This column is a collaboration betweenDoubleBlindThe Psychedelic Movement’s leading media company,, is a magazine and media company.
As the world of psychedelics matures to include both a grassroots movement and a burgeoning legal industry — Echoing the cannabis process a few years ago — many are wondering what kinds of new jobs will become available in the psychedelic space. Will psychedelics come to resemble most other mainstream, corporate North American industries — or can we expect something that more reflects the spirit and ethos of the medicines that have been used for generations?
There will be many types of jobs available. “As psychedelics go from the fringe to the mainstream, the same types of jobs for every other industry that went from fringe to mainstream apply to this one,”Lewis Goldberg, managing partner at KCSAA communications consulting firm that works with a few companies in the psychedelic area. “I would tell anyone who wants to get into the space to do it, but you better move fast. I’ll steal a line from Aldous Huxley: ‘The doors of perception are wide open, but the doors of opportunity are still closing.’”
In the last couple of years, there’s been an exponential growth in the number of drug development companies seeking to take psychedelic compounds through the FDA approval process. MDMA, also known as “ecstasy,”In the next five years, both psilocybin as well as psilocybin will be available for prescription. More than a dozen drug companies have already raised hundreds of millions of dollars in order to develop compounds. 5-MeO-DMT for depression to novel psychedelics they’re hoping will Remove the possibility of a “bad trip.”
Indeed, it’s not just those developing the drugs who will be in on this industry — careers will span from lawyers who specialize in helping entrepreneurs navigate the legal landscape, to therapists who help patients integrate their experiences after a psychedelic trip, to receptionists who greet visitors at psychedelic clinics across the country.
“If you think that in the last three years, something like $3 billion of venture money has been pumped into the industry, that’s a tremendous amount, but not a lot of money — it’s building the foundation for a multi-trillion-dollar industry,”Goldberg. “Five of the top 25 selling drugs in the world are designed to treat central nervous system disorders. This collective group of [psychedelic] companies is going to disrupt that. Some are going to be the equivalents of Google or Amazon and some are going to be Pets.com.”Goldberg, however, is self-described as a “serious” lawyer. “regular mainstream capitalist,”He said that “the companies looking to be open-source are more likely to be successful and have a societal impact than those that are looking to solely work on their own.” In the field of psychedelics, being open source means allowing everyone in the field access to your data and research, in the spirit of progressing the movement as a whole — as opposed to prioritizing your company’s profitability.
However, open source does not guarantee that all key players are working towards a compassionate and equitable cannabis industry. “This will require a lot of personal and internal decolonization work by the emerging ‘leaders’ of this space,”Charlotte James, cofounder of The Ancestor projectA platform that provides educational opportunities for people of color, allowing them to access resources and workshops on the topic of plant medicine. “We believe that by doing this work first, it then becomes natural to understand your role in the collective liberation movement that this medicine wants us to usher in. An equitable ‘industry’ won’t be an ‘industry’ as we currently understand it to be, and instead a mycelial-like network of co-creation across diverse communities and environments.”
So far, James doesn’t know a single BIPOC-led organization that has significant financial support in the psychedelic space, which, she says, leads to a widening gap between the grassroots movement and the corporate. “More folks are recognizing that in order to move away from capitalism, we have to break the work patterns that are ingrained in us, [since] those patterns that contribute to the glorified ‘hustle and grind’ culture are actually just extensions of systemic oppression,”James. “Reclaiming our relationship to creativity and productivity will support us in being able to imagine a different and more equitable future in which our value is not defined by our bodies or our productivity.”
The key to a psychedelic work culture is how we view our professional lives and our personal lives. There’s a paradigm shift in being able to “bring your full self to work,”Gareth Hermann is co-founder and CEO of at MagicMarketing agency for the psychedelic industry. “At Magic, we don’t like the term ‘balance’ because it brings up the image of being on a seesaw, so we’re creating a culture that’s more celebratory of work-life ‘presence’ to create a space for the whole human to show up at work,”Jennifer Ellis is the chief people officer of Magic. Magic even offers programs to support repatterning. This helps teammates identify triggers and states of reaction so they can improve their emotional literacy. Hermann explained that those changes in beliefs and values increase our potential to have a positive impact in the world.
The invitation that psychedelics provide is to look at economic and professional systems differently, it’s a way to see the world psychedelically. It takes time to shift paradigms: Mike Margolies founder of the educational conversation series Psychedelic SeminarsPrior to ayahuasca, he was employed in a corporate setting. Then, he embarked upon a journey that would lead him to quit his job, travel, and a career as a psychedelics professional. “The irony was that after all that, I had created myself a desk job, and I was like wait, what am I doing here?”He said. “I was thinking a lot about how you spend your time is how you spend your life.”
You can also find tactics such as designated days dedicated to “work or task mode”Compare “flow mode,”He now has space. “allow for ‘productivity’ to happen in a different way.” “We have this idea of what a job is, what being productive is, but even though we’re all psychedelic, we’ve put ourselves in the same old boxes,”He said. “Because we have to have a work ethic, a mission, and so much urgency, we end up embodying the systems that we’re purportedly working to reinvent.”Indeed, it is not unusual for psychedelic people to ask whether a company can heal the ill effects capitalism has on individuals while still working within a capitalist system. Capitalism leads us to think that “work” has to be a certain way—a 40-hour a week grind. “It’s crazy that that’s become the standard,”Margolies: “The goal isn’t to get everyone working” — in the standard capitalistic sense — “but how do we get everyone self-actualized? Achieving collective self-actualization is intrinsically the pathway to creating the most value for each other.”