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Happy 4/20! Happy Bicycle Day! What a weekend it was, with the president signing an ibogaine research bill that could fast-track studies into the alkaloid. Some of the DB team were at Chacruna’s Psychedelic Culture conference in San Francisco as the news broke. We will have more coverage on that soon. In the meantime, we learned some things at Psychedelic Culture and wrote about our takeaways. You can find them immediately below!

If you keep scrolling, you’ll find other stories on ketamine addiction, faeries, DMT lasers, and a really dope psychedelic OG.

Puff, puff, and pass to your friends 💨,
Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief

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We went to Chacruna’s Psychedelic Culture in San Francisco, and here’s what we learned.

Bicycle Day weekend in San Francisco feels like a kind of psychedelic Fourth of July, but with much less nationalism and considerably more emphasis on community, tradition, and intellectual expansion. This past weekend, Chacruna Institute held its annual conference, Psychedelic Culture, at the Brava Theater in the Mission District’s remaining cultural vestiges. It was an apt location for the event, considering the culture of psychedelics as we know it is also undergoing gentrification brought on by Big Pharma and the West’s insatiable pursuit of mystical experiences in an attempt to fill the void of a spiritually bankrupt culture amid a mounting mental health crisis.

The tensions between preservation, extraction, lineage, and commodification were threaded through much of the weekend’s programming. Panels featured speakers from around the world, some of whom traveled from the depths of the Amazon not only to represent their culture, but to deliver messages on behalf of the forest. The weekend also featured discussions with storytellers and creators on navigating censorship on social media platforms, while experts discussed how cultural, social, and political movements today are actively reshaping the psychedelic landscape.

Psychedelic Culture 2026 was ultimately a successful convergence of the foundational elements that comprise the heart and soul of the modern plant medicine and psychedelic movements, without reinforcing the neo-shamanistic-tech-bro culture that’s flattening these traditions into something consumable and decontextualized. And given how much airtime that subculture is given in the mainstream these days (thanks to people like Bryan Johnson and Joe Rogan), the fact that the event programming didn’t center longevity and optimization was a breath of fresh air and a win for the culture of psychedelics. With that, here are our top five takeaways from the weekend.

Prominent Indigenous Representation

Psychedelic Culture made it clearer than polished crystal that Indigenous representation isn’t just something that event producers should do — it’s absolutely mandatory. And not just one or two people speaking on an array of topics. A conference should have many Indigenous representatives offering a spectrum of perspectives. Because Indigenous cultures contain a profound diversity of thought, they are not monolithic, and that’s something Western audiences often fail to grasp.

Furthermore, one consistent request from Indigenous communities is meaningful consultation or a seat at the table. We often hear this in regard to building regulatory frameworks. And, largely, the psychedelic industry has failed to offer that in any substantive way. However, another way to give members of these communities a “seat at the table” is by giving them the floor at conferences, the way Psychedelic Culture did.

You Can’t Fast-Track Becoming a Medicine Worker

Maestra Edelin Lopez Sanchez, a Shipibo-Konibo healer from the Peruvian Amazon, stated in a panel on Friday that becoming a healer is a long, rigorous process rooted in lineage, which isn’t something you can shortcut. While it’s common now for Westerners to go on dieta for two or three months and feel ready to work with ayahuasca, she explained that traditionally it took years, and even then, “we never have arrived, we continue to learn.”

She illustrated this through an anecdote about her family, many of whom were also healers. Her mother began training to be a healer as a young girl, undergoing dietas under the tutelage of her grandfather, who guided her in a deeply intentional, loving way. As she progressed in her training over time, she was eventually given one of her first healing tasks: to console a 5-year-old child who was screaming and crying and unable to rest due to something that was ailing him. Edelin’s mother worked with the child and was able to calm and heal him, when no one else could. That moment affirmed her capacity and marked her transition into becoming a recognized healer within the community.

The implication here is difficult to ignore. The idea that one can fast-track becoming a healer, or that after even six months of study, they are somehow qualified to be one, stands in direct contradiction to the traditional timelines these cultures practice by.

Indigenous Knowledge Can’t Be Patented

Rasu Yawanawá, chief of Mutum village and medicine healer from the Yawanawá people of the Brazilian Amazon, said on a Friday panel that ayahuasca and other plant medicines — and the knowledge around them — can’t be owned or patented or claimed. He emphasized that these medicines exist far beyond the realm of money and capitalism, working at the level of the heart and spirit, thus requiring a deep respect for how they are used. He stated that not everyone is meant to work with ayahuasca and plant medicines, and that there’s a responsibility to approach them in the right way. He also pointed out that Indigenous people are still judged, rejected, and sidelined for holding this knowledge, even as the broader world increasingly turns toward these medicines.

At One Point, Women Couldn’t Be Medicine Workers

Maestra Laura Lopez De Fernandez, a Shipibo-Konibo medicine worker from the Peruvian Amazon, shared that within her lineage, healing knowledge was traditionally passed down through men. In her family, that meant her uncles, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Women, however, were expected to remain in supporting roles, such as clearing spaces with mapacho (or sacred tobacco) while medicine was being poured. It was only through the insistence of her great-grandfather that her mother was allowed to train, despite resistance from her own father, who questioned why a girl should receive dietas at all. It was after this moment, however, that women began going through training to step into healing roles in the Shipibo-Konibo tradition.

If You’re Building on Social Media, You Don’t Own Your Work

Mikaela de la Myco, psychedelic educator and grassroots organizer, made it clear on her panel on Saturday that while social media has been essential for sharing information, organizing, and reaching new audiences, it’s ultimately an unstable foundation for building something sturdy and long-lasting. After being deplatformed on Instagram, she lamented how easily years of work can disappear overnight, especially in a space already shaped by censorship and oppressive algorithms. She explained that these social media platforms, on which so many of us are dependent, can remove you without warning — and will not give you your work back — making it critical to build outside them, especially an email list, as well as direct relationships and other forms of infrastructure.

What if friendship isn’t something you have, but something you do? In a new essay, writer Bett Willians, author of “The Wild Kindness: A Psilocybin Odyssey,” makes the case for friendship as a verb best practiced not over coffee or dinner, but in motion, in chaos, and, occasionally, under the influence of mushrooms.

Drawing on intimate, sometimes chaotic firsthand experiences — from silent, candlelit trips to bar-hopping nights that dissolve into pure presence — the story explores how psychedelics can strip away performance, forcing connection beyond language. The result is a reimagining of friendship not as a static bond but as something alive, built moment by moment through shared experience.

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