Bringing psychedelic medicine from the margins to the mainstream
Research into the therapeutic benefits of psychedelic drugs is nothing new. In fact, research extends back 80 years with the discovery of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), when the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, looking to synthesize a migraine treatment, created the derivative of the ergot fungus. It wasn’t until several years later that he accidentally dosed himself and realized LSD’s psychedelic effect.
This initial research kicked off a wave investigating the therapeutic potential of psychedelics, but with the emergence of the secretive and unethical research by the Army and CIA and the rise of the counterculture, the federal government stepped in. The Controlled Substance Act subsection of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 classified LSD, heroin, marijuana and a few other drugs as having “a high potential for abuse, no current medical use, and a lack of safety for use under medical supervision,” classifying them as Schedule I substances and effectively killing research because of the hoops scientists would need to jump through, with both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
It would be nearly three decades before psychedelic medicine research re-emerged in a meaningful way, when researchers at Johns Hopkins obtained regulatory approval to reinitiate research in healthy, psychedelic-naïve volunteers. A subsequent study examining psilocybin administered in a supportive setting is widely recognized for igniting the current period of psychedelic research. This seminal study, which demonstrated long-term benefits of psilocybin (e.g., positive mood, life satisfaction, prosocial behavior) in healthy participants, is just one of many studies that have since confirmed the low toxicity and minimal addiction potential of psychedelics.
In the intervening years, legislative reform regarding psychedelics began to gain momentum. According to a study in JAMA Psychiatry, from January 2019 to September 2022, 25 states considered 74 bills to reform existing laws restricting access to psychedelic drugs or proposed further research into reform legislation. Ten of those bills were signed into law by seven states, with the vast majority (90 percent) specifically referring to psilocybin and 36 percent of the bills also including 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine (MDMA).
The foundation laid by Johns Hopkins has, over the last 20 years, spurred a wave of interest — and progress — into the benefits of psychedelic medicines.
In October 2022, mental health company Compass Pathways announced initiation of the first Phase 3 program of psilocybin therapy globally for treatment-resistant depression. Initiation of the program followed positive results from the company’s Phase 2b study, presented at the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting in May 2022. Likewise, earlier this year, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies announced results of its Phase 3 clinical trial of MDMA-assisted therapy, which demonstrated statistically significant improvements in PTSD symptoms after three sessions.
This past June, the FDA published a new draft guidance to highlight considerations to researchers investigating the use of psychedelic drugs for potential treatment of medical conditions. This represented the first draft guidance that presents considerations for designing clinical trials for psychedelic drugs. It recognizes the interest in exploring their therapeutic potential, but also the unique challenges throughout the drug development process, including clinical trial conduct, data collection, subject safety and new drug application requirements.
Further, the draft guidance notes that, for psychedelics that are currently Schedule I controlled substances, activities associated with investigations under an Investigational New Drug Application must comply with applicable DEA regulatory requirements. Importantly, in providing a pathway for the research, this is a tacit signal that the FDA is also indicating to the biopharmaceutical industry that there is ultimately a pathway to approval. With the first approval possibly coming as soon as 2024, there will surely be increased interest in the space, even if it doesn’t translate into an immediate wave of approvals.
Yet, challenges remain.
These challenges are often logistical in nature. Given the psychedelic experience that accompanies treatment, which can last up to 12 hours in some cases, conducting clinical research is labor and resource intensive. FDA’s guidance requires two people to monitor clinical trial participants. One of these monitors needs to be at least a Ph.D.-level researcher and the secondary monitor still needs to have experience in the mental health space. This is something that will likely extend into treatment once these medicines are approved. Uptake could be a similar challenge, as it could require two people to guide patients through their psychedelic experience to make sure they remain safe, and if there are any adverse effects, that they can support them along their journey.
This is also new ground for the FDA, and the agency will likely take a very cautious approach to safeguard patients and minimize the risk for unforeseen treatment-emergent safety concerns. Compounding the challenge of uptake is that manufacturers and investigators will need to go through the process of securing DEA clearance to be authorized to administer these drugs in the research setting.
