CPEP funding & EI editorial independence

Plus what the election means for psychedelics, and other stories from around the net

Welcome to the weekly round-up of news. Here’s a brief article then there are some links for paid subscribers at the end.

One of my favourite documentary makers is Errol Morris. He made documentaries on all kinds of different topics, from pet cemeteries to the Vietnam War. He has a son called Hamilton, who also makes TV. As far as I can see, Hamilton has only ever had one topic - his love of drugs. That’s all he’s covered in 20 years, but there is an audience for that, and Morris Minor had some success with his Vice TV show, Hamilton’s Pharmacopia.

I had never heard of him until about two years ago, when he gave a talk at Wonderland and decided to publicly attack the work of Shayla Love, a colleague of his at Vice, from the stage. Love is a very good journalist, which is why she was just hired by the Atlantic, so this attack surprised and annoyed me. I understand Morris has suggested she was funded by Carey Turnbull, which she absolutely isn’t - she’s a professional journalist so that’s a serious accusation. He’s also trash-talked Josh Hardman of Psychedelic Alpha and suggested his publication was launched with money from Carey Turnbull and Bill Linton (it wasn’t) and he’s slagged off Erik Davis, Nese Devenot and various other writers whose work I admire.

But I had never written about him, mentioned him or really been aware of him at all until the last month. In the last month people have sent me two episodes of his podcast, both focused on MAPS / Lykos, in both of which he has said that I was paid by the Sarlo family to coordinate an anti-MAPS campaign, partly by claiming that Elon Musk was paid to support Lykos. 

MAPS is a leading psychedelic organisation in the US and Lykos is the MDMA therapy company it launched, which recently failed to get MDMA approval for its treatment.

The first time he said this I was bemused, and surprised he’d ever heard of this Substack, let alone crediting it with some behind-the-scenes mastermind role in the failure of Lykos’ FDA application, but he keeps on saying it, and yesterday a subscriber wrote to me asking if this is true. So I feel I need to respond.

No I have not been paid by the Sarlo family to coordinate an anti-MAPS campaign. And hopefully no one looking at this Substack could think it’s in any way focused on MAPS or unfairly biased against MAPS or that it played any role whatsoever in the failure of MAPS / Lykos to get FDA approval.

Apologies if this does not seem the most important thing in the world to you today, but maybe some of us could do with a brief respite from US politics. I’ll share some links about how the election results might affect psychedelics at the end of this brief article.

In September 2022, I started an NGO on psychedelic harms and post-psychedelic support, the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project (CPEP), working with academic researchers around the world to produce peer-reviewed research on post-psychedelic difficulties. I care about this topic because I had a bad trip when I was 18, which led to post-psychedelic difficulties lasting several years, as I discussed in this TEDX talk from 10 years ago.

CPEP’s mission is to try and improve psychedelic safety, and it is not ‘anti-psychedelics’. It is agnostic, recognizing people are always going to take drugs and can be encouraged to make informed, safer decisions.

It was initially funded mainly through two philanthropic donations, both private, neither connected to the world of psychedelics, with further support from a great NGO called Emergence Benefactors. Back in 2022 CPEP tried to get funding from some of the big philanthropists from the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative, but in 2022, as far as I’m aware, they did not fund research on psychedelic harms (some have recently started funding research in this area now, which I welcome). 

We received funding for the last 12 months (September 2023 - September 2024) from five donors, all US philanthropists or charities. Some of them choose to remain private, I guess because they’re publicity-shy and anything to do with psychedelics is still a bit unusual for philanthropic families. But other supporters are fine with being public - including Emergence Benefactors, and the Sarlo family.

Also back in September 2022, I started this newsletter to accompany the research NGO. It grew really fast and in two years built up over 13,000 subscribers including over 1000 paid subscribers. I write about whatever I want, with a particular focus on ethics and safety in the psychedelic and New Age cultures.

The donations to CPEP support CPEP’s work. If you want to know what CPEP does, here’s our 2024 outcomes report. CPEP’s team of academic researchers produce around four academic articles a year on psychedelic harms and harm reduction, we present our research at conferences and to organisations like SAMHSA and the Australian Association of Psychologists (to name two presentations from the last month), we organize Psychedelic Safety Seminars and working groups of researchers, and we support a lot of people who email us asking for assistance with post-psychedelic difficulties, by referring them to evidence-based support and inviting them to our own online peer support group. We do a lot for a very small budget. That’s what our donors fund us for. 

