Making Sense of Psychedelics After April 18

The most important and potentially liberating change in American drug policy came from Donald Trump and Joe Rogan. Here are some ways to think about what comes next.

Anyone unfamiliar with the psychedelic world was probably thrown for a loop by the April 18 press conference and executive order announcing the most significant changes in US drug policy in fifty years. Donald Trump, with Joe Rogan smiling right behind him, became (we think) the first sitting president to publicly say the word “psychedelic” in a positive way, and announced expedited review of psychedelic medicines. These are goals that, in the public imagination, are still probably associated with liberal values and Sixties-era cultural history – but they were achieved by a conservative populist president after prodding from a right-leading celebrity.

The order itself was compact, with five components: ordering an expedited review of three psychedelic treatments for mental illness (these have now been selected), providing the legal ‘Right to Try’ psychedelics for those with terminal illness, setting aside $50 million to help states (Texas, in particular) develop psychedelic interventions for mental illness, boosting clinical trials, and rescheduling psychedelic drugs that have completed Phase 3 clinical trials.

But the state of play is complex: there are progressive, conservative, and independent players, and there are commercial, indigenous, medical, and civil-libertarian interests, often working at cross purposes. In this post, I will briefly explain how we got to this disorienting moment, and offer some principles that might inform thinking about psychedelics in the wake of it.

Trump as psychedelic guide, from the brilliant AI video by Ari Kuschnir

How did this happen?

This sudden change was actually a long time coming.

Over the past twenty five years, hundreds of scientific studies have shown the efficacy of psychedelics to treat intractable mental health conditions, including PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, traumataic brain injury, anxiety, alcohol use disorder,and others – what become known, for better or for worse, as the “psychedelic renaissance.” (Here’s a 2025 roundup of 23-meta analyses encompassing over 100 primary studies.)

Some of the data is indeed remarkable: psilocybin therapy has demonstrated sustained remission in over half of depression patients over six months, for example, and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy produces lasting relief from PTSD among 71% of veterans and first responders. There have been at least 134 clinical trials of psilocybin alone. And there are now 86 drugs in Phase 2 or 3 clinical trials at the FDA – below is a handy bullseye chart of all them, grouped by mental health condition, courtesy of Psychedelic Alpha:

The reason this is called a “renaissance” is that in the mid-twentieth century, LSD and other psychedelic compounds were seen as legitimate subjects of scientific research, both as cures for mental maladies and as potential agents for psychological and spiritual growth. When LSD was being studied by psychologists in white lab coats and religious scholars in tweed jackets (and, it should be noted, government agents), it was legal.

But after Timothy Leary, the Beatles, and Abbie Hoffman started promoting it; after psychedelics became associated with the left-wing “counterculture” (itself a problematic term, as scholar Christian Greer has discussed); and after overdoses and other tragedies because sensationalized and broadcast on television, the Nixon administration banned it in 1970. Research was almost totally shut down for thirty years.

The motives for the bans were mixed: partly, they were a response to young people suffering psychological damage due to unregulated and unreliable drugs. But in larger part it was a culture war. In a famous and over-quoted statement made in 1994, Nixon aide John Erlichman said that the point of banning marijuana and heroin was to enable the administration to go after hippies and Black radicals. “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said. “We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

That is just one quote, and not even specifically about psychedelics. It is indeed overused and over-cited. But it does align with the racially and culturally slanted ways in which the War on Drugs was prosecuted — as Rogan himself said in the Oval Office — and with the effect it had on research.

Yet even between the first wave of research in the 1950s-60s and the ‘renaissance’ of the 2000s, psychedelics did not disappear; they went underground. LSD in particular circulated at Grateful Dead concerts and throughout the ‘counterculture.’ Indigenous communities, primarily Native Americans or migrants from South America, continued to use medicines that had been part of their cultures for centuries if not millennia. Quirky but sincere psychedelic churches began to appear — there are now over 200 of them, according to a database compiled by the religious studies scholar Gordon Melton. ‘Underground’ therapists and facilitators (of a range of ethical quality) used LSD and other psychedelics in psychotherapy, religious/spiritual ritual, and other contexts. And there were a few isolated studies, like Rick Strassman’s work on DMT in the 1990s, as well as dogged efforts to win government permission to reopen research. led by Rick Doblin at MAPS, David Nichols at Purdue, Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins, and others.

