🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter written for spiritual beings having a human pleasant email-reading experience. 🤓

Neil Markey took plenty of cues from his role model, Amanda Feilding. Her lightness, her pragmatism, her daring to be different. (He stopped short of drilling a hole in his skull, though.) Now, at Beckley Retreats, he's building the case that healthcare should invest in psilocybin.

We asked Neil why psychedelics belong in preventive care, what a group experience can do that a one-on-one session can’t, and why the future of retreats might involve an old campground near you.

Sheesh, seems like every week there’s more to report on ibogaine.

But frankly, education about the actual experience of ibogaine hasn’t kept up with the news cycle.

So Nekawa put together a few short videos to bring y’all up to speed. They cover where industry standards fall short, practical differences between ibogaine and iboga, and an alternative model for treatment.

If you’re thinking about doing ibogaine, you owe it to yourself to check these out first.

And if what you see sparks more questions, Nekawa’s founders are hosting a live Q&A on the 24th.

I studied math at the University of Maryland, and when September 11th happened, I joined the ROTC program. I believed the weapons of mass destruction story like most of the country did. After school, I went to Iraq as a lieutenant, then tried out for the Ranger Regiment and went to Afghanistan twice with them.

Once I got out in 2012, I went to grad school. That's where I realized I was having real trouble reintegrating. On paper I looked fine, but I was carrying an incredible amount of pain. Like a lot of veterans, I cycled through SSRIs, anti-anxiety meds, and sleeping pills. They have their place, but at best they're band-aids. Meditation was the first thing that got at the root, and some professionally facilitated psychedelic experiences seemed to accelerate that progress.

I got well enough to start teaching meditation, then spent a few years at McKinsey and a boutique restructuring firm. Part of me loved it, but it wasn't my work, and my old symptoms started coming back. My sleep was bad again and my relationships were getting rough around the edges, so I left without knowing what was next.

I ended up in Mexico, teaching meditation and spending time with the Wixárika people. It became a bit of an underground railroad, with military buddies and corporate friends coming down to have medicine experiences with them and then meditating with me on the beach. When I started thinking about formalizing the operation, I talked to some healthcare VCs and realized that was exactly what I didn't want.

A mentor put me in touch with a grad school classmate who was a partner at Beckley Waves, Amanda Feilding's family office. Through him I met her son, Rock, and eventually Amanda herself. Beckley Waves and I started Beckley Retreats as a joint venture.

Amanda was so authentically herself. She spent her whole life going against the grain, doing experimental stuff way before it was accepted or cool. Her family would keep clippings from the UK press making fun of her, and she’d just laugh and say they didn’t get it. She had a lightness that embodied what I thought psychedelic experiences were supposed to bring out in people. We’re spiritual beings having a material experience after all.

And it wasn’t about the money for her. She was pretty wealthy, and I know that perspective is a luxury. But I’ve met plenty of people with extreme wealth for whom it’s never enough. Amanda didn’t need more. She wanted to do interesting things and help people, which is admirable and rare. That inspires me. I’m not trying to get rich off people’s spiritual development, and I think there’s a way to do this work sustainably. 

She was also eyes in the sky and feet on the ground—idealistic and principled but pragmatic too. She supported the medical model as the breach in the dam, but she called the Beckley Foundation her art project. I love that a scientific research institution was her art project. She knew these experiences weren’t only for getting someone out of the depths of PTSD. They can help people live richer lives and remember how fortunate we are to be here.

The big idea is showing that psilocybin experiences have preventive health benefits. The clinical applications are great, but I don’t think we can make even a remote dent in American healthcare without prevention. We spend so much at the critical end and so little upstream. Psychedelics can help people make behavioral changes and take better care of themselves, and I think those changes can save the system money in a big way.

We’re also comparing one-on-one sessions with a group model. The group approach isn’t for everybody, and if someone doesn’t feel safe in a group, that’s fine. For many people, though, the therapeutic benefit can be even better than one-on-one, because we are our relationships. Harvard’s longevity research found that the health of your close relationships is the number one factor in living a long, healthy life. 

Setting matters too. Some of our work with Dr. AZA Allsop at Yale looks at how psychedelic experiences change the way people feel about each other and about nature. A psychedelic experience in a doctor’s office can be profound, but I think most people who've tried both would tell you doing it in nature is different and better.

We haven’t started on the savings to the system yet, but I’ve gotten clearer on the cost per person. With digital preparation, a four- or five-night immersive experience, and digital integration, I think we can get programs down to something like $2,000 to $2,500 a person at scale while still gathering data and paying facilitators well. The digital pieces matter for habit formation, since you can’t keep people on-site for three months.

The biggest costs are facilities and facilitators. We’ll always do the higher-end, culturally immersive experiences at Beckley for people who want them, but health systems don’t need fancy. There are lots of underutilized hotels and old campgrounds that would welcome 10 or 20 programs a year, and they just need to be clean and close to nature. 

On staffing, a lot of people come out of these experiences wanting to give back, and some offer to pay their own flights just to help. Vipassana retreats run almost entirely on returning students who volunteer. We can’t go that far, but we can pair paid leads with volunteer sitters. We already have people paying to join our practicum program for the training.

Right now, people fly all over the world to participate in psychedelic retreats because of the laws, but that’s going to change. Eventually I think these centers will sit an hour or two outside major cities, run by locals for locals. People will go once a year or every other year to reset and reconnect, and it’ll feel different when you come home and a bunch of people nearby have had the same experience.

Being back at school has reminded me how much academia sits in a bubble. I go to conferences where people are still announcing that meditation works, as if 50 years of studies hadn't already settled it. I keep waiting for the “so what.” Without an ROI, nothing’s going to happen. I want states, the federal government, employers, police, and unions to see these programs are worth investing in, because right now they’re on the sidelines.

Safety is the other half. We’ve built models that are getting pretty predictive about who’s at risk for challenging experiences. Most of it comes down to health and medical history, but there are also signals in how people fill out the application and communicate in screenings. So far, we only have about 1,200 data points, but eventually, I’d love to turn our system into a tool any retreat operator or facilitator could use to de-risk their programs.

Ultimately, I hope our research makes these experiences more accessible for people who want them. Looking ahead, I think the problems we have today around meaning, connection, and technology addiction are going to get worse, and these experiences can help us through that transition. You don’t need treatment-resistant depression to benefit. When people feel connected and loved, they give back to the system, so well people benefit too.

See what’s happening at Beckley Retreats.

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.