Nonprofit Chronicles

A minister, a rabbi and the man who gave them psilocybin

Marc Gunther

August 27, 2020

Veteran psychedelic researcher William A. “Bill” Richards

Pastor James Lindberg was unmoored by his first trip on psilocybin. “I’m a pretty normal middle aged white guy who found myself involved in things that were a bit larger than I intended them to be,” says Lindberg, who leads a Lutheran church in an Omaha suburb. He questioned his place in the church but, after some soul-searching, recommitted “to the tradition that has been entrusted to me.”

Rabbi Zac Kamenetz’s first journey on psilocybin led him to “light, connection, warmth, gratitude and the sense that all is well,” he says. “I left that experience inspired, energized and grounded, in the sense that the path that I was on was a noble one.” His next trip brought “darkness, emptiness and a void.” Nevertheless, Kamenetz, who lives and works in San Francisco, has become an evangelist for psychedelics.

Pastor Lindberg and Rabbi Kamenetz are participants in an FDA-approved study to examine the effects of psilocybin-facilitated experience on the psychology and effectives of religious professionals. The research aims to deepen understanding of what are called mystical, transcendental or awe-inspiring experiences because, some argue, such encounters can have profound benefits for those who experience them, their family and friends and, ultimately, for the world as a whole.

The man helping to guide this mashup of science and the sacred — William A. “Bill” Richards, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research — is uniquely qualified to do so. A clinical psychologist who has investigated psychedelics since the 1960s, Richards is an ordained minister (though he never pastored a church) with advanced degrees from Yale Divinity School and Andover-Newton Theological School. He has for many years been guiding volunteers on drug trips on weekdays at Johns Hopkins and singing bass in the choir on Sundays at the Episcopal church where he worships in Baltimore.

You can read the rest of this story at Medium.

The CEO of Dr. Bronner’s wants to turn America on to drugs

Marc Gunther

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July 28, 2020

Photo of David Bronner, courtesy of Dr. Bronner’s

Civil rights. Feminism. Gay rights. Environmentalism. Meditation. Yoga. Natural childbirth.

Much of the politics and culture of the 1960s has been absorbed into mainstream America.

Not psychedelic drugs — not yet, anyway.

That will soon change if David Bronner, the CEO of family-owned soap-maker Dr. Bronner’s, has his way.

“Psychedelic medicine is the last and arguably the most powerful gift of the counter-culture that hasn’t been integrated,” says Bronner, who has put millions of dollars of his company’s money behind drug policy reform.

Bronner, who is 47— he came of age in the 1990s, not the 1960s — is a pony-tailed vegan and an enthusiastic user of psychedelic drugs who says his life was transformed by a three-month sojourn in Amsterdam after college. Amidst growing evidence that psychedelic medicines can help alleviate an array of mental ailments, he’d like to see them become more widely available. He also believes that the wider use of psychedelics can help heal the world.

To that end, Bronner recently put $1 million of his family-owned company’s money behind a ground-breaking ballot initiative in Oregon….

You can read the rest of the story here on Medium.

At a pivotal momentum for psychedelic medicines, a challenge for philanthropy

Marc Gunther

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June 26, 2020

MDMA, the man-made drug often called ecstasy or molly, has a colorful history. It was patented in 1914 by the German drug company Merck, and set aside for decades. The US Army studied it during the Cold War, perhaps seeking a chemical weapon or interrogation tool. Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, an iconoclastic chemist, rediscovered MDMA during the 1970s and gave some to a psychotherapist friend, who in turn shared it with hundreds of therapists around the world; some called the drug “Adam” because it returned patients to a more innocent state. Only after MDMA gained popularity as a party drug did the US Drug Enforcement Administration ban it in1985, declaring that it had no medical use and a high potential for abuse.

Now MDMA is on the verge of making history again — as the first psychedelic drug to become available as a prescription medicine.

