[suspenseful music plays]
[crickets chirping]
[man 1] The relationship that we have with the medicine in the peyote,
it's like a relationship that we have with creation.
[man 2] This Mother Earth right here,
what I'm sitting on right here, it's you.
[man 3] These plants here, the air...
[man 2] The air you breathe, that's you.
The sun, the clouds...
[hawk calling]
[man 3] Fire.
[man 2] The fire, that's you.
[man 3 speaks in foreign language] Wind.
[speaks in foreign language] Space.
[thunder rumbles]
Everything's about the energy. The movement of things.
[speaks in foreign language] Things that move like this.
[melodic music playing]
Through the spiritual helpers, through the medicine.
That's where the energy comes from.
[man 2] When you ingest that medicine,
you're gonna feel the spirit of this Mother Earth.
The air, the water, and the light.
You reconnect.
Connecting to a higher power.
[man 3 speaks in foreign language] Coming from the heart,
the words that you say, everything that goes into that medicine,
it's gonna hear you.
[man 1] And the spirit
of the Creator himself is there.
[men chanting in foreign language]
[drums beating]
[uplifting synth music playing]
[birds chirping]
[buzzing]
[Michael] I thought I was done writing about psychedelics
after How To Change Your Mind.
But there were some loose ends.
Things I'd picked up on in the course of writing it
that I wanted to follow up on,
and one was this substance, uh...
that I think of as the orphan psychedelic.
One that I'd read a lot about in the history,
but nobody talked about in the present, uh, and that was mescaline.
[melodic synth music plays]
Mescaline is a chemical compound, a phenethylamine,
which is like MDMA,
that is produced in two classes of cactus that we know about.
One is the peyote cactus.
It grows in a pretty narrow band
around both sides of the Rio Grande River in Mexico and the United States.
[man] Look at that family.
[Michael] This area's called Peyote Gardens.
It's the only place in the world where it grows.
And then you have San Pedro cactus,
which is native to the Andes, called Huachuma.
It has mescaline in it, not a tremendous amount,
it's a very mild psychedelic.
At a certain point,
it dawned on me this thing was hiding in plain sight.
It was growing all over Berkeley.
In garden after garden right on the street.
It's legal to grow it.
It's one of the weird wrinkles of the drug law.
It's illegal to grow peyote.
It's illegal to grow opium poppies.
It's illegal under federal law to grow cannabis.
But somehow this plant, which is the source of a psychedelic,
is perfectly legal to grow.
[melodic string music plays]
So that is Huachuma.
Growing this cactus, possessing this cactus is perfectly legal.
When do you cross that line
into manufacturing a scheduled substance?
So the moment that it's ever kind of used,
prepared, and/or ingested
is when it becomes illegal.
[Michael] As I began to research mescaline,
I turned to my friend Erika Gagnon
for her knowledge in the use of cactus in Indigenous ceremonies.
Specifically Huachuma.
So I learned it by another name, San Pedro.
- Yeah. It's the same plant. - [Michael] Yeah.
Huachuma is its original name from the south in Quechua.
Five hundred years ago, when the colonists came
and they were trying to destroy as much as possible of the original culture,
and in colonialism when you want to get rid of a whole population,
aside from massacring people and killing everyone,
you'll want to also go after, um,
the medicine keepers.
And so a lot of the traditions had to go underground, had to be hidden.
They could see that this was a sacred cactus...
And they knew they used it in ceremony and it had powerful effects on the mind.
[Erika] Effects on the mind. And so in order to save it,
they actually decided to give it another name that the...
[Michael] A Christian name.
Exactly. So San Pedro, as you know, is Saint Peter.
- [Michael] Peter. - [Erika] Who holds the keys...
- [Michael] To the... - [Erika and Michael] Gates of Heaven.
[somber music playing]
[Michael] When the Conquistadors get to the Americas in 1492,
they were of course Catholics.
And they find a people who practiced very different religions
than they were familiar with.
They found natives who were using Huachuma or San Pedro
and peyote as part of their religious worship.
People reported once they ingested these cacti,
they saw God.
They visited God.
It made it a very powerful sacrament and therefore, a very threatening one.
You render the priesthood superfluous
if everybody can talk to God on their own.
The Spanish tried to suppress its use and indeed wipe it out.
