THE SURREAL FRONTIER OF PSYCHEDELIC SCIENCE

Hunting for rare drugs at America's largest psychedelic gathering

Touch down in Denver with the squirrely mania of a sleepless body surviving on synthetic energy. The sun is a strip of gold sinking behind the Rocky mountain’s jagged panorama—breathtaking, truly—but all I can do in the car ride from the airport is check my phone like fuck fuck fuck I am going to be laaaaate. I’m here for Psychedelic Science, the largest psychedelic conference in history, and there’s an opening dinner tonight hosted by Beckley Foundation—a UK-based think tank founded by Amanda Feilding‚ an eccentric British aristocrat best known for her twin loves of LSD and trepanation. But staring down the barrel of hobnobbing with psychedelic high society, I re-route and opt for a softer landing: meeting my friend Juan MacLean, a DFA Records OG and mainstay of the New York club scene. 

Juan is playing a DJ set for Psychedelic Assembly—a social club in Midtown Manhattan that is one of many organizations putting on lavish parties around Psychedelic Science. Over dinner at a hipster vegetarian restaurant, Juan tells me that he’s completely disinterested in attending the conference. “The world of legal and above-ground psychedelics has no appeal for me… I’m actively opposed to most of what’s going on,” he says. Juan is not the only person with a bone to pick with the conference; rumblings of dissent have been coming from across the psychedelic space. A few days ago, Oakland Hyphae wrote an open letter critiquing the price of tickets, which started at $800—a barrier to entry that seems to encapsulate one of the biggest issues facing the burgeoning legal psychedelics industry: how to make this healing technology accessible to a broader swath of society, especially the communities who need it most. (Later, I meet a guy who tells me he snuck into the conference through the intrepid use of a ladder.)  

As for Juan, he’s just returned to the US from the Peruvian jungle, where he’d been training with the Shipibo tribe to serve ayahuasca—a process that entailed drinking the brew three times a week for three months. “Doing ayahuasca alone in my hut was pretty intense…” he laughs, with a faraway look in his eyes that I recognize in people who steep themselves in psychedelic plants. 

The party that night is sold out, and it’s clear that people are planning to go hard—like, “popping MDMA at 10pm backstage” level of hard. Juan opens his set with a few ambient tracks, layering on droning vocals and stretching out the feeling of drifting suspension for as long as he can. Studies have shown that music is critical to psychedelics’ therapeutic potential, giving these amorphous experiences a structural container that can guide people towards catharsis. Juan is one of the few electronic artists working in this modality that I fuck with. A few blocks away, at another Psychedelic Science party, a blue-eyed DJ named Savej (literally pronounced “savage” if you can believe it!!!) is playing “tribal trap” and “shamanic bass” to a party full of whirly-limbed Burners. No thanks. 

I head home before midnight to be ready for the action tomorrow: running between keynote speeches from celebrities like neuroscientist heartthrob Andrew Huberman, Hollywood nepo-baby Jaden Smith, Republican ex-Texas governor Rick Perry; schmoozing with the psychedelic intelligentsia; and most of all—trying to score weird new drugs from all the psychedelic entrepreneurs eager to show off their blackmarket products. 

Waiting for my car back to the hotel, I chat with the founder of a major biotech company who saunters up to the club in a suit. “How has your evening been?” I ask as he leans against a sidewalk railing. “Very good,” he smiles. “I was just at a private dinner party where everyone was passing around giant vials of ketamine…” 

***

9am and the mescaline gummy is hitting. I’m scurrying around the Colorado Convention Center, a sterile labyrinth of conference rooms that is decidedly not the ideal setting for any psychedelic experience. (Mercifully, I’m microdosing.) Swarming around me are 12,000 other attendees representing every imaginable stripe of the psychedelic rainbow: pony-tailed psychonauts, briefcase-toting Pharma bros, aging hippies, underground therapists, academic researchers, and rainbow-haired Burners. As you can imagine, the collision of these disparate tribes in the carpeted hallways of corporate America is surreal and slightly psychotic.