This weekend, Matt Zorn, the US government’s psychedelic czar, spoke at the Horizons conference co-organized by Psychedelic Alpha founder Josh Hardman. Josh asked Matt about a story I wrote three weeks ago, asking if HHS was too cosy with psychedelic start-ups. My story included a clip from the MAHA Summit in which Zorn interviewed the CEOs of three psychedelic start-ups - Compass Pathways, Definium and Helus, all of them sponsors of the event, all of them seeking FDA approval in the next 12-24 months. Two of the CEOs declared on stage that there was basically no chance of extended difficulties after a trip - people come down, and go about their life like normal, just like after an anesthetic.

This is not true. Even in one of Compass’ own trials, 12 people out of 200 reported serious treatment-emergent adverse events, including one person who told the European Parliament she felt suicidal for weeks afterwards. Compass included her in its trial paper as a ‘non-responder’.

Matt and Josh discussed my article briefly on stage at Horizons (you can read their full interview here). Here’s one bit:

Josh Hardman: Jules Evans, who writes about psychedelic safety, wrote a week or two ago about you at the MAHA Summit, where some CEOs of psychedelic drug developers had paid to participate, and you moderated a discussion and said you’re very passionate about psychedelics. He asked whether that’s being a bit too cosy with industry, given you’re a government lawyer for the department that approves new drugs. What do you think of that?

Matt Zorn: If you’re not engaging the industry, you’re not doing your job. I like to think that, across HHS, we’ve created an unprecedented amount of opportunities for public engagement writ large. At the FDA Part 15 hearing, I believe only one of the drug sponsors spoke, and the rest of the speaking slots went to non-industry speakers. So I reject the premise that we’re being favourable to industry. We are engaging with industry, and we’re engaging outside of industry. I would think that’s what people want: broad engagement, no matter what the stripes are.

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My article wasn’t criticizing Matt, who I like. But there is a general cosiness to the psychedelic lobby in the US federal government, from the president down, and especially in RFK’s Health and Human Services. I don’t think that’s deniable, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. As I wrote in 2025:

RFK has appointed so many pro-psychedelic figures at HHS it’s starting to resemble Zendo Project. As one industry figure put it: ‘The HHS deck is well and truly stacked with pro-psychedelic figures. It’s almost too stacked, like, don’t show your hand so much.’

RFK’s HHS is very open to certain lobbies, such as the peptides industry or the flavoured vape industry, while being very hostile to other interests, such as vaccine companies. It’s not simply that psychedelic companies and ultra-wealthy psychedelic enthusiasts have bought the government’s support for psychedelic drugs, though there may be some of that. But RFK also seems to be a genuine fan of psychedelics, personally - they’ve helped his kids, several of his advisors are psychonauts, and he likes to take them himself, if reports are to be believed.

Anyway, this is the part of Matt and Josh’s conversation I want to highlight. Matt said this:

One of the things I’ve expressed concern about is that I think adverse events are going to be higher in the real world. Looking at the Oregon data on adverse events, I actually don’t think there are too many, but I think that could be a useful function.

He’s referring here to a very interesting recent paper published by the psychedelic research team at OHSU. It surveyed 346 Oregon psilocybin clients, from 24 service centres, enrolled November 2024 to March 2026. The survey found that 92% said they benefited from the psilocybin experience, and 59% ranked it among the ten most meaningful experiences of their lives. Only 1.2% needed emergency medical attention, and only 1.6% rated the experience as harmful, although this rose to 2.3% at the three-month mark. Nonetheless, extended difficulties were fairly high - 11.6% reported non-HPPD adverse events at the three-month stage, including worsening anxiety, worsening depression and new headaches. People still felt they benefitted overall, but the picture was complicated.

We should also note that, as far as I can tell, facilitators at service centres got to choose who they enrolled for the study. Still, the Oregon legal psilocybin program looks, on this evidence, to be pretty safe. That’s good news. But the expensive legal program is not where the action is in Oregon.

The real effect of the Oregon push to legalize supervised psilocybin sessions, paid for with state money and with millions of dollars in PSFC funding, was to boost demand in the underground. The Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Service estimated that 90,000 people took psilocybin who wouldn’t have, due to the change in state law regarding psilocybin. The authors wrote:

an additional approximately 90,000 individuals in Oregon used psilocybin annually following passage of the ballot measure. This estimated number is larger than the number of people the Oregon Health Authority reports used regulated psilocybin services.

Only 5000 people used the state legal psilocybin program in 2025, so 95% of the impact of this legislative initiative was use outside the legal program, in recreational or underground or church contexts.

We don’t have a lot of data about outcomes in the unregulated market, but there’s some. Rocky Mountain, again, analysed the National Survey Investigating Hallucinogenic Trends. It found that psilocybin use in the US, which went up 23% last year, led to largely positive outcomes - 50% felt their mental health improved, versus 5% who felt it got worse. That’s pretty positive, and by far the best safety profile among psychedelic drugs (with ibogaine and 5meoDMT, by contrast, the same number felt worse as felt better).

But one point to take away from Oregon is that public health initiatives can’t just focus on legal supervised usage, because that (in Oregon at least) is only around 2-4% of total use. In Oregon, legal psychedelic initiatives ended up boosting demand in the underground. And the same will occur nationally - the biggest impact of FDA approval will be to boost demand in the underground. It will be boom-time for dispensaries, illicit labs, churches and underground guides. I’m not saying that’s good or bad, it’s just a fact.

Matt Zorn made exactly the same point at Horizons:

I would encourage everyone to look at safety and adverse events carefully, because I think the greatest risk here is use outside the medical channels that results in adverse events, driven by FDA approval [my italics].

But then he says:

For the government’s sake, it’s about making sure that people use these compounds as prescribed and within indicated channels.

That is not going to happen. The price differential between legal and illegal psychedelics is going to be huge - it costs over $20,000 for legal psilocybin or MDMA treatment in Australia, versus nothing to grow or pick shrooms yourself, or maybe $20 to buy these drugs online, or maybe $200 for an underground guided session. Not to mention the speed-of-access differential: on the one hand, you order drugs online and get them delivered to your door that week; on the other, you go to your doctor, maybe you get prescribed to a psychiatrist’s clinic, maybe you get approved for treatment, then you go on a waiting list, go through all the paperwork, and then try to get your insurer to reimburse you.

Even with cannabis, where recreational use has been widely legalized and there is nothing like the price differential between legal and illegal products as there is with psychedelics, an estimated 75% of cannabis is still bought from illicit channels.

A public health response from the US government (or any other government) can’t focus on just legal medical use of psychedelics. It has to try and educate the public and reduce harms however and wherever the public accesses these drugs.

That was one of our main points in CPEP’s FDA comment:

• FDA approval must be accompanied by public education on psychedelic risks in medical and non-medical settings

• training for providers must include the nature, frequency and treatment of extended postpsychedelic difficulties, which most current programs omit

• informed consent must cover the risk of feeling worse for weeks or months after psychedelic treatment, despite psychedelic CEOs recently denying this is a possibility

Secondly, public communication about psychedelics, especially from government sources but also from leading industry and media voices, needs to be honest about the risks of psychedelics, as well as the benefits. Those risks exist no matter what the context - we’ve reported on severe extended difficulties in the Swiss legal medical program, for example, and also in psychedelic trials.

This is what one patient who experienced a severe adverse reaction to legal MDMA treatment in Switzerland told us:

I don’t think words can truly convey the depth or quality of suffering that prolonged adverse effects from psychedelics can cause. For me, it was over a year of unimaginable hell, often staying alive only because I was in psychiatric isolation rooms or under extensive monitoring in hospital settings. There is a second kind of hell in enduring such profound suffering without knowing whether you will survive or remain indefinitely in that state. Even surrounded by professionals and loved ones trying to help, the uncertainty of facing something that seems beyond anyone’s understanding is terrifying, month after month.

Finding CPEP was a lifeline after four months of indescribable suffering. Through CPEP’s website, research findings and educational resources, conversations with CPEP staff, and the monthly support group, I discovered that I was not alone, that these adverse effects had been researched, and that people were willing to listen and understand. CPEP gave me context for an experience that had felt incomprehensible, and a tiny glimmer of hope when I desperately needed one. That hope helped keep me alive. I am still bewildered that I survived, and will be forever grateful to CPEP for being a light in the darkness.

The psychedelic industry and culture can afford to be honest about the risks - the risk profile for psilocybin and MDMA looks pretty good, better than SSRIs I would say, but when it goes wrong, it can go really wrong. Let’s learn about those cases of ‘unimaginable hell’, find out what helps people recover, and make sure the public knows there is a low risk of extended difficulties, but a risk nonetheless. And let’s have a plan for when things do go wrong.

It is not the adverse events that could derail the psychedelic movement - it’s the cover up.

After the paywall, Navy SEAL podcaster Shawn Ryan on how the psychedelic movement wants him to shut up about his bad trip; Krysten Sinema’s psychedelic romance turns into a bad trip; the recording of Matthew Watkins’ talk on AI gods / AI delusions; and a new podcast I’ve launched on Costa Rica. Plus, why the public spat between psychonauts Billy Bush and Amy Griffin is more than just high society tittle-tattle.

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Here’s a case of a post-psychedelic crisis, which has changed how I think about post-psychedelic difficulties.

Pat Berlinquette is 41, and a marketing expert who helps non-profits secure grants from Google for ads. He grew up in Long Island, New York. His father, an aeronautics engineer who helped design the F-14, died when Pat was six ye…

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Kelly met Chance when she was 17, on a fairground ride called the Gravitron: ‘he was the boy in the middle of the ride running it.’ They lived together as teenagers, drifted apart, and reconnected on social media 24 years later. He moved into her Montreal home in April 2024, they were engaged within three months, and in September 2025 they moved with two of their children to a 108-acre property in rural Nova Scotia. Kelly tells me: ‘We used to always say to each other we owed each other 24 years, the years we had lost.’

Chance, 45, was 6’5, ‘a massive man with a bigger personality’. He had struggled with cocaine and opioid addiction in the past, after the death of one of his sons ‘sent him down a bad path for a while’. But he was rebuilding: a new job as an electrical estimator, a house to renovate, a wedding planned for September. ‘He would always tell me, ‘Thank you for loving me. Thank you for choosing me. Thank you for giving me this life.’’

He took mushrooms occasionally, about six times in their three years together. ‘It was the alternative to the stuff he thought wasn’t safe’, Kelly says. She had never taken them. When she looked them up, ‘all I saw was all these things that it can treat. It never said it could hurt somebody.’ She says he had no history of suicidal thoughts and was outspokenly ‘anti self-harm.

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Three minutes in May

May 2nd 2026 started like any other day. The family spent the day building a fire pit. A friend of Chance’s was due to stay, and he and Chance planned to take mushrooms together, so at about 4:30pm Chance ordered mushrooms from a nearby online dispensary, and they were delivered to the house around 6pm.

The friend didn’t come, but Chance took them anyway at 8:30pm, by the fire with Kelly, his 19-year-old son and her brother. He took 14 grams, which Kelly says was his usual amount but which for most people would be a very high dose (an average dose might be three grams). For two hours everything was normal.

At about 10:30pm he said calmly: ‘I’m never taking mushrooms again. I don’t like how I’m feeling. I’m going to bed.’ Kelly wasn’t alarmed. ‘What I didn’t know is those would be the last words he would ever say to me.’

He went upstairs. She went out to douse the fire and briefly left him alone. ‘I’ve walked it. I’ve timed it, and the most it was was three minutes.’ When she came back in, she heard a strange noise from upstairs. He had collapsed at the top of the stairs with self-inflicted knife wounds. She did CPR for 13 minutes. “He stared into my eyes. And I watched him die.”

There had been no visible crisis. ‘There were no big signs. There was no big freakout. Sometimes there’s no big event. It’s silent.’

The family was questioned repeatedly by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They didn’t even ask about psychedelics. For two days Kelly was ‘absolutely catatonic.’ Some of Chance’s relatives could not accept that he would do this and suspected there was ‘more to this story,’ which has split the two families. Then Kelly began to search online, and found other cases like Chance’s, in which people seriously or fatally harmed themselves during psychedelic experiences.

At first Kelly told people Chance had died of a heart attack. ‘I was ashamed.’ Then she decided: ‘How many tragedies have to happen before somebody stands up? And then I thought, it’s going to be me.’ With a career in public relations, Kelly launched a campaign to improve public understanding of psychedelic risks. She founded an organization called Don’t Take Chances (donttakechances.ca) and published a book, Three Minutes. ‘I always said it took three minutes to take a life. Maybe it can take three minutes to save one.’ She says she is not anti-psychedelic, she is pro-informed consent. ‘People cannot make truly informed decisions about risk if they do not know that the risk exists.’

How do you define fatal self-harm during psychedelic intoxication?

The final autopsy report for Chance’s death, completed on 29 September, confirms multiple sharp-force injuries, most of them superficial, and a fatal stab wound to the chest. The manner of death is given as suicide. Kelly rejects this ruling: ‘To be suicidal, you have to have intent. Chance was not a man that wanted to die.’

The report openly acknowledges the difficulty. It cites a 2026 paper (which I shared with Kelly) about an incident of fatal self-harm under psilocybin, where the pathologist favoured suicide but the coroner ruled the death undetermined, and it notes the question of whether the drug itself can precipitate self-harm. It then falls back on the 2002 US National Association of Medical Examiners guidelines, which suggest that self-inflicted deaths under a voluntarily-taken mind-altering drug be classed as suicide, because the person ‘assumes the risk’ of the drug’s effects on their behaviour. It adds that self-inflicted sharp-force injuries carry ‘a self-evident intent to harm,’ and that it is essentially impossible to establish that the act would not have happened without the drug. The case went to the service’s Difficult Case Rounds, where multiple medical examiners agreed.

Kelly tells me the assumed-risk reasoning is ‘the part I am struggling with most…Chance and I did not know this was a risk. How can the fact that Chance voluntarily took mushrooms demonstrate suicidal intent on the basis that he assumed the behavioural risks of taking them, when he did not know that this was one of those risks?’ She will ask the medical examiner what evidence established suicidal intent, as distinct from ‘a catastrophic drug-induced behavioural reaction resulting in fatal self-injury.’ She says: ‘That’s a fight I’m going to have for his children, for his grandchildren, for his great-grandchildren.’

Ironically, if you kill someone else while high on psychedelics in Canada, you can plea ‘automatism’, ie loss of control through intoxication, and may be convicted solely of manslaughter rather than murder, as in the case of Thomas Chan, a young man who killed his father on mushrooms and who successfully pleaded manslaughter through the automatism plea. In psychedelic murder cases, then, defendants can sometimes plead no intent and temporary loss of control for their actions during trips. In incidents of psychedelic fatal self-harm, by contrast, the medical presumption is that the death was intended.

How Chance’s death matters not just for Kelly, but perhaps for how the police treat the supplier. Several months after the tragedy, the company Chance used to order magic mushrooms is still operational - the Mounties told Kelly there is no criminal investigation into them, because Chance’s death was ruled as suicide. I’m not sharing the name of the online dispensary because Kelly is worried they could pose a risk to her and her family. There’s still no health warnings on any of their products. Kelly says: ‘Cigarettes have health warnings on them, why shouldn’t mushrooms?’