The drug war, which I sometimes like to call the war on certain plants,
uh, really begins, um, back then,
in 1620, when the Mexican Inquisition
declared peyote a heretical perversity,
opposed to the purity and integrity of our Holy Catholic faith.
There was a list of questions
you would use to interrogate a Native and, you know, one was,
"Do you consume the evil peyote?"
The "Diabolical Root" they called it.
[laughter]
Shoot you all the way back there. Slingshot.
[grunts]
Let go, see what happens.
[Michael] These efforts to wipe out the Indigenous use of peyote failed.
And to this day,
Native Americans have carved out a special use for the sacred cactus.
[man 3] We're in this, um... southern region of Texas here.
This is our home. Second home here.
You got that? Come on.
[muttering, grunting]
[man 3] We are unified as Indigenous people,
in prayer for the future of conservation,
the future of reconnecting our children's children
to the medicine and to the land.
The Peyote Gardens.
[melodic music playing]
And the significance of it is the ancestral pilgrimage
that occurred here a time ago.
[man 4] Our ancient relatives knew of their lands.
The medicines, the plants,
the animals that grew on these naturally.
[chanting]
[Julius] Our celebrations of song and dancer
have a unique way of expressing
the stories of ancients.
We make motions to the Great Spirit.
[drums beating]
[man 1] And the ceremony is all about healing
a sick person with this holy medicine.
From the beginning, this Native American Church,
as it is known today, was a healing ceremony.
I've heard a lot of my elders talk about
how this medicine started with a woman.
[crickets chirping]
[uplifting synth music plays]
[distant howling]
[Arlen] As the story goes, it was a woman
that found this medicine, this peyote.
[Julius] A young lady...
[Sandor] A chief's daughter.
[Julius] She was on a journey.
[Sandor] Told to ride the horse, go out, to get away.
There was white people coming.
[neighing]
She rode the horse, the horse gave out and she continued to walk
till she couldn't walk anymore.
[Julius] She became hungry.
In need of water. She had fainted, collapsed.
Some people would call it a dream or a vision.
[Sandor] The medicine found her, talked to her.
[Julius] The message told her to consume this medicine.
And as she did, she rejuvenated.
[Sandra] She developed that spiritual connection
with that medicine.
[Julius] She was able to continue on her journey.
[Sandor] And the medicine told her to take her back to her people.
[Sandra] Some tribes, they call the medicine Mother Peyot.
[Julius] She represents Mother Earth. The life-giver.
[men chanting]
[drums beating]
[reporter] History reveals no more tragic figure
than the American Indian.
He has been completely stripped of his freedom and dignity,
restricted to reservations.
He has little left to console him
but the memories and traditions of his forefathers.
[Michael] The creation of the Native American Church
dates to the 1880s,
and this was a moment of incredible trauma for Native Americans.
[men chanting]
It was official federal policy to essentially destroy Indian culture.
People who had spent their lives traveling with the buffalo,
living the life of hunter-gatherers, was forced onto reservations.
[Arlen] I think it's pretty well-documented,
what the Native people of this land's been through.
Terrible.
[chanting, drums beating]
[man 2] The peace treaty of 1868,
our people didn't ask for it.
It was the federal government that mandated,
says that "Five to six years old,
your children are going to have to be put in school,"
somewhere in Pennsylvania,
Kansas City, Florida.
Where they don't even come from.
Christianized them.
[somber synth music playing]
[woman 1] Before we could really understand
what our life was about,
then we're taken away from our parents
and they started institutionalizing us.
That's what I'm dealing with.
You know, there was a lot of brainwashing that happened
and it's gonna, you know, take a lot of undoing.
[Julius] I once heard, "Kill the Indian, save the man."
Indian children were taken from their homes, their hair was cut.
They were placed in these boarding schools.
Their language was taken away.
These children were physically,
emotionally, spiritually abused.
[Michael] Just recently,
the unmarked graves of 751 Native American children
were discovered on the grounds of a former boarding school
in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan.
Sending shock waves through the indigenous communities of North America.
Hard thing to even talk about.
There's a spirit that the government suppression wanted out of us, you know?
And this medicine here starts to help heal.
[Arlen] It's part of our identity of who we are
and how we survived.
Maybe without this medicine, we would've been wiped out.
We have to remember that the right of Native Americans to use peyote
has not been handed to them.
