ATMA's Journey: the Underground

A sexual assault case hits Canada's nascent psychedelic industry

What happens when a psychedelic start-up gets hit by accusations of sexual assault? This two-part article tells the story of one of the first legal psychedelic companies to experience this – ATMA Journey Centers, whose co-founder David Harder was charged with sexual assault in May. What lessons can the industry learn?

Part One tells the story of David Harder’s work in the psychedelic and tantric underground. Part Two will tell the story of the emergence of ATMA into the legal psychedelic industry.

Canada has just started to develop its psychedelic industry. Although psychedelic drugs are, with the exception of ketamine, still illegal in Canada, Health Canada (the Canadian government’s health department) has approved several psychedelic therapy trials and given special exemptions to over 200 patients to receive psychedelic therapy. Canadian organisations like ATMA Journey Centers, Numinus and TheraPsil offer psychedelic therapist training, and there are several psychedelic companies that have listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in preparation for the launch of the legal psychedelic market.  The underground market, meanwhile, is more and more visible in retreats, online dispensaries, and even high-street stores.

David Harder is a significant figure within this nascent Canadian psychedelic industry  – the founder of Catalyst, Canada’s biggest psychedelic science conference, and co-founder of ATMA Journey Centers, a leading psychedelic therapy training company. So it was a shock for the industry when a podcast emerged earlier this year, in which a woman accused Harder of raping her during a tantric massage. Another woman has since given evidence to police of an alleged rape by Harder. Calgary police confirm that Harder was charged with sexual assault in May of this year, and will face trial later this year.

David’s lawyer tells us:

Mr. Harder denies these allegations and is looking forward to addressing the allegations through all available legal channels. Furthermore, he is presumed innocent in law. Mr. Harder respects our legal system and has faith the truth will prevail in our court system.

The court will decide on whether Harder is guilty of rape. What this article will do is explore his and ATMA’s journey from the underground to the frontier of Canada’s legal psychedelic market. What lessons can the industry learn?

David’s journey

David Harder’s journey begins in a very different world to psychedelic tantra – Christian rock music.  He grew up as Leroy David Harder in a Christian family – his father was a preacher, and David (or Leroy as he was then) worked as a music teacher at Briercrest College. Some of his students went on to form successful Christian rock bands, like downhere and Honour to Honour.  He moved to work for GMA Canada, an annual awards event for Canadian Christian rock musicians. His wife, Natalie, worked for the Christian CTS Network in Alberta. Here she is in 2011, interviewing him about GMA Canada. They have three children.

Within a few years, they had left the church, become swingers in an open marriage and were training as tantric masseurs. Leroy Harder had become David Harder. What happened?

David told The Travelling Swingers YouTube channel in 2020: ‘Our first 15 years or so were very conservative, having our kids, a white picket fence lifestyle. And we became restless and looked at, do we part ways, or find some new arrangement?’  

The pendulum, David said, ‘swung really hard’ from Christian conservatives, to swingers, to tantra practitioners, to tantric polyamory.  They decided to train as tantric practitioners in 2015. David told the Travelling Swingers channel:

I had a curiosity about tantric massage. Then we ran into an opportunity to provide a tantric experience. We had no idea what we were doing. We thought that was amazing, how do we get training in that?

David and Natalie trained to become tantra instructors at Devi Ward Erickson’s Tantra School (as it was then called) in Washington, USA.  They both took Devi’s introductory four-month course. A year later, her school became Tibetan Tantra, and then re-named again as the Institute of Authentic Tantra Education. Students of the school’s earlier incarnations were invited to sign up to a code of ethics to get certified by the new organization.

David and Natalie declined to sign up to the code of ethics,  Devi tells me. Nonetheless, they represented themselves at tantra and swinger events as being ‘certified by the Authentic Tibetan Tantra LLC in Washington State, USA’. Devi, the founder of Authentic Tantra Education, tells me: ‘the company/school/institution that they cite in their bios has never existed as a legal entity and is a completely fabricated entity.’ Natalie also did not respond to messages asking for comment.

David and Natalie set up a company called Pleasure Center and worked at swinger and tantra events in the US, Canada and around the world, including swinger cruises. They offered intimacy coaching sessions for individuals and couples, and workshops in tantra at retreats and festivals, involving exercises like eye-gazing and ‘the wheel of consent’.

Their tantra business grew slowly. David wrote to Devi in 2017:

Natalie has pursued her practice hard and it has been really successful here in Calgary, although we are feeling the effects of the oil boom disappearing, so bookings are bit slower than they were in the beginning. Which is also a good thing as she was getting some pretty sketchy ones that we had to filter, and now seeing more mature and intentional clients. Getting some opportunities in the swinger crowd as well which is a lot of fun.

He and Natalie also discovered plant medicine ceremonies around this time. David travelled to the UK to attend Breaking Convention in 2015, just as the psychedelic renaissance was beginning to take off and legal retreat companies were beginning to emerge from the underground.

