This article was originally published on The Conversation, an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts. Disclosure information is available on the original site.
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Authors: Kevin Walby, Associate Professor of Criminal Justice, University of Winnipeg; and Jamie Brownlee, University instructor, Department of Law and Legal Studies; Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University
Once stigmatized and outlawed, psychedelics are moving from the counterculture to the mainstream. From Prince Harry’s use of psilocybin to National Football League quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ adventures with ayahuasca, our media is awash with accounts of their professed benefits.
Hundreds of universities around the world are now engaging in psychedelic research. And psychedelic legalization initiatives are taking hold.
Psychedelics are becoming big business. Just as private capital flooded the cannabis sector years ago, a psychedelic gold rush is underway.
Wealthy entrepreneurs are investing in the psychedelic industry while biotechnology start-ups are raising capital and running clinical trials on novel psychedelic molecules. Venture capitalists are eyeing the prospects of a new lucrative mass market.
Three causes for concern
To date, most debates about psychedelics have offered little critical analysis of their relationship to the political economy of modern capitalism and broader power structures. In our new book Psychedelic Capitalism, we make three central claims about the so-called psychedelic renaissance.
First, the medicalization of psychedelics is likely to restrict access and reinforce existing health and social inequalities.
Second, the corporatization of psychedelics will enable economic elites to dominate the market while appropriating the vast reservoir of knowledge built up by Indigenous communities, public institutions and underground researchers.
And third, rather than representing progressive drug reform, the limited legalization of select psychedelics for medical use will help to entrench and sustain the drug war and the criminalization of most drug use.
Ignoring community knowledge
Across North America, we’re seeing a medicalization of psychedelics, where a range of problems are presented as treatable by these substances. This is happening in a way that boosts corporate control of the process and pushes aside community and Indigenous knowledge.
We have seen this scenario play out in Australia. Substances such as psilocybin and MDMA are legally available, but only through a doctor’s prescription and at great financial cost — raising questions about equity, access and who these therapies are for.
Framing psychedelics as pharmaceutical commodities and individualized health-care solutions reinforces the prohibitionist narrative that these substances are unsuitable for use outside of the medical context. This narrative shifts attention away from how medicalized use might perpetuate a neoliberal ideology — locating mental “disorder” within an individual, rather than addressing more systemic causes such as poverty, inequality and social exclusion.
It also disregards centuries of traditions created by Indigenous community use, as well as the values of the psychedelic underground.
A system built on expensive individual therapy, medically trained gatekeepers and hyper-controlled clinical access is not the model that most advocates have envisioned.
A pill-only model for productivity and happiness
The foundations of psychedelic capitalism were largely created by public innovation at the public’s expense and are now in the process of being taken over by private capital.
Psychedelic conferences increasingly resemble corporate trade shows. The psychedelic tourism industry continues to expand and cater to elite clients. For-profit companies like Mind Medicine and Compass Pathways are eliminating psychotherapy from their treatment protocols and embracing a “pill-only” model favoured by Big Pharma.
Psychedelics, including microdosing and psychedelic-assisted therapy, are marketed as a way for the general population to extract more work out of their already overworked lives, and to be happy about it in the process.
Companies are competing to capture intellectual property to harness profits from existing compounds and erect legal barriers around new chemicals and their applications.
The for-profit ketamine industry already offers a glimpse into the future of corporatized psychedelic therapy. This includes a lack of attention to risks, deceitful marketing and little consideration to therapeutic care.
There has been a surge of new patent applications (and granted patents) in the U.S. on substances such as psilocybin, LSD, DMT, 5-MeO DMT and mescaline that seek to secure exclusivity, monopolize supply chains and privatize knowledge that already exists in the public domain.
Psychedelics have been swept up into the well-rehearsed capitalist playbook where private players are fabricating exclusionary rights over what are ultimately the products of collective human struggle and intellectual achievement.
Medical legalization of psychedelics
The medicalized approach to psychedelic mainstreaming also connects to drug law and policy.
Across North America, the biomedical approach is the main influence on drug law and the primary avenue for psychedelic access in most jurisdictions. This approach is widely supported by psychedelic capitalists who have a financial stake in medical legalization and want to limit legal access to anything outside of the medical-pharma frame.
In the United States, places like Oregon and Colorado have more holistic legal models that include elements of community control to prevent corporate capture. But most state initiatives remain limited in scope and are centred around medicalized therapy, particularly for military veterans. Even in Oregon, which has been lauded for its progressive drug policies, there has been an unmistakable drift toward medicalization.
Canada’s cannabis industry exemplifies how processes of legalization can become intertwined with the interests of corporate-dominated industries.
As Michael Devillaer, professor of psychiatry and behavioural neurosciences and author of Buzz Kill (2024), has explained, the cannabis industry has prioritized profit maximization, product promotion and increased consumption at the expense of public health concerns.
What is best for public interest?
As the medical legalization of psychedelics deepens, we are likely to see the intensification of criminal penalties for recreational and other uses.
In fact, police seizures of psychedelics like psilocybin in the U.S. have increased in recent years. Global arrests for the transportation of compounds such as ayahuasca, iboga and peyote have also increased.
These problems are likely to be exacerbated by systems of bifurcated scheduling, where a drug product is placed in a different class from the active ingredient or substance.
For example, if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were to approve psilocybin for depression or MDMA for PTSD, it is likely that only FDA-approved medicinal psilocybin and MDMA products would be rescheduled, while the substances themselves would continue to be prosecuted as restricted narcotics.
It is in the public interest to move beyond a myopic focus on medical legalization to a more open, decriminalized model of public access. An approach like this would not only mitigate the threats associated with corporate capture, it would also reduce the harms associated with criminalization and the war on drugs.
Community-controlled decriminalization is a better path to mainstreaming psychedelics than relinquishing power to the medical industry and pharmaceutical cartels that provide monopolized services to primarily affluent customers.
And treating drug use and dependence as a public health issue and incentivizing harm reduction and support services for at-risk populations would go a long way to mitigating the tragedies of the drug war.
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Kevin Walby receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Jamie Brownlee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Disclosure information is available on the original site. Read the original article: https://theconversation.com/the-rise-of-psychedelic-capitalism-work-harder-and-be-happy-about-it-253003
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