Harvard Divinity School psychedelic spirituality and race February 17th 2024 all right well Welcome to our panel on psychedelic spirituality and race our talks today are going to explore how race and identity intersect with psychedelic spiritualities and how the field can work towards more equality and justice um for me this is something that's really special and exciting because my grandmother was a Healer from northern Mexico so and we're talking about um different practices this is something
I get really excited about um my name is ginger I'm a alumnist of the Harvard Graduate School of Education and I'm a part of our talking group here so really excited to see this now coming into fruition and my collaborator Simon and I Simon's in the back we're going to be doing the logistics of today's panel and the talks are going to range about 15 to 30 minutes and to maximize the speaker time I'm going to provide a brief introduction and you can find their full bios in that digital program or
you can ask one of us for one of the printouts we have for that longer bio um and then for questions we're going to take them at the end to be able to maximize the time of our speakers so without further Ado our first set is going to be a collaboration between between Ivon bant and Candace Oglesby Evon is an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and an instructor in psychosocial oncology and paliative Care at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute and Candice is the founder of Journey ment
al health Consulting and program director of fluence training ketamine assisted therapy certificate program so please join me in welcoming yvon and [Applause] Candice good morning everyone thank you for being here with us today we are so honored uh to be talking about something so passionate with us and so we're going to be talking about the interconnection of psychedelic spirituality social justice and bipo which stands for black indigenous and people of color uh engagement and psychedelic assi
sted therapy and I think it's important for us to give you a little bit of context before we go into uh this topic of discussion so yavon and I met um about three and a half years ago we were both on a clinical trial that was studying cocin uh with treatment resistant uh depression and cancer patients and so as I was invited into the space I realized that I was the only uh therapist of color in the space um and that I was supporting a small percentage of participants of color and so I had to ask
myself why am I the only therapist of color in this space and so I started to share my concerns with any of my colleagues who would listen to me and so yavon was one of those colleagues and so we started to get curious we started to question I'm sure that I'm not the only therapist that's experiencing this that's having a hard time to break through in the psychedelic therapy space even though this was an opportunity there were still barriers so on this clinical trial where kandes and I met um I
was a um in part my one of my role was to conduct a qualitative analysis of people's experien participants in this clinical trial so these were all um cancer patients uh with severe depression and they were going through one dose of cocy therapy 25 mgram and um so I was interviewing them about two months after they they had their Journey with this intervention and um here is what one said about her experience she said I cried the entire time it wasn't sad or anything like that it was a very bea
utiful experience I just felt a wave of gratefulness and support I had a group of women around around me they felt like my ancestors they were supporting me and they were surrounding me it was hundreds of people and they were supporting me it was like they were having a celebration of me my therapist was a black woman this was candes it gave me another sense of reassurance there a black woman would understand certain things that nobody else would understand I didn't feel like I'm the only black
person here and these people don't understand me and they're not going to know how to reassure me so there is a lot here there is both the healing which is why why I'm doing this work and what I'm hoping this work will bring in the space of oncology and paliative care and there is also the importance of interpersonal relationship in this work and for this person the sense of connection and safety that candes brought was for me like really eye opening on this importance but when I was hearing kan
d telling me about her experience as a black therapist I was like wait this is not just a discussion maybe we can research this more so this is how um we brought a team together so we are very grateful to Dr Justine Sanders uh who is a paliative care clinician at Mill and Dr agrael Who is an oncologist um and funded Sunstone therapies which has provided funding for this TR for this study and Aman Ingram who is our research assistant and we really want to express a deep gratitude to the participa
nts of the study that we're going to talk about today so today we're going to be giving you a little bit of an overview of historical and cultural background in terms of the Psychedelic Renaissance um psychedelic spirituality as a catalyst for black and brown therapist engagement obstacles also barriers that are faced by black and brown therapist but also integrating psychedelic spirituality with social justice we can't talk about one without talking about the other so the the simple fact that w
e're all here at the Harvard Divinity School today is a manifestation of the this psychic Renaissance that uh you know many have C this reemergence of interest for psychic medicines and plants um over the past decades after 60 years of prohibition uh there has been increasing research suggesting the safety and efficacy of uh psyched AED therapy in a clinical context uh there are there are like exponential number of Trials of cybin and MDMA to name only the these substances and we may be a few mo
nth away from FDA approved uh medicines uh with maps uh filing MDMA for MDMA assisted therapy to the FD ta recently and all this it belongs to the medical model of this Renaissance is really the tip of the iceberg of what's going on uh and I think we're going to hear more about all this today um and so this the hope is that it can foster some of the healing that we heard in the previous slide in many indications um and there are many other concerns as well that we've heard um and that Candace is
going to tell a little bit more and so as we talk about cultural humility and Equitable access um psychedelic therapy is not just a novel concept um but has Deep Roots and Indigenous Heritage and Living Traditions um it also provides promising interventions like psychedelic therapy equitably to diverse communities uh which requires a foundation of cultural humility and Trauma informed care and then also the under representation and mistress so despite black and brown communities is experiencing
a disproportionate risk for conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder and depression uh they're significantly underrepresented in psychedelic clinical trials and then also this underrepresentation is partially due to experiences of racial discrimination and Trauma leading to valid mistrust or barriers related to psychedelic treatment specifically as we look at us history over in regards to clinical trials Henrietta LAX MK Ultra and Tuskegee experiment as well so also part of the background
for our research we had been in Communications with colleagues from M University who um surveyed the population of um black Americans and white Americans to explore their views on psyched therapies so they had about half of both races and um they showed that uh after short education about what these medicines are uh Black Americans demonstrated more positive views than white Americans about uh their potential and especially those who identify a clinical need a more important clinical need for t
hemselves in terms of mental health and so they concluded that the the diversification of psychedelic therapy uh is uh the Hess of the researchers more than bip people um and so and in in our study based on that so that's the the bipo communities and in our study we focused on bipo therapists absolutely and the Curiosities that came up for us is what role do black and brown therapists play and also what opportunities and barriers do they perceive to engage in psychedelic assisted therapy so to e