One night in New York

In 2016, David and Natalie offered tantric massages at a plant medicine retreat that took place outside Toronto. An American lady called Dawn (name changed) offered yoga at the same retreat. Dawn and David met at the retreat and got on well. David was supposed to give her a tantric massage at the retreat but for various reasons it didn’t happen. The two kept in touch and exchanged friendly messages.  Dawn says:

At that time I was going through some problems with my boyfriend and I would talk to David a lot about it. He said he would be the guy in my life who would never try to fuck you, who just holds love for you, who you deserve in your life. My self-esteem was very low at that time.

When David visited New York, he suggested he meet up with Dawn and give her the tantric massage he owed her. They were both staying at the same friend’s house. They went out for dinner and had some drinks. When they came home, David offered Dawn the massage. Her muscles seized up, and David suggested that – in Dawn’s words – ‘he could try something to open me up’. She tells me:

The next thing I know David is now on top of me and has penetrated me. From my understanding penetrative sex was never supposed to happen in a tantric massage. It's [meant to be] just fingering. I froze.

Dawn continues:

I woke up the next morning and went for a run to wash it off me. And I played it cool. The next night, I initiated sex with him. Because I thought, ‘I have a tantra teacher here, I am going to learn what I can about sex’ – to make it safe and okay. And then he left and I just crumpled. I was like a ping pong of pain and trauma.

She didn’t report him to the police at that time because they had met in the plant medicine underground, and because she had reported a previous assault and nothing had happened. Instead, she asked a shaman friend to mediate. ‘I can’t believe I was that gracious’, she says now.

At the mediation, David said she had asked for the massage. Dawn said he penetrated her without asking. David insisted he said ‘are you okay with this?’ Dawn said he penetrated her without a condom and then ejaculated in her. David said he’d had a vasectomy and also a recent STD test. He later sent her an article about alcohol and its effect on people’s capacity to give consent, and then abruptly (according to Dawn) blocked her on email and social media. Again, David has declined to comment on the events of that night.

For Dawn, that night with David had a terrible impact on her mental health. She says: ‘For a long time, every time I closed my eyes, all I could see was his face. It was so disgusting…. I had PTSD for two years afterwards. My ex-husband had to financially take care of me because I couldn’t work. I put on 25 pounds in four months of numbing and pain. I lost all trust in myself. It took a big toll on me.’

The same year, David was helping a fellow student from the tantra school, Carmen Shakti, with the website where she advertised her massage and escort business. Then the MeToo movement happened. Carmen tells me:

I remember him speaking out very much against the movement on social media – saying all the women were lying to get attention. Stuff you don’t want to hear from someone you’d studied with on a sexual healing course. And it was a couple of months after I had suffered a sexual assault, so I was struggling in the aftermath of that. I reached out to him privately and asked why he was behaving like this. He said he’d met a woman in the swinging community and they had a consensual sexual experience, and she’d taken to social media and said it wasn’t consensual, and that was why he was against the movement.

Then things got weird.

He sent me this email that was a long-winded overwrought apology for being a man. And at the bottom of the email was a close-up photo of his genitalia in white lace. Which might have been fun if it was consensual, but it was not. So we ended up having a falling out, and I wrote him off as a creep.

So did Devi Ward Erickson, the head of the tantra school where they both studied.

The psychedelic underground

By 2017, David and Natalie were establishing themselves in Canada’s small but growing psychedelic scene. David organized psychedelic meet-ups in Calgary, where he presented the exciting research coming out of institutions like Johns Hopkins and Imperial College, as well as hosting ethical discussions on issues like consent and harm reduction. He also ran psychedelic and tantric sessions in Calgary, including at the lakeside house he and Natalie lived in. He set up his own business, www.microdoseonline.com, which became one of the biggest online suppliers of psilocybin microdoses in Canada. And he would eventually launch Catalyst, the annual psychedelic science conference, the first of which took place in 2020.

At this stage, he didn’t have much in the way of capital or investment, and a lot of the work was done by volunteers, or people paid with microdoses or access to ceremonies. One such ‘employee’ was Jenelle Kitto, who helped David with the first Catalyst conference. Jenelle attended one of David’s retreats in Calgary. She had a fair amount of experience with psychedelics but she says she was given ‘three to four times more than I’d previously taken’. She adds:

In many ways, it was a well-run retreat. But there were also some red flags. People were still coming out of their journeys and there was David in the hot tub naked, drinking wine. If you have a problem with nudity, that’s your problem. It didn’t seem very trauma-informed. I reached out to him afterwards and said what I appreciated and what I thought was inappropriate and could be done better. He was not very receptive to any constructive feedback.

Another retreat client was Edward (not his real name) who was part of the same ‘Calgary burner potluck’ crowd as David. Edward was receiving therapy for depression and was introduced to David by his therapist. They both suggested he try psychedelics. Edward tried a first session on MDMA in a session supervised by David in April 2019. ‘It was blissful and wonderful’, he says. David suggested he try mushrooms next.

On August 9, 2019, Edward went to a house in Calgary for a mushroom session facilitated by David and attended by six or so other people. He was given five grams of dried mushrooms. ‘I was expecting a pleasant experience but I guess the clue is in the name ‘heroic dose’’, he says. The participants took the mushrooms together and were told to find a quiet place to lie down on their own. Edward went to a bedroom upstairs, lay down, and 40 minutes later ‘the mushrooms hit me like a freight train’. 