Eventually, these efforts bore fruit; Griffiths’ first large scale study of psilocybin took place at Johns Hopkins beginning in 2000 (with the results published in 2006), and since then, the “renaissance” rapidly gained momentum, thanks to advocates, billionaire funders, highly motivated researchers, a bestselling book by Michael Pollan, and extremely promising data. Not coincidentally, this explosion in study coincided with America’s rising mental health crisis, opioid crisis, and, I would suggest, the meaning crisis as well; at a low ebb for our country’s collective well-being, here was a possible source of help.

There have been plenty of road bumps. The first effort to win FDA approval for MDMA-assisted therapy failed in summer, 2024, to the surprise of many; the initial bubble of enthusiasm burst and has not re-formed. And the data is not uniformly positive; in some studies, psychedelics barely outperform placebos (which, to be fair, is also true of many approved medicines as well, including some SSRIs). The ‘underground’ nature of psychedelic use has also led to cultic dynamics, weird and possibly dangerous healing modalities, and cases of abuse by unscrupulous facilitators.

Still, the data is generally good, most scientists are serious, and, above ground, there are for-profit companies, serious academic centers (at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, the New School, and Emory) and several large nonprofit organizations in the space. The psychedelic renaissance is not just a big Grateful Dead show.

As the field has grown, many conservatives, libertarians, and other non-liberals who have joined in. This may be particularly hard for progressives to grok, since obviously, for many people, psychedelics still carry associations with liberal, even radical, American subcultures — not Joe Rogan, not Rick Perry, and for sure not Donald Trump. But that is not the reality of the field today. Generally liberal and basically apolitical people (scientists, especially) are still probably in the numerical majority. But some of the most effective advocates for “moving the middle” on psychedelic research are veterans’ groups who have experienced the power of psychedelics to address the massive mental health crisis among veteran populations — as the Trump EO noted, there have been over 6,000 veteran suicides in each of the last several years. Vets and their advocates are not coastal elites motivated by consciousness expansion; they are frequently conservative people who want to stop vets from killing themselves and who have found something that (maybe) works. That population and mission resonates with mainstream politicians.

And then there are the quasi-right-wing libertarians and right-leaning independents: Rogan himself, several close associates of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and several high-profile funders and founders of psychedelic companies. This is a wide, diverse bunch; some critics have lumped them all together, but that’s not accurate. Some indeed subscribe to ideologies like transhumanism, eugenics, and various forms of AI speculative religion. Others are hard-core, anti-woke independents like Rogan who are anti-establishment, libertarian, and, lately, MAGA-friendly. Still others are RFK/MAHA-adjacent, either as true believer or as transactional coalition partners. It is a range, in other words, and having worked with many of these people directly for the past several years, I’ve seen a number of recurring themes, but no ideological unity.

Of course, for those who still associate psychedelics with left-leaning values, the ideological diversity of the space can be jarring. Yet, as we saw last week, this kind of coalition politics tends to be effective, especially when Republicans are in power. Would the White House have changed course without Joe Rogan? Almost certainly not.

Now, does all this mean that we have entered “the age of conservative psychedelia,” as Michelle Lhooq’s brilliant essay about April 18 suggested?

Yes and no. Conservative psychedelia is definitely a thing — and Lhooq is spot-on that its spiritual center is Austin, Texas, a nexus of libertarianism, experimentation, tech-bro-ism, healthmaxxing, Trump-embracing, and even some old-school heads. As Lhooq writes, “Psychedelia’s swing from the vehemently anti-war era of the 60s to its contemporary framing as a patriotic duty to veterans—at a time when the United States is engaged in multiple high-stakes global conflicts—is particularly complex.”

But, as some of the conservatives Lhooq met with (including Perry) explicitly noted, they are only one part of the movement — and still, I would say, not the dominant part. On April 18, after all, Lhooq herself was at a left-dominated psychedelics conference in Berkeley, together with leaders of MAPS and other liberal psychedelic types. Rather, it seems to me that the movement for psychedelic research, medicine, and decriminalization has become what it should always have been: a trans-partisan coalition, which includes within it people who want to legally erase my marriage and deport some of my friends.

