Jaesen Kanter works where veterans’ mental health meets the ancestral lineages of plant medicine, in spaces where ceremony and science are not rivals, but partners. A storyteller grounded in lived experience, he cuts through jargon and performance to speak to what is real, urgent, and human. His advocacy builds pathways that meet veterans where they stand, bridging psilocybin’s therapeutic promise with the disciplined, intergenerational teachings of medicines like ibogaine, long held in Indigenous and Afro-diasporic traditions. This work is not the quick commerce of cures, it is the slow, deliberate work of restoring relationship: with self, with community, and with the knowledge systems that empire once tried to erase. Drawing from both battlefield and ceremony, Jaesen carries the voices of those too often absent from policy tables and clinical trials. He knows that medicine alone cannot heal what was made in the absence of context, trust, and belonging. Veterans deserve more than protocols, they deserve the cultural literacy and community infrastructure to engage these medicines in ways that honor their origins, protect their integrity, and allow each person to reclaim authorship of their own healing.He sits on the Advisory Board of the Chacruna Institute’ for Psychedelic Plant Medicines.