At some psychedelic conferences, the majority of hands might remain down. Psychedelics aren’t drugs, the common narrative goes, they’re medicine. Here, nearly every hand shot up. This was the harm reduction room at the Oakland Psychedelics Conference, a Black-led event hosted by mycologist and policy advocate Reggie Harris and his psychedelic culture organization, Oakland Hyphae.

In its third year, the September 17-18 conference expanded to include programming from science and policy to mycology and cultivation, sex and health, religion, Indigenous perspectives, and a femme-led space where people walked barefoot and kids served tea.

It enabled Harris, for the first time, to dedicate two full days to harm reduction. The goal was to bring a harm reduction lens to a psychedelic conversation that’s often dominated by exceptionalist attitudes. Many of the speakers had a foot in both worlds. 

“It’s lacking the harm reduction ideas of radical inclusion and defiant hospitality.”

Panels centered challenging conversations about where the psychedelic mainstream falls short. “It’s lacking the harm reduction ideas of radical inclusion and defiant hospitality,” Byrd told Filter, adding that while many talk about “meeting people where they’re at,” they don’t do it physically. His HRTC offers mobile services, from harm reduction supplies to roving clinics and a pop-up kitchen, bringing care to the streets.

The harm reduction perspective is holistic, recognizing that truly living means having basic needs met, Yarelix Estrada of New York City Psychedelic Society said in one panel discussion, which means providing health care and housing as well as needles and naloxone.

“What I appreciate about harm reduction is that we all have the shared value or goal of keeping people alive,” she told Filter, while some in the psychedelic space don’t know what their goals are. For the loudest voices, it’s legalization through the medical model—but without a comprehensive view of access, this risks simply recreating systemic inequalities.

“As harm reductionists, we’re doing really hard work … to try to reduce the overdose epidemic [and] help people meet their needs,” Estrada continued. “I don’t see that as part of the psychedelic space. We hear people talking about how these things are going to change the world … [but] what are you doing to assure people are staying alive?”

Communities around substance use tend to fall into camps that rarely communicate, former community mental health worker Ayize Jama-Everett said in a panel: the harm reduction and anti-drug war crews, and psychedelics advocates. That made the conference a needed forum for connection and knowledge-sharing.

In many psychedelic spaces, panelists said, harm reduction conversations stop at calls to test your MDMA and LSD. But in Oakland, discussions called out the broad human impacts of failed drug policies and the need to not just normalize, but legalize all substances.

“If we’re serious about stopping the drug war … we need to [recognize] it’s not fentanyl killing people, it’s the fact that we’re living in prohibition,” Harris told Filter, linking this to the harms of capitalist systems. “It starts with the ‘least desirables’ of society, and ends up consuming us all.”

Whole industries, he said, revolve around keeping people undereducated and underemployed, and seeding misinformation about drugs and addiction. He credited Dr. Carl Hart, a neuroscientist whose work debunks exceptionalism and determinism, with opening his eyes to the need for broad legalization.

Panelists foregrounded similar messages: that most drug use is not problematic, and that use and substance use disorders exist on a continuum, guided by circumstances rather than genetics. Byrd and fellow organizer Leticia Brown, a therapist at Oakland’s Doorway Therapeutics, described growing up under the D.A.R.E. program, thinking they’d overdose on heroin if they smoked weed, or jump out a window if they used LSD.

“We’re taking back this idea and ‘just saying know,’” Byrd said in a panel. “Know what the drugs are and how they work, what you want from the drugs, and your limits.”

“One of the main reasons I use psychedelics is so I can keep doing harm reduction.”

Speakers touted the benefits of psychedelic therapy, while seeking to join it with harm reduction efforts. And since many harm reduction workers suffer burnout and other negative impacts, panelists said they’d like to see more programs aimed at them.

“One of the main reasons I use psychedelics is so I can keep doing harm reduction,” Estrada said. “I go through intense periods of burnout, and if I didn’t have a way to regulate my emotions … I’m not sure I’d be healthy enough to continue.”

Speakers Maurice Byrd, Rosalind McMillan and Yarelix Estrada 

Byrd offers psychedelic therapy and integration at sliding-scale rates to expand access. Doorway and Alchemy Community Therapy Center in Oakland—both of which offer ketamine therapy—also have sliding scales. But they have waitlists for discounted services, and even deep discounts leave many without access.

Patients who do find relief are also immediately sent back to the streets, making “recovery” a complex, moving target. The psychedelic mainstream has a narrower view of set and setting than harm reduction spaces, Byrd told Filter, which look at everything that impacts a person.

The harm reduction perspective, however, tends not to include spirituality, he added, and here, it could take a page from the “love and light crowd.” The average psychedelics user also knows a great deal about drugs, Byrd and Jama-Everett said, calling for greater knowledge-sharing.

Brown spoke of offering a “menu of options” for people who want to “change their relationship” with a drug, such as dosage, time of day and other factors. “People get to figure out what works best for them, and I get to support them.”

Everyone emphasized using the word “drugs” to refer to all substances.

