Psychedelic Injustice: How Identity Politics Poisons the Psychedelic Renaissance

Just as the world is waking up to the promise of psychedelics, the decades-long push to introduce these extraordinary medicines to the masses faces a significant threat—the introduction of critical social justice ideology into psychedelic culture, practice, and activism. Describing how this form of identity politics sees everything through an oppressor-oppressed lens, Psychedelic Injustice calls attention to the ways in which individuals and institutions within psychedelia have not only adopted the ideology’s most divisive narratives about race and gender but also aggressively pushed them. It also demonstrates how these same individuals and institutions misrepresent the history of psychedelics in the name of decolonialism, draw boundaries around psychedelics based on identity categories, and drive away anyone who does not submit to “approved” critical social justice ideas. Through first-hand accounts, rigorous scholarship, and an eye for nuance, Psychedelic Injustice serves as a much-needed and long-overdue counterpoint to the highly questionable, disunifying narratives increasingly found throughout modern psychedelia. Ultimately, however, it is a call for hope, unity, and simple common sense. If psychedelia is ever to go fully mainstream, the psychedelic Renaissance must reject ideological narratives about our present and past and see these sacred medicines for what they are: a universal birthright that allows for the expansion of minds, the healing of psyches, and the creation of deep human bonds and connections.