Psychedelics are steadily moving from the fringes of counterculture to the heart of mainstream society, driven by a growing body of research and shifting public perception. Once relegated to underground movements, substances like psilocybin, LSD, and MDMA are now being explored for their potential in treating mental health conditions such as depression, PTSD, and anxiety. High-profile studies at institutions like Johns Hopkins and Stanford have highlighted their therapeutic benefits, while cities like Denver and Oakland have decriminalized their use. In addition, psychedelic retreats, wellness practices, and even art and tech industries are embracing these substances as tools for creativity, self-discovery, and healing. As psychedelics shed their stigma, they are catalyzing a broader conversation about mental health, spirituality, and the boundaries of human consciousness.
Recorded on March 6, 2025, this panel featured Diana Negrin, Lecturer of Geography at UC Berkeley; David Presti, Professor of Neuroscience at UC Berkeley; Charles Hirschkind, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley; and Graham Pechenik, a patent attorney and founder of Calyx Law. Poulomi Saha, Associate Professor of English and Co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley, moderated.
Matrix On Point is a discussion series promoting focused, cross-disciplinary conversations on today’s most pressing issues. Offering opportunities for scholarly exchange and interaction, each Matrix On Point features the perspectives of leading scholars and specialists from different disciplines, followed by an open conversation. These thought-provoking events are free and open to the public.
This event was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography, the Program in Critical Theory, Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, the Center for Research on Social Change, the UC Berkeley Department of English, and the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
Podcast and Transcript
Listen to this panel as a podcast below or on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CORI HAYDEN: Thank you so much for coming. Usually we say, sometimes, X, such and such speaker needs no introduction. Well, clearly, the topic needs no introduction. I’m delighted to see such a crowd here. So my name is Cori Hayden. I’m delighted to welcome you here to the Matrix. I’m the interim director this semester.
I think it’s clear that the resurgence of psychedelics has completely transformed how we are thinking about all manner of things, from mental health to spirituality to the boundaries of human consciousness. And I am delighted to welcome this extraordinary panel of colleagues, scholars, practitioners with expertise in biology, anthropology, law, critical theory, neuroscience to guide us through this discussion.
Now, today’s event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, the Center for Research on Social Change, the Center for the Science of Psychedelics, the Program in Critical Theory, and the Departments of Geography and English. And I also want to make sure to thank the Social Science Matrix’s extraordinary staff, Chuck Kapelke, Eva Seto, and Sarah Harrington. Thank you all.
So before I turn it over to the panelists, I want to briefly mention a few upcoming events here at the Social Science Matrix in this space. We have an Author Meets Critics Panel on Monday, March 17th, on Colonizing Palestine with Areej Sabbagh-Khoury. March 18th, a panel on the New Contours of Mass Incarceration.
Projects on computational analyzes. An Author Meets Critics on Native Lands with Shari Huhndorf. So anyway, please go to the website and take note of these things, and we hope to see you in this room again very soon.
Let me just briefly now– and welcome, Graham– introduce our moderator, Poulomi Saha. So Poulomi Saha is Associate Professor of English and Co-director of the Program in Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. Professor Saha works at the intersection of American Studies, psychoanalytic critique, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial studies.
And as a Flourish Fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, they explore the intersections of mysticism, psychedelics, and critical theory from spiritual, psychoanalytic, and sociological perspectives. Also, might possibly be finishing a book on cults, so I heard, possibly could be true. Without further ado, let me turn it over to the panel to Poulomi, and thank you all for being here. I’m really excited.
POULOMI SAHA: Oh, I don’t have to get up, ha. Hi, everyone. I didn’t realize I was mic’d up. I’m Poulomi Saha. I’m really delighted to be moderating this afternoon’s event, which is called mainstreaming psychedelics. And we have a really extraordinary panel, and I don’t want to take up more time than is my due.
But I will say that, actually, three of us on this panel are Flourish Fellows this year. The Flourish Fellowship is an initiative that was launched by the Berkeley Center for the Study of Psychedelics in collaboration with [? CC ?] and Harvard University. And this year was the first year for the Psychedelics in Society and Culture Fellowship, which Diana, Charles, and I all received fellowships.
And there is another fellowship round coming up if you are interested, March 16th. Information is available on the website. I highly recommend you check it out. It has funded some really exciting initiatives and projects on campus this year and is sure to do so next year, including some of the work that we’re going to hear today.
Normally, I would spend much more time on introductions, but I’m told that time is short, so forgive me for giving short shrift to the extraordinary bios of our presenters. But I will very briefly introduce them and then hand it over.
Our first presenter is Diana Negrin, who is a lecturer in Geography at UC Berkeley. In addition to her research interests in identity, space, and social movements in Latin America and the United States, her current project seeks to document the impact of global theogen commodification on sacred Indigenous lands caused by agroindustrial expansion and peyote tourism, focusing on the preservation of Indigenous rights and the defense of ancestral lands against extractive practices.
Our second presenter, David Presti, is Professor of Neuroscience here at UC Berkeley. His areas of interest are human neurobiology and neurochemistry, the effects of drugs on the brain and mind, clinical treatments of addiction, and an evolving conversation between cognitive science with this philosophy, and the scientific study of the mind and consciousness.
He is the author of several books, but most recently, The Mind Beyond Brain– Buddhism, Science, and the Paranormal, and a public education course that I’d love to hear more about called Psychedelics and the Mind.
Then we have Charles Hirschkind, Professor of Anthropology here at UC Berkeley. His interests include religious practice, media technologies, and emergent forms of political community in the Middle East and Europe.
He is the author of two books, his most recent book released just a few years ago, entitled The Feeling of History– Islam, Romanticism, and Andalusia, and has a current project that I hope we’re going to hear about on psychedelics transnationally, but including in Israel.
And our final panelist is Graham Pechenik, who is a patent attorney and founder of Calyx law, a law firm, and I believe the only law firm in America, perhaps, specializing in cannabis and psychedelics-related intellectual property, especially as it relates to drug discovery and development.
He’s also the editor-at-large of Psychedelic Alpha, where he writes about psychedelics intellectual property and provides data for patent trackers, and maintains a psychedelic law and policy tracker with the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
It’s an extraordinary panel, and I will not take up any more time. I’m going to hand it over now first to Diana.
DIANA NEGRIN: Thank you so much, Poulomi. And thank you so much to the whole Social Science Matrix network, and I definitely have to say, Ambrosia Shapiro from the Geography Department for also helping network this in. My name is Diana. And also I want to add, I teach in the Ethnic Studies Department, so just a couple stories below us.
So I’m going to try to condense, in 15 minutes, what has really been a body of work that I’ve been researching for quite some years now, but it’s also part of my own biography in many ways, and so I’ll speak about that in a minute.
