Chacruna: Workshop: Psychedelic Churches: From Legal Protections, to Ethics and Reciprocity (2025) | Cannabis Law Report | Where to order Skittles Moonrock online

Learn how to order CBD Oil online. TOP QUALITY GRADE A++

Cannabyss Inc. is the best place online to buy top quality weed, cannabis, vape, marijuana and CBD products. Get your borderless orders delivered at the pickup spot with ease. Top Grade products for client satisfaction.

👉 Click here to Visit our shop! 🛒

Wednesday, October 1st from 9:00am to 1:00pm PST

Register here

Do you wish you got into this event for free? Become a Chacruna member and receive free or discounted access to all Community Forums, Courses, Workshops, and more! Also get full access to our entire archive of past forum recordings and join our global network of psychedelic professionals and activists to dive deeper into discussion and discovery.

Price: $100

CE Approval Pending

Scholarships Available

As the use of psychedelic plant medicines becomes increasingly visible within spiritual communities, this workshop offers a critical and timely exploration of both legal protections and ethical responsibilities for churches and communities that incorporate plant medicines into their ceremonial practices. It will help participants better understand the rights, limitations, and legal pathways available to psychedelic churches. Participants will gain insight into foundational legal concepts, such as “sincere religious belief,” sacramental protections, religious exemptions under RFRA, and key legal precedents including the UDV, Santo Daime, and the more recent cases, such as the Church of the Eagle and the Condor, the Church of the Celestial Heart, and the Church of Gaia.

Going beyond legal frameworks, this workshop emphasizes the ethical and relational dimensions of practicing with sacred plants. Through a critical analysis of the power imbalances and extractive dynamics within the global psychedelic landscape, it invites participants to consider what meaningful reciprocity, cultural respect, and community accountability might look like in practice. Grounded in over three decades of experience with ayahuasca, mushrooms, and fieldwork across Latin America, this session will challenge attendees to seriously engage with Indigenous claims to plant medicines, and to reimagine their roles as allies rather than consumers.

Participants will be encouraged to reflect on the implications of the psychedelic renaissance for Indigenous communities, explore how to build ethical relationships rooted in humility and horizontal exchange, and examine the true potential of intercultural dialogue and decolonization within the psychedelic ecosystem. This workshop is an invitation to integrate legality with integrity and to align spiritual practice with justice, reciprocity, and respect for the traditions that have long held these medicines sacred.

Dr. Bia Labate (Beatriz Caiuby Labate) is an anthropologist, educator, author, speaker, and activist, committed to the protection of sacred plants while amplifying the voices of marginalized communities in the psychedelic science field. As a queer Brazilian anthropologist based in San Francisco, she has been profoundly influenced by her experiences with ayahuasca since 1996. Dr. Labate has a Ph.D. in social anthropology from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil. Her work focuses on plant medicines, drug policy, shamanism, ritual, religion, and social justice. She is the Executive Director of the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines and serves as a Public Education and Culture Specialist at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Additionally, she is a Visiting Scholar at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and an act as advisor for around 15 organizations, among them the Veteran Mental Health Leadership Coalition and the Alaska Entheogenic Awareness Council. Dr. Labate is also a co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Group for Psychoactive Studies (NEIP) in Brazil and the editor of its site. She has authored, co-authored, and co-edited 28 books, three special-edition journals, and numerous peer-reviewed and online publications (http://www.bialabate.net).

Henrique Fernandes Antunes is Research Director at the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of São Paulo (2019), where he also earned his M.A. in 2012. He completed his undergraduate and teaching degrees in social sciences at São Paulo State University (UNESP-FFC) in 2008. Dr. Antunes has been a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and has held postdoctoral positions at the Centre d’Étude des Mouvements Sociaux (CEMS) at EHESS, the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, and the International Postdoctoral Program at the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP). He is a member of CEBRAP’s Religion in the Contemporary World research group and is affiliated
with the Interdisciplinary Group for Psychoactive Studies (NEIP). His research explores the regulation and global circulation of ayahuasca, with a particular focus on legal, political, and cultural frameworks in Brazil and beyond. He has also written about the mainstreaming of
psychedelics, the DEA’s religious exemption for churches, and the psychedelic renaissance.

Dr. Osiris García Cerqueda is an Indigenous Mazatec historian and sociologist from Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, Mexico. From a very young age, he has dedicated himself to the study of the history of his community and the practice of the ancestral ritual with psilocybin mushrooms, of which Maria Sabina was renowned. In recent years, reciprocity and restorative justice are the basis of his work of conducting a needs assessment in his community and developing activities to strengthen the Mazatec bioculture. He is the author of the book Huautla tierra de magia, de hongos y hippies [Huautla land of magic, mushrooms, and hippies] (2014) and the independent magazine, Mirador Mazateco (2010–2015). Osiris seeks to raise awareness about the impact of the Global North on the Mazatec people in this new wave of the psychedelic renaissance. He is Program Coordinator of Chacruna’s Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative of the Americas (IRI).

accutane pills fast delivery

Lígia Duque Platero is Chacruna’s Education Program Associate. She is a queer, cisgender Brazilian woman. She has an interdisciplinary background in history, anthropology, and Latin American studies. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history (2005) and a history teacher training qualification (2006) from the University of São Paulo (USP), in Brazil. She has a master’s degree in Latin American Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM – 2012) in Mexico City, addressing public policies in relation to Indigenous peoples and Indigenous education in Brazil and Mexico from the 1940s-1970s. She has a doctorate in humanities, with an emphasis on cultural anthropology (2018), from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), in Brazil. Her PhD looked at the cultural transformations and exchanges amid the alliance between the Yawanawá Indigenous people and an urban church of Santo Daime. Her main research focus areas are: ayahuasca, Santo Daime, sacred plants, shamanic tourism, Yawanawá (Pano) people, Indigenous policies and human rights in Brazil and Mexico. She is a research associate at the Interdisciplinary Group for Psychoactive Studies (NEIP) and at the Laboratory for the History of Religious Experiences (UFRJ/IFCS) in Brazil.

Refund Policy click here