What psychedelic researchers and activists can learn from medical marijuana legalization
Even under Trump and with the Jeff Sessions, Attorney General, marijuana prohibitionists in the US are losing the war on that drug. Now is a good time to take a hard look at their terms of surrender and the path forward to legalization of psychedelic medicines.
Legalization of therapeutic botanicals pursued solely through the marketplace denies access to the poor. Even with the preservation of the Affordable Care Act, millions of Americans don’t have health insurance. And, even for those lucky enough to have coverage, botanical medicines are almost always excluded. In efforts to legalize the use of other psychoactive botanicals, an important focus must be on histories of colonialism and imperialism as White First World peoples begin to embrace plant medicines cultivated in, and historically used by, those from the global South. A failure to pay close attention to such historical inequities, and to contemporary material interests fighting for control over psychoactive botanicals, may produce a kind of “legalization” that ends prohibition but undermines the vision of broader social change that drew so many of us to these plants in the first place.
Original Article (Chacruna):
What Psychedelic Researchers and Activists Can Learn from Medical Marijuana Legalization
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