Soccer and Psychedelics Have A Very Similar Problem Plus surrogate healing, amanitas, and pharmahuasca gummies. Glauber Loures de Assis, PhD, Mary Carreón // Editor-in-Chief & Reinaldo Lima 20 Jul Welcome back to The Drop In, DoubleBlind’s newsletter serving up news, culture, and independent journalism about psychedelics straight to your inbox. Today’s lead story is an essay about what the psychedelics space and FIFA, the international soccer federation that oversees the men and women’s World Cup, have in common and what they can learn from each other. Glauber Loures de Assis and Reinaldo Lima, former professional Brazilian footballer, wrote this today’s piece. You can find it immediately below! If you keep scrolling you’ll find stories about surrogate healing, the safety profile of psychedelic medicines, and ayahuasca gummies. Stay hydrated , Mary Carreón Editor-in-Chief You Are Invited… Come to DoubleBlind’s Psychedelics and Systems Change Summit! Heal interpersonal and global conflicts? Awaken us to the climate crisis? Bridge political and ideological divides? On Sunday, July 26, 2026 at 10am PT, DoubleBlind is hosting a Psychedelics and Systems Change Summit, where we’re bringing together the most incredible minds and hearts we know to talk about how we can leverage our psychedelic experiences for collective healing, change, and imagining life in a post-capitalistic world. This free, one-day virtual summit gathers the voices reimagining what psychedelics are for. How can we repair our communities and the planet with the support of plant medicines? Across the day, we’ll explore: Psychedelics and collective healing for our communities, systems, and the planet, building sustainable ways of living and working under late-stage capitalism, transformative capital, ownership, access and accountability. You won’t want to miss this one. We look forward to seeing you there! Learn more here. Featured FIFA and the Psychedelic Industry Profit From the Magic of Living Cultures A footballer and a sociologist trace how football and psychedelics both got turned into products, and what it costs the cultures that made them. By Glauber Loures de Assis and Reinaldo Lima For many people around the world, football is religion. The 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup was a month-long proof of it. The sport produces ecstatic experiences and a sense of unity sociologists refer to as “collective effervescence,” or the rush you feel when you’re part of a crowd all feeling the same thing at the same time, and that shared feeling becomes bigger than any one person in it. The same is true for psychedelics and plant medicine, where a mystical, or “God”, experience can trigger serious religious fervor and induce a dissolving sense of oneness with nature and humanity, and even those sitting in ceremony with you. Even though psychedelics and football appear to be vastly different fields on the outside, they actually have a few staggering parallels, particularly around how institutions are packaging, branding, and reselling us a magical product they claim to have invented. At their cores, football and psychedelics are living cultures before they are industries. They’re alive in neighborhoods, ceremonies, forests, locker rooms, and songs. Yet both keep getting stripped for parts. Once something this alive becomes this valuable, power comes for it. And this year, both football and psychedelics bent to the White House. It raises the question: How do living cultures survive the institutions built in their name? US Politics Intervenes Before getting started, we need to be honest: We, the co-authors of this essay, love football. Where we grew up in Minas Gerais, Brazil, the World Cup was a season of the spirit — it was never just a sport. Neighbors painted the streets green and yellow, goals were made from a pair of rubber sandals, and matches paused only for passing cars. The country simply stopped: Shops closed, schools tuned in, and grandmothers who had never cared about football suddenly had opinions about the midfield. When Brazil scored, the goal arrived twice: first on television, then, a heartbeat later, as fireworks and cheers rolled across the town. We both grew up inside that world. Reinaldo (who helped co-write this essay) played in a World Cup for Brazil, and knew the game’s mental, physical, emotional, and political costs. Glauber is a sociologist who has spent almost 20 years within ayahuasca traditions, studying what happens when movements become establishments, and how they sometimes find their way back. But, we do not trust the World Cup, which is run and operated by FIFA, with its corruption, theater, and spectacle. This year, the season of the spirit came with checkpoints. The tournament was largely held in the United States, a country conducting mass