Good morning and welcome back to the Drop In, DoubleBlind’s newsletter delivering independent journalism about psychedelics straight to your inbox.

The chasm existing between the psychedelics space and the cannabis industry perplexes me. The majority of people in psychedelics consume cannabis. Pretty much everyone in cannabis takes psychedelics. Between shared cultural intersections (The Grateful Dead, anyone?), the insidious effects of prohibition and the Drug War, and the seamless consumption of these plants and compounds, it seems like both camps should be more united. Particularly around the ICE raids that just occurred at Glass House Farms in Carpinteria and Camarillo, California, last Thursday, in which ICE agents stormed CA’s biggest legal cannabis farm (that an ex-cop owns, FYI!) and apprehended upwards of 200 people, according to sources close to the situation. The head of finance and the head grower of Glass House were both detained, according to sources, but ultimately released. One farm worker died from the injuries they sustained after plummeting 30 feet from a greenhouse to escape the enforcement action. His name was Jaime. RIP.

I’m not writing this to argue about politics. My only point is that, whether we like it or not, the cannabis space is — and has always been — a mirror for what’s unfolding in psychedelics. The same law enforcement apparatus, immigration policies, and federal illegality of substances could easily pivot toward psychedelic businesses, retreat centers, and medicine communities (and medicine workers and shamans, more specifically). These spaces all remain illegal or operate in legal gray areas in the U.S. If there’s any time to be a united front with other groups of people being targeted by the government, it’s now. I’ll leave it at that.

Today’s lead story, written by Jairo Lima, Glauber Assis, and Adana Kambeba, reviews MAPS’ Psychedelic Science conference through the lens of psychedelic confluence. You can find it below! If you keep scrolling, you’ll find pieces on why medical professionals and researchers believe trip-free psychedelics are essential for medicine, why Hollywood can’t get ayahuasca right, and a funding opportunity to assist a museum honoring Mazatec traditions. 

In solidarity,

Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief

Together with EntheoDNA

Your DNA holds clues about your psychedelic sensitivity 🍃🧬

At DoubleBlind, we love when science and self-inquiry meet.

That’s what makes the EntheoDNA Home Kit so exciting. It’s not just a novelty—it’s based on solid research into how genetics can influence your sensitivity and metabolism of entheogens like psilocybin, LSD, DMT, ketamine, and MDMA.

How does it work?

EntheoDNA analyzes variations in genes like CYP2D6, CYP3A4, HTR2A, MAO-A, BDNF, and AKT1—all of which play roles in how your body processes these substances and how your brain’s serotonin and neuroplasticity pathways respond .

Your at-home cheek swab unlocks information about things like enzyme activity and receptor sensitivity, so your report can highlight if you have a faster or slower metabolism for psilocybin, or if you carry markers associated with heightened sensitivity to serotonin-active compounds.

We wish this existed before our first journeys—it could have brought much-needed insights.

DoubleBlind readers get $10 off—use code DB10

👉 Get your kit here.

Psychedelic Confluence at PS2025: The Watershed Beyond the Renaissance

As the psychedelic renaissance fades, confluence offers the path forward, weaving diverse traditions and communities into a shared future.

The waters have changed.

At Psychedelic Science 2025, the largest gathering in the field, thousands converged in Denver: neuroscientists, therapists, Indigenous elders, entrepreneurs, artists, policymakers, and families. It was the first major MAPS conference since the FDA’s rejection of MDMA-assisted therapy and the psychedelic market’s downturn. Though the official theme was “The Integration,” the atmosphere felt closer to the crossroads, a place of opposing forces, clashing visions, and decisions that will define the future.

While many gathered to resist a prohibitionist model that is still killing people and to support marginalized groups, others were given platforms to promote narcissistic ideologies unbound by any commitment to collective well-being. Alongside genuine voices of care and kinship, the event also gave space to a different current, marked by conspirituality, biohacking individualism, crypto-patriarchy, and elite spectacle. The presence of figures like Aubrey Marcus made these tensions visible, and reflected the divergent paths at the crossroads, each leading to very different destinations.

To move ahead with integrity, we must go beyond protest or passivity. We must think, analyze, and strategize. The MAPS conference—still a meaningful act of resistance against the war on drugs in a time of war on otherness—revealed the light and shadow of the psychedelic movement.

Crossroads are not places of neutrality. They demand clarity. They demand prayer. They demand a decision.

The psychedelic waters are flowing. And we must learn to read their direction and their message.

The Psychedelic Renaissance Is Dead. And This Is Not the End.

For years, the idea of a “psychedelic renaissance” was seductive: a unified, science-driven revival, supposedly more ethical and credible (and also “cleaner,” clinical, medicalized) than the counterculture of the 1960s.

That narrative has collapsed.

Internal conflict, exclusionary gatekeeping, underrepresentation of Global South, BIPOC, and queer voices, regulatory resistance, and ethical failures (including from “renaissance architects”) have made one thing clear: The psychedelic renaissance as we have known it is over.

