Purépecha

Underground Wisdom & Official Erasure: Race, Psychedelics, and Resistance in the U.S.

The story of psychedelics in America is not just about science or altered states of mind—it is also a story of race, power, and resilience. The U.S. War on Drugs was never simply a battle against substances; it was a campaign that disrupted entire communities, criminalized Indigenous and Black traditions, and stripped public education of once accessible pathways to chemistry and science. Yet, despite systematic suppression, knowledge survived. It survived in ceremonies, in oral traditions, in underground networks, and in the hands of those who refused to let history erase them.

When President Nixon declared a War on Drugs in 1971, the language was framed around morality and public safety. But behind the curtain, the intent was deeply political and racialized. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy chief, later admitted that the campaign was designed to disrupt Black communities and antiwar activists. By criminalizing substances closely associated with these groups, the administration could arrest leaders, raid homes, and fracture networks under the guise of “law and order.” The ripple effects of this are still visible today in sentencing disparities, mass incarceration, and the disproportionate policing of minority neighborhoods.

At the same time that enforcement was tightening, public access to chemistry knowledge was shrinking. In the 1950s and early 1960s, chemistry sets sold to children contained real glassware, alcohol burners, and reagents. High school labs often taught distillation and organic synthesis. Universities were more open, and ambitious young students—sometimes future pioneers—could experiment in relative freedom. But as drug policy shifted, so too did the culture of science education. Liability fears, coupled with the paranoia of the drug war, led to sanitized chemistry curricula. In marginalized communities where funding was already scarce, the cutbacks were even more devastating. Entire generations lost access to advanced laboratory training, widening the educational divide along racial lines.

This is not to say that Black and Brown scientists were absent from the story. Figures like Percy Julian, Alma Levant Hayden, Lawrence Knox, Samuel P. Massie Jr., and Lloyd Ferguson broke through extraordinary barriers to contribute groundbreaking work in chemistry and pharmacology. Their legacies show both the brilliance that thrived against the odds and the systemic gatekeeping that made their stories exceptional rather than commonplace. At the community level, though, chemistry was increasingly treated as dangerous knowledge when pursued outside white institutions. Curiosity that once could have led to discovery was instead framed as criminal intent.

Parallel to the shrinking of formal education, Indigenous psychedelic practices were coming under attack. Long before Western researchers like Albert Hofmann or R. Gordon Wasson introduced psychedelics into scientific or cultural discourse, Indigenous peoples had used psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, and ayahuasca for centuries. These were not “drugs” in the recreational sense but medicines and sacraments used for healing, ceremony, and spiritual alignment. U.S. law, however, lumped these practices into the same criminal categories as heroin or cocaine. Entire traditions were pushed underground, their practitioners forced to choose between cultural survival and legal safety.

Yet the knowledge endured. The Native American Church, through long and difficult legal battles, secured the right to continue peyote ceremonies under religious freedom protections. Mazatec communities in Mexico safeguarded psilocybin mushroom rituals, passing them down orally even as outsiders profited from rediscovering them. In the Amazon, ayahuasca ceremonies persisted, often hidden from authorities or reframed under syncretic religious movements. These acts of resilience are as much scientific as they are cultural—they represent the preservation of knowledge systems rooted in observation, ecological stewardship, and human experience.

Now, in what many call the “psychedelic renaissance,” these traditions face a new challenge: mainstream re-entry. Universities like Johns Hopkins and Imperial College London lead clinical trials with psilocybin and MDMA. Biotech companies are patenting psychedelic compounds. Wellness industries are marketing retreats and microdosing regimens. While this surge is framed as progress, it raises urgent questions: who benefits? Who is recognized as the custodian of knowledge? And how do we prevent history from repeating itself, where Indigenous and minority communities are criminalized while corporations profit from the very practices they preserved?

Today, groups like the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative work to restore habitats and protect ceremonial use against the pressures of overharvesting and commercialization. Black- and Indigenous-led organizations such as the Sabina Project provide education that resists cultural appropriation and re-centers the voices of those historically excluded from psychedelic discourse. Scholars like Marlena Robbins (Diné/Navajo) advocate for frameworks that honor Indigenous philosophies and integrate them into mental health approaches, without stripping them of their cultural roots.

If we are to truly move forward, it cannot be through extraction alone. The resilience of Indigenous and minority communities has kept psychedelic knowledge alive through centuries of colonization, erasure, and criminalization. Now that Western science and industry seek to reclaim psychedelics, there must be reciprocity. This means funding Indigenous-led research, protecting sacred plants ecologically, creating space for oral and ceremonial traditions in academic discourse, and acknowledging that the psychedelic story is not just one of white pioneers, but of countless communities who never stopped knowing.

The War on Drugs disrupted both education and tradition. But it did not destroy them. Today, as psychedelics return to the spotlight, the question is not whether science will advance—it will. The question is whether society can finally listen to the wisdom it once tried so hard to silence.

Works Cited

Jocelin Molina
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