South by Psychedelics

Art via Getty Images

Picture yourself in a boat on a river. It’s the Lower Colorado River winding its watery way through Austin, Texas. And when you leave that boat and venture anywhere Downtown in the next week or so, you’re going to run smack into the annual meatspace kaleidoscope of culture and commerce, art and advertising, hope and hype that the world knows as South by Southwest. And, as sure as this lede’s first sentence is from “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” you’ll be able to learn a lot about psychedelics at the fest.

SXSW 2024 boasts an impressive three-day track of programming about the use of mind-altering substances in medicine, for various forms of therapy, as gambits of recreation, and as (oh boy) another consumer product to be leveraged with sweet capitalistic fervor. To be sure, some of the information will be predictive – this is what could happen, eventually – but much of it will concern what’s going on right now, in laboratories, in hospitals, in therapists’ offices, in legislators’ lairs, in dorm rooms and corner shops and dens of diversion worldwide.

The Explore Forbidden Design: Psychedelic Medicine at Stanford talk will reveal what instruction students receive toward “designing for expanded realities” at the esteemed university. Later that same day, Dr. Melissa Barker of the Phoenix Project, Sutton King of the Urban Indigenous Collective, marriage and family therapist Sunny Strasburg, and Sexloveyoga’s Dr. Cat Meyer will present MDMA Saved My Life: Psychedelics & Healing From Sexual Trauma, exploring the crucial role psychedelics play in facilitating recovery. Attending Saturday’s Psychedelics Meetup will mean you’ll have to miss the concurrent This IS Your Brain on Drugs panel at the Convention Center, wherein neuroscientists discuss the most recent studies depicting what psychoactive substances actually do in the brain, showing slides of imagery and debating whether such studies divulge anything about consciousness itself. But never mind the FOMO: There are plenty of other learning opportunities. And, in case you’re wondering why there’s this upswell of interest in psychedelics at the festival – and, tbh, everywhere in the world – we asked a couple of attending experts that very question.

“My answer for 'why now’ is different today than it would have been a year ago,” says Neşe Devenot of Johns Hopkins University and, more immediately, the Who Governs Psychedelics in 2030: Medicine vs. Mysticism panel. “A year ago,” says Devenot, “the answer would have focused on the buzzy excitement for psychedelics as a 'new’ treatment modality, at a time when people are broadly having a hard time and are desperate for healing and a sense of meaning. That excitement is still there, and still valid. But this year, there’s another side to the psychedelic interest, which I’ve been writing about under the banner of 'critical psychedelic studies’ – more and more people are realizing that psychedelics’ real potential for healing also comes with real risks. ... For a long time, many people felt that the psychedelics field had to be protected from any discussion of harms, since it had taken so long to shift psychedelics out of stigma and into the spotlight. But the field is maturing now, and a lot of people are realizing that a nuanced perspective can maximize the potential benefits while minimizing the potential risks. You can be both pro-psychedelic and anti-hype.”

Mycopreneur’s Dennis Walker – popular court jester of the psychedelic set, who is part of the Psychedelic Entrepreneurship and the Underground Economy panel – sets levity aside to inform us that “The FDA designation of MDMA and psilocybin as 'breakthrough therapies’ in 2017 and 2018 kicked off a wave of research and investment in psychedelics that continues to trend upward today. Every major platform ran stories about psychedelics, and the world’s top academic institutions published promising studies touting the benefit of these long-stigmatized molecules. Demand skyrocketed with very few legal channels available to procure them. This spike in publicity led to a boom in psilocybin mushroom interest, and more people than ever started learning to cultivate and connect with mushrooms. Their ubiquitous availability, coupled with countless anecdotal reports of people having profound and life-affirming experiences with them, opened the door to the broader cultural interest in different types of psychedelic substances that we’re seeing today.”

Psychedelics for research, for healing, for recreation, for profit: Their time has come, and they’ll be well covered at SXSW this year – with or without tangerine trees and marshmallow skies.

Getting Psychedelic at SXSW

Explore Forbidden Design: Psychedelic Medicine at Stanford

Friday 8, 11:30am

Austin Convention Center, Room 18CD

MDMA Saved My Life: Psychedelics & Healing From Sexual Trauma

Friday 8, 2:30pm

Austin Convention Center, Room 18CD

This IS Your Brain on Drugs; Neuroimaging Psychedelics

Saturday 9, 11:30am

Austin Convention Center, Room 18AB

Who Governs Psychedelics in 2030: Medicine vs. Mysticism

Sunday 10, 2:30pm

Austin Convention Center, Room 18AB