Dead Nexus Theory: Or How I Learned to Stop Gatekeeping and Love the Psychedelic Reformation
I am eternally grateful to this forum and the community that rose and fell around it. Within these walls, some of the greatest minds I have ever known shared their wit, wisdom, and wealth of knowledge. Perhaps even more than psychedelics themselves, the Nexus helped me become a better human being. I learned, grew, healed, undertook incredible adventures, helped thousands of other explorers along the way, and even met the love of my life here. I cannot overstate how important this place has been to me.
So while its twentieth birthday deserves celebration, it also feels like the right time to speak honestly about what has been lost and how we got here.
The mid-to-late 2000s were a very different time. Social media was only just getting its footing, Google still returned useful results, and there was barely a DMT ecosystem outside a few old archives, scattered forum posts, and the Terence McKenna torrent collection. Search for DMT, or DMT plus almost anything, and you would find pages upon pages of Nexus results. Anyone seriously interested in the subject eventually landed here.
And what a place it was! The Nexus was not merely an information repository. It was a living community full of brilliant, beautiful, adventurous people trying to understand this weird and wonderful thing together. Every day brought new discussions, experiments, explorations, experiences, and discoveries. Chat was constantly alive with engaging conversations at all hours. Projects like the Hyperspace Lexicon, Synchronized Hyperspace Events, and the Coalition for Entheogenic Liberty reflected the scope of what people imagined this community could accomplish. Even the April Fools’ pranks were legendary.
As DMT exploded in popularity during the early 2010s, the forum had to adapt. McKenna talks spread across YouTube, the 2012 phenomenon captured the public imagination, the magic purple bark started to attract law-enforcement and alphabet-agency attention, traffic surged, and new members arrived faster than a small volunteer staff could manage them. The rules, gates, ranks, and recognition systems arose within that context. We removed the vendor section to keep association with the forum from bringing undue scrutiny upon botanical purveyors and worked to prevent the forum from becoming associated with illegal commerce or large-scale commercial extraction. The welcome area and pulsed registration helped manage the overwhelming growth, and senior membership and expertise tags helped people identify reliable information within a huge, fast-moving community. Those systems addressed real problems. They were created to protect a thriving community within a particular cultural and political landscape. They were never meant to become ends in themselves.
The internet and the world outside the Nexus have changed substantially since then. Reddit largely replaced traditional discussion forums, Discord absorbed real-time chat, and YouTube, TikTok, blogs, and countless smaller sites repackaged information that once existed mainly here. Many old communities disappeared altogether. (RIP ayahuasca.com, eboka.info, Tribe.net, and all the other enclaves of wisdom lost to the ages.)
DMT also went from an obscure underground subject to something discussed throughout mainstream media and readily available through personal connections, darknet markets, Telegram groups, and an expanding grey market of cartridges and other semi-commercial products. Most people who merely wanted to try DMT were never eager to source exotic plants, teach themselves chemistry, and build a laboratory in their kitchen. That was simply the price of admission. Today it is not. Now someone can get a cartridge, watch a video, and ask Reddit or Discord if they have a problem. They may receive a low-quality answer, but they receive it immediately, without first reading a six-page Attitude statement, writing an introduction essay, excavating thousands of old posts, learning years of forum culture, and being shamed for not making it themselves.
The Nexus was always going to lose traffic as the internet changed. Forums declined, information spread, and most of the original contributors moved on with their lives. None of that was preventable. What was not inevitable was our failure to adapt. When the Nexus was effectively the only serious source of DMT knowledge, people tolerated its cultural quirks and heavy-handed rules to reach the extraordinary community and information behind them. As that knowledge spread across the internet, much of the membership followed it to places where it was easier to access.
Those who remained to inherit the established systems treated the written policies as authoritative even as the circumstances they addressed faded into history. The rules survived more successfully than the community itself. Over time, preserving the rules began to be confused with preserving the Nexus.
