The Politics of Psychedelics

Mystical Experience, Cognitive Freedom & the War on Consciousness

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"Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing."

— Terence McKenna

There is an experience so profound, so unlike any other human experience, that it rips through the veil of consensus reality, placing you face-to-face with the eternal, the transcendent, the ineffable, the creative source behind all things. Some call it God and build religions to contain it—but the truth is, it cannot be named, and it cannot be contained by mere words or comprehended by ape-like neural networks. In its presence, the scaffolding of contemporary society begins to collapse: laws, ideologies, institutions, even the voice in your head that calls itself “I.”

All of it falls away. What remains is raw awareness, naked before the infinite.

While such experiences can occur through meditation, fasting, chanting, other ascetic practices or even spontaneously, certain molecules—some of which grow freely on the planet—offer a more direct pathway. Psychedelic substances—whether plants, mushrooms, or synthesized compounds—can unveil the evolutionary intelligence of the universe through journeys into the depths of consciousness. Under the right conditions, these psychedelics can even catalyze genuine mystical experiences.

These aren’t trivial encounters. They represent states of being that millions across history have spent lifetimes pursuing—building temples, erecting cathedrals, even waging wars in their name. Mystical experiences have the power to radically redefine a person’s life, to shift perception at its roots, and to reorient behaviour around something truer than doctrine. And that kind of authentic, direct, and unmediated awakening is deeply threatening to the established structures of power and control.

Despite mounting evidence of their therapeutic, spiritual, and cognitive benefits, psychedelics remain largely illegal. Why? While various explanations exist, the root cause lies in how these substances threaten established structures of domination by dissolving the psychological, social, and cultural frameworks through which we've been conditioned to perceive and behave.

By revealing these structures as constructed rather than absolute, psychedelics challenge the very foundations upon which contemporary systems of control rest—a possibility that established interests have systematically worked to suppress.

Psychedelics & Consciousness

The principal effects of psychedelics include enhanced access to unconscious or previously inaccessible psychological material, insight, mystical experience, and perhaps most significantly, the temporary dissolution of the self, often referred to as ego-death. These are not merely “interesting” effects. They represent ecologically and evolutionarily meaningful shifts in human perception—changes in how individuals experience themselves, others, and the world at large.

And with that shift in perception often comes a shift in behaviour.

Dissolving Perceptual Structures

Psychedelics have a unique capacity to disintegrate the organizational and hierarchical structures that shape human experience. When ingested, compounds like psilocybin and LSD temporarily disrupt default mode network activity in the brain—the neural system responsible for maintaining our sense of self and narrative continuity. This disruption allows for new patterns of brain connectivity and information processing that aren't constrained by usual cognitive frameworks.

The result is a state where psychological, social, cultural, parental, religious, and political structures—all of which we've been raised to accept as normal—suddenly appear as constructs rather than absolutes. As McKenna observed, psychedelics help us see through conditioning, dissolving opinion structures and culturally imposed models of behaviour that typically operate below conscious awareness.

And this is dangerous. Not to you, but to the systems that require conformity.

The Ego & Its Function

The ego serves a vital function.

It's necessary for survival and general functioning within complex ecological and social structures, allowing us to navigate reality as coherent organisms within ecosystems and individuals within societies, with agency and intention. The ego eases our interaction with the world by providing a stable sense of identity.

However, the ego becomes problematic when left unchecked—either by the self-regulating and reflective insights offered by psychedelic the ancient plants and fungi, or when hijacked by forces with their own agendas. Religious institutions, political ideologies, corporate marketing, and algorithm-driven media all work tirelessly to shape our sense of self in ways that serve their interests, not ours. These systems aren’t neutral. They’re precision-engineered to manipulate the ego’s fears and desires, to keep us consuming, conforming, and asleep to our deeper nature.

Psychedelic experience temporarily free awareness from these external influences by revealing consciousness beyond ego-identification. When consciousness recognizes its nature as independent from the constructed self, organisms (individuals) gain greater agency in choosing how they're influenced. The realization that "the real you" isn't merely who you were taught to be creates profound freedom from manipulation.

