For the last five years I’ve been on hiatus from the psychedelic community, following my own experience of sexual victimization and the poor community response. I’ve gone on to complete a PhD focused on social responses to sexual violence. I also conduct best practice research on institutional responses, develop curriculums, write and consult on policies and procedures, and teach on sexual violence. All the while, I’ve kept one eye on the psychedelic movement, silently hoping to see the field advance while generally supporting mainstreaming and medicalization. The Kool-Aid I’d imbibed a decade earlier was still in my system, I guess. I thought making psychedelics available medically could make a positive difference in people’s lives.

In the last year my outlook has changed. I have been forced to grapple with the extent to which sexual violence is endemic to psychedelic therapy.

Abuses of power, especially those of a sexual nature, are especially pernicious and harmful in the context of psychedelic therapy for several reasons. First, there is the vulnerability of the population seeking this novel treatment. To be eligible for MDMA clinical trials, for example, one must demonstrate treatment resistant PTSD. This criteria is an important part of obtaining ethics approval for a novel treatment. By definition, these patients have tried multiple treatment options, to little or no avail. They are suffering, and obtaining effective relief may be a matter of life and death. This amplifies the power disparity between patients and clinicians in profound ways: a psychedelic clinician and the drug experience they offer may be a patient’s last hope.

Then there’s the matter of who actually wants to be a psychedelic therapist or play shaman, especially in the underground. It was clear to me, even ten years ago, that psychedelic spaces are home to many people interested in laying claim to spiritual power and authority, and preying on vulnerable people. There are numerous documented cases of people out to satisfy their own desires at the expense of those they claim to serve, and even more allegations and accusations floating around psychedelic communities, communicated in whispers and warnings.

Underground practitioners are an unregulated group of renegades, with minimal oversight and varying degrees of experience, training, and credentials. In some cases, they administer high doses of psychedelics to clients who are trying to heal deep psychological wounds. Sure, there are some good and ethical practitioners, but I have met over two hundred psychedelic therapists to whom I cannot comfortably and confidently refer people seeking treatment. The good ones, often, are the hardest to find.

We must think critically about how to reduce the power of practitioners to do harm and distribute power among people seeking psychedelic experiences, whether therapeutically motivated or not.

Decriminalization of psychedelic drugs would help address the problem of sexual misconduct by distributing access to these substances.

It could mitigate the problem by democratizing access, and allowing for greater choice of when, where, and with whom to take psychedelics. It could limit some aspects of the power held by psychedelic therapists by undermining their position as gatekeepers of psychedelic experiences. It could also reduce medical profiteering by providing alternatives to medicalized use, which may protect against corporate monopolies on access to psychedelic experiences.

Decriminalization could create scope to develop pathways for disclosure and ethical responses—for victims/survivors to tell their stories and seek help from informed others. It opens new avenues for justice. Sexual violence is already notoriously under-reported, and barriers— including distrust in police—are amplified when victims are also members of a criminalized subculture and were under the influence of illegal drugs when the violence occurred. Even in sanctioned settings, such as a clinical trial, stigma may deter filing a report or telling someone. When a victim is not afraid of persecution for their drug use, they may be more willing to tell a friend (friends are usually the first responders), ask for help, post about their experience online, or seek out an ethical oversight board with whom to file a formal complaint.

Frankly, decriminalization and democratization are necessary because too many professionals’ hands are dirty, both under- and aboveground. Of course, while not all practitioners are abusive, rapey, or otherwise exploitative, an alarming number of practitioners have participated in some form of silencing or enabling. Rick Doblin’s unwillingness to warn participants in MDMA clinical trials of the risks of sexual misconduct, or provide pathways for handling cases—especially in light of the history—is one obvious example. Olivia Goldhill reports that:

“‘The loving and trusting feelings that can be induced by MDMA can make patients more vulnerable to sexual pressure,’ wrote the head of MAPS. Yet he warned neither patients nor the FDA”

Allegations against Donna Dryer regarding her knowledge of her husband and co-facilitator Richard Yensen’s sexual transgressions—and her silence—are another example. But the issue is far more widespread. It’s not an issue of bad apples: the orchard is rotten.

For the last several decades, members of the psychedelic community have taken the contemptible stance that acknowledging the scope of the problem of sexual misconduct and abuses of power in the field poses a threat to the future of all psychedelic work. This should tell us something about the pervasiveness of the problem and the extent to which it is an open secret. What’s more, this culture of cover-ups, complacency, and active silencing of victims hurts those who are already suffering. Those who benefit from silencing victims/survivors are psychedelic therapists, researchers, and activists; preservation of the field amounts to preservation of their own jobs, incomes, and reputations.

