Updated April, 2024

Sixty years ago, psychedelics marketing was less a matter of owned, earned and paid media strategy than it was blotter design and word-of-mouth warnings about the brown acid. When the Merry Pranksters took their bus "Further" on a cross-country tour in 1964, it in some ways served as a natural-born PR campaign, only it wasn't advocating a product or brand as much as the psychedelic experience itself.

Well before psychedelics captured part of the ‘60s zeitgeist, however, scientists began researching psychedelic substances like psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA, LSD, DMT and ibogaine, beginning in the 1930s. Even early on, the research showed enormous medical and therapeutic promise. As Michael Pollan notes in the Netflix documentary How to Change Your Mind, over a thousand scientific articles were published on psychedelics just between 1950 to 1965, reflecting the experiences of some 40,000 research subjects. In that half-decade alone, there were six international conferences just on LSD. 

A Brief History of the Psychedelics Movement

Nevertheless, the federal government began classifying psychedelics as Schedule I substances throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, stifling further investigation for over 20 years. 

During the 1980s and early 90s, the only marketing anyone was doing around psychedelics and other psychoactive substances were scare-tactic campaigns like  “Just Say No” and “This Is Your Brain on Drugs.” 

Around the time the medical cannabis movement coalesced in response to the AIDS crisis, however, interest in psychedelics research was revived by a small niche of scientists. Much as the fight for medical cannabis emphasized the plant’s potential for palliative care, second-wave psychedelics researchers continued the work of their predecessors in understanding how these compounds could be used in the treatment of depression, alcohol use disorder, PTSD and other conditions. 

Advocates and scientists alike propelled the second wave of the psychedelics movement. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) was founded in 1986, for example, to further psychedelic research and education. Five years later, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a double-blind, controlled study on LSD as an addiction treatment. With federally approved research protocols in place, the psychedelic renaissance slowly took off. Throughout the early and mid-aughts, a flurry of new studies were published into using psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca and other psychedelics to treat everything from generalized anxiety disorder to depression in cancer patients.

By 2006, the third wave of psychedelic research had gained enough momentum in the United States and Switzerland that the latest clinical findings were making their way into mainstream media. Meanwhile, over the past 15 years books like Pollans’ How to Change Your Mind, Oliver Sacks’ Hallucinations and Tao Lin’s Trip: Alienation and Change increased consumer curiosity about psychedelics in a context removed from their 1960s countercultural baggage.

Benzinga announced in 2021 that there were already 50 psychedelics companies in the United States alone. Meanwhile, JAMA Psychiatry reports that “the number of psychedelic reform bills introduced during each calendar year has increased steadily from 5 (2019), 6 (2020), to 27 (2021), to 36 (2022).” The psychedelics industry is still very much in its infancy. But a fresh wave of legalization legislation points to a bold new future for therapeutic psychedelics. 

Denver, Colorado voted in 2019  to decriminalize psilocybin. Oregon passed psilocybin decriminalization and medical legalization in 2020. The momentum continues—in May of 2023, the California senate approved a broad psychedelics decriminalization bill that would apply to psilocybin, psilocyn, DMT, ibogaine, and mescaline possession by individuals 21 and older.

The Current State of Psychedelics Marketing

The legal market for psychedelic drugs is projected to reach a value of nearly $12 billion per year by 2029. Currently, the psychedelics marketing space is quite small, particularly compared to the mature cannabis market. However, as more and more psychedelics companies secure investment funding and begin to roll out products for a new era of mental health treatments, psychedelics marketing will rise in prominence, too. Here’s what to expect in psychedelics marketing and branding.

As with marketing in other industries, psychedelics marketing blends messaging and informative content to build a sense of expertise, authority and trust with audiences. Utilizing branding, digital marketing and content marketing tools, psychedelics marketers can build brand recognition, demonstrate value, strengthen brand loyalty, increase sales and maintain a competitive edge in the rapidly evolving legal psychedelics market.