But I’m going to start with a little trip to a place called Las Margaritas. It’s an ejido. It’s communally-held land in the high plateaus of San Luis Potosi. One of the most beautiful places I have seen. It’s like a semi-desert in the sky, one could say.
And it’s a place that has been the site of pilgrimage for the Wixarika and many other Indigenous peoples of the Utah Nahuatl linguistic groups since time immemorial, but also since The Conquest, it’s become a very important site of pilgrimage for those Catholics that follow Saint Francis’s patron saint ethic, which is actually one that’s also tied to ecology.
However, there’s been a third pilgrimage, let’s say, they like to call themselves pilgrims, which has really begun since the 1960s, but taken off a lot more in the last 20 years or so, which is the new age pilgrims, the psychonauts. And Las Margaritas, Wirikuta, the way the land is called in Wixarika, has become one of many nodal points of these travels that psychonauts take. And there’s a transnational group, but many of them are Latin American.
And since 2010, I’ve been focusing a lot on the different communities of people who have been attracted to this land because of peyote, but in many ways have also participated, in one way or another with its– the land use change that’s happening. So in the summer of 2023, I went to Las Margaritas, and I found a new small retreat that had just been built since the previous year that I had been.
And this new retreat had been erected in a random plot of land, in the ejido, which is communally-held land, it’s not supposed to be bought and sold under law, and unlike the other houses in the community– there are houses. It’s a very small community. They’re all adobe houses. They’re very traditional. They’re all small farmers. This particular construction was made from materials that one would find at Home Depot, bricks and metal, principally, rather than adobe and wood.
All of the rooms were filled with bunk beds, and outside the structure, there was a small chapel that was being built with a Virgin of Guadalupe image and a cross at the top of the little steeple. And outside of there was the remnants of a sweat lodge, of a temazcal. The owner of this new construction– very modest, one wouldn’t think much of it if you were just walking, but I noticed it because it was new.
The owner is a Colombian psychonaut, a psychonaut, a traveler, a psychedelics traveler, who has a lot of relationships with people in the philanthropic circles of the north. He’s a Colombian individual who had already started retreats in other parts of Latin America.
And I spoke to the caretaker because the individual himself wasn’t there, and the caretaker told me that just a couple of weeks prior to me being there, there had been about 30 people lodging at this place, and they had gone and harvested great quantities of peyote, laid them out, dried them, ground them up, and took it with them.
Now that is, under law, illegal. Nobody is supposed to harvest peyote if you are not part of a tribe that is recognized as having practiced this harvesting since time immemorial. Furthermore, you’re not supposed to take peyote outside, much less of this region.
So what I think is so important is that, since 2003, I’ve been doing a lot of research with Wixarika struggles for autonomy, for sovereignty, land, defense. My first book looked at the activism of Wixarika university students and the way they were affirming their rights as citizens to Mexico. But at the tail end of that research, these mining concessions were declared, these transnational mining concessions owned by a Canadian company.
And that brought about a lot of attention towards Wirikuta. And many of the activists that were part of this network were people who had been attracted because of peyote. So my postdoc actually started to look at interviewing many of these individuals, who were largely of European descent, but Latin American, and all of my interviews started with the same point of departure, which was peyote, right?
They had encountered peyote prior to encountering Wirikuta, prior to encountering Wixarika culture, and it was from these transformative experiences that they wanted to now be a part of this transnational activist circle. And what we started to notice was that much of the attention was focused around Wirikuta, peyote, and the Wixarika, and the small farmers were largely foreclosed. They were erased from this picture.
And so, since 2010, in particular, I’ve been doing a lot of research in this area. And what I’ve been noticing more and more is that now it’s not just about the mining concessions, it’s also about large agroindustrial plots of land, mostly tomato for export. When we see dry farm tomatoes, that’s actually one of the indicators is that they might be coming from a place like Sonora or San Luis Potosi that’s semi-arid. Most of these are for export.
And then the third big land use change that I’ve noticed in particular in the last 10 years is the purchase of a [? helo ?] land in the name of land back, in the name of the Wixarika, without it being any Wixarika individuals.
Following Instagram, which has been a great source of netnography, I’ve come across, at least, a dozen initiatives, mostly led by either people from the United States, or maybe a Latin American that’s not actually connected to either San Luis Potosi or Jalisco that do events. Some events have actually happened at places like Yale and Harvard to raise funds to buy land to protect the peyote and to protect Wixarika sovereignty.
So my work started with mining in this typical political ecology, and I never would have guessed that suddenly I’d be looking at the question of psychedelics. And I think that Michael Pollan’s Netflix special is a really important reference for a lot of people, maybe, in terms of the question of mescaline and peyote.
There’s a small little bleep that’s given to the question of Wirikuta and to the Wixarika people. But it’s important to note that the same people that were intermediaries for Michael Pollan’s Netflix special are the same people who are intermediaries for these land purchases. And so I’ve been really trying to track, who are these individuals? Trying to follow the money.
Many of these individuals, again, Don Moore was one of my PhD professors, and I’ll never forget Donald Moore saying, good intentions can have bad consequences. Good-intentioned people that met at Burning Man might not understand land tenure practices in Mexico, Colombia, and Peru. They may not understand that the concept of a land bank operates differently in the United States than it does in Mexico because of colonial and post-colonial structures. Again, of land tenancy, of legal recognition of Indigenous people.
So I don’t have much more time, probably, but I do want to say that a lot of what I’ve been observing is a loss of translation, right? Not only linguistically, where we have much of what’s happening in the mainstream of psychedelics happening in English. If you look at any retreat website, if you look at any of these philanthropic initiatives, they’re in English for an English-speaking audience.
And it’s only a few– for example, in the case of the Wixarika communities, there’s only a couple individuals that are actually connected to these philanthropic initiatives. But the way that they get presented in both conferences, everywhere from maps to, again, a university like Harvard is that they are representatives.
And this is an age-old problem with misrepresenting Indigenous leadership and autonomy. It’s very easy to do that when you are talking to a group of people who don’t understand who it is that they’re seeing, what the context is.
So what we’ve continued to see, not only with respect to land purchases, is that the mainstreaming of psychedelics has also started to really disrupt governance in Indigenous communities that are connected to these psychedelic plants and psychedelic traditions, if you want to use that term. So in the case of the Wixarika, peyote has always made them very hyper visible, right? From Carlos Castaneda to, again, the present Netflix example.
And I’m starting to really see a combination of, not just usurpation of leadership, but also of land tenure. And while the Wixarika have always claimed that the way to defend land is to coordinate with the small farmers, what is happening with these very powerful players that have millions of dollars at their disposal, literally, is that you have a lot of backdoor deals that are happening.
And so the result has been a lot of infighting, a lot of community animosity. And I’m quite concerned, given the landscape that we’re seeing right now, with– again, there was the constellation of Silicon Valley forces that are also interested in psychedelics, that we have very much an authoritarian view of how to manage land that is connected to endemic species like peyote.
