Axel Quack
Residency, banking, assets, business — the classic flags. This essay plants one more: the mind itself.
I have kept a mindfulness practice since 2014 — first through the corporate lens of Google's Search Inside Yourself and MBSR/MBCT, later through Daoist training, and since then as a daily habit that survives in my calendar to this day. Twelve years of watching my own mind, and I have come to a conclusion that sounds grandiose only until you test it: the mind is the last sovereign territory — the one jurisdiction you cannot offshore, because you are standing on it.
This essay is about what happens when that territory becomes contested ground. I write it as an observer, not a practitioner of anything chemical: about the ancient technologies of consciousness, the state's century-long attempt to schedule them, the regulatory reversal now unfolding in real time, and the arrival of artificial intelligence — which is busy engineering both the trip and the stillness.
Cognitive liberty: the flag nobody plants
Axel Quack
Individual sovereignty, personal empowerment — the manifesto this blog stands on.
Flag theory tells us to diversify jurisdictions so no single state owns your life. The Network State extended the logic to citizenship itself. But there is a jurisdiction deeper than residency and more personal than a bank account: the right to determine the contents and states of your own consciousness — what scholars of drug policy call cognitive liberty.
For most of history, that right was negotiated locally: priest, shaman, sacrament, custom. The modern state replaced negotiation with a schedule. The Controlled Substances Act of 1970 placed psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and MDMA in Schedule I — defined as having no accepted medical use — and most of the world followed. Whatever one thinks of the substances themselves, the structural claim is extraordinary: the state asserted the authority to decide which states of consciousness its citizens may enter. No other domain of personal life is regulated at the level of the experience itself.
The reversal of that claim, now visibly underway, is therefore not a health story. It is a sovereignty story.
Ten thousand years of the technology of consciousness
Before the scheduling, there was the sacrament. The cultural record is long and remarkably consistent:
- Mesoamerica. Mushroom stones and codex iconography point to ritual psilocybin use across the Maya world; the Aztecs called the mushrooms teonanácatl — "flesh of the gods" — a name documented by colonial chroniclers and rediscovered for the West when R. Gordon Wasson's 1957 Life essay and his Oaxaca sessions with the curandera María Sabina made world news.
- Eleusis. For nearly two millennia, initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries drank the kykeon before their revelation; Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck's ergot hypothesis (1978) remains the most famous attempt to read the rite as chemically assisted.
- The Vedic world. The Rig Veda hymns soma, an unidentified ritual preparation — Wasson's Amanita muscaria candidature is contested, but the pattern is not: a culture naming its access to the divine by its drink.
- The Americas, ongoing. The Native American Church's peyote sacrament and Amazonian ayahuasca traditions — the latter now entangled with exactly the tourism and church-of-wellness phenomena I was collecting links on in 2022.
Then the twentieth century compressed the arc: Albert Hofmann synthesizes LSD in 1938 and discovers its effects in 1943, and later isolates psilocybin; psychiatry studies the compounds seriously (the Good Friday Experiment at Marsh Chapel, 1962); the CIA abuses them (MKUltra); Timothy Leary weaponizes them culturally; and the reaction arrives — scheduling, the War on Drugs, and fifty years of frozen research. The 2006 Johns Hopkins psilocybin studies restarted the clock. What we are watching now is not a trend. It is the unwinding of a fifty-year exception in a ten-thousand-year continuity.
The 2026 reversal
The regulatory dam is breaking in real time, and it is breaking through the institutions that built it:
- April 24, 2026: the FDA issued National Priority Vouchers to three psychedelic programs — Compass Pathways' synthetic psilocybin (COMP360) for treatment-resistant depression, the Usona Institute's psilocybin for major depressive disorder, and Transcend Therapeutics' methylone for PTSD — putting them on a 1-to-2-month review track.
- July 7, 2026: Compass reported positive 26-week Phase-3 results (COMP006) and began a rolling NDA. An executive order (EO 14401) now pushes federal agencies to clear the path, and the FDA holds a public hearing on therapeutic psychedelic use on September 14, 2026, after finalizing guidance on psychedelic trial design.
- Australia remains the only country where MDMA-assisted therapy is legally prescribable (since 2023) — early PTSD cohorts treated with zero serious adverse events reported.
- Oregon and Colorado run state-regulated psilocybin service models — not prescriptions, but supervised access; Portugal and the Czech Republic have decriminalized possession.
Read through this blog's lens, the pattern is pure flag theory: jurisdictional arbitrage of consciousness. Psychedelic tourism — retreats in Jamaica and Costa Rica, churches claiming sacramental protection, clinics in the few legal corners — is the perpetual-traveler strategy applied to inner states. Where one jurisdiction schedules, another ministers; where medicine is blocked, religion provides the wrapper. The 2022 draft of this essay was a link dump about exactly that industry. Four years on, the industry has something it didn't have then: the FDA on the other side of the door.
Two tensions worth naming. First, medicalization vs. sacrament: the approval path demands a clinic, a therapist, and a protocol — which legitimizes the compounds while domesticating the experience. Second, access: approved psychedelic therapy will likely price like specialty care, which is precisely why the tourism and church channels will keep growing underneath it.
AI enters the trip
Here the story turns, because the entity now engineering consciousness is not a state, a church, or a traveler — it is a model.
