The Unreal Betrothal of Trump and the Psychedelic Industry
Why the Pope is right and drug politics are football
“The reality of football is understood through the unreality of its media depiction, which is the same way we understand most of modern life.”
Chuck Klosterman
This Month in Doctor
Last month, Twitter erupted in the most memorable mutiny of MAGA Christianity to date because Donald Trump depicted himself as Jesus Christ, which Trump then lied about by saying he was a “doctor.” A week later, on the eve of a holiday for LSD, Trump played doctor again by signing an executive order crafted by psychedelic activists within Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s administration because he had received a text from Joe Rogan. With blasphemy out of the newscycle, Twitter this time erupted with bipartisan applause. By the time you’re reading this, the Trump administration has also rescheduled state-licensed marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, and someone attempted to assassinate him at a hotel for reasons nothing to do with any of that.1
The above paragraph is, insanely, an even-handed summary of events. What had long been a flirtation between the budding psychedelic industry and the Trump administration was finally consummated, if not quite yet a marriage.
It’s always a little strange for me when something happens in the psychedelic movement that I would have once cheered. Why am I not excited about the order today? To some, since I am no longer a psychonaut and am now a pastor, I am a religious fundamentalist who hates veterans, science, medicine, healing, and derives his pastoral identity from Les Misérables’ Javert. To Michael Pollan, I simply think “psychedelics are the root of all evil.”
My view isn’t for these reasons, nor because of Trump’s reasons for signing it: the unpopularity of the Iran War, retaining Rogan’s services, and appeasing a MAHA coalition of hippies and Christians even weirder than you can find in my favorite Asheville Waffle House. My view is that even if you like psychedelics and find them to have potential uses for medical healing, you still have good reasons not to like this move.
As I started to think through this, a tweet from Pope Leo and the NFL draft made me think about the even bigger issues at play in how we relate to reality itself.
But first, since you didn’t ask for it but are reading anyway, here’s what I think about Trump’s embrace of psychedelics.
What the Executive Order Does and Doesn’t: A Primer
Trump’s executive order does three primary things: fund ibogaine research, expand “Right to Try” access, and direct the FDA to give vouchers to “fast-track” review of new psychedelic treatments. There is more detail on this covered in a psychedelic industry outlet’s overview and across the internet. There are also some public misconceptions.
“Federal prohibition of psychedelic medicine in America is over,” said Bryan Hubbard, an ascendant ibogaine evangelist who was in the White House for the order signing. This is not technically true, but it’s also impressionistically false. As far as the U.S. government is concerned, you cannot legally go out and use psychedelics unless you are part of a clinical trial, which has already been the case for decades.
The order basically moves select FDA drug applications (which have already gone through initial trials) to the top of the queue for final review, shortening the review time to 1-2 months. While ibogaine was heavily discussed and was the raison d’etre for Rogan’s inspirational text to Trump, ibogaine was not one of these fast-tracked therapies. Rather, ibogaine received additional funding, notably in the wake of Texas legislation that Hubbard and others have backed and have failed (including a version in my state of Vermont that did not make it out of committee this session).
Since the Trump administration moves faster than the speed of discernment, six days after the order, vouchers have already been awarded to three companies for two drugs, psilocybin and methylone. But for the psychedelic breakthrough therapies that did get a green light for quicker review, it doesn’t guarantee they will be approved, per se.
So there are some concrete wins here for proponents that they would argue are simply righting some wrongs. In their view, Nixon created an unjust system over 50 years ago, therefore Trumpian tactics to save lives are worth it. Others think the order is still important but more notable for its symbolism than its specific actions, a rising tide for all our research boats. Accordingly, most news stories presented the story without much askance glances, save for its policy-by-podcaster birth process with doula Rogan. This origin story is only partly true—psychedelic lobbyists have been part of the Trump 2.0 every step of the way—but it has a charm, given that the order doesn’t sound that bad to most people.
The Other 11 Hours and 59 Minutes
The main reason it doesn’t sound that bad is that the stories of psychedelic healing sound so good, probably because they often are, in and of themselves, good. Since the order, even some of Trump’s fiercest opponents like Jon Stewart found themselves reluctantly admitting our Broken Clock in Chief had finally fulfilled time. Is this that special twice-a-day minute?
Many people just see Trump’s order as cutting some red tape to fix bad politics with better politics, prioritizing promising forms of research that help veterans and others suffering crippling diseases. People like myself thus feel cornered to repeat our thousandth supplicating caveat: while my views on the psychedelic movement have changed drastically since being a part of it, I can still support people who get psychedelic healing. I’ve had some myself (I haven’t drank in nine years thanks to a psychedelic experience, and I wasn’t even trying to quit drinking). People who had accepted hardship from a mental disease found liberation. How could I gripe against this? I couldn’t, and I don’t, even knowing that these anecdotes miss the unspoken tradeoffs, complicators, and other bad decisions downstream of the healing.