Despite decades of research, the FDA’s draft guidance is finally bringing psychedelics research into the light. As the space continues to progress, there could be a move toward fine tuning the experience for patients. That may mean minimizing the psychedelic effects of these drugs without compromising their therapeutic benefits or being more selective in the receptors researchers target to reduce their adverse potential. Along with this evolution, a meaningful step that could bring us closer to realizing the full potential of these important therapeutics would be for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to initiate a review to consider recommending rescheduling of the individual drugs or the entire class. The precedent for such a move was recently set when HHS recommended in August 2023 to have cannabis moved to Schedule III from its current Schedule I. Doing so would greatly ease access for further research and eliminate the administrative burden on prospective researchers and the DEA that is currently required to review the paperwork from each researcher for each trial they plan to conduct.
Robert Bauer is executive director of operational strategy at Precision for Medicine.
The daughter of multi-millionaire oil tycoon Charles Koch thought she had to be liked to deserve to exist, until MDMA therapy
Rachel Nuwer
Dec 30, 2023,
Elizabeth Koch, daughter to right-wing oil magnate Charles Koch, struggled to find joy in her life.
Using MDMA therapy, she broke through the feeling that she needed to be perfect to deserve to exist.
Author Rachel Nuwer tells the story of how Elizabeth overcame her pain in the new book "I Feel Love".
One organization has been largely responsible for bringing psychedelics into the mainstream, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS.
In researching her new book, about the therapeutic applications of MDMA, author Rachel Nuwer dove into MAPS. She discovered the group was supported by some surprising benefactors.
This includes Elizabeth Koch, the daughter of Charles Koch of Koch Industries, which is one of the largest private American companies. Besides their massive fortune, Charles Koch and his brother David are known for funding conservative movements, like the Tea Party.
Nuwer explained in her book that though it may be counterintuitive, many public figures with conservative ties, like Elizabeth Koch, invest in socially liberal groups like MAPS.
Advertisement
Read below for the story of how Elizabeth Koch came to support psychedelic therapy in an excerpt from Rachel Nuwer's new book "I Feel Love."
The following is an excerpt from Rachel Nuwer's new book, "I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World."
The moment I walked through the door of the loftlike space, the slender forty-five-year-old greeted me with a hug, a blanket, and not one but two very LA-appropriate canned drinks ("energy booster" and "prebiotic popping soda") from the office's meticulously organized fridge. Elizabeth's bubbly enthusiasm and disarming warmth immediately put me at ease, and within minutes I felt as though I were chatting with an old friend.
Elizabeth's uncanny ability to endear herself to others is a skill she has been cultivating nearly her entire life, and it's actually a symptom of her trauma. In hearing her story, I would learn that MAPS's fundraising success doesn't just boil down to Doblin's prowess as a salesman, or to wealthy people simply loving MDMA, but to the fact that trauma and suffering are universal.
Not even the most privileged individuals in the world are immune to mental anguish, and they can face the same limitations as the rest of us in finding relief for that pain. Elizabeth's "fall from Eden," as she described her index trauma, occurred when she was five years old.
After a close friend of her parents severed his spine by diving into a shallow pond, the family went over to pay their respects to the now wheelchair-bound man. The atmosphere in the house was oppressively somber, so to lighten the mood for her little brother, Elizabeth began singing the Humpty Dumpty song.
In one refrain, though, she absentmindedly replaced "Humpty Dumpty" with the name of the paralyzed man. Suddenly, all the tension in the room was directed at her. "I see my dad looking over his shoulder and giving me this death stare," she recalled.
When the family got home, Elizabeth's father sat her down. "You kids don't get it," she recalled him saying. "You have everything that everyone wants, and you'll be hated for it your entire life. Your job, always, is to be the nicest person in the room, and the hardest worker in the room — the one who picks up garbage that everyone leaves behind. You have to be aboveboard because if you aren't, you'll not only be hated by everyone else but also by yourself."
Looking back on this incident with an adult's perspective, Elizabeth now understands that her father was trying to protect her. "He was absolutely terrified that my brother and I would grow up to be spoiled, piece-of-shit monsters," she said. As a five-year-old, however, she interpreted his lecture to mean that she could only be loved if she were good.
