Over the next period, we will be curating a Cognitive Liberty hashtag campaign, offering a selection of images and stories in support of the entheogenic coming-out process. This already challenging process is made even more difficult by decades of politics and legal policy, demonizing the identity of those who partake in psychedelic/entheogenic experiences. We hope this campaign will provide some tools for you in that next uncomfortable conversation.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,  “Identity politics starts from analyses of oppression to recommend, variously, the reclaiming, redescription, or transformation of previously stigmatized accounts of group membership. Rather than accepting the negative scripts offered by a dominant culture about one’s own inferiority, one transforms one’s own sense of self and community, often through consciousness-raising.” The mainstream single-state view has created a politics of consciousness by stigmatizing states of mind incongruent with their models (Roberts, 2006). This project’s aim is to provide educational support to empower those in the grassroots community to defeat the Drug War through their hearts and minds.

The Drug War’s influence is accomplished through propaganda campaigns that generate fear and stigmatize individuals who explore alternative mind states, “othering” and oppressing them as second-class citizens. Entheogenic exploration can be a spiritual practice, but it can also get one thrown in jail, with the mainstream societal response being “Oh those hedonists are just trying to get high.”

The point is to gain the right to take entheogens, not as blast-your-pants-off recreation, but in service to our freedom to grow personally, spiritually, creatively, and communally, through the exploration of our own consciousness.

There are well over 30 million people in the United States alone who have tried a psychedelic, a statistic often quoted by the late Daniel Jabbour of the Psychedelic Society San Francisco. He said “individuals who know someone who used cannabis were more likely to also want to end cannabis prohibition.”

Applying this principle to psychedelics and entheogens, if more people came out about the potentials of these experiences to be of value to themselves, the stigma against them would likely decrease and grassroots policy change would be more effective. How many times have you been surprised that someone you knew was practicing deep medicine work, but you had no idea?

Imagine if we didn’t have to hide from each other due to fear of persecution, demotion, and oppression?

We need to have the courage to come out and talk about how entheogenic/psychedelic experiences have been insightful and transformative – and sometimes challenging – for us. It is time to have real, open discussion about this, but it is hard to hear others if we are holed up in the closet. The Johns Hopkins studies show more than 70% of the respondents report their psychedelic experience as one of the top five most important experiences of their life. The value of psychedelics is apparent even at the level of biomedicine, both for their chemical interactions and for the experience itself.

Unfortunately, the same worldview that has separated man from nature, leading to the destruction of planetary ecosystems, and the oppression of ancient cultures, is also writing the narrative of psychoactive stigma; oppressing individuals who have deep relationships with these sacred medicines. Does it make sense to criminalize ancient, sacred healing practices and tools because they don’t conform to reductionist materialism? Do we have to wait through the long, drawn-out, bureaucratic process of clinical trials to gain approval to explore our own consciousness? As long as the majority of people are afraid to share their experiences, changing this prohibitive paradigm will take time.

So what is a good way to kickstart this movement? We will begin by posting educational memes from artists, authors, mathematicians, philosophers, practitioners, scholars, scientists, computer engineers, and more, describing their personal psychedelic/entheogenic experience.

Other sites offering an archive of quotes are

Erowid, The Third Wave, and People on Psychedelics Wiki

Who wants to hear this information? We’re sure you have some amazing stories, too. Please share them with the larger community at #cognitiveliberty or #eip, or in the comments section below, and help empower others to share their story and support the freedom of consciousness.

entheogenic identity politics: join the movement, support cognitive liberty