Shaping The Psychedelic Narrative

The psychedelic conversation is now fully integrated into mainstream culture in the United States and beyond. In the last few weeks, The Biden Administration, The New York Times, the reigning NFL MVP, and numerous other similarly influential and visible juggernauts of pop culture have explicitly addressed or endorsed psychedelics and their rising profile in society at large.

Social media behemoths like Meta and Tik Tok are taking a more cautious and punitive approach to entertaining the emergent public conversation around psychedelics and plant medicine, yet the white collar LinkedIn platform is increasingly rampant with psychedelic entrepreneurs, investors, and tastemakers openly broadcasting their ventures and opinions within the ‘disruptive new industry’ of psychedelics — an industry that has a potential target market of ‘every single person on the planet’, according to an established venture capitalist on stage for the “Big Money In Psychedelics” panel at the Meet Delic conference in November 2021.

But as the fervor surrounding psychedelics grows, this emerging ‘Psychedelics Industry’ is quickly evolving into a pay-to-play system that strengthens and reinforces the status quo that these molecules are being marketed to disrupt.

A handful of high profile psychedelic media platforms have emerged over the last few years to position themselves at the vanguard of the emerging psychedelics industry, boldly projecting themselves to be shaping the psychedelic narrative on the global stage. They lead with numbers and data, as bulletproof an argument as one can make for the veracity of such claims.

A recent press release that swept high profile media outlets such as Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, and numerous other platforms touted one of these companies as being the de facto leader of the emerging psychedelic media sector; the undisputed mediator at large between the psychedelic renaissance and the information hungry public.

How did they evolve so quickly from a recently unknown media property into the premiere arbiter and tastemaker of psychedelic culture?

They paid for it.

A simple analysis of their social media sponsored posts vs. organic posts shows wildly inconsistent metrics, with sponsored posts generating tens of thousands of reactions and click throughs to their website (the very same numbers that they promote on their press release as being evidence of their leadership in the psychedelic media space) - while the organic posts perform significantly below the metrics of the thousands of other individuals and organizations contributing their perspectives and experiences towards shaping the evolving psychedelic narrative.

A handful of these sponsored posts clock in with metrics in the tens of thousands or higher — view count, social media reactions, podcast downloads, etc. - and these are the metrics that they publicly flaunt in their press release and on their website, positioning their brand value and cultural authority around them. As it happens, the rest of their unsponsored multimedia content delivers supremely unimpressive metrics; videos with 200 to 500 views, social media posts with 3 likes, etc.

A particularly egregious example of this is a sponsored post with 9,900 likes, over 700 comments, and 1,600 plus shares - while the next post down (unsponsored) has 12 likes, 0 comments and 0 shares. The comparative analysis described here is typical of the rest of the multimedia content that this outlet produces across platforms.

This isn’t a phenomenon linked to a single actor in the psychedelic space — the practice of artificially inflating metrics and paying for high profile media placements is as widespread in the psychedelic media landscape as it is in the political sphere.

Since hosting the Mycopreneur podcast and organically scaling the platform into a position of relative cultural value, I have had several conversations with high profile actors in the psychedelic space who have asked me for concrete numbers such as number of podcast downloads per month, audience size, website traffic etc., in order to determine whether or not I might be a legitimate platform to collaborate with.

Likewise, people and organizations with the capital to retain PR firms and to invest directly in sponsorship deals with ‘unbiased’ psychedelic media outlets are the same people and organizations receiving podcast guest slots, favorable press, and invitations to present on stage at the major ‘psychedelic industry’ conferences that have surfaced.

If a platform or a tastemaker can buy traffic and pay for downloads, high visibility, and audience reach - do those numbers actually matter?

The future of the psychedelics industry is evolving at a pace that no one in their wildest imagination expected a few short years ago, and it’s evolving into an oligarchy pegged to a golden bandwagon.

The way society at large thinks about these long-stigmatized and misunderstood molecules is increasingly being bottlenecked into a narrative shaped by those who can afford to be louder and more visible than the competition — a strategy eerily reminiscent of the Trump Administration, who also leveraged sponsored, targeted social media ads and effective digital advertising campaigns to cultivate an appearance of legitimacy and authority.

Will the emerging psychedelics industry transform mental health and bring forth a happier, healthier society of environmentally-conscious empaths? Or will it end up exacerbating existing mental health crises and societal inequities by prioritizing the motives and perspectives of those who can pay more for a license, a metric, or a narrative? Perhaps a mix of both?

Time will tell, but odds are that only a few of you will even entertain the dichotomy since I didn’t pay to boost this post.