xplore those questions we uh put together a mixed method uh study uh we are going to talk of about the qualitative approach today uh knowing that that we just completed the the qualitative phase of this study and we're going to put together a survey a national survey based on those results and so the the the main objective is to explore um bipo therapist perspectives on opportunities and barriers for them to engage in this field we conducted semistructured interviews and focus groups um with a c
onvenient sample that included a variety of therapist from different backgrounds research non-research different races and different degrees of familiarity with psych therapy uh so we conducted individual interviews with 13 therapists and and focus group with 10 the Min age was 43 year old there were 10 femal six males six who did not identify as female or male the distribution of races is this slide uh and all our participants were practicing therapist in various settings for so for the sake of
our presentation today we're only going to focus on three main areas um or themes shall I say and the first being psychedelic spirituality as a catalyst um to identify obstacles and barriers faced by black and brown therapists and then what does integrating psychedelic spirituality would social justice look like so for the sake of this conference we we we asked ourself uh what are we talking even when we talk tell about seic spirituality and we looked at this through a definition that is widesp
read in healthare uh that came from a a cycle of um consensus conferences uh bringing together oncologists paliative care researchers spiritual care researchers philosophes and and people from religion and so they Define spirituality as a dynamic and intrinsic aspect of humanity through which persons seek ultimate meaning purpose and Transcendence and experience relationship to self family others Community Society nature and the significant are sacred and so what is p spirit it uh for the sake o
f This research we uh consider maybe it's when spirituality is informed somehow by psychedelic experiences and so when we talk about psychedelic uh spirituality as a catalyst uh psychedelic spirituality serves as a driving force uh for black and brown therapists to be able to enter into this field and what that looked like was acknowledging a purpose or something greater than themselves and then also the concepts of interconnectedness unity healing trauma-informed approaches and empowerment are
often emphasized with psychedelic medicine and serves as motivating factors for black and brown therapists to engage in psychedelic assisted therapy so for our participants what did this look like Revolution psychedelics have the potential to challenge existing paradigms including those related to race and spirituality and offer New Perspectives that may contribute to Social and personal transformation there was also this sense of collective Liberation so not solely leveraging psychedelics for o
ne's own personal Liberation but a shared Collective freedom for all and then Liberation is interconnected so this notion aligns with the understanding that addressing racial disparities and achieving social justice are all interconnected with spiritual and psychological growth thank you yeah so from one of our participants I think there's a sense of this work being revolutionary and almost a responsibility in terms of making sure that our communities have a tool for personal Liberation individu
ally and collectively I think for me at the end of the day the opportunity for myself the opportunity for the client it just starts to blur and it's our Collective opportunity to really meet ourselves and another quote from one of our participants um but it says I don't think we can really do this work if we've not had at least a few of our own experiences with the medicine I find with my clients who are predominantly black it just feels like I'm in community with them and I'm not over them we'r
e all in community together and healing together it just brings a different type of connection so this is the the the vision the idea and uh but there is also the the reality of barriers faced by back for therapists when they're trying to um to enter this field and to uh get training get uh involved in research or uh implementing their clinical practices um and what we heard from them is that the barriers that they face really feel disproportionate uh because they are bipoc therapists um and tha
t this really comes in tension with uh those claims of psychedelic spirituality around interconnection Unity trauma inform approach and uh and but but there is this reality uh that we heard from our participants that they face barriers in every dimensions of the psychic field that is currently evolving uh when they seek seek out for training uh the cost of training the location of training the cility the sense of safety like as a Boke therapist it may feel much less safe to tell other people or
people in my profession that I want to commit to this F field or that I want to engage in this field um than others and and several of them told us that how um compl complicated it us to navigate this sense that it might not be safe for or they might get some adverse consequences for engaging in the field and then it's the the psychological burden of engaging in this field uh that is predominantly white uh that uh often propose curriculum that are not really not inclusive when they're not used b
y tokenism or facing racism uh the clinical research uh is mainly designed and implemented in ways that were described non-culturally inclusive um and uh with under representation of bip investigators where are the bip investigators in the current psychic research um this tress for clinical research in the bipo populations were mentioned and an under representation of bipo research participants of course as a consequence um in terms of clinical implementation uh participants describe a lack of j
ob opportunities outside of research uh and although they mentioned ketamine as a way to engage in in this research but also a lack of practicality of the job opportunities uh acknowledging that it's very much uh a field that is developing and that most of the access is through research and not really uh available but beyond all that there is um this sense that bipo therapist don't really recognize themselves in the model that is being pro proposed mostly um because it's a model that feels roote
d in capitalism in individualism and systemic oppression and uh this model feels extractive with cultural appropriation and lack of reciprocity and we've heard a lot of that this morning already so here's what one participant said we've borrowed a modality we've borrowed this but we're really not even adhering to how in depth this modality goes into there's parts of me and parts of my culture that are being stripped borrowed but not really much credit is given or respected and another therapist
say I have been someone as a clinician who's been an advocate for psychedelic healing to happen outside of the clinical container because not only it will make that more accessible but you're also not having to overcome some of the barriers that you would have to overcome in a clinical container like stigma safety trust rapper Etc so as we begin to wrap up this is our call to action to you so being able to integrate psychedelic medicine spirituality and social justice the link between psychedeli
c spirituality and social justice is essential as I mentioned before we can't talk about this without talking about social justice two go hand in hand and so being able to achieve true integration of psychedelic spirituality necessitates a commitment to social justice principles and so it is imperative psychedelic spirituality is not utilized to bypass issues around racial inequalities and white supremacy and so when we talk about these steps we acknowledge that the first one may be acknowledgin
g that there's even systemic issues so psychedelic experiences may lead individuals to a heightened sense of interconnectedness and unity but it's essential not to leverage these experiences to minimize or ignore systematic issues related to race and so the focus should be on understanding and addressing the root cause of social injustice and challenging oneself to eradicate these systems yeah and so recognizing intersectionality psychedelic spirituality should not be wielded to diminish the uni
