Welcome to this slightly (OK, very) late issue, #26, of The Ethical Trip! This fortnight:

For all this, plus an existentially tired overview of recent research and a memorial to the untimely apparent passing of JD Vance, read on!

As always, I’m humbled by everyone who supports 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.

Some interesting papers hit the web this past fortnight, though a lot of what has appeared on google scholar lately is either AI slop or just crushingly dull (sometimes both.)

Priest et al brings yet more evidence that people in the US are taking a lot of psychedelics, especially psilocybin, and especially as microdoses.

Davis has a really interesting paper around process philosophy and Alfred North Whitehead’s doctrine of non-sensory perception. Worth reading, IMO, if you can set aside the time. When the author says the implications of these ideas are wild, he really means it!

Smith et al cautiously draws together a scoping review which suggests that ‘psychedelic drugs may modulate processes relevant to social cognition in psychiatric disorders.’

OK, so the price has gone back up to $140 as of Friday afternoon, but hear me out: sitting with people who are intending to have a therapeutic/’healing’ psychedelic experience might take a little skill and require a little training or relevant experience. Helping people do the (IMO) far harder work of putting themselves and their world back together again through integration, almost certainly takes more of both.

So, I wasn’t massively impressed when I saw Zappy Zapolin’s Psychedelic concierge website spruiking “ethical” certification. Honestly, I’m not sure how much whatever he’s ultimately selling costs. I did a questionnaire/thinly veiled marketing survey only to be offered a place in a professional online community for the low low price of $29 a month or $197 a year. I’m sure at some point it’ll lead to an expensive course.

Maybe if I seemed richer I’d be directed to something else (one of the survey questions was about how much money I’d be willing to put into training to fulfil my calling.)

Maybe it’s OK. I mean, having the wisdom to purchase the beer.com domain must be transferable to the empathy and space-holding abilities needed to be a good psychedelic concierge (whatever the fuck that is.)

This isn’t the worst, though. I still save that for whatever it is Naturalistico seems to be selling.

The price tag of $139.79 AUD might look good, depending on who actually accredits this. Or not, as one of the accrediting bodies is the Centre of CPD Excellence - earlier in the year, in the UK, they were found by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to have undertaken: Misleading comparative advertising, unverifiable comparison claims and
unsubstantiated expertise and partnership claims.

No, what really got me is that the course preview files aren’t videos, but audio that’s very obviously a machine generated voice reading astoundingly generic content. I think there’s much better than even odds that this course is largely ChatGPT-generated.

Most readers here would never fall for this, nor would you sit with or employ someone who’d done this course. But people without psychedelic experience or community connections are much more vulnerable to the grifters that will inevitably be orbiting this gravity well of late capitalist enshittification.

What really got my goat, overall, is that these sorts of courses have recently started making a big deal out of how ‘ethical’ they and their graduates are. They obviously feel it’s a selling point for customers. But what standard do they actually hold themselves to?

I keep an eye on a few psychedelic pharma stocks via SimplyWallSt. Don’t own any, so I have no real skin in that game, but it’s been interesting to watch exuberant narratives run into accounting and regulatory reality.

Atai, now AtaiBeckely ($ATAI ( ▲ 0.14% )) , has long been on my watchlist. It’s really gained traction in a corner of the retail investment community, and is consistently rated by commentators who may or may not be real people, as undervalued.

I was interested, therefore, when SimplyWallSt emailed me a note about Atai’s phase III trials for intranasal mebufotenin (5-MeO-DMT) benzoate, aka BPL-003. It wasn’t new news though. the company hasn’t officially said anything about these trials for that drug since March and the note was basically a cut and paste of the press release from earlier in the year.

What did happen, about a week ago was some Atai executives offloading a bunch of their own shares. Chief Marketing Officer Kevin James Craig and Chief Operating Officer Gerd Kochendoerfer sold 42,579 and 50,000 shares respectively.

You wouldn’t know this if you only followed AtaiBeckely via platforms like SimplyWallSt, TradingView, or Seeking Alpha, none of which mention these trades. SimplyWallSt, in particular, seems keen to encourage the view that these shares are a bargain.

Why and how this narrative has emerged is a mystery. I think it more likely this is the action of some key bag-holders, I mean, shareholders, rather than a PR move by the company itself. In future, if I see anything like this, I’d take it as a signal to have a dig to see if there’s less salubrious news someone wants to bury. (Like if ‘reactivations’ are finally recorded from the use of BPL-003.)

The more I look at SimplyWallSt, the more I wonder if some of the ‘news’ is machine generated because it thinks I hold shares in the companies on my watchlist, and/or if someone involved with this website has some related financial exposure themselves. (I mean, trying to talk up the financial bin-fire at Optimi with: ‘The Only Psychedelic Company Already Selling MDMA and Psilocybin to Real Patients, Yet Priced Like It Doesn’t Exist’ - really?)

In the meantime, the main lesson here is to not rely on one source of information, especially where money (yours, or someone else’s) is on the line.

Want to help upgrade my budget from ‘owns 50% of a toothbrush’ to ‘Aussie battler’? Support me via Buy Me a Coffee.

Speaking from his lavishly appointed villa in Ubud, Doubleblind’s ‘Sexiest Shaman of 2024’ and CEO of Jungian Sperm Energy, Orinoco Visionwolf, has issued the following statement:

Jungian Sperm Energy^tm: Keep your friends close, unless they’re foaming at the mouth.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading!

As always, all feedback and suggestions are welcome, and I promise* to not trick the DuckDuckGo AI into reporting that your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.

*Unless you’re a One Nation supporter.

PS:

Why did the integration therapist tell their lonely client to buy some shares?

Because they needed a bit of company

Written on Worimi lands. Sovereignty was never ceded.

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