They've had to fight for it.
Since the founding of the Native American Church,
there were people who regarded the Indian use of peyote
with fear and suspicion,
and it got caught up in prohibition.
And then later, it got swept up in the drug war.
Peyote is Schedule I, which means no recognized medical use.
[cryptic melodic music plays]
There was a famous case called Employment Division v. Smith.
A Native American named Alfred Leo Smith,
who worked for the employment division of the state of Oregon,
was told by his superiors
to stop attending Native American Church ceremonies.
They called me in the office Monday and, uh, asked me if I had attended
the Native American Church ceremony and I says, "I did."
And, uh, they asked me if I ingested that mind-altering drug peyote
and I says, "No," I says, "but I did, uh...
take the sacrament, the sacred sacrament," I says.
[sighs]
And he says, "You leave us no alternative, but we have to terminate you."
[Michael] So he took the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
In a 1990 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia,
the Supreme Court ruled
that the free exercise of religion in the First Amendment
must give way to needs of law enforcement to enforce the drug laws
and that religious pluralism in America was a luxury we could no longer afford.
An individual's religious beliefs
do not exclude him from compliance with an otherwise valid law
prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate.
So with that decision,
Native American Church had lost its right to use peyote.
[Scalia] We reject respondent's argument that government...
Why did the Europeans come here in the first place?
It was for freedom of religion.
[Michael] It's quite astonishing, you know, the country was founded
on religious freedom, that's why we're here.
Um, and the idea that the people from whom we took the country
in order to exercise our religious freedom were being denied theirs...
How outrageous.
This galvanized the church
and began a campaign led by a Native American named Reuben Snake.
Here, within this country, the Indigenous people of this land
continue to suffer these gross injustices
and deprivation of our religious freedom.
[Michael] Aided by the civil liberties establishment in America
and the heads of almost every other religion
who saw the danger in this decision,
the threat to the free exercise of religion in the First Amendment,
they began a campaign that resulted in a new law passed in 1994
and signed by President Clinton, and that was a tremendous victory.
The use of peyote as a sacrament
was allowed and was protected by the First Amendment.
[man chanting, drumming]
[Michael] Since the mid-1990s,
the Native American Church and the peyote ceremony
have grown in popularity
as Native Americans work to heal themselves,
and part of this means keeping the ceremony closed to outsiders.
So filming of the ceremony is strictly off-limits.
[melodic synth music plays]
[Sandor] All ceremonies, uh, you know, recording devices are taboo.
That's spiritual aural space, you know?
It's... It's an invasion of that, you know?
But when you... When you take that out, then you can breathe.
Breathe better, you know?
[breathing deeply]
What is sacred sometimes is a secret.
[drumming]
This creator that we refer to is imminent
in its own creation
and in us, and we...
we live according to its laws.
[melodic string music plays]
[Sandra] When we have these ceremonial gatherings,
we collectively lift our prayers up for healing, for sickness.
[Sandor] The peyote ceremony,
to help us with our emotional state of being.
Our trauma, our spirit.
[indistinct conversation]
- Let this land hear us once again. - [women laughing]
Remembering our predecessors,
without their prayer and guidance we wouldn't be here.
[crickets chirping]
Here, we're building this, you know?
We're holding each other up.
Now, how do we hold it? This medicine holds us.
We have to open up, you know, to it.
You have to consume it.
[birds chirping]
[indistinct conversation]
[Michael] Peyote has proved to be a powerful tool in the collective healing
of the injustices done to Native Americans,
but it is also used to heal individuals.
I traveled to South Dakota to meet with a Native American Church member
who used the peyote ceremony to cure an addiction.
It's an honor to be here and I appreciate your welcoming me into this sacred space.
I'm interested in the power of peyote to heal both individuals and a culture.
I was suffering from, uh,
depression, anxiety.
The days of, uh,
participating in drug and alcohol use,
were becoming overwhelming.
[drumming]
As a young Lakota boy growing up,
I was taught our values,
which are generosity, respect,
wisdom, and courage.
[chanting, drumming]
[chanting, drumming continues]
The things I do is powwow.
I use peyote to get closer to God. It's not a drug.
We don't use it as a drug.
[drumming, chanting]
I'm just a humble kid walking below God.
