20 September 2024
The Revolution Within
How Psychedelics Can Help Disrupt Systems of Control and Root us in Imagination by Raiden Washington, J.D.
Editors:
Sia Henry, J.D., Senior Policy Associate, MAPS
Ismail Ali, J.D., Director of Policy and Advocacy, MAPS
MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXIV Number 1 • 2024
As the medical establishment and broader society begins to recognize the potential role of psychedelics in treating mental health disorders and healing from individual or intergenerational harm, it is important not to lose sight of other ways these substances might impact individuals and society as a whole. If we understand society itself as a body that is also burdened by generations of trauma and suffering, psychedelics may even invite us to imagine ways to treat those social illnesses.
Psychedelics As Tools for Abolition
Imagination is a practice of healing, an important tool for abolishing systems of control and implementing a liberated future.1 As humanity navigates our self-made global crises, there is a glaring need for solutions that can liberate all living beings from the shortcomings of our growing dominance over the Earth. The capabilities for transcendence and consciousness expansion offered by psychedelics may help imagine these outcomes.
We know now that multiple psychedelics increase neuroplasticity and reconnect pathways in the brain, helping people in a variety of ways, like quickly learning new languages and processing daunting trauma.2 LSD’s mind expansion capabilities were cynically acknowledged by the U.S. government’s attempt at mind-control in the MK Ultra experiment.3 Thankfully, we know LSD doesn’t actually work that way, and is instead being legitimized as a potential treatment for mental health challenges.4 The new wave of studies are confirming early research and ancestral practices of communities of color, pointing to the seemingly limitless possibilities of psychedelics, especially as it pertains to healing. Even US federal agencies have signaled their openness to this healing potential.5
Disrupting Historic Systems of Control
While psychedelics have been perceived as dangerous, they could actually help us overcome the domestication of our imaginations and challenge systemic oppression. For generations, criminalization, stigma, and a poor drug education system have prevented large swaths of society from having safe access to psychedelic substances and traditions, and undermined the potential in their responsible use.6 In the same way, criminalizing racially-coded drugs has provided cover for racial discrimination, prohibiting safe access to psychedelic tools as a form of coercive social control. The veneer is starting to crack, and the attempt to maintain control through criminalization is increasingly futile. Instead, a more liberatory vision is emerging – one where the potential of psychedelics for consciousness expansion can be used in service of abolition. Today, the momentum of oppressive systems inexplicably excludes experienced underground psychedelic practitioners from participation and decision-making, leaving attempts to regulate floundering without their input. Developing systemic resilience in future drug policy requires safeguards that are representative of all, particularly those most often harmed by current systems. This will likely prevent harmful, implicit cultural norms from disrupting the safe haven needed for imaginative social evolution.7
Though liberation efforts are vulnerable to oppressive systems efforts seeking to revolutionize, psychedelic assisted therapy (PAT) for and by those most harmed by the carceral system may help reverse the current paradigm and disrupt systems of control. Drug policy has historically been weaponized against marginalized communities; centering those communities in developing psychedelic healing practices flips this dynamic on its head, utilizing one mechanism feeding mass incarceration for widespread liberation.
The Importance of Psychedelic Liberation
The harms of the War on Drugs’ cyclical, intergenerational, and chronic legal isolation are felt regardless of a marginalized person’s relationship to drugs, actual usage, or criminal background. For example, stop-and-frisk policing, a product of the Drug War, and other “tough on crime” policies foster Fourth Amendment violations while profiling people as drug users or criminals.9 We also know that the prison industrial complex leverages white-supremist, punitive drug laws to create, target, and oppress groups of people based on similar identifying characteristics or behaviors.10 Moreover, unhoused people and those experiencing mental health challenges are often targeted and caught up in the dragnet.11 The scope and consistency of harms requires us to consider the potential of psychedelic therapy in this context and demands we utilize these emerging modalities in service of systemic healing.
Humanity has relied on gateways to transcendence throughout human history, from religion and spirituality to meditation.12 Psychedelics may be another gateway that can support us in imagining realities outside of capitalism, white supremacy, and fascism by expanding our consciousness to conceive the impossible.13
Where Do We Go From Here?
It can be challenging to even dream about a world devoid of mechanisms of dominance and control. Racist and capitalist systems have been deeply ingrained into nearly every Western institution for centuries.
It can also be hard for some to see how the social issues discussed here are related to psychedelics. Attempting to solve systemic oppression with a band-aid of misguided policies, however, has only led to increased social unrest.14 Only by understanding these issues at the root – perhaps with the support of tools specifically used for deep reflection – we can imagine ourselves out of this vicious cycle. Engaging in efforts to understand the needs of marginalized people – in particular those most directly targeted by existing systems – could help society better understand and more efficiently springboard towards the changes necessary to achieve a radically different future. The weight of existing oppressive systems sits heavily on all of our shoulders, but focusing this movement’s potential toward the most harmed communities invites us to a bigger imagination, one that may truly achieve equilibrium for the planet and liberation for all.
