
When a mother spikes their emotionally disturbed child with large quantities of class-A drugs, the response is not often sympathetic. Yet Paul Stamets – a fungus expert and wildly popular psychedelics advocate who is fond of appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast wearing a mushroom hat – is choked with emotion when telling the story, which he received via anonymous email, and recalled following a question about the possible role of psychedelics in paediatric medicine. (While this may seem suspect, testing drugs in children and adolescents appears to be in the medical research pipeline.) Speaking last September, he was addressing an audience of Britain’s psychedelic vanguard, the people who advocate for wider access to some of the world’s weirdest and most powerful drugs.
The boy was regularly violent and sadistic to his siblings, we are told. His parents struggled to cope; nothing would help. So the mother decided to spike him with an extremely large amount of magic mushrooms. She was probably influenced by a limited number of observational studies from the 1960s and 1970s of LSD treatment for childhood autism and schizophrenia, which reported some success. No matter that the studies had no controls or extended follow-ups, so we’ve no idea what actually happened in the long run. Some studies suggest that children and adolescents in South American religious communities have enjoyed beneficial effects from using the drugs. But more research is required.
Such a brew could have risked prolonged psychosis, PTSD or neurovisual damage. Instead, the young boy apparently sat silent for several hours in contemplation. The next day, he was found cleaning the kitchen, after which he apologised to his family for his prior violent behaviour and pledged to turn over a new leaf. This tale is not verified; no names or details are disclosed. It is a plain miraculous conversion. Relatedly, there may be a link between psychopathic and antisocial behaviour in children and trauma; meta-analysis suggests a small-to-moderate link to the development of psychopathy. If the event even occurred, therefore, we may wonder why the child was the way he was – and speculate on the quality of a caregiver whose techniques resemble those of Charles Manson.
Stamets’ psychedelic parable is not the only extraordinary statement of the evening. Much of the crowd who attend an event like this – held at a swanky private members’ club in London – are already converted to a bigger mission, part of a global movement. The organiser is an Ogilvy advertising executive named Tara Austin, an expert in behavioural science and a self-described “psychedelic utopian”. “Just by being in this room, you are in this psychedelic elite,” Austin told us. “The vast majority of people have no bloody idea.”
They might seem eccentric, but in many ways it is Stamets and his allies who are at the zeitgeist. Donald Trump’s nominee for his health and human services secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has criticised the “suppression of psychedelics”, and promised to legalise cannabis during his own wildcat presidential campaign. Should his nomination be approved next week (following a rocky confirmation hearing a couple of days ago) a medical psychedelics sympathiser would find themselves at the helm of American healthcare. Elon Musk, a reported psychedelics user, has also promoted their benefits compared with traditional antidepressants. Musk’s brother even helped organise the installation of a large Holy Grail at Burning Man festival, in testament to a fringe theory that the early Church used psychedelic drugs. By no means confined to one event in London, for years now the psychedelic elite has been on a coordinated campaign to transform humanity’s relationship with drugs.
Psilocybin, along with other psychedelic and related drugs like LSD, DMT, ketamine and MDMA, has received increasingly positive press coverage in the past half-decade. This so-called psychedelic renaissance, pitched as a “paradigm shift in psychiatry”, is led by a network of university research departments, pharmaceutical firms and an array of funders: Silicon Valley captains, eccentric aristocrats, a right-wing dynasty, and the corporatised New Age. They see these drugs not just as recreational, but as an opportunity to revolutionise our medical and everyday lives.
The mycologist Stamets, who is among the movement’s most prominent figureheads, has tallied millions of views from his appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience. And he is supported by lieutenants like Austin, the effervescent leader of a new campaign for Psilocybin Access Rights, a group seeking to ease regulatory barriers to clinical research and making psilocybin, the core ingredient in magic mushrooms, “accessible for patients”. Austin came close to power once: in 2020 she was asked by Dominic Cummings to be Boris Johnson’s spokesperson. But she is dedicated to the psilocybin cause – when she declined Cummings’s offer, she instead requested that he consider the use of psychedelics in British healthcare and criminal justice. Austin’s faith in the drugs began when she found relief in psychedelics from depression after a bad break-up, she tells me, clearing her system of needless guilt.
The Psilocybin Access Rights campaign is already under way. In support of “Project Hull”, the group has leafleted and made door-to-door visits in the constituency of the Home Office drug minister Diana Johnson, which has the highest use of mental health services in Britain. But the Labour government has expressed little interest in wholesale drug reform; the issue is likely too divisive, and hardly a political priority. And there is still no conclusive evidence that psychedelics would be good medicine, not least considering the high expense of observed multi-hour sessions and aftercare. The only head-to-head of psilocybin and SSRIs (some of Britain’s most widely used antidepressants) so far conducted revealed no significant difference in the primary outcome measure of depression. Certain secondary measures favoured psilocybin, but the result was underwhelming. The press courteously followed the line of the Imperial College press office when the latter called psilocybin “at least as effective as a leading antidepressant medication in a therapeutic setting”. But only psilocybin represents a drug class which demands a “paradigm shift” from the rest of society.
Just a few years ago, headlines regularly asked whether psychedelic drugs could “cure” a range of mental disorders, usher peace in the Middle East, make people less right-wing, and battle climate change. The “renaissance” was positioned as guided by science and white coats, a world away from the delusional lecturings of the original Swinging Sixties LSD advocate, Timothy Leary. Some promising early studies did emerge; many people found healing and restoration. Psychedelic use has leaped to the highest level yet recorded among the middle-aged in the US. Mushroom use has nearly doubled there in three years. Even so, the prospects for psychedelics appear mixed. Their place in the legal pipeline and medical mainstream have taken a battering – and recent events have coloured the fantasies of the movement.