que challenges faced by individuals based on their racial or ethnic backgrounds embracing an intersectional perspective involves acknowledging and addressing the complex Lex interplay of various social identities promoting inclusivity so incorporating the integration of psychedelic experiences into spiritual practices should promote inclusivity and diversity it's essential to create spaces that respect and honor different cultural racial and spiritual backgrounds rather than leveraging psychedel
ics to reinforce existing power dynamics or cultural appropriation and engaging in self-reflection right maybe one of the toughest things but it's important those engaging in psychedelic spirituality challenge themselves to critically self reflect questioning their own biases their advantages their prejudices this includes being aware of how personal experiences May differ from the experiences of others in different cultural backgrounds and then last but not least what it means to be a co- disru
ptor versus an ally rather than using psychedelic spirituality as a way to disengage from social justice initiatives or avoid having the hard conversations around race individuals can utilize their experiences to fuel a commitment to disintegrate systems of Oppression and so this involves activ and intentionally participating in efforts to address racial disparities and promote equality so to conclude I think one of our participants put it best what came to mind for me was a co- disruptor a co-
disruptor because that differentiates allly ship as a costume that's not to dismiss the efforts allies ship on a policy level but also from a personal level if it presents with an agenda then I'm less likely to want to be in connection with that brand of allyship I think a C- disruptor the evidence would be your hands are as dirty as mine are you going where I go are you having to repeatedly answer questions or to experience certain things discomfort and harm just like I I am are you experiencin
g closed doors if you're a C- disruptor and the evidence is how dirty your hands are you're able to get into the work like me thank you very much here [Applause] are thank you all right thank you and just as a note if you have questions make sure to note them down on your phone or something so we'll come back to them later and our second our second speaker today is jul and Sanchez Gonzalez he is a PhD candidate in art history at Columbia University and a research fellow at the Museum of Modern A
rts SOS Institute okay good morning everyone it is a great pleasure and an honor to be here with all of you many thanks to Paul and Jeffrey for the invitation and to all the people attending in person and also online today's gathering at Harvard cinity School makes a case for the growing interest in psychedelic research and spiritual practices Beyond disciplinary and Regional boundaries together we reflect on our shared need to shift our bodies of knowledge and our embodied experiences to create
realities that we desire to live in and live through desire psychedelics and spiritualities are intrinsically linked and thinking about them requires us to keep considering our bodies in relation to culture and more poignantly in relation to race and gender this convening addresses from an academic standpoint a globalized phenomenon partially defining the side Guist of our time I'd like to contribute to insights to this panel on psychedelic spirituality and race the first is to offer historical
context to today's efforts by establishing a parallel between our convening and the First World Congress of sorcery a unique event celebrated in Bogota in 1975 the Congress largely understudied in the intellectual and cultural histories of the countercultural era is one of the case studies from my doctoral dissertation project in art history second I'd like to consider the quering and liberating possibilities that the cross-cultural sacred or interspiritual can offer within the context of the C
ongress of sorcery my proposition Roots the idea of sorcery witchcraft or brera as a form of spiritual promiscuity highlighting its utopian qualities as well as individual and Collective agency in cultural Exchange congregating a reported number of 3,000 participants the first Royal Congress of sorcery or prier congresso was as groundbreaking and problematic as a public event Simon Gonzalez Restrepo a businessman with influential Family Ties in the Arts and politics initially devised the idea of
this multipronged convening together with his former spouse Claudia rre with the support of Colombian and German investors Gonzalo Restrepo managed to organize a team of over 35 people from humanistic scientific and artistic backgrounds over the course of a year part of this team worked at Gonzalez resto's newly founded travel agency Lana in downtown Bogota which served as the congress's operations headquarters the Congress heralded the slogan in the shadow of the unknown with love and wonder a
phrase coined by the Colombian poet Gonzalo arango a transgressive figure in col Ian Arts arango had been a student of Gonzalez resto's father the existentialist writer Fernando Gonzalez Ooa by the 1970s arango had become increasingly distanced from the from his disruptive role as leader of the nista avanguard movement and was exploring a mystical and liturgic phase in the Caribbean archipelago of San Andres and Providencia his time there was also marked by frequent visits to Ronald William Wil
liams's home a local botanist and healer also known known as El broa Williams became a teacher and friend of the Naas including Gonzalo Restrepo professing what he called The Gospel of love his teachings combined elements from brastop ironism Latin American leftwing politics and afrodiasporic herbalism the poster of the event designed by this designed by the Spanish Colombian painter Alejandro oron roses alluded on a surface level to the witch's flight in direction to the orgastic rights of comm
union with the devil or Sabbath following the medieval oral and iconographic conventions to represent the scene the witch accompanied by the M goat this composition captur a growing interest in OU Cult spiritualities of a transnational countercultural movement further as a publicity stunt the Congress received widespread attention nationally and internationally gaining followers and also raising eyebrows for the elevated fees of its academic conference a collective craze for participation in sue
d as the event also featured a witch Fair three art exhibitions Musical and ritualistic performances film screenings and theater displays whether by conviction of visibility or driven by monetary gains the Congress proved to be a cultural phenomenon despite being Loosely defined by gonal Restrepo as sheer love and the energy of that which is in material sorcery or witchcraft operated as an umbrella term for various leading studies and practice practices of non-hegemonic spiritual systems this in
cluded vuru candomblé marona lumu as well as astrology pychology hypnosis clian Aura photography sacred plants demonic iconographies and even extraterrestrial contacts witchcraft was thought of as an InterContinental permeable platform that privilege unorthodox spiritual and scientific Explorations as well as to share Humanity in spite of notorious cultural differences I have discussed elsewhere some of the events taking place during the first roal Congress of sorcery including preliminary findi
ngs on major art exhibitions containing over 600 pieces today I'd like to briefly bring to your attention two of the over 20 panelists invited to participate Andrew Tre wild are Harvard educated by sorry I think I lost my turn here okay Andrew T A Harvard educated biologist and Doctor Who at the time of the conference worked as a researcher at the Harvard botanical museum and Teresa erod a theologian from Mexico City who had done a year-long doctoral Fellowship here at Harvard Divinity School in
1959 by 1975 Ro had finished her doctoral program at the University autona Mexico and imparted classes on comparative religion at the same Institution the presence of v and R's writings in the proceedings Memoirs provide crucial information of the countercultural networks across the Americas in the 1970s Wild's positive use of plants raised questions on how to quote unquote Safeguard the magic of psychoactive substances whether through rituals surrounding the use of the plant and having an awar
eness of its powers R's magic and World in crisis asserted that quote the Resurgence of magic superstition astrology witchcraft bloody Cults and divination of all kinds coincide with the worst socioeconomic crisis that in turn are also of an ethical order both addresses present us with moral queries though of a different nature responding to the need of studying non-western or non- honic epistemologies as necessary catalyzers for a larger social behavioral shift what narrative prevents excess co
