It wasn’t a new phenomenon. It had started two months earlier, on Easter Sunday, when Clacton-on-Sea was invaded by “1,000 fighting, drinking, roaring, rampaging teenagers on scooters and motor-cycles”. But there was no identification then of any specific groups, so they were all lumped in together, headlined “The Wild Ones”, a reference to a 1953 biker-movie starring Marlon Brando that had been banned in Britain.

Clacton had been a big story, but it was Margate, 60 years ago this weekend, that made the most impact — both at the time and in popular memory — because now there were named subcultures. In fact, had the papers been paying attention, the categorisation had already been established.

“Are you a Mod or a Rocker?” Motorcycle magazine had asked in December 1963. The choice of transport was probably enough to answer the question — the greasy motorbike of the rocker, or the neat little scooter of the mod — but in case there was any doubt, you could look in a mirror. If you were wearing a black shirt, blue jeans, big boots and a leather jacket, said Motorcycle, you were a Rocker; whereas a polka-dot shirt, pink half-mast trousers, Cuban boots, and a parka with fur-trimmed hood signified a Mod.

So Mods vs Rockers it was. They had names and they had a rivalry. It was like the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story, which gave the papers a reference point for the older reader; three years after release, the film was still being screened in British cinemas, and the soundtrack was still in the album charts.

In the run-up to the August bank holiday, the press were licking their lips with anticipation. “Will it be another Margate?” they hoped, as they reported that 400 men from the Metropolitan Police were waiting at RAF Northolt, ready to be flown into any resort that required additional support. And in Hastings, the disturbances were bad enough for the chief constable to call in this flying squad, to deal with what the papers dubbed the Second Battle of Hastings.

The ripples spread out in unpredictable ways. In Streatham, south London, the local Young Socialists produced a leaflet: “Up the Mods! Up the Rockers! Down with police violence!” and were promptly suspended by the constituency Labour Party, with five members being expelled. There was a general election due, and caution was the order of the day; no one wanted to risk controversy with a leaflet that “was detrimental to Labour Party election chances”. Meanwhile, 22-year-old satirist Bill Oddie released his first single, “Nothing Better to Do”, inspired by the seaside confrontation: “Play, little boy,” he mocked, “there’s so much to destroy.” It was banned by the BBC, he said, because they feared “the gangs would use it as an anthem”.

And at the London School of Economics, a young PhD student named Stanley Cohen became fascinated by the media response to Margate. The fruit of his research was one of the most influential works of sociology, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972). The phrase “moral panic” already existed, and the idea wasn’t entirely new — “We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality,” wrote historian Thomas Macaulay in 1831 — but it was Cohen’s book that formalised and established the concept.

At its heart, it was an understanding that a moral panic is a short-lived explosion of outrage that is rooted in a longer history. The media present an incident as being shockingly new, but it shocks only because it plays into an existing narrative.

In the case of the Mods and Rockers, there was the obvious precedent from the Fifties of the Teddy Boys, and before them, the Cosh Boys. There’d been a rise in juvenile crime in the post-war years, and in 1950 the Daily Mirror had asked its readers to identify the cause. “Films, radio, lack of parental control,” came the answers, together with a call for the restoration of corporal punishment for young offenders. (Judicial birching had been abolished in 1948.)

But even then it wasn’t new. There were reports in 1942 of a group of teenagers being attacked and robbed by a gang of men in south London, leaving one of them dead in the street. The previous decade, before the war, newspapers had noted that “knives, razors, knuckle dusters and sandbags were used by rival gangs in fierce street fighting” in north London. Going back before the First World War, shots were fired “during an encounter between rival gangs”. Further back still, to the days when judicial birching was at its peak, in 1888 the Pall Mall Gazette listed “the bandit gangs of London”, including the Prince Arthur Gang, the Gang of Roughs and the Jovial Thirty-Two. (All available for use by indie rock bands seeking a name.)

