Psychedelic Commodification
A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
Karl Marx, Das Kapital
Commodity Fetishism
During the first great wave of capitalism, Karl Marx was perplexed by how commodification transformed everything it touched like King Midas, giving otherwise ordinary goods magical qualities.
To make sense of the phenomenon Marx turned to anthropology, the taproot of the social sciences and the subject of my bachelor’s degree (much to my parents’ chagrin), borrowing the term “fetishism” which anthropologists use to describe beliefs that inanimate things like wooden idols (fetishes) have divine powers.
“Commodity fetishism” helped Marx to explain why a good like a table could become “a thing which transcends sensuousness.”
Today, commodity fetishism helps explain why bricks from Supreme, a streetwear brand, can sell for $160.
Psychedelic Commodities
Enter psychedelics.
The reverent kin of magic mushrooms today lovingly refer to them as “niños santos” and “flesh of the gods” (teonanactl), while we find B. caapi (ololiuqui, the serpent vine), the eponymous vine of the ayahuasca brew, in the murky waters of the internet with the long-tail keywords, “the spirit vine,” “vine of souls,” and (perhaps the better translation) “vine with a soul.” What a fetish.
Not that that’s wrong. We commonly fetishize plants. Like the superb fruits of Japan, where an exceptional cube-shaped melon can sell for more than USD $27,000.00 (3 million yen).
Ayahuasca and magic mushrooms and the rest of the motley entheogenic ethnobotanical crew are neither the first nor the last plants ever to be fetishized, commodified, and sold.
So then, should a good cup of ayahuasca be priced higher than an exceptional cube-shaped melon?
Is what will most certainly be one one the most meaningful experiences in your life (as most participants in the Johns Hopkins psilocybin study reported their psychedelic experience to be) worth $27,000.00?
The Perception Problem
“These botanical wonders are not just objects,” said Shuar Velasquez, a lecturer on indigenous peoples’ perspective on nature with the School for International Training at the Centro Bartolome de Las Casas in Peru to student-me researching my thesis Ayahuasca and Globalization there in 2009.
The reality, Shuar continued, is that we are subjects looking at other subjects, we are not subjects looking at objects, like the trees and the peccaries. Plants and animals think they are people, too. “Jaguars are thought to see themselves as humans” explained anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro in Cannibal Metaphysics. Luis Eduardo Luna referred to it as “relational epistemology.”
Subject-subject. Not subject-object.
The subject-subject perspective, Shuar explained, is easy when you look at ayahuasca, peyote, iboga, and magic mushrooms. These botanical wonders have such an ontological je ne sais quois such that any objectification or objection to their status as subjects should be overruled.
Is this idea, “sacred plants are subjects, not objects,” really just a commodity fetish — giving otherwise ordinary goods magical qualities, turning them into things which transcend sensuousness?
But doesn’t commodification deprive them of some subjective sacredness?
What can we do about that?
3 Solutions
We can do three things to mitigate the negative effects of the commodification of psychedelics:
1. improve upstream conditions;
2. make the market ethically; and
3. invest responsibly.
1. Improve upstream conditions
The popularity of ethnobotanical psychedelics, especially the entheogenic plants of the Amazon Rainforest, impacts indigenous peoples who use the plants in a variety of ways. The effects of increased tourism, proliferation of ayahuasca lodges, and demand for indigenous shamanic services are often negative.
As anthropologist Bia Labate and others have commented, commodification of indigenous plant knowledge is happening and we can direct it in a way that ensures value accrues upstream, in-region, where indigenous peoples live.
It is unconscionable to rip these materials out of their cultural and geographical context without giving back to indigenous peoples.
Dennis McKenna, Fireside Chat, April 15, 2020
To that end I started the RAO DAO, a community-owned agricultural co-op growing ayahuasca in Santa Clara, a Shipibo-Community just outside of Yarinacocha, the lake side of Pucallpa, Peru, upstream on the Ucayali.