nsumption of various drugs including coffee and sugar though lingering in static pasts of an indigenous romanticized indigenous other the second contents that the dismantling of Western Christian and scientific values desperately looks for Alternatives that serve as quote paleo ties of social anguish such as the case of Witchcraft how much of this intellectual and ontological Legacy do we carry today I wonder can our theories and discursive tools help us suede in advertent essentialisms and bina
ry thinking as Scholars conjoining in the studies of psychedelics and spirituality this is a pressing matter particularly when considering the histories in which this very conversation is rooted would would be open to accept and act on the idea that the research carried out by the scientists associated with the Harvard psychedelic Club in South America locals was a form of biopiracy as it has been dued in certain circles for its extractive non redistributive qualities further if we take the mode
l of spiritual returns laid out by R as a factual historical Rec recurrence then the success of the political projects assembled in this room is contingent Upon Our capacity at implementing a widespread non-positivist anti-racist ontological shift easier said than done the same year that the First World Congress of sorcery was celebrated American writer Annie dard won the Pulitzer Prize for General non-fiction for her book a pilgrim at Tinker Creek this firstperson narrative recounts the author'
s year-long walking journey across Virginia and punds on themes related to Transcendence and nature the novel Blends themes as described by dard from quote Christianity Judaism Buddhism and Sufism attesting to what she has also attributed quite brilliantly to her spiritual appro PR Mis curious Behavior interestingly enough Gonzalo resto's father Fernando also embarked in a walking journey of spiritual Liberation from a Catholic Jesuit of bringing in the 1920s his experience culminated in the acc
laimed book VAP a novel that rooted his authorial Persona as a type of andian nature bound mysticism the lar idea of spiritual promiscuity has been revived though somewhat shilly in the last decade in a few spaces of War ship across the us as well as in prominent podcasts namely Christa tipet's on being further Brazilian Minister Nan cardoso and theologian Claudio cfal have recently made use of the term to describe the Juda ontologies and rituals from the northeastern region of Baya in Brazil fo
r them Jura an interracial religion rooted in plant-based cosmogonies represent a quote spiritual promiscuity between indigenous people and spirits black people and Enchanted ones as well as their oral nature moreover jurema which was thought to be extinct decades ago enables an afro-indigenous quote solidarity and mysti and of quote against the lack of social recognition and territorial displacement promis security as solidarity and agency against settler colonialism is an enticing idea though
one that would have to be concerted as all intellectuals mo intellectual models with communities on the ground half a century apart the lar self-referential account and cardoso and Carval subscription of a Reviving afro form of Afro form of afro-indigenous spiritual activism signal a form of interspirituality infused with feminism and critical race Theory at the core they also share a theological ethos of human interconnectedness this is precisely what Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvi
a winter has described as an imperative to acknowledge that which is ecumenically human and to learn to think trans cosmogonic in its theological political provocation the recirculation of the term spiritual promiscuity becomes thorny not only because it connotes banality and disinterest but also because it continues to destabilize a modernist mindset grounded in sacred ideas of Purity and homogeneity winter plea following following France fenan is to upend the rationalist framework which consid
ers the human as biologically bounded and to shift to a conception of humanity that's biological yes as well as linguistic relational and practiced why promiscuity and not syncretism hybridity or calization though these terms have been discussed by others Ms and edar gisson I believe that their focus ultimately relies on processes and outcomes and less so on intentions and effect the promiscuous aims to shift our agency as individuals and collectives who are increasingly empowered both discursiv
ely and materially to create our own realities profoundly utopian yes in fact my aim is to establish a word play with Jos Stan mun's adoption of the term cruising from his seminal book cruising Utopia not as glamorized liberal EX and this is crucial to my argument but as a straddling between disciplines Realms and regimes of perception this terms this term also follows along mun's theorizing of the word queerness as a fundamental refusal of pre-established performatic forms of Being Human in man
y ways aligned with Winter's bios math mytho liberating diet promiscuity expands Mosa's invitation to rejoice in ecstatic rapture and open-ended Consciousness towards the other for him quote queerness is time is a time of ecstasy ecstasy is queerness is way as a discipline art history's Fallout with spirituality coincided with the prohibition around psychedelics in the 1980s the AIDS pandemic worldwide and the rise of neoliberal multiculturalism this as it was the case in other disciplines in th
e humanities is no coincidence it is exciting to see a shift in various institutions worldwide including my own where conversations on Art and the spiritual can be held unapologetically though as it is also the case with radical racial and queer politics there's still much ground to be covered given this decades long lack of Engagement with spirituality as a legitimate research subject a great Luna in content Theory and method theology is pervasive in my field this is greatly felt in our engagem
ent with archival materials and the interpolation we allow ourselves to establish with living artists experiences I hope to have shown in this reading how the First World Congress of sorcery despite its contradictory grounding which navigated the complexities of the New Age Era posited sorcery witchcraft or brera as an umbrella term manifesting a radical spiritually promiscuous ethos this serves as a cautionary tale for us to steer Direction in our research and discussions it is also a reminded
reminder of the need for ecstatic experiences and for storytelling as enablers of shifts in our ontological and epistemic regimes this is an exciting and challenging time for a develop developing school of thought like this one as we aim to resist unjustified social and biological hierarchies and to aply respond to pressing Global needs for increased social justice and sustainability thank you and I look forward to your comments and [Applause] questions thank you julan and to bring us home we ha
ve Grant Jones um Grant is a contemplative musician and researcher who is currently a PhD candidate in psychology at Harvard University he is also co-founder of the Black Lotus [Applause] Collective how's how's everyone doing good I love to hear it um I'm so blessed and honored to be with you all here today um on this incredible panel um my name is Grant um and as mentioned I'm a Clinical Psychology PhD student at Harvard and today I'm going to tell you all a little bit about my research um natu
ralistic psychedelic use in health in communities of color and for those of you who don't know um naturalistic psychedelic research relates to studying psychedelic use in real world non-clinical context before I jump in I'm going to give an overview of what I'm going to talk to you about today I'm going to start with reviewing background information on psychedelics and health as well as key gaps that I perceive within current clinical psychedelic research I'll then get into the role of naturalis
tic psychedelic research in filling those gaps and then I'll discuss my naturalistic psychedelic research and then I'll discuss future directions for my work so I know that we're at a conference of psychedelic so I'm sure many of you know what these substances are but in jumping in talks I always like to give a definition just in case folks have joined who don't know um what we're talking about so um psychedelics are substances that give rise to non-ordinary States Of Consciousness characterized
