Here’s the introduction to the piece in Capital & Main
In the past four years, four states and 15 U.S. cities have legalized or decriminalized psychedelics or reduced the enforcement of laws regarding them. Research into therapeutic uses for psilocybin, LSD, MDMA and other psychedelics is expanding for the treatment of conditions ranging from PTSD to anorexia.
A major funder of these legislative and research efforts is David Bronner, the CEO of All One God Faith Inc., maker of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, a globally successful brand of mostly vegan, cruelty-free soaps and personal hygiene products. Bronner also funds causes related to inequality. His company donated almost $3 million to human rights, labor, criminal justice, community betterment and environmental justice groups in 2021 alone.
Psychedelics and inequality are inseparable for Bronner, 49. Drug policy reform, he believes, is integral to criminal justice reform. His company has donated more than $25 million since 2015 toward drug policy reform and research, with a notable focus on psychedelics, according to annual reports. Bronner also serves as a voting board member of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit that has raised over $130 million for psychedelic research and education.
Beyond making the justice system more equitable, Bronner says there is another reason he has invested so much in psychedelics: He believes such substances can also help people to behave better. Psychedelics can be “boundary dissolving,” giving people a better understanding of their relationships to others, themselves and the planet.
With such a boundary-free world view, Bronner believes, people could embrace both social justice and “multistakeholder capitalism,” the idea that businesses have a responsibility not only to shareholders but to their workers, customers, the environment and Indigenous communities. Bronner said his company practices multistakeholder capitalism in its equitable hiring practices, paying a starting wage of almost $26 an hour for full-time workers and capping executive salary at five times the lowest-paid fully vested employees, among many other measures.
Bronner’s business model works. When he took over as president in 1998, Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps brought in around $4 million. In 2021, company revenue was almost $170 million.
Bronner’s CV is as colorful as his business outlook. He was a football and rugby player at Harvard, where he studied biology. After college he took psychedelics while hanging out with squatters in Amsterdam which turned him from an apolitical person to someone willing to be arrested for his causes, as he was in 2012, after locking himself in a cage in front of the White House to protest restrictions on industrial hemp farming. Bronner also recently came out as he/they, embracing his “lighter shade of queer” by speaking at events like Queering Psychedelics and “cross dressing every full moon.”
Capital & Main spoke with Bronner at his company headquarters in Vista, California.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Read the interview at
