The crowd moves as one, collectively swaying to the rhythm. I join them, riding in the psilocybin’s wake. Feelings rush to the surface, my temperature rises, and as the bass drops, something in me breaks free. I’m crying and laughing at the same time, allowing my body to zig and zag, bob and weave. When I open my eyes, they meet those of another having a similar experience, and we smile knowingly at each other. We’re at a psychedelic music, arts, and culture festival, and to some, it looks like a party. But for us, at this moment, it’s a ceremony.
Psychedelic legislation is sweeping the U.S., with reform initiatives underway in 34 states and counting. While more Americans ages 35-50 now report using psychoactive substances like LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin than ever before, stigmas remain, holdovers from the drug-war era. Within the emerging psychedelic ecosystems, many are divided into camps: those who “party,” and those who “take it seriously.”
The former includes the festival, concert, and rave crowds; the latter, the scientists, spiritual seekers, and therapy patients and practitioners. Each thinks the other’s goals and risks are different, but they’re more alike than they seem.
The “serious” crowd, ostensibly, is focused on healing; they don’t take drugs for fun. The therapists and scientists want to use psychedelics to undo mental and physical unwellness and better understand the brain; the spiritual folks get at similar aims using ceremony, often incorporating Indigenous traditions (to varying degrees of appropriateness).
Then there are the “partiers”: the psychonauts and concertgoers who want to explore the mind-expanding fullness of these substances in the wild, not in a doctor’s office or blindfolded on a therapist’s couch. They may be unfamiliar with traditional practices or laugh at those who call psychedelics “medicine,” finding the spiritual crowd strange, with their crystals and sage.
Yet everyone wants to connect with each other, themselves, and something greater; and sometimes, we all need to turn off our minds, kick back, and just be. However they describe it, people who use these substances have transcendent experiences that can bring healing from personal and collective pain. Even in supposedly sterile contexts like research studies and clinical trials, scientists concede that the measure of success is metaphysical, with the alleviation of symptoms like depression linked to the intensity of participants’ indescribable journeys.
But everyone who uses psychedelics and similar molecules, like MDMA, knows that they give you not what you want, but what you need, whether or not you’re prepared. This includes a darker side that, without proper context, many people find terrifying—but, if approached correctly, can teach powerful lessons and transmute pain.
The key is having the proper set and setting, a ritual container to hold and explain the experience, and this can come in many forms. Retreats are increasingly popular, as Global Northerners travel to places where these substances are legal and local cultures have long psychedelic lineages. Many return with obstacles overcome, their lives changed.
Yet some “parties” offer better support than therapy sessions and clinical trials, where providers may not have personal experience with psychedelics, some participants allege sexual abuse and neglect, and even well-meaning therapists can cause life-threatening harm. Similarly, retreats can be as exploitative and unsafe as any basement rave without the right leadership and intention.
Besides, “party” settings are ceremonial in their own way, creating sacred space; I’ve had awakenings at festivals, concerts, ecstatic dance events, and journeying with friends that were almost as paradigm-shifting as my ayahuasca journey. In these contexts, people are accustomed to staying accountable and taking care of each other and psychedelic use is normalized, minimizing the shame that can surround these experiences.
At its best, this helps create cultures of harm reduction. Gatherings like Medicine Festival in the U.K. and Boom Festival in Portugal—where all drugs are decriminalized—offer too-rare drug-testing services as well as peer support for people having challenging trips. Similarly, Burning Man and its sprawling, global network are governed by a code of ethics and principles that participants are expected to enforce and uphold; the safest I’ve ever felt in a consciousness-altering space was a regional Burn I attended in 2023, surpassing even craft beer environments that claim to value community.
“As partiers previously, we’ve had so many transformational, powerful experiences in this space that has now become, with the clinicalization of [psychedelics], … shunned or shamed, as if that route is somehow dirty, sordid, or unenlightened,” says Joanne Hunt, half of the music duo Silvermouse, whose music draws from and inspires psychedelic states. “Within [it], I’ve met some of the most amazing people, and had the most incredible connections and conversations. … Just being in authentic community spaces is transformational.”
In the psychedelic ecosystem, the lines between these spaces blur. Breaking Convention in Exeter, England honors both party and ceremony, with panels on dance-trance culture, festival welfare, and ancient African spiritual practices getting equal stage time with therapy and neuroscience. The psychedelics conferences in California and Washington, DC, hosted by BIPOC-led organization Oakland Hyphae cover an equally broad range of topics, highlight underrepresented people in the industry, and support family friendly programming.
Such gatherings harken to our ancient past, says Breaking Convention speaker Akua Ofosuhene, who leads psychedelic education and community events. In West Africa, where she traces her lineage, tribes would historically gather to participate in ceremonies, intermingle and even intermarry, facilitating the spread of cultures and ideas.
“In Mali, there are communities related to the Berber [tribe] in North Africa, and their whole year is mapped out by festivals in different places along the route they're traveling through the desert,” she says. “That's when they come together and share resources, find partners for their sons and daughters, and bring fish. Everything is exchanged, and then everybody splits up again.” Today, she says, these events “are where we can have that skin-to-skin contact, find people to be in each other's networks, and then we go back out to do our work.”
But if these settings share benefits, they also share the risks. People on all sides can find themselves running from responsibilities and abdicating relationships, hiding in the ritual without integrating the lessons into their everyday life. Philosopher Alan Watts famously said of the psychedelic experience: “When you get the message, hang up the phone,” and that’s true no matter what camp you’re in.
There are people who never want the party to end, and their consequences are often louder and messier than those of others—yet “spiritual bypassing” is its own phenomenon, where people go into ceremony over and over, bringing back insights without any ability to apply them. The same thing can happen in therapy, where people get stuck in the past, leaving piles of soul material exhumed and largely unexamined. And science, for its part, can get so lost in the minutiae of understanding that researchers lose sight of its purpose: helping people live better lives, continually asking questions, and assuming you’re wrong, until proven otherwise.
There is no growth without integration: grounding what you’ve learned in lived experience; honoring the past and what brought you to this point, but using it to move forward. Without this, says Justin Handley, Hunt and Silvermouse’s other half, “there’s no bridge between the states, … so you think, ‘I want to go back there, I want to do another ceremony, or I want to go out partying again.’ Whereas if there’s more of a connected experience, it’s not something that’s in the past or over there, [but] cohesive in your being.”
Whether or not your path includes psychedelics, the spiritual leader Ram Dass said that awakening means learning to move between the formless and the form, the many and the one, realizing it’s all the same thing. This involves challenging what you thought you knew about yourself, the world, and reality; continually dying to old ways and being reborn.
But at some point, if you want to live in this dimension, you have to blow out the candles and close the ceremony; stagger home from the party, the echoes of those frequencies you’ll never hear again ringing in your ears; wrap up the clinical trial, even if it doesn’t prove your desired conclusions; roll up your sleeves, and do the dishes.
