What do… medicine companies owe to the community
…a crucial part of the therapeutic power can be lost in translation when a psychoactive substance is removed from its cultural context… [given their historically and currently exploitative business practices and adherence to extraction and accumulation of wealth a prior to equitable healthcare distribution, compounded by an acceptance of both socialism for corporations propped up by capitalistic structures for the poor].
It is perhaps easy to see how [Gordon] Wasson might have overlooked the possible effects of his actions on María Sabina’s community. Understanding a community’s stake in some piece of knowledge or other resource can be difficult. We see this with Maria Sabina’s example, where there was a simultaneously increased market for mushroom trips along with a harder-to-quantify loss of sacred quality. These different uses that a community has for some knowledge or other resource make the community vulnerable to changes in the resource and thus give the community a stake in what happens to it… local uses of a resource give the community…. stake in the resource… psychedelic users have [a priori] stake in how psychedelics are [so-called], “developed”…
Original Article (Chacruna):
What do psychedelic medicine companies owe to the community?
Artwork Fair Use: Robert K. Sharpe productions for the office of economic opportunity
