Our Sacred Medicines are Not Commodities to be Patent and Sold
On Sacred Medicine Personhood & Rights, Corporate Capture, and the Abolition of Empire Through Right Relationship
There is a story being told right now about healing a story that arrives dressed in the language of access, equity, and mental health revolution, that speaks earnestly of trauma and suffering and the desperate need of a people who have been failed by every institution that was supposed to care for them, and that offers, as its solution, a familiar architecture wearing unfamiliar clothes: the pharmaceutical pipeline, the venture capital portfolio, the licensed facilitator, the proprietary clinical protocol, the Schedule I exception carved out not for communities but for capital.
This story is not new, it is, in fact, among the oldest stories that empire knows how to tell the story of the commons enclosed for your own good, the story of the seed patented so that it might feed you more efficiently, the story of the water commodified so that it might be delivered more reliably and its reappearance now, in the domain of sacred plant medicine, should be understood not as an anomaly but as a continuation, the latest iteration of a project that has never fundamentally changed its nature regardless of how many times it has changed its branding.
What is changing, and what makes this particular moment both urgent and generative, is that those of us who stand in relationship with these medicines as stewards, as relatives, as people who understand that iboga is not a molecule to be extracted but a living being embedded in cosmology, ceremony, and ecological community are naming the pattern before it fully consolidates, and refusing the terms that are being prepared for us.
To understand what is at stake in the current landscape of psychedelic policy reform, it is necessary to understand something that the dominant framework of mental health has long struggled to accommodate: that these plants are not treatments. They are not interventions in the clinical sense, not compounds whose value is reducible to their pharmacological activity within an individual nervous system, not problems to be solved by isolating the active ingredient and delivering it through a protocol designed to satisfy an FDA pathway. They are, as the Bwiti lineage holders of Central and West Africa have maintained across generations of colonial violence and erasure, living spiritual beings, teachers, and relatives whose relationship with human communities is governed not by licensing boards or benefit corporations but by ceremony, lineage, ecological stewardship, and the obligations of kinship.
The separation of ibogaine from iboga the extraction of the alkaloid from the root bark, the plant from its forest, the molecule from its cosmology is not merely a scientific procedure. It is a colonial one. It replicates, with remarkable fidelity, the logic that transformed land into real estate, water into a commodity, and seed into intellectual property: the logic that insists value can be isolated, abstracted from relationship, and transferred into systems of private ownership without remainder, without consequence, without loss. The history of that logic is a history of ecological devastation and cultural erasure, and there is no reason to believe that its application to the domain of sacred medicine will produce different results simply because the people advancing it have read Fanon and attended a diversity training.
The precedents, for those who are willing to read them clearly, are not reassuring. Oregon, which became in 2020 the first state to decriminalize possession of small amounts of drugs through Measure 110, reversed course in 2024 through House Bill 4002, recriminalizing possession as a misdemeanor in a political gesture that demonstrated, with the kind of clarity that only betrayal can produce, how rapidly a public health framework can be reabsorbed into the criminal legal apparatus from which it was never fully separated. Colorado’s Proposition 122, celebrated as a landmark in natural medicine decriminalization, created not community sovereignty but a regulated access program centered on licensed facilitators, healing centers, and a state infrastructure whose relationship to the communities most harmed by the War on Drugs is, to be generous, aspirational. The ACLU has documented that Black Americans comprise thirty-three percent of all drug arrests nationally while representing thirteen percent of the population, and research on Measure 110 found that its most significant concrete achievement was the reduction of drug possession arrests, with especially large reductions for Black and Hispanic people which is to say that recriminalization does not simply roll back reform in the abstract; it restores, with surgical precision, the machinery of racialized enforcement.
These are not cautionary tales at the margins of the psychedelic reform movement. They are its structural truth. When plant medicines enter legal frameworks governed by Western law, clinical licensure, and the enforcement mechanisms of the state, they become subject to the same political volatility, the same racial calculus, the same swing of the pendulum that has defined drug policy in this country since Nixon made explicit what had always been implicit: that the War on Drugs was never about drugs. It was about the bodies and communities that the state had decided should be criminalized, and the psychedelic reform movement has not yet reckoned seriously enough with the question of whether the frameworks it is building will protect those communities or simply reorganize their exposure.
