Dr Samuel Lee, the Spiritual Psychiatrist, and the MAHA moment

I occasionally write about the underground psychedelic market. Some take that to mean that I am actively promoting a particular product I write about. That is not the case - I am holding up a mirror to what is happening in the space, not selling it. In general, as regular readers know, I am an advocate for psychedelic safety and ethics, and am cautious regarding the safety of psychedelics, however they’re taken. However I try not to preach to my drug-loving audience, and instead to do what I can to promote education and risk-reduction. When writing about illegal activity, I will never ‘out’ someone for it unless (a) there’s a strong public interest in doing so or (b) they have done it themselves by openly promoting the activity on social media.

Come to this free online event on November 25th at 1pm Eastern time to hear Ellen Huet talk about how she exposed OneTaste, the so-called orgasm cult, with her reporting

Dr Samuel B. Lee MD, also known as ‘the Spiritual Psychiatrist’, is an American alternative health and spirituality guru with a big social media following. He pitches himself as a board-certified psychiatrist who delves into the spiritual causes of illness. The cure for our woes, he says, is for people to reconnect to the Christ consciousness embedded in our DNA. He offers various ways to heal, from peptides to morphogenetic codes, to the psychedelic ‘heart protocol’ which he apparently learned from Virgil Klunder (the most expensive plant medicine facilitator in human history). The heart protocol involves giving people ketamine, MDMA and psilocybin to re-connect them to their higher Self. This is illegal in the US, and would be cause for Dr Lee to lose his medical license, except as far as I can see his medical license expired in 2024, so he’s not actually a licensed psychiatrist.

Dr Lee appears to be on a genuine spiritual search born out of his own mental health issues. But sometimes, when you try to develop a more spiritual, holistic science, you can end up believing in anything: ancient blood-lines, Atlantis, aliens, light language, demonic entities and the 144,000 special awakened souls.

Dr Lee’s platform and business model

Dr Lee seems to spend a fair amount on online marketing. This is the advert that often greets me when I open Facebook these days:

He also set up a podcast and YouTube channel called the Spiritual Psychiatrist in February 2024, and that’s got him a lot of followers. He has 717,000 followers on Facebook, 678,000 followers on Instagram , 171,000 followers on YouTube and his podcast has a 4.9 rating on Spotify. This social media funnel directs people to sign up to his inner circle, an online community called the Eternal Life tribe, who get access to his special codes to help them re-activate the 12 strands of their DNA, re-connect to God, and live forever, all for $55 a month. There are 2600 members of the Eternal Life tribe so just that is netting him $150,000 a month or $1.8 million a year.

If you want to access just the DNA activation codes without joining the Eternal Life tribe, you can buy his online course for $300. (Just to be clear, I am not promoting Samuel B. Lee’s DNA activation codes, he hasn’t paid me, and I don’t personally believe in DNA activation codes). He also sometimes drops songs containing his Anuhazi light-language DNA activations:

Then he has a company called Limitless Living, where you can order a bunch of drugs online like Semaglutide (the weight-loss drug), Tirzapatide (another weight loss drug), MIC/B12 injections, Sermolin hormone treatment, PT-141, NAD+ injections, the ‘Glow protocol’ of GHK-cu peptides and BPC-157 peptide to ‘reclaim your radiant self’, there’s even Dr Lee’s Founder’s Bundle, the ultimate energy and longevity stack.

I asked Limitless Living’s bot who is the certified physician prescribing these drugs and it told me it was ‘board-certified physician’ Dr Samuel Lee.

I also asked what pharmacy was providing the drugs and whether it was FDA-licensed but it wouldn’t tell me.

Finally, Dr Samuel B. Lee MD offers people ‘the heart protocol’, which is apparently a multistack of phenibut, MDMA, MDA, psilocybin, and ketamine that he says enables you to connect to God and heal 30 years of trauma in 4 hours ( I am not promoting this, I am just telling you this). Here’s one happy customer, Luke Storey, describing it in conversation with Dr Lee:

People can buy ‘the heart protocol’ at one of Dr Samuel B. Lee’s retreats in the US, Portugal, Bali or other places for around $2500 a participant. He may also run private consultations, private treatments and private retreats for high-end clients.