Most of the popular media takes echo the years of narrative-crafting by psychedelic lobbyists who have invested heavily in social engineering practices. This has culminated in an unassailable onslaught of buzzwords, marketing associations with thought-terminating cliches, and probably no small amount of personal affinity that the average middle-class to wealthy American has from their own personal experiences of psychedelics, at least from my view from the amphitheater lawn.
I don’t necessarily hold these takes against anybody. It is a fact of navigating life that we have to settle for being well-read in summaries of summaries of issues we mostly don’t have time to delve deeply into the specifics. Most people on most issues, myself included, repeat opinions we’ve heard that make us feel good to hold. In this case, it feels good to many people to be cautiously affirming of drugs, provided it’s in a wise, reasonable, and nuanced way. Nobody wants to identify as a prohibitionist Puritan nor van-dwelling trustafarian. For many like Jon Stewart, I imagine it must also feel really good to occasionally “hand it” to Trump on an issue, proving to yourself that you are not an ideologue, and that like all the other reasonable people, you just happen to also agree Trump did a good thing here, still disagreeing with Trump along with all the reasonable people on every other issue where Trump did a bad thing.
But as you know within the domains of your expertise, when we get into the specifics of an issue, they often defy conventional wisdom and certainly include things the birds of media miss from their view.
Why the Obviously Good Order is Actually Bad
There are reasons to dislike this executive order even if you think it’s obviously a good thing because psychedelic drugs should be safely administered in clinical settings, and probably even if you think they should be fully decriminalized (within that camp, Psymposia put out a summary video that includes many concerns from a leftist perspective, and we should probably all be concerned about tools being developed by wealthy dudes who love combining privacy-invading tech with AI and drugs while believing they’re here to save America from its “mind viruses”).
Another notable voice of dissent was Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a Marine Corps veteran Democrat from Massachusetts. Shortly after the executive order, Rep. Auchincloss grilled RFK Jr. about it in a committee hearing.
Here are some of my reasons this is a bad idea:
The order uses a voucher program that may be illegal and which FDA staffers already thought was sketchy
We are all goldfish in 2026, and most of us (including the media) completely forgot or never heard that the mechanism Trump’s FDA is leveraging for this order is only months old, highly controversial among those within it, and to many, probably illegal. According to the AP, “Concerns about the legality of the program have also contributed to the recent departure of several leaders of the FDA drug center, which is now being led by its fifth director in the past year.” Why? Per the article:
The plan may run afoul of legal, ethical and scientific standards long used to vet the safety and effectiveness of new medicines.
Outside experts point out that FDA drug reviews — which range from six to 10 months — are already the fastest in the world.
“The concept of doing a review in one to two months just does not have scientific precedent,” said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a professor at Harvard Medical School. “FDA cannot do the same detailed review that it does of a regular application in one to two months, and it doesn’t have the resources to do it.”
Widespread concern that FDA drug reviews — long pegged to objective standards and procedures — have become open to political interference.
Questions about the legality of the program led the FDA’s then-drug director, Dr. George Tidmarsh, to decline to sign off on approvals under the pathway, according to several people with direct knowledge of the matter. … After his departure, Dr. Sara Brenner, the FDA’s principal deputy commissioner, was set to have the power to decide, but she also declined the role after looking further into the legal implications.
I’m going to stop quoting because you read more about it in that article, another one from the AP on its legality, this one from STAT News discussing the voucher program as a vehicle for political interference and corruption, or (and let’s be honest) just doing your own AI-powered research. This was also further backed up by Rep. Auchincloss:
“Scientists under political pressure from Makary have shared their concerns through my office’s whistleblower channel. Here are a few: "I was pressured into withholding a recommendation for approval for a drug that was intended for a rare disease by Dr. Prasad and other FDA leadership"...
“Direct lobbying to the Commissioner's office [is] a smart and productive business practice for companies to get what they want.”
There have been further concerns about the overall climate at the FDA and political interference in the drug process:
Former FDA staffer: “I recently left FDA due to the political pressure I was receiving to withhold my recommendation for approval for a drug that was intended for a rare disease. I was part of a review division that was constantly under pressure. Specifically for this recent example, we met frequently with Prasad and other FDA leadership who emphasized the drug should not be approved. However, from the review document and my experience, it would have been approved had it not been for the political pressure.”
