The Women's Entheogen Fund (WEF) was created in 2002 to support the work of women who spend a significant portion of their professional lives researching psychoactive plants and chemicals. While women have historically played a central role in investigating the use of entheogens,
their work has been funded less frequently and has been consistently underrepresented in the scientific and popular entheogenic literature.

Relatively few female entheogenic researchers present their work at conferences and other public gatherings. This continuing disparity was illustrated at the International Symposium on the Occasion of the 100th Birthday of Albert Hofmann that took place in Basel, Switzerland in 2006. Of the seventy-three confirmed speakers at the event, only eight were women.

Some women who investigate entheogens have good reasons to pursue a lower profile than their male colleagues. Women are often more vulnerable to retaliatory action and frequently have less money to defend themselves within the judicial system. But it became clear that more support was needed for women who choose to be public about their work.

Launched in 2002 by a woman philanthropist, the Women's Entheogen Fund is administered by MAPS which serves as the non-profit sponsor. Since 2003, the WEF has provided funds for eight women to receive grants of at least $5,000. Women who receive the grants make recommendations for future recipients.

MAPS has also nominated women for funding. Past WEF recipients include, Sandra Karpetas, director of the Iboga Therapy House, documentary filmmaker Tania Manning, Sylvia Thyssen, drug information researcher and editor, and Fire Erowid, director and co-founder of the Erowid Web site. Ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison is the recipient of the most recent 2007 WEF grant.

These women continue a tradition that stretches forward from the first wise women to our modern day woman healers, researchers and writers. The WEF advisory council invites others who value this work to donate financially or simply take time to honor and acknowledge the important contributions of our contemporary wise women. We close with a passage from the chants of Maria Sabina, a Mazatec curandera and a woman of great moral and spiritual power who spent a lifetime working with healing plants.

She is a woman of the day
She is a clean woman
She is a well-prepared woman
She is a woman of light
She is a woman of the day
Because I am a woman who lightnings
I am a woman who thunders
I am a woman who shouts
I am a woman who whistles
I am a woman who looks
into the insides of things

Foreground art on this web site is based on the painting "Dualities," by Mark Henson.