And there’s very little time and space given to really understanding other epistemic approaches how to defend land. And that peyote is not exclusive to one particular community, but that we have ancestral communities that need to be, not just selectively at the table, but really need to be understood in a much deeper way.
And I’m afraid that a lot of intermediary work has continued to really disrupt Indigenous sovereignty. So that’s really the focus of my work right now. And hopefully soon I’ll have a film and a new book project to bring to people about this very issue. So thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
POULOMI SAHA: Next up is David Presti.
DAVID PRESTI: Wow, that was great. Yeah. Thank you, everyone, for being here. And you all who organized these Matrix events for pulling this together. This is really wonderful. Very important topic these days.
It’s interesting that we often talk about how we live in a bubble here in Berkeley or maybe even California or the West Coast or something like that. With respect to the mainstreaming of psychedelics, there’s still a way in which that’s very accurate.
Because if I talk with people in the middle of the United States who are not part of the academic establishment or something like that, this is not something that they’ve heard much about. So it’s just an interesting kind of contrast that we continue to appreciate and live in.
So I’m assuming that most of you know quite a bit already about psychedelics, what we call psychedelic. And really, they entered– really only entered the first time in the popular culture in America in the 1950s, even though there’s been, of course, a centuries- or probably millennia-, in many cases, long history of use of psychedelic materials by a number of Indigenous cultures around the world for a long time.
This was largely unknown, except for folks who studied it, anthropologists, folks like yourself, who actually knew this really intimately. And then it hit the more popular culture in the ’50s. The psychiatrist Osmond coined that word psychedelic, meaning mind-manifesting.
Because he thought these materials, which were represented only by two chemicals in those days, mescaline from peyote, and LSD, which was the synthetic that was discovered, whose properties were discovered in the 1940s, he felt that these materials and a number of other things from which chemicals hadn’t been identified like the Teonanacatl mushrooms from Mexico, Datura, cannabis, even the active components were not known–
He put all those into that category of psychedelic because he felt they should be– that psychiatry could come up with some good ways to utilize these powerful materials to open up one’s mentality in some way and make it more amenable for psychotherapy and for transformative change.
So in the 1950s, through popular essays like Aldous Huxley’s books and Gordon and Valentina Wasson’s articles in major media outlets, people became knowledgeable about something about these materials and their history. And then it really all opened up in the 1960s, of course, and psychedelics, especially LSD, became a huge part of the revolutionary processes that were happening back in those days.
And all of these things that happened in the 1960s that were really building up a lot of momentum, things like the Free Speech Movement right here on– just a few hundred feet away on the UC Berkeley campus, and the Civil Rights Movement, and Women’s Rights Movements, and gay rights movements, and very importantly, the anti-war in Southeast Asia movement, these were all melded together in people’s minds as just these, in some ways, chaotic things that were disrupting the status quo.
And psychedelics as well as cannabis got thrown into that category as well, and at the end of the ’60s, in 1970, everything was made illegal. So with the Controlled Substance Act in the United States, with the United Nations International Convention the next year, psychedelics, all the known psychedelic molecules at that point were declared illegal and whatever academic and clinical research had been going on in the ’50s and ’60s all came to a halt in the nonmainstream ways. I mean, not that they were ever mainstream, but they were a huge part of the culture.
And, however, there was a psychedelic underground that continued unabated from the time that they become illegal, in the late ’60s, California was the very first state to pass a law against LSD in 1966– and the underground, though, which was this constellation of folks that would take LSD at concerts, later MDMA and other things at raves, and artists, musicians, folks looking for some kind of recreational novelty.
And then a more reverent ceremonial component to that underground. Folks that held a more sacred relationship with the materials, they– often it was embedded in some kind of ceremonial structure for them. They usually knew quite a bit about what they were doing, and did it with respect and planning and so forth.
And there was an element of also underground psychedelic-assisted therapy, so-called, guides or therapists that would utilize LSD or psilocybin or MDMA when it was appreciated as materials to guide folks through a therapeutic or transformative process.
And this was all underground, in some cases, very deeply underground, especially the therapists, because there were draconian laws against all of these materials. And throughout the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s and even into the 2000s, there were many people who were arrested for distributing or manufacturing and so forth. Long prison sentences were handed out to young folks at Grateful Dead concerts for distributing LSD in the parking lot.
So it behooved people, especially who were doing this as their livelihood, like the underground therapeutic community, to stay very quiet about what they were doing. And it was taken very seriously as a profession. People often spent years and years apprenticing with other more knowledgeable people.
They knew the medicines, the materials they were working with really, really well themselves through their own experiences. So it was a pretty reliable kind of way to get introduced to the transformative properties of these things should you happen to have the right connections to meet someone like that since they were hard to find.
So this puttered on for several decades, the ’70s, the ’80s. By the mid to later ’80s, there began to be developed some activism around bringing these materials back into the public sphere to make them available for recreational uses, nonmedical use, as well as clinically administered use.
And most notably, the MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies was started in 1986 with the explicit agenda of bringing MDMA, methylenedioxymethamphetamine, also known as ecstasy, back into the place where it could be legally used as a therapeutic tool.
But the bigger agenda was these materials should be legal for everyone, not just in the therapeutic context, but that doesn’t work to say that publicly. You have to go through the steps of getting government sanctioning through the FDA and all of that. So it was a wild vision to be able to do that at the end of the– I mean, to think that could be possible in 1986 because the laws were so draconian and so rigid, it seemed, with respect to all of these things.
But by the 1990s, by 1990, the first human studies, again, had started with a psychedelic, that was dimethyltryptamine, DMT. And then MDMA and psilocybin followed through the ’90s clinical studies. Quiet, low key. The media hadn’t noticed yet. The art of developing the finely-honed press release had not been developed yet.
So it continued on, though. Progress was being made. The FDA approved things to go on to the next phase of clinical trials, phase II, and so forth. And so by the 2000s, by the early 2000s, although the underground was still very active in all the ways that it had always been, there was beginning to be some above-ground approved activity, again, specifically FDA-approved clinical studies with MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder and psilocybin for anxiety and depression, later, just the focus on depression.
And this continued to be successful. It was a slow process. There were only a handful of people doing this work. But in the early 2000s, psychedelic centers actually started at two major universities, Johns Hopkins and at University College London, so there are now beginning to be academic credibility, and papers were beginning to be published in mainstream journals.
And importantly, graduate students and postdocs were beginning to be trained because it’s not sustainable if there are only five people in the world doing clinical or basic science in psychedelics. But now there’s beginning to be a new cohort of folks who will be trained up to do this.
Of course, all these folks are now out there in the academic sector with projects of their own. And so now there are hundreds of universities that have psychedelic research going on. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of universities that have official psychedelic centers like our own here at Berkeley. And so it really has achieved, in the academic center, something of a mainstream status.