immigration raids, with ICE agents confirmed at World Cup stadiums. Then, on July 1, the political machine showed its hand in the tournament. American striker Folarin Balogun received a red card in a match against Bosnia and was sent off the field and suspended for the following game — this is the standard rule when a player gets a red card. But, the president of the United States didn’t like the referee’s decision to oust the American forward. So he decided to telephone the president of FIFA to get the red card revoked, and FIFA obliged, allowing Balogun to play in the next game against Belgium. Fans around the world were understandably furious. The US team ended up losing to Belgium 4 to 1 anyway. The World Cup is not the only thing the US political machine has recently moved. Three months earlier, the US president impulsively signed an executive order to accelerate psychedelic medicine, including a right-to-try pathway for ibogaine, a plant medicine from a shrub Bwiti communities in Gabon have stewarded for generations. The order never mentions them. And since December, Gabon itself sits under US visa restrictions — along with more than 20 African countries. So, while the medicine travels on a fast track, its stewards wait at a checkpoint. Culture Comes From the Streets Brazilian football was not born in a stadium. It came from the dirt field and the beach, from the street game with no referee, and from kids inventing moves nobody taught them. We call it pelada, or “the naked game.” No one had to pay a fee, there were no uniforms, or adults in charge. The academy, which nurtures football players from youth to professionals, inherited this genius it likes to claim it created. Psychedelics has its own pelada. The counterculture of the ’60s was its street game. It was improvised, communal, and ecstatic. It gave today’s field its imagination and courage. But it was never open to everyone; those who could take a psychedelic and walk home safely was always a matter of skin color and zip code. It produced casualties along with visions, and preempted its own prohibition. Nostalgia for the 1960s will protect this field no better than nostalgia for a golden age protects Brazilian football. When Culture Becomes Something to Fix But when the FIFA machine arrived in Brazil, the pelada became something to fix. Football academies took shape, scouts scoured the region, agents paying millions lured in players, performance data was deployed to justify paying players massive salaries, and the creation of a standard — the “correct” way to play — was born. Scouts and coaches were molding talent without allowing it to become strange, artful, and inventive. The same thing is happening in psychedelics. If you work in the field, you know the pattern: protocols, clinics, patents, brands, and the conservative aesthetic of legitimacy. To be clear, this essay isn’t meant to disparage structure. Rather, it’s meant to point to the harm in letting one method become the “correct way” of doing things and forcing the rest of a field to abide by a set of standards that diminish the validity of the frameworks that came before it. As football professionalized, the crowd became customers of their own game. People began to speak about professional football players as gods with moods, ultimately handing over their power to the institutions that profit from the mythologies around superstars. In essence, the public image of a player becomes a separate entity from the person a player actually is. Reinaldo lived this. In 1981, at 24 and already a national idol, he told the press that inside him lived a young man named Zé (short for José, his given name), and that Zé was no longer on speaking terms with the footballer Reinaldo. The idol had swallowed Reinaldo whole. The clinical trial process is similar, in that it wants the molecule without the forest. But ayahuasca, peyote, iboga, and psilocybin survived a century of prohibition inside Indigenous biocultures, living systems where plant, song, territory, and community are one knowledge. The industry extracts the active principle, rebrands the ceremony as “set and setting,” and invites the original scientists to open a conference with a blessing. In 2025, at the 5th Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference in the Brazilian Amazon, 34 Indigenous nations declared: “Ayahuasca is not a heritage of humanity. Ayahuasca is not open source.” This is not a rejection of science, but instead a demand to be recognized as an already established science, with the authority that recognition carries. Recognized scientists don’t just open the conference with a blessing; they help decide how the research is done, who holds the patents, and on whose terms the medicines travel. Compass Pathways holds patents on a crystalline form of synthetic psilocybin, and