Who Decides
What Is Truth?

Dear Rose Family,

Something interesting is happening in the world of plant medicine.

Medicines that have been honored, studied through experience, and passed down within ancestral traditions for generations are now entering universities, laboratories, hospitals, and government discussions.

Iboga is being studied for addiction. Psilocybin is being investigated for depression. Ancient ceremonial practices are finding their way into modern conversations about mental health and wellbeing.

And suddenly, the world is listening.

But I find myself sitting with a question.

Why does wisdom become worthy of our attention only when someone wearing a lab coat tells us it is?

For centuries, communities have cultivated relationships with plants, observed their effects, developed systems of care, and preserved knowledge through generations of practice.

Yet much of this knowledge has been dismissed as superstition, primitive belief, or pseudoscience when it exists outside the institutions we have been taught to recognize as authoritative.

Then, when a university publishes a study or a pharmaceutical company begins investigating the same plant, the conversation changes.

The medicine has not suddenly appeared.

The ancestors did not suddenly become knowledgeable.

What changed was who was speaking.

And perhaps that deserves more examination than the medicine itself.

What Is Happening
in Plant Medicine?

1. Iboga Is Gaining Federal Research Attention

In October, the FDA invited public input on advancing ibogaine research, including its potential use in treating opioid use disorder.

Iboga comes from Central Africa, where it has held spiritual and ceremonial significance within Bwiti traditions for generations.

Today, researchers are exploring its potential applications through clinical studies, while examining important safety concerns.

Read the FDA announcement ↗

2. Gabon Is Working to Protect Iboga and Its Ancestral Knowledge

As international interest in Iboga grows, Gabon is working to protect the plant, regulate its trade, and address questions surrounding the ownership and commercial use of traditional knowledge.

It raises a question that should concern us all:

Who benefits when ancestral medicine becomes a global industry?

And will the communities that protected these traditions be respected, included, and supported?

Read the reporting from Mongabay ↗

3. Psilocybin Research Continues to Advance

In November, Compass Pathways announced the completion of its FDA application for an investigational synthetic psilocybin treatment for treatment-resistant depression.

Research into psychedelic compounds continues to expand, opening new conversations about mental health, consciousness, and the ways we understand wellbeing.

Read the research announcement ↗

🌹 FROM OUR GARDEN

Who Taught Us What
Excellence Looks Like?

I invite you to look beyond the headlines and sit with five questions:

1. Who taught me what intelligence, excellence, and truth look like?
2. Why have we been taught to trust knowledge from a laboratory while questioning the wisdom preserved by our ancestors?
3. Who established the standards by which we determine which cultures, traditions, and systems of knowledge are considered advanced or primitive?
4. What beliefs have I inherited about education, healing, and success that I have never truly examined for myself?
5. If I removed the limitations of what society has taught me to believe, what ancestral wisdom might I begin to recognize within myself?

These questions are not an invitation to reject science, but to examine the relationship between knowledge and authority.

Science is a method of inquiry, not the exclusive birthplace of wisdom.

Our ancestors were observers, thinkers, botanists, astronomers, farmers, midwives, and keepers of sophisticated systems of knowledge.

Their wisdom was cultivated through relationships, observation, experimentation, and generations of lived experience.

Not every ancestral belief was correct, just as not every modern scientific theory has proven correct.

But we cannot confuse the absence of institutional recognition with the absence of knowledge.

The Rose Dispatch shares educational perspectives on ancestral traditions, plant medicine research, cultural preservation, and holistic wellbeing.