The Psychedelic Trojan Horse

Psychedelic Capitalism, The Sacred & Counterculture Vision

Long before the plague infected our bodies, a sickness was spreading roots in our minds. We’re in the grips of a global mental health crisis, with close to a billion people struggling with some form of mental illness. Someone takes their own life every 40 seconds. A sense of dislocation, anxiety and loneliness pervades modern life.

As psychiatry struggles to find solutions, psychedelics are emerging as beacons of hope. Promising results from a new wave of clinical research suggests that psychedelic-assisted therapy using psilocybin, MDMA and DMT, might not just be more effective than current treatments, but usher in a new paradigm of treating mental health. The last two years in particular have seen a gold rush of investment, with dozens of psychedelic pharma companies raising close to $2 billion in stock market flotations. The press has stopped telling stories about people jumping out of windows high on acid, and instead pumps out glowing headlines about the promise of psychedelic science. Investors like Christian Angermayer claim that psychedelic pharma companies could solve the mental health crisis.

The hype can make it appear as though we understand what’s causing this crisis. We don’t. From the perspective of biomedical psychiatry, our depressions, anxieties and addictions can be…