The field received a seismic shock last August. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rejected MDMA as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, and then three papers about MDMA-assisted therapy were retracted because of the concealment of violations “amounting to unethical conduct” at one study site – a reference to an alleged case of sexual assault. Several of the papers’ authors are associated with the FDA applicant, Lykos Therapeutics. Also that month, the Wall Street Journal spoke to participants in MDMA trials organised by Lykos. They said they felt pressure to report good outcomes. (Lykos disagreed with the pulling of the papers, saying, “The articles remain scientifically sound and present important contributions to the study of potential treatments for PTSD,” and said it had cut ties with the therapist accused of sexual assault.) The “backlash” has been psychedelic PR strategists’ greatest fear.
A political shift has likewise occurred. You don’t have to lean left to trip. Through its historic connection to an increasingly right-wing Silicon Valley – and its focus on PTSD-afflicted veterans as a lobby – the psychedelic movement has built new frontiers around Elon Musk, Maga, QAnon, fans of Jordan Peterson and the broader anti-woke network around Joe Rogan. There are potential strategic advantages here: the presence of psychedelic cheerleaders such as Musk and RFK Jr in the White House could expedite FDA approval, and a close ally of Musk’s is now seeking to take over Lykos and restore the executive position of its utopian former head, Rick Doblin. But it makes it harder to present psychedelics as an apolitical lifestyle choice, to say the least.
Yet negative associations aren’t the only potential problem for psychedelic advocates. In 2023 a depressed pilot who self-medicated with mushrooms nearly downed an aircraft. Many clinics and psychedelic firms have shuttered. The ketamine industry is facing a crackdown in the US after the drug was publicly implicated in the death of the actor Matthew Perry. The United Healthcare assassin Luigi Mangione’s forthcoming trial may reveal details about whether he used psychedelics, and if they played a role in his violent turn.
At the London event in September, the psychedelic elite dismissed these setbacks. “The FDA will approve MDMA,” one panel member suggested. Stamets declared that our grandchildren will ask us down the line which side we took on psychedelic drug policy. “States, cities, countries, the world could change,” he said. But journalists and commentators are increasingly alert to the issues with psychedelic science, and the feel-good period for the movement seems to have already peaked.
The faithful remain resolute. David Nutt, the Imperial College academic and psilocybin campaigner who was sacked by the Gordon Brown government for diminishing the harms of ecstasy and LSD, maintains that the risks of psychedelic drugs are “vanishingly small”. Nutt suggested that mushrooms are the safest drug around in a much-reported but controversial survey study. He claimed to Australian media that “no one has ever come out [of psychedelic therapy] more depressed”. But, as much as 10 per cent of nearly 1,500 psilocybin users in one survey have experienced psychological symptoms lasting more than a year. And we have little knowledge of the longer-term effects, including prolonged psychosis or heart problems, flashbacks and strokes. Several patients have emerged from recent trials with worsened suicidality.
Psilocybin is currently under Schedule-1 status in the UK, which increases the regulatory burden on researchers. Campaigners believe they can only make their case with greater freedom to experiment. “Rescheduling psilocybin is a common-sense move that would make it easier for researchers to study its potential applications in healthcare,” Josh Hardman, of the research portal Psychedelic Alpha, tells me. “It’s frustrating, then, that successive UK governments have shied from making the move, presumably due to political concerns.” More psychedelic research would allow for greater knowledge of their risks and specific contraindications. Patient access under present conditions will be harder to justify, for the drugs’ effects remain unpredictable. The therapy will likely be highly expensive to administer on the NHS.
But campaigners are blinded by a deeper, semi-theological conviction that takes precedence over measurable medical impact. Tara Austin calls psychedelics a frontier in “the new civil rights movement” for what many call “cognitive liberty”, or the right to explore and perturb inner space as much as our exterior lives. When dealing with people like (in her specification) Telegraph journalists, neophytes and MPs, Austin said, “We never talk about religion and God… until they’re a bit further down the line.” The Council on Spiritual Practices, a circle of “spiritual guides” behind influential Johns Hopkins University studies, claims that its work “uses science, which modernity trusts, to undermine modernity’s secularism”. The sacred and questions of existence have long been stripped from psychotherapy due to stigma, Austin tells me. Psychedelic therapy represents a correction.
The association between religion and psychedelic advocacy is not a new one. In his memoir, Flashbacks, Timothy Leary remembers Aldous Huxley saying, “We must spread the word… The obstacle to this evolution, Timothy, is the Bible.” Many proponents suggest that drugs can help us evolve to a more perfected state – what Stamets called the “next level of the human species”. Highly contingent experiences are presented as “objective” data, and alleged to shape patients’ experiences through suggestion. The priest is substituted for a scientist.
The radicalism of this movement cannot be doubted – and it has many powerful sympathisers, including at the summit of American government, should RFK Jr’s nomination pass. But the institutional obstacles to any substantive change remain considerable. Notwithstanding the positive PR around veterans who have benefited from psychedelic drugs, the broad Trumpian church may critically expose psychedelia to suspicions from the conservative right, who have long been some of the staunchest opponents of narcotic legalisation. The Republicans were once the party of the “war on drugs” after all. Yet, across podcasts and the broader alternative media ecosystem, zealots continue to convert. Whether or not psychedelics ever become mainstream, the revolution for many is already complete.
[See also: Britain is walking into an American opioid crisis]