Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Double Blind Magic Hour, where we cover what’s going on in the world of psychedelics. From insider baseball drama within the rapidly unfolding movement to the latest news on research, politics, and beyond, we cover it all. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the co-founder of Double Blind, a print magazine covering psychedelics. Today, we’re joined by an incredible journalist and someone who we’re lucky to have as an adviser to Double Blind, Shayla Love. She’s a journalist who, yes, has reported on psychedelics—of course, that’s why she’s on this podcast—but also writes about so many other things, including psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. This is one of the reasons I’m excited to talk to her today because she brings her reporting from the world of mental health and wellness more broadly into her perspectives on psychedelics, which I think is really unique.

Hi, Shayla. Thank you for joining.

Thank you so much for having me, Shelby. It’s great to be here.

This episode is brought to you by Magnesium Breakthrough by BiOptimizers. Magnesium Breakthrough by BiOptimizers is the only full-spectrum magnesium supplement with seven unique forms of magnesium that your body can actually use and absorb. And yes, you need all seven forms if you want to sleep better, feel more relaxed, have healthier levels of blood sugar and blood pressure, lower inflammation, have strong muscles and bones, balanced hormones, and dozens of other benefits. Visit bioptimizers.com and use promo code DOUBLEBLIND for 10% off any order.

I always like to start these conversations by asking journalists how they came to report on psychedelics because I think it’s really unique. There aren’t that many of us—there aren’t that many journalists actually, and there aren’t that many people working in psychedelics—so finding people at the intersection of the two is rare. What was your path? How did you get here?

Yeah, it’s a great question. You’re right, there aren’t that many people who… And I wouldn’t even consider myself, as you said, a totally psychedelic-drug-only-focused journalist. It has taken up a lot of my work, which I feel really happy about and grateful for. Now that Vice is gone, there’s probably going to be a lot less psychedelic journalism, at least like everyday kind of iterative psychedelic blogging, which is a bummer. We can talk about that later, maybe. Double Blind is really the last psychedelic-focused publication left, which I think is really sad. But I started out doing kind of like local news reporting in my early days, but pretty quickly pivoted to science and health journalism. I got my master’s in that from Columbia, and that interest came from both coming from a family of scientists growing up and everyone around me being really interested and working in those fields. But then I was really interested in mental health because of my own personal experiences struggling with obsessive-compulsive disorder and then seeing a lot of my friends struggling with depression and anxiety. I really wanted to get into this world of what makes the mind tick and why our experiences are the way they are.

That led me on a path to writing almost exclusively about neuroscience, psychology, and mental health. I really loved writers like Oliver Sacks, a neurologist who would write about these case studies of people having extreme experiences because of problems they had in their brain, revealing how funky day-to-day experience can get depending on what’s going on in your mind. So when all the research on psychedelics started coming out, it was a natural fit for my beats that existed already. But I didn’t have a pre-existing interest necessarily in writing about drugs. It was really more their effect on the mind and mental health that got me. I was at Vice, which was the perfect home to have those interests. I just started writing about psychedelics a lot, and this was in like 2017 or so when things were really kind of blowing up in the mainstream media and psychedelic journalism. You could write about psychedelics all the time, and it would reach the attention of people who weren’t just using them recreationally.

I hope you don’t mind me asking, but your path is really unique because a lot of psychedelic journalists actually get into psychedelic journalism because they are journalists and they’re also using psychedelics, and they’re very passionate about them. When you started writing about psychedelics, did you have a personal relationship with them at all?

I didn’t really. I mean, I agree with you. It is a little bit unique. I was so interested in hearing about people’s experiences on them. I had taken psychedelics before recreationally, but I didn’t really… I didn’t not like them, but I didn’t really develop a very close relationship in the way that I see other people have with them. It just wasn’t something that happened for me. When I started writing about the research and seeing people apply it therapeutically, I think that made it more intriguing for me, actually, because I was like, “Oh yeah, that thing that I did or that I tried this one time, or these different substances people are really having these profound interactions with, and I’m curious about that. I want to know what’s going on with the research and the brain.” It’s hard for people to have a totally neutral experience with psychedelics because sometimes they really love them, or sometimes if you have a negative experience or one that was difficult for you to process or integrate later, you can be really wary and cautious. I really fall somewhere in the middle, or at least I definitely did when I was starting to report on psychedelics, where I had some really good experiences and some kind of whatever ones that weren’t that amazing but also weren’t that bad either. So I came to it sort of neutrally, which is a strength in some ways, I think, if we want to believe in the gold standard principle of objectivity within journalism, which is a whole other conversation.

We do know, obviously, that journalists are people, and as much as we try and uphold these values of neutrality and interviewing both sides, inevitably if a person has had a profound transformative experience on psychedelics, that is going to color the way that they write about them. There’s this whole ethical debate within the psychedelic movement right now about if someone is holding space for someone who’s on a psychedelic, should they have a personal relationship with psychedelics? But we’re not talking about if someone is writing about psychedelics, should they or should they not have a personal relationship with these substances, and how does that change the questions that they’re asking and how they’re framing their stories?

I think it’s such an interesting question, and something that’s happened to me, which I find really interesting, is that sometimes if I write a story that’s maybe bringing up potential problems about psychedelic therapy, or I wouldn’t even use the word critical, but it’s just not overwhelmingly positive, sometimes I will get criticisms or emails where people accuse me of never having taken a psychedelic because the piece is not positive. I think that’s a really interesting thing to couple those things together because I’m like, I actually have, but it’s sort of beside the point. But the fact that you think that I haven’t because this piece is critical is a bit revealing of that. I think for me, because my experiences were kind of neutral, it was very easy for me to both talk to people who had had more negative experiences or more complicated experiences and people who had those really profound transformations, and have both be completely plausible and imaginable to me how it could go in either of those directions because my personal experience had been middle of the road. It was not difficult for me to endorse either way.

