I was here for the Product Earth Expo: the “UK’s no.1 legal cannabis, CBD, and nootropic experience”. The three-day event, co-organised by a former marketing lead at Facebook and a Harvard-educated medical data executive, is an outdoor festival of business and pleasure, with live music taking place alongside panel discussions on the various questions and goings-on in British cannabis. There are glassblowers, stalls for CBD businesses, tools for rolling, growing and baking weed, as well as medical and activist groups such as David Nutt’s Drug Science, Hemptank and the UK cannabis patients’ group.

Being an event centred around cannabis, it’s little surprise that funny smells were detectable throughout the grounds. No police were in sight. As with Hyde Park’s annual “4/20” gathering, last month’s Notting Hill Carnival and near-enough every music festival, the Expo’s look-the-other-way approach allows for a brief and flailing glimpse at our muddied present of drug policy.

Britain’s approach to cannabis can be described as contradictory — and in many ways backward. North America has largely legalised the drug, and Germany is following suit. But in Britain, some police forces will still raid large-scale dealers, even while medical cannabis patients are cultivating their own plants and small-scale growers are semi-officially tolerated in some counties. One scheme with a stall at the Expo was Cancard, an unapproved ID card scheme that lists users as medical cannabis patients and is backed by some police officers. If stopped, users can show their Cancard to excuse their use on medical grounds.

In reality, though, little has officially changed since 2018, when medical cannabis was first approved. Since then, senior Tory figures including William Hague have come out in favour of reform, while new cannabis companies entered the market and the City wetted its lips with anticipation. Britain swiftly became one of the world’s largest export-producers of medical and scientific cannabis. But, last year, regulators launched a crackdown on substandard and over-marketed items — and now the Expo’s founders are concerned about the CBD market’s possible collapse.

Medical cannabis was first approved in California off the back of stories of how it could relieve the symptoms of Aids patients. And this playbook has been followed in the UK. In 2018, a child whose epilepsy was treated with medical cannabis had his prescription seized at Heathrow Airport, prompting a relapse. Cameras and press were ready waiting. The resulting campaign, “End Our Pain”, was funded by commercial interests and led by Steve Moore, a former insider in the Cameron government, who later started the drug reform advocacy organisation VolteFace with funding from Paul Birch, the founder of Bebo. One of the other co-founders was Alastair Moore (no relation), who also co-founded a cannabis consulting firm called Hanway Associates.

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Two years later, the British Medical Journal documented a dense range of interconnections between pressure and patient groups and industry funders in the nascent cannabis market. New initiatives have since emerged: as well as founding VolteFace (with which he is no longer involved) Steve Moore would go on to set up the industry-funded Centre for Medical Cannabis and the Association for Cannabinoid Industry. Elsewhere, the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for CBD is managed by Tenacious Labs, a CBD firm, while the newly-elected Secretariat of the APPG for Medical Cannabis is jointly held by VolteFace and the industry-funded Medical Cannabis Clinicians Society.

It is an instinctively suspicious series of intersections between government and business lobbying. But Neil Woods, an ex-police officer and activist for drug policy reform, has questioned the significance of such connections. “Big business is of course interested in the emerging opportunities of a legal cannabis market for adult use,” he says. “But so what?” And Steve Moore himself has previously argued that a “public-private partnership” will always underlie a coalition for change. But for all the money involved, the market is still fraught with problems: many firms are loss-making, and rising interest rates are cutting the relative attraction of risky and future-looking businesses. Westminster isn’t playing ball, either, with home secretary Suella Braverman reportedly considering upgrading cannabis to Class A status.

Despite Braverman’s concerns, the medical case for cannabis has made some important advances. Medical cannabis was Nice-approved in 2018 for three conditions: severe treatment-resistant epilepsy, muscle spasticity, and chemotherapy-related nausea. Each of these conditions is prescribed as a last resort using a patented formulation, even when first-line treatments involve punishing side effects. But few prescriptions have ever been made on the NHS. Instead, a large private sector using registered cannabis clinicians has emerged, offering prescriptions to patients for a range of conditions where prior treatments have failed — including anxiety, depression and ADHD, for which evidence of cannabis’s efficacy is quite limited. For an “initial consultation” at clinics such as the Lyphe Group, Sapphire Medical Clinics and the London Cannabis Clinic, patients pay as much as £399. And many later complain that the expensive products from private prescribers are of inferior quality — often late, sometimes contaminated with mould.

Unsurprisingly, ideological arguments about the “right to get high” and bodily autonomy are rarely seen (at least explicitly) in the mainstream. All throughout the Product Earth Expo, the dominant way to present cannabis is medical — in line with broader medicalisation rhetoric that presents drug use as a public health problem and not a carceral one. And, perhaps inadvertently, allying with the medical system has exposed cannabis to greater scrutiny on its risks and benefits — as well as the demands of medical evidence. The last 10 years have produced more evidence in particular of cannabis’s link with psychosis, schizophrenia and a range of mental health problems. Indicatively, the Home Affairs Select Committee released a new report last week, which supports a “public health-based harm reduction” approach and calls for “greater provision” of medical cannabis on the NHS. Yet its authors “remain concerned” by cannabis harms and oppose full legalisation.