As I’ve written about before, I remember a similar dynamic from my LGBTQ activist days (roughly 2003-2015): plenty of radical queers were repulsed by the HRC and right-wing donors like Paul Singer, but when it came to counting votes and pushing legislation through Congress, these alliances were crucial. It’s a familiar, perhaps unresolvable debate between radicals insisting on systemic, holistic, and anti-capitalist change, and liberals/moderates willing to work across the aisle to win on specific issues and incrementally reform the system. I wrote a whole long scholarly paper about that back in 2016.

So, that is how we got here: compelling data, cross-partisan support, and a field that has matured significantly, along with plenty of growing pains, in the last two decades.

How Should We Think About All This?

On to the second question, which is what to make of all this. Again, there won’t be a single answer here; ultimately I remain optimistic and pro-psychedelics in general, but there are a lot of ways things can go better or worse, depending on how it plays out.

1. Zooming Back for a Moment

Let’s start with context. The 55-year-old drug war has been brutal, has disproportionately targeted vulnerable communities, and has led to a wave of mass incarceration, mostly of Black, brown, and/or poor people. There are legitimate public health issues regarding psychoactive drugs, but both the initial motivations of drug prohibition in 1970 and the ways in which the ‘War on Drugs’ has been fought ever since have decimated communities and are shot through with cultural and racial bias. While some psychedelic users and dealers have been (outrageously) thrown in jail, they are not the primary victims of the drug war; the main victims are Black, brown, and poor people who have been relentlessly and disproportionately targeted and incarcerated by it. From specific elements like the longstanding disparity between penalties for crack and powder cocaine to the entire police state that has disproportionately focused on the “inner city,” the War on Drugs has been racist in conception and execution.

The Trump EO does not end the War on Drugs. It doesn’t affect the criminalization of cocaine or illegal opioids, doesn’t invest in treatment rather than prosecution, and even on psychedelics, its impact will be limited to narrow uses psychedelics as mental health treatments. But if it helps to roll back some of its excesses, that is to be applauded. It will also slightly reduce the reach of the state into my brain and yours – reducing what Mason Marks has called “cognitive content moderation.” And it will make potentially life-changing medical interventions available to people who are suffering and de-stigmatize practices that should never have been stigmatized in the first place. Eventually, it should even enable more people to pursue their spiritual, religious, or therapeutic self-actualization.

That said, it’s reasonable to be uneasy about the spectacle of the April 18 press conference, and how it came about. As has been well-reported, the policy change came not as a result of decades of activism, democratic process, deliberative review, or the scientific advances described in the previous section, but because Joe Rogan sent Donald Trump a text message, and Trump replied “‘Sounds great. Want FDA approval? Let’s do it.” That is hardly a paragon of good governance or administrative policymaking. And the whole spectacle may well have been Trump’s bid to win back Rogan, who has severely criticized the Iran War and Trump in general.

But it wasn’t just the text message. Rogan himself came to appreciate psychedelics as a result of those decades of activism and scientific advancement. There is plenty that one might criticize about Rogan’s role in spreading conspiracies, undermining science, and promoting nationalism, but on the question of psychedelics, his show has platformed over a dozen smart, competent people in policy, science, and the wider field, and features deep, interesting conversations about it. It was Rogan’s interview with Ibogaine-booster Bryan Hubbard that led to that text exchange. Like him or not, on this issue, Rogan is supported by two decades of research.

Rick Perry, Joe Roan, Bryan Hubbard — now psychedelic heroes?

I have heavily criticized Trump many, many, many, many, many times. But we agree on some things: we both like Diet Coke, for example. And we apparently agree that psychedelics hold promise for treating mental health. This is how politics often works. And if Zohran Mamdani can work with Trump on issues of shared interest, so can you and I.

2. Dystopia 1: Safe for Me, Not for Thee

Alright, enough positivity. Let’s turn to three ways in which all this could go badly awry – and what might be done to prevent that from happening.

