The Outlaw Chemist Teaching People How to Make Drugs From Scratch

But shortly afterward, his Patreon account was taken down too. In an email statement, a spokesperson for the platform said: “Patreon prohibits works that provide instructions around the creation of controlled substances or other recreational drugs. We take violations of our policies seriously, and after an internal investigation, we have removed the creator’s account.”

Myco hopes to successfully appeal the Patreon decision, as he pays his team through the funds accrued from his subscribers. “I know I’m a renegade, but I don’t promote the use [of drugs],” he says. “It’s all scientific. It’s all education, in the hopes to promote harm reduction.”

As hallucinogens edge closer to mainstream medicine, Myco is pushing in the opposite direction—away from clinics, regulators, and expensive trip-sitters, and toward radical self-sufficiency. To his many supporters, the outlaw chemist is democratizing psychedelic knowledge, out of the hands of academics, dealers, and erstwhile gatekeepers. To critics, his confidence occasionally outruns his science, and his commitment to secrecy raises questions about at least some of what he says.

Myco, a 38-year-old from Boston who now lives in his parents’ native Puerto Rico, seems at ease breaking the law.

He claims that, in 2002, he produced his own DMT by following a published scientific extraction method. Smoking the resultant hallucinogen was a transformative experience. Psychedelics “became my entire world,” he says, adding that he was dealing with “a really serious depression” at the time, after his parents split and his uncle died. He says he communed with his late uncle in the throes of that DMT trip. “He reassured me that everything’s all right,” recalls Myco. From that point on, “I knew I wanted to be part of psychedelic history.”

After studying microbiology in college, Myco says, he started posting on drug forums like the Shroomery, Mycotopia, and Nexus in 2009 but was appalled by their cliquishness. “They treated new cultivators and chemists like shit,” he says. (A moderator from Shroomery says cliquish behavior does exist and can shut down people with new ideas, but they are glad it did not stop Myco “from pursuing his passion for chemistry and mycology.”)

Myco says he went on to work for a pharmaceutical company in Boston “making more money than I’d ever seen,” but it was only ever a stopgap. He says that in late 2014 he posted his first explainer video on YouTube on aspects of growing psilocybin mushrooms, while wearing a gas mask. Several months later Myco logged back into his YouTube creator account and discovered “it had completely blown up,” accruing thousands of subscribers. So he quit his job and created a Patreon—anointing his supporters as the “Trip Team family.”

In mid-2023 he started drawing up plans to brazenly educate people on how to produce LSD. “Sure, a chemist can go get a synthesis schematic and synthesize LSD, but for the average Joe it would look like hieroglyphics,” he says.

So he decided to try to become the first person to bring to the screen long-established LSD recipes shared by legendary psychedelic chemists Albert Hofmann and Sasha Shulgin. To minimize the threat of censure or even prosecution, Myco claims that in May 2024 he found a university laboratory in Pakistan, which apparently secured government approval to produce the psychedelics for scientific research.