Try to stay out of trouble 'cause I think it'll further me in life
than getting into drugs, alcohol.
[somber melodic music plays]
In my early twenties, I had started a family.
Two children.
There was some difficulties.
I left as requested by their mother.
I was devastated
and I turned to another way of life.
I seen myself wasting away.
Fifteen years of methamphetamine.
It became a daily use.
The darkness, intensity,
was getting a lot stronger,
and I had a type of spiritual awakening.
Saying to myself,
"You're going to be incarcerated."
"Or you're going to be six foot under."
[upbeat synth music playing]
[birds chirping]
I reached out to my uncle Sandor Iron Rope,
whom I grew up with throughout my life,
and telling him, "Uncle,
I am struggling. I want to overcome this."
"I would like a ceremony."
He said, "Nephew,
don't worry, we got you."
[Sandor] We put up the teepee, right where we're sitting.
I prayed out here, and I talked to all these young men.
[Julius] Relatives waiting for me,
to help me.
[Sandor] Putting your mind towards a certain purpose, that's the intent.
[Julius] They activated the spirit.
And it was in full movement.
[music builds]
[male voices chanting indistinctly]
[Julius] We enter the lodge
before the sun goes down.
[chanting continues]
There's essence of herbs
that are burnt on the charcoals
and it started bringing my senses.
As they started to administer the medicine with the prayers and the energy,
I could feel this rejuvenation.
[flames crackling]
I can feel the fire start breathing with Mother Earth.
[chanting continues]
[bells chiming]
My brain seemed to start having, uh...
movement,
to allow the medicine to take an in-depth doctoring
from heart, mind, body, spirit.
I knew this was my one chance.
I cried for the Great Spirit
to give me my life back.
I didn't want to be an addict.
[somber synth music plays]
There was hands massaging into my brain.
[bird calling]
I started making connections with ancient relatives
and I found my spirit in the ceremony.
[thunder rumbling]
At the top of the morning,
when the ceremony'd come to conclusion,
I recall a courage
to seek this other route
of having goodness and being a family man,
and it felt so strong and full of energy
that today I hold onto it dearly.
[upbeat synth music playing]
It's been almost four years substance-free
with a clear mind,
full-heartedly understanding
what power the medicine gives.
My children are coming home.
I'm able to ask my daughter, "Would you like a dress?"
The youngest, she replies,
"I want a unicorn."
We are able to move in harmony together,
with love, compassion.
My name is Julius Not Afraid.
I utilized the name in a wrong way for a minute.
But now I can look back and say,
"I'm not afraid to change my life."
This medicine, it really helped me stand on my own two feet.
[man 5] We're all trying to strive for the same thing.
We're all trying to strive to be better than we were yesterday.
You know, we're all striving to have that good health and happiness.
We're all striving for something greater than us.
[crickets chirping]
[fire crackling]
[Aldous Huxley] The vision of this world
is a vision of blessed beholders.
Not a mere metaphysical construction,
but it is a visible world,
a world which can be seen with the inner eye.
The most beautiful thing in this world is fire,
which is a transference from something
which is highly esteemed
in the inner world, into the outer world.
[psychedelic music plays]
Good evening, I'm Mike Wallace.
Tonight's guest Aldous Huxley is a man of letters
as disturbing as he is distinguished.
Born in England, now resident of California,
Mr. Huxley has written some of the most electric novels
in social criticism of this century.
You've even written about the use of drugs.
Well, now this is a very interesting subject.
I mean, I think it's quite on the cards that we may have drugs
which will profoundly change our mental states
without doing us any harm.
I mean, this is the... the pharmacological revolution
which has taken place, that we have now
powerful mind-changing drugs.
[crickets chirping]
Some of these substances are related to substances existing in nature.
For example,
mescaline is the active principle
now synthesized in the Indian peyote.
[cryptic synth music plays]
[Michael] So mescaline's a molecule that's produced by these plants.
But when you have mescaline by itself, it's a synthetic.
It's been made in a laboratory.
It played a central role in the early part of psychedelic history.
It was 1897, a man named Arthur Hefter
is the first to extract mescaline from peyote.
There was a period in the 1920s where it was being used,
but it really is Huxley who puts it on the map
with Doors of Perception.
Huxley's a very interesting character. He was a famous writer
by the time he wrote Doors of Perception,
he had written Brave New World.
