Nine things you should know before entering the psychedelic industry

On psychedelic gatekeepers, and other challenges

We did another Founders Club this weekend, a chance for me to meet some of the Founding Members of EI and hear what they’d like me to write about, and it struck me that most of my readers, certainly the high engaged ones / founding members, are drawn to my writing principally for its exploration of the psychedelic renaissance. They appreciate me taking a critical view, because they want to be responsible, careful and ethical in their work. I applaud that aspiration. Many readers have gone through or are going through one of the 160 or more psychedelic training programmes, which have been churning out thousands of guides for a legal market that barely exists. But students are not always given a full view of quite how challenging it can be to work in the field. So here is a quick list of some of the main challenges they should consider and prepare for.

1) It’s still mainly an illegal market

People don’t realize this. People set up churches or trip-sitter companies or microdose dispensaries and think they’re legal – they’re not. Or they work as guides or psychedelic therapists and think it’s legal – it’s not (unless you have a state license in Colorado or Oregon). Clients get offered psychedelic therapy by their therapists and think it’s legal – it’s not. The risk of legal consequences is not zero. If a client has a bad experience, they can report you to your licensing board or sue you. There have been cases of therapists who lost their livelihood after clients complained about them following a bad trip.

2) Paying thousands for a training certificate doesn’t mean you can legally practice

Because there are 160 + training courses offering courses and qualifications for thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars, including many universities, people may think ‘at the end of this expensive course I will be able to work legally as a psychedelic therapist’. Josh Hardman of Psychedelic Alpha tells me:

The amount of people that contact me asking if they have wasted money on some random training program is astounding. They think they now have some sort of accreditation to deliver PAT.

Check what you’re paying for and what a training programme will enable you to do legally before you hand over thousands of dollars.

3) There are very few opportunities to work legally in the psychedelic therapy industry and these opportunities often have specific licensing requirements

If you want to work as a licensed guide in Oregon or Colorado, you need to go through a state accredited training and licensing programme. Even then, the supply of licensed guides appears to outweigh consumer demand at the moment, and some Oregon training programmes have closed recently. Other international training programmes seem to be struggling to recruit new students, for the simple reason that there are few legal economic opportunities for psychedelic guides. There aren’t many clinical trials and they use experienced licensed therapists. The biggest legal market opportunity at the moment is the ketamine market, but the telehealth market pays guides very little, and the Spravato and off-label markets require a medical license. Don’t expect a big pay-off from your psychedelic training course.

4) It’s not clear what the future of the legal psychedelic market will be

At the moment, it’s likely to be a handful of FDA-approved medical treatments provided by physicians under REMS programmes, and small state-legal programmes requiring state licenses. So you should ask yourself, what specific part of the industry do I want to work in, what training do I actually require, and what actual economic opportunities are there at the end of that training process?

5) The unregulated / underground / offshore market is an untransparent frontier market full of poorly or unethically run organisations

Given the lack of legal opportunities for work, most graduates of the 160 or so psychedelic training programmes will work (if at all) in the underground or possibly in retreats. Hopefully it’s clear from reading this newsletter that the underground therapy / church / retreats markets are quite untransparent, unaccountable and unsafe at the moment. Even some of the best-known retreat companies are, from what I hear, quite badly run. Because it’s a frontier market (like, say, crypto or cannabis) you should expect a certain percentage of cranks, grifters and frauds. I’ve met psychotherapists who have had one bad experience after another working in the field – either a company goes bust, or it has a terrible owner-manager who doesn’t care about quality ethical care, or the company is a straight-up fraud. Ask around before you take a job, especially if its at a retreat centre, and even more if that retreat centre is in a developing country. Working as a guide in a retreat centre is extremely hard work under very tough conditions, usually in places with poor infrastructure, low standards of care and a weak legal system. The chances of being able to do good, ethical care in retreats is, sadly, low – there may be some retreats which do a good job, but my hunch is they are outnumbered by the chancers. And the pay at retreat centres, considering the hours you will be putting in, is often low (and sometimes non-existent because centres will tell you you’re getting free experience).

6) Psychedelic culture is often quite culty, permissive, boundary-less and Dionysian

I don’t think newcomers from more staid fields are always prepared for quite how wild, culty, permissive, boundary-less and Dionysian psychedelic culture is. I’ve spoken to people who went on well-known training courses, run by internationally famous people, and they still came away shocked by what they saw. ‘If you did something like that in mainstream medicine, you’d lose your job immediately’, one therapist told me of her experience in one psychedelic training programme taught by a famous person. There’s a big emphasis on personal drug experimentation – so you have newcomers earnestly plunging in and trying a huge amount of high-dose psychedelics often in quite a short space of time, while also diving in to alternative or neo-shamanic belief systems, and there is a risk of them becoming ungrounded or destabilized. Psychedelic culture is a bubble in which Dionysian ethics prevail – high doses, fuzzy boundaries, harms not talked about or rationalized with pseudo-spirituality, and guru-figures claiming deep spiritual wisdom and a license to do whatever they want. And Nese Devenot is right - guides are sometimes taught that they magically know what a client needs, as in Facilitated Communication. Maybe they need to be groped. People get caught up in this Dionysian bubble and don’t necessarily realize how weird and, sometimes, dangerous it is. It can sometimes be basically a New Age version of a chem-sex orgy. You can be the victim of ethical transgressions, or you can be the perpetrator, even with the noblest intentions. Are you clear about your own boundaries in the space? Caty Enders was part of Massachussetts psychedelic-insider culture and was immersed in a network of researchers, guides and seekers all getting high and exploring and transgressing their limits. She wrote in the New York Times:

For many years, I accepted as normal the blurring of lines between clinical and research interests and recreational use. I failed to recognize the ways in which my own use made me more credulous and less clear about my own boundaries.

7) Be wary of psychedelic gatekeepers

Think of the landscape of psychedelic drug-taking as a large plain dotted with tents of individuals or friends taking drugs they grow, get from other friends or buy off the internet. This is maybe 90% of the market and will be so for a long time. Then imagine a fortified medieval town in the middle of the plain, called The Psychedelic Village. This is a very small group of people who have declared themselves the Elders and Gatekeepers of psychedelic culture. For 20 years they have been planning the Future of Psychedelics, talking about it at conferences, training people for the Glorious Future, setting up and funding organisations to create this Glorious Future. And after 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars, the Elders of the Psychedelic Village don’t have a great deal to show for it. The future of the legal industry is likely to be, on the one hand, a handful of pharma start-ups like Compass, with little connection to The Psychedelic Village, and on the other, that vast plain dotted with individuals and small groups of friends doing drugs together entirely unaware of and unconnected to the Village.

In other words, the medieval village of The Psychedelic Community is a bit of a castle-in-the-air, without a genuine economic foundation. Nonetheless, there is a long queue of idealistic and sometimes credulous people desperate to enter the fortified village, because they think that is where the party is at, that’s where wisdom and experience is, that is where they can develop, heal, learn wisdom from the Elders, have special magical experiences and become Magical Healers themselves. This gives a handful of gatekeepers a disproportionate amount of power, and some of them are, unfortunately, toxic narcissists, bullies and predators…

After the paywall, watch out for psychedelic gargoyles, plus other interesting links from the field