In June, the world’s largest psychedelics conference returned to Denver. Eight thousand participants gathered to hear 500 presenters over the course of a week.
Psychedelic Science, organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), brought together people from 50 countries. They discussed such diverse topics as decriminalization initiatives, therapeutic and commercial regulation, electronic music raves, artificial intelligence, racial and social justice, and the genocide in Gaza.
Psychedelic movements are at a crossroads, testing different and often competing strategies and ideas. The research field was dealt a major blow in 2024 when the United States Food and Drug Administration rejected an application for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, one of the marquee MAPS initiatives of the last 20 years. MAPS itself has undergone major changes since then, cutting one-third of its staff. Its for-profit pharmaceutical arm Lykos, meanwhile, cut about three-quarters of its staff.
Denver, which also hosted the biennial conference in 2023, is a fitting venue. For years it’s been at the forefront of psychedelics liberation, and possession of naturally-occurring substances is largely decriminalized there. As the conference kicked off, Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D) announced a blanket pardon for anyone with a state-level conviction for psilocybin possession. He urged local governments across the state to follow suit.
“Healing, liberation and decolonization—they’re completely connected,” said Tegan Carr of Medicine Objective, which helped organize a “Chill & Liberation Lounge” for Black/Indigenous/People of Color (BIPOC). “We do education for health professionals,” she said of her organization, “and a lot of nature-based work; food and medicine sovereignty, teaching people how to grow and forage food, process, prepare and preserve it. When it comes to medicine, how to use it and treat medical conditions and chronic illness.”
“We need liberation in order to heal, we need healing to experience liberation,” Carr said. “For decolonization, that’s a matter of decolonizing ourselves and dismantling the colonial structures that maintain systems of oppression.”
Organizers of the BIPOC Chill & Liberation Lounge. Photograph courtesy of the Medicine Objective.
I also met with Dr. Glauber Assis, cofounder of the Psychedelic Parenthood Community. Assis runs a plant medicine community center, Jornadas de Kura, in Minas Gerais, Brazil, where guests do more than just consume substances like rapé, ayahuasca, sananga and kambo—they help plant, harvest and prepare them.
“Psychedelics without the culture is a ticket to nowhere,” Assis said. “[People think] psychedelics will save the world—they will not … psychedelics can help us only when they are attached to a sustainable cosmology.”
Daiara Tukano at Psychedelic Science 2025. Photo courtesy of MAPS.
Daiara Tukano, an Indigenous Brazilian artist and activist, and founder of the Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference, would expand on that theme in a speech at the end of the conference. “The time has come to find some space, to talk to the scientists, religions, institutions and explain that we also have science,” she said, describing the need for cooperation between Indigenous peoples and research organizations.
“A spirit can’t be fabricated in a laboratory,” she continued. You help us understand what is going on outside our territories, but we need you to understand what is happening inside—the effect, impact and responsibility we all share.”
Widespread discussions of social and racial justice often turned to how the psychedelic movement itself has sometimes stood in the way.
“I assume you all are trying to grow the fuck up,” neuroscientist and drug policy reform advocate Dr. Carl Hart told an audience that had packed the room to hear him speak. “I simply mean that you are trying to take responsibility for your shit … we have to allow people room to make mistakes. But we also have to encourage people to take responsibility.”
For advocates like those at the conference, that responsibility includes confronting “psychedelic exceptionalism,” Hart urged. Why, he asked the crowd, should drugs like methamphetamine or PCP be more stigmatized than chemically similar drugs like MDMA or ketamine? Why does the psychedelics liberation movement endorse psilocybin or ayahuasca as “natural” medicines, while ignoring opium or coca—which also have rich histories of medicinal and spiritual use?
Psychedelic exceptionalism, Hart warned, is killing us. He highlighted the case of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, a Black boy fatally shot by Chicago police who claimed he was dangerous due to “superhuman” strength from PCP intoxication.
Hart’s suggestion for those looking to help dismantle psychedelic exceptionalism is straightforward. “Get out of the closet about your drug use,” he said. “There’s so many Americans who have used cocaine at a party [and] no one died, you didn’t become addicted. Tell those stories … you see that people are being wrongly persecuted for what they put in their bodies. To stand on the sidelines and do nothing, I think that’s immoral.”
“I’m privileged to have another passport, [but] another Lebanese person would not have made it here.”
