The Right to Cognitive Travel: Psychedelic Experience and Freedom of Movement
This Article argues that the law should protect a right to cognitive travel—the ability to navigate altered states of consciousness—grounded analogically in the constitutional right to travel. The author contends that existing justifications for psychedelic reform, such as medical utility or cognitive liberty, either protect too few interests or lack a workable limiting principle. The proposed right would subject the Controlled Substances Act's categorical prohibition of classic psychedelics to strict scrutiny, which the author argues it is unlikely to survive. The right permits regulation (age limits, licensing, purity standards) but not total prohibition, drawing on the Nation's history and tradition of protecting freedom of thought and self-directed movement.