EP 188: Victor Cabral LSW | Psychedelic Therapy for Marginalized Communities

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Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility Podcast. This is Bleit Mall, your host and today having another conversation in our series addressing this emerging field of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, which is offering so much promise to so many suffering from serious human challenges like severe depression, anxiety disorders, addictions, PTSD and so on. And today we're having a conversation with Victor Cabral, who is a seasoned licensed therapist working in this space and a real leader in.

Untangling and unpacking the factors of oppression and racism that because they pervade our society, still can show up in this movement and replicate themselves in the way that we're thinking about. Psychiatric assisted psychotherapy, access to it, the delivery systems and so forth. You know, it's currently actually psychedelic assisted psychotherapy is really a matter of privilege. It's available to those with resources and as it rolls out, and with the clinical trials that will lead hopefully to the rescheduling of some of these medicines for legal therapeutic use. We need to figure out delivery systems that are going to make this widely available and not just available to those who are most privileged in our society. So, Victor Alfonso Cabral, fascinating interview.

And.

I'm very happy to be here today with Victor Cabral. Welcome, Victor.

Hi Flea, how are you? It's great to be here again and looking forward to the conversation.

Yeah, we're so happy to have you back this year. You did a great interview with our colleague Andrea.

Dr. Pennington last year. That was an incredible contribution to the summit. And so we're really looking forward to checking in with you and seeing what's going on in the past year and so forth and your very important work. So I'm going to share your bio and then we'll jump right into the conversation. Sound good?

Sure.

All right. So Victor Alfonso Cabral, msw, lsw, is an innovative and award winning Afro Latinx leader who is dedicated to fostering strategic relationships and inspiring substantial transformation in historically marginalized communities. Victor's strength lies in his empathic strategic and forward thinking approach rooted in his personal and professional experiences. His multifaceted career spans policy development, community outreach and providing community mental health services. He is the former Director of Policy and Regulatory affairs at Fluence Training where spearheaded strategic policy initiatives, developed an inclusive training curriculum and served as a connector among key stakeholders in the field of psychedelic medicine. Victor's passion for advocacy and reform has been recognized by numerous organizations. He was listed on the Students for sensible drug policies 40 under 40 outstanding BIPOC leaders in drug policy and received the 2022 Emerging Social Work Leader Award from the national association of Social Workers.

And we were talking just before we went live with the interview that your work hasn't been pretty absorbed in policy work for some time now and you're just getting ready to re. Engage with direct clinical work yourself. But previously you were.

Doing integration work, primarily integration work, with four people doing psychedelic sessions. And were you doing that in a. In private practice or in a mental health clinics, a community clinic setting, or both?

Yeah, in a private practice here in Pennsylvania. So I worked for a few different clinics, some of which were community clinics, but mostly private practice.

Great. So, Victor.

Your involvement in the psychedelic medicine psychiatric assisted psychotherapy field has to a great degree focused on diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, or deia.

And so I wonder if you could talk about your personal journey into the field of psychedelic medicine, psychedelic assisted therapy.

And.

Just what inspired you to find your way into being a social worker, being a therapist, and entering the world of psychedelic medicine and then your particular passion for reform and policy around diversity, inclusion, equity and accessibility for. Especially for the marginalized populations who often can be left out of our mainstream mental health and medical systems?

Yeah, I think so. My journey into this field is very much intertwined with my personal story and my personal.

Journey when it comes to healing. But I, I came across psychedelics in my first experience in, in 2016. I had heard about them before. I had some other experiences where I had had conversations or heard about them in other contexts, but never really saw them as, as healing or understood their potential. And in 2016, I was working in a community clinic as a therapist in Reading, Pennsylvania, where I'm from. And.

I just had done some research and had. Was going through my own healing journey at the time.

Taking several different medications and trying to navigate my own mental health. And I decided that I wanted to.

You know, engage with, with psilocybin. And I had a personal experience that really is what catapulted me into this work. I was, I was struggling as a clinician with the community that I was working with and seeing how the medications that they were taking weren't really supporting them or improving their situations.

