Power without safety is danger.Safety without clarity is stagnation.Neither is optional.
- Screening
- Monitoring
- Escalation
Serious work requires structure
This experience is powerful, and power without precision causes damage. Not confusion. Damage.
So this page is not a reassurance. It is a list. Everything below is either a thing we do or a thing we refuse to do, and you should hold us to all of it.
Our approach to safety
Our harm-reduction approach is medical, clinical, and structural. It is not energetic. Nothing on this page depends on anything you have to believe.
What disqualifies you
All of this is assessed by our physician, and not by us. Some of it is absolute. Some is case by case.
- Personal history of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or psychotic depression
- First-degree family history of schizophrenia or bipolar I
- An active manic or psychotic episode
- Current use of SSRIs, SNRIs, tricyclics, or MAOIs — including ayahuasca within the prior four to eight weeks
- Lithium — in combination with serotonergic psychedelics, the seizure risk is markedly elevated
- 5-HTP, St John's Wort, tryptophan, or high-dose melatonin in proximate use
- Significant cardiac disease — uncontrolled hypertension, recent myocardial infarction, structural heart disease, arrhythmia
- Pregnancy
- Active suicidal ideation with plan or intent
- An active eating disorder with cardiovascular compromise
- Epilepsy or a seizure disorder
We also ask about
- A personal trauma history without prior preparatory work
- Regular benzodiazepine use — it blunts the effect, and withdrawal during a session is dangerous
- Stimulant use, because of the sympathomimetic load
- Heavy THC use, where paradoxical anxiety potentiation is common
- Whether you have adequate integration support after the session. If you don't, we build it in. We do not proceed without it.
Reactivations. A minority of people experience the state returning, briefly and unbidden, in the days after. It is usually neutral or positive. It is not a sign that anything has gone wrong. We tell you this during preparation, not afterward, so that if it happens it is something you were expecting. Your integration therapist is ready for it either way.
What we do
Thorough screening
You complete a detailed psychological, emotional, and medical intake. Our physician reviews it, conducts the intake conversation himself, and decides. Not us. Him.
Your $500 deposit pays for that assessment. If he does not clear you, you do not proceed, and the deposit is partially refunded. People are turned away. That is the point of the gate.
One month of preparation
One month, before you are anywhere near the molecule. Sessions with a licensed clinical therapist, working through what would otherwise arrive on the day with nowhere to go. Nervous-system preparation — interoceptive acceptance, somatic settling, resonance breathing, and a daily practice drawn from mindfulness-based cognitive therapy — so your system meets the state rather than fighting it. Nobody arrives here hoping it will be fine.
Calibrated dosing
Pharmaceutical-grade, lab-purity-tested synthetic 5-MeO. Not toad secretion, which contains bufotenin and other alkaloids in proportions nobody has measured.
Administered in stages, with each stage assessed before the next is offered. The doses and their purposes are discussed in preparation, and what happens on the day is decided on the day. Nobody has compiled a record of harm in this field, so nobody can tell you how often. What recurs in the accounts that exist is a single large dose, given all at once, by someone with nothing to assess against.
Two people, the whole time
At some of the doses we work with, you cannot speak, signal, or tell us what is happening. That is not a risk we manage around. That is the state.
So there are two of us in the room, the entire time. One attends to your body. One attends to you. Neither of us is ever the only person watching.
Integration, with referral
Eight weeks of weekly one-on-one integration with your integration lead, every session mandatory. Not optional, not an upsell, not a community forum.
And if something surfaces that we are not qualified to hold, we will not try to. We will refer you, and we will keep working with your therapist if you have one.
If something goes wrong
- In the room
- Blood pressure is monitored where our medical team indicates it. Equipment is on hand and used as needed. A full crash kit is on site. It has never been used.
- The nurse
- A registered nurse is on site when our physician determines an individual requires it. Otherwise she is reachable by phone throughout, and available to come on site during the experience hours.
- The physician
- A licensed physician determines eligibility and remains reachable throughout the three months.
- Emergency services
- The nearest emergency department is nineteen minutes away.
- Afterward
- We arrange transportation back to your accommodation. You may drive yourself if you would rather, and you will be asked, not assumed.
- To date
- We have never had an emergency. We have written all of this down anyway, because the operators who have emergencies are the ones who never wrote it down.
What we added, and why
Not all of this was here at the start, and one piece of it we learned the hard way.
Preparation used to be optional. The people who skipped it told us afterwards that they wished they hadn't, and enough of them said it that it stopped being optional.
There was no crash kit at first. We added one before we had any reason to, because a day with no equipment in the room is a day that depends on nothing going wrong.
The nurse is more recent. An intake raised a history of dissociative episodes on THC, and the advice we took was that a case like that warranted having a nurse available, since parts of a crash kit can only be used by one. Nothing happened. We added the capability anyway, and a physician decides when it is needed.
Most of that was anticipatory. One part was not. The intake questions got longer because someone had a hard time afterwards, and in the course of it told us things they had not told us before the day. The intake only works if it is answered honestly, and we had not been asking in a way that made that easy.
Consent
Once you have taken a dose, you cannot reliably consent to anything. You cannot decline, withdraw, or ask us to stop. This is not a risk we manage around. It is the state itself, and it is why everything below is settled before the day.
So consent is taken twice, and neither time is inside the state. The first is in advance, in writing, during preparation. You decide then whether physical contact is permitted, and what kind. If you decline, nothing about your day changes except that we do not touch you.
We do not interpret the absence of objection as permission. A person in this state cannot object.
The second is in the room. 5-MeO is metabolised quickly, and between administrations you are back — conversational, oriented, able to hold a considered answer. That is when you are asked whether to continue. Nobody moves to a further dose without being asked out loud and answering.
People stop. So far it has always been because enough has happened, and by then all three of us can see it. Not taking every dose available is not a day that failed.
If you want to stop for any other reason, or for no reason you can name, that is a complete answer too. The rest of the day runs exactly as planned.
There is no third party in the room. Nicholas, Fehren, and you. Only one participant is ever in the room, so a recording only ever contains that participant.
The experience is recorded, and this is not optional. The agreement you sign makes recording a condition of proceeding. It is the single strongest protection that exists for someone who cannot speak for himself in the moment — an account of what happened, held for you as much as for us.
This is not therapy
- We do not treat trauma.
- We do not offer psychological counselling.
- We do not work with anyone in active crisis.
This is for people who are already stable — mentally, emotionally, physically. If you are not, this is the wrong month. It is not the wrong year, and we will tell you that plainly rather than take your money.
We are not going to tell you what this will do for you. We do not know.
Our non-negotiables
- We only work one-on-one.
- Up to two people on site. Never in the same room.
- We use synthetic 5-MeO. A dose that has not been quantified cannot be cleared or staged.
- We turn people away, and we refund what we can.
Everything on this page can be checked. Ask us about any of it.