But that is not a tragedy.

Why cling to a sanitized, medicalized adaptation of a concept rooted in 14th to 16th century Europe, when the use of plant medicines—alongside songs, prayers, healing practices, and communal life—has never ceased within Indigenous traditions?

We don’t need a renaissance. What we need is confluence.

What Is Psychedelic Confluence?

Quilombola philosopher Nêgo Bispo invokes the metaphor of confluence: A meeting of rivers. Each river maintains its course, identity, and force, but together, they shape the journey to the ocean.

As a political technology, confluence is a form of cosmic diplomacy. Distinct worldviews engage without losing their autonomy. Through contact, each is strengthened—not by domination, but by synergy.

Psychedelic confluence offers a path through the crossroads. And it demands that we form the broadest possible alliance against Indigenous genocide, systemic injustice, and prohibition.

But not all alliances are equal. Rivers only converge if they move in the same direction. A river cannot merge with fire or with a pipeline. This is not a call for universalism. It is a call for a principled relationship.

Confluence demands open dialogue between cosmologies, sciences, epistemologies, and cultures. It invites us to recognize Indigenous systems of knowledge not only as “wisdom,” but also as science. It challenges us to build therapeutic bridges without reproducing colonial hierarchies between biomedical and traditional knowledge. Relation over conquest. Solidarity over gatekeeping. Co-production of knowledge over patents.

In a field increasingly shaped by capital, hype, and regulation, psychedelic confluence reminds us that the transformation we seek cannot mimic the failures of Western psychiatry. This is not about pills, gummies, or new products. It is about a new ethos, where ethics and collective well-being rise together, while honoring real plurality.

Like many rivers flowing to one ocean of collective healing.

Indigenous Voices Shifting the Field

The psychedelic sciences owe an unpayable debt to Indigenous knowledge holders. Yet too often, this knowledge is extracted, tokenized, or stripped of its context by intermediaries with no real commitment to community. 

At PS2025, signs of change appeared.

Indigenous presence was potent. Leaders from the Global North and South—Sandor Iron Rope, Biraci Nixiwaka, Daiara Tukano, Adana Kambeba, Alvaro Tukano, Christine McCleave, Osiris Cerqueda, Raine Piyãko, among others—brought an impactful counter-colonial current to the event. The Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund led a powerful delegation. The Psychedelic Parenthood Community held open dialogues with Indigenous leaders at their booth throughout the conference. Some panels created shared space between Indigenous and non-Indigenous voices.

True integration, however, demands more than representation. It requires protocols that honor ancestry, include Indigenous voices in decision-making, and value traditional medicines as equal partners in healing. Despite being a minority presence, Indigenous voices created new gravitational fields in the conference and shifted its magnetic pole. 

Policy Is More Than Regulation

Psychedelics are entering the halls of economic and political power. But with visibility comes contradiction: Conservative politicians champion plant medicines while upholding carceral drug laws. Corporations file patents on ancestral plants. Legalization becomes a race for licenses. 

Psychedelic confluence offers another path.

It means building coalitions that align science, culture, and justice. 

At PS2025, veterans called for trauma healing. Mothers advocated for family spaces. Indigenous leaders defended sacred territories. BIPOC presenters addressed racial trauma. Community voices argued that psychedelic parenthood should be a human right. Hundreds of participants were immigrants.

What stance will the psychedelic field take toward the marginalized—North and South?Good policy is never neutral. It must honor the ancestors, protect the land, secure rights, and support communities. In sociological terms, it must reenchant the world in disenchantment times.  

The Kinship Paradigm

Who leads?

Who is visible?

Who defines legitimacy?

Who determines risk?

Who is allowed to speak? 

At PS2025, confluence outshone influence. The workshop “Plant Medicines, Indigenous Healing Traditions and Right Relationship” drew more attention than Conscious Capitalism, illustrating how a new gravity center is emerging from the margins.

These voices are no longer asking for inclusion. They are setting the terms of a new paradigm of kinship. 

While today’s mental health systems treat symptoms in isolation, psychedelic confluence calls us toward a deeper paradigm—one rooted in interdependence among beings, systems of knowledge, and territories, collective healing, intergenerational trauma, and just benefit-sharing.

A group of Indigenous scholars has even proposed a new term: Kindelics—not just mind-manifesting, but kinship-manifesting. For all our relations. And one of the most powerful sign of this new paradigm came from the children. 

For the first time, a major MAPS psychedelic conference welcomed families, offering childcare, youth programming, and panels for parents. Grassroots initiatives like the Psychedelic Parenthood Community and Plant Parenthood held space on Rick Doblin’s track, following a pivotal moment at Breaking Convention in the UK.

As Adana Omágua Kambeba—Indigenous physician, traditional healer and the first of her people to become a medical doctor in Brazil, as well as the first Indigenous woman to serve a Federal Medical Council committee—reminded us: The resistance to family inclusion isn’t scientific. It’s social stigma.