Yeah, you’re getting at something so interesting. We had Mary Carrie on a few episodes ago, and she was talking about this story that she reported for us for the print magazine on the relationship between conspiracy theories, right-wing extremism, and psychedelic experience. There’s this whole contingent of people who believe in the plandemic and believe that… We’re not going to get into the whole story, but on and on about all the conspiracy theories, UFOs, and George Floyd’s death being a conspiracy. It gets pretty dark. When we posted about it on our Instagram, same thing, so many people in the comments were like, “Well, clearly you’ve never done a psychedelic,” which Mary… I don’t want to speak for her, but from what I’ve gathered, she’s not like you, where she’s had some psychedelic experiences and the net outcome is that she feels neutral about these medicines. She’s had a lot of psychedelic experiences that have been positive and transformative and informed her identity.

It opens up something that we’re hopefully going to get into later in the episode when we talk about some of your reporting on the romanticization of what psychedelics can do and how that potentially might harm the movement in the long term because we’re not being critical about what the research actually says.

Totally. I really resonate with that. It just makes me think that someone who has really positive experiences could be more critical actually. They might be more critical about things like commercialization or patents or the way these decriminalization or legalization programs are happening because they care more. My experiences with psychedelics are kind of middle of the road, but what I care a lot about is accessibility to potentially really promising mental healthcare treatments. That’s the basis of why I keep writing about psychedelics because I care so much about that thing. That’s also where my critical eye comes from because I don’t want mistakes to be repeated that I’ve seen in the mental health space before as a mental health reporter for many years before writing about psychedelics.

That’s the perfect transition to our first segment, where we’re going to get into some of the very sticky and complicated reporting that you’ve done on the world of patents, specifically psychedelic patents. First, we’re going to take a quick break.

This episode of the Double Blind Magic Hour is sponsored by FUNGI. FUNGI chocolates and fruit chews are an alcohol and psychedelic alternative activated with kanna. They’re perfect for the newly sober or for people interested in trying a psychedelic-adjacent plant. At Double Blind, we’re very passionate about the fact that there’s a lot of romanticization of these bigger psychedelics, these illegal substances, whether it’s MDMA, psilocybin, LSD. There’s actually a whole apothecary of legal plants and fungi that come from the earth that are beautiful for connecting with yourself and connecting with other people. I’ve tried FUNGI chocolates. I did them the other day in the backyard with my friend. It was just the kind of gentle stimulant and euphoria that I was looking for. In addition to the kanna, the FUNGI chocolates have core aphrodisiacs such as damiana and a gentle stimulant to activate the experience called guarana. The FUNGI fruit chews are dosed at half of a chocolate serving, giving you more flexibility in how you build your dosage. Strength-wise, two of their fruit chews equals one chocolate triangle. I had one chocolate triangle the other day. With kanna, they’re able to provide a sort of similar instant magical effect to psychedelics. You can think of it like a microdose of MDMA. Kanna also pairs well with other substances such as mushrooms, cannabis, and caffeine. If you want to check out FUNGI kanna chocolates, you can get 25% off your first order. Just use the code DOUBLEBLINDPOD at fungi.com.

First up, I want to talk about your reporting on psychedelic patents. For those of you tuning in, before you’re like, “Snooze, patents, I don’t want to listen to them talk about patents,” I just want to say that while the world of patents is pretty hard to understand—and I can attest to that as someone who has also tried to do some reporting on patents, albeit not even remotely to the degree that Shayla has—it’s actually really interesting and it is important as it relates to psychedelics. As Shayla was referencing, there’s a lot of concern right now in the psychedelic industry, movement, and field—people have different words for it—about accessibility. There are a lot of people who are obviously suffering. People say we’re in a mental health epidemic, and we need novel solutions. Psychedelics might be that novel solution. What happens if they get to market and people can’t afford them or people don’t have a particular diagnosis that the substance has been approved for? Mushrooms are being studied—psilocybin—for major depressive disorder and treatment-resistant depression. If someone has alcohol dependence or general anxiety disorder or one of the many other conditions for which psilocybin has shown promise in smaller clinical trials, will they be able to access this treatment for any amount of money that is reasonable for most humans right now? That’s really where this whole conversation around patents comes in. Shayla, can you give us a little more high-level context as to why we should even be talking about this?

Yeah. I can explain a little about how I started writing about patents, which I didn’t really write that much about even as a health reporter before this. It all started with, as many things do, a tweet that I saw from Graham Pechen, who is a patent lawyer who I didn’t know at the time. He tweeted a patent application from Compass Pathways that was about the methods in which they might deliver their synthetic psilocybin, which is called Polymorph A. In the claims of the patent, it described some of the basics of psychedelic-assisted therapy, like holding someone’s hand or having soft furniture. Those details were included in the claim. His tweet was basically like, “If this patent got granted, would they be able to sue someone for patent infringement who delivered the same kind of psychedelic therapy?” These things are very basic. Having soft furniture—I don’t know about that one.

Let’s get into it. That application was never granted. This was an application, but when I saw that and saw that tweet, I sort of woke up to the fact that psychedelic patents were going to be a thing. When I looked it up, the only patent tracker that was out there was on Psychedelic Alpha, which is a website run by Josh Hardman. They had these graphs of how many patents were being filed every year, and the number was skyrocketing. That made a ton of sense because there were all these new biotech companies starting up, people trying to get investor money, and that’s the way that you get investor money to do research to develop these molecules. You say, “Look, I own this thing. This means that we’re going to make money afterwards, so why don’t you give me money and I’ll make it, and then I’ll give you your money back.” That’s how the cycle works. But I knew from reporting on other health issues in pharmaceuticals that the way the patent system works in this country is kind of messed up. People are supposed to only have a patent for 20 years, but sometimes that doesn’t work out that way. They make a small change, they hold on to a patent for a really long time. It’s one of the reasons that drug prices are so high in the United States. Psychotherapy prices, for separate reasons, are also really, really high because there’s often out-of-network coverage. I thought, wow, patents are really going to be a thing because we’re not just talking about psychotherapy. We’re really talking about a biotech model where people are developing novel molecules, or molecules that are similar to ones that we know already to get into this investment structure.

That first piece that I wrote about that patent was basically using that patent application to ask a question: What is it going to mean for the future of psychedelic-assisted therapy when there are all these things that are owned by various companies, and what is it going to mean for cost down the line? I still think we don’t know the answer to that question because we don’t actually have an FDA-approved therapy yet. All of this is still in the future. Since I started writing about this, the number of patents… We don’t even really pay attention to it anymore. I used to report on, “Here’s a new patent, here’s a new patent.” I would never write about anything else again if I did that now because there are just thousands of patents on almost everything. I think this is the way that money is generated, but we still don’t know the implications of that. I still think it’s an important question to ask and for people to pay attention to.

