The Psychedelic Underground’s Future Is in Consumer Packaged Goods
I recently traveled with a posse of fantastic colleagues to this year’s South by Southwest Conference in Austin to present a panel titled “Psychedelic Entrepreneurship and the Underground Economy.” My session with master satirist Dennis Walker, journalist Mary Carreon, and mushroom testing pioneer Reggie Harris was a blast, and we met amazing people who, like us, were part of the psychedelics track.
As is the case at most psychedelic conferences, the speakers, panels and presenters in our category generally fell into three categories:
• Scientific research and study findings (“Psychedelic Medicine at Stanford”)
• Drug policy reform discussions (“The Future of Psychedelics: Drug Development & Policy Reform”)
• Philosophical, metaphysical or futurist observations (“Psychedelics & The Soul”)
These are fascinating and crucial topics to explore. Yet conversations about the already-existing illegal psychedelic economy (and the consumers funneling billions of dollars into it) were few and far between (and serious credit to the SXSW organizers that they not only accepted our unorthodox panel but singled it out for praise).
The fact that our panel was selected gave me hope. In my vision for psychedelics, grassroots advocates and everyday citizens would get the same airtime that biotech investment companies, venture capitalists and government regulators automatically receive — and more presenters would acknowledge that confining psychedelics to medical use only is a fool’s errand.
How Cannabis Mapped Out the Road to Legal Psychedelics
Let’s not kid ourselves: medical access is merely a stepping stone to legality. States may decree that only veterans with PTSD or patients with terminal cancer can have access to psilocybin mushrooms, but millions of people are purchasing chocolates, tinctures and other underground market products with the hope of feeling better. Prohibition is failing, just like prohibition always fails.
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The road to legal psychedelics has already been mapped out by cannabis. “Medical use only” is how cannabis was normalized years before “adult use” was approved — but the definition of medical use is wildly flexible. Just like cannabis, advocates argue that seriously ill patients and military veterans deserve access to these substances — when in fact they may actually be helpful to nearly all of us. Dennis Peron’s famous quote “Every cannabis user is a medical patient whether they know it or not” applies to psychedelics too.
For me, the missing piece at so many of these conferences is the present-day psychedelic economy, which is already thriving. Session after session, you hear biotech CEOs pontificate about FDA approval for their new psilocybin or MDMA analog by 2030, or mental health professionals debating the best future framework for psychedelic-assisted therapy — when in fact psychedelics are being bought and sold right now. Psychedelic-assisted therapy is being provided right now.
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These transactions are rarely legal, but they’re happening. Why aren’t we talking about them? And why do so many so-called leaders in psychedelic science either ignore or disregard them?
How Prohibition and Stigma Created the Underground Psychedelic Economy
Part of the reason we don’t hear much about the underground at these gatherings is that many participants in the psychedelic underground don’t want to be onstage at mainstream conferences. For all the headlines about psychedelics finally escaping 50 years in purgatory and going mainstream, the underground stays underground for a reason: The work they’re doing is still highly illegal.
It’s important to remember that the criminalization of these substances is what created an underground economy in the first place. After being used medicinally and sold over the counter in the United States for decades, cannabis was driven underground in the 1930s by racist government prohibitionists led by Harry Anslinger.
Psychedelics followed a similar path, except that we had hundreds of research papers, studies and conferences attesting to their therapeutic benefit in humans before they were similarly driven underground by another racist prohibitionist: Richard Nixon. It bears repeating: Every time we talk about “the underground” or “the black market,” we need to remember that these communities and cultivators were driven underground by bigoted, power-hungry politicians and their cronies.
Decades of psychedelic prohibition have already created an extensive gray-market infrastructure, complete with community-based networks and referrals. In the same way that alcohol prohibition invented the cocktail and the Drug War spurred the breeding of high-THC cannabis, legacy operators are creating products and services to meet the needs of millions of Americans who want to try them. Without the risks taken by the underground, there would be no corporate psychedelic investors, which is why it’s weird when leaders in the space act as if it doesn’t exist or matter.
As I argued in my last article, the people who have been studying, consuming and serving these plant medicines for generations are like space monkeys for scientific breakthroughs. With legalization many years away, the underground is advancing the networks, economy and ingenuity of the psychedelic space, all without FDA approval.
What Biotech CEOs and Venture Capitalists Fail to See About Psychedelics’ Future
As a psychedelic and cognitive freedom advocate, I want to hear from researchers, scientists, mental health experts and clinicians. But we miss a great deal when we don’t hear from those who have been part of this space for decades, whether they’ve been cultivating fungi, leading ayahuasca ceremonies or facilitating psychedelic experiences for people suffering from trauma and grief. Plenty of research — anecdotal and clinical — existed long before anyone had heard of Michael Pollan.
Biotech companies are spending tens of millions of dollars patenting compounds. When was the last time one of these CEOs was in a cannabis or mushroom dispensary? Or talked about the trap chocolate bar market? They seem clueless about how these economies truly operate, and they ignore that reality at their peril. Psychedelics are on the same trajectory that cannabis has followed: safe, regulated products sold to adults 21 and over. CPG (consumer packaged goods) is the actual future of these goods and services.
If pharmaceutical execs really think they’ll be able to confine psychedelics to strict medical use for people with health insurance and diagnosable medical issues, good luck with that. The illegal market will dwarf them, just like it dwarfs legal cannabis today.
In 2021, Rolling Stone’s parent company, P-MRC, acquired a 50 percent stake in the SXSW festival.