So this was already happening in the 2000– the first decade and then the second decade of the 2000s. By the end of the– and then I mentioned the press release earlier. The other thing that happened is that all of these early studies, when they were published, they had really good press releases. They had really good press coverage, so they got a lot of positive media attention. So the media juggernaut was beginning to take off.
And, of course, by the latter part of the 2000 and teens, then we have Michael Pollan’s excellent book, best-selling book that came out, the Netflix series, so more and more attention to more and more people to these substances. So here we are at the stage where we are in this trajectory.
The other thing that happened by the end of the 2000 and teens was that this was looking like a pretty good investment to a lot of people. So then startups formed to try to, in some way, capture. Now, remember, psychedelic molecules, LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, DMT, I mean, they’ve been out there in the public sphere for a long time, decades. The therapeutic procedures had been out there for a long time, for decades. So how are they going to make money off this?
So then– I’m sure you’ll speak to this– all kinds of schemes are concocted to try to grab intellectual property. Well, maybe if we tweak the crystal structure of the molecule in some way, then we can patent that. And it doesn’t matter whether that’s actually meaningful. As the CEO of that company said in a recorded interview, it doesn’t matter what I think. It only matters what the US Patent Office and the UK Patent Office thinks.
And so a number of things are now in the sector moving along. And so we have billions of dollars or certainly hundreds of millions, probably billions of dollars invested, certainly billions if you count ketamine, which I’m not even going to have time to get to, but we can come back to it in the Q&A.
And we have training programs, which have turned out thousands, now, of people that were being trained to participate in clinical studies and so forth. And, however, that’s all on hold because of the FDA’s unwillingness to improve MDMA for clinical studies. So in any case, it’s going to be, it has been, and will continue to be a wild ride, unpredictably wild ride. These are complex materials. Nobody ever said this was going to be easy or predictable, so to be continued. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
POULOMI SAHA: Thank you, David. And potentially setting us up for a pitch debate during the Q&A. But before we get there, up next is Charles Hirschkind.
CHARLES HIRSCHKIND: OK. First, a big thanks to Poulomi for the invitation to join this panel, and to my illustrious colleague, Cori, Director of the Matrix and good friend.
So I am new to this field. And, really, it’s only been in the last year and a half that I’ve put my foot into it. And that’s centered around a project that explores embodied practice in relation to different traditions involving psychedelic use.
So that doesn’t have a lot to do with mainstreaming. I’ve been working with a couple of colleagues at the Chacruna Center in Berkeley, who work on ayahuasca, and particularly in the context of Santo Daime, a Brazilian tradition.
So the question of the mainstreaming of psychedelics is, in ways, new to me. Of course, overall, the field I find to be exciting and with plenty of room for optimism, but, of course, also room for concern and worry. So today I’m going to focus my discussion on the mainstream of psychedelics and explore it from one particular national standpoint, that from the experience of Israel.
And the psychedelic phenomenon is well-established in Israel in terms of research, in terms of therapeutic practice, in terms of recreational use. The country has been an early and important contributor to studies in medical uses of psychedelics. There are numerous research initiatives, clinical trials, important conferences, workshops.
It’s one of the few countries outside the US where MAPS has an institution. Israel was the first national government to financially support MDMA-assisted psychotherapy research. It was also the first country to improve a compassionate use program, the use of MDMA in actual therapeutic practice.
Much of the research on the therapeutic use of psychedelics in Israel is focused on trauma victims, and particularly those suffering PTSD. Let me read briefly from a MAPS press release from 2020 on psychedelic research in Israel. So the report states that preliminary research has shown that MDMA-assisted psychotherapy may be a profound way to help those who suffer greatly from traumatic experiences, such as war or sexual assault.
Now, according to Keren Tzarfaty, the Clinical Investigator and Director of Israeli projects in collaborations with MAPS, in the face of the perpetual violence in Israel and the surrounding region, the innovative, heart-based treatment can transform suffering to wholeness. The article goes on, over 10% of the Israeli population experiences PTSD, and this figure increases significantly in regions frequented by rocket attacks. Military service is compulsory, and most families in Israel have histories of trauma and persecution.
The Israeli Ministry of Health is constantly looking for new tools to get better results in psychological and psychiatric treatment, says the Director of Psychological Trauma for the Israeli Ministry of Health. After seeing the very promising results of the completed MDMA-assisted psychotherapy research in Israel, we now believe that it is crucial to allow more citizens who suffer from PTSD to have access to this new treatment. This was back in 2020, and there’s only been growing momentum in this field in Israel since then.
In a talk that Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS back in the ’80s, as David mentioned, a talk he gave at Google in 2009, he presented in a slide an image that, in his words, was the best image we have ever seen about MDMA for psychotherapy. This image, which was taken from an Israeli newspaper, showed a soldier largely submerged in a pool of blood, with helicopters in the background, and clinging for life onto a life preserver in the form of an MDMA tablet.
And this was, as Doblin suggested, the best image he had for what he imagined to be, we might consider it the mainstreaming of MDMA within psychotherapy. An article from Wired titled, “Israel is at the vanguard of a new psychedelic revolution,” the authors survey the explosion of new startups and companies entering the psychedelic field, affirming that Israeli startups are proving to be the pioneers in the use of mind-altering drugs, from mushroom to medical grade cannabis, to treat conditions like depression and PTSD.
So besides the medical clinical field, the genealogy of psychedelic use in Israel has another important element. Since, at least, the early 1980s, young Israeli tourists, many of them just released from IDF service, have traveled to India, particularly to Goa, but as well to other parts of India, giving shape to a distinct psychedelic-fueled party culture, party beach culture in many places.
By the 1990s, sigh party or rave culture was becoming well-embedded within Israel itself. And today, Israel is celebrated as a global center for rave culture. So these are a few snippets from the development of psychedelic use in Israel.
My point in mentioning them is to just suggest that Israel is a major contributor to and participant in the psychedelic renaissance. That the psychedelic culture, both medical and recreational and nonmedical being developed there, therefore has considerable impact on the global stage, and their considerable impact, perhaps, on the direction in which the future of mainstreaming psychedelics may take.
So, as the Executive Director of MAPS that I cited above noted, there is perpetual violence in Israel. Service in the IDF is mandatory, with some exceptions, which means that most of its citizens participate directly in the brutalization and violence that has been directed routinely against Palestinians for many decades, and now in the genocide of the last year and a half.
This is not easy for any human being, and I believe it is not at all surprising that one finds such high rates of PTSD in the country. When one participates, in my view, in extreme violence, including the type of atrocities we’ve seen more recently, there are psychic costs.
Often when the violence ends, when there’s a pause, there’s a sense that one eventually, in some form, will confront the acts that one has done. The psyche tries to defend against this, tries to avoid it in ways, sometimes through an intensification of violence. This has been documented in other global contexts.