Doorway therapist and longtime harm reductionist Rosalind McMillan, who works with queer people of color in Oakland, said she explores with patients, “What is it you’re trying to achieve, and is it working? Is there something we can figure out how to get for you with other tools?”

Those options might include psychedelic therapy, with substances like psilocybin, ibogaine and ketamine being studied as promising treatments for substance use disorder. Yet many mental health studies still exclude people with histories of using certain drugs. And all agreed on the need for approaches that are more personal and less medical.

We’re all drug users, speakers said, channeling Hart, it’s just that some substances are socially sanctioned. Everyone emphasized using the word “drugs” to refer to all substances, and the need for people to “come out of the closet” as users, especially those in high-profile positions.

The term “psychedelics” is often applied unevenly, they said, used to refer to not only drugs like mushrooms and DMT but ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, and MDMA, an empathogenic amphetamine. Meanwhile, crack/cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and especially fentanyl are “drugs,” othering the substances and their users.

The Oakland conference’s organizers reflect the diversity of the legacy psychedelic and plant medicine communities. This stands in contrast to mainstream psychedelic conferences in the United States. In June, at the Psychedelic Science conference organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), founder Rick Doblin’s keynote was interrupted by Indigenous protesters over lack of representation.

The face of the mainstream movement is largely white, male and upper-middle-class, panelists said, which is reflected in everything from its goals to the nature of clinical trials. Meanwhile, those most impacted by “other” drugs are people of color and the poor, Byrd said. And those who draw lines between psychedelics and other drugs are recreating the conditions that caused prohibition in the first place.

Estrada asked of psychedelic leaders: “How do you speak about people who use drugs, health care, [and] housing? Is that part of your orientation, … or is it just this fluffy language around how psychedelics alone will somehow bring us to net-zero trauma by 2027?”

“Psychedelics won’t make us not racist or boundary-crossers.”

Mainstream associations and clinics, having failed to recruit diverse practitioners and participants, are now reaching out to leaders like Byrd to legitimize their offerings, he told Filter. And Estrada cited festivals where white “support” staff disproportionately called police on people of color having challenging experiences, and violated consent with female guests.

“Psychedelics won’t make us not racist or boundary-crossers,” Brown said.

Yet the discussions that unfolded over these two days suggested that harm reduction and psychedelia have more in common than it seems—everyone just needs to talk to each other more. Many in the rooms called this emphasis the conference’s biggest success.

Connecting the communities in this way, Jama-Everett said, could help the psychedelic movement build “a coalition, so it’s not just a bunch of white hippies … [but] everybody, from the ground up.”

Byrd called for the better-funded psychedelic therapy facilities to become more holistic, including all substance users. “Every time you turn around someone has opened up a new healing center,” he said. “Why not orient one toward bringing people in?”

“We don’t have time to be fucking around,” Harris told Filter. “I understand the incrementalist approach, but … it’s been more than 40 years since the drug war started. The government has [very easily] been able to rebrand and sell it back to people who are against [it]. … We need to talk about the real shit.”

Correction, October 3: This article has been edited to reflect that Rosalind McMillan works at Doorway Therapeutics, not Alchemy Community Therapy as originally stated.

All photographs by Holly Regan

The post How to Unite the Psychedelic and Harm Reduction Movements? appeared first on Filter.

“We want to buy some truffles,” he says, with mustered swagger. He’s referring to the fruiting body that psilocybin mushrooms sprout from, legally sold at shops like this across the country.

Naturopath and salesperson Dave Achula smiles at them curiously from beneath his fluffy brown curls and wide-brimmed felt hat. They’re a contrast from the regulars who stop in to top up their microdoses and tinctures.

Achula asks if they’ve ever used psychedelics before and what their intentions are for the journey. Only the ringleader has, but he’s flummoxed by the other question. “I dunno,” he stammers, “we were just gonna go to the city center and see some cool shit.”

Intention, Achula tells them warmly, is what you’re bringing into the experience and hoping to get out of it. He explains the importance of set and setting when working with psychedelics, and encourages the trio to consider a more peaceful environment, preferably in nature. He also recommends that they set expectations with each other, and that the first-timers start with a half-dose.

Blushing but nodding along, the ringleader acknowledges that the nearby sand dunes might be a better location than the city center. He and his friends agree to start low, go slow and make a plan.

“The main focus is maximizing the benefits and minimizing the risks.”

This respectful, informal but well-directed conversation was one of the best examples of harm reduction I’ve seen in the legal psychedelic landscape. Dutch smartshops are often the first and only point of contact for people beginning their psychedelic exploration in a climate that isn’t as warm to these substances as many believe.

Staff and owners bear a big responsibility, and safety is paramount to people like Yvonne Mosbach, Herbal Spirit’s owner, whose experience in smartshops goes back almost 20 years.

“Self-regulation has been fundamental to the structure of things in the Netherlands from the beginning,” she told Filter. Members of the smartshop supply chain determine their own standards of safety and care, working with health ministries to codify guidelines on age restrictions (18 and up), informed consent and harm reduction principles.

“It’s important that all involved, including drug policymakers, scientific researchers [and others] find common ground when it comes to harm reduction,” Mosbach added, “where the main focus [is] maximizing the benefits and minimizing the risks.”