These late-Victorian delinquents were collectively known as Hooligans in London, but there were similar groups elsewhere, referred to as Scuttlers in Manchester, High Rippers in Liverpool, Peaky Blinders in Birmingham. What they had in common was low-level crime and street violence, though mostly they fought each other in turf wars. They tended to dress much the same as well: cap worn forwards over the eyes, no collar, a muffler or neckerchief instead of a tie, bell-bottom trousers, hobnailed boots and, in some quarters, a Newgate fringe — a shaved face with a beard running below the jawline, in imitation of where the hangman’s noose would be placed. Then there was the element of clothing as weaponry. “The most characteristic part of their uniform is the substantial leather belt heavily mounted with metal,” read a report in 1900. “It is not ornamental, but then it is not intended for ornament.”

In short, young men have always had a propensity to violence — and each generation discovers this anew when it gets to be old enough to talk about “young people”. It’s the moral panic that keeps on giving, because it’s a reflection of human nature. Also discovered on a regular basis is the shock revelation that this isn’t just a male preserve. In 1906, it was said that the gangs in Glasgow included “young girls of ages averaging from 14 to 17, with very long draggled skirt and hair in tightly twisted pigtail”.

Nonetheless, there was something different about the post-war youth subcultures. “Teddy boys were really narcissistic,” wrote Mim Scala in his memoir Diary of a Teddy Boy. “I mean Masai warrior, Beau Brummell, Bertie Wooster narcissistic…” And that reference to Beau Brummell was significant. It was Brummell in the early years of the 19th century who’d invented the concept of the dandy, using an obsessive attitude towards clothes as an entrée to the highest circles in the land. “A nobody, who made himself a somebody, and gave the law to everybody,” said novelist Catherine Gore, and his inspiration soon filtered down through society.

The young Charles Dickens, with his green velvet jacket, red waistcoat and long hair, was typical of those who aspired to dandy status. “We keep no horse, but a clothes-horse,” he wrote in the 1830s. Later, the music hall had a rich vein of songs that mocked those who came from working-class parts of London and dressed above their station: “The Marquis of Camberwell Green”, “Percy from Pimlico”, “Burlington Bertie from Bow” and more. “Tho’ I’m not worth a groat, I wear a decent coat,” sang Walter Laburnum in “Fashionable Fred”, a sentiment that resonated down the years, recognisable in Adam Ant’s dandy highwayman: “I spend my cash on looking flash.”

What the Teddy Boys did was to bring together these two strands from the 19th century: the street-gang tradition of the Peaky Blinders, and the working-class dandy. And then, with the arrival in Britain of rock ’n’ roll, they added a musical soundtrack.

The subcultures that followed took their lead from the teds. Mods and Rockers, skinheads and punks, metalheads and goths — all defined themselves by dress and by music. That connected them to a wider popular culture and made them national movements, not just local street-gangs as the scuttlers had been. They identified themselves as being outside the mainstream, yet helped to shape it.

The other thing that the fashion and the music did was to soften the violence. According to the police, teds didn’t resist when arrested; they’d spent too much on the outfits to risk damaging them. Despite the press coverage, no one was killed or seriously injured at Margate or in the Second Battle of Hastings. And not even the Skinheads, at their racist football-hooligan worst, were as violent as the Peaky Blinders had been, 70 years earlier.

“You could say it’s a fashion statement, but I think it’s more than that,” said Paul Weller in 2004. “The working-class love of clothes, looking good, rising above your station. I don’t think it’ll ever die. It’s really in our British fibre. These clothes, my haircut, reflect my attitude.”

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By then, however, the phenomenon had ceased to exist. Vestiges of the old world remain, frozen in time, but they’re museum pieces, not new creations; they’re the punks who hang around Camden Market in north London, selling themselves for tourist photos. Street gangs still exist, but they’re more akin to scuttlers than teds, fighting turf wars that are certainly more violent than their 19th-century predecessors.

