The Abnormalization of Psychedelics

(Note: In light of the Thanksgiving holiday and my wife’s birthday, there is no Incubator scheduled for this week - see you all next week. This newsletter is a sort of Anti-Black Friday missive, with a long-form essay format instead of a blitz of 80% of product advertisements)

On Saturday night I was pregaming for a 5-course mushroom dinner put on by the team behind Mama Funga (pics or it didn’t happen 👇 ) when I opened my phone and scrolled through X for a few minutes.

I came across a post on X (formerly Twitter) that required the suspension of disbelief - it was like a Black Mirror episode staring at me in the face in real time.

A guy who goes by @Chompers2024 on the platform was promising to make good on a promotional stunt platformed on the notoriously ‘free speech’ and uncensored social media site in which he would eat 28 grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms live for all his followers as a fucked up reward of sorts for a prior post of his exceeding the 100 like threshold.

It’s safe to say his stunt piqued the interest of many more people than me, as within 24 hours he had accumulated thousands of likes and 270k impressions on the post. What made this scenario particularly intriguing to me is that the user was by all accounts a real person showing his face and interacting with other platform users instead of the run-of-the-mill bots that anonymously try to sell scheduled substances in every comment section.

I forwarded the post to a journalist colleague and within 48 hours, there was a story up on Vice that was largely driven by my perspective on the matter.

Normally I wouldn’t want to draw more attention to this type of behavior, but in today’s world of social media metric driven news and increasing normalization of psychedelics - This type of stunt officially crosses the line into the abnormalization of psychedelics in society. 

Plus, as the proud holder of a degree in Media Studies and a journeyman student of social media and mushrooms who has been creating content around this particular intersection for 18 years at this point - since the very inception of social media in fact; this type of foregone conclusion is arguably a watershed moment in the devolution of the ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’ (I’ve always loathed that term).

When social media first emerged from it’s Silicon Valley cocoon and enveloped the world, there was a great hope that it would offer a liberating lifeline for humanity to connect and share intel, best practices, and to escape the oppressive reign of dictators and oppressive, war hungry governments the world over. The 1960’s psychedelic awakening in western culture had virtually identical hopes underpinning it. The time had finally come for people to free their minds, live in peace, and awaken to our prosperous and loving shared destiny as the human race.

After it’s launch in 2006, Twitter played a vital role in (among many other notable contributions) coordinating the Jasmine Revolution and the Arab Spring in the 2010’s. These grassroots revolutions coordinated by youth in the Arab world toppled several seemingly invincible governments and dictators in the region, starting in Tunisia and eventually extending to Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain. It’s of course possible that these revolutions were astroturfed by supranational actors using grassroots activism as a front, but that’s a whole other rabbit hole of speculation for another time.

In 2020, Instagram was largely responsible for the emergence of a homegrown psilocybin mushroom movement during the pandemic. For the first time ever, mushroom entrepreneurs and activists around the world ‘came out of the psychedelic closet’ and started freely sharing information and resources about how to cultivate medicinal fungi, improve yields, grow healthy and abundant food, and make materials out of Reishi in addition to many other possibilities. It was a domino effect; as soon as a few people started sharing publicly about mushrooms, tens of thousands of previously closeted activists and enthusiasts all came out of the woodwork to share their own insights and evolutions centered around the mushroom kingdom.

In both instances, a grassroots movement of benevolent and humanitarian activists connected and coordinated subversive campaigns that sought to empower the average citizen and usher in a more equitable and humane world.

Fast forward to 2024, and we have a hostile takeover of Twitter and subsequent rebranding to X that has seen the platform continue to play an instrumental role in shaping the social and political discourse, albeit at the whims of the world’s richest person in lieu of a coterie of grassroots activists. Simultaneously, we now have extreme censorship on Instagram / Meta platforms that largely penalizes law-abiding grassroots activists (and incorporated educational psychedelic companies) in it’s dragnet sweep of any accounts that seemingly violate the oftentimes ambiguous and arbitrarily enforced ‘community guidelines’. The resulting information ecosystem is a patchwork of inconsistent and often contrasting views on politics, mushrooms, and virtually everything else. The internet, as well as the ‘psychedelic community’, are for all intents and purposes a series of segregated and fragmented ideological bastions that mirror the tribal identities of nation states sequestered away from neighbors and foes with militarized borders.

It’s now virtually impossible to consistently post about psychedelics on most social media platforms, even when the research is peer-reviewed or the discourse is intelligently formulated for public debate and open discussion. It’s even difficult to post about functional mushrooms, as the AI censors and algorithsm that have come to dominate society have a difficult time distinguishing between ‘good and bad mushrooms’ in their eyes. A number of prominent social media accounts run by reputable and public facing functional mushroom companies have been deplatformed this year, and the accounts that aren’t are often subject to suppressed reach.

So what can we learn from all this?

With the incoming administration in the U.S. appointing a number of key figures that have publicly expressed their desire to stop the suppression of psychedelic research and access to legal psychedelic therapies, there are a number of people betting on the imminent arrival of legal psychedelics at the federal level in the United States. I’d argue that the hand of the powers that be is forced to broadly regulate psychedelics at this point - at least in theory as a unified public policy approach if not effectively in practice.

A RAND report issued this year effectively argues the same thing - knowledge and use of psilocybin mushrooms and psychedelics has burst out of it’s counter cultural echo chamber and into mainstream society, and the result of unfettered cognitive liberty and exponentially increased access to psychedelics married to an oftentimes vacuous and disoriented modern American value system leads to clout-chasing stunts and increasingly desperate bids for attention that leads to people livestreaming themselves eating ultra high doses of mushrooms while sitting in their Tesla - and for anyone who hasn’t read the article, here’s where this scenario leads:

“One day I had a meltdown and took too many mushrooms and I ended up totaling my car and I got arrested,” he claims. “I spent overnight in a jail cell.”

I don’t care where you stand on the cognitive liberty and anti-authoritarian spectrum - anyone familiar with my body of work can take a guess where I am - but the increasing commonality of unhinged psychedelic use coupled with our personal 24/7 public broadcasting systems in our pocket mean that tight regulation of these substances is likely inevitable - and with the increasing technocratic overreach of centralized government power, the pendulum may indeed be swinging back towards a government monopoly over psychedelics; except instead of prohibition, we may have extremely regulated access.

So will we have Logan Paul mushroom gummies and Ross Ulbricht branded DMT vapes legally available in tightly regulated smart shops across major metropolitan areas in the next 4 years? Or clinics requiring the oversight of a therapist and a minimum 8 hour session? Maybe a government monopoly on both?

Time will tell, but in the interim, we’re going to continue to see some absolutely insane shit happen very publicly. And more than anything, public education and community infrastructure that doesn’t rely on social media platforms and the internet is an essential lifeline to develop as an inoculation against authoritarian overreach and restrictive public policy around psilocybin mushrooms.

I have a lot more thoughts on these matters, but those will have to wait for future newsletters and podcasts.

What do you think? Is tight government regulation of both social media and psychedelics inevitable? Does it even matter at a certain point, as enforcement is virtually impossible?

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Hit me up with any feedback and ideas for future newsletters, projects in the mushroom world that I should know about, etc.)

Cheers,

DW

(Note: The views contained herein are constantly evolving and open to feedback, and this newsletter - along with all of the others - is written as a form of thought experiment rather than a definitive stance on the subjects contained within.)