This week, Washington Governor Bob Ferguson signed Executive Order 26-01, directing the Washington State Women’s Commission to create workplace accommodations for women experiencing perimenopause and menopause. About 600,000 women in our state are currently in the workforce, navigating these life stages. The Mayo Clinic estimates national productivity losses from menopausal symptoms run $26 billion a year. Ferguson named the obvious. We are losing experienced women from the workforce because we have not been willing to prepare for a natural stage of life. à la postpartum.
Today, Washington-based Pivotal announced an additional $215 million in funding for women’s health, with a specific focus on reproductive and midlife health. That brings Melinda French Gates’ total women’s health giving to $600 million over two years. Ten million dollars of the new funding goes to The Menopause Society to train healthcare providers, because the lack of training is a major reason women in midlife cannot find a doctor who knows how to treat them.
Two Washington-rooted announcements in the same week. Both centered on women in midlife. Finally, some good news. Home Sweet Home.
For over a decade, my professional focus has been on improving health outcomes for women, because, as I shared with my son just last night, societies that take care of women are more peaceful, more prosperous, and better educated. That is the society I want for all of our children. I am proud to live my values by living in Washington and to raise my boys here.
What are the chances that this great news, relevant to what’s covered in this publication, would unfold as I’m preparing to announce what I’ve been working toward for months?
My work is no longer as the founder of SetSet. Whether through this brand or those that came before, the voice, infinite curiosity, and willingness to ask uncomfortable questions emanate from me, April Pride. Stepping out from behind the brand was spurred by a trademark cease-and-desist that came within days of four payment processors immediately and permanently deactivating SetSet’s account, and, in quick succession, more friction came from an unlikely source. Three strikes in as many weeks. Similar challenges have arisen since SetSet’s inception, but this time it felt like I was being asked to do more than just solve acute operational problems.
Rather than rush to fix, my work was to do nothing, which is the most difficult job I can imagine and the tallest ask of me. But at age 50, taking a beat is easier and more welcome than it once was. During this brief pause, the president’s executive order ushered in an expedited interest in ibogaine, a psychoactive compound found in Tabernanthe iboga, a West African shrub that the Republic of Gabon named a national treasure in 2000. Although the first fair-trade iboga harvest for export occurred in 2023, the rise in global demand for this powerful plant medicine to address substance use disorder and PTSD has outpaced regulation. Iboga has been dubbed the “blood diamond” of psychedelics because the vast majority of the plants reaching clinics outside Gabon are harvested illegally, with no compensation to the Bwiti communities who developed the practice or the Gabonese ecosystem that produced the plant.
This is not a new story. Yet this may be the first time in history that sacred plant medicines from across the globe are being mined simultaneously to develop a new generation of patented pharmaceutical drugs. Synthesized in the name of therapeutic progress. in the name of healing. to address the West’s mental health crisis. our addiction epidemic. to clean up the mess we made. with the medicine we made. from plants made for healing. In a nutshell.
Indigenous peoples knew which leaf, which bark, which root, prepared in what way, for what ailment, at what time, by whom. The medicine was relational. It required the plant, the land, the practitioner, the patient, and the preparation.
Then chemistry happened. In the early 1800s, scientists began isolating “the active ingredient.” Morphine from poppy. Quinine from cinchona. Cocaine from coca. High-potency THC isolate from cannabis. The synthesized molecule became “the drug,” and the rest of the plant became waste. The Indigenous knowledge keepers became primitive. unscientific. The ceremony became placebo. optional.
What was gained through modern chemistry: consistent dosing, scalability, IP protection (you cannot patent a plant, but you can patent an isolated molecule), and profit.
What was lost through extraction and isolation (the words say everything, no?): the synergy of whole-plant compounds, the relationship with the plant itself, the role of ceremony and preparation, the cultural lineage, the wisdom of the body’s whole-system response.
The psychedelic pharma push is the latest chapter in this 200-year-old story, and it is unfolding in real time before our eyes.
Compass Pathways isolated synthetic psilocybin (COMP360) rather than developing protocols for the whole mushroom. Johnson and Johnson took ketamine’s antidepressant enantiomer, patented it as Spravato, and engineered out the deeper experience that made the medicine work in the first place. Researchers are now developing ibogaine analogs with no hallucinatory component, removing the very experience the trip reports say is essential for trauma resolution.
This is not new. This is the oldest story in modern medicine, and I want to use this space to bring the story of the plants to the people. Working directly with plant medicine has shown me the undeniable truth of energetic reciprocity, and working in plant medicine professionally continues to illuminate the toll of forsaken reciprocity.
The research I’ve begun has unearthed many stories of Western doctors working with Indigenous communities, observing how they use plants as medicine, bringing the plant home with them for further lab investigation, and going on to use findings as the basis for lucrative pharmaceutical patents. often without acknowledgment and certainly without financial reciprocity.
A decade ago, my beat broadly covered women’s reproductive health at the intersection of one plant, cannabis. Today, my beat — like me — has matured into midlife and grown to include many more medicinal plants. My intention toward and understanding of the sacredness of these plants has, too.
Improving health outcomes for women ages 50–64 is finally having its due. (Sorry, Mom!) Care and respect for women are occurring alongside the more mainstream adoption of plants as medicine. The convergence of a community in need and another with plant-based solutions has the makings of a collective remembering in women’s bodies. minds. hearts. spirits. Women have always turned to plants for healing, but chemistry and capitalism charted the course of modern medicine, which sidelined female bodies in research until the 1990s — and even then, only in trials that federal dollars funded. Men thought they knew better, and women were not always better off for it.
At a time when man and machine are maybe too smart for all our good, we are lucky that nature has always been on our side.
Take care,
April
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