The Art of Selling Psychedelics

Olivia Marcus, a medical anthropologist with training in public health, grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area with parents who meditated every day. Family vacations often involved going to silent retreats. She noticed the tactics that retreat centers used to market themselves: They promised enlightenment and well-being.

Her academic work has focused on how people seek out health care, and how clinics integrate different therapies. She was recently a postdoctoral fellow in New York University’s Behavioral Sciences Training in Drug Abuse Research program and worked on the Ayahuasca Treatment Outcome Project, a study of an addiction rehabilitation center in Peru. But her early interest in how medicine and healing get advertised never went away.

Psychedelic drugs and services used to be on the fringes, but they’re now widely marketed on social media and even on billboards, sometimes using similar catchphrases and buzzwords that Marcus saw when she was younger. Now, she is researching the language and themes in direct-to-consumer advertising of psychedelic treatments and services, alongside the ads on social media that are algorithmically delivered to consumers. She presented on the topic of the ethics of direct-to-consumer advertising at the Hopkins-Oxford Psychedelics Ethics conference in summer 2024 and is currently working on an academic paper on psychedelic marketing.

The Microdose talked to Marcus about how psychedelic advertisements fit into the legacy of pharmaceutical marketing, and the repeating themes she sees in psychedelics ads.

You did your doctoral fieldwork in Peru in 2015, a time when many ayahuasca retreat centers were opening up to foreigners there. When did you first start to pay attention to the ways psychedelics were being advertised?

Definitely early on. It was a lot of word-of-mouth hyperbolizing — people trying to get people into their retreats by talking about how ayahuasca was like meeting Jesus and the Buddha in the same three-to-five-hour experience. There were these very big claims about what was going to happen, how it was going to be so beautiful, and you were going to heal all your wounds and your traumas.

Those are the things that I remember as far back as 2015 from my fieldwork. From the beginning, there were the claims that ayahuasca was worth 10 years of therapy in one night. By 2015, people were starting to put that on their websites.

I also noticed in that time span of that year, 2015 to 2016, a lot of the websites started to get updated and modernized. You had people who would come to retreats, have a really good experience, and they had web design skills. They created websites for local practitioners who didn’t have much of a media presence.

Before, a lot of centers and people offering services had these rudimentary websites, looking like the late 1990s and early 2000s; I found them very charming. I liked that basic look. The websites began changing, getting updated by foreigners with web design skills. Or, new centers emerged that had a design focus from the beginning. They would add in these very, to me, bland, cookie-cutter statements.

What are the common themes or catchphrases that you see in the psychedelic marketing landscape as it exists now?

To back up a bit, in the mid-2000s there were already a few really promising early studies that got people excited. You had the MAPS [Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies] psychedelic science conferences that started, and the Horizons conference. At those conferences, there were always booths with people selling stuff, selling ideas or advertising psychedelics for this and that. But it all felt very cottage industry. And it all felt very contained.

Then around 2015 to 2017, a lot of organizations began to up their game with brochures, modernized web design and more proactive marketing techniques on social media — which brings us up to today. Now we have social media targeted advertising. We have templated patterns of websites. In these, people are smiling really brightly while getting a ketamine IV, or jumping in the air — the same kind of stuff you see in other pharmaceutical advertisements. They look meditative, they have a peace of mind, or they’re pensive.

They’ll use buzzwords targeting the kinds of things people are concerned about: trauma, PTSD, burnout, being stuck in your life, conquering feelings of helplessness, pursuing your goals, clarity, reclaiming your life, moving beyond your path, breaking the cycle and rediscovering joy.

A lot of these advertisements, whether they’re physical media or social media, use the same word clouds: breakthrough, empowerment, mind-altering, innovative, neuroplasticity, revelation and empowerment. Experience healing beyond the surface, go deeper, go to the root. A lot of my participants in my research — that’s what they wanted to do. They wanted to go to the root causes of their issues. That’s a very reasonable thing to want to do, but it’s used as part of the marketing allure.