After my experience of rape and violence, I was attacked for wanting to speak out. I was told that I was selfish, self-interested, and fame-seeking. I was warned that my speaking out would effectively end the psychedelic research movement and re-instigate the war on drugs. That same sentiment is on the record in Olivia Goldhill’s reporting on the problem of sexual abuse in psychedelic therapy:

“In the course of reporting this story, one psychedelics researcher Quartz reached out to said they didn’t want to be interviewed and warned that this article could have negative consequences for the field. ‘I’m a bit worried that mainly some very vocal people will be interviewed that will blame MAPS or the mainstreaming of psychedelic therapy for this incident, while these things are always much more nuanced and definitely not exclusive to psychedelic therapy,’ the researcher wrote in reply to Quartz’s email. ‘I think it is important to have a constructive dialogue around these issues and challenges, but it can easily become polarizing and potentially damaging to the current developments as well. I hope that you are aware of that and are approaching this carefully.’”

It’s important to note that the researcher who made the comment lacked the basic courage to put their name on the record and stand behind their own statements. They advance the toxic notion that telling the truth is the source of harm.

Harm is not done by those who seek to tell the truth: it’s done by those who are adamant that sexual violence and abuse must remain hidden.

Silencing tactics contribute to the long-term, devastating impacts of sexual violence on victims and survivors. Secondary victimization comprises its own area of research, focused on poor institutional responses across multiple sectors. Jennifer Freyd, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, coined the term “institutional betrayal” and found worse outcomes for victims/survivors who were subjected to poor institutional responses. Such responses are often motivated by an institution’s reputational interest, which highlights the critical need for external oversight bodies and accurate measurements of the problem. Within the psychedelic community, one would hope that a group of people supposedly motivated by the alleviation of traumatic suffering would be a bit more savvy in how they respond to traumas happening in their own domain. At least, that’s what I once hoped. It turns out that my hope was gravely misplaced.

Goldhill’s article raises questions about the fundamental tenability of psychedelic-assisted therapy in a professional setting. We cannot divorce current practices from violent histories, and the history of these therapies is one of limited oversight, insufficient or absent training to prevent sexual misconduct, dead-end reporting pathways and protocols, and, troubling, zero indication that these gaps will be meaningfully addressed.

In spring 2019, MAPS published a Code of Conduct which outlines Sexual Boundaries. MAPS’ training involves discussion of erotic transference and sexual boundaries, which are necessary but not sufficient. Addressing sexual misconduct requires comprehensive, evidence-based prevention education strategies and clear avenues for holding therapists to account. In terms of external oversight, Goldhill’s Quartz article suggests that the FDA and IRB boards have been useless in intervening and providing necessary oversight to MAPS.

“All US clinical trials are overseen by an independent review board (IRB) and, in the trial consent documents, MAPS told trial participants to contact the IRB with any concerns or complaints. Buisson did so in January 2018, but says the IRB told her it could not investigate as the trial was over. The IRB did not respond to requests for comment.“

I used to believe in the potential of psychedelic therapy. After my rapist chose to assault and abuse me, I wanted to sound the alarm in a way that I hoped would preserve and nurture all that I found healing and good about psychedelic therapy, while rooting out sexual misconduct and hostility towards victims. But these patterns of violence are endemic to the psychedelic therapy movement. When people told me I risked destroying an entire movement that I loved, I believed them—I disappeared, went quiet, and left the community.

Now, I have come to the sad conclusion that any movement predicated on the belief that women and our safety are an acceptable sacrifice to a larger cause—especially causes with blatant histories of advancing at the expense of women—is a movement that I am unwilling to support. The ethical viability of the psychedelic therapy movement is in question—and not because victims are speaking out and finally being heard in our #MeToo world. No, it’s not the fault of victims. Responsibility lies on the shoulders of abusers and the people who have been enabling abusers and covering up for them for decades. MAPS, and their affiliates both under- and above-ground, have demonstrated that neither patients nor the public can trust them.

The greatest hope for introducing an ethical psychedelic therapy model is in conjunction with the decriminalization of all drugs.

The grief we live with during the Covid-19 pandemic is political. The threat of death stalks the streets, and so we grieve the freedom of movement and the lives we had a few months ago. As a consequence of overwhelming and outrageous failures of leadership, the grief of losing loved ones will touch exponentially more people than it might have otherwise. Capitalists urging workers to get back to serving elite economic interests incites grief for the hope that maybe a crisis like this would elicit more human compassion and consideration. 