It’s my understanding that—I know you’re not a patent expert, so if you don’t know this one, that’s fine—but it’s my understanding that there are different kinds of patents. Two different kinds of patents or three different kinds of patents that might be relevant to psychedelics, which I think is interesting for people to understand. One, there’s the novel compound, right? Like, “I have created a drug that has never existed before,” which we can talk about the degree to which some pharmaceutical companies are trying to tweak compounds and then say, “Okay, it’s novel.” No, it’s not novel. It pretty much is psilocybin, but you just made a little change so that you could patent it. Then there’s the application of the drug, right? Like, is it possible to patent a compound that’s already in the public domain but for a particular indication? So like psilocybin is in the public domain, but you’re studying it for anorexia. No one’s ever done that before—just pulling something out of a hat. You’re nodding, so I’m assuming this is correct. Then my understanding is there’s also the delivery system too. For example, psilocybin is in the public domain, but you know what’s not in the public domain? A psilocybin nasal spray.

Exactly. This is one of the ways that people can genuinely innovate and also ways that people can just claim ownership to things that they didn’t really invent. A couple of examples will be the DMT vape pen. It’s a good one from a few years ago. Some person has a patent now for the DMT vape pen, and he’s like, “I think this is brand new. I made this.” The patent application office, they search PubMed to look for prior art, which is examples that it’s been done before. They didn’t find a DMT vape pen, even though everyone knows—

They need to search Erowid. Someone needs to turn the patent office onto Erowid.

I agree. This is what Porta Sophia has been trying to do. They’ve been trying to send prior art that might be in unusual places to the patent office, and they’ve been really successful. But they’re just a small nonprofit, and they can’t do everything. So that’s a great case of like, is that really novel? It’s not about being anti-patent. It’s about being anti-bad patent and people getting patents for things that aren’t true innovations and hijacking the system of being able to get investor dollars from inventing something that’s not really a novel thing.

Another example is MindMed applied for a patent to give people an SSRI and psilocybin-assisted therapy in conjunction. That was also a controversial patent because that’s not really new either, and they did get it. Again, it’s a complicated patent, and it’s hard to understand the exact ownership and the boundaries of ownership unless you really dig into each individual patent, which is why it’s so tricky. One of the reasons that I wanted to report on this topic and cover some of these patent basics is that I felt like all of this patent law stuff was a language that people didn’t have access to or information that they didn’t have access to. It’s tough. It’s hundreds of pages. You have to pay patent lawyers thousands of dollars. No one knows how to read these things except for them. There are real barriers to people being able to assess, “Is this a patent that I think is cool, or is this one that I think is not okay and I feel not great about it?” I think it’s even really difficult to do that process.

But that said, if we invented a psilocybin pimple patch or something, it’s like you stick it on your face and it gets rid of your pimple. Sure, that’s like, see what Sephora is going to have in seven to 10 years alongside the CBD face masks. You’ve got your psilocybin pimple patch.

Yes, psilocybin pimple patch. If we invented that method of delivery and it was brand new, I would be like, “Let’s patent it.” If we made it, we can patent that. That’s okay. That’s a real novel invention. Maybe someone’s done that before; I shouldn’t say anything. That’s what I mean. But you’re right, there are true innovations that exist within all those categories. There’s also ways to skirt the boundaries. The implications are down the road. A bad patent on its own doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it does give the person that a right to sue somebody later potentially or decide to make someone else’s life really difficult if they decide to sue them or threaten legal action. If you are starting a company, let’s say I want to start a company in the psychedelic medicine space. I might look and see who else has a patent for the thing that I’m interested in, and if they have one, I might not pursue that idea or topic because I don’t want to be sued later for patent infringement. That’s a way that patents can actually stop innovation. Let’s say that other person has a patent for no reason, or they’re just kind of sitting on it—they’re kind of a patent troll. They just did the patent; they don’t intend to do the work. They’re just going to sue people and try to make money that way. You’re actually stopping research.

One example we saw is that someone patented LSD for food allergies. We tried to reach out to the guy. It wasn’t anyone in the psychedelic space; it was just someone who patented this thing. It’s possible that somebody who wants to research that or start a company wouldn’t do it because they see someone else already has the patent for that. They’re like, “Well, I don’t want to touch that. Let me do something else.” There are all these secret rules that are driving decisions and research dollar allocation. Patents aren’t bad, but it’s something I think is really important because it drives a lot of decision-making.

So interesting. Patent trolls—did you make up that word?

It’s like domain trolls, people that just buy websites left and right, and then they just sit on them. Actually, funnily enough, I’ve never shared this before, but I originally tried to buy doubleblind.com. I was in my parents’ bedroom, or my childhood bedroom in my parents’ house, and I couldn’t figure it out. It was owned by people. We tried to reach out through GoDaddy, and no luck. Doubleblindmag.com, folks.

Yeah, well, I did not come up with patent troll. Patent trolls are really interesting to read about. This is a strategy and a type of company or person that exists in the pharma space and in the tech space for a really, really long time. To say that there aren’t going to be patent trolls in psychedelics is just naive. There definitely are going to be. It’s a tried-and-true practice that makes people money, and I think we’re going to start seeing it more. Again, this is not really my idea; this is just kind of what happens when the field narrows and companies start to go out of business because there are so many little startup companies. The only asset they’ll have left is their IP. It’s already happening. The only assets they’ll have left will be their IP. What are they going to do with it? They hold on to it. That’s where trolls emerge from—sometimes from companies that didn’t make it, but they still have their IP. All they can do to make up their revenue is sue other people based on the IP they have. The worst kind of patent trolls are basically shell companies that only create IP, never intend to do anything with it, and then go after people who seemingly infringe on their patents.

