Psychedelic Culture at the Crossroads

Originally published on March 5, 2015

For many, today’s “psychedelic renaissance” means the resumption of above-board psychedelic research and the positive shift in mainstream opinion represented by recent coverage in periodicals like the New Yorker and the New York Times. In this talk for the San Francisco Psychedelic Society, delivered on March 5, 2015, I offer a more complex picture of various tensions within the “psychedelic community” as it finds itself at a crossroads of what I identify here as four distinct zones of culture and discourse: the Underground, the Grey Market, the Clinic, and the Jungle.