To decriminalize entheogenic plants, restore our root connection to nature, and improve human health and well-being.
To improve human health and well-being by decriminalizing and expanding access to entheogenic plants and fungi through political and community organizing, education and advocacy.
We envision happier, healthier individuals and communities reconnected to nature and entheogenic plant and fungi traditions and practices.
"I support Decriminalize Nature because it is time to do the right thing for Mother Nature and her children. By liberating Nature, we stand in solidarity with her and restore our human right to the miracle of the healing of these sacred plants and fungi."
"Decriminalize Nature seeks to rejuvenate new life into the modern person’s psyche, lost through oppression and rebuilt through nature - the original way."
"I support the Decriminalize Nature movement because I support the idea of happy, healthy humans independent of pharmaceutical companies."
"I support the Decriminalize Nature movement because it honors Nature, the Sacred, our Ancestors, our sovereignty, each other, community healing, and the power of the grassroots to create change."
We stand at a historical crossroad, a key transition point in our relationship with nature and each other. Our entheogenic allies enable us to heal, understand, and mature our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the planet that birthed us.
Join us in spreading awareness of these entheogenic plants and fungi. Support the movement to decriminalize our relationship with nature so we may shift the balance to rebuild a more cooperative, just, and caring world.
for Creating Sustainable Communities in Partnership with Sacred Plant Medicines
Decriminalize Nature follows these five principles to guide legislative and public policy discussions in a way that creates community-based healing and community-based, equitable economic opportunity.
Ensure that “grow-gather-gift” models are at the heart of decriminalization legislation across the US, enabling anyone, regardless of income, to have access to healing plants and fungi. Unfortunately, leading with legalization (the creation of regulations that encourage corporate economic exploitation), without first decriminalizing, creates economic pressures against decriminalization. (Decriminalize Nature Resolution, now passed in over 25 cities/counties in the US)
Protect community-based ceremony to enable people to heal in their own family or community circles or groups, respecting cultural difference in America, where not all cultures prefer clinical therapy or medical models and/or find them undesirable for financial reasons, efficacy, or safety reasons. Marginalized communities tend to heal in community, more often than in clinical or medical settings. (Decriminalize Nature’s Community Healing Initiative, passed with unanimous support in Oakland)
Restrict value-creation for anything that grows from the ground to only tribal-, reservation-, city-, or county-based economies by ensuring local ownership and hiring policies; prevent extractive models of capitalism by creating barriers of entry to out-of- area ownership and extractive investment models. (Decriminalize Nature’s Community Healing Initiative Section 8.62.030 B—creation of a micro-enterprise task force)
Create strong social equity programs directed at the emerging synthetic-based, for-profit corporations in psychedelics, based on the best models of social equity; target social equity programs at the FDA trial phase with fees and taxes and carry these through the permitting process, creating equity capital and loans to support local economies. Allow for the ease of regulations and entry of small businesses from disadvantaged communities to the synthetic/isolate industry. Do not allow prior cannabis, plant medicine and psychedelic charges to exclude participation from the market. Ensure expungement of records for arrests associated with cannabis, plant medicines, and psychedelics. (Analyze the best social equity and expungement programs from throughout the US)
Working in partnership with local indigenous communities around the world where more well-known entheogens grow, establish protocols and practices ensuring the local communities benefit in the ways they desire, and offer support in protection of species and habitats. (Decriminalize Nature’s Sustainable Relations Committee has initiated a working group to collaborate with local indigenous communities throughout the world)
The use of entheogenic plants and fungi for healing and growth has roots in ceremonial practices of traditional communities that go back hundreds and thousands of years.
Those uses are now re-emerging through rapidly unfolding legislative, economic, and public policy discussions across the United States. Decriminalize Nature (“DN”) offers a Five- Point Plan to ensure that the benefits of emerging uses and markets derived from plant medicines flow to local neighborhoods and communities by incorporating reverence, social equity, and the creation of community-serving markets into these legislative processes and public policy discussions throughout the United States.
Our goal is to learn from society’s experiences with how the cannabis legalization movement rapidly evolved over the last two decades, creating billions of dollars of new value through legitimization of the market, innovation of new processes, and development of new products.
