Making Place for the Spiritual Geography of Psychoactive Substances in Post-Prohibition Public Health
I am a medical doctor and geographer. I envision a public health system that universalizes respect and protection for spiritual/existential health as well as physical and mental health. There is no way to public spiritual health without respecting and protecting one of humanity’s oldest methods of achieving awe: entheogens.
“Entheogen” is defined as: “a chemical substance, typically of plant origin, that is ingested to produce a nonordinary state of consciousness for religious or spiritual purposes” (OED). I see entheogens and the phenomena they help generate as part of the evolved biospheric web of life, a kind of ‘fundamental force of nature‘ that humanity has co-evolved with and co-created through traditional ecological knowledge application, admixtures, and chemistry know-how. Serious scholars theorized over 50 years ago that the fountainhead and ongoing wellspring of religion is the use of visionary or entheogenic plants (1).
Once we accept as a given that human cultures have a core tendency to develop meaningful/special/sacred/spiritual/religious relationships with select psychoactive substances, then any absolute criminal prohibition of people’s close nonviolent contact with any psychoactive substances in presumed service of public health fundamentally diminishes religious freedom associated with valued psychoactivation experience and free exercise of sovereignty over one’s own consciousness—or cognitive liberty. This is true even if those substances are not psychedelic.
The entheogenic reformation we are amidst is growing in both religious and secular spheres and is reawakening in diverse quarters a deep respect and appreciation of the potency and import of entheogens, as ancient and still-accessible portals to gnosis and healing and what many might call a direct experience of transcendence or divine presence within one’s lifetime. As the entheogenic reformation spreads, the healing they offer will increasingly be recognized and the gnosis they offer will be understood as valid knowledge. Entheogenesis will become widely accepted as a valid pathway to transcendence. Like the Protestant Reformation before it, these developments will impact wider culture, including public health, medicine, science, politics, and law.
(1) Mary Barnard, “The God in the Flowerpot.” American Scholar 32.4 (Autumn 1963): 578-586. Reprinted in Psychedelic Review 1.2 (Fall 1963): 244-2511964 (Available at: https://maps.org/research-archive/psychedelicreview/v1n2/012244bar.pdf)