The Dawning of the Natural Medicine Health Act: My Perspective
The news here in Colorado at the top of my headlines is the passage of Prop. 122, the Natural Medicine Health Act. It has two parts, one part decriminalizes plant derived psychedelic medicines including psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, and ibogaine. Another part legalizes these medicines for use in licensed healing centers with psilocybin rolling out in September of 2024 and the option to roll out the other medicines in 2026. This regulated access model will be guided by a group of 15 individuals, known as the advisory council. They will build out the structure and nuance of these healing centers and the license that licensed professionals will apply to eventually operate these centers, making recommendations to DORA, the Department of Regulatory Affairs who will be responsible for implementing these recommendations and managing the licensure going forward.
This measure is exciting in a number of ways. It is sufficiently balanced in that it marries the therapeutic benefits as well as incorporating foundations in spiritual and religious practices. A purely therapeutic model, while useful wouldn’t have been sufficient at honoring the true benefits of these medicines because, in their essence, they are deeply spiritual experiences. It does this in a few ways, firstly, the prop requires that indigenous perspectives are considered. These medicine keepers hold a depth of knowledge that, truth be told deserves more voice than even this prop allows. (Here is an article breaking down some of this tension in the psychedelic community) But it is a step in the right direction and it’ll be up to the members of the advisory council to elevate those voices to the greatest extent possible. The lineages of the medicine keepers have held these medicines sacred for millennia. To leave out the sacred from the medicine experience would strip the experience of the profound mystical changes that can occur in benefit of the individual and coincidentally, the collective because as the individual heals, the collective community benefits. Second, facilitators are not required to have advanced degrees in therapy, which incorporates a fundamental truth to healing: every person has a gift to offer. The licensed facilitators will go through a training program set forth by an advisory board and implemented by DORA. This program will incorporate safety, efficacy practices, the history of medicine and medicine keepers etc. By removing gatekeeping to the extent that this measure does, we’re allowing sufficient space for natural healers to step into power and offer their gifts. While therapists are highly trained and knowledgable on the therapeutic arts, this work and this medicine does not require advanced degrees to be stewarded with reverence for, and in service to, the healing journey of the client. This feature is an overall positive from where I sit.
By creating a licensed and regulated model, we invite in trust for those that are more risk averse than others. This is a big portion of the population as they lie in the heart of the risk spectrum. And if one thing is clear, it is the positive, trustable, personal stories of those in our communities that bring in more risk averse individuals to their own personal, spiritual work. So a cascade effect can occur where risk averse individuals will lower their guard enough to approach these medicines and heal, relax into the unfolding of life, and begin to trust life to a greater degree. Therefore as we wake greater numbers of the population up to the mystery of life, we are bound to see a spiritual revolution unfold as people come into contact with their own version of the mystery, God, divine, sacred, etc. On a micro scale, in my practice, I see clients engaging life in new ways because they’ve been through these journeys. They’re more compassionate, understanding, less rigid, more expansive, and more available to the flow of life that ties us humans all together. I have hopes that this will begin to happen on a macro scale as this measure opens the door for more moderate and conservative individuals (not political, just in their own risk management) begin to step into the work these medicines enable.
I’ve been deep in this work for 3 years, providing containers for people to experience the healing powers of psychedelics and a proper preparation and integration process. When someone journeys, they reach into the mystical for a few hours and obtain information that is meant to be integrated into their day to day worlds, without a proper preparation and integration process, clients can be left floundering, unsure of what to make of the experience. I see the downside of the absence of such a process in the field of ketamine healing. Ketamine is a potent substance that is often used as an anesthetic in hospitals, and it has an ability to reorganize the brains neural structures to help with depression and anxiety. It’s a powerful dissociative. Yet some ketamine centers do not offer a preparation and integration process. Clients come into the office and receive infusions then are sent out into the world to make sense of the experience. I’ve had many of these clients come to me worse off than when they went in. Prop 122 will set forth requirements for healing centers to incorporate proper preparation and integration sessions enabling a space for clients to make meaning of the deep mystical experience and coincidental changes that can occur in their lives. While the measure’s requirements have been set forth as 1 administration session, 1 preparation session, and 1 integration session, I suspect some healing centers will opt for more extensive processes. They might include additional sessions or even a build out of community processing sessions, meaning group integration sessions, and any other tangential offerings that brings together community to heal in relationship with one another.
Amidst it all, we will face challenges as a community. While these plant medicines offer extensive healing capabilities and much has been said about the promise they offer us, we must ground into the reality that everything has shadow and enlightened attributes. News articles, books, research articles, Netflix series’, and even the campaign itself have focused on the positives of this modality of healing while the shadow elements have been glossed over. These are powerful medicines and they need to be stewarded in integrity with the nature of the medicine by leadership and the individuals holding space for clients. We all have blind spots in our perspectives and, in relationship with one another, harm can happen, sometimes intentionally sometimes unintentionally. If we can remain committed to resilience, reciprocity, repair, and compassion, we can remain open and cohesive as a community when conflict and harm are identified. Yet, as a society, we love to build up our heroes and then when any fault shows up we can tend to strike them down in their imperfections (it is appropriate when real harm is involved). I bring this to light to shed awareness on the tendency to self-destruct at the first realization of conflict. This movement will not be perfect in its implementation. It can’t be, as humans themselves are imperfect and the systems that they create are imperfect. Therefore we must ground into the reality that stewarding this movement will bring a host of challenges. The bar has been set high and we should prepare ourselves to welcome these challenges with resilience, reciprocity, repair, and compassion.
Ultimately, I believe we are amidst the dawning of great change in our community that will be drawn out over the next 5, 10, 50, x amount of years. We now have the capacity to shed light on the underlying causes of mental, physical, and spiritual health in our society and begin to shift the collective psyche of the state. As anyone whose done their own personal work will know, change happens from the inside out. Collective change and societal shifts toward greater consciousness, expanded compassion, right action, and inner peace are available on this path we’ve laid before us. And with great power, comes great responsibility. The collective ‘We’ must steward this movement with integrity and in relationship to the laws of nature to be in alignment with the power these medicines and their histories possess.