Realizing that the self is not the ego—and that the ego has been molded to serve fabricated social systems rather than the living ecosystems we emerged from—isn’t just liberating. It’s deeply subversive. Because it threatens the very foundations of systems you never chose, but were born into.

Transforming Values

This newfound perspective often leads to value transformations that directly challenge consumer capitalism. When people experience states of interconnection and feel wholeness, material acquisition and status-seeking frequently diminish in importance. Instead, values like community, creativity, authenticity, and ecological harmony emerge—not as ideals to strive toward, but as natural expressions of a more connected, healthy and harmonious way of being as part of a planetary system.

Our economic systems rely on the successful marketing of artificial needs. Every day, we’re told: “use this product to feel beautiful,” “buy this car to be happy,” “take this course to become successful.” But these messages begin to lose their grip when a person realizes—viscerally—that everything they truly need is already here (assuming their basic needs, including community, are met). Fulfillment, it turns out, is not something to be earned, bought, or constructed. It’s something to be remembered.

This realization is not benign. It poses an existential threat to a system that depends on dissatisfaction to survive. People who have touched genuine wholeness rooted in ecological and spiritual reality become harder to manipulate. They’re simply not interested in what’s being sold by the fabricated system, because they’ve glimpsed a form of abundance that can’t be packaged, branded, or bought.

The transformation of consciousness catalyzed by psychedelics, then, is not just a personal awakening. It is an inner revolution—one that undermines the foundations of an individualistic, materialistic, consumeristic and self-destructive society.

Political & Economic Control

The prohibition of psychedelics cannot be fully understood without examining the political and economic contexts in which these substances were criminalized. What emerges is not a story of public health concerns, but rather a calculated strategy to maintain social control and protect established economic and political interests.

The War on Drugs as Political Strategy

The 1960s counterculture movement, partially fueled by psychedelics like LSD, represented a significant challenge to established authority. Young people experiencing states of consciousness characterized by unity, love, and connection began questioning the United State’s involvement in Vietnam, challenging racial inequality, forgetting sexual norms and rejecting consumerist values.

This widespread social awakening threatened the political establishment of the time.

The Nixon administration's response was the declaration of the "War on Drugs”—a campaign ostensibly about public health but actually designed as a political weapon.

John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy chief, later admitted the truth in a remarkable confession:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

This stark admission reveals the true nature of early drug prohibition: a bigoted and racist political tactic designed to suppress dissent and control targeted communities.

Once again, the threat wasn’t to health, it was to hierarchy. These substances catalyze values and visions that challenge the status quo at its roots.

Economic Interests: Medicine as Industry

Beyond politics, powerful economic interests have maintained psychedelic prohibition. The pharmaceutical industry, which plays a central role in the global economy, depends on patentable medications that require ongoing use.

Of course, psychedelics present a fundamental challenge to this business model.

Unlike conventional pharmaceuticals that manage symptoms and require regular consumption, psychedelics often produce lasting therapeutic effects with just one or few sessions. Recent clinical research shows that a single psilocybin experience can produce significant long-term reductions in depression, anxiety, and addiction—results that far outperform many standard medications.

Economically, this efficacy is precisely the problem. Pharmaceutical companies cannot easily profit from substances that:

1. Are naturally occurring and difficult to patent.

2. Require minimal doses rather than ongoing prescriptions.

3. Address root psychological causes rather than merely managing symptoms.

The medical and pharmaceutical industries largely operate on a model that profits from illness management rather than cure. A healthcare paradigm incorporating psychedelics would fundamentally disrupt this economic arrangement.

Challenging Materialist Paradigms

Perhaps most significantly, psychedelic-informed consciousness directly challenges the materialist and consumerist paradigms that drive our economic systems.

When individuals experience states of profound wholeness—contentment, peace, interconnection, and meaning stemming from simply being, from within rather than from external acquisition—the endless cycle of consumption loses its grip.

