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Should Sacred Plant Medicines Have Standing? The Original Instructions and Western Jurisprudence

By Keith Williams and Ariel Clark

The resurgence of interest in psychedelics, or sacred plant and fungal medicines and their psychoactive constituents, has been described as a kind of “renaissance” much like the European renaissance that blossomed between the 14th – 17th centuries. The comparison is apt—for, in addition to a flowering of learning and human achievement, the psychedelic renaissance, like its namesake, is only possible because of the underlying extractivist colonial logic informing activity in this domain. We are both writing as people with ancestry from Indigenous communities, and we have a profound interest in respecting, honoring, and becoming-with our more-than-human kin. A business-as-usual approach to the so-called psychedelic renaissance will only reinforce the harmful extractivism inherent in contemporary global capitalist culture and will foreclose the kind of collective healing possible with reciprocity as an orienting principle. This post offers a brief sketch of the potential for Rights of Nature legislation to safeguard these sacred medicines by recognizing them as rights holders unto themselves and by embedding into law a relational positionality of respect and responsibility with our plant and fungal kin.

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Traditional countryside scene in the Netherlands with windbreak lane of poplar trees in the wind under summer sky. Ens, Flevoland Province, the Netherlands.

Q&A with Mason Marks on New Psychedelics Law and Regulation Initiative

By Chloe Reichel

On June 30th, the Petrie-Flom Center announced the launch of a three-year research initiative, the Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR), which is supported by a generous grant from the Saisei Foundation.

The Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation at the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School will advance evidence-based psychedelics law and policy.

In 2017, the FDA designated MDMA a breakthrough therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, and in 2018 the agency recognized psilocybin as a breakthrough therapy for treatment-resistant depression. These designations indicate that psychedelics may represent substantial improvements over existing treatments for mental health conditions. Many other psychedelics, including ibogaine, ketamine, and dimethyltryptamine, are the focus of ongoing psychiatric research and commercialization efforts.

Despite the proliferation of clinical research centers and increasing private investment in psychedelic drug development, there is a relative lack of research on the ethical, legal, and social implications of psychedelics research, commerce, and therapeutics.

In the following interview, which has been edited and condensed, Senior Fellow and POPLAR Project Lead Mason Marks explains how POPLAR will fill this gap, and previews some of the initiative’s topics of inquiry.

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