Five years later, tech bros are still trying to gatekeep psychedelics

Updated 2 years ago

Matrix Runes

Hear hear. Money corrupts e v e r y t h i n g
This isn’t news by any means.  James Kent has been beating the same drum for at least five years.
Still, I can see Angermayer’s point. Anything gotten on the cheap is not valued. But the best things in life are indeed free, and having him or some assorted tech bros being the gatekeeper, or anyone for that matter, is a nonstarter.

There is a developing schism in the psychedelic medicine world, with hippies on one side, and tech bros on the other.

by Daniel Pinchbeck
June 30, 2023

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In my latest newsletter, I focus on the Libertarian billionaire Christian Angermayer who has become the lead investor in the psychedelic space:
“So far, speeches and panels from the Psychedelic Science Conference haven’t been made available on-line. Apparently, Doblin held what Evans calls an “awkward ‘fireside chat’” with Angermayer, 45, a libertarian billionaire who first tried psychedelics a few years ago but doesn’t support psychedelic use at raves or festivals, and has become the leading investor in the space. Since that video is unavailable, I went back and watched this online discussion between Doblin and Angermayer from a year ago, which I found infuriating on many levels.
Angermayer makes it clear that he intends, with his investments in Compass and Altai, to gain monopoly control, as much as possible, of the psychedelic future. Doblin brought up a previous interview where Angermayer said, in the end, it would “only be Atai and Compass,” because they would have everything “locked up with patents.” Compass has sought to patent a version of the psilocybin molecule, a method of synthesizing this compound, as well as therapy modalities which have been commonly used for decades. “If i want to approve medical drugs in the existing framework, it’s pretty expensive,” Angermayer noted. “Therefore I need capital, and capital I just get if I can make a business model out of it. So I need to sort of secure it with patents around it.”
Doblin also quizzed him about decriminalization versus legalization / regulation, which would be far more beneficial for profit-driven corporations. Angermayer’s answer is long, a bit self-contradictory, and rambling. Here is an excerpt:
“I am extremely on the spiritual side of this stuff. I believe these are religious drugs. If you look in the history — and by the way the 60s might have been an exemption in the history of psychedelics. Most famous use cases from the Eleusinian Mysteries to the Sekhmet Cult in Egypt, it was always a sacrament, a religious ceremony, a guided thing. it was never a puppet on the weekend because somebody sold it to you for ten dollars. This is what I think it should be in a decriminalization world. And I believe very much in the ethos of effort — in anything in life, by the way nothing should be for free free because then it becomes — I don’t know the English word — it becomes meaningless. If you can have it for ten dollars, you might try it, you might not. You might have a bad experience. So the effort doesn’t have to be financial. For instance, if someone grows mushrooms at home, this is almost a little bit of a sacred thing… I do think they should be limited because they are so valuable. But the limitation should not be on the medical side, the limitation should be that someone puts effort into obtaining the drugs… But I do not believe they should just be available… I fear if we would do wider legalization, it could be very detrimental and it could push back the whole effort.”
I find this to be pure self-serving bullshit. The arrogance of Angermayer to think he should determine in what way people can access or experience substances that induce transcendent experience is impressive. I am delighted to hear that Atai’s valuation recently dropped 92%. I hope it goes under.
We encounter numerous paradoxes in the effort to fit the psychedelic experience into the framework of late-stage Neoliberal Capitalism, marked by excessive focus on personal healing and a fetishization of the self while driving the whole planet off the cliff in a grey cloud of fuel exhaust. I suspect a deeper philosophical inquiry needs to be made at this time. It almost seems like a new language needs to be crafted — I find the word “psychedelic” increasingly problematic, oddly disconnected. Indigenous medicine holders repeatedly express deep frustration at the co-option of their instruments for accessing the sacred within a particular context of tradition, culture, and communion. I don’t blame them.
In “Why the ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’ is Just Colonialism by Another Name,” Alnoor Ladha and Rene Suša make many excellent points. They write:
In relation to the recent uptick of interest in psychedelics in the West, the current “renaissance” appears to be far from a deep intellectual and spiritual rebirth, grounded in something other than the survival instinct of Western modernity. As is, it is more akin to a reboot of modern society’s failed attempt to re-imagine (and somewhat heal) itself in the 1960s, while continuing to conveniently place the cost of its survival and continuity on other peoples and cultures elsewhere (i.e. continued coloniality and exploitation as a salve for the existential woes of Western culture)…
Baked into the current notion of the psychedelic renaissance is the sense that it already knows where it wants to go: more scale, more global distribution, more money, more people, more markets, more “social impact.” Psychedelics are the new Terra Nullius, new, uninhabited ground for the market to expand into and human ingenuity to uncover. And of course, ironically, we will need psychedelics to help us cope with the cascading collapses of crises that have been created by the market system in the first place.
Doblin — very sweetly and, I believe, authentically, but perhaps, at this point, a little fecklessly — continues to proclaim his vision for a psychedelic future that is spiritually enlightened, with “net zero trauma.” There is reason to worry, however, that the “psychedelic renaissance” is veering off on a different trajectory. As Ladha and Suša warn, it may just temporarily extend the inexorable, vampiric logic of late-stage Capitalism which hunts the planet for exciting novelties to convert into new markets, profit centers, and entertainment complexes…”
Read rest of essay on Substack

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