First, though, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Science, a nonprofit seeking to develop psychedelic medicines, must raise about $7.5m by September as part of what it calls the MAPS Capstone Challenge. The funds are needed to unlock a challenge grant of $10m and to complete a final round of clinical trials, now underway in the US, Canada and Israel, that are designed to demonstrate that psychotherapy assisted by MDMA is safe and effective for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

FDA approval, which could come in 2022, is important for two reasons. First, MDMA-assisted therapy will almost surely bring relief to millions of people suffering from PTSD: Military veterans, victims of sexual assault, first responders, perhaps even doctors or nurses who today are treating COVID patients.

Second, FDA approval of MDMA will open the door for other psychedelic drugs, particularly psilocybin, that, when combined with talk therapy, can alleviate the suffering from a remarkable range of mental ailments, including depression and anxiety.

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Which donors are stepping up? Which are not? You can read the rest of this story on Medium.

The Ford Foundation and the fierce urgency of now

Marc Gunther

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June 17, 2020

Foundations are peculiar institutions. They lack competition or meaningful regulation. They are perhaps the least accountable institutions in the US. Many want to live forever.

Last week, the Ford Foundation, which has an endowment of $13.7 billion, said that it has decided to borrow another $1 billion to be able to give more money away now to meet the needs of nonprofits that are struggling during the Covid-19 crisis. The announcement was greeted with near-universal acclaim-no surprise, since much of the praise came from those in a position to benefit from Ford’s largesse.

Ford’s president, Darren Walker, has been an influential leader in philanthropy, and a good one. He put challenging inequality at the center of Ford’s work. He got the foundation to make unrestricted long-term grants to nonprofits, as part of an initiative called Build. He persuaded Ford’s trustees to invest a share of the foundation’s endowment to do good, as opposed to simply investing to maximize returns.

Yet the decision to borrow $1 billion to meet current needs puzzled me. How confident can we be that today’s needs are more important than tomorrow’s? And if a foundation decides to spend more now than the customary amount — legally, they are required to spend or give away at least 5 percent of their assets — why borrow money to do it? Why not just spend some of the endowment, if this, is, indeed, an emergency?

My latest story for Medium, headlined The Ford Foundation and the fierce urgency of now, is my attempt to explore those questions. You can read it here.

In Oregon, resistance to the war on drugs

Marc Gunther

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June 2, 2020

This is a strange and deeply disturbing time. I’d like to be writing more about racial justice and Covid-19 and, in an indirect way, I did just this morning, at Medium. My story looks at two progressive, criminal-justice ballot initiatives that are all but certain to be on the November ballot in the state of Oregon. One would decriminalize possession of all drugs-yes, all drugs. The other would make psychedelic medicines available under a tightly regulated regime.

The story is timely because, as most know, the criminal justice system discriminates against people of color, from arrest and conviction through sentencing and parole-and, these days, via the coronavirus. I learned while researching the story that the first federal prisoner to die from Covid-19 was Patrick Jones, a 49-year-old man who was serving a 27-year sentence for selling cocaine. (One reason why his sentence was so long was that he lived within 1,000 feet of a junior college. Really.) Jones had a record of criminal convictions, most for burglarly, but he was not a violent man, by all accounts. Here’s the best one I could find, from the excellent Marshall Project. What’s more, he seemed to have turned a corner in prison. (Some experts say that career criminals age out of crime.) Last fall, Jones wrote a heartbreaking letter to a federal judge seeking release; he was turned down and that decision became a death sentence.

Oregon’s proposed new drug law would not have saved Patrick Jones. It decriminalizes possession of drugs, not the sale. But it is a meaningful step in the right direction. Here’s how my story begins:

Oregon is approaching a milestone in the drug wars: It’s poised to become the first state in the US to decriminalize possession of all drugs, from marijuana and ecstasy to heroin and LSD.

This fall, voters in Oregon will be asked to approve an initiative that would end prison sentences for people who possess drugs for their personal use, and instead offer treatment to all who want it.