Walking the aisles of the Product Earth Expo, you get a two-sided picture. Users believe history is on their side. Much more than the old, the young are largely convinced of cannabis reform — though use of the drug has actually declined markedly among the young since the Nineties. Failing legal change, the growing normalcy of cannabis smoke forms part of a gradual and de facto erosion of anti-cannabis policy. Users will keep ignoring the law, until the law is so absent as to seem unworkable.

“Working in the sector it has been so frustrating to see the dialogue stagnate politically,” said Katya Kowalski, the Director of Operations at VolteFace, earlier this year. Indeed, among activists and campaigners, one hears many of the same arguments that have been made for decades, and which first caught flame in the Sixties: the motives of the original anti-hemp campaigners, the possible tax rewards, the relative safety of cannabis. Yet that final point is one on which the cannabis community seems to be losing ground. Making the case that “Cannabis Is Safer Than Alcohol”, as Bebo founder Paul Birch attempted in 2015, is no longer feasible.

Instead, it is possible that once again re-converging on a sympathetic human story will shift the debate. And Britain is full of such poignant cases. Kyle Brown, 26, is from Winchester and lives with craniometaphyseal dysplasia, a rare genetic disorder that causes the muscles and bones around the head to grow abnormally. He approached me at the Expo and told his story. Brown expects he will not live past 60, and estimates he probably has around eight years of high-capacity living left. Brown consumes medical cannabis to manage the punishing side-effects of his licit prescriptions.

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But he still relies on the so-called “legacy market” of street sales because of the high expense of legal prescription. Understandably, he is concerned about the presence of adulterants such as MDMA and fentanyl in his cannabis — as well as the lack of transparency about what exactly he’s smoking, which could contain the high THC concentrations so associated with mental health problems.

Who is truly leading Britain’s evolving cannabis policy is therefore difficult to estimate. The influx of medics, commerce and Big Pharma (though the latter is not as present at the Expo) has so far disappointed with their Whitehall strategy. But the lobbyists still hope to win through a long game, and their proximity to lawmakers would allow them to shape whatever model Britain eventually adopts.

“If they are to legalise cannabis, it will be a fully corporate model,” says Greg de Hoedt, a Crohn’s patient who manages his symptoms with cannabis. He’s also the founder of UK Cannabis Social Clubs, an activist umbrella group for private members’ clubs around the country that grow their own cannabis, smoke together, and offer testing on potency. Social Clubs are part of Germany and Malta’s legalisation models and form a third-way between community and commerce. Social Clubs have been tolerated in Britain historically, says de Hoedt, but he has noted more crackdowns from police in the five years since medical approval compared to before.

The Expo’s attendees are likely unaware of all the lobbying and politicking of the last half-decade. They form the lobby’s shock troops, normalising use and forming the consumer base for the current medical market and a future commercial one. The strategy has a shadow side, though: the more cannabis is unofficially decriminalised, the less immediate the issue seems for a short-term and crisis-driven political system.

Barrett is the main case study of the “acid casualty”: the archetypal subject who, after a few too many trips, is said to endure a mental collapse from which they may never return. His story is frequently shared as a parable in online forums such as Reddit, which is a recruitment pool for psychedelic studies. And while attitudes around psychedelics have softened in recent years, this meme still lurks subtly within the public consciousness. One doesn’t have to ask too many baby boomers before someone shares a story, perhaps of a friend from school or university, who got lost ashore on the other side.

The first recorded reference I could find was in 1974, from Changes magazine. A passage spurns the “unique contemporary type: that kind of burnt-out acid casualty who ends every sentence with ‘Man’”. Amid the Nixonian disappointments of the Seventies, the acid casualty was a way to culturally dismiss the psychedelic ruptures of the Sixties. No longer an agent for spiritual awakening or a wonder treatment, LSD was cast as a trigger for madness and a tool for mind control. Many casualties were reported in the press: Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac, Roky Erickson of the 13th Floor Elevators, Arthur Lee of Love, and Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, who suggests his LSD experiments “fucked with his brain”.

What really caused these cases of psychosis is not known for certain, but the explanation usually focuses on their internal worlds. In a new film about his life, Have You Got It Yet?, some of Barrett’s contemporaries cast him as an Icarus figure — one who communed with the Gods prematurely and “reached for the secret too soon”. Other narratives are less grand: perhaps he “boiled his brains with acid”, sustaining real organic damage to his nervous system through excessive chemical stimulation. Or perhaps the breakdown was inevitable. His former bandmate David Gilmour suggests that Barrett had in him a “switch waiting to be turned”, a “weakness of some sort”, maybe a vulnerability embedded in his genes. Such determinism echoes the public understanding of severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia.

However useful such layers of analysis can be, they risk downplaying the external factors that might have engendered the distress. If an individual takes a drug to cope with experiences they find hard to bear, it is not necessarily wise to blame the drug for any subsequent mental break. Touring several nights a week for months straight, Barrett’s deranged behaviours could be partly triggered by the exploitative atmosphere of the music industry.

“He feels that the application of commercial considerations is harmful to the music,” a report in Melody Maker stated in December 1967 — after the chart failure of “Apples and Oranges”, a by-the-numbers psych-pop single that Barrett had written amid intense managerial and label pressure to produce another hit. “He’d like to cut out the record company, wholesalers and retailers.” The same year, Pink Floyd performed on Top of the Pops for the first time, and Barrett expressed some reluctance to go on stage. It was then that Pink Floyd’s bassist Roger Waters first noticed that something might be wrong.

