Monday Brunch: Hamilton Morris, Psymposia, and why donors are leaving psychedelics

Plus other ecstatic links from around the net

Welcome to Monday brunch, which is a short article followed by headlines on psychedelics and other ecstatic practices. First bit free, the rest behind a paywall.

Last week ended with some shocking and very sad news for the small psychedelic research community: Dr Nolan Williams, a star researcher at Stanford, died on the night of October 8th. His friend, psychiatrist Owen Muir, said in a moving obituary that it was suicide.

It’s hard to understand why someone so young and successful would decide they should take their own life. But it happens, particularly to men. Even someone who broke new frontiers in the treatment of mental illness, as Nolan Williams did with trans-cranial stimulation and then with ibogaine, can fall into the crevasses of the mind. He is a big loss for psychiatry and psychedelic research. May his work benefit many.

Meanwhile, there’s been more drama in psychedelic media, where the information space has become so acrimonious there’s a risk philanthropists and researchers will decide it’s not worth it. I know some philanthropists who have quit the field because of the drama, and have considered doing the same myself in the last few months, as have other researchers I know.

On Saturday Psymposia, a left-wing critical psychedelics organisation, published a 200-page report accusing the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative (PSFC) of trying to capture the nascent psychedelic industry for their own profit. It wrote:

a small group of Silicon Valley elites sought to capture the psychedelic therapy industry — using a network of affiliated organizations to scapegoat critics while pressuring regulators to approve their botched MDMA clinical trials.

PSFC was launched in 2017 by entrepreneur Joe Green and Graham Boyd, a civil rights lawyer who helped get marijuana legislation passed in several US states. Its mission was, firstly, to encourage other wealthy philanthropists to focus on psychedelics as a philanthropic goal. It succeeded in that goal: since 2017, many philanthropists have started to donate to psychedelic research and NGOs. I think there’s over 100 donors in the PSFC network now.

Secondly, PSFC (which is a small organisation with a small budget), tried to steer philanthropists towards what the PSFC leadership saw as the most effective psychedelic organisations or causes to fund. Philanthropists could decide for themselves whether to follow PSFC’s advice - in some ways, it’s just a mailing list.

PSFC can claim some successes - its members and leadership funded a lot of psychedelic research, including the research of Nolan Williams. PSFC members also helped to get legal regulated-access programs passed in Oregon and Colorado, partly through an affiliated lobby group called New Approach PAC. Some PSFC donors also support the Healing Advocacy Fund, which provides advice to state health agencies on how to run these programs. Colorado’s program hasn’t really started yet, while Oregon’s hasn’t been much used. But these programs did, along with a handful of legal psychedelic churches, create a new term in the US - ‘legal psychedelics’. Arguably, they helped to normalize psychedelics, following the playbook of cannabis and gay marriage, both of which were normalized through state ballot initiatives.

PSFC’s biggest bet, and the biggest bet of its members, was on MAPS and Lykos getting FDA approval for MDMA therapy. Donors in MAPS and investors in Lykos bet hundreds of millions of dollars on that outcome, and it didn’t work, not yet anyway.

There are competing theories as to why Lykos’ trial failed, and scholars will no doubt still be discussing it centuries from now. My theory is MAPS and Lykos tried to do something very hard - use an NGO to get a psychedelic drug FDA-approved, having never done an FDA trial before, sometimes using therapists who worked in the underground and had never worked on a clinical trial before as trial sites. MAPS made it even harder by also being a drug reform lobbying group vocally preaching a spiritual-psychedelic mission. The odds were against it getting approved under those conditions, but it came close, and probably will eventually succeed in some shape or other.

So that’s one theory as to why MAPS / Lykos failed last summer - it didn’t execute the Phase 3 trial properly. That’s what the FDA itself said and what leading investor Christian Angermayer also said. Another theory is it was all Psymposia’s fault for hijacking the FDA public hearing and spreading suspicion and negativity towards the company through its anti-MAPS campaign. Some people at MAPS preferred the latter theory, and maybe some PSFC donors believed them.

Last summer, some PSFC donors paid for a well-funded PR campaign attacking Psymposia and trying to persuade the FDA to approve Lykos’ bid, garnering support from RFK, Elon Musk, Rep. Dan Crenshaw and others. It’s understandable that donors were desperate to get Lykos over the line - they had donated hundreds of millions to the mission, and now this tiny radical leftist organisation was (in their eyes) screwing it up and threatening the future of the entire movement.

But this PR campaign was a bad idea, in my opinion - I’m not sure you persuade the FDA to approve a drug with a PR campaign, and the campaign attributed excessive influence to Psymposia. It was also potentially risky to Psymposia’s members to publicly scapegoat them like that, as I said at the time.

So I understand Psymposia feeling scapegoated. They’ve also had the New York Times criticizing them in quite a one-sided piece, and psychedelic celebrity Hamilton Morris doing the podcast rounds saying they’re ‘psychos’ and ‘paid activists’ doing the bidding of various secret backers (including a philanthropist who donated to my NGO and other organisations last year, who has since exited the space because of Morris’ rants).

Morris is outraged that Psymposia received funding from a philanthropist, and claims this means they’re ‘paid activists’, astroturf phonies, shills. It shows a weird misunderstanding of NGOs - NGOs have a mission, stated on their website, then they seek funding for that mission. That’s true of pro-Lykos NGOs like Heroic Hearts, Reason to Hope or Healing Breakthrough and anti-Lykos NGOs like Psymposia. Hopefully the NGO leadership believe in their mission, and aren’t forced by donors to do something that goes against their values. In Psymposia’s case, I don’t think anyone can doubt they believe what they say. They were attacking MAPS years before they ever got funded.

