Jamie Brownlee and Kevin Walby met while doing their PhDs in sociology at Carleton University in Ottawa. Their new book, Psychedelic Capitalism, was sparked by a desire to address a critical gap in the growing literature on psychedelics. In this Q&A, they discuss several key issues and trends associated with psychedelics today, including their concerns that psychedelics are being appropriated and commodified by institutional power structures.

Q: What motivated you to write the book?

Jamie Brownlee and Kevin Walby: We’ve been interested in psychedelics on a personal and intellectual level for some time. Like others who have been keeping up with the literature and media in this area, we were hopeful that the so-called psychedelic renaissance would bring clear benefits to society at a time when many are distressed and struggling. But as we dug deeper, we came to a far more critical position. Despite all the interest in psychedelics, there has been very little critical analysis of how the political economy of modern capitalism and other relations of power impact these developments. While we continue to believe that psychedelics hold great potential for people and communities, we are concerned that the psychedelic renaissance is advancing in ways that could not only limit this potential but also entrench systems of inequality and cause significant social harm. This is what motivated us to write the book. We want to ensure there is some attention paid to how psychedelics connect to broader systems of inequality and injustice, as well as how to challenge these possibilities.

Q: What are the main arguments of the book?

Brownlee and Walby: We argue that psychedelics are increasingly being medicalized, with key medical players controlling who has access to these substances and how. While medicalization might be helpful for a certain segment of the population, we believe that it’s problematic for the majority as it sharply restricts access and reinforces existing health and social inequalities. Millions of people have consumed psychedelics for therapeutic and other purposes for centuries, so why is Western medicine now acting as a gatekeeper? Related to this, a second main argument is that limited legalization of select psychedelics for medical use is not necessarily something to be celebrated. This approach instead helps to sustain and entrench the drug war and the criminalization of most drug use. Broader conversations need to happen about decriminalization and harm reduction, as opposed to piecemeal approaches to granting access to certain psychedelics under particular conditions. Lastly, we argue that the corporatization of psychedelics is allowing economic elites to dominate the market and appropriate the vast reservoir of knowledge built up by Indigenous communities, public institutions, and underground researchers. As it stands now, psychedelics are basically being delivered into the waiting arms of big capital, and that isn’t what we want to see.

Q: Some advocates suggest that the psychedelics industry will be fundamentally different than other capitalist industries. Is there any truth to this claim?

Brownlee and Walby: In short, no, we don’t think there is. This is a narrative we encountered time and time again during the course of our research. Investors and business leaders often speak of their personal, transformative experiences with these substances and claim they want to get them into people’s hands in a fair and ethical way. Profits and growth are touted as secondary to improving society. One might expect that these personal experiences—all of which occurred not in medical clinics but in underground or recreational settings—might lead these executives to champion broad, equitable access by supporting decriminalization or broader forms of legalization outside of the medical model. But it hasn’t—quite the opposite in fact. It is not difficult to see what’s happening here: humane and rational drug policy reform is bad for business. So long as psychedelics remain criminalized, there are potential riches to be made in being the only “legitimate” providers of these experiences. You could even say their success depends on continuing to put people in jail for using psychedelics outside of clinical settings. As these substances are thrust into the world of psychedelic capitalism, structural forces are and will continue to have far more influence on this industry than any personal values, commitments, or intentions.

Q: Can psychedelics offer some kind of remedy or solution to the social and economic problems facing our society?

Brownlee and Walby: In the book, we push back against some grandiose claims made by the media, psychedelic researchers, and leading advocates about the ability of psychedelics to save the day, whether those involve solving the climate crisis or bringing about world peace. The literature and historical record do not support the idea that psychedelics represent some kind of inherent good or that their very nature virtually guarantees essentialized outcomes, like creating kinder, gentler people and a more just and progressive society. There is no doubt that psychedelics can have positive, even transformative impacts on individuals; it is one of the most interesting things about them. Research suggests that psychedelic use is associated with increased empathy, pro-social attitudes and behaviour, increased levels of “openness” among individuals, and higher levels of nature-relatedness and pro-environmental behavior. But this is very different than claiming that psychedelics will save the world. In the current context, this narrative has been used to justify the tactics of those looking to control and monopolize psychedelic services and supply chains. If psychedelics can save the world, then what right does anyone have to criticize medicalization, for-profit drug development, or bogus intellectual property claims? And if psychedelics alone could bring about social change, we wouldn’t need real activist work, which of course we do.

Q: Last year, the FDA rejected Lykos Therapeutics’ new drug application for MDMA-assisted therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). What are your thoughts on this?

Brownlee and Walby: The FDA decision came just as we were finalizing the book, and we were happy to be able to include some discussion of it. The rejection obviously came as a major shock to many psychedelic advocates. There was a lot of blame directed at the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), who released a report evaluating the Phase 3 trials, as well as at the advisory committee of independent experts that reviewed the evidence. This backlash also included a hit piece in the New York Times that placed most of the blame on the activist group Psymposia.

We have a different interpretation. In our view, the interventions by Psymposia and others represented a principled stance. They were concerned about the direction of the field and potential harms to vulnerable populations. Likewise, the FDA decision reflects some serious concerns in the area of psychedelic medicine, such as methodological challenges in how the research is conducted, the underreporting of adverse events, research bias, and issues with the psychotherapeutic components of psychedelic therapy, among others. The decision was not so much a rejection of MDMA or MDMA-assisted therapy as it was a statement on the quality of the research and the application. We hope the FDA decision will provide a much-needed course correction for the field, and encourage researchers take issues of safety, ethics, and scientific integrity more seriously.

Q: What are the biggest threats to a just and equitable psychedelic future?

Brownlee and Walby: This is an area where we disagree with many advocates, especially those who believe that the priority moving forward is to work within and not to threaten existing institutions. People like Michael Pollan, for example, suggest the biggest danger lies in carelessness. In other words, he thinks that without a “proper” cultural container, reckless psychedelic use will create a backlash on the part of dominant institutions, like it supposedly did in the 1960s. In contrast, we argue that dominant institutions themselves represent the single greatest threat to a just psychedelic future: namely, the powerful combination of governments, venture capitalists, billionaire investors, medical gatekeepers, and pharmaceutical firms. We don’t believe the overriding goal of this movement should be to restore the legitimacy of psychedelics in the eyes of the dominant culture. Instead, we think we need to challenge power structures and the role that psychedelics might play in supporting these structures. Psychedelics are going mainstream within an institutional framework that is deeply unjust, and in this context, they could merely serve to reproduce and entrench the ills of our society.

Q: What alternatives are there?

Brownlee and Walby: Where we landed is that safe and equitable access should be a human right and no one should be criminalized for choosing to alter their consciousness. The problem with most legalization initiatives is that they do not open up research or make these substances more accessible to people. We see many examples where legalization is restricted to specific medical conditions and population subsets (like military veterans) and/or designed to advance corporate interests. We argue that decriminalization holds far more promise for people, communities, and social justice. But we don’t limit our argument to psychedelics, as we also caution against “psychedelic exceptionalism.” Decriminalization initiatives that focus solely on plant-based psychedelics or even psychedelics more broadly may have their place, but viewing these substances as deserving of special legal protections (“good drugs”) risks legitimizing the broader classification scheme behind drug criminalization. It also does little to address the criminalization of other substances (“bad drugs”) and the ongoing stigmatization of the people who use them. Decriminalizing all drugs, treating drug use and dependence as public health issues, and incentivizing harm reduction and other support services for at-risk populations would go a long way to mitigating the tragedies of the drug war. We hope this is a vision that a broader segment of the psychedelic community will soon embrace.