Psychedelic Science 2025 Closes with Talks From Indigenous Activists, Psychedelic Parents, and Hamilton Morris

The MAPS 2025 Psychedelic Science conference wrapped up with a final day of talks on June 20. The presentations included insights into the impact of global demand for psychedelic medicines on Indigenous communities, why nature heals and should be included in psychedelic-assisted therapies, an examination of ketamine use, and a discussion about psychedelic parenthood. This roundup also includes interviews with author Zach Leary, presenter Cassandra Muileboom, and videos from the closing ceremony.

The Lucid News coverage offers a sampling of the hundreds of panels and presentations at PS2025, which spanned a wide range of topics within the psychedelic space. The twelve Lucid News journalists who attended the conference offered views into a historic moment that reflects the current energy, tensions, and healing potentials of psychedelics in contemporary culture.

You can read our previous coverage of Psychedelic Science 2025 here, including the Opening Plenary, and part 1 and part 2 of our reporting on the opening day of the conference on June 18, and part 1  and part 2 of our coverage of day two on June 19. You can also read coverage from the PS2025 policy track here.

Indigenous Communities Seek Right Relationship at PS2025

At Psychedelic Science 2023, the closing ceremony was interrupted by a protest over the treatment and tokenization of Indigenous and BIPOC participants, both at the conference and within the broader psychedelic ecosystem. One protester, Angela Beers, took the microphone as MAPS founder Rick Doblin stood by.

“You’re sprinkling us in and you’re not giving us the space we deserve,” Beers told him. “If you don’t liberate the people most marginalized on their own land and sovereign nations, you can’t liberate anybody.”

Indigenous delegates and medicine keepers sponsored by the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund (IMC) were in attendance at PS2023, representing nations and tribes including Oglala Lakota, Diné, Comanche, Havasupai, Hopi, Cheyenne, Menominee, Oneida, Mazatec, Yawanawa, and others. Following the five-day event, and the protest at the closing ceremony, the delegation issued a joint declaration to MAPS, expressing concern over the state of what Doblin had dubbed the “psychedelic 20s.”

In the wake of these concerns—and amid other challenges in the field, including the FDA’s 2024 rejection of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD—the MAPS organizers “set the setting” for Psychedelic Science 2025 with a focus on accountability, integration, and right relationship. The conference offered increased visibility and support for Indigenous and BIPOC communities, including written acknowledgements, a Black Liberation Track, a dedicated Plant Medicine Track, and an Indigenous community lounge. 

On the final day of the conference, IMC delegates presented an updated version of their 2023 declaration from the main keynote stage. It included insights from the first two days of PS2025, which they said they will update again post conference. MAPS Interim Co-Executive Director, Ismail Lourido Ali, invited two delegates, Brazilian Indigenous rights activist Daiara Tukano and Indigenous healing scholar and advocate Christine Diindiisi McCleave, to the stage to share their message.

“It is with recognition and love for humanity that we participated in Psychedelic Science,” read Tukano. “Despite our skepticism, we share our concerns and recommendations with this declaration. We call upon you to address the harm.”

McCleave detailed the escalating pressures facing Indigenous communities amid the global surge of interest in and demand for psychedelic medicines, which they hold sacred. “[This demand] has unintended consequences that bring harm to our communities, such as the rising price of medicine for native people and overexploitation, which undermines their reproduction, causes scarcity, and in some cases leads to their disappearance.”

The declaration warned of the negative consequences that take place when sacred medicines are extracted from the cultural, ecological, and spiritual frameworks they have co-evolved with for millennia. Without these contexts, the document argued, the therapeutic use of plant medicines risks doing more harm than good.

“We are concerned about the speed and urgency of this movement,” Tukano read, “and the repeated patterns of seeking fast routes to healing, including the transactional and profit driven nature of the growing industry.”