That pivotal message came to hold sway over nearly every facet of her personality and life.
In "The Myth of Normal," Gabor Maté wrote, "A child who does not experience himself as consistently and unconditionally lovable may well grow to be preternaturally likable or charming" — which was exactly the path Elizabeth followed.
It started with a nightly ritual: before bed, she would review everything she had said and done that day to make sure she had been the nicest person and the hardest worker, and that she hadn't accidentally hurt anyone's feelings. If something bad happened to her — say, she tripped and skinned her knee — she would tell herself that it was because the universe was punishing her for not being good enough.
In classrooms, during extracurricular activities, or on sports teams, she would always beeline for whichever kid she thought would hate her the most — usually the one who appeared to have the least money, or the one who looked the least like her — and try to win them over by telling them funny stories about her family's dysfunction.
Over the years Elizabeth rose to the top of her class, won competitions for her writing, and made many friends, but she lacked joy. "I have to do this to prove that I deserve to be alive," she would tell herself each time she accomplished something.
"I have to earn my existence."
Her paranoia about what others thought of her intensified, as did her unhappiness. She realized she needed help and began trying various mental health solutions, including yoga, silent meditation retreats, and, briefly, medications.
Advertisement
She read books about Buddhism and neuroscience and gained glimpses of insight. But no amount of knowledge, learning, or practice brought genuine relief.
When a friend suggested in 2016 that she try psychedelic-assisted therapy with a "consciousness cowboy" he knew — an ex-military man who called himself Doug the Lovebunny — she agreed. Doug filled a silver balloon full with "some kind of vapor smoke," Elizabeth recalled, and instructed her to breathe in and hold it.
She had no idea what she was in for: he had given her 5-MeO-DMT, a short-acting but incredibly potent tryptamine. The ego-abolishing drug dissolved Elizabeth in totality. It was terrifying.
Doug the Lovebunny hadn't prepared Elizabeth for this harrowing and destabilizing experience, and he did not provide any support or integration for her afterward. For weeks, she would wake up in the middle of the night, she said, "scrambling to try to grab hold of my body."
She wanted to know more about what she was going through, and research led her to MAPS. She attended a psychedelics conference in Los Angeles, where she was moved and inspired by the firsthand accounts shared by war veterans who had taken part in the MDMA-assisted clinical trials for PTSD.
MDMA sounded a lot more user friendly than 5-MeO-DMT — and perhaps, Elizabeth thought, it could help her, too. So in spring 2018, she found "someone off grid" who agreed to give her MDMA-assisted therapy following the MAPS protocol.
Elizabeth wound up doing three sessions, and through that process, she saw the vast amount of pain she had been harboring throughout her life.
"I had been terrified of joy," she said. "The medicine showed me the degree to which all this buried stuff that I hadn't even been able to see was causing me to be reactive and feel constantly trapped, overwhelmed, and miserable."
The MDMA sessions (one of which she also paired with psilocybin) helped Elizabeth let go of the "intense self-hatred" she had been burdened with since she was five years old, she said, and to feel sympathy and love for herself. She's since become one of MAPS's top five donors.
"MDMA is not going to save the world," Elizabeth said. "But together with conversations and experiences of going inward and self-investigating, I think it can help."
Following that thread, in 2018, Elizabeth founded a company, Unlikely Collaborators, that aims to bring people together who seem like they're on opposite sides of an issue, and then work with them to reveal their shared humanity and commonalities.
If and when MDMA-assisted therapy gains FDA approval, Elizabeth also envisions Unlikely Collaborators providing community-oriented group integration services.
"We each have our own relative hell realms that we have to learn to crawl out of," she said. "The only way to bridge divides out there are to bridge the divides within."
From "I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World" out now from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2023 by Rachel Nuwer. All rights reserved.
Peyote is the darling of the psychedelics renaissance. Indigenous users say it co-opts ‘a sacred way of life’
Flowering peyote plant (Photo: Hans B | CC BY-SA 3.0)
- BY ANNETTE MCGIVNEY, THE GUARDIAN
On the first day of autumn, evening temperatures near Window Rock, Arizona, were brisk. Beneath the late September sky, a traditional round hogan in this remote corner of the Navajo Nation was enveloped in darkness. Ten tribal members gathered inside.