Despite a sometimes-festive mood—characterized by attendees in dragon costumes, their faces painted with glitter—there were palpable tensions behind the conference. Days before it began, Israel and Iran had traded military strikes. And President Donald Trump ordered troops to the streets of Los Angeles in the wake of pro-immigrant protests. Psychedelics can be powerful tools for healing trauma. But what if any power do they have to heal collective trauma, not just that of individuals with the privilege of access?
“This was a chance to have a voice in a space where we’ve usually been sidelined,” said Nat Rustom, a member of the Arab Psychedelic Society who lives in Lebanon. “People would come up to our booth and say, ‘I didn’t know this group existed, I’ve never met another Arab in this space.’ They feel a sense of belonging, like their heart is full. We want our voices to be heard and to speak for our community.”
The conference drew attendees from Palestine, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Syria. But Rustom explained that many of the people from those countries were only able to make the trip because they had a second passport.
“I’m privileged to have another passport,” she said of the French one she holds. “Another Lebanese person would not have made it here; the visas are very difficult to get. Some of our team members were searched at the airport and asked excessive questions.”
Organizations such as MAPS have investigated the use of psychedelic treatments in regions impacted by military conflict, including Israel (where the MAPS affiliate also hosted a deeply controversial conference), and more recently Ukraine. In April, MAPS representatives including founder and President Rick Doblin traveled to western Ukraine—far from active conflict—to train local therapists. But other than ketamine, all psychedelics in Ukraine are banned, even for research.
“Male therapists cannot leave the country to get trained,” said Galyna Pidpruzhnykova, a Ukrainian independent psychedelic therapy consultant who advocates for rescheduling. “All people need support to be reintegrated into regular life. Even if there are fire raids, it’s their reality now. If [their depression is] treatment-resistant, and no other therapies are helping them, it’s essential to develop psychedelic therapy. We can’t wait [until] the war is over, and tell people suffering now to wait until it all resolves.”
“I had to switch from talking about racial and social justice to talking about class-consciousness and fighting for the poor.”
When I met with Jason Ortiz at Psychedelic Science 2023, he was leading Students for Sensible Drug Policy, proposing a nationwide coalition of advocates organizing for drug decriminalization, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights and other issues related to bodily autonomy and personal freedom. He’s now director of strategic initiatives at the Last Prisoner Project, which pursues decarceration for people impacted by drug laws, and is working directly with members of Congress like Rep. David Joyce (R-OH) and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT).
“We’re talking more about classism, and the poor who have been struggling to work that are in direct competition with oligarchs and rich folks who want to exploit our labor,” Ortiz said of his more recent work. “That is a more broad-based message that includes tons of Republicans. You can see it throughout the base even amongst MAGA folks, they’re pretty anti-oligarch and anti-elite. I had to switch from talking about racial and social justice to talking about class-consciousness and fighting for the poor.”
The dynamics in working with the GOP are different, he said; far fewer elected officials are willing to back something like marijuana or psychedelics legalization outright. Yet politicians of all stripes are aware that these issues can generate a lot of support, so Ortiz is focused on creating a climate that encourages them to take public stances against criminalization.
“[Republicans] get more blowback from within their party, whereas with Democrats, they were more worried about Republicans attacking them on it,” Ortiz said. “It’s actually easier to talk to Republicans; they get to the point where Democrats say, We need 10,000 things to be in place before we can take a step forward.”
“Moving into the next midterms, it’s going to be very contentious.”
The conference closed out on an emotional note. Doblin received a standing ovation, speaking about the hope he felt despite the setbacks of recent years, and knowing that achieving the collective vision of conference attendees will “take our lifetimes and beyond.”
Among the final speakers was Rhana Hashemi, founder of Know Drugs, a pioneering harm reduction-based drug education program in the US. She described the optimism she felt at seeing so many different people come together at the conference—and her dread as her father at that moment was in Tehran without internet access, amid the outbreak of violence between Israel and Iran.
“Our dedication to healing cannot stop at the psyche, it must also reach the conditions that keep breaking it,” she said. “Last night I danced with my Arab brothers and sisters, and tonight I will break bread with my brothers and sisters in the Jewish community at Shabbat. Only here could those be true. After all, working for our shared humanity reveals it … let us remember, when systems crumble, we still have each other.”
Top photograph by Alexander Lekhtman