What is long gone is the great British tradition of creating a new subculture every four or five years, along with a new form of pop music. Maybe it’s because music is no longer a badge of identity, but a massive online jumble of everything that’s ever been recorded. Clothes mean less, as well, in an era of body modification, from tattoos to piercings to surgery. Maybe it’s because there isn’t a shared culture anymore, and it’s hard for a group to define itself as outside the mainstream if there’s no mainstream in the first place.

Tribalism hasn’t disappeared, of course, the wish to belong, to go where the in-crowd goes. It’s just that, lacking a cultural escape-valve, it finds its place in internet “communities”, where identity comes with the political slogan and the hashtag. It’s much the same as the polka-dot shirt and pink half-mast trousers, but not as cool. 

The 14th Earl of Home emerged as leader in autumn 1963 after one of the most contentious leadership selections in Conservative history. The process even forced him to rebrand, becoming Sir Alec Douglas-Home when compelled by democratic mores to disclaim his hereditary title. His party was divided, behind in the polls, and widely expected to lose the next election. The circumstances were unpropitious, and on first inspection Douglas-Home doesn’t offer an encouraging role model for Sunak. When voters had their say on his leadership in the 1964 election, he was ejected from office in favour of Harold Wilson. But in his short time at the helm, Douglas-Home managed to turn a widely forecast electoral blowout for the Conservatives into one of the closest contests of the century. When all the votes were counted, Labour led the Conservatives by just 0.7%, earning them an overall majority of just four seats.

Douglas-Home’s turnaround mission began by restoring stability and decency to a government rocked by scandal. Throughout the spring and summer of 1963, rumours swirled around Westminster about War Secretary John Profumo’s affair with the showgirl Christine Keeler, who’d also had a fling with a Soviet Naval attaché. Both decency and national defence were said to be under threat by the actions of a government minister. Profumo strenuously denied the allegations in Parliament — a straightforward lie — and was ultimately forced to resign, but only after his lapse in judgement exposed a government that appeared to have lost its moral compass. Douglas-Home was one of the few senior ministers who managed to stay aloof from the sordid affair, preserving his reputation and enabling his appointment as prime minister to signal a clear turning of the page.

Sunak’s premiership began in much the same spirit. On the steps of Downing Street one year ago, he told the country that his “government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level”. It was a promise that things would change after two Tory premierships were prematurely felled — one by scandal, the second by a mini-budget that called the government’s economic credibility into question. Sunak, the former chancellor known for his hard work and teetotalism, was well placed to signal change at the top. But as is now clear, change alone isn’t enough for the public to look at the Conservatives with fresh eyes.

Like Douglas-Home before him, Sunak also needs to find ways to get the better of a revitalised Labour party. The Tories’ opponent six decades ago was the wily and accusatory Harold Wilson. From the moment Douglas-Home walked through the door of No. 10 Wilson pounced on his aristocratic status, alleging that he had won the leadership thanks to his “family and hereditary connections” in an affront to the meritocratic spirit of the age. Against Wilson’s class politics, Douglas-Home fired back that while he may have been the 14th Earl of Home, “Mr Wilson, when you come to think of it, is the 14th Mr Wilson”. His pithy line, combined with his decent and earnest approach to politics, helped make Labour’s attacks look both unfair and ineffective.

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Keir Starmer has been borrowing from the Wilson playbook in his attacks on Sunak. Whilst insisting that he is “very relaxed about people being rich and getting rich”, a tactic borrowed from another Labour leader, Starmer has consistently chided Sunak for his personal wealth. Yet Sunak is no landed aristocrat. His story — the migrants’ son who went on to lead his country — is self-evidently one of ambition realised in a meritocratic country. But Labour clearly sees the Sunak family’s success, and that of the family he married into, as one of his principal weaknesses. Douglas-Home repudiated Wilson by tapping into the country’s sense that what someone does, not what they’re born with, should determine how you judge them. Sunak would do well to turn his own story back on Labour, emphasising how his life shows a Britain where hard work and determination pays off — a message Labour will not want to oppose.

