What happens when we try to industrialize psychedelics?
A growing pharmaceutical model seeks to make psychedelics more scalable, standardized, and medically compliant by separating their supposedly “active” biochemical effects from the subjective experience that accompanies them.
The ideal, in this model, is increasingly something like a psychoplastogen: keep the neurobiological effects, take out the trip.
Our new article in the International Journal of Drug Policy, with Julian Heller, argues that this separation deserves much more scrutiny.
The problem is not simply that the psychedelic experience might have therapeutic value. More fundamentally, the distinction between a biochemical intervention and a psychological, narrative, and relational experience is itself philosophically and scientifically unstable.
What happens to a drug when its effects depend partly on what a person expects, understands, remembers, feels, and encounters? What happens when set and setting shape the experience? and when the experience, in turn, changes how a person relates to themselves, other people, and their surroundings?
Placebo research should make us particularly cautious here. Placebo effects are not evidence that “nothing happened.” They demonstrate that meaning, expectation, context, clinical relationship, and narrative can become biologically consequential. The body does not simply receive a molecule and then separately generate an interpretation of what happened. Pharmacology and meaning are entangled.
This makes the pharmaceutical ambition to extract the “real” biochemical effect from the subjective experience more questionable than it first appears.
The “trip” may not be an extraneous psychological layer sitting on top of a pharmacological mechanism. It may be part of the mechanism.
There is also a political-economic question. Industrializing psychedelics means making them compatible with existing infrastructures of medicine, intellectual property, investment, clinical standardization, and scalable treatment. But what is gained in reproducibility and marketability may be lost in the very features that make psychedelics potentially disruptive: their capacity to alter narratives, relationships, contexts, and ways of perceiving the world.
The question, then, is not simply whether we can take the trip out of psychedelic medicine. It is whether, in doing so, we are removing precisely what made psychedelics interesting in the first place.
Our article “Why taking the trip out of psychedelic medicine is a mistake” is now out in the International Journal of Drug Policy.
What world do we live in where pharmaceutical companies are buying up 5-MeO-DMT and DMT companies?!
Didn’t have this one on my radar for 2026.
I guess our work was even more prescient that we thought…