Welcome back to The Drop In, DoubleBlind’s newsletter serving up news, culture, and independent journalism about psychedelics straight to your inbox.

Today’s lead story is about Psychedelic Culture, a San Francisco conference centering around Indigenous people, ideas, and knowledge. You can learn all about it and find out how to get tickets (while they last!) immediately below!

If you keep scrolling, you’ll find stories on the importance of home cultivation, things to do while you’re tripping on LSD, and Scientology.

Stay hydrated 💧,
Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief

As psychedelics continue to become more mainstream, the gap between options for where and how you can have these experiences continues to widen.

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Psychedelic Culture returns as access, borders, and Indigenous participation tighten.

From April 17 to 19, 2026, the Chacruna Institute will bring Psychedelic Culture back to San Francisco’s Brava Theater, bringing together more than 200 speakers across three days of programming. The conference comes at a pivotal moment in which psychedelics are being funneled into clinical pipelines and getting boxed in by regulatory frameworks. But that’s only a fraction of what’s happening — and what’s at stake — in the psychedelic field, particularly when it comes to Indigenous practices and plant medicine traditions.

The stakes are obvious, and they don’t necessarily only have to do with access. In a recent email sent to attendees, organizers of the conference flagged the possibility of encountering U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while traveling or moving through public spaces, particularly in the airport, where ICE has recently posted up to apprehend migrants.

“While there are no known or planned immigration enforcement operations tied to conferences or events,” the email read, “federal agencies may still be present in public spaces.” It then outlines immigrant rights should an ICE confrontation occur. “You are not required to answer questions about your immigration status in most situations, [and attendees] have the right to remain silent and the right to ask if you are free to leave.”

While an ICE warning may seem extreme, the reality is that an international conference, especially one that’s rooted in Indigenous and Global South participation, now has an added layer of responsibility. The notice reminds us that movement across borders, especially for a psychedelic and plant medicine conference, is increasingly fraught.

“Chacruna’s mission is uplifting marginalized voices in the field of psychedelic science. We were born in Mexico, and we are Latin, we are a very diverse community, and our team and speakers come from all over the world,” says Bia Labate, the executive director of the Chacruna Insitute, who is hosting the conference. “We need to protect them during these unprecedented times in the United States. We also took a proactive approach to reducing waste (by using no gift bags or printed programs and recycled materials). Chacruna sets trends in the field, and we hope folks follow us.”

Protection, in this context, means safeguarding forms of knowledge that are regularly sidelined as psychedelics and plant medicine are folded into Western frameworks, thanks to the so-called “psychedelic renaissance.” That’s why Chacruna is moving forward with another round of the conference.

“The advancement of the medical use of psychedelics through the FDA process has proven to be more complicated than some wanted, and will tend only to a small minority,” Labate tells DoubleBlind. “Regulated access and religious and community use seem to be the future of the psychedelic movement. Chacruna has been a historical leader in these areas, and we need to continue to guide the field on how to better steward these real-world uses forward.”

As legal frameworks come online and biotech companies push psychedelic drugs to market, the conversation among the people is shifting toward community-based use and religious contexts, and the ethical questions that come with both. “We need to support communal uses and psychedelic churches' best practices, fight for religious freedom, and center harm reduction, ethics, justice, equity, and reciprocity,” Labate says. “Chacruna’s main mission is education, and we educate the field through our conferences.”

Where Chacruna excels is in its commitment to educating about Indigenous cultures, despite the tensions inherent in that work. “The psychedelic movement urgently needs to learn from Indigenous people, repair epistemicide and support their political struggles,” Labate says. “However, we have also seen a concerning trend in the field of treating Indigenous people as saviors of humanity and messiahs of a new era.”

Instead of flattening those perspectives into something symbolic, Psychedelic Culture leans into the diversity, nuance, and even contradictions in opinions that exist across communities. “Chacruna is about bringing many voices and perspectives together and never losing critical thinking,” Labate says. “We named the conference Psychedelic Culture as we want to re-center dialogue from science to culture. Culture is bigger than science, and embraces science.”

That shift shows up in the structure of the event itself, which incorporates panels, lectures, and more experiential formats that engage participation beyond a purely academic lens. “PCU brings joy and celebration, and gives us a chance to be in community during these troubling times,” Labate says. “PCU is also about recognizing embodied forms of knowledge and cultural modes of perception as legitimate ways of knowing and being in the world.”

Psychedelic Culture is more than an educational gathering. It is a statement against cultural erasure and how sometimes Western science can inflict harm on Indigenous cultures, even without intending to.

“We also want to raise awareness around what happens with the knowledge produced by psychedelic science, and how this impacts local communities on the ground,” Labate says.

If you want to attend Psychedelic Culture on Bicycle Day Weekend in the Bay, learn more by clicking here.

This week’s Friday feature is about the uncanny phenomenon of “psychedelic telepathy,” or those eerie moments when thoughts, feelings, or phrases seem to leap between minds without any verbal communication.

Drawing on firsthand accounts, clinical perspectives, and decades of parapsychology research, the story traces how psychedelics may blur the boundaries between self and other, amplifying empathy, pattern recognition, and emotional attunement. At the same time, it interrogates the science, revealing a space where neuroscience, psychology, and the mystical collide, and where definitive answers remain just out of reach…or do they?

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If you’re currently searching for a psychedelic experience (or recovering from one that didn’t go as planned), The Complete Guide to Healing with Psychedelics was created to help you approach your next experience with greater clarity.

The Complete Guide to Healing with Psychedelics walks you through seven questions that can determine whether your next experience becomes a breakthrough or a regret.

Before you commit time, money, and energy to your next chapter, download the guide here and learn how to plan for the most transformative experience possible.