Rachael is a writer and environmental consultant who advises nonprofits and foundations on climate change. With an expertise in tropical forests, Rachael has conducted fieldwork in the Brazilian and Ecuadorian Amazon, Borneo, Uganda and elsewhere. After almost a decade in climate policy, Rachael has turned her attention to the spiritual implications of our current ecological crises. Rachael stumbled into psychedelics as a participant in a psilocybin clinical trial for major depression. Her writing excavates the potential risks, rewards, and societal implications of medicalizing and commercializing mysticism. Her work interrogates the intersection of the mystical and the moral, and envisions the role of non-ordinary states of consciousness in current and future forms of religion. Rachael explores these themes as a Junior Fellow at Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions.
April 22, 2019
How do you center the needs and perspectives of people of color in your activism—not because you want to fill a quota, but because the success of your work depends on it?
October 9, 2019
With the recent creation of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, we must remember that, while industrialized medicine has never attempted to serve all people, institutional histories vary from one organization to the next.
October 21, 2019
Reality Sandwich was sold to a group called Delic Corp. Now there's a lawsuit.
October 22, 2019
Chicago’s Committee on Health and Human Relations unanimously passed (50-0) a resolution October 16 to decriminalize entheogenic plants and fungi.
October 31, 2019
Climate justice is racial justice, and we cannot achieve racial justice without ending the War on Drugs.
November 21, 2019
With a checkered history of misconduct, how will psychedelic-assisted therapists be held accountable in the emerging legal field?
November 25, 2019
The first time I bought a balloon of heroin I was 20 years old. Fresh out of rehab, I was craving opiates—specifically OxyContin.
December 5, 2019
Pinchbeck has not publicly engaged in the difficult work of reorganizing his relationship to power, which is a precondition for learning to wield power and authority responsibly. Instead, he has shown that he is predominantly concerned with reestablishing his career and with recentering himself as an authority figure
December 19, 2019
A corrective experience achieved through dropping acid and running the 2019 Burning Man Ultramarathon
January 15, 2020
A recent BBC story entitled “The ‘psychedelics coach’ with drug-fuelled career advice,” offers an opportunity to examine what happens when sloppy journalism and self-promotional psychedelic marketers collide.