The Right to Alter Your Own Consciousness

“McKenna argued that the privacy of the individual mind is the most basic civil liberty. The courts have not agreed. The legislature is beginning to.”

The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue, McKenna wrote. It concerns the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.

The courts have been skeptical. No federal court has recognized a constitutional right to alter one's consciousness through controlled substances independent of religious context.

The legislature has been more receptive. Colorado's Proposition 122 is the most expansive implementation of McKenna's personal autonomy argument: decriminalized personal possession, cultivation, use, and social sharing of psilocybin, psilocyn, ibogaine, and mescaline (excluding peyote) for adults. The social sharing provision specifically protects informal, communal, and ceremonial use outside commercial or medical frameworks.

The Cato Institute's 2025 analysis argues for building on existing cannabis regulatory infrastructure rather than creating new regulatory agencies, using dispensaries, testing laboratories, and compliance frameworks already established for cannabis.

McKenna's framing, that the illegality of plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place, captures what most policy advocates are more careful to avoid saying: the fundamental premise of drug prohibition, applied to plants humans have used for thousands of years, is philosophically incoherent. The plant does not become illegal because a legislature says so. The law making it illegal is the aberration.

Sources

• McKenna, Food of the Gods (1992)
• Colorado Proposition 122 (2022)
• Cato Institute Future of Psychedelic Regulation (2025)