its filings go beyond chemistry and into the therapy room, dictating a therapist’s behavior. The football academy did this to the pelada, and now it’s doing it to ceremony, molding an ancient practice into clinical therapy and calling it the “correct” way. The Psychedelic Mineirazo We Won’t Forget In 2014, Germany beat Brazil 7 to 1 in a home World Cup semifinal, in our city, in the same Mineirão stadium where Reinaldo still holds the scoring record. The score of that game became shorthand for a national story collapsing in public, a collective wound with its own name, the Mineirazo, an echo of the pain of 1950, when Brazil lost a home World Cup final to Uruguay in the original Maracanazo. Psychedelics had their own massive, painful defeat in 2024, when an FDA advisory committee declined to approve MDMA-assisted therapy in a 10 to 1 vote. It was the psychedelic Mineirazo none of us will forget. The story of inevitable psychedelic triumph stopped being enough, and its shadow asked to be integrated rather than managed. The psychedelic field preaches integration to its patients but manages its own shadow with PR. A field that cannot sit with its own 7 to 1 loss will keep repeating it. Part of what collapsed in both cases was theology. Both fields worship the savior: the prodigy who wins alone, the visionary founder, the molecule sold as the redemption of psychiatry, the names on the top-hundred lists. Reinaldo has a better definition. Half of an idol belongs to the crowd; the other half is a man. The savior, in other words, is what a crowd builds together and asks one person to carry. The psychedelic field does the same thing, handing that weight to a charismatic founder or a single molecule we ask to redeem an entire field. Intertwining Rivers At the root of this is a simple yet difficult question: Can the structure of an industry stay accountable to the living cultures that make it possible, or will it only extract from them while declaring them obsolete? The psychedelic industry wants Indigenous knowledge without letting Indigenous institutions influence or impact the rules of the field. The market wants new idols because novelty is baked into the business model. Selling the newest thing hinges on forgetting what came before. Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo are sold to our children as if Pelé and Maradona never existed. New molecules arrive as if the forest never existed. A field that forgets where it came from isn’t a culture. It’s marketing. Five knee surgeries ended Reinaldo’s career at 31, and a cocaine addiction, which he has written about openly, took years more. What brought him back, by his own account, was psychedelic healing and an ayahuasca ceremony with the Santo Daime tradition, the Brazilian forest religion. Reinaldo was healed decades later in the tradition Glauber has studied from the inside for almost 20 years. We did not build this symmetry for the page. The rivers of this essay met long before we wrote it. Protecting Living Cultures Football’s market can be cruel, and so can the psychedelic field — underground and legal markets alike. The unaccountable space is where abuse hides, often behind charisma, and sometimes behind the vocabulary of justice and care itself. Real accountability begins in relationships with communities, elders, women, and families. The challenge is not to protect living cultures from institutions, but to build institutions that protect living cultures without sterilizing their magic. Even though Norway eliminated Brazil in this most recent World Cup, one thing remains clear: A living culture doesn’t hand over a life-changing experience just because we show up wanting one. Football owes us no salvation. Neither do psychedelics. What they offer, at their best, is more difficult: An encounter with our own light and shadow, followed by the responsibility to integrate. Brazilian football cannot live forever off the memory of a glorious past. The psychedelic field cannot live forever off the memory of the counterculture, or of the years when MDMA-assisted therapy approval felt inevitable. After a goal, ceremony, tournament, or revelation, comes an ordinary Monday. Football fans believe football is the deepest cultural force on Earth. Psychedelic people feel the same and believe the molecules will heal humanity. We have been both. But as the Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield warns, after the ecstasy comes the laundry. Beyond every final game and every ceremony wait climate crisis, racism, inequality, and hunger, problems no stadium or molecule will solve. Collective healing demands knowing the exact size of what we hold. We don’t need saviors, gurus, or kings. We need responsibility, ethics, epistemic humility, and each other. The question was never whether the magic is
