Pardon Me Mr. President Trump, Can you Pardon Me?

To: President Donald J. Trump,

My name is Dr. Adam O’Brien and I am currently on probation with the New York State Department of Education and the Office of Professional Discipline for doing psychedelic therapy with classical psychedelics with a disabled Veteran (and also former first responder), even through I was trained, educated, and have a license to ethical and morally practice it. I was reported when it was successful and, even though I was trained to their standards to practice, NYS said that what I learned in my training and had a license to practice was not good enough. No client complaint; and, as my research institute stands, I am more thoroughly educated in it then those most practicing in the field.

I present you this request and to highlight our differences. I leave you the academic paper below to highlight our differences because they have named me as a “bad apple” for simply following science that they were requiring of other citizens, have a professional license to use, code of ethics requires advocacy against systematic oppression, and have a moral character clause as a part of NYS license renewal. I ask you, Mr. President, for the common sense to return home from the domestic war on drugs. Psychedelics offer more than just trauma healing; they offer communal healing. I implore you to legalize all of the classical psychedelics plants, fungi, cacti, and roots. Protect them so the law cannot take them away again. This will be your greatest accomplishment yet; and ever.

I believe that following the science was what they made us do as free citizens, and now I believe that it is their (and yours) time to follow the science of psychedelics. Your opinion is valuable, but when the science is this clear, legalization is the only return from justice that the law should be looking to achieve to have this issue resolved. As a Healer and person in long-term recovery from substances, I offer the world the Wounded Healers solution because theirs was D.A.R.E.,

What we know is that we were all one and we can be so again if we choose. If you were to review WHI published blogs, you would see that I am not a fan of the system as it stands today for different reasons. This system is pathological, and its history reads like an abusive relationship.

Let’s be honest, Mr. President. We are in 2025. The “War on Drugs” is over, and the drugs won—because they weren’t drugs, they were medicines that the State was too paranoid to understand. I am asking for this pardon not as an admission of guilt, but as a correction of history. Here is why you should clear the record, not just for me, but for the sanity of the profession.

Mr. President, consider the following:

• The Science of Healing: While the government spent decades fighting a “War on Drugs,” the very people they labeled “addicts” were discovering the Endocannabinoid System (ECS) and the healing properties of plants. Science finally caught up in 2012, but the laws—and the boards that enforce them—remain frozen in the developmental logic of the 1970s. I provided a Veteran the care the VA couldn’t. I followed the Endogenous Psychedelic System (EPS).
• The Addiction to Power: My research, the Addiction as Dissociation Model (ADM), proves that power and control are as addicting as any drug. The Office of Professional Discipline (OPD) is addicted to its authority. They demand that I follow “the law” over my own medical ethics, even when the law is unscientific and dangerous.
• A History of Madness: We are told to follow the “experts,” yet these are the same systems that gave us the food pyramid, allowed cigarette ads for children, and pushed “non-addictive” opiates while ignoring the veterans who were actually dying. This is not “good moral character”; it is systemic dissociation from the heart.
• The Right to Advocate: My code of ethics requires me to speak truth to power when the system contradicts the well-being of the public. I have the truth; it is in my published work that will outlive me. I am being persecuted for refusing to lie.

I am not a criminal; I am a Psychedelic Healing Artist and have earned a PhD in Addiction Studies and have a Postdoctoral in Applied Recovery from this journey that I am. I am a free citizen who chose the side of science and the side of a Veteran who was suffering. If the “experts” in the field don’t know who is who or what is what, then they shouldn’t be the ones calling the shots.

I am asking for a pardon to restore my life, my profession, and my voice. It is time to stop the “Industrialized Comfort Conditioning” that makes citizens dependent on a false gods. It is time to acknowledge that the “drug addicts” were right, and the scientists who follow them are the ones who will lead us out of this systemic sickness.

I know what side of history I am on. Mr. President, are you on the side of the abuser, victims, or the healers?

Pardon Dr. Adam O’Brien and let the science of law finally follow the laws of science.

I have endured the war on drugs and after I became a licensed professional I was told that my license was not allowed to diagnose without the legal privilege to do so. My research challenges the diagnostic categories and the foundations of the psychological science.

1. The “Moral Character” Paradox
The State questions my “moral character” for using a plant that is now decriminalized and recognized as medicine? Let’s look at the scoreboard. The government gave us the Food Pyramid (diabetes), the Opioid Crisis (addiction), and the “Safe and Effective” mandates that ignored nuance. I gave a Veteran relief from the hell of PTSD when the VA could not. Who has the moral high ground here? The entity that counts beans, or the Healer who counts souls saved? If I need a “moral character” clause to practice and diagnostic privilege to diagnose, perhaps the State needs a “Sanity Clause” to govern and their privilege checked as to who gave them the power and responsibility to govern free citizens.

