About
We are a mission-driven community dedicated to advocating the benefits of decriminalizing entheogenic plants and fungi. Our commitment is rooted in research, education, and support for holistic well-being. Discover our mission, vision, and purpose as we pave the way for a healthier, more enlightened world.
Our
Purpose
To decriminalize entheogenic plants, restore our root connection to nature,
and improve human health and well-being.
Our
Mission
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.
Our
Vision
We envision happier, healthier individuals and communities reconnected to nature and entheogenic plant and fungi traditions and practices.
Five Principles
For Creating Sustainable Communities in Partnership with Sacred Plant Medicines
The use of entheogenic plants and fungi for healing and growth has roots in ceremonial practices of traditional communities that go back hundreds and thousands of years. Those uses are now re-emerging through rapidly unfolding legislative, economic, and public policy discussions across the United States. Decriminalize Nature (“DN”) offers a Five- Point Plan to ensure that the benefits of emerging uses and markets derived from plant medicines flow to local neighborhoods and communities by incorporating reverence, social equity, and the creation of community-serving markets into these legislative processes and public policy discussions throughout the United States.
Our goal is to learn from society’s experiences with how the cannabis legalization movement rapidly evolved over the last two decades, creating billions of dollars of new value through legitimization of the market, innovation of new processes, and development of new products. Unfortunately, very little of this value stayed in the neighborhoods which needed those economic resources the most, nor went to the people who paid the highest price of incarceration and persecution related to cannabis prohibition over last fifty years. Instead, the cannabis industry has seen value creation become increasingly consolidated into the hands of venture capitalist and corporate investors. We can learn from those mistakes in how we guide a new set of processes related to the use of entheogenic plants and fungi, as well as the emerging synthetic markets.
DN is pleased to offer 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.
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)
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)
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 area ownership and extractive investment models. (Decriminalize Nature’s Community Healing Initiative Section 8.62.030 B—creation of a micro-enterprise task force)
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)
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)