One of the most important aspects of the psychedelic movement is preserving the right to grow and consume plant medicines at home without fear of legal repercussions. The right to cultivate psychoactive plants and entheogens from the comfort of your home represents the core of the anti-prohibition movement, a direct response to decades of tyrannical Drug War atrocities. It symbolizes the freedom many of us have all been fighting for since we first hit a joint and realized how pathetic and tragic it is that people are rotting in prison for the possession and consumption of Mother Nature’s gifts, which are comically easy to cultivate with minimal resources. The federal government, mired in all of its “not-in-my-town,” Bible-thumping pomposity, made growing plants, like mushrooms or cannabis, at home an arguably easier way to end up in federal prison than driving around town throwing stink bombs out the window at ICE agents.

Over the last several years, the chains of psychedelics prohibition have become slightly looser. Three states have implemented state-level legislative measures to allow psilocybin therapy: Oregon, Colorado, and New Mexico. There have also been other cities, such as  Arcata, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Detroit, Ann Arbor, Cambridge, and Minneapolis, to name a few, that have deprioritized entheogens within city limits. This essentially directs the local police force to abstain from spending taxpayer dollars on investigating or prosecuting the possession, cultivation, or consumption of certain naturally occurring psychedelics, such as psilocybin mushrooms, DMT from ayahuasca, and mescaline from San Pedro cacti. 

But even in the states where psychedelic therapy is legal, the right to grow plant medicine at home remains largely illegal. Why? Because being able to grow your own medicine undercuts regulated product suppliers and pharmaceutical companies, and, by extension, the big-moneyed interests funding the political action committees behind these initiatives. Colorado’s Natural Medicine Health Act allows limited home grow, setting it apart from Oregon's and New Mexico’s frameworks and underscoring how rare such regulation and access actually are. We unequivocally cannot have psychedelics or plant medicines locked behind the impenetrable wall of American pharmaceutical jurisprudence. Home grow exemptions open the door for people to take control of their health, and it meaningfully forces the federal government to say, “We are trusting you to be responsible adults.” While I understand that we need big money to lobby in a way that matters, we have directly and indirectly handed the mic to pharmaceutical interests to speak and lobby on our behalf. 

The irony of giving corporations licenses to sell us plants and fungi that we can grow at home for a fraction of the cost isn’t lost on me. And it shouldn’t be lost on you, either. This is exactly why these smaller, local efforts matter. I love seeing city councils pass deprioritization measures, but people are still vulnerable to state and federal prosecution. It also leaves several plant medicines off the “deprioritized” list that should be included. 

In almost every conversation, both on the floor of state legislatures and between individuals who consider themselves proponents of psychedelic reform, hypocrisy oozes from every pore. We condemn the actions of the Drug War with one hand, yet proliferate its harms with the other. I’m not sure if it’s decades of brainwashing or unbridled hippie logic we’re dealing with here, but it’s odd to me that the only plants included in the decriminalization push are psychedelic-containing plants and fungi. We are leaving out plants, specifically opium poppies and coca shrubs, that could help solve massive problems in this country. For fucks sake, the streets of almost every major American city are flooded by people who are homeless and sick because they’re hopelessly addicted to drugs that contain alkaloids we can replicate with plants that are infinitely less harmful and expensive compared to what’s being sold by dealers. 

It is irresponsible and illogical to leave these other plants out of the “decriminalize nature” conversation for no better reason than the plants sound off-putting to people, thanks to their stigma. Is this not another version of psychedelic exceptionalism? (This is not intended to be a jab at the grassroots organization Decriminalize Nature, for the record, which has done impressive work advancing deprioritization initiatives in more than 25 cities across the U.S. I am merely pointing out that we shouldn’t put limits on the nature we are working to decriminalize.)

Additionally, the American demand for cocaine is insatiable. It’s been this way since the 1980’s, and it has singlehandedly turned plenty of regions south of Tijuana into narco-states. Almost every bag of cocaine sold in the United States arguably carries with it the blood of children who died laboring to produce it, to say nothing of the billions and billions of taxpayer dollars spent on playing the world’s most misguided game of whack-a-mole, wherein federal agencies spend a fortune to find and eliminate cocaine dealers but never manage to make a dent in the overall supply. I haven’t done cocaine in years, but I could still find an eight-ball in 30 minutes or less if I wanted to. All that money and violence only serve to drive up the price, making cocaine addiction far more expensive than it needs to be. Allowing the cultivation of coca — which is to cocaine as coffee is to concentrated caffeine extract, mind you — would help cripple the violence and wasted tax dollars associated with this plant. Additionally, researchers are currently studying the health benefits of coca to help diminish the stigma, violence, and criminalization associated with it. 