2. Qualitative Wisdom vs. Bureaucratic Ignorance
I practiced what I preach: Qualitative Primacy. I listened to the lived experience of the client over the outdated text of the regulation. The experts judging me likely haven’t read a new piece of research since they got tenure. They don’t know that the “drug addicts” discovered the endocannabinoid system before the scientists did. I followed the science—the real science, not the political science. Punishing me for being ahead of the curve is like punishing Galileo for owning a telescope.

3. The Abuse of the “Professional”
Psychology has become the “Church” (Right Brain) trying to survive in the “Industry” (Left Brain) of the State. The State acts like an abusive partner—controlling, gaslighting, and demanding implicit obedience. I am in a “Recovery Awakening” from this abusive relationship. By punishing me for doing my job effectively, the State is proving my diagnosis of it: it is a pathological system addicted to control. I am simply the interventionist.

4. The 1+1=3 Principle
They say I violated the law. I say I upheld the Morals of Humanity by being unethical by their standards; and moral with my own. In the logic of the mystic and the quantum physicist, 1+1=3. The sum of the parts (Me + Me = You) created something greater: Healing. The law only sees 1+1=0 (Non-compliance). This is a failure of imagination on the part of the government when the answer is mother, father, and baby.

5. Historical Precedent
Mr. President, look at the history books. Prohibition. MKULTRA. The exclusion of religious exemptions. History is a list of things the government got wrong and then quietly apologized for decades later, while also denying it. I am offering you the chance to be on the right side of history now, rather than apologizing later.

I am not asking for a favor. I am asking you to recognize that a healer’s hands should not be tied by red tape manufactured by a system that doesn’t understand the first thing about the human soul. I’ve done my time in the trenches of the psyche. I’ve undiagnosed the sick and reframed the wounded. Now, it’s time to undiagnose me and those who have gone before me. My life’s work is extensive, but real. Undiagnosing dissociation would be the greatest liberation ever.

From: Adam O’Brien, Ph.D., LMHC, CASAC Wounded Healers Institute

The Epistemic Capture of Cannabis: A Critical Response to Federal Rescheduling to Schedule III

Abstract

The federal reclassification of cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) is presented by the administration as a milestone in medical research, tax reform, and social justice. However, through the lens of the Addiction as Dissociation Model (ADM) and the Wounded Healer Paradigm, this action is revealed as an “epistemic capture”—a systemic farce that maintains the “War on the Body/Unconscious” under a new administrative label.¹ This report argues that rescheduling ignores the fundamental biological distinction between a natural plant and an industrialized drug, perpetuates a developmental arrest within legal logic (7–12 years old), and further solidifies the dependency on “Industrialized Psychiatry” and “Big Law”. True reform necessitates the full decriminalization of healing plants and the recognition of the physical body as the psychological unconscious, over which the State has no moral or constitutional authority.

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Introduction: The Farce of Reclassification

The recent executive order directing the U.S. Department of Justice to expedite the rescheduling of cannabis to Schedule III is a “game of language” designed to facilitate corporate tax relief and market expansion rather than authentic healing. While this move removes the crushing IRS Section 280E tax burden for state-licensed businesses, it fails to federally legalize the plant, leaving criminal penalties, banking restrictions, and the “War on People” intact. By placing cannabis in the same tier as ketamine or Tylenol with codeine, the government has simply moved it from one industrial silo to another, ignoring its biological nature as a self-regulating plant.

The Biological Fallacy: Plants vs. Industrialized Drugs

A fundamental tenet of the Wounded Healers Institute (WHI) is that a plant is not a drug. Biologically, a plant emerges from a seed and provides a holistic medical effect in its natural form—a “superfood” for the psyche and in the case of our recently re-discovered endogenous psychedelic system (EPS), these plants are us and we are the plants (e.g., endocannabinoid system). Conversely, a “drug” is an industrialized, manufactured product—the result of a reductionist science that extracts or synthesizes compounds for patentability and profit.²

Under the gauze of public safety, there are the professions ensuring that they get their cut before you can do what they say that you shouldn’t or can’t. When psychedelics became more psychological understood, the implications have to be applied. The rescheduling of cannabis to Schedule III treats the plant as a “processed drug” similar to cocaine (Schedule II), yet a drug cannot be turned back into a plant. The medicine is the plant itself, which interacts with the body’s innate Endocannabinoid System (ECS) to facilitate regulation and healing. By maintaining cannabis on any schedule, the government asserts an “ideological monopoly on consciousness,” claiming the authority to regulate what is inherently a natural right to heal.² This living reality defines and captures the dependent relational conditions that professional dynamic produce when created separate and not equal and give way to the abuse of power and control, which is one of their drugs – the other is telling you that they do it because they were once where you were (altruism) and the other is that they do not enjoy it (ambition). This injustice is abuse through the use of perfectionism that is sold as compliance and cooperation but comes at the cost of individual freedoms and the right to choose what one and their family put into their bodies or do with their minds.

