We are the culture

At a 2017 gathering organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, Rick Doblin described a movement once identified with the counterculture as part of the culture itself. His declaration captured a change in public and scientific standing, but the history behind it makes the claim more complicated: psychedelic practices had long existed outside Western institutions, and claims of cultural inclusion can obscure whose traditions are being represented and on whose terms.

From marginality to public legitimacy

In April 2017, more than three thousand people from around the world gathered at the Oakland Convention Center for Psychedelic Science, a six-day conference where researchers from twenty-five countries presented their work. The event’s scale marked a striking change from a modest 2010 gathering of psychonauts and a small number of renegade researchers. Lectures and panels shared the venue with a sprawling marketplace of psychedelic books, art, and music. For the author, it also became a reunion with many of the scientists and underground guides encountered during the book’s reporting.

Doblin’s statement was grounded in institutional developments as well as attendance. The Food and Drug Administration had approved phase-three trials of MDMA earlier that year, and psilocybin research was approaching a similar stage. Doblin anticipated that strong results could lead the government to reschedule the drugs and allow doctors to prescribe them. His declaration therefore named an aspiration as much as an accomplished fact: the movement sought recognition through research and medicine, even as the regulatory outcome remained conditional.

A contested history of religious authority

The phrase’s confidence sits against a much longer history of suppression. After the Spanish conquest, the sacramental use of psychoactive mushrooms was driven underground and kept secret from Westerners for centuries. Spanish authorities treated the practice as a threat to church authority; religious observances were prohibited, and sacred mushroom stones were destroyed. The Nahuatl name for the mushrooms, meaning “flesh of the gods,” sharpened the conflict with Christian sacramental claims. The episode shows that psychedelic culture did not begin as a modern counterculture: it also includes indigenous religious and healing practices targeted by colonial power.

That history, however, cannot be reduced to a single enduring use or theology. When R. Gordon Wasson gained access to a Mazatec mushroom ceremony in 1955, he approached it with a theory that psychoactive fungi lay at the roots of religious experience. The book notes that this framework shaped his account. By that time, many Mazatecs were Catholics, and mushrooms were used in healing and divination, including efforts to find missing people or objects, rather than simply as a means of worship. Wasson knew about these contemporary purposes, yet presented the ceremony in terms that aligned with his prior theory. The contrast matters to Doblin’s slogan: calling psychedelics part of “the culture” can signal inclusion, but it does not by itself correct the ways outsiders have recast indigenous practices to serve their own accounts.

Building a cultural container

The book traces another strand of the movement through Al Hubbard, who wanted psychedelic research to reach beyond medicine’s focus on treating illness. In 1955 he established the Commission for the Study of Creative Imagination and recruited researchers, a philosopher, and a United Nations official. The commission’s practical scope is uncertain, but its formation registered a growing divide between medical and spiritual approaches. Hubbard said his interest was moving beyond what empirical methods could reach; the book presents the shift from psychotherapy toward cultural change as already underway before Timothy Leary became its most visible advocate.

In the contemporary underground, that broadening has been accompanied by efforts to formalize practice. A draft charter described making profound experiences more available and named both psychedelic substances and non-drug practices, including meditation, breathwork, and fasting. The associated Code of Ethics for Spiritual Guides emphasized disclosure of risks, consent, confidentiality, client safety, and protection against a guide’s ambition or self-promotion. The Guidelines for Voyagers and Guides addressed preparation, intention, set and setting, difficult experiences, and post-session integration. Together, these materials present a community attempting to make powerful experiences safer and more accountable rather than treating access as sufficient in itself.

What the declaration includes—and leaves open

The book distinguishes between the clinical setting, with controlled trials and clinicians, and the underground guides’ own rules and traditions. Both can serve as social frameworks for experiences that might otherwise be difficult to contain or interpret. The declaration “We are not the counterculture. We are the culture” thus points not only to growing visibility, but to the construction of new forms of legitimacy: scientific trials, professional guidance, ethical codes, and public institutions.

Yet the phrase does not settle who speaks for psychedelic culture, whose practices receive recognition, or what happens when medical and spiritual aims diverge. Its force lies in rejecting the idea that psychedelics belong only to an oppositional fringe; its limit is that cultural acceptance can coexist with the appropriation or simplification of older traditions. The book’s juxtaposition of a confident 2017 claim with histories of suppression, reinterpretation, and careful underground practice leaves the slogan both a marker of change and an invitation to ask what kind of culture is being claimed.