The United States is facing up to its racism during the most important election in memory. Ideas that had previously seemed impossible are now mainstream political conversation, and the Movement for Black Lives’ call to defund police, dismantle mass incarceration, and invest in communities has resonated around the world. What has drawn less public attention is the impact of these uprisings for racial justice on mass surveillance, civil rights, and digital free speech.

Following the 2016 election, the complete dissonance between elected officials and the electorate was palpable and signaled the dire need for large-scale organizing. It was in this moment that Sunrise Movement was born. Sunrise is a decentralized youth-led movement demanding climate action in the form of the Green New Deal. In 2016, the founders of Sunrise Movement dropped everything to study social movement theory and the history of social movements (major lessons are detailed in Mark and Paul Engler’s This Is an Uprising). All of this culminated into Sunrise Movement’s strategy: utilizing direct action (including sit-ins and regular climate strikes) to organize as many young people as possible to register as many voters as possible, then turn out the vote and stage mass non-cooperation events until the Green New Deal is formally adopted.  More concisely: Organize, vote, strike.

Sunrise’s mission is simple: implement the Green New Deal so that young people will have a livable future and environmental justice can be attained by our most vulnerable populations. Regular climate strikes act as powerful community building events that nonviolently escalate the conversation. The urgency is real, and presenting a dire problem (climate emergency) beside a comprehensive solution (the Green New Deal) in a unity-focused tone (Sunrise) ensures that every individual can become engaged, if only we find what resonates.

Sunrise Movement’s strategy involves developing a People’s Alignment which does not shy away from speaking the truth about our nation: We have not addressed the trauma of indigenous genocide and slavery, which has led to catastrophic policies including the War on Drugs. This manifests in the context of the climate emergency as environmental racism. Research demonstrates that the people who have contributed the least to climate change experience the harshest and most immediate consequences of the crisis, especially impoverished communities and specifically communities of color. Environmental racism and the War on Drugs are both systems of institutionalized racism. Climate justice is racial justice, and we cannot achieve racial justice without ending the War on Drugs.

The Green New Deal addresses the climate crisis with the kind of transformative change necessary to save our planet from catastrophe. The legislation includes principles of environmental justice and community reinvestment, extending protection and service to communities most directly and immediately impacted by the climate crisis. Both domestically and internationally, there are overlapping injustices of drug war criminalization and climate crisis, and there is even data suggesting that the full-scale militarization of the War on Drugs is directly contributing to carbon emissions, deforestation, and toxic pesticide use, especially in South America.

We have presidential candidates who are running on platforms that address many major components of the War on Drugs, including: cannabis legalization (everyone except Joe Biden, with Bernie Sanders leading the charge to define social equity as a tenet of legalization), ending mass incarceration, de-felonization of drug possession, and the medicalization of the opioid crisis via implementation of harm reduction policies. We even have candidates who have gone as far as suggesting that all drugs should be decriminalized! 

Beyond drug policy reform, some candidates have published extensive criminal justice reform platforms, including Bernie Sanders (whose platform headline includes “end the War on Drugs”) and Elizabeth Warren. Information about candidates’ positions on drug policy reform, harm reduction, and criminal justice reform are being synthesized into a zine by Students for Sensible Drug Policy’s Inter-Chapter Collaboration Committee.

The same candidates who champion the Green New Deal also advocate for the tenets of an end of the War on Drugs and economic liberation via abolition of student loan debt, comprehensive healthcare reform, and federal living wage legislation. The drug policy reform, harm reduction, and psychedelic renaissance movements must recognize our obligation to build power with a movement which seeks to fundamentally disarm corporate entities that maintain their dominance by means of economic force. 

2020 is the 100th anniversary of both women’s suffrage and the inauguration of successful nonviolent direct action, first led by Gandhi in 1920 against British occupation of India. Synchronously, 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of both the signing of the Controlled Substances Act and the first Earth Day, inviting a powerful opportunity for direct co-creation of the April 22, 2020 strikes.

Young people have been the largest voting generation since 2016, and in 2018 we outpaced Boomers in voting participation for the first time ever – and that was in a midterm election year when participation rates are historically even lower than those of general election years. Voters ages 18-39 will make 37% of the electorate in 2020. The 2020 election will be decided by voter turnout, so student and youth organizers’ most pressing task is finding the messaging that resonates with those we are trying to persuade and connecting those who can already hear us to the drug policy reform and climate action coalition network. 

Revolutions are completed when intersecting movements intentionally align toward a shared goal, so the most important thing we can do right now is find each other. Then, we organize. Get connected via People for Sensible Drug Culture. If you are a student, find your local SSDP chapter. Non-students are also invited to join a campus-based SSDP chapter. The first wave of resources for the drug policy reform/climate action coalition will be made available in the coming weeks. In the meantime, connect with your Sunrise hub and start the drug policy reform conversation in your local climate action network as organizing begins for December 6 #ClimateStrike. Climate justice ends the War on Drugs. People are receptive to this message, but we can’t expect them to understand if we don’t meet them where they’re at.