CPEP donors can be public or private as they prefer. Either way, we decide what CPEP focuses on, and I decide what I write about in EI each week. No CPEP donor has ever sought or been given editorial input to Ecstatic Integration - EI is funded by over 1000 paid subscribers, they’re the reason I have time to do long investigations.

Why would Morris and various figures around MAPS be fixated on the fact CPEP got a grant from the Sarlo family in particular?

Some years ago, the Sarlo family had a law case with a board member of MAPS. George Sarlo was a big donor of MAPS in the years when it wasn’t so good at attracting millionaire funding. He was an elderly millionaire, a Holocaust survivor, who discovered psychedelics late in life and apparently found some healing. He had an assistant called Vicky Dulai. She was also his lover, and the head of his charitable foundation, and she used to do a lot of drugs with George, then in his late 70s, including magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, LSD, MDMA and regular infusions of ketamine. During this time, Vicky Dulai received at least $4 million in gifts from George, and she oversaw a million-dollar donation from Sarlo’s foundation to MAPS. Sometime afterwards, she joined MAPS as a board member.  

Eventually George’s daughters intervened, took Vicky to court for elder abuse, and took George into conservatorship. The case was settled out of court, in the Sarlo daughters’ favour, and they maintained the conservatorship of George. The story was covered by Olivia Goldhill in STAT News in 2022.  Having read the legal papers from the case, I think Dulai was clearly in the wrong and MAPS should not have kept her as a board member.

In around August 2023, I pitched to the Sarlo family to see if they would support CPEP’s work on pychedelic safety, and they gave CPEP a grant in September 2023, as did other donors. I made clear to them this would not have any impact on the Substack’s editorial and they have never sought any influence at all either on CPEP research or what I write on the Substack.

Since that time, I have barely written about MAPS or Lykos on this Substack. In 12 months, or 104 editions of Ecstatic Integration, I wrote about MAPS / Lykos six times. CPEP’s academic research was focused on psychedelic harms and harm reduction in general, while the newsletter has been focused on all kinds of things - shamanic cults in Peru, shamanic cults in the UK, dodgy underground MDMA teachers, encounters with negative entities, unattached burdens in IFS, case studies of post-psychedelic difficulties…Whatever crossed my path. 

You can read those six articles about MAPS / Lykos and tell me if they look like part of a concerted ‘anti-MAPS campaign’. I’m going to go through them very briefly - again, if this is boring feel free to skip to the end for links regarding the election results!

1. In May of this year, in this Tuesday round-up of links, I shared Anna Silman’s Business Insider article on MAPS. I thought that was a really good article and frankly wish I’d written it. When I shared it with my readers, I mentioned something I’d heard from a senior MAPS figure who used to be a source - that Rick Doblin would ask funders for money the day after psychedelic parties. I should have asked Doblin for a response to that. He then emailed me - the only contact we’ve ever had - to say this wasn’t true, and I added his comment to the article. 

2. In June, just before the FDA Advisory Committee meeting made its decision about MAPS / Lykos’ MDMA therapy application, I wrote this piece:

D-Day for the psychedelic industry?

In it, I give three reasons why I think the Ad-Comm would approve Lykos’ application. I write: ‘What if the FDA doesn’t approve the Lykos application…

Ironically, I think it would make it more likely that psychedelic companies minimize the therapy component of their applications (they’re already doing that). In that sense, one could argue the failure of MAPS’ application would make psychedelic medicine less safe.

At that time there was a petition going round in the run up to Lykos’ application, saying there was evidence of minimized adverse events on the Phase 3 trial and calling for an extension of the public FDA hearing by 30 minutes. I signed that petition, and felt some unease about that, because it felt quite partisan and I try to maintain good relations across the field in order to work together on common goals. However, CPEP supports full disclosure of adverse events, so I was one of the 80 or so signatories. 

The FDA public hearing was dramatic, in so far as the committee came out so negatively against the Lykos application. There were also many voices speaking out against Lykos. I didn’t submit any written or spoken evidence to that FDA public meeting, for the simple reason I hadn’t closely followed Lykos’ application and didn’t feel qualified to comment.

3. After the FDA advisory meeting voted 11-1 against Lykos’ application, I wrote this piece, expressing consternation at what the effect would be on the psychedelic industry and wondering / predicting what would happen next.

MAPS / Lykos: who is to blame and what happens next?