Counterpoint: we seem to be fine with political corruption as long as it helps us, because otherwise it may mean never being helped. Over the years of rooting for my mostly unsuccessful North Carolina pro sports teams, I never complain when a referee makes a bad call to help my guys; God works in mysterious ways for the Carolina Hurricanes, at least until the Eastern Conference Finals (maybe this year will be different).
The decisions made are already nakedly political
But while I like it when corruption helps my sports teams, I also like a little theater of plausible deniability. In pro wrestling, the refs need to maintain kayfabe too.2 So even if you’re the most cynical pro-psychedelic actor, you have to worry about the optics here when the voucher program’s debut has already demonstrated that these are going to be political decisions.
The order benefited a voucher recipient denied by the White House only six months ago, a choice also apparently made for political reasons. Did the data change in six months, or the winds? As reported in Psychedelic Alpha:
This element of the executive order seems to be a complete U-turn. Last October, the White House vetoed FDA’s inclusion of Compass Pathways’ psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression program in its inaugural list of voucher recipients. As we have reported, apprehension among Trump’s inner circle around how its base would view the action appears to have driven the decision to yank the voucher. One can only assume those political considerations would be accentuated in an election year, meaning today’s executive order seems to also suggest a level of confidence around the political viability of forwarding certain psychedelics-related policies.
Take 1 and 2 together, and the only reasonable null hypothesis is that psychedelic drug decisions at Trump’s FDA will be overtly made under political pressures. Where will this leave the long-term credibility of any approvals?
Injecting politics into science is bad, even if you think bad politics prevented good science
To the psychedelic movement, using politics has been justified because psychedelics were treated unfairly. Rogan repeated the common and oversimplified history that says psychedelics were only banned for Nixon’s racist political purposes, and they stopped being studied only because of political blocks, and there were no other harms or issues coming from them. I’m going to frustrate some of you by saying that this is wrong, and I’m gonna annoy you even more by telling you the truth that I don’t have time to explain why it’s wrong, just that I used to believe it until I learned how FDA standards changed, how there actually were a lot more horror stories in the psychedelic sixties than I knew or wanted to admit, and how the extant evidence base for psychedelic therapy is still contested by many independent scientists as insufficient. When I was in it, I did not want to believe any of this.
But even if the story in its simplest form were true, it would still bother me how unbothered people are at the nakedly embraced injection of politics that has always been part of psychedelic science. As Michael Pollan told the open secret a decade ago, “science” has been the theater upon which psychedelic political activism has played out for thirty years. Take the problems you’re aware of with normal scientific biases, then add in a spiritual belief in their advancement to fix society, and the result is a movement’s self-righteousness to manipulate political levers to “spiritualize humanity.” While there are serious researchers in the field who value data over slogans, the politics and public reception steamroll their nuance.
If one thinks the substances were maligned by bad politics, the answer must be better science. When this science is irresponsibly expedited through yet more politics, the long-term effect will not lead to better science, but reasons to further question its legitimacy. Will the 2076 history of 2026 be “the only reason psychedelics became legal is because Donald Trump wanted a political victory”? If so, it would have as much valid explanatory power as our current revisionism.
The profiting has already begun by those literally in the room
You might be surprised to learn that the Trump administration has aligned itself with people advancing policy in support of their financial interests. Many of the Silicon Valley investors who have been influencing Trump 2.0 since before inauguration day stood in the Oval Office for the order signing. This includes Elon Musk’s longtime associates, the Jurvetsons, who have ambitious market-oriented and AI-infused plans for our psychedelic future. Bryan Hubbard’s Americans for Ibogaine legislative gambits also got a bailout after floundering in Kentucky and Texas.
Another attendee at the signing ceremony, Matthew “Whiz” Buckley, is a veterans advocate who also runs a psychedelic church and offers an investment advisory service. I don’t know Mr. Buckley, who might have an ability to hold all these roles together in integrity that I wouldn’t. Within days after posting about the proud moment in the White House, Buckley posted an advertisement for his investment services, promoting an “institutional-grade sector intelligence brief”; Saturday’s “sacraments” were Thursday’s “exploding” stocks. As one pro-legalization commenter replied: “It’s not a good look for an advocate for their legalization for medicinal uses to be associated with a hedge fund focusing on psychedelics... This just looks gross.” Buckley responded, saying, “It’s called Profit with Purpose. My wife and I have personally funded No Fallen Heroes for five years. Donations are scarce. … Investors who understand the science and believe in the mission are part of the solution, not the problem.”
