The psychedelic tourism industry has, in recent years, grown into a significant international business. Nested within the broader $1 trillion wellness tourism market, this once-niche travel offering has coalesced into a global ecosystem that stretches well beyond traditional and neo-shamanic ceremonial healing frameworks, encompassing a wide range of lifestyle and adventure experiences. 

One analysis of the psychedelic retreat field found that there were over 440 different retreats and nearly 300 companies offering them in 2023 — and the field has grown even more since then. But is this rapid growth actually a good thing? As a multimedia producer with many years of experience in the world of psychedelics, there was a time when I would have said absolutely not.

I’m personally four-for-four as a participant of Wild West-style, unhinged international psychedelic retreat experiences. In 2010, I embarked on a journey to Iquitos, Peru, wild-eyed and ready to dive deep on a medicine quest at an ayahuasca center. After I arrived, I was terrified to learn that the center owner at the time was a gun-toting cowboy with a taste for local moonshine and a backlog of sexual assault allegations against him. 

Over a decade later — after attending two more ayahuasca retreats that aesthetically veered between white saviorism and criminal lunacy — I traveled to Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, to attend a mushroom retreat and saw firsthand how badly a psychedelic retreat could go off the rails. Mid-week, one of the male participants was caught loudly masturbating in one of the fully occupied co-ed dormitories, not once, but twice. The retreat organizers were unprepared and fumbled their response to the incidents, which only exacerbated the tensions and further outraged a number of participants.

Making the situation even worse, the retreat organizer disappeared for long stretches of time throughout the week. He would often reappear withdrawn and disoriented, and I eventually found out that he was macrodosing mushrooms in the double-digit-gram range every day. Apparently, he felt the need to attend to his personal process, rather than participate in the group retreat. That was outrageous: As any self-respecting psychedelic facilitator would know, a retreat organizer is responsible for the participants' safety, security, and for providing a meaningful experience for their group. He should be doing the work of a skilled trip sitter — not tripping himself!

Fed up with these experiences, I swore off psychedelic tourism retreats entirely. Instead, I decided to focus on solo tripping and attending festivals with friends. 

Of course, I’m hardly the only one to notice that the psychedelic tourism industry has its fair share of problems. In the worst cases, participants have reportedly been harmed — and even died — at retreat centers in multiple countries. Since regulation of the retreats is often lax or ambiguous, the barrier to entry remains strikingly low, allowing virtually anyone to open a center and begin administering potent combinations of psychedelics like 5-MeO-DMT and iboga with little meaningful oversight or accountability. 

While the psychedelic retreat ecosystem is varied in breadth, many retreat centers market their services to the ultra-wealthy and celebrity classes. On a small island in the Caribbean nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, the world’s first legal luxury DMTx immersion experience is set to open in March 2026 under the name Eleusis. In the Mexican border city of Tijuana, NFL Hall of Famer Brett Favre recently joined UFC superstar Conor McGregor in undergoing ibogaine treatment at the beachfront Ambio Life Sciences Center. Many retreats are held in parts of the Global South, where locals don’t have the same economic and social privileges as resort owners and attendees who fly in from overseas. Venues have included high-end resorts and other luxury settings where retreat participants are cut off from the local economy, or only get brief, superficial glimpses of local life. 

Although local staff may benefit economically from the retreats, the wealth disparities on display are hard to overlook. In one stark example, a foreign retreat owner in the Peruvian Amazon once told me point-blank that he was pulling in roughly $3,000 a day, while local staff were earning approximately $3 a day. 

So, how did I end up getting involved in co-organizing a retreat of my own? Let me explain.

The emergence of the multibillion-dollar psychedelic retreat industry has not been without growing pains. But many of the misgivings I outlined so clearly above are now being actively addressed as the industry matures and increasing international scrutiny is brought to bear on retreat operations and the teams running them. 

“Mushroom tourism has evolved quickly in the past couple of years and is still widely rooted in the ‘traditional’ space, meaning that many psychedelic retreats globally aren’t regulated by any kind of governing body,” says Santiago Ongay, mushroom industry professional and founder of Full Canopy Genetics. “We’re slowly starting to see more ‘healing centers’ licensed and regulated by the state, which means more quality control and compliance with licensing and regulatory protocols, but also comes with a much higher price tag. The trade-off for this is that a more regulated retreat industry comes with higher price tags due to all the compliance requirements, presenting a higher barrier to access. I’m interested in how the space evolves and hope that we can bridge the gap between Western medicine and traditional knowledge/use while remaining professional, ethical, and accessible to all.”

A major enhancement in the transparency and ethics of psychedelic retreats worldwide has come with the rise of psychedelic journalism and reporting. DoubleBlind has covered incidents of abuse in the space, and public forums such as Reddit publicize harms tied to specific programs and retreats.