Barrett deteriorated rapidly. Before another scheduled performance on Top of the Pops, he turned up at a friend’s door barefoot and in a panic. In 1971, Barrett — now three years out of Pink Floyd — refused to leave his home for a photoshoot; he was afraid of “aliens”. What appears to be deranged at first makes a kind of sense when one considers that the aliens he feared were in fact his managers and hangers-on.

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Robert Chapman’s biography describes how, even after Barrett had achieved some semblance of later-life balance in his hometown of Cambridge, obsessive fans would regularly knock on his door, film him with camcorders, steal his paintbrushes, climb over his fence, pose as couriers to secure autographs, and scan the neighbourhood trying to catch a glimpse. And something strangely under-discussed in the documentary and Barrett’s biographies is how the massive success of his former band — which had ejected him without warning in 1968 — might have made him feel. It can’t be a coincidence that Barrett retreated into isolation at the Chelsea Cloisters Hotel just as Pink Floyd hit the big time in 1973 with Dark Side of the Moon, which is partly about him and his madness.

Many acid casualties were as much victims of a music business that eviscerates its workers as of overwhelming psychedelic trips. Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac rejected the music industry in even more radical terms than Barrett, pledging to give away his earnings to charity, to reflect his new Christian beliefs; a move viewed by his contemporaries as the initial spark of his madness. The 13th Floor Elevators took LSD daily for long stretches of the Sixties; but their breakdowns were surely influenced by the predation of the local Texan police force, which sought to destroy the band’s acid evangelism through arrests and threats of violence.

Someone else deemed an acid casualty is Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, the subject of a recent BBC documentary. On top of the relentless psychoactive effects of fame and public pressure, Jones’s paranoia can be seen a response to prohibitionist drug policies: after a humiliating court appearance for drug possession Jones, as Nick Kent writes, “was too scared to go into a shop to buy cigarettes even, because he thought anyone behind the counter had to be a plain-clothes cop”. Jerry Berkers, bassist of the Krautrock band Wallenstein, may have collapsed under the weight of his LSD visions, but it’s thought his trips reacquainted him with the trauma of time spent serving in Vietnam.

And yet, our interpretation of mental breaks often place little emphasis on the worlds in which they’re situated. In his classic text, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff describes the ascendancy of the “Psychological Man” — the embodiment of late modernity — who understands himself in internal terms. We are our thoughts; our self stands behind the glass of our eyes, variously disappointed and enchanted with the stream of our inner lives flowing out into the world we perceive. And yet in studying history’s casualties, it seems that what was happening on the outside was flowing into, and warping, their internal worlds.

Even among those who reject the simplistic diagnosis of acid casualty, a more subtle form of othering can occur. “There can be no doubt that Syd was a schizophrenic,” Waters said — despite the fact that Syd was never diagnosed with anything other than an undisclosed personality disorder. Indeed, the schizophrenia diagnosis, applied to many of history’s casualties by both psychiatrists and onlookers, may seem like an objective description. But the reality is far more complex.

Schizophrenia is popularly understood as a biological phenomenon: an organic madness, in which its primary explanation lies within the individual. But poor outcomes for schizophrenia are independently shaped and predicted by parental socioeconomic status, poverty, class, immigration status, living in urban environments, and membership of a racial minority. Evidence tentatively suggests that those labelled schizophrenic in countries such as India and Ghana fare better than those in the United States, since they are less likely to be medicalised or face the stresses of developed modern life. This supports the idea that the music industry’s pressures may have been far more harmful to the acid casualties than either their original or psychedelically altered brain chemistry.

It’s easy to apply the labels of “acid casualty” and “schizophrenia” — and it sounds authoritative — but, in truth, the latter diagnosis is broad, vague, and variably administered. Dr Robin Murray, one of the UK’s most senior psychiatrists, suggested in 2017 that “the term schizophrenia will be confined to history, like ‘dropsy’”. As early as 1973, when many casualties were being diagnosed, the World Health Organization suggested that, for all its faults, the term should be preserved partly “for the benefit of non-professional contemporaries who enjoy talking about schizophrenia without knowing what it is”.

Commentators are therefore right to remark on the hypocrisies of “mental health awareness”: depression and anxiety are being unduly neutralised in the language of medicine, while “serious conditions like psychosis and schizophrenia are being overlooked”. The general public was understandably struck by the news last year that depression is not, as they’d been told, a mere “chemical imbalance”. The Moncrieff paper fast became one of the most accessed in modern history. But the popular reckoning with the parameters of schizophrenia is nowhere to be seen.

It is acknowledged even in the DSM-5, psychiatry’s “Bible”, that the majority of those who develop psychotic disorders have no family history of the disease — weakening the idea that genetic predisposition can fully explain mental breaks. The medical establishment has found hundreds of biomarkers “associated” with schizophrenia, but many of them overlap with other conditions, and may point to a broad “sensitivity” — which may make mental collapse more likely, but not inevitable.

