Questions
Frequently asked
The things people write in and ask, answered plainly.
No. We publish information and, increasingly, a directory of legal retreat centres. We do not sell substances, source them, or tell anyone where to. Messages asking us to will not get a reply.
Because wild peyote grows slowly and is assessed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, and it is the sacrament of the Native American Church. In 2020 the National Council of Native American Churches and the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative asked that decriminalisation efforts leave peyote out, and Colorado's natural medicine law excludes peyote by name. We point that demand toward cultivated San Pedro instead, never wild plants, which carries the same primary alkaloid. Our position page cites every source.
It depends enormously on where that is, and the answer changes. Psilocybin is licensed in Oregon, unscheduled in Jamaica, decriminalised for personal possession in Portugal and prescribed only by authorised psychiatrists in Australia. Check our cited legal status table as a starting point, then confirm with a qualified local source before acting.
Usually not safely, and with ayahuasca the combination can be fatal, because it contains MAOIs, and combining those with an SSRI or SNRI can cause serotonin syndrome. Lithium plus a classic psychedelic has been linked to seizures. Tapering off a psychiatric medication is itself medically risky. This is a conversation for a clinician, not a retreat's intake form.
By the law and the enforcement record where a centre operates. We list centres where the medicine they serve is licensed, unscheduled, unregulated or tolerated, and, under a separate label, "Illegal but tolerated in practice", where national law prohibits it but retreats operate openly and a dated news search found no reported prosecution of a retreat. That label means participants and operators carry real legal risk, and it can change without notice. Every listing states the law in its place, including where the medicine is illegal, and a centre is listed only while it is verifiably operating. Peyote is never listed, whatever the law, for conservation and sovereignty reasons. Profiles are built from state licence registers, the centre's own website and independent sources, each cited and dated. No centre has been independently audited, and every profile says so and shows any public record, such as a reported death or a regulator action. Paying us will not buy a listing, remove a record or change a profile.
Through paid featured placement ($149 a month per centre, labelled "Featured"; it never hides or changes a centre's public record). We do not sell leads and charge centres nothing per enquiry; an enquiry reaches a centre only if you tick the box asking us to share it with that one centre. The Amazon links to our book, Occasioned, earn a small commission as an Amazon Associate. We don't run programmatic advertising. Every commercial relationship, and every outbound link that could earn a commission, is listed on the disclosure page (/Disclosure).
No. It's educational. Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prescription, or a recommendation to use any substance. Psychedelics carry genuine psychiatric and cardiac risks, and those risks are not evenly distributed across people.
Yes to both, and corrections especially. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we'll fix it and say that we did.
Something we haven't covered? Ask us directly.