Disclaimer: This article contains tongue-in-cheek satirical humor and some thinly veiled jabs at the psychedelic industrial complex, deal with it

The international psychedelic conference circuit is a wonderful, weird world that exists beyond geopolitical and neurological borders. I had no idea such a scene existed until a few years ago when people started asking me if I wanted to come to New York or Miami and pontificate about mind altering molecules with the jetset crowd of doctors, lawyers, journalists, charlatans, and opportunists of every imaginable stripe all looking to cash out on the ineffable.

Naturally I enthusiastically joined the fracas and brushed up on  psychedelic industrial complex approved talking points designed to heighten empathy and raise capital. 

I’m actually surprised some of these conferences haven’t been rebranded to ‘Neuroplastogen’ industry conferences to keep up with moving goalposts and shifting socioeconomic tropes. 

Anyone with a little bit of celebrity clout and a story about the time they smoked 5-MeO-DMT with Logan Paul or puked rainbows on ayahuasca turned into a psychedelic thought leader overnight thanks to these conferences, where legitimate scientists put their reputations on the line and ketamine dealers flaunted licensure and PR teams to gloss up their hustle into something almost respectable to mainstream society. 

As the public profile and stock market ballooned around the hype of an emergent psychedelic industry circa 2022, the conference circuit went global. Major psychedelic conferences have been held everywhere from Austin to Reykjavik, with new ones coming online every year across multiple continents.

Many of these psychedelic conferences are still in their infancy and approaching their third editions, while some have already gone bust. This year the first psychedelic conferences in Asia and South America are set to take place, with public multi-day events taking shape in Malaysia, Puerto Rico and Argentina for the first time. Then there is the rare feat of making it into the second decade as an event, as is the case with Entheogenesis Australis down under. 

The remaining few months of this year will see a number of psychedelic conferences taking place all over the world, signaling a continued escalation of public interest and professional opportunities in the psychedelic field. Here’s a rundown of the big ones happening through the end of 2025.

The Borealis Psychedelic Science Summit is touching down in Stockholm, Sweden from September 26-27 and features internationally renowned therapists and researchers like Julie Holland, Matthew Johnson, and Paul Liknaitsky among others. The ethereal glow of the Aurora Borealis, rumored to be the brightest and best of the last decade, will surely yield a tantalizing setting for the psychedelic jetset crowd to unveil the latest research on 5-HT2A agonists and the Total Addressable Market for technofuedalists to corner. 

Across the Pacific, Puerto Rico will concurrently host Psychedelic Summit PR 25 on September 27 in the capital of San Juan. The summit offers the chance to join “global leaders, clinicians, scientists, and innovators shaping the future of mental health through psychedelic-assisted therapies” and surely at least a handful of inadvertent opportunities to connect directly with tax-evading bitcoin bros who have made the island their homebase. 

The third Finnish Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelics runs October 2-4 in Turku, Finland, where psychedelic medicine may be the second hottest point of cultural and scientific interest after traditional Finnish saunas. 

58 degrees south latitudinally, Buenos Aires will host the first psychedelic conference in South America from October 8-10. ‘LAPsychConf’ is set to take place amidst the vibrant Argentinian capital with the aim to “open dialogue, connect local agendas with international debates, and highlight the advances that are paving the way for a new way of caring for human well-being”.

Psilocybin mushrooms are decriminalized in Argentina, where a growing demographic of psychonauts has found a foothold in lockstep with the rest of the world. International speakers include MAPS founder Rick Doblin, distinguished neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt, and Chilean scientist and DMT researcher Chris Timmerman of Imperial College London among others. 

Later in October, the ALPS Foundation will host the fifth edition of the ALPS Conference in Geneva, Switzerland on October 24-25. I’ll be one of the keynote speakers at this event, and would not feel right without exploring the potential overlap between DMT entity contact and the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. Perhaps one day in the future, gap year students and the spiritually entangled will be able to seek out LSD retreats in  Helvetia the same way people make pilgrimages to the Peruvian Amazon Basin for Ayahuasca or to Phish concerts for Nitrous. 

To cap off this prolific month in the history of psychedelic conferencing, the inaugural Asia-Pacific Psychedelic Symposium on Psychedelic Medicine is scheduled October 30-31 at Monash University Malaysia. A distinguished lineup of international speakers will join local researchers and faculty in the Asia-Pacific region to help steward over the emerging science of medicinal psychedelics in Asia.

After having received a Yellow Fever vaccine at the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur as a conditional requirement before entering Tanzania in 2014, I can attest to the quality of the medical system in Malaysia – perhaps in the next few years I can schedule a series of ketamine sessions at the same clinic.

The inaugural Global Psychedelic Week is being unveiled from November 3-9. I’m a co-founder of this ambitious project, which will feature both a virtual global summit and over 50 confirmed in-person satellite events happening in cities all over the world from Los Angeles to Amsterdam to Goa, India.

The goal of ‘GPW’ is to connect the numerous psychedelic communities and activists around the world into one decentralized community that is accessible to everyone above and beyond those who have the budget and bandwidth to relocate cities and continents every few weeks to join the jet set & setting psychedelic crowd. 

The action is even set to come to Hoima, Uganda from November 13-15 with the third iteration of the African Rising Mushroom Festival. While not explicitly geared towards psychedelics, the overlap and the international speakers in attendance – including yours truly, have an obvious interest in the psychedelic space and a keen eye for wild psilocybes and exotic mushrooms.

From November 28 – December 1, the storied Entheogensis Australis celebrates its 21st year with the Garden States ‘outdoor ethnobotanical conference’ in Victoria, Australia just outside of Melbourne.

This gathering of psychonauts and visionary bushcrafters holds a special palace in the hearts and minds of the ethnobotanically inclined; while some conferences can feel like they emerged out of the fever dream of a group of k-holed investors wary of falling off a looming patent cliff, Entheogensis Australis caters to the ‘too weird to live and too rare to die’ crowd who have spent the last few decades stepping over highly venomous snakes and duking it out with kangaroos to get their hands on various wild cubensis mushrooms and DMT containing shrubs. 

The psychedelic conference circuit has ironically become the most dominant and commercially viable form of any true global psychedelic industry over the last few years. Why get FDA-approval and establish a legal market for psychedelics when you can tour the world campaigning for their approval instead?

If I had a microdose for every conference keynote speaker I’ve heard parrot the same dubious rhetoric about quieting the Default Mode Network (™) and shaking up the snowglobe to carve out new grooves in the ski slope of the entropic brain, I’d have an ultra macrodose on my hands. But as goes the old adage, ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’ – so catch me on the international psychedelic conference circuit!