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The non-zero risk of fatal self-harm during trips

Deaths during psychedelic experiences are thankfully very rare, and population-level studies show no strong association between psychedelic use and suicidal ideation or behaviour (Johansen & Krebs, 2015). However, one large survey found that 6.7% of psychedelic users thought of harming themselves or others during a psychedelic experience (Simonssen et al 2023).

One study (Darke et al 2024) found 43 psychedelic-related deaths reported in Australia between 2000 and 2023. A third were classified as fatal accidents, and typically involved people falling or jumping from buildings or bridges. A third were classified as ‘fatal self-harm’ (ie suicide) and typically involved people stabbing themselves. The rest were classified as drug or multi-drug toxicity, or undetermined.

So it seems if people take psychedelics then fall from a height and then die, as Nick Cave’s son did, or even if they jump from a window or balcony, it’s likely to be classified as an accidental fall, while if they take psychedelics and then stab, shoot or hang themselves, it’s likely to be classified as intentional self-harm / suicide. Yet in both cases, there is usually no pre-trip intent to die.

Behind the statistics are tragic stories of families forever impacted. My friend Kristin Nash lost her son William to a psychedelic-related accident when he was in college. Her colleague in the Coalition for Psychedelic Safety and Education, Susan Sagy, lost her daughter to another tragedy of psychedelic-related self-harm. Both their children were 21 when they died. Earlier this year I interviewed Rebecca, who lost her 20-year-old son Ariel when he shot himself during a mushroom trip. None of these young people had pre-existing suicidal intent.

How law enforcement treats the supplier or facilitator in such cases

After the paywall, why do the police sometimes go after the suppliers in psychedelic-related fatal accidents, and sometimes not?

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The first panel was on psychedelics. It was chaired by Matt Zorn, Kennedy’s ‘psychedelic czar’ and the lawyer who drafted President Trump’s Executive Order on psychedelics, and featured the CEOs of three psychedelic start-ups hoping for FDA approval in the coming months: Rob Barrow of LSD company Definium, Kabir Nath of psilocybin company Compass Pathways, and Michael Halstead, CEO of psilocybin company Helus. According to Bloomberg, they were all paid sponsors of the summit, so they paid to be on stage and to get access to RFK and other HHS officials.

Now listen to what they say when Matt Zorn asks them about the safety of psychedelics. The first speaker to answer Matt Zorn is Rob Barrow of Definium, the second is Kabir Nath of Compass.

So, according to two of the leading CEOs in the industry, taking psychedelics is basically like receiving an anesthetic. You won’t feel any lasting effects once the trip is over - no lasting negative effects anyway. Absolutely no risks of any prolonged difficulties after the trip. Just like having a tooth pulled, you could say.

Now watch this - this is a participant in one of Compass’ trials, talking about the prolonged difficulties she experienced after the trial, to the point of suicidal ideation.

As Maryam says, hers is not a unique case. Between 5% and 35% of users of psychedelics report feeling worse after a trip, depending on the substance (Rockhill 2026), while 9% report moderate-to-severe difficulties lasting over a month (Robinson 2026). Adverse events figures are undoubtedly lower in clinical settings, but they are not zero - see our article on severe adverse events in Swiss clinical program.

Are the American people being sold a lie by the psychedelic industry? Are we five or ten years away from an entirely predictable psychedelic class-action law-suit?

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Psychedelic oligarchy

There have been concerns for the last two years that the psychedelic movement - both companies and multi-millionaire philanthropic backers - might try to buy their way to approval from the Department of Health and Human Services.

When the FDA advisory committee rejected Lykos in 2024, despite philanthropists spending over a million dollars on PR that year to support its bid, it was a serious blow to the psychedelic movement. But when Trump won the 2024 election and Robert F. Kennedy was appointed Secretary of HHS, there was real optimism among the psychedelic elite that HHS support and FDA approval for psychedelics could basically be bought…even for Lykos, now renamed Resilient, which is expected to refile its rejected application to the FDA with a bit of third-party data added.

If you’re a supporter of psychedelic legalization, you might say, well so what? These drugs are proven effective, they’re desperately needed, and now they will finally get approved. If money was spent to ensure MAGA / MAHA political support, it was well-spent.

But in the acceleration to market, will the risks of these drugs be properly communicated to the American public? Because the real impact of the Trump government’s enthusiastic support for psychedelics will not be what happens in medical clinics. It will be in the much bigger black market. FDA approval and the support of the federal government will give a massive signal to the public that these drugs are safe, and we can expect unregulated use to surge, even more than it did last year when psilocybin use went up by 23%.

That’s why it really worries me that the CEOs of psychedelic start-ups, having stripped therapy from their treatment and reduced it to ‘psychological support’, are now seriously trying to claim that being given a psychedelic is just like receiving an anesthetic, with no risks at all of any prolonged psychological difficulties.

That is flat-out false. Maybe no prolonged serious adverse events were reported in Definium’s Phase 3 trials - we’ll see when the full data is published. But therapists working on psychedelic trials told me that monitoring of psychological adverse events is weak and inconsistent on many trials, and drug companies have a lot of license on what they report, and whether they attribute an AE to the drug. They also tell me of having to support a few destabilized patients for months or even years after a trial. There is a 10-year history of psychedelic trials minimizing and hiding adverse events, as Olivia Goldhill chronicles in her upcoming book Empire of the Mind.

And it’s dangerous to suggest there’s zero risk of prolonged difficulties, because everything that the industry and the federal government say on psychedelics will affect what people take not just in the clinic but in unregulated spaces.

The psychedelic industry and HHS display a wilful naivete about how easy it will be to control these substances and limit ‘diversion’ (ie people taking these drugs outside of medical settings). Definium’s Rob Barrow said at the MAHA Summit: ‘None of us have an interest in this spilling outside of medicine in the ways it has in the past’.

Spilling outside of medicine? My friend, they’re already spilled! Anyone can get LSD or other psychedelics mailed to their door.

There’s a similar wilful blindness to the reality of massive unregulated use of psychedelics in the new Congressional Report on Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy, produced by Pinney Associates. More below.

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Clay Martin is a former Green Beret who has, in his own words ‘killed other humans in a significant quantity, and basically led a life of violence few other humans can fathom’. In 2022, he tried psilocybin, turned into a werewolf, and started a Norse-pagan psilocybin church for veterans called the Path of the Barbarian Spirit. It aims to heal trauma, but also to awaken rage against the globalist elite. In the month when Rolling Stone published a fairly bland feature on psychedelic churches, it’s worth noticing quite how weird some of these churches are.

‘I was raised by the Murder Machine’

Clay was born in 1980 in a poor part of the Texas panhandle, and grew up in a trailer with a father who was ‘a little bit of a psychopath’. In a 2025 podcast, Clay remembers being attacked by his father when he was in a psychotic rage, and fearing for his life. The incident still chokes him up. He was forced by his parents to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses for a few years, which put him off Christianity for life. He decided he needed to learn how to fight and be the scariest, baddest guy around, to protect himself from his father. He thinks a lot of soldiers, and a lot of Special Forces, come from violent childhoods:

It’s either you’re going to be a criminal, or you’re going to be an incredible MMA fighter, or you’re going to be some kind of Johnny Commando.

When he was 18, he joined the US Marines, and life got a lot better. The military was a much safer environment than home, it was a reliable structure, a community, and an outlet for his love of violence and tough-guy stuff. He discovered he was ‘extraordinarily good at violence’. He was posted in Panama for a while, and then deployed to Iraq when the Global War on Terror (GWOT) began. His first Iraq deployment was a disappointment - his unit was not involved in enough fighting. So he resigned from the Marines, joined the Army, and was recruited by the Green Berets.

He was an assaulter and sniper with the Commander’s In-extremis Force (CIF), a counter-terrorism Special Forces unit which ‘could arguably be described as the most vicious murderous bastards on the planet’, in his words. CIF were deployed to Baghdad in 2007 alongside the ICTF (Iraqi Counterterrorist Force), and were hitting 3 to 4 targets a night, seven days a week. Martin estimates the CIF suffered a one-third casualty rate over this period, with many of his comrades injured two or three times over a single deployment.

Around 2008–2009, he was involved in a bar brawl in the US in which people got hospitalized. His security clearance was suspended and he was assigned to teach recruits at Fort Bragg. He applied to be redeployed in Iraq or Afghanistan but wasn’t, and he retired from the military in 2013.

At that point, he fell apart:

I can see with retrospect being in the army and being commando fucking Johnny is the only glue that had kept all of my fucking terrible childhood in one piece. So now I am fucking absolutely losing my shit - it was like hitting puberty again, you know, emotions and fucking shit that you can’t fucking handle…l’d just do crazy fucking shit because I wanted to die but not enough to off myself - but I’ll fucking drink a fifth of Jack Daniels and go drive a goddamn car around the mountains as fast as I can.

Clay was not drawn to conventional talk therapy and was wary of anti-depressants: ’SSRIs turned my father from an angry unhappy person to a fucking raving ass lunatic. So, because of that, I would have never touched anti-depressants, not on your life.’

His first marriage collapsed and he ran out of money.

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Prepping for civil war

Then things started to turn around. A health condition meant he was forced to give up drinking. He met another girl, got married and moved with her and her two daughters to Idaho. He became a Private Civilian Tactical Instructor, teaching fire-arms and survival techniques to crypto-bros. He also became a journalist reviewing guns for Guns America Digest. He decided he would try his hand at writing non-fiction and fiction. He read Stephen King’s On Writing, and wrote his first novel, Last Son of the War God, self-publishing it on Amazon in 2019. It reveals a taste for violent paganism, judging by the blurb on Amazon:

Mike Bryant has come to the wilderness to die. Tired of the trappings of modern life, his will to live has run out. But when he crosses paths with a group of warriors who challenge him, he suddenly finds purpose. Mike is no ordinary man. Frozen and given up for dead, an inner core of rage ignites a fury few have seen and lived. Deep in the White Cloud Mountains, a demon is awakening. The Last Son of the War God was forged in the storm of blood and fire. And now he’s angry. The War God has chosen his champion, one of his favorite sons. And by the time the dust settles, one thing will be clear. If you choose the War God as your deity, you had better have what it takes to measure up. Consequences are eternal.

While continuing to write fiction, Martin wrote a series of online articles on urban survival tactics and community defense that broke out far beyond the traditional gun community. Recognizing the massive demand for practical, non-academic survival advice, he compiled his military experience into his non-fiction guides, Concrete Jungle and Prairie Fire. Self-published in 2020 during the pandemic and civil unrest, these books became major hits—selling tens of thousands of copies, and garnering over 1000 positive reviews each on Amazon. The books offer more than practical survival and combat advice. They paint a picture of a coming civil war between Red and Blue states.

Blue Team has positioned itself remarkably well over the last seventy years. They have completed the long march through our institutions. They control the media, tech giants, popular culture and a significant portion of the Deep State, including entire Departments.

Clay, in these books, taps into a deep anxiety among some Americans about the globalist elite forcing wokeness, LGBTQ and trans rights and immigration onto Red states. Like former Navy Seal Shawn Ryan, Martin suggests that this leftist worldview is not just something he disagrees with - it’s demonic.

They do want you broke, dead, your kids raped and brainwashed and they think it’s funny. The tranny story-book hour of recent years has convinced me that literal demons walk the Earth and it is entirely possible we are for reals ruled by a global child sacrifice pedo cult.

Faced with this existential threat, the former Green Beret tells his readers they need to prepare for civil war:

The streets are going to run red with blood one way or another and I have a vested fucking interest in making sure my team wins…the Blue team doesn’t have a fucking chance if they turn this into a shooting match.

He dedicates Prairie Fire to ‘Saint Rittenhouse, defender of the realm’, which presumably is a reference to Kyle Rittenhouse, an American teenager who shot three men during a riot in Wisconsin (he was acquitted for self-defence). But Martin insists being a lone fighter is not enough, you need to build a militia to survive the coming cataclysm.

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Wrath of the Wendigo

In 2022 he published a novel called Wrath of the Wendigo. He says it was channelled from a spirit. It imagines the US in the near-future, when there is a civil war between a collection of red states called ‘Cascadia’, and the tyrannical woke-globalist blue states that now make up the United States of America. General Eric Hansen from Cascadia infiltrates the White House, is arrested and interviewed - for the rest of the book, General Hansen explains the history, vision and strategy of the Cascadian insurrection.

General Hansen says violent insurrection became necessary because the globalist elite stole the election in 2020 and used tyrannical power to force their agenda onto red states

It was a many-fold process. The first step was to slowly break their will and identity. In Europe, this was done by importing as many North Africans and Arabs as possible. Simultaneously using the natives’ tax money to support them, and using the paid-for police forces to protect them from retribution for crimes was genius. It was not only cost effective, it served as a humiliation ritual. Many European nations even made it illegal to speak out about it. Systematic rape gangs ran rampant in the capital cities of every ‘civilized’ European nation by 2015. Fully protected by the power of the state.

The United States is portrayed as having been corrupted by woke ideology. Cascadians are very against LGBTQ and trans rights, and in the opening chapters General Hansen refers to a trans woman as ‘it’, ‘he’ and ‘a daemon’. Cascadians also resist immigration, and what they see as the forced import of third-world immigrants into rural red states. Behind all this, Cascadians see a deeper evil at work - a demon-worshipping globalist paedo cabal.

Against this demonic evil, the heroic Cascadian resistance built up through ‘wolf lodges’ of warriors - similar to the Mannerbund or secret warrior lodges that were popular in 1900s Germany. General Hansen says: ‘What was needed was a grassroots secret society that could fly under the radar until it had grown strong enough to stand.’ The wolf lodges are pagan sects, made up of acolytes, disciples and then high priests: ‘a freshly minted Acolyte was given the simple guidance the Fanatic Sons took with them from the founding: “‘ Be the reason the forest is haunted.’”

Wolf lodges are the building blocks of a new society dominated by elite male warriors. Women in Cascadia are ‘shield-maidens’. They ‘bear and raise warriors’ and don’t have the vote. ‘We believe that the feminization of the Western polity was a large part of what doomed the West’, says General Hansen. ‘While we are never going to let them run our affairs of state, we are also never going to attempt to run their houses’. Cascadia at times sounds a bit like Afghanistan under the Taliban:

We have the Krypteia, a secret body tasked with policing morality and subversion. One of its tasks is picking young girls at random and keeping an eye on them…When a woman is to be wed or reaches her coming of age, a ceremony is held in public. One of the questions she must answer is how many lovers she has had. More than five is quite scandalous…

Cascadia is a pagan-shamanic society. The founder of Cascadia took part in a Native American vision quest in which he encounters the demon Wendigo and bends him to his will as a weapon of violent retribution. The Cascadians use pagan runes and embrace a violent form of nature-worship and social Darwinism: ‘Nature is beautiful, but it is also remorseless…You might think that is savage, but it is the way of nature.’ There is no after-life, but there is a blood legacy, or ‘orlog’, that you pass on to your sons: ‘The spiritual idea of eternal life paled in comparison to what he saw as the generational struggle to continue one’s DNA.’