Huxley reads about psychedelics in the early '50s,
and reaches out to Humphry Osmond.
He's an Englishman doing research on mescaline,
in the province of Saskatchewan in Canada,
looking at the healing properties.
Huxley writes him and says, "I'd really like to try this mescaline."
Humphry Osmond flies to Los Angeles,
brings his mescaline sulfate and was very nervous about it.
I didn't really want to, uh...
end my career as a man who'd
driven all of us mad.
It wouldn't have been a good start.
[Michael] And Huxley, one day in 1953, had this mystical experience
on a couple hundred milligrams of mescaline sulfate,
which he beautifully described in Doors of Perception.
[cryptic melodic music plays]
"I took my pill at eleven 'o clock.
An hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study,
looking intently at a small glass vase.
[thunder rumbles]
I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light,
I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing.
[pulsing tones]
Like the flowers, the books with which my study walls were lined, glowed.
Red books, like rubies, emerald books, books bound in white jade,
books of agate, of aquamarine, of yellow topaz
seemed to be on the point of leaving the shelves
to thrust themselves more insistently on my attention.
From the books, my attention turned to the furniture.
A small typing table stood in the center of the room.
When I looked down, by chance,
and went on passionately staring by choice at my own crossed legs,
those folds in the trousers,
what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity.
And the texture of the gray flannel, how rich,
how deeply mysteriously sumptuous."
[waves crashing]
Huxley gets at what's unique about mescaline.
It's less visionary than LSD.
Hallucination is not a big part of the experience.
It's very much about the body and feelings.
It's not about escaping reality in any way,
it's about plunging deeper into reality.
I think it would be extremely good for almost anybody with fixed ideas
and with... with a great certainty about what's what
to take this thing and to realize
that the world he has constructed is by no means the only world,
that there are these extraordinary other types of universe
which we may inhabit and we should be very grateful for inhabiting, I think.
[rock music plays]
[Michael] Huxley had this experience, published the book a little bit later,
and this is a seminal moment in the history of psychedelics.
It led to an interest in psychedelics on the part of the Beat Generation,
and then later, the hippies that followed the Beat Generation.
Huxley influences Timothy Leary.
[Leary] The effect is like looking through a microscope.
Suddenly, uh, when you look through a microscope,
you discover there's an invisible world around you
that you hadn't known about before you did it.
The same is true with a psychedelic,
you're aware of processes that are going on inside your own brain
and that you weren't aware of before.
[Michael] Huxley ended up being very worried about Timothy Leary.
He knew Timothy Leary.
Six words.
[Michael] He tried to get Leary to cool it.
Turn on, tune in, drop out.
[man 6] Those are beautiful sized buttons. Fat ones. Thick.
[man 7] I had tied up with some Navajo Indians, at an American...
Native American church ceremony.
They know how to use that medicine. So good.
[somber melodic music playing]
[Michael] There's always been a split in the psychedelic community
between a populist and an elitist approach.
And so, you have Leary who's like,
"Give it to as many people as possible and you'd change the culture."
And then you had these elitists, and Huxley is one of them,
who thought that was too dangerous, this is just such powerful news,
if you give it to everybody, who knows what could happen.
His theory was, let's give it to the best and brightest.
And the thinking there was, give it to the influencers
and the new consciousness will filter down to the society.
This battle still goes on today.
One of the most interesting political movements
to pop up in this country in recent years,
is the Decriminalize Nature movement,
making various plant medicines, including ayahuasca, psilocybin,
peyote, Huachuma decriminalized.
Decriminalize is not the same as legalize.
It basically means that you are ordering the law enforcement authorities
to make this their lowest priority
as long as it was just being done for personal use, no commerce involved.
The group that has pioneered the decriminalization of psychedelics
is based in Oakland.
[man 8] October 20th, 2018, I had this really tremendous mushroom journey.
I went into that journey
because I was trying to heal over the passing of my mother,
and understand my own trauma
that made it so difficult for me to keep my relationships in the world,
but also to ask the question, "Where did she go?"
a question that haunted me my entire life about what happens when people die.
I went straight into the infinite,
to questions that you've been asking your whole life
that you forgot you were even asking,
and that are deep meaningful questions
that have impact on your sense of self.
