The First AI “Psychedelic Patient” Has Arrived

Good morning and welcome to another edition of The Drop In! We're kicking things off with a story about a new AI model that could reshape how psychedelic therapists are trained. Jack Gorsline has the scoop!

We won’t say much about our lead story here (you’ll have to read it below!), but we will say that AI is moving in whether we like it or not. So where does that leave us? In the roles of observers and critics. Can an AI model simulating a patient tripping on psychedelics ever fully mirror the raw complexity of a true altered state? We must ask this question to gauge not just the promise of these tools, but also the risks of letting them stand in for the messiness of the human experience. And it leaves us with a harder question still: What’s the greater danger? Clinicians entering psychedelic work with almost no experiential training, or therapists leaning on AI for experience, even though artificial intelligence can only ever approximate the real thing? Time will tell.

If you keep scrolling, we also feature stories about psilocybin and weight loss, sacred geometry, luxury cars using reishi mushrooms to craft leather seats, and so much more.

Happy December 🌙
Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief

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Meet Lucy: The AI “Patient” Poised to Train a New Generation of Psychedelic Therapists

As MDMA and psilocybin inch toward federal approval, the field faces a shortage of trained clinicians. A nonprofit believes its simulated patient, “Lucy,” could become the safety net the system desperately needs.

By Jack Gorsline

As the medical establishment prepares for the potential FDA approval of psychedelic therapies like MDMA and psilocybin, the industry faces a critical bottleneck: a severe shortage of experiential training for the thousands of therapists needed to administer these treatments. In response to this "scalability crisis," the Fireside Project, a prominent harm reduction nonprofit, has developed Lucy, an AI tool launching on December 3rd, 2025, designed to revolutionize how mental health practitioners are trained.

Unlike the wave of therapeutic AI tools flooding the market, Lucy functions not as an AI therapist, but rather as an "AI patient." The system is trained on a proprietary database of thousands of hours of anonymized conversations from Fireside’s psychedelic support line. This data is said to allow the chatbot to simulate the emotional nuances, non-linear thinking, and vulnerability of an altered state with a fidelity that theoretical role-play cannot match.

“From the time that I launched Fireside, it was very clear that we would be creating the largest repository of psychedelic conversations ever to exist,” said Joshua White, founder and director of Fireside Project. “It took us about three years to build the software platform that would allow us to anonymously record those conversations and then begin to use them for internal training purposes.”

The impetus for Lucy arose from a conversation between White and Dr. Felix Scholer, a neuroscientist and entrepreneur who eventually built the tool. They recognized that while traditional therapy programs rely on practicums, opportunities for students to sit with patients undergoing psychedelic experiences are legally and logistically restricted.

David Esselman, former Executive Director of BrainFutures and a strategic advisor to the Lucy project, noted that the historical apprenticeship model in underground communities cannot support a national healthcare rollout.

“We see this challenge point even with university-level programs where practicum sites are just very limited,” Esselman said. He warns of a future where clinicians are licensed but inexperienced. “What happens if MDMA is approved... and thousands of practitioners are trained who are good therapists but have never had their own experience or a community to support them?”

Lucy is designed to be the “base camp” for safety in the field, bridging the gap between coursework and clinical practice. It allows aspiring practitioners to hone their skills in a low-stakes environment before they ever interact with a human patient.

“It’s not trying to provide an AI therapist,” Esselman clarified. “It’s trying to bridge what humans are best at — connection and relationship — and really allow them to own skills... to be authentically attuned to one another.”

In the burgeoning world of artificial intelligence, a model is only as good as its training data. For a chatbot designed to mimic human emotional states, generic internet scrapes are insufficient. Lucy’s "special sauce" is said to be the rich, emotionally charged dataset derived from the Fireside support line.

However, the intersection of AI, mental health data, and illicit substances raises significant privacy concerns. White emphasized that maintaining community trust was paramount, leading the organization to develop a rigorous, multi-layered anonymization protocol.

“The anonymization occurs in real-time,” White explained. “We use AI to excise from the recording and the transcript, before it's saved, any personal information.” Furthermore, the system decouples call data from phone numbers, ensuring the resulting dataset is completely untraceable.

