PS2025 Juneteenth Statement
Public Statement to the PS2025 Community
This is a statement collectively written by the official PS2025 Juneteenth & Black Planning Committee to both publicly recognize prior shortcomings and commit to a more inclusive Black experience at Psychedelic Science 2025.
Psychedelic Science 2023 was heralded as a groundbreaking event—a bridge connecting the medical, the mystical, the marginalized, and the mainstream. With over 12,000 attendees, it stood as the largest psychedelic conference in history. It was positioned as a space where healing, transformation, and inclusivity would take center stage.
Yet, for many Black participants, this vision did not hold true. Instead, PS2023 became a moment of harm, disappointment, and erasure. Despite the conference taking place during Juneteenth, there was a glaring lack of acknowledgment and celebration of Black culture, influence, and history. This was not just an oversight. It was a painful reflection of the same systemic exclusion and disregard Black people have endured in every sector, including within the psychedelic movement.
Juneteenth is not just a day of celebration — it is a reminder of delayed justice, stolen time, and the continued fight for true liberation. On June 19, 1865, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, TX, to enforce the liberation of enslaved Black people. But freedom had not been freely given — it had been deliberately withheld to continue exploiting Black labor for as long as possible. Even after that day, new systems of racial oppression emerged—Black Codes, convict leasing, Jim Crow, redlining, and mass incarceration — all designed to strip Black people of autonomy, wealth, and security.
The physical, psychological, and economic harm inflicted on Black communities is not a relic of the past. It is ongoing. Black people have and continue to experience some of the most barbaric treatment in human history. This country continues to allow the forced and unpaid labor of our people in carceral settings as “punishment for crime,” a clear exception to the supposed abolition of slavery. We have watched as police officers and private citizens murder Black people with impunity for no other reason than their insistence that we are “threatening.” Meanwhile, our women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes, and our children, as young as six years old, are being handcuffed and arrested in institutions entrusted with educating them. We are incarcerated, impoverished, disenfranchised, and discriminated against at higher rates than practically any other race.
And yet, despite this, Black people have continued to create, to heal, to build, to thrive. In the face of centuries of oppression, we have cultivated art, music, literature, medicine, spiritual practices, and entire movements that have shaped the world. Our resilience is not just survival — it is transformation. We have taken what was meant to break us and turned it into brilliance.
The failures of PS2023 could have been just another dot in the long line of Black exclusion. But we refuse to let that be the story. In response to the harm experienced by many Black attendees, Black members of the MAPS team, alongside Black leaders in the psychedelic community, have come together to form the Juneteenth and Black Planning Committee for Psychedelic Science 2025. This committee was created because we will not idly stand by and allow another conference to diminish the power, presence, and shine of Black people in this field.
In 2025, Psychedelic Science once again falls during Juneteenth — but this time, we are doing it differently.
-Juneteenth will be honored with the reverence, the depth, and the celebration it deserves. This is not a day to be ignored or treated as symbolic — it is central to our collective liberation.
-There will be intentional, dedicated spaces for Black healing, Black joy, and Black community. Black people must feel safe, seen, and fully included in the psychedelic movement—not just invited in, but prioritized.
-Black voices, expertise, and leadership will be amplified and uplifted. We have been at the forefront of healing traditions for centuries, and our wisdom deserves respect, funding, and platforms — not tokenism.
-We will ensure this field is honoring its own ideals. Psychedelic spaces cannot claim to represent healing and liberation while replicating the same systems of exclusion and harm that exist elsewhere. Real change requires real action.
-Engaging Black leaders and organizations to ensure a community-driven, inclusive design process. Recognizing that the Black experience is diverse, we are committed to collaborating with a wide range of voices in the psychedelic space to shape our objectives and programming with collective wisdom and vision.
We are here to ensure that PS2025 does not repeat the mistakes of the past, but instead, becomes a space that truly reflects the values of justice, healing, and transformation.
-Devon Phillips, Hanifa Nayo Washington, Joseph McCowan, Kevin Cranford, Jr., Kufikiri H. Imara, Pamela Roundtree, Sia Henry, Sutton King
Collectively, the Juneteenth & Black Planning Committee for Psychedelic Science 2025
