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.

Viña, 2026 presents interesting (and, IMO, important) work on the differences of how psychedelics impact men and women in light of their caring roles. The results indicated that men, on average, tend to get more relief by using psychedelics, women, especially single parents, tend to experience far less: “If researchers and clinicians fail to address the gendered conditions under which distress arises—and the unequal ability to recover from it—they risk designing therapeutic models that reproduce the very inequalities they aim to heal.”

Garcia et al, 2026 reports that people reported ‘inner dialogue and adaptive coping’ in their psilocybin experiences were more likely to recovery from alcohol use disorder than those whose accounts emphasized visual or affective aspects of the trip.

I’ve been wondering how much longer various organisations can continue to charge considerable fees for their psychedelic therapy/coaching/guiding etc. programs. As psychedelic businesses continue to falter in Oregon, and the ongoing bin-fire of general economic uncertainty settles in, it seems to me that not every current training provider will be around by this time next year.

Like I said, I was already thinking this. Then I got this ad served to me on Facebook:

Become a psychedelic facilitator for only $27.00! Not sure much else needs to be said.

Revisiting some of my older work is interesting. I wrote about cannabis reforms for Independent Australia in the lead up to the Nimbin Mardi Grass 2018.

Aside from my utter misreading of the Reason party’s ability to succeed outside of Victoria (and Fiona Patten’s presence,) I was also wrong about the Greens ability to attract a higher vote. (My feeling that neither Labor nor the Liberals would enact reform without external pressure turned out to be correct.)

Very little drug law has changed in most states and territories since I wrote that piece in 2018. Campaigners have to ask ourselves why this is so. That’s a longer question to answer. (Also: I’m not sure how to answer it.)

One thing that has stayed the same in the public law reform discourse is how little we talk about things like choice, freedom, or autonomy - the idea that people should be able to make informed decisions free from control by someone else. FYI, philosophers, and anyone with half a brain, worked out that there are necessary limits to this, i.e., when a decision disproportionally harms someone else, a few hundred years ago, so this doesn’t mean people would irresponsibly get to do whatever they want.

Anyway, I noted at the time that even the Greens couldn’t bring themselves to say that people should be able to choose what they put in their bodies, and that if people’s cannabis use isn’t negatively impacting anyone else, we have no good reason to take this choice away from them.

Politicians in Australia seem to have a deep horror of the idea of autonomy, and rarely mention it by name. Law reform organisations like Unharm have seemingly followed suit, with the word only mentioned in two blog posts on their entire domain, one in 2016, one in 2022.

Autonomy, via our bodies, relates to things like consent, how we express identity and gender, all the way out/up to larger-scale issues like political self-governance. So why not mention it? Is it because it’s too confusing for the average punter? Is it because political parties here are deeply wedded to paternalism?

Or is it because if people thought too hard about why and how they’re coerced to use alcohol rather than a prohibited substance, there’s a risk they might connect some dots and see an uncomfortable picture? I do not imagine that politicians, or their billionaire bosses, want people to realise just how few of our choices are made with good information and without coercion or duress.

Talking about autonomy doesn’t mean we should adopt an unreflective notion of freedom, where we don’t distinguish between freedom from restriction and freedom as capacity to do something. For example, in Australia, if people meet the diagnostic criteria, they’re technically be free to get psilocybin-assisted therapy. But if they don’t have the spare $30,000 it costs, that freedom from restriction doesn’t mean shit.

Nor should autonomy free from philosophical criticism. Feminist theorists have correctly critiqued classic conceptions of autonomy for being too individualistic. That our ability and right to choose is, therefore, relational, is a no-brainer for me as these things always exist in the context of our environment and the people around us.

Philosophically, autonomy is worth mentioning. But I wonder if it’s part of the answer for activists too. Whatever we’ve been doing hasn’t been working. Perhaps we should try reminding people the of the choices that politicians have taken away from them.

I'd like to celebrate an incredibly small but ongoing victory over Paul Stamets.

Through a combination of SEO mastery and unmitigated pettiness, I've managed to get the Esty entry for this shirt to outrank the patent itself when you search the patent number.

Is anyone buying the shirt? Not yet.

Does this change much? Maybe not.

Do I derive sick satisfaction from the idea of potential investors googling this patent number and, instead, finding my stupid shirt? Absolutely.

Profits, should there ever be any, go to supporting my work (i.e. helping me contribute to paying the bills.)

Use the code: SHROOM26 for a 20% discount (I can’t cut the cost more than that!)

If you made it this far, thanks for reading!

I’ve been pondering some changes to frequency and format of The Ethical Trip. If you have any thoughts on what I should write about or how often the newsletter should come out etc., I’d really love to hear them. If you think the format should stay as it was in 2025, that’s cool too, but I won’t know unless you tell me.

As always, I promise* to not turn your psychedelic training course into a meme.

*Unless it’s written by ChatGPT and being sold for $27 (even though it’s apparently “worth” hundreds of dollars.)

PS: For my IFS-savvy readers:

Q: What is the favourite drink of Richard C. Schwartz?

A: The Unattached Bourbon

(Everyone else: Google ‘IFS unattached burden.’)

Written on Worimi lands. Sovereignty was never ceded.

Icon by Freepik from Flaticon