This article was originally published in The Guardian and is used with permission.
After a dinner of mutton and fry bread, the group settled in a circle around a wood stove radiating with burning juniper, preparing to ingest what the Diné (Navajo) call azeé – the medicine.
Most people know azeé as peyote: a small, button-like cactus famed for its powerful psychoactive and healing properties. The cactus is extremely rare in the United States – it grows wild in only one part of Texas – and has been integral to traditional Indigenous American practices for thousands of years.
The goal of this ceremony was to guide Diné college students on their spiritual path. One young man struggling with alcohol abuse was especially in need of the medicine.
“When this is over, you will feel like a washrag with all the gunk wrung out of it,” the man’s grandmother told him.
Tonight, the ritual would be no different from what it was a century ago. There would be peyote songs and drumming. Margie Whitney-Silva, a certified spiritual leader known as a roadman, would supply the peyote in the form of a tea brewed from the cactus, carried in a large pickle jar. Eagle-feather fans and gourd rattles would be used as the jar was passed around.
During the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, Indigenous Americans risked being thrown in jail for participating in such ceremonies because peyote was illegal under US law. Today, it is just the opposite. Peyote and mescaline – the hallucinogenic substance found inside the cactus – have become a darling of the psychedelic renaissance.
Peyote, mescaline and other hallucinogenics such as LSD, MDMA, ayahuasca and magic mushrooms are being touted for their capacity to revolutionise the treatment of PTSD, addiction and other health problems. In recent years, progressive politicians, doctors, community groups and Silicon Valley investors alike have thrown their weight behind decriminalization bills in dozens of US states and cities.
Their goal to spread the benefits of psychedelics may be well-intentioned, but for Indigenous Americans, the boom has a dark side that rarely comes up in venture capital pitches. Many Diné tribal members are describing this moment as a “peyote crisis” that threatens to appropriate and commodify their sacred way of life.
Their concerns are multifold. Decriminalizing peyote could fuel poaching and a black market for the slow-growing cactus, whose limited habitat is already threatened by climate change and development. A sudden surge in demand might completely wipe out peyote from its natural environment, traditional practitioners say.
Then there are the deeper concerns about turning peyote and mescaline into an on-demand drug. Members of the Native American church of North America, an inter-tribal religion that revolves around the ancient practice of peyotism, are alarmed by pharmaceutical ventures seeking to create mescaline in a lab, in much the same way opium from the poppy flower was synthesized to create fentanyl.
Non-Indigenous leaders in the psychedelic space insist they are respecting Native American spirituality by using synthetic mescaline instead of the real thing. Dozens of Indigenous Americans interviewed for this story see it otherwise.
“How would Christians feel if Jesus Christ was cloned?” asked Justin Jones, a Diné peyote practitioner and legal counsel for the Native American church of North America, a non-profit organization that advocates for more than 300,000 members. “And while the real Jesus is protected, people could do whatever they wanted to the clone.”
At its core, the push to medicalize and mass-produce peyote and mescaline goes against the Indigenous American worldview of interconnectedness. There are no English words that describe how the spiritual character of peyote is inextricably intertwined with its hallucinogenic properties, the land where it grows and the Indigenous Americans who consume it, says Jones. In the Navajo language, Jones describes this harmonic oneness as azee’ hinááh biníłch’idiyin, be’adínídíín.
Creating synthetic mescaline in a lab or growing peyote in a greenhouse is a violation of natural law, and interrupts the unique symbiotic relationship with the plant. “What western scientists call mescaline is for us the essence of the medicine,” said Jones. “It is the soul of it and what makes it holy.”
Traditional peyote practitioners emphasise that they are not against the use of all psychedelics to innovate new treatments for addiction and PTSD. After all, their experiences prove just how powerful a healing tool these substances can be.
But they question why peyote and mescaline need to be used when a variety of other tools – especially psilocybin and MDMA – have proven effective. In rushing to medicalize peyote, which has a unique history and a sacred role for tribes, the decriminalisation movement risks perpetuating more harm in the name of doing good, they say.