Four months ago, Dr Lee said on a podcast ‘we’ve just created a church and we’re about to roll out it’. So that sounds like the next evolution of his offering. All in all, ‘spiritual psychiatry’ seems a pretty profitable venture and must earn Dr Samuel B. Lee MD several million dollars a year. So who is he?

How Samuel B. Lee became ‘the Spiritual Psychiatrist’

Dr Lee is quite open about his back-story, in podcast interviews and in a book he published in 2019 called The Spiritual Guide to Mental Health. He grew up in California, and is the son of a Seventh Day Adventist minister. Seventh Day Adventism is an American Protestant movement started by a vegetarian called Ellen G. White in the late-19th century. They believe in the imminent second coming of Christ, and are very into healthy living and wellness. Dr John Harvey Kellogg, a key figure in the American history of wellness, was a Seventh Day Adventist who then left the church to set up his own religious-wellness regime, a bit like Samuel Lee. I wrote about Kellogg here.

Morning breathwork at Dr Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanatorium, which would almost certainly be offering ketamine therapy these days

Dr Lee’s father seems to have been a harsh presence in his life, and Samuel talks about how he had to deprogram a lot of shame and guilt from his upbringing. He became a youth pastor, went to a Seventh Day Adventist university, Pacific Union College, then studied medicine at Loma Linda University, a Seventh Day Adventist scientific college. He then went to work as a psychiatrist at various places including Kaiser Permanente in Los Angeles.

However, Samuel went through several mental health crises, as a result of which his life took a very different direction. It seems he experienced severe depression while graduating as a psychiatrist. He also had a few wild years after leaving the church, then went back to church and felt intense guilt and shame. He got engaged, then had a manic episode on his bachelor party in Vegas, and felt the shame of being treated as a mad person by his friends and family. He didn’t get married, and instead embarked on a spiritual odyssey, training to be a yoga teacher, getting very into kundalini, trying ayahuasca and other psychedelics, and publishing his book The Spiritual Guide to Mental Health, in 2019. He was limbering up to become an alternative health / spirituality guru. He was also still a licensed psychiatrist, working for a while at a place called Alternative To Meds Clinic.

About five years ago, he met someone who invited him to his retreat centre in a small town in Tennessee, where he was given the ‘clarogenic’ protocol for free. He says he lived at the retreat centre in Tennessee for nine months and, when he emerged, he was an evangelist for the ‘heart protocol’.

Dr Lee didn’t confirm this to me (he didn’t reply to emails), but it sounds like he is talking about Virgil Klunder, a business coach who has a ‘clarogenics’ retreat centre in Tennessee and runs a coaching program called Waking Up Giants, in which clients receive a drug / plant medicine concoction to help them connect to their higher self. They record their insights while they’re under the influence, and then transcribe them to unlock their higher purpose. Klunder claimed, in a video interview since taken down, that he has ‘really, really high-end clients’ including politicians and world-famous musicians, who pay as much as a million dollars for sessions of clarogenics. I wrote about him a couple of weeks back:

The most expensive coach / plant medicine facilitator ever?

While under the influence in Tennessee, Samuel B. Lee realized it was his soul calling to set up healing centres around the world. He started offering ‘the heart protocol’, which may or may not be similar to what Klunder offers in ‘clarogenics’. The difference is Lee seems to be more open about what he’s giving people, and he seems to charge less (about $2500 a retreat, versus $12,500 to one million). Lee has offered the heart protocol with partners including Chief Phil Lane and William David Naylor of the Within Center in Austin.

The Within Center opened in 2022 and received positive media coverage from Fox News for its ketamine therapy. This year, it opened the 12-acre AWKN ranch outside Austin with a pool, pickleball court and sauna, and it’s now developing an 80-dome co-living ‘conscious community’ on the ranch. You can stay there and get personalized psychedelic treatment for $27,000 a month. Naylor said in a podcast interview a few months ago that Dr Samuel Lee was their medical director, but he isn’t any more. Naylor tells me: ‘We never offered the heart protocol’, although he discusses it at length in this video posted earlier this year:

Decoding the Guru: is Dr Samuel B. Lee MD actually a certified psychiatrist?

Central to Dr Samuel B. Lee’s sales pitch is that he’s both a mystic and a ‘board-certified psychiatrist’.

I have asked him repeatedly if he was board-certified and his assistant told me he is.

However, as far as I can see his license expired last year…