Psychedelics Branding

The first step to building any successful psychedelics marketing campaign is to develop a strong brand design. That not only includes visual elements like logos and a style guide, but also content elements like:

• A memorable, future-proof brand name
• Foundational brand messaging
• The industry table stakes
• The identity of key segments and stakeholders
• The brand’s position in the market white spaces 

Psychedelics Marketing: Owned, Earned and Paid Media

With those branding elements in place, psychedelics companies can then flesh out their digital marketing and content marketing strategies. Using owned, earned and paid media, psychedelics brands can stay compliant with advertising regulations and still communicate their value to consumers. 

Owned Media for Psychedelics Brands

Owned media is content that brands create and host on channels over which they have full control. Owned media is one of the most important types of marketing for brands in highly regulated industries that may not have access to some of the advertising tools we take for granted, like radio and television commercials. Owned media can include:

• Web copy and blogs
• Email marketing
• White papers, ebooks, case studies
• Gated content

Earned Media for Psychedelics Brands

Earned media is content created by third parties about a brand, but isn’t pay-to-play. Earned media includes valuable content like a local news story on a new psilocybin clinic opening, an influencer posting an Instagram Live about their ketamine therapy experience, or your CEO’s thought leadership column appearing in an industry trade publication. Brands can earn that exposure through a mixture of PR and marketing techniques. Earned media can include:

• Articles and op-eds in magazines, newspapers, journals and digital publications
• Newsletters, e-blasts, podcasts, blogs, vlogs and third-party social media posts
• Coverage by radio and television news stations
• Product reviews and gift guides
• Snippets and SERPs on search engines

Paid Media for Psychedelics Brands

Paid media intersect marketing and advertising, just as earned media is where marketing and PR integrate. Paid media is also one of the most highly regulated content marketing categories, making it especially difficult for brands in cannabis, psychedelics and other highly regulated industries to participate. Nevertheless, paid media can include:

• Sponsored ads on Google and other search engines
• Paid ads on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram
• Billboards, bus wraps and aerial advertising
• Television and radio commercials
• Newspaper and magazine ads
• Digital pay-per-click ads
• Affiliate marketing

How Are Different Types of Psychedelics Marketed? 

Slowly but surely, psychedelics are developing a new reputation that is less Haight-Ashbury and more Johns Hopkins. As with cannabis, some psychedelics brands are leaning into brand messaging that overlaps with that of the $1.5 trillion global wellness market and natural products marketing for categories like food, supplements and alternative medicines. Others are building on their roots in the equally strong $1.5 trillion global pharmaceutical market. 

Psychedelics marketing isn’t a monolith, however. Within the broader psychedelics industries, some of the markets for individual psychedelic compounds are more mature than others. Psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA, LSD, DMT and ibogaine have all garnered different levels of interest and funding from researchers, and clinical protocols for these substances have advanced at different rates. Here’s what the landscape looks like for different categories of psychedelics marketing:

Psilocybin Marketing

Where is Psilocybin Legal?

Psilocybin—the active ingredient that makes Psilocybe, Panaeolus, Copelandia, Inocybe, Pluteus, Gymnopilus and Pholiotina mushrooms so magical—has a head start over other Schedule 1 psychedelic compounds when it comes to legalization, regulation and FDA consideration for approval.

In 2019 voters in Oakland, California and Denver decriminalized magic mushrooms—the Denver decision set up the state of Colorado to decriminalize psilocybin under Proposition 122 in 2022. In 2020 Washington D.C. decriminalized, while the following year three towns in Massachusetts ended magic mushroom criminalization. 

As of January 1, 2023 Oregon is the first state to fully legalize the administration of adult use of psilocybin at licensed service centers. Through Measure 109, Oregon has set a precedent for psychedelics policy already reverberating throughout like-minded states and municipalities. Under Colorado’s recent law, for example, not only is possession of magic mushrooms no longer a priority for law enforcement, the law also permits growing and sharing of psychedelic mushrooms as long as there is no sale. 

