Can Psychedelic Spaces Avoid Recreating Colonial Systems?
Can Psychedelic Spaces Avoid Recreating Colonial Systems?
As the modern psychedelic movement continues its rapid expansion across the UK, Europe and the Americas, a profound ethical question looms over the industry: can modern entheogenic spaces genuinely avoid recreating colonial systems? The commercial market is currently scaling at an unprecedented rate, yet its structural foundations look deeply familiar. From patenting natural plant molecules to capitalising on indigenous traditions without permission, the mainstream landscape is frequently operating on an extractive blueprint.
Avoiding these historic pitfalls requires a complete dismantling of the standard Western approach to medicine work. It demands that we actively resist biopiracy and move past treating sacred entheogens as mere commodities waiting to be standardised, packaged and consumed. True innovation in this field is found in our collective willingness to build models grounded in structural humility, ecological accountability and genuine cross-cultural partnership.
Identifying the Signs of Imperial Extraction
To construct an ethical framework that actively resists colonial patterns, we must first recognise how imperial extraction manifests within the contemporary industry:
Biomedical Hegemony: The systemic belief that Western clinical science, psychological metrics and academic credentials are the sole arbiters of truth, validity and safety in sacred medicine work.
Epistemic Injustice: The practice of silencing or tokenising traditional knowledge systems while simultaneously adopting their ceremonial practices for mainstream commercial use.
Commodity Fetishism: Treating sacred entheogenic plants as isolated tools for individual optimisation, productivity gains or corporate financial return, detached from their original ecosystems.
De-Centering the Wellness Industrial Complex
The conventional landscape is dominated by corporate training organisations and luxury retreat providers that operate within a purely transactional framework. They promise rapid personal transformation, yet they regularly strip these medicines of their inherent spiritual and relational intelligence. By treating entheogens as a product to be consumed, they unknowingly reinforce the very colonial mindsets that cause human disconnection and trauma in the first place.
Be the Medicine was born out of a desire to break entirely free from this transactional loop. We are explicitly not a standard training organisation, nor are we a conventional retreat provider. We operate as a collective of practitioners, ceremonialists, artists, decolonial scholars and therapists dedicated to holding spaces rooted in Earth-based traditions. We recognise that the modern wellness industrial complex is built on extraction, and we choose to walk a different path: one that centres prayer, reverence and deep relational depth.
When training and ceremonial gatherings are reduced to commercial transactions, true healing is compromised. We do not aim to graduate certified technicians who view these substances through a detached, mechanical lens. Instead, we gather to cultivate a deep, shared responsibility to the earth and to the communities who have kept these traditions alive through generations of prohibition. We stand together because we believe that safe and ethical medicine work cannot exist without decolonial justice.
Active De-Centering and Shared Leadership in Action
To build spaces that actively resist colonial duplication, Western practitioners must move beyond abstract academic theories of decolonisation and step into real, material practice. This means actively de-centering the Western clinical lens as the ultimate authority and creating spaces where diverse modalities sit side by side in mutual respect, honouring international benefit-sharing principles like those found in the Nagoya Protocol.
This commitment to cross-cultural partnership shapes everything we do at Be the Medicine. We actively invite a diverse circle of practitioners, advocates and guides from across the UK, Europe and the Americas to enter into rigorous, non-hierarchical conversations.
Our collective learning and ceremonial spaces are guided by traditional culture bearers, including Grandma Margaret Behan, a lifelong traditionalist and member of the International Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, and Dr Alta Piechowski-Begay, founder of the Hozho Voices of Healing Center.
We sit with traditional Amazonian lineage perspectives through practitioners like Metsa Nihue, while exploring the intersections of healing justice, psychotherapy and ancestral memory with seasoned educators like Charlotte Duerr James and Philip Carr-Gomm. By elevating these voices to positions of true authorship and leadership, we step away from the colonial habit of taking without asking, and we step into our collective responsibility to the global community, the ancestral lineages and the living earth.