Every country in the world prohibits direct-to-consumer prescription pharmaceutical advertising, with the exception of the U.S. and New Zealand. There is a long and sometimes sordid history in America of marketing drugs to treat mental health issues. If the Food and Drug Administration were to approve a psychedelic drug, consumers will likely see ads for that drug. How do you see psychedelic advertising fitting into this larger history of drug marketing?

I like to look at older advertisements. Some of them are just from 20 to 30 years ago. Like, imagery of the housewife being imprisoned and needing something to feel free, while advertising [the anti-anxiety drug] Serax. Going back even further, there’s all sorts of perfumes and medicinal waters that were advertised as being able to help animate the spirit and ward off infections.

[Psychedelics] have become an industry, with corporations and businesses, and we know that the commercial and corporate determinants of health are extremely deleterious. From formula milk companies derailing progress on breastfeeding education, to the opioid epidemic, tobacco industry, and alcohol industry. If we want to be responsible, we have to really consider: Are we developing anything good here if we’re engaging in this form of misleading information, or are we just outright snake oil salesmen?

This idea that there’s some paradigm that we’re changing, whereas, we’re really squarely fitting psychedelics into an existing paradigm. The “paradigm shift” is a marketing technique.

I find social media ads the most unsettling. How do you think direct-to-consumer advertising influences what people do or don’t know about psychedelics?

This might sound extreme to some people, but I think it’s incredibly toxic. Marketing is all about behavioral economics, right? You’re trying to get someone’s attention and keep it. The one that really got under my skin was this Field Trip advertisement, where they do the unboxing of Field Trip’s at-home ketamine kit, and they had a cute white girl, young with a beanie. She’s so stoked to get her box, and she’s doing an unboxing video.

It’s like she’s opening up shoes. It’s uncanny that we’re talking about unboxing something in the way that you might unbox a new toaster, but it’s a potent substance that people tend to not know anything about.

I’ve spoken with people who used ketamine companies where they got mailed stuff. They didn’t really know what it was. They were just desperate for something to help with their depression. The only instructions were to take this with a friend nearby your first couple times.

What is your prediction for the next five years of advertising and marketing of psychedelics?

In some ways, we already have the future mapped out for us in terms of what we’ve seen in any other pharmaceutical or health or wellness industry domain. A lot of current proponents of psychedelic want it to be more like pharma. They want to be normalized in that way, so that it can become accessible. There’s another interesting phenomenon that’s happening, which is that the wellness industry is trying to emulate the pharmaceutical industry with “evidence-based” claims, and similarly, the pharmaceutical industry is trying to pick up on the cache of the wellness industry by saying a pharmaceutical will bring you a sense of peace and wellness. There’s a lot of cross-contamination going on, and maybe one day it’ll all just be the same thing. To think that psychedelics may play out any differently would require, I think, a monumental shift in priorities on multiple levels within our country.

There was a 2022 study of marketing strategies by cannabis companies in four U.S. states, and they demonstrated that businesses do not comply with regulations. To no surprise, they’re aggressively using social media to target younger and more vulnerable populations, as well as sharing misinformation and not reporting risks or contraindications.

Another study by a group in 2023 was on news media reporting about ketamine. A lot of the positive aspects were being reported, and there was an underreporting of risks and making unsubstantiated claims about ketamine — which we see is rampant on almost every ketamine or esketamine website.

All of this is, unfortunately, the proverbial race to the bottom. Everyone is trying to stay afloat in their business and their practice, and if they need to say the things that get people in the door, then that’s what they say.

That’s what I saw in my experience in Peru among ayahuasca retreat centers. I would look at these websites, and I would be horrified by what people were saying. I would go to talk to the owners, and ask, “Why are you saying this?” And they would say, “We know it’s ridiculous, but that’s what people expect us to say.” They may have good intentions, but still feel like they need to play into this economy of lies or misinformation.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.