And, and so once I had my personal healing experience, I wanted to learn more. And I. And I knew at that moment or through that experience and afterwards that this was really the work that I wanted to do. So I went on that fall and started my master's degree in social work and what, you know, policy work kind of just fell in my lap. I wasn't really a huge fan of policy, but when I graduated with my master's in 2019, Governor Tom Wolf offered me a fellowship here in the state of Pennsylvania. And so that threw me into the policy work. And I've always been a systems thinker, and I think learning how to navigate that space really helped me see where the needs were in the psychedelic space, not only from the community perspective, on an individual level, working with folks, but also on a systemic level and trying to address some of the barriers there. And that's really what brought me into this work with this unique perspective of, of trying to address.

The issues at different levels.

So I know you've expressed concern not only about accessibility, but safety for people of color, accessing the mental health infrastructure altogether, in particular that of psychedelic medicine. So I wonder if you could talk about some of those concerns and maybe some of the work you've done to try to.

You know, to try to improve the situation.

Yeah, I mean, if you look at the current mental health system and the issues of access and, and the ways in which people of color, bipoc folks, are harmed within that system, whether it's again, lack of access or it's being harmed by.

Not having representation among therapists or the healthcare systems that, that offer care, you see that that problem already exists. And so when you start to look at the psychedelic space and some of the bottleneck issues that we have, both at the clinical trial stage and then later on after approval, with having trained therapists, with having enough researchers and clinicians of color who understand issues, with having the majority of clinical trials.

Be by white participants being the people that are being looked at.

You start to see how down the line this could be a real issue for our communities, because the data that we're gathering there has been some improvement in some of the trials, but the data that we're gathering is not really representative of the communities that I serve. And so a lot of concerns there, and also a lot of concerns around the policies that we're introducing and ensuring that they include bipoc communities and include the communities that are in the most need when it comes to these services. So I often tell people, if you take all of the issues that we have already in the mental health care System, for example, 4% of therapists.

Are black and 1% of them are black men. And so if you take that statistic and you overlay it in the psychedelic space, that issue becomes even more stark. And, and so, you know, if you extrapolate that or if you scale that to what the potential implications of that are, there's a lot of work for us to be doing right now to make sure that we address those things.

Yeah, absolutely. And I know Maps, in terms of the clinical trials that they're conducting, has made a commitment to diversity, but still, I know there's a long way to go. And also there's. I know there's a history with people of color having been harmed, even abused in the mental health and medical systems with experimentation and of all kinds. I mean, there's a real history of very serious egregious harm. And so I've heard it said anywhere, speaking to other presenters of color, that there can be levels of fear in the black community and other communities of color, a lack of trust of the medical system and the mental health system in particular. And then there are certain stigmas around drugs and drug involvement and so forth. So I'm curious about your thoughts on both. Maybe.

What we can do to facilitate more men of color, especially since I assume from what you said, many of the therapists of color are female, but both women and men of color, more of them to take an interest in the mental health field as professionals, because people start making those decisions early on in high school and college, and so to attract more people of color onto those educational tracks and then also to lower their fear level and deal with some of the stigmas involved. So, I mean, I think there's both some issues around clients being willing to access these systems, people of color who. To access them as clients. But then there's also the lack of clinicians of color and which also exacerbates the problem because then you can't find someone that looks and. And identifies similar to you do to. To do therapy with.

Yeah. So I think it comes down to representation. Right. So when we, when we talk about young people or people who are getting ready to select their careers and making choices about moving into this space or moving into health care, mental health in general, they have to see there has to be some level of representation in what already exists. And so putting more money behind clinical trials, putting more money behind supporting those folks in going that way and pursuing those educational tracks, but also generally looking at our system and looking at how bipoc therapists and clinicians or researchers, et cetera, are often underpaid and serve communities that.

Ask a lot more of them in terms of.

The workload that they carry. So when you look at, for example, here in Pennsylvania, a lot of clinicians of color have caseloads that are.

