The Scariest Part About Psychedelic Mainstreaming?

For decades, hippies everywhere have clung to a utopian dream: Dose the masses to usher in a collective “societal awakening.”  If only, the hippies believed, people everywhere would tune in and turn on with LSD, mescaline, or any of the other molecules promising a taste of universal oneness, humanity would awaken to empathy and egalitarian values, and at last, there would be peace on Earth.

There was, and to some degree still is, a trope that “If we put LSD in the water supply, we can have world peace”.

Apparently, no one ever considered that even if you put LSD in the water supply, corporate interests could still privatize it and narcissists could launch their own branded LSD-infused water. 

For all the hoopla surrounding the psychedelic renaissance, leading to a prosperous and mutually aid-oriented global village populated with empaths and benevolent visionaries, the reality of psychedelic mainstreaming is giving more Clockwork Orange than “Kumbiyah.”

Pharmaceutical companies are quickly approaching a patent cliff, and scrambling to secure profits by monopolizing synthetic psychedelic analogues with for-profit models. Meanwhile, the current U.S. administration is escalating the War on Drugs to new heights by indiscriminately bombing alleged “narcoterrorist” drug smuggling boats in international waters. Billionaire longevity bros are touting the potential power of psychedelics to help them extend their lifespan and grow their portfolios, while the class divide exacerbates and concentrates more wealth and power in fewer hands. The Pentagon is investing in psychedelic research aimed at extending the operability of active duty military while simultaneously introducing drug testing for unsanctioned psilocybin use among soldiers. 

But the good news is that even with all of the terrifying possibilities of where the world seems to be heading as psychedelics go mainstream, there’s also a healthy margin for humor and absurdity as we collectively hurtle toward the many “unknown unknowns” ahead. As is often the case these days, the line between satire and reality is increasingly blurred, making it difficult to differentiate between the two. 

Ideas that sound ridiculously outlandish become the blueprint for a new biotech venture, or the pursuit of a narcissistic guru with infinite money to pour into achieving the impossible. 

I’m just wondering when we get Palantir for the spirit world? The multiverse is full of entities, and it’s high time we got to surveilling and profiling them. Some of them could be illegal aliens.

Peter Thiel, if you’re reading this, there is a non-zero chance that the antichrist is actually a fifth-dimensional DMT entity rather than, say, Greta Thunberg. 

I can even see Burger King incorporating Iboga into its menu once Target fully accelerates the normalization of THC-infused drinks, paving the way for a full merger between plant medicines and American consumer culture. 

There’s also a statistical probability that some company will figure out how to embed advertisements into trips with their proprietary new psychoactive substances (“NPS”). Imagine creating a lifetime customer by imprinting your brand logo and ethos upon their psyche during the peak of the trip. They would feel deeply connected to your brand values and product portfolio, and act accordingly. 

Further yet, there have been reports of people contacting deceased relatives and loved ones while in an Iboga trance. I don’t see why this advanced spiritual technology couldn’t be adopted by the IRS to recoup back taxes by tracking down deadbeats in the afterlife — no pun intended. If the potential for crossing over into the other realm exists to help someone alleviate generational trauma or receive a message from their spirit guardians, it can also surely be used for purposes of debt collection. 

AI shamans are also a real possibility here — not ChatGPT, but ChatDMT. 

Let’s not forget the potential of psychedelics to be weaponized by the military. Training, equipping, and mobilizing a hayseed from America’s heartland — just to have him shot in some backwater town he can’t pronounce on the other side of the world and consequently develop complex PTSD rendering him inoperable within 6 months’ time — is bad for business. In this context, we can think of psychedelic therapy as an insurance policy for active duty military. Just wait until someone tells them that the same people making IED’s were opium poppy farmers and hash producers before they became the beneficiaries of invasive democracy.

With AI drug development in play, we can now look forward to a potentially infinite number of different new psychedelic drugs that are precisely engineered for an infinite number of different highly individualized pathologies — we can invent new names for all the different sicknesses and moral injuries as well, like DPDS (Dictatorial Penile Derangement Syndrome), where if you’re a dictator and have trauma around the size of your penis, there’s a 5-HT2A agonist NPS drug that can be manufactured on the fly to help you manage the trauma around your tiny dick. 

I have my own thoughts and feelings about the potentially scary outcomes of the mainstreaming of psychedelics, but I wanted to get a pulse check on what other people who are deeply invested in this space have to say on the matter.

So, here are 10 perspectives on the mainstreaming of psychedelics from the community, unfiltered and unhinged:

*These quotes have been edited for length and clarity.

Mainstream psychedelics could have unintended consequences we’re not even thinking of. I want to keep psychedelics in the hands of counterculture artists and musicians, for example. If Taylor Swift had used mushrooms to help her heal from her breakups, we may have never heard of her. Not a world I want to live in.

- Robert Johnson, CEO of Mycroboost mushrooms

Can I hit your Ketamine Vape?" I ask my girlfriend after finishing my Ergotini Cocktail. Pre-gaming for an AI-generated film at the Las Vegas Sphere, we finish a strong line of something Blue called "Eiffel 65"... must be a new research chemical. The effects of my over-the-counter medication, paired with my AR goggles, completely cancel out any high of my chemical gumbo. I arrive at the sphere completely sober. "Damn, this SpottieOttieDopaliscious Flip backfired majorly, I feel absolutely nothing", I tell her. "Yeah, I'm just glad we're finally cutting back this week," she says.

