it wrong. Australia did not approve MDMA or psilocybin. MDMA and psilocybin are not on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods. What the government did was cut a narrow door into an existing mechanism called the Authorized Prescriber process. This was a pathway ordinarily used to get an unregistered drug to a defined patient population under a named doctor’s supervision. It was a regulatory workaround presented to the public as a reform. The door it opened has four locks on it, and together they made significant access unlikely.

The first lock is the prescriber, and only a psychiatrist may prescribe MDMA or psilocybin. Psychiatry in Australia was already a specialty in shortage and their national association itself had opposed the rescheduling.

Then ethics approval. The psychiatrist must write a complete treatment protocol, covering dosing, screening, monitoring, adverse event handling, and risk mitigation, and submit it to a Human Research Ethics Committee registered with the National Health and Medical Research Council. Committees meet on their own calendars and send protocols back for revision. There is no approved template to copy and every psychiatrist writes one from scratch and defends it.

The authorization itself comes only after ethics clearance, and it is granted separately for each indication. MDMA for PTSD is one authorization. Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression is another.

Supply is the fourth lock. With nothing on the Register, clinics import pharmaceutical grade MDMA and psilocybin. This entails Office of Drug Control permits, import exemptions, and a supply chain resting on a handful of overseas manufacturers. On top of all this sits a standing obligation to report patient numbers and adverse events every six months for as long as you prescribe.

The result is what you would expect. By August 2025 in a country of twenty-seven million there were only twelve psychiatrists listed on the public directory of authorized prescribers. By the end of that year additional authorizations had been granted but literally a handful of prescribers are holding the keys to access.

Now consider the other side of the door. To receive MDMA legally in Australia you must have post-traumatic stress disorder. To receive psilocybin, you must have treatment-resistant depression, meaning you have already failed adequate trials of conventional treatment, though there was never fixed a national threshold for what counts as adequate. That definition lives inside each psychiatrist’s ethics-approved protocol, which means it varies from clinic to clinic. Nothing else qualifies — not end-of-life anxiety, where the psilocybin evidence is arguably strongest, and not alcohol use disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anorexia, or cluster headaches.

You must then find and be accepted by one of those approved psychiatrists, most of whom practice in Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane. You must pass medical and psychiatric screening, and a personal or family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder will usually disqualify you, as well as a range of cardiac conditions. What you are signing up for is a course of care. Preparation sessions first, then one or more dosing days that run six to eight hours under continuous supervision, then integration sessions afterward.

And you must pay for all of it out of your own pocket. Because the substances are unapproved goods they cannot be listed on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, so there is no subsidy. A peer-reviewed analysis published this year put real-world psilocybin protocols at upwards of fifteen thousand USD dollars per patient. The cost of a MDMA protocol is even higher. The drug itself is cheap. What costs money is clinician hours: two trained practitioners sitting in a room for eight hours at a stretch, three or four times over.

Here is the detail that makes Australia worth studying. The treatment worked. Across the entire program, no serious adverse events have been reported. The safety case that all those requirements were built to protect has been made, and it was made partly by demonstrating that the requirements were not necessary at the scale they permitted.

In June 2026 eighty-three stakeholders proposed loosening the rules on treatment teams. Instead of a psychiatrist remaining in the room for the entire session, the requirement would become a minimum of one health practitioner, with psychotherapists, counsellors, and social workers eligible to occupy the second chair. The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists responded that this posed an unjustifiable risk to patient safety.

The sequence is worth laying out. The College that opposed the original rescheduling, whose members are the only people legally permitted to prescribe, and whose billable hours constitute the largest single line item in a fifteen-thousand-dollar course of treatment, is now opposing the one change that would make that treatment affordable, on safety grounds, in a program that has recorded no serious adverse events in three years. I am not suggesting bad faith. I have sat in enough regulatory rooms to know that the people making these arguments usually believe every word. That is precisely the difficulty. Gatekeeping does not require anyone to be dishonest. It only requires that the people writing the rules be drawn from the same profession the rules protect, and that no one is assigned to count the patients who never got through the door.

Americans should watch this closely, because we are busy assembling our own version of the same machine. Australia is the clarifying case, because Australia obtained the very thing every advocate here says they want. Full national legal recognition, medicine status, a government blessing, and headlines around the world. Even with all that less than two hundred people in Australia have gained above ground access to treatment.

The lesson I take from this is that legalization is not access, and that the two get confused constantly by people who should know better. A law permitting a treatment that nobody can reach is a press release, not a policy, and the honest question to ask of any new framework is how many people finished treatment last year. Whoever controls the bottleneck sets the price, so restricting delivery to the scarcest and most expensive professional class in medicine guarantees a fifteen-thousand-dollar treatment and a boutique clientele.

That is the lesson in Australia’s rollout of psychedelic assisted therapy. The headlines were real enough; the access never arrived, and until it does the rest is decoration.

On July 14, 2026 the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) published a Request for Information carrying the title: “Training and Care Delivery Models for Safe Administration of Potential FDA-Approved Psychedelic Therapies in Ambulatory Clinical Settings.” There was almost no press coverage and the comment period ran thirty days and closed on August 13.

I have obtained and read all fifty-nine comments that were posted. Some run to twenty pages and some are a single line pointing to a PDF. Together they are the most honest picture I have seen of where this field actually stands.

There were fifty-nine chances to tell the federal government that psychedelic therapy is unproven, and not a single correspondent took it. The associations and the psychiatrists did not take it. The skeptics, if any remained, stayed home. What the letters argue about instead is staffing ratios, square footage, encounter rates, and who is legally permitted to sit in a room with a person for seven hours while the medicine does its work. That is what a movement looks like when it stops arguing for legitimacy and starts arguing over the details.

The docket follows Executive Order 14401, “Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness,” signed April 18. HRSA does not approve drugs. That is the FDA’s work. HRSA runs the safety net, and so the question it put to the public was narrower than the one the movement is used to answering. Not whether psilocybin heals but whether a community health center in a county with one psychiatrist could administer it on a Tuesday.

The answers split, and they do not split where you would expect.

On one side we have the operators, and they come armed with numbers. Althea, which runs infrastructure for state-regulated psilocybin services, produced the count for participants across Oregon and Colorado. The Healing Advocacy Fund put Oregon’s total above 22,000 and its severe adverse event rate at 0.15 percent. Numia Healing Center in Denver did something better than cite a study. It opened its own books: 162 documented sessions, zero adverse medical reactions, and an offer to let HRSA staff walk through their building. These arguments are not philosophical. It is that trained facilitators without medical degrees have already done this work safely, at scale, under state regulation, for years, and that the burden of proof has quietly changed hands.

On the other side stand the physicians and the professional societies. The American Psychiatric Association wants psychiatrists leading diagnosis and selection and a physician physically present and immediately available during administration. The National Association of Social Workers wants training standards federally recognized and housed inside accredited programs rather than left to the private training market that has grown up around this field over the last decade. In reading that comment closely I could feel an entire cottage industry being shown the door.

Then there are the individual clinicians, who scramble the map entirely. Rebecca Allen, a principal investigator on multiple Phase 2 and 3 trials, wrote in to argue for fewer rules. She suggests treating these drugs like any other medication, let physicians exercise ordinary judgment, and skip the psychedelic-specific apparatus altogether. Mindbloom, a telehealth company with more than 800,000 at-home ketamine treatments behind it, argued that the clinician does not need to be in the room at all, only on the screen, with a non-clinical support person present. Nearly every profession in American medicine filed to claim its seat at the table. Nurses, mid-level providers, pharmacists, psychologists, social workers, and peer support specialists weighed in. If you have ever wondered what professionalization sounds like, it sounds like this.

The input from the field that will decide the outcome are the ones about money. Numia reported that its sessions average seven hours, that thirteen percent run past eight, and that a single administration room therefore serves exactly one patient per day. Community Health Center, Inc. supplied the other half of that equation. Federally qualified health centers are paid a flat daily encounter rate. Their clinical director wrote that being paid one flat rate for the day “will make this fiscally impossible.” Those two comments outline the entire problem.

