The Psychedelic Industrial Complex and the Geo-Pharmaceutical Architecture of Israeli Apartheid
A Critical Intervention on Biopolitics, Militarization, and Sacred Medicine
Introduction: Against the Mythology of the Psychedelic Renaissance
The so-called "psychedelic renaissance" is often celebrated as a cultural and scientific awakening. Mainstream narratives invoke imagery of collective healing, mental health innovation, and spiritual rediscovery. Yet beneath this surface lies a transnational structure of extraction, control, and complicity, a nexus that weds pharmaceutical expansionism with geopolitical violence.
This article offers a critical intervention into that structure. It interrogates how "Israeli" state institutions, U.S.-based venture capital, and Western clinical research have collectively repurposed sacred, Indigenous medicines as tools of military rehabilitation and settler control. This is not a renaissance, it is the formation of a psychedelic industrial complex, where trauma is triaged based on political affiliation, and where molecules of sacred origin are subject to global patent regimes devoid of consent.
Clinical Trials and the Reconstitution of the Perpetrator
Controlled clinical trials in "Israel" routinely administer MDMA and psilocybin to "Israeli" war criminals diagnosed with PTSD. These soldiers have often participated in documented violations of international law, including forced displacement, unlawful killings, and the use of chemical weapons against civilian populations.
These trials are framed as a form of trauma-informed care. But in practice, they operate as technologies of moral reconstitution, designed not to foster accountability or transformation, but to render the soldier psychologically fit for reintegration into state institutions of violence. In this sense, psychedelics are not misused; they are strategically deployed.
This clinical framework cannot be separated from the colonial history of psychiatry itself. As scholars such as Frantz Fanon and Jonathan Metzl have illustrated, the field of psychiatry has long functioned as a disciplinary apparatus that medicalizes resistance, polices deviance, and reinforces dominant racial and political hierarchies. From the use of schizophrenia diagnoses to pathologize Black liberation movements in the United States, to the psychological experiments conducted on Indigenous children in residential schools, psychiatry has often served as a tool of white supremacy.
The modern “healing” of the oppressor, then, continues this lineage. It redirects resources away from the communities most impacted by structural violence and repurposes sacred medicines to restore the mental health of those who benefit from such violence.
“When access to healing is reserved for the colonizer, medicine becomes a mechanism of occupation.”
The Psychedelic-Military-Pharmaceutical Nexus
The "Israeli" firms Clearmind Medicine, Madrigal Mental Care, and PsyRx are positioned at the forefront of the psychedelic biotech sector. Their research pipelines prioritize synthetic psilocybin, ibogaine analogues, and novel delivery systems such as intranasal MDMA.
These companies collaborate with international investors, notably Peter Thiel’s ATAI Life Sciences, to develop intellectual property portfolios that serve both commercial and military applications. They enjoy expedited regulatory pathways within "Israel" due to the country’s unique fusion of biomedical and defense infrastructure.
Of particular concern is the commodification of ibogaine, a plant medicine historically stewarded by Bwiti and other Central African spiritual communities. Its extraction and patenting, undertaken without consultation or consent, represents a paradigmatic instance of biopiracy, violating international standards such as the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing.
These molecules were never meant to be extracted, sterilized, and resold. They are embedded within rich cosmologies, initiation rites, ceremonial sequences, and ancestral codes that protect both the practitioner and the community.
To sever the medicine from its ceremonial root is not only theft, it is spiritual violence. There are protocols, songs, and lineages that hold the integrity of these substances. When untrained facilitators or pharmaceutical companies manipulate these compounds without that sacred context, they are opening energetic portals and summoning forces they do not comprehend.
Globalizing the Occupation: Exporting Protocols Through Capital
Through corporate entities like ATAI Life Sciences (Germany) and COMPASS Pathways (UK/US), psychedelic protocols designed in the context of "Israeli" militarism are exported to Western pharmaceutical markets. These protocols are stripped of their violent genealogies, then rebranded as therapeutic breakthroughs.
This process mirrors broader logics of settler globalization. Military-proven techniques, whether in surveillance, crowd control, or now psychotropic therapy, are exported from the colonial periphery to the metropolitan core.
But medicine, too, has memory.
There is a long history of what happens when sacred plants and substances are extracted from their ceremonial, ethical, and cosmological roots. When coca leaves are taken from Indigenous stewards and weaponized into cocaine; when tobacco is stripped of its ritual significance and mass-produced into carcinogenic cigarettes; when fermentation traditions are industrialized into alcoholic empires, the medicine turns on the people.
