Another speaker, Neşe Devenot, a senior writing lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, recounted an incident in which a therapist pinned down a patient “as their distress escalated to the point of shouting, quote, ‘Go away. Get your effing hands away from me.’” In a 17-page document submitted to the FDA, Devenot alleged that the MAPS therapy wasn’t a scientific treatment at all: It was a “therapy cult,” comparable to NXIVM, the notorious sex-trafficking pyramid scheme.
When the hearing concluded, after some eight exhausting hours of testimony, Lubecky stepped onto the balcony of his Washington, DC, apartment, inhaled deeply, and yelled, “FUCK!” He was sure Buisson’s and Devenot’s accounts would doom the treatment’s chances of approval. Here, he believed, was a medical innovation that could save thousands of lives, and it had been torpedoed not by its usual opponents, like law enforcement agencies or opponents of drug legalization, but by warring factions of the psychedelic community itself. Or, as he described them, “a bunch of fucking hippies who fucked it up.”
Photograph: Tonje Thilesen
Until fairly recently, the “psychedelic space” was a small and somewhat parochial collection of academics, research chemists, and recreational trippers, all loosely connected to the drug underground or the vestigial 1960s counterculture. Then, in 2018, author Michael Pollan published How to Change Your Mind, his bestselling account of the “psychedelic renaissance,” and helped popularize drugs like LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, and mescaline.
The community’s gatherings outgrew church basements and Holiday Inn ballrooms and relocated to glass-and-steel convention centers swarming with pharmaceutical salespeople and venture capitalists. To many in the left-wing, anticapitalist psychedelic scene, Neşe Devenot told me, it was like the evil Eye of Sauron from The Lord of the Rings had swiveled in their direction.
Devenot, who uses they/them pronouns, first took LSD as a freshman at Bard. It was “the most profound experience of my life,” they said. Until that point, they had been terminally shy and suffered from intrusive thoughts about dying. But under the influence of LSD, Devenot says, “the finality and fearfulness I associated with death disappeared.” They fell in with the community of researchers and enthusiasts in which Doblin was regarded as a pioneer. “Before this field became financialized,” Devenot told me, “it was a domain for a lot of weirdos and misfits … people looking for community and meaning and connection.”
In 2018, Devenot joined an advocacy group called Psymposia, which was founded to advocate for drug policy reform. The group began working diligently to conduct policy research and rail against the corporate capture of psychedelia. A Psymposia cofounder named Brian Normand told me that he finds the incursion of Silicon Valley and Big Pharma into psychedelia “incredibly cheesy.” With open letters, articles, academic papers, podcasts, and voluminous social media posts, Psymposia called attention to abusive practitioners of psychedelic therapy and right-wing uses and abuses of mind-expanding compounds, among other topics. Early on, Psymposia and MAPS worked together. But a few years after MAPS spun off its for-profit arm, the alliance splintered.