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
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!
Perceptions of psychedelics
This week Psychedelic Alpha rolled out its Psychedelics Perceptions Tracker, which aims to provide a ‘curated series of headline figures, charts and data visualisations to learn how various groups perceive and interact with psychedelics.’
There isn’t a great deal of country-specific data across all categories, other than for the US. But there are definitely similar results in some areas. E.g., 80.9% of American psychiatrists polled in 2022/23 ‘agreed that psychedelics show promise in treating psychiatric disorders,’ which is very close to Nadeem et al’s (2025) 2023/24 survey of Australian clinicians, that had close to 85% agreement for that same question.
Likewise, Kunstler et al (2022) suggests similar community attitudes towards psychedelics, between the US and Australia, though direct comparison is harder due to different survey questions.
Where I think a resource like this is helpful is in reminding people who are in psychedelic communities or work in psychedelic professions that the broader general public outside our little bubble may not share our more positive attitudes. If you want to have a chance at reforms such as decriminalisation, it would be helpful to change community perceptions of of harms and what actions best alleviate them. (Yes, I know politicians generally ignore community attitudes when it suits them, but you have to start somewhere.)
Information on perceptions of psychedelics also gives us clear areas that public health communications should be aimed at. This isn’t just a case of countering misinformation (because most classic psychedelics don’t cause physical dependence), but in educating about safety in the areas that people might miss. E.g., addiction isn’t nearly as much of a risk as, depending on substance, serotonin toxicity, health contraindications, or traumatic experience caused by lack of knowledge about set and setting.
(On a different note, I had intended to write this week about Optimi ($OPTHF ( ▲ 0.24% )) and their announcement regarding psilocybin and the Medibank program, where they’re offering coverage for PAT and MDMA-AT. For various reasons outside my control, that story isn’t ready yet. However, I am speaking with someone from another organisation that is associated with the program next week, and hope to have something solid ready for next time.)
Want to help upgrade my budget from ‘Path of Exile’ to ‘Diablo IV’? Support me via Buy Me a Coffee.
Philosophical Brief: measuring ethics
As I’ve written in previous issues, certifying psychedelic practitioners is more difficult than a lot of people think. But as well as the practical difficulties there’s a whole lot of mistakes people make when they’re less familiar with ethics and what sets it apart from things like science.
If you feel listening to or watching a discussion around this, rather than reading it, my EPIC colleague, Dr Sandra Dreisbach and I recorded this conversation about the difficulties of measuring ethics:
Consultancy Corner: Lean marketing & promotion
(for people who’d rather be in the ocean)
By ‘lean’, I mean low cost. And by low-cost, I mean cheap.
Whether you’re a writer like me, an integration facilitator like Antanika Hoberg, or an entrepreneur like Dennis Walker (aka Mycopreneur), people need to see & engage with you on social media & the web to get your message. Right now, this means visually appealing content, posted at alarmingly short intervals, on as many platforms as you can manage, plus some sort of website and a mailing list.
If, like me, you find constantly posting on social media to be a horrendous grind, and have the graphic art skills of a potato, this can feel like an insurmountable task. Yes, there are tools that can make this easier. But they all cost money.
Or do they?
Here’s my favourite tools for cutting through the noise, without breaking the bank:
Buffer: Scheduling social media is one of the best ways to condense all that work into a manageable block and not have to log into all your different networks every day (saving you both time and your mental health). Buffer offers a free version of its scheduling system, allowing you to connect up to three channels (Instagram, LinkedIn, Bluesky etc.) and cue up to 10 posts per channel. Would some of the paid features be helpful? Yes, Especially the ability to schedule the first comment under your posts. But what you get for free is a good start.
Canva: I know a lot of you use this already. But if you don’t, you can squeeze a lot out of it for free. And it does have a 30 day trial of the premium version. So if you need to export files at higher resolutions or remove backgrounds, you could always do a month-long push to get some designs out (e.g., a t-shirt satirising MAPS that only you and 2 other people find funny.) But for doing tiles for Instagram or any of the other major social media platforms, the paid version is largely unnecessary.
Carrd.co: If you need a basic one-page website, done as cheaply as possible, Carrd is one of your best bets, IMO. Pick a template, throw your own stuff in, and you’re done! If you want to use your own domain, that will cost you $19 USD per year - but that gets you a heap of extra features. Even if you pay this, and buy a domain for $20-30 per year, that’s still going to cost you less than a something like Squarespace, which starts at $17 AUD per month. Why pay more for a full website if you don’t need it?
Beehiiv: I wasn’t always sold on newsletters. But since social media companies can be very hostile towards discussion of psychedelics, or simply politics their owners don’t approve of, it’s never been more important to collect and maintain your own contact list of readers/supporters. Again, the features you get improve with paid tiers. But for $0 beehiiv gives you a functional newsletter system for up to 2500 subscribers. Why not Substack? If you do get to monetising via paid subscriptions or advertising, beehiiv takes less of a cut and you have more control over your contact list. (Also, Substack is full of Nazis.)
Reminder - Garden States!
Not sure if anyone had noticed, but this year I’ve stopped writing what people want to hear, and started being more forthright in my views on psychedelics and the industry that has grown around them. If you’d like to hear more of my thoughts around this in person, and have the chance to hang out with the who’s-who of Australian psychedelics, mycology and plant medicines, EGA Garden States: Regeneration is the conference/outdoor experience for you!
Tickets are limited. So if you want to attend hit that website now to secure your spot: https://www.gardenstates.org/
A word from our sponsor:
It has come to the laser-like attention of our CEO/spiritual advisor, Orinocco Visionwolf, and his c-suite executives/apostles that legitimate corporate enterprises in psychedelics are being targeted by a shadowy group of anti-capitalists.
This group, which we will not name for legal reasons, has repeatedly disrupted public events by loudly yelling things like: ‘Do you have safety data on doing consciousness-expanding breathwork while attempting a personal-best deadlift?’ and ‘Wait, Shaman’s Blood has actual blood in it? What the fuck, dude? I drank that!’
Worse, thanks to information passed to us by an inside source, we have learned that these patchouli-scented supervillains are aiming to derail our plan to get FDA approval for combined semen-retention/ego-death therapy.
CEO Visionwolf reached out to this organisation to see if we could resolve our differences, offering to help heal their ‘inner capitalist shadow’ and to ask if there is any way we can meet their exceptionally strict ideological standards. So far, the only response has been:
‘No. Everyone is terrible, except us.’
Negotiations have been paused while all parties complete a purity audit.
Jungian Sperm Energytm: Commodify your resistance.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading!
As always, all feedback and suggestions are welcome, and I promise* to not ruin your favourite Signal group chat by relentlessly attacking everyone who doesn’t 100% agree with me.
*Unless you think that the fact that patient abuse occurs in mainstream psychiatry is evidence that psychedelic therapy doesn’t need to do better.
PS:
Q: What do chickens take when they go to a rave"?
A: Eggstacy
Written on Worimi lands. Sovereignty was never ceded.
Icon by Freepik from Flaticon