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But since the Sixties, the biogenetic model of schizophrenia has been in ascendance; and the basis of diagnosis always influences the rationale of treatment. Just as the understanding of depression as unsettled brain chemistry allowed some irresponsible medical practitioners to sell antidepressants as a silver bullet, our understanding of mental breaks as caused entirely by internal factors can be harmful. Many acid casualties faced great failures from the psychiatric sector following their diagnoses: involuntary electroshock, premature discharges, and shocking over-prescription.

None of this is to say that our treatment of those experiencing mental breaks has become worse since the Sixties. The antipsychotics on offer now seem to be more tolerable than those of their forebears. But stigmas towards psychosis and schizophrenia have, by some measures, deteriorated — possibly because of the othering that associates the stereotyped schizophrenic with some alien influence in their nervous system. Though we might not label anyone an acid casualty these days, our readiness to see mental distress as solely internal may prevent us from reckoning with the unhealthy pressures our society places on individuals. Psychiatry always attempts to remain apolitical. But it might do well to accept that mental breaks can, at least in part, be blamed on a troubled world in which, to quote psychiatric researcher John Read, “bad things happen and can drive you crazy”.

Many great thinkers have sought to make sense of Abraham’s deranged vision – Kierkegaard, Kafka, Derrida — and the sort of God that could have sanctioned it. For Kierkegaard, the absurdity of a father trying to kill his own son can only be grasped in its own terms. By some flavour of supreme logic, in the terrible clarity of God’s command, Kierkegaard surmised, Abraham must have expected a deliverance: if not the return of his son, at least a “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”. By trusting in the absurd, his faith was commended.

Succession reveals a different element of the parable. As we approach its season finale, its Shakespearean themes of corruption, trauma and power are clear. Yet until its penultimate episode, “Church and State”, its Christian themes were left more subtle.

The funeral of Logan, the Roy’s patriarch, is held in the ornately painted and cavernous halls of a church in New York. The hypocrisy of the ultra-rich and far-Right sat in pews is not lost on his second eldest son Kendall, bipolar and drug-addicted and proud of his “ambition”, who whispers of “money changers in the temple” while plotting before the service. Younger brother, Roman, intends his eulogy as a Mark Antony-esque pitch for the crown. But after his prior claims that he had “pre-grieved”, Roman quickly breaks down. The boy — for he is a boy at heart — can scarcely believe his father has really died: death would surely only be another obstacle for his Titan Father to surmount. “Is he… is he… is he in there?” Roman pleads on the altar steps. “Well, can we get him out?”

Yet there is no hope of resurrection in Logan’s tragic arc. By the time of his death, he had consciously and unconsciously sacrificed all of his children on the altar of personal ambition. Paranoid and depressed, his absurd trust in “things unseen” — the empty promise of Satanic power — would never travel beyond the emptiness before his eyes. “You’re my pal, my best pal,” he told his bodyguard, before consoling himself with the empty Gospel of Adam Smith. “People are economic units. I’m a hundred feet tall. These people are pygmies.”

For the Christian, the coming to earth of God’s son completes the template forged by Abraham and Isaac. Having first set creation free, God knows the inability of humans to overcome the patterns of their lives. So God sends his son to bear man’s sin himself, plunging down to Hell, before the resurrection reveals the limitless power of goodness: an absurd event none of the disciples seemed quite to understand.

Logan, meanwhile, perishes in a perfect and absurd parody of heaven: in the toilet of a private jet. How did our invincible Caesar Logan die? Not through a theatrical stabbing by close friends — but for having not put on his compression socks.

Sin is always built on lies, the Christian understands. That’s what Satan is: “a liar and the father of lies.” The Roys indulge in a similar lie, believing their success to be the fruit of ceaseless business acumen. Their wealth really comes, however, from a happenstance of particular social and economic arrangements, and the fortune of technological advances. Their “business first” approach is a lie, too: the show continually reveals that decisions are not made through an unblinkered process of calculation, but self-regard, pettiness and a lust for control.

The most explicitly Christian moment, however, comes with Kendall’s funeral speech: a tour de force case for the appeal of Evil and the Nietzschean will to power. “He was comfortable with this world. And he knew it. He knew it and he liked it,” Kendall says, shaking but articulate, still afraid of his father. “The will to be, and to be seen, and to do. And now people might want to tend and prune the memory of him to denigrate that force. That magnificent, awful force of him, but my God, I hope it’s in me.”

“Evil” has disappeared from much of contemporary vocabulary. It is typically ascribed to “forces” of history, institutions and the unfolding of individual lives. But the Christian believes “evil” to be an entirely real and different kind of force: what David Bentley Hart called “an ontological wasting disease”, whose lies avoid annihilation by sucking on the tendrils of open hearts and truth.

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The Roys can see how the evil of power destroys their family and themselves, yet they cannot help it. It “comes over them”: a possession that still finds resonance in old understandings of demons. While a trauma-based understanding of Succession has a certain merit, one doubts how our Roy children could ever be “saved” by enough psychotherapy while being so close to power. It is not the innocent child who is the true undeserving victim of evil, but the creature, who, once corrupted, neglects to admit their creaturehood.

Logan failed to be redeemed, and we can expect a similar failure for our Roy children. Hopes were raised when they found one other as siblings at the start of the final series, as well as with several of Kendall’s rock bottoms. But true “sacrificial love” — the highest form — was always eclipsed by “mutual love”. Evolution, the post-religious seat of how ethics are said to have emerged, may encourage “altruism”, but only in a reciprocal sense. “You know, Hugo, life isn’t nice”, Kendall tells his sickly PR gofer, Hugo. “It’s contingent. People who say they love you also fuck you…You’ll be my dog. But the scraps from the table will be millions.”

