Welcome to the Psychedelic Overground
Why have I named my psychedelic copywriting & consultancy business Psychedelic Overground?
Psilocybe subaeruginosa
So much in and around psychedelics seems to be moving fast. What was once only whispered about is increasingly popular culture, appearing in everything from entertainment to stock portfolios. It's not that the hallucinogenic nature of substances like LSD or Psilocybin has ever been far from our collective imagination. But the real secrets, that they might have profound therapeutic value and that they're safe enough that their prohibition is not (and was never) appropriate are on many more minds and lips than even a few years ago.
What was underground is now becoming…overground. Note that I don’t say “mainstream” or “banal” or "normal". Psychedelics are none of those things and may never be. Their impact on human experience is so powerful that if they did become truly ubiquitous, it might be that we'd hardly recognize the result.
Nor was I inclined to call it something like Psychedelic Utopia. These substances and the mind-states they produce can be many things and have a range of outcomes. Mystical experiences, ego-death, and neuroplasticity are like electricity in that they're neither good nor bad, save that our use of them makes them so.
All we can depend upon is that things might be changing.
Welcome to the Psychedelic Overground.
Who are we?
We're not the government. We're not conventional. We're not part of the system in the same way that others are. We're still largely unknown, and some of us may never be household names. But we’re not underground anymore.
We’re the Indigenous people on whose traditional knowledge this whole edifice is built. We’re those with audiences of millions and those who have no voice. We’re retreat facilitators, ayahuasca servers and mushroom guides, often taking legal risks or working in regulatory grey areas. We're integration specialists overwhelmed by the demand for our services. We're researchers, writers, chemists, botanists, mycologists, environmentalists, gonzo journalists, socialists, anarchists, and conservatives. We quietly microdose in suburbia and detail our psychonautic exploits on YouTube. We're in grassroots non-profit collectives advocating for decriminalization and working at the coalface of harm reduction. A very few of us even sit astride corporate behemoths, flush with billions of dollars of investor capital.
We each have our unique motivations and envisage very different future worlds. Some of these futures are better than others.
What happens now is, quite literally, up to us.
What if we want to have a future where psychedelics are part of an existence that is fairer, more compassionate, more sustainable, and where power is less able to override accountability? In that case, we need to do the work. Likewise, if we’re serious about psychedelics being able to help alleviate suffering, we will need to deploy more than just good intentions. So, this is part of my effort to show up and contribute (the other part being my volunteering with the Australian Psychedelic Society.)
Good people and organizations of the psychedelic overground need carefully crafted, accurate, and authentic psychedelic content to cut through the noise, to appear in searches and then hold the attention of consumers, investors, and regulators alike. More importantly, this content must ring true with the existing psychedelic communities. I can do this.
People and organizations who want to do better (and not just use psychedelics as another way to perpetuate existing problems and bolster their fragile egos via market capitalizations) will need assistance. Finding new approaches to leadership, putting connection into practice, embracing reciprocity, and understanding the complexity of acting ethically in the real world are all going to be challenging. I hope, in time, that I can help with these things too.
While academia takes up less of my time than it used to, I’m still a philosopher of language at heart. So, I take communication very seriously. Every time we speak or write, we stand on the shoulders of everyone who has ever used those words before us. At the same time, we open new possibilities for language, concepts, and values whenever someone reads or hears what we are putting out into the world.
If you want a psychedelic copywriter who takes neither words nor ethics seriously, thanks for dropping by, but I'm probably not the person you're looking for. But if you think I might be, please get in contact, and we’ll see where the conversation takes us.
