Advocacy
“Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal class, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
— Eugene V. Debs, 1918
It's Time...
It is time to end the war on entheogenic plants and fungi, and support the unalienable human right to develop our own relationship with nature.
Decriminalize Nature is an educational campaign to inform individuals about the value of entheogenic plants and fungi and has the intention to propose a resolution to decriminalize our relationship to nature.
Their mission is to improve human health and well-being by decriminalizing and expanding access to entheogenic plants and fungi through political and community organizing, education and advocacy.
Decriminalize Nature offers the following five principles to guide these legislative and public policy discussions in a way that creates community-based healing and community-based, equitable economic opportunity:
1- Decriminalize Entheogens to Ensure Equitable Access:
Ensure that "grow-gather-gift” models are at the heart of decriminalization legislation across the US, enabling anyone, regardless of income, to have access to healing plants and fungi.
Unfortunately, leading with legalization (the creation of regulations that encourage corporate economic exploitation), without first decriminalizing, creates economic pressures against decriminalization. (Decriminalize Nature Resolution, now passed in 14 cities in the US and the basis of the California SB 519)
2 - Protect Healing with Community Based Ceremony:
Protect community-based ceremony to enable people to heal in their own family or community circles or groups, respecting cultural difference in America, where not all cultures prefer clinical therapy or medical models and/or find them undesirable for financial reasons, efficacy, or safety reasons. Marginalized communities tend to heal in community, more often than in clinical or medical settings. (Decriminalize Nature’s Community Healing Initiative, passed with unanimous support in Oakland and integrated into California SB 519)
3 - Create Local, Community-Serving Economies for Things that Grow from the Ground:
Restrict value-creation for anything that grows from the ground to only tribal-, reservation-, city-, or county-based economies by ensuring local ownership and hiring policies; prevent extractive models of capitalism by creating barriers of entry to out-of- 3007 Telegraph Avenue Oakland, California, 94609 info@decriminalizenature.org area ownership and extractive investment models. (Decriminalize Nature’s Community Healing Initiative Section 8.62.030 B—creation of a micro-enterprise task force)
4 - As Synthetic Markets Emerge, Ensure Benefits are Shared Broadly via Strong Social Equity Programs:
Create strong social equity programs directed at the emerging synthetic-based, for-profit corporations in psychedelics, based on the best models of social equity; target social equity programs at the FDA trial phase with fees and taxes and carry these through the permitting process, creating equity capital and loans to support local economies. Allow for the ease of regulations and entry of small businesses from disadvantaged communities to the synthetic/isolate industry.
Do not allow prior cannabis, plant medicine and psychedelic charges to exclude participation from the market. Ensure expungement of records for arrests associated with cannabis, plant medicines, and psychedelics. (Analyze the best social equity and expungement programs from throughout the US)
5 - Develop Sustainable Relations with Indigenous Communities, Species, and Habitats:
working in partnership with local indigenous communities around the world where more well-known entheogens grow, establish protocols and practices ensuring the local communities benefit in the ways they desire, and offer support in protection of species and habitats.
(Decriminalize Nature’s Sustainable Relations Committee has initiated a working group to collaborate with local indigenous communities throughout the world)
Search for your local Decriminalize Nature group and Donate here