Are we ignoring how connected everything is? Why don’t we talk about autonomy? How little can I pay to become a psychedelic facilitator?

For answers to these questions, plus a discounted t-shirt that no one understands, some research, and lots of opinions read on!

Where everything is connected, except when it’s inconvenient

When you deal with people with more power than you to achieve your goals, the benefit goes both ways. You get legal psychedelic therapy and whatever secondary benefit you derive; boosting prices of certain shares or funnelling students towards certain courses etc. They get something out of it too, though.

Politicians being who & what they are, this is often social and political goodwill, street cred, or just plain distraction from inconvenient events.

In Australia the price is high enough to make it ethically complicated. But in the US, self-declared centre of the psychedelic renaissance, the current situation is much more dangerous.

There is a point where compromising with a politician in order to achieve your goals becomes unethical. Pandering to RFK junior, Casey Means or whatever other unqualified reprobate has been parachuted into a regulatory role is working with the Mango Mussolini, just with extra steps.

Likewise, if you’re enlisting senators, members of congress or state governors who are part of the problem (mostly Republicans, but I include more than a few Democrats in this,) to get what you want, you become part of the problem. Same deal if you’re kissing the boots of billionaire oligarchs like Musk or Thiel.

So what if MDMA assisted therapy becomes legal? If you had to tacitly endorse and, therefore, participate in fascism to achieve this, it was not worth it. We so often feel that our personal crusades are the most important thing in the universe, to the extent that we lose sigh of the bigger picture. If, for example, I had to choose between being able to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a psychiatrist who barely smoked weed at university for psychedelic therapy vs an equitable and sustainable future, I know what I’d prefer.

Yes, you and certain people (veterans, people with lots of money or very accommodating health insurers) may experience some benefits. But everyone else who isn’t part of your little club, i.e. the rest of the world, pays the price. And, as people throughout history have discovered, things don’t always work out that well for the in-crowd of authoritarian regimes once things, inevitably, come unstuck.

Our goals are ethically important. Nonetheless, how we reach them matters. People who feel their ends are justified by any means, who would work with literally anyone to achieve their goals are amongst some of the most potentially dangerous and immoral individuals you’ll ever meet.

So, psychedelic therapy is directly political and I’ll be talking about politics within and adjacent to our little bubble.

But our situation doesn’t exist in isolation.

Ask yourself, do you think the War on Drugs is a feature or a bug in our current economic/political system? Do you think Mark Zuckerberg wants you to stop doom-scrolling on Facebook and Insta and go hug a tree? Have you somehow missed that psychedelic therapy, like all healing and helping professions, is only tolerated to the extent that it supports the status quo?

Individual people might care about how you feel. But the system does not. It just wants you to stop complaining about your depression or PTSD and get back to your designated role as part of the machine.

That, and things going on in the world are kind of worth caring about, regardless of whether or not they impact your ability to legally get high or provide certain kinds of therapy.

So yeah, I’m going to get more critical and political this year. And I’m not going to strictly stay in a psychedelic ‘lane'. If that doesn’t work for you, there’s the door. Don’t let it hit your behind on the way out.

For everyone else who’s left, my advice for this newsletter is the same as my advice for 2026 in general: Buckle up, it’s going to be a wild ride.