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.
Despite the growth of the use of MDMA in the treatment of PTSD, Terence Ching argues that the intersectional accessibility of this therapy remains limited. In his Queering Psychedelics chapter, Ching advocates for better support for queer and diverse psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy programs.
Maya Fern dreams of a day when the psychedelic community doesn't just tolerate human diversity and complexity, but celebrates it. For now, transgender individuals and other marginalized groups continue to be tokenized in psychedelic spaces. Fern asks those who enjoy the privileges of being in the majority, to break the cycles that enable these inequalities to persist.
Transgender activist, Taylor Bolinger, reflects on her experience navigating the psychedelic community in Texas. Using Spinozan naturalism as a baseline, Bolinger discusses gendered embodiment and the significance of ritual.
Marcelo Leite highlights the broad spectrum of queer experiences, both positive and negative, represented at the Queering Psychedelics II conference held in San Francisco in April 2023.
Dr. Clancy Cavnar delivers the opening remarks for Queering Psychedelics II. Cavnar states that this conference shows how vibrant the connection between psychedelics and queerness can be and calls on participants to be the change they want to see in the world.
Rowan Woodmass argues that non-binary and genderqueer people are uniquely positioned to transform the psychedelic industry. Identifying gender issues in the psychedelic realm, Woodmass discusses how non-binary people are equipped to reduce harm through inclusion and to both imagine and implement a more intersectional future.
What do mushrooms and non-binary people have in common? Summer Vineyard counts down five points that connect the dots between the two, including invisibility & erasure, societal phobias, and deconstruction of binaries.
On ne cherche des origines pathologiques à l'identité gay que si on part du principe qu'être queer constitue une anomalie plutôt qu'une manifestation naturelle de la diversité humaine.
In this essay, Justin Natoli debunks Jacques Mabit’s homophobic and problematic criticism of Chacruna’s Queering Psychedelics conference. Beyond critiquing Mabit’s comments, Natoli gives an informative run through of queerness and the problems that have been historically present in accepting and understanding the queer community and concepts therein.
In this article, Amy Bartlett interviews Annie and Michael Mithoefer, who are both psychotherapists that work with MDMA, to talk about queer issues within psychedelic therapy. They discuss topics such as intersectionality, sexuality, gender, diversity, inclusivity, and social justice as it relates to this space in an effort to challenge the heteronormative structural norms that have been in place for decades.