So I set this stage because this is the context in which psychedelic use and interest has grown medically, therapeutically, and recreationally in Israel. We often think of psychedelics as offering a kind of mirror by which we can explore deeper dimensions of our consciousness and experience.
But here we see something that follows something of an opposite logic. Instead of allowing a patient, a soldier, or a citizen to confront the traumatic violence that they have had to exercise, in this case against Palestinians, psychedelics becomes a tool by which one can avoid or defer such a confrontation, and thus be ready to return to the battlefield. It is for this reason that the Israeli state finds this research on psychedelics so important. And the Israeli state is a major contributor, major funder of research in this area.
So insomuch as the Israeli state necessitates the will for participation of much of its population in the ongoing perpetration of violence in order to sustain the particular form of apartheid rule, it cannot afford to tolerate the psychic repercussions, the trauma that such violence produces among its people, and must seek out methods to limit those repercussions. It is for this reason that psychedelic therapy is seen to have such great promise in the country, and as I mentioned, receives considerable support from the state.
Nowhere, at least, in my exploration of the literature, which I acknowledge is limited, nowhere in the literature on psychedelic research in Israel have I encountered the suggestion that the state policies that produce a condition, a necessity of perpetual violence, and hence of traumatic experience be changed.
The violence is viewed rather as a natural feature of the landscape, as in the quotes that I cited above, a result, sometimes, of the savagery of Israel’s neighbors, a context where Israelis themselves can understand themselves as victims, ones whose suffering may be alleviated by psychedelics.
So I’m going to stop there. But my overall point is to suggest that Israel is an important reference in reflecting on the possible direction that a mainstreaming of psychedelics takes. Not only because the phenomenon is well-developed there, but also because of the influence that Israel exerts in shaping a global psychedelic culture. So this is a cautionary note.
POULOMI SAHA: Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
And our final presenter is Graham Pechenik.
GRAHAM PECHENIK: Thank you. And I think this might be a giveaway that I’m the one nonprofessor on the panel that I need the support of slides to get through my talk, so.
So I’ll probably pick up actually where David Presti left off. Because where I start is in 2018, really, at the start of what people have been speaking about as a psychedelic renaissance. Well, my story maybe goes back a little bit earlier to part of David’s story, which was the research and the growth in the number of academic centers and just academics studying psychedelics.
Actually, my interest in psychedelics dates back to my first psychedelic experience in undergrad, and I thought at one point that I might become a psychedelic chemist. I was very inspired by the work of Sasha Shulgin, who created a lot of novel psychedelics and helped to bring MDMA back into the popular consciousness.
I had no encouragement of that. Maybe it was just a few years too early because now, certainly, there’s many people who are making that their work. Although I’m happy to have ended up back in the space. So I went to law school thinking maybe I’d do drug policy with my science background. I ended up going to do patent law.
And I continued to follow the science, and I’m actually at– I was at a MAPS info table volunteering the weekend after this article came out. So this article was really the first time, I think, patents, certainly that I had heard of, but even in general, were written about for the popular culture.
So this was before Compass Pathways, actually, their patent had published, but it was– it was known that they had filed patents on psilocybin, and an article about the work that Compass Pathways was doing came out talking about the patent. And I was very curious about it.
And in talking to people at MAPS who were themselves very interested in how somebody might even patent something like psilocybin, which, obviously, is a known compound and a compound that’s been synthesized and already patented in the ’50s by Albert Hofmann, I actually went home that night and made a table of all the psilocybin patents I could find. And I’m not sure– oh, that works. Just yell it out.
And so in 2018, after this article came out, there were just over a dozen. A couple of them were actually the original ones from Albert Hoffman. A few of them are from Paul Stamets, who many people might know has been working with psilocybin for quite a long time. So there really weren’t very many. This was still– again, as I mentioned before, Compass’s hadn’t come out.
Two years later, so on the next slide, there still had really only been less than even double that. Not even two dozen patents on– this is on psilocybin. These are just patents that have psilocybin in the word in the patent anywhere.
Today that list is– on the next slide, this slide probably took me the longest. I probably didn’t need to copy-paste every single part of it. But this is the number of patents on psychedelics today, over 2,000. So I’m fortunate to be able to work with BCSP on making this public. So this is a resource that’s on BCSP’s web page. And you can see and sort all the patents that are covering all sorts of psychedelic compounds.
The next slide is just an image to show, people might know, if you’re familiar with patents, they’re not public for 18 months. So 18 months from now, you may see the ones that were filed 18 months ago. So we only know the ones that have already published that have already been filed that long ago.
So on the next slide, the reason for all this activity, I think, is you already heard a little bit of suggestion from David is, in 2020, there were– start of companies in the space. There were not all that many yet, but there were quite a few who are looking at trying to figure out ways to commercialize psychedelic compounds.
A couple of years later, then that– on the next slide, you can see, well, this is now today, there are many, many dozens of companies who are looking to commercialize, in some way, psychedelics. Now, most of these companies are looking to bring some sort of psychedelic compound through FDA.
Many of them are looking to bring this same psychedelic compound through the FDA, competing to do the same thing. There’s a question mark on there because there’s many that are still in stealth and probably a question mark, too, because many of these have run out of funding, so. But there are really a lot.
Although putting this in context, on the next slide, the small circle with the other small circles in the middle is the whole scale of the psychedelic space, which is just a few million dollars– a few billion dollars in market cap. I mean, really dwarfed by– these are the three largest pharma companies by market cap.
And the three that are listed there in the middle, the psychedelics companies, I mean, a thousand times smaller than the biggest pharmaceutical companies. Probably the size– maybe not even the size of a single program within one of these pharmaceutical companies. Eli Lilly could basically buy every single company in the psychedelic space and wouldn’t make much of a difference to their accounts.
So at the time that all this has been going on, I think maybe we already heard a little bit of suggestion, some of these patents have been a little bit controversial. And indeed, from the next slide, we can see– this is just what I could fit on one slide– there have been dozens, if not more, articles written on the ethics of patenting psychedelics, what it means to patent psychedelics, how can people patent psychedelics?
So there has been a lot of conversation around it. Actually, on the next slide, the conversation has leapt even into the popular consciousness. So people might have seen this, perhaps. This was a couple of years ago from John Oliver, of course, talking about what was one of the most controversial patents in the space when it published.
It was another one of Compass’s patents, not that original one, but one that had claims to psilocybin treatment with a variety of things that people, certainly in the underground, would have known about. The fact that a person was laying on a bed or a couch, or wearing an eyeshade, or maybe wanted soft music playing in the room.
So John Oliver, on the next slide here shown, this was so obvious it would have been like patenting somebody sitting in a suit behind a desk telling jokes. Which if one filed for it, maybe it is patentable, although I haven’t seen one just like that.
