The psychedelic therapy movement has been sold to the public as a grassroots revolution driven by compassion for suffering veterans and breakthrough science. The reality is far more sinister. A coordinated campaign by Silicon Valley billionaires has hijacked the psychedelic industry, weaponising vulnerable populations whilst suppressing safety concerns that should have halted their plans years ago.

These psychedelic therapy safety concerns extend far beyond isolated incidents—they reveal systematic failures in oversight and accountability that threaten to replicate the opioid crisis under the guise of healing.

The Architect of Capture

The Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative (PSFC) represents everything dangerous about concentrated wealth meeting unregulated pharmaceutical development. Founded in 2017, this shadowy network of approximately 200 high-net-worth individuals—including SpaceX board members, tech founders, and hedge fund managers—has systematically captured the psychedelic ecosystem. Their wealth exceeds the GDP of small countries, yet their accountability to public health standards remains virtually non-existent.

PSFC member Genevieve Jurvetson acknowledged the disproportionate power wielded by this tiny elite: “This field has been carried by like 20 families, and the leverage that they’ve had with [a] million, you know, tens of millions of dollars—hundreds of millions at this point is really quite extraordinary.”

Extraordinary indeed. Extraordinary in its concentration of control. Extraordinary in its disregard for scientific integrity. Extraordinary in its willingness to experiment on traumatised populations.

Veterans as Marketing Props

PSFC’s internal documents reveal a calculated strategy to exploit public sympathy for military veterans. In 2019, co-founder Joe Green explicitly acknowledged this manipulation at Burning Man, telling attendees that PSFC’s focus on veterans stemmed from internal polling showing veterans are “one of the most sympathetic groups in our country.” He admitted not wanting to “sound unduly calculating” whilst describing exactly that – a calculated exploitation of veteran suicide statistics to advance commercial interests.

The November 2021 PSFC Landscape Report formalised this cynicism, positioning veterans groups as an “insurance policy” and “bulwark against backlash.” The document openly advocated “bypass[ing] the ‘gatekeepers'” to “directly support the creation and dissemination of content focused on the messages we want the public to hear.”

This strategy manifested through proxy organisations Heroic Hearts Project and Healing Breakthrough, which received at least $1.65 million and over $5 million respectively from PSFC members and Lykos Therapeutics investors. While exploiting veteran sympathy, PSFC systematically dismissed psychedelic therapy safety concerns raised by participants and whistleblowers. These groups led a vicious disinformation campaign after the FDA advisory committee rejected MDMA-assisted therapy in June 2024, falsely accusing critics of “single-handedly dash[ing] the hopes of thousands of veterans who continue to take their own lives.”

The rhetoric was inflammatory and dangerous. Representative Dan Crenshaw directed his followers to “tell them to stop hating veterans,” whilst Elon Musk amplified the attacks. Death threats followed. One target received messages stating “You support rape and lynchings” and “I want to say fuck you as loudly as possible.”

This wasn’t advocacy. It was stochastic terrorism—demonising critics to incite violence whilst claiming concern for veteran welfare.

The Therapy That Enables Abuse

Behind the marketing gloss lies a therapy model rooted in pseudoscience and rife with documented abuse. MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) developed its MDMA-assisted therapy protocol based on the work of Stanislav Grof, whose “Holotropic Breathwork” encourages therapists to physically restrain patients whilst “amplifying” their distress through touch.

The protocol instructs therapists to believe they can telepathically “attune” to patients’ needs, determining when patients must suffer for healing. This mystical framework—dressed in therapeutic language—explicitly sanctions “focused bodywork” where therapists physically struggle with intoxicated patients, relying on “safe words” despite MDMA’s known impairment of verbal recall.

The predictable consequence? During MAPS’s Phase 2 clinical trial, participant Meaghan Buisson was sexually assaulted on camera by her therapists—blinded, gagged, pinned, and violated whilst screaming for them to stop. The therapists later exploited her as unpaid labour whilst controlling her income and medical care.