This week, the New York Times also raised questions about financial conflicts of interest with the close RFK ally Calley Means, a psychedelic activist who some psychedelic insiders believe may have had an influence on coordinating this executive order.3 As reported in Politico this week, Means’ sister, Casey, has been struggling in her nomination process for surgeon general due to questions about her psychedelic endorsement, New Age beliefs, and basic qualifications, criticized in a Washington Post op-ed by a former Trump administration official: “Americans are free to pursue whatever spiritual path they choose. But the surgeon general is not a shaman.”
We are really bad at reading health headlines
One of the many issues of turning science and health decisions into political ones (of which we have plenty of examples since March 2020) is a people problem. Again, most of us don’t have time to credibly study most issues, even ones that affect us. People read headlines, hear anecdotal proclamations, assume the safety cart before the data horse, and seek them out immediately. That’s essentially why there is a psychedelic underground that has boomed in recent decades, and why I expect it will boom more from these actions even more than the official pathways of legal therapy (assuming it comes), if for nothing else than for cost reasons. I regularly get calls from people and loved ones who have experienced harm in the underground, and I expect to get more.
The idol-making drugs just got fed into an idol-making machine
There is another factor that makes long-term issues from psychedelics harder to detect than other drugs. I truly mean it when I say that I love many people who feel helped by these drugs. They’re among some of my oldest friends in my entire life. And because I love them, I have to emphasize the spiritual gravity of this: these are drugs that, for whatever reason, make people worship the divine with them. It is not a good thing that a side effect of these drugs is that people idolize them. It is a disastrous thing when the professional community supporting them also idolizes them. And this is obvious if you spend time in the psychedelic spiritual industry and you don’t share that idol.
Granted, you could still feel it’s better to be imperfectly Machiavellian to create faster opportunities for healing than to let people die in a purity spiral. I don’t expect emerging Big Psychedelia to turn down the opportunities, and I also won’t hold it against researchers who take some extra crust from a larger research funding pie even if they don’t directly benefit from the order. The system may be corrupt, but at least now it’s legibly corrupt, right?
Yet this will always sit in extreme tension with the spiritual ideals that remain intrinsic to the movement. This isn’t Tylenol research. Process is even more important where there is passionate ideology, and if you’re a spiritual movement, process has to matter or you eventually lose all credibility among those who don’t blindly follow false shepherds. The reason there was an Oval Office meeting on April 18th was because for decades, the bulk of psychedelic research has been driven by people who see them as sacred paths to the divine. Once again, the movement has a choice between its spiritual ideals versus what’s more effective and most convenient (which is how you know it’s on its way to becoming a true religion). And once again, the leaders of the movement revealed their true perennial philosophy is a glamorous realpolitik. It’s like how my dearest love Phish chooses not to fix Ticketmaster price-gouging because paying to play pays more than playing straight-up. They have every right to, but it makes their parking lot “community” hit different.
Okay.
So that’s the executive order.
But as I’ve been chewing on this story for a few days, the issues with the executive order don’t interest me as much as the reality of football.
When the Reality is the Simulation
I bought Chuck Klosterman’s recent book, Football, for vacation. I went on vacation despite knowing that psychedelic news reliably interrupts my vacations (this now has happened with the 2024 FDA rejection of MDMA, the 2025 release of the clergy study, and now Dr. Trump’s office hours). I bought the book because despite my Carolina Panthers’ usual efforts, I love football.4 I thought I was getting what Klosterman advertised as a book about why football will one day not be culturally hegemonic, and it is that.5
But along the way, the pop-cultural intellectual also makes an important observation, to repeat the epigraph: “The reality of football is understood through the unreality of its media depiction, which is the same way we understand most of modern life.” Put another way, what we love about football isn’t the truth of what football is, but the media product it is presented as, which is fundamentally different from how it is experienced as played or even personally witnessed.
To state it in more obvious terms: your idea of something isn’t the thing itself. This is because things are “mediated.” You don’t directly perceive a thing. To see anything, you go through something else.
This is important in understanding psychedelic media coverage, and it is important to understanding psychedelic experiences themselves. Psychedelics are, by definition, mediations. You take a substance to alter your perception of reality. Pop psychedelic spirituality often invokes the idea that you are getting to something purer, truer, and un-mediated. I’m going to be unpersuasively blunt and just tell you: this is wrong.