Even if the Roys retain power, the family cannot last. It will exhaust itself, as evil and lies always do. And while Kendall is right to endorse “bloody, complicated life”, the answer is not a Nietzschean embrace of such a world. One answer is what Reinhold Niebuhr called “Christian Realism”: the cliche of being “in the world, but not of it”. It is to accept the realities of power, and that things do matter — which Roman could scarcely believe after helping a fascist become President from his skyscraping New York office. But it also holds the “foolish” hope that the story will complete.

As Kierkegaard suggested, perhaps we each have a choice, an “Either/Or”: we either trust in the Loganesque absurdity of self-worship, that the human can solve the human problem, or we don’t. The choice is ours.

Psychedelic trips have played a part in mystical traditions for millennia, but their revival comes at a time when our old religions are endangered. The march of Reason and Evidence has left a gaping void; we are surrounded by a bubbling sea of Unreality. Television, billboards and newspapers first threatened the dam between dreams and waking consciousness; Twitter, Netflix and the smartphone, always there and nudging away, have blasted it asunder.

In place of structural changes, or indeed religious ones, the system defaults to plaster solutions, offering mere jolts of aliveness. The “altered states economy”, now generating as much as $4 trillion worldwide, offers a range of techniques to tap into the Real, or at least muffle the Unreal. There’s alcohol and disposable vape pens, video gaming and high-intensity sports, breathwork, meditation apps — and now, the legal psychedelic drug, perhaps the most significant launchpad to sacred states yet.

Medical authorities in Oregon are set to roll out psychedelic therapy this year, while many cities and states in the US have, to various extents, decriminalised the drugs. Meanwhile, Mexico is tapping into the market for psychedelic experiences still illegal in the US: the Guardian reported yesterday on clinics set up just over the border that offer courses of the powerful psychedelic ibogaine as treatment for trauma.

The faith we once put in transcendent states has been swiftly industrialised. A scan of the current psychedelic market reveals a strange mix of Big Pharma and young start-ups, such as ATAI, a Peter Thiel-funded firm. Its founder, Christian Angermayer, has been accused of manoeuvring to dominate the psychedelic market through zealous patenting strategies. He envisions his trials as perpetuations of mystical traditions from Ancient Greece. More than 2,000 years later, though, “profane illumination” is now under the microscope, dissected, refashioned as a tool. Only when validated in scientific, psychiatric discourse is it taken seriously. The industrial boom has happened in tandem with an enormous amount of research, much of it funded (with likely biasing effects) by profit-driven entities.

Whereas psychedelic culture used to be defined by its naive subjectivism — you have to take it to know what it’s like, man! — a kind of naive objectivism has taken its place. On a scale of one-to-five, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire asks trial participants, how would you “sense that [your psychedelic] experience cannot be described adequately in words”?

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Our grasping search for the Real is heading for more disturbing developments still. As documented by the scholars Maxim Tvorun-Dunn and Tehseen Noorani, efforts are underway to render “psychedelic medicine” continuous with growing suites of “digital therapeutics”. Some firms plan to substitute post-trip in-person therapy for an app. Other companies intend to track and harvest data from clients’ voyages, via wearable devices that “personalise” and “facilitate” the “clinical experience”.

The ketamine market in the United States offers a terrifying glimpse at this future of runaway capital. In some so-called “McKetamine” clinics, users are shuttled through a pricey yet cost-minimised production line of “profane illuminations”, with little after-support — despite serious risks of addiction, psychosis, and permanent visual disturbances. One such company, Peak, thankfully shut down its operations amid a backlash to its flagrant promotional strategy, which included online consultations lasting two minutes and promises to “cure depression forever”.

Such absurdly utopian rhetoric abounds among the proponents of psychedelics, who include many powerful people in the tech world. Certain transhumanist thinkers in Silicon Valley have called for more research into drugs that produce permanent bliss states without side effects; theirs is an “abolitionist” ideology that seeks to eliminate all conscious suffering from the universe. Meanwhile Elon Musk, who hints strongly at a taste for psychedelics like the aforementioned DMT, has expressed hopes of “extend[ing] the light of consciousness to the stars”, in tandem with technology: his Neuralink brain-machine interface is set to commence human trials in 2023.

This language goes beyond aspiration, or even idealism: it’s a simulated religion. Inconveniently, there are dangers in viewing our search for God as a technical problem — one that can be solved through human ingenuity. The current psychedelic landscape is greatly influenced by Carl Jung, whose acolyte Stanislav Grof administered LSD in more than 5,000 sessions in communist Czechoslovakia. Yet Jung was famously suspicious of what he called “the pure gifts of the Gods”, described and promoted by early “psychonauts” such as Osmond and Huxley. More than anything, Jung suggests, we ought to engage with the psyche on its own terms, as a mysterious and subterranean layer of reality that can’t necessarily be gauged in the terms of Reason that govern our everyday lives.