Systemic Pathology and Developmental Arrest

The Wounded Healers Institute diagnoses the current legal and political systems as being in a state of moral-cognitive arrest, operating from Piaget’s “Concrete Operational Stage” (7–12 years old). This stage is defined by rigid, binary thinking (1+1=2) that cannot grasp the qualitative truth of emergent human experience (1+1=3).⁴

The “War on Drugs” is not a public health policy but a systemic trauma reenactment of abusive, authoritarian parenting. By tying health insurance, safety, and retirement to professional compliance, the system creates a “compliance dependence” that mirrors the “Addictive Reenactment Loop” seen in trauma survivors. The government acts as the parens patriae (legal parent), treating citizens as “incapable children” whose bodily choices must be managed by the State.

The Epistemic Capture: From “Chemical Imbalance” to “Safe Vaccines”

The track record of the industries currently authorized to manage Scheduled substances is marked by a history of false advertising and systemic deception:

• “Non-Addictive Opiates”: In the late 1990s, the medical-legal establishment allowed the marketing of OxyContin as “non-addictive,” leading to a catastrophic opioid epidemic.
• “Chemical Imbalance”: The serotonin myth was used to sell decades of antidepressants, despite evidence that it was a reductionistic oversimplification designed to serve pharmaceutical profit.
• Mandatory Compliance: The enforcement of “experimental safe vaccines” for pregnant women and children, often without meeting the Daubert Standard for rigorous scientific evidence, illustrates a system prioritizing “Legal-Ethics” (compliance) over “Moral-Ethics” (timeless principles).¹

If the government maintains a schedule for cannabis based on “safety,” then for consistency, all psychiatric medications must be added to the controlled substances list, as their widespread overprescribing and overpathologizing have caused measurable iatrogenic trauma, which the field of psychology has to stay silent about because Big Medical and Big Pharma will produce “science” and “unbiased research” (funded by whom?) against or dismiss natural ways of healing like cannabis, EMDR being “evidence-based”, meditation as “New Age”, Brainspotting being named a “pseudoscience”, and what psychology primarily offers a balancing force to the medical model. The analogies and metaphors about being in an abusive relationship with the government, professional siblings, corporate America, and parental generations are starting to become true because awareness of the type or quality of the relationship that we are in is become true.

Jurisprudence of the Unconscious: The Body as the Locus of Truth

The WHI asserts that “the physical body is the psychological unconscious”. Trauma is not an abstract thought; it is somatically encoded in the nervous system. Therefore, any state regulation that restricts an individual’s access to natural healing agents (cannabis, classical psychedelics) constitutes a “traumatic event to the unconscious body”.

The government’s failure to apply its own “implicit bias protocols” in its decision-making—specifically the failures of individuation and perspective taking—reveals a system addicted to power and control.⁴ The State’s continued reliance on quantitative “science of evidence” (industrial metrics) over the qualitative “evidence of science” (lived experience) is a clinical sign of systemic dissociation.

Conclusion: A Call for Decriminalization and Systemic Recovery

The rescheduling of cannabis to Schedule III is not a victory for freedom; it is a realignment of institutional control. Authentic reform requires:

1. Full Decriminalization: Recognizing cannabis as a plant (equivalent to aspirin or melatonin) that cannot be “scheduled” by industry-driven or professional-based science.
2. Epistemological Decoupling: Separating “Legal-Ethics” from “Moral-Ethics,” recognizing that it is often “moral to be unethical” for the right reasons (breaking unjust laws to achieve healing).⁴
3. Systemic Recovery: The government and professional associations must “undiagnose” their own institutional addictions to power and profit before they can claim the authority to dictate the health of the citizenry.⁵

Healing is a universal right. It is time for the State to cease its abusive guardianship over the body-unconscious and allow the “Wounded Healers” of this nation to reclaim their reality. Unfortunately however, the field of psychology has multiple children with the law, medical, insurance, and corporate America and they do not seem to be paying their fair share of what following the science means. If psychedelics are healing, then why were they taken away? What didn’t they know then that they know now? What was the cost of a war on a drug that is really a plant that heals and is so organic to our body that it is our healing immune situations? Like the cost of what shutting down during COVID did to the next generation, this type of generational reenactment and oversight ensures compliance is conditioned and obedience to their plan is what is going to continue to happen whether anyone likes it or not. The crime of discovering the endocannabinoid system in 2012 becomes the intellectual betrayal of the next generation.

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References

• O’Brien, A., & Marich, J. (2019, Oct 15). Addiction as dissociation model. The Institute for Creative Mindfulness.
• O’Brien, A. (2023a). Addiction as trauma-related dissociation: A phenomenological investigation of the addictive state (Doctoral dissertation).
• Wounded Healers Institute. (2025). Systemic and dominant culture privilege: Moral-ethical observations. ⁴
• Wounded Healers Institute. (2025). 5 revolutionary truths about addiction and healing.
• Wounded Healers Institute. (2025). The political chemistry of contradiction. ²