What Can We Envision?
Can you imagine a reality fueled by the same limitless innovation psychedelics breathed into Silicon Valley?15 When we look beyond the constricted reality of the present, visionary options emerge. These might enhance a global sense of community, access to resources for basic needs, foster communal resilience and accountability, and reclaim the power of the governed within symbiotic governmental relationships.
Global Community
Rebuilding a sense of community is both local and global. Abolitionists advocate to reclaim the U.S.’s once easily navigable, now colonized living spaces16 with village-style, walkable communities. Infrastructure prioritizing large gathering centers; resource, activity, and employment pathways; clean, shared water; and sustainable, natural architecture.17 Villages integrate the infrastructure and social features of exclusive burns, festivals, and college campuses into mainstream society to share the privilege of accessible amenities.
Universal Basic Resources
Abolitionists advocate for state and communal resources sufficiently meeting everyone’s basic needs.18 For example, community gardens using recycled rain water could erode food desserts.19 Ethical, naturally sustainable community gardens reduce pollution, prevent undocumented farm workers exploitation, and provide access to fresh, locally grown produce. Accessible mental healthcare is also needed.20 Fostering safer spaces with diverse practitioners and modalities can increase tailored care and personal success.
Communal Resilience and Accountability
Fostering communal resilience and accountability to ensure all interpersonal harms are addressed can first begin by fostering resilient compassion for ourselves, others, and our humanity to heal. This includes transforming fear and doubt into understanding and empathy of our own impact on interpersonal and internal relationships. We can thereby foster a communal paradigm of accountability to mend burnt bridges and hardened hearts. 21
Reclaiming The Power of the Governed
Lastly, a capitalism-free world could foster synergy between governments and the governed to reclaim their power. Statistics indicate that the vast majority of people are justified in doubting their ability to influence public policy.22 The tensions between the public and government affect collaboration openness, as grassroots organizers are warned to “[b]eware invitations to work with government: they’ll water down your goals, take credit for your work, and divide your solidarity.”23
One important step to resolving the distrust between the public and government is to imagine and implement new ways of governance that moves away from representative-centered power and restores influence to constituents through participatory decision-making.24 For example, legal protections centering the needs and practices of psychedelic underground practitioners are paramount to reverse post-prohibition drug policy’s trend towards reinforcing capitalist, racist control systems privilege.25
Real World Application: MAPS’ System Impacted People Project
People often struggle with pairing the ideals of abolition with the reality of our society today. How do we begin to view psychedelics as a tool of abolition to de-systematize our humanity? One way to begin decolonizing our minds and practices is to engage with the wisdom and leadership of those most directly impacted by the carceral system, strengthening and incorporating voices from impacted communities.26
MAPS is exploring ways to do this through its System Impacted People Project, which seeks to utilize PAT as a tool to foster psychedelic healing from carceral-system-induced trauma. Through this project, MAPS seeks to center the voices these same systems were built to control. Though “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,”27 these tools can be used to build things never before seen until it is time to build a house of our own liberated design.
References and Footnotes
1. Dyck, Ph.D.
2. John Parrington Ph.D., Did Drug Use Help the Development of Human Consciousness?, Psychology Today (2021).
3. Project MK-Ultra, CIA Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room (2018).
4. Alana Hippensteele, LSD D-Tartrate Receives Breakthrough Therapy Designation From FDA for Generalized Anxiety Disorder (2024)
5. Julia LeDoux, VA will fund research on psychedelic compounds, Audacy (2024).
6. Ben Johnson, Do Criminal Laws Deter Crime? Deterrence Theory in Criminal Justice Policy: A Primer, Minnesota House Research Department, St. Paul, 2 (2019).
7. Imani Robinson at 260,
8. Risa Goluboff, Vagrant Nation: Police Power, Constitutional Change, and the Making of the 1960s, Oxford University Press, 16-20 (2016) (discussing how vagrancy laws and law enforcement were weaponized to undermine the labor union efforts of the IWW or Wobblies, organized by “ radical labor activists, anarchists, and socialists” who opened membership to workers of any race, “[u]nlike most unions at the time”); see also Fernanda Pirie, Oxford University; Law: instrument of oppression or tool of justice?, Medium (2021); See also Martha Davis, Human Rights, Social Justice and State Law: A manual for Creative Lawyering, Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School (2008) at 3 (discussing how the U.S. has failed to honor its “ obligations to ensure fundamental economic and social rights (including the right to education, housing, healthcare, food, work, and social security)” as specified in the ratification of the Charter of the Organization of the American States); see also Robert R. Keuhn, Undermining Justice: The Legal Profession’s Role in Restricting Access to Legal Representation, 6-2006 UTAH LAW REVIEW, 4 (2006).