Downstream, at the consumer level, I see more and more psychedelic commodities in what was once a world populated almost wholly by obscure websites like BouncingBearBotanicals and whatever treasures you would find at Shakedown Streets, common at music festivals. The psychedelic market of today is peppered with venture-backed product companies like Soul Drops or Field Trip or MUD\WTR, sleek like snakes, ads popping up on my Reddit and Instagram feeds.
You can buy B. caapi tinctures from Jungle Medicine House on Amazon.com. Buy magic mushrooms at pop-up markets in Los Angeles. Peyote in Texas if you are a member of a federally-recognized tribe. Somebody trademarked the word “Psilocybin” (for educational purposes). How many of these products with interesting ingredients of indigenous origin have direct positive impacts on indigenous peoples?
The psychedelic markets of the future are coming. With them, as Noah Potter wrote for Chacruna, should come better law. The laws of such markets, emerging from the customs of market participants and crystalizing from the kinds of industry standards I describe below, should create opportunities for indigenous peoples to get as rich as their cultures.
UN SDG #1 is poverty alleviation. That’s sacred, as any Liberation Theologist (like Pope Francis) will tell you.
2. Make the market ethically
Is something less sacred, somehow, if you have to pay for it?
Does enlightenment really cost $260,280.00?
Should a 12-week rehab program including an entheogenic smorgasbord of treatments including 6–10 ayahuasca ceremonies, 1–3 ibogaine sessions, and 3–9 5-MeO-DMT sessions really cost $500,000.00? How enlightened would a person be after so much generating the divine within?
Capitalism is a secularizing force, so the idea of money changers in the temple is a subject of valid rage.
But how do we address commodification of these entheogenic psychedelics without raging? How do we create the kind of capitalism we wish to participate in and, in words attributed to Mahatma Ghandi, an Indian non-violent revolutionary, “be the change we wish to see in the world”?
The answer comes from redefining capitalism.
Making money solving social problems
Like Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech for his work developing microcredit systems among women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh through Grameen Bank, we should focus capitalism on making money solving social problems.
Since Yunus’s clarion call creative corporations emerged like social enterprises, public benefit corporations, co-operatives, and new kinds of religious organizations.
Corporations of the incorporeal
For the latter there is precedent, including a recent Supreme Court case, for creating new kinds of for-profit religious organizations. Though prophet-for-profit may sound oxymoronic, for-profits with religious freedom are real and include booksellers, bakers, and hobby stores. Courts found that the booksellers, bakers, and hobby stores’ otherwise illegal behavior (e.g. denying customers cakes and denying employees health care coverage for contraception) was protected by the free exercise clause of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Non-profit corporations using psychedelic sacraments such as Soul Quest, AYA, and Aya Quest already charge money for ceremonies in the United States. They have contracts, corporate documentation, and revenues.
Is it a wrong to say that these corporations of the incorporeal could incorporate as for profits? And that their entheogenic plant practices should still be protected under the free exercise clause?
Fees for services
First Amendment protections for sacred plant corporations should include growing the sacrament plants, processing them, distributing them, and charging fees for ceremonial services. They should be afforded the same freedoms as religious booksellers, bakers, and hobby lobbies.
They should, but the legal reality is as muddy as a pot of ayahuasca.
How to navigate these muddy waters without getting wrecked?
Co-ops
Maybe co-opt the co-op model from cannabis. Successful during the early days of cannabis legalization in California, co-ops handled production and supply of the cannabis plants (illegal even at the state level at the time) and to members only. Membership in a cannabis co-op afforded members some level of legal protection because decriminalization resolutions passed at the local level helped them stay safe from prosecution.
The co-op model could be useful for those growing and distributing legal entheogenic plants, many of which are listed in the strictest schedule of the Controlled Substances Act, Schedule I. At the same time, entheogenic plants are seeing more and more decriminalization resolutions passed at the local levels.
Built on the strong foundations of the decriminalization of entheogens, which has spread from Denver to Oakland to Santa Cruz, Ann Arbor, and beyond, these co-ops could require membership in their religion (e.g. initiation via a period of study, taking of vows, and maintenance of membership via regular ritual practice) before making sales.