Everything else in the docket is an attempt to reconcile the issue of what gets left behind in the expansion of above ground psychedelic access. Suggestions were made for group dosing, hub-and-spoke arrangements, and remote monitoring. A request is made, repeated by several correspondents independently, that HRSA simply publish a sample payment structure separating the cost of the drug from the professional time from the facility time, so that a clinic director can run the arithmetic before committing. A figure of 35 to 51 percent cost reduction for group administration appears in at least four separate letters, which tells me everyone is reading the same underlying analysis and everyone is frightened by the same math.

The most interesting submission in the docket is not a comment letter at all. The neuroscientist Gül Dölen filed her 2026 Annual Review of Neuroscience paper instead of writing one. Her argument is that these compounds work by reopening critical periods and remodeling the extracellular matrix, a learning model rather than a chemical imbalance model, and that the psychological setting is therefore mechanically load-bearing rather than a pleasant addition to the pharmacology. The patient, she notes, is returned to something like a childlike state of openness and requires safeguarding while there. Filed into a docket about staffing ratios, that paper becomes an argument rather than a review. If the context is part of the mechanism, then stripping it out is not cost saving. It is a different treatment wearing the same name. The VALOR veteran’s coalition made the identical point in policy language, warning HRSA against efficiency-driven modifications adopted before anyone has evaluated whether they work.

That, and not the medical-versus-non-medical quarrel, is the real fracture running through this discussion. It is fidelity against scale. The people who have watched this work up close, from every side of the credentialing fight, are afraid of what gets cut on the way to volume.

A coalition including BrainFutures, Mental Health America, the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, and the Meadows Institute has told HRSA it will deliver a set of interdisciplinary core competencies by the end of this year. Whoever writes that document will define what the word “trained” means in this field for a generation. It is being drafted right now, outside this docket, and almost entirely out of view.

AI (Claude Cowork) was used to facilitate access to submitted comments referenced in this post and provide error checking.

The most consequential emerging clinical story in behavioral health is arriving faster than most healthcare operations have recognized. I’m talking about psychedelics. What is coming is not just an expansion of retreats and wellness experiences, but clinical implementation.

Across the board timelines are being compressed. Compass Pathways has achieved two positive Phase 3 results for COMP360 (their synthetic psilocybin) in treatment-resistant depression. This was the first positive Phase 3 clinical trial data for any classic psychedelic in U.S. history. Compass is on track with their guidance of final NDA submission in Q4 2026 and launch in the first half of 2027. In April 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14401 directing federal agencies to accelerate psychedelic therapy review. The FDA followed a week later with National Priority Vouchers issued to Compass, Usona Institute, and Transcend Therapeutics. This collapsed the standard review window from 10-12 months to 1-2 months. Resilient Pharmaceuticals resubmitted its MDMA new drug applications (NDA) in August 2026 and Definium Therapeutics is not far behind with DT120, an LSD tablet with positive Phase 3 data in generalized anxiety disorder. In July the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking stakeholder feedback on workforce training and care delivery models for the safe administration of potential future FDA-approved psychedelic therapies in ambulatory and community health settings.

In August 2025, AbbVie acquired Gilgamesh’s bretisilocin in a deal worth $1.2 billion. In July 2026th the Eli Lilly/AtaiBeckley psychedelic deal was announced to the tune of up to $3.8 billion. J&J’s esketamine (Spravato) generated $584M in Q2 2026 alone, up 40% year-over-year. The message is clear that big pharma sees the valuation potential in FDA approvals. The open questions now concern the ability of clinical and health systems to provide infrastructures for the delivery of these medicines.

Compass has announced two delivery collaborations with Radial and Osmind, the platform behind a national network of small-to-mid interventional psychiatry practices. They are on a hiring spree for jobs with a title of “Neuroscience Therapeutic Sales Specialist”. That is all you need to know. They are preparing for delivery that will happen in independent clinics, not health systems.

Top challenges to scale after FDA approval

DEA rescheduling: FDA approval doesn’t by itself make psilocybin prescribable. Schedule I placement has to be moved, and EO 14401 directs the Attorney General to expedite that review specifically because it’s a bottleneck.

Economics: This is the constraint everything else runs through. One or two clinicians occupying a room for 6–8 hours per patient is the least labor-efficient encounter in behavioral health. Nothing about credentialing or reimbursement matters if the financial math doesn’t work. Some of the faster acting psychedelics (DMT, 5-meo) could change the equation. Also, group treatment with the longer acting psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD could bring down the cost.

Reimbursement: Procedure codes for billing (CPT 0820T–0822T) are Category III meaning they are trackable, not payable. Category I conversion requires utilization data, which requires providers to bill unpaid codes first. Then CMS, then commercial payers. That sequence historically runs for years, and it starts after approval.

Credentialing standards: Thousands have been trained by CIIS, Columbia, IPI, MAPS, Fluence, etc. with no reciprocity, no common competency definition, and no licensure pathway. The likely resolution is that REMS (https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/risk-evaluation-and-mitigation-strategies-rems) becomes the de facto standard by default, which means the FDA sets the therapy workforce standard as a byproduct of drug safety regulation. Not obviously the right body for it.

Physical environment: A low-stimulation room tied up for most of a clinical day is space most behavioral health clinics don’t have and can’t repurpose without losing throughput.

Adverse events: Managing an acute psychological crisis with no psychiatric backup on site is unsolved, and one publicized incident in a clinic could reset the field’s trajectory.

Liability with no actuarial history: Carriers have almost no basis for pricing this. Informed consent boundaries for an altered-states intervention aren’t settled.

Current existing models

Spravato is the current closest structural model and the most useful. The process involves REMS-certified settings, two-hour post-dose observation, vitals before and after, and direct provider observation. It proved certified-site distribution works at scale and that payers will cover a monitored in-clinic psychiatric intervention. The problem is that a two-hour session versus six to eight is an enormous difference. Staffing ratios, room turns, and scheduling all break at that extended length.

Oregon is the cautionary case, and it’s the most instructive thing in the field right now. Of thirty-five approved service centers, twenty-two were still operating as of June 2026. Individual sessions range from$1,000 to over $5,000, group sessions at $300–$500, and multi-day packages up to $15,000. That spread is almost entirely labor and facility overhead. A roughly one-third closure rate in a cash-pay market with no reimbursement friction is the clearest available evidence that the session model doesn’t sustain itself on economics alone.

Colorado explicitly redesigned around Oregon’s failures. The design changes are the interesting parts including a micro-healing center tier with lower overhead, a prohibition on local government bans, and dual licensure for clinicians from launch. The micro-center tier (reduced security requirements, up to 750mg total psilocin on site) is a direct answer to the unit-economics problem and the closest thing to a template for a rural pathway.

Ketamine clinics are the operational predecessor nobody credits enough. They’ve been running prep–dose–integration, billing it, staffing it, and managing adverse events for years. Osmind’s network is largely these practices, which is exactly why Compass partnered with them.

The VA deserves a mention as they now have five sites in psilocybin trials, and roughly twenty psychedelic trials active system wide. It’s the one U.S. environment where the economics don’t bind which makes it a poor model for everyone else but a good proving ground for protocols.

The Road Ahead

So, what is it that we may see evolve?. My prediction is that psychedelic-assisted therapy is unlikely to integrate into general acute care in any near-term timeframe. The session model (preparation, 4-8 hours of supervised dosing, integration) is structurally incompatible with inpatient throughput economics and the existing acute care physical setting. What is more plausible is the possibility of the emergence of two tracks.

Track 1: Behavioral health specialty integration: Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHCs), outpatient psychiatric practices, and addiction treatment programs are the natural first-mover settings. CCBHCs receive enhanced Medicaid reimbursement and have the clinical staffing model to accommodate extended therapeutic sessions. The HRSA RFI specifically names CCBHCs as a target delivery setting.

Track 2: Health system-affiliated outpatient behavioral health: Major health systems that have invested in behavioral health ambulatory infrastructure will build or affiliate with psychedelic therapy clinics as a specialty line. This is a similar approach to how bariatric surgery centers and fertility clinics were launched. This is a 3-5 year horizon post-approval, conditional on CMS coverage and liability frameworks settling.