And it was so tremendously beautiful and amazing
understanding it's all an interplay between the darkness,
the fear of dying, and the thrill of life.
In finding the thrill of life, we are creating beauty.
So that's where I committed,
that my life would be about the beauty of life,
and just walking it instead of talking it.
[insects chirping]
[woman 2] If you can just have access to some of these plant medicines,
you can take control of yourself again
and it's really amazing how quickly things can change in your life.
[melodic guitar music plays]
I experienced postpartum depression with my first child.
People don't tell you, "You're gonna have this baby and,
like you might not instantly love it," you know? [laughs]
"And that's okay."
[cheering]
Having one kid is hard.
Having two, your life gets flipped upside down.
[laughter]
I was thrust into this hole, and it just got worse and worse.
[male voice] For two years, she was having panic attacks.
Watching your wife, who is your rock,
not being able to help herself,
let alone your family or your children,
that... that's a tough thing to watch.
[Melissa] I felt that, well, the only solution to this problem
is just to remove me from that equation.
Death was the way out.
At that point, I was so desperate that I was willing to try anything.
I had heard about micro-dosing psilocybin.
I hadn't even tried a psychedelic before,
but it was like, "Let's just see if this will work.
If it doesn't work, then I'll stop."
[melodic synth music plays]
The changes in me were so drastic and so quick,
it was like two, three days.
It was just almost unbelievable.
I'm like carrying myself differently.
I'm talking different... I'm actually talking and engaging with people,
I'm playing with my children, which I wasn't doing.
[Carlos] These plants and mushrooms enable us
to really reboot our consciousness
in a way that frees us from those stories we tell ourselves
that are based on deep trauma.
After coming out of the state of being in awe,
I was, um, a little pissed off
that they were illegal to begin with.
[Melissa] We didn't have anybody
that we knew that just had a steady supply of mushrooms
they could provide us.
So we figured out how to grow them in our house.
Buying the spores is completely legal.
As soon as you start cultivating them, that's when it gets a little iffy.
The wrong person finding out about this could be detrimental to my life.
I'm a DC government employee. Am I going to lose my job?
What if my daughter goes to school and says, "My mommy eats mushrooms,"
would my children get taken away from me?
[Carlos] I found a psychedelic community in the Bay Area
and, uh, began to ask,
"What are we doing here? How are we making these accessible to people?"
The social justice, the consciousness justice,
the connection to nature,
love, compassion, all that has to get back out into the world,
especially right now.
As part of that conversation,
we all gathered and talked about what each one of us was doing.
And in that process, I told people that I had worked in government
and if we wanted to pass a resolution of some kind, I'd be happy to do that.
So we all agreed we'd do a decriminalization of all plants
because we wanted to make it about nature and our relationship to nature
as opposed to one compound, one plant,
but make it about our relationship to the planet and nature.
And that's where the "Decrim Nature" came from.
"Decriminalize nature."
How did nature ever get to be criminalized?
How did a plant species become a crime?
So in effect, they're naturalizing drugs, they don't use the word "drug" ever.
It was really a reframing of what a drug is.
[indistinct conversation]
Item number eight is a resolution
supporting entheogenic plant practices
and declaring that the investigation and arrest of individuals involved
with the adult use of entheogenic plants on the federal Schedule I list
be amongst the lowest priority for the city of Oakland.
What you're seeing here tonight is really a pent-up appetite
for having this issue heard.
And we have crafted a framework for education.
This is something that we intend to roll out over the next, one, two years
for it to become a framework for urban communities.
We Advocate Oaklanders to just grow
whatever they want in their own gardens
without fear of arrest, with no middleman, no doctor's prescription,
with no need for a dispensary.
All in favor say "aye."
[council members] Aye.
[council woman] Any opposed say "no."
Any abstentions?
That motion passes unanimously. Six ayes.
[crowd cheering]
[Michael] This passed without a problem. Shocked everybody.
Everybody say, "Decrim Nature"!
[crowd] Decrim Nature!
[Michael] After the success of Decrim Nature in Oakland,
it spread around the country.
- [car horn honking] - [Melissa] Louder. Yes on 81!
Yes on 81!
[Melissa] Based out of Carlos Plazolas's Oakland model
of what Decrim Nature looks like,
this is a movement that has grown to over 100 cities across the country.