Really big caseloads that they can't manage. There's not a lot of support when it comes to reimbursement or helping those folks kind of manage those caseloads. And so again, looking at increasing representation by increasing funding to research and increasing funding to.

Educational opportunities, increasing funding to.

Making sure that the clinicians that already exist in this space are being compensated equally or equitably. On the other side of that, in terms of dealing with the stigma and dealing with the history.

I think it's also, you know, these companies or these corporations that are doing the research.

Really putting the effort and the resources behind looking at their protocols and how those protocols take into consideration, you know, all of the different.

Intersectionalities or identities that people bring. And so in doing that, and to do that, we need to bring in more researchers of color, men, women, you know, all genders, etc. To be able to really inform how those protocols are being written and ensure that people aren't being harmed. And if you talk to more clinicians of color who are doing this research, they, at least the ones that I've talked to, people are being harmed in these clinics. People of color are being harmed in the process of, of.

Pursuing these medicines and clinical trials. They're often, these protocols are often not written with them in mind. And so I think we need to put resources behind all of these different entry points and, and then bring in folks that are doing this work and understand the field and have these unique experiences and perspectives to really inform how we're going forward with the work.

Well, this all really points to the importance of people like yourself and the leadership role you're in. And as a clinician, I know in speaking to other bipoc clinicians, I know there's a tremendous risk of burnout and a reality of burnout among clinicians. You talked about the large caseloads and unsupported and just such a background of intergenerational multi generation trauma and of all kinds of levels related to race and ethnicity and marginalized communities and so forth, and how that can be exacerbated. And so that's something that both clients and clinicians are exposed to or have those backgrounds. And then of course, doing your work, I mean, working as a clinician can, you know, there's always a risk of burnout for anyone with the vicarious trauma, continual exposure to the trauma of others, but just the complexity gets ramped up on so many levels when we're talking about someone like yourself doing your work primarily with marginalized communities.

Yeah, for sure. And, yeah, to the point about complexity. You add on all of the barriers that us as professionals in this space face when it comes to institutional racism, when it comes to all of these other layers that we face as professionals, but are also baked into protocols or baked into policy, the way that we do policy, the way that we write protocols, et cetera, research trials, those are additional.

I guess, upstream issues that don't really. That we might not really see, but that also add to kind of the way of addressing this issue, which is why I've become so involved on the many levels that we are discussing psychedelic medicine.

I wonder if you could talk more specifically about some of these protocols. You mentioned that in community clinics and other settings that there are people of color actually being harmed because the protocols that have been established are not appropriate.

So.

I'm wondering if you could talk specifically about some of the protocols or how protocols. I mean, I know there's one issue with the clinical trials that everybody's questioning how scalable is the protocols that were done because very expensive to do it the way it's done in the trial. So it's going to be to replicate that. It would only be accessible to people with a lot of means, regardless of their racial background. It would really be for rich people, basically. So that's a wide issue of how to make it scalable. But I'm wondering if there's other elements specifically of the protocols even that are being used in some of these clinics you're referencing that need to be changed and how they need to be changed or adapted in specific ways for clients of color.

Yeah. So I will preface by saying I haven't been involved in any clinical trials directly. And so a lot of my conversations come out of policy conversations or personal conversations with folks that are doing the work in clinical trials. But I think if we just look at some of the.

Aggression or the violence that people of color face when they seek out therapy, whether that be a microaggression or sometimes very direct racism or. Or someone's, you know, when we talk about intersectionality, you might have someone who is marginalized in different aspects of their identity. And just the way that we train therapists to respond to certain issues that people bring up or being able to understand the impact of racism and how that manifests in. In someone who's seeking therapy services, that already is happening right across the board. And so when you look at someone being in an vulnerable state. And you're giving them a medicine that is really opening them up in a way that.

Has the potential for immense healing, but also puts them in a state where they could be re traumatized or they could be hurt. In that sense, when you look at a lot of these clinical trials and you have protocols that are focusing mainly on white folks and are.