The industry is mediated by an association called VLOS (translated, the National Consultation Association of Smart Products), which represents smartshops, growers, wholesalers and resellers—all of whom sign an agreement to abide by the association’s ethical and safety standards.

The goal, according to the VLOS website, is “maintaining a favorable social and economic climate so the legal trade and sale of smart products remains possible.”

VLOS liaises with health ministries and the media to negotiate guidelines, advocate for members, stay up-to-date on regulations and promote a positive public image for the shops. An annual course for members teaches minimum safety standards, guidelines for first-time users, pharmacological information, and how to deal with customers who are under the influence or become aggressive when refused service.

Deep listening, Achula emphasized, is the most important skill for a smartshop worker.

Owners and staff who abide by this agreement play complex roles: educator and harm reduction advocate; herbalist and pharmacist; de facto therapist and spiritual guide. They advise customers on everything from products and dosage to expectation-setting and how to navigate a trip, even sharing playlists.

Deep listening, Achula emphasized, is the most important skill for a smartshop worker. “People trust the person behind the counter,” he told Filter. “They come [to] me with their deepest traumas. … It’s a great responsibility to hold space for those people, to really listen to them, and find which plant can help them in this process.”

If someone comes in looking to treat a symptom, Achula said, he tries to uncover the root of the problem, whether it’s physical or emotional: a tenet of herbalism. Mosbach trained him to always get curious about people’s background, especially first-time users, before selling them anything psychoactive.

“Some people come in thinking they need salvia or truffles, and I talk them out of it, [and suggest] working with cacao, some herbs or breathwork first,” Mosbach said. “I tune into the situation: How sensitive is this person, what is their experience and what is their intention? With all the information, you can make proposals.”

There is a lot of misinformation about psychedelics, Achula said, and some people just come in looking for a light show. “I always tell them about the full experiences I’ve had. It could be laughter, wanting to dance, or fun visuals, but you can also experience confrontation and sadness, and traumas may come up. This is all part of the process, and if you allow yourself to surrender to these feelings … then it’s just an experience that you can learn from.”

With no formal public education efforts in the Netherlands about psychedelics, a smartshop may be the only source of information a person has before they trip. Mosbach considers preparation and integration part of a shop’s informal purview. As well as suggesting practices and guidelines, they may offer herbal supplements to support the nervous system and ease re-entry.

It’s all a far cry from the early days of legal psilocybin access in the United States. For example, Oregon’s tightly regulated model allows people to use only by appointment at licensed service centers, in the presence of trained facilitators. Prices, as a result of this costly set-up, are far out of reach for many—and some consider the unregulated market a better fit both in terms of cost and care provided.

While a single high-dose session can cost $3,500 at an Oregon service center, 15 grams of psilocybin truffles—enough for several high-dose journeys—costs just €19.50 at Herbal Spirit.

At the end of the day, “If I don’t feel good about selling to someone, I don’t do it,” Achula said. But he acknowledges that harm reduction can be complicated in these scenarios: They can go somewhere else or buy online, where there’s no chance for dialogue.

The tourist draw is currently driving a slow retreat from the country’s famously open-minded stance on substance use.

Self-regulation has both upsides and downsides: Owners’ voices are heard, but they’re also blamed when something goes wrong, and one bad actor can ruin it for everyone, Mosbach said. VLOS can make recommendations, but members are still only one bad headline away from a business-threatening ban.

While truffles are legal in the Netherlands, mushrooms are not—and neither are any processed psychedelic products, including chocolate and gummies. Not even cannabis is legal, though possession of up to 5 grams for personal use is decriminalized, and sale and use is tolerated at the “coffeeshops” where tourists flock to smoke.

This draw is currently driving a slow retreat from the country’s famously open-minded stance on substance use: Smoking cannabis is no longer allowed on public streets, and Dutch authorities are considering banning tourists from coffeeshops to protect locals from rowdy crowds.

Mushrooms were banned in 2007 after a series of incidents that authorities tied to the fungi—92 percent of which reportedly involved tourists who ignored safety guidelines from smartshops. Like their primary advice: not to mix psychedelics with substances like alcohol and cannabis.

VLOS filed an injunction request, claiming the risks of mushrooms were being inflated, but it was rejected by the court. Previous attempts on behalf of the organization to institute additional safety measures, such as a three-day waiting period for mushrooms, were also rejected by the health ministry.

After the ban, many shops went out of business. Allowing truffles to remain legal was a compromise, but other substances, such as those including DMT, are banned even for religious use. In 2018, despite acknowledging that this breached religious freedom for the Santo Diame church, Dutch courts ruled that banning ayahuasca was justified on public-health grounds in 2018—reversing an earlier exemption and walking back a once-progressive drug policy.

A large community of advocates, including researchers and psychiatrists as well as underground guides and facilitators, is working to open a dialogue with the government. They hope to negotiate the integration of safe ayahuasca use into Dutch society, but the future remains uncertain.

Today, “there are smartshops that are really working in alignment with the advice and the law, like my business, but there are also new guys [who] push the limits, and it puts us in disgrace,” Mosbach said, citing truffle wholesalers and retailers who offer bulk discounts and advertise on Facebook—people who “made it extremely commercialized … because they’re not part of our association.”  That means they haven’t signed up to the harm reduction principles and community spirit of VLOS.

