“This is probably the most important video I have ever done,” William “Willy” Myco tells his nearly 2,500 paying Patreon subscribers. The video, posted on Halloween 2024, offers viewers step-by-step instructions on how to produce what he claimed is “100 percent pure LSD.”
Wearing a baseball cap that said “Mycelium Familia” over his shaved head with his brown beard peeking out from beneath his mask, he declares his tutorial on synthesizing the psychedelic over the course of three days to be the “world’s first.”
“It has been a dream of mine to record this process so everybody has the scientific knowledge they need,” says Myco, which is short for mycologist, a scientist who studies fungi, in the video. (He doesn’t share his real last name, and he spoke to WIRED on the condition we wouldn’t use his last name due to the illegal nature of some of his work.)
When the process is finished, the video shows his chemist collaborator holding out a lab flask of a greenish-blue liquid, but no test of the substance is conducted on camera to confirm its identity. Nonetheless, Myco issues a stark if hyperbolic warning about the final product, telling viewers, if it “touches your eyes, skin, mouth … you better cancel your plans for a month, ’cause you’re not going to be able to do anything.” (Most LSD trips wear off after a day, though there can be exceptions.)
It was once unthinkable to post a video on the internet demonstrating how to synthesize a controlled psychoactive substance. But the masked psychedelic educator has released more than 120 how-to videos over the past decade which run the gamut from the attempted LSD synthesis to explainers on cultivating psilocybin mushrooms, extracting mescaline from mind-altering cacti, and preparing DMT vape cartridges.
In addition to his Patreon, which had more than 14,500 subscribers, Myco sells mushroom genetics, merch (in the LSD video, he wore his own branded hoodie with the slogan “Love My Country But Fuck The Government”), and offers consultancy services for mushroom growers. His YouTube channel, called “Willy’s World,” had over 96,000 followers but was taken down after WIRED reached out to the platform for comment. YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said it was removed “under our terms of service, which prohibit creating new channels after a termination.”
Myco responded on Instagram: “YouTube is back on their BS again. Channel had zero strikes whatsoever, I post super censored and safe content there … So if you’ve ever asked why I put all my energy into my patreon channel … this is why.”
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.
Myco months later released a similar video synthesizing MDMA in Pakistan. Then, in March 2026, he published a video of what he says shows a synthesis of the psychedelic 2C-B, also known as “tripstasy” as its effects are like a mix of MDMA and LSD. “I could tell you from personal experience, this stuff is absolutely amazing,” he says. He signs off from the video with his trademark catchphrase: “Do good, be good, live good, namaste.”
Next up, he plans to undermine an incoming US Drug Enforcement Administration ban on the opioid-like compound 7-OH, which is found in kratom. “The Feds are about to schedule [7-OH] tablets and take them away from countless individuals that have been using them to successfully escape opiate addiction,” Myco wrote in a recent Instagram story. “So I think it’s time to film a synth video showing you how to make your own [7-OH] of the highest quality for next to nothing.”
Each video cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce, he says. “We should be able to explore our minds the way we see fit,” Myco said in the LSD video. “These aren’t just substances to me,” Myco says in our interview. “These are sacraments; these are medicines.”
But some are calling bullshit on Myco’s methods.
Hamilton Morris, an expert in psychedelic chemistry and creator of the Vice show Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, saw the LSD video in June last year and claimed, “with absolute certainty this is not 100 percent pure LSD.” In a video to his Patreon subscribers, Morris said: “The fact it has this green-blue color is something that I have never heard of. Right off the bat that is a bit suspicious.”
Myco soon shot back against Morris on his Patreon. He acknowledged some minor errors in the presentation of the process but said the synthesis route was long-established. “I don’t know if he’s upset that I figured out how to do this legally, and I got it out there,” Myco said in his counter-response.
Myco’s commitment to democratizing making drugs can also put him in the crosshairs of dealers. He says he started receiving threats from other drug producers in spring 2024, in the run-up to the LSD video, which he had announced was in the pipeline. “Tell Willy putting out a video like that can hurt a lot of people’s business and that can make problems nobody wants,” a text from an associate in June 2024 reads. “It’s best for his safety to not release that video.”
Myco is increasingly security-conscious as a result. He has always worn a face mask in photos and in his videos to conceal his identity. “In Puerto Rico, I’m heavily armed,” he says. “I carry a gun everywhere I go.”
He refused to publicly state how much money he makes, but documents of last year’s revenue, shared with WIRED, indicate that he possibly earns well into the six figures.
Despite the hiccups, Myco’s psychedelic roadshow continues. “The gatekeepers wanted to keep [the knowledge] mystified forever,” he says. “I want people to see, you could do this yourself quietly at your home for pennies on the dollar.”
His Robin Hood ethos has seen him pick up supporters throughout the psychedelics industry. “People have kind of grown up with him, like they first learned how to cultivate mushrooms by watching Willy Myco videos,” says psychedelic comedian and entrepreneur Dennis Walker, host of the Mycopreneur podcast. “At the heart of what he is doing is creating crowdsourced, decentralized access models for these substances.”
Reggie Harris, cofounder of the mushroom testing outfit Hyphae Labs, says in a text: “Willy is the god and fuck ANYONE who has anything negative to say about him. Ask them what they have done to build community.”
Every year, Myco organizes vacations for groups of more than 30 of his followers to Disney World in Florida and, this October, to Sedona, Arizona, for “Tripaween,” where he says the group is going to do a San Pedro cactus ceremony with Navajo Native American shamans and explore the quartz-rich red rocks.
“We’re tripping all the time and just partying, having fun like rock stars,” he says. “If it wasn’t for the [Trip Team family] I don’t know where I would be. They’re not my biological family, but they’re the family I choose, and I would give my life for them.”
If he is unable to get Patreon to reconsider, Myco says he will simply continue his work through Discord and his website. “The more people know about something,” he says, “the safer they are.”
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