Psychedelics, Wheat, and Rhizomes

How do psychedelics spread, and how do they affect human societies?

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Humans use psychedelics. But do psychedelics ‘use’ humans too? Or, another way of asking it; how do psychedelics spread, and affect our world?

One of the perks of writing a book on psychedelics is that I get to nerd out with people like Dr Leor Roseman. We zoomed this week; Leor on his houseboat in London, me on my floating home in Sausalito, so Leor dubbed it a “B2B call” - boat-to-boat.

He also reminded me of this line from Yuval Noah Harari:

“It’s not clear whether we domesticated wheat, or wheat domesticated us.”

Harari’s talking about how humans plant wheat, irrigate it, defend it, ship it around the world, sometimes organise our lives around it. We even build religions on it. Wheat gets global dominance; humans get to eat cake. So who’s really winning, y’know?

Leor’s work on what he calls psychedelic diffusion asks a similar question: how does psychedelic use spread, and what are the factors and agents of that spread? Leor explores this question in his provocative ICPR talk. Listening to him, I was reminded of the ongoing dialectic; to what extent are psychedelics just tools we use, versus agents in a co-evolutionary process?

Psychedelic use has shaped rituals, musical and artistic styles, belief systems, startup pitch decks, Substack posts, and more. Some people - especially seasoned psychonauts - will tell you this is partly because plants and fungi are sentient. But you don’t need to go that far to see that these substances shape us. Culture, after all, is full of feedback loops.

Leor’s talk also made me think of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, who proposed the concept of the rhizome - a model of culture as a sprawling, mycelium-like network of influence, rather than a neat up-down hierarchy. Unlike a tree, which grows from root to branch in a vertical structure, a rhizome spreads horizontally. In Deleuze’s conception, a rhizome has no center, or authoritative source of hierarchy where someone - or something - is ‘in charge’. 

Deleuze used it as a metaphor for how ideas spread - not from a single source, but through shifting, non-hierarchical connections. It’s a good fit for how psychedelics seem to move through culture; not linearly, but in lateral bursts, across unexpected terrains. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘deterritorialization’ also feels appropriate; psychedelics repeatedly originate in one geography or culture, before detaching from that territory and landing in a new context.

Psychedelics clearly affect humans, and our culture, far beyond an individual trip. From the foundation of the Native American Church to the evolution of Burning Man, from the music of The Beatles to how Stewart Brand’s LSD trip created clamour for the famous ‘Earthrise’ photo, psychedelics have played powerful roles in shaping how we see our selves, our world, and the relationship between the two.

One of the themes I’m exploring in my book is how psychedelics are intertwined with cultures and societies - so, selfishly, I’d love to get your own favourite examples - big or small - of a) how psychedelics have spread, and b) how they’ve affected human societies and cultures.

Feel free to leave a comment, or drop me an email!