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A BRIEF (MODERN) HISTORY

An often contemporary perception of sacred plant medicines was born from patriarchy, propaganda and politics. Richard Nixon’s oppressive “War on Drugs” with the signing of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 that inaccurately labeled psilocybin, a naturally wild growing fungi, as a schedule 1 drug defined as “having no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse”. (Note that Schedule 2, the less “threatening” category includes cocaine, meth, fentanyl, ritalin and oxycotin among other profiteering pharmacological patents.)

The War on Drugs was not a war on drugs but was a war on people that marginalized communities even further through incarceration and intimidation, criminalized age old indigenous cultural and ceremonial practices and halted decades of modern clinical research into the therapeutic and healing benefits of sacred plant medicines.

After half a century of lost lives and opportunity, in the year 2000, Johns Hopkins Medicine was granted approval by the FDA to resume clinical research into the therapeutic and healing benefits of psilocybin known by indigenous cultures worldwide for millennia. Clinical experiential studies by John Hopkins as well as their colleagues at the Imperial College London have shown that psilocybin positively affects treatment resistant depression, substance use disorder, PTSD, fear, anxiety and existential distress. In 2018, the FDA designated psilocybin as a breakthrough therapy providing further research opportunity and legal therapeutic access and pathways to these sacred healing modalities for various forms of depression, which the World Health Organization designated in 2017 as the leading cause of disability worldwide. Oregon and Colorado have legalized the therapeutic use of psilocybin and a number of cities and states have legislation in process including New Mexico, Hawaii, California, Vermont and New York among others, paving a wider road towards social justice and collective healing.

More to come…