Like Oregon, Colorado law outlines a clinical, rather than retail, model for legal sale and use of psilocybin. Governor Jared Polis appointed 15 people to a Natural Medicine Advisory Board to help the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies determine how best to implement Prop 122 and figure out what regulations should be put in place. Grasslands is very proud that our own Ricardo Baca serves on the Natural Medicine Advisory Board.

Psilocybin Marketing Regulations

Cannabis businesses are famously limited in the marketing and advertising channels they can use to promote their brands and products. Under federal prohibition and state-by-state legalization, the cannabis industry operates amidst a complex regulatory and legal patchwork. It remains unclear today whether cannabis will eventually be legislated after federal legalization as a recreational product like alcohol, or a medicinal pharmaceutical one, like Paxlovid. 

That said, plenty of cannabis marketing takes place, and some psilocybin marketing regulations are comparable to cannabis compliance rules. Oregon, for example, has similar psilocybin labeling requirements for whole fungi, homogenized fungi, psilocybin extract or edible psilocybin products. 

The Beaver State also stipulates that psilocybin licensees cannot advertise on television, radio, billboards, print media or internet advertising unless “the licensee has reliable evidence that no more than 30 percent of the audience for the program, publication or Internet website in or on which the advertising is to air or appear is reasonably expected to be under the age of 21.” 

This, as with cannabis, is due to the federal illegality of psilocybin at the federal level, and the regulation of most telecom channels by the FCC.

What Types of Businesses Need Psilocybin Marketing?

Both Oregon and Colorado have been clear from the outset that psilocybin will be regulated with its medical efficacy in mind—not its recreational uses. However, ancillary services for the psychedelics industry, mycological cultivators and other types of business are sure to support those clinics, as similar businesses do for cannabis retailers. Some of the business categories that will need psilocybin marketing include:

• Clinics
• Mental health care facilities
• Ancillary service providers
• Cultivators

Ketamine Marketing

Where Is Ketamine Legal?

Unlike psilocybin, ketamine has been legal in the United States for regulated use by physicians since 1970. It was first synthesized in 1962, and proved so useful for veterinary, emergency and pediatric applications that it is included on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines. 

Like so much else in American drug culture, the Vietnam War changed ketamine’s trajectory. Veterans who had experienced the psychogenic effects of ketamine in field hospitals and sought relief from the psychological effects of the war helped popularize “Special K” as a party drug throughout the 1980s and later the rave culture that peaked during the 1990s and early aughts.

The popularity of recreational ketamine did lead the DEA to classify it as a Schedule III drug in 1999— the same category that includes Tylenol with codeine, testosterone and anabolic steroids. But because ketamine was never made federally illegal like cannabis, psilocybin, LSD or other psychoactive drugs, research has continued unimpeded since its discovery. It was in the 1990s that researchers began to look into ketamine’s psychiatric and psychological potential, discovering it has efficacy not only for treating physical pain, but mental health conditions like depression, too. 

While ketamine wasn’t approved by the FDA for applications beyond anesthesia until 2019 (when it approved esketamine, a nasal spray prescribed for depression), doctors have prescribed the drug off-label for depression, anxiety and PTSD for over a decade. Telehealth ketamine clinics that could connect with patients for therapeutic sessions remotely while offering medicated lozenges by mail were already growing in popularity when COVID-19 reached the United States. 

As the on-going national mental health crisis emerged in the wake of the pandemic, telehealth regulations were further loosened and the popularity of oral ketamine only increased—leading to a spike in interest from investors in clinical ketamine startups. 

Today ketamine is legal in most states as long as it’s obtained through a clinic or pharmacy and used under medical supervision. That may mean paying hundreds or thousands out of pocket, however, as insurance coverage for off-label use can be dicey.

