The psychedelic industry tries to grow up

And fourteen other stories I'm following

Welcome to another Tuesday Brunch, a weekly round up of interesting stories I’m following related to the broad theme of ‘ecstatic integration’. First bit is free, the rest is for paid subscribers only.

• Creating a psychedelic safety net

I arrived in San Francisco last night for a Psychedelic Safety Summit at Berkeley starting tomorrow. I wondered if the passport control would be suspicious if I said I was here for a psychedelic conference - last time that came up, in Dutch passport control, the border official went off on a monologue about his fascination with LSD! Anyway, this time, they didn’t even look at my passport, just scanned my face with a camera and said ‘welcome Julian’. Wow, the psychedelic establishment is really in power these days.

I come to the summit with all kinds of emotions, but the main one is excitement and hope that the industry is putting safety issues right at the top of its agenda, for three days at least. New organisation The Psychedelic Safety Institute has done a great job at gathering many of the top industry figures for three days of discussion. I hope egos can be put to one side (including my own) and attendees can focus on useful outcomes for the field. There are many relatively straight-forward ways the field can be made safer, some of which I am working on with others. The harder questions, to my mind, are: ‘how can the field ensure better standards in unregulated spaces?’ and ‘are there spiritual risks to psychedelics we don’t fully understand?’ I saw the loathsome Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones debating the risk of demonic possession on psychedelics recently - this is what I’ve called the psychedelic industry’s ‘entity dilemma’. Anyway, entities aside, there are a lot of easier things the field can do to ‘build a psychedelic safety net’ - I outlined some steps in this piece, a year ago, including more clincs for post-psychedelic support, better public communication on risks, and better coordination of researchers through a psychedelic safety research working group, and it’s encouraging that there’s been real progress on all those fronts. So…here’s hoping it’s a useful week.

The psychedelic industry's entity dilemma

• Australia’s legal PAT programme one year on

Talking of the psychedelic safety research working group, we had another meeting last week. It included presentations by two leading figures in Australia’s legal psychedelic therapy industry. The main takeaway I got is that the Oz psychedelic industry is ‘rolling out’ legal MDMA and psilocybin therapy slowly and very carefully. ‘We’re taking the farmers market approach to PAT, rather than the Walmart approach’, said Monica Schweickle, founder of the Peridot Clinic. The recording is in our Video Archive, along with 15 more hours of Psychedelic Safety Seminars.

After the paywall, notes from the first Founders Club; another celebrity death on ketamine; how can you tell if you’re in a therapy cult; mental illness is now an existential threat to the UK economy; the likely new owner of Lykos joins DOGE to slash social security spending; the religious visions inspiring the founders of OpenAI and Google DeepMind; the business opportunities in UAP artefacts; and AI / Ari Kuschnir recreates Gurdjieff’s commune…