Disappointment can be a form of grief. And while there are ample examples of mutual aid, generosity, and solidarity, these points of light coexist with the emotional, relational, and political realities of our grief.

We are actively grieving who and what we have already lost, and experiencing anticipatory grief of what we stand to lose. Some of our losses are ambiguous. We can’t always see or name what we feel slipping away. We aren’t just bereft of loved ones, we are losing access to precious moments. When people we love die from COVID-19, we can’t be by their side, hear their last words, tell them we love them. We can’t see or touch or bathe their bodies. We have no material proof that they are really gone. These abstractions compound grief.

I remember a day in late February when it hit me: the world I woke up in the week before, the month before, was gone. What lay ahead was unknown then, and remains unknown now. We have to dwell in a prolonged uncertainty that is laden with threats.

It’s not all brand new. This is also a period where we are forced to confront the uncertainty that has long been leaking through the fissured surface of late capitalism. So many people already live at the edges of those fissures. The inhumanity of our social, political, and economic systems is laid bare at the same moment that these systems face an existential threat. Toxic systems were the devil we knew. We can see the devil’s face even more clearly today than we could three months ago.

I am among many whose political critiques are rooted in psychedelic insights of interconnection. These insights help me understand and resist everyday assaults on life, ecosystems, and humanity commited by imperialist white supremacist capitalist [hetero] patriarchy. The incursion and colonization of psychedelic spaces by capitalists, charlatans, and leeches grieves me because what I have learned from psychedelics guides me in times like these. It grieves me to see psychedelics diluted and co-opted to reproduce the hegemonic social and political structures that psychedelics inspired me to resist in the first place. 

There is fuel inside of this grief. It shows me what I care about. My grief and its siblings—rage, hope, sorrow, love—mobilize me to continue resisting madness and working toward a more just, egalitarian, and humane configuration of our society and shared resources.

Our grief now serves a powerful, political function. There is work to do, now and over the coming months, toward dismantling oppressive systems and building a better world. Our grief informs that work. Our capacity to be present with who and what we have lost, and what we stand to lose, can enhance our sense of connection to our values and to each other. In grieving together, we stand to build and nurture relationships that are the seedbed of collective resistance and hope.

I know I am not the only one whose sensitivity to grief—and the tools I’ve developed to process it—derive from psychedelic experience. It was because of psychedelics that I pursued training and education in clinical chaplaincy. My time with families at the bedsides of their sick and dying loved ones taught me how showing up for grief was a way of affirming life. That’s one reason I believe we need to stay present with our grief throughout this pandemic: because it keeps us attuned to love and life as nothing else can.

Here is what I have learned about grief:

Be with it. Give yourself time everyday—maybe three minutes, maybe three hours—to stare at the wall and feel the emotions and sensations of grief, whether acute, abstract, or anticipatory. Maybe you’ll weep, maybe you won’t. Maybe there’s a song or movie that’s sure to get a river flowing on your cheeks. If the tears are coming, let them rock. 

Make a list of things you find self-soothing, and keep it readily available; different states of grief can make it hard to know what you need or how to soothe yourself, so having a ready-made list is like a love letter to your future self, offering a roadmap to comfort for moments when you’re distressed. Try baths, walks, making art, building a fire, or cocooning in a blanket. 

Remember that current griefs can make old griefs feel alive again. If you know someone has lost a lot of important people in their life, be aware that they may need extra care right now.

Talk about it. Ask people about their grief or what they are afraid of losing, and respond in ways that normalize it. Share. If someone you care about is experiencing death and loss, ask them about the person they lost and invite them to reminisce. What stories do they remember? What did they appreciate about that person? Listen. Be kind. You can ask questions and offer engagement, and even if the invitation of engagement is declined for now, you have signaled that you are available. Just knowing support is on hand is its own comfort.

The road ahead is long and too twisted to see what’s next. Where we are now is a complex jumble of emotions and basic human needs. There is so much to tend to, so much to do just to survive, and so little comfort. Grief is not a thing people feel, it’s a thing people do. And in these times, it’s an asset to our survival—especially if we grieve together. 

Nothing can prepare a woman to read a journalist’s account of her own rape. To call it surreal is an understatement. Rachel Monroe’s handling of my story for New York Magazine (read it here), situated in a larger piece on sexual abuse in ayahuasca tourism, was exactly what I hoped it would be: understated, nuanced, to the point, accurate in fact and time-frame. She resisted sensationalism, which isn’t easy to do when the rapist in question has so many murder allegations against him. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

And anyway, who on Earth — besides the one who survived it — could possibly describe the horror of having a man writhe beside you in the dark as the world pulses and melts around you, as you begin to realize that you cannot move? Under the influence of scopolamine (brugmansia), the fear tasted green in my cotton mouth. I watched as my overwhelming doubt in this man grew quiet, how my inner thoughts came to sound like his voice while, next to me, he wouldn’t stop saying “I love you, we’re in love, this is the will of god.” I don’t even believe in god.

