686 minutes with …“Gloria”

Tripping till 10 a.m. with a psychonaut therapist at the after-parties for New York’s psychedelics conference.

- By Brock Colyar

Woooooo, we’re on drugs! We’re gonna make it happen! It’s gonna be really cool! And I have more drugs that we can doooooooooo!” I’m sprinting carelessly across Eighth Avenue on an early-December Saturday night with a 40-something woman I barely know, and she is singing this to me or to herself. We’re heading to one of the (pre–Omicron surge) after-parties for Horizons, New York’s annual psychedelics conference, at a sports pub near Penn Station, and we are, needless to say, completely out of our minds and would get only more so.

Let me backtrack on how we got here. Back in the fall, sitting outside a neighborhood dive bar drinking irresponsibly late on a Sunday night, I met Gloria— which is not her name, but she’s a mother and doesn’t need any trouble with her ex and, besides, what she does is more or less illegal. She had a sailor’s mouth, great style, and a very good-looking boyfriend. I guessed she probably owned one of those quaintly implausible artisanal shoppes that garland Brooklyn’s gentrification zones. But it turned out she’s an “underground therapist,” meaning she treats patients not only with the usual “How does that make you feel?” but also with psychedelic drugs, including MDMA (a.k.a. ecstasy or molly) and psilocybin (the magic ingredient in mushrooms). Between Burning Man and Michael Pollan, these drugs have lately gone mainstream, with studies touting their efficacy.