Psychedelic Healing Isn’t Enough Without Drug Policy Justice
- Dr. Shannon Hughes
- Jun 6
- 8 min read
I recently returned from Bogotá, Colombia, where over a thousand people – from current and former drug users to UN policymakers – gathered for the Harm Reduction International Conference.
Over the four days, I listened to stories of devastating hardship, resilience, and liberatory practices. We weren’t just swapping research or policy memos – we were reimagining how society treats people who use drugs.
Together, we scrutinized the unjust policies that disproportionately impact disadvantaged global communities and the continuing colonization that perpetuates these injustices today.
I witnessed how harm reduction initiatives are saving the lives of people from contexts of trauma, abuse, and marginalization. In a country plagued by decades of violence at the hands of prohibitionist policies, I was reminded how the Drug War hasn’t ended. It simply continues.
I left the conference feeling inspired to continue confronting the systems that criminalize, commodify, and colonize drug use itself.
As someone in a position of leadership in the psychedelic space, I care deeply about including ALL drug users in our advocacy efforts for cognitive liberty and safe and legal access to substances. I also believe we must expand our view of the rapidly shifting psychedelic policy landscape to be more inclusive of the global and historical context of drug users and drug policy.
Harm Reduction Saves Lives
Wandering through the conference’s exhibition, I was struck by a passage from Róisín Downes, a youth worker and advocate for drug policies that support human rights and harm reduction.
“Drug-using communities have played an incredible support role in my life, a role they had to play due to the secretive and unspoken nature of drug use,” she said.
Let’s take a moment to pause there. What comes up for you when reading that drug-using communities played a supportive role in this woman’s life?
What preconceived beliefs around drug use might this challenge?
“I spent the majority of my teen years in a violent and sexually abusive relationship, and once I found my way out of it, my romantic and sexual relations were clouded with trauma. The validation I was seeking from men was so retraumatizing, and these drugs were the tools I used to survive these situations,” she continued.
While prohibitionism pushes drug use into the shadows, instilling shame in users and preventing them from seeking outside help, community is often the tether that keeps us alive.
Along with public health-focused harm reduction initiatives, such as drug testing, safe injection sites, and safe supply programs, drug-using communities provide a lifeline for people managing trauma, socioeconomic scarcity, insecure housing, marginalization, and abuse.
Beyond public health harm reduction, liberatory harm reduction approaches remind us of the grassroots lineages of excluded others – like the Young Lords, Black Panthers, and queer and trans sex workers, among others – that have showed up by-for-with their communities to save themselves after being excluded, exploited, or otherwise abandoned by colonizer systems.
Yet while the case is clear for progressive policies that support legal and safe access to drugs and grassroots harm reduction approaches, not all reformists agree on putting all drugs under that umbrella.
Psychedelic Exceptionalism Limits True Reform
Altering our consciousness, dealing with trauma, while connecting in community…sound familiar?
Whether using meth or mushrooms, heroin or ayahuasca – could it be that community connection is an essential common denominator of healing for all of us?
While psychedelic enthusiasts push for legal access to medicines like psilocybin and ibogaine, many turn their noses at doing the same for more stigmatized so-called “street” drugs.
However, privileging psychedelics for reform while leaving out other illegal drugs only further vilifies them and marginalizes populations who use them. People get branded as “junkies”, are dehumanized, and pushed into economic volatility and social precarity.
This notion of psychedelic exceptionalism is captured well by neuropsychopharmacologist Dr. Carl Hart,
“[All drugs] interact on receptors in the brain to produce their effects, and we shouldn’t be treating some drugs as if they’re special while other drugs are somehow evil. Drugs all carry some risk, and depending on how you define danger, they fall on different levels of the spectrum of risk and benefits.”
This exceptionalism applies to wider stigmas around currently illegal drugs and reinforces classist and racist views and narratives. Just take the crack vs. powder cocaine sentencing disparity, even though they are both fundamentally the same drug.
Consider the way society views crystal meth vs. MDMA, even though MDMA is structurally similar to methamphetamine. Or how about the way we view an SSRI antidepressant compared to microdosing psilocybin or LSD, especially considering their relative safety profiles?
Illegal drugs are not the only ones subject to this exceptionalism. This same standpoint is used to support the notion that the “good” drugs are the ones pushed by the for-profit pharmaceutical industry and funneled through doctors’ offices.
Our relationships to drugs – illegal, legal, recreational, prescribed – are completely chaotic and shaped by the political and economic interests of powerful stakeholders. This incoherent hierarchy of substances reinforces the very logic of the War on Drugs.
The Drug War is a Global Human Rights Disaster
Since its inauguration in the early 1970s during the Nixon administration, the global War on Drugs has led to…
Mass incarceration
Environmental destruction
The dehumanization of marginalized communities
Skyrocketing overdose rates
Violence and instability in producer countries
Criminal networks and corruption
Human rights abuses
In the US, nearly one million arrests are made for drug law violations each year, with Black, Latino, and Indigenous people, and those with low income, disproportionately affected. Between 2001 and 2018, fatal overdoses increased by over 600% in state prisons.
Meanwhile, people who use drugs are consistently punished by social services, housing, education, and employment systems, with access often denied based on drug use and drug test results.
In Colombia, where we gathered for the conference, prohibitionist policies have fueled narcotrafficking and a decades-long civil conflict. Illegal cocaine production is one of the biggest drivers of deforestation, while US-backed policies of aerial fumigation of coca crops routinely contaminated lands, food crops, and water supplies, and even caught humans in the crossfire until recently.
