Camilo pictured on a night hike with friends in Oakland, CA (PHOTO Zaccai Doe Parker)
I was crying but it felt good.
Camilo, 21, was hesitant when his friends suggested they do shrooms one night on a camping trip, he says. However, their descriptions of previous “trips” and thoughts on psilocybin’s healing potential made him feel the experience would be a positive one. “I could understand it was about healing myself and learning from it.”
“I had an emotional block before I took shrooms. Like, I was really blocked off. I hadn’t cried in 3-4 years. I was just numb. So that was surprising, because I was crying but it felt good. I was happy I was crying. I was like ‘I gotta let this s*** go.’”
Eventually, Camilo, an Oakland-based artist, was consuming doses of shrooms up to “twice a week for four months straight,” sometimes with friends, sometimes by himself, and always on his terms. He experienced “the worst and the best trips.”
“I was just trying to find [things] to keep me focused on my path, and it was really helpful to be honest,” he says after experimentation with psilocybin increased his confidence and connection to nature.
one size doesn’t Fit All.
The growing resurgence of psychedelics in cultural, medical, spiritual, and legislative dialogues has been termed by some as a “psychedelic renaissance,” but Black practitioners, researchers, as well as knowledgeable recreational advocates like Camilo have long been excluded from the conversation. Rather than scramble for a seat at the table, Black people are building their own.
Everett pictured during Q&A at a Los Angeles screening for A Table of Our Own (Feb 2024)
“The present day ‘psychedelic renaissance’ is…a bunch of rich white men trying to tell everyone how to do their drugs,” says Oakland-based licensed therapist, author, and documentary filmmaker Ayize Jama Everett. “It’s a rebirth of the same bullshit in the 60s and 70s that fell off because it was too exclusive. It’s not including people of color, it’s not including women, it’s not including queer folks in a way that’s substantial.”
When Ayize set out to make a film about Black people carving out space in psychedelics, he’d already seen, first hand, the benefits of psilocybin manifest in his patients. However, he is skeptical of advocates pushing for medicalization of the substance, due to the historical and current biases and limitations of the American healthcare system.
Rick Doblin, popular but controversial leader in MDMA-assisted therapy research and founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), has long suggested that more therapists trained in facilitating medicinal consumption are an adequate necessity to keep up with the increased demand for MDMA.
“I’m a Black therapist,” Everett asserts. “Most of my clients aren’t Black. A lot of Black people don’t go to therapy…We don’t need 1500 new therapists. We need people that are already rooted in the community. Why don’t we work with them?”
Due to a number of factors including socioeconomic disparity and social stigma, according to the Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, only 25% of Black adults seek out mental healthcare, compared to 40% of white adults, despite being more likely to report persistent symptoms of emotional distress. Those that do pursue treatment, according to the American Psychiatric Association, are less likely to receive guideline-consistent care (National Alliance on Mental Illness).
“We’re not thinking about this stuff in a way that’s useful to change society. We’re thinking about it in ways that fit into an already broken society and broken health care system.”
“If we don’t have culturally competent guides or growers for that matter or, you know, doctors or psychiatrists, we’re taking a chance on our psyches the way the American medical institutions are taking chances with our health as Black people.”
Richardson photographed in the Archaeological Zone of Izamal, Mexico
They have enough spaces.
Those culturally competent guides exist, trying to ensure Black folks get a piece of the “mushroom pie” as the demand for decriminalization and the likelihood of medicalization and industrialization in the U.S. grows. However, operating in ways that defy what has been laid out as best practice by white medical professionals and as legal by white government officials takes some finesse at the very least; or in Keba Richardson’s case, a literal crossing of borders.
“I do feel a lot of gratitude for being in Yucatan, Mexico…. I’m in a place where psilocybin, bufo, ayahuasca, these things are not frowned upon. They are viewed as sacred medicine.” In 2023, Richardson, a facilitator, life coach, and author from Atlanta, GA, decided to move to Southern Mexico, where the West’s relationship to psilocybin began.
“A lot of people don’t know but…in Oaxaca, Mexico, Maria Sabina is who reintroduced the western world to mushrooms…She agreed to give them the information, but she did not want to be put in the magazine and they did it anyway…. And you rarely even hear her name mentioned.”