Time will tell how this all plays out and that time is coming soon. And what will become of the Underground? The Underground, as always, will morph to meet the needs and desires of a vast population not served by what the Overlords of approval and regulation decree.

I was in Scotland a few months back meeting with members of the Scottish Psychedelic Research Group. One thing they brought up was the growing use of DMT vape pens by teenagers. That was a shocker for me. Scotland is years behind the US in terms of widespread social progressive movements related to psychedelic acceptance. The idea of 15-year-olds running around with DMT devices in the pocket of their jeans was hard to accept. I’m all for safe and affordable access but, at least for me, this is a bridge too far.

Over the past week I decided to see what was widely available for online purchase and delivery here in the good ole USA. It is all there. As long as you check the box that states you are over eighteen, in some cases twenty-one, it is all there for the asking. Mushrooms, LSD, DMT, 5-meo, and who know what else. No need to go to the dark web or pay with crypto. Just load up your cart, pay with a credit card, and the friendly mailman will bring it right to your door.

Congress has been unable to do anything with the fact that potent THC hemp extracted products are being legally sold to minors at gas stations. This is an unregulated market and we’ll soon see if there is the political will later this year to put even minimal regulations in place. Meanwhile there is no widespread public discussion at even more powerful substances being openly sold across state lines with no regulation at all.

I don’t know but maybe this is what always happens during prohibition. We are in strange times as psychedelics emerge from the shadows of the underground. Currently there are no controls over the online availability of the most powerful mind-altering substances on earth. It is a circus that can’t last forever and a crackdown is coming. The hammer will eventually fall on the online sales of Schedule 1 drugs. Hopefully it will not set back the current movement of research and appropriate use. I’ll let you decide what is “appropriate use.” We need safe access to psychedelics but we don’t need high schoolers with DMT vape pens in their backpacks. Sermon ends.

In the early 1970s my friends and I would search for psilocybin mushrooms in the cow pastures outside Tampa. It was a treasure hunt and you never knew if the gold would be found. Sometimes we would return empty-handed, sometimes with bags almost too heavy to carry. In those days foraging was the only way to locate the elusive fungi.

Psilocybin is still illegal but it sure keeps getting easier to get. Somewhere in America this morning a shipment is being readied to send mushrooms, capsules, and chocolate bars containing a Schedule 1 substance. This is not happening in the dark web but in fully above ground commerce. The transactions are conducted by credit card, on a website with a shopping cart and a customer service email, and shipped by the United States Postal Service.

That is the strangest fact about psilocybin in 2026. There was never a moment when the country decided this was acceptable. There was no vote, no landmark ruling, and no signature ceremony in the Oval Office. Availability simply crept forward, decade by decade, through a series of gaps that nobody bothered to close.

In 1955, if you wanted psilocybin mushrooms, you needed a passport and a working knowledge of rural Oaxaca, Mexico. Availability at that moment was essentially zero. In 1958, Albert Hofmann isolated psilocybin and psilocin from Psilocybe mexicana specimens. Sandoz put the compound into production under the trade name Indocybin and shipped it to research institutions and psychiatric clinics around the world.

For about eight years, psilocybin in America was a pharmaceutical. You obtained it the way you obtained any investigational drug: through an institution, on paper, from a Swiss manufacturer. That door closed in 1966, when Sandoz stopped making it amid the cultural backlash, and it was sealed in 1970 when the Controlled Substances Act placed psilocybin in Schedule I. That defined it as having a high abuse potential with no accepted medical use.

On paper, availability returned to zero. In practice, prohibition changed the shape of supply rather than its volume, and the next move was the one that mattered most. In 1976, a small Berkeley press published Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide. It was credited to O.T. Oss and O.N. Oeric, the pen names for Terence and Dennis McKenna. The book did something no law had anticipated. It gave ordinary people a reliable, reproducible method for cultivating Psilocybe cubensis indoors.

That is the hinge. Before 1976, psilocybin was something you found in a Mexican village, in a cow pasture, or in a research pharmacy. After 1976, it was something you made. Supply stopped depending on geography, on smuggling routes, on chemists like the ones I have written about elsewhere in these pages. It depended on a jar, a pressure cooker, and patience. And it created the loophole that everything since has flowed through.

Psilocybin is a controlled substance, but the spores are not. A spore contains no psilocybin and that compound appears only after germination, in the mycelium and the fruiting body. Federal law, drafted to control molecules, had no answer for a package of genetic material that would only become illegal if somebody chose to sprout it. So, the spores moved into the open, sold “for microscopy and taxonomic research.”

Through the 1980s trade was small, slow, and conducted by mail through the back pages of the counterculture. Then the internet arrived and collapsed every barrier that remained. Erowid went up in 1995, building a free, searchable archive of dosage, chemistry, interaction, and trip reports. This was the accumulated knowledge of an underground, indexed. Cultivation forums followed.

By the mid-2000s the commercial side was fully visible. A study in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs ran Google searches for “psilocybin spores” repeatedly between 2003 and 2005. Of eight hundred links, 58 percent led to sites offering spores for sale. The authors also documented sites offering whole mushrooms. That was published in 2009. It described a market that was not hiding.

The 2020s brought the part everyone reads about. Denver decriminalized possession by ballot measure in May 2019; Oakland followed by council resolution a month later. In November 2020, Oregon passed Measure 109 and the District of Columbia passed Initiative 81, which became local law in March 2021. Colorado’s Proposition 122 followed in 2022. Oregon’s licensed service centers opened in 2023; Colorado’s healing centers began operating in 2025. In April 2025, New Mexico became the first state to authorize medical psilocybin through its legislature rather than a ballot box, with the Department of Health now targeting the end of 2026 for its first licensed patient sessions.

These are real, deliberate policy decisions, and they are also the smallest part of the availability story. Every one of them requires you to sit in a licensed room with a trained facilitator, on the premises, for a scheduled session, at a cost most people cannot casually absorb. None of them lets you take anything home.

Meanwhile the informal market simply outgrew the legal one. In Washington, a “gifting” economy sprang up in which shops sold a sticker or a small piece of art and included mushrooms at no additional charge, a workaround borrowed intact from the early cannabis gray market. Elsewhere, the workaround went chemical as chocolate bars and gummies were marketed with mushroom imagery that contain, variously, Amanita muscaria, synthetic psilocybin analogues, or something the label does not mention at all. That last category is where the story stops being merely interesting.

In the summer of 2024, a brand called Diamond Shruumz was being sold openly in smoke shops and convenience stores. It was linked to more than a hundred poisonings across dozens of states and two deaths under investigation. FDA testing found toxic levels of muscimol and undeclared psilacetin, a synthetic compound most consumers had never heard of.

Almost none of the people who were hospitalized had eaten a psilocybin mushroom. They had eaten a product that the market produced because psilocybin remains illegal. This was an unregulated analogue, sold in a regulatory vacuum, by a company nobody was inspecting.

The legal track is now moving faster than the underground would have predicted. Compass Pathways reported positive results from two consecutive Phase 3 trials of its synthetic psilocybin formulation, COMP005 in June 2025 and COMP006 in February 2026. These were the first positive Phase 3 results for a classic psychedelic in psychiatry in this country. The company has said it expects to complete its rolling application in the fourth quarter of this year, with a decision possible by early 2027.

Here is where seventy years of slow drift have brought us. Spores, mushrooms, and psilocybin products now travel by mail under a legal fiction everyone can see through. Analogue edibles sit on gas station counters with no testing regime and, on the evidence, no reliable idea of their own contents. Two states operate licensed programs that require a supervised session most people will never schedule. And a pharmaceutical version may be approved within the year, at which point psilocybin will be simultaneously a Schedule I substance, a prescription medicine, a state-licensed service, a decriminalized plant, and unregulated snack food.

This is not legalization as nothing was legalized. This is what happens when a prohibition stops being enforced but is never repealed. The demand routes around it, and the routes it finds are the ones with the least oversight. The Diamond Shruumz poisonings were not a failure of the psychedelic renaissance. They were a failure to notice that availability had arrived years before policy did, and that the space in between would be filled by whoever showed up first.