Here’s the first: a world in which psychedelic therapies are only legally available to rich people (currently, a psilocybin assisted therapy session in Colorado costs between $2,500 and $5,000; an Ibogaine treatment in Mexico costs over $7,000), while not-rich people, especially the most vulnerable and most in need of these medicines, get unregulated and dangerous care from providers who are either shady or incompetent or both. There is a dystopian outcome here where corporate pharmaceutical developments sell expensive products to the few, while off-label providers motivated by money, clout-chasing, or unethical spiritual adventurism take advantage of people seeking help.

This is already happening to some extent. Psychedelics exist in a kind of legal gray area: technically forbidden by state and federal laws, but by laws that are only sporadically enforced. And in such a grey market, shysters flourish. It’s hard to share information – there is no Yelp for psychedelic clinics – and so many people end up with ‘shamans’ or healers who aren’t adequately trained and who offer psychedelics to people who really shouldn’t take them (e.g. folks with certain mental health conditions) or even, in some cases, commit acts of abuse. This is by no means true of most facilitators — but it is true of some.

It’s also happening, to an extent, in the context of ketamine, which is technically legal only as an anesthetic, but which is widely prescribed off-label for depression, anxiety, PTSD, and chronic pain. This can be fine – many psychiatric medicines are prescribed off-label, and many ketamine providers are ethical, careful, and professional. But it can also not be fine: ketamine can be addictive, it can do damage to the urinary tract and liver, and at high doses, its use is strongly contra-indicated for people with dissociative disorder or other conditions. Again, I’m not impugning ketamine or most ketamine providers; I’m just noting that some are more reputable than others, and people have been harmed by the less reputable ones.

With legalized psilocybin, ibogaine, or even MDMA, this could all get much worse. We might get another version of the opioid crisis, except instead of people getting addicted to Oxycontin and then opioids, there could be people suffering acute mental health crises or abused by bad actors. I don’t think this means that psychedelics are bad; on the contrary, they can be quite good for health, flourishing, and even society as a whole. I’ve devoted years of my professional life to researching them, after all. But there needs to be serious policy thinking around cost sharing, equity of access, insurance coverage, and, above all, safety. There need to be standards for psychedelic care that can serve as a good housekeeping seal of approval for responsible providers. And there needs to be more investment in mental health infrastructure, chaplaincy, and education so that when people have powerful psychedelic experiences – more on that in a moment – they can be supported by family, medical professionals, and clergy.

We should not want safe psychedelics for the rich but unregulated and unsafe access for everyone else. The psychedelic rollout will go much better if it is informed by values like equity, harm reduction, transparency, and safety – and if it can constrain exploitative profiteering, tech-bro recklessness, wellness grifting, and messiness. This is not a time to move fast and break things.

3. Dystopia 2: Colonialism and Exploitation

Let’s zoom back further.

Psychedelics are not new, and for the vast majority of human history, they were not regarded as “drugs” or “pharmaceuticals” but as mind/soul-altering plants, fungi, spirits, or entities – often sentient – that were woven into cultures in present-day South and North America, Central and South Asia, Western Africa, and, possibly, pre-modern Europe and the Mediterranean. The ‘psychedelic renaissance’ is a new, Western phenomenon; the word ‘psychedelic’ was coined in 1956 by a British psychologist (to replace ‘hallucinogen’ and ‘psychotomimetic’); the concept of ‘intoxication’ as negative has a particular, Western-religious history; and, basically, everything that can seem like “common sense” about these molecules is, in fact, culturally contingent, culturally specific, and recent. Even the word “drug” is just one particular culture’s conception of altered states and the means to cultivate them, and not a particularly accurate one.

These compounds were understood in different ways by different cultures; there is no single “indigenous” culture or perspective prior to the 20^th century, though there are trends that frequently appear. Nor were these substances aligned with a hippie-like, peaceful ideology. In various cultures, they have been used to see the future, gain power, or curse enemies; to bind tribes or cultures together in communal contexts; to contact non-human entities who may be benevolent or malevolent or chaotic; and any number of other purposes. They were often restricted to the elite, and embedded in legal and social contexts. They blended together what Westerners might call medical and spiritual. They often had nothing to do with individual unitive mysticism, or tripping, or personal growth. And they were definitely not about frying your brain, ‘intoxication,’ escaping from reality, or any of the other cliches promulgated by the drug war. They were embedded in cultural, religious, and social contexts that varied from culture to culture.