Healing doesn’t begin at 21. It begins in the family. In community. In kinship. The closer we are to trauma’s roots, the more healing can unfold naturally.

Some wounds and traumas have collective roots, and the time has come to consider not only individual healing, but also collective and intergenerational healing.

From Renaissance to Responsibility

After all the buzz surrounding psychedelics at PS2023, the expectations for PS2025 were high. Though smaller in scale, the 2025 gathering offered something valuable: A moment of divergence, of difference, of decision. A true crossroads.

And one of the most important lessons, from the FDA’s rejection to the conference’s most vibrant moments, is this: What comes next must not be defined by headlines, but by coherence. And coherence will not come from the top. It will come from relationships.

We don’t need a new generation of psychedelic CEOs, curated lists of “most influential voices,” or more branded solutions. We need what we already have: communities, talking together, walking together. We need cosmic councils with diverse voices, cultures and cosmologies. Healers. Scientists. Elders. Youth. Parents. Artists. Funders. Also plants, fungi, animals, biocultures. Cosmopolitics.

Let the scientist learn from informed consent. Let the shaman advise the doctor. Let the funder hear about benefit-sharing. Let families decide together. To be egocentric or cosmocentric—that is the question.

The Weaving Ahead

Waters cannot be domesticated. They have their own flow. Psychedelic confluence is not a trend or a brand. It is a watershed. A zeitgeist.

Some voices have already become bridges for this shift, like Rick Doblin, whose resilience has helped open the doors to a multiplicity of voices; David Bronner, whose steady alignment with progressive causes remains a beacon in uncertain times; and Daiara Tukano, who moves between worlds with grace and courage, sowing the seeds of art and raising her voice for the rights of Indigenous peoples to their sacred medicines and biocultures. 

Some initiatives are already walking in confluence, such as the World Ayahuasca Forum—an alliance between Global South and North, Indigenous and non-Indigenous leaders, uniting ICEERS, Instituto Yorenka Tasorentsi, and Instituto Nixiwaka.

This is a reminder: It’s not the plants that must be integrated into the West. It’s the West that must be re-woven into the living tapestry of the Earth. PS2025 may be remembered for its size and ambivalences. But it should be remembered for its watershed. And now, the current flows to us.

If we each commit—to listen, to unlearn, to walk in reciprocity— not as owners of psychedelics but as their friends, we might say that in 2025, we didn’t just witness a turning point. 

We began to flow in psychedelic confluence.

Cooking MDMA, Dodging Bombs, and the Psychedelic Chemist Who Won’t Be Silenced

This week, we’re crossing continents with Willy Myco — the internet’s favorite shroom wizard turned underground chemist — who risked a war zone to film a step-by-step MDMA synthesis video.

The story tracks Willy’s wild detour through Dubai and Pakistan, where airstrikes, closed universities, and bomb threats couldn’t stop him from documenting the manufacturing process of one of the world’s most coveted (and highly illegal) party drugs.

You definitely don’t want to miss this story, written by none other than the inimitable Patrick Maravelias.

Upgrade your subscription here to get the story in your inbox this Friday morning!

DoubleBlind Digs

SCHOLARSHIP OPP: Ready to deepen your skills in psychedelic care and harm reduction? Zendo Project’s SIT (Sitting and Integration Training) offers an immersive, expert-led course to help you support others through challenging journeys — perfect for professionals and community members alike. The last day to apply for a scholarship is July 15. Learn more here.

WANNA GET AWAY? Win a legal psychedelic retreat with Synthesis in the Netherlands! You will be guided through a safe, intentional psilocybin experience with world-class facilitators and operational support. This 7-week journey includes 2 legal psilocybin ceremonies, expert prep, and integration support, nourishing meals, and round-trip travel — all designed for inner transformation. Giveaway closes August 12. Learn more here.

INTEGRATE WITH INTENTION: Whether you’re microdosing or diving deep, Wakeful Travel’s guided journals support every step of your psychedelic journey—from daily reflections to big breakthroughs. Thoughtfully designed, beautifully bound, and made for explorers like you. Get your journal today.

GRANT OPP: A new funding opportunity has landed: Healing Hearts, Changing Minds has launched Walking Each Other Home, a $500,000 grant initiative to advance psychedelic-assisted care at the end of life. They’re seeking proposals that blend science, compassion, and spirituality — especially from grassroots leaders and marginalized communities — to bring dignity and healing to life’s most tender transitions. Applications are open through August 22. Learn more and apply here.

*We may make a small commission from purchases using this link. Proceeds through advertising help to fund our independent journalism.

Together with EntheoDNA

Know before you dose—your genes matter.

EntheoDNA reveals how your genes may affect your experience with psychedelics like psilocybin, MDMA, DMT, and more.

Easy, private, and designed for conscious explorers.

$10 off with code DB10 👉 Try EntheoDNA