Welcome to this special issue of The Ethical Trip!

I’m going to mostly be talking about Entheogenesis Australis Garden States: Regeneration. We can go back to normal industry news and cynicism next time.

Huge thanks to everyone supporting my 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, (not least because you all contributed to me getting to the event at all!) Special thanks goes out to the subscribers who came up to me at EGA to tell me they appreciated my writing. That really means a lot.

Table of Contents

1. Reflecting on Entheogenesis Garden States 2025

   1. The culture is bigger than any industry narrative

   2. People want depth, meaning, and accountability, no …

   3. The most valuable knowledge is still on the fringe

2. Consultancy Corner: Four days in wet shoes = smell …

Reflecting on Entheogenesis Garden States 2025

I didn’t go to Entheogenesis Australis (EGA) Garden States: Regeneration expecting carefully curated industry insights or tips on how to maximise my share portfolio. I already knew what I was heading into. I’ve attended EGA events before, and been part of these communities for most of my adult life. These are my people. This is where I fit, without having to pretend I’m something or someone I’m not.

What I didn’t expect was how deeply emotional the experience of being back, physically immersed in the living culture, would be for me. Not the branded pharmaceutical vision of a billionaire techbro on a yacht, or microdosing hustle-culture sold by serial grifters. The real thing: interconnected, based in relation to each other, ecology and place, moving with a chaotic, organic logic that can’t be easily described in words but had to be instinctively grasped as a whole.

It was, at times, politically sharp. Perhaps most important of all, it was unapologetically and deeply weird. (If I needed more evidence of that, I was complimented by a number of people on my satirical t-shirts.)

This remined me, in a way I felt in my bones, of just how much of the psychedelic world does not and will never fit into neat, controlled-dose box that the ‘industry’ wants for these substances.

Here are three take-aways from my experience:

The culture is bigger than any industry narrative

Psychedelic culture, plant & fungal medicine practices, rave & doof culture, Indigenous cultures and underground traditions. When I write this down it’s obvious that these things are bigger than the cashed-up dreams of Christian Angermayer or William S. Marth.

I’m not talking about just numbers, though I will, as is my habit, tap the sign and remind everyone that it’s people and settings outside of labs and clinics that make up the psychedelic majority. Rather, it’s about the drivers of cultural dynamism - what causes culture to change and be a living thing, rather than static and dead.

The psychedelic-pharmaceutical-industrial complex narrative, if I can speculate a little, is, at best, something like this:

Enable a small change, specifically that people can use psychedelics to feel better, or at least well enough to go back to work and stop costing governments or insurers money. Achieve this in a way that maintains or deepens socioeconomic inequality and make huge profits in the process.

(I appreciate I’m probably being a bit unfair to therapists. But there is an undeniable tension for those who want to work in ways that support the same system that makes people unwell in the first place.)

Such an industry narrative is inherently incapable of creating much texture or experiential richness in culture. Nor can it deliberately induce radical change, even to something as ephemeral as the art and music we appreciate. And societal values or economics? Forget it!

Contrast this with the whole EGA experience: art, exchange of ideas, explorations of ways of being as both individuals and communities. Even individual presentations or workshops exemplified this. The retrospective on Terrence McKenna’s time here in Australia showed how just how much one person and their ongoing sense of wonder (plus DMT, obviously) can impact a culture in ways that we’re still unpacking. This, and other talks on the art, culture and experience of psychedelics weren’t relegated to some corner, they were the core of the event, on the main stage in the best timeslots.

People want depth, meaning, and accountability, not just productivity drugs and business as usual

People want and need healing. A great deal of what people presented was around how to most effectively achieve this aim.

Concurrent with this (and it’s not a contradiction, because if you really want to help people you ultimately have to be ethical) there’s also enormous interest in hard conversations and not sweeping problems under the carpet.

One case in point is Dave Nickles’ talk and Q&A. Lots of people who think they’re driving the mainstream of psychedelic discourse love to hate Dave and portray him (and anyone who can’t maintain sufficiently relentless positivity) as a nay-sayer that no one is interested in. But both his timeslots had great attendance and enthusiastic audience interaction.

