When Do Psychedelics Go Too Far?
Welcome to The Psychedelic Blog. Bestselling essayist & Psychedelic cultural analyst examining how altered states shape relationships, grief, death & meaning.
This week: Injectable MDMA with injectable ketamine. Iboga, Bufo & mushrooms in the same weekend. Past-life certainty. At what point does exploration become escalation?
A Few Recent Things Made Me Ask The Same Question
The older I get, the less interested I become in intensity for its own sake.
I’ve met people whose lives were transformed by a single mushroom journey & people who have spent a decade accumulating experiences without fundamentally changing anything.
Recently, a few things caught my attention:
Injectable MDMA with injectable ketamine.
Multi-medicine weekends.
Past-life certainty.
Kambo & Bufo being stacked together.
None of these observations struck me as particularly important on their own. Together, however, they left me asking the same question:
At what point does exploration become escalation?
The question isn’t whether Psychedelics work or whether more experiences are better than fewer. The question is whether Psychedelic culture has developed a blind spot around novelty, intensity & accumulation itself.
Because somewhere along the way, Psychedelic culture stopped asking whether something was necessary & started asking whether it was available. Stopped asking whether it was useful & started asking whether it was possible. Stopped asking whether we were going deeper & started assuming that more automatically meant further.
Those are very different questions.
1. Injectable MDMA & Injectable Ketamine: What The Fuck Are People Doing?
A few weeks ago, I came across a discussion about injectable MDMA, injectable ketamine & mushrooms being used in the same ceremony.
What struck me wasn’t the substances themselves…it was how casually the conversation unfolded. Nobody seemed particularly surprised. Nobody appeared to think this was unusual. The entire exchange carried the same energy as people comparing supplements, biohacks or meditation apps.
Maybe I’m getting older. Or maybe Psychedelic culture has moved faster than I realized. Or maybe the fact that someone can describe injectable MDMA, injectable ketamine & mushrooms being used together without anyone blinking an eye is worth paying attention to.
Five years ago, this would have sounded fringe even within Psychedelic circles. Today, it barely registers as noteworthy.
The substances aren’t really the point. The point is how quickly the boundaries of what counts as normal experimentation have expanded.
2. Iboga, Bufo & Mushrooms In One Weekend: Is There A Prize For This?
In the last month or so, I've come across multiple pamphlets outlining multi-day retreats where participants move from Iboga to Bufo to mushrooms over the course of a single weekend.
I found myself wondering whether the goal was transformation or completing a side quest. Nobody seems interested in asking the obvious question:
Who decided that stacking reality-shattering experiences on top of each other was inherently a good idea?
Iboga carries real cardiac risks. All three substances can be psychologically destabilizing on their own…now people are combining them into a single retreat experience. This is a recipe for disaster.
3. Getting Caught in a Past-Life Lie
Oh boy...sometimes the 'shaman' reveals their ineptitude without knowing it.
A facilitator recently told someone that their Bufo experience was so calm & beautiful that they must have done Bufo in a past life. The problem? Modern Bufo practice didn't emerge until the 1980s. So unless this person communed with the Toad in a past life while they were in the third grade, it's highly unlikely.
One thing I’ve noticed about Psychedelic culture is that confidence rises much faster than evidence. Somewhere along the way, “I had an intuition” became “I know this to be true.”
Those are very different statements.
4. Kambo, Bufo & The Cult Of More
If one medicine is good, two must be better. If one ceremony is powerful, three must be transformational. If one ego death changed your life, surely another one next weekend is exactly what you need.
Kambo before Bufo has become a common example of this logic. When two of the most physically & psychologically demanding experiences in Psychedelic culture start being packaged together, it's worth asking whether we're pursuing transformation or intensity for its own sake.
At a certain point, you start wondering whether Psychedelic culture has accidentally recreated the same optimization mindset it claims to be escaping.
Just with different substances.
The Real Question
Psychedelic culture spent years asking:
Do these substances work?
Now we need to ask:
When does exploration become escalation?
Not every person doing multiple medicines has a problem, not every facilitator is reckless, not every intense experience is excessive.
But when injectable drugs, multi-medicine weekends, unverifiable (aka bullshit) spiritual claims & extreme protocols all start appearing in the same ecosystem, it's worth asking whether the culture has developed a bias toward intensity itself.
I'm not arguing against Psychedelics (clearly). I'm arguing against the assumption that more intensity equals more growth.
Up next for Sunday’s Insider: The Psychedelic Retreat Bubble. The economics, incentives & warning signs behind one of the fastest-growing corners of Psychedelic culture.
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Unwind intentionally.
Good point. Perhaps it was implied, but it should have been explicitly pointed out: multiple drugs do NOT necessarily play well together. You may do just fine on drug A, and just fine on drug B but have a radically different experience if you take both A and B. And that experience might include death.
Doctors ask you to enumerate EVERY drug you are taking before they prescribe another drug. Pharmacies now have computer programs to sweep through all the drugs they have sold you to look for known bad combinations. It has taken lifetimes of experiences with large numbers of patients taking infinate combinations of drugs to discover which combinations are problematic. We don't have that documented experience with psychedelics. At least, we don't have enough of that experience.
There is a published table of Red/Yellow/Green combinations. That's helpful. Nevertheless, it's better to be cautious and avoid combining psychedelics.
How much escalation do you need in one weekend? In 2021, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) of Australia banned the use of kambo in Australia and classified it as a schedule-10 poison. It is listed in the category for "substances of such danger to health as to warrant prohibition of sale, supply and use".[6][a]