A Call For Change

McCleave followed with a call for actionable change. She emphasized the need for respectful, consent-based collaboration, and for the psychedelic field to abandon colonial practices such as cultural misappropriation, bioprospecting, and biopiracy. The declaration called for consultation, reparations, and restorative justice when developing policy or frameworks affecting Indigenous biocultures.

“Ultimately, this declaration asks all of us to reflect on our roles as stewards of the planet,” McCleave said. “It implores us to act in ways that honor and protect ancestral knowledge passed down through generations. Together we can embark on this transformative journey.”

She paused, smiling as she stumbled over the word transformative. “It’s hard to transform. It’s hard to say it. It’s hard to do it,” she said, drawing a warm laugh from the audience.

Ali closed the session by thanking the speakers and acknowledging the long, ongoing nature of these conversations. “I know they mentioned this,” he said, “but I want to appreciate the many voices and conversations involved in this work over hours, days, weeks, years, and generations.”

In a statement marking their participation at PS2025, IMC noted, “We are grateful to MAPS for their willingness to support the participation of our delegation in this comprehensive way. The conference provided travel, lodging, and technical support for the delegation, allowing for international participation from our territories. We have shared our messages — now it’s time for the psychedelic industry to respond.” – Nicki Adams

Cassandra Muileboom Explains Indigenous Reciprocity

PS2025 presenter, Cassandra Muileboom, is a clinical mental health provider who works with the Chacruna Institute. In this interview she shares her journey with psychedelics outside the colonial framework. She also discusses Indigenous reciprocity, a major them at the PS2025 conference this year, and explains why it is important to give back to the Indigenous communities that the psychedelic movement has benefited from. – Vaughn Jefferson and Nicki Adams

A Q&A with the Psychedelic Parenthood Community

This interview was edited for clarity and concision. 

Lucid News: What is Psychedelic Parenthood and why are you here?

Glauber Loures de Assis: The Psychedelic Parenthood community is the very first international mentor of parents and caregivers in the psychedelic space. Our goal is to make sure that families and caregivers do not feel oppressed or that they’re going to be persecuted, because they are families and they’re in this space. Here we are also representing indigenous voices at this booth. With me is Papa Chief Alvaro Tukano Yepa-Mahsã who is a father of 10 children and is also responsible for 25,000 people of the Tukano lineage, the Yepa-Mahsã people of Brazil. 

We are here to help people understand they should not be afraid of plant medicine in families. It’s not about giving drugs or psychedelics to children; it’s about bringing families together. I cannot separate my life as a psychedelic researcher and as a dad; Alvaro cannot separate his spiritual life from his family.

Álvaro Tukano (Yepa-Mahsã): I consider this to be an important event of great healers. My presence here is important because I am one of the traditional leaders of Brazil that has been defending and practicing the traditional knowledge. Here I don’t consider myself to be a stranger. We Indigenous people are not strangers here. We are the one who open the way for the psychedelic science to happen. 

Our purpose here is to share healing; to support humankind to heal. At the end of the day we are all brothers. 

 Loures de Assis: Here at this booth we are trying to create a Global South embassy, the core of psychedelic science. We have handicraft from different indigenous traditions, we’re singing traditional songs; here we have the Omagua/Kambeba tradition, the Yepa-Mahsã tradition, the Santo Daime tradition, all together, praying and talking about education.

This is a family friendly space. MAPS is now welcoming children into the field. Here we are not receiving children because we are in the exhibition hall. We’re happy MAPS opened this space for us.

LN: What’s one thing you’ve learned at the conference this year?

Álvaro Tukano (Yepa-Mahsã): The fear of being happy – this is not healing. The wish of love: this is something that can overcome challenges in order to help everybody.

Loures de Assis: Community is very important medicine. We are always talking about the beauty of substances, but sometimes we miss how important human relations are. Sometimes I hear of competition in this space, people trying to gatekeep others, but when we see people together, supporting each other no matter where they are from, then we can see a big difference happen. – Andrew Meissen

Experts Take Temperature of Ketamine Use in Society

Is there a problem with the way ketamine is entering broader culture? How concerned should we be about ketamine dependence? In a panel discussion entitled, “Ketamine Reality Check: Miracle, Mirage, or Misused?” moderated by PS2025 organizer Lianna Gillooly, chemist Hamilton Morris and psychiatrist Gita Vaid weigh in on these questions. 

