In 2018, a statement signed by prominent members of the psychedelic research community circulated in alarm. Compass Pathways, which is a for-profit company backed by substantial venture capital, had been pursuing patents not only on novel compounds but on basic therapeutic elements: furniture, sound systems, protocol structures. The items themselves were unremarkable, but what they represented was not.
The alarm was about enclosure. About the application of intellectual property logic to dimensions of the therapeutic encounter that had previously been understood as common — relational, contextual, atmospheric — and therefore not ownable. Compass Pathways was doing nothing unusual by pharmaceutical industry standards. And that was exactly the problem.
What happened with those patents is emblematic of something deeper than corporate opportunism. It is part of a structural process — one that has already played out, in our lifetimes, with mindfulness.
The Pattern We Keep Missing
When Jon Kabat-Zinn developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in the late 1970s, the technique he developed was rooted in Buddhist phenomenology — in a particular orientation toward attention, impermanence, and the relationship between the self and its experience. That orientation was the substance of the practice.
Forty years later, mindfulness is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Apps, corporate wellness programs, eight-week certificates, productivity hacks. The technique survived, stripped and formalized and deployable at scale. The orientation did not. What critics call McMindfulness is the result: the form of the practice preserved, its root severed.
Psychedelics are entering this same process. What we are watching (and in many cases participating in) I have come to think of as McPsychedelics: the absorption of sacred psychedelic medicines into the consumer-capitalist order, on that order’s terms.
The analogy is not perfect. Psychedelic experiences are harder to commodify than breath-following — they are longer, stranger, less predictable, more demanding. But the structural pressures are identical. And the dimensions of the experience being foreclosed are, if anything, more consequential.
What the Market Knows How to Do
Consumer capitalism is not random in what it absorbs. It is systematic. What it absorbs most efficiently are techniques, such as the reproducible, scalable, patentable elements of a practice. What it discards are the relationships, the obligations, the cosmologies, the communal accountability within which those techniques were originally embedded.
This is how a company can pursue patents on furniture. The room, the sounds, the soft surfaces — these are technique. They can be standardized, licensed, owned. The relationship between a healer and a person in crisis, the cosmological framework within which that crisis is understood, the community into which the person returns afterward — these cannot be patented. They also cannot be billed.
Researcher Tehseen Noorani has documented this with precision: pharmaceutical companies face structural incentives to develop what he calls “diluted-yet-profitable” forms of psychedelic-assisted treatment — simplified interventions more amenable to the intellectual property frameworks through which medical products generate returns. The simplification is not incidental to the business model. It is the business model.
What gets simplified, predictably, is not the pharmacology. It is everything surrounding the pharmacology: the relational context, the communal dimension, the cosmological framing. The molecule is preserved; the ecology it once operated within is discarded.
A More Expensive Version of the Problem It Was Meant to Solve
There is a structural critique of medicalization that cuts deeper than concerns about access or affordability, as urgent as those are.
Mark Fisher described “capitalist realism” as the pervasive sense that there is no alternative to capitalism — a background assumption so thoroughgoing that it shapes not just political imagination but the basic categories through which problems are understood. Within this atmosphere, mental health becomes synonymous with effective adaptation. Depression is not a social product; it is an individual malfunction. The question of whether the arrangements to which a person is being restored are themselves pathological becomes unaskable.
This is the landscape psychedelic medicine is entering. Psychiatric knowledge production has been systematically shaped by the incentive to locate suffering inside the individual brain, because doing so generates a market for compounds targeting specific neurochemical systems. Psychedelic medicine, absorbed into this paradigm, risks becoming another iteration of the same logic: better tools for returning people, processed and stabilized, to the arrangements that produced their distress.
Researchers Emilia Sanabria and Luís Fernando Tófoli observe that the concept of “integration” — now central to psychedelic-assisted therapy — already presupposes this dynamic. It presupposes a gap between the insights generated by psychedelic experience and the cosmology of the social world into which the subject must return. When integration is itself commodified — rendered as apps, coaching protocols, formulaic checklists — that gap is not bridged. It is administered. The subject is returned to their life, tidier and better resourced, without the question ever being asked of whether the life itself is part of the problem.
The Ecology That Can’t Be Patented
The Shipibo people of the Amazon have conducted ayahuasca ceremonies for generations not as therapeutic interventions in a psychiatric sense, but as processes of relational and communal repair — ceremonies in which healing is understood as the restoration of right relationship between a person, their community, and the more-than-human world they are embedded within. The ceremony is not the product. The cosmology that frames it, the trained practitioner who navigates it, the community that holds both, the relationship with the vine itself. These are not separable accessories. Rather, they constitute the context within which the compound becomes meaningful.