MAPS founder Rick Doblin dismissed this as therapists failing to sufficiently emphasise “inner healing intelligence.” Yet the video evidence shows therapists following Grof’s framework exactly as designed. The abuse wasn’t deviation; it was implementation. The psychedelic therapy safety concerns documented in Buisson’s case weren’t anomalies but predictable outcomes of a flawed protocol that sanctions physical contact with intoxicated, vulnerable patients.

Buisson reported the assault to the institutional review board in 2018 and submitted a formal complaint to the FDA in 2021, explicitly warning that the abuse resulted from MAPS’s clinical trial design. Neither adequately responded. When she testified at the FDA advisory committee hearing in 2024, PSFC’s coordinated network attacked her credibility rather than addressing the systemic failures she exposed.

Regulatory Failure at Every Level

Multiple safeguards failed catastrophically. The institutional review board approved a protocol sanctioning physical struggles with drugged patients. The FDA ignored a whistleblower’s detailed warnings about protocol-enabled abuse. MAPS continued recruiting participants into Phase 3 trials using the same dangerous framework. Multiple psychedelic therapy safety concerns were reported to authorities years before the FDA advisory committee hearing, yet remained unaddressed while trials continued enrolling vulnerable participants.

By the time the FDA advisory committee convened in June 2024, the evidence of misconduct was overwhelming. The committee voted 9-2 against approving MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, citing numerous safety and efficacy concerns. Yet the sole member voting “yes” on safety—Dr Walter Dunn—had undisclosed conflicts of interest, serving on the advisory board of the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition alongside Brett Waters, who testified at the hearing without disclosing their professional relationship.

The FDA’s Complete Response Letter, released September 2025, revealed “several unreported adverse events for at least two sites” and ongoing investigations into data reliability. Lykos Therapeutics’ own former Chief Medical Officer expressed alarm at these revelations.

Three papers by Lykos were subsequently retracted from Psychopharmacology for “protocol violations amounting to unethical conduct.” The journal found that multiple authors knew about violations when submitting articles but failed to disclose this information or remove contaminated data.

The Stanford-Lancet Warning Ignored

Researchers at UC San Francisco published a viewpoint in JAMA Neurology in January 2024 highlighting critical gaps in psychedelic research for addiction treatment. Their concerns—published before the FDA decision—identified systemic problems that the psychedelic industry continues to ignore.

The JAMA authors noted that published psychedelic clinical trials enrolled only 2.5% Black participants and 2.1% Latino participants, whilst 82.3% were non-Hispanic white. This isn’t merely disappointing diversity statistics—it represents fundamental failures in research design that render findings inapplicable to populations most affected by addiction and trauma.

Moreover, trials systematically excluded people with cardiac disease, physical disability, family histories of psychosis, and those using multiple substances—conditions associated with social disadvantage. These exclusions create an artificial safety profile that collapses when treatments reach real-world populations. The JAMA authors’ research highlighted psychedelic therapy safety concerns that particularly affect marginalized populations systematically excluded from clinical trials, creating a dangerous gap between research conditions and real-world implementation.

The authors warned: “Overreliance on a medicalised model is likely to preclude access among racial and ethnic minoritised patients and those with SUDs, who already experience barriers accessing medical care.”

Their call for expanded public funding, observational data collection, and community-based models went unheeded by PSFC, which preferred controlling the narrative through captured media and proxy organisations.

The Stanford-Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis offers a blueprint the psychedelic industry should follow but won’t. The Commission identified how pharmaceutical manufacturers downplayed risks whilst promoting industry-friendly thought leaders and astroturfed advocacy organisations. The American Pain Foundation received 88% of its budget from opioid manufacturers—a playbook PSFC replicates through Heroic Hearts, Healing Breakthrough, and similar proxies.

The Hopkins Religious Leaders Scandal

PSFC’s corruption extends beyond therapy trials into academic institutions. The Johns Hopkins religious leaders study—funded by PSFC members including T. Cody Swift’s RiverStyx Foundation—was designed not to research religious experience but to engineer acceptance of psychedelics within major faith traditions.

Swift didn’t merely fund the study; he conducted qualitative interviews with participants whilst intoxicated on psilocybin, then used his philanthropy to fund nonprofits (Shefa and Ligare) created by study participants to promote psychedelic use in their religious communities. This circular funding created the illusion of organic adoption whilst actually orchestrating every element.