It turned out to be the worst, most terrifying, gut-wrenching, chaotic, awful experience of my life. I was in panic mode for two hours or so, though I had no sense of time. I felt like I was hanging on to my sanity. I called out repeatedly and no one came. I mentioned it later to David and he said ‘don’t worry, we checked on you occasionally to see that you were fine’. I was not fine.

David suggested Edward try another session, taking three grams of mushrooms with a dose of MDMA ‘to take the edge off’. On February 21, 2020, Edward went to David’s house for an MDMA and psilocybin session, and this time he stayed in the living room with others. But the experience was no better. ‘It was chaotic panic for two hours. Everything from the subconscious was loose and whirling around like a hurricane in in my brain.’

In the days and weeks afterwards, Edward felt let down by the lack of support for people who had difficult experiences.

There wasn't any kind of professional psychological approach or sense ‘this is where we go from here’. It was just like ‘oh you had a difficult experience’. There wasn’t much support, just a loose empathy. David presented himself as an authority, but I got the sense he had only had wonderful experiences, and he had a reckless optimism that it would all turn out fine.

Lindsey’s story

Another member of this Calgary psychedelic community was Lindsey (not her real name), a woman in her late 40s with a history of anxiety and depression. She attended David’s psychedelic meet-ups and says: ‘David would tell me on a number of occasions that I needed to try mushrooms to heal my anxiety and depression.’

Lindsey couldn’t attend one ceremony David organized, but he said he could offer her a private ceremony at her home, according to her. She felt special, singled out. On September 28, 2017, he came to her home with three friends and some psilocybin chocolates. Lindsey took the chocolates but didn’t come up for a while. David and the others finally left, just as the mushrooms took effect. She had a difficult night on her own, and no one checked in to see if she was OK the day afterwards.

By 2018, Lindsey was hanging out in David’s circle a lot. They became friends, and he told her about his tantra work. ‘He said he could break me open sexually’, according to Lindsey. One September evening, they met for dinner and a beer in her town outside Calgary, then went to her home, and he gave her a yoni massage.

On the next occasion they met up, two months later, he asked her before the tantra session if she wanted to help him run www.microdoseonline.com. Lindsey was honoured to be asked, and excited by the career opportunities opening up in the exciting psychedelic industry.

But the massage that evening was different, she says:

Up til that time he only massaged me, no penis penetration. That night I felt him insert himself. We hadn’t discussed this. I froze but continued to let him do what he wanted. I was confused -  excited because I had been offered the chance to be part of something big but I also felt violated.

The ‘tantra’ sessions continued, she says, but turned into sex. They became involved in a relationship, but David insisted it remain secret. Lindsey helped run the microdose business and also helped with the Catalyst events.  She worked hard to gain David’s approval.

One of the products on www.microdoseonline.com was the ‘Stamets stack’ – a concoction of Lion’s Mane, niacin and psilocybin designed by mycologist Paul Stamets. His lawyers sent www.microdoseonline.com a letter demanding it remove the product from its website. Meanwhile, the overground David Harder was hosting Paul Stamets at the Catalyst conference.

Lindsey increasingly felt her and David’s relationship was toxic and exploitative. Her mental health was plummeting. She says David could be attentive one moment, controlling the next, and then ignore her if she complained. He would use sex, access to psychedelic ceremonies and her role in the microdose business as ways of controlling her, she says. Those close to them noticed the unhealthy dynamics. ‘It just seemed a very toxic situation’, says one mutual friend. Jenelle Kitto says:

During a mushroom ceremony, there was a moment when David got mad at Lindsey and I during our journey. We were having a giggle moment together. He scolded both of us, for ‘not doing the work or being serious about the journey’.  He then proceeded to address Lindsey more quietly and directly. My journey turned from light to dark within minutes.

Eventually, David cut off social contact with Lindsey. First he removed her from the microdose business in April 2021, then he blocked her on social media, and didn’t tell her why.  

In March 2022, a mutual contact of theirs – a therapist – reached out to Lindsey at David’s request, seeking to ‘clear the energy between you’. Lindsey agreed to meet but didn’t trust the process. She felt that David was trying to control what she said publicly about their relationship. Eventually he sent her a cease-and-desist letter forbidding her from contacting him. She began to meet other women who said they’d been harmed by his behaviour. And, finally, she decided to go public with her story.

She says:

I have suffered. I lost 70 pounds in short period of time. My anxiety was so high. I never knew from one minute to the next if he would be hot or cold with me.  He always wanted to know what I was doing and saying. He would talk to me and then ignore me for periods of a time. I was vulnerable with trauma which he promised me he would heal. He used that to get into a position of power and exploited it to get me into a sexual relationship. He broke me down and got into my psyche. I lost my self. It's hard to trust anyone when everyone is connected in the community.

By the time she went public with her story in February 2023, David had co-founded ATMA Journey Centers, and it was on its way to becoming one of the leading psychedelic companies in Canada.

Part Two will be published on Friday.