By mobilizing young people to participate in what is, in many ways, the counterculture’s full circle, we are raising a generation who know that we can change the world. We are planting the seeds of the restorative justice movement that will follow our anti-prohibition and climate action revolution. By layering the climate action and drug policy reform movements, we can laser-focus our strategy and take back our future in 2020.

The foundation of this article originally appeared on SSDP’s blog.

The prison industrial complex is a powerful force within the United States, lobbying for more prisons, stricter laws, and mandatory minimums, leading to an epidemic of mass incarceration even as crime rates sit at historic lows. Many argue that the emotional appeal to protect the children really had the effect of instigating violence and instability in communities around the country, especially when incarceration for drug possession became enough to separate parents and children for years.

It is well documented that the War on Drugs has disproportionately affected the impoverished, particularly communities of color. These observations were vindicated in March 2016 when a quote from former Nixon adviser John Ehrlichman appeared as a cover story for Harper magazine:

“‘You want to know what this was really all about,’ Ehrlichman, who died in 1999, said, referring to Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. ‘The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.’”

In addition to being an undeniable confession of targeting communities of color, this also serves as an insight into the War on Drugs as a tactic to disrupt the counterculture, including the psychedelic community.

When the War on Drugs began, much of the psychedelic counterculture went underground, and as countless psychedelic therapists continued to illegally treat their patients, many were determined to make psychedelics a legal therapeutic tool for healthcare professionals.

Research slowed considerably after LSD was made illegal, and then again when all psychedelics were relegated to Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act. After a decades-long endeavor, psychedelic researchers have resurfaced in mainstream culture presenting FDA-approved scientific data on psychedelic medicine as promising treatment options for some of the most difficult to treat conditions, specifically those that manifest from trauma. The collective data of all psychedelic research, within the U.S. and internationally, have reported consistently significant effects in the treatment of a variety of conditions.

Ibogaine, an entheogen derived from a West African bush that has been used ceremoniously by indigenous peoples for millennia, has been cited by several researchers in multiple journals as a powerful tool for fighting addiction. Ibogaine has a greater effect on the brains of those who have used opiates or amphetamines. It literally interrupts the brain’s production of dopamine when morphine receptors are activated, effectively disconnecting opiate use from the physical high, while also mediating the debilitating physical symptoms of opiate withdrawal.

Cassidy, a 37-year-old female, spent 19 years severely addicted to opioids and had only maintained sobriety for a maximum of three months while undergoing methadone treatment.

Then, in 2016, she participated in a treatment study using the new-to-the-West drug, ibogaine. After the four-day trip, she had kicked her addiction, successfully avoiding remission for the duration of the 18-month study.

In an interview with Psychedelic Times, Kevin Franciotti, a journalist and recent presenter at Psychedelic Science 2017, recalled his experience as a participant in a study researching the anti-addictive properties of ibogaine. He argued that due to its ability to mediate the physical symptoms of heroin withdrawal, ibogaine is “one of the most compassionate treatments” available for heroin detox.

Ketamine has also shown great promise treating addiction, with detoxified heroin addicts who received a psychedelic dose of ketamine reporting less intense cravings, improved emotional well-being, and abstinence from heroin use for the length of the two-year study.

Ketamine has also shown promise treating cocaine dependency, alcoholism, and severe depression, a condition correlated with addictive behavior. Ketamine is prescribed off-label by psychiatrists as emergency treatment for patients with acute impulses to harm themselves, and higher doses have been used to mediate treatment-resistant depression. This off-label use of ketamine has made mainstream headlines in NPR and other outlets over the past few years as research studies have been published supporting anecdotal evidence of ketamine users who have experienced relief from depression and addiction.

Ayahuasca has long been recognized for its ability to treat addiction, and ayahuasca treatment centers boast lower relapse rates than traditional addiction centers.

In 2013, a MAPS-funded study published in Current Drug Reviews concluded that among a sample of members of Brazil’s União do Vegetal, ayahuasca drinkers showed statistically higher rates of addiction recovery due to increased mindfulness and connection to other people. There have even been several incidents of ayahuasca being used for cancer treatment, adding to the psychedelic therapy theory that physical ailments are often manifestations of psychological distress.

Decades of peer-reviewed psychological and sociological research have consistently concluded that trauma is the root of many psychological disorders, addiction, physical ailments, and criminal behavior. The narratives of maladjusted individuals, such as those who struggle with severe addiction, often include abusive and neglectful caregivers, desperate poverty, lack of opportunity, and absence of functional adult role models.

A study of 470 substance abuse patients concluded that a full 80 percent of female participants and 70 percent of male participants had experienced sexual abuse and physical violence, with childhood abuse an even stronger correlate with adult substance abuse.

When we begin to recognize even the darkest of human behavior as manifestations of trauma and generational cycles of abuse and neglect, it becomes clear that society’s practice of ostracizing, isolating, and punishing maladjusted people (often beginning in childhood) perpetuates the problem rather than helps it.

