Roam the wide-open halls and cavernous showrooms of the Colorado Conference Middle throughout Psychedelic Science, the world’s largest psychedelics convention, and also you’ll see exhibitors hawking every thing from mushroom jewellery, to chewable gummies containing extracts of the psychoactive succulent plant kanna, to broad flat-brim baseball caps emblazoned with “MDMA” and “IBOGA.” Cubicles publicize organizations such because the Ketamine Taskforce and the Psychedelic Parenthood Neighborhood, and even The Faerie Rings, a live-action characteristic movie seeking to appeal to traders.
It’s a motley, multifarious symposium the place indigenous-plant-medicine healers mingle with lanyard-clad pharma-bros, legendary underground LSD chemists, and workaday stoners tottering round in large pink and white toadstool hats that make them appear like that cute little mushroom man from Mario. And but, oddest amongst such oddities could be the sight of enormously burly NFL robust guys speaking candidly about their emotions.
Amongst Psychedelic Science 2025’s keynote talks was “Therapeutic Behind the Highlights.” Hosted by the podcaster and dietary complement salesman Aubrey Marcus, the panel gathered three NFL stars—Buffalo Payments security Jordan Poyer, retired Raiders guard Robert Gallery, and San Francisco 49ers guard Jon Feliciano—to debate how psychedelic medication have benefited their lives off the turf. They talked about their journeys to retreat facilities the place they imbibed the heady hallucinogenic brew ayahuasca, and the way these drug experiences allowed them to reconcile their gladiatorial beliefs of on-field toughness with the truth that they’re, on the finish of the day, mere mortals.
The consequences of psychedelics like ayahuasca (and its major psychoactive chemical, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT) are pretty effectively documented. It’s believed that such highly effective hallucinogens can carry important shifts in self-understanding, through a psychological mechanism generally labeled by researchers because the “mystical expertise.” However Poyer and different athletes are pushing this concept even additional. It’s not solely that psychedelics can stimulate a psychological—or mystical, or non secular, or in any other case metaphysical—change in an individual’s thoughts, however that these medication can provide bodily, neurological advantages to a broken mind. It’s an concept that’s particularly interesting to athletes competing in high-contact arenas, like skilled soccer, hockey, and fight sports activities, the place gamers are routinely uncovered to concussions.
Poyer says he “completely” buys into the concept that psychedelics may also help heal the consequences of repeated head trauma. “I’ve had many concussions,” he admits, with a shrug, talking with WIRED after the panel. “However I’d prefer to suppose I overcame a few of these mind accidents.”
On January 22, 2023, the Buffalo Payments squared off in opposition to the rival Cincinnati Bengals within the AFC Divisional matchup of the NFL playoffs. With about 12:54 remaining within the fourth quarter, and the Payments lagging by two scores, Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow dropped again and fired a deep go to vast receiver Tee Higgins. Making an attempt to cease Higgins, Poyer and Buffalo cornerback Tre’Davious White collided on the sting of the top zone. It was a case of “pleasant fireplace” that produced the loud crack of head-to-head, helmet-to-helmet contact acquainted to any soccer fan. “You possibly can hear that hit up right here,” play-by-play announcer Tony Romo mentioned from the printed sales space, as Buffalo’s medical workers shuffled onto the snow-covered subject. “That was as depraved a sound as I’ve heard.”
Poyer was knocked to the bottom, rising to his knees earlier than sinking again down into the turf, and after a head harm analysis, he was pressured to exit the sport. However his points with concussion predate that particularly brutal hit. Earlier than that sport, he remembers bouts of utmost anger and irritability, and cluster complications: all signs of repeated trauma to the pinnacle. Whereas improved security gear and key rule modifications have decreased the incidence of concussion within the NFL, neurotrauma stays an unavoidable reality—or, for followers, gamers, homeowners, and league executives, extra of an inconvenient reality—of such a quick, crunchy, extraordinarily bodily sport. NFL harm information reported some 692 concussions over a five-season interval between 2019 and 2023.
Concussions are a type of traumatic mind harm—the broad medical time period for harm brought on to the mind by an exterior power—that may end up in the lack of neurons within the mind in addition to different neurological issues and cognitive deficits. Concussions have been linked to each short- and long-term impairment, essentially the most extreme of which is persistent traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a neurodegenerative illness believed to be attributable to repeated head trauma. CTE impacts reminiscence, judgment, and government operate, and it happens at an alarmingly excessive fee amongst former NFL gamers.