The same can be said for opium poppies, which have been illegal to cultivate in the United States since the Opium Poppy Control Act of 1942. Americans fucking love opiates. We’ve loved opiates since Albert from Little House on the Prairie fell in with the wrong crowd and started eating morphine by the fistful. People addicted to fentanyl have flooded the streets in almost every city in the country, and overdose rates have generally risen steadily since 2003, experiencing a sharp rise during the COVID pandemic, killing over 107,000 people in 2022, over 80 percent of whom had opioids in their system. 

Opioids, like fentanyl and oxycodone, are far more potent and dangerous than the opium derived from poppy pods, and require lab and chemistry knowledge to produce. Poppies require dirt and sunlight. I am of the distinct opinion that a harm reduction approach would be effective here. Allowing people to cultivate opium poppies would likely put a serious dent in overdose deaths and synthetic opiate addiction, not to mention give chronic pain patients a reasonable alternative to pain relief, since almost every doctor across the country is scared shitless to prescribe painkillers to anyone who isn’t on their deathbed. Including these plants in the decriminalization conversation would help correct the very weird logic that says “these plants are cool and trippy, but these other plants are bad and dangerous,” which, unfortunately, also plagues our current lobbying efforts. It would also carry immense potential to heal a lot of the damage the Drug War has wrought upon the American public.

Growing these sacred plants at home is punk rock as fuck. It’s representative of so much more than the people who will consume it; it’s saying loudly and proudly to the oppressors of all that is good: “Fuck you, try and stop us.” The truth is that trying to control the growth of plants in any capacity is as futile as it is dystopian. We don't need bombs to spark the revolution; we need soil and water. 

My proposed solution is simple: Every single person who reads this and considers themselves an advocate for psychedelic reform needs to call and e-mail their congressmen and local legislators until their eyes bleed, demanding that under no uncertain terms should any laws relaxing psychedelics prohibition move forward without including home grow. 

Right now, the “trigger laws” moving through state legislatures (in West Virginia, South Dakota, and many others) are designed to legalize psilocybin therapy in a “turn-key” fashion once the FDA approves it. But these bills purposely exclude home grow and keep naturally-occurring psilocybin illegal. These laws only carve a legal pathway for a patented pharmaceutical version of psilocybin, called COMP360, a compound created by COMPASS Pathways, a leading psychedelic pharmaceutical company. Of course, COMPASS is the firm proposing and lobbying for these trigger laws. Not only is this an infringement on our rights as humans, but it’s also ensuring the criminalization of nature. 

While I personally would love to encourage you all to grow your own fungi and plant medicine regardless of what the law says, this publication does not endorse illegal behavior. It does endorse finding a savvy attorney, however. So, interpret all of this as you wish. If you do happen to accidentally inoculate a tub with spores, just remember that being able to grow your own medicine at home is not about making a profit. Give these medicines away to the people free of charge as often as possible. If you, like me, believe that there is no earthly way to stop people from growing plants or taking drugs, help your fellow man by providing him or her with a baggy of free, clean, and high-quality home-grown mushrooms. It is aligned with the spirit of the movement to give out plant medicines to as many people as possible without making a dime. I’m not suggesting anybody risk their freedom, but the beauty of these things is they’re easy to cultivate discreetly. If I can get away with growing weed in a one-bedroom apartment in San Diego without my landlord finding out, I assure you it’s not hard to grow drugs without getting arrested (many of which, even our most diligent police officers, wouldn’t be able to distinguish from regular garden plants or hemp, for what it’s worth).

No one should live in fear of federal prison time for cultivating medicine in the privacy of their own homes. But the way things are shaping up, access to plant medicines will be available only to those who can afford it or those who get permission from their doctors or therapists. That doesn’t sit right with me! Neither do people dying from fentanyl when they could be drinking poppy tea. Neither do children dying to produce cocaine in the jungles of Colombia when Americans could be getting buzzed on coca leaves we grew ourselves. Let’s make nature fully legal and unrestricted to all. 

As always, stay safe and please trip responsibly, my friends.

💌 If you loved this email, forward it to a psychonaut in your life.

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