In the novel, Cascadia is in a long and bloody civil war with the Democrat-ruled United States. The Cascadian resistance is led by right-wing veterans of the Global War on Terror:

this wasn’t some hairbrained scheme by hillbillies with dynamite in their overalls. It was a calculated plan executed by seasoned professionals, veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Law and order break down, the wolf packs rise up, and the Cascadians manage to fight off the better-equipped United States with the help of Russia and the FSB. They wage guerrilla war, including targeted assassinations of globalist billionaires - Klaus Schwab is taken out by a sniper, Balmer (Steve?) is crucified on his front-lawn, an ex vice-president (Mike Pence?) is killed by a swarm of drones, the entire Sun Valley gathering of billionaires is incinerated by white phosphorus, and 300 Somali immigrants are blown up on a bridge. When Cascadian forces are bombed by US Airforce pilots, Cascadian troops infiltrate a school where the pilots’ children are educated and murder every one. Anything goes in war, is the message.

Finally, at the climax of the novel, General Hansen is brought in front of the Satanic pedo globalist cabal, led by ‘Karl Rothschild’ and ‘Schumer’ (Chuck Schumer, possibly, the most-senior Jewish politician in the US government) . They try to perform strange magic on him to control him, but he takes them out with an ebola bio-bomb. As he dies, the hero is taken up to Valhalla by a valkyrie.

So that’s Wrath of Wendigo, which has 725 positive reviews on Amazon.

After that, Clay Martin tried psilocybin, turned into a werewolf, and established his psychedelic church for veterans, the Path of the Barbarian Spirit.

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Hilik Magnus is the 77-year-old founder of Magnus Safety, a unique search-and-rescue service for Israelis and other nationalities who find themselves in crises while travelling. His typical client is the family of someone who has lost their mind on drugs while travelling. His organization was founded in 1994, and he says in the first decade, most of the rescues involved young Israelis travelling and smoking a lot of cannabis after military service, although he says these days rescues are often of people in their 30s. He has developed a protocol to track and bring home people in four days, even if they are in psychotic states. His work is famous in Israel, where travelers sometimes wear t-shirts saying ‘You won’t catch me, Hilik’. He featured in a 2008 documentary called Flipping Out, about young Israelis losing it in India after leaving military service. It suggested a high number of Israelis ‘flip out’ when travelling after military service, partly from PTSD. Readers will have a range of views on the Israel Palestine conflict, through which they will view this interview - I was specifically interested in the protocol he has developed to work with people in drug-induced crises. This interview was done the day after the Nepal tsunami.

Jules: You are in Nepal at the moment?

Hilik: I am not, but I have two teams working there now.

What’s the situation there?

The situation is that a lot of people die, much more than they are providing numbers. The numbers will rise.

How come your team is there already? The tsunami only happened yesterday.

I have a network of teams all around the world, more than 2000 people.

How did you get into this work, and when?

A friend came to me in 1994 and told me, listen, let’s provide search-and-rescue for Israeli travelers. So I thought to myself, oh nice, we will be forever on a trek. And I started to build it.

Had you recently left Mossad?

This is not important.

But you were in the military?

Of course, everybody in Israel does military service. I had been also the chief of the nature reserve in Sinai until we withdrew from Sinai.

The first case you had – it was a young woman in India?

Yeah. I remember. She was 20 years old. She had taken a lot of drugs, including some magic mushrooms. She was severely harmed, in a coma, in a catatonic position on the beach. Some travelers called the family. The family sent her uncle. Her uncle came and took her with him but couldn’t control her. So at the airport she undressed herself, starting running around the airport naked, shouting “fuck me, fuck me’. The uncle tried to calm her down, but couldn’t do it, and he left for Israel, crying. The Hindu taxi driver, who was a very good person, took her, dressed her, and drove her back to the same beach in Karnataka, and the boy who informed her family suddenly saw her again, and he called the mother, and she came to us.

So we flew immediately the same night to Delhi, then from Delhi to Mumbai. Then driving a jeep all night to Karnataka on an unpaved street without asphalt. We came to the beach at 5am. Everybody was asleep. We looked for the boy. We found the boy in one of those shelters. We waked him and asked, “Where is she?’ He took us. He told me, “I’ve seen her yesterday on the beach sleeping’. So we went down to the beach. She was curled up like a baby. We waited. She stood up, shouting crazy. She was dirty. She was extremely wounded. So we undressed her. We took a bucket and cleaned her with water out of the sea because there was no running water there. I took out a couple a pair of trousers and t-shirt for my backpack, and dressed her, and I carried her on my back up to the road, which was a hard climb. And we took her to the airport. We took good care of her. We flew with her to Mumbai, took her to a five-star hotel, and the wife of the consul cleaned her and dressed her in decent clothes. We tried to make her eat. She ate slowly, and it took another two days until we could fly her back to Israel. When I flew her over, I came to the airport. She, of course, couldn’t answer any questions. She was not able to communicate. And suddenly, I am approached by some person at the airport who asked me what I’m doing. I told him, listen, she is harmed, I am trying to bring her home to rehabilitate her. He told me, come with me. It was the manager of the flight company, and he located us in the business zone in the airport, so we can take good care about her. And we flew her home. But she was in very difficult situation, and we had to come several times to take her back home because she ran away, to calm her down and so on. We did it, of course. Today she is a mother and lawyer and nobody could even notice that something was wrong anytime.

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So after that first case, you established a regular service for these sorts of mental health crises among travelling Israelis?

Yes, we were providing search and rescue for travelers. We spent time with the youngsters at the guest houses where they used to stay. We were the adults who were approached: ‘Hey, listen! This guy lost his mind. That lady is running naked in the street. He’s destroying all the guest house’ and so on. We had no knowledge of this culture at the start. I never have seen drugs, and suddenly I found myself in a situation where I have to respond to the calls of the youngsters, and I came in touch with those disturbed youngsters, and I looked at them and tried to understand what’s going on. And slowly, I found out that I can understand the language. It is a language of behavior, and I provided a solution for this. I built a protocol which gave me the possibility to reach those people and to bring them in no time to cooperate with me. Here’s someone destroying all the guest house, frightening everybody. And here I am hugging him, and I am walking with him through the immigration in the airport, and I am flying with him safely home. And in those years, flying home means almost five days of traveling. And I spend time with him 24 hours a day.

Wow, bringing someone back from South America or from Australasia - those are long flights, and these people may still be in some kind of psychotic state.

Sometimes they don’t sleep three or four days. So you cannot sleep. You have to be with them. I’m with them 24 hours a day. So we are going in two person teams. If I’m tired, I tell my partner, “Hey, take over’. And I’m falling asleep for half an hour or an hour. You understand?

Can you ever offer them like benzos, tranquilizers?

Normally, we don’t need it. But sometimes we are coming to a person that is in a mental situation for a month or two. So we got a doctor. He will provide some medication.

And I guess sometimes they might be in trouble with the local police.

Sometimes I have to release them from prison. And then I have to help the families handle the stigma. Because the families are also casualties of drugs [through association] and can feel guilty. His father is a decent man, and now he is in a in a deep shitty story of drugs and jail. Why? Because of the hypocrite behavior of the countries. You go to a country where drugs are common, like eating a sandwich, and suddenly they caught you with drugs and they put you in jail, and they show all the world how they are fighting drugs. It’s total bullshit.

So I developed a protocol how to behave with people like this. I taught it to the members of the team, and they did it the same as me. And the situation was tough because the youngsters those days didn’t use drugs in Israel - the first time they used drugs was travelling, so many of them got harmed. I was flying at least three times every month. There were weeks in which I flew twice a week.

Always to India?

Not always to India, also flying to South America, flying to to Australia, flying to New Zealand, flying anywhere.

Were drugs always involved?

Most of the occasions, drugs were the catalyzers for people losing their minds.

As in psychosis? Manic episodes?

I call it a mental fracture. If you got a fracture in your leg, everybody knows what to do. They have to tie your leg and to bring you to the hospital to provide the X-ray and then to put the bones together to put around the bandage, and after three, four weeks to give you some physiotherapy, and then after half a year you are walking, running, and dancing.

It’s the same with the mental issue. You handle it correctly, it is not anything more like a fracture. If you know how to handle it, it will end in a good situation. Very quickly, I understood that the person who got harmed needs the family to rehabilitate them. If you don’t support the family, if you don’t address them and give them the tools to handle the situation, the boy or the girl that are harmed will never recover.

So you have to give the family advice?

Yes. I developed a huge protocol how to do this. And today we are we are bringing in all the family. We are advising them and teaching them how to behave, how to understand the situation. We are handling them through the telephone after we return their loved ones, and we escort them until they reach the light in the end of this tunnel.

So the context is that young Israelis leave military service and often go traveling afterwards, and often take a lot of drugs.

This is not correct today. This story is a part of anti-Israeli political issue. I checked the statistics in Austria, in Germany, in France, in Italy and in Japan. And what I found out is amazing. They have more drugs casualties than we do in Israel.

I’m just talking about your kind of typical client. There will often be a young person who’s traveling after the military?

No. That was in the first 10 years. But today, all the people are consuming drugs, especially cannabis. So they are not using drugs for the first time when travelling. What I see is a change in the casualties’ age. We got more casualties in their 30s than in the 20s.

Are all your clients from Israel?

Not all of them.

And what kind of drugs are typically causing the problems?

80% of the casualties are of cannabis, not because cannabis is the most dangerous drug, but because people consume more of it than other drugs.

And people are smoking it every day.

Every day, all the day.

What about psychedelic drugs like ayahuasca?

Such drugs are dangerous, but not many are using it. If they are using it once in a party, it is not a problem. But people who use it more often, they are exposed to a danger.

So you know the famous T-shirt that said, ‘Hilik won’t catch me’. Do people ever not want to come back to Israel?

No, it never happened to us that somebody didn’t want to come back. We are not forcing them. We are not injecting them or forcing them to take medication. We are handling them by the protocol that I develop, and they participate and are willing to come home, and they are getting listened to for rehabilitation. We have to convince people, bring them to a decision that they are going to make the effort and rehabilitate. You cannot force somebody to follow a program like that.

Do you ever track people down, and they are in a spiritual community or in a cult?

Yeah. It happened several times, and it is a little bit more difficult to convince them to leave and to follow you. The situation is complicated. It takes more time.

How long does the process usually take, when you are hired by a family to track someone down?

The process takes 4-5 days.

You can you can find people and bring them home in four or five days?

Yeah, it is easy.

Anywhere in the world.

Anywhere in the world. We are doing it very quick. Meanwhile, we are preparing the family to face the crisis and to handle the situation. You and me are normal people. We share the same circle of logic, sanity, reality and experience. If you meet someone in a crisis, they are not logical, not sane, and their experience and reality is different than yours. So those two circles are not joining each other; they are opposite each other. So you have to get the chords of the language in which he is operating.

What kind of language is that - quite spiritual, quite paranormal?

If you want me to give you the protocol, I will give you two sentences, and you will find out how to manage a person in a mental crisis.

First, you have to manage yourself, your thoughts and your feelings. Not to manage him, you have to manage yourself, because he is in a high-sensitive situation. He is not listening to what you are talking logically. He is reading your feelings and your thoughts, and he is not in self-control, he will amplify your feelings and your thoughts. So if you are nervous, he will be hysterical. If you are frightened, he will be angry, he will become violent. You have to be able to control yourself and to behave correctly. You are asking yourself always, how do I feel? If you feel that you are angry, cool yourself. If you are not able to cool yourself, let somebody different handle their case.

More after the paywall, including links to other interesting stories from around the internet.

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When president Trump signed his Executive Order supporting psychedelics in April, he was flanked by not one but four Navy SEALs, highlighting the importance of Special Ops soldiers to the mainstreaming of psychedelics with the American public.

From the Luttrell brothers to Marcus Capone, from Shawn Ryan to Dan Crenshaw to Osama-killer Robert O’Neill, Navy SEALs have used their fame to promote ibogaine, 5meoDMT, MDMA and other psychedelics. But now, the most famous of them all - podcaster Shawn Ryan - says he is under spiritual attack since encountering demonic entities at an ibogaine / 5meoDMT retreat, and has sought four exorcisms from Catholic priests, none of which has worked. The ibogaine movement must be praying he quickly finds the support he needs.

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Shawn Ryan Palmisano joined the US Navy aged 18, made it into the Navy SEALs, and deployed in Iraq, where he guarded Iraqi politicians. He left the Navy in 2006, and worked as a contractor through Blackwater for the Global Response Staff (GRS), a paramilitary security wing of the CIA. After that, he became addicted to painkillers and other drugs and spent time in Colombia, where he claims he became a cocaine trafficker.

Then he got therapy and in 2019 he started a podcast. He made his name doing confessional interviews with Special Ops soldiers. Elite warriors shedding tears made for compulsive listening and Ryan was soon getting millions of followers. But he had bigger ambitions. “I want to take the Rogan slot,” he said in 2022. “I’m going real broad. I’m honestly getting bored with the Special Operations stuff.”

He first tried psychedelics at the Ambio clinic in Mexico in 2022, where he took their protocol of ibogaine followed by 5meoDMT. He went there seeking healing from substance-abuse issues, and was accompanied by fellow former SEAL Marcus Capone of VETS, the non-profit that brings veterans to Ambio for ibogaine healing. Ryan was served the medicines by Trevor Millar, co-founder of Ambio. He came back gushing: everyone should do ibogaine and 5meoDMT, everyone should donate to VETS, psychedelics should be legalized now, and the government and Big Pharma were ‘murdering people’ by not legalizing psychedelics immediately.

Ryan said that his trips had turned him off booze and opened him up to the spiritual: ‘I realized there was a lot more going on in the universe around us that we don’t see.’ His psychedelic episode also opened him up to a bigger audience, and became one of his most popular episodes. Ambio replayed clips from it on their social media channels, then Ryan interviewed Trevor Millar on his show (250,000 views and counting). When he sat down with Secretary of Veteran Affairs Doug Collins last year, he gave another shout-out to Ambio, which immediately got repackaged and amplified by Ambio’s social media.

In 2023, Ryan went to Sedona, feeling close to a breakdown due to his concerns about COVID, vaccines, China, open borders, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, trans rights and drag queens. The breakdown led to an epiphany - he felt like he met God, then saw a UFO, then embraced Jesus Christ as his Lord and Saviour. From then on, he became noticeably more into the paranormal, as in the popular 2023 episode, ‘US Marine Encounters UFO Black Ops Human Trafficking Operation’.

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2024 was his breakout year. He went from outside the top 50 US podcasts to producing some of the most popular episodes of the year. He also started to become a political player. His 2024 campaign interview with Donald Trump has 53 million views on YouTube. He also interviewed JD Vance, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and Fox News presenter Pete Hesgeth. ‘And then five days later he gets picked for Secretary of Defence’, Ryan recalled. ‘I’m like, holy shit, the show has power. Then I went to the Army-Navy football game and he points at me, he goes, “Thank you.”

Then came the death of Matthew Livelsberger in January 2025. On New Year’s Day, active-duty Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger detonated a Cybertruck outside Trump’s Las Vegas hotel, killing himself and injuring seven people, apparently to publicize UFO secrets he claimed to know. He had tried to get on as a guest on Ryan’s show. A day after his death, Ryan posted: ‘My family and I are disappearing for a few days. What we are about to release is mind boggling and will raise a lot of questions.’ The next day, Ryan posted an episode with retired army officer Sam Shoemate, who read aloud an email he received from Livelsberger claiming that America and China had “gravitic propulsion systems.” The episode took the Shawn Ryan Show to the number one slot on the US podcast charts, briefly overtaking Joe Rogan (it’s now number 3 on the US Spotify podcast charts).