The Mazatec use of psilocybin mushrooms in Oaxaca operates from a similar logic. The healer Maria Sabina understood her work as fundamentally relational — not a technique applied to an individual but a participation in forces larger than any individual. The mushroom, in this framing, is not a tool the healer wields. It is a being within a relationship.
I am not invoking these traditions as romantic correctives to Western medicine, or suggesting that non-Indigenous practitioners should attempt to replicate them. A globally represented Indigenous-led consensus process, published in The Lancet Regional Health in 2023, articulated eight ethical principles — reverence, respect, responsibility, relevance, regulation, reparation, restoration, reconciliation — that make clear both the seriousness of the obligations involved and the considerable distance between those obligations and what the psychedelic renaissance is currently practicing. The point is narrower: that what commodification forecloses is not a supplement to psychedelic healing. It is the structural core of it.
The Set & Setting We’re Not Talking About
Set and setting, which are the internal mindset and external environment of a psychedelic experience, have been understood as central to outcomes since the earliest systematic research on these compounds. What receives less attention is the broader social set and setting: the cosmological atmosphere of the world into which a person returns when the session ends.
In Western industrialized societies, that atmosphere does not recognize non-human sentience. It does not accommodate the perception of radical interdependence except as metaphor. It provides no institutional form for the relational obligations that psychedelic experiences sometimes produce. The bounded individual, maximizing their utility in a competitive economy, is not merely an assumption of that world — it is its moral default.
This means that even the most carefully conducted psychedelic session operates within a structural tension. The experience may dissolve the sense of separation. The world to which the person returns insists on it. When integration is commodified, this tension disappears as a question. The work becomes personal optimization. The experience is processed into insight; the insight is filed as individual property; the individual is returned to the performance principle. The relational and ecological dimensions of what was experienced — the ones with the most urgency for the current moment — are the first to evaporate.
The Trojan Horse That Might Not Be
There is an argument that McPsychedelics could still function as an entry point — a way of getting people into proximity with these compounds who would otherwise never encounter them, trusting that the experiences themselves will point beyond the delivery mechanism. That the molecule will do what the institution cannot.
I find this partially persuasive. These experiences are difficult to fully colonize. The encounter with something that feels genuinely other, genuinely alive, genuinely relational, does not always stay inside the therapeutic frame. People leak. They come away with questions that productivity apps cannot answer.
But the argument underestimates the decisive role of what happens after. Psychedelic experiences temporarily loosen the habitual structures through which a particular version of the world is enacted, co-generated in each moment between organism and environment. What reconsolidates is shaped heavily by what the environment keeps pointing attention toward. If that environment is the same apparatus that produced the distress — if the integration protocol is an app, the follow-up is a coaching package, the community is a subscription — then whether something genuinely different occurred is not answered by the experience itself. It is answered by what gets fed back to it. Psygaia’s own membership-based community model is not exempt from this question.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is an argument for taking context seriously. And for asking, with some urgency, what a genuinely different context might look like.
What McPsychedelics Actually Reveals
The problem is not that corporations are involved in psychedelic medicine. It is what their involvement reveals: which dimensions of psychedelic experience are permitted to become clinically and socially legible, and which are not.
The mystical dimensions: encounters with something that feels radically sacred, alive, and relational. The communal dimensions: healing understood as repair of relationships rather than repair of individuals. The ecological dimensions: the perception of embeddedness in a living world that has claims on you. These are not being foreclosed because they are unimportant. They are being foreclosed because the consumer-capitalist reality principle has no framework to absorb them, and therefore no incentive to preserve them.
The distance between what these experiences reveal and what the market can accommodate is not a technical problem to be solved by better policy, though policy matters. It is a measure of the gap between two fundamentally different understandings of what human beings are and what their relationship to the living world requires.
That gap was there before the psychedelic renaissance but the renaissance makes it visible.
Sources
Noorani, T. · Journal of Psychedelic Studies · 2020 · “Making psychedelics into medicines: The politics and paradoxes of medicalization”
Purser, R. & Loy, D. · HuffPost · 2013 · “Beyond McMindfulness”
Fisher, M. · Zer0 Books · 2009 · Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Sanabria, E. & Tófoli, L.F. · Journal of Psychedelic Studies · 2025 · “Integration or commodification? A critical review of individual-centered approaches in psychedelic healing”
Celidwen, Y., Redvers, N., Githaiga, C., et al. · The Lancet Regional Health – Americas · 2023 · “Ethical principles of traditional Indigenous medicine to guide western psychedelic research and practice” — https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lana.2022.100410
Jesse, R. · Open Letter · 2018 · “Statement on open science and open praxis with psilocybin, MDMA, and similar substances” — https://files.csp.org/open.pdf
Rose, N. · Theory, Culture & Society · 2003 · “Neurochemical selves”
