Ayahuasca, Empire, and the NGO Hydra: Reflections Ten Years After the Ibiza Conference
Ten years ago, in September 2014, I attended and presented at the first World Ayahuasca Conference held on the island of Ibiza, Spain. Organized by ICEERS (The International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research and Service), it was billed as a landmark event: a global gathering of academics, practitioners, indigenous representatives, scientists, psychonauts, and activists—all convened under the banner of sacred medicine, intercultural dialogue, and planetary healing. For four days, the atmosphere was collegial, warm, and hopeful. My own contribution, a presentation on the jurisprudential permissibility of Ayahuasca for Shiʻi Muslims following a fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Rohani of Qom, was received enthusiastically. I met luminaries, engaged in meaningful dialogue, and participated in what appeared to be a genuine cross-cultural exchange. But then came the final session.
The closing speech was delivered by Kasia Malinowska-Sempruch, a representative of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Her name and affiliation had been omitted from the conference program. As it turned out, she was also there representing UNESCO. Her talk, ostensibly about global drug policy reform, veered sharply into geopolitics—including a disturbingly off-topic attack on Russia and an endorsement of methadone therapy, a highly contested pharmaceutical substitute for opioid addiction. I sat stunned. The corporate globalist hydra had reared its head. The mask had slipped. The specter of Soros, and all he represents in the Transatlantic neoliberal order, had breached even this sacred space. That was the moment the deeper truth hit me: the Western psychedelic renaissance had already been compromised—and completely captured. And it has only gotten worse since.
The NGO-Pharma-Psychedelic Complex
In the years since, the corporatization and geopolitical weaponization of the psychedelic sphere has accelerated with disturbing speed. Organizations like MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), Beckley Foundation, and ICEERS have emerged as central nodes in a sprawling network of psychedelic-industrial influence. Often funded by tech billionaires, corporate venture capital, or the very same philanthropic outfits that underwrite regime-change soft power around the globe (such as Open Society Foundations), these groups masquerade as apolitical reformers. In truth, they are ideological agents of a late-capitalist system that seeks to neutralize the subversive edge of the entheogenic experience.
Psychedelics once posed a threat to Empire. Now they are being enrolled into its service. Ayahuasca, Ibogaine, MDMA, psilocybin, and LSD are being recast not as sacraments but as scalable, patentable mental health solutions. Microdosing is sold as a productivity hack for Silicon Valley executives. MAPS, with its close cooperation with the US military and Department of Veterans Affairs, is testing MDMA-assisted therapy on traumatized soldiers—not to help them resist the military-industrial complex, but to make them functional enough to return to it. This is not liberation. It is biopolitical management.
The Rise of the Psychedelic-NGO Trojan Horse
In 2014, I warned that the psychedelic movement was becoming fertile ground for elite capture.[1] The Ibiza conference made it clear that the globalist NGO matrix—Soros, UNESCO, and their affiliated bureaucracies—was seeking to infiltrate sacred medicine cultures under the guise of human rights, drug reform, and cultural preservation. Ten years on, their presence is no longer peripheral. It is dominant.
The psychedelic sphere has become a tightly managed ecosystem of grant cycles, peer-reviewed journals, ‘safe spaces’, and decolonial language-games that serve to obscure the deeper imperial structures at play. Indigenous voices are tokenized. Authentic shamans are displaced by retreat entrepreneurs. Amazonian medicine is rebranded for Western consumption, scrubbed of its metaphysical potency and reinserted into the logic of extraction. What was once a site of countercultural resistance has become a festival of performative healing and spiritual consumerism.
Empire’s New Tool of Soft Control
More than just commodification, psychedelics are now being used as tools of affective engineering. Participants in Western ayahuasca ceremonies often undergo powerful catharses—but these are rarely directed toward political awareness or collective liberation. Instead, they are channeled into hyper-individualized narratives of trauma, healing, and self-love. The plant spirit becomes a therapist. The revolution becomes a retreat. Resistance is pacified by inner work.
The deeper irony: even as these movements appropriate the symbols of decolonization, they replicate the very logics of coloniality—extracting indigenous wisdom, repackaging it, and reselling it to disaffected Westerners seeking transcendence without consequence. What results is a new kind of settler mysticism: psychedelic liberalism. Its primary features include:
- Therapeutic ego reinforcement masked as ego death
- Apolitical identity healing
- Performative indigeneity
- Consumer mysticism
- Strategic Russophobia and anti-"authoritarian" signaling
And, above all, the evacuation of spiritual danger.
Sacred Medicine, Not Pharmaceutical Property
For the Fāṭimīya Sufi Order, and for those of us who continue to walk a path of metaphysical resistance, Ayahuasca is not a wellness product. It is a theophanic sacrament: a vegetal gate to visionary unveiling (kashf), to be approached with awe, humility, and radical accountability. We reject the reduction of entheogens to psychiatric tools. We reject the neoliberal capture of healing. We reject the spiritual bypassing of global injustice. We reject the presence of Sorosian agents and similar in sacred spaces. A line must be drawn.
The events of 2014 were an omen. We ignored them at our peril. But it is not too late. Ten years on, we must return to the roots. We must decolonize not only our medicine spaces, but our cosmologies. We must reassert the sacred. Let it be known: for us, the answer remains categorically and eternally No. We will not allow our sacraments, our saints, or our spirits to be conscripted by Empire. Instead, from here on out we will employ our sacraments, our saints, and our spirits against Empire and every last one of its minions. Indeed, this is a call to arms against the Anglo-American Atlanticist Psychedelic Industrial-Complex and its representatives with their monetization, banalization, colonization, never mind racialization of a sacred indigenous medicine and sacrament. It is time for this shit to stop!
Peace be upon those who follow the guidance.
[1] See my The 2014 World Ayahuasca Conference in Ibiza, the NGO globalist polyarchy and the dangers of Soros https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/257365139 (retrieved 6 July 2025).
