Mycoremediation: Inoculation
Part 1: On my departure from the psychedelic field, composting the psychedelic renaissance, and struggling for a people's medicine movement
“The struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one, or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.” - Frederick Douglas
About a year ago, I started writing what I thought was going to be an open letter addressing my sudden hiatus from the psychedelic political landscape after five years in the field. I intended to publish it last fall, but I needed more time to metabolize my experience on the psychedelic frontlines before engaging with those lines again. Plus, I had too much to say for a letter.
So I just faded from the scene. But I kept writing. The writing took on a life of its own and transformed into a series of pieces compiled into this swan song saga I’ve dubbed “Mycoremediation”.
I’m not sure how many parts I’ll add to the series, but I know it’s time to begin publishing. This first piece is just to inoculate the compost heap. Compost is an alchemy that turns grief into gold and shit into soil. Compost, like the land that receives it, is ready when it's ready. So the timing isn’t really up to me, though I try to be keen on timing.
With the Natural Medicine regulations having recently been set in Colorado, the upcoming Psychedelic Science conference returning to Denver in June with all the charge surrounding it, and the mounting upheaval around the attempted union between neoliberalism, empire, and psychedelics, there is a ripeness in the air and I don’t think it’s just me.
In the weeks leading up to publishing, I caught wind that at a recent conference Rick Doblin announced that MAPS is taking $100M from Antonio Gracias (one of Elon’s DOGE henchmen who’s been busy lately setting up Palantir surveillance tech as our new citizen data infrastructure) to recapitalize the organization.
Rick also was reported to have informed the crowd about the work MAPS is doing in Israel, which now includes providing psychedelic assisted “therapy” for undercover active duty IDF soldiers. These undercover soldiers were described by someone with intel on the collaboration as “clandestine IDF kill squads that speak fluent Arabic, dress in civilian clothes, and pursue targets in Palestinian settlements.”
After receiving this info, I reached out to my connections at MAPS to fact check and see what they’d have to say about this. I was told that leadership at MAPS wasn't aware of that project in Israel (though they didn’t confirm or deny its existence) and that actually Antonia Gracias invested $50M, with the other $50M coming from Chris Hohn (a hedge fund manager and philanthropist from the UK) and that those are investments in Lykos—the pharmaceutical company that MAPS created, has partial ownership of, but has lost control of after a series of buyouts that began after the FDA rejected MDMA’s approval as a federally legalized treatment for PTSD. Regarding the current state of the Lykos takeover, reports say that this is being led by Antonio with the full support of Rick Doblin.
So what’s going on here? Well, I have informed guesses but I’m not quite sure. All I know is that this reeks of the kind of corruption and lack of accountability that has come to define the psychedelic renaissance.
If Hannah Arendt were alive today, her assessment of the psychedelic renaissance might go something like this, “Well, it seems like the real M.O. of this so-called ‘renaissance’ is to make the banality of evil great again. And, at an order yet unseen, they’re doing it.”
For me, no amount of good intention is going to make me ok with MK-Ultra 2.0 and the dystopian realisms that the psychedelic renaissance is aiding and abetting the normalization of. This kind of shit needs to be confronted and composted.
Paranoia doesn’t empower us, but it’s the responsibility of any constituency to never passively trust any authority which has the power to make decisions that carry massive consequences for us all and future generations. Our job is to trust our own authority and hold any external authority accountable with the demand that it legitimizes its right to exist and influence our lives. If the institution or authority figure proves illegitimate, unworthy of trust, unethical, or irresponsible upheaval and compost is what is called for.
Answering the call to compost, I tried to write in a way that would please the mushrooms. So, you might find parts of Mycoremediation not easy to stomach and challenging to your beliefs. Reading this might catalyze reflections and contemplations you didn’t ask for. But my intent with Mycoremediation is to make confrontation bioavailable. So breathe as you read and take pauses as you need.
Confrontation doesn’t necessarily mean “conflict”, but it does include its possibility. Whatever the shape they take, the confrontations I’m aiming to bring about here are full contact communions. So pay attention if you feel confronted at any point through this series. Sense into what is being stirred in you, even asked of you. What sacred instructions might require rupture in order to get through to us?
Take only what serves, but lean into the discomfort with me. We’re starting with a microdose here, but soon we’ll get to heavier doses. I suggest that you take Mycoremediation in as it was written: with discernment, fierce love, a willingness to be troubled, and a sense of humor. I need you to meet me there for this medicine to do its work.
During my time in the psychedelic field, I played a central role in the political landscape surrounding psychedelic reform in Colorado, beginning with helping Denver become the first city in the country since prohibition to decriminalize mushrooms.
After the Denver initiative, I co-founded an organization called SPORE: The Society for Psychedelic Outreach Reform and Education. SPORE went on to become one of the premier young organizations in the psychedelic field, garnering plenty of attention and scrutiny in its three year existence.