Nothing made sense, not his words, not his erection, not my paralysis.

It took me ten minutes to muster the strength to turn away from him that night. A pool of sweat had formed between us. I spent the next eight hours shivering, ten feet from the bed he slept in, unable to coil my fingers around my sleeping bag, unzip it, and crawl inside. From that night on, I was clay in his hands. I watched myself speak his words and do as he instructed. I couldn’t stop myself. It was like he had commandeered my will, my body, my inner life. I did as he told me to. “Get on the bed.” I’ll never forget the rage in his eyes, how his face contorted in hate. All I could feel while he was inside me was his hatred of me, how I wasn’t even human to him. He left without a word. That was the first of six rapes.

Maybe the horror is in the numbness of it all, the way he crept inside my body and twisted my mind. The thing about being brainwashed is how dream-like everything seems, how tranquil. I spent those twenty five days in a haze. He took me from myself. I was a part of him. Leaving never crossed my mind. And thank goodness for that. To this day, I believe he may have killed me if I tried to leave. To escape took surpassing my captor’s own ability to deceive.

The moment I managed to escape hinged on three factors: first, it had been a while since he had dosed me with scopolamine, so my head was not totally muddled. Second, I’d gotten an email alleging him of multiple murders: bodies cut to pieces with chainsaws, producing shrunken human heads for the black market, that sort of thing. I was afraid for my life. And when, an hour after that email, he locked eyes with me, testing the lies I’d told him in my effort to escape, I had no doubt that this man was willing to kill me. That distinct terror cleared my head enough that I could devise a plan that worked. The third thing, the x-factor, was luck.

Maybe the horror is that he did this on purpose, meticulously. He planned this. He knew exactly what he was doing. By all accounts, he’d done it before. He had a method. He changed my name. He controlled my food intake. He drugged me multiple times. He cut off my contact to the outside world. He laid a trap. And it worked. For a while, anyway.

Do you see it now? Can you begin to comprehend that kind of powerlessness?

And that’s just the beginning. The twenty five days I spent in his grasp were just the beginning. The story rode me for years after that, spurs and whip and all. And the fallout when I got home, the utter failure of the ayahuasca community to respond appropriately to me as I fought to survive, was a nightmare every bit as traumatizing as my time in the Amazon.

In the New York Magazine article, Daniela Peluso’s comments offer an exceptionally clear example of the rhetoric of victim blame I encountered every day of my recovery. I struggled against it as I fought to bring light to sexual violence (and abuses of power more broadly) within the global culture around ayahuasca. Her words betray the conviction that women get themselves raped by extension of their naïveté. Her rhetoric suggests that women should know better, they should look past their cultural expectations — they should keep themselves safe. This is woman blame — undiluted, straight up, chased with a caveat about being feminist and not blaming victims that lingers with the taste of rotten lime.

The real responsibility lies not with women to keep themselves safe, but with shamans to stop raping.

And to move in that direction, to actually work to keep women safe, we need to consider who controls the narrative about ayahuasca. Members of the global research community have circled the wagon. They have used academic rhetoric to build a wall against critique and criticism, silencing those who seek to draw attention to the proliferation of sexual violence in their midst. Such acts depict scholarship at its worst: using big words and impressive credentials to shut people out of the conversation and bury the issue.

The controlled narrative goes something like this: ayahuasca is good, and we need to control how people perceive it because this is a controlled substance we want to see legalized, a medicine we want to see legitimated. And if we have to sacrifice a few women who get themselves raped to keep ayahuasca’s name clean, so be it. Efforts to raise the issue of sexual violence in a meaningful way, to bring people to the table and begin to create solutions, have been attacked and bullied into submission and silence. Anyone who watched the rise and fall of the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council can attest to that.

When I’m not doing research, I teach sexual violence resistance to university women. The program’s developer pulls no punches on this: resistance is not prevention. Prevention targets those who commit rape (mostly men, according to decades of peer-reviewed research). Resistance is a strategy that reduces, but does not eliminate, rape. But the first step in resistance is identifying that there is a problem, that rape happens, that it can happen to anyone. It’s one piece of the puzzle in addressing the problem, but it’s by no means the only piece.

