Policy & Advocacy

The MAPS Policy & Advocacy Department advocates for healing and justice. We work to eliminate barriers to psychedelic research, education, and care. We envision legal paradigms for psychedelic use grounded in social, racial, and environmental justice. Guided by public health, we advocate for the decriminalization of all drugs, combined with comprehensive harm and risk reduction. We work alongside passionate advocates to end the global war on drugs, building bridges with our vibrant, and rapidly growing worldwide psychedelic community.

Policy

We help vision legal frameworks for psychedelic use, and work to reform local, state, federal and international psychedelic and cannabis policy. The war on drugs was developed to criminalize people of color and anti-war activists, and has accelerated domestic militarization and surveillance. We work toward nonpartisan policies that decriminalize and regulate substances within evidence-based, equitable, and compassionate frameworks—medical and otherwise—so people can benefit from the safe and intentional use of psychedelic substances.

Advocacy

Psychedelic-assisted therapy has the potential to help heal trauma, but individual therapy alone cannot solve the systemic issues that often cause trauma. With a focus on systemic change, we advocate for the decriminalization of drugs in a framework of social and racial equity. This also requires advocating for comprehensive harm and risk reduction, including honest and culturally relevant drug education, legal and accessible substance analysis, peer support, and accessible services for mental health and integration. We believe that healing is intertwined with justice and that social, political, and cultural progress creates fertile ground for community healing.

Movement Building

We collaborate with strategic intersectional and interdisciplinary partners worldwide to collectively develop research projects, events, campaigns, networks, and actions based in healing and justice. Highlights include: co-founding Catharsis on the Mall, a free annual Burning Man-inspired event formed as a vigil for the war on drugs; producing the Psychedelic Medicine and Cultural Trauma workshop on the intersection of psychedelics and cultural and racial trauma in Louisville, Kentucky, in 2019; and co-developing a study evaluating psychedelics as a tool for healing intergenerational trauma among Palestinians and Israelis.

Formal Comments

Video, Audio, and Writing

Allies