So, these last few years have been a time. After getting stung by ONO in 2018 (if you don't know, don't ask), I had a protracted sulk and slight career pivot. Now, academia is my side gig, and I have my own business, a niche content and copywriting concern called Psychedelic Overground.
(Copyright: me. So, steal this image at your peril!)
How I got to this is a little unexpected. I was working as a non-tenured philosopher and education researcher in 2019. But then, 2020 happened. All my paid work with my university left with the international students. By the second half of that year, cash was getting pretty tight for me.
I'd been interested in psychedelics for a long time and had been volunteering with a local nonprofit, the Australian Psychedelic Society, since 2018. So when I saw that Paul Austin's company, Third Wave, was looking for freelance writers, I thought, sure, I'll give this a go.
It went well. It turns out I'm pretty good at writing what psychedelic companies want in the blogs they use for SEO and to drive community engagement. Since September 2020, I've done many blog posts for Third Wave, some massive info pages, including their Ultimate Guide to Microdosing, and have been helping craft their educational content. After doing bits and pieces of the same thing for other companies such as MindLeap and Ketamine Media, I formalized my freelancing into a business.
I say "formalize," as if I had a clear plan. I initially needed a website to host my copywriting and content portfolio. But once I'd bought the domain and registered my business name, things picked up pretty quickly. So I threw all my time and intellectual energy into this thing. Once I started writing down my thoughts around how I wanted to position the business, many ideas solidified. I had a good idea of what I wanted to do and who I saw as my ideal client.
Most of all, I wanted to capture the feeling that psychedelics are transitioning from being looked at in one way by society to something entirely different. As I said in the blog post that started to lay out my vision:
Welcome to the Psychedelic Overground.
Who are we?
We're not the government. We're not conventional. We're not part of the system in the same way that others are. We're still largely unknown, and some of us may never be household names. But we're not underground anymore.
As things progressed, I laid out more of where I was at in blog posts and my FAQ. Values are still fundamental in psychedelic business circles and within psychedelic communities. So, yes, I support decriminalization of all drugs, including psychedelics. No, I don't think you should have to sit in a clinic and pay a psychiatrist thousands of dollars to take psilocybin mushrooms.
What's helped people know where I'm at is the section titled: "Is there anyone you wouldn't work for?" To paraphrase, I won't work for any org that:
- doesn't publicly and genuinely supports the decriminalization of psychedelics.
- pursues excessively aggressive patent strategies
I expect organisations to make sure any therapists/guides/sitters who work for them treat their patients well and observe appropriate boundaries. If a business profits from Indigenous knowledge of plant medicines, I expect it to be materially and financially giving back to that community. Finally, I expect organizations to treat their workers well. Organizations that don't do these things can take their business elsewhere.
What's wild is that being upfront about these conditions hasn't been a problem. OK, so I'm never going to land a contract with Compass Pathways, famous for both trying to patent soft furnishings in psychedelic-assisted therapy settings and attempting to undermine decriminalization efforts in Oregon. But still, I've been working full-time over my entire summer.
Now, it's not like I'm rolling in cash - far from it. But I'm doing more than breaking even, and am building a team of my own. This business takes up a lot of my time, and I'm still doing a little philosophy teaching, plus volunteering with the Australian Psychedelic Society. If I do have any spare time to write, it will be crafting content for my own blog to keep raising my SERP position, and generally not here (sorry!)
Anyway, I have a piece to finish and another client brief to put together, so I'd better go. If anyone out there has need of some psychedelic-themed content and is willing to pay for it, please reach out. I haven't been paid in crypto for a while, but I'm quite happy to take it, so long as it's a coin or token with decent liquidity. So, sadly, I won't be accepting ONOTs (That's a little joke for my old friends.)
Thanks for reading!