Since 2024, Ryan has followed Tucker Carlson in becoming increasingly demon-obsessed. He told Carlson: ‘I became obsessed with evil, like obsessed with it…In the end, we’re all evil. We all have an evil side to us.’ In October 2024 he featured Catholic exorcist Fr Dan Reehill on an episode called ‘Inside the Demonic World’, and another Catholic exorcist, Fr Chad Ripperger, for two episodes this year (‘Inside the Most Disturbing Exorcism Cases’ in March 2026 and ‘The Signs of Diabolical Influence in the US’ in July 2026’). In these interviews, homosexuality and transgenderism are often depicted as signs of demonic influence.

Despite this lurch to the Catholic right, he’s kept on promoting psychedelics, speaking at the Tennessee Senate in March in support of a bill to fund ibogaine research.

In July, he appeared on the Tucker Carlson show and declared he’d just come from an ibogaine / 5meoDMT retreat that had gone awry:

Ryan: I just got back from an ibogaine 5-MeO experience. Didn’t go great. Found hell.

Carlson: Hell?

Ryan: Hell…It’s been a long 3 weeks. And I’ll just say this— I’ve talked to some of the most respected exorcists in the country. And I’ve been working with them and things have happened. Really scary shit…It definitely sent me down a new path that I’m still trying to figure out…I’m full-blown going back into the Catholic Church now

How does he feel about psychedelics now, Carlson asked.

I kept saying that, like, psychedelics would be like a f*ing quick fix for me. I just want to clean it out, I want to reset. And I would take all the science that they’re finding, the good things about it, and justify it. But in the end, I think you’re opening— you’re just in a forbidden realm that maybe we should or should not be f***ing around in. I won’t be f**ing around in that realm anymore, I can tell you that. I got strict guidance— strict guidance from God— and that is, don’t mess around in that anymore. But it’s done a lot of great things for people. And it’s done a lot of great things for me. As painful as this is to go through, I’m thankful for it.

This time Ambio, where I understand he returned to, did not splice up the show for shareable clips on social media. In fact, the entire psychedelic culture has not said a word about the haunting of Shawn Ryan.

Then, last week, Ryan hosted Cardinal Raymond Burke, a hard-right American Catholic, and told him he felt he, his family and his staff had been under spiritual attack in the weeks since the psychedelic retreat.

What in the name of Our Lady of Guadalupe is going on?

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Yaakov is a 30-year-old Orthodox Jewish father of two in New York. He was working with a life coach to try and improve his life and self-optimize. In May, the life coach suggested they go for a trek in a large park, wearing weights, on magic mushrooms. This, the coach insisted, would be character-building. Yaakov was unsure, having never done mushrooms before, but the coach urged him to go for it. Psychedelics are surprisingly popular among Orthodox Jewish Americans, and Yaakov decided to try it.

He arrived at the park to discover the coach had not brought any water for the trek. The coach told him to go for it anyway, so he did. He took two grams of mushrooms, and they set off. What followed was one of the most horrendous experiences of his life. Yaakov’s habitual anxiety was exacerbated. He didn’t feel safe at all. The coach was not a calm, sympathetic ‘space-holder’ but a militaristic bully. And the thirst was unbearable. The hours seemed to last forever as Yaakov staggered, gasping, through the park.

We might remark, in passing, on the casual fuckwittery of this ‘life coach’, presuming to incorporate psychedelics into his work as if they were no riskier than electrolytes or Omega oils. But that is not the focus of this article.

In the days and weeks afterwards, Yaakov remained in a state of extreme anxiety. He worried about losing his mind, worried about not being able to work, worried about the stigma of having damaged himself on drugs, worried about the derealization he could experience all day, and worried above all that these symptoms would last forever. Sometimes he would wake up feeling pure fear like he’d never felt before.

Yaakov has a therapist who, though not familiar with psychedelics, is still supportive and helpful to him. He has looked for other help, including the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, which he contacted in August. He feels bewildered by all the options - should he try hypnotherapy or acupuncture or trauma therapy or medication? His health anxiety, exacerbated by the bad trip, sometimes goes into overdrive and he feels paralysed by choices.

Yaakov has now decided that over-thinking is making the situation worse. He says: ‘This week I’ve started with a very straight-forward approach of living life, not ruminating or fantasising about it. Today is Tuesday, and as I try the new approach of not ruminating, I’m having a pretty good day today, probably one of the best in the last three months. There’s times when I think ‘let me go and search for the best health supplements’ or something, and I think ‘no Yaakov, you’re not doing this right now’.

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Rumination as a causal factor for extended difficulties

Why do some bad trips lead to extended post-psychedelic difficulties? Why do some people feel bad for a few days, and others for months or years? We don’t yet know but it’s likely to be various reasons - how awful the experience was, how much support was available afterwards, the circumstances of the person’s life, and perhaps their childhood history or personality traits.

But I suspect one of the main reasons is rumination. Rumination is what turns a transient dip into a sustained one.

This is my working hypothesis of what happens in many cases of extended post-psychedelic difficulties: there’s an adverse event (a bad trip) which leads to unwanted symptoms, such as negative feelings, negative thoughts or unwanted phenomena like nightmares or visual distortions or derealization.

For some people, these symptoms arise and then pass after a few days or weeks without them obsessing over them, and the mind’s natural healing properties allow it to bounce back. But other people (and this is just a hypothesis) ruminate and catastrophize over the adverse event and the unwanted symptoms, they become much more self-focused and hyper-monitoring, and every time an unwanted symptom occurs it contributes to the catastrophising beliefs ( particularly the belief - ‘I am permanently broken’) and to worse mood, more negative self-focus, and to withdrawal from the world, from relationships, from work. It becomes a vicious loop, and people can be stuck in that whirlpool for a long time.

A few people I’ve interviewed for our ‘Stories of Recovery’ say that one of the key things that helped them recover from post-psychedelic difficulties was finding ways to ruminate less and turn one’s focus outwards. I met Matias at Psychedelic Science 2023 - he’d traveled there from Argentina searching for a cure for the intense derealization he experienced for four years after vaping DMT. I kept in touch with Matias, and he told me his symptoms eventually diminished. What helped?

When it all began, I assumed the way back would be more inner work — more meditation, more breathwork, more spiritual practice. I even thought I needed to do regular Holotropic Breathwork to work through the material. Over time I learned the opposite was true, at least for me. Any practice that turned my attention inward — meditation, breathing exercises, energy work, even “grounding” by walking barefoot — reliably made things worse. There was some pattern inside me that wasn’t working properly, and stirring it up was like pouring gas on a fire. What actually helped was the opposite direction: going to the gym, coming back into my body and into ordinary life.

This insight has a much broader application than post-psychedelic difficulties. Rumination is put forward by some psychologists as one of the main causes of depression and anxiety, as well as a key contributor to stress, insomnia, burn-out, procrastination and other common forms of vexation. The word ‘rumination’ comes from rumen, meaning one of the four compartments in which a cow slowly digests grass. What works well for cow digestion works much less well for human cogitation - excessive rumination can literally make us grind our teeth and give us a stomach ache!

So if we are prone to chewing the mental cud, what can we do about it?

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How to think less

From our first months, we are taught how to think and solve problems, and trained to live in a highly complex society and to play a part in the knowledge economy. We are thinking machines, and our problem-solving mind is like a chainsaw, helping us hack a way through the complexity of modern life. Every night we go to bed with the chainsaw, and sometimes we don’t know how to switch it off.

Many of the leading spiritual teachers of the last century recognized that over-thinking is one of the great psychospiritual issues that modern humans face. Alan Watts, for example, gets millions of views on YouTube with his talks on why modern humans over-think and get lost in the ‘symbolic world’, and how to use ideas from Zen and Taoism to think less and have a less mediated and more direct experience of reality. Eckhart Tolle became perhaps the leading spiritual teacher of the Noughties with his simple message of how to liberate yourself from an over-thinking mind.

In the age of smartphones and social media, we’re perhaps even more addicted to thinking and people flock to diagnoses and cures for this very modern ailment - my friend Alex Olshonsky, a life coach in the Bay Area, wrote an essay in February called ‘You’re probably addicted to thinking’, which got 5000 likes on Substack, leading him to launch a new course on the topic which is starting next week (you can see a brief interview I did with Alex after the paywall).

So how can we think less?

There are several possible methods to reduce rumination. Two experimental methods that I know many of you are interested in are psychedelics and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). A mini-review in 2024 found that psychedelic-assisted therapy significantly reduced rumination, while TMS for depression has also been found to reduce rumination (check out this recent ‘before and after TMS’ video featuring Owen Muir and a patient).

But there are less experimental techniques with a lot more evidence that one can try first. There’s plenty of evidence that regular exercise reduces rumination, especially if you try something that demands continuous attention, such as swimming, cycling, running, tennis/pickleball, martial arts, surfing. These are methods of re-directing your attention out of introspection and rumination and towards an external activity (sport also has the advantage of releasing endorphins, getting you in shape, raising your self-esteem and connecting you to others).

There are also various forms of cognitive therapy which have been found effective at retraining the mind and reducing rumination, such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Mindfulness-based CBT, Compassion-Focused Therapy, and a relatively new but promising form of therapy called Meta-Cognitive Therapy (MCT) which I have been finding quite helpful. In the rest of the article I’m going to briefly explain MCT and share some of its exercises and practices, then I’ll share the video of my conversation with Alex Olshonsky.

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Many humans have this deep need for enchantment. It’s closely allied with our need to alter consciousness. As a species, we are easily bored with the mundane, and want to be transported. Two of the main methods we use: drugs, and stories. Gather round the campfire, chew on some leaves, and listen to a story-teller conjure up another world.

This basic human need goes wrong when a person uses drugs, or stories, to habitually avoid reality and becomes lost in delusion. Both drugs and stories can heal, or they can become addictive labyrinths from which we cannot escape. Stories, like drugs, require discrimination and harm reduction.

Carlos Castaneda, the author of the Don Juan books and the subject of a new biographer by Ru Marshall, wove enchanting stories and millions of people fell for them. Some people really fell for them and followed the path he laid down, crumb by crumb, until they realized they were lost in his labyrinth. He was a world-class spiritual fabulist, the latest in a long line from Joseph Smith to Madame Blavatsky, from L Ron Hubbard to contemporary shamanic hucksters like Simon Buxton or [name deleted on legal advice]. The history of religion is, to a large extent, the history of spiritual fabulism. Give us an enchanted fairy-tale, a treasure hunt to follow, and we are hooked.

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On mythomania or spiritual fabulism

Carlos Castaneda was a young, affluent, educated Peruvian who went to study in Los Angeles, initially studying creative writing at Los Angeles City College, then transferring to UCLA to study anthropology. He was a bullshitter from the start - he changed his name (it was Carlos Araña originally, which means ‘Carlos the Spider’), sometimes claimed to be Brazilian, and left a daughter in Peru who he never mentioned or supported.

At UCLA he was particularly influenced by two professors: first, by a sociologist called Harold Garfinkel. He had a cult of personality around him, and only worked with certain special students, who he sent out into the world to do ‘breaching’ experiments. They would be instructed to do weird shit and see how people around them react when social norms are breached. Some would later wonder if the entire ‘Don Juan’ hoax was one long breaching experiment.

Secondly, there was a UCLA anthropology professor Clement Meighan, who told his undergraduates he would give any student an A if they managed to interview a real, genuine Indian. Young Carlos came back from this assignment with an extraordinary story - he had met and interviewed a Yaqui brujo (sorcerer) in Mexico called Don Juan, who had taken him on as his sorcerer’s apprentice! Carlos had supposedly travelled down to Mexico in between UCLA classes and undergone this life-endangering apprenticeship, smoking mushrooms, taking datura and peyote, undergoing various magical trials, being favoured by the god of peyote, ‘Mescalito’, and even turning into a crow!

It was a tall-tale perfectly suited to hook a certain sort of liberal white person who credulously romanticizes non-white cultures. His undergraduate thesis was published by University of California Press as The Teachings of Don Juan. It’s a good read, which takes the boring genre of student anthropology essay and turns it into a heroic fantasy of magical apprenticeship that’s straight out of H. Rider Haggard or Edward Bulwer Lytton. Carlos appears as the hapless representative of arid western academia, utterly clueless before the real master, Don Juan, who is constantly swatting away Carlos’ naive questions:

“Are you going to use witchcraft?” I asked with great expectations.

“Don’t be silly. No witchcraft would ever work on her. I have other plans! I’ll tell you about them some day.”

“Can your ally protect you from her?”

“No! The little smoke only tells me what to do. Then I must protect myself.”

“How about Mescalito? Can he protect you from her?”

“No! Mescalito is a teacher, not a power to be used for personal reasons.”

“Is Mescalito God- the only God? Or is he one of the gods?”

“He is just a protector and a teacher. He is a power.”

“Is he a power within ourselves?”

“No. Mescalito has nothing to do with ourselves. He is outside us.”

“Then everyone who takes Mescalito must see him in the same form.”

“No, not at all. He is not the same for everybody”

You can see the format - Carlos asks a question ‘is it X?’ and Don Juan replies ‘no, it’s Y’. His answers give the impression of this vast, coherent and hitherto secret body of knowledge about a separate magical reality. And Carlos the undergraduate just happens to have been handed the key to the secret garden. It’s as if an owl had flown into his bedroom with an invitation to Hogwarts.

Institutionalized fabulism

If you want to get people to accept a tall story, there are various ways you can increase the chances they will accept it. One way is social proof - get others to say they believe it, especially if the others are famous. Another way is institutional proof - somehow get your story imprinted with the legitimacy of a well-established institution, like the University of California. The University’s UC Press published The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge in 1968 and it was soon snapped up by Simon & Schuster. Carlos then went back for more teachings from Don Juan, which he recounted in A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan (1971); Journal to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan (1973) and so on. Journey to Ixtlan was accepted by UCLA as Castaneda’s PhD thesis.

Such extraordinary books, arriving with the official imprimatur of the UCLA anthropology department and the glowing approval of authorities like Michael Harner and Theodore Roszak, naturally caught the attention of all the young hippy undergraduates, themselves experimenting with mind-altering substances. Like Castaneda, the young hippies were all too ready to reject mainstream western civilization and search for alternative father-figures at the fringes. Don Juan reportedly inspired George Lucas to invent Obi Wan Kenobi, and Castaneda’s tales were also gobbled up by Oliver Stone, David Bowie, the Eagles, Bob Dylan. The adventures of Don Juan and his hapless apprentice made Simon & Schuster a fortune - eight million copies sold worldwide.

But slowly, sceptical voices began to be raised.

