> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.thepsychedelicblog.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # 7 Questions I'm Obsessed With About Psychedelics Right Now - URL: https://www.thepsychedelicblog.com/7-questions-im-obsessed-with-about-psychedelics-right-now/ - Published: 2026-09-04T14:07:55.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-04T14:07:55.000Z - Author: Andrew M Weisse **Welcome to The Psychedelic Blog.** An independent media platform covering drugs, altered states & the culture surrounding them. **This week:** The 2nd edition of a monthly series featuring 7 questions about Psychedelics I can’t stop thinking about. --- ![a black and white photo of a maze](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1695747298465-1ab46f753740?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wzMDAzMzh8MHwxfHNlYXJjaHw2fHxhYnN0cmFjdCUyMGdlb21ldHJ5JTIwJTJGJTIwbWF6ZXxlbnwwfHx8fDE3ODgxODIxMTF8MA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=1080 "a black and white photo of a maze") Photo by [A Chosen Soul](https://unsplash.com/@a%5Fchosensoul?ref=thepsychedelicblog.com) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?ref=thepsychedelicblog.com) --- ### **1\. What if the Psychedelic Renaissance is happening in the wrong places?** Currently, the conversation is concentrated in LA, Austin, Denver & select retreat centers & wellness spaces throughout the US. But what about rural America? There’s something strange about watching Psychedelics become normalized among people who already have therapists, wellness memberships, meditation apps & $14 smoothies while huge parts of the country remain ravaged by addiction, chronic disease & despair. Rural Americans are more likely to die prematurely from heart disease & several other leading causes of death. The opioid crisis tore through these communities while access to addiction treatment remains limited. Yet these are also places where taking Psilocybin still sounds less like healthcare than something your cousin did before he started talking to the refrigerator. Maybe the Psychedelic Renaissance succeeds in LA & Austin but still fails the people who could benefit most from parts of it. If Psychedelics ultimately become another wellness product for affluent urban Americans, I’m not sure we get to call that a renaissance. --- ### **2\. Why are we so uncomfortable admitting that people use Psychedelics for fun?** I’ve made the case before that [Psychedelics can just be for fun](https://thepsychedelicblog.substack.com/p/psychedelics-can-just-be-for-fun): - You don’t need trauma to eat Mushrooms. - You don’t need to be depressed to take LSD. - You don’t need PTSD to work with MDMA. What interests me now is why we’re so uncomfortable saying that out loud. Healing gives Psychedelics moral legitimacy; therapy makes them socially acceptable. “Personal growth” sounds considerably better at a dinner party than “I took mushrooms with my friends & laughed until my face hurt.” But if someone is going skydiving, a relatively high-risk endeavor, we don’t ask them for a therapeutic justification. Why do we do this with Psychedelics? Pleasure is one of the oldest reasons humans use drugs. We alter consciousness because it can feel good, make music better, make sex more interesting, deepen friendships & turn an otherwise ordinary Saturday into something you remember for 20 years. None of this means Psychedelics are harmless or that everyone should use them…it just means fun doesn’t require a medical diagnosis to justify itself. --- ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!aHR9!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdd4f0077-e698-405a-be7f-e73ecf639313_1230x510.png) --- ### **3\. Do Psychedelic facilitators have too much power?** Why does taking a drug suddenly mean surrendering authority to someone else? I wrote about this recently in [Sunday Insider](https://thepsychedelicblog.substack.com/p/the-psychedelic-consent-problem), specifically the risks created when facilitators are given enormous power over people in altered states. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder whether the problem goes beyond bad actors. We’ve built a culture where the person holding the mushroom is treated like they’re holding the tablets from Mount Sinai. Facilitators can decide the dose, setting, music, physical contact, interpretation of the experience & sometimes even what your experience supposedly *means*. Add Psychedelics, suggestibility & a charismatic personality & that’s an extraordinary amount of authority to hand another human being. Good facilitators are enormously valuable. Some experiences genuinely require skilled support. But the healthier model is less guru & more lifeguard: trained, attentive, there when you need them & otherwise perfectly happy to let you swim. The question isn’t whether facilitators are useful…it’s whether we’ve confused guidance with authority. --- ### **4\. What happens when Psychedelics become boring?** This is a question no one seems to be grappling with despite it being the most plausible outcome. The future isn’t millions of people jetsetting to Peru for an Ayahuasca ceremony. Most will never spend 12 hours dancing around a fire on Peyote. Most will never summon the courage to smoke interdimensional toad venom & get catapulted into the furthest reaches of human consciousness. And that’s fine. Most people don’t BASE jump either…but they’ll ride a roller coaster. What many people *will* do is microdose Psilocybin before work. Take MDMA with their partner a couple times a year. Use LSD instead of reaching for another prescription. Smoke a joint at a concert the same way previous generations drank 6 beers. And maybe that’s what success actually looks like. No Psychedelic Renaissance, no consciousness revolution, no mass awakening, no guy returning from Peru to explain that your ego is the reason you hate your job. Just another category of drugs adults sometimes use because they make certain parts of life better, more interesting or more fun. We keep talking about normalization like it’s the first step toward something bigger. Maybe normalization *is* the endgame. Maybe Psychedelics win when they finally become boring. --- ### **5\. Have we romanticized Indigenous Psychedelic use?