I have watched this trajectory for a long time, and what strikes me is how quiet it was. No single year looks like a turning point. But add them up and the mushroom that Wasson needed a plane ticket and an introduction to reach now can be ordered online and shipped flat rate across the US. Psilocybin, even if federally illegal, has escaped into the wider culture. Most folks would agree that is progress, but I sure miss those walks at dawn through the cow fields outside of Tampa.

This missive is dedicated to the medicine men and women who have carried the fire since pre-history. To those that tended the wisdom across generations, knowing its power to illuminate and to burn. To the modern researchers, writers, therapists, and seekers who mapped this territory at great personal cost. Their sacrifice is the foundation we walk upon.

I offer blessings to the younger generation now stepping forward, the scientists and therapists, the advocates and artists, and the Indigenous scholars reclaiming their heritage, who are opening those doors again. May they carry the flame without burning down the house.

Finally, speaking directly to my generation arriving at elderhood. You spawned a youth movement that stopped a war. You are being called again to use all the knowledge acquired in your life to support the common good. We live in a world that supports the rise of trillionaires but is unwilling to provide affordable access to health care. It is time to rise again and change the world. If we don’t, who will? What will we do with our last few precious years? It is never too late to heal, to wonder, to grow, and to fight for what is right and true.

What I could not have predicted was that the people with the most to gain from these medicines might turn out to be people of my own current age of 75. I’m speaking directly to those seniors navigating the accumulated weight of decades, the slow losses that come with later life, and a medical system that too often has nothing left to offer except another pill.

I wrote Elders at the Threshold: Psychedelics for Seniors for my generation. This book is for them. It is also for their children, their doctors, and anyone else willing to look past the mythology and examine what the science actually says. The evidence is serious. The research is real. And the conversation, for far too long, has excluded the very people who perhaps need it most.

The burden of psychiatric illness among older adults is vast, undertreated, and badly in need of better tools. Depression affects an estimated fifteen to twenty percent of adults over sixty-five. Anxiety disorders are even more prevalent. PTSD among veterans and trauma survivors is chronically underdiagnosed in older populations. The available treatments, primarily antidepressants and conventional talk therapy, leave a large proportion of patients without adequate relief. Psychedelic-assisted therapy is emerging as the most promising response to this gap.

We are at the beginning of something. The scientific renaissance in psychedelic research is barely twenty years old. The first legal supervised psilocybin services in the United States have been operating for just over two years. The clinical trials most directly relevant to older adults for Alzheimer’s disease, age-related cognitive decline, chronic pain, and late-life depression and anxiety are mostly still in early phases. The regulatory and healthcare systems that will ultimately determine how these treatments are delivered and who can access them are still being built. We are in the early pages of a story whose later chapters have not yet been written. What can be said with confidence is that the direction is clear. The scientific momentum is real, and the human need driving it is profound.

An aging population is struggling under a burden of mental and existential suffering that conventional medicine addresses only partially and inadequately. Some members of my generation have begun to find something that was missing: not symptom management, but the possibility of genuine transformation. The promise of meeting the final years of life with less fear, less isolation, less unprocessed grief, and more capacity for presence is real.

As I research psychedelic history, I keep coming back to Amanda Feilding, who died last May at Beckley Park. That was the Tudor house with three towers and three moats where she had been born eighty-two years before. She is easy to caricature and hard to dismiss, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. If she had been born centuries earlier, she would have almost certainly been burned at the stake. She was dangerous to the status quo and for that I sing her praises.

The caricature writes itself. In 1970 she drilled a hole in her own skull with a dental drill, filmed the whole thing, and titled the result Heartbeat in the Brain. She ran for Parliament twice on a single platform: trepanation for the National Health. She was an aristocrat who had been microdosing LSD since her twenties, decades before the word existed. If you wanted to discredit the entire psychedelic ecosystem, you could hardly have designed a better mascot for your opponents to point at.

A good part of the reason we take psilocybin trials seriously today traces back to this woman. She spent decades and a large share of her own fortune keeping the research alive when no respectable institution would come near it.

Her thinking started somewhere genuinely strange. Feilding believed that consciousness was, at bottom, a matter of blood. She got the idea from Bart Huges, the Dutch thinker she met in 1966, and built it into a theory: that the ego is essentially a regulatory mechanism controlling how blood is distributed in the brain, and that our sealed adult skulls limit the circulation children still enjoy. Trepanation, she argued, let the full heartbeat back in. The medical community never bought a word of it, and the evidence remains thin to nonexistent. I don’t believe it either. But it’s worth noticing that a wrong idea, held seriously, can still lead somewhere useful.

What it led to was the Beckley Foundation, which she founded in 1998, first under the earnest name Foundation to Further Consciousness. From a Tudor hunting lodge outside Oxford, she began doing the thing almost no one else would do as she partnered with actual neuroscientists, putting psychedelics into brain scanners, and publishing the results in peer-reviewed journals. The first brain-imaging study of LSD came out of that work. So did the early psilocybin-for-depression trials, co-authored with Robin Carhart-Harris and David Nutt, names that now anchor the field. She has her name on more than fifty papers. Not bad for someone with no formal scientific training and a hole in her head.

The other half of her life was politics. She understood that the science would go nowhere while the War on Drugs set the ground rules. She compiled evidence for reform and brought people together who could act on it. That included a Global Cannabis Commission, a launch at the House of Lords, and advisory roles for the governments of Guatemala and Jamaica. New Scientist called her the Queen of Consciousness, a title she seemed to enjoy. Underneath the eccentricity, she was a remarkably effective operator.

The later years complicate the picture, and I think they should. As psychedelics turned respectable, they also turned into a business, and Feilding was in the thick of it with the ventures of Beckley Psytech, Beckley Retreats, and Beckley Waves. You can read this as vindication, the long-suffering pioneer finally rewarded, or as the familiar story of a countercultural cause being absorbed into the market it once defied. Probably it’s both. I don’t think Feilding lost much sleep over the tension. She wanted the medicines legal and available, and she was pragmatic about how that happens.

What stays with me is her persistence. It is one thing to hold a strange conviction in your twenties. It is another to still be pushing it, refined and funded and half-vindicated, into your eighties, working out of the house you were born in until the year you died there. She was told for most of her life that she was a crank, and she outlasted the verdict. The research she seeded is now mainstream enough that people forget where it came from.

I don’t share all her beliefs. I’m not sure anyone should. But the field she helped build is real, and it exists in part because one persistent woman who refused to be laughed off.

Sail on Amanda Feilding. Sail off into the wild blue yonder. We were lucky to have you as long as we did.

Recently I have obtained access to a large number of letters from Albert Hofmann, the Swiss scientists heralded as the discoverer of LSD. In these documents there are numerous fascinating tales. One of these involves an attempt to raise money from Steve Jobs to fund LSD research in Switzerland. This effort, spearheaded by Rick Doblin, the founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) leveraged Hofmann’s influence and reputation. These documents give a fascinating look behind the curtain of early attempts to solicit donations to fund psychedelic clinical trials. Jobs spoke openly about the use of LSD and its impact on his life. That made him an obvious target for fundraising.

January 22, 2007 Letter from Doblin to Hofmann

Summary: Doblin asks Hofmann to help raise funds for Peter Gasser’s pending Swiss LSD-assisted psychotherapy study by writing a personal appeal letter to Steve Jobs. He notes Jobs has said publicly that LSD helped him in developing Apple’s products and even joked that Bill Gates might have improved Microsoft’s products if he’d “taken more LSD.” Doblin encloses a draft letter for Hofmann to use as a guide, plus a stamped envelope, and offers to help.

Doblin believes a letter from Hofmann asking Jobs to support Swiss LSD research would mean a great deal to him, and that Doblin is working to get an appointment with Jobs and would help deliver Hofmann’s letter in person; he encloses a draft letter for Hofmann to use as a guide and a stamped envelope, suggesting a handwritten or typed/printed note would be great. This letter documents a notable and unusual episode: MAPS’s attempt to solicit major funding from Steve Jobs for Swiss LSD research via a personal appeal from Hofmann.