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1. Psychedelics as costly magic

Sharon Doni is a therapist and clinical director of the Israeli Center for Cult Victims. I came across her when she posted on Facebook about the rise in psychedelic cults and abusive facilitators in Israel. We had a great conversation, which I will share in the future, and she said this, which stuck in my mind:

People are drawn to psychedelics because it’s like magic. It’s a shortcut. But there’s something you need to remember about magic. There is a TV series called “Once Upon a Time” with a witch, and the witch often says that every magic comes with a price. And that’s a sentence I have really adopted. And I also realized: the bigger the magic, the bigger the price. Check the magic you’re taking because you want to realize what’s the price. If a facilitator appears God-like and says he’s going to save you from yourself, he’s going to be a father and brother to you and give you all the hidden knowledge you need…that’s very appealing magic, and there will be a high price for that.

We’re often wondering how psychedelics ‘work’ - neuroscientists, psychiatrists, therapists and pharmacists have put forward various theories of change. Curanderos and brujos, meanwhile, suggest that, sometimes at least, it’s a magical process, and magic can be a zero-sum game. You want to create a big effect - healing, harm, or some other effect - you need to pay a big price, or someone does. It is a dog-eat-dog world. ‘Whoever becomes the weed’s [datura’s] ally must pay the price’, Don Juan says in Carlos Castaneda’s tale of sorcery. Is that a voodoo way of thinking? Maybe. Sceptic as I am, I sometimes wonder if psychedelics really do involve magic in some zero-sum way, and what the psychic-societal impacts could be when that magic gets scaled up by Eli Lilly and the rest.

2. Psychedelic antinomianism

Reporting on the story of Dr Samuel Lee, the ‘spiritual psychiatrist’ who started working with (and taking) psychedelic drugs and became a full-on psychedelic guru, I interviewed a clinician who reported Lee, and the Within ketamine clinic where he worked in Austin, to the Texas Medical Board. This clinician told me how he often hired people to offer ketamine therapy, and then saw them get lost in the deep waters of psychedelic culture. He said:

When you employ therapists that have an interest in doing psychedelic-assisted therapy, a certain amount of them are either completely nuts to begin with or slip down a slope. It’s a certain percentage. I’ve had therapists that actually started out well, some of them straight out of school, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, by-the-book clinicians. Then they start doing underground work, they start working with a church or something, they dive off the deep end, it gets weird, they get into dual relationships and other sorts of unprofessionalism, and I have to fire them. I think that it’s an inherent challenge – people who go through profound psychedelic experiences sometimes feel like they’ve figured it out, they’ve heard the message, they know ‘the truth’.’

This quote reminds me of a fantastic paper by David E. Smith, founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, on ‘the psychedelic syndrome’. I mentioned the concept a few weeks ago and someone has helpfully made a wikipedia page about it. Basically, Smith noticed that regular users of LSD around the Haight started to heavily believe in magic, vibes, energy, telepathy, curses, astrology and so on. He noted some workers at his clinic wouldn’t even come to work if their astrology reading was off that day.

The quote also hints at something very prevalent in New Age and psychedelic circles: antinomianism. This is a belief, often found in ecstatic Christianity, that because you’re so close to God, because you’re so 5D, the old laws don’t apply to you. As Crowley put it: ‘Do what you will shall be the whole of the law’.

Samuel Lee would say things like ‘drugs are legal according to God’s law’. Because Dr Lee is, in his own words, acting out of ‘pure love’, he cannot cause any harm. If clients die, they’re actually transitioning to a better place.

I notice, by the by, that Dr Lee is now required to put ‘this is not medical advice’ at the bottom of his videos. Imagine if every wellness guru had to do that.

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3. The worst harms from the psychedelic renaissance are not from psychedelics

They’re from two related drugs - cannabis and ketamine. These are, I suggest, more dangerous than the classic psychedelics because they’re much more likely to be used daily and to lead to dependence.

According to Leung et al (2020), 22% of cannabis users qualify for Cannabis Use Disorder. That certainly included me in my teens - I needed to smoke cannabis every day. Regular users then become susceptible to something called Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome (CHS), or ‘scromiting’ - daily cannabis use inflames the cannabinoid receptors in your gut so that you experience severe nausea, vomiting and abdominal pains. CHS only recently got recognized by the International Classification of Disease, and it’s affecting a lot of people - approximately 2.7 million a year. The CDC says the group most affected is 15-24-year-olds. People can die from CHS, but you can also recover from it, if you quit weed for a while to give your gut a chance to stabilize.

And then there’s ketamine. In the UK, there are weekly stories about young people experiencing severe physical effects from ketamine addiction, particularly damage to their bladder. In the US, meanwhile, ketamine seems to be ever more popular among psychonauts for recreational use, and ketamine addiction is becoming a growing problem in places like Austin and San Francisco. There seems to be a serious misunderstanding of the risk of ketamine addiction in the US and I worry about a generation of tech psychonauts having to wear nappies because their bladders don’t work.

4. ‘He would call it medicine’

The public understanding of the risks of ketamine is not helped by folks like the comedian Reggie Watts, a relentless psychedelic booster. Watts has promoted psychedelics through the Joe Rogan podcast, the Netflix documentary Have a Good Trip, a partnerships with MAPS, and so on. ‘I encourage all of you guys to get a [ketamine] prescription’, he told the audience at one concert. Watts consistently downplays the risks of ketamine or other drugs. On Rainn Wilson’s podcast, when Wilson brought up Matthew Perry’s death, Watts insisted: ‘Whatever he died of, it wasn’t ketamine’. On the Psychedelics Today podcast Watts said: ‘My message is ‘reduce the fear’.…Certain drugs [like ketamine] are very safe…People have fear of going into chaos…but…in the right context going off the rails is awesome.’

I have no problem with a person doing whatever drugs they want, and I have friends who can throw extraordinary amounts of drugs into their system without any obvious negative effects. But if you are a prominent psychedelic evangelist you have a responsibility to be accurate about the risks, or you are going to build up some bad karma.

In Watts’ case, he apparently loved to introduce friends and girlfriends to his lifestyle og intense drug experimentation - he’s like the guy in the pub who insists on getting everyone shots, but with him its ketamine lozenges. He told Joe Moore a story about an LA party where he handed out lozenges to guests at someone else’s party, and no one disappointed him by refusing. Is that a bit risky? No, because he’s ‘very good at dosing’.

At one such party, he met Katherine McCollough and (she said) gave her ketamine. They started a whirlwind romance and - according to a new Rolling Stone article by Cheyenne Roundtree - McCollough was introduced to Watts’ LA party lifestyle and on various occasions they took LSD, MDMA, DMT, MMCs, cocaine, Ritalin, Adderall, ketamine, Xanax, Valium, and Modafinil. What began as a dream romance soon spun out of control.

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The story of every psychedelic is outlandish, but perhaps none more so than the story of toad medicine, Bufo, or 5-MeO-DMT. It’s still hard to believe, but in five years it hopped from an dank underground populated by rascals and reprobates to a billion-dollar treatment acquired by Eli Lilly and now on the brink of FDA approval.

The leading wild man in this extraordinary tale is Octavio Rettig, and his story is told in Kimon de Greef’s rollicking new book, The Ego Trip: Psychedelic Toads, a Trail of Deaths, and the Guru Who Peddled Transcendence. In fact, Kimon tells the story of Rettig and also a little of the story of Countess Amanda Feilding, whose 5-MeO-DMT company was bought by Eli Lilly. Rettig and Feilding - two posh, drug-binging bohemians keen to bring chemical bliss to the masses, and not too concerned about the side effects.

How Octavio took the toad global

South American tribes probably used 5-MeO-DMT for centuries, through snuffs made of Anadenanthera seeds. 5-MeO-DMT was first synthesized by Japanese scientists Toshio Hoshino and Kenta Shimodaira in 1936, and was identified in the seeds of Anadenanthera peregrina (the yopo tree) by VL Stromberg in 1954. Vittorio Erspamer, the Italian scientist who discovered serotonin, identified 5-MeO-DMT in the secretion of the Sonoran Desert toad (Bufo alvarius) in the 1960s. It didn’t really play any role in the 60s psychedelic counterculture, and it was only in 1983 that an American hippy called Ken Nelson decided to try and smoke the toad secretions. He anonymously published a pamphlet - Bufo alvarius: The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert - describing how to milk and smoke the venom, then he founded the Church of the Toad of Light. The church didn’t take off, but his method of getting high certainly did.

Through Nelson’s pamphlet, toad medicine spread in underground psychedelic circles and was pioneered by folks like Andrew Weil and Ralph Metzner. Then it was discovered by two Mexican doctors - Octavio Rettig and Gerry Sandoval.

Rettig and Sandoval were two privately-educated reprobates who met at medical college and discovered a shared love of drugs. Soon, Octavio was taking so many drugs he was homeless. But then Gerry introduced him to 5-MeO-DMT. After a long toad binge, Octavio emerged declaring he was clean (except for the toad, and the weed). Both he and Gerry became interested in the potential of 5-MeO-DMT in treating addiction.

Octavio got connected to an indigenous fishing tribe on the coast of the Sonora desert called the Seri. Octavio helped some of the Seri get off meth through Bufo, and he developed a relationship with some of them and began to weave a myth of an ancient indigenous toad medicine culture spanning Mesoamerica. There’s no actual evidence for this. Nonetheless, Octavio obtained a letter from someone in the Seri tribe authenticating his work, and he somehow managed to become a semi-official United Nations provider of ‘ancestral indigenous medicine’. He started a non-profit called OTAC (the Seri word for amphibian) and wrote a book, The Toad of Dawn: 5-MeO-DMT and the Rising of Cosmic Consciousness. The Seri were incredibly useful to him, providing (or selling) him indigenous legitimacy and adding a priceless (if illusory) ancient lineage to his product. And he was useful to them, helping some of the locals through his toad ceremonies, and bringing thousands of tourists to the impoverished town of Punta Chueca (population: 600).

Ana Maria Ortiz, who co-founded the OTAC non-profit with Octavio, was also crucial in taking 5-MeO-DMT into mainstream healthcare. She got a job at an ibogaine clinic in Tijuana called Crossroads, where Martin Polanco served ibogaine to recovering addicts and traumatized veterans. Ortiz incorporated 5-MeO-DMT into the Crossroads protocol, and the ibogaine / 5-MeO-DMT protocol is now used in many ibogaine clinics. That brought 5-MeO-DMT to Special Forces veterans looking for healing and some of them, like former Navy Seal Shawn Ryan, went on to sing the drug’s praises on their podcasts. Crossroads also inspired the first ever scientific studies of 5-MeO-DMT experiences, led by Professor Alan Davis of Ohio State University.

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In 2013, Octavio went to Burning Man and introduced 5-MeO-DMT to the global party set. So did James Oroc, an extreme sports enthusiast who tragically died in a paragliding accident in 2020, and Florencia Bollini, an Argentine facilitator who tragically died in a ketamine-related incident in 2025. Flor, who Kimon says was a great help to him with his book, played a central role in turning on the ultra-rich to toad medicine. Her clients included people like Alki David, multimillionaire heir to the Leventis-David Coca-Cola bottling company, who says he was smoked Bufo every day for six months, and billionaire Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté, also introduced to Bufo by Flor, who now lives on a private Polynesian island, dresses like a frog, has a band named the Frogs, and surrounds himself with toy frogs.

Citizen Cane (Toad)

Other ultra-rich fans of Bufo include the ‘never die’ multimillionaire Bryan Johnson, who has the molecular structure of 5-MeO-DMT tattooed on his body and live-streamed himself smoking it; and billionaire investment manager Ron Carson, who changed his name to Omani after a psychedelic experience (it means ‘running into a stiff wind’ in Native American, apparently). Omani smoked 5-MeO-DMT and then started a church. When asked what his favourite spiritual text was, he replied ‘I don’t read spiritual books. I’ve done Bufo.’

Why are the ultra-wealthy so into 5-MeO-DMT? I’ve never done it, but am told it feels like a direct encounter with the Godhead. It sweeps you into a pre- or post-egoic state, beyond the self, beyond words or images. When it works, it can be profoundly liberating from ego patterns - people have told me their first 5-MeO-DMT experience freed them from decades of mental suffering. It’s also quick - it takes you to the Godhead in just 15 minutes - and it makes you feel God-like, which appeals to the super-yacht class.

Let’s get wrecked

But it’s not always plain sailing. Sometimes the ego resists dissolution, or whites out, and it can struggle to put itself back together. Ana Maria Ortiz and others have warned of reactivations, insomnia, terrible anxiety and suicidality after bad 5-MeO-DMT trips. It’s one thing to recover from a bad trip if you have your own island and private staff, another if you’re struggling to make ends meet and need to work to support your family.

There’s also a risk that the purveyor of the God-molecule thinks they’re God. This is ‘the ego trip’ of Kimon’s title - several of his interviewees compare the God molecule to Sauron’s Ring of Power. He mentions my article on Bruno Cluzel, a Miami fraudster who set up a retreat center in Mexico, smoked toad all day long, and screamed at participants until they accepted he was the Messiah. Octavio seems to have experienced some ego-inflation as well. It must have been intoxicating to be feted as ‘the prophet of toad’ and have followers get your face tattooed on their body.

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The psychedelic renaissance has not inspired an abundance of great artists producing great art (music, movies, fashion etc), unlike the Sixties counter-culture or the acid house movement of the 80s/90s. Maybe it’s too dominated by affluent people over 40, the kind who prefer a gentle ‘sound bath’ to Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar. But one genuinely great musician who emerged from the plant medicine scene is British folk singer Nick Mulvey. He spent many years in a Santo Daime church in the UK, and this inspired his 2017 album Wake Up Now, which is a stone-cold classic. I listened to it when I was on an Amazonian ayahuasca retreat and was astonished - he was describing my experiences! - then discovered he’d been inspired by ayahuasca as well. His song ‘Remembering’ was my most-listened-to song of 2017.

So it’s been a shock to some of his fans that this mellow proponent of psychedelic spirituality has now embraced what looks like evangelical Christianity.

The shift began, Nick has said, in 2023, when his life was ‘in pieces’: ‘Things in my life had started to fall apart, in more ways than one. I wasn’t living in alignment with who I wanted to be. Not as a partner, not as a father, not as an artist.’ He was struck by a Christian friend of his, who seemed to have the peace he craved. He yearned to surrender to the Creator of the universe - ‘what I’m aiming for is total dependency on God... I try, each morning, to give the first portion of the day to Jesus. To say, Lord replace my agenda with your agenda.’ He felt exhausted by a pick n’ mix spirituality where he was the selector: ‘what I eventually realised is that when you’re the one doing the picking, you remain in charge of the whole thing. You stay at the centre; your blind spots are built into it.’ He also had a keen sense that he was an imperfect, broken being, and felt rescued from his fuck-ups by the grace of the Lord. He didn’t reject his former nature-spirituality, but he decided it made more sense to pray to the Creator than to the created.

He now seems to be in the charismatic Christian subculture of HTB / Vineyard - the same subculture as Mumford & Sons. Charismatic Christianity can look quite similar to middle-class spirituality on the outside - the same scruffy, authentic, soulful, hipster-folksy vibe, the same beanie hats and lumberjack shirts - but the values are quite different when you get into it. No drugs, no spiritual pot pourri, no sex before marriage, a quiet disapproval of LGBTQ+, more emphasis on family values, much more emphasis on sin / imperfection / brokenness, an over-riding emphasis on surrendering to Jesus, and a focus on ‘the Enemy’ - Satan, the root of all evil. Nick hasn’t denounced ayahuasca yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he does.

