The medicine I work with comes from a place. That sounds obvious, but it’s the part most people skip over when they’re first learning about it, and skipping it changes how the work lands.
The Sonoran Desert stretches across what’s now southern Arizona, parts of California, and most of Sonora in northwestern Mexico. It’s hot, dry, and full of life if you know how to look. The Comcaac people — also called Seri — have lived along the coast of that region for thousands of years. They’ve known about the medicine for at least that long, though their relationship to it isn’t something I’m in a position to speak about.
What I can say is that the medicine itself only became visible to the West in the second half of the twentieth century. A pamphlet published in 1984 outlined how to source and use it. That pamphlet, more than anything else, opened the door. Through the eighties and nineties it remained niche — known to a small circle of researchers, psychonauts, and a handful of underground facilitators.
The current wave is more recent. Beginning in the 2010s, the practice started spreading more widely, partly through retreat centers in Mexico, partly through individual facilitators who began offering ceremonies in jurisdictions where it was legally ambiguous or explicitly permitted. Colorado, where I work, is one such place — though the legal landscape changes quickly and what’s true today may not be true in five years.
The thing I want you to take from this is not the history itself, but the shape of it. This is a medicine with deep indigenous roots that the West has been in contact with for only a few decades. The people I learned from learned from people who learned from people. The lineage is short and uneven. There’s no single tradition, no central authority, no agreed-upon way to hold the work.
That has consequences.
On the one hand, it means the field is wild. Anyone with access to the medicine and enough confidence can call themselves a facilitator. Some are excellent. Many are not. There are no licensure boards, no consumer protections, no easy way to verify someone’s experience. Most of what you’ll read online about who to work with comes down to personal referrals and gut instinct.
On the other hand, it means the field is alive. We’re still figuring out what works. Frameworks that seemed solid five years ago are being revised. People who entered the work in the 2010s are now mentoring a new generation. The conversations happening right now, in private rooms and small conferences, are shaping what this practice will look like in twenty years.
I sit somewhere in the middle of that timeline. I’ve been at it long enough to have made most of the mistakes I’m going to make. I’ve sat with enough people to know the patterns. But I’m also aware that I’m part of a generation that’s still learning, and that some of what I think I know now will be revised by what I see in the next decade.
What I owe you, as someone considering this work, is honesty about that uncertainty. I’m not going to pretend the lineage I work in is older or more coherent than it actually is. I’m not going to overclaim about what the medicine can do. And I’m going to keep pointing you back to the deeper truth, which is that the medicine doesn’t do the work for you — it shows you the work that needs doing, and then it’s gone.
The Sonoran Desert is still there. The Comcaac are still there. The medicine is still rare. And the longer I do this, the more I think about all three.