Sabina (1894-1985), was a Mazatec sabia (wise woman), curandera (healer), and poet from Oaxaca, Mexico, and the first indigenous shaman to allow “westerners” to participate in a velada, or sacred mushroom healing ceremony. (Vale)
María Sabina playing a guitar, photographed by Álvaro Estrada, author of “María Sabina: Her Life and Chants” (1981) (La Jornada)
She is known for unintentionally contributing to the popularization of psilocybin in the U.S. after her knowledge and practices were published in a 1957 LIFE Magazine article against her wishes. Psilocybin spores were collected and cultivated without her authorization.
Image of 1957 LIFE Magazine article by American businessman turned ethnomycologist, R. Gordon Wasson (Donlon Books)
By the 1960’s, Oaxaca was flooded with tourists looking to be “cured” by Sabina. Despite her village’s unwanted popularity, she died impoverished, and suffering from malnourishment.
Sabina’s “story of extraction, cultural appropriation, bioprospecting, and colonization” (Gerber) inspired Richardson to be choosy about the communities she serves, having decided only to facilitate psilocybin retreats for Black and Brown women, although she works with people of all identities.
“Because I am a woman and through the experiences of my life and having the wisdom I now have, I know that women, especially neuro-melanated women, have been the most deeply impacted by this whole system that we’re all programmed into…I just want to give guidance and assistance to the women in my community to assist them in really remembering what they already know to be true about themselves.”
Still, even post-2020 woke-phoria, when individuals and businesses alike embraced anti-racist performance for a trendy and profitable moment, cultivators of affinity subspaces struggle to evade “reverse racism” allegations.
Richardson with attendees at her Zen Butterfly Retreat in Izamal, Yucatan, MX. They are photographed in front of a mural of María Sabina. (PHOTO Keba Richardson)
“I had gotten a lot of backlash for the fact that I’m doing a retreat for only melanated women, but I’m creating a safe space for us to have this experience, because if you just go Google psilocybin retreats, you will not find a retreat that’s facilitated by someone of color…We have specific healing we need to do amongst ourselves because of the experience that we have…So this is not a time for us to be sharing our healing space and journey with women who can not relate to what our experience is…They have enough spaces to do that with each other.”
Richardson’s points make reference to an increasingly acknowledged source of mental illness among people of color: racial trauma, and the fact that its manifestations often only find legibility in the eyes of insiders.
“Racial trauma, or race-based traumatic stress (RBTS), refers to the mental and emotional injury caused by encounters with racial bias and ethnic discrimination, racism, and hate crimes,” according to Mental Health America.
“Racialized trauma can come directly from other people or can be experienced within a wider system.” Additionally, it can result from both direct and vicarious experience and/or be transmitted intergenerationally. “In the U.S., Black, Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) are most vulnerable due to living under a system of white supremacy.”
The terminology has allowed people of color to language a phenomenon long felt but spoken only through cultural nuances of interaction and exchange, cultural sensitivities that signal shared struggle and mutual understanding that distinguish “kinfolk” from the “skinfolk.” And rarely do white professionals have the knowledge and skillset to identify and address racially coded traumas or triggers.
Reggie Harris photographed at 2024 conference (PHOTO reMind)
a table of our own
This can further isolate individuals like community organizer, mycologist, and shroom advocate Reggie Harris from already exclusive communal psychedelic spaces. Harris, himself, experienced most of his early trips with white friends in the States before moving to Holland to learn cultivation and distribution in his early 20s.
“Before I stepped into the world of psychedelics, there were really no social organizations that I could tap into that resonated with me. As well meaning as they were, damn near every single one of them tried to tokenize me,” he says.
Reggie Harris started his organization Oakland Hyphae with the goal of “tak[ing] up as much space in psychedelics as possible.” Initially, Harris leaned into potency testing on a team of scientists making up Hyphae Labs. They hoped to develop an accurate psilocybin potency test, due to Reggies own concerns with misinformation on the street about what makes magic mushrooms “stronger” (ie. darker blue hue, all caps vs stems, etc.).
Panel of speakers at 2023 Oakland Psychedelic Conference, hosted by Oakland Hyphae (PHOTO Holly Regan)
“And so we wanted to quantify that shit.”
