About

Promoting the use of psychoactive plants is not a task we engage in lightly, knowing full well the risk associated with substances with powers that can potentially lay waste to those who consume them. If we do, then only because the benefits from informed and socially embedded use vastly outweigh the social wreckage that has and is being caused by Prohibition, a policy and series of practices that have become a defining feature of modern governance. Eradicating certain plants and persecution the consumers of these, is one of the most effective tools of repression in the employ of contemporary authorities, and in the guise of public good, a fetish for empire building bureaucracy.

Conscientious objection is for us the only ethical response. In terms of political engagement and their personal encounter with psychoactive plants every man and woman have to decide for themselves how to manage their indulgence and risk. This is rarely easy, and often part of a lifelong relationship marked by episodes of abstinence and excess. Wonderful as mood-shifts and mind-trips can be, they are also prone to leaving marks and scars. And a sweet and supple servant can quickly flip into an unforgiving master. And yet, for most of us the sensual pleasures of consumption outweigh the ethereal benefits of abstinence.

Our own approach is to keep the eyes wide open when embarking on the fabulous journey into the vast web of relationships that plants and humans have woven over the course of time. There is a thrill in experimentation, in exploring new experiences, mixing and matching the joys and insights to be had. By necessity, this requires adjustment to the realities of contemporary life, from calibrating potency to devising delivery processes. Safe zones in both space and time need to be prepared, preferably with a well-informed and supportive environment. Most importantly, is controlling the quality of all that goes into the body. For the third generation consuming under the pall of prohibition this is an important lesson: Check your drugs.

If for most people, consumption and indulgence is a private matter, this is as much a consequence of prohibition as of the individualism and fragmentation of our time. Yet, the introduction to new substances and initiation into their use is usually a shared experience, often of monumental consequence, a rite of passage that furnishes the initiate – the adept –  with a new status. In the eyes of the law, s/he has lost their innocence, falls now under the power of the state, has become arrestable. It means entering a subterranean world where certainties can no longer be taken for granted.

This tension between individuals and the law, between sub-cultures and the state, is the arena which we would like to illuminate. The violence that has been unleashed under prohibition, against the hapless users of psychoactive plants, the farmers that grow them and the millions of traders that stand between the two, has left deep scars. It has undermined our trust in law enforcement, often steeped in related corruption, eroded the credibility of health professionals, and further undermined the already fickle trust in policymakers. But the most devastating impact has been on the plants and the cultures of consumption that have grown around them. In the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia, century old traditions of episodic opium or cannabis have been eliminated. The chewing of khat and coca leaves, betel and kola nuts, has been pushed to the social margins, part of a global standardisation in the norms of consumption.

At the same time, spaces are opening up for the recreational consumption of cannabis and medical use of psilocybin. Welcome as these developments maybe we fear that they come at a cost. First, most legislative changes appear in suffocating straight jacket of regulations, designed with customary disregard for public health or well-being to safeguard the role of control agencies. Secondly, the most dynamic models of cannabis regulation in Canada and the US take a ‘for profit’ approach. The potential for adverse public health consequences of allowing profit maximising companies to promote habit forming substances are well established form industries built around sugar, tobacco and alcohol.

In the cracks between state and market, there are niches for civil society be these self-help groups, grower associations, ayahuasca churches, crypto markets, to share experiences and trade product. This is the space where we aim to help people improve their knowledge and increase their enjoyment of psychoactive plants. It should be an open forum, where thoughts are traded and insights shared and where the plants that since the dawn of history of lifted human lifted the spirits and sharpened minds of humanity are demystified and made accessible.