Hamptons elite de-stress with ketamine therapy and scream booths

Wealthy Long Island residents are eschewing alcohol — but have picked up a taste for MDMA and magic mushrooms

This post originally appeared in the London Times

BY WILL PAVIA

On a high street in the Hamptons between a jeweller’s and a shop that sells eye-wateringly expensive baby clothes, there’s a door with a faint sign stuck to the glass, for the Hampton Insight for Psychedelic Therapy.

Up a flight of stairs there’s a psychiatrist’s office, a treatment room, and one larger room containing a statue of the Buddha and an assortment of musical instruments: a shruti box that sounds rather like an accordion, a rain stick which mimics the sound of a shower, and a gong.

This is where groups of patients do the primal scream, said Amalia von Alvensleben, the chief operations officer of the clinic. “You scream from the top of your lungs,” she said. “People are nervous, they don’t want to be loud. But if everybody does it together, they let everything out.”

Downstairs in the street, tanned couples dine on the pavement outside a chic Italian restaurant, families sit on benches licking ice creams and the occasional Lamborghini noses down the road looking for a parking space. It looks like any other summer in one of the smart villages of Long Island: leisurely, expensive and buttoned-up.

Yet the Hamptons are now in the grip of the psychedelic renaissance. “The big thing is chocolate infused with mushrooms,” said a man walking his dog on the high street. “I get it through the guy I get my cannabis from.” As he spoke his wife arrived and said, apologetically, that they had to go and pick up their children from camp. Then she added: “Um, I don’t know if you should give your name, Todd. We have kids.”

In a café around the corner, two teenagers discussed the drugs their parents were taking. “A lot of our parents microdose,” said one. She added: “My friends’ dad is one of the investors [in psychedelics].”

Jennifer Ford, 57, who runs Lifted, a wellness centre and fitness studio in the Hamptons, with her partner, Holly Rilinger, said microdosing — taking tiny doses of a psychedelic drug to improve one’s mood or productivity — was now commonplace.

“[Hamptons residents] are very high-powered individuals with very demanding jobs and families,” she said. “Instead of taking Xanax, they microdose mushrooms.” Recently, she was at a party and was offered “a glass of molly water” — a glass of water with MDMA, or ecstasy, dissolved into it. “It’s an alcohol alternative,” she said. “A lot of people don’t even drink any more.” “Everyone has to get up and go to work the next morning, she said. “They don’t want to get wasted.”

Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, said he was invited to the Hamptons in 2021 by the billionaire financier Michael Milken to address a seminar. The audience was “very excited. That’s why I was invited back,” he said. “There are a lot of people in the Hamptons that have a lot of money. They are looking for meaning.”

He said Long Island now boasts not only “below ground” psychedelic therapists, operating discreetly, but also “above ground” clinics such as the Hampton Insight Institute for Psychedelic Therapy. It is run by Lea Lis, a psychiatrist and assistant clinical professor at New York Medical College.

The ketamine treatments Lis offers for depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders are entirely legal. Still, when she first opened her psychedelic clinic last year “I was afraid to even put up a sign,” she said. “I was like: ‘When are the police going to come?’”

In the Hamptons, she says, “there is definitely a whole underground scene” involving mushrooms and mescaline from the San Pedro cactus. Ketamine can be prescribed legally and she believes that MDMA therapy will soon be approved by the Food and Drug Administration as well.

Patients treated with ketamine experience something akin to “an extreme form of meditation,” she said. “You are almost watching yourself. You could have memories from your past, you could have [experiences of] sacred geometry” — seeing geometric shapes and patterns. Often, patients have visions of Egypt or Mesopotamia, she said. “A lot of people think they are connecting back to their ancestors.”

Jennifer Ford’s daughter, Chloe, 22, is being treated at the clinic for anxiety that affects her sleep. “The first time I was definitely super nervous,” she said. Her first treatment involved a mild dose, taken via a lozenge. During the second session, where a higher dose was delivered via an injection, “I had a whole series of visions,” she said. “I was in the Sahara desert.” In the third, “I had a vision of holding my parents’ hands. My parents are divorced, I don’t get along with my brother, I had this very broken family feeling, but we were all standing together.” As it ended, she realised that she was crying, she said.

She credits the treatments with making her a good deal calmer. “It’s the whole thing with letting go of your ego and accepting what’s going on,” she said.

Her mother is now planning to introduce a ketamine treatment session with Lis at the wellness centre. Another psychedelic gathering took place at a studio in Sag Harbor, on the north coast of Long Island, last month. The session was run by the East Institute, which was founded by Lena Franklin and her husband in Atlanta. Franklin declined to say what sort of “plant medicine” was used. But she said: “We are evidently being drawn to the Hamptons, for whatever reason. We are following that call. There seems to be a growing spiritual community there and I would also say the land feels sacred.”

Just a few miles west from the smart high street of Southampton is the Shinnecock Reservation. “Indigenous tribes inhabited that land,” said Franklin. “There is what I would call a global evolution of returning to these indigenous ways of being.”