Supporters of the ballot initiative, known as IP44, have collected 147,000 signatures, well over the 112,000 signatures need to secure a place on the ballot. Internal polling shows that most Oregonians favor decriminalization, according to Anthony Johnson, a lawyer and one of the chief petitioners for IP44.

“This is a watershed moment,” Johnson told me. “Oregonians — and people nationwide — realize that what we are doing around the drug war isn’t working.”

You can read the rest of the story here.

The NoVo Foundation, Peter Buffett, and the city that wants to fix capitalism.

Marc Gunther

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May 26, 2020

Every October, Kingston, N.Y., a city of 23,000 people in the Hudson Valley, attracts throngs of visitors to the O + Festival, a weekend celebration of art, music and wellness.

The O + Festival — it’s pronounced O Positive — is no ordinary civic gathering. It is, improbably, an alternative to America’s profit-driven health care system: The artists and musicians who participate can barter their work for medical or dental care. Help paint a mural, get a cavity filled.

In a story about Kingston headlined The US city preparing itself for the collapse of capitalism, The Guardian last fall called O + Festival an “anti-capitalist, anti-establishment healthcare network” and an “example of a model that could supplant corporate America.” The story explains:

Locals have launched a non-commercial radio station, Radio Kingston WKNY, with widely representative, hyper-local programming that broadcasts via power generators if the grid goes dark. A regional micro-currency called the Hudson Valley Current now exists to, according to co-founder David McCarthy, “create an ecosystem that includes everyone.”

Agricultural initiatives like Farm Hub work toward equitable, resilient food systems. A network of bike trails quietly connects local towns to local farms (for the day when there is no more gas for our cars). And organizations like RiseUp Kingston…facilitate civic engagement, combat displacement, and advocate for policies to address an increasingly dire housing shortage.

What the story neglects to say is that all these organizations — the O + festival, the radio station, the farm hub, the local currency project and Rise Up — share a powerful patron: The NoVo Foundation, led by Peter Buffet, the youngest son of legendary investor Warren Buffett, and Peter’s wife Jennifer. In 2010, Peter and Jennifer Buffett bought a 19th century farmhouse for $1.2 million in Kingston, a historic city perched on the west bank of the Hudson River, about 100 miles north of Manhattan.

“What started as a weekend getaway,” Buffett says, “became a core piece of what we’re doing at the foundation.”

You can read the rest of this story on Medium.

Psychedelics Inc.

Marc Gunther

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April 28, 2020

Philanthropic dollars helped to create today’s psychedelic renaissance by funding medical research into the therapeutic benefits of psilocybin and LSD. The research has generated a great deal of excitement, as I reported last year in the Chronicle of Philanthropy and in Medium.

Now, startup companies want to bring psychedelic medicines to market. That’s the topic of a story that I posted today at Medium.

Here’s how it begins:

Despite Covid-19, a crashing economy and formidable legal obstacles, a growing number of entrepreneurs and investors are betting that medicines derived from psychedelic drugs can become a real business and heal millions of people. They are joining the researchers, activists, philanthropists and journalists who until now have been driving what’s been called the psychedelic renaissance.
A dozen or more startup companies are developing medicines from psilocybin, MDMA, ibogaine and LSD, all of which are illegal in the US, as well as from ketamine, a legal anesthetic with hallucinogenic properties. They hope to treat a surprisingly wide range of mental conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anxiety, addiction, even Alzheimer’s disease.

This is excellent news. Developing new drugs is an expensive proposition. Especially in today’s tough environment for fundraising, nonprofits are likely to have a hard time bringing in enough donations to stage clinical trials, secure regulatory approval, manufacture and distribute the medicines, persuade doctors to use them and convince insurance companies to pay for them.

Investors, by contrast, may be willing to risk their money with the hope of eventually making a financial return. Just this week, Otsuka, a global pharmaceutical company based in Japan, invested in Compass Pathways, a UK-based startup that aims to help people suffering from treatment-resistant depression by giving them psilocybin along with therapy. To the best of my knowledge, that’s the first investment by an established pharmaceutical company in psychedelic medicines.