The pipeline from ayahuasca to evangelical Christianity

Nick’s conversion is not unique. There are a whole bunch of ‘ayahuasca to Jesus’ video testimonies on Christian YouTube channels and other social media. There are far fewer videos of ‘mushrooms to Jesus’, even though magic mushrooms are much more commonly used than ayahuasca, or are there many ‘LSD to Jesus’ videos, or ‘DMT to Jesus’ videos. I’ll discuss why this might be shortly.

Claude and I did a qualitative analysis of 23 ‘ayahuasca to Jesus’ testimonies on YouTube. I searched for ‘ayahuasca to Jesus’ and selected the first 23 testimony or interview videos I could find on YouTube. I made sure none of them were by the same people, then turned the YouTube videos into Word transcripts, then uploaded the 23 transcripts into Claude and asked it to do a thematic qualitative analysis. I asked it to look for common themes or patterns in the conversion / salvation testimonies and to test my hypothesis - that people convert to evangelical Christianity after ayahuasca experiences because they get freaked out by either negative entities or brujeria and seek protection in Jesus Christ.

Was this hypothesis confirmed? For the majority, yes, but not all. More after the paywall. Plus - why ayahuasca leads to more evangelical conversions than other psychedelics, and why people convert to evangelical / charismatic / Pentecostal Christianity.

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It’s officially the Summer of Homer, with Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of The Odyssey making a fortune at the box office and sparking off an intense discussion about all things Homeric - is the film too woke, as Elon Musk has claimed? Is it trashy, as Odyssey translator Emily Wilso…

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This new army of psychedelic guides often had little idea of how bad things could turn out for their clients, or for them. If one of their clients died, they’re not dealing with the lax regulatory environment of the Amazon jungle. No, they’re in the US, and they might have to face the American judicial system.

If you sell someone a controlled substance and then they die, you could face a sentence of 15-25 years in prison on charges ranging from manslaughter, to distribution of a controlled substance leading to death, to failure-to-aid if you don’t seek prompt emergency assistance.

‘Spiritual psychiatrist’ Samuel Lee could face 15 years in prison if he’s found guilty of manslaughter in the state of Florida, after one of his clients died at a Miami retreat last year (he’s pleading not guilty). Jasveen Sangha, the ‘ketamine queen’, got 15 years from the US federal government after she sold ketamine to Matthew Perry, who then drowned in his pool. In Australia, the organizer and facilitator of an ayahuasca and kambo retreat were both charged with manslaughter this year after a client died at their retreat, and could face a maximum of 25 years in prison if found guilty.

Many of Samuel Lee’s followers have told me this week on my Instagram (check out the 400 comments, it’s an education) that people die in hospitals from ‘mainstream medicine’ all the time, so why is ‘the spiritual psychiatrist’ being accused of one death when (they say) he has helped thousands? ‘Why not focus on the light?’

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It’s true that accidents and deaths often occur in mainstream medicine. That’s why doctors spend a lot of money on insurance and indemnity. That doesn’t exist in the underground. The waiver form your client signed? It won’t make much difference if the client died.

Some underground guides have realized the shit they would be in if it emerged one of their clients had died. So they have hidden deaths, or at least, not faced consequences when clients died under their care. But, like Odysseus’ comrades who died without a proper burial, one day the dead may speak. How many have died in underground supervised sessions in the US in the last 15 years? Yesterday I heard from two sources about three deaths in the last three years, just in one US city. I know that’s nothing compared to deaths from alcohol, cigarettes or opioids, but it’s still three dead people.

Did thousand-dollar training courses warn about the risk of prison?

I might be completely wrong about this, but I feel the psychedelic renaissance has downplayed the potential legal consequences underground guides could face, including prison time. Reading Michael Pollan’s 2018 New York Times article, ‘The Trip Doctors’, which is about his journey into the world of underground guides, the word I would use is: genteel. Pollan takes us into a discreet, elegant world of high-minded, bourgeois guides, supporting people in plush living rooms while listening to Bach. It’s the elegant world of the New York Times weekend supplement. There is no mention of the possibility of death or psychosis, nor any mention that these discreet charming bourgeois guides could potentially go to jail for 15-25 years if a client dies. But that is important information. The suburban shaman-moms of the psychedelic renaissance need to know that. Is anyone warning them?

Pollan’s article features the late Ralph Metzner, emeritus professor at CIIS, telling CIIS students they have a moral responsibility to offer this treatment now, ie illegally:

It’s an underground culture, and underground cultures are good, in fact they can be lifesaving…[He then compared the psychedelic underground to the underground German resistance hiding Jews during the war]. [We have these] fantastically promising medicines that can cure all sorts of ills, and yet doctors can’t get them. We don’t have to accept that!

I get the feeling some of these courses are inflating their naive middle-class students with a saviour complex, and it would be a rude awakening if and when they discover the judicial system views them not as Oskar Schindler but as a drug-dealer.

Readers who work in the underground: did any of the training courses you paid tens of thousands of dollars for tell you what to do if a client dies? Because if they didn’t, they are leaving out a critical aspect of your new career.

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For 15 years or so, there’s been impunity, more or less, in the psychedelic underground. And that’s given providers a false sense that this impunity will last and that to all intents and purposes psychedelics have been decriminalized in the United States, psychedelics are entirely safe, and this is a golden opportunity to get very rich very quickly. But this is a dangerous bet.

The Department of Justice or State / District Attorneys may decide they want to start cracking down on illegal activity - that’s already happening in the ketamine industry, where some doctors have gone to jail for illegal prescribing. And the public may also become more emboldened to bring civil cases if they feel they or their loved ones were harmed by guided psychedelic sessions.

In Denver, a man was referred by his therapist to an underground guide (the therapist’s wife). They did a psilocybin session in a hotel room in May 2025 and - according to a law-suit brought by the client - the underground guide left him unattended during the trip, and the client fell out of a fourth-floor window. He says he spent nearly two months in hospital and accumulated $2 million in medical bills, and now he’s suing the therapist and his wife, according to the Denver Post. The defendants didn’t respond to the Post’s request for comments.

We’re already seeing lawyers recognize an opportunity to go after ketamine clinics where harm has occurred. If underground guides have overground businesses, clients and their lawyers could be emboldened to go after them too.

How can therapists and coaches reduce the legal risks?

The easiest way is simply: don’t work with illegal substances. Or don’t sell them to the client and just offer ‘harm reduction’ services. If you do sell them controlled substances, you still have a duty of care even if you’re choosing to conduct illegal activity.

• Before the trip: preparation, screening, informed consent (telling people what they’re taking, explaining the potential benefits and risks accurately, warning of contraindications), presenting your credentials accurately (not calling yourself a physician or licensed therapist if you’re not).

• During the trip: stay with them for the entirety of a retreat, keep them safe, don’t over-dose them, don’t give them multiple drugs, don’t make sexual contact with them.

• After the trip: if they’re in crisis, make sure they have proper care, refer them to emergency support if needed, don’t over-dose them in repeated sessions, don’t take advantage of them sexually or financially while they’re in the afterglow state, don’t allow dual relationships to form, warn them not to make sudden major life decisions which they might regret or which partners might resent and blame on you.

All of this is hard, and even if you take care, a person might still die, and you might still go to jail - but at least you could show a judge or jury you’re not a complete cowboy. Saying that, none of the above provides a legal defence for distributing Schedule I substances. Alternatively, you could go down the route of becoming a legal DEA-approved psychedelic church - this is happening more and more. But just saying you’re a church isn’t enough, as Samuel Lee may discover (or not, who knows how the trial will pan out).

It seems obvious but is worth saying clearly: illegal psychedelic work has serious legal risks, and if you haven’t been told that by your training course, you’ve been dangerously misinformed.

After the paywall, an update on the Amy Griffin ‘recovered memories’ law suits; an update in the Paulo Roberto Santo Daime trial in Brazil; a case against Netflix involving ketamine, wild developments in the Mango succession law-case in Barcelona; and (in a break from legal matters) why is China so into the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead?

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Dr Samuel Lee, a 44-year-old ‘spiritual psychiatrist’ with two million social media followers, has been charged with second-degree-felony manslaughter in Miami for the death of Tina Sodhi, a 51-year-old wellness entrepreneur who died at a psychedelic retreat facilitated by Dr Lee. He faces a jury trial in October, and if convicted could face a maximum of 15 years in prison. He denies the charges.

The three-day retreat took place at Sabia Wellness House in Miami, with Ms Sodhi and another client each paying $2000 for the retreat. They were given something called the ‘Heart Protocol’ which, according to podcasts featuring Dr Lee, typically includes phenibut, MDMA, a microdose of psilocybin (although in this instance Sodhi seems to have been given DMT) and two ketamine injections.

According to Miami police reports, Detective Bryan Gonzalez arrived at the house at 8.44am on February 10th 2025, in response to an emergency call, to find Dr Lee giving Sodhi CPR in a sauna. Ms Sodhi was pronounced dead at 8.52. Dr Lee told police he was ‘a licensed doctor and an ‘Elder of the Eternal Life tribe’ and that the Heart Protocol was ‘a sacred sacrament of the church and not performed under his medical license’.

The Miami-Dade Medical Examiner’s Office ruled in July 2025 that the cause of death was hyponatremic dehydration due to confinement in a sauna and use of MDMA and ketamine in combination with a parasite cleanse (ZenCleanz) which Dr Lee advised Ms Sodhi to do in the days before receiving the Heart Protocol. The toxicology report showed Sodhi had MDMA, ketamine and DMT in her system.

Dr Alberto Augsten, a clinical toxicologist, told Miami police that MDMA is often associated with dehydration and cardiovascular stress, and that the parasite cleanse and sauna compounded the risks. Dr Augsten advised the police that, ‘to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, the actions taken by [Dr Lee] reflect an extreme and unjustifiable deviation from accepted safety and clinical practices’.

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Dr Lee told his Eternal Life tribe this weekend that Tina Sodhi fell asleep in the sauna ‘12-24 hours after the ceremony’, and ‘transitioned’ with ‘a smile on her face’. He said he had left the house for a meeting, and when he came back he was called upstairs to the sauna to give CPR. He added:

My belief is she decided to transition…If I was going to transition, I would leave after a Heart Protocol. Why? You’re already there. You are home….My conscience is super clear.

Tina Sodhi was an Indian immigrant to the US and a former private equity worker who, in 2009, lost her job and turned to breathwork to cope with depression. She founded a Miami wellness company called Art of Breathing. A friend says:

This woman was a ball of light. The type where her smile makes you feel safe and her nervous system is medicine. So smart, fun, kind, caring. I just can’t compute that this happened to her.

Ms Sodhi’s death is not the first recorded instance of harm through Dr Lee’s facilitation of the Heart Protocol. Another medical professional reported him to the Texas Medical Board in September 2025 when a client became manic and was hospitalized, reportedly after receiving the protocol from Dr Lee at the AWKN Ranch / Within Center in Austin, Texas, where Dr Lee was briefly medical director. There was no response from the Texas Medical Board to this complaint - it only temporarily suspended Dr Lee’s license this May after he had been charged by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office. The Texas Medical Board ruled that Lee’s ‘continued practice of medicine poses a continuing threat to the public welfare’. Dr Lee did not respond to emails and David Naylor, the founder of AWKN Ranch, did not comment on the 2025 medical board complaint.

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Another client received the Heart Protocol at a gathering in February 2024, facilitated by Dr Lee and organized by David Naylor. The client describes it as ‘the worst-ever facilitated ceremony of my life.’ Lee did not respond to emails and Naylor did not comment.

Dr Lee, the son of a Korean pastor, was previously a psychiatrist working at Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles. During the pandemic, he became an underground psychedelic facilitator, a conspirituality influencer with millions of social media followers, and a prophet to a 4000-strong online paid community called the Eternal Life tribe.

His devoted followers were unfazed by the news that their leader had been charged with manslaughter for the death of a client. Social media posts by followers have included outpourings of love for Dr Lee, prayers for his protection from the forces of darkness, and speculations that Tina Sodhi’s soul chose to die.

This story raises some important questions for the psychedelic community. Why do some medical professionals working with psychedelics evolve into guru-figures? Should psychedelic retreats offer access to saunas and sweatlodges? What are the risks of ‘multistacking’ drugs? Why do wealthy, educated people pay thousands of dollars to underground facilitators, sometimes to take unidentified substances? And will Dr Lee be that very rare case - a psychedelic facilitator who causes harm and faces legal consequences?

After the paywall, the origins of Dr Lee and the Heart Protocol, how to be a guru in the digital and AI age, and what is likely to happen.

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A very big day for the young psychedelic industry yesterday, with news that Eli Lilly, the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company, is paying $3.8 billion for psychedelic developer AtaiBeckley, which is developing 5meoDMT, DMT and MDMA treatments for mental illness. This follows earlier billion-plus acquisitions of psychedelic drug candidates by AbbiVie and Otsuka. Meanwhile, one of the best-known, best-paid facilitators in the underground, Dr Samuel Lee, got charged with manslaughter this week when one of his customers died after taking ‘the heart protocol’. Her name was Tina Sodhi, and friends tell me she was a really lovely person. I wrote about Dr Lee last year, and will write about him again, probably next Friday. But today, I’m continuing with my Esalen / Bay Area theme, with the transcript of the talk I gave at Esalen on ‘spiritual emergencies’.

I’m going to talk about the concept of ‘spiritual emergency’. This is a concept that emerged here, at Esalen, to mean a turbulent spiritual experience which has some features of pathology or even psychosis but is actually a transition to a higher state of spiritual development. This concept has had limited clinical uptake outside of transpersonal psychology but still been helpful to some people in crises, including me - I co-edited a book on spiritual emergencies and found the framing helpful during a messy post-ayahuasca quasi-psychotic episode.

The term is now becoming more widely used because of the psychedelic renaissance, it’s taught in some of the big facilitator training programs and is promoted by MAPS and its psychedelic harm reduction organisation Zendo Project. If you’re in a post-psychedelic crisis and you seek help from a psychedelic integration coach, there’s a good chance they may tell you ‘you’re having a spiritual emergency’.

Much as this concept is helpful to some (including me), there is a risk of harm if the concept is clumsily imposed by therapists and coaches on people in crisis. It could be iatrogenic and unethical to impose your religious frame on people in vulnerable states, especially if they would benefit from conventional care or medication or they’re just not into new age spirituality

In addition, the concept of spiritual emergency can sometimes be wielded ideologically, as a way to defend the psychedelic movement and deny that psychedelic drugs ever have serious adverse consequences, rather than helping the person in crisis.

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1. The roots of ‘spiritual emergency’ in the early years of Esalen

Right from its founding, Esalen was conceived of as a place where disruptive unusual experiences could be processed better than in psychiatric care, due to the life-experiences of its co-founder, Dick Price.

In his 20s, Price got very into Taoism and Buddhism while studying at the American Academy of Asian Studies (which later became CIIS) in San Francisco. In 1955, when he was 24, he experienced what Jeffrey Kripal in his book on Esalen terms ‘mystical mania and institutionalization’, possibly triggered by mismatch between his mystical temperament and his cold, conservative and demanding parents. The mania was also triggered after he met his future wife - he heard a voice saying he would marry her. They got married, he became manic, and one night he was arrested and hospitalized.

