Decolonizing psychedelics: 5 Questions for psychedelic facilitator and teacher Charlotte James

James discusses her new course, the Psychedelic Liberation Training Program, and racial equity in the psychedelic space.

Charlotte James had what she calls her “first allyship” with a plant when she started smoking cannabis at 14. “It kept my mind very open, and allowed me to traverse adolescence with a little less anxiety,” she says. In her later teens, she experimented with psychedelics at raves, and then became more interested in psychedelic ceremonies with “bufo,” or 5-MeO-DMT from Colorado River toad secretions, and Kambo, a secretion from the Giant Leaf frog.

In her 20s, James, who is Black, began to wonder why she was often the only person of color in these ceremonies. As she looked more closely at the intersection of race and psychedelics, she found there were few resources for BIPOC in the psychedelics field — so when she met cannabis entrepreneur and Kambo practitioner Undrea Wright at a conference in Baltimore the summer of 2019, together they decided to start the Ancestor Project. The group held integration circles, and created free educational videos and guides about psychedelic ceremonies.  

Now, James has stepped back from the Ancestor Project and is launching a new course with therapist Sara Reed called the Psychedelic Liberation Training Program. The Microdose spoke with James about the new course and racial equity in the psychedelic space. 

What led you to create the Psychedelic Liberation Training program?

It started when I was a student in a training program through the AWE Foundation. It’s three years of transpersonal psychology and Indigenous wisdom, and we have these in-person pilgrimages. It’s a lot of learning through personal process, which is also what the liberation training is. 

After the first retreat, I was getting this very clear message from the medicine that I needed to be more in the role of teacher, and that’s when I wrote the curriculum for this training program. I ran it once as part of the Ancestor Project, and over the last year, I recognized that I wanted to focus my energy into this training. Sara and I have known each other for awhile and worked together before, and we started talking about what classes or curricula we would want to put together. 

In my facilitator training, there’s been an arc of working with different medicines — which I’ve been doing outside of the program as well — and in that process, I’ve been recognizing how I want to show up in the psychedelic space in the most decolonized way possible. I think it’s unrealistic to say you’ve been decolonized in the same way one can arrive at being healed, but for me, that was about removing myself from institutions, even one that is Black and brown-led. 

What does decolonization mean to you?

Just like we all have trauma, we have also all been colonized. Everyone’s ancestors, at some point, were indigenous to some place, and likely practicing animus traditions, which recognized that we are in communion and relationship with the earth, and that everything around us is our relations. The process of colonization is a process of demonization, suppression, appropriation, and commodification; you see it happen in yoga, chocolate, cannabis, ayahuasca, and it’s happening now, with all these medicines.

The process of decolonizing is unlearning the conditioning that allows this process to take place. It’s also the deconditioning of patriarchy and white supremacy. It’s a process most of us have, to some degree, internalized; we participate in our own oppression and colonization and participate in replicating these systems that continue to exploit and capitalize and create inequity in the world. 

How do you design a course that puts these ideas about decolonization and liberation into action?

It was important to me that the training takes into account the personal into the learning process. It’s about decolonizing yourself and your practice — we’re learning through the personal decolonization process, the ways in which we participate in systems of oppression or dismantling them. 

I want the training itself to be a model of how you do more community-based or decolonized education, so I’m not leading everything. I teach some of the classes, but I’m bringing in people within my community and network who can speak on their own experience, to share the learning from their communities: queer, neurodivergent folks, Indigenous communities. Those people all speak on how we can be greater stewards of care in the psychedelic space.

There’s also richness brought in by students. Yes, there are facilitators and teachers and students, but what is it like to sit in circle and learn from each other? In the course, there’s lots of space for discussion and time in breakout groups. I hope people come out of the training with a community to lean on. 

Who is this course for? 

It feels hard to answer that question! There are 28 students in the first cohort, and 30 for the second, and there’s a breadth of people signed up. Most people who signed up are some kind of practitioner, like therapists or clinicians. But some people have never sat with medicine but are curious about what's going on in this space, and want to come at it from this decolonized approach. There’s even one person who has been in psychedelic-assisted therapy for the last year and felt it was incredibly impactful, so they want to learn better ways to communicate about it and use their skills in the space. 

I don’t see it as a facilitator training; I don't feel like I'm qualified to be running a full facilitator training, and that’s not possible in 10 weeks. I see it as a supplement to programs where DEI work or decolonization work is a check list item. 

How would decolonized psychedelics look different from current psychedelics?

It would be way less extractive. There would be way less cultural extraction — the act of taking from cultures and capitalizing on what you take. There would be less spiritual bypass — people wouldn’t use spiritual ideas or concepts to erase someone’s personal experience. Saying things like, “Well, race doesn't exist; we’re all just one human collective,” erases difference and the very real experiences of oppression that come with that difference. There’d be less psychedelic exceptionalism, and more real embodied compassion. 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.