“I’m all for healing,” said Cora Maxx-Phillips, a social worker, member of the Navajo Nation human rights commission and board member of the Council of Peyote Way of Life Coalition, a grassroots group in the Navajo Nation.
“But don’t do it at the expense of our people, who are trying to survive the multigenerational trauma inflicted upon us. Please, leave us alone.”
A fight for tradition
The ceremony near Window Rock was a private, emotionally grueling ritual that lasted all night.
Before the ceremony, Boyd Tsosie, another roadman who led the ritual, said the experiences of ancestors from three or four generations prior might surface. There would be little discussion; the goal was for each person to embark on their own inner journey in a kind of spiritual vision quest where the plant itself was the guide.
Tsosie emphasized that the practice of peyotism is as much about the ceremony as it is about the psychological effects. “We don’t view peyote as a substance the way non-Natives think about drugs,” said Tsosie. “There is no hallucination, no trip. The medicine is not used to numb the body like with other drugs, but to teach us.”
The gathering was sponsored by a local Diné chapter of the Native American church. Diné peyote practitioners and church members across the west describe peyote as one might a beloved family member. For them, peyote is a sentient being, a wise elder, a savior. They say the medicine is a gift from the creator that has made it possible to survive the traumas of colonization.
Fear and anger about what outside forces might do were palpable inside the hogan. Synthesizing, commodifying and enriching oneself at peyote’s expense is no way to treat a relative.
“We just have a sliver left of what we hold dear,” said Tsosie. “And we are praying and fighting to hang on to it.”
The way modern tribal members tell it, their ancestors were drowning in sorrow as a result of federal policies to seize their homeland and sacred sites, force their children into boarding schools and forbid the practice of traditional ceremonies. Peyote was sent by the creator as a kind of life raft that traveled from tribe to tribe, and those who jumped on, survived.
Radiocarbon studies of peyote buttons have dated the ritual use of Lophophora williamsii by Indigenous peoples back more than 5,000 years, but peyotism did not reach the Diné and other Plains tribes until the mid- to late 1800s.
Then in 1883, Congress passed the Religious Crimes Code, outlawing Indigenous American spirituality on the grounds that it hindered the federal policy of forced assimilation. In addition to peyote ceremonies, the sun dance and ghost dance were only practiced in secret, with violators subjected to jail time and the withholding of food rations.
Frank Dayish, 65, grew up on the north-western corner of the Navajo reservation and is descended from generations of peyote practitioners. He remembers how, when he was a young boy, tribal law enforcement would show up at his home and seize his community’s supply of peyote.
“The Navajo Nation police put all the peyote in a pile and poured gasoline on it and burned it,” said Dayish. “After they left, my father and his brothers would try to salvage what was too green to burn.”
The religious crimes law would not be repealed until 1978, when Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (Airfa). But Airfa did not specifically address the use of peyote, which the federal government still classified as a highly addictive, schedule 1 drug. To distinguish themselves from the experimental hippies in the 1970s, Indigenous American peyote practitioners banded together to form a religion called the Native American church, demanding the same protections for their religious beliefs as anyone else in the US.
After decades of lobbying by Native American church groups, a 1994 amendment to Airfa finally gave protections to Indigenous American peyote users by stipulating that peyote can only be consumed by a “federally recognized tribal member” and “in connection with a traditional Indian religion”. The amendment also authorized tribal members to legally transport peyote across state lines.
“That was a huge victory for us,” said Dayish, who was president of the Native American church of North America at the time and heavily involved in lobbying for the amendment.
However, the hard-won exemption soon had unintended effects. Non-Indigenous New Age groups, such as James Mooney’s Oklevueha church and the Peyote Way Church of God, began offering access to the sacred cactus by claiming to follow the Native American church religion or their own brand of peyote religion.
In a precedent-setting 2004 case, the Utah supreme court ruled that Mooney was allowed to distribute peyote to his church members under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The result was to embolden psychedelic activists, who established plant-medicine churches on the grounds of religious freedom and to invigorate the decriminalization movement.
