The Trip to Market: Perspectives on Psychedelic Commercialization

Psychedelics have deeply complex social histories that have traversed boundaries, both political and cultural, for millennia. In recent years, these compounds have reemerged as promising treatments in “above ground” environments, such as clinical research settings, for a range of mental health conditions including depression, PTSD, and substance use disorders. Yet unlike previous waves of psychedelic research in the 1950s and 1960s, today’s psychedelic renaissance is driven in large part by private sector actors seeking to commercialize these substances as pharmaceutical products. Jake Lang and Emily Mendenhall draw on three years of extensive ethnographic work with stakeholders from industry, politics, and lived experience in the psychedelics “space” to describe how the policy and practice of psychedelics have manifested in the American arena.

The Trip to Market tells the story of the contemporary psychedelics renaissance, and burgeoning industry, by introducing how different stakeholders approach psychedelics through distinct—and sometimes conflicting—frameworks shaping how these substances are understood, regulated, used recreationally, and implemented therapeutically.