That is so crazy. I want to zoom in a little bit and talk more specifically about Compass because that’s kind of where this whole conversation began. You wrote a story about Compass Pathways and their attempts to patent various things related to psilocybin therapy. But a lot of folks who are listening might not really know all of the hubbub around Compass because, I mean, talk about insider baseball drama. I remember first hearing about Compass when they had just gone from being a nonprofit entity to a for-profit company. People at that time within the psychedelic space—this might have been 2019, maybe 2018—people were like, “Oh, the first big bad wolf of psychedelic pharma has arrived.” This company, they were nonprofit, now they’re for-profit. A lot of longtime therapists within the field who had been part of Compass when they were a nonprofit and had given them a lot of information about best practices regarding psychedelic therapy, how you prepare people, navigate the experience, and integration—all of this languaging—felt like they had been gutted for their expertise and left to the wayside. It took a couple of years for people not within psychedelics but interested in the dynamics within psychedelics to start paying attention and talking about this narrative of Compass as the big bad wolf. Can you talk to us a little more about some of the fiery debate around Compass and whether it is or is not an ethical company?

Yeah. I wrote a piece called “Is It Possible to Have an Ethical Psychedelic Company?” The answer was kind of like, is there any ethical company? Once profit is your motive, there are things that happen, and you can be happy or sad about them. I think Compass—here’s the deal with Compass. The nonprofit to for-profit transition is really important in their story because people got their feelings hurt during that process. It started them off on a bad foot with people in the psychedelic community. As you said, there are people who volunteered a lot of their time and energy with the idea that they were participating in something that would become a nonprofit, like MAPS or like Usona. That was the world they were in, the idea that we’re going to research this and develop it, but it’s going to be nonprofit. That really matched everybody’s values who were giving their time. When they transitioned to a for-profit, Olivia Goldhill wrote about this. I think it was when she was at Vox. People were really upset about it. Then they started doing things that all for-profit biotech companies do, which is that they started filing patents on stuff. They started using the money from the patents to fund their clinical trials, which are very expensive. It’s not necessarily that what they did is unethical. What they did was common practice with every other biotech or pharma company that exists in the world.

Because in the psychedelic community, people thought, “We’re going to do biotech differently,” that was the wakeup call. Just because this is a psychedelic company doesn’t mean it’s not a pharmaceutical company. It doesn’t mean they’re not going to have to file patents to fund their research, which is fine. Maybe they will file patents that are on the boundary of what we think is a good patent or not, just like other pharma companies do. I think that’s the reason why Compass is important. It was the first big company, but it was the first big company that signaled to everybody else that, hey, psychedelic biotech is not going to be different from regular biotech. It is going to be exactly the same, and it’s going to have a lot of the same problems. It may also come with some perks. It may be able to generate millions of dollars of investment, which other biotech companies do. That’s something that psychedelics had never done before in the traditional pharma space. But those two things go together.

That’s why the story of Compass is really interesting and why I focused on them so much because they were the big first one. They represented this ideological shift or a coming-of-age moment for the psychedelic industry and the challenging of their patent, the Polymorph patent by Carey Turnbull and Freedom to Operate. It was a really good window into how the patent system works and what happens when people don’t like a patent, how expensive it is to challenge it. They ultimately lost that patent challenge. It really elucidated what that whole process is like. I should also say that story was important because Carey Turnbull, even being so against Compass’s patent, has patents himself with his own companies for psilocybin and for OCD. It’s really hard to say someone is ethical or not ethical because people are just operating within a system that allows behavior that’s on the border of skirting the law.

Right. That’s why it’s so important that we’re having these conversations because we see a lot of people trying to create this false dichotomy in the psychedelic space between the good guys and the bad guys. But that’s just getting increasingly harder to uphold, especially as MAPS, which was for the longest time the nonprofit in the space, has now established a for-profit arm and rebranded. I just want to say for folks who don’t know, Compass went public in 2020. I checked it out last week, and they currently have a market cap of around 600 million dollars. Carey Turnbull is one of these names that, again, if you’re not in the psychedelic industry, you probably haven’t heard of Carey Turnbull. But there are a lot of these people behind the curtain of the psychedelic industry who are very well-capitalized and have been working hand-in-hand with researchers and other folks in the field for often more than a decade. You haven’t heard their names, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t had an incredible amount of influence on how the psychedelic movement has unfolded. Carey Turnbull is one of them. As Shayla mentioned, he, along with others, decided to challenge Compass’s attempt to patent their version of synthetic psilocybin.

In that application, he

had a quote that I thought was really interesting that I wrote down. He said, “There are an almost infinite number of novel contributions to be made to the future of psychedelic science. That there is a molecule named psilocybin and that it can be useful in treating depression is not one of them.” You put that in your story. It’s so good.

Yes. Again, this question of what is novel, what should the patent office consider to be novel, what are the boundaries for novelty—this is a question that has been argued about in the patent world for a long time. Put psychedelics to the side. When I was doing this reporting, I was interviewing people who have been arguing and fighting for patent reform for decades. I was like, “We are having these issues where people are able to get patents on things that we don’t think are novel.” They’re like, “Welcome, join the club. We have been fighting this for decades.” They’re like, “I can’t believe you are just learning about this right now.” There are people—it was actually amazing. I started talking to patent experts and patent reform advocates who didn’t know anything about psychedelics at all. They were some of my best sources for reporting on all of these stories because they have been in the muck of this for a really long time. It’s such a good example of how psychedelic journalism has to look beyond itself. The people who had the most expertise on this didn’t know what psilocybin was. I’m like, “Oh, it’s mushrooms.” They’re like, “Okay, cool.” They didn’t know that, but they could talk to you for a long time about how that boundary for novelty started and how it has changed in America over time. Other countries don’t allow for polymorph patents, but the United States does. There are all these really interesting nuances in how psychedelic medicine is going to unfold that exist in experts in other fields.

Oh my gosh, I could talk and talk to you about this. There’s so much more to say about Compass and all the drama around Compass and some of their investors, including Peter Thiel and German billionaire Christian Angermayer, and some of the fights Christian Angermayer has gotten into with Tim Ferriss on Twitter—now X, never going to call it X. There’s some juicy stuff here. For those of you who really want to get into what exactly Compass tried to do and successfully managed to do in terms of their patent and polymorph patents, Shayla does an amazing job breaking down what a polymorph is in her story in Vice. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. Right now, we’re going to take a quick break.