While Douglas-Home’s approach earned him the right to be heard among an electorate that had grown weary of his party, it wasn’t enough to win the election. Two key failings denied him another term. Firstly, Douglas-Home failed to heal his party after his bumpy ascent to the top of British politics. When Prime Minister Harold Macmillan announced his resignation in October 1963, there were no clear rules for the selection of the new prime minister. The decision would ultimately lie with the Queen, who would take her advice from Macmillan. Over the course of 10 days, senior Conservatives jostled in unprecedented and chaotic scenes to earn themselves the Queen’s commission. Douglas-Home stayed above the fray, refusing to comment on the leadership and even briefly ruling himself out of contention before he emerged as the choice of Macmillan and senior Tories.

The appointment of a peer crushed the ambitions and bruised the egos of many Conservatives, especially those in the Commons. Two senior MPs, Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell, were so outraged that they refused to serve in Douglas-Home’s government. Macleod went on to write a denunciation for The Spectator of the “magic circle” that had put Douglas-Home in office, while Powell vented his fury through anonymous articles in The Times, attacking the government’s policies and direction. Douglas-Home later said that their election year antics cost the Tories at the polls.

While Sunak’s elevation to the premiership followed a process with clear and predetermined rules, that hasn’t prevented a small number of MPs and activists from echoing allegations of illegitimacy from 60 years ago. Perhaps this was inevitable after the rapid turnaround of Conservative leaders left supporters of Johnson and Truss disgruntled and unexpectedly on the backbenches. Sunak has built a big-tent cabinet, including senior names from both former administrations. But the warning from Douglas-Home’s experience is that it only takes a small number of malcontents for a party to look divided. With the benchmark so low, it will take an almighty display of political skill from Sunak to keep his party’s divisions contained as polling day approaches.

Douglas-Home’s second big mistake concerned policy, specifically the abolition of the Resale Price Maintenance (RPM). Under the antiquated RPM, shops had to sell branded products at the price recommended by the manufacturer. With its removal, they could compete on price. So far, so good — for the consumer. The problem for Douglas-Home was that those in the firing line were an essential part of the Tory voting coalition: small business owners and shopkeepers. Fearing they would be undercut by major stores and driven out of business, they revolted. It was, according to Ian Gilmour, “Sir Alec’s Poll Tax”.

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One motivation for the policy was the pursuit of a legacy, a means of rebutting Labour’s claim that the Conservatives had overseen “13 wasted years”. Six decades on Starmer has been making the same criticism. The challenge for Sunak, who is clearly keen to use the time between now and the next election fruitfully, is to show that his party is still brimming with ideas while recognising what can be achieved in the fifth year of a parliament — and what cannot. By abolishing RPM, Douglas-Home discovered the worst kind of electoral dividing line: one that separated him from his voters. Sunak will be hoping that yesterday’s announcements can bring the two closer together and improve his party’s polling.

One silver lining for Sunak is that, compared to Douglas-Home, he has the benefit of time. Douglas-Home’s premiership ended after just 363 days; Sunak has around another year (longer if he really wants it) before going to the polls. No two elections are the same and the playbook that would have won for Douglas-Home in 1964 won’t be the same for Sunak. But if the Prime Minister can learn the lessons of 60 years ago, he could still deliver a competitive electoral performance, as Douglas-Home did, and possibly even a Conservative victory. If not, Sunak may find that it isn’t just the beginning of his premiership that looks like Douglas-Home’s, but its ending too.

Rob Barrow is the CEO of MindMed: a leader in a new species of pharmaceutical firm. These companies, described as “corporadelic”, are aiming to change mental health — and maybe the world — through psychedelic drugs. 

Barrow was the opening speaker at the PSYCH Symposium, held recently in the National Gallery. The agenda: “to connect and collaborate”, and to “expedite access” to “psychedelic healthcare” across Europe. The wider mission is an old Sixties dream — brotherhood, connection to nature — repackaged for a new age of all-powerful corporations and philanthropists.

