The Dark Side of Psychedelics – Reporting on the dark side of the psychedelic renaissance
As a journalist reporting on the psychedelic world at the same time as having his own experiences, for both research and as part of a personal quest for growth, Mattha Busby has seen it all. Ceremonies bathed in love and light, and rituals steeped in darkness. Through all of this, he has witnessed and experienced both the benefits of psychedelics and their serious potential for harm. To tell this story, Mattha embarks on a rip-roaring journey through a brave—and profoundly weird—new world in which psychedelics are more available than ever before in human history. Retreat organizers are paying for targeted ads on Instagram, and giving celebrities free trips in exchange for positive testimonials. Illegal psychedelic dispensaries have popped up on high streets, and vendors are selling psychedelic toad venom on tropical beaches and in hotels, often without adequate safety measures.
For many, these psychedelic experiences have provided welcome relief from a near-constant sense of anxiety, but others have been left dazed and confused, or worse, and with few avenues for support. In rare cases, people have even died at psychedelic retreat centers, and at clinics, though we often do not hear about this until someone investigates. Some of these incidents have highlighted the folly of erasing the reality of the darker aspects of shamanism in popular representations and denying the sometimes radical cultural differences between those who serve psychedelics and those who receive. There has been scant discussion of how many of the traditional uses of ayahuasca were for sorcery and other nefarious purposes.
Ultimately, it can be difficult to deduce good psychedelic facilitators between the less well-intentioned until you’ve spent time with them. But increasing numbers of people around dinner tables now tell of destabilising journeys and touchy shamans. There are no easy answers to all of this — but the first step would be leaders in the psychedelic industry accepting this fact and not dismissing critiques as ill intentioned tellings of isolated incidents.
Speaker Bio
Mattha Busby is a journalist specialising in health policy, drugs/psychedelics and (sub)culture. His work has appeared in The Guardian, VICE, Rolling Stone, WIRED, and elsewhere. In 2024, he was a Ferris-UC Berkeley fellow in psychedelic journalism. He has published two slim book volumes, on drug policy for Thames & Hudson in 2022 and on psychedelics for Hoxton Mini Press in 2025.
Curated and hosted by
Maya Bracknell Watson is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, retired cult leader and psychedelic researcher.
Her background is in psychedelic parapsychology research with Greenwich University, specialising in exceptional human experience and entity encounters on psychedelics, and as an artist. She has studied shamanism for 10 years, working closely with Amerindian indigenous shamanic cultures of Mexico and Peru and western neoshamanic groups, focusing on the introduction and integration of indiginous and animistic knowledge and perspectives to westerners and western ontologies.
She publicly lectures on the subjects of psychedelics and shamanism, and produces art on the subjects informed by her research and experience, including films, performances, writing and immersive worlds. She has performed and exhibited at the Tate Britain and Breaking Convention and is the creator and host of Psychedelicacies, an online lecture series.
Walking between the worlds of art, psychedelic science and shamanism she works to bridge them and uses each as investigatory tools to inform and articulate each other.
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