by profound changes in mood and perspective and these substances include substances like MDMA um which is an empathogen that's known to give rise a feelings of increased social connectedness and empathy empathy as well as classic psychedelics that are naturally occurring or derived like the substance psilocybin which is the active compound in magic mushrooms which are known to give rise to U mystical type experiences that can have profound um spiritual and personal personal significance uh for
those who use them and there have been a number of groundbreaking clinical trials in the past while that demonstrate the efficacy of psychedelics for a host of different mental health conditions Mitchell Al 2021 which is published in nature medicine demonstrated that MDMA assisted therapy may be an effective treatment for PTSD and Davis at Al 2021 demonstrating that psilocybin assisted therapy may be an effective treatment for major depressive disorder however given the outsize emphasis that I p
erceive that clinical trials have had on shaping the current psychedelic Renaissance I believe that these Studies have left us with some really critical gaps within current clinical psychedelic research the first is that clinical trials really have limited to no ecological validity and ecological validity is another way of saying do the findings generalize the real world so we have these trials that are conducted in really tightly controlled settings but we don't actually know whether psychedeli
cs um how psychedelics are linked to health outcomes when people are using them in real world context and given the barriers um that we've already started to discuss uh most people are using psychedelics outside of the clinic so it's important for us to know how are they actually associated with health um in real world settings a second obvious critical limitation as well is their um really ridiculous levels of um racial and ethnic homogenity limitations to diversity in psychedelic clinical tria
ls um a 2018 foundational review of psychedelic clinical trials U Michael zal 2018 found that samples are often greater than 80% white and really often just uh four uh roughly four% Black Or Hispanic and um more recent psychic clinical trials unfortunately have been even more homogeneous um so taking all this together it's very clear we have very little information about uh the associations between psychedelic use and health and diverse communities um and it's an essential Gap uh I believe to fi
ll this is where I believe naturalistic psychedelic research is essential for the coming psychedelic Renaissance naturalis psychedelic research again just to reground us in terminology is studying psychedelic use in real world's non-clinical contexts typically naturalis Psy psychedelic research is in the form of online surveys or large epidemiological surveys which uh gather information from broad SWS of the population to better understand um Health outcomes and substance use patterns uh Within
the population of interest and given that it's inherently rooted within the real world such studies can address limitations to ecological validity and also that can address the very obvious limitations to diversity and psychedelic research as you can create online surveys directly designed to better understand Health in diverse populations in large epidemiological surveys are inherently representative by Nature because they seek to gather gather and understand information about health um in popu
lations at large so now with all that bad context around what the gaps that I perceive in current psychedelic research are as well as the role of naturalistic psychedelic research in filling those gaps I'll now discuss my research before I jump in I want to give us a definition of a survey um called the national survey on drug use and health or the nisda for short as this is a survey that I've used to conduct most of my psychedelic research while I've been in graduate school so this is a large e
pidemiological survey like the type that I just named and it collects information on substance use in health and a nashy representative samp of the United States and every single year it surveys roughly 50,000 Americans ages 12 years old and and and above so it provides a really amazing chance to um study psychedelic use in in um in a large sample it includes thousands of variables on substance use in health including psychedelics so as I mentioned a chance to study these substances further in d
epth and an important caveat that I always want to name and I name repeatedly is that my research is cross-sectional these data are cross-sectional meaning that the data are gathered at a single point in time and this is in contrast to longitudinal studies that that uh assess health and assess outcomes over multiple periods of time in a given study and because it's cross-sectional nothing that I'm going to discuss is causal and so what that means is I can't say that psychedelics are causing chan
ges in health in the population when I discuss my research we're really just talking about the fact that psychedelic use is associated with various patterns um at a correlational level and it might be due to causality but it might also be to um variables that I might not have controlled for in my research so just always want to give that caveat up front now I want to discuss my first research paper in this area Jones and KN 2022a and the core research question that I had in heading into this ini
tial study was the following how is MDMA and classic psychedelic use associated with psychological distress and suicidality at the population level and I wanted to ask this question because a group of researchers Hendrick ad 2013 um asked um looked at the data from the nisda um a while back and demonstrated that classic psychedelic use was associated with lowered odds of these outcomes and so for me this study was my attempt to not only replicate those prior findings using more up-to-date NDA da
ta but also to assess whether that pattern of associations could also apply to MDMA as well and so as I mentioned I use data from the nisda this time more updated data I'm data ranging from 2008 to 2019 featuring a sample of over 484 th000 people I included adults ages 18 years and above in my research the independent variables in my study so the core uh domains that I'm changing or manipulating was assessing lifetime use of the following substances and these uh variables are binary so whether s
omebody had or had not used these substances in their lives MDMA which is the substance that I named and individual classic psychedelics so psilocybin LSD which is synthesized from the ergot fungus peyote which is the psychoactive Cactus and mesculin which is the primary psychoactive compound within peot the dependent variables or the core outcomes that I was assessing were also binary so they fell into category ories of whether somebody did or did not meet criteria for the following mental heal
th conditions past month psychological distress past year suicidal ideation past year suicidal planning and past year suicide attempts and in my analyses I controlled for various demographic factors such as age and sex and I also controlled for Lifetime use of various different substances like cocaine and pain relievers and for those of you who aren't familiar controlling for a given variable means that you're accounting for these variables when you're looking at the associations between the ind
ependent variable and the dependent variable so it's over and above any of these demographic factors are these associations significant or not is what we're looking to see the analytical approach that I used is something called logistic regression and it's a modeling approach that's used specifically for binary dependent variables like the type in my analyses and the core outcome that's yielded from a logistic regression model is something called an odds ratio and an odds ratio is essentially ju
st a measure of the strength of an association between an independent variable and a binary dependent variable like the type that I have within my studies and so if an odds ratio is lower than one that means that the independent variable is associated with lowered odds of the dependent variable occurring and this is exactly what we're looking to see within my work so are are psychedelics associated with odds ratios lower than one for these dependent variables related to distress and suicidality