These are boom times for psychedelics. Celebrity endorsements, Netflix documentaries, and all-star conferences abound. In recent weeks we’ve seen The New York Times and the BBC broadcast stories of veterans dissolving PTSD in MDMA, and psilocybin’s apparent (and, it seems, swiftly-discredited) capacity to “free up the depressed brain”. 

Maybe the most extraordinary moment, though, was the Psychedelics House of Davos, featuring a World Economic Forum-sponsored panel: “shamanic investing” expert Silvia Benito, Deepak Chopra, and the Countess Amanda Feilding. Feilding’s Beckley Foundation has fronted her quest since the Sixties to rehabilitate psychedelics — LSD is her favourite — and, curiously, the ancient art of trepanning.

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It’s been a strange turnaround. Criminalised and forced underground since 1970, psychedelics and related drugs have been found, by a a growing number of clinical trials, useful in treating mainly psychic ills, including depression, PTSD, anxiety, and addiction. The “peak states” furnished by LSD, psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), MDMA, ketamine, and others — combined with pre- and post-session therapies — can help ease chronic distress. Johns Hopkins studies of psilocybin for end-of-life anxiety, depression, and smoking cessation, for instance, indicate rough efficacy rates of 85%, 75% and 80%, respectively — although their sample sizes were not large or diverse, and their results have not yet been replicated.

Establishing efficacy in trials according to a gold standard of evidence is difficult. Long-term follow-ups are scant and a host of concerning side-effects — re-traumatisation, debilitating changes in visual processing, strokes — are under-explored. COMPASS Pathways’ Phase 2b trial of psilocybin for depression prompted concern among commentators and retail investors, who noted that suicidal thinking and behaviour were higher among those administered psilocybin than the control: a serious adverse event (SAE) rate of 5%, with a resulting crash in the share values of psychedelic firms. Whether down to chance, a small sample sensitive to noise, or, as COMPASS argues, the inherent risks of dealing with highly depressed patients, one broad conclusion should remain the same: psychedelics are powerful, and we ought to tread lightly. 

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Joining these difficulties are a host of barriers faced by those who want to conduct research on psychedelics. “The Science” is always political, as Covid-19 showed in spades. Psychedelics are researched in an uphill, pragmatic battle against anti-drug prejudice. Britain remains sclerotic and authoritarian on drug policy, as revealed by our new culture war-driven push to persecute “middle class cocaine users” and black-mark their passports. These rules are reified in institutional obstacles to further research (some of them bizarre), which a UK campaign led by Crispin Blunt MP is attempting to reform. Similarly Byzantine practices afflict researchers in the United States. Research must therefore be conducted alongside a push to change attitudes, convince committees, and win a PR war. 

The response of psychedelics firms, backers, and some scientists has been to hype their products. Story-hungry media and a searching mental health sector have been willing enablers. We see studies from top institutions suggesting psychedelics can “decrease political authoritarianism”, help combat climate change, or “navigate a path to peace” in Palestine. A recent “population study” suggested psychedelics “lower the odds of crime”, with an “association” observed between peyote use and decreased “motor vehicle theft”. In particular, a famous (and flawed) chart by ex-Drug Tsar Professor David Nutt showed harms from LSD and magic mushrooms as near-zero, with the results replicated in downstream “drug information” and “harm reduction” resources. 

The corporadelic movement is playing “the establishment game from inside the establishment”, Countess Feilding said at the Symposium. “Use the light of science to destigmatise and rehabilitate psychedelics.” This rhetorical approach has been dubbed the “Trojan Horse”, with medico-scientific corroboration a vessel for the larger mission.