What's the word that I'm looking for? They are screening out people of color. Right. For certain reasons. Right. So one of the things that I've heard discuss is, for example, people of color from certain communities might suffer from high blood pressure or suffer from all of these other impacts of racism. And because of that are being screened out. Right. And so when you talk about the protocols, you really have to have folks who are part of those communities understand those communities understand how to respond and care for those communities. Communities really making sure that the protocols that have been written by the majority, white researchers, clinicians, et cetera.

That they're involved in that process and that when someone's seeking out these services.

Or are in a clinical trial, that their experiences are being honored and are being respected and are being received in a way that doesn't re traumatize them. And so, you know, I have heard anecdotal stories about this happening, and I'm sure if you talk to some, you know, I've heard researchers themselves, as participants, you know, experience harm.

And this is, you know, people who are trained and understand these modalities and even. And understand the space. Right. And even with that experience are being harmed. And I can't imagine what that would be like for someone coming in who's just, you know, an everyday person who's. Who's looking for healing.

So again, it just points to the.

Need for greater and greater representation at higher and higher levels.

Just to give you an example, during the pandemic, I was seeing people from Philadelphia, from as far as Pittsburgh, who were seeking out black, sometimes not only black men, but sometimes just black clinicians or Latinx clinicians, and weren't able to find them in their area. There's places here in Pennsylvania where they have none in some areas. Right. At all. And so, based on my own experience working with folks, but also the outreach that I get from different folks around the state to see if I have any space to see people or if I know of any clinicians, and when I refer them, they have lists that go on forever.

I think that there's definitely. We know that there's a need out there, and I think that, you know, Given the mental health crisis that we're in right now in this country, I imagine that that problem is more than.

That we can see right now. I just put out, I collaborated with Megan Mayer from the University of Maryland to put out an article in the Baltimore sun that talks about the need for social workers to be talking about psychedelic assisted therapy. And it's pretty much the conversation is non existent at this point. And.

And so there's barriers there in terms of professions kind of having these conversations. But also there's no standards yet. Right. The American Psychedelic Practitioners association just put out some standards, but generally there's no body that's established standards of care, standards of training. And so while there are institutions that are doing a better job, it's hit or miss. Right. Because they're not really answering. They're looking at best practices, whatever is available in the research, but there's really no body that's holding them accountable in terms of the standard quality of the training that they're offering. And how much of that is focusing on ensuring cultural competence.

Yeah, and I mean, obviously this is just an emerging field and right now the only legal psychedelic assisted therapy is with ketamine. And it looks like MDMA will be rescheduled soon for therapeutic use and prescription by a physician and maybe psilocybin not far behind that. So it is a new emerging field. And.

I've heard anywhere we're going to need to train an additional 10,000 to an additional 100,000 psychedelic assisted therapists because the feeling is the demand's going to be so high and there's, I mean, sometimes the enthusiasm gets a little ahead of the data. But generally these medicines are showing tremendous promise for treating human maladies and conditions that have been very difficult to treat. So tremendous promise and very likely going to be a huge demand. And so in some ways we're at a whole transformational moment and inflection point in the world of psychotherapy altogether and psychiatry. I mean, hopefully this is really going to transform psychiatry, which has been in a kind of a very limited box for a long time. So we're in that process of the field of, of therapy and psychiatry and so forth, going through this transformation, which could be very positive. But what that, what's now, I think there's a light being shed on the fact that the work had not been done previously in those fields around diversity, equity and inclusion, that it just hadn't been done. So now here trying to do that while at the same time being in this emerging field that's trying to transform the whole system, but also needing to make sure we don't perpetuate the old system in terms of its lack of equity and inclusion and accessibility and so forth. So pretty complex and daunting. But again, points to need for leaders like yourself. So how do we get more leaders like yourself in more positions of influence and power and decision making?

Yeah, I think, you know, for me.

It'S just really personally I've just made a choice to be out and talk about these things as much as I can. And making a commitment to decolonization, which not only calls for me to do the work externally, but also to be doing my own internal work and dealing with.