Many independent growers have additionally been driven out of business as a result of the growing dominance of warehousers who can undercut them on price, a phenomenon already seen in the nascent US market.

“Accidents happen, but we are still driving cars and flying. We do it because it’s useful and beneficial, setting rules and guidelines for all involved.”

That’s why Mosbach sources locally and goes with personal relationships whenever possible. The truffles, microdose packs and grow kits her shop sells are supplied by a local grower. Aged 82, he’s the country’s oldest supplier—and one of its first—of mushrooms, originally, and now truffles.

According to Mosbach, he long ago made enough to retire, but keeps doing it for the love of mycelium, talking to the truffles each morning and working with them personally. Building resilient local ecosystems among community members is the best approach, she said. “We take care of each other; I’m lucky to go directly to the producer.”

Local initiatives and communities across the Netherlands and Europe—including the Guild of Guides, formed by those who lead truffle ceremonies—form a network of care governed by shared ethics and created by all involved, Mosbach said, from participants themselves to facilitators informed by scientific research and Indigenous traditions.

For her, that community includes the natural world. Mosbach and Achula have personal relationships with the plants and fungi they sell and coexist with; Achula even leads guided herbal walks introducing native plants.

In this field, firsthand experience is key. Achula advises smartshop workers around the world to get familiar with what they’re selling and be honest about what they don’t know, even sending them elsewhere if it’s safest.

“If you work in a space like this, it’s quite crucial to understand how the herbs, mushrooms, [and] different products work,” he said. He’s systematically testing every product in the store one by one, “so I know what I’m selling to advise people correctly.”

In the end, the healing Mosbach and Achula have experienced themselves and witnessed in others makes navigating this complicated landscape worth it.

“Accidents still happen in traffic … and on airplanes, but we are still driving cars and flying,” Mosbach said. “We do it because it’s useful and beneficial, setting rules and guidelines for all involved. Like pilots and flight attendants, we just have to minimize the risks.”

All photographs by Holly Regan

The post Inside a Dutch Smartshop’s Harm Reduction Approach appeared first on Filter.

Preparation is just as crucial as integration, if not more so, believes Rosalind McAlpine, a PhD candidate at University College London. Most studies and trials include a preparation stage, but there are no established standards for what that entails, and the people designing and leading research often don’t have firsthand experience. It’s why she helped create the first Psychedelic Preparedness Scale (PPS): Based on feedback from people who actually use psychedelics, it measures the degree to which a person is prepared for a trip.

In societies where plant medicine is part of everyday life, “many aspects of what we might call preparedness are often woven into the fabric of the culture, and the community itself acts as a container,” McAlpine told Filter. But in the Global North, “this is a relatively new construct … [and] there’s an active need to make time and space for adequate preparation.”

“Anything we can do before going in to increase the likelihood of having a safe, meaningful and potentially transformative experience … should be exposed.”

In a presentation at Breaking Convention 2023, she likened it to a day trip to Paris: You don’t have to pack, research, or plan a route; you’ll still have an experience. But you’ll probably end up missing a lot of what you hoped to encounter, and you might even end up in an unsafe situation. 

Psychedelics, too, will bring you an experience no matter what—but without familiarizing yourself with the possibilities, you could not only miss the benefits, but potentially suffer real harms.

Challenging experiences are often the most transformative parts of psychedelic journeys, but these can be incredibly intense: from encounters with death or otherworldly entities, to repressed memories resurfacing. People need tools to navigate these moments when they arise.

Blogs and articles provide blanket advice; retreat centers give attendees guidelines; but none of this is standardized or geared toward the clinical setting, and little of what users and practitioners are doing is documented, McAlpine said.

The PPS aims to change that. “From the perspective of harm reduction,” she said, “anything we can do before going in to increase the likelihood of having a safe, meaningful and potentially transformative experience, reducing the risks involved and potentiating challenging experiences as growth opportunities rather than traumatic events … should be exposed.”

The team gathered items for the scale based on feedback from both “learned experience experts” and “lived experience experts.”

McAlpine’s team defines psychedelic preparedness as “a state preceding the session that is conducive to a safe and personally meaningful experience. The state will allow the participant to be psychologically, physically, and socially ready for the content and consequences of the experience, and will most likely involve a variety of extra-pharmacological factors.”

The team gathered items for the scale based on feedback from both “learned experience experts” in psychiatry, philosophy and psychedelic research and, uniquely, “lived experience experts” undergoing psychedelic healing, whose perspective is often missing from scientific literature.

The intention was to “include patient and public involvement [or PPI], throughout the whole process,” McAlpine said, from creating the scale to implementing and optimizing it, in order to reflect “not only the rigorous, hard-science framework, but also the voices of those people who would most benefit.” PPI aims to bring accountability, transparency, and relevance to scientific studies—defined by the authors of a paper that inspired the team as “research performed ‘with’ or ‘by’ patients and members of the public, rather than ‘to,’ ‘about,’ or ‘for’ them.” 

