Exponential Healing for Existential Times

 Uniting the population power of public health with the transformational potential of psychedelics for the good of people and the planet

Our Mission

Amplify and accelerate psychedelic benefits and safety by establishing the new field of psychedelic public health

CPPH responds to a critical gap by applying collective-level strategies that address equity, community, health determinants, Indigenous knowledge and people, and the full spectrum of psychedelic use, prioritizing safety and transparency

Psychedelic public health includes the formal and informal use of classic and non-classic psychedelics with complementary therapeutic, contemplative, cultural, traditional, energetic, ecological, and expressive modalities

Psychedelics: A public health issue

  • Rising use of psychedelics

  • Beneficial potential for major public health issues including addiction, trauma, depression, chronic disease, and health behaviors such as smoking and violence

  • Evolving policy contexts from local to global settings

  • Concerns regarding safety, adverse events, misconduct

  • Equity gaps in access, affordability, and representation in research, training, and service

  • Transformational possibilities for human and planetary health

Public health’s scope encompasses psychedelic uses and settings beyond the therapeutic and clinical. It applies interpersonal, community, population, social, and systems-level tools to generate collective impacts, regardless of regulatory status

The Gap

CPPH’s seminal research, published 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

  • limited contact between public health and psychedelic fields, marked by structural inequities

The Imperative

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

These crises are collective in cause, scale, and impact

Collective-level solutions are required

The prevailing clinical focus in psychedelics does not 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 to the full scope of psychedelic use for safety, health, and wellness for communities and populations