In the last few weeks, I have become aware of a disturbing practice employed by one of the more notorious of the “psychedelic shamans” in the US. That practice is, believe it or not, a process in which those who are about to trip are not informed what psychedelic they are given. Now there might be an interesting debate as whether this level of “radical trust” is something that might be beneficial to some small group of psychonauts, I find it alarming in the extreme. Aleister Crowley famously stated, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”. Taking that in mind, I guess if folks choose to have no choice in what psychedelic they are about to take, that is, hopefully, free will. For myself I find this risky, and little bit creepy. Below are what I consider to be the risks of such a path. Since I quoted Crowley, I guess I should throw in a quote from Jesus, “Whoever has ears, let them hear.”

Risks of Taking an Unknown Psychedelic from a Guide

This is a serious harm-reduction concern. The risks are substantial:

1. You Can’t Give Informed Consent

Consent requires knowing what you’re agreeing to. A guide who withholds this information is violating a foundational ethical principle of any therapeutic or ceremonial context.

2. Dosing and Duration Are Unknown

Different psychedelics have wildly different timelines. Psilocybin peaks at 3–4 hours, LSD at 6–8, ibogaine at 12–36. Not knowing what you took means you can’t mentally prepare for the duration, which significantly increases anxiety and panic risk.

3. Drug Interactions Become Dangerous

Without knowing the substance, you can’t assess interactions with medications you take. In particular:

• MAOIs (dangerous with many tryptamines)

• SSRIs (serotonin syndrome risk)

• Lithium (seizure risk with LSD/psilocybin)

• Cardiac medications (relevant for MDMA, ibogaine)

4. Medical Emergency Response Is Compromised

If something goes wrong, emergency responders need to know what you took. Ibogaine carries real cardiac risk and requires specific medical management. An unknown substance can turn a manageable crisis into a fatal one.

5. No Way to Evaluate Source or Purity

An unknown substance equals unknown synthesis quality and unknown adulterants.

6. Psychological Preparation Is Impossible

Set (mindset) is one of the most important determinants of a psychedelic experience. You can’t prepare your set for an experience you don’t know you’re having.

7. It Signals a Guide You Shouldn’t Trust

A competent, ethical guide whether in a therapeutic, shamanic, or retreat context, will always disclose the substance, dose, and expected duration. Withholding this information is a red flag for incompetence, manipulation, or worse.

Bottom Line

Don’t do it. The guide’s reasoning doesn’t matter: “trust the process,” “it’s part of the ceremony,” or “knowing changes the experience” are rationalizations that don’t override your right to know what’s entering your body. Be careful out there, there are snakes in the grass.

In 1970, the United States government did something unprecedented in the history of medicine. It did not merely restrict a class of substances, it effectively erased them from the scientific record. The Controlled Substances Act placed LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and MDMA in Schedule I. This designation meant there was no accepted medical use, no legitimate research pathway, and no tolerance for inquiry. The clock stopped. For more than fifty years, the most promising tools in the study of human consciousness were locked in a bureaucratic vault.

What makes this story so painful is what came before. The decades preceding the ban were some of the most fertile periods in psychiatric history. Between 1950 and 1970 researchers published more than a thousand peer-reviewed papers on psychedelic-assisted therapy. The research was not fringe. It was rigorous, peer-reviewed, and deeply promising.

Then it all vanished. Not because the science failed. It vanished because the politics demanded it.

The Human Cost of Prohibition

The moratorium’s most devastating toll was not measured in data sets or publications. It was measured in suffering. Millions of people with treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, end-of-life anxiety, and alcohol use disorder lived and died without access to therapies that might have helped them. Veterans returned from war with wounds no existing drug could touch. My brother, after two tours in Viet Nam, was one of those that could have been helped. It is too late now for him, as it is for many others. The underground persisted, as it always does, but without the safeguards of clinical oversight or scientific refinement.

There is also a generational cost to scientific knowledge itself. Researchers who built careers in psychedelic pharmacology in the 1960s were forced to abandon their work or pursue it in exile. The institutional memory was scattered. Graduate programs that might have cultivated a generation of expertise never materialized. When the thaw finally began cautiously, in the mid-1990s, with Rick Strassman’s DMT studies, scientists had to essentially rebuild from scratch. They were rediscovering what their predecessors had already found.

The Archaeology of a Rediscovery

The renaissance that has unfolded since the early 2000s has been remarkable precisely because it confirms what was lost. Researchers at Johns Hopkins, NYU, and Imperial College London have now replicated and extended the work of the 1960s. Psilocybin produces significant, lasting reductions in depression and end-of-life distress. The science, once resumed, has moved with uncommon speed. But it is worth noting that much of what is celebrated as breakthrough research is, at its core, the completion of work that should have been done over forty years ago.

The moratorium also shaped the cultural narrative around these substances in ways that persist. Fifty years of criminalization embedded a stigma that slowed not just research but public acceptance. Regulators, insurers, and hospital systems still approach psilocybin therapy with the residual caution of prohibition. The language of the drug war uses words and phrases like “addiction, abuse potential, moral failure” to cloud discussions that should be conducted purely in the language of medicine.

What Cannot Be Recovered

Some things cannot be recovered. The patients who suffered without access to effective treatment are not statistics. They were people with names and families and lives that deserved better. The researchers forced from their field never returned. The hypotheses never tested, the trials never run, and the refinements never made represent a void in human knowledge that no amount of current enthusiasm can fully fill.

The fifty-year moratorium on psychedelic research was not an accident of science. It was a choice made by politicians, shouted by media, enforced by law, and sustained by fear. As the field now races to reclaim what was lost, that history deserves to be named clearly. The frozen clock is ticking again. But it cannot reclaim the time that passed while it stood still.

Not long ago, a psychedelic experience required knowing someone. You found your way into the underground through a friend of a friend; a whisper network of trust built over years. The substances you encountered whether psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, or MDMA moved through a shadow economy where the currency was often community rather than cash. That world still exists. But something new has arrived, and it is wearing a suit.

As the psychedelic underground rises from its subterranean base, I have found myself thinking about the challenge of safe and affordable access. Over the past few months, I have created a concept for a foundational platform to raise the standards of psychedelic assisted therapy (PAT). This concept, which I believe is not only beneficial to the safe rollout of PAT, also reflects a path to financial stability. This is not just another non-profit that would have to beg for donations and grants to survive.

I submitted my proposal and slide deck to a number of organizations and investors that claim to support the introduction and scaling of PAT. The first reply I received stated, “At this time, we are very much focused on funding the development of therapeutics (biopharma startups).” There you have it. Though their mission statement says otherwise, the only psychedelics initiatives that they are supporting are focused on where the most money can be made. The focus, as it often is, is on rewarding shareholders and to hell with the stakeholders. Maybe I am just naive in believing that the commerce around psychedelics would be any different than the selling of any other commodity.

In the last decade, a tidal wave of venture capital, pharmaceutical investment, and private equity has crashed into the psychedelic ecosystem. Companies like ATAI Life Sciences, Compass Pathways, MindMed, and Cybin have raised hundreds of millions of dollars on the promise that the molecules discovered or rediscovered in the 1950s and 1960s are the next great frontier in mental health treatment. Their investors are often not counterculture idealists. They are fund managers, family offices, and hedge funds who see a potential market in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Some of these groups do indeed support the perceived Common Good that can come from safe and transformational psychedelic access. Many of them do not.

The pitch is compelling on its face. Mental health in America is in crisis. Antidepressants help some people and do nothing for many others. PTSD devastates veterans and trauma survivors with few effective long-term options. Psychedelics, the research is increasingly showing, can produce profound and lasting therapeutic benefits in a fraction of the sessions required by conventional treatment. Science is real. The need is real. The problem is who gets to decide how, and at what price, the medicine is delivered.

Compass Pathways made headlines, and a few enemies, when it filed broad patents on specific synthetic formulations of psilocybin and on therapeutic methods that critics argued should belong to no one. The patent office agreed to grant some of those claims. The psychedelic research community erupted. Advocates who had spent careers building the scientific case for these medicines suddenly found themselves potentially blocked from using basic laboratory preparations by a single corporate actor. The patents have since been narrowed or challenged, but the precedent was set. The boardroom had arrived at the medicine wheel.

