THE TRIP DOCTOR IS IN

| DRUGS | The wild world of psychedelic therapy schools

Big hugs to all my sexi new subs! I’m guessing ya’ll found this underbelly of the newsletter multiverse either through my sobriety-for-ravers workshop for CTM Festival (which was so sick)—or The Face’s roundup of ~ best Substack newsletters~ (chef kisses to Today In Tabs + all other Stacks on that list). ICYMI, The Face pretty much described Rave New World as a secret dispatch for hardcore ravers and druggies lmao ~ thank you, we’ll take it.

So I just dropped a piece in Bloomberg’s print mag about psychedelic therapy schools—a newish* industry sprouting up like shrooms in the wake of America’s sweeping drug reform. These online + IRL programs teach doctors, therapists, counselors and other healthcare workers how to integrate psychedelics like MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin, and cannabis into their practices—in other words, this is where regular docs become TRIP DOCS.

Before we get into the meat of this story—and all the spicy shit I had to leave out of the offish narrative—here is the mag cover art! “Ph.D. in MDMA” lmao Bloomberg is carrying…

What first drew me to this story was the idea of doctors formalizing the therapeutic modalities that ravers have been experimenting with on dancefloors for decades. A few months ago, I met someone who snagged a coveted spot in MAPS’ (extremely waitlisted) MDMA therapist program, which is currently training wannabe MOLLY DOCS (lol) to meet future demand once the drug is legalized for therapeutic use in the next year or two (Yes, seriously! Not many people are aware of how close we are to medical molly, but the FDA is expected to legalize MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in ‘22 or ‘23.)

This person was drawn to become a molly doc because MDMA helped her overcome many emotional barriers in her relationships, and she wanted to be able to offer this powerful, heart-opening medicine to others once its legalized. She also joked about how weird it was, during her training, to watch videos from the FDA’s ongoing clinical trials of MDMA for PTSD, where patients are lying in bed rolling on molly, with therapists gently feeding them water and holding their hands.

Someone getting ketamine therapy from a trip doc with tatts lol

It struck me that this research protocol is not so different from a cuddle puddle at a rave. Over decades of dancefloor experimentation, club kids have figured out our own “best practices” for engaging in safe and yes, therapeutic, drug use; even if it’s often anecdotal and informal, this shared body of knowledge really does help to reap the benefits—and reduce potential harms—of these powerful surgical tools for the soul.

One of my fave interviews for this story was with Dr. Julie Holland, a psychiatrist in New York who used to party at The Shelter—an underground spot in a Tribeca loft run by the 90s rave collective N.A.S.A. (which stood for ‘Nocturnal Audio + Sensory Awakening’). This club was so iconic, I totally gagged when I found out this trip doc was a rave regular!

Let’s take a quick detour, shall we, and savor the 90s lewks on parade in this video of blinkered NASA ravers emerging into the daylight (you know the vibe…!)

Another lil nugget I loved: Julie confessed that she would sit on the floor with freaked-out patients in the emergency room as if they were lounging at a party’s chill-out room—definitely not typical behavior for an ER doc, but again, this kind of intimacy is learned raver behavior for when someone is having a bad trip. She also credited her early MDMA experiences for helping her be a better shrink. “I did a lot of self-analysis, and to be a good psychiatrist, you have to have a good handle on your own pathology,” she said. “MDMA made it easier for me to have empathy, to be open-hearted and accepting. Those lessons came from [the rave mantra] PLUR.”

Julie’s willingness to speak so openly about her early days partying on MDMA is kinda rare tbh. As the psychedelic community buttons itself up and these drugs go mainstream, the empirical question of whether therapists and clinicians should personally experience psychedelics has become a hot debate. Most trip docs I spoke to said HELL YES—“The prevailing perspective is of course—how can you help if you don’t understand the psychedelic state yourself?” said Ingmar Gorman, founder of the psychedelic school Fluence8. But he pointed out that therapists who participate in the FDA’s clinical trials are not required to have tripped before, and the outcomes still appear to be successful. “The minority view is that as long as therapists are trained, they can deliver care and be supportive without having personal psychedelic experiences.”

This is probably where I should note that administering psychedelics like psilocybin, even in therapeutic settings, is still illegal; Oregon legalized medical shrooms last November under Measure 109, but the state is still in the early stages of figuring out how that’s going to work. So psychedelic schools mostly focus on theory, with courses like “Psychedelics and Psychoanalysis” or more specialized topics like “Special Considerations for the LGBTQIA+ Community with Religious Trauma.” Most schools also teach doctors how to do psychedelic integration, which is how to give therapy before and after the patient trips on their own (or does an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru or something).

One interesting exception is this school called Psychedelic Somatic Institute (PSI) in Portland. At PSI’s programs, trip docs-in-training bring their own weed from a legal dispensary, or get prescribed medical ketamine from a psychiatrist. Then they actually administer these drugs on themselves, before participating in group therapy sessions with other students. “This particular training model is where you can get a lot of your own work done,” said PSI co-founder Saj Razvi. “Psychedelics take clients so deep. If they go someplace the therapist has not gone to in their own system, they cannot lead the client.” (You can watch PSI’s training videos here, warning: they're kind of intense.)

Another issue that kept cropping up is that these psychedelic schools are also unregulated—like, there’s no official certificate or degree that qualifies you as a trip doc. So it can be tough for students to discern between quality vs. quick buck, or as Razvi put it: “There are training spaces on the West Coast where everyone and their mother is a shaman.”

What’s crazy is that psychedelic schools are doing such brisk business when so much of how the trip therapy industrial complex is gonna work is still unknown. Every school I reached out to told me their waitlists are popping, and with courses costing anywhere from a few hundred bucks to ~$10,000, you can do the math. Basically, a lot of doctors are betting that once the legal floodgates for MDMA, cannabis, MDMA are opened, they’ll have their feet in the door—and could even open their own trip clinic$ or retreat center$.

As I dove into the deepest layer of this world, I also heard stories of psychedelic therapy already happening in underground spaces all the country, like private homes in the Bay Area where therapists administer MDMA to patients under-the-table. It was a touchy subject and most people didn’t want to divulge many details on the record, which is why I didn’t even broach this angle in the offish piece, but maybe feel comfortable mentioning it here? (Idk, I’m still navigating the ambiguous public-private gaze of this whole newsletter thing…)

It seems like underground psychedelic therapists—and indigenous shamans—have amassed a lot of knowledge in this area, yet their expertise aren’t always part of the medical or research communities’ discussion of legal protocols. So how do they do it? This, my friends, will hopefully be something I’ll poke into when we’re allowed to dive back into the world and I can skulk around the psychedelic therapy underground. (Send me hot tips?) Until then, stay tripping fam ~

NASA rave flyer

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