The Psychedelic Syndicate: How Silicon Valley Used Veterans to Hijack the Psychedelic Industry
Excerpt from Executive Summary
This report provides an in-depth examination of how a strategic, well-funded campaign operated to influence public perception at the expense of public health.
Psymposia has spent over a year investigating the financial and political forces shaping the psychedelic industry. Through analysis of hundreds of internal documents — including unedited emails, transcripts, presentations, and other primary materials spanning nearly a decade — this report describes the rise of the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative (PSFC) and its extensive influence across the field.
The prevailing media narrative has characterized the psychedelic movement as an organic coalition of grassroots activists motivated by psychedelics’ therapeutic potential. Our analysis reveals PSFC's coordinated efforts to circumvent federal regulatory structures and manipulate state-level policy development, transforming a community-led movement into a vehicle for centralized corporate influence.
Following the FDA’s 2024 rejection of MDMA-assisted therapy, PSFC-funded organizations targeted critics and whistleblowers in collaboration with the Psychedelic Communications Hub (now incorporated into the Psychedelic Safety Institute). Organizations involved in this campaign included the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Lykos Therapeutics, and veterans groups Heroic Hearts Project and Healing Breakthrough.
Having failed to subvert the FDA regulatory process, these groups are now appealing to the Trump administration to accelerate approval based on data from clinical trials characterized by serious scientific failures. Disregarding public safety concerns in their rush to bring an experimental therapy to market, PSFC responded to the FDA's rejection by intensifying strategies that would amount to regulatory capture.