Johns Hopkins’ institutional review board found “serious non-compliance” involving multiple undisclosed conflicts of interest. The IRB blocked publication of Swift’s qualitative interviews, but journalist Michael Pollan—recipient of PSFC member Tim Ferriss’s psychedelic journalism fellowship—incorporated the unpublished data into his New Yorker article anyway, deliberately circumventing ethical oversight.

PSFC board member Genevieve Jurvetson appeared alongside Pollan and study participants at events promoting the research, whilst her husband Steve Jurvetson invested in companies positioned to profit from psychedelic legalisation. Neither disclosed these financial entanglements when promoting the study’s supposed evidence of spiritual transformation.

Training the Underground

PSFC positioned Françoise Bourzat—whose training network has been implicated in decades of sexual abuse and ethical violations—as a key figure for scaling psychedelic therapy training globally. Despite her Hakomi therapy certification being permanently revoked in 1997 for “multiple ethical violations,” and despite her husband Aharon Grossbard being identified as the abusive underground guide “Andrei” in Michael Pollan’s book, PSFC funded her organisation and incorporated her training model into state-level psilocybin programmes.

Internal PSFC emails show leadership planned to leverage Bourzat’s network to train 100,000 therapists by 2031—a staggering goal that would exceed the entire projected growth of traditional mental health counsellors during the same period. The emphasis was on speed and scale, not safety or accountability.

Oregon’s psilocybin programme, heavily influenced by PSFC through sister organisation New Approach PAC, created pathways for underground practitioners to obtain state licences with minimal oversight. Bourzat’s successor organisation, Gather Well Psychedelics, now trains guides for state licensure in Oregon and Colorado through partnerships that require as little as five days of in-person training for experienced underground practitioners.

The Psychedelic Safety Institute—which integrated the Psychedelic Communications Hub that coordinated attacks on critics—is now building ethics frameworks based on Gather Well’s model. This represents regulatory capture in its purest form: the industry defining its own ethical standards whilst marginalising independent oversight.

The AI-Surveillance Convergence

The dystopian endgame is already visible. Steve Jurvetson envisions AI handling psychedelic therapy whilst humans serve as “lowest-cost labor” for physical emergencies. His firm Future Ventures has invested in xAI, Elon Musk’s company developing Grok—a chatbot already altered to promote far-right political narratives.

Compass Pathways, backed by PSFC investments, is deploying an AI tool called Chanterelle that “records sessions with…patients” for “continuous optimisation throughout treatment.” This convergence of psychedelics, AI, and surveillance technologies under billionaire control represents an authoritarian nightmare: tools that could enhance human flourishing being weaponised for behaviour control and profit extraction.

PSFC member Antonio Gracias—Musk’s close ally who led Lykos Therapeutics’ recent $50 million funding round—worked with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to gut federal agencies and expand surveillance capabilities. The same network promoting psychedelic access for “healing” is simultaneously dismantling public health infrastructure and democratic institutions.

Regulatory Capture in Real Time

PSFC’s 2025 Strategic Roadmap seeks $125 million to fund coordinated messaging through proxy organisations, with $46.4 million allocated to “strategic communications”—more than any other category. The document explicitly frames communications as “monitoring social media,” “coordinating responses,” and “centrally vet[ting] and incubat[ing] new ideas.”

This isn’t public health advocacy. It’s information warfare.

The Roadmap identifies “negative media cascades” as threats requiring “proactive engagement” to “reduce both actual and perceived ethical violations.” Note the phrasing: reducing perceived violations matters as much as addressing actual harm. The priority is reputation management, not patient safety.

Whistleblower allegations in Massachusetts revealed that Heroic Hearts allegedly served as a “slush fund” for New Approach PAC to violate campaign finance laws during the failed 2024 Ballot Initiative 4 campaign. The organisation reportedly coordinated with political operatives whilst claiming to be an independent veterans advocacy group—textbook astroturfing.

