Theoretical Background and Rationale: Traditional contexts of psychedelic use have often been attenuated simultaneous to the wider social uptake of these substances in the west. Many scholars, practitioners, and indigenous medicine holders have stressed the necessity to preserve traditional insights and contexts even as their medicines have taken on new forms. As the psychedelic industry develops, many are wary that new legal, economic, and social paradigms could eclipse or undermine traditional uses.

1. Research Question and Hypothesis: This panel will ask what constitutes colonizing practices of psychedelics and what are their effects? We hypothesize that certain constraints and conditions exist that have evolved out of generations of psychedelic use that cannot be separated from certain formal and unquantifiable elements of community and ecology without remainder.  

2. Methods and Analysis: Through investigating various forms of use, we look at charges of appropriation and epistemicide, and the monetization of traditional ecological knowledge to the latter’s detriment, through ethnographic, case-based methods, and reviews of contemporary and historical literature.

3. Main Findings: Integrated ways forward include a moratorium on patents, declaring these substances and their derivatives global patrimony; allocating profits to preserve indigenous land (e.g., preserving the home of peyote in Mexico from silver mining), and retaining certain ritualistic elements that emerged historically with psychedelics.

4. Conclusion: Indiscriminate decontextualization of psychedelic substances from their contexts – biological, ecological, psychological, and social – runs the risk of undermining the wellspring which makes them efficacious, rendering them as one more tool in the pharmaceutical lineup.