The typical Western paradigm of resource accumulation, status competition, and material success depends on maintaining certain psychological structures, particularly the belief that fulfillment comes through having rather than being.

Psychedelic experiences often reveal the hollowness and ridiculousness of this premise, leading individuals to prioritize values like community, creativity, purpose, ecological harmony, and direct experience over material acquisition.

This shift represents a fundamental threat to economic systems that require continuous consumption driven by perpetual dissatisfaction—a threat significant enough to explain decades of suppression despite mounting evidence of benefits.

Spiritual Liberation & Authority

At the heart of psychedelic prohibition lies their most subversive power: the ability to grant direct access to the sacred—no priest, no doctrine, no institution required. This undermines the historical gatekeepers of spiritual authority and threatens the very architecture through which religious and cultural hierarchies have maintained control.

Direct Access to Transcendence

Psychologist and philosopher William James, in his seminal work "The Varieties of Religious Experience," documented the mystical-type experience as a fundamental human phenomenon across cultures and time periods. This state of consciousness—characterized by unity, sacredness, ineffability, and noetic quality—appears to be a universal potential of human consciousness throughout time.

While religious traditions have long offered disciplined paths to mystical experience—through meditation, prayer, fasting, and other rituals—psychedelics, many of which emerge organically on the planet, can catalyze similarly profound states with remarkable consistency. As researcher Roland Griffiths noted after conducting controlled studies at Johns Hopkins:

"There is such a sense of authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures. We ended up demonizing these compounds. Can you think of another area of science regarded as so dangerous and taboo that all research gets shut down for decades? It's unprecedented in modern science."

This "sense of authority" is precisely what makes these experiences so transformative, and so threatening to established power structures. When individuals directly encounter what they perceive as ultimate reality, divine consciousness, God or whatever you want to call it, external authorities lose their mediating role.

Cutting Out the Middleman

Throughout history, religious institutions have positioned themselves as necessary intermediaries between ordinary people and the divine. This role as spiritual middlemen has conferred enormous social, political, and economic power. Similarly, political systems often derive legitimacy from claims to moral or spiritual authority.

Psychedelics disrupt this ancient arrangement by democratizing access to the divine. They offer direct, unmediated experiences of transcendence, unity, and insight—no priest, prophet, or politician required. In doing so, they threaten the spiritual supply chain. When individuals realize they can commune with the sacred directly via nature itself, without permission or hierarchy, the power of intermediaries begins to dissolve.

The Root of Religious Traditions

Many scholars and theologians have suggested that psychedelic or mystical experiences lie at the origin of numerous world religions. The direct encounter with transcendent reality—whether described as God, Brahman, Buddha-nature, or cosmic consciousness—appears to be the seed from which religious systems grow.

Mystical experiences are not just a human experience among others. Rather, mystical experience lies at the very heart of human predicament. It is the center that gives meaning to the whole. Once encountered, life is fundamentally altered because one's identity expands beyond individual ego to encompass a more fundamental reality.

By facilitating access to these foundational experiences, psychedelics reveal the common spiritual core of human nature that lies beneath diverse religious traditions—a revelation that challenges claims to exclusive spiritual truth and authority. This democratization of the sacred represents a serious threat to systems that depend on controlling access to transcendent knowledge and experience.

The New Gatekeepers

As we witness the so-called "psychedelic renaissance," a troubling pattern emerges. The reintroduction of psychedelics into society and culture is occurring primarily through medicalization—a framework that, while validating their efficacy and establishing safety, also initiates new forms of control that may preserve the very power structures these substances naturally challenge.

Medicalizing the Mystical

The current model of psychedelic research and potential implementation focuses almost exclusively on their therapeutic applications within conventional medical paradigms. While this approach has strategically bypassed prohibition, it also effectively narrows the narrative around these substances, reducing sacred medicines and powerful teachers to mere "medications" for diagnosable conditions.

This framing is not accidental.