Today, one of the largest groups behind this movement is called Decriminalize Nature. The organization has 50 chapters across the United States, each comprising grassroots plant-medicine activists who advocate for legislation at state and local levels. Their logo features a peyote button, with a website that urges humanity to “draw upon the ancient wisdom of all our ancestors who lived from the Indigenous Worldview upon this Earth”.
Aikutzi Valadez, a member of Decriminalize Nature’s board, believes anyone should be allowed to grow peyote in private greenhouses for their personal use in order to increase supply and protect the cactus from being depleted in its native habitat. Valadez resides in California but is a member of the Huichol tribe in Mexico, which practices peyotism. She said that because she is not enrolled in a federally recognized tribe in the US, current drug laws prevent her from being able to engage in traditional peyote rituals where she lives.
“Native American church members need to look at the big picture,” she said. “If they are concerned about peyote becoming commodified, the solution is to make it widely available so it’s not just the pharmaceutical companies that have access. We are trying to liberate peyote because it is Mother Nature’s plant and should not be criminalized.”
This anti-corporate, nature-based ideology is appealing to many liberal-minded activists. But the philosophy of Decriminalize Nature, and groups like it, illuminates a tension at the heart of the peyote debate. Native American church leaders say groups describing themselves as culturally progressive are not only ignoring the requests of tribal governments but have done little to consult them on how peyote should be used by non-Indigenous people – if at all.
Valadez confirmed that Native American church leaders were not involved in developing Decriminalize Nature’s policy on peyote.
While the group’s policy is positioned as a “working plan” to help Native American church members and other Indigenous peyote practitioners protect their sacred medicine, Kevin Feeney, a cultural anthropologist at Central Washington University, sees echoes of the US’s colonial past in such efforts.
“There is the sentiment within the movement that decriminalizing these plants will result in this rosy, kumbaya situation where we all get to take peyote,” said Feeney, who has written extensively on peyote issues. “They are saying, let bygones be bygones … But, really, they are only asking Native people to be OK with this history.”
An $11bn industry
The psychedelics drug market is expected to be worth more than $11bn by the end of the decade. And while the use of psilocybin and MDMA in a clinical setting are farthest along, mescaline is the dark horse that some of Silicon Valley’s biggest investors are betting on.
One company riding the wave is Journey Colab, a pharmaceutical startup that’s developing psychedelic drugs and therapies. Since its founding in 2020, the company has raised more than $12m from high-level investors including Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT and an avid psychedelic proponent.
Journey Colab’s founder, Jeeshan Chowdhury, says people describe him as a “Silicon Valley tech bro”. He’s also a physician and the son of Indian immigrants.
He says he was intrigued by mescaline when he started the company. “The elders and respected leaders in the psychedelic space all told me mescaline was their favorite,” he said.
Peyote has long had a certain cachet in the psychedelics world. The English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley first coined the term “psychedelic” in his 1954 essay The Doors of Perception to describe a mescaline trip. The perpetually intoxicated gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson further popularised the drug in works like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
While mescaline was studied for its therapeutic benefits in the 1950s and 1960s, it became overshadowed by LSD, which was cheaper and more accessible. Today, multiple companies, including several in Canada – where there are fewer restrictions on mescaline – are developing mescaline-based products and growing peyote in greenhouses.
The Canadian company Lophos Pharma, for instance, describes itself as “North America’s largest cultivation and research facility for peyote cactus” and is working on genetically modifying peyote to “decrease the peyote growth timeline from 13 years to as low as 3 years”.
Chowdhury says he set out to do things differently, and was influenced by Altman’s OpenAI model, which strives to share technological benefits with society at large. Alongside its drug development, Journey Colab set aside 10% of its founding equity for Indigenous groups, such as the peyote practitioners in the Native American church, as part of what it calls the Reciprocity Trust. Journey Colab has also signed a “patent pledge” that promises to use only synthetic mescaline in its products, and to not directly utilize any Indigenous resources.
Chowdhury says the fund is about respecting Indigenous American use of peyote and sharing financial benefits with Indigenous populations. “I believe if you have used any psychedelic personally or they are in any part of your professional career, we all owe our relationship to these medicines to the Indigenous communities who have stewarded this knowledge for generations,” Chowdhury said.
