Unlikely Drug Kingpin Is Fine With His Downfall

He's not your typical drug kingpin. A story at Wired unpacks the remarkable tale of Joseph Clements, who goes by Akasha Song. As Andy Greenberg writes, the Texan's fascination with psychedelics led him to the powerful hallucinogen DMT, but not just as a user. Clements mastered the extraction of DMT from jurema bark and began selling it at music festivals, eventually scaling his operation into a sophisticated dark-web enterprise under another alias, Shimshai. He imported the bark from Brazil, extracted DMT with surgical precision, and shipped the potent stuff around the globe, raking in crypto profits and earning a kind of cult status in online psychedelic circles.

Clements continued his operations for years, but his downfall came in 2022 when a sting operation involving a jurema bark shipment led to his arrest in Colorado. He faced decades in prison, but then caught two breaks: First, the feds concluded the seized bark had relatively low levels of DMT. (Clements "didn't argue" but figured his own labs would have done better, writes Greenberg.) And, second, Colorado decriminalized psychedelics around this time. As a result, Akasha received a 24-month sentence and is already out. Greenberg reports that the money is all gone, either seized or spent, and Clements has been mostly living with his mom since his release. He's OK with all of it. "Even before I had the money, even if I never had the money," says Clements, "I was free." (Read the full story.)