In the case of ayahuasca tourism, efforts to address the issue, including fostering women’s resistance (“keeping themselves safe”) are continuously stymied and silenced. And the people who silence those efforts keep coming back with the same nonsense: women are responsible for their own safety (victim blame), it doesn’t happen that much (minimization of the problem), it’s not a big deal (minimization of its impact), we need to protect the name of ayahuasca (self-interest). In other words: “ladies, keep yourselves safe, but we aren’t going to actually give you any information that might help you do so, and we aren’t going to out abusers, or take any other preventative measures, either.” This kind of nonsense, like abuses of power and sexual violence, is not limited to the ayahuasca community. But it’s the example I have to work with. And to borrow from Anne Lamott, if people want me to talk about them more kindly, they should have behaved better.

Which leads me to my point. The responsibility for addressing this issue lies in the hands of the wider community. When I was in recovery, people often told me that I was in a position to find a solution, to create change, to keep other women safe. But it’s ridiculous to tell a person in a sinking boat that they are now perfectly poised to save others from drowning. It is not a victim’s responsibility to find solutions. It’s a victim’s responsibility to take care of herself, to try and survive on her own terms. And the role of the community is to step up to the bat, start meaningful dialogues, and try to combat the issue together.

My relationship to the ayahuasca community was always as an outsider. As a young researcher fascinated by marginalized spiritual communities, it was a compelling field. As a survivor, I stepped into the community to try and bring attention to an issue I was forced to grapple with. Since the subculture around ayahuasca claims to be progressive and self-reflective, I thought this community might be ready to lead the way in handling the age old problem of sexual abuse (and abuse of power) by spiritual leaders. I was wrong.

All I wanted, in the most treacherous phases of my recovery, was for people who care about ayahuasca to say “this isn’t your problem to fix, it’s our problem. We’re going to do something about it. And when you’re ready to give us input, we’ll listen.”

Within that conversation, the input of survivors is vital: we have valuable knowledge, insight, and guidance regarding sexual violence resistance, prevention, and response. But we are not obligated to stand on the front lines of the struggle. Communities everywhere have to work together on this issue — church communities, schools and universities, professional networks. Anywhere there is power to be abused and potential victims to be exploited, people need to work together to stop sexual violence, and to react appropriately when the unthinkable happens. Survivors need support, not pressure to find the solution or recover in a tidy way that makes everyone else in the community feel comfortable.

What’s more, we victims are the only ones with the authority to tell our community if their response to us in the aftermath of rape has been appropriate and helpful. In my case, with the exception of very few individuals, it wasn’t. And for it to improve, I’d suggest engaging the writings of feminists like Rebecca Stringer and Nicola Gavey. Our culture’s handling of victims places the onus of responsibility on individuals to prevent victimization, rather than looking at complex cultural and social factors that foster the proliferation of sexual violence. What’s more, the onus isn’t just on would-be victims to protect themselves, but to rise above: not just to survive, but to turn their personal hell into the best thing that ever happened to them. Maybe it changed their outlook on life and now they can write a step-by-step guide to survival that makes them a boatload of cash. It’s balderdash, codswallop, bullshit.

Don’t get me wrong. These stories need to be told. But we need to think carefully about how they are framed.

Communities, and the individuals that constitute them, need to educate themselves about victim-blame. Working with survivors can be a minefield, and even people with the best intentions can say the wrong things when they aren’t sensitive to the dangers of the territory. That level of sensitivity takes work. That works begins in communities.

And let’s be clear, grammatically speaking. It’s not that women get raped. I did not “get raped.” This shaman raped me.

One final thing. I wasn’t an ayahuasca tourist: I knew what it was, I had a scholarly interest in it, but I did not go to the Amazon with any plans or intentions of drinking it. I certainly would never, under any conditions, have consented to ingesting brugmansia (scopolamine). And I did not walk into the Amazon naively. Even if I had, it wouldn’t be my fault.

The fact is, I was a Harvard graduate student with training in ethnography, and a field-education student working with an organization that had been collaborating with my abuser (who was also my boss and supervisor) for two years before I went to the Amazon. Two days before I left, I specifically asked a trusted colleague if there was any danger that this man would make sexual advances toward me. I was reassured that he would never do such a thing.

But for all my training and all my knowledge, I was blindsided by drugs I did not consent to taking, in an environment miles away from the nearest town, police station, or paved road. I had no way to contact the outside world except to use my abuser’s phone (did I mention he gave me the wrong phone number to pass along, so that no one back home could contact me?). I was blindsided by a man who planned every step of what he did to me. I wasn’t naive. I “knew better.” And I thought I was immune. Turns out, this nightmare can happen to anyone.

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Psychedelic Sisters In Arms was produced in collaboration with Oriana Mayorga.