Welcome to issue #14 of The Ethical Trip! This fortnight:

• How do normal people perceive psychedelics?

• Can you measure good (or bad) ethics?

• What are the cheapest tools for social media & online marketing?

For all this, plus an personally-curated roundup of recent research and supposed humour, read on!

Massive thanks to everyone supporting this work. Whether it’s feedback, sharing, or contributing a few dollars a month via buy me a coffee cactus, it all makes a big difference to me and I’m deeply grateful.

Table of Contents

1. Industry Insights:

   1. Research Round-up

   2. Perceptions of psychedelics

2. Philosophical Brief: measuring ethics

3. Consultancy Corner: Lean marketing & promotion

4. Reminder - Garden States!

5. A word from our sponsor:

Industry Insights:

Research Round-up

It’s been a truly fantastic fortnight in psychedelic research. Maybe I’m biased towards humanities-based research. But I think so many of the issues around psychedelics are about values and society, not just scientific or technical.

Lang (2025) kicks things off with The Trip to Market: Perspectives on Psychedelic Commercialization. I have to say, that this is an honours thesis blows my mind. It’s comprehensive, perceptive & incisive, though I think they were perhaps not as thorough as they could have been regarding criticisms of Psymposia. Nonetheless, I am 100% keeping an eye out for this author, as I expect big things from them in future.

Van Eyghen (2025) argues that Psychedelic Induced Mystical Experiences (PIMES) are as epistemically authentic as other forms of mystical experience, and that they can’t be automatically written off as ‘counterfeit.’

Gomez et al (2025) reports that ‘psychedelic use within the past 5 years was a significant predictor of willingness to participate’ in a range of unpaid surveys and administration studies, and suggests that paying participants may help reduce volunteer bias in future.

Earleywine et al (2025) conducted an interesting study on how US veterans with current or past diagnoses of PTSD perceive MDMA-assisted therapy (MDMA-AT). Interestingly, the authors point to the 10% of their participants who had misunderstandings about MDMA and MDMA-AT as indicating a need for improved educational resources. But I think this shows a relatively high level of awareness of this therapy amongst their participants. I’d be very interested to see how well this generalises to a larger sample of veterans in the US and beyond.

Lots more good stuff below, but only for subscribers!