The Epic Rise and Fall of a Dark-Web Psychedelics Kingpin

Joseph Clements fell in love with LSD as a teenager. Later, as Akasha Song, he fell in love with DMT even harder, learning how to extract it from jurema bark so that he could share it with his fellow psychonauts. People gonna people, though, so sharing became selling, and selling became selling at scale, and selling at scale became a multimillion-dollar empire that made Scarface seem penny-ante. Andy Greenberg, as he so often does, lays out his reporting impeccably, turning Akasha’s candor into a jaw-dropping tale of unsustainable escalation.

They rented a house on the north shore of the lake with a backyard patio surrounded by redwood trees stretching into Tahoe National Forest. The landlord let Akasha pay the rent in bitcoin. This time he brought Coinflip and another friend with him to live and work in the house from the start. They set up DMT production in the garage at more than twice the scale of the lab in Colorado, ultimately expanding to 10 of the same 35-gallon barrels. Two competent lieutenants were now taking much of the work off Akasha’s hands, and he could settle into a lifestyle befitting the crypto millions rolling in.

Akasha and his son spent their days hiking, rock climbing, slacklining, and water-skiing in the ultra-clear lake, riding his new $150,000 G-Wagon to any of three ski resorts within a 20-minute drive, or partying with the locals—who all seemed to be rich, retired, and not very interested in how anyone had made their money. When someone did ask, Akasha would simply answer “bitcoin,” which was enough to end the conversation (and which, he points out, was technically true).