** I recently saw someone post about how Native Americans got along great before the colonizers showed up. Wow…talk about the Disney-fication of history. Indigenous societies, like every other collection of human beings in history, fought wars, conquered rivals, tortured enemies & competed for territory & power. Violence is agnostic to human groups. This sanitizing & romanticizing of the past extends to Psychedelics. There’s this belief that Indigenous use was one long tradition of healing, spiritual growth & communal harmony. The reality was far more varied. Psychoactive plants have been used for divination, sorcery, identifying enemies, acquiring power, social control, political authority & warfare. That doesn’t diminish Indigenous knowledge. If anything, it makes it more interesting. There is an enormous amount we can learn from traditions that developed relationships with these substances over centuries or millennia: ritual, preparation, community, reverence, restraint & ways of understanding altered states that modern Western culture largely discarded. But learning from Indigenous traditions doesn’t require pretending Indigenous people were something other than human. Maybe the real respect is taking the entire history seriously: the wisdom, the healing, the spirituality, the power, the violence & everything in between. --- ### **6\. Are bad trips more dangerous than the Psychedelic movement wants to admit?** We need a better definition of a bad trip. I don’t mean 6 terrifying hours confronting your mortality, childhood or the fact that you’ve wasted the last decade of your life. That can be brutal. It can also produce extraordinary clarity. I mean a *bad* trip: a psychotic break, delusions that don’t disappear when the Psilocybin does, mania, paranoia. Someone who was functioning normally on Friday & is hospitalized on Monday. These outcomes appear to be rare, but they are real. Psychedelic-associated psychosis & other serious psychiatric events have been documented in the medical literature, including cases following a single Psychedelic exposure. And I think the Psychedelic movement sanitizes this by stuffing everything into the friendlier category of a “challenging experience.” Sometimes the challenge becomes the lesson. Sometimes the worst night of your life eventually becomes one of the most important. But sometimes something simply goes wrong. Acknowledging that doesn’t require returning to *This Is Your Brain on Drugs*. It requires treating Psychedelics like powerful drugs instead of protagonists in a story where every frightening outcome must secretly be part of the healing. If we want adults to make informed decisions about Psychedelics, we have to tell them about the small number of people for whom the trip doesn’t end when everyone else comes down. --- ### **7\. Which Psychedelic will matter most 20 years from now?** Psilocybin? LSD? MDMA? Ayahuasca? Ibogaine? 5-MeO-DMT? My bet: none of them. I think the most important Psychedelic of 2046 probably hasn’t been invented yet. We’re still working with drugs humans largely stumbled upon: - Mushrooms grew out of the ground. - LSD was discovered accidentally. - MDMA was synthesized more than a century ago. - Ayahuasca came from plants Indigenous tribes somehow, almost miraculously, learned to combine & cultivate. - Ibogaine came from a plant humans had been using long before anyone understood what a serotonin receptor was. - 5-MeO-DMT came from a desert toad humans somehow discovered could produce one of the most powerful Psychedelic experiences on Earth. 20 years from now, I suspect that will seem remarkably primitive. The future I’m betting on is AI-designed compounds engineered around an individual’s unique neurobiology. Instead of asking, “Should this person take Psilocybin or MDMA?” we may eventually ask what molecular profile produces the desired effect in *this particular brain*. Want increased neuroplasticity without an 8-hour trip? Design for it. Want the emotional openness of MDMA without the same physiological baggage? Design for it. Want something that lasts 90 minutes instead of 12 hours? Design for it. Eventually we may stop discovering Psychedelics & start designing them. If that happens, the biggest Psychedelic breakthrough of the next 20 years won’t come from the Amazon rainforest or a mushroom growing in the forest. It’ll come from a computer. --- ## **🍄 Help Build the World’s Largest Psychedelic Transparency Database** Thank you to everyone who has contributed so far! I’ve been genuinely overwhelmed by the submissions over the past few weeks…it means more than you know. If you’ve attended a retreat, worked with a facilitator, visited a clinic, or participated in a ceremony, I want to hear from you. Share your experience anonymously at **Psychedelic Watch**. Whether it was exceptional, disappointing, or somewhere in between, your report can help others make more informed decisions. ![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zdrU!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F30525f93-8901-41e6-b775-d428664b1821_1664x642.png) ### [**Submit Your Experience Here**](https://psychedelicwatch.carrd.co/?ref=thepsychedelicblog.com)