Joseph Emerson: 'I had no idea psychedelics could have a prolonged adverse effect'
An exclusive interview with the Alaska Airlines ex-pilot whose life changed when he tried magic mushrooms two years ago
On October 22nd 2023, off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot Joseph Emerson grabbed the fire suppression handles of Horizon flight 2059 in an attempt to crash the plane. When he was arrested and arraigned for the attempted murder of 83 people, Captain Emerson said he had taken magic mushrooms two days before, and thought he was in a dream.
The shocking incident was reported by media around the world. It was a bad news day for psychedelics. Emerson was blamed for putting back the cause of psychedelic legalization back years. Some leading psychedelic advocates told the media it couldn’t have been the magic mushrooms as their effects only lasted six hours.
By chance, our NGO published a journal article on October 24th 2023 -the same day Emerson appeared in court - showing this was not true. Our paper, ‘Extended difficulties following the use of psychedelic drugs’, was a survey of 608 people who all reported post-psychedelic difficulties lasting longer than a day. One of the most common reported difficulties was derealization, or feeling like you’re in a dream. I shared our research with Emerson’s defence team, who later told me it helped get the attempted murder charges dropped, so Emerson would not face the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.
Today, he avoided jail time for the federal charge of interfering with a flight crew, and instead was sentenced to time served and three years supervised release. He agreed to an interview with me, to describe the nightmarish events of those days in October 2023, and why he nonetheless feels he has grown as a result of all he has been through. He hopes the interview will raise awareness of how little we still know about the risks of psychedelics.
‘I had no clue that what happened to me could happen’
How old were you when this happened?
I was 44.
Had you used psychedelics before?
This was the first and only time.
What did you know about psychedelics?
I think I had seen the Netflix documentarty Have a Good Trip. I had some friends who did mushrooms, they said it’s really fun and doesn’t show up in a drugs test.
Had you heard anything about the risks of psychedelics?
My friends didn’t seem to be having any ill effects. I heard that you could have a bad trip, but I didn’t think that could have a prolonged, pronounced effect, as it did in my case. I had no clue that what happened to me could happen, and it seems that most people I’ve spoken to really aren’t aware that things like Hallucination-Persistent Perception Disorder (HPPD) can persist. Hindsight is always 20/20. If I knew the risks, there’s no way I’d take that substance. But I can’t change that. Where I am in life at this point, facing time in prison. I am grateful for what happened, because I’m sober today. I mean…I feel like shit today. I had a meeting with a probation officer yesterday for the state charges. It can be quite dehumanizing, the whole process. But I don’t have to drink over it.
How was your mental health when you took the mushrooms?
I didn’t have any sort of diagnosis of mental health disorder. Now I consider myself an alcoholic but I didn’t back then. I used alcohol to deal with life because it’s culturally accepted and didn’t jeopardize my secondary addiction, which was success and aviation. Being a pilot was a big, big addiction for me. I was working very hard and the alcohol was numbing me out of the existence of being a father and husband. I wasn’t showing up for my sons properly. When I took the mushrooms, I had just had a three months’ separation from my family for flight training. That’s high stress but everything went fine.
I understand you took the mushrooms with some friends on a camping trip to commemorate the passing of your best friend.
Yes, Scott Pinney was my best friend and he died of a sudden cardiac incident in 2018. It was traumatic and stayed with me. A group of his friends met in Winthrop, Washington, on October 20th, on a piece of property that was very important to Scott. His friends put up a yurt there to commemorate him, with his hiking boots in the yurt. I arrived in Everett, Washington. I had done four days flying, including a red-eye flight. It was grueling and I had a sleep deficit. My friend picked me up in a camper van and we drove to Winthrop, picking up supplies on the way. I started drinking in the camper. It’s a four-hour drive and I was feeling pretty good when I got there, and I just kept drinking.
The place is beautiful. We set up trailers and tents and a big bonfire. I drank a lot of whisky. I was very, very intoxicated when I finally did take the mushrooms. The first time they were offered, they were dried-out mushrooms, and I took one cap. And then another person arrived at the camp and he started handing out some mushrooms. And I remember announcing that I was going to have one too as I didn’t really feel much off that first cap. His mushrooms were fresh, and bigger. I remember the taste was terrible.
Then what happened?