He interpreted his psychosis as a spiritual awakening (this is a quote from Jeffrey’s book):

Price emerged from the psychotic episode “washed clean.” He would later describe it as a “transitional psychosis”

His parents then lied to him to keep him hospitalized in a private hospital, while they annulled his marriage and paid his first wife to disappear. This second hospitalization was a brutal experience involving successive treatments with Electro-Shock Therapy and induced insulin comas. Price later said:

There was a fundamental mistake being made and that mistake was supposing that the healing process was the disease, rather than the process whereby the disease is healed. The disease, if any, was the state previous to the “psychosis.” The so-called “psychosis” was an attempt toward spontaneous healing, and it was a movement toward health, not a movement toward disease.’

Then he came out of the hospital, recovered, and in 1960 he met Michael Murphy at the American Academy of Asian Studies, and the rest is history.

So part of the founding story of Esalen is the idea that spiritual awakenings can be mixed together with what looks like psychological disturbances, even extreme disturbances like mania and psychosis. But Price argued such mystical-psychotic experiences shouldn’t be treated as just a breakdown or pathology - they can actually be a move towards greater wholeness, health and spiritual maturity

Others made a similar point, that psychotic breakdowns could also be meaningful spiritual experiences, such as Jung, Roberto Assagioli, and contemporaries of Dick Price like RD Laing and John Weir Perry. A better treatment than anti-psychotics and hospitalisation in an ER ward, according to Price, would be to find the right container - like Esalen (although it is on a cliff, so maybe not…), or John Weir Perry’s Diabasis House in SF, or Laing’s Kingsley Hall in London, where you can let the experience play itself out. Price and his second wife, Chris, developed a method he called Gestalt Practice to support people experiencing extreme states of consciousness.

Price’s personal life didn’t necessarily fit the ‘spiritual emergency’ model entirely (i.e a turbulent transition to a higher state), in the sense that he had further psychotic episodes and needed to be hospitalized at least one further time. In 1969, he had a psychotic episode after taking ibogaine. They tried to contain it at Esalen for the first months, which led to some interesting episodes. Apparently, when Richard Alpert appeared there in his new incarnation as Ram Dass, complete in Indian robes and prayer beads, the manic Price (who was a college wrestler) rugby-tackled him, dragged him into a stream and got him into a chokehold until he admitted he was a phony! His co-founder, Michael Murphy, still laughs at the memory of Price and Alpert rolling down the lawn, Alpert’s Indian robes wrapping around them.

Eventually, the staff at Esalen agreed Price needed to be taken to the local hospital. John F. Callaghan, writing for the Gestalt Legacy Project, recalls:

At the hospital, during the admission process, Dick almost convinced the hospital staff that he was actually his friend, Dr. Jack Downing — the person who had taken Dick to the hospital.

Still, apparently after this episode Price remained in very good health until the end of his life in 1985. Robert Forte, who lived and worked at Esalen in the early 1980s, tells me:

Dick was one of the most fantastic people. I used to think, this was a guy who had life by the balls. He was in his 50s. He was incredibly fit and athletic. He had Esalen, he had this beautiful little house, he had this gorgeous wife and this cute little boy. He’d wake up every morning and you’d see him do his yoga out on the deck, he was very disciplined with his yoga. And every day he would walk up the canyon and sit and do his meditation. And I just thought, if I can be reborn, I want to get reborn as Dick Price.

So Price’s life does stand testament to the possibility one can have a very rich, fulfilling life after experiencing one or more psychotic episodes - and maybe spiritual practices and a non-judgemental context like Esalen can help with that.

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The Grofs and spiritual emergency

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the concept of ‘spiritual emergency’ was developed by Stan and Christina Grof here at Esalen. Stan was a Czech psychiatrist who supposedly supervised thousands of LSD experiences with patients (although his one-time disciple, Robert Forte, says he now thinks that total must have been exaggerated). He moved to Esalen from Johns Hopkins in 1973, leaving academia in order to explore the far reaches of human consciousness, including working with psychedelics illegally.

It was at Esalen in 1975 that he met his second wife Christina . She had previously experienced psycho-spiritual crises connected to life stressors (the birth of her first child, and then divorce and losing custody of her children), and then she had a five-day ‘spiritual emergency’ after taking psychedelics with Stan at Esalen.

Together, they developed the idea of the ‘spiritual emergency’ and published a collection of essays with that title in 1989. The term denoted a psycho-spiritual crisis often prompted by intense spiritual practices (yoga, meditation, psychedelics) although it could be spontaneous as well. Their term included UFO experiences, channeling, near death, out of body experiences, and even spirit possessions. A spiritual emergency was characterized by intense and disturbing symptoms - kundalini, mania, Messianism, weird synchronicities or paranormal events, a blurring of the inner and outer worlds and intense archetypal content often with religious themes. They insisted such experiences were not organic pathology (ie, not physical), but rather an ‘evolutionary crisis’, a turbulent spiritual emergence into a higher state.

So ‘spiritual emergency’ included both a developmental state theory - the individual is emerging into a higher or ‘more evolved’ state of development and maturity; and also a metaphysics and teleology. Each moment a human ‘popped’ into a higher state was part of a collective flowering of human consciousness into cosmic consciousness, part of the evolution of humanity into the superhuman. This idea fitted very well with the evolutionary spirituality of Esalen - we’re all evolving into superhuman mutants (or some of us are, anyway - there could be a subtle or not so subtle elitism to evolutionary spirituality, as I wrote in this article).

What does it mean practically if someone is diagnosed as experiencing a ‘spiritual emergency’ as opposed to common-garden psychosis or mania? According to the Grofs, they should receive support, sympathy and sanctuary in a safe place (it helps if you’re affluent and can afford to take weeks or months off work and have a safe peaceful beautiful place to be, like Esalen). Stan Grof coined the term ‘holotropic’, meaning the psyche seeks wholeness - the patient (or ‘experiencer’) should help the psyche seek wholeness by going in and through the experience to complete the transition into a higher and more evolved state. Sometimes that might involve more psychedelics, Holotropic Breathwork or other psycho-spiritual practices to achieve catharsis, even if that means intensifying the experience. Avoid hospitalization, and avoid anti-psychotics or tranquilizers, according to the Grofs, because they dampen the psyche and prevent it completing the transition to wholeness. They wrote:

When these states of mind are properly understood and treated supportively rather than suppressed by standard psychiatric routines, they can be healing and have very beneficial effects on the people who experience them

The exception to their wariness towards psychiatric medication is psychedelics, because they were thought to help the client go in, through and out the other side.

The Grofs published Spiritual Emergency in 1989 - a collection of essays from figures like Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, John Weir Perry, RD Laing and Roberto Assagioli, who offer a range of perspectives on this domain. It’s a really helpful book, sort of a Be Here Now for the dark night of the soul. They also held a four week seminar on the topic here at Esalen (the tapes of this might exist somewhere), and they established the Spiritual Emergence Network (SEN), through which hundreds of people contacted them each year seeking help for psycho-spiritual crises.

The veteran psychedelic researcher, guide and writer Robert Forte worked with Grof at Esalen, and I reached out to him to ask for his reflections. He left academia in his early 20s to work with Grof at Esalen. Grof, 20 years his senior, was a father-figure to him, taught him how to trip-sit (or ‘baby-sit’ as they called it), and taught Forte his Holotropic model, including the four stages of birth that people supposedly go through during psychedelics. Robert was a believer in this model at first, but came to think that, actually, people were just telling the charismatic guru what he expected to hear. He also became sceptical of ‘spiritual emergencies’.

I initially believed in the idea that we need a spiritual awakening and we all have to go through this passage. But after a while, I realized, this is stupid. I didn’t see any ‘spiritual emergencies’ in two years, I did see psychosis and early-adult-onset schizophrenia. But we would refer people to a few places where they could get alternative treatment and not get over-medicated. I still believe in that.

He adds:

I learned another thing about Stan’s personality - he has a very controlled persona, but he loves to see people break down and break through in sessions, it was like a triumph if you were having this abreaction.

And did that make him less sensitive to the possibility of people simply having breakdowns?

Yeah, he was distant. He didn’t want to be involved in stuff like that. He was above that. He didn’t want to deal with personal issues. He didn’t really want to deal with mental illness. Just ventilate it and keep going into the transpersonal.

There are even doubts if Christina Grof - patient zero for Spiritual Emergencies - could be said to have had an experience that cleanly fits the Grofs’ own model of a crisis followed by an emergence into a higher / more evolved state of development and maturity. As she recounts in her 1993 book, The Thirst for Wholeness, when she moved to Esalen and had her psycho-spiritual crisis, she ended up developing alcoholism for 12 years, and was helped to recover through AA. Good for her for admitting that and talking about it honestly.

1990s-2000s: The concept of Spiritual Emergency struggles to establish itself clinically

In the years since the Grofs introduced the concept of Spiritual Emergency, it has struggled to establish itself clinically and academically. This is true of many of the therapeutic innovations developed in the hot-tubs at Esalen, like Gestalt therapy, Internal Family Systems and Transpersonal psychology. It’s just a different form of validation and assessment, one more based on vibes and charisma than peer-review and falsification. The innovations developed in the informal spaces of Esalen can spread in alternative healing networks, but they often fail to cross back into the mainstream.

The Grofs struggled to define the term themselves. They wrote in their 1989 book:

Episodes of nonordinary states of consciousness cover a very wide spectrum, from purely spiritual states without any pathological features to conditions that are clearly biological in nature and require medical treatment. It is extremely important to take a balanced approach and to be able to differentiate spiritual emergencies from genuine psychoses.

What does that mean - ‘clearly biological’? Are there clear biomarkers for schizophrenia? Could the Grofs be at risk of falling into too rigid and neat a Soul / body split - ‘our psychotic crises are spiritual, while your psychotic crises are clearly biological’ ?

We also need to keep in mind the historical context in which the term was introduced - in the 1980s, as psychedelic research and practice become outlawed and move into the illicit underground. Was ‘Spiritual Emergency’ in part a defensive posture to defend these banned substances and to spiritualize any adverse events that clients might experience? Did the label ever cause harm? There was at least one psychedelic-related death at Esalen under Grof’s supervision, we simply have no idea how many other Serious Adverse Events there were, because no outcomes data is kept in the underground.

The Spiritual Emergence Network kept on running through the 1980s and 1990s, and was housed at the California Institute of Integral Studies in 1998. But it declined in the Noughties and is barely going today, as far as I’m aware. Meanwhile, there have been several attempts to validate the SE concept and disseminate it into mainstream psychiatry. The most successful was David Lukoff’s introduction of the diagnosis ‘Spiritual or Religious Problem’ into the DSM IV in 1994. But I don’t think the diagnosis has been used much by psychiatrists, if at all.

More recently, Goretzki et al developed a Spiritual Emergency Scale in 2009, which Bronn and McIlwain sought to validate in 2014. They found it overlapped with positive symptoms of psychosis (voices, visions and so on). Harris et al in 2014 suggested the scale did not capture the ‘crisis’ aspect of Spiritual Emergency. Then a Delphi consensus study by Harris et al, of 20 experts, failed to find consensus over what the term actually meant. Any term that can cover everything from UFO encounters, spirit possession, channeling, dark nights of the soul, kundalini awakenings, to post-psychelic and post-meditation crises is probably just being asked to do too much heavy lifting.

But the term lives on in informal networks of ‘lived experiencers’ and people who want a better label for their extreme experiences than strictly-pathological ones. If you search on YouTube and TikTok, you can find many videos along the lines of ‘10 signs you’re having a spiritual emergency’. Phil Borges’ 2017 documentary CrazyWise is enormously popular, with its somewhat Romantic exploration of how unusual mind-states are much more validated in non-western cultures, while his TedX talk has 8 million views.

I myself found the SE frame helpful, when I experienced extreme derealization / psychosis after a 10-day ayahuasca retreat. For several days, I wasn’t sure if I was in a dream, or the afterlife. Luckily, I got home from the retreat safely, my friends took care of me, and a few days later the experience passed and I was none-the-worse. I even look back on the experience as interesting, and net-positive - it helped me open my heart to my friends, and learn to rely on others. I was very lucky I wasn’t arrested or hospitalized, and that my friends were also familiar with ‘spiritual emergencies’ and didn’t freak out. Three years after that, in 2020, I co-edited Breaking Open, which is a collection of first-person accounts of spiritual emergencies or, if you prefer, psycho-spiritual crises. But, six years later, I find myself a little more wary of the term. Let me explain why.

Spiritual Emergency and the psychedelic renaissance

The concept of SE has become more widely known in the last few years due to the psychedelic renaissance. Probably all of you are familiar with the renaissance, but just to recap - in the last 20 years, there’s been a surge in research into psychedelics, a lot of positive media, tens of billions in capital investment, and even an executive order from President Trump supporting psychedelic medicine. This is after psychedelics were banned in the late 1960s and early 1970s, after a moral panic that college kids were taking them and losing their minds.

The psychedelic renaissance has been extraordinarily successful at rehabilitating the image of psychedelics. They’re not drugs, they’re medicine. If you sell them you’re not a drug dealer, you’re a ‘space-holder’ or a concierge. There’s no bad trips, just ‘challenging experiences’. You’re not vomiting, you’re purging. And you’re not experiencing a serious prolonged adverse event, you’re having a spiritual emergency.

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One of the bits of the ‘psychedelic safety net’ which needs some improvement is the evidence base for how to help people recover from post-psychedelic crises. We know that roughly 8% of people report moderate-to-severe difficulties lasting longer than a month after taking psychedelics. What we don’t yet know is what’s the best way or ways for them to deal with those difficulties. There have been a handful of papers (we’ve published some) but not much. And the lack of evidence means there’s a risk that people don’t know there’s help out there, or they reach out for help and get substandard care.

That’s what happened to me when I had post-psychedelic PTSD when I was 20 - I went to see a therapist, who had no knowledge of psychedelics, and he told me I was suffering from teenage angst and would grow out of it. I didn’t start recovering for another four years. That’s why I’m passionate about trying to improve care for post-psychedelic issues today.

We’ve just launched one initiative which I hope might slowly begin to improve care. It’s a database where therapists and psychiatrists with experience of treating post-psychedelic issues can offer their services, so people in crisis can find support near them or online that fits their needs.

• If you’re a therapist or psychiatrist who supports people with post-psychedelic difficulties you can sign up for free here.

• And if you’re looking for support you can find therapists and psychiatrists here (although keep in mind we only launched last week, so we’re still populating the database).

The database is also a network - every practitioner in the database receives a monthly digest from us with the latest research or case studies on post-psychedelic difficulties / recovery, and gets invited to a monthly group where they can discuss cases and new findings. The first monthly group is next Monday.

The hope is the network will help the field to learn collectively about harms and how to help people recover from them. If you’re a practitioner, I hope you sign up, it’s completely free and hopefully will be of benefit to you and to clients.

After the paywall, looksmaxxer Connor Murphy’s tragic death connected to ayahuasca-induced psychosis; man sues OpenAI after ChatGPT tells him he’s the Messiah; good times for philosophers and the Talmud in AI; RIP Robert Thurman; a new paper on psychedelic safety; six government agencies make psychedelic announcements in one day (yesterday), and - is the VA providing adequate safeguards for veterans trying psychedelics?