Ketamine Marketing Regulations

With ketamine startups comes ketamine marketing. Like other psychedelics, marketing regulations largely hinge on a substance’s approval by federal agencies including the FDA, FCC, DEA and others. The FDA is particularly applicable when it comes to federally legal ketamine, especially regarding health claims. Cannabis companies, for example, cannot make health claims about their products because of a lack of FDA approval. 

As the American Bar Association noted in a 2022 letter on legal precautions for ketamine operators, “FDA approval is an assurance that the drug works safely and effectively prior to marketing.” It wasn’t until esketamine—a concentrated nasal spray form of ketamine—was approved for treatment-resistant depression that brick-and-mortar and telehealth clinics were able to widely advertise ketamine for mental health treatment.

That led to a slew of online ads and paid social media campaigns by ketamine clinics, particularly during the COVID-19 emergency. The DEA has since signaled it will tighten the telemedicine rules that contributed to the pandemic-era ketamine boom. But until then, ketamine clinics still have a lot of room to move—and are capitalizing on online marketing leeway as much as other direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisers. 

What Types of Businesses Need Ketamine Marketing?

As with most psychedelics, ketamine is regulated as a pharmaceutical and has to adhere to attendant marketing and advertising regulations. Because of ketamine’s legal status, the types of businesses that need ketamine marketing include:

• Brick-and-mortar ketamine and psychedelics clinics
• Telehealth pharmaceutical and ketamine clinics
• FDA-approved ketamine brands like SPRAVATO®

MDMA Marketing

Where Is MDMA Legal?

Scientists have known about MDMA since the year the Titanic went down, but the drug also known as molly, mandy and ecstasy was only added to the list of Schedule I drugs by the DEA in 1985. MDMA had made it into the disco and club scene at least as early as 1970, but was not added to Schedule 1 in 1970, when its precursor MDA joined LSD, heroin and cannabis on a new list of federally prohibited substances. It took another 15 years before MDMA’s popularity on the party scene—which spiked in part thanks to The Texas Group’s rebranding of MDMA as “Ecstasy”—put it on the radar of federal officials and Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign. 

Although MDMA is illegal in all 50 states thanks to its Schedule 1 status, some individual states are eying MDMA legalization and decriminalization as they reconsider other psychedelics, including psilocybin. As of 2023, New York legislators are considering several bills related to psychedelics, including one that would reschedule MDMA. Missouri and Nevada are both considering bills related to psilocybin and MDMA decriminalization, too.

That said, MDMA is lagging far behind cannabis and psilocybin in terms of mainstream acceptance and getting the green light for clinical applications. In 2023, the FDA approved a limited clinical trial into the efficacy of MDMA for tolerability in patients with schizophrenia. The FDA has also signaled it may soon approve MDMA-assisted therapy for those with PTSD. How that will impact its accessibility and marketability remains to be seen.

MDMA Marketing Regulations

Currently, the only widespread marketing campaigns concerning MDMA are anti-drug spots like the ones run by Partnership for a Drug-Free America or the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy. That may change if and when the FDA shifts its official stance. Should MDMA be legalized for medical use, marketing regulations will likely be in line with those for other pharmaceuticals. 

Given the huge popularity of MDMA as a recreational drug and its longstanding presence in the rave, EDM and club scenes, it’s likely to appeal to telehealth startups in line with ketamine’s market explosion. However, if regulators crack down on the channels ketamine clinics have used to market their services over the past five years, that could radically shift the MDMA marketing landscape. 

What Types of Businesses Need MDMA Marketing?

Currently, the only businesses that need MDMA marketing are those that operate on the illicit market. MDMA manufacturers are advertising much as they have for decades—relying on distinctive tablet designs for product differentiation in an underground market. Given how fast things are changing in and around the nascent psychedelics market, however, MDMA is undergoing as big a public relations shift as psilocybin or cannabis have in recent years.

