On Nov. 11, 2024, Bridger Lee Jensen stepped out of his church, Singularism, and was surrounded by police. They detained him, searched the church, and seized an alleged 450 grams of dried psilocybin mushroom.
Sixty-three percent of Americans identify as Christian. A primary responsibility for the established Christian church is to offer ethical guidance to church members, all of whom live in a society with particular state and federal laws.
Alongside the last two decades of growth in the field of psychedelic medicine, the use of psychedelics in religious and spiritual contexts has increased, not only in novel psychedelic spiritual communities (i.e., psychedelic churches) and indigenous or Native American contexts, but in Abrahamic religious communities as well.
One of the biggest challenges in psychedelic regulation is reconciling competing ideas of what psychedelics are and why people use them. These definitions shape not only our cultural narratives but concrete policy choices.
This symposium, The PULSE of Psychedelics, Law, and Spirituality, highlights the work of the Petrie-Flom Center’s Psychedelic Use, Law, and Spiritual Experience (PULSE) Project. We invited this year’s cohort of affiliated legal and religious scholars and practitioners to explore an idea from their own work. These PULSE researchers, who meet monthly, come from a range…
The Health Law Policy, Bioethics, and Biotechnology Workshop provides a forum for discussion of new scholarship in these fields from the world’s leading experts. The workshop is led by Professor I. Glenn Cohen, and presenters come from a wide range of disciplines and departments. Harvard graduate students may register to take the workshop for course…
I spent 15 years as a U.S. Navy fighter pilot, including flying F/A-18 Hornets on combat sorties over Iraq. I believed deeply in the mission I swore to uphold: defending the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
Join us for a lunchtime debate hosted by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. This discussion will explore the surge of interest in increasing access to psychedelics. What are the law and policy choices that would maximize benefits and minimize risk of harm? Lunch will be served; event…
The Petrie-Flom Center hosted an intensive training on issues in psychedelics-related law, medicine, research, and policy on July 14-15, 2025. With nine sessions, 25 instructors, and 60 participants, the conference emphasized lateral learning, in-depth conversation, and a complex picture of the psychedelic landscape today. Made possible by a generous gift from the Gracias Family Foundation, Psychedelics…
Sacred Rights: Psychedelics, Law, and Spirituality 2025 PULSE Conference Project on Psychedelic Use, Law, and Spiritual Experience (PULSE) Scientific and commercial interest in psychedelics is exploding. In the flood of news about drug companies, clinical trials, and state and federal regulation, one might overlook the spiritual use of psychedelics. However, spiritual use long predates Western…