Native American Church prayer tipi near Potomac Park on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Darren Thompson for Native News Online)
However, he admits he did not consult with US Indigenous American peyote practitioners or leaders of the Native American church before establishing the Reciprocity Trust. Nor did he get their opinion about creating a company that revolves around synthetic mescaline. He says he wants to give back because he believes it is the right thing to do, but he also believes that because Journey Colab’s synthetic mescaline product is not directly derived from peyote, it is not appropriating Indigenous Americans’ sacred medicine.
“There is absolutely no use of peyote or any botanical material in the construction of our synthetic mescaline,” he explained.
This is of little comfort to peyote practitioners. Aside from the spiritual implications, there is no guarantee other companies won’t try to obtain patents for mescaline that may contain some degree of organic material, or attempt to patent aspects of Indigenous American ceremonies as part of clinical treatments.
According to Chowdhury, establishing how and when the Reciprocity Trust will distribute company profits is currently on hold. Leaders of both the Peyote Way of Life Coalition and the Native American church of North America have been reluctant to engage with Journey Colab regarding the Reciprocity Trust, which is featured prominently in the company’s marketing material.
“Our unwritten spiritual laws don’t allow us to receive benefit from the extraction of our holy medicine or from our sacred heritage molecule that the pharmaceutical companies are trying to appropriate,” said Ryan Wilson, a peyote practitioner with the Oglala Lakota tribe and chair of the Native American church of North America’s legislative committee. “We don’t sell our way of life.”
While psychedelics have created a new gold rush, cultural anthropologist Feeney says the drive is about more than money.
“If someone’s goal is to have a psychedelic trip, then why do they need to use peyote or mescaline when there are so many other equally effective options like LSD or psilocybin?” he said. “I think it comes down to what non-Natives in the United States associate with the American Indian. They want a psychedelic trip and they want something that feels traditional, authentic and Earth-based.”
The proliferation of non-Indigenous ayahuasca ceremonies and plant-medicine retreats show just how mainstreamed Indigenous spirituality has become. Ayahuasca used to be largely off-limits to tourists and required an arduous trip into the South American jungle with the permission of a tribal community. Today it’s possible to attend luxury ayahuasca retreats in places like New York, New Mexico and Florida that cost thousands of dollars and promise access to Indigenous wisdom and sacred ceremonies alongside yoga, massage and other perks.
As a white person who is disconnected from his own European ancestry and Catholic religion, Feeney says he understands the desire to find meaning through Indigenous spirituality.
“There is a common emptiness among the European diaspora in this country,” Feeney added. “But, we can’t continue to perpetuate the harms of colonization by trying to fill that hole with Indigenous people’s culture.”
Back on the reservation, the peyote ceremony was drawing to a close. Diné participants greeted the rising sun with drumming and singing as shafts of white light pierced the hogan’s east-facing door.
Coals from the woodstove that had burned all night were used to form a giant heart on a square of dirt inside the structure. It was a testimony to the 12-hour spiritual marathon the participants had completed.
Hostess cupcakes and coffee were passed around. A rooster crowed. Eventually people made their way outside, where Native American church volunteers were cooking breakfast. Navajo was spoken more than English.
The student struggling to overcome alcohol abuse reported that he felt “energized and happy” as he held his girlfriend’s hand. They said the power of the experience was not just about ingesting peyote but also receiving support from their community and connecting to a tradition passed down by their ancestors.
Margie Whitney-Silva stood outside the hogan hugging the pickle jar to her chest. About half of the peyote tea had been consumed.
Having inherited the role of Native American church roadman from her father, Whitney-Silva takes the responsibility of “protecting the medicine” very seriously. She has been facilitating peyote ceremonies on the Navajo Nation for nearly two decades, ever since she first heard the sacred cactus singing to her from inside her deceased father’s medicine box.
When Whitney-Silva had arrived at the ceremony the night before, she said, she had been filled with grief. Her husband had died suddenly just a few weeks prior.
“I thought I was going to collapse, but then I heard the singing,” she said. “Our medicine is like a beating heart. As long as you have it, you will be OK.”
No comments:
Post a Comment