Every time a psychedelic bill fails, we hear a familiar and urgent warning that veterans are suffering. First responders are suffering. Lives are at stake. While that sense of urgency is valid, when I look at who the psychedelic drug policy movement keeps centering, I notice an absence, one that has become impossible for me to ignore. There is another population facing profound trauma, mental health challenges and nearly every imaginable barrier to healing.
That group includes people from heavily policed, low-income communities who have and continue to live with the direct consequences of the War on Drugs. People who are disproportionately Black and Brown.
When my colleagues in the psychedelic field mention the War on Drugs, the conversation typically stops at “we need to address the harms” and, even then, it starts and ends with record clearing. Don’t get me wrong, expungement matters, but if our response to decades of deliberate devastation begins and ends with paperwork, we are not talking about healing.
Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman, said the quiet part aloud in a 2016 interview. The administration knew it could not criminalize being Black or against the Vietnam War, so it associated Black communities with heroin and antiwar communities with marijuana, then criminalized both heavily. The damage has not been limited to long sentences. It has come in the form of violence. Intergenerational trauma. Families ripped apart and continued disinvestment in communities where children witness murders and grow up to understand that as normal.
The numbers reflect this. Since 1971, America has spent over a trillion dollars enforcing its drug policy, according to research from the University of Pennsylvania. The incarceration rate for drug offenses has increased tenfold since 1980. Black Americans are nearly four times more likely than white Americans to be arrested for cannabis possession, despite comparable usage rates across racial groups. These are not side effects of policy. They are the policy.
The psychedelic field has developed a deep well of compassion for veterans. It should, but there is a near-complete silence around people of color from historically oppressed and exploited communities who are dealing with the same mental health crises.
Trauma does not exist in isolation. When violence, incarceration, instability, and loss become common features of daily life, they stop feeling exceptional. They become normalized. A 2019 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that exposure to community violence is associated with elevated rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety at rates comparable to those seen in combat veterans. Yet the communities carrying that burden are barely footnotes in conversations about psychedelic healing.
When conversations about psychedelics and system-impacted people do happen, they tend to focus on reentry, offering healing after incarceration. The instinct is understandable, but why are we only talking about healing after the most traumatizing part? Why respond to trauma after someone has experienced the full punishing weight of the criminal legal system, rather than as an alternative to incarceration in the first place? The documentary The Alabama Solution illustrates this reality with painful clarity.
Let’s imagine a different model. Picture diversion programs that combine trauma-informed care, wraparound social services, community support, and, where appropriate and legally available, an option to participate in regulated psychedelic-assisted treatment. Conversations are underway right now, involving a district attorney, community members, researchers, and national trauma experts, to build the first criminal diversion program in the country that would include voluntary, regulated psychedelic treatment as part of a wraparound support model. This is exactly the kind of work the field should be amplifying and funding.
Can you already hear the objections? Why should people who have caused harm receive these opportunities? From my vantage point, the United States is the most individualistic society in the world. There is a deeply ingrained assumption that success is entirely self-made and hardship is entirely self-inflicted. That assumption ignores how interconnected we are. When the difference between people’s access to resources is vast, harm finds its way past security systems and gated communities. Because, as my favorite African proverb says, “a child who isn’t embraced by its village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”
Surveys of survivors increasingly show that what they actually want is not retribution. They want the harm they endured to never happen again, to them or to their loved ones. The only way to get there is to give the people who have engaged in behavior we fear sustainable, transformative healing opportunities. Punishment has never healed trauma, and it has never made anyone safe.
Too often, psychedelic advocates talk to other psychedelic advocates. Criminal legal reformers talk to criminal legal reformers. Both groups are holding different pieces of the same problem and few even know the other exists. We need intentional, open dialogue and genuine collaboration between the psychedelic field and criminal legal reform spaces through shared policy development, joint pilot programs, and community-led solutions.
The most important innovation in psychedelics may not be a new molecule. It may be a new system, one that treats healing as a right rather than a privilege and urgency as something that belongs equally to combat veterans and to people whose communities have been under siege for decades, dating back to the founding of this country
Every time a psychedelic bill or initiative fails, we are reminded that veterans are suffering and lives are on the line. We should bring that same urgency to the communities devastated by the War on Drugs. For too long, this country has ignored, criminalized, and stigmatized people who are poor, system-impacted, and disproportionately Black and Brown. If psychedelics are truly about healing, that promise cannot stop at the clinic door or the prison gate. It must reach the communities that have borne the greatest harms for generations.
