Psychedelic Science 2025 Examines Religious Use, the Climate Crisis, Fungal Medicine, and the Shulgin Legacy
The MAPS 2025 Psychedelic Science conference kicked off in Denver, Colorado this week. Beginning on June 18, after two days of workshops, the main portion of the conference hosted a series of talks and events that offered participants a view into a range of topics impacting the psychedelic ecosystem. Lucid News brought a team of reporters to PS2025 and is publishing a collection of stories from the conference. The reports below are from the first day of the conference, which we cover in two parts. Continue reading our day one coverage in part two.
In the coming weeks, our journalists will continue to cover panels and presentations that took place at the event. We also covered the Psychedelic Science conference in 2023. Read our round-ups for PS2023 and compare how the ecosystem has changed from then until now.
Indigenous Leaders Urge Psychedelic Churches to Learn From History
Psychedelic churches have emerged as important points of focus at the intersection of policy and healing. Their growing proliferation raises nuanced issues related to ethics, training, and cultural appropriation. To unpack these issues, a panel called “Churches and the New Psychedelic Emergence: Ancestral Medicines and the Growing Movement” brought together Sandor Iron Rope and Walter Lopez, leaders in their respective Indigenous communities, and Sean McAllister, a drug policy reform lawyer based in Colorado.
Iron Rope, a Lakota peyote practitioner and leader in the Native American Church, has been a vocal advocate in the conservation of peyote, including efforts to remove his people’s medicine from decriminalization initiatives in many U.S. cities and states. He shared a history of Native Americans’ fraught relationship with the U.S. government and the trauma they endured before the Religious Freedom Restoration Act established federal protection for the Native American Church’s right to use their sacramental plant.
“The purpose of the church was to protect us,” Iron Rope explained, alluding to the NAC’s unification of previously disconnected tribes. He expressed caution towards new psychedelic churches that establish little to no standards for their facilitators’ training. For Iron Rope, becoming a peyote practitioner has been a lifelong path he began learning from his father and grandfather.
Lopez, whose words were translated into English by Miriam Volat of the Riverstyx Foundation, is a leader and healer among the Shipibo-Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon. He described how colonization disrupted the region’s ayahuasca traditions through the Catholic Church. “We don’t believe in just one God. We believe in many gods… the gods of the waters, the eEarth, the animals—what you would call spirits,” Lopez said. “That’s why plants heal, because they have that power.”
Informed by this history, Lopez questioned the role and intention of new churches. Speaking respectfully toward the NAC, he asked, “Why are we going to continue to build more churches when there already is a church that comes from integrity, that comes from the roots of these American people?”
To connect Iron Rope and Lopez’s words to contemporary U.S. law, McAllister offered a brief history: After the Native American Church’s protections, the Brazilian church União do Vegetal won a case in 2006 protecting ayahuasca. In 2024, the Church of the Eagle and Condor won a similar case, and last month, the Church of Gaia received recognition without litigation.
“Everything we do stands on the back of Indigenous people,” McAllister said. “The question is, will we be their partners, or will we continue the colonization history we’ve engaged in?”
“If you want to do things right,” Iron Rope added, “we have to unify.”
To grateful applause, Lopez offered the important reminder: “If you don’t know about your history, then you will repeat it.” – Sean Lawlor
Paul Stamets Discusses Fungal Medicines
In a talk titled, “The Potential of Mushrooms to Support our Minds and Wellness,” Paul Stamets presented his current research into the use of fungal medicine to treat depression and inflammation, as well as immune and nervous system health. One paper, published in Nature Neuroscience in 2023, shows that psilocybin and LSD, while binding to the same receptors as SSRI antidepressants (e.g. Prozac), can be up to 1000x more effective in promoting synaptogenesis, the growth of new neural connections, which is linked to overcoming addiction and depression.
Fungal medicines are also effective at reducing inflammation, which is linked to depression as well. The combination of psilocybin mushrooms with niacin and lion’s mane mycelium (the “Stamets Stack”), developed by a research team supported by Stamets, is found to be particularly effective in this application, and in helping elderly patients restore general neural function, said Stamets
Stamets also cited recent work suggesting that fungi, and even psilocybin by itself, can promote healthy immune system function. A mix of Agarikon mycelium and turkey tail mushrooms were found to greatly reduce the short-term side effects of the COVID vaccine, suggesting the power of combining fungal and pharmaceutical medicine. – Aaron Baum
Finding Pathways Through the Climate Crisis
Close your eyes. Now, picture “home” in your mind. What did you see?
That was the exercise Marc Buckley posed during a panel entitled “Psychedelics, Social Change, and Environmental Justice: Transforming Our Collective Future” at Psychedelic Science 2025. If you didn’t see Earth, you’re in the majority — and according to Buckley, that’s a problem.