One does not simply take a trip back to something pure. You are tripping on a distilled combination of every association you have with psychedelics, every time your mind has contemplated the Peruvian jungle or the Grateful Dead or Midsommar or your uncle who overconfidently synthesizes NPR stories, or perhaps the researchers of your clinical trial and the interviews they give, the music they play, and the way they arrange the couch you trip on. You take a trip that, if basic materialism is correct, is taking all the unconscious contents of your brain and, the wet Large Language Model that it is, spits back out something between statistics and algorithmically-influenced but impossible to fully derive chaos and this becomes indistinguishable to us from magic or God. If basic materialism is incorrect, you dare to dance with angels and demons and learn the tricks to not meditate on the stories of psychosis you’ve heard don’t really happen if you don’t want to believe they do. All of this is saturated in drugs that, for some unknown (at least to me) mechanical reason, generate feelings of deep profundity. Simulated meaning attaches itself to your unique simulated spirituality.
Every Christian’s and atheist’s experience of Christianity is not the full reality of Christianity, even if it were knowable. We all operate under an idea of what Christianity is—authoritarian or liberating, communal or cultish, abusive or saving. We all live in the unreality of our perception of it. Likewise, your psychedelic “reality” is the unreality of what you think psychedelic experiences are supposed to be like, with a massive injection of barely-understood biochemistry. And what’s informing this is every story you’ve heard and headline you’ve ever glanced. It is all mediation, and for this reason we do call its creators “the media.”
I’ve been thinking about this again not only because of a hipster book on football, but because Pope Leo recently tweeted something about the dangers of AI:
“When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.”
(People have been referencing Baudrillard and “hyperreality” in reference to this. I haven’t read him, which hasn’t previously stopped me from referencing somebody to sound more sophisticated, but today I’ll just assume there’s something very French going on here.)
Centuries before Pope Leo and ChatGPT, John Calvin identified this problem within Christianity, arguing that in the sacrament of the Eucharist, we have collapsed “the sign” (bread and wine) with the Signified (God).6 Calvin’s instincts were iconoclastic, but it didn’t mean he was a Christian nihilist.7 While the signs may not be the Signified, we can still retain what makes them spiritually meaningful. The Lord’s Supper is still a place where Calvin believed Christ and the Holy Spirit were really present, just not in the way we thought.
The problem is that we need a mediator between us and God, or for the less-theist, between us and the Ultimate. To Calvin, and the author of the letter to the Hebrews, only Christ was the great Mediator.8 In turn, baptism and the Eucharist are appropriate lesser mediators only because the Mediator instituted them, not because they are him. But Calvin’s take remains controversial because we are passionate about signs and their verisimilitude, and theology is boring for most people and hard for the people it isn’t.
But even Calvin, whose serious detractors could still admit was one of the most scrupulous Christian thinkers ever, probably underestimated how much our collapsing of the sign and the Signified was a problem for everything we experience. When we feel like we’re touching the pure Signified, the true, unmitigated spiritual reality, it’s just a complex series of signs that we’ve inherited that we’re still relating to, rather than the thing as it is. This is not just about drugs, but a human condition. It’s also how I could have an extended period as a non-Christian really into Zen only to wind up Presbyterian again. Our roots share the instincts of distrusting overly reified symbolism because it distorts our relationship to truth, even if truth is ungraspable beyond fleeting moments of satori, or to the Christian, grace. I guess the main lesson here is that, like Baudrillard, Calvin was very French.
But while mediation feels inescapable in post-postmodernism, Klosterman also notes how there are very somber reminders that not everything is mediated. Some things just are. His example of that is the prevalence of the brain injury CTE from playing football. It’s a disease that is much realer than any story football tells about itself. Leading to violence, mental illness, and self-harm, its reality has loomed over and dominated the evolution of football and our understanding of it in the past decade. This hasn’t unseated its cultural hegemony, but it has complicated it. Notably, and also complicatedly for me, the former NFL player Robert Gallery is an advocate of ibogaine because it helped him deal with his CTE. Gallery would have every reason to be specifically upset at me for liking football and being suspicious of the psychedelic industry.
Also complicatedly, and unfairly, psychedelic harms are often realer in a way that lots of psychedelic healing isn’t. Yes, some psychedelic healing is “really real,” and we know it especially when we can measure it. But much isn’t. So instead, narratives are crafted and stories told, the domain of mediation. Maybe these mediations are trying to overcompensate with narrative what science can’t, for in the land of the blind postmodern, the one-eyed narrative is king.
Eventually, though, the narratives fail when they don’t reflect the “premodern” data that science gropes for. This is where the cardiotoxicity, the psychoses, the sexual abuses, and the suicides live. One can weave these into narratives as just part of the “dark night of the soul” or the sanctity of harm reduction or the need for yet-more funding. I suspect that, like football, part of the attraction of psychedelics is the danger. But the harms are literally realer than the stories about them, and eventually, though it may take forever, reality catches up.
