An independent research institute
The law governs persons. It has never had jurisdiction over the substances, ideas, or states of mind a person chooses.
Heartmind Research Institute studies the point where constitutional doctrine, cognitive liberty, and drug policy meet — and publishes what it finds, cited to the source.
Mission
Most classification regimes that govern human conduct — which substances are lawful, which states of mind are permitted, which acts warrant criminal sanction — were built decades ago and have gone largely unexamined since. Heartmind Research Institute exists to examine them: to ask whether a given law was validly enacted, whether it operates the way its own text requires, and whether the evidence that once justified it still does.
The Institute's work is interdisciplinary by necessity. A single question about a state's authority to classify a substance can turn on constitutional text, statutory drafting history, comparative law from other jurisdictions, and the philosophy of mind. We follow the question wherever the primary sources take it, and we cite what we find rather than what would be convenient.
Areas of Inquiry
Three questions the Institute returns to, framed the way the law itself frames them — as articles, not talking points.
Cognitive Liberty
The right to alter or decline to alter one's own mental functioning, examined as a first principle antecedent to — not derivative of — the freedoms more commonly litigated under its name.
Arbitrary Power & Uniform Law
Constitutional doctrines requiring that general laws operate generally, and prohibiting legislatures from carving named exceptions into otherwise even-handed statutes without evidentiary justification.
Drug Policy Architecture
How scheduling regimes are actually built, administered, and exempted — and what happens when a state's own statute is measured against the standard it was written to enforce.
Approach
Four commitments that shape everything the Institute publishes.
Primary sources, verified
Every citation is checked against the original text — statute, case, treaty, or government document — before it is relied upon.
Comparative by default
A single jurisdiction rarely tells the whole story. Where a pattern recurs across states or countries, the work says so.
Precise about limits
An argument is stated at the strength the evidence actually supports, with its weaknesses conceded in the same breath as its claims.
Built to be used
The Institute's research is written to hold up in the room where it matters — a courtroom, a legislative hearing, a peer review.
Research
Working papers currently in preparation.
Working paper
Cognitive Liberty and the Architecture of Conduct Classification
An argument that the right to alter one's own mind is antecedent to the doctrines that currently protect it — and a proposed framework for evaluating drug-classification regimes against that first principle.
Working paper
Arbitrary Power, Special Laws, and the Limits of Legislative Authority
A facial challenge to statutory exemptions carved into otherwise general drug-control schemes, built from the constitutional doctrines that predate — and do not require — any novel legal theory to succeed.
Publication venues and availability will be announced here as they are confirmed.
Research Agenda
Open questions the Institute intends to pursue, including threads that predate the Institute itself.
Proposed inquiry
Language, Mindset, and the Altered State
A controlled qualitative study examining the role an individual's mindset and linguistic programming plays in shaping the subjective psychedelic experience — extending the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis into the phenomenology of altered states, and asking what the language a person brings to an experience reveals about the nature of consciousness itself. First proposed by the Institute's founder in "An Amateur Qualitative Study of 48 2C-T-7 Subjective Bioassays," MAPS Bulletin, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer 2000), under the heading "Suggestions for further research."
Contact
For inquiries regarding the Institute's research, collaboration, or publication, write to the address below.