Time travel exists. We do it every time we read and write.
When I started publicly writing on psychedelics a few years ago in 2022, I did so in part because a mix of people who wrote in the 1960s—Lisa Bieberman, Thomas Merton, William J. Craddock, and later, Joan Didion, to name a few—were helpful to me in gaining clarity amidst a ton of noise, propaganda, and various influencers shaping narratives in our time. They gave voice to something specific to my experiences that I didn’t know anyone else could understand, much less articulate. Merton was also a chief teacher in how the essay can become a spiritual practice even more necessary for the writer than the reader, and I’ve found that true for me. I figured that if their words could reach me decades later, maybe something I wrote could help somebody years later who found themselves making sense of a strange time, even if nobody resonated here and now.
In 2023, as I was becoming a pastor, I wrote about issues with a Johns Hopkins study and a Christian non-profit and assumed it would simply exist as a visible fort of red flags hoisted above the sand in a rising cultural tide. I did not actually expect it to make much of a difference. Eventually, despite our human tendency to memory-hole matters that disrupt our self-mythology (Wade Mullen wrote a great piece about this), it became a significant research ethics scandal.
Beyond journalistic reportage, I have continued using my essays as a place of spiritual practice, public theology, personal intellectual refinement, and witnessing to what was burning in me to witness.
As it turns out, over the past few years, people have reached out to me about psychedelic stuff that they or someone they knew was going through. I am grateful for that, and want to make the invitation to reach out clearer.
Contact Me If:
If you are having issues related to psychedelics, the psychedelic field, a person in your life who is using psychedelics, or something else entirely, I would be happy to hear from you and see if there is a way I can help.
Here is an ad hoc list of the kinds of people that I appreciate hearing from. Please reach out if one of the following applies to you:
Psychedelic harm
If you’ve been harmed—yes, and I will share with you the best resources I know, and refer out where I can
If you fear someone you know is being harmed by psychedelics or a person involved with them—yes, and see above
If you’ve been harmed by a spiritual or religious leader who is using psychedelics or encouraging and/or facilitating others to do so—yes
If you’ve been harmed by a secular authority with psychedelics—yes
Writers and whistleblowers
If you are wrestling with whistleblowing—I will not recommend you do or don’t, but can share my experience with you and offer insights where applicable
If you’re a writer who is working on a story and needs other sources or ideas about where to look—yes
If you are an access journalist or advocacy journalist—no
If you’re trying to recover your voice after feeling it robbed—yes
Psychedelic spirituality and disillusionment
If psychedelics reconnected you to your spirituality and now you’re not so sure—yes
If you’re a Christian layperson wanting help discerning your psychedelic usage—yes
If you’re a Christian leader discerning psychedelics in the Church—yes
If you are in a psychedelic subculture, industry, non-profit, or religion and are starting to have doubts—yes
If you feel like you’re in a cult and want solidarity, whether in academia or the industry or your retreat center/church—yes
Miscellaneous cases
If you’re a state legislative aide asking about legislation—yes
If you want to talk about Scripture or theology—yes, and even if there is disagreement, provided it’s respectful and productive
If you want help getting into Harvard Divinity School—no, for a variety of reasons
If you are a psychedelic advocate wanting to dialogue—it depends; my trust has been burned before, and I may not respond if my spidey-sense is off. This may sometimes be unfair, but I have to be unfair sometimes
If you are an old colleague or friend wanting to authentically reconnect—often, yes, but it also depends (see above)
If you don’t know exactly what you need but you feel like you’re going crazy when it comes to something involving this topic and you don’t know who else to talk to—yes
You can contact me through a direct message on Substack or at psychedeliccandor[at]substack.com.
As a pastor, I am bound by pastoral codes of confidentiality. There are some usual limits; I am a mandatory reporter when it comes to child abuse and have a duty to warn when it comes to harm to self or others. I am accountable to my church’s governing bodies if I violate the ethical obligations of my office.
Many times, I might simply refer you to better resources and people better equipped than me to deal with things outside my expertise. I have no loyalty to psychedelics or any practitioners, institutions, or other research bodies in the field; I also have no financial conflicts of interest within the psychedelic space. That doesn’t mean I am completely unbiased, of course, but I intentionally maintain as much independence as I can in these matters.
Sometimes, people reach out who don’t need help but have another purpose. I can’t answer everything, including many good-faith messages, and sometimes I have ethical obligations not to respond and can’t disclose why. Sometimes, people reach out to do an interview, and sometimes I may be up for it, but for my own peace of mind and where I’m at with (waving my hands) all this stuff, I often have to keep my correspondence limited to focus on my other priorities.
What’s Next for Me
For the past three years, I have been blessed to pastor a small church in Vermont, and I am set to begin again at a new small church in the mountains of my home state, North Carolina. While I will still write for Psychedelic Candor as I feel so moved, my first priorities have been and will remain following Christ by being a husband, father, and pastor to my local church. Although people who only read this newsletter encounter me in a particular critical register, it’s not really my preferred mode. I do not want to be driven by an antithesis to what disturbs me, but to foster a better world through stewarding the good, beautiful, and true things God has given us.
To that end, Psychedelic Candor was not originally meant to be anti-psychedelics, and it’s still not. Candor, in its ideal form, is about sharing as much truth as love can muster and as much love as the truth can muster. I have not always succeeded at either.
Because this can be such an asymmetrical form of time travel, I can’t always tell how my stuff is received. I feel very blessed and grateful for people who have reached out over the past several years to let me know that something I said resonated and was helpful. I don’t always know whether I’ve helped, or how. I am also grateful for those who are some version of “pro-psychedelics” or otherwise may disagree but still reached out for genuine connection.
The nice, scary, frustrating, and mysterious thing about writing is that you never know who is reading and what strikes them. Chances are that on average, any given person will only read a summary of it through an AI’s summary of an AI’s summary buzzing through a million liters of data center coolant. For the human beings who actually read these words, though, I try to write with enough attention to detail to hopefully reward attention spans, though I struggle with my own.
So: can I help you? If I can, I do hope to hear from you. But it may not be until after I’m dead, and you may not even be alive yet. You may be a single person born in the land after time. But if I were the only person helped by those writers who never knew me, their efforts were worth it to me. I believe it would have been worth it to them if they knew. If I prove helpful to you, it will have been worth it to me.