(Side note: I’m again amused by events that banned Dave from attending. There were disagreements - it’s not as if everyone liked everything he said. We even had unashamed capitalists like Dr Prash Puspanathan presenting at the same event. And everyone was just fine.)

A different kind of example of the desire for meaning that goes beyond superficial change was the Tomorrow Parties workshop. Led by Anna Conrick, Kirt Mallie, Tehseen Noorani and Alex Gearin, this was one of the highlights of my weekend. Was it emotionally exposing to name our hopes for psychedelics? Yes. Was it challenging to roleplay our future selves, meeting up at future EGA events to reflect on our individual paths forward? Absolutely.

Did every single participant in that workshop mention how great it was, every time we bumped into each other, for the rest of the event? 100%.

Even my own modest talk (far away from the main stage), that started by acknowledging our failures and ended with a discussion of revolutionary ruptures and underground networks ‘composting’ that which doesn’t serve our best interests, fits into this. That it landed well indicates that people have an appetite for more than superficial change.

The most valuable knowledge is still on the fringe

I’m not talking about pharmacological effectiveness, though you will probably find that many EGA attendees have knowledge in that area that rivals that of the best psychedelic researchers.

Rather, what stood out to me was we so obviously have some idea about how to relate to each other and the world. Knowledge isn’t just knowing about something or knowing how to do it. It’s knowing why you should, and believing it enough to act accordingly.

• We know how to look after each other, and and we know why we should. Based on my observations and the people I talked to, we did. Not perfectly, but relative to the rest of society, extremely fucking well.

• We know how to show respect to the traditional owners of the country we are on, and why that matters. If you saw the way people were with both the Welcome to Country and closing ceremony, both led by Uncle Mark Brown, you wouldn’t doubt the depth of this.

•  We know how to tread lightly on the places we are in, and minimise our impact before we leave. Never, ever, have I seen a festival or event site so devoid of rubbish and destruction by the last day.

I know I sometimes get caught up in financial value, because I spend so much time watching the most malignant corners of psychedelic commercialisation (and so little time receiving money of my own.)

But if you want to talk about real value, as in the things that are profoundly important and can make our possible futures brighter, you couldn’t do much better than those three points above. That is what matters and what ultimately carries our community forward.

I don’t often point this out so bluntly, but I genuinely need more support. If you’d like to help me graduate from ‘doesn’t need to file a tax return’ to ‘eccentric,’ you can support me via Buy Me a Coffee or buy one of my ill-considered t-shirts.

Consultancy Corner: Four days in wet shoes = smelly feet

Did you know that if you have a whole tent to yourself, and it has two memory foam mattresses, you can put one on top of the other so your hip doesn’t dig into the ground for three nights straight?

Neither did I.

Other lessons from the event:

• The Melbourne area can still be cold at the end of November, doubly so if you are outside the city in an area with some elevation.

• Always take more pairs of socks than days of an event, especially an outdoor one

• Remember to eat

• Ideally, get a good night’s sleep before your presentation and panels

• Pace yourself!

If you made it this far, thanks for reading! As a special treat for getting through all that (or scrolling to the bottom, at least) use the code EGA2025 for 20% off at my terrible Etsy store for the next week.

Unusually for me, I’m all out of vaguely amusing sarcasm. It’s been a long year. Don’t worry, Orinoco Visionwolf and I will be back in 2026, with more critique, snark, and cooked humour than ever before.

As always, all feedback and suggestions are welcome, unless you’re a facilitator who serves Syrian Rue and 5-MeO-DMT together. If you’re that guy, you’re a fucking idiot, and I will drag you at every possible opportunity.

PS:

Q: What is Santa’s favourite psychedelic research chemical?

A: 4-HO-HO-HO-MET!

Stay safe everyone. See you next year.

Written on Worimi lands. Sovereignty was never ceded.

Icon by Freepik from Flaticon