What may never catch up is the stuff that remains unrecordable and always-contestable yet nevertheless impactful: ended marriages and deserted careers over dubious “insights,” false recovered memories leading to false allegations, becoming a more morally “fluid” person who becomes comfortable with manipulation because curating a psychedelic journey teaches you how to manipulate yourself first.
The upshot is this: psychedelics are on-demand spiritual simulations to accommodate hyper-individuality. When they become objects of devotion, and (like AI) mistaken for authentic reality, the trade-offs can be subtle and devastating on one’s basic ability to make sense of truth and meaning. In my view, this is probably at the core of so many of their negative effects that are difficult to study even if people wanted to. These are drugs that imbue you with so much meaning that they can “one-shot” you into insane conclusions, even if they’re wrapped up with real healing. Some thus blend partial reality into deeply held unreal conclusions and reorient their entire lives around them. Some become outright schizophrenic in the clinical sense of the word, and it tears me apart knowing these cases. If you do come to realize you’ve believed a profound illusion without fully breaking, you might still become nihilistic and demoralized. Or worse, you complete your psychonaut arc, find the remixed cliche insights tired, and become devoutly religious. As I can report, that’s the 5-MeO of spiritual pride.
People who trip should care about these problems, but so should people who don’t trip. You should care that while there are unpredictable harms, it is predictable that they will happen, they will be catastrophic, and the second-order effects of harms will rip open our meaning-making.
There is an old saying in law that I learned from one year of shuttling court documents for a Raleigh law office to the state house (while listening to the early days of Joe Rogan): “When you have the facts, you pound the facts. When you have the law, you pound the law. If you have neither, you pound the table.” Psychedelic narratives pound the science if it has it, but because it so often doesn’t, it pounds the stories over and over and over. And while “the science” may be good enough to be approved, the Trump order is like pounding the table with an anvil. Both the stories and the science may end up cut by the shards.
On-Demand Angels, Mediated Demons
So yes, everything you love and hate about psychedelics is not reality as-is but mediated by media and The Media. But you have to remember that members of the media are people too (the internet doesn’t love this). The producers of media are also consumers of media, and despite knowledge of how it is made, they are not exempt from being manipulated by good storytelling technique. In fact, a compelling, well-made story may even more incline them to believe in its truth, as if it were an artistic masterpiece pointing to something beyond itself. In other words, the journalists who report on this movement are also its audience, receiving pro-psychedelic curations and curating them again for the public.
This is the engine that makes Pollan and the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative’s strategy sophisticated and effective (several PSFC leaders were in the Oval Office for Trump’s signing ceremony). The “cadre” of psychedelic-affirming journalists doesn’t just create reporters who know specific details about drugs and policy. It creates a sea of content that drowns out the reality as is, in all its blank canvas, with unreality that is even louder: psychedelic medicines are an inevitable good if we are “safe and responsible,” whatever those things need to mean at any given time. What’s even more effective is that these mediations sometimes have been balanced, both sincerely and performatively. The result is that we informed citizens now all agree, we just must, that psychedelics can be safely and responsibly incorporated.
While these stories of healing have been on parade from Netflix to Oprah to a thousand decentralized seashells in the ocean of our internet, the horrible stories get the occasional name-check from a psychedelic blogger and only break through to the mainstream media when their inconvenience is overcome by an undeniable relevance (as in the case of FDA’s 2024 rejection of MDMA, which got far more press than the abuse that occurred within it which had been known for years). These stories remain woefully untold. They never enter into the trip that is your personal unreal opinion of psychedelics. Take the recent emergence of abuse stories from the Brazilian group Santo Daime, often lifted up in Christian conversations as a proof of psychedelic Christian concept (if you’re willing to accept that God, after revealing himself as Jesus Christ in the first century, ordained a 20th-century prophet to evangelize ayahuasca and instruct us to sing hymnody about its founder Mestre Irineu). Or take the 21-year-old who stabbed himself, or the Utah ketamine doctor who committed murder-suicide of his son, or on and on and on. In my memory, as someone who notices these things, the only notable case in recent years of a psychedelic harm story breaking through to the national media is Joseph Emerson, the commercial pilot who tried to shut off a plane in the after-effects of a mushroom trip.9 While the same glowing healing pieces run on everywhere from 60 Minutes to your favorite YouTuber, the average person never hears about the vast majority of these stories unless you happen to live in the locality where it happens. If that’s not by design by the psychedelic movement, it’s a gratefully accepted accident.
