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 25, 2020
Field Trip Ventures leads the charge to use “psychedelic” as a marketing buzzword for any kind of niche therapy.
May 5, 2020
"I want nothing to do with those kinds of folks who want to decriminalize psychedelics,” Rahn told Forbes."
May 7, 2020
The grief we live with during the COVID-19 pandemic is political.
May 20, 2020
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.
May 27, 2020
Aldous Huxley's thoughts on “progress” in capitalist democracies, why people take drugs, and the role of psychedelics in people's lives.
June 3, 2020
American policing is a white supremacist institution that has repeatedly demonstrated the degree to which it values property over human life. Our struggles against the police are inseparably entwined with similar struggles around the world, and they cannot be disconnected from larger struggles for human rights.
July 10, 2020
The current spotlight on toxic law enforcement culture has propelled conversations about facial recognition and biometric surveillance into mainstream politics. Banning facial recognition is necessary to avoid automating racism and further institutionalizing white supremacy.
July 11, 2020
Two of our biggest crises—COVID-19 and climate change—lay bare the magical thinking that pervades psychedelic discourse: that individual experiences of oneness will necessarily transform our society for the better.
July 17, 2020
For decades, MAPS and other proponents of psychedelic medicalization have justified their emphasis on treating police and soldiers as a political strategy in service to mainstreaming psychedelic drugs. This strategy perpetuates the logic of white supremacism, capitalism, and imperialism.
July 24, 2020
LSD chemist and longtime drug war prisoner, William Leonard Pickard, was officially released from prison on July 27, 2020. Pickard had been locked down since 2000 and was slated to serve two life sentences without the possibility of parole.