For example, a recent study, conducted with representatives from 49 publicly advertised retreats, documents safety protocols in the field, including adverse event reporting. This type of qualitative study demonstrates an increased commitment to safety in the psychedelic retreat field. Against this backdrop of the rapidly expanding tourism market — one capable of delivering extraordinary personal experiences while channeling serious capital into local economies — I decided it was finally time for me to give psychedelic retreats another chance. In fact, I’m co-hosting my first psychedelic retreat in a bid to explore this industry from the inside out. 

The Laughter Is Medicine psychedelic retreat is scheduled for March 15-20 at Coral Cove Wellness Resort in Little Bay, Jamaica. We’ve intentionally framed it as a fun-forward “summer camp for adults,” centered on psilocybin mushroom-enhanced play rather than the heavy shadow work and solemn ceremonial aesthetics that typically define the psychedelic retreat field. 

To be clear, ceremonial and shadow work-oriented retreats remain invaluable for many people worldwide, particularly those without legal or financial access to that level of care in their hometowns. But my fellow retreat organizers and I see a meaningful opening for alternative approaches that center joy, levity, and play as primary elements of a well-lived life. We are not producing this model of retreat to do deep dive trauma work; we are catering to people who have already done their internal work and are ready to have some serious fun and take their relationship with mushrooms to the next level. 

“Nothing makes me happier than seeing the lights come back in people’s eyes after a deep dive with psilocybin,” says Laughter Is Medicine retreat co-host Andy Sudbrock of Sacred Path Retreats. “The cherry on top is to see the sparkle come back while having fun and enjoying the beauty of nature, things they may not have experienced in years!” 

A major reason I stopped being interested in psychedelic tourism is that I didn’t feel super comfortable in sharing deep, trauma-focused containers with groups of random people, who fly in overnight and immediately dive deep into visionary plant medicine rituals together. I experienced a lot of cult dynamics in the retreats I was a part of, and I often felt out of place as someone who thinks that fun and recreation are an integral part of psychedelic experiences. 

Traditionally, entheogens were taken in community contexts with people you lived alongside and had deep communal ties with; the modern invention of a psychedelic healing retreat is a recent phenomenon. Often, you have no idea what other energies and traumas the other people in the group are bringing into the container. 

I remember sitting in a sharing circle at one of the retreats, while people who had just met wept and shared their deepest secrets and trauma histories in a radical authenticity exercise. I would sit awkwardly and then crack a joke for my 30-second part before the group moved on to more bonding over trauma. 

With my retreat, I am taking a different approach to psychedelic tourism. I draw from my own experiences — consuming local, wild-foraged psilocybe mushrooms while trekking with mountain gorillas, swimming in crystalline pools beneath a waterfall on a low-dose of mushroom chocolate, doing mushroom-enhanced karaoke and stand-up comedy onstage with a group of close friends. Those and many other similar experiences have created amplified states of ecstasy and joy, and that has carried over into my appreciation for life and my overall well-being. In the psychedelic tourism market, where are these types of fun-centered, joie de vivre-amplifying experiences? 

Being on the backend business side of the retreat industry has been a learning curve for me. Everything I’ve done with Mycopreneur, a global platform that I founded five years ago, has been free for everyone to use: no paywalls for multimedia content, free weekly incubators for mushroom entrepreneurs, and no membership model. I believe that mushrooms and mushroom education should be accessible and affordable to all. I’ve been fortunate to have consistent sponsorships with different brands that recognize the virality and visibility of Mycopreneur media content, which has helped sustain the platform and compensate me as the sole proprietor. 

When working with a venue and partners on a retreat model, the bottom line is much different than running a media and education service — mostly because there’s a world-class private resort with operating expenses to cover. As such, putting on the “sales hat” is something that’s very foreign and new to me. There are variables to navigate, such as dealing with people canceling, accommodating different lodging and dietary requests, and managing international travel logistics. I’m fortunate to be partnered with a retreat industry veteran and to have the full support of the Coral Cove Wellness Resort team to address these considerations. If people are not able to afford this particular retreat model's price tag, there are a tremendous number of free resources and opportunities available through Mycopreneur to help them learn how to connect with mushrooms, community, and a sense of fun. 

While the psychedelic tourism industry continues to experience dramatic international growth, more niches within the broader space will emerge. Although I used to be a lot more skeptical, I feel a lot more confident now that the industry will continue to mature thanks to enhanced transparency and professionalism in step with a more regulated psychedelic industry as a whole. And if I have anything to say about it, psychedelic tourism will also include offerings that appeal to responsible, sensible adults who want to enhance their well-being and sense of joy, without having to feel like they’re undergoing a collective trauma exorcism in the company of strangers. 

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