Psychedelic Professionals Meet: DENVER

Psychedelic Professionals Meetup Groups are happening!  Let's keep Colorado on the leading edge of psychedelic medicine work by coming together in community to learn, share, and grow. Each Psychedelic Professionals Meetup Group starts with an informative topic relevant to research, practice, policy, or activism around psychedelic medicines, followed by open discussion and an opportunity to connect with like-minded others. 

For our August meetup...

One of the things of interest to us at The Nowak Society is to normalize and humanize the spectrum of drug use. As "psychedelic professionals," we can get caught up in what might be called psychedelic exceptionalism -- the idea that psychedelic drugs/drug use is an exceptional category of drug use, somehow morally superior because people are using drugs for "healing" whereas we might assume others are not. We might forget that we're part of a larger movement of undoing prohibitionist drug policies and repairing harms to impacted communities. And we might forget that there's a spectrum of drug use involving all kinds of drugs and all kinds of relationships with drugs and medicines. There's no hierarchy and there's no need to place ourselves or others as better or worse. How can we normalize and humanize drug and medicine use and remember the bigger picture that connects us all?

We are excited to welcome Lisa Raville to our August meetup at the Mercury! Lisa Raville grew up outside of Chicago, IL and graduated from DePaul University with a degree in Communications and a minor in Women’s Studies. Lisa is the Executive Director of the Harm Reduction Action Center, a public health agency that works with people who inject and smoke drugs. Lisa has been with HRAC since 2009. Lisa’s activist voice was cultivated with her experiences as an overnight homeless shelter coordinator, development work at a domestic violence agency, a former campaign manager for a CA County Supervisor, and an AmeriCorps VISTA at an AIDS agency. Lisa is the Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition.

Suggested donation of $10 goes toward supporting the work of The Nowak Society. If you have ideas for topics or presentations for these meetup groups or would like to be more involved, please contact us! Please support the Mercury Cafe by purchasing food or drink during our event. For August we are meeting in the Rose Room at the Mercury Cafe --- that is the first floor room where the bar and cafe are. See you there!

Finally, if you have a brochure, flyer or business card you want to display, please bring them! We kindly request that anything advertised is legal and aboveboard, but otherwise we're happy to make space for you to share your offerings with the larger community.