So from the next slide, you can see the controversies over psychedelic patents aren’t entirely new. Actually, in the 1980s there was a fairly large controversy that actually caused some diplomatic rifts between the US and some Central and South American countries. I think the diplomats in Ecuador threatened to close their mission at one point.
This was called– so this was, I guess– for the context, this was a patent on– a plant patent on a type of ayahuasca vine. It was called an offense against Indigenous peoples. One said it was as outrageous as trying to patent a communion wafer. On the next slide, I was curious about that, too, I looked it up. There’s actually over 50 patents on communion wafers.
[LAUGHTER]
So if you’re eating a low-gluten communion wafer during the Holy Communion, you might actually be infringing some of these patents. I think that one is still active. So I guess patent lawyers really don’t have any shame when it comes to taking on clients and doing work. It doesn’t matter if it’s for ceremonial or sacred use.
So the next slide here, I can probably jump through some of this stuff pretty quickly. I think most people probably are familiar with why we even have patents to begin with. I think the pharmaceutical space is probably the most paradigmatic for what patents stand for, which is the reward of the patent people claim is necessary for people to make the investment in coming up with a new pharmaceutical drug.
And the reason for that, of course, is the patent provides the exclusivity that keeps others from being able to copy it and make it themselves. And if one were to be able to copy it, as the next slides show, you can probably just go through both quickly, the line is where the generic enters the market. So sales go down.
And then on the next slide, you can see that the price of the original nongeneric, the branded drug, drops pretty quickly to a small fraction of what it was. So the exclusivity of a patent is the thing that provides the outsized revenues for pharmaceutical companies, and that’s what gives them the interest, arguably, in bringing a new drug to market to begin with.
So from that perspective, this is a good thing for society. But then, of course, one can argue that the cost of those drugs to patients and the length of time that those drugs remain at that cost, depending on how long those patent terms last, something you have to weigh against the value of new drugs.
So going to the next slide. Yes, so those are patents. So patents, obviously, then play this important role. So I’ll go through these pretty quickly. If you go to the next slide, this is just what a patent is. As I mentioned, it’s right to exclude for a particular period of time. It’s defined by the claims.
The next slide shows the actual– this is the Compass patent when it did publish. So a patent itself is like a physical document. It has what’s called a specification, describes the invention, and then the claims. And the claims are really the legal words of meaning. People sometimes say the metes and bounds of the invention. They’re the property boundaries of real property. So this is Compass’s patent on crystalline psilocybin form Polymorph A.
And so for the next slide, thank you. So, again, the reason we have patents, of course, is to incentivize this type of work. So this is the first article in the Constitution. It’s called the progress clause, to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
So the next slide. And then so, of course, the patent stands as this reward or inducement for that knowledge to bring that new drug to market or those new psychedelic compounds to market.
So we go to the next slide. I think this is maybe just to put it in historical context. This isn’t a new thing. As far back as ancient Sybaris. Maybe people have heard of Sybarites or something Sybaritic. Sybaris was known for the outlandish luxury that people in town there had.
And part of the reason, some argue, actually, is because Sybaris had what was sort of like a patent system. They gave people who came to town and demonstrated that they had some peculiar and excellent culinary dish, or any new refinement in luxury, they gave them all the profits from the sales of those for one year, exclusive right to sell those. And that attracted lots of people to the town with their new dishes and new luxuries. So this is the goal of a patent is something that has been understood through history.
So go the next slide. Yeah. So when we think about the patent, we think about it as this balance. So what is it that we’re giving? We’re giving this monopoly. We’re taking something away from the public. Arguably, we’re taking away the ability to have cheaper drugs in the pharmaceutical context, but we’re allowing, in theory, more drugs and better drugs to actually come to market.
So the next slide. And this I like to highlight because I think a lot of people, rightly, see the patent system as really shrouded in two very difficult technical hazes. One of which is the legal haze of– I mean, the patent system is pretty complicated, one is the technical haze of what gets patented itself.
But I think it’s important to point out that, like, patents don’t just exist because it’s just like a natural right, and that’s what it is, but it exists because it is this outcome of what is arguably a democratic process, but not that many people participate in it. But I think it’s worth calling out because there are a lot of ways, if we understand the way the patent system works, to actually get involved and to try to make changes to it.
And now probably is a good time to think about that in particular because with the change in administration and the change in some of the priorities of the administration, what is going on with the patent system is a bit up for grabs. But typically, it tends to be just big pharma who’s sitting at the table and making a lot of these rules.
So next slide. And yeah, so some of the basic requirements for what a patent is. So it has to describe the specification, describes the invention and how to make and use it. And to get a patent, really, the crux of it is you have to have something that’s novel and nonobvious. It’s an invention, right?
So to be able to determine what is worthy of being granted a patent, the next slide– thank you, Dave– shows that, really, the crux of the patent examination process is the examiner searches for what’s called the prior art. So basically, what’s the state of the art? What’s everything that people know before the patent was filed?
They then compare it to what the invention is claimed to be. And they determine if that difference between what the prior art was and what the invention claims to be was obvious to what’s called one of ordinary skill in the art, so the ordinary person. Not the inventive person, not the inventors because they’re presumed to be, by nature of being inventors, a little bit maybe above the ordinary skilled person. But would this be obvious?
So we go to the next slide. So, obviously, the first thing then to be able to determine if something is patentable is to determine, is it novel? So here’s a patent that was granted on a DMT vape pen. People might have heard of DMT vape pens before. This was filed in 2020. DMT vape pens certainly existed before 2020, if you’re familiar with DMT vape pens.
So why was this granted? Well, the next slide shows the patent examiner missed– I mean, there were articles that one should have seen before 2020. And they didn’t search for– even DMT vape pen, they didn’t search Google. They spent really only less than seven minutes even searching. So this is a problem if people can’t find the prior art.
So the next slide shows, this is not just a theoretical problem, but actually, this is a pitch deck from the person who has this patent saying, in the bottom there, the visible internet is replete with sales of DMT vape pens, but they’re infringing. He’s going to go after them. Well, the reason the internet is replete with those sales is because those existed before he filed the patent. So this is somebody getting market power without actually contributing anything to the market.
So the next slide. Actually, this email is just from two days ago. So people may have heard of Porta Sophia, but it’s a nonprofit that is bringing together prior art. David Presti mentioned a lot of the underground work, especially the deep underground work and some of those techniques or the use of some compounds for certain things. Those might not have been in a place where a patent examiner, for instance, can find it.
So this nonprofit called Porta Sophia actually worked to pull together a lot of that prior art and make it available to patent examiners. And so this email just from Tuesday shows actually the– and this is quite a big deal. The Patent Office has made Porta Sophia part of their resource page.
So patent examiners now, because as you could see for the DMT vape pen, they actually don’t sometimes even go look on Google. They just go to the resources they have. So now they have this dedicated resource with psychedelic prior art.