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The missionaries dwell in a broad church. Consider the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, and its founder Rick Doblin. Funded by and collaborating with corporadelic firms, MAPS is in Phase-3 studies into MDMA for PTSD, in particular for veterans: a group bound to elicit sympathy from the conservatively-minded. “We don’t actually do science,” Doblin said. “We do political science.”

He foresees that psychedelic therapy, and an envisioned network of “thousands of clinics” by 2035, will democratise “the sense of connection, not just the idea of it, but the felt experience of it”. 

“It is inevitable that in hyping things up too much, risks can arise”, Countess Feilding clarified via email. “On the other hand, it seems vitally important to establish if psychedelics have a major part to play in the survival of Homo sapiens and in improving our health, happiness, and outlook.”

But today’s psych-elites don’t seem particularly interested in democracy: they are drawn from Silicon Valley, Burning Man bros, billionaires, and California narcissists. A “market opportunity of £1.8 billion by 2026” remains for the taking, Symposium attendees were told. Billionaires like Peter Thiel, venture capital, hedge funds, Google, and the owner of GoDaddy have piled into psychedelic medicine; dozens of new firms with names like Eleusis, Awakn, Field Trip and MindCure have appeared, all decked with white-sheen websites and evangelical web copy. And the safer psychedelic retreats currently cost thousands of dollars, and may well stay that way.

“I believe loving money is one of the greatest gifts you can give humanity at this time,” said Azrya Bequer, one half of a husband-and-wife duo behind BEQOMING, an outfit earmarked “to serve the 0.1% of the wealthiest people in the world to start making better decisions for our planet and our future generations” — through facilitated ayahuasca ceremonies. 

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Why now? Psychiatry is in crisis, commentators observe: in total contrast to the advances of physical medicine, and despite tens of billions of dollars invested in treatments and research, outcomes remain broadly stagnant. It is a field in search of a silver bullet. 

But squaring the circle of the world “out there” has been psychedelia’s perennial problem. “It’s all in the mind, ya know,” George Harrison’s acid cartoon blurbed in 1968’s Yellow Submarine, to the trumpets of All You Need Is Love. The cost-of-living crisis, inequality, institutional decay — the more material drivers of our distress — received little mention at the Symposium. There was talk of trauma, the inner healer, the true self. Or, for pharma firms profiting from a brain-centric, diagnostic view of misery, there is “chemical imbalance” and “brain disorders”, leveraged by overstretched references to “neuroplasticity” and pretty pictures of brain scans. Even the Department of Defence is directing $26.9 million towards novel psychedelics for veteran PTSD, whose battle scars they reduce to a “neurophysiological dysfunction”. 

MindMed’s former CEO, JR Rahn — now CEO of a “People-Powered Pharma” outfit called LOVE Inc. — put it this way: “Forty percent of the country is suffering — that’s a big, big market.” 

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That market is greedy. Reportedly in keeping with the FDA’s regulatory requirements, plans are in place, in time, for MAPS to administer MDMA to children as young as seven. “The sooner you treat people for their trauma, the more benefits when you come to talk about insurance coverage and all,” Doblin said. “The more lifetime benefits there are, the more suffering you avoid.”

It’s tricky territory. A psychoactive as powerful as MDMA would seem precisely contraindicated for children, whose developing brains may render them susceptible to long-term changes and dysregulations. Doblin is firm and provocative. “The prohibitionist argument leaps from problems that can be caused by daily or frequent use of marijuana, or other drugs, to arguments for abstinence”, he said over email. “Daily use of marijuana in high school can be problematic but that doesn’t mean the message to adolescents should be to never use marijuana.

“For adolescent patients with PTSD, their brains are already warped by their PTSD, so not using MDMA to protect their brains doesn’t make sense”, he said.

The mission is not without its own traumas, however. Strikingly, at least four participants in MAPS’ MDMA trials experienced significant deteriorations in their wellbeing that were neither chased up nor reported in their much-vaunted paper, published to mass media attention in Nature. Across psychedelic culture, victims of sexual assault and rape claim they have been told to keep silent to avoid drawing stigma to the Mission.