LSD Marketing

Lysergic acid diethylamide, better known as LSD, might be one of the most famous psychedelics out there but it’s been illegal in the United States since the federal government classified it as a Schedule I controlled substance in 1968. As a Schedule I substance in the same category as cannabis and MDMA, the federal government does not recognize any “currently accepted medical use” or “accepted safety for use under medical supervision” for LSD. 

Is LSD Legal?

That legal status is something of a 180 from how LSD was initially regarded after it was first synthesized by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938—and his accidental discovery of LSD’s psychedelic properties five years later. The latter occurred on April 19, 1943 during Hofmann’s two-wheeled commute home, which the psychedelic community now commemorates as an annual holiday known as Bicycle Day.

In the decades following Hofmann’s accidental psychonautic voyage, LSD became something of a darling for researchers, psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies. Most famously, LSD was the subject of a CIA interrogation experiment known as Project MKUltra, which ultimately contributed to LSD’s breakthrough into the mainstream. 

Stanford University graduate student Ken Kesey, who participated in MKUltra as a volunteer test subject, became so interested in the psychedelic experience that he began hosting “Acid Tests”  throughout the Bay Area, kickstarting the long-standing association between 1960s counterculture and LSD. 

Kesey’s Acid Tests, produced in association with a group known as the Merry Pranksters, were the subject of seminal psychedelic books like The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by journalist Tom Wolfe, as well as Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.

On the East Coast, psychologist Timothy Leary began his own LSD experiments at Millbrook, a private mansion in upstate New York, to pick up where his research left off after Harvard terminated his lectureship. Leary’s friendships with literary figures like Allen Ginsberg further contributed to the synergy between LSD and the bohemian underground.

Indeed, the role of LSD in a rapid cultural shift and growing opposition to the Vietnam War throughout the 1960s contributed to bad PR for a substance that has shown promising results in studies for substance use disorder treatment and other psychotherapeutic applications. It’s only in recent years that scientific research into LSD has been renewed—which will play a key role in and future changes to the legal status of this iconic psychedelic.

LSD Marketing Regulations

In some regards, LSD has some of the best marketing of any psychedelic out there. For one, underground manufacturers and distributors have distinguished their products for years with distinctive blotter art (the paper sheets of dosage squares) that has become a collectible genre in its own right. It’s also hard to deny the public relations power of figures like Kesey, Leary and Owsley “Bear” Stanley, who drew tremendous attention as psychedelic evangelists throughout the 1960s and beyond. 

The cultural influence of LSD grew tremendously thanks to artists and musicians from the Grateful Dead to The Beatles. Lyrical euphemisms like “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and word-of-mouth reviews of Stanley’s legendary purple acid eclipsed any erstwhile marketing efforts by pharmaceutical companies like Sandoz, which at one time had hoped to market LSD under the brand name Delysid.

What Types of Businesses Need LSD Marketing?

As a Schedule I substance with no state legalization carve outs, LSD currently cannot be legally marketed for any purpose. It remains to be seen whether legislation like Oregon and Colorado’s psilocybin regulation bills and those states’ regulatory advisory boards eventually extend decriminalization or legalization to this storied substance. If and when LSD ever becomes legal for therapeutic or recreational use, lysergic acid diethylamide will likely need a major public relations overhaul to counteract decades of negative messaging promulgated by the War on Drugs, not to mention urban legends and lingering stigma from the Swinging Sixties.

DMT Marketing

Where Is DMT Legal?

Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), sometimes referred to as “the spirit molecule,” is different from other psychedelics in that it occurs naturally in several plant species. 

DMT can be found in many members of the pea family, the nutmeg family, the yopo tree species and plants used to make ayahuasca, including the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and the Psychotria viridis shrub. Of the hundreds of plants that naturally produce DMT, however, few produce it in high enough concentrations to produce psychoactive effects in humans.

DMT is classified as a Schedule 1 drug under the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 as well as the United Nations 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, which curtails the international DMT trade and limits such trade to scientific and medical purposes. 

