People’s Medicine: Plant Medicine, Psychedelics & Healing Justice

Psychedelics and plant medicine have vast potential to help us access health and healing. They have been utilised by global majority peoples for millennia. For people with experience of mental distress and trauma, they can serve as powerful tools to process our lived realities. Despite this, these technologies have been stigmatised and criminalised by state institutions for decades, resulting in more racial violence, community breakdown and trauma. In recent years, some have hailed a ‘psychedelic renaissance’ in the minority world – but this phenomenon cannot be divorced from its neoliberal capitalist context.

In this exploratory space chaired by Farzana Khan, we are joined by Ismail Lourido Ali, Akua Ofosuhene, Camille Sapara Barton and Darren Springer, who discuss the transformative possibilities offered by psychedelics and plant medicine. We will approach these technologies not only through the lens of individual and collective healing, but also address their relationship to large-scale structural issues such as the war on drugs and abolition. How might psychedelics and plant medicine help us meaningfully intervene in cycles of violence and trauma? How might they serve as tools to reimagine public health?