When people talk about psychedelics and cannabis today, the conversation usually splits into lanes: clinical trials, Silicon Valley microdosing hacks, or wellness trends.
But before they were hashtags or “treatments,” entheogens like ayahuasca, peyote, psilocybin, and cannabis carried a much older role. They weren’t just substances—they were cultural technologies. For generations, communities have used these plants to encode story, anchor identity, and stitch memory into ritual (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019; Schultes & Hofmann, 1992).
Plants as Libraries, Not Just Drugs
Think about it this way: an ayahuasca ceremony in the Amazon isn’t only about the visions—it’s about the icaros (songs) that guide the experience, the cosmology retold in chant, the ecological ethics carried in myth. Peyote ceremonies among the Native American Church aren’t just “sessions”—they’re intergenerational archives, teaching resilience through rhythm and prayer (Calabrese, 1997). Cannabis, burned as incense in Hindu practice or shared communally in Rastafari ritual, isn’t just about getting high—it’s a tool for remembering relationship, with each other and with the divine (Clarke & Merlin, 2013).
Cognitive neuroscience now backs up what elders already knew. Entheogens heighten neuroplasticity, shift emotional salience, and etch memory more vividly (Ly et al., 2018; Barrett et al., 2020). When that altered state is paired with collective practice, it’s not just a trip—it’s a cultural imprint. In that sense, these plants are libraries in disguise: transmitters of cosmology, keepers of law, and archives of ecological knowledge.
Entheogens as Cultural Technologies
Long before psychedelic science was measured in PET scans and fMRI charts, plant medicines were already running as cultural operating systems. Entheogens weren’t just about altering perception—they were structured ways of carrying memory, ethics, and cosmology across generations (Schultes & Hofmann, 1992; Dobkin de Rios, 1984).
Think about ayahuasca: it’s not just the brew, but the icaros (songs) that encode ecological knowledge and collective story. Peyote ceremonies layer rhythm, drumming, and prayer to weave resilience into community life (Calabrese, 1997). In Hindu and Sikh contexts, cannabis has long been part of ritual offerings—framing altered states as forms of devotion, not distraction (Clarke & Merlin, 2013). These aren’t random cultural add-ons; they’re the actual technology—the ritual architecture that turns pharmacology into lived meaning.
Cognitive neuroscience helps explain why these practices stick. Psychedelics and cannabinoids enhance neuroplasticity, heighten emotional salience, and lock memories in with more weight (Ly et al., 2018; Barrett et al., 2020). When those brain states are paired with structured ceremony, the result isn’t just an “experience”—it’s myth embodied. Stories become visceral, origin tales feel etched in bone, ecological teachings land as lived truths. In this way, plants aren’t just “used” by people; people co-evolve with plants, embedding story into nervous systems through ceremony.
Entheogens, then, can be seen as libraries and servers: they don’t just shift consciousness in the moment, they carry cultural knowledge forward—ritual by ritual, trip by trip, generation by generation.
What Happens When Ceremony Becomes Protocol?
The modern psychedelic renaissance loves its protocols: prep, dose, integrate. Checklists, white coats, therapy manuals. But what gets lost when ancient ceremonies are distilled into clinical “interventions”? Entheogens stop being cultural technologies and start looking like sterile treatment tools (Langlitz, 2013).
Ayahuasca
Take ayahuasca. In Amazonian traditions, the brew is inseparable from the icaros, the jungle environment, and the lineage of the curandero guiding the night (Labate & Cavnar, 2014).
But in Western clinics, it’s reduced to “active alkaloids” delivered in a lab chair. Similarly, peyote, once at the heart of Native American Church ceremonies that provided resilience against cultural erasure, now faces the risk of being commodified as another “psychedelic therapy molecule” (George et al., 2019).
This extraction isn’t just a vibe shift—it has legal teeth. Indigenous groups have had to fight for sacramental protections under religious freedom statutes in both the U.S. and abroad (Dobkin de Rios & Grob, 2005). Lawsuits over ayahuasca importation (e.g., União do Vegetal v. Gonzales, 2006) and peyote access show how fragile these rights are when the substances are redefined through biomedical or commercial lenses. Intellectual property disputes also surface as pharmaceutical companies try to patent isolated compounds that have been in community use for centuries (Tupper, 2009).
