Colonial Psychedelia: A Critical Intervention in the Age of Extraction

What people are calling a psychedelic renaissance often arrives bathed in golden light, framed as progress, healing, and long-overdue liberation, yet beneath the glow there is a quieter movement taking place, one that slips through institutions and grant cycles, through glossy branding decks and clinical trials, through retreat centers and policy announcements, carrying with it the familiar weight of empire learning how to speak a new language without changing its behavior.

This shadow has a name, colonial psychedelia, and it describes the way psychedelic medicines are being reintroduced in the Global North through the same extractive logics that have shaped every other phase of colonial expansion, where Indigenous knowledge is mined, ritual is aestheticized, healing is professionalized, and profit is extracted while the communities who have stewarded these medicines for generations remain marginalized, erased, or politely thanked and excluded.

While headlines celebrate MDMA and psilocybin as miraculous breakthroughs for mental health, many of us who carry ancestral memory, movement history, or lived experience inside systems of harm find ourselves asking different questions, not because we are opposed to healing, but because we have seen what happens when liberation language moves faster than accountability, when care becomes a brand, and when the story of medicine is told without asking who gets to speak, who gets paid, and who absorbs the risk when things go wrong.

There is a persistent myth moving through psychedelic culture that these substances are inherently healing, neutral, or universally benevolent, as if the molecule alone could override history, power, and intention, yet no substance exists outside of context, as evidenced by LSD’s role in MK-Ultra, by ayahuasca’s transformation into retreat tourism, by MDMA’s entanglements with the military-industrial complex, and by ketamine’s quiet rise as a tool favored by institutions that seek relief without reckoning and dissociation without repair.

The belief that psychedelics are somehow exempt from politics, or that access alone constitutes justice, does not merely collapse under scrutiny, it actively causes harm, because when these medicines are removed from relationship, land, lineage, and consent, they are easily folded into white wellness culture, where healing becomes an individual achievement and structural violence fades conveniently into the background.

This pattern becomes harder to ignore as billionaire capital increasingly shapes the psychedelic landscape, from venture investments and pharmaceutical startups to philanthropic campaigns that promise liberation while operating through the familiar logics of ownership, patents, clinical gatekeeping, and spectacle, producing a version of psychedelic culture that wears tie-dye and data while quietly reproducing the same hierarchies it claims to dismantle.

What troubles me most, however, is not only the money or the institutions, but the growing number of spaces that call themselves healing while operating without grounding, protection, or consent, where altered states are opened by untrained facilitators, where sound, touch, and trance are offered without relational accountability, where energetic fields are treated casually, and where people already carrying trauma, displacement, or dissociation are invited to go further out without anyone truly holding the way back home.

In these conditions, psychedelics do not automatically heal, they can confuse, destabilize, and even dominate, especially when spiritual authority goes unchecked and care is offered without responsibility, a dynamic that is not limited to underground spaces, but is visible even within respected institutions like MAPS, whose ethical failures around consent, safeguarding, and abuse are not anomalies, but signals of a deeper misalignment between speed, approval, and embodied care.

When the institutions leading the so-called renaissance cannot guarantee basic safety or consent, it becomes difficult to call this moment progress, and easier to recognize it as a familiar pattern of recolonization, where the language changes but the extraction remains.

What we need instead is not more capital, more branding, or more heroic narratives about molecules saving us, but a return to relational medicine, to community-led governance, to consent as a living practice, to spiritual hygiene, to ceremony rooted in humility rather than performance, and to a slower, more accountable way of remembering why these medicines exist at all.

Psychedelics are not innocent, and they are not evil, they are mirrors, amplifiers, and portals, reflecting the consciousness, ethics, and intentions of those who wield them, which means the future of this work will not be decided by substances alone, but by whether we are willing to tell the truth about power, harm, and responsibility even when it disrupts the fantasy of easy healing.

I did not come to this work to chase transcendence or collect experiences, but to remember what was broken, to tend what was wounded, and to protect the spirit of these medicines from being swallowed whole by an empire that has learned, once again, how to dress extraction up as love.