On The Globalization of Psychedelics

Earlier this summer, a Denver-based psychedelic company announced that they would be conducting an observational research study with a group of immigrants and refugees undergoing an ayahuasca ceremony organized by a Saudi Arabian filmmaker.

The proposed research study drew immediate and intense scrutiny, and highlights some of the ethical and moral ambiguities inherent to the seismic cultural shift currently in process:

The globalization of psychedelics.

The transplantation of psychoactive plants and substances from their ancestral homelands and traditional contexts into a more globalized paradigm has been happening since at least the 16th Century, when tobacco was commodified and integrated into the global economy.

Tobacco use in the ‘new world’ had traditionally been embedded within a larger constellation of sociocultural codes and practices, but it’s transplantation to Europe stripped it of much of this context - which traditionally included being used for divinatory and hallucinatory purposes.

While a Nahuatl priest may have used tobacco to enter a trance and consult the gods, a Portuguese cartographer used it to lighten the mood in his studio and to entertain guests.

A similar recontextualization happened with cacao, which also caught on in popularity across Europe after its ‘discovery’ by colonizers in the new world.

But while 17th-Century Jesuits were busy commodifying and shipping boatloads of their newfound cash crops back to merchants in Lisbon and London, they continued to burn people at the stake for ayahuasca, peyote, and psilocybin use.

Why it took another few centuries for psychedelics to penetrate the global market is a multi-faceted riddle. The relative ease of commodifying tobacco and cacao certainly had something to do with it, not to mention the preferences of the elite and the constraints of Christian dogma - which historically viewed ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, and peyote as tools for consulting the devil and the cause of divine madness.

Today, we’re witnessing a mass reconstellation of cultural norms and use cases happening with psychedelics on their journey from counterculture to mainstream.

The historically-recent distillation and chemical synthesis of active compounds and novel drug development pipelines delivering assets with names like FT-104 are further elements of the globalization of psychedelics that require new sociocultural paradigms and that are in some cases ethically ambiguous.

At its core, the globalization of psychedelics is the integration of previously geographically distributed and culturally isolated substances, practices, and ideologies into an interdependent framework of use cases in global society.

I had my own “aha” moment of globalized psychedelic experience while careening around the Shibuya district of Tokyo in 2019 and peaking on mushrooms at the Robot Restaurant. The sights and sounds of bemushroomed Tokyo at night are a true spectacle to behold, and suit my personal tastes and interests more so than a traditional ceremonial setting.

The disintegration of psychedelic substances from their ancestral roots and the cultural frameworks surrounding them has exponentially accelerated in the last few years - whereas ayahuasca was largely unknown to mainstream United States society a decade ago, Sports illustrated and ESPN have devoted prime time coverage to the brew this Sumer after NFL MVP quarterback Aaron Rodgers cited his ayahuasca experience as a primary factor in his recent professional success.

This confluence of previously geographically distributed substances and cultural frameworks has created a global psychedelics ecosystem that has arrived contemporaneously to another emergent global phenomenon:

A mass identity crises.

We have a global identity crises. We don’t yet know who we are in the context of a rapidly evolving and increasingly intertwined global society that is constantly in a state of ‘becoming’ rather than a crystallized final form.

Technology, mass migration, and the overview effect of globalization have caused us to constantly reconsider who we are and how we fit into 21st century global society.

We are in an “everything all of the time” information ecosystem that forces us to continually redefine our sense of belonging and meaning - and this same ethos extends to psychedelics on their journey from previously geographically and culturally isolated cultural frameworks into our current digital global society.

While I remain skeptical of any psychedelic research study purported to help refugees while simultaneously being blasted out to Bloomberg and Businesswire, all of us in the psychedelics ecosystem will have to continually challenge our sense of cultural conditioning and ways of thinking about psychedelics as they continue to integrate into and evolve alongside global society -

And if you think things are starting to get weird, consider that the first person to do mushrooms on Mars may very well have already been born.