It started with a simple question at a workshop.

A man I'd just met — we were both from New York City — leaned over and asked: Do you journey?

I said yes.

That was the entire intake process.

No forms. No health history. No conversation about what I was looking for, what I was carrying, or what I might encounter. Just: do you journey, and show up at this address.

I showed up. And I kept showing up — for months. What I eventually learned inside that group is one of the reasons I do the work I do now.

Show Up and Find Out

The group was led by a woman I'll call AB. She presented herself as experienced, as someone with access to powerful medicines and a deep understanding of how to use them. The operation had a professional veneer — there was onboarding documentation, a screening form, references to decades of research. The language was warm and credible. You're here to learn. You're safe. Your facilitator carefully monitors your safety throughout the session.

What those materials never mentioned — not once — was what we would actually be taking.

The vibe was intentionally mysterious — this wasn't advertised anywhere, wasn't affiliated with any organization, didn't have a public presence. You were brought in through personal connection. That exclusivity felt like a feature. In retrospect, it was a design choice.

The framing on the substances was similarly vague. We were told they were hard openers. Plant medicine. Something called kana. People in the group speculated about what was actually in them. Nobody seemed to know for certain. AB didn't volunteer the information, and asking too many questions was quietly discouraged.

The onboarding materials even provided a mantra for navigating the experience: Trust, Let Go, Be Open. TLO. It was presented as a widely used framework in plant medicine work, borrowed from respected researchers in the field. And maybe it is. But in this context, it functioned as something else — a pre-emptive instruction to surrender your discernment before you'd even arrived.

I later learned — piecing things together over time — that the substances included MDA, MDMA, Syrian Rue, and barbiturates, among other things.

Think about that for a second. Syrian Rue is an MAO inhibitor. Combined with MDA or MDMA, it creates a pharmacological interaction that can be medically dangerous — particularly for anyone on certain medications, with certain cardiac conditions, or who simply isn't in optimal physical health. Barbiturates carry their own significant risks.

None of us consented to any of this. Because none of us were told. The screening form asked about our health. The intake documents promised safety monitoring. But the actual substances — the thing you most need to know to give informed consent — were never disclosed. We were handed a mantra about trust and told to open up.

Why I Stayed — And Why I Started Assisting

I want to be honest about something: the experiences themselves were often powerful. That's part of how these dynamics work. There were sessions that felt genuinely meaningful — moments of emotional opening, of connection with other participants, of something that resembled healing.

That's the hook. And it kept me coming back, even as other things were accumulating in the background.

The thing that fully engaged my concern — the thing that shifted me from participant to something more watchful — was an 80-year-old woman who attended the group.

I want to say that again. An 80-year-old woman was being given undisclosed combinations of MDMA, MDA, Syrian Rue, and barbiturates, with no informed consent, in a group setting led by someone who had made clear she didn't welcome questions about what she was administering.

I started assisting not because AB asked me to, but because I felt a need to be present. To watch. To be a point of safety in a container that I was increasingly unsure about.

The Red Flags That Kept Accumulating

Looking back, the signs were there from early on. I just didn't have the framework to name them.

"Trust the process." The onboarding materials said it. AB said it. Whenever someone raised a concern — about how they were feeling, about something that seemed off, about a question they had — the response was a variation of trust the process or you're in your head too much. It's the kind of language that sounds spiritual but functions as a silencer. It reframes legitimate discernment as a personal failing. The message underneath was: your doubt is the problem, not what's happening here. When a system is built around "trust and let go," asking questions becomes an act of disloyalty.

Secrecy as sacred. The proprietary nature of the medicines wasn't presented as an oversight — it was framed as intentional, even reverent. The medicine is sacred. It doesn't need explaining. Questions about it were treated as a kind of spiritual immaturity. This is a clever inversion: the thing that should raise alarm (not knowing what you're ingesting) gets repackaged as a sign of depth and trust.

Reactivity when challenged. AB was warm when things went her way. When they didn't — when someone pushed back, when someone asked the wrong question, when the energy in the room didn't match what she wanted — she became reactive. Cold. Sometimes openly angry. I watched her gaslight people who raised concerns, watched her treat disagreement as disloyalty.

Financial pressure. Over time, the group started to feel increasingly transactional. Fees kept shifting. New charges appeared. AB complained openly about money — about how little she was making, about how expensive everything was, about how she needed more from us. There was a persistent pressure to pay for things, to give more, to prove your commitment through financial contribution. What had presented as a spiritual community started to feel like a revenue stream.

Keeping people stuck. A functional therapeutic relationship builds your capacity. You get stronger, more resourced, more able to navigate your own inner life. What I observed in this group was the opposite — a dynamic that seemed designed to maintain dependency. To keep people returning not because they were growing but because AB had positioned herself as the indispensable source of something they couldn't get anywhere else.

What I Learned About the Death

I wasn't in the room when it happened. The death occurred in another group that the head guru of all the groups was running — not mine. And it’s been verified by multiple people including AB.