Four Elements of Preparedness

The scale was built in a three-study process. This involved collecting feedback through focus groups and interviews to determine which measures should be included; exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses to gauge which measures most impacted preparedness; and preliminary implementation. The scale was then validated by two online samples of psychedelics users (516 and 716 people, respectively), and tested on 46 people attending psilocybin retreats at partnering centers, tracking preparedness levels and outcomes.

Preparedness elements defined by the PPS fall into four categories. These include knowledge expectations, meaning the person had an understanding of the substance itself and what the experience might be like; support and planning, meaning they felt the substance was safe to take and had a supportive physical environment; and psychophysical readiness, or being prepared for the whole range of emotional experiences, from bliss to horror, as well as physical possibilities, like vomiting or urination.

Across the board, participants with higher levels of preparedness had significantly better outcomes than those with lower levels.

The final category was intention preparation, involving measures like journaling, breathwork, and meditation—rated most important by participants. McAlpine’s team plans to pilot a meditation-based preparedness intervention at UCL.

Through meditation, one participant said, “I was able to enter the psychedelic state with a more open and receptive mindset. It helped me shed some of my preconceptions and allow the experience to unfold organically, without trying to control it or impose my own expectations.”

Another noted, “[Meditation] allowed me to approach the experience with a sense of curiosity and exploration, rather than fear or resistance.”

Measures of participants’ outcomes included emotional breakthrough; mystical experience; challenging experience; post-psychedelic growth; the centrality of the event (whether, and how, the experience became central to their identity and a turning or reference point for their life story); wellbeing; relationship attachment style; extraversion; altered states of consciousness (gauging the acute experience); and depression, anxiety, and stress.

“The scale doesn’t prevent difficult things from happening, but it can point you in the right direction to reduce harm and maximize benefit.”

Across the board, participants with higher levels of preparedness had significantly better outcomes than those with lower levels. High preparers had higher scores on positive measures such as unity, spiritual experience, blissful state, and insightfulness than low preparers; they also showed significantly greater reductions in depression, anxiety, and stress. When high preparers did have challenging moments in a trip, they were more likely to turn them into growth opportunities, and they were also more likely to experience positive changes in wellbeing after the experience.

“The scale doesn’t prevent difficult things from happening, but it can point you in the right direction to reduce harm and maximize benefit,” McAlpine said. “If one went into those experiences with no idea that was going to happen, it can be an unnecessary challenge … Even a little bit of psychoeducation [and] expectation management can go incredibly far.”

The PPS “could serve as a valuable screening tool to identify individuals who may require additional preparation or support prior to undergoing psychedelic interventions, thereby functioning as a pre-intervention assessment to pinpoint areas of preparedness that necessitate attention,” the researchers wrote. “Furthermore, the PPS could serve as an outcome measure to evaluate the effectiveness of psychedelic preparedness interventions or to compare the efficacy of different preparation protocols.”

A Call to Action

Just because a study is conducted in a scientific setting doesn’t mean it’s safe, as evidenced by allegations of abuse and misconduct in some of the MDMA trials conducted by MAPS. “There needs to be more investigation and reporting of what’s going on in those preparation sessions, specifically within the context of clinical psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy,” McAlpine said.

While the PPS was co-created with people who use psychedelics, the studies behind it focused on clinical settings, limiting researchers to including only people who could legally disclose their psychedelic use—those who had participated in research studies, clinical trials, or retreats. (Only clinical-trial participants contributed to the creation of the scale items.)

“The last thing we want is to be like, ‘We’re the scientists, we’re right.’”

Obviously, this misses a massive swath of the user base, as McAlpine lamented, and vastly underrepresents the Indigenous people who are the original keepers of the largest body of knowledge on the subject. It also impacts the demographic makeup of their samples: The academic contributors, unsurprisingly, were predominantly white men. The lived-experience experts were more diverse by gender and nationality (data on sexual and gender identity were not collected). But respondents were still largely white, educated and well-off, hailing from the United Kingdom (mostly) and other European countries.

The PPS is open-access, and McAlpine encourages everyone to use it. She now calls upon others to pick up where her team’s research left off, capturing a broader scope of lived experience. The scale is currently being used in a DMT neuroimaging study at  University College London, and organizations such as the Institute of Psychedelic Therapy have used it for therapist training.

“The aim is to keep it iterative and intuitive, learning from as many sources as possible … to shed light on what works and what doesn’t,” McAlpine said, “[while] giving voice to people who don’t always get it. The last thing we want is to be like, ‘We’re the scientists, we’re right.’”

Image via PxFuel

The post The Psychedelic Preparedness Scale: A Tool to Optimize Trip Outcomes appeared first on Filter.

They live in a darkened, mylar-lined tent in the spare room, clustered at the bottoms of plastic tubs. Along one wall is a shelving unit where they gestate in round petri dishes, each containing what looks like a fluffy white snowflake. In the closet, rows of wide-mouthed mason jars hold their ancestral DNA.

Ari is an independent cultivator of Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms. Growers like her are the backbone of local psychedelic ecosystems that have flourished underground like the fungi themselves, but shifting legal and economic landscapes threaten the balance.