[upbeat music playing]
Decriminalize Nature DC campaign
submitted over 36,000 signatures
to DC Board of Elections
to get the Entheogenic Plant and Fungus Policy Act of 2020
on the November presidential ballot.
[indistinct chatter, laughter]
We're gonna send a message to the country
that we're decriminalizing plant medicines,
this is the beginning of the further dismantling
of the war on drugs and providing options for people to truly heal themselves.
[Daniel] Let's do it, bud! Yes on 81!
- [woman] I did. - [Melissa] Yay!
I cried when I voted.
I just pushed "Yes" and then it said,
"Your ballot's been submitted," or something.
And I was just like, "Okay, I just did it. I voted on my own initiative." [laughs]
And, um...
yeah, it was a really great moment for me.
[indistinct chatter]
What is it?
[Daniel] Let's get outta here. We got 76% of the vote!
Seventy-six percent of the...
- I fucking told you 70%! - [Daniel laughs]
[speaks indistinctly]
Congratulations, babe!
[Michael] The weather's changing around this.
Decrim Nature understood this.
But as politically adept as they have been,
and as successful as they have been,
they did run afoul of the Native American community
by including peyote in their ballot initiative.
[tribe members chanting]
[Sandor] Every generation has challenges.
Today we have, you know, this uh...
psychedelic renaissance as our challenge.
[car horns honking]
[Michael] The challenge of taking peyote out of the Decrim Nature movement
is it fouls the beautiful simplicity that no plant should be illegal.
So they're really uncomfortable with this idea of carving out this exception.
So I see their point.
On the other side, I see the point of Native Americans.
They were afraid that this would lead
to a surge in use by non-Native peoples
and that people would come down poaching in the Peyote Gardens.
[somber melodic music plays]
Peyote takes about 15 years
to get from seed to edible plant.
It grows very slowly and that's the problem.
Peyote and the peyote lands are endangered in the United States
as well as in Mexico.
[string instruments playing]
The Huichol people from the Sierra mountains in Mexico,
their culture has been relatively well-preserved.
Every year or so the Huichols conduct a pilgrimage to gather peyote.
The threat to the Huichols' peyote in Mexico is from agriculture,
and there's some challenge from mining interest also.
[male voice speaking Huichol] Miners are invading.
And tomato greenhouses are also taking over.
They are destroying the Hikuri (peyote) that grow there.
They are depleting the springs.
[Michael] In Texas, the dangers are multiple,
from bad harvesting
to the rise of all these wind turbines
and the roads that access them.
That too has cut into the peyote lands.
Given the fact that peyote is in short supply,
what's the proper position of people like me?
I'd be interested in healing and seeing myself the way peyote might show me.
Do you think non-Native people have any business using peyote?
You have to respect the Indigenous people
for what they have been doing.
You know, all of America... America is created on stolen land.
The realities of it, but nobody wants to say that.
And this medicine here, it's a biocultural cacti, you know?
And we realize that exploitation,
you know, appropriation happens.
It has happened. It will continue to happen.
The purpose of me coming here, is not to be on film,
it's to share our concerns
as practitioners, as Indigenous people,
leaders of our community.
What about my children?
You guys take all the medicine, what about my children?
You wanna stretch it.
[Michael] This tension about who should be able to use peyote
and who shouldn't continues to grow.
[indistinct conversation]
The IPCI, the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative,
has bought 605 acres
of Peyote Gardens from ranchers
to protect the peyote in various ways.
In my tenure, as the Native American Church of North America president,
you know, we started coming down here.
The importance of this land
is the ecology, the medicines,
the ancestors that are here.
For us, as Indigenous people, to take care of
what was bestowed upon us
as generational responsibilities.
What are you gonna leave your grandchildren?
[Arlen] This place here,
the 605 acres here,
is a answer to a prayer of our elders.
Indigenous people,
conservation's always been a part of us.
Preservation, taking only what you need.
[indistinct chatter]
[Julius] I agree with making a synthetic version.
So that way, the non-Indian would be able to utilize this,
which would not have any effect
on the natural growth of peyote itself.
[somber synth music plays]
[Michael] Do you ever imagine a world where peyote has gone extinct,
and it can't be found anymore?
[breathes deeply]
That's a scary thought.
[quavers] It brings back...
You... You wanna take, it brings back you wanna take it.
That's what it brings back.