and so just to break this down even further so let's say that in my study I got an odds ratio where I looked at MDMA use and if we see that lifetime MDMA use um is associated with um an odds ratio of 0 .90 for pasture suicidal thinking this would mean that individuals who have used MDMA within the population have 0.9 times the odds or 10% lowered odds of having experienced suicidal thinking than somebody who had not used MDMA and again this isn't a causal Association so I'm not saying that MDMA
is causing um reductions in suicidal thinking I'm saying if you look at somebody who has used MDMA in the population versus somebody who has not the person who's used MDMA is going to have roughly 10% lower odds on average of having um uh of suicidal thinking within the past year so again I always just want to parse that correlation versus causation um distinction that exists within my work so what was what was the key finding from from all this from all this um investigation the key finding is
that indeed in alignment with my hypothesis lifetime MDMA and cocy in use were associated with lowered odds of psychological distress and suicidality specifically MDMA was associated with lowered odds of past year suicidal thinking and past year suicidal planning and siloc was associated with lowered odds of past month psychological distress and past year suicidal thinking very importantly all of the other substance use covariates that I included all the other substance use variables they either
didn't share any associations with these outcomes or conferred increased odds of these outcomes so we're really seeing that psilocybin and MDMA stand alone in terms of their pattern of protective associations with these outcomes whereas all other substances either weren't significant or actually were increasing OD of these outcomes after this first paper what I've also sought to do was not only replicate this pattern of results for MDMA and psilocybin in major depressive episodes which is Jones
and off 2022b my second research paper in this area but I I subsequently published a host of different papers demonstrating the same pattern of protective associations for psychedelics so for instance demonstrating that psilocybin is associated with lower odds of crime arrest demonstrating that psilocybin is associated with lower odds of opioid use disorder of nicotine use disorder um MDMA being associated with lowered odds of uh um social impairment for instance so um really seeking to regular
ly uh demonstrate that psychedelics are associated with um with uh these lowered odds so those are my first two steps one demonstrate the association for psychedelics and psychological stress and suicidality second replicate that pattern of results for many different outcomes a core um investigatory direction that I always had in mind in heading into and heading into this work was really to seek to explore how race and ethnicity might impact these associations because with the same example as la
rge as the type that I have it actually represents a really unique opportunity to ask questions really granular questions about the associations between psychedelics and health for different racial and ethnic groups that might be impossible to ask within the current landscape on clinical trials so um this was a a research direction that I always wanted to go in and that I have been fortunate in graduate school to be able to do so Jones andok 2022 e and Jones in 2023a were two of my first researc
h papers uh within this area to explore the intersection of race ethnicity psychedelics and health of the population level and these studies explored whether race and ethnicity impact associations between lifetime use of MDMA and psilocybin as the independent variables and psychological distress suicidality and major depressive episodes as the dependent variables so as you all can tell a very clear uh follow on from my prior work I again use nisda data with Jones and KN 2022 e um exploring psych
ological distress and suicidality as the main outcomes and this used NDA data from 2008 to 2019 Jones 2023a uh explored major depressive episodes as the um core outcomes with lifetime past year and past year severe major depressive episodes representing the core dependent variables and this used nisda data from 2005 to 2019 um featuring a sample of over 596 th000 individuals so the statistical approach that I used Within These studies was largely the same as the one that I described in my prior
work so using logistic regression models to assess the associations between psychedelic us in these Health outcomes but the core difference in this study um these studies that I want to name and discuss is that I was conducting moderation tests this time and uh statistical moderation is another way of asking does the strength of the relationship between two variables such as psilocybin as the independent variable and depression as a dependent variable depend on the value of a third variable such
as race or ethnicity and put even more simply is the relationship between psilocybin and depression going to be different if you're One race versus another race for instance and so um when I conducted these moderation tests the key finding that I found was that indeed the moderation tests were significant so we're seeing probably unsurprising to many folks in this room that race and ethnicity are indeed impacting the associations between psychedelics and health but I didn't stop there I also wa
nt to go a step further to examine what are the specific associations that psychedelics share with health outcomes for different racial and ethnic groups so when I did these analyses I found that MDMA and solosy and were associated with lowered odds of the aforementioned outcomes for white participants which follows exactly in line with my published work and also with the clinical uh literature within this area but when I did this um same exercise for participants of call and this is really the
core um the core finding that I want everyone in this room to take home if you remember nothing else um is that there were actually fewer and weaker associations between psychedelics and health among populations of color which even though again it's not causal and it's just a correlational study this raises extremely important questions around whether you'd see similar moderation effects within the clinic um are we seeing that um Psych and health are sharing different associations with the healt
h outcomes that we're looking to test when we're when we're examining these substances um in specifically treatment based context we don't know because um psychedelic clinical trials aren't representative but it is now imperative it now begs the question of uh what um would the impact of race and ethnicity be on psychedelics and health within um within treatment settings so taking all this together I really quickly want to discuss um some of the future directions that I have that um I want to an
d plan to take based on um my my research so first and foremost um as a basic you know first next step I want to conduct additional cross-sectional studies of psychedelic use and communities of color as I mentioned I've I've published a host of different papers uh uh demonstrating protective associations between psychedelics and various health and behavior outcomes but I've only conducted moderation tests on a small number of those outcomes so I want to have that be the first step that I take um
going forward next I want to conduct the longitudinal studies to really demonstrate um and investigate how psychedelics might be um impacting health and diverse communities over time because that can start to generate causal information about the impact of psychedelics on health and diverse populations I want to conduct qualitative studies to just better understand the lived experiences of individuals of color who are using psychedelics within the current moment again a massive Gap that we real
ly don't have much information on at all within clinical research and finally I want to take all of this information to um really craft safe effective um treatments of psychedelic assistant therapeutic paradigms for diverse communities so so that we can make sure that the current psychedelic Renaissance can actually be of benefit for people from all different backgrounds thank you so much and I'm willing to take it yeah thank [Applause] you thank you to our pent panelist and we're going to open
