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For legal small businesses, advocates and educators in the psychedelic or cannabis space, losing your social media account is what journalist Dennis Walker calls “a rite of passage.” (Leading psychedelics magazine DoubleBlind has been banned so many times from so many different platforms that their website features a guide to psychedelic censorship on social media, complete with words to avoid and tips on how to get your account back.)
Google and Facebook don’t want their platforms used to sell federally illegal substances, as they could potentially be held criminally liable for participating in trafficking. But none of these journalists, educators and media outlets are necessarily hocking drugs online. Social media accounts providing essential information on topics like the history of psychedelic research, new science about addiction, and essential risk reduction information are disabled daily. The reasons why are often opaque.
Cannabis is no stranger to this struggle. The industry has languished in a weird no-man’s-land on social media for years. Though it’s legal in some form in 38 states, selling or consuming cannabis remains federally illegal, which is why Facebook, Google and Instagram are skittish about what weed-related content they permit. As every dispensary or cannabis brand owner knows, social media policies are often enforced inconsistently and often abruptly. You can try your damndest to follow every one of Meta’s Terms of Service to the letter, and still wake up to find an account you spent a decade building was deleted overnight.
This is what happened to Dennis Walker, founder of Mycopreneur, a platform that tracks the emerging psychedelic industry and the cultural, historical, spiritual and medicinal use of functional mushrooms. Walker’s educational and hilarious content has developed an enthusiastic following, particularly videos in which he satirizes Western tech-bro eagerness to increase productivity and find lucrative enlightenment through indigenous plant medicine rituals.
On November 16, 2023, Walker’s 25,000-follower Instagram account and professional network at @mycopreneurpodcast was disabled. He’d received no warnings or previous strikes on the hundreds of similar original videos he’d posted for the last three years. He was informed that his account did not “follow our Community Guidelines on guns, drugs, and other restricted goods.” (Walker was not promoting or selling guns or illegal drugs, or in violation of any other Instagram ToS.) “After organically building a global network of professionals and collaborators over three years,” Walker wrote, Instagram’s algorithm “destroyed the entire ecosystem I’d painstakingly cultivated with no clear reason why.”
A journalist or a small business losing their Instagram account may not feel like an urgent threat to free speech or consumer safety, but it’s a potent example of our completely haphazard, inconsistent approach to what is digital discourse is permitted around substance and drug education.
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The random, unpredictable enforcement of vague Terms of Use such as “You can’t do anything unlawful, misleading, or fraudulent or for an illegal or unauthorized purpose” disproportionally punishes small businesses and educational platforms and suppresses valuable information that consumers actually need. Facebook famously denied a request from a Colorado law firm to boost their post about marijuana arrests dramatically increasing among Black and Latino adolescents, claiming their news about these racist disparities promoted “illegal drugs” (cannabis has been legal in Colorado since 2012).
In contrast, a ProPublica/Washington Post investigation that analyzed millions of posts between Election Day 2020 and January 6, 2021, provided stark evidence that Facebook users were a key driver in fomenting the insurrection. Hundreds of thousands of posts, many calling for violence, executions and similar illegal activity, fueled a siege of the U.S. Capitol that left hundreds injured and five dead. Such blatant violation of the platform’s Terms of Service, with such catastrophic results, has cannabis and psychedelic educators in disbelief when their accounts get banned.
Critics will argue that Google, Facebook and Instagram need rules of engagement and Community Guidelines (and point to the swarm of neo-Nazis that flocked to Twitter once its new owner stripped most of its content moderation) and I would agree. Content moderation is essential: terrorists, abusers and hate promoters don’t have rights to social media accounts.But if the algorithms were actually set up to prevent lawbreaking and violent crime, it seems they should flag Nazis and would-be congressional assassins before psychedelic journalists, small licensed businesses and educators making good-faith attempts to share vital information and reduce harm to people who are consuming universally available substances.
The American attitude towards drugs has always been black and white (pun fully intended) with scant room for nuance. In 2023, it seems we should be further along in the public discourse. There’s a vast gulf between “Just Say No” and “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out,” between addiction and mass incarceration, between the failure of D.A.R.E.’s famously expensive programs to convince American children that dabbling drugs of any kind (except alcohol) leads to certain death and the massive Food & Drug Administration failures that helped fuel the opioid crisis.
In 2024, let’s let go of this silly binary and have balanced, nuanced conversations around mind-altering substances instead. If Oprah, Gwyneth, Sanjay Gupta and Anderson Cooper can all publicly opine on the use of microdosing, cannabis and psychedelics, shouldn’t a journalist be able to post about how to handle a bad trip? Or break down the potential mental health impact of magic mushrooms? Or provide fact-checked information about how long ketamine stays in your system?
We need to accept the fact that cannabis, mushrooms and all manner of psychedelics are more widely accessible to the American public than ever before. Restricting information about these substances is like restricting birth control — neither of them prevent behaviors, they just put people at more risk. Harm reduction is valuable — our government has known this since it started issuing free condoms to servicemen in World War II. With daily headlines proclaiming psychedelics may offer relief for serious diseases, we should assume Americans will experiment with these substances and allow journalists and educators to help ensure their experiences are safe and well-informed.