Access is where corporate interest meets its most uncomfortable reckoning. A single ketamine infusion at a private clinic in a major American city can run between eight hundred and two thousand dollars, with full treatment courses costing several thousand more. When the FDA approved esketamine, a proprietary nasal spray version of the same drug, Johnson & Johnson priced it in a range that placed it beyond reach for most uninsured Americans. MDMA-assisted therapy, which produced stunning results in Phase 3 clinical trials for PTSD, was estimated to cost thousands of dollars per treatment course. These are not medicines for the people who need them most.

The policy dimension is equally troubling. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies with large psychedelic portfolios have hired lobbyists in Washington and in state capitals to shape the regulatory frameworks governing these substances. In Oregon, where voters passed Measure 109 to create a legal framework for psilocybin services, the early rollout was plagued by licensing fees and facility costs that effectively priced out many small, community-based providers in favor of well-capitalized operators. The law that was passed by voters as a public health measure is being implemented in ways that favor those with access to capital.

None of this makes the science wrong, or the therapeutic potential any less real. Psilocybin, MDMA, ketamine, ibogaine and related compounds appear to do things for human suffering that nothing else in the pharmacological arsenal can reliably replicate. That matters enormously. But there is a difference between medicines that heal and medicines that generate returns for shareholders. The former should be as accessible as oxygen. The latter will always find a way to the highest bidder.

The psychedelic industrial complex is not a conspiracy. It is simply capitalism doing what capitalism does by colonizing the commons, extracting value, and pricing out the people who discovered the territory in the first place. The Indigenous cultures who have worked with these plant medicines for centuries receive no equity stake. The underground chemists and therapists who kept the knowledge alive during fifty years of prohibition will not be invited to the IPO. The question now is whether there is enough political will and community organizing to build an alternative, one in which healing is not a product, but a right.

In the United States above ground access to psychedelics, with rare exception, is being structured by the same system that allows the rise of the billionaire class but does not have the desire or will to ensure affordable healthcare for its citizens.

No matter which way this works out, remember one thing. The medicine is still the medicine. The question is who holds the keys.

If anyone wants to hear more about my solution to address the challenge of safe PAT access you can contact me at kykeon23@gmail.com.

In the crowded mythology of the psychedelic underground, Ronald Hadley Stark stands apart. Not because he wrote a manifesto or gave a famous lecture or got himself arrested on the evening news. He stands apart because nobody could quite figure out who he was working for. That question, who did Stark really work for, has never been answered.

The DEA estimated Stark produced and moved fifty million doses of LSD during his years of operation in Europe. He accomplished this by embedding himself with the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the California collective of psychedelic idealists who had decided their spiritual mission was to flood the world with acid. They had vision and Stark had the chemistry and, more importantly, the money. He arrived with resources that nobody could account for and knowledge of clandestine synthesis that went well beyond what any amateur chemist should have possessed.

He set up a laboratory in a French chateau and later moved the operation to Belgium. The product was exceptional in quality and staggering in quantity. The Brotherhood thought they had found their angel investor. Maybe they had. The question is, who the angel was actually working for?

Stark was multilingual, charming, and utterly comfortable lying to your face. He told different people different things about where he came from, who he was, and what he wanted. He moved across international borders with a fluency that struck people around him as strange. In that era, crossing borders was not always easy, particularly for Americans trafficking in controlled substances. Stark seemed to have no trouble.

He was involved in helping break Timothy Leary out of a California prison in 1970 and his subsequent exile in Algeria. That operation required money, coordination, and connections that a freelance chemist would not ordinarily possess. Stark possessed them.

He also turned up in proximity to the Palestinian liberation movement, Italian far-left terrorist networks, and various European radical organizations. Whether he was infiltrating them, supplying them, or simply running in those circles for reasons of his own, no one has been able to establish with certainty. What is certain is that a man whose day job was manufacturing LSD had no obvious reason to be anywhere near those groups.

In 1978, Stark was sitting in an Italian prison on drug charges. The presiding judge, Flavio Castellano, reviewed the case and reached a conclusion that does not appear often in legal history. He determined that Stark’s profile, his resources, his contacts, and his patterns of movement, were consistent with those of a CIA operative. Judge Castellano ordered him released on that basis. His reasoning, in plain terms, was that Stark’s real employer was the United States government.

The broader context makes this worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. By the mid-1970s, the Church Committee hearings had pulled back the curtain on MKULTRA, the CIA program that had spent years dosing unwitting subjects with LSD in pursuit of mind control. The agency’s deep and documented interest in the drug as a tool of manipulation was no longer speculative. It was on the record.

Whether that interest extended to weaponizing the counterculture itself by flooding political movements with a substance that made organized resistance difficult, gathering intelligence inside radical communities, or simply studying the social effects of mass psychedelic use is a question that remains open. The documents that might answer it conclusively have not surfaced.

Stark died in Bologna in 1984. He was 45 years old. The official cause was a heart attack. He had been released from Italian custody not long before. He left no memoir and no known family came forward. The historical record he left behind is a tangle of aliases, contradictions, and deliberate misdirection. Researchers who have tried to trace his origins have run into walls. That is either very bad luck or very good tradecraft.

The history of the psychedelic movement is usually written from the top down. We know the philosophers and the chemists who became celebrities and the cultural figures who landed on magazine covers. Stark is a reminder that the story has an underside that is considerably stranger.

If Stark was simply a true believer with exceptional chemistry skills and a gift for self-promotion, his story is remarkable enough. Fifty million doses is fifty million doses. That alone reshaped a generation. But if an Italian judge’s assessment was correct, if Stark was an intelligence asset operating inside the Brotherhood and the broader psychedelic underground, then what we call the counterculture looks somewhat different. It means the surveillance state was not merely watching from the outside. It may have had a hand in the supply chain.

That possibility has never been proven. It has also never been ruled out. Ronald Stark died before anyone could make him answer for it, which is either a coincidence or it isn’t.

If you have a line on who Stark really was, I would very much like to hear from you.

The history of psychedelics, as it’s usually told, is a story about men. Who hasn’t heard of Albert Hofmann, Alexander Shulgin, and Timothy Leary? There’s a reason every one of those names is male, and it has nothing to do with who actually did the work.

Behind some of the most important discoveries in psychedelic chemistry, there were women who were the researchers, the collaborators, the synthesizers, and the field testers. They kept the notebooks, ran the experiments, wrote the papers, and then watched their names get quietly dropped from the narrative.

Ann Shulgin didn’t just marry a chemist. She was the laboratory.

When Alexander Shulgin was synthesizing novel phenethylamines and tryptamines in his backyard lab in California, Ann was his primary psychedelic test subject, his integration guide, and his co-author. PiHKAL and TiHKAL, the two-volume opus that functions as both memoir and synthesis manual, carry both names on the cover. But in the psychedelic community’s retelling, Sasha gets the genius mantle and Ann gets described as his wife.

Ann was a therapist with decades of underground MDMA-assisted session work before that was a clinical trial or a press release. She trained guides, documented outcomes, and built protocols. When the field of psychedelic-assisted therapy talks about its therapeutic roots, it’s drawing directly from methods Ann helped develop. It just doesn’t always say so.

Melissa Cargill worked in Owsley’s lab. That sentence alone should be enough.

Owsley Stanley is a legend in psychedelic history as the underground chemist who produced an estimated 500,000 doses of LSD between 1965 and 1967. What gets mentioned less often is that Melissa Cargill, a chemistry student with real laboratory skills, collaborated with him throughout that period. She wasn’t a groupie, and she wasn’t a muse. She was in the lab, handling synthesis and managing the technical operation that made Owsley’s output possible at scale.

Cargill eventually left the psychedelic underground, went straight, and built a life far from the counterculture mythology that swallowed her early years whole. That exit made her easier to forget as there was no memoir, no speaking circuit, and no legacy brand to maintain. Owsley became a folk hero while Cargill became a footnote. The asymmetry is almost perfect. The man who made the drugs is immortalized, the woman who helped make them possible quietly disappears from the record.

