Packaging altered states like boutique skincare...

Malana VanTyler’s excellent piece in Bust distills several major points from my book —about trauma, community, and the commercialization of psychedelics.

When looking at the evolution of psychedelics in modern culture, I’m overwhelmed by the accelerating encroachment of the pharma industrial complex on the fundamentals of human society.

First among these is the cooptation of psychedelics purely as a vehicle to profit pharmaceutical investors. No one fights legalization with more zeal than this group. Not only are the substances themselves being reduced to easily manufactured chemical compounds which can be prescribed as pills, the reduction of the psychedelic ritual itself extracted from a cultural context is commodified so that it too can become profitable.

One of the first patent applications filed by pharma Compass Pathways aimed to put a profit lock on every component, feature and gesture of the clinical psychedelic experience: from the way a guide speaks to the subject during a session, to the way they offer reassurance, to simple movements, such as touching an arm or holding a hand. The very idea is chilling: reducing even spontaneous human interaction to a commodity. The shared experience of the people in the space itself are owned by a third party, a corporation who will profit from what might be one of the subject’s most meaningful life experiences. Insodoing, they are extending a phenomenon which has been operating in the social media space for over a decade, and is rapidly accelerating as corporations strive to replace human relationships altogether with AI.

Corporations aim to own and mediate and profit from all human relationships, including the most intimate. They aim to profit from your interactions with others. Think they don’t already? Take Facebook, or Twitter. They direct and govern your impressions and feelings about people you haven’t met. They dictate what information arrives on your screen in order to manufacture your choices and incite your prejudices.

To quote from the Bust article:

Altered states alone don’t heal trauma. Psychedelics might crack open suppressed memory and emotion, but without ethical guidance, community support, and economic stability, the outcomes can cause more harm. True recovery requires structural safety—not just chemically induced breakthroughs sold by aggressive clinics and celebrity brands.