As we launch Season 2 of the Healing Cancer Journeys podcast, I decided to step into a time machine. I reread HCJ’s own origin story.
When I founded Healing Cancer Journeys in 2024, I wrote two essays: one about my personal journey with cancer and psychedelic medicines, and another about why I started HCJ. They were written barely two years ago. Yet they read like ancient texts.
Because the author of those essays was a child. Not in years. In spirit. Wide-eyed. Earnest. Gloriously naive about what it takes to build an organization in a field fraught with legal, medical and social pitfalls. That little child didn’t know what he didn’t know. Thank goodness. If he had known, he might never have started.
I admire that founder. I also laugh at him. Hilarious. Beautiful. Mostly hilarious. So much has changed since those essays. And so much hasn’t.
Three things have changed since HCJ’s founding
1. The closet door opened.
In 2024, I was terrified to come out as someone who uses psychedelics. I worried my family and my friends and my employer would think I was abusing drugs. I worried about the persistent stigma that clings to these psychedelics.
Today, I talk openly with my family and friends. They support HCJ. They support my personal use of psychedelic medicines. What changed wasn’t a research paper. It was a face. Mine. Many of us still picture psychedelics through images inherited from the 1960s counterculture and the 1980s drug war. Tie-dye t-shirts on one side. DARE t-shirts on the other. And then someone in your own family, a cancer patient no less, shows you that this is real medicine with real healing potential.
I’m not alone. A recent survey estimated that nearly 14 million American adults used psychedelics in the past year. Set that beside the more than 18 million Americans living with a history of cancer. Nearly everyone knows someone who has had cancer. Which means that many of us also likely know someone who has used a psychedelic. But we don’t know about psychedelic use because social stigma keeps many of those Americans silent.
Stigma thrives in silence. Silence undermines safety. I’m trying to be a little less silent.
2. The legal landscape shifted.
When I founded HCJ in the fall of 2024, the FDA had just declined to approve MDMA-assisted therapy, and hopes for legal access felt dim. Today, the FDA has placed several psychedelic therapies on an expedited review track. Psilocybin, MDMA and LSD therapies are all moving toward review, and we could see FDA approval as early as next year.
At the state level, Colorado has joined Oregon in offering regulated psilocybin access, and New Mexico is preparing to launch a medical program of its own. At the federal level, an executive order on psychedelic medicine promises to open pathways for faster review, expanded research and new funding.
3. I’ve learned a few things.
I founded HCJ on the strength of a few powerful experiences. I wasn’t a doctor. Or a researcher. Or a psychedelic expert. I was a cancer patient who received tremendous benefit from medicines I’d been told my whole life were dangerous. I’m still not an expert. But two years of reading research papers, talking with other patients and interviewing experts on our podcast has taught me a thing or two . . . mostly about humility.
I’ve learned that I haven’t learned enough about psychedelics and probably never will. But I’ve also learned that the loudest, most strident, most confident voices in the psychedelic landscape are also the ones that should be treated with the most skepticism.
Three things haven’t changed since HCJ’s founding
1. Our mission.
HCJ exists to provide education and community for people exploring psychedelic medicines in their cancer journeys. As psychedelics go mainstream, education matters more, not less. More options and more noise mean people living with cancer need science-based information to make their own informed decisions.
And community still heals. Over the summer, I attended a psilocybin retreat in Oregon hosted by the Survivorship Collective, co-founded by Anne Hamilton, a guest in our first season. The retreat was a circle of cancer survivors working through our experiences together, with the medicine as a guide. I didn’t build that circle. I joined it. HCJ doesn’t need to create every community. Sometimes our job is to help people find the ones already gathering. I’m excited to continue working with Survivorship Collective and other partner organizations.
2. My complicated feelings.
I still hold nuanced, even contradictory feelings about psychedelics. I reject blanket prohibition. I also reject unregulated access. I believe in a middle ground. And I often don’t know what that middle ground really looks like. I stand in unknowing. Unknowing is uncomfortable. But I stand with the confidence that humble unknowing is a form of wisdom.
What I do know: wherever psychedelic regulation initially lands will be imperfect. Our first steps toward legal access will likely be more restrictive than I’d like. I believe that lawmakers are largely acting in good faith to keep us safe. But I also believe that those good-faith legislative efforts will almost certainly create financial, legal and administrative barriers that will restrict access for people living with cancer. Alas.
Oregon’s psychedelics initiative is instructive. The program is restrictive, expensive and possibly unsustainable. And still, an imperfect legal option beats absolute prohibition. Other state lawmakers will learn from Oregon. And so will federal lawmakers in Washington, DC. These are the laboratories of democracy, doing what laboratories do: test, evaluate, adjust.
I do hope lawmakers watch for unintended consequences. Restrictions meant to make us safer can push patients into riskier underground settings. A safety rule that drives people away from safety isn’t safe.
Some in the psychedelic community grieve the mainstreaming. The corporatization. The medicalization. The loss of something intimate and sacred. I share some of those feelings. We lose some control when psychedelics move out of the smaller underground communities and into mainstream American life. But I mostly see this as good news, because more of my sisters and brothers with cancer may benefit. For the cancer community, the trade-offs of medicalization and corporatization are likely worth it because they will lead to safer, broader access to these healing medicines.
3. My conviction about the wisdom of the cancer community.
Most strongly, I still believe that people living with cancer carry tremendous wisdom in our bodies. We have suffered. And our suffering has made us wise. And strong. We should have full authority to decide which medicines enter those bodies. I still believe we have a legal and moral Right to Try psychedelic medicines. And today, even more than two years ago, I believe the Schedule I classification of psychedelics, which declares they have no accepted medical use, is scientifically inaccurate and morally wrong.
What comes next?
I look forward to the second podcast season. And I look forward to the next few years with HCJ. I can’t tell you what the future holds. But I have a clear vision of myself in 2028 where a slightly older version of me will reread this post. He’ll probably laugh. Good. Let him laugh. It will mean we kept growing. Hilarious growth. Beautiful growth. But mostly beautiful.
Let’s journey together.