Go back further, and the erasure gets worse.

In the 1950s, a Canadian nurse named Harriet Kling worked alongside Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer at the Saskatchewan mental hospital where some of the earliest clinical LSD research in North America was conducted. Osmond and Hoffer became famous. Kling administered the sessions, held patients through harrowing experiences, and recorded the data that made the research publishable. Her name appears in a handful of footnotes.

Then there’s the matter of Marie Curie’s intellectual granddaughters.

The women who moved through mid-century psychedelic research often did so under the cover of technical roles and were named as lab assistants, research nurses, and data collectors. The male physicians and chemists took credit for findings they couldn’t have reached alone. This wasn’t unique to psychedelics. It was the operating model of science in the postwar decades. What made it worse in the psychedelic field was the secrecy involved. Underground work leaves no institutional record, just the memory of the people who were there.

Some women didn’t just contribute, they led.

Helen Mayberg isn’t a psychedelic researcher, but she’s an instructive case. A neuroscientist whose foundational work on depression circuitry was overlooked for years while male colleagues collected the citations. The pattern repeats. In the 1960s and 70s, numerous women in the orbit of Millbrook and the early San Francisco psychedelic scene were doing serious philosophical and psychological work around these compounds. They mapped the terrain of consciousness and developed therapeutic frameworks. What they produced was absorbed into the culture without attribution.

The Renaissance isn’t much better. Not yet.

The current psychedelic renaissance driven by MAPS, Johns Hopkins, NYU, and the rest of the whole clinical apparatus has made some gestures toward inclusion. Women lead several major research programs. The therapy-training world is heavily female. But the names that get attached to the movement’s founding mythology are still mostly men.

That matters because mythology shapes funding, shapes credit, and shapes who gets to define what the field is for. The forgotten women of psychedelic chemistry weren’t peripheral. They were central as they synthesized compounds, guided sessions, trained therapists, and wrote protocols. In some cases they kept the entire enterprise from collapsing. The least we can do is say their names.

Start with Ann Shulgin, then go looking for the rest. There are more than you think.

On a recent journey to Scotland, I met with Fiona Gilbertson and Anna Ross of the Scottish Psychedelic Research Group. In the shadow of Edinburgh Castle, we broke bread. I had reached out to them based on my desire to understand the historic medicinal and spiritual use of psychedelics in Scotland and the wider Celtic communities.

Anna and Fiona are crones, and I use that term with respect. In a woman’s life the “crone era” is a potential time of liberation, intuition, and stepping into one’s power unburdened by societal expectations. In the past crones and those with plant knowledge and suspicious healing abilities were lucky to only be driven out of their village. Burning at the stake was often the reward for perceived threats to the ruling religions and governments. Both the Old and New Worlds have a nasty habit of bringing down the hammer on crones. The first step was to label the crones as witches.

I remember the War on Drugs all too well. That movement was launched with a fury that continues to permeate the atmosphere today. In my conversations with Anna and Fiona, and in further research, I have come to see an eerie pattern of similarities between the War on Drugs and the War on Witches. Though they are separated by four hundred years, an ocean, and the language of their respective moral panics, the song remains the same. One invoked the Devil. The other invoked public health. But Scotland’s Witchcraft Act of 1563 and Nixon’s War on Drugs share a skeletal structure so similar it should disturb us, because it means we haven’t learned much.

The Target Was Never the Stated Enemy

The Scottish government and Church convinced themselves the whole country would suffer if malevolent elements within it were in league with the Devil. The accusation was theological, but the targets were social: the poor, the eccentric, healers, midwives, and women who lived outside male authority.

Nixon used the same playbook with updated language. His domestic policy adviser John Ehrlichman admitted it bluntly in a 1994 interview:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

It was a different century but the same logic. Name a threat, attach it to a despised group, then prosecute the group under cover of fighting the threat.

The Law as Instrument of Social Control

More than 2,500 people were executed under Scotland’s Witchcraft Act, four-fifths of them women. The law didn’t simply punish, it systematically dismantled communities. Networks of accusation spread through villages, destroying healers and dissenters. Each tortured confession produced new names, spreading the net wider.

Nixon’s War on Drugs institutionalized its own version of that process. Mandatory minimum sentencing coerced defendants into naming others in exchange for reduced charges, generating convictions that served the machinery more than justice. Underground chemists were given life sentences. Timothy Leary was publicly decried as “the most dangerous man in America.” The drug war destroyed millions of lives through punishment that didn’t end at the prison gate, one of every eight Black men have lost their right to vote because of a felony conviction.

Nixon’s version was more bureaucratically elegant. Plea bargains and informant incentives replaced the iron maiden, but the logic was the same. The system wasn’t designed to find the guilty, it was designed to produce bodies and to demonstrate that the war was being prosecuted, whether it was being won or not.

Delayed, Incomplete Reckoning

Scotland’s First Minister issued a formal posthumous apology in 2022, three centuries after the fact, calling it “injustice on a colossal scale” driven “at least in part by misogyny in its most literal sense.” A bill for formal pardons was introduced in the Scottish Parliament and work began on a national memorial.

The United States has issued no comparable apology for the War on Drugs. Every president since Nixon, Democrat and Republican alike, have found the drug war equally useful as a political tool. The machinery continues and the DEA still exists. Schedule I still lists cannabis alongside heroin. Psilocybin, a compound with demonstrable therapeutic value, remains federally criminalized. Prisons are still full of the modern-day equivalent of witches. Small rays of sunlight offer the promise that relief is on the horizon, but the War on Drugs has a long tail.

Scotland took 300 years to say it was wrong. America hasn’t even started to come to the recognition that an apology is due for the lives destroyed. I’m not holding my breath.

The Through Line

What connects a 16th-century Scottish witch hunt to a 20th-century American drug war is not coincidence, it is a recurring structure of power. The pattern is consistent across centuries and cultures. First, identify a folk devil like witchcraft, or drug use that sounds self-evidently threatening. Follow up by attaching the devil to a group you want to suppress like women, Black Americans, the anti-war left, or immigrants. Provide legislation with the language of protection and public safety. Finally, prosecute selectively, coercively, and at scale.

The faces may change but the apparatus does not.

For those working in the psychedelic space, this history is not abstract. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970, passed the year before Nixon formally declared his war, placed psilocybin, LSD, and mescaline in Schedule I, effectively halting decades of promising clinical research. For over 50 years there has been no research into the power and potential of psychedelics. Research has begun in fits and starts but one wonders where we would be if all that time had not been stolen by those in power. We are still living in the legal wreckage of those decisions.

It was never about witches or drugs. The communities using them were politically inconvenient. Call it what you will, but the Empire, by definition, always pays the piper and therefore calls the tune. Psychedelics, as agents of change, are often perceived as a threat to the Empire. Even today, “acceptable” use is focused on treatment of PTSD, depression, and addiction. Taking psychedelics to see the world in new ways, loosen the grip of materialism, or to question the role of government is considered a bridge too far. With money to be made, corporations and consultants are making giant strides in their attempts to neuter the deep transformational potential of the compounds. Allowing authorities, or the mainstream culture, to define what is the proper use of psychedelics is a watered down version of the War on Drugs.

Fear not the growing focus on simply curing the neurotic maladies and stress disorders of the modern world. Psychedelics by nature can not be bridled. They will continue to show us that the clock on the mantle is alive and the cat in the corner has secrets to reveal. The message they bring is embedded within the molecules themselves. There is much to learn from these wondrous and deep primeval sources of knowledge. What is the teaching that the Old Ones knew and can be known once more? Everything is alive and moves in waves. As above, so below. What you give is what you take. What else do we need to know understand? The message is clear and unconstrained as it is transmitted to us across the centuries. It cannot be obscured by the shroud of logic.

You may take away the drum and the feather, but the song remains the same. Blessed are the one-way tickets.

There was a moment in the late 1960s when cannabis felt like a covenant. Not just a drug, but a shared language. It was a way of being in the world that implied something about music, about politics, about how you treated the person sitting next to you. A genuine counterculture with its own economy, its own ethics, its own quiet rituals. People called each other “Brother” and “Sister.” I remember those lovely days. But now it is gone and remains a sweet distant memory.

