Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines is a registered California 501(c)(3) non-profit organization (EIN 84-3076078). We are a community-oriented organization run by a small staff of experts and enthusiastic volunteers who work to bring education and cultural understanding about psychedelic plant medicines to a wider audience. We promote a bridge between the ceremonial use of sacred plants and psychedelic science and envisage a world where plant medicines and other psychedelics are preserved, protected, and valued as part of our cultural identity and integrated into our social, legal, and health care systems.
Help us to achieve our mission! From our beginnings in 2017, we have stood apart from other psychedelic education and advocacy organizations by pioneering initiatives that support and provide a platform for diverse voices, including women, queer people, people of color, Indigenous people, and the Global South. In efforts to address the lack of diverse representation in the expanding psychedelic landscape, we centered our mission around the empowerment of marginalized voices to foster cultural and political reflections on topics like race, gender, and sexuality in psychedelic science. We believe now more than ever, given the current social and political climate, our work is critical to the future of psychedelic healing for humanity.
Please become a member so that you are able to help Chacruna, yourself, and the world. Support of any amount helps this cause and allows us to provide psychedelic education to anyone who wants to access it.
Julien Bonhomme explores how Euro-American psychedelic communities have appropriated Bwiti ibogaine rituals, creating a liminal experience that incorporates from both traditions. For Western practitioners, ibogaine visions allowed individuals to see through themselves and recreate themselves as they desired in order to overcome their existential problems. While the Gabonese practitioners' visions more often reflected the images of mythical ancestors or relatives practicing witchcraft, rather than mirror-images of themselves.
Between 1952 and 1964, the UK's Powick Psychiatric Hospital served as a center of LSD-assisted therapy. Ronald Sandison stood at the center of this activity, publishing papers in psychiatric journals and presenting at conferences, which temporarily brought the UK to the center of therapeutic LSD use. Wendy Kline explains why things changed in the mid-1960s.
Timothy Vilgiate looks at how the story of Voacanga africana is an example of how Western psychedelia co-opts Indigenous culture in order to create fictional "primitive others" that they can utilize for their own agendas. The idea of Voacanga africana as a ceremonial psychedelic ultimately serves less to reflect of African realities, and more to appeal to Western ideas of psychedelics as primordial elements of human mystical experience and spiritual life.
Magaly Tornay looks at early practices of meaning-making around LSD in the clinic, a crucial site for negotiating the normal & pathological. Tornay argues that the case of Switzerland is particularly notable in the history of LSD because the drug first found its way into psychiatry through personal connections.
From their experience as a psychedelic mother and father, Jacqueline Alves Rodrigues and Glauber Loures de Assis share 10 topics on psychedelic parenthood that deserve more attention. The topics address issues of gender, diversity, and Indigenous traditions. Ultimately, they argue that working to include families in psychedelic spaces will strengthen the psychedelic community.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous bad trip took place in February 1935, but is it accurate to call it a bad trip when this language didn't exist yet? Gautier Dassonneville shows that Sartre's story fits into a distinct moment in French psycho-philosophy.
Our new Chacruna series will highlight the global history of psychedelics. It will highlight some of the dynamic ways that historic traditions, cultures, and research spaces have contributed to the field of psychedelics, as well as raise questions about whose knowledge and expertise has been centered through time.
Glauber Loures de Assis addresses the issue of conspirituality within the psychedelic renaissance and shows how these Western ideas have had an impact on the Global South. He offers ways to move forward that address these issues. He emphasizes the need to counter conspirituality's individualism in order to build a supportive and reciprocal psychedelic community going forward.
Starting with Mexico's first National Pharmacopeia in 1846, Nidia Olvera-Hernández traces the long history of peyote in Mexico. She shows how scientific studies throughout the twentieth-century eventually led to prohibition in 1971.
At a Chacruna retreat in Brazil, Marcelo Leite and other team members took part in a feitio ayahuasca ritual at a Santo Daime church. Leite describes the steps of the ceremony and his experience.