SXSW Festival Opens Voting On Cannabis And Psychedelics Panels For 2025 Event

Voting is now open for panels to be part of next year’s South by Southwest (SXSW) conference, allowing anyone with an opinion to weigh in on what topics the festival covers and whose views are featured onstage.

There are more than a dozen proposed panels on cannabis, including both marijuana and hemp, and more than 60 on psychedelics. That’s a decline compared to what was offered in recent years.

Among the proposals are 21 cannabis panels, including seven around hemp and its derivatives and 14 around marijuana. They fall into broad categories such as culture, government and civic engagement, climate and sustainability as well as branding and advertising.

Next year’s conference will also, like this year’s event, host a separate panel track for psychedelics—an indiction of the ongoing interest the more recent mainstream movement holds for festivalgoers. There are 64 panel submissions in the psychedelics panel track that voters can pick from with the online voting tool.

Here are examples of some of the noteworthy panels being considered for SXSW 2025:

Rescheduling, criminal justice and culture-related proposals feature prominently in the cannabis-related options for next year’s SXSW. There’s also a bevy of offerings on brand strategy and marketing amid the changing legal environments at the state and federal levels.

Members of the legal justice advocacy group Last Prisoner Project have submitted a proposed panel on “Pathways to Cannabis Justice” that centers on a pair of former bunkies in a Kansas prison who “have emerged as successful entrepreneurs in the legal cannabis industry,” according to a description of the proposal. “This panel will explore their journey from incarceration to freedom, their entrepreneurial ventures, and their unwavering commitment to advocating for the release of other cannabis prisoners,” it says.

Among the other marijuana offerings for the festival’s government and civic engagement track include a broad panel with members of law and industry discussing the history of marijuana prohibition and what’s ahead as well as a conversation around track-and-trace issues.

In the advertising and brand experience track, a proposed panel would explore what rescheduling would mean for cannabis marketing and brand strategy. And while technically submitted for a different track, another proposal focuses on strategies for brands on how to be attractive acquisition targets.

Culture-related submissions, meanwhile, include proposed panels on the influence of marijuana within hip-hop culture, whether to “buy weed from a dispensary or grow weed at home” and discussion of a film focusing on social equity in the cannabis industry.

Another offering on the SXSW conference’s culture track is a proposed session with the founder and CEO of Raw Rolling Paper discussing “changes in the culture of cannabis consumption…from the mid 90s to today.”

On the climate and sustainability track, a proposal centers on the environmental impacts of cannabis and tobacco—which a description says could affect both product quality and consumer prices—and how industry members are working to lessen those impacts.

Your chance to shape the 2025 #SXSW Conference is here! PanelPicker Community Voting is open now through August 18. 🗳️ https://t.co/ULjsF92FiL pic.twitter.com/RaCHJHI63L

— SXSW (@sxsw) August 6, 2024

Amid the ongoing commotion around hemp-derived cannabinoids, two separate proposed panels—each titled “High Stakes”—discuss the business opportunities and around converting hemp into forms of THC. One proposal features panelists from the companies Delta Emerald, Sunderstorm, Curaleaf and Find Wunder, while the other includes leaders of Kiva Confections, Cann and 1906.

Another offering, “Navigating Schedule III: Regulatory, Social Equity and Hemp,” features consultants and industry members discussing the possible hemp-related changes around marijuana’s proposed move to Schedule III of the federal Controlled Substances Act.

On the climate and sustainability front, a proposed talk covers how hemp has emerged as “a versatile solution to many of our sustainability challenges,” creating new frontiers in fuel, textiles and high-tech products. Another zooms in on how hempcrete and other agricultural building products can help minimize environmental impacts—an issue the federal government recently spent millions on to explore further.

Related to hemp, one proposal is a talk on “finding distribution for your indie film” that centers on a documentary about a hemp farmer.

The simplest way to sort through the dozens of panel submissions around psychedelics is by selecting the “SXSW 2025” conference on the festival’s PanelPicker tool and filtering by the psychedelics track.

Some of the proposals look at the growing phenomenon of psychedelics-assisted therapy. A group that features heavily in the ongoing discussion around MDMA-assisted therapy, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), has members on a few proposed panels for SXSW 2025. One, organized with the group Drugs Over Dinner, is billed as “an interactive workshop where we will explore personal stories of self-discovery and transformation through psychedelics,” while another looks at psychedelics applications in war-torn areas, including Palestine and Ukraine.

There’s also a proposed standalone talk from MAPS founder and president Rick Doblin titled “MDMA-Assisted Therapy: Going to the Trauma, Not the Profits,” in which Doblin will discuss MAPS’s “domestic and global projects to prioritize access to MDMA-assisted therapy for communities with the largest burden of trauma and fewest resources for treatment.”

Other prospective panels notable attempts to look beyond the current focus on clinical applications of psychedelics. One, for example, attempts to “rekindle a conversation” from before prohibition about how entheogens “can facilitate creative problem solving. It involves discussion of a University of Texas project in collaboration with Bruce Damer’s Center for MINDS “that is testing the effects of psilocybin on these neurocognitive mechanisms and the potential for psychedelics to induce false insights.” (A standalone panel with Damer is also on offer for next year’s festival.)

Another offers what it describes as a behind-the-scenes look at what led to the current psychedelics renaissance. “Perhaps you’ve heard dinner party stories of an ayahuasca retreat, seen new neighborhood ketamine clinics, or learned about parents microdosing mushrooms. How did we get here?” it asks. Writers and a patent attorney plan a wide-ranging discussion on “science, industry, commercialization, culture, policy, and more.”

Many of the panels feature speakers who have personal stories about how psychedelics helped improve their lives. One in particular features “three patients whose pain was dramatically reduced and their lives transformed by the use of psychedelic medicines,” according to a description, “providing healing for a spinal cord injury, complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), and long-COVID.” It includes a rehabilitation specialist from the University of California San Diego’s Center for Psychedelic Research and a retired Air Force Judge Advocate General.

As for issues of social justice and psychedelics, some noteworthy panels include one from members of Last Prisoner Project, New Approach PAC, MAPS and the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP) that looks at “the complexities and pitfalls of successfully joining social justice efforts with drug policy reforms and how we can decriminalize psychedelics,” according to a description. Another proposal argues that the “current psychedelic landscape is being molded by cisgender, heterosexual, and capitalistic notions of how these medicines might find a place within our culture” and instead proposes “a different view of psychedelics informed by queer theory and activism.”

It’s also impossible to ignore allure of some of the more unusual presentations, such as a panel that asks, “Can we take a snapshot of the psychedelic mindset with VR?” The proposal, from an Australian research team, says it will reveal how challenging the status quo of targeting symptoms “let to an accidental development of a digital telepathy prototype.” An event description tantalizingly promises that attendees “will be the first to experience a smart combination of immersive tech and psychedelics that reveals and freezes in time our deepest layers.”

Community voting will make up 30 percent of the final programming decision, organizers said as they announced the opening of polls on Tuesday. Voting can be done online until August 18, and the final lineup of speaking panels is expected to be unveiled later this year.

The SXSW conference runs March 7 to March 16, 2025.

The slate of more than 450 sessions chosen last year for the 2024 conference included a handful of panels focused on legal marijuana and a whopping 13 sessions on psychedelics.

For the first time since 2018, however, this year’s event did not feature a dedicated cannabis track.

The psychedelics track included sessions on MDMA, transformative psychedelics “beyond MDMA,” psychedelic training, entheogens and people of color, the commercialization of psilocybin therapy, an open-ended psychedelics meetup and more.

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Image element courtesy of Kristie Gianopulos.