The first inclination I had of the effects was visuals from the fire, time slowing down, and when I closed my eyes I saw patterns. Then the sound of the conversation would slow down or speed up. At one point it felt as if one of the guys was doing it on purpose. One of the guys was throwing up, I got very concerned. He went to bed so it was just three of us awake. I became fearful of the other two, I thought they were going to try and kill me. One of the guys kept saying ‘don’t forget you took drugs, it’ll be OK when the sun comes up’. The other guy said ‘you bought the ticket, you got to ride the ride’. That wasn’t helping me at all.
The stars were just incredible, and I was confused and paranoid. I look up, and it feels like I’m in the Milky Way, and then back to where I was. One of the guys gave me some water, and I had put a supplement in it earlier. When I tasted it, I thought they had tried to poison me. Finally, I ended up in the yurt, all by myself, with Scott’s boots. I was very concerned, seeing the sun start to rise and thinking ‘I am not OK’. I’m trying to fall asleep and wondering ‘am I an old man in a hospital somewhere? Can I hear medical machines? Am I going to see Scott come in?’
You’d been left alone in the yurt commemorating your dead best friend, it’s not surprising you were having a ‘death trip’.
I got very little sleep, and I remember waking up [on October 21st] and still not feeling okay. I remember my body proportions feeling off. I defecated and thought ‘my God, what’s going on with my body’. Everything felt out of place. I was scared for my wife and kids. I couldn’t understand why my wife wouldn’t answer the phone. I had a very odd conversation with my brother that didn’t make any sense. I was desperately trying to figure out, what’s going on? Am I in a dream? Am I alive, am I dead? I was asking to touch people’s faces asking if I’m alive. Then I think some people went shooting, I can’t fucking remember. I just did not feel OK and I had this strong desire to be home with my wife and kids. I remember when I finally got hold of my wife, I told her what I had done, and she was like ‘what the fuck are you doing?’ She sent me a video of the kids climbing some structure, but I never saw their faces. That fact stuck with me for the rest of the experience.
So there was one more night, October 21st, before you took the flight home. I guess you didn’t sleep well or recover your normal mental functioning that night either. Then on October 22nd, the day of your flight home, you’re still in a very altered state of mind.
From what I’ve heard and understood, everything should have metabolized out of my system. But I didn’t come back into a full sense of reality until October 24, when I was arraigned [for the attempted murder of 83 people].
So on October 22, you got on a flight back to San Francisco. Did any part of you think ‘I shouldn’t get on a plane and be in a cockpit?’
My perception was so skewed that my body was in full flight from reality. You try to explain it, you can talk about feeling like you’re in a dream, not knowing if you’re alive or dead. And people say ‘you should have gone to a hospital’, but I was not connected to the fact ‘you’re unsafe around other people and need to go to a hospital’. There was no self-awareness of that. I was just trying to go along with whatever was happening so I could get home, because that’s where I thought I needed to be. Nobody understands. This was an experience that was completely foreign to me. I can’t really explain it. I didn’t know that I was screwed up.
Were there moments where you felt more yourself, before getting on the plane?
Yes, but I never felt 100% in reality. I remember being dropped off at the airport. I kept looking at my maps and going, Is this really the way to the airport? Am I really in reality? What the fuck is wrong? I’m trying to figure this out. I said to the guy something about reality, and he said ‘you’re scaring me’. I think he said ‘do you want me to hit you?’ And I said ‘I don’t want you to hurt me’. I thought, ‘I’m just going to roll with it’.
None of your friends thought ‘this guy shouldn’t be flying right now’ or ‘this guy needs medical assistance’?
The one thing that brought those people together was we all knew and loved Scott. Some of the guys did drugs and some didn’t. The guy who dropped me off didn’t.
Captain Emerson checked in at Paine Field airport on the afternoon of October 22nd. Various unusual things happened to him that undermined his sense of reality and strengthened his belief he was in a dream - in the airport, a pilot approached him and talked to him as if he knew him. ‘He said he worked at Horizon Airlines with me. I was like…I don’t know you.’
Emerson got onto Horizon Air flight 2059 from Everett, Washington, which departed for San Francisco at around 5:23 p.m, with four crew members and 80 passengers onboard. As a Horizon / Alaska Airlines pilot himself, he travelled as a ‘jumpseater’ in the cockpit. Court documents say that the three pilots chatted amicably for a while about the weather and types of airplanes. At 6.11pm, while the plane was flying over Oregon, came the moment that would change Joseph Emerson’s life forever.
Court documents say that Emerson threw his headset across the cockpit, announced ‘I’m not OK’, then grabbed the fire suppression handles of the plane in an attempt to turn off its engines.
