By Jessica Semaan
After decades of being stigmatized, feared, and criminalized in the United States, psychedelics are getting a fresh look and being studied for their healing potential by scientific researchers and psychotherapists. With a growing interest in the use of psychedelics in medicine and as tools for healing trauma in guided psychotherapy contexts, we reached out to interview Natalie Ginsberg, Policy & Advocacy Director at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a “non-profit research and educational organization that develops medical, legal, and cultural contexts for people to benefit from the careful uses of psychedelics and marijuana.” Ginsberg shared her personal journey which brought her to work on this topic and ultimately to become a public face and advocate for MAPS.
Tell us about your path to becoming the Policy & Advocacy Director at MAPS, a job that I would imagine is highly coveted.
Natalie Ginsberg: While pursuing my master's degree in social work, I worked as a therapist with people arrested for prostitution at an alternative sentencing court, and I worked as a guidance counselor at a Bronx middle school located in one of the poorest zip codes in the United States. I noticed that so much of the trauma people were facing stemmed from oppressive policies and systems, especially related to mass incarceration and criminalization, and driven by racism and the profit-maximizing demands of capitalism. I was seeing firsthand how drug policy is used as a deeply racist tool and the largest driver of mass incarceration. During college, I had interned for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, and had to refuse to process the hundreds of cases that were coming in for black teenagers arrested for crumbs of marijuana, when my white classmates from Yale were smoking freely a few blocks away from the courthouse without a worry from the cops. My senior year in high school, a cop walked up to me smoking a bowl in a park and said, “Honey put that down, aren’t you going to college?” It was so clear that these thousands of marijuana arrests were not about the cannabis, but were an excuse to criminalize black people.
Natalie Ginsberg, Director of Policy and Advocacy at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Photo by Tumay Aslay.
How did that lead you to MAPS?
I began a fellowship at the Drug Policy Alliance, where I was working on a campaign for marijuana decriminalization that focused on racially disparate arrests. After we succeeded in decriminalizing marijuana in New York State, I was moved to the medical cannabis campaign, and we also ended up legalizing medical cannabis in New York, though unfortunately Governor Cuomo personally removed the ability to smoke cannabis from the legislation, after the law had been passed by the legislature. While working at Drug Policy Alliance I started to read about MAPS, and their research struck a chord. Though I had enjoyed smoking cannabis, before my work on this campaign I never understood cannabis’ deep medical value. Now I was intrigued to read the research and learn that other plant medicines and psychedelics could help people struggling with addiction, PTSD, and depression — ailments I had learned had no cure in social work school.
What was the psychedelic therapy you read about?
As a policy fellow at Drug Policy Alliance, I was asked to write an article about a MAPS LSD therapy study for the treatment of anxiety. I quickly discovered that the bulk of MAPS’ research was focused on MDMA-assisted therapy for the treatment of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Researchers and psychotherapists were finding that psychedelic therapy had the potential to heal or lessen a wide range of afflictions in only a few sessions. I figured psychedelic therapy must be addressing the root of the problem rather than suppressing the symptoms, which really resonated with me. I also understood that the research must have broader political implications regarding the way we approach medicine and treatment as a society. I reached out to the pioneering MDMA therapist Marcela Ot’alora after seeing her speak at a Drug Policy Alliance conference, and after a beautiful conversation with Marcela I connected with the founder Rick Doblin, who luckily needed some help on the marijuana-policy front.
You've been at MAPS for six years now. How have you seen the organization change?
Size-wise, we’ve more than doubled our team. In certain ways, the organization doesn't feel different internally, but things have changed significantly from the outside due in large part to the research that MAPS has done in the last 30 years.
What has changed from the outside?
Society has started to become more accepting of our work and MAPS’ goal of mainstreaming psychedelic medicine seems closer than ever to being achieved. The popularity of Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind, news coverage on the TV show “60 Minutes,” and other mainstream movements are helping to shift the tide. There are even ayahuasca jokes and MDMA-themed episodes on a bulk of mainstream TV shows these days! We are starting to see major policy shifts, such as the city of Denver decriminalizing psilocybin and the cities of Oakland and Santa Cruz decriminalizing all entheogenic plants.
Natalie Ginsberg, Director of Policy and Advocacy at MAPS. Photo by Tumay Aslay.
What is something you are proud of in the past 6 years at MAPS?
A change I'm really proud of is our work toward more accessibility. Last summer we hosted our first MDMA therapy training for communities of color, which opened with a workshop called Psychedelic Medicine and Cultural Trauma. We're expanding our conversation around who has access to these medicines and where these medicines come from. The reality is that the highest rates of trauma exist within the communities that are most marginalized in our society, including communities of color and queer communities, and especially indigenous communities around the world, who are also the communities who have been in practice with plant medicine for millennia. A lot of marginalized communities don't have access to diagnosis or treatment. When trauma is constant it can be even more deeply traumatic, especially when it is compounded by the historical and intergenerational trauma that is often attached to social marginalization. It's important that we expand our understanding of PTSD, especially when considering who has access to psychedelic therapy and which therapists are best equipped to provide this sort of treatment to various populations.
