How do families heal together when cancer detonates through entire family systems, leaving everyone wounded?

In this episode, we speak with Ismail Ali, co-Executive Director at MAPS and psychedelic policy architect. Ismail holds a law degree from UC Berkeley, co-founded the Psychedelic Bar Association, and has been remarkably open about his family's use of ayahuasca ceremony to process grief after his mother's death from cancer. We explore how cancer grief and psychedelic use both carry profound stigma that isolates families in their suffering, and how Ismail's family courageously gathered three generations for ceremony even though his mother had fled Colombia partly to escape drug-related violence.

We also discuss MAPS's people-centered approach across three pillars: policy advocacy including Right to Try and Freedom to Heal Act, research establishing safety and efficacy, and education translating complex information for patients and providers. After forty years, MAPS is transitioning into an orchestration role, coordinating diverse organizations while keeping actual humans at the center of every decision. Ismail reminds us that policy work can become dehumanizing and abstract, but at the end of the day, if one person gets impacted by safe legal access to psychedelic medicines, that is everything.

You can find us online at www.healingcancerjourneys.org. Follow us on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Substack at @healingcancerjourneys.