Who Owns Psychedelic Knowledge?

Do you wish you got into this event for free? Become a Chacruna member and receive free or discounted access to all Community Forums, Courses, Workshops, and more! Also get full access to our entire archive of past forum recordings and join our global network of psychedelic professionals and activists to dive deeper into discussion and discovery.

We invite you to explore the contested landscape where knowledge, authority, and psychedelic experience intersect. This Community Forum examines who gets to define legitimate expertise in psychedelic studies, whether rooted in clinical research, lived experience, Indigenous tradition, or social media influence, and what is at stake in those definitions. How can researchers, practitioners, and communities distinguish between biomedical authority, embodied knowledge, and influencer-driven narratives in a field undergoing rapid transformation, and what responsibilities do institutions hold in preventing the consolidation of new epistemic hierarchies? The visibility and charisma characteristic of today’s psychedelic renaissance raise profound questions about how certain voices come to be trusted over others and how commercial, cultural, and therapeutic contexts shape what counts as credible knowledge. As psychedelic-assisted therapy expands into mainstream clinical and public discourse, ensuring that diverse forms of knowing, including Indigenous and Global South perspectives, are not marginalized or commodified becomes increasingly urgent. We’ll discuss the risks of epistemic injustice, the power dynamics embedded in competing knowledge claims, and the ethical standards the field needs before expertise can be responsibly exercised or publicly communicated. How should the field balance honoring the experiential reality of psychedelic states while remaining critically attentive to who benefits from particular definitions of truth and authority? Deepak Sarma, Distinguished Scholar in the Public Humanities and Professor of Religious Studies and Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University; Pierce Flynn, cultural sociologist and ethnographic researcher with deep expertise in psychedelic cultures and sacred plant medicines; and Paulina Valamiel, sociologist of religion and Research and Communications Officer at Chacruna Institute, will explore these questions together in what promises to be a rich and necessary conversation.