🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We're the psychedelics newsletter that alters your perception of reality. Thankfully, we don’t show up on a urine test. 🚽

Sia Henry spent years suing prisons and keeping people out of them. We’d understand if she’d bowed out by now to “protect her peace.” But Sia’s relentless. Now she’s at MAPS, leading the first psychedelic research program for formerly incarcerated people.

We asked Sia why the people most harmed by the War on Drugs are missing from the psychedelic movement, what the research says about who suffers most, and how system-impacted people relate to psychedelic healing today.

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My entire career has been dedicated to racial justice, ensuring that Black and Brown communities have access to the resources they need to be well and thrive. A big part of that was working on conditions inside jails and prisons. I met some amazing people through that work, but also heard some deeply heartbreaking stories. Then I spent several years working with communities around the country to establish what we were calling pre-charge restorative justice diversion programs.

The model was straightforward. Someone engages in some type of serious harm in their community, like robbery, assault, or carjacking, and instead of being prosecuted and most likely incarcerated, their case gets diverted to a community-based organization. Facilitators meet with both the person who caused the harm and the person harmed, do extensive prep work, and when everyone's ready, bring them all together. The goal is to give the responsible person a chance to apologize, give the person harmed a chance to explain how that harm impacted them, and have everyone come up with a plan to make things right. As long as they completed that plan, no charges were ever filed.

Throughout all of that work, I kept seeing unmet mental health needs and communities of color, in particular, being failed by traditional mental health systems. So I became interested in finding other ways to help people heal. That's when I came across psychedelic-assisted therapy and MAPS.

Policy reform is inevitably wrapped up in politics. The strategy of centering veterans, and increasingly first responders, really comes down to messaging and what populations are, on the surface, more “deserving” of healing in the eyes of the public. People who have been convicted of crimes are seen as people who've engaged in behavior that we're either scared of or mad at, or both. It's hard for a lot of folks to wrap their minds around advocating for the healing of people who've committed crimes (although veterans make up almost 10% of our incarcerated population, which is another missing part of the psychedelic policy conversation).

That political reality sits on top of a much longer history. The connection between our prison system, slavery, and the War on Drugs is something that's hard for us as a society to face head-on. Our prison system wasn't built around crime. It was our country's direct response to the supposed abolition of slavery, which grew into mass incarceration, largely starting with the waging of the War on Drugs.

The law makes it even harder. If you're on probation or parole, you typically have drug testing requirements or restrictions on where you can be, and decriminalization in your city or state doesn't mean the substance is legal for you personally. Because psychedelics are still federally controlled, accessing a regulated program in Oregon or Colorado sits in a gray area, and whether it's allowed often comes down to the discretion of your probation or parole officer. That guidance isn't safe to rely on, though, because discretion can change. You might get informal clearance and then, retroactively, be told you violated the terms of your probation or parole.

The first phase was about building our “why.” We conducted a literature review exploring the mental health needs of people impacted by the criminal legal system. It covered adverse childhood experiences, the impact of trauma and violence during incarceration, and mental health needs upon reentry. 

A lot of it confirmed what I already knew, including the prevalence of early childhood trauma. But some things stood out. Women who are system-impacted tend to have higher rates of PTSD, depression, and suicidality than men. The literature also showed how diagnostic frameworks like the DSM have been applied differently to communities of color. There's a documented history of Black men being overdiagnosed as bipolar or schizophrenic. During the Black Power Movement, two psychiatrists spread the idea that engagement in the movement was itself a sign and symptom of schizophrenia. 

The second phase is a qualitative study. We're still raising funds to partner with the Center for Collective Healing to conduct paid focus groups with at least 100 formerly incarcerated people of color. From those focus groups, we'll publish a report that will be, as far as we know, the first of its kind for this field. Then a working group made up of formerly incarcerated people, researchers, and other stakeholders will take what we've learned and build a research protocol from scratch.

There's very little representation from formerly incarcerated people in the broader field conversations, and a lot of ambiguity about how to approach working with this population. After establishing that foundation through the literature review, we thought it was important to hear directly from people in this community about what their concerns and barriers actually are, and what they would need to feel comfortable accessing psychedelic-assisted healing. Jumping to a clinical protocol without that would mean designing something for people without them. 

One thing I can predict is that the mental health conversation alone will surface real obstacles. Especially in the Black community, there's a lot of resistance around accessing mental health services or even having vulnerable conversations about one's own struggles. Among Black men in particular, there's this need to not be vulnerable, to not acknowledge weaknesses, born out of a genuine need for survival. The brain develops ways of framing things that allow you to keep going, but that might not always be the healthiest way to move through life. Any protocol that comes out of this effort will need to acknowledge that pattern as an obstacle to healing. 

Beyond that, a lot is still unknown. Half the participants will have had their own informal experiences with psychedelics and half won't. From the group with no experience, I anticipate pushback, especially from people in recovery or those who ended up in the system because of a drug charge. Even the choice of substance is an open question. MAPS has its MDMA-assisted therapy approach, but we can't just drop that into a community it wasn’t designed for. We might end up with a protocol that has many different branches depending on each person and their specific needs.

Many of the reactions I've gotten when I bring up psychedelic-assisted therapy have been skepticism or outright amusement. People have literally laughed in my face when I talk about the therapeutic potential of MDMA especially.

What surprises me more is how normalized this existence has become for so many of them. I have a system-impacted friend who has been in and out of jail. One time at an event, he was describing how he'd set up his house with mirrors in every corner and how, more generally, he spends his days constantly looking over his shoulder for people trying to kill or arrest him. I told him living in a perpetual state of hyperarousal like that wasn't normal. He left to grab snacks, was gone a while, and came back empty-handed. It turned out he'd just been sitting in his car thinking, because no one had ever told him that the way he was moving through life wasn't normal.

He occasionally uses psychedelics, but like a lot of the people I've spoken to, he treats them as a recreational break from the day-to-day, without integrating those experiences in a way that could support growth or healing. Psychedelics are very context-dependent. Getting to a place where someone can engage with them intentionally, rather than as an escape from a reality they haven't yet been invited to question, is going to take a lot of education and meeting people where they are.

Read the full Psychedelics for System-Impacted People literature review, or donate to MAPS to support her work.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.