You can read the full story here on Medium.

The new new thing in philanthropy? Cash.

Marc Gunther

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April 15, 2020

When writing about foundations and nonprofits, I try to keep something in mind: Surprisingly few social programs do what they set out to do. When subjected to rigorous evaluation, most fail to produce “meaningful progress in education, poverty reduction, crime prevention and other areas,” as Arnold Ventures puts it. This is one reason why my favorite charity remains GiveDirectly, which sends money to those living in extreme poverty, mostly in Africa.

Cash, at the very least, makes people a little less poor.

Few foundations, though, have funded direct cash transfers-until now. So I was heartened to learn last week that some big, influential funders are supporting programs to give away money, with no strings attached, to Americans suffering from the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I wrote about this for Medium. Here’s how my story begins:

The well-educated folk who lead America’s big foundations have over the years devised no end of theories about how to do what they do. Strategic philanthropy. Collective impact. Venture philanthropy. Big bets. Participatory grantmaking. Trust-based philanthropy.
Now, in response to the economic devastation caused by COVID-19, they are trying something completely different: Giving money, with no strings attached, to those who need it.

Foundations that are supporting direct cash transfers include Blue Meridian Partners (a funding collaborative) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, as well as the foundations of Charles Koch, Pierre Omidyar, Steve Ballmer and Sergey Brin.

You can read the rest of my story here. If you find it worthwhile, I’d be grateful if you give it a “clap” or share.

The ethics of grocery shopping during the pandemic

Marc Gunther

8 comments

April 9, 2020

This story began as a conversation in my family-how do we get groceries or order food while trying to shelter at home during the pandemic? Some argue that going to the supermarket is needlessly risky. Others are reluctant to ask others, who are less well off, to assume those risks.

We’re having similar debates, as you may be, about whether to order take-out from restaurants or patronize a favorite coffee shop. What, if anything, do we owe to these places that have been there for us for years?

I had hoped to talk to some gig-economy workers for this story but they were too busy. (Surprise!) So I talked to ethicists, and read what I could about the working conditions and pay at Instacart, the giant in the Internet home delivery business. Here’s how my story, which appears at Medium, begins:

“When the plague came to London in 1665, Londoners lost their wits,” the historian Jill Lepore writes in The New Yorker. “Everyone behaved badly, though the rich behaved the worst: Having failed to heed warnings to provision, they sent their poor servants out for supplies.”

Today, only the richest of the rich have poor servants to do their shopping. The rest of us rely on Instacart, Door Dash and Uber Eats.

This raises a thorny question: Is it ethical, during the pandemic, for healthy people to hire others to bring them food and take risks they want to avoid? The Silicon Valley gig-economy firms do not provide workers with health insurance or hazard pay, and they need not pay even the minimum wage.

“Those of us who are lucky enough to have jobs that enable us to work from home need to be honest with ourselves about whether we are bearing our fair share of the collective risk, or whether our comfort is coming at too high a price to others,” says Karen Stohr, a senior scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. “If we’re healthy, this may mean going to the grocery store ourselves rather than relying on others to do it for us.”

You can read the rest here.

Luxury condos and corporate headquarters are not worth dying for

Marc Gunther

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April 4, 2020

Social distancing? Not for workers at Marriott’s new corporate HQ [March 24]

On April 2, two people working on the construction of Marriott’s new corporate headquarters in downtown Bethesda, MD, tested positive for the coronavirus. Their illness was entirely predictable — and preventable.

Hensel Phillips, the prime contractor for the $600m project, said it would temporarily suspend work, clean up the site and resume the work in a few days.

That’s nuts.

The politically influential construction industry wants special treatment. Last week, industry executives told the Washington Post that their work is essential. Builders, they said, would protect the health of workers. Neither claim holds up to scrutiny.

You can read the rest of this story on Medium.