Spiritual evangelism runs through psychedelic culture, particularly in the ’60s and ’70s when pioneers like Tim Leary, Ken Kesey, and Owsley Stanley embarked on quests to dose the world. These leading figures believed that turning people on to psychedelics would bring about a revolution in human consciousness, and thus engender social change. “Psychedelics are not only a key to personal salvation,” Tim Leary wrote. “They are the key to the salvation of mankind.”
But the new psychedelic culture of the 21st century suggests that when venture capitalists and investment bankers start to microdose, the drugs don’t make them want to drop out of the system at all. Rather, these executives are interested in using mushrooms and other psychedelics to gain ever-higher levels of business success. Due to the illegality of psychedelics in most places in the world, however, buttoned-up professionals might hesitate to engage in an illicit activity that could be seen as reputationally or physically risky. Thus, the rise of luxury psychedelic retreats for corporate climbers and strivers, such as this $15,000-a-pop offering from Journeymen Collective in Canada.
Journeymen Collective’s “curated luxurious psychedelic medicine shamanic journeys” include two mushroom trips in luxury estate accommodations, vegetarian meals from an “intuitive chef” who senses participants’ nutritional needs, and several weeks of virtual coaching. The experience is described as the “Rolls-Royce of psychedelic plant medicine journey experiences,” and can even be filed as a business expense.
One former attendee of Journeymen Collective’s retreats is Peggy Van De Plassche, a former banker and venture capital investor from France. According to Fortune, Van De Plassche credits the experience for helping her cultivate more patience for the executives she oversaw, as well as directors who derailed meetings by talking about their past achievements and stroking their own egos. Instead of becoming outwardly aggravated, Van De Plassche said, the mushrooms taught her how to find compassion for the egoists, and gently redirect the conversation.
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Van De Plassche went on to write a book called The Microdose Diet, in which she touts the benefits of microdosing mushrooms to achieve more success in life—from a promotion to a new job to increased revenues. People raised in a working-class family might have limiting beliefs, Van De Plassche writes, such that it is “better to have a solid family than money” or “rich people are thieves.” Mushrooms can help shift these unsupportive mindsets to become more in line with their goals of making more money, Van De Plassche claims.
The experiences of Van De Plassche and other executives attending these retreats are part of a larger trend of corporate bigwigs and entrepreneurs who hope that psychedelics will produce business breakthroughs. Given that many others will soon follow in their footsteps, perhaps it is time for the rest of us to let go of this long-standing, idealistic belief that psychedelics are the antidote to capitalism and its destructive impacts. Rather, we could view them as “non-specific amplifiers” of the psyche, as psychedelic pioneer Stanislav Grof famously put it in his 1975 book, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research.
What Grof meant is that these substances do not produce specific effects on consciousness themselves, such as making a person suddenly desire world peace. Rather, they amplify and bring to the surface existing contents of the subconscious mind, thus highly dependent on the individual’s pre-existing mindset, personality, and cultural context. In other words, if the capitalists want to use mushrooms to become the board-room power player they’ve always dreamed of, that’s exactly what it will help them to do.
