SHROOMS ARE THE NEW WEED
| DRUGS | Inside the nascent psychedelic underground, the question on everyone's lips: how do we avoid the mistakes of cannabis?
My friend, an editor at a ~hip psychedelic magazine for Millennials~ recently invited me to an outdoor dinner party at Soho House for psychedelic women. As in, women who work in the psychedelic industry, or to put it another way, professional bad bitches who deeply believe in the value of tripping balls, AKA my people. A seat at this table was very exciting to me, because, like so many other people in the weed world, I’ve found myself drifting towards the psychedelic underground—not even by design, more out of an instinctive pull towards where the hot wet action is happening.
But I was also kinda scared?? Earlier that same night, LA announced a new curfew banning non-essential shenanigans after 10pm, and you can feel The Fear creeping back to the streets—even in New York, my spies tell me that no one is throwing iconic forest raves anymore. Last dinner party of 2020, I told myself, imagining this psychedelic dinner would be the coda to the short-lived window that opened earlier this summer when life felt kinda normal again. (By the time you’re reading this, that window has officially been slammed shut in our faces—bitch, bye!).
TBH I’ve been getting restless with weed. I moved to LA under the spell of a fantasy that I’d witness a stoner revolution, wondering naively what kind of collective awakening would happen once this drug went mainstream. This dream of THC-assisted transcendence never really materialized, but a mess of headache regulations, exorbitant taxes, and borderline snake oil products that reduced cannabis to its most inoffensive facets arrive in its wake (sorry, CBD is so over).
I watched cannabis go from counterculture to capitalist cash cow, morphing into a mundane industry dominated by stoner bros and IPOs.
People doing rooftop CBD yoga at Weed Rave while DJs blasted techno downstairs lol
If you’ve been following me for a minute, you already know I started this stoner fantasy party Weed Rave last year with the intention of introducing cool people to cool weed brands run by queers, BIPOCs, and femmes; it was hella lit lol but even this concept of “conscious capitalism” has limited efficacy—most of my friends still just throw their money at bloodless megacorps like MedMen. Meanwhile, equity programs meant to give back to minority communities harmed by the War on Drugs ended up falling flat, and in a horrific twist of irony, benefiting white business owners instead. Cannabis tax money is even going directly to fund law enforcement. (Although Portland plans to change that.)
More weed fails: studies have found that while cannabis arrests in California have gone down, racial bias has actually gone up, with Hispanics still getting arrested for pot nearly twice as often as white people. Even the relatively high number of female executives in cannabis—once held up triumphantly as a sign of how great the weed industry can be—has been in steep decline, dropping from 35 to 17% in the last five years as women are pushed out by (traditionally white + male) VC money.
Ugh, it’s all just so disappointing.
So can you blame me for moseying over to the shroom scene, which is booming with the type of electric possibility that lured me towards cannabis in the first place? I can’t leave my house in LA these days without meeting someone working on some artisanal shroom brand, and I’ve become obsessed with documenting all the cute packaging and products flooding the market—microdose LSD kits, DMT vapes, and shroom chocolates seem to be especially chic right now.
The best party I’ve been to recently was Family Shroom, an outdoor shroom market in an Echo Park backyard where the hosts served tea infused with shrooms they’d grown on their own, and everyone sat around on picnic blankets chatting and nibbling on artisanal olive bread. It was so cute and wholesome!! Plus, with the recent US elections delivering a referendum that the War on Drugs is CANCELLED, it’s obvious that the future is trippy af—and ya girl was obviously dying to get that deep insider tea on what the psychedelic industry is gossiping about behind closed doors.
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