Maybe the State would defer to the self-regulation inherent in an ethically-made market. Say the State does defer (and what more capitalist dream than when the State defers?) and these organizations emerge, could you invest in them? If you wanted to start a corporation of the incorporeal, prophet for-profit, could you raise money for it? Share profits from sales and ceremonial services with third parties? Build a brand?
3. Invest responsibly
I am biased because I have worked in socially-responsible investing (“SRI”) for the better part of a decade, but I think there is room for both SRI and outlier returns. The SRI system works best when people articulate industry-standard business guidelines, e.g. the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas, etc. (collectively, “ESG and CSR”), and require companies to publish periodic reports against those guidelines.
To enable SRI, the psychedelic industry will develop sets of key performance indicators (“KPIs”) which corporations (even those prophet-for-profits) use to measure whether they are achieving their ESG and CSR goals. A caring consumer base will audit the reports, benchmark companies’ performance against the KPIs like we did at Development International, and file disputes against bad actors.
So who will be the stakeholders at the table in the forum that publishes the KPIs for the psychedelic sector? Who will articulate the industry-standard business guidelines for psychedelic businesses? Whoever it is should understand that the cornerstone of any SRI system is requiring public reporting. Only then can stakeholders such as investors and consumers make informed decisions about whether companies are up to their ESG and CSR standards.
The public benefit corporation (“PBC”), a new kind of corporate entity gaining traction in the psychedelic space, has accountability to ESG KPIs baked into its structure. The PBC accountability mechanism looks like this: at least every other year, PBCs must publish reports on how they worked to achieve their stated public benefit “special purpose.” If the PBC’s directors fail, then the PBC’s shareholders can sue the directors via a shareholder derivative action. for failing to take action to achieve the corporation’s special purpose, righting the ship.
In other words, a derivative action from socially responsible shareholders hangs like a Sword of Damocles encouraging responsible corporate behavior.
But the most famous psychedelic PBC, MAPS PBC, has no Sword of Damocles warning portense bien.
MAPS PBC is wholly owned by the MAPS 501(c)3 non-profit. As a result, MAPS PBC cannot rely on the accountability mechanism baked in to the PBC design. The shareholder derivative action at the heart of the PBC organizational structure is not an option in MAPS PBC because MAPS PBC does not have outside shareholders. Insiders only. There is no Sword of Damocles keeping MAPS PBC on its best behavior.
North Star
I like to think of myself as a socially responsible stakeholder, so I want to see companies adopting the right models. In order to do something about it, I spoke with North Star about collaborating to develop a set of ESG KPIs for businesses in the psychedelic space, the seeds of a certification scheme like the B-Corporation label for psychedelic businesses.
The North Star Ethics Pledge, released in Q1 2020, called for people to indicate their support adherence to a set of ethical principles. But it can easily be used for virtue-signaling by corporate actors in an exercise of psychedelic-style greenwashing: tie-dying.
Self-regulation
The more the industry self-regulates, the more the State tends to leave it alone. Self-regulation is how we separate the wheat from the chaff; the bad actors from the good; the shaman from the sham.
If psychedelic industry self-regulation is to be effective then it should be done carefully, wisely, like the thunder said: datta, dayadvham, damyata. It should be done charitably, by attending to psychedelic non-profits, and with compassion — solving social problems.
Here and Now
Marx is missing out. If he knew we were redefining capitalism to be socially responsible then what would he say? Perhaps that we all should know the moral of the King Midas story. Otherwise we will find ourselves with neither food nor family and will realize that we cannot eat money.
With the right direction, the Midas touch of commodity fetishism for psychedelics will create Tairona-gold not the gold of the Conquistador, which laid waste to environments and indigenous peoples.
With the right perspective, the fetishization of psychedelics will neither blind us to their good nature nor their nature as goods. Lest we create a world where a good cup of ayahuasca does cost more than a cube-shaped melon.
With the right action, the commodification of psychedelics will result in improved conditions upstream for indigenous peoples, new businesses, industry standards, and periodic public reporting — a world where corporate actors recognize not only their rights as people but also their responsibilities as them.
There, there is something sacred: subject-subject.
