Make America Hallucinate Again (Part Deux)

the rightward turn in psychedelics

Miss Part I review of the MAPS conference and setup for this second part?

Click here to catch up.

IMPT NOTE: what follows is not an indictment of this shift. I have friends and colleagues on all sides of this thing, but do want to point out what feels like a crucial conversation for us to have openly.

Nor does this diminish the thousands of good hearted sincere academics and therapists doing on the ground work around the world. There’s tons of well-intentioned and noble efforts happening and they all need more support, not less.

I am discussing a tiny but highly influential subset of funders, power brokers and policy writers that are influencing the landscape everyone else is trying to navigate blind, and without clear line of sight into these dynamics.

You might be stoked and rooting for this shift. You might not have noticed it yet, and have other thoughts. Either way, I’m gonna do my best to neutrally point it out and you can come to your own conclusions.

(where I do have a point of view I will state it plainly)

The psychedelic renaissance going forwards is three things:

Capitalized

Conservative

and

Christian.

How on earth did it all come to this?

Here goes…

Now we’re going to dive into exactly how this counter-counter cultural turn in the psychedelics space has happened, what (and who) prompted it, and where it might be heading next…

Best I can tell, this is the result of two main threads in the psychedelic movement:

1. The tactical decision to make military veterans the face of MDMA for PTSD movement has now taken on a life of its own. Even though the majority of PTSD sufferers are victims of domestic and sexual abuse, MAPS shrewdly realized that vets were more broadly sympathetic to wider swaths of the population. This has paid off, even if several vet advocates themselves have chafed at the feeling of being used as window dressing for a broader decriminalization push for all psychedelics.

This did what you’d imagine it would.

Put lots of special operator veterans with a fierce “no man left behind” commitment to their brothers, into powerful conversations with legislators and policy writers about fast tracking relief for those who’ve risked it all to serve their country.

(after the failure of the FDA MDMA track, momentum has shifted to this lane of access and approval. It has also resulted in expansion of scope from veterans to active duty which creates a different and more challenging set of ethics and optics concerns)

also:

2. The rightward shift of Silicon Valley philanthropists from Techno-Utopians to wherever we’re heading now

For the past decade, those folks discreetly funded most of the major projects happening across the space. Endowing university chairs, backing longitudinal research, funding lobbying efforts at state and federal levels, the works…

And for all that time, it seemed like the Left Coast elite were aligned with progressive, humanist “make the world a better place” kinda values. Always with a bit more libertarian and Rationalist leanings than New York or LA Dems, but squarely in Google’s Don’t Be Evil camp.

Now they have pivoted towards different goals, and are far more explicitly tied to this current administration’s policies across a wide portfolio of legislation and contracts including AI, surveillance and military tech.

***

Let’s take them in reverse order.

I got my first hit of this shift in the psychedelic intelligentsia in late January when I was invited to a well-known MDs Austin house for a Jeffersonian Dinner on MAHA.

These folks all had direct lines to RFK, DC, WH, HHS etc. and they wanted to explore how they could positively shape this administration’s public health agenda for the good.

It was a heavy-hitting room with Harvard neurosurgeons and PhDs, genomics founders, billionaire health food magnates, online medical testing platform folks, and Texas scions of the old oil and gas ilk (recently acquainted with sparkly things).

#nofervorliketheconverted

The dialogue was fast paced with people struggling to jump in or get cut off. Not really like the slower more structured Jeffersonian dinners I was used to, so it took me a minute to get my bearings.

After ten minutes or so the host noticed my silence and asked me what I thought.

I said:

“Well, if it was you lot sitting around this table that was actually running things, I’d be all in, and cautiously optimistic. But I think it’s a mistake to assume that this coalition (MAGA/MAHA/DOGE) doesn’t have populist momentum and competing agendas that may take it well past the reasonable interventions you all are talking about.

It’s a well-known pattern in history, that the radical intelligentsia who light the fire, rarely get to stop the burn in a reasonable spot.

Just ask all the progressive French aristocrats who had their heads handed to them by Robespierre.”