The Trump Administration Pivot

After losing control of the FDA process, PSFC pivoted to supporting the Trump administration’s “accelerationist” approach. Genevieve Jurvetson set a “moonshot” goal to “get MDMA across the finish line” within a year, without additional Phase 3 trials. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a vocal psychedelic supporter—promised access to psychedelic medicine within 12 months.

This represents regulatory capture’s ultimate expression: when industry can’t win through legitimate scientific processes, it bypasses them entirely through political pressure. The same network that claimed to champion evidence-based medicine now advocates approving treatments based on flawed trials that resulted in journal retractions and FDA rejection.

Meanwhile, billionaire PSFC members promote far-right ideologies incompatible with genuine healing work. Genevieve Jurvetson reposts content calling socialism “the suicide pact of mediocrity” and mocking voters seeking relief for rent, food, and childcare. Steve Jurvetson speculates about “infiltrat[ing] Grok and ChatGPT” to disseminate preferred narratives about psychedelics.

This is the movement’s true face: reactionary elites using psychedelics as another tool for social control, wrapped in therapeutic language whilst actively opposing the structural changes that might actually reduce suffering.

What Actually Works

The tragedy is that psychedelics, properly researched and responsibly deployed, might offer genuine therapeutic value. But achieving that requires rejecting the Silicon Valley model entirely.

Liberation psychology—developed in Latin America—offers an alternative framework that understands distress as a natural response to collective suffering rather than individual pathology. This approach centres collective action, mutual aid, and structural change as essential components of healing, rather than reducing everything to brain chemistry and individual transformation.

Addressing psychedelic therapy safety concerns requires rejecting industry-captured frameworks in favor of transparent, community-centered approaches that prioritize participant welfare over profit. Proper psychedelic research would require:

• Genuine public funding independent of industry influence, eliminating conflicts of interest that have corrupted trial design and data reporting
• Rigorous safety protocols based on evidence rather than underground traditions, with transparent reporting of adverse events
• Meaningful community engagement with populations most affected by trauma and addiction, not token diversity gestures
• Rejection of pseudoscientific frameworks like telepathic attunement and trauma amplification through touch
• Long-term follow-up adequate for chronic conditions, not brief interventions designed to generate positive press
• Elimination of astroturfing through mandatory disclosure of funding sources for advocacy organisations
• Firewall between prescribers and industry to prevent the conflicts that enabled the opioid epidemic

The Stanford-Lancet Commission’s recommendations for addressing opioid industry influence apply equally to psychedelics: restrict drug promotion and industry-funded education, end regulatory “revolving doors,” unmask astroturf groups, and restore limits on corporate political donations.

The Path Forward

The current trajectory guarantees harm. PSFC’s Strategic Roadmap explicitly states that “without field-wide action, this pattern is likely to continue, resulting in increasing harms and backlash.” Yet their proposed solutions—industry-defined ethics, continued funding of underground training networks, and expanded influence operations—will only multiply those harms.

Demanding Accountability

We must demand accountability. Regulatory agencies must investigate the unreported adverse events identified in the FDA’s Complete Response Letter. Ethics boards must scrutinise the conflicts of interest pervading psychedelic research. Journalists must identify and disclose industry funding behind ostensibly independent advocacy.

Beyond False Choices

Most critically, we must reject the false choice between prohibition and industry capture. Decriminalisation can address prohibition’s harms without legitimising dangerous therapy models or concentrating control among billionaire elites. Community-based approaches with proper drug education and harm reduction can expand access without replicating the power imbalances that characterise both criminalisation and medicalisation.

Who Deserves Better

The psychedelic industry’s current direction serves no one except its architects. Veterans deserve better than being used as marketing props. Trauma survivors deserve better than pseudoscientific therapy that enables abuse. Vulnerable populations deserve better than exclusion from research followed by exposure to untested treatments.

The Public Health Imperative

Public health demands we say no to billionaire-controlled “healing” that prioritises profit over safety. The alternative isn’t prohibition—it’s democratic governance, scientific integrity, and genuine accountability.

Until the psychedelic industry embraces those principles, every promise it makes should be treated as the marketing copy it is: designed to extract value whilst minimising liability, wrapped in the language of compassion to obscure the machinery of exploitation beneath.

Source:

Psychiatric risks for worsened mental health after psychedelic use

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