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This series is a response to the ongoing need of paramount importance to educate lawyers and the rapidly growing numbers of participants in the psychedelics community, so that the well-intended and critically important healing efforts of the current psychedelic resurgence might be conceived with the appropriate orientation of harm-reduction and benefit-honoring.
The convergence of psychedelics and plant medicines and mainstream Western culture is cause for appropriate concern and hypervigilance, in light of the harms and erasures of Western colonial dominance upon Indigenous Peoples, traditions, and lands. This era of psychedelics decriminalization and regulation is inherently an opportunity to reorient from having adverse interests and dominating paradigms to ones of respect, ethical actions, and shared destinies. The historical tension between the Western and Indigenous cultural worldviews and the people holding them necessitates a calling in before moving ahead, for each of us to embrace a process of continuing education and realigning our actions with mutual commitments to ethical, decolonized, and harm-reducing goals that empower rather than threaten Indigenous communities and the ecological systems upon which Western and Indigenous lives depend. This series aims to offer this type of restorative process as the orientation with which to approach one’s commitment to ethical behavior, Indigenous reciprocity and benefit-honoring.
The “restorative” orientation encourages lawyers advising clients in the psychedelics ecosystem, and anyone approaching the question of how to get involved in psychedelics ethically, to view respecting Indigenous Peoples, traditions, and communities as not simply being for the benefit of Indigenous people or, in the case of applicable laws, as not simply another box-to-check in the race to business. Rather, consulting with, listening to, and ethically partnering with Indigenous Peoples (where appropriate and consent is sought and given) initiates the cultural and ecological healing that is a prerequisite for ethical and sustainable healing of the minds, bodies and spirits of human beings and the systems we create.
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