While growing and using psilocybin mushrooms is still federally illegal, to Ari, it’s health care: the natural extension of her seven-year career in counseling, focused on helping people with substance-use challenges. She uses the mushrooms in her psychedelic integration and facilitation practice, and co-leads a peer-run group offering entheogenic education, events and support for the LGBTQ+ community.

It’s a line of work that offers her not only personal and professional fulfillment, but flexibility and self-sufficiency as a single mom, working alone and from home.

“I really love cultivation because it [gives me] more freedom … and fits with parenting well,” Ari told Filter. “It allowed me to step out of the draining, time-oppressive work schedule and … see the opportunity to be self-employed. I didn’t ever think I could be, due to neurodivergence and mental health [challenges] as a queer person with trauma.” 

The “Little Children”

Ram Dass’s dulcet New England drone wafts from the speakers as Ari puts on gloves and picks up a petri dish with feathery white fronds branching from the center like a capillary system. These are mycelia, root-like structures from which mushrooms ultimately sprout, composed of clusters of fungal threads called hyphae. They’re embedded in agar, a gelatinous layer of algae-based nutrients, and will ultimately be mixed with grain spawn in those jars in the closet, where they will gestate for two to four weeks. 

María Sabina called mushrooms “the little children,” and it takes a lot to raise them right. According to some traditions, the energy of the cultivator is passed down to the mushrooms, influencing the trip; the key is providing a safe, supportive environment, making only those few interventions that facilitate healthy, natural growth. Independent growers say they’re producing something very different from mass-market psilocybin products.

“I said, if that’s your stance, I’m out. I’m gonna go all-in on cultivation.”

Working with fungi helped Ari find freedom from her own substance use issues. With their help, she has chosen to be abstinent from alcohol and opioids and have a more balanced relationship with cannabis. “When I had this life-changing experience, it was like they inoculated me. I was enlisted into the mushroom [tradition],” Ari said, adding that “the medicine has helped greatly with moderation and harm reduction.”

Ari started growing her own mushrooms early in that journey. In 2016, she bought a Midwest Grow Kit, got some spores on Facebook, and taught herself the PF Tek Method for small-scale cultivation through online tutorials, YouTube videos and trial-and-error.

She has facilitated ceremonies since 2020. “Psychedelic integrative recovery coaching is my specialty,” she said. “I’ve lost so many people to addiction or suicide, and … I want to be one of the people to help save more lives.” Research has pointed to psilocybin’s efficacy in helping people with issues such as substance-use challenges and depression.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced Ari to leave her high-stress, low-pay job as a substance use counselor. With no option during lockdown but to stay home with her kids, she invested the subsequent unemployment funds into her own business: building her grow room and creating materials, workshops and courses for her new integration practice. In 2021, she traveled to Peru for a dieta, the traditional preparation process for those who work with sacred plants, and trained with the Shipibo people, an experience that “changed the course of my spiritual and mental health.”

It also changed her career. Upon her return, she began working for a men’s outpatient rehab. But when a coworker found her pro-psychedelic Instagram page, “I was told, ‘You can delete it and keep your job, or quit,’” Ari said. “I said, if that’s your stance, I’m out. I’m gonna go all-in on cultivation.”

Looking for support in her new line of work, she became acquainted with someone in the Californian psychedelic advocacy space. He proposed a scheme where she would scale up her growing, he would sell, and they’d evenly split the earnings. In the end, she said, she was doing all the work while he got half the money—a familiar scenario in the nascent psychedelics industry.

“I quickly realized I didn’t want to be involved with him. He had a very capitalist, self-interested ethos,” she said. “I’m grateful to him for showing me it was possible … but I was still figuring everything out on my own. I paid for all the materials. He just wanted to profit off my labor.”

Luckily, her own business grew through word of mouth, and she built a loyal customer base. “I’ve always hooked people up with medicine,” she said, and her customers refer others to her, too, because “people seem to get a lot out of my product.”

“Proximity to your clients matters … You have to know your clientele—people who know it as medicine and aren’t trying to get fucked up or shopping for the lowest prices.”

It’s what small-scale growers need to survive in an increasingly volatile landscape, said Reggie Harris, founder of Oakland Hyphae. His organization offers education and events supporting the independent plant medicine community.

“People who are able to weather the storm can make a decent living as a cultivator,” Harris told Filter. “Proximity to your clients matters … You have to know your clientele—people who know it as medicine and aren’t trying to get fucked up or shopping for the lowest prices.”

As an early leader in the psilocybin space and a person of color, Harris has offered counsel to the movement’s diverse underground workers, including Ari. And it’s been needed.

“I’ve encountered toxic masculinity [from other cultivators] as a queer femme grower,” Ari said. “I thought they were just being helpful, … and then it would turn into this expectation of returning their advice with affection. You’d think that because it’s mushrooms, it wouldn’t be happening.”

She now buys all her genetics from a grower named Bear, whom she calls “a genius with genetic isolation,” introduced to her by Harris.

A South Asian-American woman, “Bear was a cultivator these white boys just hated,” Harris said, “but she’s doing such good work that they don’t even know how to try and destroy her.”  

