The White House just signed an Executive Order fast-tracking psychedelic research for mental health. Psilocybin. Ibogaine. MDMA derivatives.
I am a licensed clinical psychologist, CIIS and MAPS certified in psychedelic-assisted therapy. I have been trained as a Lead Session Monitor for a clinical study investigating the impact of a psilocybin derivative on MDD -- and I am looking forward to sitting with study participants soon.
This moment is significant. It is also incomplete.
These medicines carry indigenous roots. Healing traditions practiced in ceremony across cultures long before Western science arrived to study them. For many communities of color, the word "drug" does not arrive neutrally. Nixon's War on Drugs targeted Black and Brown communities with devastating precision criminalizing, incarcerating, traumatizing. That history lives in bodies. Calling something medicine does not automatically undo what decades of policy taught people to feel.
During my training at CIIS, colleagues who had been study subjects described being in deep medicine vulnerability when material arose around racial trauma and identity and the session monitors in the room could not hold it. That gap works both ways. It affects what happens inside the session. And it keeps people who need healing most from ever walking through the door.
In a political climate that is actively narrowing the conversation around identity, the psychedelic field must resist that pressure -- because the medicine will not.
What needs to happen now:
Trial participant pools must be racially diverse, by design
Session monitors must reflect the communities being served
Cultural humility and racial trauma must be core clinical training, not electives
Outreach must honestly address the War on Drugs legacy
Federal funding must carry equity benchmarks, not just efficacy benchmarks
The indigenous origins of these medicines must be genuinely honored
The medicine does not discriminate. Our systems do. If we build this new world the same way we built the last one, we replicate the same harms at therapeutic speed.
This is the moment to get it right.