The sourcing policy is the clearest example. Restrictions made sense when shipments of purple bark were being seized, botanical vendors were attracting scrutiny, and the forum risked becoming associated with illegal commerce. Somehow “do not facilitate illegal transactions” gradually became “do not name vendors,” and then “do not discuss obtaining materials at all.” At that point the rule was no longer longer merely keeping commerce off the forum. It was policing ordinary language. Forbidding someone from saying “I bought bark,” when no source is named and no transaction is being arranged, provides no meaningful protection. It derails useful conversations, creates unnecessary work for moderators, frustration for members, and encourages people to seek help elsewhere. The Shroomery has continued linking to ethnobotanical vendors throughout this period and remains standing, which at least demonstrates that less sweeping approaches are possible.
There is a bitter irony in watching a forum that once championed entheogenic liberty struggle to discuss psychedelics becoming more openly available. The Coalition for Entheogenic Liberty existed because we wanted a world in which people could access these substances safely, responsibly, and without prohibition. Now pieces of that world are arriving, however imperfectly, and our response is often, “We cannot discuss that because it resembles sourcing.” The larger issue is not just one frustratingly overreaching rule. It is whether the Nexus can reconsider policies created for an earlier time and place as the world once again changes around it.
That question has become urgent because entheogenic liberty is no longer merely a distant ideal. Psychedelics now exist simultaneously underground, in legal and grey markets, in licensed and unlicensed therapy, at retreats led by guides and facilitators, and in products appearing at corner stores. This landscape is confusing, inconsistent, poorly regulated, and full of claims that deserve investigation. Now more than ever there is a need for what the Nexus once did best: collaborative research, critical examination, reliable information, and harm reduction free from commercial and institutional interests.
Entheogenic liberty was never going to mean everyone first becoming a chemist, mycologist, botanist, and research scholar before being allowed access. Rather than forbidding people from mentioning the products and services they encounter, a modern harm-reduction community should be asking what those products contain, which are adulterated, misrepresented, or dangerous, whether emerging therapies and practices withstand scrutiny, and how people can navigate this new landscape more safely.
The Nexus will never again be what it once was, and that is okay. I feel incredibly fortunate to have been part of it at its height, and here I remain at the end of that long, strange trip. I am also one of the relatively few people still around who remembers the full arc: what this place was, why these systems arose, what they were meant to protect, and the circumstances that once made them necessary. I may now carry more of that institutional memory than almost anyone still participating and my hope in sharing this history is that those who remain can step beyond the inherited orthodoxies of a world that no longer exists and ask what the Nexus could contribute to the world we actually inhabit.
Reddit, Discord, and social media are good at immediacy but terrible at memory. Their information is fragmented, disposable, unreliable, and easily overwhelmed by algorithms, marketing, and targeted agendas. A permanent, searchable, long-form forum still has something unique to offer: durable collaborative research, nuanced discussion, reliable information, and approachable human mentorship.
To remain relevant, the Nexus must meet the psychedelic world where it is. That means organizing its archive into approachable resources, welcoming and supporting new members instead of expecting them to arrive already initiated into an insular culture, and moving beyond taboos that prevent honest discussion of products, services, access, and emerging markets. It also means working with the wider internet ecosystem, bringing the Nexus’s depth and critical scrutiny to conversations already happening elsewhere and connecting those communities with the durable knowledge and serious discussion a forum makes possible.
We are closer to real entheogenic liberty than at any point in this community’s history. That should not be treated as a threat to contain, but as the imperfect arrival of the future we helped build. The Nexus adapted before when the world changed around it, and it can adapt again. Embracing the psychedelic reformation means carrying forward the curiosity, generosity, critical thinking, and commitment to harm reduction that made the Nexus exceptional while allowing the methods once used to protect those values to evolve.
The Nexus today resembles a grand old library whose shelves are still tended long after the patrons have stopped coming; a valuable archive, but an empty shell without the living community that gave it meaning. That is the real Dead Nexus Theory. I offer this manifesto as one more contribution to a place that gave me more than I could ever repay, not as a goodbye, I’ll be around as long as this forum is, but as an invitation. Whether this becomes a eulogy for another forum lost to the ages or the first page of the Nexus’s next chapter is up to you.
Viva la Nexus! Here’s to twenty more years.
-Paz
