PSA Profiles: Finding The Intersectional Threads Of The Psychedelic Renaissance

By Jack Gorsline

Julian Fox, co-founder of the Entheogen Melanin Collective (EMC), brings a unique and multifaceted perspective to the burgeoning conversation around psychedelics. Growing up biracial, queer, and neurodivergent in rural Western Massachusetts, Fox's early life was marked by a determination to forge a different path. This drive led them from a challenging start in community college to pursuing acting in NYC and later film studies in Santa Fe. It was in the latter that Fox's journey intersected with the psychedelic community, sparking a deep engagement with the field.

Initially an "outsider looking in" and an enthusiastic user, Fox's interest evolved into a commitment to informed harm reduction and integration education. This dedication led to the establishment of a Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) chapter at Santa Fe University of Art and Design and an internship with Synergetic Press. Those experiences ultimately paved the way for the creation of the Entheogen Melanin Collective, a testament to Fox's passionate and informed approach to psychedelics. 

That work is paying off. Among other highlights, Fox and his EMC Co-Founder Imani Turnbull-Brown took the stage in Denver in June at the biannual Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Psychedelic Science conference. Their presentation, Plant Power to the People: Healing Black and Melanated Minds and Souls, headlined the first-ever Black Liberation Track at the world’s largest psychedelic conference. With their message in mind, I spoke with Fox about their movement and much more.

JG: When and why did you first become interested in psychedelics? 

JF: My interests first came when I was 17, watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The dramatic, at times whimsical chaos that Hunter S. Thompson portrayed in the novel’s adaptation both inspired me and freaked me out to use the substances. 

When I did finally take them a couple of years later, I had made this association that I would be able to escape into a sort of Mad Hatter's psychedelic world. I wanted to feel something, be shown dragons and wizards, laugh and be joyful, heal and feel free for the first time in a long time. When I came out on the other side of the trip, I was shown that I was universally connected to everything and that I needed to learn to meet people where they are.

After that, I knew I needed to share with anyone that I could the amazing wonders and powers of shrooms.

What’s the Entheogen Melanin Collective’s origin story?

Along the way of my own journey, I became reconnected to myself through a series of different events, thanks in part to psychedelics, which made it a whole lot easier to open myself up for the expansive amount of work that I needed to do on myself to be a vehicle for change. In this way, I found myself exploring and recovering my spiritualism, activating my mind on the systems that are interconnected, like how the prison industrial complex, mental health, racism, poverty, class, colonialism, militarism, and groupthink are all interconnected. I wanted to untie all of the chords and get to the root of the problems that we as humanity are facing. That meant I needed to work on embracing and empowering the intersectionality within myself, ie, queerness, neurodivergence, and being biracial. 

During February of 2020, I visited my aunty in Los Angeles. We are both biracial, light-skinned, and from the same rural area of Massachusetts. Neither of us was given much in the way of tools to embrace and empower our blackness. Still, my aunty made her way out and became a successful badass artist who tackled the inequities and erasure of identity. She developed her Black community and embraced her identity in blackness. When we reconnected in LA, she helped me to embrace my own blackness. She gave me the tools to work within the body that I was born into, which meant that I had a particular responsibility, presenting as I do within melanated and non-melanated spaces, and not hating any of the parts that make me who I am. That mentorship led me to look at the world even more critically, and it led me to consistently see the lack of Black and melanated folks within the psychedelic community.

I knew it was a problem, but had not fully processed how deeply it ran. So in March of 2024, thanks to the encouragement of my girlfriend, I took up a camera and started to document the Question 4 ballot initiative. That led me to meeting many of the Advocates in the psychedelic community here in the Boston area. I found that the majority were white. That bothered me because I knew from my research and experience that melanated people needed to be a part of this movement. We needed more than just a seat at the table; we needed to make our own table, which puts our needs and desires first. 

While filming at an advocate launch event in June of 2024, I met [EMC co-founder] Imani Turnbull-Brown. We started to talk, and quickly found out that we were both deeply inspired and impassioned to utilize psychedelics through a holistic approach through alternative healing modalities and reclamation of spaces, ancestry, and activities that we as melanated folks have often been excluded from or have outright forgotten to empower, reframe, and unify. We met to help build community. That was the beginning of EMC.

One of the biggest concerns surrounding psychedelic-assisted therapy is the high cost of treatment sessions. How do you think this issue can be addressed—be it legislatively, commercially, or otherwise—to make psychedelic medicine more accessible to a broader range of participants?

As it has and will continue to be, the underground most likely is going to do the bulk of healing that is cost-effective and widely accessible. The other means are through religious exemptions and full decrim/legalization. These legislative actions will be started in the localities of towns and cities, and will spread to the states. Hopefully, with enough public pressure, it will become nationally embraced and rescheduled. 

The way forward is unpredictable at best. The war on drugs/substances has been so embedded nationally and internationally through moral and scientific dog whistles that it has left a deep stain of stigma. The first steps to making a significant change in the zeitgeist around psychedelia and substances in general are by way of education. This means not only being active in the psychedelic community, but getting out onto the streets, tabling and going door to door, having workshops in churches, mosques, and synagogues, making events that are in public spaces like the park, or sharing info at natural gathering spaces like bus and train stops. It means having family-friendly community-centered workshops that embrace a holistic approach that offers alternative options to the public on topics ranging from indigenous reconciliation to policy change and activism, to spiritualism, meditation, food resources, and the arts. 