Those who make a revolution by halves do but dig their own graves.

I also pointed out the potential moral hazard of backing parts of an agenda without taking responsibility for the whole.

For instance: that dinner group at that time was especially exited about pending legislation in Texas that was going to limit food dyes in school lunches and other healthy provisioning.

Sounds great! Our kids are tubby little fucks, and Oscar Meyer Lunchables are Frankenfood sodium bombs.

(and ketchup still isn’t a vegetable)

#sorryronnie

Then I asked (as USAID was soon to be fed into the wood-chipper and NIH medical research and NOAA climate monitoring was getting poleaxed)

“what’s the ethical tradeoff of focusing on incremental tweaks to some kids’ diets while we gut funding and social safety nets of others who go hungry?

Or take policy steps that leave kids in other countries starving and dying by the hundreds of thousands?*

And finally,

“aren’t all of these depoliticized evidence-based health reforms you’re championing dependent on healthy EPA, NIH and federal agency coordination, along with all the grants, research and data that’s essential to make informed policy?”

Crickets.

It’s not that they disagreed necessarily with what I was asking about. They were all super smart and accomplished folks with colleagues directly impacted by these changes. It just became clear they weren’t thinking in those ways about those things.

(and equally clear that I was an outside perspective and not on the same channel).

So that was my point in general–just cuz a bunch of you got invites to the Inaugural Ball, are thrilled to have sit-downs with HHS, and beltway think tanks, and are a little bit giddy on the access, influence and bare knuckles, world shaping power of it all…

(To say nothing of favorable legislation for your entrepreneurial MAHA business plays. Like prying open the treasure chest of $250 billion in Health Savings Accounts so you can now sell everything from MAHA branded supplements to infrared saunas to cold plunge pools against all those sweet tax-deferred dollars and call it “health care reform!”)

…All of that shouldn’t mean that we fall asleep on the island of the Lotos Eaters, and forget our Hero’s Journey to save the world in time.

Right?

***

(what I also found fascinating/surprising was at least 80% of that gathering were psychedelically informed and most had gone to Burning Man).

To unpack for those both familiar and not with this particular subculture and how it interweaves with the dynamics we’re discussing here:

For the last twenty years (but especially in the past ten) Silicon Valley elites have colonized Burning Man with luxurious turnkey camps and multi-million dollar art cars.

Those fantastical vehicles function like gondolas for the doge in Venetian times, just dustier.

Players float about the playa, and take in the festivities from a perch on fantastical dragons, rubber duckies, and Jules Verne style flying machines.

the one in your kids’ tub probably cost a bit less

But unlike back in the day when anyone at the event could run to catch up to and hop on any magic school bus prowling the playa, these ones come with bouncers and wrist bands.

“We’re with the people,” they might kindly explain to a hopeful plebe trying to board their rig “but we’re not of the people. I hope you understand?” they smile sweetly, and rumble off to the sunrise set from the DJ they had flown in special from Ibiza.

Like modern day Masons, they all get the secret handshake and stick together. (hence the remarkably discrete coherence surrounding many of their philanthropic efforts in this space).

Camping at the right camp at Burning Man is the equivalent of getting 33rd degree initiation.

It’s that chummy initiatory experience that has turned Burning Man into the primary vehicle for baptizing other rich and powerful folks into “the tribe.”

So in some respects, exactly none of what’s happened since January is surprising.

The “vibe shift” of the recent election was actually a tectonic power shift. And many power players have shifted with it.

You coulda come in via the Bobby Kennedy anti-vax Rogan biohacker bro angle for MAHA.

You coulda come in via the Elon/Thiel/Andreessen Techno Utopians for AI and DOGE angle.

You coulda been a true believer on DJT all along and just wanted to see him get a fair crack to MAGA this place, unencumbered by all that pesky “lawfare” holding him back.

Or really, you coulda had some serious concerns about lots of it,

But then you got invited to Mar a Lago.

Or DC.

Or a sweat lodge with Bobby.

Or a rocket launch in Texas.

And, all of a sudden, you’re persuaded that, just like Bill Maher was, these folks actually make a lot of sense, and they’re way nicer than I thought!

