Speaker Bio
Neşe Devenot, PhD (she/they), is an Affiliated Researcher on The Project on Psychedelics Law and Regulation (POPLAR) at Harvard University, and Senior Lecturer in the University Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University. They have been contributing to the interdisciplinary field of Psychedelic Studies since 2010. They completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Bioethics at the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and received their PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Neşe’s scholarship explores the intersections between health humanities, psychedelic bioethics, neuroethics, and comparative literature. They were a 2015-16 Research Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Timothy Leary Papers and a Research Fellow with the New York University Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study, where they participated in the first qualitative study of participant experiences. Their psychedelic ethics research has appeared in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, JAMA Psychiatry, the Journal of Psychedelic Studies, Frontiers in Psychology, and Anthropology of Consciousness. Neşe’s book project on the role of narrative and literary devices in psychedelic experience is under contract with Columbia University Press. They are affiliated with The Ohio State University's Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education (CPDRE), the Intercollegiate Psychedelics Network (IPN), the Psychedelic Educators Network (PEN), and Psymposia.
ICPR 2024 Abstract
The (de)colonization of psychedelics
Theoretical Background and Rationale: Traditional contexts of psychedelic use have often been attenuated simultaneous to the wider social uptake of these substances in the west. Many scholars, practitioners, and indigenous medicine holders have stressed the necessity to preserve traditional insights and contexts even as their medicines have taken on new forms. As the psychedelic industry develops, many are wary that new legal, economic, and social paradigms could eclipse or undermine traditional uses.
Research Question and Hypothesis: This panel will ask what constitutes colonizing practices of psychedelics and what are their effects? We hypothesize that certain constraints and conditions exist that have evolved out of generations of psychedelic use that cannot be separated from certain formal and unquantifiable elements of community and ecology without remainder.
Methods and Analysis: Through investigating various forms of use, we look at charges of appropriation and epistemicide, and the monetization of traditional ecological knowledge to the latter’s detriment, through ethnographic, case-based methods, and reviews of contemporary and historical literature.
Main Findings: Integrated ways forward include a moratorium on patents, declaring these substances and their derivatives global patrimony; allocating profits to preserve indigenous land (e.g., preserving the home of peyote in Mexico from silver mining), and retaining certain ritualistic elements that emerged historically with psychedelics.
Conclusion: Indiscriminate decontextualization of psychedelic substances from their contexts – biological, ecological, psychological, and social – runs the risk of undermining the wellspring which makes them efficacious, rendering them as one more tool in the pharmaceutical lineup.