For those of you who don’t know, Double Blind began as a print magazine five years ago that I had the idea for when I was meditating. It hasn’t been easy. We’ve been up against a lot, from censorship to all the challenges of running a media startup in the 21st century. We vowed to never have a paywall over our articles and to always offer scholarships for our educational offerings so people are not locked out from the information they need to heal. This has all been made possible by the support of our members. Our membership comes with journeys to help people prepare for and process their psychedelic experiences. We’ve teamed up with our favorite people in the psychedelic space to offer breathwork, cannabis ceremonies, integration circles, and more. Plus, the membership comes with a free subscription to our print magazine, which comes out twice a year. If you feel called, I invite you to join us.

Now I want to talk a little bit about some of your reporting on the psychedelic hype, so to speak. There’s an organic transition here from our last conversation around patents because there’s a lot of hype in the psychedelic industry, right? Among people who want to get in and people who want to invest, there’s also a lot of hype among researchers and individual people who want to have psychedelic experiences. There’s just hype all around, and it’s affecting how people are investing in the space, potentially too aggressively. It’s affecting how researchers are talking about psychedelics. I’m especially interested in talking to you about this because, as mentioned, you’ve reported on so many other facets of the mental health industry more broadly. I’m curious to hear, in your reporting on other novel mental health treatments that are coming about, how does that put into perspective for you the degree to which people are saying, “We need a novel solution, and psychedelics are it”?

Really, I think this is where my fatigue or weariness about hyping something up so much comes from writing about other novel miracle solutions to the mental health epidemic. You hear this over and over again, from natural supplements to things like transcranial magnetic stimulation to the promise that we’re going to have really personalized individual psychiatry based on biomarkers. Even back to SSRIs, all the debate about them—are they placebo, do they work, are they harmful? It’s just become clear to me from writing about mental health for a long time that there will never be a single intervention that works for every single person. Mental health is incredibly complicated. Even the boundaries of what a diagnosis is are being hotly contested in the mainstream psychiatric world. Is a mental disorder really a brain disorder? Is it something else? Does it come from the environment? Does it come from your genes? Is it in your body? Is it trauma? People are threatening to throw out the entire DSM one day and then also re-codifying it the next day. It’s just so complicated. So when I read an article that’s like, “Oh, the cure for depression,” I’m like, “It’s not. It’s definitely not.” I would love if that was the case, but having a little nuance in how we talk about mental health treatments is just more accurate. It’s a messy landscape and industry. For a person who’s really struggling with their mental health to hear that there’s a cure and be disappointed over and over again, I think, causes a lot of harm. It makes people get their hopes up and then feel hopeless again.

When I think about a journalist’s role in communicating to the public, I always think, “What if this is a person for whom this intervention won’t work?” You can still talk about the research and the potential promise, but I think about the use of anecdotes a lot. So many shorter mainstream pieces about psychedelics just give that really good, fast anecdote: This person was super depressed, nothing else worked for them, then they took mushrooms, now they’re fine. A lot of those complicated narratives appeared in the news. If we think about communicating about psychedelics to people who are not enthusiasts, coming to this from a place of distress, we need to be more responsible in communicating how variable it can be.

I love that you brought up all these other treatments that you’ve reported on that are not related to psychedelics, for which people are really excited. Can you talk to me a little more about what your experience has been like talking to folks who are really excited about the promise of treatments that are not psychedelics? What parallels do you see, and do you feel like psychedelics are showing more promise than some of these other things, or is our perception of the promise skewed because we’re all personally really attached to the idea of legalization?

I think it’s complicated. There are ways in which psychedelics as a mental health intervention seem to be more promising because you don’t have to take them all the time. I like that there’s a therapeutic component. They seem to really help people come to these massive insights paired with psychotherapy that they just weren’t able to reach on their own. The studies, in general, are still really small. They capture something really important that’s happening, but at the same time, I just still think we have a lot more to learn. To answer your question, I remember when all the work was coming out about transcranial magnetic stimulation. I went to conferences where people said, “This is going to be the future, and everybody’s going to do this, and this is going to be the thing that’s paired with psychotherapy that will be really easy, and everyone will just be cured of depression.” It is a really interesting, useful thing that I know some people have done, that a lot of people have gotten help from. Some people try it and it doesn’t work very well. It’s hard to access and can be really expensive. Therapy doesn’t necessarily cover it. Some people do it with therapy, some people do it without. It’s a good example of how these adjunctive therapies are difficult to break into the mainstream. That’s something where you don’t even need really intense psychotherapeutic support, and the potential side effects or adverse effects are not that profound. But I still heard people get really excited about this, both in my personal life and in reporting, and then just kind of not have it really work and then feel really bummed. Sometimes they had gone off their SSRI in order to do it. There’s a lot of parallels. People make really important decisions about their medication and their personal life and what’s going to happen to them based on what they think will finally help them, and when it doesn’t work, they get even more depressed.

I appreciate you bringing that up. I think I said at our panel when I was moderating at Psychedelic Science that you were on, the sexy headline is: A veteran has PTSD, goes to the Amazon, does ayahuasca, and their life is transformed. This is too long of a headline, so don’t hire me as your editor. The headline is something like that. What’s not a sexy headline is: Lots of people do mushrooms, some people are helped by them, most people still have problems. Which is probably the most accurate way I could describe it. You can have a transformative experience and simultaneously still struggle a lot in your life. I can say personally that I’ve had transformative psychedelic experiences, but I still sometimes struggle with sadness. I still sometimes struggle with my inner critic. All these things are just a part of the human psyche. What are we all trying to achieve? We’re all trying to be perfectly happy, perfectly healthy, and perfectly whole on a planet that is degrading before our eyes. Sorry, I’m getting off my soapbox now, but there’s something there. This idea that people just want to be perfectly happy, perfectly whole, and perfectly healthy—is that even the human condition?

