The Common Ills: The Future of Psychedelics

Bioneers Pulse – updates from the Bioneers Community

Bioneer,

The regulatory landscape and social attitudes surrounding visionary plants and psychedelic compounds are in rapid and dramatic flux. A great deal of new scientific research has revealed exciting potential medical uses for these molecules, while dynamic, ever-growing, and mutating psychedelic subcultures continue to expand globally. But with this explosion in new interest comes challenges. Will profit-focused investors seek to corner the legal use of psychedelics and monopolize the resulting profits, further marginalizing the Indigenous cultures who discovered these plants millennia ago and developed robust healing methodologies with them? Will this new “medicalization” of sacred substances forsake the underground subcultures that further explored the use of psychedelics starting in the mid 20th Century?

This week, we explore the world of plant-based medicines through the words of leading experts.

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Sacred Medicines, Creativity, Evolution & the Paradigm Shift

With the rapidly changing scientific, social, commercial and regulatory landscape surrounding the use of sacred plants and psychedelics more generally comes a number of challenges. How do we approach the future of consciousness expanding medicines in our society so that the debt owed to the Indigenous cultures who discovered these potent healing modalities is honored, and so the profit motive doesn’t totally desacralize their use? In this panel conversation, three longtime leading experts on sacred plant use—Paul Stamets, Katsi Cook, and Françoise Bourzat—wrestle with this and other questions.

Watch here.

Human-Visionary Plant Relations in the Anthropocene

In this edited and excerpted transcript of a 2020 Bioneers Conference panel, botanical luminaries—Mark Plotkin, Karyemaitre Aliffe, and Kathleen Harrison—share their perspectives on the growing global fascination with certain plant species and what their embrace tells us about the current zeitgeist.
Read more here.

Sacred Plants in the Americas II

A Virtual Psychedelic Summit on the Globalization of Plant Medicines and Indigenous Reciprocity (Buy Tickets Here)

April 23-25, 2021 - Presented by the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines

This global virtual summit will bring together Indigenous leaders from throughout North, Central and South America as well as researchers, practitioners, community builders and other experts from around the world who will discuss the potential benefits and harms of the globalization of psychedelic plant medicines and explore how we can offer reciprocity to honor the Indigenous cultures and traditions that these medicines come from. It is vital that members of the psychedelic community help support Indigenous groups and the traditional spiritual and ecological knowledge they preserve and practice. This gathering is a follow-up to the conference, Plantas Sagradas en las Américas, held in Mexico in 2018. Like that previous conferences, this event reflects the mission of Chacruna by applying a multidisciplinary approach for creating intercultural dialogues and building bridges between Indigenous traditions and mainstream psychedelic science and policy.

Read an interview with Josh Meadow, Chief Operating Officer of the Chacruna Institute, here.

Paul Stamets – Psilocybin Mushroom Medicines: A Paradigm Shift in Global Consciousness

Should psilocybin mushrooms come to market as People’s Medicine or Profit Medicine? Paul Stamets, one of the world’s leading authors, inventors, educators and entrepreneurs in the field of mycology, shares his thoughts on the latest research and the rapidly evolving landscape of psychedelic medicine.

Watch here.