[ragged breathing] You'll take everything
or it goes extinct
because of man-made, you know,
industry or whatever.
It brings back all these children,
all these children, they didn't have a voice.
They... They passed away.
They passed away. Why?
Because of... [quavers] "Your culture isn't good enough."
They've taken away our peyote and it's... it's extinct.
It reminds me of "You don't exist."
"You don't exist."
[Michael] In writing about mescaline, I interviewed many Native Americans,
and I left those conversations thinking, "I'm not gonna use peyote."
There are other ways to get mescaline.
There is San Pedro, and there is synthetic mescaline.
[men chanting]
Respecting Native American culture means leaving peyote alone.
Thank you, Madam President...
[Michael] This message is being more and more widely embraced.
...which will decriminalize the possession and personal use
of certain psychedelic substances.
[Michael] I was very interested to see
that when the California State Senator Scott Wiener
introduced a bill to decriminalize psychedelics,
he specifically excluded peyote.
Personal use and personal possession
of entheogenic, psychoactive plants, and fungi...
[Michael] Other cities are now excluding peyote from their initiatives too.
...passes unanimously.
[crowd cheers]
[Michael] The movement to re-envision the laws governing these substances
is well and truly underway,
but we're still figuring out what that's gonna look like.
What I think is really significant about the Native American Church,
is it gives us a model of a drug being used in a socially constructive way
to solve a community's problems.
This is not how we think about drugs.
It's a reminder that drugs are highly contextualized,
and it's the meanings we put on them,
the uses to which we put them, that really matter.
They're not inherently good and they're not inherently evil. They're tools.
[upbeat instrumental music playing]
When psychedelics arrived in America,
psilocybin in the '50s and LSD a little bit before that,
we had no models as to how to use them,
and we used them in a pretty careless way.
Took a tab of LSD and went to a concert
or walked around the beach and people got into trouble.
It's a consequential act to take one of these drugs,
and it should not be approached lightly.
Today, even, as we're still trying to develop the proper container
to put these substances in,
I think we have to look at these Indigenous practices.
And what do we see?
Well, there's always an elder,
someone who knows the territory very well, who's presiding.
There's usually a group, a community is involved,
not just an individual.
There's always an intention,
a purpose to what you're doing, and you're treating it as sacred,
in order to achieve altered states of consciousness,
which contribute to worship in various ways,
or celebration or healing.
[mystical music playing]
But maybe all this is not so new to Western culture after all.
When a chalice was excavated containing residues of ergot,
it validated decades of theories
about the role of psychedelics in ancient Greece.
In the old Greek histories of Eleusis,
people who were initiated there got the drink,
the kykeon, and then they had the illumination.
[Michael] The precise recipe is a mystery,
but we know that the kykeon was a psychoactive brew
that was used at the Eleusinian mysteries,
a sacred annual ritual of enlightenment
practiced by some of the world's greatest minds
including Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
So why did this ritual come to an end more than 1,000 years ago?
Was the possibility of illumination or achieving a higher consciousness
considered threatening to the powers that be?
Have the drug wars been merely an extension of that fear?
We must wage what I have called total war against public enemy number one
in the United States, the problem of dangerous drugs.
[Melissa] We have changed the game here.
- This is... Yeah. - [crowd cheers]
[applause]
Psychedelics has a major part
in how we can heal as a community,
how we can heal as a city, and how we can heal as a country.
[Michael] The current renaissance of psychedelics
could not come at a better time
as the world confronts a crisis in mental health.
But psychedelics have much to offer well people too. And science.
The psychedelic experience changes the mind
in ways that will help scientists better understand how it works.
It is not the only way to expand consciousness.
So too can meditation, pattern breathing, and sounds or flashing lights.
All these altered states allow us to probe
what is the greatest mystery in all of nature.
The emergence from mere matter
of something as miraculous as consciousness.
But an even bigger question
is whether psychedelics might help us address the environmental crisis
of how we think about our place in nature.
[men chanting]
One of the greatest gifts of psychedelics
is how they reanimate the natural world, allowing us to perceive the subject,
the spirit of all species, not just our own.
And to feel a deeper sense of interconnectedness with nature.
[chanting in foreign language]
This is no small thing.
In fact, our survival as a species may depend on it.
[melodic synth music playing]
[mellow music playing]