🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that gives way more than it takes. (Reply with a ❤️, and we’ll call it even.)

Liana Gillooly watched cannabis activists build an industry, then lose it to suits who'd never touched the plant. She refuses to let that happen again. So as co-founder of North Star, she's helping psychedelic companies survive without selling their souls.

We asked Liana what made her realize the psychedelics industry needed an intervention, how regenerative businesses work in practice, and whether integrity and growth can ever truly be aligned.

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I saw a pattern from my experience in cannabis. I worked for years with the Arcview Group, an investment network started by the radical activists Troy Dayton, who co-founded Students for Sensible Drug Policy, and Steve D'Angelo, who'd been organizing smoke-ins on the front lawn of the Capitol since the '60s. They created this group to help stand up a safe, compliant industry that would prove cannabis could be regulated properly and create a domino effect for drug policy reform.

But what happened was the classic story of commercialization and market capture. Many of those people in the early days who had a direct relationship with the plant and cared about social justice ended up losing their companies. I'd emcee these conferences in New York where entrepreneur after entrepreneur would stand up in a suit and say, “I've never smoked cannabis a day in my life, and here's my cannabis company.” I was like, what is happening? It became this massive business opportunity for people to capitalize on, and I left.

When Compass Pathways switched from nonprofit to for-profit in 2017, I worried the same trajectory would play out in psychedelics unless we tried to build an industry that really cared about ethics. We can’t stop capitalism from doing what it does. There will always be large, publicly traded companies maximizing profit per their fiduciary obligation to shareholders. But my prayer has been that that doesn't become the only way to access psychedelics, and that smaller companies caring about outcomes, safety, harm reduction, and reciprocity can band together and survive.

In cannabis, pretty much all of the smaller companies and multi-generational operations didn't survive the big business takeover. That's what I'm concerned about here. There are so many people who really care about doing things the right way, but we exist inside systems where the rules of the game are often antithetical to the core values that many founders care about.

What's working is that people are grappling with this tension. They're asking, how do we stay present to this challenge and create pathways to deeper alignment? I think of what we do at North Star as harm reduction on capitalism. It's a transformational membrane where, through intersecting with us, you can onboard practices and policies that walk you toward becoming a company with transformational practices.

There's a three-horizons framework I find helpful. Horizon One is business as usual. This is how business works; don't ask questions. Horizon Two represents businesses in transition making different choices, like saying, “I know that if I source minerals from China it might come from child labor, so I’ll pay a little more money to know it doesn't.” Horizon Three means steward-owned organizations with decentralized governance, truly in service to all their stakeholders.

Many companies in Europe and other countries exist in these models. 70% of Danish stock market capitalization comes from foundation-owned firms, including large companies like Novo Nordisk. We're trying to help psychedelic entrepreneurs open up to that possibility.

An extractive business takes without putting anything back. A regenerative business creates flourishing, not just for shareholders, but for all stakeholders: patients, employees, communities, and knowledge holders.

Say you're building a psychedelic therapy company. An extractive approach would be: source your psilocybin from wherever it's cheapest, oversell your product’s benefits without highlighting its risks, patent everything you can, pay therapists as little as possible, charge patients premium rates, and focus solely on maximizing investor returns.

A regenerative approach looks different at every level. You'd ensure ethical sourcing. You’d engage in meaningful reciprocity with indigenous communities beyond symbolic gestures, including real resource sharing, collaboration on protocol development, and compensation for knowledge. You'd pay facilitators living wages, create access solutions for communities and patients in financial need, and consider governance structures that aren't just about enriching founders and early investors.

The key difference is asking, who benefits from this company's existence? If the answer is primarily the founders and investors, that's extractive. If the answer includes patients, practitioners, communities, and knowledge holders, you're moving toward regenerative.

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I worry about recommending too much to newer, smaller companies. They need to get on their feet, and if they're burying themselves in checklists, that’s not functional. I've seen amazing groups eat themselves through over-focus on ethics and governance too early.

That said, make integrity a design constraint, not just a cultural vibe. Be clear about your non-negotiables. If there's something you won't do even if it's profitable, name those red lines. Have a mission statement and principles, and co-develop them with your team so there's collective ownership.

I'm a big believer in transparency, both inward with the team and outward to the world. Practice it before you're forced to. It builds trust. Nobody's going to do everything perfectly, especially in a space still figuring itself out, so be honest and upfront when you stumble.

Then there's naming the shadow. We know that engaging with shadow is often where the personal work is in psychedelics. So how can we as companies name our shadow, too? Normalize not getting an A+ on alignment and identifying where the growth is. It can be simple: “We want to improve our employee satisfaction score.”

Finally, practice rupture and repair. Make it part of company culture. Ruptures are inevitable, so experiment with repair even when there's no rupture. Build that skill so when it does come up, it's not so scary.

I think there is always going to be some tension, but they don't have to be mutually exclusive. The question is whether you're willing to live in that tension and make choices that might mean slower growth or smaller returns.

There's a 2020 paper by Nate Hagens called "Beyond the Superorganism" about our economy as this organism that can only survive by consuming natural resources and labor to grow. For me, the dominant form of capitalism today is a fundamentally flawed paradigm to try to do something with integrity inside of. It treats life as a resource, complexity as inefficiency, and relationship as a cost center.

That said, there’s still a massive spectrum of operators within this system, and there are certainly examples of companies that have grown significantly while maintaining their values. It’s an ongoing practice, not a destination or box to check, to do things with more alignment, more integrity, more care, and less extraction.

For me, none of this really changes until we discuss ownership and governance, and those are two of the hardest things to change. Sure, some benevolent dictators can do amazing things, and that model can work. But I think giving up ownership and decentralizing decision-making really strengthens entities and creates a broader base of people who want to do the right thing.

Learn about the True North Guild leadership program, or sign the North Star ethics pledge.

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.