The country is the deadliest in the world for environmental activists, with a record 79 killed in 2023, many of whom came from Indigenous communities. Even Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, has openly supported the legalization of cocaine.
Yet, advocating for the legalization of all drugs remains inconvenient for many proponents of psychedelics, despite the complete failure of the Drug War over the last five-plus decades.
If psychedelics hold promise to transform our relationships to ourselves, each other, and the Earth, there is no better place to start than the largest and most destructive war on other and land that exists – the Drug War.
Healing is Collective, and Must Involve Structural Change
Fighting the drug war. Paving paths to legalization. Supporting the liberty of drug-using communities.
None of this can be achieved without breaking free from unchecked neocolonialism and the commercialization of sacred plants.
Just take the example of tobacco. This sacred medicine has been used as a tool for prayer, healing, and spiritual connection across the Americas for millennia. It is revered and respected, and used with intention as part of traditional ceremonies, from mapacho, rapé, and ambil in the Amazon, to tobacco for prayer and offerings in Native American rituals.
Yet once colonially-minded capitalist forces became aware of the addictive potential of the plant when used unconsciously and habitually, an almost trillion-dollar industry formed around hooking people on the abusive use of this Master teacher.
As a result, many Native peoples did not have access to traditional tobacco for centuries and were forced to use commercial tobacco.
A similar story can be told for the sacred coca leaf. The plant is a vital tool for spiritual connection and the sharing of wisdom in South American indigenous communities. Yet because of the prohibition of cocaine, coca has become stigmatized and illegal outside of its countries of origin.
Not to mention, the land on which coca is traditionally cultivated is being destroyed and poisoned. Yet, white westerners love their cocaine and demand for this extracted drug sustains with little consideration of the societal and environmental impact of its production.
This commercialization and abuse reaches into entheogenic plants, too. Ancestral medicines like Iboga, Peyote, and Ayahuasca are all facing sustainability issues as a result of growing commercial interest in Western communities.
Many of these plant medicines and their traditions are being appropriated by Global North organizations that seek to use them for commercial gain. Oftentimes, there is no real recognition of the traditional wisdom and context that surrounds the medicine, and no (or merely performative) reciprocity or benefit sharing with indigenous communities.
We saw this when Compass Pathways attempted to patent basic components of psychedelic therapy, such as soft furnishings and rooms with non-clinical decor during psilocybin sessions. Where was the recognition that psilocybin mushrooms have been used ceremonially by indigenous Mesoamerican cultures for centuries?
Or with the “Ayahuasca Pill” – a DMT- and MAOI-containing pill developed by Canadian drug company, Filament Health. Critics have raised questions about Filament’s benefit-sharing policies and the process of gaining informed consent from indigenous communities.
Legalization without decolonization is just a new form of harm. To fight for fair access to all drugs, we must confront the colonial and commercial forces exploiting sacred plants and psychedelic medicines.
A Call to Action For the Psychedelic Community
My message for the psychedelic community is this: The transformation we are seeking begins with us. The healing that is possible with these medicines is not just for our clients and their trauma, pain, and suffering.
It’s for us. It’s for our collective body and our culture. We are not separate or different from them.
We have to be in this together. We’re all seeking healing, we’re all seeking community, we all want to be heard and feel like we belong.
We seek to treat individual bodies as the location of illness, but perhaps physical bodies are expressions of larger dysfunction.
Let’s treat these medicines not as something that is here to serve us, but as sacred consciousnesses that we enter into relationship with.
Extracting chemicals and compounds from sacred medicines won’t heal us if we don’t make the space for true change within us, in our professions, and on a systemic level.
Let’s come into right relationship with the Earth and the sacred medicines it grows.
Let’s reject New Age healing culture’s hyper-focus on individualism and recognize the power that lies in the collective.
Let’s work to dismantle systemic inequities and advocate for the rights and voices of marginalized communities.
The legalization of psychedelics for white, privileged people is not enough. Let’s commit to inclusive drug policies, cultural humility, and reparative justice as the foundation for a truly healing culture.
How You Can Support Humane Drug Policy
You might now be thinking, OK – but how?
Here are some tangible ways you can support the rights of drug users and fight for fairer policies today.
Donate to organizations fighting the drug war and supporting at-risk communities, such as the Drug Policy Alliance, the National Harm Reduction Coalition, the Yarrow Collective of Larimer County, High Rockies Harm Reduction, and the Harm Reduction Action Center of Denver.
Look up harm reduction legislation initiatives in your state, and join activism efforts aimed at protecting and advocating for the rights of people who use drugs.
Volunteer for harm reduction initiatives in your local area, such as safe injection sites, syringe access programs, or drug testing stations, and get trained in how to use Narcan to prevent overdose.
Learn about the lineage of harm reduction in grassroots communities that moves us beyond a co-opted version of public health-only-focused harm reduction. Dispel myths that the psychedelic community believes about drugs (check our Dr. Carl Hart’s 2019 keynote address for more details on this).
If you are engaging in ceremonies with ancestral medicines, learn about where these traditions come from and the challenges that many indigenous communities face. Do your best to sit with facilitators who are in right relationship with Native communities and engage in reciprocity and benefit sharing.
Where possible, go and sit directly with indigenous elders, and learn of their plights. Listen to their guidance on respectful interaction with their traditions and the world around us.
If you are looking for an organization to support, the Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative of the Americas is a great place to start.
True transformation doesn’t end in the ceremony space, or with decriminalization bills – it extends to how we show up for each other, how we honor ancestral wisdom, and how we challenge unjust systems.
The psychedelic movement has the power to catalyze deep healing, but only if it stands with all drug users. Let’s make this a movement of care, courage, and collective liberation.