Compounds with spirit molecules are no different. When sacred compounds are commercialized without protocol, when lineages are ignored, and when the plants are treated as products instead of beings, the spirits within those medicines rebel. They twist. They haunt. They resist.
Medical Colonialism: Nonconsensual Experimentation and Narcotic Destabilization
Multiple reports, including from the Journal of Palestine Studies, document "Israel"’s long history of medical experimentation on Palestinian prisoners. From the 1980s onward, detainees have been subjected to unapproved pharmaceutical trials, sedative regimens, and psychiatric manipulation, all without informed consent.
More recently, investigative journalism and human rights monitors have revealed that "Israeli" state actors and collaborators have actively facilitated the infiltration of heroin and synthetic opioids into refugee camps such as Jenin and Balata. This practice, known in some activist circles as narcopolitical suppression, operates as a form of socio-biological warfare, weaponizing addiction to undermine collective resistance and dismantle kinship structures.
This pattern reflects broader global trends. In the United States, the War on Drugs, initiated under Nixon and escalated under Reagan, was never a war on substances, but a war on Black, Brown, and poor communities. It criminalized entire neighborhoods while flooding them with crack cocaine, heroin, and state-sanctioned pharmaceutical painkillers. The legacy of these policies continues through the carceral state, police militarization, and the pharmaceutical-industrial complex.
And now, under the guise of “decriminalization” and “public health,” we are seeing the reemergence of carceral logic. In Oregon, recent legislative backpedaling on Measure 110 threatens to recriminalize drug possession and redirect funding away from community-based care. In Colorado, similar trends show how decrim initiatives can be co-opted by elite PACs and white-led biotech firms that exclude the very communities most impacted by prohibition.
In both contexts, Palestine and the U.S., addiction and drug policy are not isolated health issues. They are tools of governance. And when psychedelic legislation emerges from these same frameworks without decolonial grounding, it becomes a new mask for the old empire.
Therapeutic Optimization as Imperial Logic
Within settler colonial infrastructures, psychedelics are not vehicles for liberation. They are increasingly tools for biopolitical calibration, that is, mechanisms to optimize the psychic performance of individuals within oppressive systems.
Under this paradigm:
Trauma is depoliticized
Healing is pathologized
Ceremony is instrumentalized
This logic does not eliminate suffering. It reorganizes it according to the needs of the state and the market.
And without a consciously decolonized, anti-oppressive praxis and cosmology, psychedelic medicine risks reinforcing the very systems it claims to transcend. The myth that taking psychedelics inherently makes one more ethical, awake, or compassionate is a dangerous fiction propagated by the corporate psychedelic movement. Without structural analysis, sacred medicines become mirrors for existing power, amplifying, rather than dismantling, the human traits of domination, entitlement, and spiritual bypass.
This pattern is most clearly exemplified by the behavior of the billionaire class. Figures like Elon Musk, who openly tout his regular psychedelic use, simultaneously uphold technofascist ideologies, invest in militarized AI, and perpetuate white supremacist logic. This reveals the core truth: without a grounded ethic of liberation, these substances become tools of ego expansion rather than collective healing.
The medicine itself does not create morality. In the hands of those who refuse to confront their own power and positionality, it becomes yet another weapon of empire, justified through a veil of cosmic language and pseudo-spiritual branding.
In the absence of ritual accountability, political clarity, and community reciprocity, psychedelics will not make someone a good person. They may in fact fortify white supremacy under the guise of “healing.”
“This is not misuse. It is strategic deployment.”
Epistemicide and the Erasure of Palestinian Medicinal Traditions
The erasure of Palestinian medicinal and spiritual knowledge is not collateral, it is systemic. As "Israeli" researchers gain global recognition for psychedelic innovation, Palestinian herbalists, midwives, spiritual leaders, and lineage holders are criminalized for practicing traditional medicine. Their communities are:
Incarcerated for cannabis possession
Surveilled during herbal and ceremonial gatherings
Excluded from clinical trials conducted on their occupied land
Silenced and underrepresented in international psychedelic policy forums
This erasure reflects what decolonial scholars term epistemicide, the deliberate destruction of knowledge systems through legal, institutional, and discursive means. Palestinian healing traditions, rooted in oral transmission, land-based cosmology, spiritual interpretation, and intergenerational care, are denied legitimacy while their ingredients, methods, and motifs are extracted for clinical repackaging.