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After I was at Esalen, I spent a few days in San Francisco. I live in a little beach town in Costa Rica, which is lovely, but wow it’s a pleasure to be back in a big city every now and then, especially one that is a little colder than the tropics, pedestrian-friendly, has great Asian food and is always buzzing with new ideas. I walked around like a country bumpkin, staring with a goofy grin on my face.

I also had some great meetings - I put out a call to my Substack readers and several got in touch and met up with me. Some even gave me gifts - thank you!

A highlight of the trip was meeting Marsha Rosenbaum. She’s a legend in drug reform and harm reduction. Marsha was a sociologist at UCSF, and got an NIDA grant to do the first sociological study of MDMA in 1985. She and colleagues interviewed some of the first users of the drug and published their stories in Pursuit of Ecstasy. Just like today, people used and experienced the drug in all kinds of different ways - to dance, to uncover trauma, to have wild sex, and so on. She then worked at the Drug Policy Alliance with her then-husband, Ethan Nadelmann, working with people like George Soros and Graham Boyd (now head of the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative) to get marijuana legalized in many US states.

It started with approval for medical use then quickly spread to approval for recreational use. Now, whenever you visit a US city, the sickly smell of weed hits you in the streets. One psychedelic researcher I met in San Francisco predicted psychedelics would follow a similar route - first medical, then recreational. There are already mushroom dispensaries in San Francisco, openly selling many varieties of shroom - they call themselves churches. You join the church by filling in a form on your phone, then in you go and buy your shrooms.

There’s been some articles of late suggesting marijuana doesn’t have the medical benefits that were touted in the campaigns of the 1990s and 2000s. I wonder if psychedelics could also turn out to have fewer medical benefits than was predicted five or ten years ago. Another researcher I met from SF is publishing a commentary that will point out the effect sizes of psychedelic treatments (which in some cases are quite small) might be smaller still, because people can tell when they receive the placebo so, ironically, the ‘placebo response’ only works in the treatment arm. That, he suggests, is exaggerating the effect of the psychedelic, because trials measure the gap between the treatment arm and the control arm. Privately, he wonders if psychedelic medical treatments will turn out to be a damp squib. Maybe…but by that point perhaps they will already have become normalized and available in thousands of dispensaries.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to meet with Marsha Rosenbaum was to learn about a drug harm reduction initiative that she launched in the 1990s called Safety First. It was / is a school and college program set up after the notoriously-ineffective DARE, which tried to educate young people about safe drug use rather than telling them ‘just say no’. Hundreds of thousands of young people have taken the course or read the booklet. I came away from our conversation thinking ‘wow, that’s proper impact, that’s a serious drug education project’.

It made me ponder how to increase the public’s awareness of our research on post-psychedelic difficulties and how to recover from them. I want everyone who experiences serious post-psychedelic problems to find the help they need - how can the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project increase its bat signal? We have been so focused on academic research this last three years but I wonder if it’s time to shift to a focus on communication. It’s horrible to think of people suffering alone when there is help available.

As it happens, while I was in San Francisco, I was emailed by a Ukrainian lady called Helena, who experienced severe difficulties after an ayahuasca experience. She feels, quite rightly, that there is too little information about the risks of extended post-psychedelic difficulties on the internet. Helena happens to be a marketing expert, and she’s been kindly helping me to optimise our website and YouTube channel so we reach as many suffering people as possible. She found us through ChatGPT, which is encouraging.

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Preparing for lift-off

Next up, I met a reader, now a friend, who works in the psychedelic industry. I’m not going to say which company, but they - like many companies - are preparing for the launch of FDA-approved psychedelic treatments either later this year or early next year. Is the industry ready to offer these treatments? Is the training and infrastructure in place? My friend thinks possibly not - he suggests some pharma executives seem intent on treating psychedelics as just another pharma intervention, like Spravato or Ritalin or TMS. It feels to me like the early years of the psychedelic renaissance were dominated by individuals and organisations who did too many psychedelics, while the later years are dominated by individuals and companies who don’t do psychedelics at all!

My friend pointed out that, as we approach market launch, there’s still a lot to do around education and training both for providers and for the general public. For example, should there be education for the partners and families of people receiving psychedelic treatments, so they know to expect sudden personality shifts? The fact is, the person who comes back from the clinic in the afternoon could be very different to the person who went to it in the morning. They might have different emotions, different memories, different worldviews, different metaphysics, different feelings towards their career, or towards you, they might have a different sexuality entirely.

The friend added that psychedelics are still very popular among the tech crowd in San Francisco, particularly ayahuasca, and at-home ketamine lozenges from Joyous, which many people are taking recreationally, apparently.

On cults, entities and AI spirituality

I also had the pleasure of meeting up with Don Lattin, a former San Francisco Chronicle reporter on religion, and the author of best-sellers including The Harvard Psychedelic Club and Distilled Spirits. He has a great Substack called Messiahs I Have Known. Don has been reporting on Californian religion and spirituality since the late 1970s and has seen it all. It was interesting hearing his take on various legendary figures of the scene, like Ram Dass (‘nice guy, sex addict’).

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I’m at Esalen for a seminar on mysticism and psychosis, organized by religious studies scholar Jeffrey Kripal and anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann.

Esalen is a hotel, workshop centre and hot spring on the Pacific coast near Big Sur, belonging to Michael Murphy. Since 1962, it’s been the home of the ‘human potential movement’, visited by such luminaries as …

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Did it fail? By one important measure, yes. Veteran suicides kept on rising in the years after the program was rolled out. But by other measures, the truth is, we don’t have a clear answer. One of the biggest-ever psychological training programs in history launched without a pilot, and was never independently and rigorously evaluated.

The rise and fall of CSF is an illustration of the power of the hype cycle in psychological theories. Psychology is an incredibly faddish discipline, arguably more so than other social sciences, because it overlaps with self-help and life-coaching, and because the media and celebrities love to amplify the incredible new way to fix yourself. Fashions rise then disappear - anyone remember the self-esteem movement? Or ‘hysteria’? Or ‘lovesickness’?

The end of CSF is further evidence that well-meaning attempts at mandatory training in wisdom / emotional intelligence / mindfulness / resilience or other psychospiritual goals always seem to fail, based on a lot of evidence over the last 25 years. Does that mean Positive Psychology was a pointless waste of time, effort and money? No. Some findings from the field appear to replicate, and it could intersect with psychedelic science in interesting ways. It’s the grander ambitions of the movement - resilience classes in every school, resilience training for every US soldier, well-being targets for entire nations - that didn’t stand up.

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A brief history of Positive Psychology

Positive Psychology evolved out of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which was developed by Professor Aaron Beck at Penn University in the 1960s. Beck was influenced by Albert Ellis, the cranky founder of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, who was in turn inspired by Stoic philosophy. The Stoics taught that our emotions contain judgements about the world or ourselves, which are often unconscious. If you make these judgments conscious, analyse them rationally, and then choose a more rational or wise way of seeing the situation, it will change your emotional response. As Epictetus put it, ‘It’s not events, but our opinion about events, which cause us suffering’. Change your habitual opinions through philosophical training, and you can change your emotions and whole experience of life, thereby becoming more resilient to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. That’s Stoicism in a nutshell, and millions of people over the millennia have found this philosophy to be literally a life-saver, including me.

Beck and his colleagues took the insights of Stoicism, dropped the ethics and metaphysics, and turned it into a brief secular eight-session therapy for depression, and then anxiety, and then a whole host of other emotional problems. And (unlike Albert Ellis) they tested out the efficacy of these interventions with measures like the Beck Depression Scale, seeing if people rated as less depressed or less anxious after a brief course of CBT. They found response rates of between 30-50%, depending on the trial and the disorder. CBT built up an enormous evidence base - there were 400 RCTs in 2014 alone, compared to two RCTs of Internal Family Systems ever. This evidence base was very impressive for insurers and regulators, and CBT became the ‘gold standard’ of psychotherapy. Its superiority to other therapies was probably over-emphasized, but at least insurers or regulators knew that clients of CBT wouldn’t be told they had ‘unattached burdens’ or ancestral trauma or perinatal trauma or ‘the Death Instinct’ or any of the other unfalsifiable and supernatural ideas floating around the psychotherapy world.

Martin Seligman was a younger colleague of Beck’s at University of Pennsylvania who made his name electrocuting German Shepherds to prove that they ‘learn helplessness’. When he was made president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, Seligman used the platform to launch a grand new vision for psychology. Why was it just focusing on pathology and misery? Why not study what makes people happy and flourishing? He called his new movement Positive Psychology.

At its heart, PP is based on the same optimistic idea you find in CBT - your reality is constructed through your habitual opinions, and you can change your habitual way of interpreting the world and train yourself to be happier and more resilient. That’s the promise of Socrates, Stoicism, Scepticism, Epicureanism, Aristotelianism and other Socratic philosophies. In Positive Psychology, people learn interventions to avoid catastrophising and to develop a more optimistic or resilient mind-set. PP also included the science of ‘flow states’ developed by Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the scientific study of ‘character strengths’, daily interventions like the Gratitude Journal or making yourself smile, and a whole adjacent field in economics seeking to measure national well-being. If CBT was Stoicism turned into secular therapeutic techniques for emotional disorders, then Positive Psychology was, as Seligman put it to me in an interview back in 2009, ‘Aristotelianism with a seven-point scale’ - a science of flourishing.

Seligman is a great salesman, and he had a fantastic sales pitch - finally, after 2500 years of human suffering, confusion and philosophical dispute over how to be happy, here’s Marty and his army of peppy Positive Psychologists to clear up the existential confusion and discover, once and for all, the ‘happiness formula’. What journalist or philanthropist could resist that? If you think psychedelics are hyped today, you should have seen Positive Psychology circa 2010. There were TED talks by figures like Seligman or Carol Dweck (mindset), Angela Duckworth (grit), Barry Schwartz (the paradox of choice) or Dan Gilbert (the science of happiness) which each got millions of views. There was a cover story in Time magazine, a six-part BBC series, and predictably insipid movies inspired by Positive Psychology like Mike Leigh’s Happy or Hector and the Search for Happiness.

All that hype led to philanthropic largesse. Martin Seligman’s 2011 book, Flourish, begins with an anecdote of Marty receiving a mysterious email from an anonymous foundation. He meets the donor, identified only as PT, who promptly writes him a cheque for $1.5 million. Why would you start your book with that anecdote? Presumably because the moments that truly stand out to you as you reflect on your scientific achievements of the last 20 years are the moments when very rich people write you a big fat cheque. The Templeton Foundation alone may have given around $100 million to Positive Psychology projects. Jeffrey Epstein also tried, by the by, but Seligman wisely demurred.

Positive Psychology, like psychedelic science, is perfectly designed for wealthy donors who discover money hasn’t made them happy - they will write big cheques to any scientist or shaman who promises to show them the secret of authentic happiness. Positive Psychology also took off because it resonated with life coaches, business coaches and HR departments, and could easily be rolled out in business or personal development workshops. Positive Psychology experts like Seligman charged companies and conferences $50,000 for one talk. Some businesses adopted a whole-organisation well-being strategy, like Zappos, led by its Positive Psychology-obsessed CEO Tony Hsieh (he later got addicted to ketamine, went mad, and died on nitrous oxide).

Many universities launched popular undergraduate courses in the science of happiness, or Positive Psychology research centres, like UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Centre or the Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues at Birmingham University. There were also attempts to introduce Positive Psychology classes into school curricula, including a three-year trial in UK schools of the Penn Resilience Program.

In fact, there was a whole political movement inspired by Positive Psychology, which was dubbed the ‘politics of well-being’. Political leaders from UK prime minister David Cameron to EU president Herman van Rompuy suggested their citizens should adopt the science of happiness. There was a brief period where this was a serious international political movement, although the wind got taken out of its sails by the 2008 economic crash and the rise of populism. The politics of well-being was, after all, very much a technocratic project - the experts educating the masses how to be content with their lot. Turns out the masses preferred rage.

I covered these initiatives from 2007 until about 2015, in articles, in my blog The Politics of Well-Being and in my first book Philosophy for Life, which featured interviews with Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, Martin Seligman and others. I was personally helped by CBT, and it inspired my love of Stoicism. I thought Positive Psychology was interesting up to a point - it seemed a good idea to teach basic CBT techniques to people to help them understand their emotions and how to change them. But Positive Psychology was more ambitious than that. It claimed to have discovered the scientific formula for happiness. This was often bad science (Professor Barbara Frederickson’s ‘happiness ratio’ was exposed as bunk by a British post-grad) and it often overstepped into terrible moral philosophy, over-claiming on what science can prove.

For example, Martin Seligman claimed to have discovered the key to flourishing: PERMA, which stands for Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment. Then he claimed scientists could quantify and accurately measure someone’s PERMA score. That is scientistic nonsense. As I often wrote, a person could score high in PERMA and still live what many would consider a bad life. Osama bin Laden would have scored high in PERMA. There is a limit to what science can objectively prove - you simply can’t quantify or prove to what extent a person is flourishing, because it is too subjective and involves unquantifiable things like closeness to God or impact on the lives of others. As George Eliot put it in the beautiful last lines of Middlemarch:

the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

In this sense, Positive Psychology reminded me of Abraham Maslow’s humanistic psychology in the 1960s. Maslow was an incredibly-ambitious, somewhat egotistical psychologist who became a media darling, and rabbinizing ‘life expert’, but who used the authority of science to pretend his banal moral truisms were proven and therefore everyone should listen to him and give him funding. For example, Maslow claimed to have scientifically discovered the values that ‘self-transcendent personalities’ always possess, simply based on his judgements of people he happened to admire.

This sort of scientism quickly becomes illiberal when you impose it on others in schools, prisons or organisations, because you’re telling people ‘we the scientific experts know the secret of the good life, we can tell you your flourishing score, you must know follow our advice’. That’s illiberal scientistic bullshit. There is no one model of the good life that fits everyone and, as Sir Isaiah Berlin argued, governments become tyrannical as soon as they try to insist there is. Let people discover their own versions of the good life, encourage them to experiment and think for themselves rather than being spoon-fed. That’s the basis of the First Amendment. That’s what John Stuart Mill decided, after an upbringing in which he was force-fed Utilitarianism.

Training the US Army in resilience

This brings us to Comprehensive Soldier Fitness and Master Resilience Training, the ambitious program to teach resilience to every person in the US military. Seligman writes in his book Flourish:

In late November 2008, I got invited to lunch at the Pentagon with the chief of staff of the army, the legendary George Casey, former commander of the multinational force in Iraq and former Delta Force hero. General Casey, lithe, short, late fifties, buzz-cut graying hair, walked in, and we all stood to attention. We sat, and I noticed that the three-star general on my left had headed his notes ‘Seligman Lunch.’

“I want to create an army that is just as psychologically fit as it is physically fit,” General Casey began. “The key to psychological fitness is resilience, and from here on, resilience will be taught and measured throughout the United States Army. Dr. Seligman here is the world’s expert on resilience, and he’s going to tell us how we are going to do it. Report back to me in sixty days.”

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