Each panelist approached this issue from a different angle, but the message was clear: Humanity must remember its symbiotic relationship with the planet. Psychedelics, other consciousness-expanding practices, and the communities that engage with them, can help restore that connection.
Speaking to the audience, Sutton King, co-founder of the Urban Indigenous Collective and a descendant of the Menominee and Oneida Nations of Wisconsin, urged attendees to think seven generations ahead. She works directly with Indigenous communities in urban settings, and believes that healing for the future generations of these communities should be rooted in tradition, like land- and water-based rites and language revitalization.
“Our people are the original conservationists,” said King. “We don’t just do stewardship. We are stewardship. […] My grandmother told me, ‘There’s a reason we have two ears and one mouth.’”
She affirmed the need to slow down and listen, especially to the wisdom of the elders, and make a distinction between ownership and stewardship. Standing at the podium, King shared the story of her grandfathers’ battle for their ancestral land, likening today’s commodification of sacred medicines to that same battle but in a new form — one for ownership of the plants themselves. Her speech emphasized that climate repair cannot happen without cultural repair and being in right relationship with the land, people, and spirit.
Panelist Marissa Feinberg, who followed King on stage, also turned toward the issue of climate change. She opened with a question for the audience to chew on: With so many solutions available, why are we still in a climate crisis?
Feinberg, founder of Psychedelics for Climate Action (PSYCA), recently launched The Mycelium, a thought leadership accelerator for leaders in climate, consciousness, and mental health.
“We need a consciousness shift,” Feinberg said. “We have to bring expansive ways of being, thinking, and doing into our organizations.” The question remained: How do we make that shift?
The Mycelium is one answer to that question, alongside PSYCA’s other initiatives, which highlight solutions to their 13,000 member community and encourages them to engage the world and media through events, dialogue, and discourse. She explained that consciousness shifts can also include things like reconnecting to nature and the self, advocating for intentional action, integrating ecological awareness, or consuming with care.
“It’s not just about personal healing,” Feinberg said, referencing therapeutic psychedelic use. “It’s about integrative healing. […] Our deepest medicine is remembering we belong to the Earth.”
Hopping on stage after Feinberg’s closing comments, Buckley, an ecological economist and United Nations advisor, rounded out the conversation. Without slides, he moved freely through topics from evolutionary biology and sound healing to ancient civilizations and quantum technology.
“Microbes and fungi were some of the first life forms on this planet,” Buckley told the crowd. “They grow all over us. And now we say we need to legalize these organisms and our connection to them?”
Buckley reminded attendees that humans are nature, indigenous to this planet — and psychedelics can help us remember that.
“They can help us see the world in a different way,” Buckley said, closing the conversation by reminding us that psychedelics reconnect us to that “primordial soup we crawled out of.” – Nicki Adams
Bob Jesse Discusses Religious Use of Psychedelics with Psychedelic Church Lawyers
During Psychedelic Science 2025, activist Bob Jesse interviewed Taylor Loyden and Martha Hartney, two lawyers at the forefront of protecting the religious liberty of psychedelic-using churches in the United States. The panel explored their cases alongside drug law history and the traits they feel indicate a healthy church they would be comfortable representing in the court of law.
Jesse opened the talk by bringing in context of a “very, very big deal” in the history of religious liberty. In 1990, the Supreme Court reinterpreted the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to no longer mandate religious exemptions from “laws of general applicability,” or laws that apply to everyone regardless of their race or religion, weakening religious protection. But in 1993, Jesse said a coalition of religious organizations banded together to restore their protection, leading to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). The law is often cited in a court of law when determining whether a church can operate using psychedelics as its sacrament. “RFRA is more powerful than the Controlled Substances Act,” said Hartney, adding the caveat that “It’s not available to anyone all the time. You have to prove your case.” The church has to show that the usage of psychedelic sacraments is a “sincere religious exercise.”
Hartney won a federal case for the Church of the Eagle and Condor after the church’s ayahuasca was seized in 2020. Instead of filing for DEA exemption, which she described as often leading to nowhere — requests would be ignored or go into bureaucratic limbo — the church sued the DEA under RFRA and won. She said that their legal team’s plan to cross-examine the DEA threatened to embarrass them and their flawed understanding of ayahuasca, helped lead to their win in April 2024. This allowed the church to import and serve ayahuasca.
Attorney Taylor Loyden represented the Church of Gaia, achieving the first-ever DEA exemption for ayahuasca use in May of this year. Loyden talked about how the DEA was surprisingly respectful, but lacked the understanding of the spiritual sincerity of the church she represented and the use of psychedelics as sacraments. The DEA, for example, recommended that the church receive ayahuasca that is already imported from the other ayahuasca churches in the U.S. that have gained legal protection — not understanding the spiritual sensitivity of where and how medicine is chosen, made, and used in a church.