Plus, I made some amazing new contacts about funding (or regulating) one of our ventures that I’m really excited about, so I’m gonna keep smiling and just see how this all plays out!

#howboutnow?

***

So that was the beginning of the year when I experienced a number of Alpha Hippies enthusiastically adjusting their priors for a New Normal.

Fast forward to another event just a couple weeks ago–the signing by Texas Governor Greg Abbott of $50 million in landmark funding for Iboga research .

(Iboga is the pharmacologically unique Bwiti plant that interrupts opioid withdrawals, provides a handy-dandy Christmas Carol style life review, and a grueling but often redemptive 36 hrs of mind movies).

Plus, it also seems to really help with TBIs for some reason.

And it’s not fun, or rave related like MDMA. Or tie-dye tinged like LSD, so perfect for the Puritan set. The only baggage it comes with is exotically African not bohemian.

(Plus a statistically significant number of cardiac events that need to be carefully managed)

But at this Austin event, which was understandably triumphant, I noticed a few things:

1. personal testimonials of being saved and healed are always touching and inspiring, regardless of the method, or the madness they mended.

2. this was a military veteran and Texas Republican gathering

3. there were no hippies to speak of (not even cleaned up and on best behavior)

And then

The MC (who I really like and is a gracious host), said something to the effect of, “and to Governor Abbott who’s recently been sending troops to protect our southern border, we say, FAFO, fuck around and find out!”

Which seemed like an odd preamble to a psychedelic legislation party.

But it sent a ripple of enthusiasm through the crowd. A tribal recognition of who they were (and where I was).

Then they invited Bryan “the voice of God” Hubbard to the stage to bring a little church.

If you haven’t heard of Bryan, he’s the former head of the Kentucky Opioid Abatement Advisory Commission. He was fired from the Kentucky government b/c of his promotion of ibogaine research.

…the exact same day his podcast with Rogan came out.

That combo has since launched him into the stratosphere of national advocacy.

He’s also the spitting image of Zach Galifianakis’ big brother, with a velvet drawl that sounds just like Matthew McConaughey.

#betweentwoferns

Bryan got up on that Austin stage to rousing cheers, and began: (read this with your best Dazed and Confused voice)

“Now, back in the middle of 2022 I didn’t even know what ibogaine was! And if you’d told me that a wormhole was gonna open up and spit me out in front of you all today, I woulda said how did this happen and who is responsible???”

Like I said, the guy has chops.

Building off the crowd’s delight, he got downright preacherly.

Backhills Kentucky Logos.

We were saving the world, it was divine and providential. Good things were coming for good people.

Can I get an Amen!

The host then closed with a testimonial of his own.

He’d just come back from an iboga retreat and wanted to share that the facilitator had opened his life-changing week with a quote from the Book of Revelations.

(just to level set here: usually these things start with a Rumi poem or something from Joseph Campbell about facing your dragons. Revelations is new to me)

“On either side of the river stood a tree of life, [and] the leaves of the trees serve for the healing of the nations. Every accursed thing shall disappear”

He shared that he hoped that iboga (and I think by extension, the other psychedelics) were those leaves on the Tree of Life, and would in fact heal the nations.

It was an utterly sincere and heartfelt plea for mending the world today.

From an utterly batshit book of fevered prophecy from the first century.

Which is kind of ironic, actually.

As Princeton scholar Elaine Pagels has observed, Revelations was less a fever dream prophecy of our current End Times than it was a first century polemic aimed at Jewish John’s enemies—the gentiles within the Roman Empire that upstart Paul was rallying to take over the movement.

“Ironically, it is precisely these Gentile Christians—descendants of the very people John denounced as corrupting the movement—who would later embrace the Book of Revelation as sacred scripture and champion its authority.”

“What would John of Patmos make of the fact that his Revelation is now quoted by Christians whose spiritual ancestry traces to the very people he attacked?”
— Pagels, Revelations, p. 39

So evangelicals quoting Revelations and hinting darkly that Kamala or Klaus Schwab (or Greta Thunberg) bear the mark of the beast, are, in point of fact, direct descendants of the very satanic cabal that John was warning about!