It disappeared, not in a single dramatic gesture, but in the slow, grinding way that things are usually destroyed. This happened through a thousand small accommodations, each one sounding reasonable on its own.

The government moved first. Nixon’s Controlled Substances Act in 1970 wasn’t really about pharmacology. It was about suppressing the counterculture. The law shattered communities. Growers became felons and sharing became conspiracy. The simple act of passing a joint acquired the legal weight of a federal offense.

Bad actors arrived next, drawn by the money that prohibition always creates. Then came street violence, adulterated products, and informants who traded their neighbors for reduced sentences. The warm trust of a shared subculture corroded into the cold suspicion of a black market.

When legalization finally came, decades later, corporations were ready. They had lawyers, lobbyists, capital, and patience. The craft growers who had kept the culture alive through thirty years of risk found themselves outbid, out-permitted, and out-regulated. California’s small cannabis farmers, the very people who had built something worth celebrating, were largely wiped out by the compliance costs that big operations could absorb and they could not. The counterculture became a commodity. The covenant became a brand.

The psychedelic community now stands at an eerily familiar crossroads.

What exists today is a genuinely remarkable community that is a convergence of rigorous science, Indigenous wisdom traditions, harm-reduction networks, and underground therapists. There is something alive here that took decades to rebuild after the original suppression. But it is at risk as the pressures gathering around it rhyme uncomfortably with what destroyed the cannabis world of fellowship and connection.

Corporations are already moving. Venture capital has colonized the clinic model. Patent races are underway for synthetic analogs. The FDA approval pathway, designed for pharmaceutical products, threatens to reduce profound experiences to proprietary protocols administered in approved settings at prices that exclude most of the people who need them most.

Bad actors exist and we have seen the predatory facilitators, the reckless retreat operators, and the people who have mistaken access to powerful substances for the wisdom to guide others through them.

The people who remember what happened to the cannabis culture are watching carefully. The question isn’t whether these pressures will arrive. They already have. The question is whether the psychedelic community has learned enough from that earlier garden, the one that got destroyed, to protect this one.

There are reasons for real hope. Unlike the cannabis counterculture of the 1960s, today’s psychedelic community has something its predecessor lacked: institutional memory of exactly how these takeovers unfold. The historians, the harm-reduction advocates, the Indigenous rights attorneys, the scientists who insisted on keeping their work in the public domain are not naive. Many of them watched what happened to cannabis and built accordingly. Organizations are already fighting patent monopolies. Community-based healing models are being codified before corporations can define what “legal” looks like. The knowledge is being written down, shared, and protected. The rise and growth of psychedelic churches and communities bring hope that the deeper ideals of the movement will continue to flourish.

But the window is narrow and the clock is loud. Legal frameworks are being written right now, in state capitals and federal agencies, by people who have never sat with a difficult experience, never witnessed a genuine healing, and who will fill the regulatory vacuum with whatever the best-funded lobbyist suggests. The underground practitioners who kept this work alive through fifty years of prohibition deserve a seat at that table, not just as curiosities, but as the people who actually know what they’re talking about.

The garden doesn’t have to be paved over again. Those of us that watched the decline of the cannabis culture have a certain PTSD based on witnessing a noble and elegant wave of humanity peak and decline. I’m hoping history will not repeat itself. We are at a special time in the arc of contemporary psychedelic expansion. Be mindful of this garden, it is a place in time. Remember that those things that are precious are often most fragile. My hope is that what exists now will not become another sweet and distant memory of a golden time of trust, comradeship, and the promise of a better world.

May you walk forward knowing you do not walk alone. Behind you stand the shamans and curanderas, the medicine keepers of the Amazon and the Mazatec highlands, the Huichol who carried peyote prayers across deserts long before any of us had words for what they knew. Behind you stand the Eleusinian priests who held the kykeon cup for two thousand years, keeping the mystery alive when the world wanted only answers. Behind you stand the forgotten ones, the visionaries and the jailed, the discredited and the quietly grieving, who loved this medicine when loving it cost everything.

Behind you stands Albert Hofmann, riding his bicycle into eternity. Behind you stands María Sabina, singing in the dark. Behind you stands Terence McKenna, reckless and brilliant, calling from the forest floor. Behind you stand Stan Grof and Ram Dass and Alexander Shulgin in his garden laboratory, and a thousand unnamed healers in a thousand unnamed villages who never needed a clinical trial to know what was true.

You stand on all these shoulders. Do not forget the height from which you see.

Go forward into the clinics and the conference rooms, into the journals and the legislation, into the ceremony circles and the community halls. Carry the data and carry the drum. Honor the molecule and honor the mystery. Understand that these two things are not opposites, they are the same river seen from different banks.

But as you go, one thing is asked above all others: Do no harm. Do not harm the people who come to you vulnerable and open, who have set down their armor and their certainty. Do not harm the cultures from whom this knowledge was borrowed, or taken, or stolen. Do not reduce sacred traditions to products. Do not let the market swallow the medicine whole. Do not let ambition dress itself as healing.

May you always ask: “Who benefits? Who decides? Who is left out?”

Act always in the greater good, not the good of your career, not the good of your study, not the good of your lineage or your company or your conviction. The greater good. The one that includes people who are not in the room. The one that includes the generations that come after even you.

The future is in your hands and your hands, like all hands, are capable of both great tenderness and great harm. Choose tenderness. Choose humility. Choose the kind of courage that listens before it speaks. These medicines did not come to us. We came to them. Remember that.

May your intentions be clean, your containers be strong, and your hearts remain soft even when the work is hard. And when you stumble, because you will stumble, may you have the grace to say so, the wisdom to learn, and the community to hold you until you find your footing again.

Go well, knowing the ancestors are watching, and they are rooting for you.

When the U.S. Department of Justice moved medical cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III on April 23, 2026, it may have inadvertently cracked open a door in one of the most cannabis-restrictive states in the South.

The mechanism is a ghost from 1980. That was the year that South Carolina legislature passed the Controlled Substances Therapeutic Research Act. This was during the Carter administration when a handful of states were tentatively experimenting with medical marijuana for cancer and glaucoma patients. The law never went anywhere. It sat dormant for nearly half a century, a legislative curiosity that nobody repealed and nobody used. Then the feds moved medical cannabis from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3.

Buried in the South Carolina statute is a provision that states, that if a substance is “added, deleted, or rescheduled as a controlled substance pursuant to federal law or regulation,” state officials have 30 days to reschedule the drug accordingly under state law. It’s the kind of conformity clause that exists in many states’ drug codes to keep state scheduling in sync with federal scheduling without requiring a floor vote every time Washington adjusts a substance.

The 1980 act, now technically triggered, authorizes state health agencies to distribute cannabis to cancer chemotherapy patients, radiology patients, and those suffering from glaucoma “for the purpose of alleviating the patient’s discomfort, nausea and other painful side effects of their disease or chemotherapy treatments.” That language is still on the books. It can be argued that the trigger has been pulled.

Here’s the catch, the law is a skeleton with no muscle. It provides almost no workable framework for how the state Department of Health and Environmental Control is supposed to source, distribute, or regulate cannabis under this program. There are no dispensaries in South Carolina. There is no supply chain. There are no licensing structures. The statute is a door with no building behind it.

The state legislature, for its part, has shown little appetite to fill in the blanks. No medical marijuana bill made it to the floor this session, and with the legislative calendar nearly exhausted, the window for action in 2026 has likely passed. What remains is a legal grey zone that patients, advocates, and attorneys are now watching closely. Qualifying patients, those with cancer, certain cancers requiring radiation, and glaucoma now exist in a state where a 46-year-old law technically authorizes their access to medical cannabis, but the infrastructure to provide it simply does not exist.

South Carolina didn’t choose this moment. A federal rescheduling decision made in Washington, D.C. found an old, forgotten clause in South Carolina and breathed life into it. Whether that becomes real access for sick patients, or merely remains a footnote in drug policy history, is a story still being written.