The Evolution of Ethnogens, Culturally
The danger is clear: when ceremony becomes protocol, the cultural memory encoded in entheogens risks being erased, replaced by mechanistic models that ignore the relational, ecological, and communal dimensions. What was once myth and ritual becomes mechanism and metric. And with that shift, the people who carried these practices through centuries of prohibition and colonization are often pushed to the margins, excluded from both recognition and profit.
Diaspora, Urban Reclamations, and the Politics of Memory
Entheogens don’t just live in jungles, deserts, or mountain shrines—they travel with people. In diasporic and urban contexts, cannabis, mushrooms, and other plant medicines have been woven into rituals of survival, memory, and reclamation.
For Afro-Caribbean communities, cannabis has long carried spiritual and political weight, linked to Rastafarian sacrament and anti-colonial resistance (Chevannes, 2001). In U.S. cities, black and brown communities are increasingly reviving psilocybin and ayahuasca ceremonies, blending ancestral traditions with contemporary struggles for belonging (Labate & Cavnar, 2014).
This reclamation is not nostalgia—it’s repair. For lineages fractured by slavery, migration, and colonization, entheogens become tools to restore continuity. They don’t just ease trauma symptoms; they help rebuild cultural identity by anchoring people back into myth, land, and story (George et al., 2019). From basement mushroom circles in Brooklyn to cannabis-infused drumming rituals in Toronto, these practices echo the same principles Indigenous groups have preserved for centuries: plants as carriers of cultural memory.
But politics cut deep here. Legal access remains unequally distributed. Communities most harmed by the War on Drugs often face the harshest penalties for using the same plants now marketed as wellness luxuries (Alexander, 2010). Meanwhile, mainstream psychedelic discourse often frames “integration” as an individual process—journal prompts, therapy sessions—while for diasporic communities, integration often means collective remembrance, rebuilding kinship, and resisting erasure (Williams et al., 2021).
In this sense, the urban reclamation of entheogens isn’t just about wellness—it’s a political act. It’s about reclaiming storylines that were disrupted and refusing to let plant medicines be defined solely by clinical models or capitalist markets. For many, these ceremonies in cities are as much about survival and justice as they are about healing.
Why This Matters
Here’s the bottom line: if we strip entheogens of their cultural frameworks, we risk turning them into yet another form of psychospiritual gentrification. Ancient tools—kept alive through colonization, prohibition, and marginalization—are now being rebranded as wellness products for the privileged (George et al., 2019). The result? Communities that carried these medicines through history are excluded from the benefits of legalization, while corporations profit from what was once sacred knowledge (Williams et al., 2021).
But entheogens aren’t just “therapies” waiting for clinical approval—they are cultural technologies. They encode ecological memory, transmit stories, and anchor identity. Treating them as mere molecules misses the fact that they carry intelligence systems built into ritual and tradition (Labate & Cavnar, 2014). When we reduce ceremony to protocol, we flatten medicines that have long connected people to land, ancestry, and community.
This matters for law and policy, too. Religious freedom cases over peyote, ayahuasca, and cannabis show us how fragile these protections are, and how easily Indigenous rights are eroded under modern frameworks (Feeney, 2016). Without intentional safeguards, the psychedelic renaissance risks repeating the same extractive patterns of colonialism—taking without reciprocity, profiting without recognition.
So, the question isn’t just “Do psychedelics work?”
The real question is: “Who do they work for, under what conditions, and at what cost?”
A more ethical psychedelic future demands that we center cultural continuity, protect sacramental rights, and resist the market’s tendency to commodify what was always meant to be communal.
Entheogens as Cultural Technologies, Not Just “Trips”
At the end of the day, entheogens aren’t just about altered states—they’re about altered stories. These plants have carried myth, memory, and identity across generations, serving as cultural technologies that bind communities to land, lineage, and one another (Labate & Cavnar, 2014). If we only see them as clinical tools or productivity hacks, we flatten their power into something they were never meant to be.