Emerson decided he was in a dream, and the way to wake up and be re-united with his family was to die ‘in the dream’.
I thought, I’m going to pull the fire suppression handles, and that’s going to cause the engines to cut out, and the dream to end, and me to wake up. I ended up making the decision I made. And I’m still responsible, I’m not trying to abdicate my responsibility for any of this. I just had no clue when I took the substance that I could be so drastically impacted.
For 30 seconds, Emerson (who is over six foot) and the pilots struggled with each other. If Emerson had successfully cut off both engines, it would turn the Embraer 175LR plane into a 40-tonne glider. That doesn’t mean the plane would have immediately crashed - the pilots could try and start the engines again. Thankfully Emerson wasn’t successful. Alaska Airlines later said in a statement that, because ‘some residual fuel’ remained in the line, ‘the quick reaction of our crew to reset the handles restored fuel flow and prevented fuel starvation.’
Emerson tells me:
The pilots grabbed my hands [from the fire suppression handles], pulled them off and pushed me back to my seat. And that human touch…it woke me up a bit from the dream. I was like, wait a minute, that human touch feels real. But it didn’t snap me back into reality. Then one pilot says to the other ‘you’re bigger than me. If he does anything again, I need you to take care of it’. When I heard that, I said, ‘listen if you guys want me off the flight deck, I’ll leave, I don’t want to harm anybody’. So I get up and try to leave but the cockpit doors are locked. I said ‘unlock the fucking door’.
Court documents say: ‘flight attendants received a call from the cockpit that Emerson was ‘losing it’ and he needed to get out of the cockpit. Emerson was observed peacefully walking to the back of the aircraft.’
I’m walking down the aisle. I go to the back to a startled flight attendant. I don’t even know what I said to her but we made our way to the back galley. There’s another flight attendant there. They’re getting ready to serve coffee and stuff. I’m like, ‘can you help me?’ She looks at me quizzically. I saw the coffee pot, and I put my hand into it, then I chugged it. I was trying to get any sort of feeling.
After the incident in the cockpit, the pilots immediately switched off auto-pilot and began an emergency diversion to land in Portland, Oregon.
Emerson says:
I’m in the back. I put my hand on the emergency door lever. I don’t even think I could have opened the door because of the pressure differential. The flight attendant put her hand on mind and shook her head. And I said OK and let it go. I said to her at that point ‘I don’t know what’s real. You need to tough-cuff me’. And that’s what they did. I sat in the aft jump seat and they held my hand. The touch was very kind. And I remember, at some point I wondered ‘oh, is this a sexual dream?’ and I tried to put my hand on the thigh of the flight attendant, and she stopped that. I was insane. The whole situation was so out of character for me.
Court documents say: ‘Another flight attendant observed Emerson make statements such as ‘I messed everything up’ and that he ‘tried to kill everybody’. The flight attendant noticed Emerson take out his cellular phone and appeared to be texting on the phone.’
Flight 2059 emergency landed in Portland, Oregon. This is audio and video footage of the moment Emerson shouted ‘fuck this shit’ in the cockpit and tried to crash the plane, and then him being escorted off the plane and into a police car, where he again says ‘I thought this wasn’t real’.
One of the passengers, Aubrey Gavello, later told ABC News: ‘The flight attendant got back on the speaker and said, plain and simple: ‘He had a mental breakdown. We needed to get him off the plane immediately.’’
Emerson recalls:
I still felt like it wasn’t real. I kept asking to go to a hospital because I thought, if this is real, I need fucking help. I need to talk to somebody. If this is real, I’ve done something unfathomable. And they kept denying that, so that became further evidence this isn’t real. Then I was in the back of the cop car, and in the front there’s a monitor showing what’s going on in the back seat. I’d turn my head and it would take a couple of seconds for the movement to appear on the video. And now it makes perfect sense that there would be a lag, but then I thought ‘what the fuck, this isn’t real, this is my mind’s projection’.
They take me into a cell, there’s nobody else in it. And I’m alone for what feels like forever. I become really agitated and convinced I’m not in reality. Am I in hell now? I tried to wake myself up by jumping on the walls. I got completely fucking naked. I don’t know how long I was left alone because my sense of time is all screwed up, and my body doesn’t feel real. No one’s telling me what’s going on. I’d never been in custody before. I know now that in jail they just leave you for long periods of time. I even urinated on myself thinking that if I wet myself I’d wake up. I did fucking insane stuff, that’s how distressed and disturbed I was. Eventually they brought me a phone and said ‘call your attorney’. I called my wife and had a surreal conversation with her. I think I sang ‘End of the Road’ by Boyz II Men.