Something really interesting I’ve been thinking about is how it’s been very striking to me that when people in the psychedelics world talk about things like PTSD or depression or anxiety and using psychedelics for these things, there is a lack of critical thinking around the boundaries of the conditions in a way that is happening in other areas of psychiatry. The thing in psychiatry right now is asking, what is depression? What is a pathological amount of sadness, and what is just an adaptive response to terrible conditions? How much of these things really come from inside of a person versus their external conditions that are making them feel that way? The answer is always that it’s some combination of both. People are really fighting back to answer that. Dealing with these philosophy of psychiatry questions that I don’t see that much in psychedelics yet because I think people in the space are just advocating for their usefulness, which may still be the case depending on the origin of mental distress. But being more critical even about what we’re talking about—psychedelics for X, whatever it is—I think that would just lend itself to more nuance in talking about these things, not as cures but as potential interventions for certain people in certain cases that may or may not work. As you said, that’s a really unsexy way to describe them, but it is kind of the case. That’s still useful. I think that’s still good enough. I remember when the New England Journal of Medicine paper came out that compared psilocybin to an SSRI. That was a complicated paper because it didn’t achieve significance using one of the depression scales, which was the one they picked to use. But it did in a bunch of other measures and scales. It was still about half and half, or something like that. People felt better afterwards on the SSRI and taking psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. I remember thinking people were like, “Oh, like 50%, that’s pretty,” people were kind of poo-pooing that result. I think it was a Compass thing, so their stock crashed or something like that. I was like, “That’s amazing. 50% is so good.” For a mental health treatment for treatment-resistant depression, that is awesome. I feel like having realistic expectations of what any one intervention can do for a general population of people is so important. You don’t have to hype it up for it to be valuable or useful. I think, again, coming from the mental health world, I’m like, “That sounds really good to me, actually. That sounds amazing.” It’s never going to be 100%.

I really appreciate you bringing this up. It makes me think about how much bad science journalism there is. I also went to Columbia and got my master’s. When I was there, I learned how to read studies and look at how many people are in the study, how rigorous it is, what the design is—is it a double-blind randomized clinical trial, is it an observational study? It’s really a systemic problem we see in journalism. Journalists are being put on these content hamster wheels where they have to write so quickly and slap headlines on things that are going to drive clicks to websites. You were really fortunate that you were able to write… I can’t even imagine how long these patent stories took you. I was reading through the one on Compass, and I was like, “Oh my God, this must have taken her, what, six months?” It’s crazy.

Yeah, tragically, I still had to write about a story a week at Vice, so most of those were written in a week, which is also part of the hamster wheel thing. We would have way better psychedelic journalism if people had more time to write articles and actually learn.

Way better journalism if people had more time.

Yes, that’s what I meant. Much better journalism if people had more time to work on stuff. I wrote a really long piece about a Nature Medicine paper that people were critiquing the statistics in the paper. I think it was three days. I was on the phone with statisticians up till midnight, trying to understand exactly what it was and making sure that I could communicate what people were fighting about. It’s not that the study was bad; the study was still valuable, but what they were claiming based on the statistics they did—there was a gap between those two things. That’s really hard to understand, especially if the paper is in Nature Medicine and it seems to have a good sample size. There are all these nuances in understanding just the knowledge that we have about psychedelics that we’re still working on. Of course, there are forms of knowledge that don’t just come from scientific studies, but we should still strive to do the science and do it well and also understand it well or communicate what the limitations of the kinds of knowledge are when we’re writing about them.

Totally. Encouraging folks, as always, to raise an eyebrow or two when they see a headline that says something to the effect of, “Study says,” or “Science says.” It’s like, does study say or is journalist on a really tight deadline?

Totally. Friendly reminder that journalists often don’t write their headlines.

Right, that’s true. That’s true. What, from all the research that you’ve read, is your high-level takeaway regarding the promise of psychedelics and also the ways in which we need to be critical? What is the research saying and what is it not saying right now?

I think for some people in very specific contexts, the measurement of their mental distress using specific scales changes after they take these drugs with psychotherapy. That’s a lot of caveats. That doesn’t mean if you do shrooms, that doesn’t mean if you do shrooms in Joshua Tree with your friends that you’re going to have the same outcome as someone that’s doing synthetic psilocybin with preparation, navigation, and integration in a clinical context.

Exactly. Who knows how it will be different for every person? Someone might have a better experience in the container of a clinical trial. Maybe you don’t like that, and you would have a better experience in Joshua Tree with your friends. It’s just so individual. I think all we can really say is this is a thing that, in these contexts, makes some people report changes on these scales that are being used in the trials that seem to be beneficial. What that means when it is dispersed into the public as a treatment, we don’t really know. There’s a very well-known phenomenon that effect sizes go down once something becomes legal, FDA-approved, and actually used as medicine. Effect sizes are always higher within clinical trials, especially when they’re being applied for FDA approval. That’s because everything is so tightly controlled; the groups are smaller. Once it’s out in the world, it’s just messier. It could be a reporting problem, but generally, effect sizes always go down. I think we should be prepared for that. MDMA is going to be the first thing that someone can actually go and get a prescription for and use it for PTSD. One of the reasons that I’ve sort of lowered the frequency of writing about psychedelics in the past year is partly because I left Vice but also because I think there’s a lot that’s going to need to be written about really soon. I still feel like we’re in a holding pattern. We need FDA approval to happen and for these things to actually go out into the world to really see what they’re going to do. There’s only so much that you can know from these research trials, which are so important. I hope they keep going, and there are all these more interesting questions that we can ask about the ways in which psychedelics work, what are the conditions, what are the variables that really change outcomes. The question of the importance of psychotherapy is one of the hugest ones. We still don’t really have a handle on what kind of therapy, how much. Understanding how to help people through adverse events is going to be really important. Jules Evans is doing great work on that. But we just don’t really know. People want FDA approval to be this stamp of certainty. What it actually is is a stamp of safety. It’s saying that up to a certain threshold, we believe that this is something that people with this kind of mental distress can go and maybe get help from. It won’t kill them immediately. We don’t want drugs that do that. But how it’s really going to play out, we don’t know. We’ve never really had drugs that influence your psychology like this on the market before. I think it’s exciting, and it’s also something that’s big either way. It’s just going to be a big deal for those who have access to it, or it’ll be too expensive, and nobody will take it, and everything will just stay exactly the same.

There’s a lot to consider here. I think the general takeaway for me and hopefully for our listeners too is, yes, psychedelics have shown promise, and also, read the fine print. Or listen to this podcast. We’ll be back in a moment.