Psychedelic medicines and substances need to be reframed to showcase their use as tools, and we need to emphasize the importance of integration after that use. Ultimately, I think the way forward is to create communal spaces that perhaps are under religious exemptions or simply spaces where people can share stories and learn from one another's experiences through mediums like art, cooking, nature, activism, healing modalities, and historical/ ancestral connections to plant medicines.

Another challenge facing potential psychedelic therapy providers in Oregon and Colorado is the high cost of certification and licensing for clinicians who want to provide psilocybin-assisted therapy. What are your thoughts on how to address this barrier and encourage demographic diversity throughout both the psychedelic community and the mental healthcare industry at large?

Aside from the underground’s persistence, the necessity to reframe, educate, and integrate plant medicines/substances into melanated communities will be the best approach to getting the people behind supporting these policies. Without this aspect, melanated communities will continue to be in the dark about what these plants and man-made substances can provide. This means we must create our own path forward—creating new systems led by us as therapists, social workers, educators, psychiatrists, advocates, and community leaders.

The difficulty, particularly around indigenous voices, is that colonialism continues to force profiteering and capital gain with these plants and manmade chemicals. The systems of mental health and the above-ground psychedelic community are structured and performed by majority white demographics, who oftentimes co-opt ancestral practices or remove those entirely to use a clinical setting that is not suitable for the many melanated people. A clinical setting often invokes a memory of testing on people of color. People of color, Black, brown, and melanated, do not want to participate. This is a very complicated and nuanced concern, and it will take more than just financial motivation to get people in the community to embrace what is being presented to them.

Grassroots advocates for psychedelic policy reform in the US and abroad have gained and maintained remarkable traction and influence. So far, they have spearheaded efforts in 10 cities in Massachusetts and statewide reform movements led by grassroots groups in Oregon, Colorado, and, most recently, New Mexico. What are some of the reasons that grassroots organization leaders such as yourself have significantly impacted tangible legislative reform?

It comes back to what I've stated: community involvement and education. When people know what they are encountering and have support and guidance, they are more apt to embrace policies that support psychedelics as medicine.

As interest in psychedelics continues to grow across the United States and around the world, what do you see as the best-case and worst-case scenarios for its future in the United States?

In the best-case scenario, substances will not be captured by capitalist means. They are destigmatized and utilized as the tools they are meant to be. They are utilized for radical rest, healing, joy, and creativity. They will help to disrupt the patterns of othering and tribalism and help to unite us as people. They could potentially help with long-term medical conditions like dementia, addiction, alcoholism, anxiety, genetic breakdowns, cluster headaches, seizures, and autism, to name a few. They can also help people prioritize their mental health, which has many potential variables to help them make better interpersonal and external connections. Many potential benefits are possible.

The worst-case scenario is that they will be captured by a capitalist agenda and used as political motivations to get bad actors into office. They will be priced incredibly high or will be very difficult to access because of a lack of support through insurance companies, or have to be utilized in specific locations that make people feel uncomfortable wanting to enter into, or they attempt to synthesize and patent the substances, which will further make them inaccessible.

Another possible issue is that if these substances are improperly implemented in clinical or religious-based settings and people are harmed either by a mental break like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, or the providers are taking advantage of the patients and sexually harming them. … Another concern is that there will be no consideration for indigenous people's voices in this conversation, never mind that of melanated people. More potential problems can emerge if things go badly.

What would you say to parents, families, and individuals who might be against or still on the fence about the use, decriminalization, and/or legalization of psychedelics? 

The only way to shift your perspective is to do the research and look at the historical records that have portrayed these substances as the enemy. If you actually look at the studies that have been done so far and consider that these plant substances and man-made chemicals have been in use for centuries amongst our ancestors and are still used today in indigenous practice, these are not things that we should be fearful of.

Many more benefits come from these substances when implemented correctly in the community, accessibility, education, harm reduction, and integration. Just because you don't like that they could be legalized or decriminalized does not mean they won't still be actively used. The black market will always exist, and people will always be able to get their hands on them. 

I would also note that historically, people are criminalized for using substances that are potentially very beneficial for their lives. In fact, thousands of people of color are in jail from the ’90s and early 2000s because of three-strike laws that put them behind bars to this day. The recidivism rate is so high because of the stigma and because society does not have the social safety nets to help the formerly incarcerated sustain a life outside of jail or prison.

What’s next for your personal and organizational advocacy work?

Starting in the middle of August, EMC will be tabling on Friday afternoons around the Greater Boston area in melanated communities to share with people about our group and provide educational materials that will help to reframe what entheogens in other words plant medicines are. We hope to start collecting stories that community members will provide (anonymously if they prefer) about their psychedelic experiences through video, audio, or written form.

We also have four different workshops coming through late summer into early fall, starting in September and ending in December.

Aside from yourself and EMC, who are some other lead innovators, and/or advocates in the psychedelic science community that you think more people should know about and hear from?

This is a very long and exhaustive list that will take me far too long to answer. Am I in my immediate mind?, I would say: Michou Olivera, Jamie Morey, Dr. Carl Hart, Synergetic Press, Sia Henry, Kevin Cranford, and Mass Healing.

Pictured: EMC Co-Founders Julian Fox (rt.) and Imani Turnbull-Brown (lt.) | via Entheogen Melanin Collective

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