After that call, a detective came in. They took my blood, and then she had a written-down description of the event, basically the police report. It talked about how many passengers there were, how many were children, and how I would be facing 83 counts of attempted murder. She said ‘does it feel real now?’
‘I asked her ‘is this hell?’ She laughed and said ‘pretty much’
After that they transferred me to the real jail in the County Detention Center, and the intake process got me all spinning. You get your mug shot and your fingerprints taken. And they put you into a holding area. To make a phone call you had to set up a phone account with the jail. And they wanted you to say phrases into the phone. One phrase really stuck out, it was from this 80s soap opera called Days of Our Lives. I had to repeat: ‘like sands through the hour-glass, so were the days of our lives’. I remember repeating it feeling, ‘this clearly isn’t real, when does this dream end or transition into whatever’s next’. There was a woman doing a standard medical assessment, I asked her ‘is this hell?’ She laughed and said ‘pretty much’.
She asked me if I intended to harm myself or anybody else. I said no. Then a bunch of guards came over, I got strip-searched, and they put me in a smock and into a cell without a mattress. It was 5am on October 23. I tried to get some sleep but kept thinking it was all a figment of my imagination. Later that morning, I had a conversation with my attorney. We had to yell through glass because the phone wouldn’t work. At one point in the conversation he said to me: ‘Mr Emerson, do you know that this is real?’ I said ‘I have to have faith that it is’.
A Portland public defender came to see me the next day. He was dressed like a hipster. He looked like a character out of a movie. If I were to imagine a public defender, it would look like this guy. I told him I’d taken magic mushrooms two days before. He said ‘of course you took magic mushrooms, they’re fucking awesome’. And I thought ‘this isn’t real’.
On Tuesday 24th, four days after taking magic mushrooms Emerson was arraigned in court on 83 charges of attempted murder. You can see in the footage that went round the world, that he still doesn’t know if he’s in reality or in some long, weird Kafka-esque nightmare. He looks bewildered and his eyes dart around the room.
He says:
I searched the gallery. I was trying to see Sarah, my wife. Meeting her eyes, there was this very intense feeling of ‘okay, this is real’. But I wasn’t fully back into reality until I went back to my cell after the arraignment. I fell asleep and upon waking, seeing where I was, I just knew, this is real. And I accepted the fact I could spend the remainder of my existence in jail.
News of Emerson’s arrest went round the world, with headlines like ‘Pilot on Magic Mushrooms Tries to Disable Plane Mid-Flight’. It was a bad news day for the psychedelic movement, coming a few months after a veteran on magic mushrooms had gone on a shooting rampage at a music festival, and just three weeks after California governor Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill to decriminalize psychedelics. Media were quick to suggest that Horizon Flight 2069 could be a serious set-back for the movement to legalize psychedelics. In the words of a Politico article on October 26th:
A near disaster involving an off-duty pilot who admitted to experimenting with magic mushrooms may doom efforts to decriminalize psychedelics in California. The alarming incident…has turned an already risky cause into an even riskier proposition for a governor with national ambitions.
Some psychedelic advocates tried to shift the blame onto Emerson himself, not the magic mushrooms, for the incident. An op-ed in the Sacramento Bee declared: ‘attaching Emerson’s inexplicable actions on this Alaska Airlines flight to his use of psilocybin is a red herring, and stands against all scientific evidence to the contrary’. Senator Scott Wiener, who brought the bill to decriminalize psychedelics in California, told the media:
Anyone can abuse a substance — legal or illegal — and do something horrific. People overwhelmingly use them safely, without engaging in violence. This situation is an extreme outlier, and this guy should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Various leaders of the psychedelic movement briefed the media that it was unlikely to be psychedelics that caused Emerson to act so erratically. Juliana Mercer, a veteran and lobbyist for the psychededelic movement, told the New York Times that the effects of psychedelic mushrooms last no longer than seven or eight hours: ‘There’s a potential for paranoia, but not 48 hours post-consumption, unless there’s an underlying mental health condition.’ Professor Anthony Back, a psychedelic researcher at the University of Washington (he’s now a friend and reader of EI), told NBC’s King5 news: ‘Extreme paranoia and panic is not really one of the adverse reactions that has been reported in clinical trials’.