Here's what I was told: they had a journey day. An older participant took part. The next morning, they woke up, fainted, fell, hit their head.

The group was scared. They didn't call 911.

They were in a remote location. And they were afraid — afraid of what it would mean if emergency services arrived, what questions would be asked, what would be discovered.

The person died.

Could they have survived if someone had called for help immediately? Perhaps. We'll never know. But I know this: the reason no one called was because the culture of the group had made that impossible. The secrecy, the undisclosed substances, the fear of exposure — all of it had been cultivated so carefully that in the moment when a human life depended on someone breaking the circle, no one did.

The same onboarding materials that promised "your facilitator carefully monitors your safety and has medication available if unpleasant side effects emerge" had created a world in which calling 911 was unthinkable.

That is not an accident. That is the logical endpoint of a container built on concealment.

When I learned about it, something crystallized for me. This wasn't just a flawed facilitator or a risky practice. This was a system that had been constructed — maybe not consciously, maybe not with malicious intent at every step — in a way that made harm not only possible but likely. And when harm came, the system protected itself rather than the person.

Against my ethics didn't even begin to cover it.

What This Was

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what to call what happened in that group. The word "cult" gets used loosely, but I think there's a more precise way to describe the dynamics at work.

This was a container built around the systematic removal of informed consent.

You didn't consent to the substances because you were never told what they were. You didn't consent to the power dynamic because it was disguised as spiritual mentorship. You didn't consent to the financial extraction because it was framed as devotion. And you couldn't exit cleanly because the community itself had become part of your support structure — leaving meant losing people, not just a practice.

Every element that should protect a participant in this kind of work — transparency about what you're taking, clarity about the facilitator's role and limits, your right to ask questions and get honest answers, your right to exit without consequence — had been removed or inverted.

And the person who died? They never got to consent to the risk that killed them.

The Connection to Consent

I wrote about my experience in Sedona — with a medicine woman who used my altered state to try to push conspiracy theories and recruit me into her worldview. If you haven't read that piece, I'd encourage you to.

These two stories are different in almost every surface detail. One was intimate and one-on-one; the other was a group. One involved a single practitioner's agenda; the other involved an organizational system. One culminated in a dramatic confrontation in a forest; the other unfolded slowly, over months, through accumulation.

But at their core, they're the same story.

Both were about what happens when someone in a position of facilitative power uses that power to serve themselves rather than the people in their care. Both were about the way psychedelics — by design — make us more open, more trusting, more available to influence. And both were about the extraordinary importance of a container built on real consent: informed, ongoing, and genuinely free.

The Wheel of Consent, the framework I work with through Psychedelic Conse nt, asks a foundational question in every interaction: whose agenda is being served here, and who agreed to it?

In both of my stories, that question exposes everything.

What Informed Consent Actually Looks Like in This Space

You have the right to know what you're taking. Not the brand name, not a poetic description, not a gesture toward "plant medicine" — the actual substances, their approximate dosages, their known interactions, their risks. A facilitator who won't tell you what they're giving you is not keeping a sacred secret. They are removing your ability to consent.

You have the right to ask questions without that being treated as spiritual weakness. Healthy discernment is not the same as distrust. A facilitator who responds to legitimate questions with "trust the process" or "you're in your head" is using spiritual language to bypass your judgment. That's a warning sign, not a teaching.

You have the right to a facilitator who has a safety plan. What happens if someone has a medical emergency? Who gets called? Where is the nearest hospital? A facilitator operating in secrecy — with no contingency, no backup, no willingness to involve emergency services if needed — has already told you something important about what they value.

You have the right to leave. Not just physically, but socially and financially. If leaving the group means losing your community, your standing, your access to something you've been told you need — that dependency has been constructed. Healthy containers build your freedom, not your reliance.

Why I'm Telling This

I'm not telling this story to scare people away from group medicine work. I believe in the power of community containers — held with care, transparency, and genuine accountability. Some of the most transformative experiences available in this space happen in groups, when the facilitation is ethical.

I'm telling it because people are walking into rooms right now and taking substances they weren't told about. Older participants, medically vulnerable participants, people with histories that would contraindicate certain combinations — taking them anyway, because the facilitator decided the question didn't matter.

I'm telling it because somewhere out there, there's another group where someone will have a medical crisis, and the people around them will hesitate to call 911 — and that hesitation will cost a life.

And I'm telling it because I was there, I kept showing up, and I stayed partly because I didn't have a clear enough framework to name what was wrong. I had instincts. I had discomfort. I had a quiet voice saying something here is not right. But I didn't have language for it.

This is the language. Use it.

Josh Jupiter is a psychedelic integration coach and the founder of Psychedelic Consent, a project applying consent education to the psychedelic community. He works with individuals through Brooklyn Balance, offering guidance before, during, and after medicine experiences — including support for people processing experiences that caused harm.

If something happened to you in a psychedelic space that didn't feel right — or if you're preparing for an experience and want to go in with eyes open — reach out to book a session.

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What No One Told Me About the Medicine I Was Taking