How’s them Edenic apples?

But we digress…

The real point here is that psychedelic enthusiasms are blending with end times messianism, and bleeding into real world politics.

This affects us all.

in Recapture the Rapture I wrote about this strain called Christian Zionism and its implications

According to Christian Zionism, God restored the nation of Israel to the Jews in 1948 (not coincidentally, seventy years to the day of the recent embassy ceremony).

This reestablished the kingdom of Israel and set up a clear path to the End Times foretold in the books of Revelation, Daniel, Isaiah, and Ezekiel.

According to those accounts, after a cataclysmic battle with the Antichrist, Jesus will return and usher in a thousand-year reign of peace. And the Jews? They will realize what Jeffress has been talking about and all convert to Christianity.

(#someonetellsamandbari)

But before that essential fulfillment of Christian theology, Israel has to rule an undivided Jerusalem and the entire Middle East has to descend into the “war to end all wars.”

When church and state come under the sway of powerful religious beliefs based upon outlier interpretations of texts written thousands of years ago, in times and places that bear little resemblance to our current world, we should pay attention.

In the great conversations of our time, we’re not only not on the same page, we’re not even in the same books.

The global events of the last few weeks and months only underscores the existential implications of this fact.

How prudent is it to pour the Ibogaine/Tryptamine/Ketamine gasoline onto this particular conflagration?

“the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity”

–Yeats’ Second Coming

Combined with the opening statement about fucking around and finding out on the southern border with US troops, and the suit and tie Republican politicos and lapel pin wearing veterans, I realized that we were in 2025 Austin and things have changed.

“Keeping Austin weird” was taking on different implications the longer I stood there taking it all in.

During Brian’s sermon I’d walked over to a former SEAL Team 6 veteran who’d been onstage describing some of his advocacy work with Iboga and vets. There’s a big film coming out about it soon on Netflix and they’ve been getting some profound results.

He’d read my book Stealing Fire (which opens with a story from the Teams), and a couple of my closest friends from that community had been commanding officers a few cycles above him. So we had some fun things to chat about.

Then I asked him what he was up to besides the Iboga work. He shared he was standing up a health insurance company that could get co-pay supported psychedelic care to those most in need.

“Oh,” I said. “That sounds like [friends’ company] who’s doing that pilot with Dr. Bronners”

“Yeah,” he smiled. “They’re our competition.”

My heart sank. (just a little).

“But we’re doing it a bit differently. Small team. I’ve recruited a half dozen top [industry pros] and we’re deploying AI to vet all options and strategies.

Now if you had to bet on a winner–either in the capital markets (i.e. who’s going to invest in your company) or in conservative legislatures at state and federal levels…

Would you bet on a SEAL Team 6 operator with an MBA, leveraging artificial intelligence with a team of Fortune 500 pros behind him…

Or

The quirky grandson of a quirkier founder of a magical soap company who (among many other contributions to the greater good) runs the legendary naked bubble party at Burning Man while dressed in a tutu?

Personally, I love David and their daytime dance party at that event! I think it is one of the more beautiful, zany testaments to the human spirit I’ve seen anywhere. I am glad to live in a world where that kind of creative play and community celebration is possible.

It’s profoundly humanizing to engage in a ritual as old as time–communal bathing–with DJs and live paintings and kooky people in animal costumes inviting you through a Noah’s ark of sudsy delight.

And…

If you really had to take these odds beyond the walls of the psychedelic subculture to Vegas (or Wall Street), who do you think pension funds and Main Street investors would bet on?

(to clarify, Bronner’s is a client not the leader of this other insurance company. I was just struck by the juxtaposition between these two outsized personalities as representative of the broader shifts we’re noticing in this space)

I hope both projects succeed and trust there’s vast amounts of market share to take from dysfunctional incumbents like Aetna and United.

