The Case for Capitalism in Psychedelics

Growing up surrounded by foreign exchange students, I often heard about the struggles of life in far off places under brutal regimes. 

Violent coups destroying family businesses with no insurance to cover the loss; savage beatings and whippings that left visible scars with no chance of punishment meted out to the aggressors; food rations, no hot showers, and extended power outages in the dead of a freezing winter; and cold pickled fish as a Christmas dinner tradition, which I experienced in Poland and which rivals the other aforementioned hardships in my opinion. 

Several of the students that my family hosted ended up fleeing their country of origin with no plans to return to Venezuela, Russia, Ghana, etc. - taking their talents to such places as the United States, Spain, and Israel and securing permanent residency or citizenship by various means. 

Several of these people have flourished into internationally renowned academics, published authors, entrepreneurs, and executives with major international corporations - and in doing so, have afforded a level of social mobility to their families that no one in previous generations could have dreamed of. One of them even recently collaborated with Elon Musk after organizing and executing a successfully audacious PR campaign that included renting billboards outside of the SpaceX HQ in Austin and having a professional choir sing to the tech titan. 

Today, I still call many of these former exchange students close friends and trusted advisors. Their life experience and lens through which they unpack the world continues to influence me to a great deal. 

I grew up thinking capitalism was king and that the United States of America was the greatest country in the world; this belief was reinforced constantly by the firsthand accounts of people who arrived from collapsed empires and failed states, and who lived through violent coups and under constant threat to their livelihood.

When I first began to experiment with psychedelics, a radically different worldview opened up for me - I began to question the status quo of my culture, my country, and everything else that comes along with a radical and abrupt shift in perspective.

My first profoundly cathartic experience with psychedelics stemmed from a 7 gram solo dose of psilocybin mushrooms that I undertook in the darkness of my room as an 18-year old getting ready to ship off to college. I experienced a cascading flow of translucent hieroglyphics in an unfamiliar language - they were as crystal clear and detailed as what you see on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and imprinted themselves in the depth of my young psyche while continuing to cascade for an indeterminate amount of time. I have no way of knowing what the actual message contained in these hieroglyphs was, but the certainty that I was communicating with an advanced intelligence of some type left me deeply moved and opened to a new perception of the world in which I lived.

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A few months later, I arrived in San Francisco for my freshman year at USF. The leftist politics of San Francisco, combined with frequent ecstatic psychedelic experiences, influenced me in a profound way. I soon found myself joining the chorus of critics condemning what we perceived as an unfair and inhumane economic system eating away at the foundations of human equality and integrity. 

I found myself embedded with fairly radical organizations and activists, volunteering in the first sliding scale kitchen in San Francisco in 2007 and performing bicycle-powered concerts on Earth Day in 2010. Capitalism was a dangerous scam, and the whole world needed to know that we were going to bring down the system. 

After graduating from USF in 2011 and negotiating the demands and challenges of establishing myself in the adult world, I began to compromise on my ungrounded idealism in favor of finding any possible way to make ends meet and to stay away from returning to live with my parents. 

I sold chai in the financial district of San Francisco; I washed dishes in a commercial kitchen on rotating assignments with a staffing agency; I managed photography shoots for youth sports teams; worked at a haunted house for two seasons - and ended up moving to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to teach English in 2012. 

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Over the last decade, my life experience has taken me to the furthest corners of the planet - from slums in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to destroyed buildings in Baghdad, Iraq - from bomb shelters in Yerevan, Armenia, to cannabis fields in China, to industrial factories in Blenheim, New Zealand - and into indigenous medicine cultures in places like Huatla de Jimenez, Mexico, and in the jungles outside of Iquitos, Peru. 

In the last 10 years, my views on capitalism and its role in shaping the world - and psychedelic culture - have changed significantly. 

No system is perfect. After having surveyed hundreds of tiny villages and megametropolises around the world, I have yet to find a better system that works at scale than what capitalism *almost is*.