Low-Tech, High-Yield

Ari is a low-tech grower, like many independent cultivators. While they still can still produce in volume, they emphasize personal attention over mass production, using inexpensive, DIY inputs to stay sustainable.

It contrasts with large-scale, high-tech operations that cropped up after various municipalities in California decriminalized—and with Oregon’s heavily bureaucratized, legal psilocybin-therapy model, where high costs are passed on to consumers.

Low-tech growers sterilize grains in pressure cookers and grow in plastic tubs, eschewing shortcuts like premade grain spawns both on principle and necessity. They’re not only more expensive, but Ari found they caused contamination; sterilizing her own grains is more work, but provides better quality control.

Indigenous traditions say working with mushrooms requires a reciprocal relationship, and nothing builds it like this kind of devotion. Harris recalled his own time as a cultivator, working strings of 12-hour days, because the harvest waits for no one; turning the house into a mycelial assembly line to manage multiple batches; hearing the pff-pff-pff of the pressure cookers that crowded the stove in his sleep.

When the grains are ready, Ari inoculates them with liquid culture: mycelium suspended in a sugary liquid base. Sterile environments are crucial in cultivation, especially during this stage. The sterile grains are inoculated either by removing strands of mycelium from the agar plates and placing them inside jars or bags, or injecting them with a plastic syringe full of liquid culture.

“Now that there are all these warehouse grows that are funded by white men with cannabis and crypto money, I question if I should keep doing it.”

No matter who you are, Ari said, at some point you’ll want to invest in certain equipment that can make the process more hygienic and streamlined. She used to inoculate grains inside a large Tupperware with holes cut into the lid for her hands, working solely by feel. Buying a flow hood—a big box with a filter that blows clean, sterile air—was a “game changer.” She also erected a cannabis grow tent in the spare room to serve as a “mini sterile room,” filling tubs and harvesting mushrooms inside wearing a mask and protective suit.

Once inoculated, the grains begin to colonize, which takes about a month, and requires keeping the room at a stable temperature. Then she transfers the inoculated grain into large tubs or grow bags, which sit in the tent for another week to 10 days before it’s time for the actual mushrooms to grow. To colonize at the right time, conditions must resemble the underground: dark and temperature-stable with lots of nutritious material. Once fruiting is ready to begin, she places them on lighted racks and allows for increased air circulation. This process mirrors nature, as mycelium reaches toward the surface and detects water evaporation, such as after a heavy rain— sensing the right time to emerge.

It’s a fitting metaphor for the rapidly swelling market. “Now that there are all these warehouse grows that are funded by white men with cannabis and crypto money, I question if I should keep doing it,” Ari said. “The days of this being a solid financial foundation are numbered, because the dispensaries are coming.”

Harris warns that warehouse growers will subsume the knowledge of independent cultivators before spitting them out, the way Amazon displaced mom-and-pop shops. He’s seen it before. In 2019, underground prices for mushrooms were nearly $2,000 a pound. Things were less lucrative in California’s legal cannabis market, dominated by dispensaries that displaced independent legacy growers—many of whom were people of color—by scaling up and undercutting them on cost.

“Mushrooms are absolutely going to go the way of cannabis unless there are safeguards put in to keep big money out.”

“The bottom had fallen out of cannabis, and a lot of [those who] were already growing at scale saw this nice situation … and transitioned to mushrooms at scale,” Harris said. “They didn’t know anything about the economy or pricing … so they created a race to the bottom. That drove a lot of people out of mushroom cultivation, including myself.”

By 2020, prices had plummeted to just $300 a pound. They’ve somewhat recovered, now averaging $700-$1,000 a pound, but some warehouses charge as little as $500, Ari said—an unsustainable price for one-person shops to compete with.

“It’s in the business model [of dispensaries] to drive prices down,” Harris said. As the biggest buyers, they set the price. “[Mushrooms are] absolutely going to go the way of cannabis unless there are safeguards put in to keep big money out.”

The Mycelial Network

The harvest is the hardest but most rewarding part, and this is what Ari is settling in for tonight. She lifts the lid of the tub to reveal clusters of light brown caps reaching skyward like clamoring children, then gently separates them from the substrate with a knife, careful not to bruise their tender flesh.

“Each tub will fruit at different paces, … and you have to gently harvest every cluster or individual mushroom,” she said of the time-intensive process. Once it’s done, she dehydrates and stores them under her altar, blessing them each day until they find a home.

“Growing is my second mom role,” Ari said. “Even though it can be a lot of work by yourself, it’s amazing when you get to experience new genetics and see what they look … and feel like.”

It can be a lonely life, as Harris knows: You can’t tell most people what you do or have them over to your home. While psilocybin is decriminalized in cities such as Oakland, enforcement is at the discretion of individual officers.

A veteran political campaigner, Harris is proposing the Cognitive Freedom Initiative of 2024, a statewide measure that would legalize sales and cultivation along with possession and consumption, while allowing people to appeal prior convictions. He also wants to see legislation limiting geographical footprints and institutional funding, “so that even if big corporations come in … you can keep everybody with a fair shot.”