So the next page. So just maybe to dip through a couple other things quickly. So here’s just another example of a patent. The MDMA and LSD in the same pill. So people certainly know that MDMA and LSD might have been taken together. The patent examiner, in fact, did have prior art to show that recreational users had MDMA and LSD that they took together, but they took them in separate dosage forms, not on the same pill.
So the next slide. So they granted that. So just to say that the bar for obviousness is actually quite low. So what makes an invention is not something that actually would take much inventive activity. So I probably don’t have– how much time? Am I done?
POULOMI SAHA: One more minute.
GRAHAM PECHENIK: One more minute. OK. So I’ll maybe see if there’s any other good slides here to go. Yeah. So what is in all these patents? Well, OK, next slide.
There are, as you would imagine, lots of these known compounds– you can probably just keep going– yeah, which, of course, we’re known for many years. And, well, you can probably skip through those. Sorry. I wish I had– yeah. So maybe just a couple other places to stop on my way out.
So, of course, if we’re thinking about how you want to design the patent system, we want to think about creating more innovation rather than having things that are just the same or very similar to what was already existing. I mean, we want to be providing this reward for things that are worthy of that reward. Maybe skip through a few others.
Yeah. I mean, I think, OK. Yeah. So maybe go one more. One more maybe. Yeah. OK. I’ll probably– I guess I’ll wrap up here. I think I have a few more slides. I mean, there are some things here that I wish I would have had time for. I know in 15 minutes is pretty difficult.
Maybe on the next slide we can show that– well, OK, this is another resource with BCSP is the Law and Policy Map. OK. Next slide. Yeah. I mean, there are so many other reasons to be critical of the patent system. I mean, one of the things that does is provides incentives for very specific things.
I mean, I think maybe one place to then end, like, David, you mentioned how MAPS was bringing MDMA through FDA as a reason to maybe figure out how to get MDMA available to more people. And that bringing it through FDA was like a Trojan Horse to get the government to permit it to be available, and then to bring it then more widely to the public.
But what has turned around is now all the investment is going to trying to bring drugs through FDA in a way that the companies who are doing so are now incentivized to make it harder to have access to those drugs outside of the medical realm. So turn what MAPS was doing on its head.
And in doing so, a lot of the philanthropic money that was going to MAPS has turned into investment dollars instead. MAPS has had a hard time– I mean, they became a for-profit entity. And so I think I’ve maybe– if you go to my very– next last slide that I’ll end on. No, not that one, the [INAUDIBLE].
Yeah. Maybe I’ll just end here just to say– I know I barely scratched the surface here, but just to say that the patent system really is something that I think it’s important for people to have more understanding of so they can have more say in it. So I’ll end there.
[APPLAUSE]
POULOMI SAHA: I’ll invite our presenters back. And we actually have– because everyone was actually wonderful about time, we have 15 minutes for questions. And I will not take moderator’s privilege except to say, this conversation was so exciting in the various overlap. Some of them, I think, expected and slightly scripted, and some of them truly unexpected.
And I would love for us to also think about some of the major things that have come up that cut across these presentations, including the question, I think, pre-eminently, of ethics and the question of power. Each of the presenters, in different ways, talked about how this question of mainstreaming has really gotten to the heart of questions of who has access to the resources.
Whether they be questions of Indigenous people and sovereignty, the questions of empire and violence, questions of moving away from the criminalization of particular kinds of access towards medicalization, towards money making patents, and how the question of money and ethics so intervenes with how we think about psychedelics today.
The fact that we are here at Berkeley, we are talking about funding available for this kind of research, and the shift, which is a highly materially driven one, which asks us to think, I think, in really nuanced ways that we begin to hear from our presenters about how we grapple with these real questions, the risks and the possibilities that mainstreaming psychedelics in this way might give rise to.
But before we let them speak to each other, are there questions? Maybe we’ll take a couple of questions at a time since we only have 15 minutes and ask the presenters to respond collectively. There’s a question in the back and here. You can take probably one more. There’s a third, but otherwise we’ll let the presenter– and there’s one all the way in the back.
AUDIENCE: Hi. I had a question for Graham, kind of following up on the last little bit. I’m a bit confused how people get patents when the drugs are federally illegal. Is it specifically like with medical exception, or is it just like– yeah, I guess I’m just a bit confused on the nuances there.
GRAHAM PECHENIK: Yeah. No, it’s a good question. And actually, I have that in my usual deck as a second slide because it is one of the questions I get most often. There are no prohibitions on patenting anything that’s illegal, with, really, two exceptions human clones and nuclear weaponry.
But it doesn’t have to be for medical use. So if you had a new way of making methamphetamines in your bathtub, you could get a patent on it. And it would be examined, too. So the patent examiner would purportedly have to go and see if there’s any prior art on it, but.
POULOMI SAHA: An invitation, perhaps.
GRAHAM PECHENIK: I mean, there may already be a patent on that, actually.
POULOMI SAHA: I think all the way back.
AUDIENCE: Hi. This is also a question for Graham. I’m curious as to how you see the landscape for psychedelic research changing in light of the fact that the recent phase III trials for MDMA-assisted therapy failed. Do you think that there’s still going to be investment and as much patenting in these substances and trials as there was previously?
GRAHAM PECHENIK: Yeah. That’s a really good question. I think the space did get a bit of deflation after the decision to not approve MDMA. It does seem, in general, like that has certainly slowed down the patent activity. I think, to some degree, it’s probably a good thing that there’s less focus on bringing as many drugs as there have been or as many companies bringing the same drugs through FDA.
So whether we need 10 competing companies to bring psilocybin all at the same time through FDA, I think, is a waste of resources, given that there are so many other ways of getting access to it that maybe would provide better access to people, like through state-regulated markets, through just local deprioritization or decriminalization.
So I guess that’s not exactly a direct answer to your question. I think the answer to your question is, I think it did make people realize that it’s going to be, perhaps, harder than they thought. That the money is perhaps further away than they thought because of the difficulty of getting these through FDA.
I think that may have changed with the new administration because people see RFK with the silver lining of maybe it’ll make it easier to have psychedelics approved with the co-president being, for instance, someone who is a very big fan of ketamine, perhaps he’s sympathetic to people who like to use psychedelics, but.
POULOMI SAHA: Let’s take a cluster. I see three hands. Let’s take all three of those questions at once, and then we’ll have the panelists respond.
AUDIENCE: I have a quick question for Diana. As I listened to all of you guys share and just my understanding, I’m curious about, how should psychedelics be mainstreamed from a decolonized perspective?
And what are a few, not necessarily concerns you have, but ways that you would like to see it unfold? Because when we mainstream something with the context of our society, it seems like, with RFK or with co-president, it will be born out of continued colonization and imperialism and capitalism.