If these horror stories could be dismissed as irrelevant one-offs, the national media’s appetite for research scandals with broader implications on “the science” itself leaves a lot on the plate. In my case, there was one well-done piece from Brendan Borrell in the New York Times in March 2024 about the issues at Johns Hopkins. But at that point, the Hopkins’ investigatory findings hadn’t returned. When they did, it became clear that the most legendary researcher in contemporary psychedelics, Roland Griffiths, deceived regulators to install his donors as researchers in a clinical trial. The national media shrugged. The only real coverage came from Pollan, whose intervening mediation established a narrative that minimized the scandal and glamorized the potential on behalf of his friends. The New Yorker was aware that he had multiple undisclosed relationships with those directly implicated in the scandal and was complicit in his journalistic misconduct. The same pattern has appeared via psychedelic industry access journalism, including in the Times.
There was a Detroit babysitter last year that you didn’t hear about. She was a 35-year-old nanny who was charged with first-degree murder for stabbing a grandfather with a screwdriver. Finding her naked and covered in blood, police also found mushrooms and marijuana in her purse. Any honest and experienced psychonaut can guess the idea of how the awful tragedy might have happened, but nobody cares when Joe Rogan says a blatantly misleading claim in the Oval Office, repeated to millions, that “these drugs are not illegal because they’re harmful.” Rogan has been repeating this line since I was a regular listener of his podcast in the early 2010s and, I’ll admit, contributed greatly to my own overestimation of their safety. I don’t know how you read these stories without genuine grief.
So why do these stories never impact the greater meta-narrative beyond “we should be cautious and careful”? Perhaps it is because such stories have already been integrated into the moral calculus of continued psychedelic usage by those who love them. The basic distilled lesson for the psychonaut is don’t freak out and have someone nearby who can help you not freak out. More extended theological meditations on these and other regular-enough catastrophes usually lead to something naive, nihilistic, or too morally relativistic for what I can accept.
When vested-interest psychedelic journalistic outlets do publicize the stories of scandal, abuse, and tragedies, the framing may poke but must never indict the greater psychedelic endeavor. The framing is “despite this horror story that the public will mostly never hear about, how can we deal with it to make our psychedelic experience better?” Maybe this is a more productive mindset, or maybe it’s alleviation of moral injury. I wonder the same thing about football’s new helmets.
Unreal Alternatives
I don’t often write about Trump and, like psychedelics, would just as soon never again. But I think the Broken Clock theory around this order is true, just not in the way people want it to be. The exceptional timing was a rare occasion when Trump did something that was somehow accepted by the media and both parties as good. The credit for that applause must go to those who helped with decades of social engineering to prime the public to take this calculated leap of faith against hard-won lessons of history.
So one thing I’ve re-learned from this episode is that we experience Trump in the same mediated way as we experience anybody. This is how Trump’s Christposting can be so universally offensive, and then in less than one week, he can do something that gets a better reaction than if Jesus himself had done it. He has been, after all, the “first meme president” since 2016, because Trump is a mediated experience more than the actual person he is. And it turns out our opinion on Trump’s corruption is, maybe also obviously, mediated most powerfully not by our reasonable principles, but by whether we like the corruption.
But if our experiences of Trump and psychedelics are both unreal, this betrothal is also unreal. Its unreality will be simulated as more real for those whose interests it serves, and will be ditched by MAGA the moment it is no longer helpful, and the psychedelic industry will probably spend decades trying to distance itself from becoming his fourth wife. But as Marla Maples knows, some associations are sticky even if they’re no longer real, if they ever were.
Psychedelics help some people in some ways. I would be happy at such an announcement if it was actually what it said it was, but even in my cynicism I know good will come out of it. Many will still be liberated, and many will be harmed, and many who believe they are liberated will be put in more beautiful cognitive chains that twist their lives and sense-making more than they could know. While some will indeed retrieve healing, others will reap as the undertold psychedelic ancestors reaped, lies that deform our sensibilities. Simply, there will be more acid casualties. And when there’s one acid casualty, despite our illusions of hyper-individuality, the harms are felt by their loved ones in the reality of our interconnectivity. Any former addict knows what the addict themselves often don’t, that the reality of their addiction impacts more than themselves. The reason for more psychedelic research is that this is undoubtedly also true for PTSD, and I think it’s good to have more options for treatment provided none are made idols. If human history is any suggestion, most of this goodness will only be discerned much later in retrospect, when the future history of our current day earns a more compelling cultural re-mediation.
