Uniting the population power of public health with the transformational potential of psychedelics

Our Mission

Psychedelics are a growing public health issue due to increasing use, therapeutic, preventive health, and prosocial potential, evolving policy context, and concerns regarding equity and safety. Yet there is currently a profound disconnect between the psychedelic renaissance and public health — the field that provides large-scale and equity-driven health promotion and protection. This divide constitutes a major missed opportunity to achieve population-level benefits.

The mission of the Center for Psychedelic Public Health (CPPH) is to:

safely amplify and accelerate psychedelic benefits for community, population, and planetary health by establishing psychedelic public health as a new discipline

CPPH responds to a critical gap by bridging research, policy, and practice, applying collective-level strategies that center equity, community, safety, health determinants, and Indigenous knowledge and people while addressing the full spectrum of psychedelic use

Psychedelic public health includes the formal and informal use of classic and non-classic psychedelics, from synthetics, to plants, to sacred medicines. It encompasses complementary therapeutic, contemplative, cultural, traditional, energetic, ecological, and expressive modalities

The Gap

CPPH’s seminal publication in Social Science & Medicine (2024) finds that, among 228 Schools and Programs of Public Health (SPPHs) and 59 Psychedelic Research Centers (PRCs):

  • public health is underrepresented, with low activity in psychedelic research and scholarship

  • public health and psychedelic fields have limited contact, with PRCs marked by structural inequities

The Imperative

The  status quo has produced crises in health, justice, climate

These crises are collective in cause, scale, impact

Collective-level solutions are required

The prevailing clinical focus in psychedelics does not tap this collective aspect, nor meet the full scope of use, underlying causes, or scale of need and faces regulatory constraints, service bottlenecks, high costs, and social barriers

Psychedelics work on collective pathways that can be pro-health, pro-social, pro-environment

Public health adds necessary collective-level prevention and promotion approaches Its scope extends beyond the therapeutic and clinical. It applies interpersonal, community, population, social, and systems-level tools to generate collective impacts, regardless of regulatory status, for both health protection and promotion