This episode is brought to you by Psyched Wellness. Psyched Wellness is on a mission to bring people the healing magic of Amanita muscaria mushrooms with their product. If you haven’t heard, there has been a growing number of folks who are exploring the prospect of Amanita muscaria extracts in small doses for anxiety. Amanita muscaria is not a scheduled substance in the United States, unlike psilocybin, so it’s something that more and more people are exploring and getting interested in. It’s something that Psyched Wellness is devoted to. There are some things about Calm specifically that are unique and worth noting. Firstly, it’s a natural-made supplement made with handpicked Amanita muscaria mushrooms. That’s important because there are a lot of supplements where you don’t know where they’re getting their ingredients. You don’t know where they’re getting their sources. It’s really important when you’re embarking on a journey of taking a new tincture, taking a new supplement, that you really know that you are purchasing a product that is made with care and intention. You know where they’re getting their ingredients. Some of the benefits are that this Amanita muscaria extract may promote better sleep and may help you wake up feeling more rested without feeling groggy. It also may provide physical and mental stress support, which is something I know a lot of us are needing at this particular moment. If you’re curious about adding some Calm to your life, you can check them out at psychedwellness.com and use code DOUBLEBLIND for 10% off at checkout.

Now we’re going to get to everyone’s favorite part of the show, trip tips. As a reminder for everyone who’s listening, sorry if you’ve heard me say this before, but we are journalists. We’re not doctors, psychiatrists, or scientists. We’re going to riff on some of your questions about tripping, but take it with a grain of salt, so to speak. Shayla, I’m going to punt to you. Do you want to pull a question from our community?

Sure. Here’s the question: “I’ve heard that Oregon and Colorado have legalized psychedelics. What’s the deal? Can I go there and do mushrooms legally now?”

Great question. Everyone’s very confused about this. I would love to talk about Oregon specifically, which I know more about because I have been following and reporting as they were developing the rules for legalized mushroom use there. Something big just happened in Oregon, which I think is a really good example of how psychedelics can’t solve all of our problems. Measure 110 was recently repealed. A little backstory, and then this will answer the question about legal use in Oregon. Measure 109 and 110 were passed at the same time. Measure 109 allowed for psilocybin service centers to be created. These are places that have to apply to get a license to give psilocybin to people who come and pay to take them there. You have to have this license and a licensed person to take mushrooms with. That person does not have to be a therapist. It can be anyone who follows the guidelines and rules set by the Oregon Health Authority and the Psilocybin Advisory Board. That was a long, complicated process. I listened to many hours of those meetings as they tried to come up with the rules. Now you can go to Oregon and go to a service center and take psilocybin there at the service center if you want, if you can afford it.

Yes, there are problems with how this has actually ended up happening, which is that a lot of the service centers are incredibly expensive. Many of them resemble other kinds of legal retreats in other parts of the world, which cost up to thousands of dollars for a few days and one or two dosing sessions. Some of them look like really beautiful experiences. They’re kind of like spa-like places. They’re very pretty. You get all your food included. Maybe sometimes you do other intentional or meditative practices. Maybe there’s a sound bath or breathwork or something like that, but they’re expensive. They’re super expensive. I read an article recently that most of the people who are coming to these service centers are not people from Oregon. They’re actually coming from out of town. It’s definitely kind of a psychedelic tourism thing, which was a concern when this was all being developed that it would just be inaccessible and very expensive. I think even more troubling is that Jules Evans in his Substack recently wrote about some complaints that have been filed to the Oregon Health Authority about what’s going on at some of these service centers. There are instances where people who don’t have any experience working with people with mental health issues are doing some questionable woo-woo type stuff. People feel like they’re not getting the support they need. They’re taking mushrooms, getting scared, overwhelmed, and not being followed up with. There was one person who complained that someone kept playing jam band music and wouldn’t turn it down. The music was really loud. One person got outright scammed.

That’s happening at the same time. Measure 110 decriminalized all drugs in Oregon. The idea was that they were going to have this really progressive drug policy to help with some of the issues they’ve been having. They decriminalized all drugs but didn’t match it with the social services that people might need who are struggling with substance abuse issues. The result is that people really pushed back because the drug problems started getting terrible in Oregon. Downtown Portland specifically, the fentanyl addiction problem there is massive. It’s hard and sad and scary. It caused enough of a public outcry that they repealed Measure 110, and now drugs are recriminalized in Oregon. At the same time, the service centers are still fine, though. You had this public health problem of substance abuse and the criminalization of drugs. The thing that was actually trying to address that is done, it’s repealed. We’re back to criminalizing drugs. Meanwhile, the $3,000 bougie mushroom retreat center is still fine. You can still go to that. I think there’s something really important in that dichotomy of actually trying to resolve complicated public health issues versus the spa-like wellness thing that’s happening with Measure 109. That remains untouched. The answer is yes, you can go to Oregon and still do that if you can afford it.

Yes. It’s really complicated. I think another thing in Colorado—maybe you know the answer to this, I can’t remember. Something that happened in Oregon is that a bunch of counties opted out of Measure 109, which meant that they voted to not allow psilocybin service centers in their county. That was complicated. I think Colorado decided to not allow for an opt-out. I have to check.

I don’t know about that. I think it was up for discussion, and I don’t remember where it landed. That’s really important too because when you think about counties coming together to opt out, I’d be curious. Is this a psilocybin PR issue? What is the reason that they’re opting out? In the psychedelics world, we can sometimes forget that we are in a bubble. Thinking about psychedelics as a mental health intervention, accessibility doesn’t just come from money. It comes from the idea that this thing could be helpful. There’s still a gap. A lot of people have outdated ideas about psychedelics, or they feel worried or wary about them. That’s another reason to cut down on the hype. If you’re actually wanting to talk to someone and meet them where they are about this use as a novel drug intervention, just promising that it’s going to do amazing things and opening up a service center in people’s counties where they’re like, “Wait a minute, mushrooms for mental health? What are you talking about?” I think that, again, Oregon provided a lot of examples of people missing each other in terms of what they really want, their education level, the needs they have in their community, how they feel about drugs more generally, and psychedelics’ position within that. It will be interesting to see how Colorado does and to compare the two and also to keep an eye on Oregon throughout the rest of the year now that Measure 110 is repealed but Measure 109 is going to keep trucking along.