Worse still, when these traditions are invisibilized, they are often replaced by settler frameworks of wellness that reproduce colonial values under the guise of neutrality. This includes white-led psychedelic therapy models that aestheticize “trauma work” while disregarding intergenerational resistance, the spiritual role of plants, and the ancestral relationship to place.
To claim global leadership in trauma healing while bombing hospitals, desecrating sacred sites, and imprisoning plant practitioners is not simply hypocritical, it is violent, calculated, and strategic.
The erasure of Palestinian medicinal and spiritual knowledge is not collateral, it is systemic. As "Israeli" researchers gain global recognition for psychedelic innovation, Palestinian herbalists, midwives, and lineage holders are criminalized for practicing traditional medicine.
These communities:
Are incarcerated for cannabis possession
Are surveilled during herbal and ceremonial gatherings
Are excluded from clinical trials conducted in their occupied territories
Are silenced within international psychedelic policy spaces
The result is epistemicide: the structured annihilation of a people’s right to name, interpret, and transmit their own forms of healing.
Decolonizing the Psychedelic Field: From Spectacle to Accountability
To decolonize psychedelic medicine, we must reject the temptation to aestheticize trauma or spiritualize oppression. We must confront the institutional entanglements that undergird the psychedelic industry, including its complicity in settler colonial governance, racial capitalism, and geopolitical violence.
This is not an invitation to disavow the sacred. It is a call to protect it.
As a movement, we must root ourselves in a sacred compass, one guided not by performative coalitions or non-profit branding, but by ancestral integrity, relational accountability, and collective liberation. This compass is not symbolic; it is practical. It requires us to uphold the wisdom of Indigenous medicine alliances, community-led harm reduction networks, and land-based ceremonial lineages that have protected sacred technologies for millennia. It is decentralized, non-extractive, and spiritually governed, not by institutions, but by intergenerational trust.
To truly protect the medicine, we must commit to the following ethical principles:
Free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) for any use of Indigenous plant medicines or protocols
Open-source access to healing, not paywalled therapies and privatized treatments
Anti-oppressive and trauma-informed facilitation, grounded in consent, somatic literacy, and accountability structures
Reparative redistribution, economic, relational, and spiritual, to those communities most harmed by prohibition, genocide, and extraction
Cultural humility, not cultural appropriation: following Indigenous and Black leadership in defining the contours of right relationship
Let the medicine remind us: there is no liberation without memory. There is no healing without justice. And there is no ceremony without consent.
To decolonize psychedelic medicine, we must reject the temptation to aestheticize trauma or spiritualize oppression. We must confront the institutional entanglements that undergird the psychedelic industry, including its complicity in settler colonial governance, racial capitalism, and geopolitical violence.
This is not an invitation to disavow the sacred. It is a call to protect it.
Toward a Sacred Compass and Ethic of Refusal
To walk the path of integrity in the psychedelic field, we must anchor ourselves not in branding, market trends, or nonprofit theater, but in an unwavering sacred compass. This compass is shaped by ancestral wisdom, community care, relational accountability, and the principled refusal to extract from what is not ours to take.
Rather than mimic institutional models, we must deepen our participation in intergenerational repair. We uplift the wisdom of Indigenous medicine lineages, Black liberation traditions, community-rooted harm reduction, and international solidarity movements.
This is not a movement that can be bought. It is a living prayer that must be tended.
We must:
Refuse partnerships with firms complicit in apartheid, extraction, and abuse
Redirect capital and platforms toward Palestinian, Indigenous, and Black-led healing initiatives
Demand open-source models and reject the patenting of sacred knowledge
Restore ceremony to its rightful context: relational, reciprocal, and accountable
This is not about ideological purity. It is about spiritual integrity.
Healers, facilitators, scholars, and psychonauts must choose: will we be stewards of sacred memory, or silent beneficiaries of a militarized marketplace?
References
Journal of Palestine Studies (2017): Medical Experimentation
NoCamels, Israel21c: Psychedelic trials on "Israeli" war criminals
STAT News: ATAI Life Sciences IPO and investor documentation
New York Magazine (2023): Sexual misconduct and suppression within MAPS-affiliated programs
Chacruna Institute: Firsthand accounts of erasure during Colorado’s Prop 122 psychedelic policy drafting
Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing (CBD, 2011)
Human Rights Watch: Detention and Interrogation Practices ("Israel"/OPT)