Decriminalize Nature’s Five Principles for Creating Sustainable Communities in Partnership with Sacred Plant Medicines Background
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.
5 principles of Decriminalize Nature
1
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.
2
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.
3
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 out-of- 3007 Telegraph Avenue Oakland, California, 94609 info@decriminalizenature.org area ownership and extractive investment models.
4
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)
5
Develop Sustainable Relations with Indigenous Communities, Species, and Habitats:
Work 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.