Unfortunately, very little of this value stayed in the neighborhoods which needed those economic resources the most, nor went to the people who paid the highest price of incarceration and persecution related to cannabis prohibition over last fifty years. Instead, the cannabis industry has seen value creation become increasingly consolidated into the hands of venture capitalist and corporate investors.
We can learn from those mistakes in how we guide a new set of processes related to the use of entheogenic plants and fungi, as well as the emerging synthetic markets.
We exist to decriminalize entheogenic plants and fungi without limits on how much we can grow-gather-gift. While we support the work of other policy organizations who seek to decriminalize all drugs and end mass physical incarceration of humans, our movement seeks to end the mass consciousness incarceration of humans, especially for marginalized communities of trauma, which have suffered most from colonialism and capitalism, by enabling equitable access to plants and fungi. Equitable access in this sense means removing barriers of access such as legal, economic, and/or cultural barriers to allow individuals to explore how they see fit. Our efforts are complimentary and we welcome collaboration.
Decriminalize Nature (DN) is a decentralized, transparent, open-source movement to restore our connection to ourselves, community, and nature/Mother Earth, starting with the decriminalization of the consciousness-healing and consciousness liberating entheogenic plant and fungi allies. These entheogenic allies were co-created by our ancestors in partnership with nature, and for which our ancestors paid a heavy price of oppression and subjugation by controlling colonizing interests.
We must decriminalize these entheogenic plants and fungi which are powerful allies for healing trauma and expanding consciousness. Our connections to our higher consciousness, our community, and our planet is being eroded–causing depression, isolation, and societal policies which are punitive and controlling, leading to higher incarceration rates, expansion of the wealth and income gap, and a breakdown of democracy.
The Decriminalize Nature movement recognizes the sacred relationship between humans, nature, and Mother Earth. As such, DN is not a psychedelics movement. It is a movement that advocates first and foremost, the need to remove all entheogenic plants and fungi from Schedule 1. We also recognize that:
We are a people-led movement, not a money-led movement. Be cautious of those who seek to give funding with strings attached.
We started as, and have always been, led by BIPOC and women nationwide. We are an organization that recognizes the wisdom that emerges from struggle and we thrive because of the participation of Indigenous, African American, Latinx/Chicanx, Asian, and recent immigrant leaders in our organization.
While we are not against clinical or medical legalization models, we speak freely and openly about the threat that these models pose if passed before full decriminalization.
No group of people own any plants or fungi. They were created by Mother Earth and are our allies on this journey of life. We recognize, respect, honor, and give reverence to the many Indigenous cultures of the world who have been in good relationships with these plant allies. We commit to work with them to ensure DN promotes sustainable and respectful relationships with these cultures and our plant allies. But we do not recognize any ownership of these sacred plants or fungi by any humans.
Decriminalize Nature (DN) recognizes these entheogenic plants and fungi as sacred allies, and as such DN is against the commodification of these sacred plants. We will pursue legalization of community-based enterprise models that enable payment for services, but we will not support commodification of the plants and fungi materials themselves. We oppose the patenting of any plant or fungi material, for example.
Decriminalize Nature encourages adoption of safe practice guidelines and practices by individuals and communities in using entheogenic plants and fungi
We encourage the emergence of community-based ceremonies that foster safe practice protocols as a key vehicle for enabling the creation of community-containers to heal the most vulnerable members of society.
Decriminalize Nature is a bottom-up organization, meaning that all of our solutions and decisions must flow from this basic question: How can this enable access to healing by the most vulnerable members of society? The idea is that if the most vulnerable members of society can access the plant allies, then everyone else can too. We will oppose efforts that threaten equitable access by the most vulnerable, and support efforts which enable equitable access by the most vulnerable.
Humans are seen as part of nature, and hence “decriminalize nature” equals “decriminalize human’s use of natural substances.” This refusal to enact the modern constitution with its separation of nature and culture situates DN’s imaginary within a pre-modern tradition of entheogenic consumption practices that dates back thousands of years; a time before drug criminalization was limiting access to these plants and fungi. Hence, DN activists argue that people should have the right to use what grows in nature to enact their cognitive liberty.
Claudia Schwarz-Plaschg, Author: Socio-psychedelic imaginaries: envisioning and building legal psychedelic worlds in the United States