The stakes are real. As psychedelics move into mainstream medicine and commerce, the risk of psychospiritual gentrification looms large: sacred traditions repackaged for profit while the very communities that protected them remain sidelined (George et al., 2019; Williams et al., 2021). To build an ethical psychedelic future, we need frameworks that safeguard sacramental rights, center cultural continuity, and reject extractive models of use (Feeney, 2016).
That means shifting the question from “Can psychedelics heal us?” to “Whose stories, whose rituals, whose laws guide how we heal?” If we listen, entheogens point us toward practices of reverence, reciprocity, and repair—values desperately needed in both our medicine and our culture.
The future isn’t just about therapy. It’s about remembering. And if we get it right, entheogens can help us write not just new protocols, but new myths of belonging, connection, and care.
About the Author
RN Collins is a 1L at Northeastern University School of Law and a neuroscientist exploring how brain health and the environment intersect. Through her writing, she bridges academic research and science communication to reframe how psychoactive plants and other traditional and alternative medicines are understood. She’s building a career that connects law, technology, and creativity—and welcomes conversations and opportunities across fields that share that vision. Connect with her on LinkedIn!
References
- Barrett, F. S., Doss, M. K., Sepeda, N. D., Pekar, J. J., & Griffiths, R. R. (2020). Emotions and brain function are altered up to one month after a single high dose of psilocybin. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 2214. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-59282-y
- Calabrese, J. D. (1997). The therapeutic use of peyote in the Native American Church. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 11(3), 267–289. https://doi.org/10.1525/ maq.1997.11.3.267
- Carhart-Harris, R. L., & Friston, K. J. (2019). REBUS and the anarchic brain: Toward a unified model of the brain action of psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews, 71(3), 316– 344. https://doi.org/10.1124/pr.118.017160
- Clarke, R. C., & Merlin, M. D. (2013). Cannabis: Evolution and ethnobotany. University of California Press.
- Ly, C., Greb, A. C., Cameron, L. P., Wong, J. M., Barragan, E. V., Wilson, P. C., … & Olson, D. E. (2018). Psychedelics promote structural and functional neural plasticity. Cell Reports, 23(11), 3170–3182. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2018.05.022
- Schultes, R. E., & Hofmann, A. (1992). Plants of the gods: Their sacred, healing, and hallucinogenic powers. Healing Arts Press.
- Dobkin de Rios, M. (1984). Hallucinogens: Cross-cultural perspectives. Waveland Press.
- Dobkin de Rios, M., & Grob, C. S. (2005). Ayahuasca use in cross-cultural perspective. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 193(11), 829–831. https://doi.org/ 10.1097/01.nmd.0000185884.50905.0a
- George, J., Michaels, T. I., Sevelius, J., & Williams, M. T. (2019). The psychedelic renaissance and the limitations of a White-dominant medical framework: A call for indigenous and ethnic minority inclusion. Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 3(1), 4–15. https://doi.org/10.1556/2054.2019.001
- Labate, B. C., & Cavnar, C. (Eds.). (2014). Ayahuasca shamanism in the Amazon and beyond. Oxford University Press.
- Langlitz, N. (2013). Neuropsychedelia: The revival of hallucinogen research since the decade of the brain. University of California Press.
- Tupper, K. W. (2009). Ayahuasca healing beyond the Amazon: The globalization of a traditional indigenous entheogen. Global Networks, 9(1), 117–136. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1471-0374.2009.00245.x
- União do Vegetal v. Gonzales, 546 U.S. 418 (2006).
- Alexander, M. (2010). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press.
- Chevannes, B. (2001). Learning to be a Rastafarian: Cultural resistance and religious identity in Jamaica. University of the West Indies Press.
- Williams, M. T., Reed, S., & George, J. (2021). Cultural adaptations of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: An urgent need. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 596818. https:// doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.596818
- Feeney, K. (2016). Peyote, cultural appropriation, and the US Supreme Court: The impact of the peyote exemption on Native American religious traditions. Journal of Law and Religion, 31(3), 397–419. https://doi.org/10.1017/jlr.2016.31
