Can the psychedelic experience be removed from psychedelic medicine without removing part of what makes it therapeutic?
This question has become increasingly urgent with the development of novel compounds inspired by classic psychedelics, particularly non-hallucinogenic “psychoplastogens,” designed to promote neuroplasticity while minimizing or eliminating psychedelic subjective effects.
These compounds could make treatment more accessible to people who are unable or wary of undergoing an intense psychedelic experience.
They also appeal to pharmaceutical developers because they may require less clinical supervision and fit more readily into standardized, scalable models of healthcare.
At ICPR 2026, Ido Hartogsohn examined this development from historical and biopolitical perspectives, situating it within a broader movement toward the medicalization, standardization, and control of subjective experience.
In a complementary presentation, Manal Al-Hammadi argued that psychedelics expose a fundamental category error in mental-health governance: context-dependent, relational interventions are being channeled through regulatory systems designed primarily to evaluate stand-alone pharmaceutical products.
A recent critical essay by Heller and Hendlin (2026) extends this conversation by examining psychedelic medicine through the lens of healthcare commercialization and commodification.
Drawing on an ‘ecodelic’ framework, the authors approach psychedelics not as context-independent pharmacological agents but as substances whose effects emerge through relationships among neurobiology, subjective experience, therapeutic setting, culture, and the wider social and ecological environment.
The article does not dismiss the possible clinical value of non-hallucinogenic compounds. Instead, it asks what may be lost when experience and context are treated as dispensable obstacles for efficient drug delivery.
Heller and Hendlin argue that psychedelic medicines should not simply be redesigned to meet existing institutional demands for predictability, throughput, and scalability, but that healthcare systems must also be prepared to adapt to the distinctive experiential and contextual requirements of psychedelic care.
Their intervention ultimately raises a broader question for the field: will psychedelic medicine transform existing models of healthcare, or will those models transform psychedelics into more familiar – and more readily marketable – pharmaceutical products?