The greater, existential mediation problem is probably inescapable. I know I’m compromised by it and complicit in it. I’m skewed and skewing it despite my most honest effort to say what I really think is true. And I know none of this will matter to you if you are convinced it doesn’t matter. You may be convinced that biblical prohibitions against plant-based magic were just haters of good mediation, power-enforcers of their own unreality. Yet it may still matter if you do care and seek reality and truth as it is, and if you are convinced (or even just intrigued) about spiritual paths of renunciation that seek to remove the unreal in pursuit of what is actually true, to glorify true divinity and not our favorite simulations that will betray us. Sometimes these simulations may never betray us personally, but they convince us to betray the people who love us, which is its own horrid fate. From this side of my dirt road, the tragic yet surest road to joy is to find oneself personally betrayed by the idol you once held, for then you can get on to God.
Drugs infuse meaning into signs that don’t often deserve it. But also, now that I type it, they can, on the flip side, make people see how mediated everything is; “It’s all just a social construct, man.” How we deal with this dialectic is seen in the difference between the health and music of the Grateful Dead and Phish.
The Dead made psychedelic music that felt poignant and reverent because they took the psychedelic signs they received seriously. But because they took them too seriously, it ended up causing destruction, not the least of which on Jerry Garcia, even with a beautiful soundtrack and a devoted following to their triumphantly melancholic folk-jazz rock. By the time Jerry died, everyone who was there for it knew it was depressing, but at least it was a deeply meaningful depression.
Phish’s approach was different. If mediation is a fact we can’t escape, the next generation of psychonauts learned that conflating mediation with reality is where things start falling into a deep well. So from the beginning, Phish evoked psychedelic emptiness with more ebullience than the Dead did. Instead of making their concerts church, they made them a party. This also had its delayed tragedies. After drugs ended the band and nearly killed its leader, now Trey Anastasio is sober and Phish shows are reliably uplifting. They are back to playing with the empty signs and alchemizing them into bliss. Sometimes they get accused of making happy-clappy, post-Christian, improvisational Dad-rock, but I’m still into this.
The bind is this: it’s actually a really big problem to take psychedelics too seriously. But they must be taken somewhat seriously to reproduce desired effects. And they must be taken seriously, or else things shatter. But also taking them seriously is how you shatter. So one might look at this dilemma and instead of picking between the lose-lose scenario, do something nutso like become a Christian. After all, religion is a pre-made sign-system with a whole interpretive tradition to help you.
But the bind here is that Christianity doesn’t work as just a sign system. It needs to believe that its most important premodern references are true. This is why I don’t think mystical psychedelic Christianity will last when it inevitably devolves into Christianity as only a metaphor, dissolving when it encounters serious commitments to Scripture and tradition. This “you actually have to believe it” bar is the rubber-and-road reason many become interested in the church and then bail. Phish can work as a psychedelic band with a sober frontman. But Christianity doesn’t work unless Jesus Christ is actually the son of God. It’s like how trying to play poker with fake chips isn’t really playing poker; what makes Christianity work is the stakes. It’s why the rich young man who can’t sell it all walks away in silence; if he really believed it, he wouldn’t walk away.10
Anyway, like football and like psychedelic experiences, the reality of Trump is understood through the unreality of his media depiction, which is the same way we understand most of modern life. And this is even more true for the psychedelic movement that simulates the spirituality we wish we had for ourselves. We cannot avoid having mediators between us and truth, knowing that upon contact with our human nature, we will immediately render it unreal. Below is not the prettiest photo of the beach you’ll ever see. But it is the beach as I saw it. Our best effort can only grope at the simulation impatiently while walking and waiting to receive grace, the unmediated Mediator, mending the rest of our lives in its own time.
I won’t be writing about that.
youtube.com/watch?v=dBUeSZHHBZs , timestamp 9:40. The order itself, according to Dr. Oz, was drafted by Matt Zorn, a cannabis and psychedelic advocate lawyer who was appointed the HHS’s deputy general counsel.
Nobody cares, but I thought we had a good draft this weekend, and I still believe Bryce Young could be our guy.
Some will find it cringe for me to seriously reference him, and perhaps even cringier to detect some of his infectious style on this piece, like telling Gen Z that stomp-clap-hey music was generationally unifying. I set aside issues of my writer’s pride simply to say his writing is playful and fun, and I enjoyed rediscovering those things in my own writing process. Consider any similarities an homage.
Institutes, Book IV, Chapter 14
I find many of Calvin’s insights enduring, but don’t lionize him. Still, because “Calvinism” remains a great boogeyman to many, I feel it’s important to note Calvin didn’t start it. Because of his anti-idolatry instincts, I’m sure he would never have wanted a devoted following. So out of respect to John Calvin, I’m not a Calvinist.
Hebrews 9:15
Corrected on 4/27 from original version that said “While on mushrooms.” He was not under the acute effects of the experience but was experiencing derealization after the fact.
Mark 10:17-22