What we are proposing, from within the Global Majority Medicine Council, from within the Wozu Healing Gardens, from within the relational networks of grandmothers and Arapaho kin and medicine stewards who understand healing as inseparable from land, seed, and reciprocity, is not a reform of the existing framework. It is a refusal of its foundational premises, and the construction of an alternative architecture rooted in sovereignty, ecological stewardship, and the understanding that the relationship between human beings and plant medicines cannot be owned, cannot be patented, cannot be administered through a licensing regime without ceasing, in some fundamental sense, to be that relationship at all.
A sovereignty-first framework places Bwiti governance not as an advisory body, not as a cultural consultant, not as a symbolic acknowledgment appended to a document whose real authority rests elsewhere but as the primary governing authority over all questions of access, cultivation, transmission, research, and global partnership related to iboga. It recognizes the plant itself as a living person with rights that precede and supersede any human claim upon it, drawing on the legal personhood frameworks pioneered in Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, which have demonstrated that the recognition of non-human beings as rights-bearing persons is not a mystical proposition but a legally viable and morally necessary one. It insists on ecological stewardship as the precondition of any expansion, requiring that iboga forests be regenerating faster than they are being consumed before any discussion of scaling access can proceed with integrity. And it demands mandatory benefit-sharing, not as a charitable gesture but as a structural requirement, so that any individual or organization working with iboga outside of Bwiti community is legally obligated to contribute to a stewardship and reparations fund that supports land protection, lineage continuity, and the community infrastructure that empire has spent centuries systematically dismantling.
We are, those of us doing this work, not under any illusion that the forces moving toward the pharmaceuticalization of iboga will be easily persuaded by the force of argument alone. Venture capital investment in psychedelic medicine companies exceeded two billion dollars between 2019 and the time of this writing, and the actors driving that investment are not primarily motivated by healing or justice, whatever language they may deploy in their public communications. They are motivated by return on capital, by the enclosure of a commons that they correctly identify as vastly undervalued by existing markets, and they are extraordinarily skilled at absorbing the language of the movements that oppose them land acknowledgment, Indigenous partnership, equity initiative while lobbying against the actual policies that would make those values structurally real.
This is why we address ourselves not only to regulators and legislators, but to the Bwiti lineage holders themselves, as relatives, as people who have watched their own medicines and lands and knowledge systems become the object of someone else’s development agenda, and who understand in the body what it means when a relationship with a plant is suddenly mediated by a corporation whose primary accountability is to its shareholders. We are asking, with humility and with urgency, that governance structures be established before expansion accelerates, that the terms of any global engagement with iboga be set by those who have carried this relationship across generations rather than by those who have recently discovered its commercial potential, and that the enormous pressure now building around this medicine be met with the kind of deliberate, community-rooted discernment that the situation demands and that markets, by their nature, are constitutionally incapable of providing.
It is worth pausing here to name precisely what a patent is, stripped of its bureaucratic neutrality and examined for what it actually does, because the language of intellectual property law has been so thoroughly normalized that we have largely lost the ability to perceive its violence. A patent is a deed. It is a legal instrument through which a state confers upon a private actor the exclusive right to determine who may reproduce, cultivate, distribute, or derive benefit from a living being, a compound, a process, a relationship and to extract payment from anyone who requires access to what has now been legally enclosed. It is, in its structure and its function, indistinguishable from other deeds of ownership over living things that history has produced, and the fact that its object is a molecule rather than a body does not alter the foundational logic: that a living being, or the knowledge of how to be in relationship with one, can be owned, and that ownership grants the right to determine who accesses it, at what price, and under what conditions of compliance.
The history of that logic, applied to land and seed and water, is a history of deliberate impoverishment not as a side effect of the enclosure process but as its mechanism. When the commons are enclosed, the people who depended upon them do not simply lose a resource; they lose the conditions of their own autonomy, and are thereby made dependent upon the very systems of ownership that dispossessed them. They must now purchase what they once tended freely. They must now comply with the terms of those who hold the deed in order to access what their grandmothers knew without asking permission. This is not a metaphor for what is happening to sacred plant medicines. It is the precise template being followed, with only the vocabulary updated to reflect the current cultural moment.