In 2021, SPORE launched The Mycoalition in response to an emerging campaign aimed at creating a regulatory framework for psychedelics in Colorado—what would become The Natural Medicine Health Act of Colorado (NMHA).
That campaign was driven by corporate interests via a PAC called New Approach and would have to reckon with local activists, some who wanted none of it and others vying to secure their seat at the table.
The Mycoalition’s work was to coalesce a common place for a common struggle that could resist, subvert, and interface with the neoliberal forces behind the NMHA. But we also held a vision that went beyond the NMHA—for a people’s medicine movement rooted in mutual aid and solidarity. That vision is still evolving with fresh eyes and a new team leading The Mycoalition now.
There was a diverse range of people, identities, and motivations involved. Beginning at the outer edge of pandemic times with little to no pre-established trust, we formed a coalition under the pressure of a rushed political process and across a massive power differential. Pulling together a common struggle in those conditions was an immense struggle in itself.
The Mycoaltion became the primary vehicle for local contingents to apply pressure and influence the NMHA. It offered a space where different camps could interact. Sometimes that looked like an arena where we could duke it out.
Through constant high stakes conflict, The Mycoalition played a significant role in forging the NMHA. We were able to empower the divergent efforts that pushed decriminalization and many of the equity measures into the law. Everyone who engaged in the struggle made our mark not just on the law, but also on the larger discourse around psychedelics in The West.
After the law was passed at the end of 2022 and implemented with Senate Bill 290 soon after, the SPORE team decided to compost SPORE into The Mycoalition. I initiated that transition (or that transition initiated me) after a series of heartbreaking betrayals that forced me to face the music. I was no longer able nor willing to be captain of this ship.
During Psychedelic Science 2023, we announced that SPORE was no more, and The Mycoalition would be restructuring with new leadership to continue the work of fostering a people’s medicine movement. Instead of letting the ship sink, as tempting as it was in my exhaustion, I decided to ride it out a bit longer for a shot at succession.
After a many month courtship with Evan Segura, the previous director of Portland Psychedelic Society and co-founder of The Rhizome, Evan accepted the offer to become the new director of The Mycoalition. Overhauling his life and moving from Portland to Colorado for the position, he’s been the director for well over a year now.
The idea was that on the other side of the succession, I’d remain on the board at least for another year or two to support the next generation of The Mycoalition. But after pushing through burnout to undergo the leadership transition, I needed a full departure.
I left The Mycoalition in June 2024. It took the time it took for me to recover, metabolize, transform, and emerge from the compost pile my life had become in the aftermath of the NMHA. Still remediating, now as a political maroon in the psychedelic field, I’m continuing my work from the margins.
Writing this has been a pitchfork turning the pile. If you like your writers with dirty hands, you should thoroughly enjoy this series. My perspectives were forged in the thick of it, and so I have insights that no sideline dwelling critic could.
Critique is not my agenda here. Critical compassion is. In mycelial fashion, Mycoremediation is a mythopoetic spiraling between some of my stories on the psychedelic frontlines, historical insights, and perspectives on the socio-political influences beset upon and begotten by psychedelic proliferation.
To understand what’s happening with psychedelics right now, our sight needs to be historically, mythically, and politically informed. In my experience, where those three lenses intersect, I tend to learn humility more than anything, and sometimes practical wisdom. I keep to the recognition that what is happening with psychedelics in The West is a phenomenon beyond the reach of our mental maps and ontologies, and in the grand scheme, I only have the clues I have as to what the fuck is going on.
In some highly weird and unique ways, but not unlike any other cultural phenomena, what’s happening with psychedelics is a beyond human conspiracy—bigger, more complex, shiftier than our theories about it. No matter how informed and coherent our understanding of the patterns at play, the mystery of it all defies our comprehension.
In this regard, what makes the emergence of psychedelics in The West unique among other era defining events, is the potential for psychedelics to help us re-member ourselves as part of spirit infused cosmologies and restore our mythic sensibility where it has been forgotten. This is worth struggling for and because the socio-political shifts that would precipitate from that shift in consciousness are antithetical to the status quo of the dominant culture, it will be a struggle.
In the midst of the current psychedelic zeitgeist, there is a return to animist consciousness that psychedelics are helping catalyze in a dominant culture that is inanimist at its core. And with that, a hyper-expedited fracturing and reconstitution of whatever common sense and shared reality there is left.
For those of us coming from an objectifying culture obsessed with certainty and control, while we learn to trust the mystery we still need to do our humble best to understand what’s happening, how’d we get here, and what we are playing into.
We need to understand our common ground to know what we want, what we need, and how we can best work together. We also need that foundation to understand the common struggles that are needed to resist what we don’t want—to be able to identify what needs to be stopped and understand what needs to be done to prevent it.