Independent and underrepresented cultivators can build networks that corporate dispensaries never will, Ari observed. “My customers are women, BIPOC, and queer folks almost exclusively.” Some of them work with psilocybin themselves, purposefully sourcing from underrepresented growers for their own clients and ceremonies.

Ari also donates mushrooms to an organization in Portland that offers low-cost psychedelic sessions to people of color. “Other small growers do that, as well. It carries on the ethos of caring for our community, while being supported to improve our own quality of life.”

Similarly, Bear promotes and sells strains from other independent mycologists on her website.

“If it’s doing that for me, I know it’s doing that for other female and queer cultivators.”

When people ask Ari how to grow, “If I have time, I will sit down with them and share everything I know,” she said. She’s in a Signal group where people of all backgrounds share growing information, but “I would love to be a part of a female and/or queer cultivators’ collective.”

Harris doesn’t think growers should have to form co-ops to survive, “but it’s the way cannabis went,” he said. “I just want to reduce the barriers of entry for people like myself, and for the barriers to be sky-high for anyone with investor money.”

There are at least opportunities for independent growers to act as consultants for new larger entrants, he added. But he advises caution, solidarity and organizing early and often.

Whatever happens in the market, “I think I’ll always cultivate, because I prefer to use my own medicine for myself [and] clients,” Ari said. “My prices are higher, but it has allowed me to shift my career in a way that’s more sustainable [and] allows me to be with my kids. If it’s doing that for me, I know it’s doing that for other female and queer cultivators.”

*Name has been changed to protect source.

Photographs courtesy of Ari

The post Is There Still Room for Small, Underrepresented Psilocybin Growers? appeared first on Filter.

Breaking Convention (BC) is the largest psychedelics conference in Europe, a not-for-profit event that feels like a festival. From April 19-22, more than 1,000 people convened at the University of Exeter in Devon, England—twice the attendance of 2011, when the biennial conference was first held.

The event’s name references the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. Organizers believe that BC’s interdisciplinary nature is what’s needed to effect global change, even if they aren’t all in agreement about what that change should look like.

“It’s a cultural event as much as a scientific event,” Leor Roseman, a researcher at Imperial College London studying ayahuasca use among Israeli and Palestinian groups, said at the BC press conference. It “represents the psychedelic ethos in the most precise way: by being very broad.” 

“Seeing where the space is heading, it’s a rich person’s game.”

Sure enough, panelists spoke on themes as diverse as psychedelic-assisted therapy; decolonization and equitable futures; metaphysics; microdosing; and ethnomycology. Advocacy groups Psilocybin Access Rights campaign and DrugScience were both well-represented. One panel was devoted entirely to trance music sampling Terence McKenna’s disembodied voice. And workshops, art installations and virtual reality simulations of psychedelic journeys abounded.

All panels were recorded and are being made available to the public on YouTube, as part of a push toward increased accessibility.

“Seeing where the space is heading, it’s a rich person’s game,” Richard Tyo, clinical director at Neuma Centre in Ontario, Canada, told Filter. The goal is to build a movement of “co-creation [and] relationships … and not rely on the commercialization and corporatization of psychedelics.”

Ketamine and ibogaine, each given its own forum, were presented as cautionary tales for the movement. Both have been marketed as miracle cures to Westerners and have increasingly been accessed in unregulated, profit-driven settings. Speakers described the alternative models—grounded in community relationships and fair-trade ethics—that could help reduce the harms of current practices, at both the individual and societal levels.

Psychedelic harm reduction had a strong presence.

“We’ve gotten a bit unbalanced and myopic on on the medical side,” Exeter psychopharmacology professor Celia Morgan, who chaired the ketamine forum, told Filter.  “It was brilliant to get the experiential side of things, like movement medicine and a tea ceremony … a holistic perspective [that] is sadly lacking in other conferences.”

Psychedelic harm reduction had a strong presence. Speakers emphasized the role of peer support at festivals, or on spiritual journeys like 5-MeO-DMT ceremonies. Others described the potential of psychedelic harm reduction tools like preparedness scales for certain types of ceremonies, or techniques for regulating the central nervous system.

Accessibility for Indigenous populations was discussed at a number of scheduled events. Speakers shared statements from ayahuasceros, as well as from Gabonese communities about ethical iboga sourcing and use in the Global North.

BC seemed lacking in queer-focused panel discussions, though, despite plenty of queer representation in the crowd.

Psychedelic exceptionalism and the dangers that come with it were also discussed. Psychotherapist Roberta Murphy was among panelists who described concern “that the pace of psychedelic research is outstripping the kind of necessary grounding [for] doing this work safely and ethically.”

To me, BC’s most impactful event was the forum on pan-African perspectives. “It was the best experience I’ve ever had speaking at an event,” said Acacea Sherman-Lewis, founder of Divine Master Alchemy Academy. “Because I was among family.” 

Correction, May 3: Due to an editorial error, an earlier version of this article wrongly suggested that psilocybin mushroom extracts were sold at the event; this was not the case.

Image by sergeitokmakov via Pixabay

The post A Psychedelics Conference Tackles the Future of the Movement appeared first on Filter.