What makes the pharmaceuticalization of plant medicines particularly revelatory, if we are willing to sit with its implications, is what it discloses about empire’s relationship to consciousness itself. These plants iboga, peyote, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and the vast pharmacopoeia of entheogenic and visionary medicines that human communities have tended across every continent are not neutral therapeutic tools whose effects happen to be spiritually interesting. They are, when encountered within the relational and ceremonial contexts that give them their full dimensionality, profoundly disruptive to the psychological infrastructure that systems of domination require in order to reproduce themselves. They dissolve the boundaries of the isolated, competitive, productivity-optimized self that consumer capitalism depends upon. They restore felt sense of kinship with the living world at precisely the moment when the ideology of extraction requires that kinship to be unthinkable. They open, in the people who work with them in right relationship, a capacity for collective grief, collective rage, and collective vision that organized systems of power have historically found extraordinarily difficult to manage.
Empire has always known this, even when it has not said so directly. The criminalization of these medicines was never simply a matter of public health concern, however sincerely some of its architects may have believed their own justifications. It was the criminalization of a form of consciousness a way of perceiving the world, relating to the living community of beings, and understanding oneself as embedded in webs of obligation and reciprocity rather than as an autonomous unit of economic production that posed a structural threat to the ideological conditions upon which the existing order depends. To criminalize iboga was to protect a particular version of reality. To pharmaceuticalize it now is to attempt to capture and administer that same consciousness, to make it available in controlled doses, at controlled prices, within controlled clinical settings, stripped of the ceremonial and cosmological context that gave it the power to actually reorganize one’s relationship to the world, and delivered instead as a treatment whose goal is not liberation but the restoration of functional participation within the very systems that produced the suffering it claims to address.
This is the sleight of hand that must be named: that the psychedelic therapy model, at its most structurally honest, is not offering healing. It is offering the management of symptoms produced by empire, using medicines whose power to dissolve empire’s hold on the psyche has been carefully removed by the extraction of the molecule from its relational matrix. What arrives in the clinic, severed from Bwiti ceremony and forest and lineage and the web of obligation that constitutes the medicine’s actual governance structure, is not iboga. It is a pharmacological fragment of iboga, administered under conditions designed to minimize its capacity to make anyone ungovernable.
The plants themselves, we might venture to say and here we enter territory that the academic register can only gesture toward, because what is required is not argument but perception are not passive in this process. A medicine taken out of right relationship does not simply become inert. It becomes something else: a force without container, a power without the ceremonial intelligence that gives it direction and purpose and the capacity to heal rather than to harm. The Bwiti have maintained across generations, through colonization and through the active suppression of their tradition by missionary and state power alike, that iboga is a living person who knows when it is being approached in the spirit of extraction, and who responds accordingly. This is not superstition. It is a sophisticated epistemology about the nature of relationship one that the scientific tradition is only beginning, through its own methods, to partially corroborate and it suggests that the project of pharmaceuticalizing iboga will not simply fail the communities it claims to serve. It will fail on its own terms, because you cannot own a teacher. You can only enter into relationship with one, or refuse to, and bear the consequences of that refusal.
The Wozu Healing Gardens exist as one expression of the alternative we are trying to build spaces in which food sovereignty and medicine sovereignty are understood as aspects of a single project, in which the land is a teacher and a relative rather than a resource, in which healing is relational and communal rather than clinical and transactional, and in which the goal is not the optimization of individual functioning within existing systems but the gradual cultivation of the conditions under which those systems become, as we intend them to become, obsolete.
We are not trying to build a better empire. We are not trying to create an equitable version of Big Pharma 2.0. We are trying to listen to the plants, to the land, to the medicine stewards in whose hands these relationships have been held and protected at great cost and to allow what we hear to guide us toward forms of care and community that do not require the exhaustion and extraction of the people and beings they claim to serve.
The medicines are not a market opportunity. They are not a mental health revolution. They are relatives who have offered themselves to human beings across every continent and every era of our collective crisis, and who deserve, at this particular moment of civilizational reckoning, to be met with the reverence and governance and ecological reciprocity that their nature requires and that their survival, and perhaps ours, depends upon.
If you believe that the future of sacred medicine belongs to the communities who have always tended it not to pharmaceutical pipelines or venture capital portfolios please add your voice to our petition and share it with everyone in your network who understands what is at stake.
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