But reading the tea leaves and knowing the business drivers that govern success, I wouldn’t bet against the special operators to out-operate pretty much anyone.

from Vanity Fair

Within this new political climate, Silicon Valley’s ambitions shifted. ”

“No one wants the Palantir guy to be high on acid for two weeks at Burning Man,” said that same venture capital communications exec. “You want hard workers. People who are like, ‘I learned that at West Point.’ We have Israelis who served in the IDF and are religious and conservative and super libertarian. And we’re like, ‘Yeah, that seems focused. We’ll take that.’ ”

Add to that, Lykos, the pharmaceutical arm of MAPS responsible for getting MDMA approved and produced is now under the leadership of Antonio Gracias (SpaceX, Tesla). He was most recently under the hood of the IRS as part of DOGE. They were aiming to install Palantir across civilian databases.

(the extent of this operation is unclear, despite congressional hearings on the topic)

You’re either super happy that competent operators are now at the helm of all this or a tad concerned we’re sliding into a Panopticon surveillance state.

–with Brave New World soma on the side if people get too twitchy.

***

So where does this leave us?

Two previously unconnected threads of the psychedelic movement—the championing of military veterans and conservative political coalition building at the state and federal level

–and the ongoing patronage of psychedelic Burner Silicon Valley elites whose politics have undergone a pronounced rightward shift very recently

–both of these have braided together and connected to our current administration to create a powerful new weave.

It will likely outclimb and outcompete any of the softer and gentler versions that preceded them.

And who knows?

It might even work out for the great good of all.

Since folks often mistake my piss-takes for cynicism, let me lay out the narrow path to redemption I see from here:

• The grownups are now in charge.

• We experience a powerful alliance between the capital and ingenuity of Silicon Valley (and the legal assistance of Washington) with traditional Christian cultural forces of love and mercy.

• We are stewarded by true warriors who have now taken up the good fight for the nation they swore to protect (and remind us of our collective oaths as we’re tempted to go cheap for power). We march into the Final Battle with our heads up and our hearts mended.

• We experience a Fourth Great Awakening in American History. An upswell of Christian fervor, social justice, environmental stewardship and deep patriotism that serves as a beacon of light to all the downtrodden around the world.

• We swear our lives to make America Great, Healthy and Governmentally Efficient (yet galactically ambitious) Again.

I mean, what could go wrong?

Well, in some of those other 14,000,604 possible outcomes in hyperspace that Dr. Strange mapped for us, there’s a few snags we might want to keep tabs on.

All you’d need for this thing to go wildly off the rails would be for the ideas from two gateway books to crystallize into the zeitgeist:

Cambridge historian Tom Holland’s recent tome arguing that Western Civilization owes all its best stuff to Christianity. (it’s become a bible of the heterodox intelligentsia and justification for us dominioning the whole world)

And Brian Muraresku’s DaVinci Code-esque The Immortality Key.

It spins the tale that a super secret sect in the catacombs of the first century accessed Christ consciousness via psychedelics (and that, by implication, the Burner elite doing it now are ushering in a revival of these ancient mysteries).

(I am absolutely certain this won’t appeal to any of the newly baptized power brokers, or their sense of Ayn Randian destiny!)

New Age Conspirituality folks got wildly bent in their meaning making from COVID onwards, prattling about 5D vibrations, timeline hopping and the Law of Attraction—after all.

So conservative Christians surely could too.

Especially all hopped up on Mountain Brew

#talladega

Dominion and Immortality Key are the 1-2 punch to go all the way into a Christian chaunvinistic millenarianism.

We’re the annointed.

The End Times are coming.

We’re on the right side of spiritual history.

(plus all the drones, guns and money in the free world to back it up)

And it’s not like everyone needs to actually read these ideas to get swept up by them.

They’re in the aether right now, and some form of Psychedelic Apocalyptic Christianity is simply the biggest and cosiest Big Tent for all the disparate MAHA/MAGA/DOGE interests to gather under.

#shelterfromthestorm

***

So the counterculture is getting out-competed by the counter, counter-culture.

It’s a battle between the establishment and the anti-establishment. It’s just now that we have an anti-establishment Establishment, our memetic wires have gotten a bit tangled up.

