Daniel McQueen’s Speech from the 4th Psychedelic Shine:

Hello everyone. Thank you for coming to our fourth Psychedelic Shine hosted by Medicinal Mindfulness. My name is Daniel McQueen and I started Medicinal Mindfulness with my wife Alison in 2012 along with a ragtag group of consciousness activists. We’ve been on a wild ride ever since.  

One of the fruits of this journey is this program, Psychedelic Shine. We’re here not just to promote and support a vision of a successful consciousness movement for the future, we’re also here to honor and support the successes of the psychedelic movement already happening today.

One of the successes we’d like to shine some light on is the legalization of recreational cannabis in Colorado. We have a lot of activists, people like Max Montrose, who is speaking today, to thank for this accomplishment.  

Psychedelic Shine asks the question: What would it look like if we simply continued to live into this emerging reality of greater freedom and healing?  

Cannabis wasn’t legal when we started Medicinal Mindfulness as a Psychedelic Harm Prevention and Education program. But since the legalization of cannabis, we’ve had the opportunity to openly guide private, intentionally guided, psychedelic journeys using this sacred medicine through our Conscious Cannabis program. In other words, we developed the framework of the cannabis program before we knew it was possible. This is what it means to live into something… Trusting that new opportunities will arise when we are ready for them.

Our community has had the honor of facilitating these experiences for over two years now, working with hundreds of people, and sharing some amazing stories.  

Very few people believe me when I say this but we’ve been able to consistently create profound, classically psychedelic experiences, safely, using “just pot.” “Just Pot” is actually an inside joke to us now. There’s nothing new about this ability, it’s just been overlooked by the modern psychedelic movement as they focus on the really big psychedelics. People again and again underestimate the power of this medicine.  

There’s something very special about this plant spirit, Cannabis Sativa.  

Our community calls this the exploration of the third frontier of cannabis activism – the first being medical marijuana for physical healing, then the second being recreational cannabis as a direct challenge to the unjust War on Drugs.  

These two movements are by no means over, but now we also have the opportunity to openly develop the psycho-spiritual uses of this amazing and healing herb in a safe and supportive way.  

Our ship, Medicinal Mindfulness, has been exploring this new terrain, and the potential seems endless. Not only have we created intentional processes that can guide the healing of physical ailments, we’ve developed experiences that guide healing for psychological and spiritual struggles as well. And like other psychedelics, cannabis also supports the development of our highest expressions of self.    

But while we celebrate the successes of our state’s step toward freedom and justice, too many people are still going to jail for using this plant. Families are being torn apart.

I read recently that the DEA may be rescheduling cannabis from Schedule 1 soon, which is good news. But the FDA also just issued a ruling and they’re trying to criminalize the sale of CBD. “Pending a drug trial.”

These two decisions are both required for one end goal – which is the control and patenting of the compounds in cannabis – for the sole purpose of making a few powerful people and corporations billions of dollars while simultaneously restricting the access of this naturally occurring medicinal for the rest of us.  

There is a ton of momentum towards stopping this from happening, but this… what ever this is… isn’t over.

What I want to give voice to today, the transpersonal perspective, is that we have a very interesting and unexpected ally – One thing really going for us – that unlike the corruption of tobacco, and alcohol, and so many other medicines that are mostly stimulants and sedatives, Cannabis Sativa is a psychedelic. And psychedelics have a very well documented history of creating vast amounts of unpredictable mischief to help people wake up. 

In the end, everything points to the truth and light.  

What if cannabis sativa turned out to be the spear tip of the psychedelic movement? 

A psychedelic experience as potent as any of the others is being legalized as a byproduct of the cannabis movement, and this in turn can be used to support the public’s growing interest in other psychedelics. In a sense, working with this medicine, in this way, is a non-research, apolitical approach to legalization.  

So today we’re here to both celebrate the successes, as well as to honor the continued journey required of our community. And to acknowledge the activists who’ve both already achieved victories, and those activists who will do so in our future. Like the students and professionals speaking here today.

Our program, Medicinal Mindfulness, is just one possibility of a new form of consciousness activism. We are here to empower people and communities on their journey towards healing and awakening.  

As I step off the stage, and others step up to share some of the history as well as the future possibilities of this decades old struggle, I want you to ask yourself how you might also be inspired to rebel.  

Any real act of rebellion, and by real, I mean non-violent and non-coercive, is simply the ability to see solutions completely outside the box of what we’re being told is possible. And then working towards making them so.   

Thank you for coming today – I look forward to seeing what happens.