Protect Our Sacred Medicines: Advancing a Rights of Nature Framework Over Clinicalization
Grand Master of the Bwiti Council and the Councilmembers
Our sacred medicines are at a critical threshold. Around the world, new systems are rapidly forming to define their future, through clinical pathways, pharmaceutical development, and state regulation, often without the leadership of the lineages and communities who have carried these medicines across generations.
This moment carries both risk and possibility.
We have already seen how sacred medicines can be separated from their roots, reduced to molecules, patented, scaled, and governed by systems that prioritize access through markets rather than relationship. In many cases, this has led to harm: to the plants themselves, to the communities who steward them, and to those who engage these medicines outside of grounded, accountable frameworks.
At the same time, there is a growing global community, made up of the Global Majority, Indigenous diaspora, and those directly impacted by colonial systems, who are seeking a different path. Many within this community have been shaped, and in some cases harmed, by the current trajectory of psychedelic expansion, and are now calling for approaches rooted in sovereignty, care, and right relationship.
This petition is not a demand. It is an invitation.
An invitation to the Bwiti council, as lineage holders and spiritual authorities of iboga, to engage in dialogue and co-creation with those who are committed to protecting these medicines from further extraction, and to imagining pathways forward that are grounded in:
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sovereignty and lineage governance
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ecological stewardship
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accountability and repair
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relationship-based access
This is a moment to shape the future before it is decided without us.
Not through replication of existing systems, but through collaboration, creativity, and alignment with the values that have always guided these medicines.
Petition by
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To:
Grand Master of the Bwiti Council and the Councilmembers
From:
[Your Name]
To the Bwiti Lineage Holders, Elders, and Spiritual Authorities,
We write to you as relatives, as stewards of other medicines, other lands, other lineages, who are watching the same storm gather that has swept across so many of our own. We come not with answers, but with love, with urgency, and with a request: please, slow down with us.
The world is hungry for iboga. We know this hunger is real, and we know it comes from real suffering. But we have seen what happens when that hunger is met not by the plant and its keepers, but by markets and clinical systems that reduce living medicine to extractable molecules. We have watched it happen to our own sacred relationships. We do not wish to watch it happen to yours.
What is being built right now, in legislative chambers and behind closed doors, in venture capital boardrooms, in pharmaceutical pipelines, is not a path to healing. It is Big Pharma 2.0, wearing the language of access and equity while preparing to own what cannot be owned. We have seen this before. It is the same project that fenced the commons, patented the seed, and turned water into a commodity. This time it wears linen and speaks of trauma healing. The structure beneath is identical.
We are working alongside the land, the plants, and the people who tend them, through the Wozu Healing Gardens, through our grandmothers, through the native food and medicine sovereignty work that understands healing as inseparable from soil, seed, and right relationship. We are not trying to build a better empire. We are trying to make empire obsolete.
We ask you, our relatives across the water: let us build governance first, before expansion accelerates. Let us listen to iboga, to the forest, to the ancestors, not to investors, about what comes next. Let us plant the seeds of a shared stewardship framework together, before others plant the terms of extraction in your name.
We are here. We are listening. We are ready to stand with you in whatever way serves the medicine and the people who need it most.
In kinship, reciprocity, and shared stewardship,
The Global Majority Medicine Council & co-conspirators