If you’re at all confused, it’s entirely understandable.

As I wrote in Stealing Fire about this forever game between the two:

This story has continued to repeat itself throughout the ages.

Typically, a rebel, seeker, or trickster steals fire from the gods.

It can take the form of a potent celebratory rite, a heretical new scripture, an obscure spiritual practice, or a secret, state-changing technology.

Whatever the case, the rebel sneaks the flame out of the temple and shares it with the world. It works. Things get exciting. Insights pile up.

Then, inevitably, the party gets out of hand. The keepers of law and order—call them the priests—spot the hedonistic blaze, track down the thief, and shut down the show.

And so it goes, until the next cycle begins.

Since then, that struggle has evolved into a decades-long game of cat-and-mouse between the “spooks” of the intelligence community and the “kooks” of the counterculture.

Scientists repeatedly pioneered new techniques to alter consciousness just in time to have the government attempt to weaponize them.

Or the spooks worked on some new top-secret application, only to have it leak out and get repurposed by the kooks.

And while some of the stories in this field may sound so outlandish they stretch credulity, they consistently underscore the high-stakes game of who controls the Master Switch of ecstatic technologies.

To be fair, the kooks have had a good 60 year run.

But they couldn’t quite get it across the goal line in time.

The spooks who’ve been patiently waiting in the wings, are ready to take back the wheel.

From those Operation Paperclip days in the ‘40’s and ‘50’s

to the MK ULTRA psychedelic studies that kicked off Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters at Stanford in the ‘60’s

to ARPANet and the origins of the internet and Earth First Battalion Men Who Stare at Goats shit in the ‘70’s

to DAPRA funding and the strange overlap between Burning Man and intelligence agencies in the ‘90’s

all the way to today’s rush for AI and weaponized drone swarms and ketamine and ibogaine trials…

***

We’re in the midst of a tectonic changing of the guard. The hands on the control panel have shifted. And many of the old norms and presumptions of shared values, world views and agendas are out the window.

As with the magical mystery tour that was the 60’s, so too once again with the ‘20’s.

So we’re here, I guess.

The torch has been passed.

The kooks who road unicycles, refurbished school buses and the occasional clown car through the last half century, have gone kaput.

All their deals with all their devils have come due.

The psychedelic ouroboros has swallowed its tail, once again.

And that’s more than a little spooky.

I mean, as Norman Ohler mentioned in his talk at the MAPS conference about his book Tripped on the Nazis, psychedelics and the CIA, Swiss pharmaceutical geniuses shared a backyard fence with their German neighbors.

Sometimes compounds and ideologies mixed more freely than the public ever realized.

(and then they jumped the pond to kick off with MK Ultra in the US )

If any of this has bummed you out, or stressed you out, we can take slim comfort in this simple fact.

It’s not personal.

It’s structural.

And historical.

Pendulums swing.

Cultures ebb and flow.

After all, we got Gordon Gekko and cocaine Wall Street right after Bucky Fuller and ganja geodesic domes

#bellbottomblues

We’ve covered a lot, so I’ll wrap this up with relevant quotes from two counter culture legends:

As I was leaving the Psychedelic Science conference looking out at the Rocky Mountains, Hunter Thompson’s famous line from Fear and Loathing came to mind, where he lamented the end of the 60s…

“Strange memories on this nervous night in [Denver]. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again.

So now, you can go up on a steep hill in [Colorado] and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

For me, that place in this time, was Denver last week.

I’m not sure the tide will be as high again for some time.

And as a different Hunter (Robert) and Jerry Garcia once penned, about the cyclical nature of life and when we should surrender to forces bigger than ourselves…

Little wheel turned by the fire and rod,

Big wheel turned by the grace of God

Every time that wheel goes round

Bound to cover just a little more ground

(Bound to cover just a little more ground!)

***

Here’s hoping the grace of God turns this bigger wheel swiftly and smoothly.

Here’s hoping it doesn’t end up grinding some of us into the dirt along the way.

And here’s hoping that every time that wheel goes round, it lifts us up to higher ground.

(Lifts us up to higher ground).