“I NEVER PICTURED a world where marijuana would be anywhere close to legal, and it’s mind-blowing to me that mushrooms are being decriminalized everywhere,” says Shane Mauss, a comedian who tours the country discussing his psychedelic experiences. For the 2018 documentary Psychonautics, he consumed a wide variety of substances on camera, from ayahuasca to LSD to ketamine to DMT, a smokable drug known to provoke especially strong hallucinations in which users sometimes encounter cartoonish “entities.” Mauss also hosts a science podcast called Here We Are, where he shares his thoughts about the mainstreaming of psychedelic drugs, the surprising pace of legalization efforts, and the role that podcaster Joe Rogan and other public figures play in normalizing psychedelics.
In June, Reason’s Nick Gillespie caught up with Mauss at the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference in Denver. Attended by a reported 13,000 people, the conference was organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit that is in the final stages of gaining Food and Drug Administration approval for the use of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.
Reason: What does the psychedelic renaissance mean to you?
Mauss: I don’t know what the psychedelic renaissance means to me. I can
