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.
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After the mass shooting in Atlanta last Tuesday, the authors wrote this statement to raise awareness of the uprise of violence in the Asian American community. This statement is a call for the psychedelic community to raise awareness and practice intersectionality solidarity in the fight against racism, misogyny, and discrimination.
Sean Lawlor interviews Camille Barton, somatic researcher, teacher, and advocate of embodied social change, about psychedelic research, therapy, ancestral dance practices, embedded systems of oppression, decriminalization, the psychedelic shadow, integration, universalism, identity politics, and QAnon’s connection to psychedelics.
This article explores how the struggle to define what an authentic Mazatec shaman is expresses a conflict about the proper way to consume psilocybes and about the right to make profit from them. Materials published by anthropologists continue to play a role in building the reputation of local shamans who use these mushrooms with tourists.
Sean Lawlor interviews Debi Roan, psychedelic educator and holder of Navajo lineage, about the Peyote Way Church, sacred Navajo plant medicine ceremonies, the Salt Lake Psychedelic Therapy Training Program, psilocybin mushroom research at Johns Hopkins, and respectfully bridging indigenous traditions and rituals with Western science.
Sean Lawlor interviews Joseph McCowan, Psy.D., licensed clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, about how MDMA-assisted psychotherapy can help heal racial and intergenerational trauma, how MAPS’s MDMA training for communities of color impacted his career, embodied trauma, and the lack of inclusion of African Americans and people of color in psychedelic research.
Maria Mocerino interviews Kufikiri Imara, Oakland activist, about Decriminalize Nature Oakland (DNO), bridging the gaps within/out the psychedelic community, access and accessibility to psychedelics for marginalized communities, why he prefers the word “entheogen” to “psychedelics,” and building a BIPOC Entheo-gen Integration Circle with the San Francisco Psychedelic Society.
White Americans often struggle with concepts, ideas and understanding about race in America and the role their ancestors played in creating and sustaining systems of racial dominion and oppression. White Americans have been socialized to view North American society and their place in it through the prism of abstract individualism. Embedded within this worldview are a set of organized set of racialized ideas, stereotypes, emotions, and inclinations to discriminate. White frames are an array of white rules, assumptions and knowledge about people of color, in general, and African Americans, in particular. This presentation will focus on teaching courteous white people how to recognize these pervasive ideas in hopes of expanding knowledge and understanding about the salience of race. More importantly, how psychedelic substances could be used to help dominant group members participants cultivate greater empathy and awareness for oppressed people living under the yoke of white supremacy.
Maria Mocerino interviews Sutton King, an afro-indigenous activist that is inno-vating Native health care services and building sustainable businesses for Native and Indigenous peoples. As the former Director of the New York City Federal Ur-ban Indian Health Program, King gives us a inside look at Native American health care, growing up as a Native American activist, the history of Native Americans through the lens of erasure and health care, bringing Natives direct services through Urban Indigenous Collective, and building Shock Talk; an app to con-nect Natives to culture, community, and therapists.
Maria Mocerino interviews Sara Reed, an MDMA-assisted psychotherapy provider at the forefront of bringing psychedelic medicine to underserved groups about MDMA as a promising treatment for racial trauma, navigating the personal and political realities that can emerge in dosing sessions, White feminism, and the importance of providing equitable access to psychedelic-assisted therapies.
Giving Back to Indigenous Communities Supporting plant medicine by nurturing ecological wellbeing, including land rights activism, bolstering food security, and strengthening economic resilience.
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