At this stage, in 2023, the psychedelic movement was largely denying or at least downplaying the possibility that people could feel worse for an extended period after taking psychedelic drugs. There was little evidence of that in clinical trials, where conditions are optimal, participants are carefully screened, and researchers have a fair degree of control over what is reported and what is attributed to the drug.
Nonetheless, there is plenty of real-world evidence. In fact, on October 24th 2023, the same day that Emerson was arraigned for 83 charges of attempted murder, the NGO I founded published an academic article called ‘Extended difficulties after the use of psychedelic drugs’, showing the results of a survey of 608 people, who all reported post-psychedelic difficulties lasting longer than a day. One of the most common difficulties people reported in our survey was ‘derealization’ and ‘depersonalization’. And they often used quotes remarkably similar to Emerson’s: ‘I thought I was in a dream’, ‘nothing felt real’. Here are some derealization quotes from our study, below.
I myself had a similar experience to Emerson’s. As I wrote in the book Holiday from the Self, in 2017 I went on a 10-day ayahuasca retreat in Peru, and experienced severe derealization after the retreat. While flying from Lima to the Galapagos Islands, I became unsure if I was in a dream or even in the afterlife. Everything felt unreal to me - time slowed down, electronic equipment didn’t work properly, conversations were surreal and stilted. Each weird event seemed to confirm that I wasn’t in ordinary reality. This continued when I arrived in the Galapagos. I sent texts to my loved ones much like Emerson’s: ‘I think I’m in a dream’. They advised me to come home immediately, so I did. On the plane back to Europe, I was still unsure if I was in a dream. Luckily, the worst thing I did was to upgrade to first class (I figured it was a dream, so money wasn’t real). It was only when we landed in London, and I hugged my best friend waiting for me at the arrivals gate, that I began to feel I was truly back in this reality.
I knew from my own experience and from our research that Emerson’s story was credible. And I felt that the psychedelic movement was, in effect, trying to throw him under the bus by insisting that magic mushrooms couldn’t have affected him 48 hours after he took them. In late October 2023 I reached out to Emerson’s defence team and spoke to the forensic psychologist working on his defence, Alexander Milkey, sharing our research findings.
Joseph says:
The day after my arraignment [October 25th] I spoke with Alexander Milkey. I had a couple of meetings with him and he helped me understand that what happened can happen. I did not want to cause harm to myself or anybody else.
On the 6th of December 2023, the court in Multnomah County, Oregon, ultimately decided to drop the 83 counts of attempted murder, charging him instead with 83 counts of reckless endangerment of others’ lives. His defence team welcomed the decision:
The attempted murder charges were never appropriate in this case because Captain Emerson never intended to hurt another person or put anyone at risk - he just wanted to return home to his wife and children. Simply put: Captain Emerson thought he was in a dream.
Alexander Milkey, the forensic psychologist on Emerson’s defence team, wrote to me in January:
Hi Jules,
Thank you for your generous consultation about this case -- I can’t tell you how valuable it was for me. I wrote a report and testified to grand jury about this case. In my report and in my testimony, I included some of the quotes from your study participants about their experiences of derealization. I think those statements were incredibly important in helping the grand jury understand the experience of derealization following using psychedelics. Ultimately, the grand jury dropped the 83 counts of Attempted Murder. Although he is still facing some state and federal charges, he is no longer in danger of spending the rest of his life in prison, and it is not hyperbole to say that was a realistic outcome. He is home with his wife and kids. I appreciate all you did, Jules. I hope that someday I have the opportunity to repay your kindness.
Alex
It was a long, weird coincidence - the fact Emerson was arraigned the same day our article was published on post-psychedelic difficulties, the fact I had experienced the same rare mental state as him on a plane. It’s either a strange coincidence or maybe…we really are in a dream! But whose dream?
For the state charges of endangering the lives of 83 people, Emerson was sentenced to 50 days in jail (with credit for time served), five years of probation, and required to complete 664 hours of community service (eight hours for each person endangered) with his charity, and to pay over $60,000 to Alaska Airlines in restitution. Of course, if anyone had lost their life it’s unlikely the court would be so forgiving.
‘I am very lucky that I get to show up for my wife and my kids in a way that I was not capable of doing before’
Today, Emerson avoided further jail time and was sentenced to three years supervised release for the federal charge of interfering with a flight crew. Nonetheless, he still faces severe life-consequences for his bad trip. He tells me:
I lost every material convenience imaginable on this journey, and I don’t think I’ll ever have much of any of it. My flying career is dead. I’ve gotten hate mail. Society tells me I’m a piece of shit. But I have my wife. I have my kids. Today, we have enough money, and that’s okay. I don’t know what tomorrow brings but I’m trying to do the best I can.