Any MAPS / Lykos supporters, donors, employees or shareholders, read that article and tell me if you think it is unfair or inaccurate. I would say it accurately presents the cultural divide between MAPS and Lykos and also accurately predicted what would be the company’s response - a public campaign involving veterans protesting in Washington. 

4. I then wrote this piece looking at the PR campaign in support of Lykos’ application, and this brief piece on Elon Musk’s public support for Lykos. I watched Lykos’ PR campaign with some bemusement, wondering what was the strategy behind it…Did they think they would influence the FDA with an endorsement from Elon Musk? But again, I don’t think any of my coverage was biased, inaccurate or unfair. Nor do I think it had the slightest impact on the FDA’s ultimate decision. And I never suggested Elon Musk’s support had been bought by Lykos - how do you buy the richest man in the world? 

There was one point in that article that was perhaps unfair. I asked if the journalist Rachel Nuwer had been pressured by big MAPS donors like Tim Ferriss to write a positive BBC article on Lykos that was widely shared by MAPS / Lykos supporters. I pointed out Nuwer has received a Ferriss grant, but so have countless psychedelic journalists and it was unfair to suggest Ferriss or other MAPS supporters might have influenced her article. In fact, what I said was I was sure Nuwer passionately believes in the cause of MDMA therapy - she wrote a whole book on it and spoke about it at a fundraiser for MAPS. That suggests she’s not a neutral reporter so much as an advocate on this topic - is that fair? Nonetheless, it’s not pleasant or collegial to suggest a journalist was influenced by a philanthropic donor, as I am now experiencing myself.

5. Finally, when the FDA made the final decision and turned down the Lykos application, I wrote this piece about that decision . Again, have a read and tell me if you think it’s biased.

That’s it. Six articles in 12 months, 6% of my total Substack output in that time, and on the whole I think they were fair and balanced articles. The reason I didn’t write about MAPS / Lykos more is that they have not been in any sense the main focus of either Ecstatic Integration or the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project. 

Both CPEP and EI have a range of sources and relationships across the field, including close supporters of MAPS, donors to MAPS, people who worked on MAPS / Lykos trials, senior people at MAPS and Lykos, and so on. They can make up their own minds if I’m a fair writer, an honest actor, or not. CPEP also involves a range of academic researchers, who are on the whole very pro the approval of psychedelic medicines. If my Substack was ever egregiously ‘anti-psychedelic’ or anti-MAPS,  they would tell me. CPEP has a variety of donors with a variety of views about psychedelic culture - some of them were / are supportive of Lykos and MDMA therapy. None of them have ever sought to influence the newsletter in any way. 

It is legitimate to ask questions about psychedelic media funding. A lot of media in psychedelia is pay-to-print - ie companies pay for positive coverage. Funding of psychedelic culture in general is small and over-dominated by a handful of corporates and philanthropists. Many journalists in the space have received grants from psychedelic philanthropists, that doesn’t mean they’re paid to promote a particular angle or organisation. All funding can come with an agenda attached, or not - it’s up to the integrity of the journalist or researcher how they conduct their business and how vigorously they defend their independence. Hamilton Morris works for Compass, and his podcast is sponsored by a nicotine company. I could suggest that’s why he talks up the joys of nicotine, or I could assume he really means what he says and writes. 

At the end of the day, the reader is the judge of the quality and integrity of what they read. Does an article read as very biased and one-sided, so much so that it seems like a corporate puff piece or a hired attack job? I don’t think any of my articles read like that and I can 100% assure you no one has ever tried or succeeded in paying me to write something for EI. I’ll try to continue to be punchy but fair in this Substack because a lot of people come to me with stories of harms. Does the space need more big publications reporting on this space, rather than a Substacker? Yes!

If you ever think I am biased, inaccurate or unfair in my reporting on psychedelics, or anything else, you can message me and I will listen, or you can unsubscribe.

Going forward, I’m going to put this disclaimer at the bottom of every newsletter: 

Ecstatic Integration is the newsletter of the Challenging Psychedelic Experiences Project, an NGO dedicated to psychedelic safety research which receives donations from a range of philanthropic donors. None of them have any editorial input whatsoever on EI. 

So that’s the big news today. Nothing much else going on.

After the paywall, some psychedelic links from around the net - an ayahuasca priest loses it on a plane, another one finds Jesus in the jungle, and a psychedelics ballot initiative in Massachusetts fails but the new White House team makes positive noises about psychedelic therapy.