Now, not all psychedelics were once indigenous medicines (to use another only-partially-accurate term); some, like MDMA and ketamine, are synthetic, and others, like LSD, Ibogaine, and many forms of psilocybin, are synthesized versions of naturally-occurring compounds. But the Western ‘discovery’ of psychedelics does often follow the tragic logic of extractive colonialism, both narrowly (in terms of extracting natural ‘resources’) and broadly (in terms of the colonization of indigenous peoples and cultures). The whole frame of “legalizing psychedelics” ignores or suppresses the fact that ‘legal psychedelics’ preceded illegal psychedelics by several thousand years, give or take.

At the very least, then, a responsible psychedelic renaissance would protect indigenous lands and plants/fungi from exploitation and would recognize and protect indigenous plant medicine use. We have already failed even in this narrow regard: for example, in Texas and Mexico with respect to the overharvesting of peyote cactus (now mostly protected in the United States but not Mexico), in the parts of Oaxaca where psilocybin mushrooms (can we please stop staying “magic mushrooms” please) originally grew, and in many other places.

But it is worth considering going further than that. It would be a typically odious irony if Ibogaine, originally derived from the roots of the Iboga plant sacred to the Bwiti religion of Gabon, swelled the coffers of pharma companies without any financial benefit to the people who stewarded this medicine for generations. What if a portion of those profits were dedicated to indigenous people’s physical and political protection, health, and cultural preservation? What if Western metaphysical claims were a bit more epistemically modest, since really, we’re not quite sure that binding to 5-HT_2A receptors is the sole explanation of why psychedelics work? What if, I don’t know, those benefiting from psychedelics helped to ameliorate the effects of anti-indigenous colonialism, or at least not exacerbate them?

Some progressives would go even further, arguing that Western science, capitalism, and culture are, yet again, stealing resources from indigenous people; that Western medicalization is a betrayal of these compounds’ sacred power and intelligence; and that these medicines simply do not belong to us. These ethical claims deserve consideration, even if it is far-fetched to imagine ceasing all pharmaceutical development or coercing companies to adopt a decolonial mindset. I have also seen a wide variety of views among the indigenous activists I have met in psychedelic contexts, ranging from the radical to the pragmatic. Just as there is no single indigenous culture, there is no single indigenous response to medicalization. Some response, though, should be part of any thoughtful implementation regime.

4. Dystopia 3: Fools Rush In Where Angels (and Entities) Tread

Thus far, I’ve focused on the medical use of psychedelics. In my own work, though, I’m more focused on religious and spiritual use, as well as when religious and spiritual issues arise in clinical contexts. And for all the new developments in the medical context, recreational use (which may or may not overlap with therapeutic and/or religious use) is still the numerically largest way in which non-indigenous people interact with psychedelics. What about them?

On paper, the Trump EO changes nothing about either of these forms of psychedelic use — yet. However, when psychedelic medicines are rescheduled — as cannabis just was, in the other major drug news of the week — that will greatly change the legal and cultural posture of religious and even recreational psychedelic use. Already, state and federal enforcement of drug laws against sincere religious users is relatively rare, although the boundaries of what ‘religion’ and ‘sincerity’ mean are contested and shot through with Christian religious bias. But rescheduling will ratchet down the priority even further, and should enable more open communication, sharing of information, and legitimacy.

This is very good news if you favor the free exercise of religion, which I do. It should also help religious organizations be more transparent and committed to safety and accountability; when you don’t have to hide everything for fear of being arrested, you can be more frank about confronting abuse and ensuring safety.

