Welcome to issue #9 of The Ethical Trip! In this issue:

• Is Atai undervalued?

• Should we use shrooms to live forever?

• How can I make a decision without missing something?

For all this, plus recent research, morally flexible product placement, and a joke that 4/5 chatbots assures me is funny (so it must be), read on!

As always, my deep and profound gratitude goes out to everyone who has supported me, including via Buy Me a Coffee Cactus, especially those who provide ongoing monthly contributions.

Table of Contents

1. Industry Insights:

   1. Research Round-up

   2. Don’t Look Back in Angermayer

2. Philosophical Brief: Shrooming For Immortality

3. Consultancy Corner: Z-model Decision-Making

4. A word from our sponsor:

Industry Insights:

Research Round-up

Another less-interesting fortnight of research, IMO, but they can’t all be super exciting.

Zheng (2025) makes an interesting argument that while psychedelic assisted therapy patients/clients can give ‘valid consent, the ineffable nature of their transformative experiences means they can never really give ‘substantially informed consent,’ essentially because they cannot understand what they will experience before they experience it.

Sen (2025) wrote what looks like an interesting PhD: “In summary, we report heterologous pathway reconstruction in E. coli to produce bufotenine from tryptophan (13.7 mg/L), 5-MeO-DMT from 5-HTP (11.7 mg/L), and trace levels of de novo 3,5-diMeO-4-OH-PEA.” Sadly, it’s under embargo until 2030, so presumably this has some valuable commercial application.

Falling just outside my normal window, probably because it went live while I was writing last fortnight’s issue, Rodan, SC., Meez, N., Lloyd-Hurwitz, S. et al (2025), looked at psychedelic use in individuals living with eating disorders or disordered eating, finding many had positive experiences, though the paper is careful to not overstate the possible therapeutic potential.

Lots more good stuff below, but only for subscribers!