You mentioned that you are working on the psychedelics in conflict resolution study. I'd like to hear more about it and share with our readers. It sounds very fascinating.
I’ve been working with Antwan Saca, a longtime Palestinian peace activist, and Dr. Leor Roseman, an Israeli psychedelic researcher at Imperial College in London, exploring how psychedelics might be useful in conflict resolution, peace building, and reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis. We are curious to see if these contexts might be particularly helpful for healing shared intergenerational trauma. In our research, we started by interviewing 36 Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Israelis and Palestinians who had sat together in ayahuasca circles. Many of the participants reported powerful visions of historical trauma or flashbacks from time served in the military. One Palestinian man reported being in the body of an Israeli soldier and looking down the barrel of a gun aimed at a Palestinian man. Strikingly, this Palestinian man reported a noteworthy compassion for the Israeli soldier’s pain, saying “this is not an easy life after” pulling the trigger. He talks about how his activism changed tremendously after this experience, from being motivated by hatred, even in his nonviolence, to now being motivated by love and compassion, which he reports feels much healthier in his own body and mind. Multiple Jewish Israelis reported hearing Arabic sung during ceremony as one of the most impactful pieces of ceremony, as they were being able to release the fear and hatred they didn’t even realize they had associated so deeply with the Arabic language and Arab people — one Jewish woman describes how for the first time the language of Arabic was sending her “light and love.” I wrote an article about it titled “Can Psychedelics Play a Role in Making Peace and Healing Cycles of Trauma?” in the MAPS 2019 Winter Bulletin, and gave a talk presenting more of our research in Austin titled Can Ayahausca Promote Peace in the Middle East?
What does power mean to you as a woman?
I think a lot about what it means to be a woman in power and how to model feminine kinds of leadership in the context of our patriarchal society. One feminine approach to power that I employ is to work collaboratively, making sure that the power I have as a director is shared with others. I always include lots of perspectives and opinions in my decision-making, sometimes to a fault. Feminine power to me is about being reflective, listening to your body, listening to your intuition — the opposite of what our patriarchal society teaches us, which is to ‘power through’ and that your value comes from how hard you work. That's another big piece of feminine leadership that I'm trying to embody — operating from a place of what feels right and feels aligned in my body. If a masculine approach to leadership is more reactive and proactive, and a feminine one is more reflective and intentional, the most effective and healing modes of social change strike a balance between the two.
Is there something you find challenging as a female leader?
In my efforts to be more collaborative and build new ways of operating, I sometimes disempower myself. I always use the word “we” because I work with so many amazing people and we build together. I notice that so many men talk about their work using only the word “I.” But on the flip side, I can sometimes erase my individual contributions when I'm elevating others, so it's an interesting balance to strike. The reason I mention that is because the dynamic of men raising themselves up and women elevating others contributes to the issue of people not seeing women leaning into things.
Natalie Ginsberg in Los Angeles. Photo by Tumay Aslay.
Whether we like it or not, we operate within a patriarchal system. I wonder how not wanting to play into patriarchy might come at the cost of your contributions being taken into account.
I’m trying to model ways of living and working that are healthy, where I get enough sleep and eat well and take care of my mental health. In this hyper-masculine, hyper-competitive society we live in, I see people not sleeping, not eating, always being urgent. I understand that because our work is urgent, and people are dying and going to jail every day because they don't have access to therapeutic treatment. But I'm very inspired by thinkers like adrienne maree brown, who talks about how the best way of serving is to take care of ourselves so that we're best able to do our work for social change.
Do you have any self-care routines or tools that you could share?
I find yoga to be really powerful, not only yoga classes but the ability, wherever I am in the world, to feel into my body where I'm holding tension, and to stretch it out. Dancing also connects me to my body; it's very cathartic. I love to smoke a joint and dance to Beyoncé alone in front of my mirror. Smoking cannabis is very healing for me. It can be a really powerful, self-reflective, and therapeutic time for me where I process a lot. Quality time with friends, and spending time in spaces where you just feel nourished and inspired. Whatever feels good! Massages!
Any resources for people who are interested in learning more about psychedelics?
Absolutely. MAPS.org for information about studies, psychedelic harm reduction, and a wide variety of other documents related to psychedelic history and research. Cosmovisiones Ancestrales, co-founded by Paula Graciela Kahn, with the mission to “build bridges between indigenous communities, psychedelic researchers, mental-health professionals, drug policy makers, psychedelic consumers, and populations that have been acutely impacted by the legacies of colonialism, slavery, war, and forced migration.” Chacruna, founded by Beatriz Caiuby Labate, is another great resource for interesting articles about the social, cultural, and political contexts of different psychedelic plant medicines.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Jessica Semaan is a freelance writer, author, poet and performer living in San Francisco. Chronicling her journey of healing from trauma, she has over 50,000 people following her writing on Medium. Jessica’s debut book Child of the Moon was published in 2018. She also is studying to become a psychotherapist.
The views, practices, information and opinions expressed in this article are those of the individuals involved in the article and do not necessarily represent those of Seismic Sisters.