- Emily Eaglin, aka Chrysantilus, one-woman production studio 

Young people are now one of the fastest-growing groups using psychedelics, and I’m seeing their spread into high schools firsthand. In the psychedelic field, it’s well established that “set” — one’s inner world, identity, and sense of self — profoundly shapes the experience. But what happens when that self is still forming? When a young person is asking, “Who am I? Who could I become?” Modern society has lost the rites of passage, rituals, and communal practices that once helped adolescents build grounded and hopeful identities.

Ultimately, psychedelics are teachers. They reveal. And what they’re revealing now is the absence of strong, affirming identity structures in our social world. We must meet adolescents with what psychedelics show they need most: identity, belonging, and belief in who they can become.

- Rhana Hashemi of Know Drugs 

As the market for psilocybin mushrooms takes off, there are a growing number of shady practices associated with vendors involved in the space. 

For example, some vendors don’t properly dry their mushrooms and are selling people a mushroom that is not fully dried and actually contains a lot of water weight. This not only dilutes the potency but also poses health risks as it can lead to rot and decay, increasing the chance of someone getting sick while lowering turnaround time for vendors so they can make more money. Invest in doing your due diligence and connect with a community that cares about both the mushrooms and you, and don’t source from random and shady companies.

- Robert Lattig, Founder of Healing Herbals

One of the most concerning emergent outcomes of psychedelic mainstreaming is the rise of mislabeled products.  Manufacturers use terms like ‘functional’ or ‘medicinal’ to conceal psychoactive ingredients without proper disclosure or warnings. This kind of misrepresentation can lead to unintended and distressing experiences for unsuspecting consumers.

Equally concerning is the industry’s confusion around potency. Many manufacturers still list total mushroom weight rather than the actual active strength, measured as Psilocin Equivalent (PEq). Understanding both serving size and relative potency is essential. The solution is simple: transparent labeling and verified testing which are guidelines we actively champion at PsiloSafe.

- Joseph Robinson of PsiloSafe.

As psychedelics enter the mainstream faster than the capacity of trained guardians, hype can outrun wisdom and harm can follow. We can blunt most risks by scaling basic education before broad adoption: consent, set and setting, simple screening, appropriate dosing, sober support, crisis response, and integration planning.

- Milica Radovic Mandic, Founder of PsilocybinSF and Global Psychedelic Week

Psychedelic culture is no longer just for hippies! Now, even your favorite racist uncle can listen to Tool and tell you how much you need to check out Shambhala Music Festival. As psychedelics become increasingly mainstream, they run the risk of no longer being a reliable way to draw attention to yourself, and show the world how small your ego has gotten.

- Skye Hawthorne of Drug Cultures Podcast

Optimistically, mainstream psychedelics might awaken people to the wealth of meaning within themselves, rendering the attention economy obsolete. Realistically, we’ll just get mushroom-shaped candles and influencer retreats.

- Soren Shade, Producer at Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia 

I hope that people will lean more on this as a medicine rather than another product to party with, and take the time to acquire a true understanding of the benefits provided by the mushroom. We can mindlessly consume mushroom gummies and chocolates or we can learn from the mushroom and integrate purposefully, and in that, give back to the mushroom. My goal is to live a symbiotic relationship with the mycelium as well as the fruit.

- Edward Crowe Music and Fashion Industry executive

One of the things I'm most worried about is people limiting their understanding of psychedelics to market-tested clichés and overused metaphors. Since the way we talk about psychedelics affects the type of tools they can be, I'm interested in keeping the concept open and fluid. There's no single model or explanation that can fully capture psychedelic effects, and different communities should be able to decide for themselves what psychedelics mean to them. The commercialization of psychedelics has domesticated the concept in ways that appeal most to capital owners, reducing their transformative potential to prescribed pathways that preserve the societal status quo.

- Neşe Devenot, Senior Lecturer in Writing at Johns Hopkins University 

The mainstreaming of psychedelics is potentially scary as fuck due to the power these plants and compounds hold. There are a million different scenarios beyond our comprehension that can manifest. But there’s also a way to avoid all of these potential train wrecks. For my money, it’s developing a sense of humor. It’s not for nothing that the old adage, “Laughter is the best medicine,” exists. Humor is the Achilles' heel of inhumanity, and it is a fundamental aspect of cognition that separates us from animals. Find that humor. Lean into it. The fate of psychedelic mainstreaming, and the world at large, may depend on us having a sense of humor about it all. Regardless of how widespread legalization and mainstreaming rolls out. 

💌 If you loved this email, forward it to a psychonaut in your life.

Editorial Process

DoubleBlind is a trusted resource for news, evidence-based education, and reporting on psychedelics. We work with leading medical professionals, scientific researchers, journalists, mycologists, indigenous stewards, and cultural pioneers. Read about our editorial policy and fact-checking process here.