The system is far from perfect, but what else is out there that actually works?

How can we focus on critiquing and improving upon the dominant socioeconomic system of our world without naively imaging that it’s going to crumble anytime soon?

The irony of people claiming that capitalism is dying and that a romanticized version of some forgotten unified planetary consciousness is being rebirthed while every major corporation in the world is generating record profits and establishing their brands in space is somewhat humorous.

The sense of absolutism and judgement that pervades many aspects of the emergent psychedelic community is completely at odds with itself and detached from the real world. The irony of people leveraging and participating in the growth and expansion of multibillion dollar platforms like Instagram and Twitter while calling for a halt to capitalism is amusing as well - perhaps this is the true sign of a dying culture; in a world where people have enough free time, bandwidth, and expressive liberty to do anything, connect with anyone around the planet, and build anything with the advantage of having all of the world’s knowledge at their fingertips; they choose to attack a system that has put internet-enabled mobile phones in the pockets of Angolan fisherman and that consolidates the teachings of every world religion into neatly accessible frameworks open to debate.

As John Lennon says in the Academy-Awarded nominated short animated film

‘I Met The Walrus’ -

“You are going to become the establishment; there’s no use in knocking it down, because it’s useful to have the rooms and the machinery”

What if people stopped antagonizing their cherrypicked and often misguided perceptions of what capitalism actually is, and started ‘building a better mousetrap’ -

This expression, for those unfamiliar, essentially states that talk is cheap; it’s easy to tear things down, but what are you going to put in place of the dominant system?

The ethos that everyone in a decentralized community governance model is going to play fair and be ‘ethical’ doesn’t have much of a basis in reality from what I can say; the amount of infighting, hostile takeovers, and bad blood that’s boiled over between psychedelic underground and anticapitalist communities continues to open up market share for established multinational business interests - who are spending more time building and networking than lashing out on keyboards.

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As the psychedelic industry begins to go global, let’s turn to the recent franchising of a billion dollar cannabis brand into an emerging market overseas as a blueprint for how things could play out in psychedelics - the notion of a billion dollar American cannabis brand setting up shop in Thailand is very much in line with the narrative of a global corporatocracy taking over the ‘people’s medicine’ - but is it such a bad thing? What about the opportunities for local entrepreneurs to elevate their craft and collaborate with major international brands as these industries start to develop and globalize? Couldn’t a partnership between regional and international players be fruitful for all parties involved - and for customers?

And isn’t it possible for people to opt out and do their own thing if they see the big players as some kind of threat?

I’m genuinely curious what the logical rebuttal is to the presence of legal and regulated global industries - which inevitably lead to oligopolies.

The argument against capitalism in psychedelics and cannabis goes something like this: 

We can’t allow oligopolies to form and to corporatize the people’s medicine.

But who’s stopping anybody from producing and consuming psychedelic medicine as a private individual? I’ve been around underground psychedelic communities for over 15 years and have never personally come across anyone who’s run into significant trouble for their lifestyle choices; engaging in commerce is another story.

If I want to open a restaurant, don’t I need a permit from the city? If I want to sell alcohol out of my spare bedroom, is that legal? So why would cultivating 10 pounds of cannabis or mushrooms for sale be any different? Making 50 racks a year off selling substances underground is a wildly different story than growing mushrooms or cannabis for personal use - and as far as community stewardship goes, where does the boundary exist between providing for your local community and running a church with 60,000 members?

The argument against legalization and regulation of psychedelics and cannabis for and by corporate interests seems like failed idealism to me; isn’t the whole point that people want to keep ‘commerce and medicine’ separate? So why who’s stopping anybody from not participating in the market and continuing to steward over medicine traditions as they see fit - which is an entirely separate conversation than participating in a regulated market?

I'm here for a legal and regulated market in which full transparency exists; capitalism as it exists today is by no means perfect, but I’m waiting for *anybody* to point me in the direction of a system that works better at scale - and that is actually going to happen in our lifetime.