“Fireside is turning that [data mining] idea on its head,” White said. “Those recorded anonymized conversations never leave Fireside Project... That data is used to create this amazing tool that will help train practitioners how to provide the skill of psychedelic support in more effective and safer ways.”

Currently, the Fireside Project team is refining the data to create specialized modules. Ideally, a student could choose to practice supporting specific scenarios, like a mid-40s male in New York City undergoing a high-dose psilocybin session, or a veteran experiencing an adverse reaction to ibogaine.

The detailed concern with which Fireside’s team has approached building Lucy has won over even some of the psychedelic community’s harshest AI critics, like Matt Brockmeier, a Psychedelic Bar Association Board Member and outspoken AI skeptic.

“Unlike most applications of AI in the larger economy, which will only further consolidate resources in the hands of a few psychopathic billionaire oligarchs and their overrated henchmen,” said Brockmeier, “Fireside is leveraging technology to support therapists - not replace them - so that they can do their job better, with fewer outcomes, leading to better outcomes for people who need help.”

Regarding their intended business model, Fireside Project remains steadfast that Lucy will remain a nonprofit endeavor, licensed to universities and training programs rather than sold directly to consumers. The revenue generated is intended to make the Fireside Project financially self-sustaining, ensuring the support line remains free for those in need.

“My guess is that within the psychedelic space this will remain a nonprofit endeavor just because of the market size... It’s not going to be sufficient to attract VC,” Esselman said, expressing skepticism toward for-profit motives in experiential training.

White and Esselman believe that the Fireside Project’s competitive advantage lies in its unique dataset. “In the world of emotionally intelligent voice models, they're really only as good as the conversations that are used to train them,” White said. “It would be nearly impossible to create more lifelike scenarios than the ones that Lucy is able to do.”

Not all industry leaders involved in the crossroads of AI and psychedelics agree with Esselman’s assessment of for-profit ventures, such as Sabba Nazhand, the founder of Safar: a for-profit AI-driven wellness startup described as an “Operating System for Human Transformation.”

“AI integration demands long-term R&D, safety standards, and engineering rigor that nonprofit structures simply can’t sustain,” said Nahzand. 

“Integration is too critical and too often overlooked to be built on slow, underfunded systems. Safar is guided by Wisdom Keepers, blending ethical stewardship with the ability to build world-class, future-ready integration infrastructure.

As the field seeks legitimacy and integration into the broader healthcare system, standardization of care is a top priority. In their quest to scale experiential training, Fireside Project hopes to embed a safety net into the industry's infrastructure. Lucy represents a fusion of Silicon Valley tech acceleration and the deep, human-centric ethos of harm reduction.

How Ayahuasca Is Helping the Yaqui Heal from Addiction and Reclaim Identity

In the deserts of Sonora, a quiet shift is unfolding among some Yaqui community members who have begun working with ayahuasca as they confront addiction, violence, and generational loss. What started as a tentative experiment has become a deeply personal healing effort — an intercultural process that weaves together ceremony, community support, and a renewed focus on protecting land and water. Together, these stories offer a rare glimpse into how a community is navigating healing on its own terms.

This week’s Friday Feature follows the people at the center of this effort: the community members who sought help, the organizers who built a space for recovery, and the practitioners striving to carry the work forward despite immense challenges. Their experiences raise larger questions about identity, survival, and what it means to reclaim a sense of connection after so much was taken.

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DoubleBlind Digs

• The Noke Koi community of Timbaúba Village is raising funds to build their first Cultural Center, which is essential infrastructure for cultural preservation and Indigenous autonomy. Contributions will go entirely toward Indigenous-led efforts to protect ancestral knowledge and keep the forest alive for generations. Donate here.

• This Giving Tuesday, your support helps seed Indigenous-led conservation across continents; strengthening cultural transmission, protecting sacred lands and medicines, and nurturing the intergenerational knowledge that keeps ecosystems, communities, and spiritual traditions alive for generations to come. Donate here.

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