In terms of recreational use, the situation is similar. On the one hand, when drug use can be used as a proxy for fighting culture wars, it will continue to be; just look at how law enforcement became suddenly interested in MDMA, GHB, and amyl nitrate (“poppers”) when straight white kids started using and abusing them. On the other hand, as we’ve seen with cannabis, stigma and illegality reinforce one another, and when that loop is disrupted, both can shift relatively quickly. Nor do most legal scholars or decriminalization activists want pure legalization with no holds barred – at the very least, we need more investment in harm reduction, but probably we need a legal regime similar to restrictions on alcohol, tobacco, and firearms to protect innocent third parties. These issues will doubtless become more pressing as psychedelic use becomes more widespread.

It is also ‘to be determined’ how we as a society will deal with the spiritual, religious, or otherwise potentially transformative impacts of psychedelic experiences that can arise in ostensibly secular therapeutic contexts. These experiences happen often, they are often quite profound, and they challenge the boundaries of secular medicine. The Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, with which I am affiliated, has several projects to help chaplains, therapists, and facilitators gain cultural competence with a diverse range of religious backgrounds so that they are better equipped to handle these experiences when they arise. That is an important start. But scaling such efforts will require attention and investment.

Here’s a pair of AI-images I used to illustrate this issue in a recent presentation I gave at Emory:

This response from the therapist seems supportive, right? Only it isn’t. Consider the following passage from the Qur’an, Surah Al-Kahf 18:50:

And remember when We said to the angels, ‘Prostrate before Adam’, so they all did—but not Iblis, who was one of the jinn, but he rebelled against the command of his Lord. Would you then take him and his descendants as patrons instead of Me, although they are your enemy? What an evil alternative for the wrongdoers to choose!

In other words, says this religious tradition, don’t trust jinn! The well-meaning therapist has made at least two mistakes in this supportive-seeming response. First, in trying to ‘tame’ the image of the jinn by defining it as a projection, she has undermined what may be an important religious belief of the experiencer, perhaps losing his trust, or at least making him feel alienated from the process. (The somewhat stereotypical images of a religious Muslim and a therapist, by the way, came from the mind of Gemini; apologies for that.) Second, by advising him to trust an entity said by his tradition to be untrustworthy, she might cause more anxiety and mistrust, rather than less. And this assumes the therapist is not being narcissistic, or claiming magical powers, or overly shaping the experience, as facilitators sometimes do.

I am optimistic that we can do better.

More broadly though, what happens when a million Americans undergo ‘peak experiences’ for which they may not be prepared? Psychedelic spiritual experiences are not ‘good vibes only.’ When I look back on my youthful, college-years psychedelic experiences, I’m horrified at how poorly we attended to set, setting, and dosage — the three most important ingredients in a psychedelic experience. I was lucky those experiences didn’t lead to any significant harm, as they did for several young people I’ve known. Most of these compounds ought to be treated with reverence, as they were for thousands of years. Adverse events are real, and some can be lasting. I do worry about what happens when access is increased but responsibility is not.

Nor do we really know the ethical and political consequences of large-scale consciousness alteration. Contrary to myths prevalent among supporters and opponents alike, psychedelics do not turn squares into hippies. They are, to quote Stanslav Grof, “non-specific amplifiers”: if you go into a psychedelic experience with a set of beliefs (religious or otherwise), you may exist with those beliefs amplified, regardless of their political valence. That has been true for thousands of years, it’s true among the nationalist right in Brazil today, and it’s true among many of the people in the Oval Office on April 18. It’s really unknowable what the societal impacts of psychedelic proliferation will be.

Relatedly, it will be fascinating to see how more conservative religious people will understand these experiences. Some conservative Christians are already dead against psychedelics, since any source of truth outside the authorized channels necessarily leads to deviation, or at least a loosening of dogmatic exclusivism. It’s quite possible that the mainstreaming of psychedelics will lead to a conservative-Christian backlash against them, as we’ve already seen in some quarters. Joe Rogan is not the only person Trump is texting with. These conservatives are not wrong to be concerned: psychedelic experiences can evoke very noetic-feeling encounters with entities or insights outside one’s own religious tradition. This is not your mother-in-law’s SSRI.