DAVID PRESTI: Well, great question and great points. Thank you. Well, first of all, I have no–
DIANA NEGRIN: They wanted to take three questions and then let us all answer.
DAVID PRESTI: Say that again.
DIANA NEGRIN: I think they were going to take–
POULOMI SAHA: We’re going to take a couple of questions first–
DAVID PRESTI: Oh, sorry about that.
POULOMI SAHA: And then I’ll let you all run free with your answers. But let’s just grab these questions. Here and then here.
AUDIENCE: Thanks so much. This question is for Charles. I really enjoyed your talk. Yeah. I was talking to some people in the Jewish psychedelic sphere the other day. I talked to this psychedelic rabbi, and he was saying some interesting things that were dovetailing with some of the things you were pointing out. He was talking about some sort of– what he thought of as Indigenous Israeli psychedelic culture.
And mentioned that even like on the October 7 attack, that there were– the Israeli people were in a rave and that apparently there was some sort of ongoing research looking at, if those people who were taking psychedelics at that rave, how they fared.
And then I just wondered if you were aware of the study on ayahuasca, which brought together Israelis and Palestinians that there was a lot talk about in the psychedelic world. So those are a lot of questions. And I don’t know, in an aside, I guess the question is just how that would fit into your thinking on the current situation. Yeah.
POULOMI SAHA: Right here. Yeah.
AUDIENCE: Hi. Application, I’m a family doctor, end-of-life. My wife’s a therapist. And a lot of this involves the board that oversees therapy versus the board that oversees doctors. And the specific questions about right to try.
One of you mentioned that, but that’s people in end-of-life or people in dire situations, that’s been used for cancer medications, we use for HIV. And I wonder if you see any role for that from your various advantages. And thank you for being here.
POULOMI SAHA: OK. I’m going to let the panelists respond.
DAVID PRESTI: Well, I mean, I’ll say something to just kick it off. One of the questions had to do with, what’s my vision for mainstreaming and going forward? I don’t have one, and I’ve never had one. And my role has been, I’ve been teaching about psychedelics for 35, going on 40 years.
And it’s always been about education, and to move things along by the maximal amount of education. I mean, I do have an opinion about I don’t think folks should be arrested for anything having to do with psychedelics. But other than that, I certainly have no vision of how this is going to play out.
And I think, as I mentioned earlier, we’re in for a wild ride and anything could happen. For decades, these materials and practices were occult. They were under the radar. They were underground. Maybe they should stay there, I don’t know. And they will stay there. I mean, there will be– that will continue.
And there may be another path where there’s some legal FDA-approved availability, probably quite expensive. But with more knowledge out there, people will be able to grow their own mushrooms and develop community around how to effectively and transformatively and, with good preparation, utilize these materials.
DIANA NEGRIN: Yeah. I guess I’ll answer to a couple of the pieces. And I think that there is a very big– there’s a lot of dangers in the current moment, and I think that, at least, from my studies, and even listening to you all, it’s a lot of the same people.
So when we talk about power and ethics, we’re talking about a lot of the same actors, whether it’s Doblin or Bronner’s or Cody Swift, that are involved not only in clinical trials and conferences, but also in land acquisition south of the border. So the question of indigeneity and decoloniality is really important.
And I think I got in a big problem when I had a– last January, I was going to have an article about the relationship between indigeneity and land in the context of psychedelics, and why the psychedelic community should understand how land expropriation and settler colonialism is part of the picture that we’re seeing right now.
And I withdrew my article when I found out that MAPS was holding– continued to hold the conference in Israel in the midst of the genocide. And there was a huge debate online around the question of indigeneity, the trial using ayahuasca with Israelis and Palestinians. Ayahuasca is Indigenous to the Amazon.
So as a geographer, I’m thinking about, what are the ecological and cultural issues ethically with moving plants around that are actually in threat of extinction, whose lands are being taken over by mining, cattle ranching, other forms of drug matters like cocaine and poppy production. These communities are dealing with so much.
And unfortunately, a lot of the people who are making the rounds doing this work at a global power level are completely abstracted from how people are experiencing this on the ground. And if we don’t treat the fundamental issues of trauma, if we replicate and perpetuate war, then, yes, psychedelics become part and parcel of the same project rather than a liberation. And so that’s my big concern of the dangers and how decoloniality needs to really address those rooted issues, so yeah. [LAUGHS]
CHARLES HIRSCHKIND: Yeah. No. I agree. Thank you for the question. I think I am aware of that study. And it brought Palestinians and Israelis together in the context of using ayahuasca to see the way that that might bridge differences between them and change their feelings for each other and open up possibilities of dialogue and connection and so on.
It’s predicated on the idea that what drives the problem in Israel-Palestine is attitudes, feelings, antipathies, when actually the problem is driven by the policies of the state, which have the effect of producing those antipathies and feelings.
And so I’m not really optimistic in any way, actually. I think that– I don’t think there’s much use in that kind of study when it ignores the political facts that drive the struggle. So I thank you for the question.
POULOMI SAHA: I saw another hand here. We have time for one. Unless there’s a burning second question, we’ll end with one last question.
AUDIENCE: Yeah. I was just curious to compare– I think, Dr. Presti, you had started to mention the political moment of the early psychedelic landscape and how that was integrated in with a radical politics, versus within the mainstreaming we’re now seeing of a neoliberal psychedelic politics about how we can become more mentally fit to maintain the status quo. And I’m just curious how we would think about those dualities as we’re considering mainstreaming psychedelics.
DAVID PRESTI: Bingo. Mentally fit for meeting the status quo is not sustainable.
[LAUGHTER]
POULOMI SAHA: A pithy answer to an excellent question. On that note, please join me in thanking our panelists for that really terrific panel.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We are now accepting proposals from faculty, students, and affiliated researchers for Matrix research teams for the 2025-2026 academic year. 
Established in 2021, the Dr. Iris Hui Memorial Graduate Student Scholarship honors the vision and goals of Dr. Iris Hui, a PhD graduate of Political Science from UC Berkeley. Family and friends raised funding for this memorial scholarship in Dr. Hui’s name to support researchers and students tackling issues that meant so much to her — urgent, real-world problems facing all of us, including the governance of natural resources, climate change, political empowerment, and migration. As a former graduate student herself, Dr. Hui understood how funding like this can benefit graduate students. Social Science Matrix is honored to be chosen as the institutional home for this memorial scholarship, which will be distributed to awarded graduate students each summer. The maximum award amount is $1000; amounts may be less than requested. Applications for the research funding are accepted each year until March 31st. Money will be given to students as a stipend upon award. We anticipate being able to award 1-2 awards each year, depending on the amount of the awards and funding availability. Awards will be announced by June 1st each year. Eligibility: Applicants can be at any stage of the PhD process, and must be enrolled in any department in the Social Sciences Division of the UC Berkeley College of Letters & Science. Students are eligible to receive this grant once during their graduate studies.
