Dear friends, old and new,

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This week I had the pleasure of contributing to a critical review of a new app for tripping (you read that right) with my awesome friends over at Holisticism for their new newsletter The Cusp. Here's my piece: 

"I'll admit, I'm biased - I was cynical about Field Trip before I was asked to review its Trip app. The company, which has the former CEO of Bayer on its board and raised over 20 million dollars before going public in October 2020, is one of several for-profit "corporadelic" pharmaceutical companies that have popped up in the past few years. 

Psychedelics have long been used for healing and spiritual practices in cultures all over the world. More recently, nonprofits and universities have studied psychedelics, with that research generally kept in the public domain. But these new corporadelic companies wall off discoveries so they can profit from intellectual property. One of them is even trying to patent hand holding. For its part, Field Trip is developing a psilocybin-like drug called FT-104, for which they will hold the exclusive patent.

So you'll understand why I was a bit skeptical when I read Trip's claim that it aims to "blend the wisdom of shamanic practices with modern understandings of psychology and neuroscience." As a physician who has spent time in the Amazon studying under traditional Shipibo healers who work with ayahuasca, I've put some thought into how to do this. To me, blending these ways of knowing might look like preparing in the weeks leading up to the psychedelic experience, paying careful attention to everything from dreams, to habits, to diet and relationships, making sure there's a safe and nurturing container for the experience itself, and then integrating over a period of weeks with a supportive community that helps bring insights into reality. I can imagine an app potentially supporting this process, particularly during the preparation and integration phases. Trip is not that app.

Trip's methodology boils down to asking the user to take a few deep breaths and consider their intention in the minutes after starting a trip, then reflect on their insights and visions via generic prompts. During the trip, it offers an animated river visual with an aesthetic eerily reminiscent of a mattress ad and unimaginative AI-generated music (all options are a combination of bird and water sounds). "I wish I'd spent more time staring at my cell phone during an important mystical experience," said no one ever.

Opening Trip, it quickly becomes clear that it is written for a novice user, given the many "Psychedelics 101"-type articles under its "Learn" tab. The imagined user also seems to be preparing to trip alone. This disturbs me, because psychedelics aren't exactly predictable. A first time trip can be a life-altering mystical experience or a terrifying hellscape that drags on for hours. And since there isn't a reliable way to predict which way it will go, standard practice in many cultures and the emerging field of psychedelic medicine is that a first timer should have a guide (as in IRL human) nearby.

The app does gesture towards offering support for bad trips - through one guided meditation that you have to click three different buttons to access. In my work with psychedelic harm reduction, I've supported people re-experiencing past traumas, complete with kicking and screaming, and sat with others who appear lost in another reality, repeating the same sentence for hours. Sometimes support means keeping a person from accidentally injuring themselves and other times it can be listening, hand holding, or gently reminding someone to breathe. Someone in the throes of a challenging psychedelic experience would be hard pressed to remember what a cell phone is, let alone know how to navigate this app.

Other aspects of the app feel downright creepy. After starting a trip, it asks you to choose what you're taking from one of six emojis including the mushroom  and pill and has you complete the sentence "I'm taking ____." Given that their privacy policy explicitly states that they can disclose your personal information to law enforcement when necessary to "take action regarding specific illegal activities," it feels weird that they're straight up prompting the user to record illicit activity. They can also use your data to generate information about your behavior and target you with third party advertising. While lots of apps do this, it feels particularly sinister that Trip harvests data about your innermost thoughts and feelings during what is considered by many to be a spiritual experience. It also raises the troubling prospect that there could be targeted pop-up ads based on what you disclosed in this vulnerable state and that you could even be marketed to during the experience itself.

The worst part about Trip isn't that it's dangerous, or that it's mining your data, but that the worldview it expresses is deeply sad. Trip strips the spiritual elements out of the psychedelic experience, reducing it to yet another wellness optimization tool. Tracking your "mood progress" on a bar graph, they flatten a multidimensional mystical experience into a means to the end of "mental health." In the Amazon, I've been blessed to take part in ayahuasca ceremonies that revolve around prayer, offerings, singing to plant spirits, and connecting to something far greater than us humans. While it might be difficult to replicate that experience at home, elements like building an altar or making an offering could easily lend a trip more meaning, but Trip doesn't go there. I can't help but feel this is related to Field Trip being more interested in creating psychedelic commodities (aka FT-104) than taking plants and fungi seriously as teachers.

I am hopeful about the immense potential psychedelics have to heal us from our alienation from ourselves, each other, the natural world, and spirit, but this app wants to keep us atomized. It imagines us as monads turning to a corporate app for support and integration rather than towards each other, nature, and the beyond."

P.S. Got thoughts/feelings/hot tips? Plz send them along. I would love to hear from you!

MYCELIAL CONNECTIONS

🌷For those preparing for a trip, there are some far better resources than that app. I highly recommend the book Consciousness Medicine by Françoise Bourzat, a counselor with a psychology background who has spent decades studying with Mazatec healers who work with psilocybin mushrooms. Her book takes you through an inventory that you can use to prepare for a psychedelic experience and includes specific integration exercises. To get support after the experience, here's a list of therapists who are open to doing psychedelic integration work. The Sabina Project runs a free integration circle for BIPOC.

🌻 To hear a spectrum of what psychedelic music can be while supporting real artists, check out Going In, a sub-label of The Bunker "dedicated to long-form musical compositions geared towards meditation, psychedelic ceremonies, yoga, massage, or simply spacing out and going inside yourself." They're hosting a virtual 48 Hour Ceremony from March 26-28.

🥀 If you want to dive a little deeper into the world of psychedelic capitalism, check out this illustrated parable. I think you'll see the clear parallels between the fictional Gaia Health and Field Trip - the novel patented psychedelic compound, the app tracking its users' behavior, the plans for rapid expansion (btw Field Trip intends to open 75 clinics by 2024). Most striking to me is how it captures the good intentions of the founder, which I imagine many psychedelic capitalists share. In doing so, it underlines a major problem with capitalism, and especially with basing healthcare systems on capitalism - if what you are ultimately accountable to is maximizing profit for your shareholders, it doesn't matter what your intentions are.

🌼 Some friends are working on this cool initiative on the religious use of ayahuasca. “The Church of the Eagle and the Condor (CEC) and the Chacruna Institute are collaborating to raise $100,000 to investigate and resolve disputes concerning the federal government’s approach to ayahuasca importation, establish processes to seek return of seized sacrament, and set new precedent for ayahuasca religions under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” Check it out and consider making a contribution here. 

     "…it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. “What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner?” 

     In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing. But nothing is farther from the truth. For the ascetic position is one of the highest fear, the gravest immobility.The severe abstinence of the ascetic becomes the ruling obsession. And it is one not of self-discipline but of self-abnegation.

     The dichotomy between the spiritual and the political is also false, resulting from an incomplete attention to our erotic knowledge. For the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic—the sensual—those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings."

-Audre Lorde, The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Kalen Flynn, MD does not encourage or condone any illegal activities, the purchase, sale, transfer, or use of any illegal substances, or partaking in any unlawful activities related to illegal substances. This content is for informational purposes only and not to be considered medical advice. This information is not intended to diagnose, prescribe, treat, or cure any medical condition. Statements should not be taken as a substitute for medical advice from a licensed physician.