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Similarly, indigenous and mystical traditions have warned the West against conquistador exploration of ecstatic states for centuries. The Eastern Orthodox tradition, for instance, has a rich literature of prelest, a spiritual malaise in which the seeker of private mystical experiences becomes possessed, obsessed, deluded, or corrupted by egotism. It’s hard not to see a grain of truth in the old Christian warning against demons: a warning levied by various Iberian conquerors against peyote and ayahuasca centuries ago, and now being revived by religious communities alerted to the psychedelic trend.

Despite these warnings, there are growing communities of self-declared “psychonauts” heading deep into DMT space for hours before sharing their experiences on online messageboards. And people do often return from that space with entirely different metaphysical paradigms, with users convinced that the entities they saw were very Real. Yet in an era when the idea of evil has lost much of its cultural currency, it is curious that many report encountering entities that are exceptionally malicious — or, indeed, demonic. So wedded are we to the idea of Reason, we might laugh and pat the heads of these omens, or reduce them solely to psychic projections. But here we fall for a transhuman fallacy: that humans are in control of what’s real. No wonder: it’s easy to fall for that fallacy when you’re in an transcendent state, if it’s a state provoked by a drug humans made (and patented).

Part of the problem is the decline in “ecstatic literacy”: we just don’t know how to discuss or understand — or draw non-delusional conclusions — from “profane illumination”. While the proliferation of psychedelic products has changed the game by normalising such extraordinary experiences, we lack the language, the elders, the tradition that helps us make meaning of them.

Indeed, the ancient roots of psychedelic use, which might have guided their explosion, are in grave danger. In Peru, fully onboarded to the ayahuasca tourism trend, the influx of gringos has fuelled a rise in “pseudo-shamans” who adulterate their brews for extra kicks. Peyote and the bufo alvarius frog, whose venom contains the powerful compound 5-MeO-DMT, are now endangered, and the sustainability of ayahuasca reserves is now a “legitimate concern”. The price of ayahuasca has spiked as much as ten-fold. Where once its sale was fiercely guarded, it’s now touted in Coke bottles by impoverished rickshaw drivers who need extra cash.

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The emergence of the psychedelic industrial complex only accelerated the up-rooting that globalisation has been enabling for decades. Filament Health, a firm whose USP is to use “natural psychedelics”, made headlines recently for its creation of “ayahuasca in a pill”: an absurd peak for an industry long-trained in extracting, stripping and distilling the fruits of the natural world. Anthropologists observe that the whole “healing” paradigm predominant in ayahuasca tourism in Peru is an exotic distortion, with “shaman” itself described as a “made-up, Western category”.

“Start your own religion,” Timothy Leary told his followers in the Sixties. Many tried, although their operations would swiftly descend into power-sustained cults. There recently came allegations of a similar cultishness emerging in a corner of Silicon Valley, at the Centre for Applied Rationality and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; one of the problems cited was frequent drug-enhanced “debugging” rituals. This is further evidence that attempts to wrench the numinous from its roots, then commodify it, are archetypally foolish — or, in the unfashionable language of religion, sacriligeous. While attempts are being made to draw psychedelics into existing traditions like Judaism and Christianity, it’s not clear how these religions can guide us through the epistemic and personal challenges of still relatively little-researched drugs that spur such swift ascents.

Little in life is really reducible to Damascene moments, but a trip at its best can unlodge something: cause us to remember something we forgot. Yet rather than set us free, the release offered by the psychedelic state — in the absence of any real programme or tradition, or “container” in the current language — seems to dissipate without leaving a meaningful trace. Even those who do experience relief from depression through psychedelics, for instance, reliably relapse after a few months.

Perhaps it is worth heeding what acclaimed psychonaut Aldous Huxley said, while lying on his deathbed in November 1963. He requested a dose of 125 micrograms of LSD to ease his passage to the afterlife, and while it’s said that his passage was uniquely peaceful, his final words are telling: “It is never enough. Never enough. Never enough of beauty. Never enough of love. Never enough of life.”

Rob Barrow is the CEO of MindMed: a leader in a new species of pharmaceutical firm. These companies, described as “corporadelic”, are aiming to change mental health — and maybe the world — through psychedelic drugs. 

Barrow was the opening speaker at the PSYCH Symposium, held recently in the National Gallery. The agenda: “to connect and collaborate”, and to “expedite access” to “psychedelic healthcare” across Europe. The wider mission is an old Sixties dream — brotherhood, connection to nature — repackaged for a new age of all-powerful corporations and philanthropists.

These are boom times for psychedelics. Celebrity endorsements, Netflix documentaries, and all-star conferences abound. In recent weeks we’ve seen The New York Times and the BBC broadcast stories of veterans dissolving PTSD in MDMA, and psilocybin’s apparent (and, it seems, swiftly-discredited) capacity to “free up the depressed brain”. 

Maybe the most extraordinary moment, though, was the Psychedelics House of Davos, featuring a World Economic Forum-sponsored panel: “shamanic investing” expert Silvia Benito, Deepak Chopra, and the Countess Amanda Feilding. Feilding’s Beckley Foundation has fronted her quest since the Sixties to rehabilitate psychedelics — LSD is her favourite — and, curiously, the ancient art of trepanning.