He and his wife Sarah have now founded a non-profit called Clear Skies Ahead to try and help pilots be more pro-active in addressing mental or physical health issues. Emerson says:
What Sarah experienced was a partner who was hesitant to fully seek care. We try to help aviators see they’re more important than just being an aviator, that their health and care is vitally important. My friend Scott died of a cardiac incident when he was 36, and his wife has told me she feels that something wasn’t right and he didn’t go to the doctor. So we’re trying to tell these stories that help people get out of fear and into action. It’s not a money-making endeavour, it’s 100% a volunteer effort.
Extreme adversity can be a spur to moral growth, and Emerson feels he has grown these two years - he hasn’t touched alcohol, and even the experience of being in prison has helped him ‘in terms of controlling what I can control, taking one day at a time. There are some books that have really helped me - David Hawkins’ Letting Go, Thich Nhat Hanh’s Peace Is Every Step, Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are, and the Bible.
I tell him that he was very unlucky. Millions of people take psychedelics every year, and most have a good time. Many say they find healing from long-term mental health problems. Even those who have bad trips usually feel none the worse for it once they come down. Only a few (perhaps 3%) experience severe post-psychedelic difficulties. He says:
I am very lucky that, most days, I get to show up for my wife and my kids in a way that I was not capable of doing when I was drinking to deal with life. And that’s a pretty profound gift for us. If what happened hadn’t happened, I don’t know if my son would be doing very well right now, and I have significant doubts that my wife and I would be able to have the closeness we at times experience now. I don’t say that the mushrooms did it, that’s not what I’m saying. It’s the changes that I’ve been through. It’s hard to explain but there’s a real gratitude.
What would he say to people considering taking psychedelics, or to the psychedelic ‘movement’?
I wish I fully knew the risks of my actions. Most people, no matter what substance they may use, don’t fully understand the potential risks. Look at smoking and how in the past we didn’t understand the risks. Alcohol and its risks weren’t fully actualized for me until after this experience. I hope my story allows someone to get the appropriate care for themselves, whatever that looks like, with trusted healthcare professionals through honest conversations. That’s where things changed for me, when I finally got honest about who I am, and I got the care I needed.
We still have a lot to learn about the risks of psychedelics. Indeed, even Joseph’s case is still not fully understood - his legal defence argued that he was experiencing Hallucination-Persistent Perception Disorder, which doesn’t sound right to me or to other experts on psychedelic adverse events. I argued that he (and I) experienced intense post-psychedelic derealization, but some experts disagree with this diagnosis as well. Professor Tomislav Majic, who runs a clinic specializing in post-psychedelic difficulties at the University of Berlin, says that most people experiencing derealization know that the feeling of unreality is just a feeling. If you really think you’re in a dream, and you act on it, that is more like temporary substance-induced psychosis. And in roughly 30% of such cases, a first episode can develop into long-term psychosis. In which case, Joseph and I both had a near miss. Some are not so lucky.
The challenge, for the psychedelics industry, is trying to predict who might have a severe adverse reaction like Joseph. He didn’t have any history of mental illness. And he’s not the only case I’ve come across of people having manic or psychotic reactions to psychedelics despite having no previous history of it (see this case study for example). If you would like to help our NGO learn more and help others in post-psychedelic crisis, you can find out more about our work here.
Come to this free online event on November 25th at 1pm Eastern time to hear journalist Ellen Huet talk about how she exposed OneTaste, the so-called orgasm cult, with her reporting, and find out about her new book Empire of Orgasm
Hi Jules, wonderful artcle - I admire your proactivity in reaching out to his team. Inspiring, and well done!
I feel this could have been prevented, easily. The lack of support this guy had in the aftermath is horrifying. I'm so glad he is doing well and my bet is that his charity takes off as pilot mental health is a great problem to start helping.
This is incredible work, Jules. As a practitioner, its very easy to read the circumstances of his trip and be aghast at the set, setting (sleep deprived, drunk on whiskey?????), and lack of support from his “friends” who were also there. But it is a potent reminder that widespread harm reduction principles regarding safe use of psychedelics have not yet entered the mainstream to a sufficient degree, and it seems that we have a very long way to go.