The Shaman's Paper

Inside a psychedelic pyramid scheme

Something I’ve noticed about many psychedelics advocates and people working in the renaissance today: they’re tone deaf about access.

Many advocates have access or they are affluent enough to buy it. Too many of them either don’t care or don’t understand how regular people access psychedelics for mental health treatment. For most of us the choices are limited: dubious Ketamine IV clinics that aren’t cheap, spurious shamans in the underground (also not cheap) or your neighborhood drug dealer.

Americans are losing access to health care, and even in places where you can be prescribed psychedelic treatment, it remains prohibitively expensive. This is crazy to me because many psychedelic elders gave away LSD or mushrooms for free. Access was central to their ethos, not an afterthought.

An old man told me that profiting from sacred medicines creates the worst possible karma. He said he could never profit from peyote because it would undermine his ceremonies. He said he would never do such a thing because he would never saddle his grandchildren with such a curse.

When I started dabbling in psychedelics eight years ago, access was much more limited than it is now. State by state legalization efforts were still building momentum and people were afraid of losing jobs and relationships if others found out they used psychedelics. When I joined the shaman’s groups, I made a vow that I understood a key protocol: You were allowed to share only your experience and not the experiences of others, unless they explicitly granted permission.

This is one of the many reasons why I see the shaman’s network as a product of draconian drug laws.

The illegality of psychedelics directly influences the price inflation, the lack of access, and the secrecy in the psychedelic underground. It convinces profit-hungry grifters and creeps to join the field. It explains why facilitators say what’s in their pills is proprietary information and clients in their groups might accept this explanation as plausible.

It all comes down to access and money. Money and access.

What follows is a dump of everything I can remember or wrote down in my notebooks about the shaman’s sources of income:

When I started journeying with the the shaman, facilitators charged $400 a night. Often the host who owned the journey house charged an extra land fee. Former facilitators tell me they were pressured to charge $450 a person per night so as not to undercut others in the network.

The shaman developed multiple income streams from his MLM-style network of companies. Whenever he had a falling out with an ex, he gave her a supplement company, took a percentage of the profits and sold the pills through his network.

This arrangement kept former girlfriends dependent on him. It also facilitated a continual rebrand of his pills and other products. When I was around from 2016-2021, he had two supplement companies and was developing a third with an ex-girlfriend. She now sells “kanna” spray for anxiety.

The shaman’s income streams included:

• Percentage from one-night journeys

• Percentage from week-long “intensives”

• Facilitator training course fees

• Sacrament access/subscription fees

• Online lecture series subscription fees

• One-on-one Zoom calls with clients

• Supplements sold online

• Donations for a psychedelic church

This information comes from interviews and text messages with the shaman when he was courting me to be his ghost writer. I attended a company meeting at his home in Pasadena in 2020. The situation was so dysfunctional and strange that I elected to move to Rocky Boy’s Reservation to teach English in 2020 instead of moving to LA to work for the shaman.

Former facilitators in the network provided additional information that corroborated my observations about how the shaman’s network functioned.

The shaman’s facilitator training program lasted two years and required facilitators to attend several “intensives” a year. The facilitators at the top of the MLM ran the intensives, typically at super fancy houses in locations like Hawaii, Carmel or St. Thomas, or trips to Peru. I recently received an email for a 7-day intensive in Hawaii that cost $3,700.

To enter the network, a new facilitator had to sign an NDA and give 20 percent of journey proceeds back to the shaman. Another 10 percent went to the mentor, or the facilitator who was higher up in the MLM and initiated the new person into the network. Top earners gave $1,200 or 40 percent back to the organization monthly. This percentage was on top of facilitator training fees and the subscription fees to access the sacraments.

Former facilitators say the monthly subscription fee to access the sacraments was $450. Estimates put the shaman’s total in-network facilitator count at 600 to 1,500. Ostensibly, he could have been making $8 million a year alone on sacrament subscription fees.

Not every facilitator paid this fee because some who had been guiding in the shaman’s network before Dawn helped monetize the facilitator training pathway were grandfathered in. In trainings, new facilitators at the bottom of the pyramid complained they could barely get by because of the various fees they paid to the shaman’s organization.

The shaman didn’t own property in his name—he rented his house in Pasadena—but he had a company that was applying for patents when I was around. I didn’t like his house because the backyard was cement with a pool and it was too sad for me to live without a garden. Journeys were held at the homes of longtime clients or facilitators. Some of the shaman’s facilitators at the top of the pyramid traveled around like he did. One recently built a retreat center in California. In general, the network had few non-liquid assets and lots of cash flow. Facilitators could easily collect $10k a night.

If you know something else put it in the comments!