By constraining psychedelics within medical contexts, authority over these experiences transfers from government prohibition to medical gatekeeping. The white lab coat simply replaces the police uniform as the symbol of control. The question of who can access these substances shifts from "nobody without risking imprisonment" to "only those with approved diagnoses, through approved channels, under professional supervision." This is less than ideal.

Corporate & Elitist Capture

Simultaneously, we're witnessing the rapid corporatization of psychedelics. Pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists are racing to patent not just synthetic variants of these molecules but also specific therapeutic protocols and delivery methods. McPsychedelics threatens to privatize and commodify substances that grow freely and practices that have existed in Indigenous traditions for millennia.

Worse still is the reframing of psychedelics as tools for optimization. No longer sacraments for the cultivation of right relationship, they’re now being marketed as productivity hacks, mental health upgrades, or creativity boosters for Silicon Valley CEOs. The message isn’t “wake up,” it’s “get ahead.” Healing is being reduced to performance enhancement—another cog in the capitalist machine.

The irony is palpable: substances that dissolve ego, challenge hierarchies, and reconnect us to Nature are now being integrated into society through intensely extractive and controlling frameworks. Their revolutionary potential is being neutralized by the very systems they might otherwise transform.

Preserving the Status Quo

This medical-corporate approach to psychedelics represents a sophisticated form of recuperation—the process by which radical ideas and practices are absorbed into mainstream systems in ways that neutralize their transformative potential. By acknowledging their efficacy while controlling access and narrative, existing power structures can maintain dominance even while appearing progressive.

Perhaps the most profound irony in this emerging paradigm is that the system is integrating medicines to heal itself from itself. Psychedelics are being pressed into service to address epidemic levels of depression, anxiety, addiction, and PTSD—conditions largely generated by the very socioeconomic structures that are now controlling these medicines. Rather than allowing these substances to catalyze fundamental questioning of why so many people are suffering under current systems, they're being deployed to help people function better within those systems, effectively treating the symptoms while preserving the disease.

The true revolutionary potential of psychedelics lies not just in healing individual trauma or mental health conditions, but in catalyzing fundamental shifts in how we perceive ourselves, others, and our relationship to the planet and cosmos. By restricting them to narrow medical applications, we risk losing sight of their capacity to help us reimagine and rebuild our social, economic, and ecological systems.

The question becomes whether society can develop frameworks that honour both safety concerns and the full spectrum of benefits these substances offer, including the spiritual, ecological, social and cultural dimensions that extend far beyond the medical model's limited scope.

Conclusion

Public health was the excuse.

But what was really being protected wasn’t people—it was power.

The contemporary resurgence in interest towards psychedelics suggests that the truth cannot be suppressed indefinitely. The therapeutic potential of psychedelics in treating conditions like depression, PTSD, and addiction has become too compelling to ignore, creating cracks in the edifice of prohibition. As these substances gradually re-enter mainstream awareness through medicalization, we face important questions about how they will be integrated into society and culture.

Will access be controlled by new gatekeepers—pharmaceutical companies, medical establishments, or government regulators? Or can we develop frameworks that honour both safety concerns, cognitive liberty and spiritual freedom?

At Psygaia, we’re working to develop such frameworks—ones that honour the sacred, therapeutic, ecological, and cultural dimensions of these substances. Frameworks rooted not only in science, but in reverence, reciprocity, and ethical accessibility.

Psychedelic prohibition was never about protection. It was about permission—about who gets to define social, cultural and political reality. It was a means of controlling which states of consciousness are allowed in a society built on specific values, ideologies, and rules—many of them inherited from eras, empires, and individuals whose worldviews no longer reflect the complexity or needs of our time.

As we move forward, the question is no longer simply: Should these substances be legal? The real question is: Who has the right to determine the kinds of consciousness you are allowed to access?

Perhaps the most radical proposition is also the simplest: your mind belongs to you. And the freedom to explore it—wisely and responsibly—is a birthright no institution has the authority to deny.

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