Reflecting on the last 10 years of the increasing integration of ketamine from a dissociative anesthetic to a therapeutic tool for mental health, Morris says that medicalization has changed how people conceptualize their drug use in both social and clinical settings. Referencing emails he’s received, people are less likely to just say they had an amazing ketamine experience they’d like to share, and instead talk about it in terms of treatment of disease. 

Some have also brought up the argument to him, “Isn’t it clear [ketamine] is safer than alcohol?” which worries Morris. He says that as soon as people conceptualize use patterns as therapeutic or beneficial in a medical framework, they give themselves implicit permission to use these things continuously because they view it as a positive impact on their lives. 

This isn’t necessarily bad, says Morris, considering the legacy of positioning all drug use as a behavior that causes brain damage or harm. But he says the pendulum of culture seems to swing into extreme opinions; either a drug is better than alcohol, or exclusively bad. What people really need, he says, is education on the helps and harms of any drug they use – including ketamine.

Gita Vaid adds that ketamine can feel great, which causes people to be drawn to it. There’s no hangover, but instead a lift. Subjectively, it feels healing to them and their body. But this disguises its potential for harm. 

Vaid adds that no addiction is straightforward; it’s a case-by-case basis. But the main question she asks as a psychiatrist is: is this substance “opening you up to have a richer life” with yourself, your friends, and your creativity, or is it causing you to bypass your life; to wait and avoid that richness and beauty until you have another alternative experience?

Vaid and Gillooly agreed that the negative effects of ketamine seem minimized when used in a clinical setting. Morris noted, however, that issues of dependence and bladder problems such as cystitis are definitely occurring among ketamine users outside of clinical settings. His bigger question is: are these problems great enough that they will cause a government crackdown that will prevent anyone from accessing ketamine? 

According to Morris, the publicized role of ketamine in Matthew Perry’s death and the NYT exposé of Elon Musk’s alleged use of ketamine have caused public misunderstandings about the substance. Perry drowned in a hot tub while on ketamine, which is called behavioral toxicity; it wasn’t the drug itself, it was a drug mediated death, says Morris. He notes that when PCP use was more common, and people drowned in the ocean while under its effect; it was not death caused directly by the drug itself. 

When these types of incidents occur, says Morris, it creates a broader conversation on whether a particular drug is safe. He says that these conversations tend to neglect these broader issues about addiction: Why are people getting into a situation where they might be obsessively using a drug like ketamine in the first place? 

Morris also notes that in the case of Elon Musk, even if he is using ketamine, the causal relationship between all of Musk’s controversial activities and his ketamine use has not been established.

Misuse in Clinical Settings

Vaid adds she is concerned by mail-order ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, which became more common during the pandemic. Some of these providers offer only ketamine without integration services. In her opinion, Vaid says this is a mixed bag that leans too heavily on the pharmacological properties of ketamine, limiting its potential. To Vaid, it seems misleading and false advertising that ketamine use under these conditions can be therapeutic. She says she is not sure if this use represents what a psychotherapist would consider psychotherapy.

Lastly, Gillooly asked the panelists: what would a wise culture around ketamine use look like?

“My extremely idealistic hope would be that with sufficient education and peer support, people would be totally free to do whatever they wanted, and there would be no restrictions other than self-imposed restrictions because everyone cared about themselves and each other,” said Morris to which the audience applauded. “But I’m aware that’s slightly idealistic.”

Vaid said a conscious culture would be one where an understanding of ritual, including a nuanced understanding of how ketamine dosages and methods provide very different experiences, allows users to “avail the beauty of the medicine.”