Because ayahuasca has significant spiritual and cultural meaning for Indigenous communities in the Amazon and Orinoco river valleys where this substance originated, it is decriminalized and use is widely accepted in Brazil, Costa Rica, Mexico and Peru. 

DMT Marketing Regulations

Like many psychedelic substances, DMT can’t be advertised in the traditional sense using strategies similar to cannabis marketing and cannabis PR tactics—at least not in the United States. That said, the legality of ayahuasca in many South American countries has contributed to a cottage industry of psychedelic tourism that has become more and more popular with travelers from countries that prohibit DMT and ayahuasca possession and consumption. 

DMT, and ayahuasca in particular, have been informally marketed as a tool for the creative class, tech workers and executives to bring fresh insights to their fields. In recent years, ayahuasca has been touted as “the drug of choice for the age of kale”—and the next big thing in the $5.6 trillion global wellness industry. 

Sometimes referred to as “the businessman’s special” or the “lunch-hour psychedelic” because DMT creates a relatively short trip compared to MDMA, psilocybin or LSD, messaging around the spirit molecule is already developing in synergy with the needs and wants of affluent, liberal knowledge workers eager for enlightenment.

As international interest in ayahuasca retreats has grown, however, so has the prevalence and urgency of discourse on the colonization of Indigenous entheogens and the impact of cultural appropriation on both Indigenous communities and the nascent psychedelics sector.

What Types of Businesses Need DMT Marketing?

Right now, it’s largely hospitality businesses—not pharmaceutical companies—that are marketing ayahuasca and other DMT-based psychedelics. That said, drug manufacturers aren’t far behind. The shorter-term effects of DMT aren’t just convenient for Silicon Valley execs, but for any patients trying to fit clinical psychedelic treatments into their busy schedules. 

Recent scientific research into DMT holds particular promise for therapeutic applications like end-of-life care and hospice. Also of interest is the development of extended-state DMT trips that allow patients to more deeply immerse in the unique insights, visuals and landscapes DMT consumption produces. 

Ibogaine Marketing

Is Ibogaine Legal?

Ibogaine is a substance naturally occurring in the Apocynaceae plant family, and particularly in the iboga tree native to Central Africa, where the Indigenous Bwiti people have used ibogaine in their spiritual practice for millennia. Although the CIA studied ibogaine alongside LSD and other psychedelics as part of the MKUltra project, ibogaine never became as widespread in the counterculture as magic mushrooms, acid or cannabis. It did show early promise, however, for use in the treatment of substance use disorders, as pioneered by researcher Howard Lotsof in the early 1960s. 

Ibogaine is illegal in the United States under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act like most other well-known psychedelics. That said, Colorado’s Proposition 122, which in 2022 decriminalized psilocybin, mescaline and DMT for personal use, also included ibogaine—although ibogaine cannot be shared or sold. 

Ibogaine Marketing Regulations

Because ibogaine is outlawed or in a legal gray area in most industrialized countries, there aren’t really many marketing regulations specific to ibogaine. Ibogaine’s legal status is different in Mexico and Brazil, where ibogaine clinics have become a niche alternative to traditional drug rehab facilities—particularly for opioid users. 

Until there is formal federal approval of ibogaine for addiction treatment, marketing regulations won’t allow ibogaine to be officially touted alongside methadone, buprenorphine and naltrexone as a medication for substance use disorder treatment. 

What Types of Businesses Need Ibogaine Marketing?

As is the case with DMT and ayahuasca, international hospitality businesses and wellness retreats will be the primary marketers of ibogaine until its medical efficacy is formally acknowledged. Already, the growing public and cultural awareness of ibogaine signals the changes ahead. 

Indeed, Geoff Rickly of the post-hardcore band Thursday depicts such a clinic in his debut novel Someone Who Isn’t Me, in which the protagonist travels to Mexico to kick a heroin habit using ibogaine. That’s just one example of the growing public and cultural awareness of ibogaine that points to how this psychedelic will be marketed in the future.