Modern capitalism operates through a fundamental process of exploitation, reducing both natural world and human experience to resources awaiting extraction and optimization. In this framework, the environment becomes a collection of raw materials to be managed, while human consciousness itself is reduced to biological mechanisms to be modulated for productivity. This reduction serves to obscure how social and economic conditions themselves generate the very problems that profitable "solutions" then claim to address.
This dynamic of creating problems and selling their solutions operates across scales. Consider how processed food companies systematically engineer products to override natural satiety signals, creating widespread metabolic disruption—only to profit again through the diet industry built to address these manufactured problems. This same pattern now emerges more profoundly in mental health, where systems of work and social organization generate unprecedented rates of psychological distress, while simultaneously promoting individualized biological interventions as the primary path to wellbeing.
Within this context, psychedelics present a particular challenge that resists simple categorization. One can recognize their genuine therapeutic potential—their capacity to catalyze healing and insight—while remaining critically opposed to their instrumentalization within systems of profit and power. This nuanced position becomes crucial as we witness how market logic transforms these substances from tools of healing into products for optimization, from medicines emerging from traditional knowledge into technical solutions for productivity maintenance.
The commodification of psychedelic experience represents a specific instance of what scholars term epistemic injustice—the systematic devaluation of certain forms of knowledge and healing in favor of those that better serve existing power structures. Traditional and indigenous understandings of these substances as teachers or as tools for communal healing are subordinated to a mechanical view of them as psychiatric interventions.
This transformation is starkly visible in the intellectual property landscape, where companies race to patent slight molecular modifications of medicines that indigenous cultures have worked with for millennia. What emerges is a particular form of solutionism—the belief that complex human experiences can be optimized through technical or pharmacological intervention alone. Silicon Valley first creates conditions of constant digital engagement and overwork, then profits from selling meditation apps and wellness solutions to address the psychological toll of these very conditions. Similarly, the medicalization of psychedelics promises to address psychological suffering without confronting the conditions that generate it. Market analysts now frame the nearly one billion humans experiencing mental health and substance use disorders as an untapped market—treating collective suffering not as a call for systemic change but as an opportunity for profit.
Yet within this commodification lies a profound irony: psychedelics, even as they are being marketed as solutions within this framework, often catalyze insights that expose the very artificiality of how we conceptualize psychological struggle. The same substances being positioned as tools to help individuals better cope with oppressive systems often reveal how those systems shape our understanding of suffering and healing in the first place. This revelation points toward a deeper truth: the real value of psychedelics may lie not in their ability to help people function better within broken systems, but in their capacity to illuminate how those systems break us. What begins as a search for individual healing often opens into a recognition that true healing requires transforming the social conditions that shape human flourishing. In this light, the commodification of psychedelics represents more than just medical reductionism—it reflects a fundamental tension between the logic of profit and the potential for genuine liberation.
