about BEMC
Founder Maudisa Meroe shares BEMC’s history, mission, and vision:
On Good Friday, 1962, Thurman — theologian, mystic, and Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University — preached the Good Friday service at Marsh Chapel, knowing that in the room directly below him, a scientific study on psilocybin and mystical experience was taking place with his consent.
A Black theologian lent his sacred office to one of the founding moments of psychedelic science, long before the language existed to hold both truths — the sacred and the scientific — in the same sentence.
Decades later, Dr. Carl Hart, neuroscientist and Ziff Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, argued in High Price that the real harm facing our communities is rarely the drug itself, but the poverty, lack of opportunity, and systemic racism that misuse so often gets blamed for instead.
In Drug Use for Grown-Ups, he went further: that responsible grown-ups have every right to alter their consciousness in pursuit of their own happiness.
I carry both of them into this work, because a whole generation of our elders has lived full lives with drugs — and almost none of that history has been allowed to be told on its own terms.
What gets passed down instead is warning. Shame. Silence. Or a recovery script that isn’t always the truth. Thurman and Hart, each in their own register, refused that flattening.
This project is for the elders whose lives are finally being witnessed through a clear lens, and for everyone else who needs to hear an intergenerational conversation that most of this country has refused to have. Our elders’ relationship to drugs is theirs alone to define, free of judgment, and worthy of being told in full.
BEMC exists to do the same for our elders. It is a place where they can speak about their own relationship to psychoactive drugs — medicine, ritual, survival, pleasure, harm, all of it — without someone else’s morality standing over the story.
BEMC is an educational and cultural project, not an advocacy campaign. We’re not here to convince anyone of a position. We’re here to hold space for elder-to-elder conversation, gathered through interview, podcast, and photography, and to let that material stand as history.
I started Black Elders Medicine Circle carrying two people with me: the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, and Dr. Carl Hart.
meet the founder
Maudisa Meroe, LCSW
Maudisa Meroe is a psychotherapist with more than 30 years of clinical experience. Focusing on the needs of the BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities, her work is informed by formal education and training in psychedelic-assisted therapies, NTU psychotherapy, sex therapy, Tantra, body work, energy work, TranceDance, Kundalini yoga, and Holotropic Breathwork®. Maudisa also hosts the BEMC podcast.
Education & Certifications
Master of Social Work (MSW)
Howard University
NTU Psychotherapy Certification
Progressive Life Center
Colorado Psychedelic (Natural Medicine) Facilitator License
Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies (DORA)
Oregon Psilocybin Facilitator License
Oregon Health Authority
Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research
California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS)
MDMA-Assisted Therapy Training
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Public Benefit Corporation