Unlearning some of the things that I learned as a trained clinician or social worker and being able to really impact my own profession and bringing these conversations to the table. I think it's really, if you have the means and the resources to really highlight the folks that are representing communities that are underrepresented in this space, I think that's where it starts and giving those folks a chance to really be out there and to let communities see themselves reflected in this space. One of the things that you hear all the time in terms of conversations about psychedelics in the black and brown community is these are white people drugs. Right. And so it's going to take for us as leaders or as servants to these communities, to our communities to really be out here, be honest, be transparent, be authentic and talk about our personal experiences to the extent that we're comfortable, but also talk about what we think is possible with these medicines for our communities.

So I'd like explore a little bit with you, Victor. Maybe kind of both the cultural side and then also the business side of this. So culturally we've seen an amazing sea change in the US anyway of legalization of cannabis. It's not legal everywhere, but I don't know how many states now, but many, many states have legalized medical marijuana and many have now legalized it for recreational use. And of course there's a whole business behind that and the whole tax benefits to governments and all. So that's a whole huge landscape. And so I'm wondering, and you know, even in terms of the medical use, it can be prescribed by physicians and so forth, but people usually use it on their own for self treatment. It's not something done in the context of a psychotherapeutic relationship usually. But I'm just still, I wonder if there's anything that's happened with that kind of movement that points to anything that might be instructive about where we are with psychedelic medicines on the kind of cultural shift side and the societal side and the acceptance side and even how that's seen by bipoc communities and so forth. And then the other side, looking at the business side as psychedelic medicine becomes legalized and so forth, know there's already a huge interest from the, from you know, either existing pharmaceutical industries or new pharmaceutical companies arising in this space. And you know, there, there's the business side of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. I mean, I don't know if you were at the recent MAPS conference in Denver, but the, the exhibitor was quite a scene. I had never seen anything like that and had everywhere from a kind of a, I don't know what to describe it, kind of little kind of hippie shops wanting to do stuff related to mushrooms, to big pharmaceutical companies and big therapy companies. And I mean it was quite, quite a scene in terms of the business end of this. And I would assume the danger is that that's going to be white dominated and dominated by white capital and white power infrastructures and so forth. So anyway, there was a lot of territory there, but maybe you could start with the cultural societal shifts and acceptance and then move into the business side of it and the importance of getting bipoc representation there.

Yeah, I think so. On the cultural side, what's happening is you have.

I think that you have interest across political ideologies in this country, given the interest on the more conservative side to make sure that, you know, the conversation about veterans having to go outside the country and not getting the care that they deserve and that they've earned from our, our veterans.

Healthcare system here in the states. And then you have kind of like the, the cultural pop culture scene where psychedelics have been around for quite some time and psychedelics have a history here in this country with.

You know, some of the early movements during the civil rights, et cetera. And so Devin Phillips I think described it well. He's the creative strategist at maps and he said when you have conservative politicians and rappers talking about the same thing, there's a point of convergence here that we need to take advantage of. And so I think what you're seeing culturally is a revisiting of these medicines.

On the cultural side, people are talking more about their experiences. I've seen more and more bipoc folks talk about their personal experience or connections or maybe their historical relationship to these medicines with their respective culture. And on the other side of that you have a medicine that's helping folks that we haven't been able to help for a long time. And just to give you an example of how surprised I've been, I mean, I've been in Washington, D.C. lobbying the House of Representatives and the Senate with organizations like Reason for Hope and the Psychedelic Medicine Coalition and going in and talking to a conservative staffer from a very conservative state and them saying, I have a family member who's attempted suicide twice, who's now microdosing, who's doing better, or.

My mom is a part of this organization in a certain state that is actually four mushrooms. We have a mental health crisis on our hands. We have an opioid epidemic on our hands. And so I think that all of these things are kind of coming together to really push the cultural conversation forward because we really are out of solutions at this point or out of tools. And.

And you know, with, with the promise of these medicines, I think it's, it's a lot easier to have the conversations now. And, and you know, things that have happened with like Michael Pollen and increased presence in the media and movies, etc, I think some would say it's hurting and it can sometimes because there's a miscommunication about the medicines and how they, how they function. But there's, it also helps just get the word on and help people be open. I think it's. 60% or more of the population now is in favor of legalizing psilocybin.