it up for questions now um this this might be thank you that was fabulous um and this may be something I'm looking for informed speculation but I was thinking with the last study you presented about whether intentionality and set and setting or what I would almost think of is faith in the thing changing for you whether that might play a role in uh in the in the v in the variable that race produces yeah thank you so much for that question and um I totally agree with that line of um inquiry and th
at possibility and many of um the uh discuss in in papers you have discussion sections where you hypothesize why you found what you found and in my discussion sections for those papers I discuss exactly that so the fact that folks of color likely doing uh psychedelics in real world context almost certainly have different mindsets heading into the experience and almost certainly are doing them in different context um than our folks um who are of European descent or who are white um again in massi
ve Gap that we just really don't have much information on at all um but definitely again another one of the directions that I hope um to that this research can tee up so thank you so much for um for tuning in to something that I also my one of the next directions for for my work and we have a question over there in green yeah hi thank you um I'm curious if um any analysis has been done across all the studies there's so many studies going on and even though the perspect uh the percentage of um bi
po is very low I'm curious if any analysis has been done of the bipox across those studies to see any trends that could speak to causes of that that that yeah who who all right do you have a specific person in mind oh anyone I know involved in research in a different way I'm just curious for anyone okay um I'm happy I'm happy to answer from what I know and of course anyone else on the panel can feel free to weigh in after me um there have been some um meta analyses of um looking at treatment eff
ects of psychedelic use for diverse populations I know that um I think last year um there was a uh a um a meta analysis that looked specifically at MDMA assisted therapy trials um to examine ethn racial potential differences in treatment effects I don't think that meta analysis found anything significant so I think that um there were no significant moderation tests for that specific um line of inquiry but that being said they also discussed how um they underpowered because even when you collapse
all the psych clinical trials that have been done there's not many participants of color to conduct um significant moderation tests in the first place so it's kind of been kind of it's it's um it's the research is so constrained because so little has been done that um I I feel like I always come home to the fact that it's really just a wide open field in which we have so much to learn and so little that we actually know um so uh hopefully can examine it in the future and I'll pause here do any
other the panelists have a add-on or we can go to the next question good okay yes um who would right right next yeah hey uh thank you first of all um so one thing that I know is a a core uh core trauma across uh black and Indigenous communities um and when I say indigenous I also include um many Latin Americans um because that is a large part of our identity um but a a core part of the trauma in these communities is intergenerational and epigenetic and I'm I'm curious about what kind of informat
ion you gather about people's histories to try to kind of find a correlation there because maybe some of that difference in efficacy is because of factors that have been encoded in our in our in our in our bodies over many generations over hundreds of years yeah for sure Candace would I'm thinking Candace yvon would you like to start us off with that so this is such a fascinating question and um I mean I can answer from a clinical perspective and just valid validate what you're saying you know t
hat um uh in people's subjective experience we see uh that a lot of intergenerational trauma is processed in Psych therapy um and and I don't know if that is uh increased in bip population that's a great question I think that we need to to to explore um so so I think it's it's you know it it feels true clinically certainly I don't think that I don't know any data about that and certainly not I'm not expert in epigenetics studies but um I think it would be really really interesting to to to look
into this yeah and I'll just say I think from a a clinical uh trial perspective even just from like an outpatient mental health setting you know doing intake I think it's important that right while we're serving clients who may be coming to us for like ketamine treatment or you know even in underground practices that we ask about this you know as part of their history because it's not uncommon right with this participant that we acknowledged that the very beginning of our presentation right her
ancestors came forward and part of that was ALS o trying to connect with um some grief around a an ancestor who had passed away and so I think it's important that we're asking these questions right because it's not just our clients that are showing up in the room but it's also their lineage and their Heritage that's also showing up in the room including our own as uh I would say therapists as well I just want to add one thing to um something that stood up for me and talking to other people from
black and Indigenous communities is um sometimes is as small as do you even know the name of your grandparents um and and so like yeah there's multiple ways to get that from a medical perspective you know they probably could be a lot explored there I'm just kind of curious like yeah what are you Gathering there in general yeah yeah thank you we'll go way to the back and just going back to the the idea of the body um a lot of uh what happens in a psychic experience for people in in the psychic se
ssion might happen at the body level uh that is beyond the verbal of the cognitive and um so I think it's important to attune to that and to support that maybe to prepare people for that as well and so uh whether that is related to what the body um has encoded you know in terms of information and Trauma I think it's a great question as well to hold thank you all for your presentation my question is around training especially for bipac potential practitioners you all have talked Al all kind of ab
out this indigenous nature of these practices so what do you see as the most decolonial route into the Psychedelic field from your very perspectives yeah that's a good question yeah who would like to start there I was going to say decriminalization you know uh legalization and Community Based trainings uh by you know I mean that's my simple answer but yeah I think it's it's dismantling the model together um and I think being able to come from a framework that is anti-oppressive um and you know o
ne of the I would say the Notions that I received from my colleagues is even just having input right because there are a lot of models that are be being created from the top down but they're not including the people on the ground who are holding the space um so that's partially my answer to yeah yeah Community Based models also want to mention the the the film that just came out came out documentary film called um a table of our own that shows very interesting um emergence of training in the bip
er communities uh around psychic practices so really encourage you to look for this okay our next question up oh oh okay we have a few from online yeah there's a number of questions in the online chat so I'm gonna I'll start with one and then I'll ask a followup after that this first question is um is really for any panelist and it it's uh a question regarding ego death that can sometimes be experienced during the psychedelic trip and this question asker uh says that their understanding of ego d
eath is that it's defined as a complete loss of subjective identity and that's leading them to wonder if whether or not um there is some sort of what they say an antagonistic relationship to um identity um as we're talking about here and thinking about broadly and this sort of understanding of ego death and I'm curious if any of the panelists have a different understanding of ego death or how these sort of this loss of identity that maybe is experienced how that intersects with race just a small
question right yeah that one um well I guess this cultural is like the big question um I feel that a way that culture internationally in the 1980s tried to grasp with that idea of the irresolute identities uh was to Embark into the neoliberal model of multiculturalism which created very stct categories in which each identity could find a place within Society um and that sense of order created visibility and representation but at the same time created this kind of like golden cage um identitary