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It’s been a strange turnaround. Criminalised and forced underground since 1970, psychedelics and related drugs have been found, by a a growing number of clinical trials, useful in treating mainly psychic ills, including depression, PTSD, anxiety, and addiction. The “peak states” furnished by LSD, psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), MDMA, ketamine, and others — combined with pre- and post-session therapies — can help ease chronic distress. Johns Hopkins studies of psilocybin for end-of-life anxiety, depression, and smoking cessation, for instance, indicate rough efficacy rates of 85%, 75% and 80%, respectively — although their sample sizes were not large or diverse, and their results have not yet been replicated.

Establishing efficacy in trials according to a gold standard of evidence is difficult. Long-term follow-ups are scant and a host of concerning side-effects — re-traumatisation, debilitating changes in visual processing, strokes — are under-explored. COMPASS Pathways’ Phase 2b trial of psilocybin for depression prompted concern among commentators and retail investors, who noted that suicidal thinking and behaviour were higher among those administered psilocybin than the control: a serious adverse event (SAE) rate of 5%, with a resulting crash in the share values of psychedelic firms. Whether down to chance, a small sample sensitive to noise, or, as COMPASS argues, the inherent risks of dealing with highly depressed patients, one broad conclusion should remain the same: psychedelics are powerful, and we ought to tread lightly. 

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Joining these difficulties are a host of barriers faced by those who want to conduct research on psychedelics. “The Science” is always political, as Covid-19 showed in spades. Psychedelics are researched in an uphill, pragmatic battle against anti-drug prejudice. Britain remains sclerotic and authoritarian on drug policy, as revealed by our new culture war-driven push to persecute “middle class cocaine users” and black-mark their passports. These rules are reified in institutional obstacles to further research (some of them bizarre), which a UK campaign led by Crispin Blunt MP is attempting to reform. Similarly Byzantine practices afflict researchers in the United States. Research must therefore be conducted alongside a push to change attitudes, convince committees, and win a PR war. 

The response of psychedelics firms, backers, and some scientists has been to hype their products. Story-hungry media and a searching mental health sector have been willing enablers. We see studies from top institutions suggesting psychedelics can “decrease political authoritarianism”, help combat climate change, or “navigate a path to peace” in Palestine. A recent “population study” suggested psychedelics “lower the odds of crime”, with an “association” observed between peyote use and decreased “motor vehicle theft”. In particular, a famous (and flawed) chart by ex-Drug Tsar Professor David Nutt showed harms from LSD and magic mushrooms as near-zero, with the results replicated in downstream “drug information” and “harm reduction” resources. 

The corporadelic movement is playing “the establishment game from inside the establishment”, Countess Feilding said at the Symposium. “Use the light of science to destigmatise and rehabilitate psychedelics.” This rhetorical approach has been dubbed the “Trojan Horse”, with medico-scientific corroboration a vessel for the larger mission.

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The missionaries dwell in a broad church. Consider the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, and its founder Rick Doblin. Funded by and collaborating with corporadelic firms, MAPS is in Phase-3 studies into MDMA for PTSD, in particular for veterans: a group bound to elicit sympathy from the conservatively-minded. “We don’t actually do science,” Doblin said. “We do political science.”

He foresees that psychedelic therapy, and an envisioned network of “thousands of clinics” by 2035, will democratise “the sense of connection, not just the idea of it, but the felt experience of it”. 

“It is inevitable that in hyping things up too much, risks can arise”, Countess Feilding clarified via email. “On the other hand, it seems vitally important to establish if psychedelics have a major part to play in the survival of Homo sapiens and in improving our health, happiness, and outlook.”

But today’s psych-elites don’t seem particularly interested in democracy: they are drawn from Silicon Valley, Burning Man bros, billionaires, and California narcissists. A “market opportunity of £1.8 billion by 2026” remains for the taking, Symposium attendees were told. Billionaires like Peter Thiel, venture capital, hedge funds, Google, and the owner of GoDaddy have piled into psychedelic medicine; dozens of new firms with names like Eleusis, Awakn, Field Trip and MindCure have appeared, all decked with white-sheen websites and evangelical web copy. And the safer psychedelic retreats currently cost thousands of dollars, and may well stay that way.

“I believe loving money is one of the greatest gifts you can give humanity at this time,” said Azrya Bequer, one half of a husband-and-wife duo behind BEQOMING, an outfit earmarked “to serve the 0.1% of the wealthiest people in the world to start making better decisions for our planet and our future generations” — through facilitated ayahuasca ceremonies. 

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Why now? Psychiatry is in crisis, commentators observe: in total contrast to the advances of physical medicine, and despite tens of billions of dollars invested in treatments and research, outcomes remain broadly stagnant. It is a field in search of a silver bullet. 

But squaring the circle of the world “out there” has been psychedelia’s perennial problem. “It’s all in the mind, ya know,” George Harrison’s acid cartoon blurbed in 1968’s Yellow Submarine, to the trumpets of All You Need Is Love. The cost-of-living crisis, inequality, institutional decay — the more material drivers of our distress — received little mention at the Symposium. There was talk of trauma, the inner healer, the true self. Or, for pharma firms profiting from a brain-centric, diagnostic view of misery, there is “chemical imbalance” and “brain disorders”, leveraged by overstretched references to “neuroplasticity” and pretty pictures of brain scans. Even the Department of Defence is directing $26.9 million towards novel psychedelics for veteran PTSD, whose battle scars they reduce to a “neurophysiological dysfunction”. 