Loyden said that it was difficult to translate the spiritual language of the church to the bureaucratic language of the DEA, saying that successful translation helps the process of exemption, as the two worlds often have a hard time meeting with their different languages. Hartney and Loyden both said they would only work with clients who had strong humility and integrity, who were not working for profit but were truly authentic. They get numerous requests from churches all over the states regularly, but choose not to represent them unless they have such traits. Egos of church leaders and “culty” dynamics also are things they see and are averse to.
Jesse asked the lawyers how to improve the process of getting exemption from the DEA. To Loyden, it’s about community. “Setting high standards of community and accountability are going to be the future of how we go through this.”
“Don’t bite off more than you can chew,” said Hartney. “Be careful with your community. Be careful with yourselves. Be careful with your medicine. Make sure that you have deep ties to something greater than yourself, and then trust something will unfold.” She added that these cases were just a piece of a puzzle and more pieces are coming, telling the audience to just be careful. – Andrew Meissen
Reverent Shulgin 100th Birthday Celebration Kicks Off Psychedelic Science 2025
In a repurposed church sanctuary, beneath golden organs and a stained glass depiction of a robed Jesus Christ in a pastoral idyll, an illustrious cast of Sasha Shulgin’s family and friends shared stories from the life of the revered chemist. The audience overflowed the pews, standing in the back of the vaulted sanctum for Shulgin’s 100th birthday celebration fundraiser. An air of reverence for molecular discovery flooded the room as imagery projected on the walls fluctuated between prismatic chains of atoms, fractals of coral green, deep blue, and gilded structures that evoked the ropes of a treasured sunken ship and the flying buttresses of Notre Dame.
“Around the world there are sacred sites” said moderator Liana Gillooly, curator of Psychedelic Science 2025. “For me,” she added, “Sasha Shulgin’s laboratory is sacred” for originating many molecules she deemed sacraments. It is fitting, she observed, that Shulgin, who died at age 88 in 2014, would have turned 100 on the eve of Psychedelic Science 2025’s first day. She introduced several speakers, including Ann Shulgin’s daughter Wendy Tucker, MAPS founder Rick Doblin, and artists Alex & Allyson Grey.
Zach Leary, son of the late Timothy Leary, spoke to the crowd of a time when he visited Shulgin. After asking if he and his father had tried the 2C-B he’d sent them, Shulgin pulled out a chemical and offered to let Zach Leary to test a derivative he’d just created. Zach Leary reflected with awe at being at such frontiers of consciousness experimentation that Shulgin was known for. Leary called for the responsible use of new substances, saying “we are the Indigenous” users of synthetic psychedelic compounds such as those Shulgin created. Leary said that he hoped that in 1000 years psychonauts who explore these substances will be seen with the respect we have for Indigenous people who have explored psychedelic substances for millenia.
Other speakers told other insightful and inspiring tales. Driving with Shulgin to another country to attend a psychedelic conference, Paul Stamets said he received a “scolding” from Shulgin after Stamets lied to an immigration officer saying they were going into the country to attend a restaurant conference. “Never be an apologist for your interest in psychedelics,” Shulgin later told him.
Scientist Gül Dölen echoed fondness for Shulgin’s openness. She told of a time, before psychedelic research was taken seriously, when she was at a venue with several Nobel Prize-winning scientists as well as Shulgin. Dölen remarked that Shulgin’s candid remarks about his exploration with psychedelic molecules he’d created was “gold” and captured the whole crowd’s attention, deeply inspiring the neuroscientists there with his experiential evidence of how consciousness changes with molecules.
Doblin shared that Shulgin’s bravery is what sticks with him. He told of a time in 1992, when Shulgin’s courage to allude to his use of psychedelics at a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) meeting was what, in Doblin’s view, opened the door for the current renaissance of human psychedelic research. Paul Daley, Co-Founder of the Alexander Shulgin Research Institute, spoke of Shulgin cutting a hole in his roof and using a crane to place equipment in his laboratory, alluding to the lengths Shulgin would go to evolve this frontier.
“All of our lives changed…on our encounter with these substances, and they all came out of this little lab,” Alex Grey said.
Before the speakers closed the night to begin the party, the congregation had one final task. Honoring Shulgin’s classical tastes, a violinist took to the stage with moderator Gillooly, who brought a lit candle. Through song, the crowd from the pews and beyond joined them to usher forth the evening event’s closing words: “Happy birthday to Sasha! Happy birthday to you.” – Andrew Meissen