A new, incredibly thorough piece of reportage from Psymposia and Truthdig digs into the nascent world of Big Psychedelics, specifically the Silicon Valley elites—operating as the Psychedelic Science Funder’s Collective—who are helping drive the push to commercialize and normalize psychedelics while sidelining critics and shoving science into the backseat.
Key quote:
We detail how this group and its affiliate organizations conducted a strategic campaign to shape public perception in favor of Lykos Therapeutics’ failed MDMA-assisted therapy application and demonize its critics. The PSFC’s ultimate goal was to persuade the FDA to approve Lykos’ application, against the recommendation of its own advisory committee and numerous other professional organizations. This approval would have jump-started a psychedelic industry in which many of the PSFC’s members are financially invested, and expedite the privatization of psychedelic research and proliferation of intellectual property barriers.
And don’t forget the PSFC’s “efforts to circumvent federal regulatory structures and manipulate state-level policy development” to help Big Pyschedelics!
You can read the executive summary here; going through the full investigation is a must for anyone interested in the malfeasance of the industry and its allies as they push psychoactive drugs as cures for serious psychological issues, propose using veterans as guinea pigs, violate ethical standards around drug testing, and much more.
That veterans issue is key. Psychedelics pushers have long appealed to the possibility of MDMA and other psychedelic treatment for those suffering from PTSD after having served their country.
In the words of the report:
Lykos funders were following a classic pharma playbook — funding proxy groups to obscure serious concerns about the company’s practices by exploiting the public’s sympathy for veterans . . .
PSFC formalized this approach to veterans groups in its November 2021 Landscape Report, which positioned them as a key element of a public relations strategy that would serve as an “insurance policy” and a “bulwark against backlash” to protect the organization’s interests. To implement this strategy, the report outlined how PSFC could manipulate public sentiment and apply political pressure by directly funding content creation: “Another option for funding is to bypass the ‘gatekeepers’ and directly support the creation and dissemination of content focused on the messages we want the public to hear” . . . this content strategy was designed to exploit public sympathy for veterans to manufacture urgency for advancing PSFC’s policy goals: “Advocacy organizations focused on specific constituencies such as veterans…can be extremely powerful elements of a policy change strategy. Tying a policy reform effort to human stories from populations who are either highly sympathetic or highly relatable is one of the most effective ways to create a sense of urgency among both the public and lawmakers.”
In other words, all the public rhetoric around helping one of America’s most vulnerable groups was just that: mere rhetoric.
Read the whole thing here. It’s long, but worth it for anyone who cares about making sure drug policy is backed by actual science, not profits.