The psychedelic experience, and what we think we know about the ways it works on the brain, challenges conventional distinctions between secular and spiritual. Clearly, these compounds can be used in secular contexts, and spiritual/religious content does not always arise. Clearly, they can also be used in explicitly religious or spiritual contexts, and in ones that combine some aspect of each, such as when Shefa, a Jewish psychedelic organization, conducts ketamine retreats with the stated intention of addressing trauma. Is that practice religious, cultural, or therapeutic? All of the above. Psychedelic medicine and psychedelic spirituality will, I believe, cause us to question the boundaries that define and divide them.

One analogy for this complex relationship between secular/therapeutic/medical and spiritual/religious/contemplative might be meditation. Mindfulness meditation evolved in a specific religio-cultural context: South Asian “Buddhist Modernism” pioneered by Burmese and Thai Buddhists in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It was embedded in a specific ideological matrix: mindfulness leads to liberation, helping practitioners see and thus loosen the desires, aversions, and delusions that often escape our notice. Now, after waves of reform and secularization, it is a stress-reduction technique with no philosophical framing. To some, this – like medical psychedelics – can seem like at best a dilution of a powerful contemplative practice, at worst an offensive appropriation.

Having previously worked in the meditation space for over ten years, I disagree. First, both mindfulness meditation and medical psychedelics can be a ‘gateway drug’ to whatever deeper explorations an individual may wish to do. That may not be the Buddha Dharma or entheogenic spirituality specifically, but I think that’s fine. It’s a dip into the shallow end of the pool, and which particular flavor of the ‘deep end’ is up to the individual. And in the meantime, both mindfulness and psychedelic therapy alleviate a lot of dukkha. I don’t think they should be gate-kept because some of us choose to go deeper. And there are degrees of cultural appropriation; one can respectfully honor a cultural lineage, for example, without ignoring it on the one hand or fetishizing it on the other.

Having said all that, I do think there is a difference in degree between a secular mindfulness practitioner wondering why she’s working so hard for material gain and a secular psychedelics practitioner wondering if the entire universe is one radiant field of unified consciousness that some people call God. I mean, you tell me.

5. Complex Seeing

April 18 has already been a “before and after” moment for psychedelic medicine. As a result of the symbolic and practical ramifications of the Trump EO, there is more openness to legal psychedelic therapy than ever before. It’s also obvious that many in the psychedelic space, and many psychedelic enthusiasts, still have a kind of unbridled enthusiasm that can lead to unintended bad results. I don’t think the dystopias I’ve explored above will unfold as feared, and I don’t think the bad guys are in control. But it’s also obvious that many in the psychedelic space, and many psychedelic enthusiasts, still have a kind of unbridled enthusiasm that can lead to unintended bad results.

In that light, perhaps one unexpected benefit of the April 18 spectacle is its complexity. On he one hand, it was a huge step forward in research and destigmatization. On the other hand, that step was taken by a president with, to put it mildly, problematic tendencies, and at the behest of a populist influencer. The complexity is a good thing. And hopefully it will inspire both caution and enthusiasm, as well as renewed commitments to scientific inquiry, equity, compassion, freedom, harm reduction, and justice. There are ways this process could go wrong, but there are also ways to get it right.

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Thanks for reading — I hope this analysis has helped make sense of a complex and evolving situation. Here’s some more coverage of the Trump executive order:

Psychedelic Alpha (roundup of coverage)

Michelle Lhooq/Rave New World

Tricycle Day

Jules Evans/Ecstatic Integration

The Guardian

In my ‘recommended reading’ section this week, I’m going to take a break from other Substacks and highlight a few pieces in the much-maligned Grey Lady:

• If you feel like you need a shower after reading this ambivalently pro-Trump post of mine, Thomas Edsall’s “Easily the Worst President in History” offers an excellent one. Like many of my pieces, it attempts a comprehensive, bookmarkable litany of all the things.

• Here’s a great review of Tim Cook’s time at Apple, focusing on how much he helped China and its regime.

• AI is coming for political campaigns.

• Finally, my Can’t-Look-Away-Even-Though-I-Should story is the Musk vs. Altman trial. The Times has done a great job covering it. I am rooting for Altman, but David Streitfeld’s subhead really says it all: “all-encompassing greed is Silicon Valley’s defining feature.” (And the piece is excellent.)

Lastly, here’s Ari’s complete video: