The Not-So TL;DR:

Our first responder and psychedelic harm reduction friends have reported a recent, noticeable uptick in calls involving people who read a glowing article or watched How To Change Your Mind, took psychedelics with no idea what they were doing, and ended up in an unexpectedly difficult, traumatic, or dangerous situation.

We’re here to help you avoid being that person.

For context, the psychedelic research studies you've heard about are conducted on extensively screened subjects. Pharmaceutically pure compounds made in licensed labs are used. The sessions themselves are conducted by trained professionals in tightly controlled environments with lots of preparation and aftercare for the subjects. Medical professionals are standing by in the next room the whole time in case they're needed.

This is in many ways the exact opposite of how people take psychedelics in the real world.

When you’re taking psychedelics in an unsupervised, uncontrolled environment like a festival, party, or event at home, the number of risk vectors you have to anticipate, track, and manage on your own goes way up.

We learned about the importance of psychedelic safety while coming of age working as staff, performers, and first responders at festivals, which are arguably one of the most (if not THE most) complex, uncontrolled environments where people regularly take psychedelics.

Over the years, we have seen a small but painfully consistent percentage of people overdose, have terrifying experiences, injure themselves, experience psychotic episodes, and rarely (but heartbreakingly) even die in situations involving psychedelics. Many of these incidents involved friends and people we cared about, so we got real nerdy with an interdisciplinary team of psychedelic safety experts to figure out how to take care of our communities.

We’ve now been working together for seven years to create a comprehensive video masterclass for people who use psychedelics outside of supervised medical, therapeutic, and ritual contexts. Having recently completed and launched the masterclass, we’re now able to help answer a wide range of psychedelic safety questions, including:

- Avoiding dangerous drug combinations

- Safer dosing practices

- Determining whether your mindset and environment (“set and setting”), and the people you're with are conducive for a safe, beneficial experience

- How to test your drugs for purity and screen for harmful adulterants like fentanyl- Medical and mental health conditions which are contraindicated with various psychedelics

- Where to find quality, no-BS information about drugs on the internet

- How to triage and respond in a crisis if something goes sideways and you need to get help

- Strategies for supporting someone having a difficult trip

- Consent around psychedelics

- How to make sense of psychedelic experiences and integrate them into your life

A COUPLE NOTES:

- This AMA is intended for informational and harm reduction purposes and should not be taken as medical advice. We’re not doctors and we don’t play them on the internet, but we also know that most medical professionals don’t receive comprehensive training about psychedelics. Thus, we encourage you to do your own research and will be happy to direct you to legit sources of online drug information.

- The word “psychedelics” is an umbrella term which refers to a wide array of compounds from many different classes of drugs. Drugs from different classes have different effects, work differently in your body, and have different safety profiles, which makes general questions about “psychedelics” hard to answer. Asking us questions about specific drugs will get you better answers.

- We don’t know everything about psychedelic safety and won’t pretend to. There’s just too much to know. We teamed up because our complimentary knowledge bases allow us to cover a lot more ground than most people in this space, but new research is coming out all the time, there are hundreds of new drugs being created every year, and there are always edge cases. If we don’t know the answer to a legit question, we’ll tell you so and will try to direct you somewhere or to someone who might.

- There is no such thing as taking psychedelics risk-free. If you take enough drugs at high enough doses over a long enough period of time, something will inevitably go sideways. Part of the point of all this safety stuff is to minimize the impact when it does. That said, there are also always going to be a small percentage of people who react poorly to psychedelics due to genetic factors or predispositions which could not have been known or anticipated in advance.

Okay, that’s all the additional stuff.

Now, should you feel so inclined…Ask Us Anything!