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Today’s lead story is about Horizons, the psychedelic conference that created the blueprint for all the information-rich gatherings we now have in the space. DoubleBlind talks with founder Kevin Balktick about the upcoming conference in October (See you there?) and how the current psychedelic landscape has added a lot of gravity to the event programming. You can read more about that (and get your tickets) below!

If you keep scrolling, you’ll find stories about music and psychedelics, meeting your soulmate in ceremony, mushrooms in India, and so mush more 🍄.

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Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief

Horizons comes back to New York this fall to spend three days asking the harder question of who this is all actually for.

In July, Eli Lilly — one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world — struck a deal to buy AtaiBeckley, a psychedelic biotech firm that developed a 5-MeO-DMT-based nasal spray for treatment-resistant depression. The deal comes mere months after the White House declared psychedelic medicine a national priority by signing Executive Order 14401 back in April. Both moves have drastically altered the landscape for psychedelic medicine and brought renewed confidence and intrigue to the space after experiencing an industry-wide plateau in the summer of 2024. This forward motion is setting up Horizons — which created the blueprint for psychedelic-conferences — to be more than just an informative gathering about these changes, but also a place to collectively process what it all means.

"By this time next year, this could be in doctors' offices, and people want to understand it and want to be prepared for it," Kevin Balktick, the founder of Horizons, tells DoubleBlind. "We had a false start a couple years ago, but I think people are really feeling [the momentum] now."

Founded in 2007, Horizons started as a single day of talks at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, and has since evolved into one of the longest-running institutions in the field. The event, which is taking place at the New York Academy of Medicine on October 15-17, has remained an outlier in its nearly two decades of existence, largely because it was created to fill an information gap and has remained dedicated to innovation ever since.

"Horizons has always been very different than other  conferences," says Balktick. "It was different in the beginning because there weren't many other psychedelic conferences to go to. It didn't exist, so we had to go and make one."

The psychedelic space took a significant hit after the FDA declined to approve Lykos Therapeutics' MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD in the summer of 2024. Money subsequently dried up across most of the ecosystem, multiple businesses laid off staff, and the idyllic vision of a better world through MDMA-assisted therapy shattered before our eyes. The psychedelic movement for mental health was under scrutiny in the mainstream media and the industry was left to pick itself up off the floor. So, when President Trump signed Executive Order 14401 to fast track the pipeline to bring psychedelic medicine to market this past April, it effectively signaled that the space was back on track.

The impacts of this policy change were instant, too. Six days after Trump signed it, the FDA handed national priority vouchers to psychedelic biotech firm Compass Pathways and the nonprofit Usona Institute for psilocybin-based drugs, and to Transcend Therapeutics for methylone, a compound similar to MDMA, compressing a review window that normally takes a year into a month or two. A field that spent two years in a state of recalibration is now ostensibly being flush with Big Pharma money and support from the federal government.

"After the FDA declined to approve MDMA, the wind came out of the sails [of the psychedelic community]," says Balktick. "We were just kind of lost in the horse latitudes. People had stopped believing. But now people believe again, and the dream of fully regulated psychedelic medicine is back."

But Balktick is quick to point out that Horizons’ programming isn’t built around the new wave of political or pharmaceutical hype. The conference runs a single stage with no parallel tracks, so everyone sees the same program, so each speaker and presentation must earn its place. The result skips the marquee circuit that other conferences lean on.

"[The format] is pretty different from many of the other conferences, where the goal is just to land big names," says Balktick. "We encourage our speakers to go a lot deeper, and we expect that the audience can handle a much more sophisticated discussion."

Dr. Julie Holland, a New York psychiatrist and author who also helps curate the conference's science and medicine program, tells DoubleBlind that the organization of the programming is what makes this gathering different from the others.

“I think the most important difference is that [all of the programming is] on one stage instead of constantly having to choose between competing presentations,” she says. “So there is no FOMO [and] there are no hard choices. This is a conference that has been cultivated to be singular in its presentations. We are committed to presenting new data, having dynamic speakers, and not having too many panels where we have so many people on them you lose a sense of what each person has to offer to the conversation. We avoid that, and I am proud that we do.”

Each day is organized by various lenses to look at the expansion of psychedelics. Thursday focuses on the pipeline between a drug's approval and patient access, insurance coverage, and addressing the issue of who actually gets to receive these treatments. Friday covers clinical studies and neuroscience. Saturday explores policy and culture, including traditional and Indigenous communities from around the globe that have been affected by the sudden popularity of psychedelic tourism as well as a Gabonese view of the development of ibogaine. As Eli Lilly and its pharmaceutical competition turn psychedelic molecules into treatments and prescriptions, Horizons is staking out the harder ground of who benefits and how, and whether a treatment that clears the FDA can ever reach the people who need it most.

"I believe that most people, given a chance, and spoken to with respect for their intellect, can understand these dialogues," says Balktick. "You don't need to have a graduate degree to learn about the science, or have a law degree to follow the policy."

The setting of Horizons is part of what makes it such a fun conference. The official program runs during the day. Everything else fills the nights, from film screenings to fundraisers to Sunday brunches that have become their own institution.

"The whole week of Horizons has turned into this wonderful sort of psychedelic circus," says Balktick. "We're really happy for it."

*Find out more about attending Horizons here

**CORRECTION Aug. 3, 2026: This story was edited to clarify a few of Kevin Balktick's quotes and to clarify the Indigenous communities who will be presenting at the event. 

In a quiet corner of a hospital museum in Cairo, a glass ampoule of Delysid, the name Sandoz gave LSD in the 1950s, has been sitting on a shelf for half a century. It's a relic from a time when Egyptian psychiatrists ran LSD studies alongside their Western peers, before the drug war shut the science down and the history faded into obscurity. Today that lineage is stirring again. In countries where drug penalties can reach execution and mental health care is thin, researchers, psychiatrists, and religious scholars are taking psychedelic therapy seriously. Lebanon's clinics are already treating patients with ketamine. The UAE is positioning itself as a future market. Jordan's skeptical doctors are being courted with peer-reviewed data. And in mosques and academic journals, the debate has moved past whether psychedelics can be halal to how.

The easy story is that the West is exporting another trend. The one the region's advocates tell is a revival — of a practice with roots in 9,000-year-old rock art, Sufi ecstatic ritual, and Egypt's forgotten labs. This week, clinical psychologist and researcher Nader Wahba maps how four countries are building a psychedelic future without waiting for permission, and asks the harder question the field keeps dodging: when this scales, who actually gets access?

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