OPINION

No Labels doesn’t have to disclose who its sugar daddies are. However, in 2018, The Daily Beast obtained a leaked donor list including billionaires in the private equity, hedge fund, real estate, and oil and gas industries. Republican megadonors are courted.

The group’s CEO, Nancy Jacobson, was a fundraiser for both Bill and Hillary Clinton, and her husband, corporate consultant Mark Penn, was a top Clinton campaign advisor.

No Labels is co-chaired by lobbyist and former Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut (who was a Democrat and then an Independent) and Larry Hogan, the former Republican governor of Maryland. Manchin and Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine are “honorary co-chairs.”

No Labels is very vague about its stances on major policy issues. Campaign finance lawyer Brendan Fischer told The Lever that this leaves a lot of room for wheeling and dealing.

“At this point, No Labels isn’t saying what ‘values and commitments’ they are looking for from a major party candidate,” he said. “This raises the specter of No Labels officials or donors using this leverage to extract backroom concessions.”

Manchin has praised No Labels’ strategy and hasn’t ruled out running for president in 2024 on their ballot line. Meanwhile, Manchin and Sinema seemed to be allied with Republicans in their reckless debt ceiling brinkmanship.

This opinion does not necessarily reflect the views of Boulder Weekly.

BY GABRIELA GALINDO

Proposition 122, now SB23290 Natural Medicine Regulation And Legalization, became law on May 9. The law legalizes regulated therapeutic use and decriminalizes personal use of psilocybin, psilocin, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), ibogaine and mescaline. Along with a team of other concerned Native folks, I’ve been involved for over a year in efforts to protect the medicines of our Indigenous traditions from regulation, appropriation, co-opting, violation and exploitation by Western capitalistic systems and people. I respond here to Will Brendza’s article “The Psychedelic Succulent,” published April 27, to discuss some crucial pieces he misses about Peyote, a mescaline-containing cactus and ancestral medicine.

My lineage is of various Indigenous Mexican tribes including Wixarika, stewards of Hikuri (Peyote) since time immemorial, Spanish and West African. I am connected to Mexican, Chicano and Native American communities across the Front Range, New Mexico and Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) and I am a traditional Aztec Dancer.

The following are my views and experiences in the legislative process and are not representative of all Native and Indigenous peoples.

The history of Peyote in Indigenous traditions began in what is now Northeast Mexico and spans more than 5,500 years, preceding European colonization by at least 4,000 years. Around the 1880s, U.S. states began criminalizing Peyote and in 1967 it was federally criminalized as a Schedule 1 drug. In 1978, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act granted federal protection for Native Americans,

Inuit, Aleuts and Native Hawaiians to practice their religions, customs, ceremonies and dances.

In 1994, an amendment legally permitted the bona fide and traditional ceremonial use of Peyote by Native American Indians. Let’s be clear: the burden to reverse these racist and discriminatory policies based on white supremacy was a result of Native people’s legal battles for their inherent rights, not the goodwill of the U.S. government.

SB23- 290 continues this familiar and historical pattern of systemic racism, disregard and invalidation of Native peoples, cultures and traditions.

Native people share general values and beliefs that we do not truly own anything: not land, not water, not plants, not ecosystems. We belong to Nature and have a responsibility to care for all life on our Mother Earth. In contrast, colonial and capitalistic systems privatize, exploit and endlessly extract from ecosystems with little reciprocity, if any. Look no further than the global climate crisis and the Colorado River, named the country’s most endangered river in 2022. SB23-290 has opened the door for predatory pharmaceutical companies to “patent medical treatments or other inventions based on and/or utilizing Peyote, its derivatives, and/or synthetic variants” as addressed in a joint organizational statement released April 26 by the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), Native American Church of North America (NACNA) and Native American Church of Oklahoma (NACO). This is not a hypothetical situation; it is currently underway.

The Native American Coalition Against Natural Medicine Health Act based in Denver released a statement on April 27 that they “stand in solidarity with the NCAI, NACNA and NACO … to protect Peyote from legislation that further endangers and erodes our constitutionally protected