After a year, Reggie’s team succeeded; however, they also realized “if we really wanna organize the second level of power, we need to push into the media space…as an organizer, I once heard somebody say that you never want to wage war with a person that buys ink by the barrel.” Now, in addition to having a successful podcast publication (HyphaeLeaks) and thousands of subscribers, Oakland Hyphae has organized annual psychedelic conferences in major cities across the country, including Oakland, D.C., and L.A., prioritizing the upliftment of contributors of color, especially Black ones.
“I feel like it’s a lot of intellectuals, a lot of “PhDs” giving the information, but they don’t have the experience with mushrooms and they do not give proper respect to where this all originated from. So I feel like right now, for those of us who are in it, we have to be educating ourselves. We have to be writing books and doing the documentaries and learning how to grow and cultivate it and sharing that information for who’s coming behind us,” Keba emphasizes.
Tools, not solutions
Ayize Jama Everett and Kufikiri Imara’s documentary, A Table of Our Own, screened for the first time during the Oakland Psychedelic Conference in September 2023, and at various shows and festivals since. While the film centers the voices of Black practitioners, scientists, healers, and organizers, what Everett really wants is for viewers to release the long held, often exploitative practice of seeking guidance from other cultures and instead, do what makes sense and works for the members of their own communities.
“My [other] concern is that, like, people are going to assume that the white way is the only way…look what the fuck you did to this planet. What the fuck you did to this country? Look what the fuck you’ve done to yourselves,” Ayize says incredulously.
Screenshot of retreat facilitated by Everett and Imara in Oakland, CA for A Table of Our Own documentary (2022)
“When I look at our adopted European models of health, I look at the people that were first rejected from that–those elderly women, again, women over the age of 50 connected to the earth, essentially witches. And what did they do? They burned those witches. And they took their knowledge about plants and healing…Well, if they did that to them, the fuck you think they’re going to do to us? So part of my time, I’m trying to have white people, European people, get back to their own culture, get back to…their own plant medicine. And maybe through that, they’ll be able to see the ways in which African Americans are able to do it in a way that’s culturally responsive and helpful for us.”
And cultural responsiveness can be a matter of life and death when engaging with potentially mind-altering substances. Psilocybe mushrooms are shown to help treat addiction, depression, etc. by increasing neuroplasticity, or essentially disrupting habitual thinking and presenting alternative perspectives, sometimes in radical ways (Daws). While both testimony and research can attest to the medicinal power of psilocybin, it’s one thing to pivot in perspective and another thing to have the means to actualize that shift in one’s material circumstances. Moreover, it is no secret that certain communities are disproportionately immobilized/incapable of uprooting their lives–the content of which mental health issues can often be traced back to–regardless of how misaligned or harmful they are.
When I first followed up with Camilo about quoting an interview with him from just a couple of months prior in this story, he was more concerned about being referenced in a way that implied glorification or romanticization of shrooms. This concern was echoed by a mutual friend, Zaccai, who lost a close friend, Khari to suicide while under the influence of shrooms at the end of last year. Tragedies like these have tainted the image of psilocybin and other psychedelics for decades, as people struggle to define which drugs are “safe,” and for whom.
Illness (including mental) is the body’s way of signaling when something is wrong in our immediate environments, when something must be altered in order for us to get well (Marashinsky). Our culture’s tendency to blame and pathologize the individual for healthy responses to unhealthy circumstances (Maté) can lead to an overemphasis on medicating and an underemphasis on the need for structural shifts to be made so that people can access the healthier lives a shroom trip might give them glimpse into.
Until Black people have culturally competent treatment that considers and responds to the systemic contexts that sustain poor mental health, illness will continue to be present so long as the source is. It’s why people have harmed themselves on shrooms. It’s why people have harmed themselves while sober, or on antidepressants.
Richardson reminds, “shrooms are a tool.” They do not have the ability to remove people from the present realities and material conditions that shape our lives and curate the ways in which we must engage with them. While psilocybin use may make someone more thoughtful about or open to alternative ways of thinking about and “doing” life, individual liberation will always be stifled by structural harm and oppression.
For shrooms to be able to do anything substantial in the realm of “healing racial trauma,” systemic and communal change is needed to eliminate what is continuously retraumatizing racially marginalized people. Otherwise, at most, they’ll help Black people cope.
In Honor of Khari Walker
2004-2023; one of the brightest thinkers I’ve known. rest in peace, power, and love.
memorializing altar made in Oakland, CA by friends of Khari (PHOTO Zaccai Doe Parker)