9. Goluboff at 11.
10. 13th. 2017. [film] Directed by A. DuVernay. United States: Netflix.
11. Patrick Sharkey & Alisabeth Marsteller, Neighborhood Inequality and Violence in Chicago, 1965–2020, The University of Chicago Law Review (2022) at 355.
12. Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process, United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (1983).
13. Erika Dyck, Ph.D., Can Psychedelics Promote Social Justice and Change the World?, MAPS Bulletin 2021 Vol. 31 No. 3 (2021); see also Imani Robinson, Towards an Abolitionist Drug Policy Reform, Buxton, J., Margo, G. and Burger, L. (Ed.) The Impact of Global Drug Policy on Women: Shifting the Needle, Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, 259-269, 260 (2020) (discussing how drug policy reform landscape’s “(sometimes unintended) violent consequences” has increased “advocating for a more radical rejection of carcerality and punishment itself.”).
14. Davis at 3.
15. Maxim Tvorun-Dunn; Acid liberalism: Silicon Valley’s enlightened technocrats, and the legalization of psychedelics; 110 International Journal of Drug Policy (2022).
16. Adam Paul Susaneck, Segregation by Design, TU Delft Centre for the Just City (2024).
17. Mark Lakeman & Andrew Millison, How to Turn Your Neighborhood Into a Village, YouTube (2023).
18. Davis at 3.
19. Lakeman & Millison.
20. Merrick et al, Vital signs: estimated proportion of adult health problems attributable to adverse childhood experiences and implications for prevention – 25 states, 2015 -2017, 2019; Susan Nembhard & Natalie Lima, To Improve Safety, Understanding and Addressing the Link between Childhood Trauma and Crime Is Key, Urban Institute, (Aug. 9, 2022)); Compassion Prison Project, How Common Are Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)?, (last visited Aug. 4, 2023).
21. Reina Sultan & Micah Herskind, What Is Abolition, And Why Do We Need It?, Transform Harm (2020);
Ejeris Dixon, Building Community Safety: Practical Steps Toward Liberatory Transformation, Transform Harm (2018).
22. Doherty et. al., Americans’ Views of Government: Low Trust, but Some Positive Performance Ratings; Pew Research Center (2020); see also Martin Gilens & Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens; Cambridge University Press (2014) (see Table 2. Influence upon Policy of Average Citizens, Economic Elites, and Interest Groups: Correlations among independent variables); see also Mikael Persson, From opinions to policies: Examining the links between citizens, representatives, and policy change; Electoral Studies, Volume 74 (2021) (stating “Recent studies show that policy changes appear to correspond primarily to the preferences of citizens with high socio-economic status.”); see also Ezra Klein, The Doom Loop of Oligarchy, Vox (2014).
23. Golden Rules for Getting Shit Done, Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (2023).
24. Caitlin Shane, et al., Talking Back to the City: A manual for winning — and resisting — local drug policy, Pivot Legal Society (2023).
25. Shane at 15, 20.
26. Jeremiah Olson, Social Construction and Political Decision Making In The American Prison System(s), University of Kentucky, Theses and Dissertations–Political Science (2013); Justin M. Smith & Aaron Kinzel, Carceral Citizenship as Strength: Formerly Incarcerated Activists, Civic Engagement and Criminal Justice Transformation; National Library of Medicine, CRIT CRIMINOL 2021; 29(1): 93–110 (2021).
27. Audre Lorde, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (1984), Crossing Press, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Ed., Berkeley, 111 (2007)
Raiden Washington, J.D.
Raiden Washington, J.D. (syre, fae, he, they); an Afro-Indigenous, gender nonconforming, & queer 2nd degree black belt, Taekwondo champion, abolitionist revolutionary, artist, University of Georgia Law graduate, & Georgia State University Film & Media graduate; deeply committed to universal liberation through grassroots movement legal advocacy, storytelling, education, empowerment, & connection. Just as they fought to win martial arts championships, they eagerly fight systems of oppression through intersectional, participatory pleasure activism spiritual art festivals & indigenized harm reductionist policymaking. Through BLKMKT Innovations, their abolitionist art advocacy organization, has championed for increased access to justice for silenced, exploited, oppressed groups by providing development & operations administration to community changemakers & international trailblazers like the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies & the Drug Policy Alliance as a Legal Intern, Students for Sensible Drug Policy as Board Director Chair, & most recently the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia’s Voter Action Project Community Coordinator role, in addition to local grassroots organizations like the Atlanta People’s Budget, Black Futurists Group, & DanceSafe.
BLKMKT Innovations (Abolitionist Art Advocacy)
Storm Cadet (Personal/abolitionist music)
