🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We're the psychedelics newsletter that plays by no one’s rules but our own. Well, that and CAN-SPAM. 📬

Jaz Cadoch got tired of studying rites and rituals as an academic. So she started helping people survive them instead. Today she co-leads the Global Psychedelic Society, a grassroots community now a decade old and 300 member orgs strong.

We asked Jaz what community organizing can do that trials and ballot measures can't, why GPS is decentralized by design, and where she lands in the tug-of-war between psychedelic profiteers and purists.

The number of psychedelic medicines and regulatory frameworks coming online can make even our heads spin.

On Friday 9/25, Numinus Executive Director Amanda Giesler is hosting a free session to help would-be psychedelic practitioners make sense of it all.

She'll help you map out a personalized path to becoming a licensed psychedelic provider, built around your background and the medicine and state you want to work in.

Believe it or not, there's no prior education required. (This field is that unique.)

If you do enroll, Cyclists get 10% off with code ALTHEA10.

I chose to study cultural anthropology in undergrad because I had always dreamt of working for National Geographic. In college, I was also regularly going to festivals and raves, where everyone throws around words like “tribe” and “ritual,” so I started studying whether festivals could actually function as a rite of passage.

Around the same time, a friend was struggling with alcohol and cocaine. I took him to rehab, and he told me he'd stop, but still believed in the power of psychedelics. He asked if he could keep using them. I said I didn’t know but I’d find out.

That conversation launched me into a master's in medical anthropology, studying people in 12-step programs who wanted to keep using psychedelics. I started volunteering with the Montreal Psychedelic Society and met Dr. Katherine MacLean, who helped write the Mystical Experience Questionnaire. Through her I found out what was going on at Johns Hopkins. Until then, I had no idea the whole psychedelic movement was popping off.

The Global Psychedelic Society began in 2016 at Beyond Psychedelics in the Czech Republic, but I first encountered it in 2018 at Horizons. In the early days, GPS was an online forum for Society leaders, with gatherings at conferences and festivals. In 2020, everyone moved to Zoom and started meeting regularly. In 2022, I joined the efforts of Mike Margolies and Mareesa Stertz to build a more public-facing organization, with consistent programming, a website, and eventually an online hub and resource library.

Let me tell you a story. In 2016, a man completed the MAPS clinical trial protocol for PTSD in Montreal. His experience was profound, but when he got home, nobody in his family could understand what he'd been through. So he came to my integration circle at the Montreal Psychedelic Society. When he heard someone else describe feeling like a floating vessel in the universe that somehow has consciousness, he turned to them and said he hadn't known anyone else felt that way.

That's the gap. You can have a life-changing MDMA session in a trial, or sit in an Indigenous ceremony in Peru, but you still have to come home. If nobody in your life can relate to you, you might get pushed further into isolation, which is at the root of so much of our suffering in the first place.

Healing happens in community, which is why we want Psychedelic Societies all over the world. The nearly 300 organizations on our map are unique, but they share four things: they’re publicly findable; gather regularly; focus primarily on education, integration, or community building rather than psychedelic services; and are locally or affinity-based because needs and laws differ everywhere.

Traditional top-down power structures are showing their cracks. They can concentrate too much power in too few hands, contribute to burnout, and fail to reflect the many perspectives of the people they’re meant to serve. If we’re building something new, why recreate the same structures? Why not take a cue from psychedelics themselves and build systems that reflect what they teach us about interconnection, relationship, and the fact that no one person holds the whole picture?

GPS has been deeply influenced by Frederic Laloux’s Teal organizing philosophy, which looks at distributing authority, allowing leadership to emerge where the knowledge lives, and creating structures that can adapt rather than relying on one central authority to have all the answers.

That’s especially important when you’re connecting nearly 300 grassroots organizations around the world. What psychedelic communities need in places like Thailand and South Africa, where psychedelics remain largely prohibited, is vastly different from Portland, where someone might ask which licensed service center to go to. Societies aren’t GPS “chapters.” They’re locally led and locally shaped. Our role isn’t to tell them what to do.

But decentralization doesn’t mean everyone figuring it out alone. We create ways for leaders to learn from each other and access resources they might not otherwise have, including expert programming, a starter kit, and a library of resources and past conversations. The goal is autonomy and interdependence at the same time.

This training gives you a clear framework for introducing microdosing to your clients. And it can lead to net-new client work. Past grads have gone on to work directly with Mycology Psychology. The fall cohort starts Sep 28.

Honestly, I thought Psychedelic Societies would remain on the fringes much longer. I always knew they were essential, but I didn’t anticipate that the growth of the broader psychedelic field would make their role even more important.

More than 98% of psychedelic use still happens outside regulated and clinical settings. That’s this massive, lesser-known part of the ecosystem that societies are already helping to support. As the field continues to grow, I think we’re only beginning to understand how important that community layer is, and how it might connect with and complement the clinical, research, and policy infrastructure being built around psychedelics.

You can see the gap even within regulated systems. The majority of people going to licensed healing centers in Oregon and Colorado come from out of state. I visited one and asked what they do, beyond standard integration sessions, to make sure clients have a network of care to return to. They said they don’t really do anything. The field is developing increasingly sophisticated ways to provide these profound experiences, but the infrastructure to support people when they return home hasn’t kept pace. They could at least direct them to the GPS map of Psychedelic Societies!

Building that community infrastructure is a huge priority for us. This year, we provided ten scholarships for Psychedelic Society leaders to participate in Dr. Rosalind Watts’s ACER Integration program, bringing a highly respected approach to psychedelic integration directly into grassroots communities.

I’ll tell you another story. A friend of mine had been off heroin for more than a decade when he started using psilocybin every Sunday and became attached to the altered state. When I asked about his integration practice, he had no idea what I meant.

I encouraged him to check out his local Psychedelic Society. Next thing I knew, he was hosting integration circles in his living room and took six months away from psilocybin because he was so focused on integration and being of service. What he had been looking for in the psychedelic experience, he started finding through connection, reflection, and purpose.

Over the next decade, I’m interested in how we can build stronger connections between the community layer and the clinical, research, and policy worlds, so what happens before, during, and long after a psychedelic experience becomes part of the equation too. There’s a saying that “community is medicine.” Maybe it’s time our systems recognized just how essential that is.

From an anthropological view, I see three camps. There are the grassroots and Indigenous purists, who focus on honoring the sacred origins of these medicines and want nothing to do with commercialization. On the other end are for-profit initiatives building what everyone keeps calling a brand-new market. They're not all malicious, but they run on the same systems that produced the spiritual and mental health malaise we're in.

Then there's a third camp in the middle: people who want to honor the sacredness of these medicines and our interactions with the other-than-human, while integrating them into our systems and simultaneously pushing against the boundaries of those systems. There’s a lot of tension between these camps.

I've spent years as the bridge, including serving on the steering committee for Prop 122 while trying to build a relationship with Indigenous people in Colorado who didn't want the natural medicine program to happen. Both sides think the bridge is doing it wrong, and neither one trusts you. I was younger then and more easily swayed by other people's opinions. Now I know where my integrity lies, so I can work inside a system while working to change it.

I call psychedelics a movement because we disagree. In an echo chamber where everyone agrees with me, I wouldn't be pushing anything forward. Being in community means learning how to be in conflict. We each need to do our own work, and every so often look up and ask what the others are building.

Follow her and GPS on Instagram, and find your local Psychedelic Society on the GPS map.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.