This is why, in many ways, the psychedelic renaissance is deeply unhinged. Along with a free-for-all mentality based in entitlement rather than responsibility, there is a pervasive sham non-dualism, which is really just a conflict avoidant complicitness with systemic oppression.
This new age neoliberal concoction known as spiritual bypass is servile to the negative peace that Dr. King warned about. He said negative peace is the absence of tension, where positive peace is the presence of justice. If we want our work with psychedelics to catalyze healing, liberation, and holistic transformation in the world, we have to wage positive peace, within and without.
There is important conventional wisdom to that maxim “what we resist persists”. But what about what we don’t resist? Doesn’t that persist too? And what does this new age meme that tells us to resist resistance make of us if we take it as doctrine, without salt? A kind of tyrant or minion, no?
Resistance is only futile if we don’t understand ourselves as part of the vital intergenerational struggle for collective liberation. If we can transcend the binary of resist vs not-resist, we can learn what regenerative resistance might be… the composting force we need to break down systems and patterns of oppression while creating beautiful alternatives towards co-liberation and abundant well being.
Resisting the empire’s co-optation of altered states of consciousness while struggling for community sovereignty and ecocentric solidarity in how we shape consciousness is one of the most understated keystones in the larger web of liberation struggles. It will be up to the fringes of the psychedelic field to help the world understand what’s at stake here in the hopes we may act with wisdom accordingly.
When we reckon with the living history we call “politics” while cultivating a grounded mythopoetic and spiritual sensibility, we become better able to articulate our principled alignments, as well as our oppositions with our counterparts, and then act from our understanding.
While we all have our different niches and approaches, nobody in the psychedelic field is exempt from this work. It is the proverbial work. To not take it on is negligence by compliance. But also, to take it on as hero or savior is to perpetuate the same old patterns of supremacy and subjugation.
In taking on that work, we are all susceptible to becoming vectors of dominant culture disease, capitulating the traumas and conditioning we’ve inherited. So we need deep, compassionate accountability. Otherwise, we easily fall into binary traps, get duped by the allure of power, overextend to burn out, and allow identitarianism to burn our bridges.
Psychedelics have the potential to help us embody an understanding that the political isn’t just personal or interpersonal, it is also transpersonal. Political work is spirit work.
Call me zealous, but I believe the most worthy aspiration anyone could have in their work with psychedelics is to become a spiritual activist. In other words, we should be working with psychedelics to decondition ourselves towards finding our dharma—where our individual awakening and our contribution to the great work of collective liberation is inextricably linked.
Embodying wisdom at the cultural level looks like doing the hard work of cultivating common sense—principally, our sense that there is a commons that needs our care and attention. I can only contribute my piece. My piece was wrought through gnarly intersectional conflicts and is still fraught with the precarities of those conflicts. I’m not interested in digging dirt but, as I’ve made abundantly clear, I am interested in compost.
Picking my battles, I’ll be selective about the details and names I share in this series, choosing to directly or indirectly address dynamics depending on what I believe to be wise and for collective benefit.
There are countless people who have contributed to the body of work and ontologies my reflections are sourced from. Some of those people are my adversaries or people I have unresolved conflict with. With gratitude for all who have shaped me, I want to acknowledge that mosaic of which my limited perspective is merely part.
I’m not attempting to present a whole story of what happened in Colorado, nor some grand analysis of the psychedelic field. I’m offering the insights and stories I believe to be worthwhile for the chance that they might inspire (or agitate) better dialogue and more divergent perspectives than the prevalent narratives driving psychedelic liberalization allow for.
What I’m accountable for—with regard to who I’m accountable to—will be interspersed throughout the series. Though I name some people within charged contexts, my intent is to hold only myself accountable while inviting others to do the same—which are two things I can’t sufficiently just through writing, so I didn’t try to.
Accountability is like mycelium. It is not just what happened or who did what. It is the web of our relationships. It is our common ground. Everything I’m adding to the milieu is intended to nourish that soil. I’m open to hearing from anyone who thinks my impact here isn’t lining up with intent.
I’m sure some will be dissatisfied because I didn’t say enough about what happened in Colorado, or I said too much, or for not affirming the predominant narratives that many livelihoods in this space depend on.
Nonetheless, I want my work here to serve a greater purpose than anyone’s satisfaction or self-promotion, including my own. My prayer is that this is good food for the soul and that I’ve given folks plenty worth chewing on.
This labor of love is an offering to the altar at the heart of the great alchemical change underway in the world. It is devoted to sustaining a story where each of our characters have room for redemption, dignity, love, and liberation.
May it help compost the psychedelic renaissance into good soil for a people’s medicine movement rooted in cultures of kinship. May it support all people working towards collective liberation within the psychedelic field in navigating its tricky terrain.
We’ll need each other for the road ahead… not despite our differences, but because of them.
Long live the revolution that no longer eats its young.
Long live the revolution that has learned to feed its people.
💚