Yes. I’ll just speak quickly to Colorado. They passed the Natural Medicine Health Act, which is opening similar centers to the centers in Oregon. They’re going through this rulemaking process like they did in Oregon to figure out exactly what’s going to be required in order to open a center, in order to become a licensed facilitator, and all the rest. One of the things that’s unique about the Colorado Natural Medicine Health Act is that in the beginning, the service centers are only going to be serving psilocybin. But the bill also opens the possibility for other psychedelics. I want to say it’s non-peyote-derived mescaline, maybe iboga. I can’t remember, don’t quote me on it. There are a couple of other psychedelics that can be served in these centers a few years following the opening of the psilocybin service centers. There is a decriminalization aspect to the Natural Medicine Health Act, although some people think it didn’t go far enough. This is all really important to be talking about because, again, going back to journalists and the hamster wheel and the headlines, you might see, “Oh, Oregon has legalized mushrooms,” or “Oregon has legalized mushroom therapy.” It’s like, well, sort of. Yes, anyone can technically go to Oregon now who’s over the age of 18 and try to have a session at one of these centers. One of the things that makes it unique from the FDA is that you don’t need a diagnosis. Anyone is qualified to do it, assuming the center thinks that you’re safe to do it. But that doesn’t mean accessibility. It’s just expensive, and there are waitlists. Also, some people might just want to do shrooms in their house. Is that okay? Not according to the law.

Not according to the law. It’s really interesting. I think it’s important to think about what kind of drug policy or health intervention through psychedelics is actually going to be impactful and accessible for most people. Oregon had a lot of hopes pinned to it, and the reality has been disappointing.

Right. To answer the question, sort of. It’s complicated.

Yes, always the answer, sadly, for everything. People want a simple answer.

Folks, if you want the chance for us to answer your questions on the Double Blind Magic Hour, you can email them to us at magichour@doubleblindmag.com. Before we wrap up, Shayla, we always like to invite our guests, or in this case, our correspondent, to do a couple of minutes of meditation with us and just sort of digest the conversation. Is that something you’re up for?

Yes, sounds great. [Music]

Hello, I’m Sky Weaver, resident facilitator at Double Blind. I invite you to perhaps soften your eyes, wiggle your body and your spine just a little bit until you come to a gentle, dynamic stillness, and perhaps noticing the breath as it comes into the body, feeling your feet or your seat beneath you, and perhaps taking one deep breath here and letting out a little bit of sound, feeling free to wiggle that spine a little bit more, softening the shoulders, and taking a moment here simply to be. That’s it, right there. Taking a deep breath in, beginning to call yourself back into your body, perhaps bringing a smile to your face, and gently allowing your eyes to open. Welcome back.

If we’re going to talk about data around the promise of particular mental health treatments, there are very few people across the spectrum of ideological perspectives on mental health who would say, “Don’t meditate.”

Well, that’s also complicated. Willoughby Britton, yeah, Willoughby Britton, her last name is not Britton, she works at Brown, or she used to. She has this whole Adverse Events of Meditation study that’s been ongoing for a really long time. Very important. It’s complicated.

We will have you back on to talk about that. It’s distressing but also maybe nice. Almost nothing is universal. We’re all really different, so nothing can be the same for every single person.

I want to invite you to share your social handles, where folks can find you. Is there anything else—hopefully, we’ll have you back on—but is there anything else you want to share with the listeners coming out of this conversation?

I want to share that I think it’s possible to have a critical eye, ask questions, and have a nuanced, pluralist perspective on things and still be hopeful and excited and maybe curious above all, and find joy in that curiosity. Psychedelics are eternally interesting. It’s why I keep writing about them. Just because they don’t do something that’s very clean or universal doesn’t mean they’re not worthy of investigation on so many levels, be it personal, academic, or examining them through other lenses than just science. Me and Leon Nerone from Vice have started a Psychedelic Humanities Salon series in New York. If you’re a listener and interested in that, it’s about talking about conversations about psychedelics not just through a scientific lens but through anthropology, history, literature, and sociology. I think that having those two things together will make it a more accessible topic for everyone, whether they want it as medicine or something else.

Where do people find you?

Right now, I am freelancing for several places. Two of them are The Guardian and Psyche, which is the psychological-focused website of Aeon, a philosophy publication. I am on Twitter. I also will not call it X, but I am on Twitter, and that’s where I post basically all of my work and any events that I’m doing that are coming up.

Thank you so much for joining, Shayla.

Yes, thank you for having me.

Folks, if you want the chance for us to answer your questions on-air about tripping, you can email them to magichour@doubleblindmag.com. You can also check out the podcast website, doubleblindmag.com/magichour, for episodes, links to articles we referenced, and lots of other fun things. We’d love to hear your suggestions about who should come on or your thoughts about what we talked about today. There are so many different ways to hit us up. We’re also @doubleblindmag on all channels—TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. I want to give a shoutout to the amazing folks at Human Content who are producing this podcast and helping make it possible. They do a lot of great podcasts other than this one, so if you are an audiophile, you can check them out on Instagram and TikTok @humancontentpods. We want to say thanks to all of the great listeners for leaving wonderful feedback and awesome reviews. If you subscribe and comment on your favorite podcasting app or on YouTube, we might give you a shoutout on the podcast. The full video episodes are up every week on YouTube at Double Blind. Thanks again for listening. I’m your host, Shelby Hartman. Special thanks to our correspondent and journalist Shayla Love, our executive producers Aaron Korone, Rob Goldman, Shawnee Brooke, and Alex Field from the Double Blind team who also edits the show. Our engineer is Jason Porzo. Our music is by Om. To learn about the Double Blind Magic Hour program, disclaimer and ethics policy, and submission verification and licensing terms, you can go to doubleblindmag.com/magichour or reach out to us at magichour@doubleblindmag.com. The Double Blind Magic Hour is a Human Content and Double Blind production. Now let’s take you out on Guacamayo by Danit.

[Music]

Thanks for watching. If you’re thinking, “Gosh, I really need more Double Blind Magic Hour in my life,” you can start listening now by clicking on that playlist button right over there. New episodes are out every Monday, so please subscribe and join us each week on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. [Music]