MindMed’s former CEO, JR Rahn — now CEO of a “People-Powered Pharma” outfit called LOVE Inc. — put it this way: “Forty percent of the country is suffering — that’s a big, big market.” 

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That market is greedy. Reportedly in keeping with the FDA’s regulatory requirements, plans are in place, in time, for MAPS to administer MDMA to children as young as seven. “The sooner you treat people for their trauma, the more benefits when you come to talk about insurance coverage and all,” Doblin said. “The more lifetime benefits there are, the more suffering you avoid.”

It’s tricky territory. A psychoactive as powerful as MDMA would seem precisely contraindicated for children, whose developing brains may render them susceptible to long-term changes and dysregulations. Doblin is firm and provocative. “The prohibitionist argument leaps from problems that can be caused by daily or frequent use of marijuana, or other drugs, to arguments for abstinence”, he said over email. “Daily use of marijuana in high school can be problematic but that doesn’t mean the message to adolescents should be to never use marijuana.

“For adolescent patients with PTSD, their brains are already warped by their PTSD, so not using MDMA to protect their brains doesn’t make sense”, he said.

The mission is not without its own traumas, however. Strikingly, at least four participants in MAPS’ MDMA trials experienced significant deteriorations in their wellbeing that were neither chased up nor reported in their much-vaunted paper, published to mass media attention in Nature. Across psychedelic culture, victims of sexual assault and rape claim they have been told to keep silent to avoid drawing stigma to the Mission.

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No psychedelic drug is yet approved by regulators, though MDMA stands at the penultimate Phase 3 stage. More banal realities can be stubborn. Despite complacent claims, including from Professor Nutt last month, that psilocybin is “the most effective antidepressant” — and “we don’t need [controlled trials]” — an Imperial College head-to-head of psilocybin versus an SSRI indicated no significant difference, even after a six month follow up. Press teams and media downstream — even The Daily Mail — spun these results in a more sympathetic tone: that “psilocybin performs as well as antidepressant”. Brought to trials desperate for help — and inflated by PR pumped by research departments about “brain resets” — the patient may experience striking collapses in mood as mushroom euphoria dissipates and depression returns, or if the promised mystical experience fails to manifest. 

These are just some of the under-explored problems with “therapy on acid”. Patients are also vulnerable to hyper-suggestibility, sexual abuse, exploitation, and risks of guru complexes among therapists, who can programme their clients with their own worldviews. These issues were rarely mentioned at the Symposium. Reportedly contacted by representatives in Rwanda, Doblin has elsewhere spoken of seeking to dissolve the animosities of Hutus and Tutsis with MDMA. An outfit known as Unlimited Sciences, a “psychedelic research nonprofit” launched to “inform public perception, education, policy and practices”, is raising funds for a study on the outcomes of mainly-female Saudi refugees at an ayahuasca ceremony: a population for whom such bioethical issues are likely aggravated.

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In the “Great Psychedelic Craze” of the Sixties, it was believed that LSD and cannabis could create a revolution. Draped in white robes and beads, Dr Timothy Leary told reporters that “the kids who take LSD aren’t going to fight your wars” or “join your corporations”. Looking around the Symposium was to see the death of a dream. Far from overturning power structures, psychedelic utopianism has been captured by the elite. 

We listened to Christian Angermayer, the billionaire “Prince of Psychedelia”, who says he “finally understood Bitcoin” after his first psilocybin trip, and has since tattooed the molecule on his arm. He compared his therapists to shamans, drawing a straight line between the apocryphal drug cults of early Christianity and “ancient Egypt”. Angermayer reassured investors of market deteriorations in guru-like tones: “The market is a cycle like life is a cycle … as a company, if you are fully-financed, you almost have to say: okay, ignore the stock market, it does not contribute to your mental health.”

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Just as mindfulness became McMindfulness, psychedelics has become McPsychedelics. The transition has not been universally applauded: two senior psychedelic figures described crying at the Symposium. “We thought we were getting Woodstock, but we’re getting Prozac Nation 2.0,” said Jamie Wheal, who was prophetic commentator on the psychedelic scene in 2019.

“How can we compete with this?”, asked Lauren Katalinich of the UK Psychedelics Society, gesturing woefully towards a Symposium room of grey fabric and black suits. Capital does as capital will. In its quest for new and fruitful markets to carve, it has gone from without to deeper within, and plumbed the fathoms of inner mind. Corporadelic firms post marketing photos of misattributed “shamans” on Twitter; “mystical experience”, a predictor for depression, sells. There is perhaps no psychedelic feature that couldn’t be captured and marketed: nominally-radical notions, like encountering hyper-realistic entities and God Himself on DMT, become news copy and advertisements to entice clients. 

At its height in the Sixties, the Great Psychedelic Craze believed it could levitate the Pentagon through sheer “vibration”. For the Second Great Craze, the world of “net zero trauma” is its infinity point — where the trip is heading is anybody’s guess. Utopia translates as “no place”.

An earlier draft of this article described COMPASS Pathways’ Phase 2b trial as exhibiting a ‘red flag of suicidal thinking’ among patients administered psilocybin. This has been contextualised. An earlier draft also suggested that Unlimited Sciences were raising funds for a study to administer ayahuasca to Saudi refugees. This is not the case. Funds are instead being raised to study the population outcomes, with no input on administration.