uh structures in which uh we are now seeing the problems of um so the the the kind of like notion of interconnectedness and intersections uh even to your introduction Jeffrey when you mentioned Kim crenchaw um has to do a lot with that you know um I think that a form of Eco death would be exceeding those categories exceeding those identitary limitations and try to see ourselves into that what I mentioned in the in my my presentation this ecstatic idea of interrelation with each other um so yeah
I mean that's like from a historical standpoint I think that could be something interesting to to explore correct thank you um the next set of questions I'm just going to lump a few questions here together which are specifically thinking about um wealth uh as a as a factor in the success of psychedelic uh treatments or therapies and I'm curious if um there's been any research that you are all familiar with about the ways in which sort of privilege or access are changing outcomes or future studie
s that you could imagine looking at something like that I can speak a little bit about just a little bit um something that I want to um explore within future work is definitely the intersection of um social economic status race and the outcomes that I describ so you can conduct three-way mod moderation tests in which you look at how multiple different variables um intersect with one another to um to assess um their impact on uh psychedelics and health so I want to do that I don't have um any inf
ormation about that and I think it's again another wide open um domain of Inc um I think it's really um in this moment of you know um psychedelic hype um which is um has a lot of promise I I think it can sometimes get lost like just how little we know and just how little we know about particularly the intersection of structures and psychedelic use and health um so wide open so great question don't have any information but want to want to explore further all right we'll take a few more questions
from the inperson audience yes yes thank you um in particular Grant and CIS I need a little help with this one there's something that you each mentioned that put together I think needs some attention uh Grant you talk about naturalistic studies that are sort of in the wild rather than a clinical setting uh and Candice yvon both mentioned um trust among persons of color black people indigenous peoples because of things like MK Ultra and they intersect like I grew up in Philadelphia where uh peopl
e in order to get bail if they were arrested for something would sign up for an MK Ultra LSD analog experiment to get their bail money and that caused this great distrust in the area and as kids we saw what were obviously experimental drugs from things like that out on the street in huge quantities they were experimenting and when it's um our institution goes and sues government agencies for deprivational rights under a color law for these kind of activities but how we we saw uh a mob Hitman Sam
my gravano was under witness protection under the FBI's protection had literally cornered The Underground Market in MDA in the United States for a time how do we know when what you think is naturalistic isn't just uh an a sick experiment and what can we do to counter this where we detect it so that's a load of question yes yes um but I think it's important to acknowledge that these experiments have existed so even when I have participants coming into a study I acknowledge that right I acknowledg
e that I am part of a system that has historically oppressed you I acknowledge that I come in with a certain amount of power and privilege and Advantage so let's talk about what does that feel like even from a preparation standpoint to be in this space knowing that historically you have been oppressed and if it's not you it's people in your lineage it's people in your community and so I think that is just you know something that as an anti-oppressive therapist and clinician and I would say safek
eeper of this space is just to acknowledge that and I find that often times people don't want to acknowledge that um which continues to perpetuate the mistrust of the system yeah thank you so much for that beautiful answer that I resonate so deeply with um and one thing that I'll um kind of add from my perspective as a Clinical Psychology researcher is um it's very easy for me to get overwhelmed with um the amount of uh the number of structural barriers that exists towards creating um safe and u
h safe effective uh psychedelic containers for um for diverse populations and so for me I also uh I try to take my uh my role within this work one step at a time um I try to do what I can um little by little and be very honest about the limitations of what I can and can't conclude about what I'm doing um and I feel like in that for me that's um just a form of honesty I also think something an undercurrent about what um has existed within um psychedelic resarch as it's been conducted um historica
lly is that it wasn't honest um it was was um it was extractive um but saying that it was providing benefit um it was um harmful saying that it was potentially going to um provide provide uh Pro provide uh health benefit um so for me I I try my best to be in a personal practice of uh of being clear about what I can and can't say from my work about where it does and doesn't reach and what I and I try to keep everything just very small um because what I'm doing is very small and what I've done is
very small and very limited um within a sea of what there is to know um but for me I I think the what I trust in is the more that I do this incremental work um being clear about what I can and can't do I can start to slowly um we can get into this practice of dissolution of dissolving um these very calcified ways of um of understanding relating to psychedelics that have um been rooted in paradigms that are meant to to harm others and to exclude others and slowly we can start to um gently but Pow
er powerfully I think um disrupt uh systems that aren't meant to serve everybody so that's my personal um practice that I'm in we'll see how it goes and we are at time we have more questions that unfortunately have time for so please take those questions we're going to have lunch soon and be able to discuss them with the community we have gathered here today is a way to wrap up and show appreciation one question left that I wanted to ask um so in like one or two sentences what is it that you um
either would want people to take away from this like one piece of knowledge or a question for them to be wrestling with or that we're wrestling with um or a call to act to action what are the first steps to starting the journey to becoming a co- disruptor in this space so from each one of you we'll start with yvon and go down the table I just want to thank you for being here and thank you questioning and just I think for me what's important is to continue to ourselves in that space I think I wou
ld just say do your work to dismantle white body Supremacy it lives in all of us um and I think someone put a great analogy out there and it just said white body Supremacy is not the shark in the water but it's the water that engulfs the shark Soh um I would say read afro Caribbean Theory and cultural theorists they have a really beautiful important key to understand this conversation and yeah very preent um investigations and research that have been conducted since the 1980s so yeah that would
be my advice yeah um is this supposed to be advice that we're giving or is it just a one to sentence reflection whatever yeah like something takeway yeah action you you define it all right cool so yeah I two sentences came to mind I think um one is yeah there's so much to explore there's so much more to know um and I U invite folks to come on this come on the journey to supporting this work and then also just a quick call to to resourcing this work as well something that we just that kind of tou
ched on but um there needs to be a lot more resources devoted to enabling psychedelic um studies and psychedelic treatments for diverse groups period I'm gonna pass it to Jeff for lunch for lunch details but before then please join me in thanking our panelist snaps claps call out thank you sponsor center for the study of world religions copyright 2024 the president and fellows of Harvard College
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