The psychedelic frontier of healing is peaking. Unicorn start-ups rank on the Psychedelic Stock Index, local decriminalization is real, and Anderson Cooper’s out here co-signing psilocybin and MDMA treatment implications for veterans with PTSD.
Colorado’s Natural Medicine Health Act (NMHA) feels like floodwaters inviting practitioners and participants to sink or swim. (Full disclosure, I’m part of the first licensing cohort.) Plant medicine and journey work inside a legal care model is substantially less wild West than collectively imagined. It’s a bit of a come-down before the level-up, like surfing the transpersonal wave as it crests. Here’s how to navigate these new NMHA tides.
Stepping Into Accountability
Conversations about plant medicine extraction, appropriation, and gratitude and reciprocity are expanding to define ethical consent protocols. Best practices for client qualification, practitioner safety, dosage/strain, and contraindications under Colorado’s NMHA are evolving as enforcement of the letter of the law takes shape.
Self-awareness and self-care are critical for resourcing and increasing the capacity of plant medicine’s emerging public container. The psychedelic community is called into a mindset of accountability—to consciously enter into the right relationship with medicine space and our highest Self. And to guard the goodness of our innate ability to self-heal and trust the medicine.
Watching the Watchers
Scanning the NMHA’s psilocybin dosage requirements, it’s immediately noticeable: less is more. Psilocybin‘s personal use has been a generously intuitive affair until now. So-called heroic or supratherapeutic doses are not cool, not effective, or legal. No guild yet exists for psychedelic practitioners to agree upon a framework for standards and practices. Pioneers are asked to police themselves, to know their lane, and to walk the line. Harm reduction is the primary social strategy driving the NMHA, and this intention is the collective setting held by Colorado’s practitioners and participants. More and more recognize and appreciate the debt owed to Indigenous people and land, our respective lineages, and our current communal context.
Honoring What’s Off Limits
Magic mushrooms have quite a dissimilar profile to other psychedelics despite what TikTok’s FYP algorithm is serving. The hype about psilocybin specifically as a panacea is likely invoking a collective placebo effect. Don’t believe it. Limited study and scholarship by the Academy and the Imperial College largely contraindicate most complex clinical concerns, congruent with the NMHA.
Colorado and Oregon are setting the drumbeat for other states to join, and it’s slow, but it’s steady. Microdosing is not currently scheduled under the NMHA. Mushroom journeys for PTSD diagnoses, or disorders with high treatment resistance, are proscribed. Psilocin interacts with serotonin, so a participant with a contraindication due to possible mania or trauma sequencing triggers must be carefully qualified during intake.
Galloping Toward the Horizon
Research investment, collaborative networking, and ethical investigation are the keywords for the new psychedelic establishment. With the NMHA bringing legacy healing above ground, into the light of scrutiny and glow, it’s time to set the collective’s sights on first growing into and then beyond an economic or medical renaissance in psychedelic use.
Looking to sources of multivalent subject expertise, like Chacruna, it’s possible to step into the future by honoring the past. Internal Systems, Somatic Integration, Unshaming Shadow, Ancestral Parts—oh my!
As transpersonal modalities catch fire in Jungian synchronicity with psychedelic medicine, the view beyond current social limiting beliefs is fantastic and coming in hot. The trip between where NMHA is now and where plant medicine is leading us may turn out to be less dramatic and wild and demand more conventional elbow grease than originally suspected—in basically a blink of a human attention span.
Regulation, Within & Without
I was a Kresge College student at UC Santa Cruz, two decades before Quentin Tarantino immortalized the Banana Slug as a mascot for stoners everywhere. Let me self-report the side-eye I threw at the cannabis legalization canvassers across campus: legalize it? Yeah, right.
In the second chapter of Gen X life, my slacker instincts—hard won back in the early nineties when Primus played as spring sprung and hit our tongues—are leaning hard into gratitude for regulation, access, and ethics. The collective nervous system is seeking regulation, and the burdens we carry have broken our previous coping mechanisms. As within, so without: awareness of the benefits of social legitimacy bolsters credibility for plant medicine facilitation as a mindful intervention, not a social media fad.
Finding and Returning to the Why
If we understand our drive, without judgment, to traverse the holotropic landscape, that reason why—once discovered—acts as an anchor within a safe psychedelic harbor. Our why in journey work will hold us when the glasses are too rosy in tint, when the game board shifts while we play, when our comfort falls out of alignment.
Why is the secret sauce to co-creation, about as dimensionally potent as gratitude for greasing the cosmic wheel to turn in fortune’s favor. If it feels like NMHA is blocking the pel-mel rush of Western, allopathic adoption of psychedelic progress, perhaps that is by design. Returning to why journey work is a calling that will ground and center plant medicine practitioners and participants into a right relationship and foster reciprocity endemic to the healing potential of psychedelics.