Psymposia’s anti-PSFC book

Now Psymposia has come out with their response to these attacks - a 14-chapter book-length riposte to the PSFC and various prominent figures in it, especially Joe Green, David Bronner, and Steve and Genevieve Jurvetson, a Silicon Valley couple who have given millions of dollars to psychedelic researchers and NGOs.

Psymposia writes:

This is one of those reports that, once read, can’t be unread: by the time you get to the end, the history of the psychedelic field looks very different, and it will make a lot more sense.

Well, I think most people in the psychedelic field already know that a handful of wealthy philanthropists funded a lot of the research and NGOs in this space. I’m not sure the report is going to cause big waves. But I’m pretty sure funders will read it, and some of them might think ‘sod this, the psychedelic field is too toxic to donate to, I’m going to buy a yacht instead’.

And that would be a pity.

There are legitimate criticisms one could make of PSFC’s strategy or donors’ choices. The main one I have made in the past is that they didn’t initially fund much research on risks and harms, or a joined-up support system for those in crisis (although donors did fund Fireside, Zendo and ICEERS).

But PSFC donors have started to fund more psychedelic safety initiatives in the last 12 months or so - particularly the Jurvetson Foundation, which has funded the Fireside Project, the Shine Collective, the Coalition for Psychedelic Safety and Education, and a one-day seminar I co-organized this year on psychedelic harm research - a seminar which Nese Devenot of Psymposia attended!

Suggesting the Jurvetsons and other PSFC donors have a plan to ‘capture’ the psychedelic therapy industry for their own profit is unfair, in my view. It’s attributing the lowest motivation to their actions - greed - just as Hamilton Morris attributed Psymposia’s campaign against MAPS to greed. In both cases it’s an ungenerous and paranoid interpretation of another’s motives.

You could legitimately express concern regarding the Faustian pact that psychedelic donors and companies seem to have made with the MAGA / MAHA movement to get psychedelics approved, even if the regime doing that is damaging the wider public health system and the fabric of liberal democracy in the process. On the other hand, I suspect PSFC members donate far more to progressive causes rather than right-wing ones - Resilient’s new shareholder Chris Hohn, for example, gave millions to pro-abortion causes while Joe Green previously headed up an NGO devoted to pro-immigration reform. And (PSFC donors might argue) if you have a cause you are lobbying for, can you refuse to work with the current US government?

You could (and I have) investigate the strange nexus of money, drugs, research, underground healing, and high-net-worth spirituality that characterizes the renaissance, and the power dynamics and blurred ethical boundaries this sometimes involves. But the power and exploitation is not always top-down. On occasion, wealthy people seeking healing and meaning are targeted by sociopathic gurus and hustlers.

And finally, you could legitimately question some of PSFC donors’ choices in terms of the organisations and projects they gave millions to. It’s great that PSFC persuaded more donors to give to psychedelic organisations, but they all seemed to give to the same handful of favourite organisations, research centres or causes, which doesn’t seem efficient capital allocation.

Philanthropic donation, or yacht?

But ultimately, no one has to be a philanthropist. No one has to give away their money to charitable causes. And American philanthropy is a one-off miracle. Wealthy Americans gave away over $500 billion last year, compared to about $70 billion in Europe.

The left-wing critique of this is that the US’ system of oligarchic capitalism allows a few people to accrue billions and then give it away to their pet projects rather than taxing them for the common good, as in Europe. Maybe so. The problem is, Europe doesn’t generate enough wealth or innovation. Why do you think so many talented Europeans move to the US?

There are hardly any psychedelic philanthropists in Europe - maybe five, by my count. Psychedelic NGOs in Europe barely get any funding at all. I would love to see a PSFC-type organisation in Europe, which encourages more entrepreneurs and wealthy families to put money into the field.

Psymposia’s report and Hamilton Morris’ rants make it harder for any NGO to get funding in this space. From what I hear, many donors are deciding they are fed up with psychedelics, disillusioned by the failure of MAPS and Massachusetts, and put off by the weirdos, drama, conspiracy theories, in-fighting and character assassination. Some are exiting the field and focusing on other causes like AI safety. Plus there’s less urgent need for psychedelic philanthropy because the movement is now being pushed ahead by for-profit companies like atai, Compass, MindMed, Gilgamesh, GH Research and so on, many of whom are nearing FDA approval.

I’ve argued that psychedelic companies should spend 1% of their capital on safety and risk reduction initiatives but there’s little sign of that yet. Christian Angermeyer, the leading psychedelic investor, set up two philanthropic organisations, atai Impact and the Aurora Foundation, but they both closed soon afterwards. We can’t rely on psychedelic pharma companies to take care of psychedelic safety, because they will probably do what pharma companies usually do - minimize adverse events and focus on the bottom line.

Future psychedelic treatments will cost a lot, and will only ever account for a fraction of psychedelic usage. We need to learn how to help the 10% or so who feel worse after taking psychedelics, no matter if they take them in a clinic or in a field. Hopefully government funders will help with safety initiatives eventually, but I’m not holding my breath.

So I hope philanthropists put up with the occasional drama and stay in the field. Their support, particularly for safety work, is crucial now, as psychedelic medicines get approved and go mainstream. I imagine some of them will watch the attacks from Hamilton Morris and Psymposia and think ‘the only way I would donate to this space is anonymously’. And, frankly, I wouldn’t blame them.

After the paywall, Peter Thiel on the anti-Christ, Mary Harrington on the revival of monarchy, darkness retreats are in vogue, shamans in South Africa, re-colonizing psychedelics, and the dawn of the post-literate society…