Psychedelic Science 2025: The Field Comes Back Together

“Psychedelic Science 2025 drew 12,000 attendees to Denver in June 2025. It was the largest psychedelic conference in history. The field that had been underground for fifty years assembled publicly.”

The Psychedelic Science 2025 conference, held in Denver in June 2025, drew approximately 12,000 attendees over five days, researchers, clinicians, policymakers, advocates, facilitators, investors, journalists, and curious members of the public. It was the largest gathering in the history of psychedelic science.

The content spanned the full range of the field: Phase 3 clinical results, regulatory strategy, indigenous knowledge and ethics, harm reduction, business development, veteran advocacy, religious freedom law, and the political coalition that had produced $50 million in Texas ibogaine research funding. Colorado Governor Jared Polis announced pardons for people convicted of state psychedelic possession charges.

The conference captured the field's current character: genuinely bipartisan, genuinely complex, and in some tension with itself. The researchers presenting Phase 3 clinical data were sharing space with advocates for decriminalization and with indigenous leaders arguing that commercialization of plant medicines without benefit-sharing was a continuation of colonial extraction.

Rick Perry, former Republican Governor of Texas, Secretary of Energy under Trump, was there, speaking about ibogaine for veterans. Rick Doblin, MAPS founder, psychedelic activist for forty years, was there, still arguing for the therapeutic framework after the FDA rejection of MDMA. Shipibo-Conibo healers were there, expressing concern about the commodification of their traditions.

This is the world McKenna was trying to describe when he talked about the Archaic Revival: a moment when psychedelic plant knowledge returned to public discourse, when the institutions that had suppressed it could no longer ignore it, when the culture was reconsidering its relationship to consciousness. Whether the conference represented the Archaic Revival or its co-optation is the question McKenna's framework asks, and which Psychedelic Science 2025 did not resolve.

Sources

• Psychedelic Science 2025 Conference, Denver (June 2025)
• Colorado Sun, Psychedelic Policy Reform (July 2025)
• Cannabis magazine report, Psychedelic Reform (April 2026)