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.
Marcelo Leite highlights statements made by anthropologist Bia Labate in her opening remarks for Psychedelic Science 2023 that address the problem of Indigenous exclusion at the conference and within the broader Western psychedelic community.
Studies in Psychedelic Justice, a new program offered by Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines, begins May 3 with the first of three courses (and a one-time workshop) designed to fill what Chacruna identifies as a void in the psychedelic space.
On Earth Day, Thursday, April 22nd from 10:30am - 11am (PT), leaders of a new coalition, Plant Medicine Healing Alliance, will be hosting a press conference to speak upon their “dual mission of improving access to plant medicines while simultaneously promoting sustainable sourcing and respect for the human, plant, and animal ecologies where the medicine grows.” They will speak about the Indigenous history of sacred plant medicines, the medical perspective of the therapeutic potential of these substances to help people heal from PTSD, especially veterans, and they will ask the Portland City Council to decriminalize these plant and fungi medicines to allow for spiritual growth and access to the treatment that people need.
The Chacruna Institute and Sacred Plant Alliance filed this amicus brief on October 17, 2023 in support of the plaintiff church in the Iowaska Church of Healing v. United States case, to emphasize to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit why the decision in the lower court, the district court, was wrongly decided.
The Chacruna Institute endorses the Breakthrough Therapies Act introduced by Senators Cory Booker and Rand Paul. Chacruna supports this opportunity to reduce barriers to MDMA and psilocybin-assisted therapy.
Psychedelic Science 2023 brought together 12,000 registrants in Denver, Colorado, four times as many people as the previous conference in 2017, crowning the movement to rehabilitate psychedelics for therapeutic use against depression and other disorders. Science unveils unsuspected mechanisms of brain reconfiguration and ends decades of research bans imposed by the war on drugs, but serious obstacles remain to be overcome.
We are sharing here a message from
our friends in Decriminalize Nature Oakland:
“We need your support! Our friends in Oakland are working with Councilmember Gallo’s...