Original Research Article Critique of Anthropology 2025, Vol. 0(0) 1–21 © The Author(s) 2025 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0308275X251357813 journals.sagepub.com/home/coa Psychedelic assemblages Joshua Falcon  Florida International University, USA Abstract The medicalization of psychedelic drugs has gained significant momentum over the past two decades in the United States, ushering in new forms of scientific, medical, and clinical practice and training. As an increasing number of research programs and academic in- stitutions focus on the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs, it is important to recognize that the emphasis on medical import is a specific cultural reification. Since limited anthropological research exists on the medicalization of psychedelics, it is necessary to reassert that the nature of psychedelics, like all drugs, transforms both within and across cultural contexts. In combining interdisciplinary research, semi-structured interviews, and netnography, this article introduces the concept of psychedelic assemblages to argue that the nature of psychedelics drugs is not only contingent upon the forms of signification and assigned functions relative to each culture’s reification of them, but that each of the ways psychedelics become reified produces unique sociocultural and material forms and effects. Keywords Assemblage, capitalism, entheogens, plant medicine, psychedelics The plants, fungi, and substances commonly known today as psychedelic drugs have undergone countless transformations in their history of human usage and cultural ex- pression. Today, what a “psychedelic” commonly refers to in technoscientific and in- dustrialized regions across the world is a subcategory of hallucinogenic drugs known as the “classic psychedelics,” which includes psilocybin, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), ly- sergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and mescaline (Johnson et al., 2019). Defined in such a manner, the essential nature of psychedelics is rendered as psychoactive alkaloids or chemical compounds whose significance remains dependent upon their therapeutic Corresponding author: Joshua Falcon, Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies, Florida International University, 11200 SW 8th Street, Miami, FL 33199, USA. Email: jofalcon@fiu.edu