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No psychedelic drug is yet approved by regulators, though MDMA stands at the penultimate Phase 3 stage. More banal realities can be stubborn. Despite complacent claims, including from Professor Nutt last month, that psilocybin is “the most effective antidepressant” — and “we don’t need [controlled trials]” — an Imperial College head-to-head of psilocybin versus an SSRI indicated no significant difference, even after a six month follow up. Press teams and media downstream — even The Daily Mail — spun these results in a more sympathetic tone: that “psilocybin performs as well as antidepressant”. Brought to trials desperate for help — and inflated by PR pumped by research departments about “brain resets” — the patient may experience striking collapses in mood as mushroom euphoria dissipates and depression returns, or if the promised mystical experience fails to manifest. 

These are just some of the under-explored problems with “therapy on acid”. Patients are also vulnerable to hyper-suggestibility, sexual abuse, exploitation, and risks of guru complexes among therapists, who can programme their clients with their own worldviews. These issues were rarely mentioned at the Symposium. Reportedly contacted by representatives in Rwanda, Doblin has elsewhere spoken of seeking to dissolve the animosities of Hutus and Tutsis with MDMA. An outfit known as Unlimited Sciences, a “psychedelic research nonprofit” launched to “inform public perception, education, policy and practices”, is raising funds for a study on the outcomes of mainly-female Saudi refugees at an ayahuasca ceremony: a population for whom such bioethical issues are likely aggravated.

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In the “Great Psychedelic Craze” of the Sixties, it was believed that LSD and cannabis could create a revolution. Draped in white robes and beads, Dr Timothy Leary told reporters that “the kids who take LSD aren’t going to fight your wars” or “join your corporations”. Looking around the Symposium was to see the death of a dream. Far from overturning power structures, psychedelic utopianism has been captured by the elite. 

We listened to Christian Angermayer, the billionaire “Prince of Psychedelia”, who says he “finally understood Bitcoin” after his first psilocybin trip, and has since tattooed the molecule on his arm. He compared his therapists to shamans, drawing a straight line between the apocryphal drug cults of early Christianity and “ancient Egypt”. Angermayer reassured investors of market deteriorations in guru-like tones: “The market is a cycle like life is a cycle … as a company, if you are fully-financed, you almost have to say: okay, ignore the stock market, it does not contribute to your mental health.”

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Just as mindfulness became McMindfulness, psychedelics has become McPsychedelics. The transition has not been universally applauded: two senior psychedelic figures described crying at the Symposium. “We thought we were getting Woodstock, but we’re getting Prozac Nation 2.0,” said Jamie Wheal, who was prophetic commentator on the psychedelic scene in 2019.

“How can we compete with this?”, asked Lauren Katalinich of the UK Psychedelics Society, gesturing woefully towards a Symposium room of grey fabric and black suits. Capital does as capital will. In its quest for new and fruitful markets to carve, it has gone from without to deeper within, and plumbed the fathoms of inner mind. Corporadelic firms post marketing photos of misattributed “shamans” on Twitter; “mystical experience”, a predictor for depression, sells. There is perhaps no psychedelic feature that couldn’t be captured and marketed: nominally-radical notions, like encountering hyper-realistic entities and God Himself on DMT, become news copy and advertisements to entice clients. 

At its height in the Sixties, the Great Psychedelic Craze believed it could levitate the Pentagon through sheer “vibration”. For the Second Great Craze, the world of “net zero trauma” is its infinity point — where the trip is heading is anybody’s guess. Utopia translates as “no place”.

An earlier draft of this article described COMPASS Pathways’ Phase 2b trial as exhibiting a ‘red flag of suicidal thinking’ among patients administered psilocybin. This has been contextualised. An earlier draft also suggested that Unlimited Sciences were raising funds for a study to administer ayahuasca to Saudi refugees. This is not the case. Funds are instead being raised to study the population outcomes, with no input on administration.