“My own distress as to how it’s been used is that one has access to this magical substance and it’s being used to almost numb pain,” says Vaid .”Which almost feels sacrilegious as far as what’s possible for that individual.” – Andrew Meissen

Why We Need to Include Nature in Healing Practices

In a welcome break from the traditional presentation format at Psychedelic Science 2025, Stephanie Michael Stewart offered a participatory, interactive session titled “Wild Awakening: Plants Rekindling Our Intimate Bond with Nature.”

Stewart, a holistic psychiatrist and psychedelic therapist who describes her work as reconnecting people to land, community, and ancestral wisdom for collective healing, laid the foundation for what would later become a partnered discussion on nature connectedness. 

She began by sharing how her interest in ecological medicine emerged after spending long hours indoors during medical school and residency. Stewart described how that feeling of nature deprivation slowly evolved into Worldwide Wellness, an organization she founded to offer adventure therapy for individuals with mental health disorders.

“Nature connectedness is the feeling that we belong to, with, and in nature and that we are not separate from it,” said Stewart. “These big adventures [with Worldwide Wellness] really stirred up emotions in people, and it’s that emotional connection to nature that counts. That feeling of awe, which induces a sense of ‘small self’ in relation to a greater whole, and the subsequent feeling of belonging, are really important factors in healing.”

Stewart then invited the audience to close their eyes and guided them through a brief mindfulness exercise. “Let’s begin very close to home,” she said. “Take a few deep breaths, soften your gaze, focus inside, and consider the question: Where do you end and nature begins?”

The audience was asked to tune in to their breath, hydration, sense of smell, the photoreceptors behind their eyelids, their taste buds, and finally their gut — home to 100 trillion microbes. Stewart then asked attendees to open their eyes and find a partner to discuss their early encounters with nature. 

Stewert continued to guide the partnered conversation on nature connection by comparing it to attachment theory and the stages of human growth and development. She spoke about how western culture has individuated so far that it’s forgotten nature’s language, and suggested a healthier model of development that would move from dependence to independence, but not stop there — evolving into interdependence.

The conversations in the room were engaging and lively, with many weaving psychedelics and biophilia together through storytelling, and neatly illustrating how interconnectedness leads to compassion, a point Stewart brought up earlier in her talk. 

“When we are connected to something, we care. It’s not enough to be tourists in nature. We are contributors, we are participants,” she said. “We should be giving back as much or more than we are taking. Being in that kind of reciprocal relationship — that’s where the healing happens.” – Nicki Adams

Zach Leary On His New Book

The Expo Hall at the 2025 Psychedelic Science conference showcased many vendors and exhibitors, including publishing company Synergetic Press. Occupying a large space near the back of the hall, Synergetic Press’ booth was dedicated to author interviews and book purchases, signings, and discussions. Many small coffee tables were spread throughout the space where authors, readers, and fans could come together and talk.

In this brief interview at the Synergetic Press booth at PS2025, publisher Deborah Parrish Snyder introduces author Zach Leary. Son of Timothy Leary, Zach talks about his unique upbringing, which inspired his career and new book “Your Extraordinary Mind: Psychedelics in the 21st Century and How to Use Them.” – Vaughn Jefferson and Nicki Adams

Voices from The Psychedelic Science Closing Ceremony

Snaking around the upper level of the Colorado Convention Center, where the crowded and overflowing Bluebird Ballroom was located, a long line of people patiently waited for others to leave the PS2025 closing plenary on the keynote stage so they could be let in to catch a glimpse.

Inside, MAPS Interim Co-Executive Director, Ismail Lourido Ali invited a few speakers, including Jaz Cadoch and Daiara Tukano to make closing remarks, before the MAPS PS2025 team gathered on stage for a bow. Rick Doblin, wearing a tie-dye MAPS t-shirt, made an appearance before touching musical performances closed the event. 

Watch Lucid News’ video clips from the closing ceremony:

– Vaughn Jefferson and Nicki Adams