The tripless trip: AI-discovered psychoplastogens
David Olson's lab trained machine-learning classifiers (the PsychLight models) to predict whether a molecule will be psychedelic — from in-vitro receptor data and, beautifully, from the structure-activity tables in Shulgin's classic PIHKAL/TiHKAL compendia. The goal is not better trips but psychoplastogens: compounds that promote the neural plasticity credited for psychedelics' therapeutic effects, minus the hallucination. Tabernanthalog (published in Nature Neuroscience, 2025), zalsupindole in clinical development, and Delix Therapeutics' EB-003 — reporting positive early clinical results — are the spearhead. The Atlantic put the 2026 mood well: researchers are "engineering the perfect psychedelic."
The structural implication is the interesting part: AI is negotiating the molecule so the state doesn't have to negotiate the experience. A tripless psychoplastogen needs no guide, no ceremony, no eight-hour supervised session — it fits inside the medical system as it exists, which is exactly why capital is flooding toward it. Whether something essential is lost when you delete the experience while keeping the plasticity is the question the tradition-minded keep asking, and it deserves to be asked.
The guided trip: virtual psychedelics and the AI sitter
The opposite vector: keep the experience, remove the molecule. A 2025 Nature Mental Health commentary proposes AI-generated "virtual psychedelics" — immersive AI+VR environments designed to induce psychedelic-like states therapeutically, with none of the pharmacology and all of the controllability. Around it, the session layer is being automated: biometric monitoring during sessions, AI-assisted integration afterward, and the inevitable chatbots.
I have been skeptical of this corner for years. In 2022 I clipped Molly Fischer's The Therapy-App Fantasy: Woebot, the Stanford-built CBT chatbot, "interactive workbooks" posing as therapists, and Sherry Turkle's warning that technological solutions arrive as "better than nothing" and graduate to being treated as "better than anything." The LLM generation of therapy bots is more fluent and more available, and the access gap they address is real — but the transaction still shapes the therapy, and your inner life is now also the training data. The question is not whether AI can hold space. It is whose interests the space is held for.
The measured mind: AI-personalized mindfulness
The third vector meets my own practice directly. The 2026 mindfulness stack is converging on six layers: AI-personalized sessions, biometric wearables with HRV feedback, EEG neurofeedback, immersive VR environments, dynamic voice coaches, and predictive wellness systems that anticipate stress before you feel it. The Quantified Self crowd asked a decade ago whether inner peace could be quantified; the market has answered with dashboards.
I meditate without one, and I think the instinct behind the dashboard is honest — feedback accelerates training — while its failure mode is specific: a meditation optimized for the metric is no longer the practice. Mindfulness, as I learned it, is precisely the capacity to be with what is unmeasured. The sovereign version of this technology is the one you run yourself, on your own hardware, with the data staying yours — everything else is telemetry about your soul, sold upstream.
Machine elves meet machine intelligence
One detour the essay owes its title. Terence McKenna famously reported that tryptamine states are populated by "self-transforming machine elves"; Rick Strassman's DMT research catalogued encounters with what he called electric elves. For decades that was the strangest corner of the ethnography.
It reads differently now that actual machine intelligence exists. The mirror runs both directions: psychedelics are used as probes of consciousness (the "emotional breakthrough" work of Roseman and others treats the trip as a short, chemically induced problem-solving episode — a microcosm of the mind solving itself), while AI is increasingly used as a probe of mind in return. e/acc speaks of intelligence and consciousness colonizing the cosmos; the older shamanic vocabulary would simply say the elves got real. I don't take a position on the ontology. I note that every era builds its cosmology out of its most powerful technology — and ours is the first whose technology talks back.
A sovereign inner stack
What does cognitive liberty look like practiced, rather than claimed? A stack, like any other sovereignty project:
- The practice is yours. Meditation, breathwork, contemplation — the ancient, legal, side-effect-free core. Daily, unmeasured or self-measured, no subscription required. This is the base layer and it predates every vendor.
- The information is yours. If you use therapy apps, wearables, or AI companions, treat mental-health data as the most sensitive data you will ever generate — more than finances, more than mail. Prefer local-first tools and self-hosted inference where they exist; read the data clauses of everything else. Your inner states, inferred at scale, are a commodity nobody should own but you.
- The jurisdiction is chosen, not inherited. Legal access to psychedelic therapy is appearing patchwork — Australia, Oregon, Colorado, soon perhaps FDA channels. If it ever becomes relevant to you, it arrives through licensed clinicians, not tourism brokers; the flag-theory move is to know the map, not to dodge it.
- The narrative is yours. States schedule, churches sanctify, platforms quantify, and AI optimizes. The sovereign stance toward all four is the same one this blog applies to banks and passports: use what serves you, hold the keys, and never mistake the registry for the reality.
Final Thoughts
In 2022 this piece was a folder of links about wellness churches and VR meditation. In 2026 it is a constitutional moment: the FDA is holding hearings on the therapeutic future of compounds it spent fifty years declaring worthless, AI is redesigning both the molecule and the meditation, and the oldest human technologies of consciousness are re-entering history through the door of medicine.
Cognitive liberty is the flag nobody plants because the territory was never supposed to be visible. It is visible now. The Maya named their sacrament "flesh of the gods"; the scheduling state named it Schedule I; the market is naming it a pipeline; the models are naming it a dataset. The sovereign answer is to name it yourself — and to keep the one jurisdiction no one can revoke, because it was never granted: the watchful, unhurried attention you bring to your own mind.
The website and the information contained therein are not intended to be a source of advice or credit analysis with respect to the material presented, and the information and/or documents contained on this website do not constitute investment advice. Nothing in this essay is medical advice or an endorsement of the use of any substance; the legal status of the compounds discussed varies by jurisdiction.