Punishment uses unfavorable consequences to discourage a particular behavior, but in reality, society’s system of incarceration has perpetuated cycles of generational trauma, poverty, and stigma.

As psychedelic research goes mainstream, more people are being exposed to the idea of problematic behavior as a symptom of trauma—a symptom that can often be effectively remedied from a place of empathy, with or without psychedelic medicine. This aspect of psychedelic medicine has the potential to ignite a paradigm shift within our culture because it enables us to reframe complex social problems as manifestations of trauma while presenting evermore evidence of the efficacy of psychedelic therapy for these particular problems.

By encouraging this culture of empathy, we can create a society that promotes healing rather than punishment, and integration rather than isolation.

Psychedelics are a powerful method of modifying consciousness.  They have a profound ability to open people’s minds to entirely new ways of thinking that often remain long after the immediate effects of the drug have dissipated, often evaporating anxieties and complexes and sometimes initiating lasting positive personality change. Across thousands of academic research studies, the majority of participants who took psychedelics report that the experience was one of the most important of their lives.

Psychedelics do not discriminate. In the proper set and setting, they can make transcendental, mystical, and archetypal experiences historically relegated to religious and spiritual icons available to nearly anyone who chooses to ingest the substance.

In a more mundane way, such is the internet: anyone who chooses to seek information on a particular subject can access it via a wide spectrum of websites, from scholarly archives and government databases to research posted on personal blogs and databases of user-generated content. In both cases, such is knowledge: the connections we make change the way we see ourselves and the world.

Net neutrality is the idea that internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all data traveling over their networks equally, without discrimination against any specific websites, apps, or services. This means that regardless of the source of data, whether it be Google, Twitter, alternative media outlets like The Young Turks, or your own personal website, it will all be carried along the network without discrimination or preference.

Net neutrality prevents ISPs from becoming gatekeepers of internet traffic by ensuring that they do not show preference to any particular data, such as data belonging to companies that pay a special premium for unthrottled access to consumers. The open internet would become more like cable television services, where your content is at the mercy of the service provider. Sometimes referred to as creating an internet speed lane, in reality no data would travel faster, but data from non-preferred sources would be much slower. ISPs could charge extra for data when the network is busy, similar to Uber’s surge charges, or websites would simply not load.

Net neutrality can also be argued from an anti-censorship perspective. If ISPs can disrupt service based on the source of data, it is not hard to imagine that websites hosting content that threatens the financial wellbeing of powerful industries could be throttled or blocked entirely by imposing a fee that website hosts can’t afford.

Consider the lengths taken by Energy Transfer Partners, the corporation behind the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, to suppress the NoDAPL movement, such as hiring private security firms who attacked peaceful water protectors with dogs, water, pepper spray, and concussion grenades. Without net neutrality, ETP would have had another weapon—suppressing online speech and communication, which was absolutely instrumental to the movement’s actions.

The internet is a vibrant platform for information, innovation, expression, and community. It allows egalitarian access to an unimaginably immense archive of human culture and knowledge. Even if the two are not directly related, it is poetic to recall that both the psychedelic revolution and the invention of the internet took place in the 60s, and the epicenter for both events was California.

A new method of communication and a new culture were born, and in so many ways technology and the psychedelic revolution developed together. Microdosing became a mainstream conversation after articles were written on sites like HackRead and Forbes, detailing the experiences of Silicon Valley icons who used LSD to enhance creativity and problem-solving abilities.

We must remember how in less than two decades, an open internet enabled us to bridge some deep cultural divides, dismantle three-quarters of a century worth of drug propaganda, crowdsource massive databases of drug information, and crowdfund millions of dollars for FDA-approved research on psychedelics.

In so many ways, the psychedelic renaissance owes its life to an open internet.

This year, the FCC proposed changes to the measures instituted by the Obama administration, which would effectively end net neutrality as we know it. The fight to keep net neutrality has been a difficult task, but getting it back may prove to be nearly impossible.

This is far from the first time net neutrality has come under attack. In 2012, the SOPA and PIPA bills were introduced into Congress with strong monetary support from the telecom and entertainment industries. These bills not only threatened net neutrality, they criminalized any publication of copyrighted material under threat of domain suspension, allowing ISPs to take down websites without a warrant or due process.

In response, the internet rose up, initiating the largest online protest in history. The SOPA/PIPA blackout inspired hundreds of thousands of people to contact their legislators, and a bill which seemed uncontested and guaranteed to pass was successfully blocked.

We must stand together again to save the open internet. The FCC is accepting public comments, and to this date over five million comments have been submitted. Add your own, and encourage everyone you know to do so.

Net neutrality is psychedelic, and just as we are serving future generations by legalizing medicinal psychedelics and breaking the stigma of exploring our own consciousness, we must ensure that ISPs (and/or dystopian governments) are legally prevented from discriminating against information based on its source.

While we fight for the right to access the depths of our consciousness, we must ensure that we protect the  right to access data in the cybersphere. By protecting cognitive liberty—both the right to use drugs and the right to access information—we may be able to save our world from the mistakes of the past by integrating lessons for the future.