And by, I think 2033, there's a recent research paper that came out that said 2033 to 2037, the majority of states will have passed some kind of legislation.

Legalizing psychedelics.

On the business side, I think it's. Psychedelics are much different than marijuana. And I think that there's some mistakes that were made with marijuana that are both on the policy side and on the business side people are trying to avoid. But I think that the more that we talk about these things and the more that we.

Bring in folks with a broad perspective of how about what this industry could look like, all of the different ways these medicines can be helpful to the environment, to our mental health, to a large number of things, the earlier we start having those conversations and the earlier we start making sure that that feedback is embedded in our policy, the more opportunities we'll have to be able to be involved on the business side of where these things emerge.

Yeah, I think that's going to be incredibly important in terms of representation. There's representation kind of at the policy level and within clinical trials and universities and research institutes and all that but there's certainly gonna be a parallel with where is the funding coming from, where capital coming from, how's the industry emerging and so forth, the delivery systems. And I think there's going to have to be strong bipoc representation all around in order to avoid just replicating the past. As this new, both new field and new industry is emerging.

Being able to talk about alternative models and about hyper local community models is also an important way on the policy side. And as we develop standards and develop, you know, models like in Oregon and Colorado that are outside of the FDA system, those kind of models, as we iterate and make them better, can really be more conducive to having a broader population involved in what this looks like, rather than just on the medical side. And so the more conversations we have about the different applications of these medicines and how we can use them, I think then allow more folks to be involved.

In the industry.

Yeah, I think, I suspect, and based on our conversation and others, I've had that by getting more bipoc voices involved because of the context, because of their lived experience, they're likely to come up with innovative solutions that are going to be better for everybody in terms of the delivery systems and how we roll this out and how we make this successful. I think because of their lived experience, they're likely to come up with innovations that really are going to serve the entire field and be better for everybody. And there's a bit of, maybe a shared context there around many of these. Of course, some of these psychedelic medicines being used have been synthesized or used in synthetic forms, but most of them come from original plant sources. And, and these plant medicines that have been used by human beings for millennia have been largely stewarded by indigenous peoples for millennia. And so the whole notion of sacred reciprocity and representation there is very important as well. And they're also likely to be able to point us towards better solutions, more localized, more community based, more, less in terms of the big mechanical systems of how we kind of do things with modern medicine now, how do you bring this really down to a grassroots level, to a ceremonial level, to a local level, to a community level. And so I think getting more indigenous voices and more bipoc voices involved, we're likely to come up with better solutions and create a better system.

Yeah, for sure. And I think a lot of the protocols or the ways in which we're approaching psychedelic assisted therapy, a lot of it is just.

In some instances appropriating from indigenous culture and taking indigenous culture and indigenous practices and kind of.

Trying to fit that wisdom into a therapeutic language. Right. So I'm sure that Indigenous communities are.

And are already informing the way in which this is being built out. But as you mentioned, reciprocity and also.

And also having those communities be an active, play an active role in designing systems or designing care models is what's really going to have the most impact for everyone in terms of access and.

Benefits.

So with the time we have left, Victor, I really like to talk about your film, this documentary film. Is it finished or are you still working on it? Transcendence.

We're still working on it. And actually the titles, we've changed the title since the last interview. It's titled We Are the Medicine. And so we're still working on it. We did a working screening at Psychedelic Science and another screening at Philadelic, which was at the University of Pennsylvania a few weeks ago. And we're getting ready to do an exclusive event at University of Pennsylvania this fall as well, showing the work in progress part of it.

So tell us about the film. What's it about?

Yeah, so it's. It's really about everything that we've talked about in this conversation. I think the. The stories.

For me, and I think the director and the writer telling the stories of. Of the BIPOC leadership or the BIPOC servant leaders in this field, as well as the history of these medicines in. In our communities, is at the core of what the film's about.

