Version 1.0 · Last reviewed July 2026. This is a living document. It gets revised in public, and every change is recorded in the changelog at the bottom of this page.
Preamble: who this is for, and what it is not
This code is for the people the existing codes skipped.
If you are a licensed therapist working inside a clinical trial, MAPS wrote a code of ethics for you in 2022. If you are an academic, there is a rich literature on psychedelic ethics waiting for you. But most of the people actually guiding psychedelic experiences right now are neither. They are coaches, sitters, ceremonialists, retreat facilitators, and practitioners in legal gray zones, working alone, with no institution behind them and no shared ethical floor beneath them.
That is who this is for: the independent facilitator who takes the work seriously and has nowhere to point when someone asks, “what standard do you hold yourself to?”
Three things this code is not. It is not a license, and adopting it does not make anyone qualified. It is not a legal shield, and nothing here is legal advice. And it is not a substitute for training. You still need to learn this work somewhere. What training does not give you is an ongoing standard for the years after the certificate, and that is the gap this document exists to fill.
1. Touch, consent, and capacity
The standard: consent to touch is negotiated before the session, is limited to what was agreed, and can be revoked at any moment, including nonverbally. A person in a non-ordinary state cannot consent to new forms of touch.
Touch is the most published flashpoint in psychedelic ethics for a reason. Grounding touch, a hand on the hand or shoulder, agreed to in advance, can be a genuine anchor. Anything beyond what was explicitly negotiated while your client had full capacity is a boundary violation, no matter how the moment feels. And the moment will sometimes feel confusing. Sexual energy can surface in sessions. Naming that reality ahead of time, to yourself and in your agreements, is what makes it navigable instead of dangerous.
For the full picture, including what to put in your consent conversation, read what counts as ethical touch during a psychedelic session.
2. Scope of practice
The standard: describe yourself with the words that are actually true, and work only within what those words permit. If you are not a licensed therapist, you do not diagnose, you do not treat, and you do not call the work therapy.
The words guide, coach, facilitator, and therapist are not interchangeable, and the differences are not branding. They are legal categories with different obligations, and your clients deserve to know which one they are sitting with. Stretching your title is not a marketing choice. It is the first ethical breach, because every agreement that follows is built on it.
The plain-language breakdown lives in coach, guide, or therapist: pick the word that is actually true.
3. Legal risk and honest practice
The standard: know the actual legal status of your work in your jurisdiction, carry that risk knowingly, and never transfer it to a client through vagueness or false reassurance.
Most independent facilitation in the United States happens outside any legal framework. Pretending otherwise, to yourself or to the people you serve, is an ethical failure separate from the legal one. Honest practice means you can say out loud what is and is not protected, what you would do if a session drew outside attention, and what your client is agreeing to participate in. This code does not tell anyone to break the law or how to avoid its consequences. It tells you that whatever risk you choose to carry must be carried with open eyes.
The fuller accounting is in the legal risk no one wants to say out loud.
4. Dual relationships and boundaries
The standard: the smaller the community, the more explicit the boundary. Romantic and sexual relationships with current clients are never acceptable. Every other overlap, friend, colleague, business partner, gets named out loud before the work begins.
This field runs on small, overlapping communities, and research from within the field says dual relationships are remarkably common and almost never examined. Good intentions are not a boundary. If you are considering guiding someone who is already in your life, that decision deserves a real conversation about what changes, what the exit looks like, and who you both can talk to when it gets complicated. If you cannot have that conversation, that is your answer.
5. Transference and power
The standard: assume the power imbalance exists, because it does. Your client’s projection is not affection, and your countertransference is not information about them. Your own inner work is the safety mechanism.
Someone in an expanded state, in your care, will sometimes hand you more authority than any person should hold. What you do with that moment defines the work. The guides who cause harm are rarely the ones who set out to. They are the ones who stopped examining what the work was activating in them. This is why a facilitator’s ongoing self-reflection is not personal enrichment. It is a duty of care.
6. Screening and duty of care
The standard: screen every client before every engagement, know the contraindications you are responsible for catching, and refer out when the situation exceeds what you are qualified to hold. Care does not end when the session does.
You do not need a medical license to ask about psychiatric history, medications, cardiac conditions, and family history of psychosis. You need a medical license to override the answers, and you do not have one, so you do not. A facilitator who under-screens because a booking matters more than a red flag has already answered the question of what their ethics are worth. And the duty extends past the session itself: integration support, or an honest handoff to someone who can provide it, is part of the work, not an upsell.
7. Supervision and peer accountability
The standard: practicing in isolation is itself an ethical risk. Every practicing facilitator maintains some structure where their real cases and real dilemmas are seen by peers.
Nearly every serious failure in this field grew in the dark, in a practice no colleague ever looked at. Peer consultation is where the confusing session, the attraction you did not expect, the boundary that drifted, get named while they are still small. If you have no room where you can say the true thing about your work, building one is not optional self-care. It is the infrastructure of safe practice. This conviction is why PGN exists, and it holds whether or not you ever join anything we run.
8. Certification and legitimacy
The standard: represent your training exactly as it is. A certificate is evidence of a course completed, not a license, and treating it as one misleads the public and endangers clients.
Anyone can currently print a certificate, and anyone can call themselves a guide. That is not a reason to abandon standards. It is the reason to hold them visibly. Evaluate any training you take, or teach, on what it actually certifies, and say no more than that. The field earns legitimacy one honestly-described practitioner at a time.
Before you pay for anything, read how to tell whether a psychedelic certification is legitimate.
Adopting and citing this code
This code is free to adopt, reference, and link in your own practice materials, intake documents, and websites. Cite it as: A Code of Ethics for Independent Psychedelic Facilitators, v1.0, Psychedelic Guide Network, 2026, by Ashley Carmen, LMFT. If you adopt it, say which version, because this document will change as the field does.
A code on a wall never kept anyone safe. What keeps people safe is a practitioner who keeps examining what they carry into the room. That examination has a starting point here: the Ethical Biography, a free, private, guided self-reflection built for exactly this. The code is the standard. The Biography is the practice of meeting it.
Changelog
- v1.0, July 2026. First public version. Eight standards: touch and consent, scope of practice, legal honesty, dual relationships, transference and power, screening and duty of care, peer accountability, certification and legitimacy.
