Wonderland Journal: A New Generation of Psychedelic Community & Technology

In 1967, Timothy Leary spoke at the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 people in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. He phrased the famous words: "Drop-Out, Turn-On, and Tune-In." In this article, more than 55 years later, I jump down the rabbit hole and pick up the looking glass to see what's ahead for psychedelics and the technologies that continue to lift our consciousness.

The November 2022 Microdose Wonderland Psychedelics Conference was hugely successful, with almost 2,000 attendees. The Wynwood conference center in Miami was the perfect location, two stages, a theater, and a range of speakers. In attendance were indigenous elders, shamans, neo-shamans, young psychonauts, doctors, scientists, researchers, venture capitalists, pharma executives, and technologists, all there to present their work, learn, network, and help lift current research for healing and transformation to a global level.

At this conference, I learned from Paul Stamets, the American mycologist, about the many potential uses of functional mushrooms and psilocybin. I also encountered companies exploring mushroom coffee, functional mushrooms, VR integration with psychedelic states, and the emerging conversation around psychedelic NFTs and digital community. The range of perspectives in one room was extraordinary, reflecting the genuine breadth of what this field is becoming.

The Next Decades of Psychedelic Culture

What became clear at Wonderland is that the psychedelic renaissance is not a single thing. It is a convergence of indigenous wisdom traditions, clinical research, technology innovation, entrepreneurship, community-building, and spiritual practice, all arriving at the same moment, from different directions, with different vocabularies but a shared intuition: that human consciousness is capable of far more than our current structures allow.

The tension between commercialization and sacred tradition was palpable throughout the conference, and important. The question of how to honor the lineages from which these medicines come, while making their healing potential accessible in a modern therapeutic context, is one the field has not yet fully answered. But the conversation is alive. And that aliveness feels like the beginning of something significant.

I left Wonderland with a renewed sense of purpose. The work of preparation, integration, and holding space for expanded states of consciousness, which has always been at the heart of what I do, is more needed now than ever. As these medicines move from the margins toward the center of our healing culture, the importance of trained, ethical, experienced guides cannot be overstated.