It follows the story of a group of men, including myself, that have used psychedelics to deal with our trauma history, as well as black Air Force veteran Duran Young, who's a black woman who did about 18 years in the Air Force and is a psychedelic therapist, as well as other voices in the space. And really trying to bring this information to our communities for us, by us, and not having.

A white talking head tell us how the research should be applied or the history of these medicines to us and really bringing that information to our communities so that they're informed and can make an informed choice about their decisions to engage with the field of psychedelic medicine, which, whether it's for personal healing or for other purposes, really working to destigmatize, working to.

Call people into this space that are already clinicians and want to learn more about it, and informing the community on these medicines that have been. That are so far removed from.

The role that they had in our communities before through the war on drugs and kind of colonization and all of these other historical happenings, our communities have been kind of disconnected from that. And so the film is about, you know, educating folks, but it's also about us taking our power back. And really we are. The medicine really gets to the heart of that of.

These are the tools that we can use to really support us in decolonizing, support us in moving towards collective liberation and to hold each other in community and how to face some of the issues that we've been facing in this country and around the world for a long time.

I love that title. And so from what you're saying, it sounds like while hopefully there will be broad interest in this film and it will have a larger educational impact, this wasn't really. It's not a film created to educate white people. It's a film created by BIPOC people for bipoc people to empower the bipoc community. And, and really, I, I don't know if there's an emerging film genre, but certainly it sounds like this is very specifically a film that's, that's part and parcel a process of decolonization.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think, you know, I think that why folks will benefit from this film just as much in terms of.

Being able to witness the stories directly, being able to understand.

The experiences of people of color, you know, clinicians, other people in this field and just broadly who are looking to be involved in this field, really understanding what our relationships are to these medicines and what we carry and what we're trying to heal from. But the film is not being made with that audience in mind. The core audience is the bipoc community and.

Their healing and their stories.

And.

They'Re striving for decolonization and collective liberation.

Yeah, I think that makes a huge difference. I'm really looking forward to seeing it. So you're also.

You founded Dreamers of the Day. Could you talk about that organization, what that's about in your work there?

Yeah, that's my personal business. And essentially what I do from there is.

My therapy services that I offer. I'm looking to expand and start to offer coaching and potentially psychedelic harm reduction and integration services that aren't necessarily clinical, but just support folks in making safe decisions. But I also offer consulting and advising to different organizations, whether that's on the side of curriculum development or just general strategic planning and ensuring that they're doing so in an equitable way that's focused on.

Liberation and ensuring that they're operating in a way that's.

That'S helping move things forward in a way that's inclusive. And so that's the focus of that organization. And.

I've been doing that work in this space, consulting on policy, consulting on curriculum, speaking, etc. For as long as I've been in the space.

Victor, anything else we haven't touched on in our conversation today that you'd really like to communicate? Something important to you that we just kind of haven't gotten to?

I would just say for those folks that haven't seen any part of the film yet, they can go to www.picturecolorfulworld.com, that's the production company's website. There they can find the trailer to We Are the Medicine, as well as sign up and subscribe to receive updates as we continue to work on the film. And if anybody wants to follow my work or keep in touch with me, they can follow me on Instagram. My handle is a wondrousmind. So that's a W O n D R O U S M I n d and on LinkedIn. Victor Alfonso Cabral is my LinkedIn name. And you can look me up on there and keep in touch with me. But yeah, we could use all the support that, that, that we can get, whether that's sharing it out, talking about it, and we hope to continue doing this work and making sure that BIPOC voices are centered in this movement.

Well, Victor Alfonso Cabral, thank you so very much for very generously being involved with our summit and doing this interview. But really for the work that you're doing and for the leadership that you're taking so that we don't keep replicating the past. And with this emerging field of psychedelic assisted therapy that offers so much promise to so many, can we really create real transformation that includes decolonization for all of us and liberation for all of us and really create the kind of society that's that we all long for, whether we know it or not? You know, there's, I think, an innate longing for all of us to be in an equitable, inclusive society. And thank you very much for your leadership in that area.

Thank you, Fleet, for the opportunity. It was a pleasure.

Okay. Be well, Vic.

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