It’s never anything but a privilege and a pleasure to present at Breaking Convention’s annual conference on psychedelics, either giving a lecture of my own (such as this delightfully snarky 2023 presentation about the global history of ketamine addiction and the reprehensible lies of the rapacious American k clinics), or just as a host introducing other speakers who usually know way more than I do.

I may have written about psychedelics professionally for 14 years now, but I’m still just a hack journalist and drugs are just a slice of my work. The scientists, therapists and academics at Breaking Convention work on psychedelic issues 365 days a year. These are the real experts, and I have been friends with many of them for over a decade. So it’s nothing but a privilege to introduce them with the greatest respect, and nothing but a joy to be a bossypants bitch hosting the Q&A sessions and reminding the audience: “This is your chance to ask a QUESTION, not to stand up and orate, if you start rambling, I WILL take the microphone away.” Honestly, it’s delicious fun: I get to be harsh so the lovely speakers don’t have to.

One of the three sessions I hosted this year, “Should Scientists Be Activists”, featured three of my very favourite researchers in the entire field: Dr David Luke, Professor of Exceptional Experience at the University of Greenwich; Dr Ros Watts, founder of Acer Integration; Dr Christopher Timmermann, Co-Director of the UCL Centre for Consciousness Research. Plus a badass anti-authoritarian journalist I’d not had the pleasure of meeting before, Guilio Sica who “walked out of his job at The Times in 2003 in protest at the invasion of Iraq” (a man after my own heart).

(Image by James Willis @james_willis_photography and courtesy of Breaking Convention.)


I’ve written about Dr Timmermann’s work many times, starting with this 2018 piece about how “DMT is the Drug For Our Collective Crisis of Meaning“, I’ve recently profiled Dr Watt’s beautiful dedication to the “integration” part of the psychedelic process – so important and so unappreciated, and I’ve had Dr Luke on panels with me countless times, such as this great panel at Noisily in 2022, because you can slot him into anything and he’ll have the best one liners and the most wonderful insights (and we all love that salty baritone don’t we). Oh lord,, I’d forgotten about how he endorsed the work of “MK Extra” and their plans to “poison the acid supplies with water” (and I just annoyed all my officemates howling with laughter re-reading this).

True to form, all the speakers busted out wise insights and great lines. Dr Watts pointed out us how hard it is to totally have a “pure” existence in your employment, whether you’re a doctor with the NHS who has no choice in handing over patient data to Palantir or a researcher forced to work under the conditions of the pharmaceutical companies who fund their research. Did you know those companies get to approve the data before it is published in scientific papers? Absolutely fucking absurd. That’s called “marking your own homework” as I said in my follow up. You can walk away, but as Sica reminded us from his own experiences standing up for his principles… it isn’t easy.

Is there any easy answer? Of course not – there never is to a question this hard. I myself used to cover environmental issues exclusively in my career as a young reporter… and it was MADDENING to see my carefully researched pieces on climate change and the lies of fossil fuel companies be placed on the same pages as giant ads for f’ing Shell. But what are you gonna do – just post your own stuff on Substack for an audience of dozens (wooooo), or in the largest newspapers in the world where people will actually *read* what you write?

I pointed out something in my own little wrap up – because I’m not just there to host the Q&As, I need to add *something* to the conversation. The subject of the delightful Albert Hoffman, creator of LSD, came up in the panel. He was renowned to be lovely and sweet. But you know who wasn’t? His boss, Arthur Stoll (1887 – 1971). Stoll was best friends with Richard Kuhn (1900-1967), who was “Hitler’s favourite chemist”, who conducted enormous experiments with mescaline on concentration camp prisoners at Dachau (and probably elsewhere – we’ll never know exactly what happened because the records were burnt as the Allies approached). But we do know from correspondce that survives that Stoll sent Kuhn samples of ergotamine, a key precursor to making LSD.

Did Hoffman know about this? Probably. Should he have quit? Everyone nodded yes. But did he quit? NOPE. He worked for Sandoz Chemicals for his entire career.

Even our heroes have skeletons in the closet, remember. And good people can get caught up in “bad” things when the tendrils of the machine are just too entangled to escape.

But as Dr Watts put it: “Sometimes we are serving the machine… and so sometimes we have to stop.”