Berenice Dimas first realized to make natural drugs from her mom as a toddler. “When we had coughs, she used to grab the oregano from our garden and boil about two tablespoons of it in a pot with half a can of Coke,” Dimas, an herbalist and former college instructor in San Diego, recollects. She didn’t understand then that her mom was basically hacking a medicinal syrup recipe with what was readily available.
Years later, whereas finding out herbalism at an ancestral apothecary within the Bay Space, Dimas requested her mom why they used soda as a substitute of water to hold the herbs.
“In Mexico, where we’re from, water is more expensive than Coke,” her mom defined. “And so we got really creative with Coke because we had to save the water for things like drinking and cooking that we couldn’t use.”
The recipe was born from care formed by constraint, care that will depend on figuring out the vegetation, the land and the folks you serve. For Dimas and the opposite herbalists I spoke with, the guts of herbalism is relationship, not transaction.
The methods settler tradition has recruited herbalism for capitalism within the U.S. are each refined and insidious. For instance, Dimas rejects the concept herbalism is a “tool.”
“Herbalism is, instead, a way of being in relationship with the land — a deep alchemy that bridges plants, their spirit and their medicine with ours,” she tells me.
Courtesy of Berenice Dimas
That refusal to border vegetation as mere devices that profit us is motif for others within the subject.
“For me, herbalism is about remembering our embodiedness and our embeddedness in our ecosystems and the magic of this world,” says herbalist Mara June, who leads Motherwort and Rose, an on-line grief-and-herb cohort. June helps folks metabolize grief utilizing vegetation as each inspiration and drugs. “It’s about seeking repair and loving relationships between humans and plants, making medicine that is shared and accessible.”
In case you don’t know, an herbalist is a healer who works with vegetation as drugs — not solely within the Western sense of treatments, however within the Indigenous sense of reciprocal care with the land. Jess Reyes, an herbalist in Lengthy Seaside, California, sees this as a direct rejection of the wellness business’s behavior of treating vegetation like commodities.
“So much of wellness is extractive — the ideologies of, ‘What can this plant do for us?’ And then they go rip through where this plant naturally grows to make some fucking face cream,” she says. “Herbalism is about shifting away from that.”
Reyes, Dimas and one other herbalist, John Jairo Valencia, co-run Hood Herbalism, a web-based college providing programs and a neighborhood grounded in BIPOC, queer, and working-class natural traditions; their lineages are sometimes excluded from mainstream natural curricula. In 2025, as warmth domes, hurricane seasons, and well being care rollbacks bear down hardest on these structurally marginalized communities, their mission — returning plant information to the individuals who’ve carried it — reads as each inheritance and insurgency.
Herbalists like Dimas, June and Reyes perceive that their work isn’t solely a couple of plant’s properties — it’s about sustaining themselves by way of care and reciprocity. For a lot of practitioners, tending these relationships can also be about tending the lineages that carried this information ahead, regardless of colonization, displacement and shortage.
This ancestral remembering is just not nostalgic; it’s a type of survival.
“We are here on this planet because someone in our lineage, a couple generations before, had plant knowledge that was able to make medicine for healing,” says Valencia. “Our work is about facilitating our remembering and our own relationships to herbalism that are innate in each of us.”
And one might argue that their work is very essential proper now. The large bastardly invoice slashes practically $1 trillion from Medicaid over the subsequent decade, imperils rural hospitals, mandates work necessities and provides new co-pays. This isn’t to suggest that herbs can substitute Western drugs — however natural knowledge that would assist us and the planet keep nicely within the absence of a functioning state feels extra pressing than ever.
Reconnecting with that inheritance and refusing to see vegetation as instruments or commodities is a part of decolonizing drugs: reclaiming practices that have been dismissed, criminalized, or overwritten, and restoring them to the communities which have all the time carried them — communities that, in 2025, are nonetheless combating for clear water, inexpensive well being care, and sovereignty over their very own meals and drugs.
For a lot of queer practitioners, herbalism’s concentrate on relationship and reciprocity mirrors their very own histories of survival outdoors dominant methods.
“Queer people have always been participating in and practicing mutual aid because the dominant health care systems exclude us,” says June. “When the conventional way of doing things doesn’t work for you, you find another way.”
Reyes says that rejecting colonial concepts of how we should always dwell and making room for a number of methods to be nicely are central to her follow. And Valencia emphasizes that reclaiming plant information additionally means reclaiming queer therapeutic histories erased by colonization — reminding us that queer folks have all the time been a part of medicine-making, even when, or particularly as a result of, we’ve been written out of the story.
Remembering {our relationships} with vegetation, June says, can also be grief work — a means of repairing the ruptures left by colonialism and the continued destruction of ecosystems for revenue. And in a political second when each abortion care and gender-affirming care are below assault, grief work is inseparable from the struggle to guard methods of therapeutic that the state can not regulate out of existence.
Crops carry these classes.
June invokes the corn poppy, whose seeds can lie dormant for a century till disturbed soil calls them again, usually after warfare. She speaks of dandelions, with their deep taproots, their capability to detoxify land, and their cussed blooms that disrupt monoculture lawns. For Reyes, the endurance of vegetation throughout millennia — by way of upheavals “maybe worse” than our personal — affords a mannequin for surviving collapse. They remind us to ask: When different methods fail, what does resilience seem like when “it’s just us and the plants that have been here”?
Herbalism, on this gentle, is inseparable from collective care.
“Queer mutual aid is health care and community care,” says June. For Valencia, that ethic extends past folks to the land itself. “Being an herbalist is a responsibility,” they are saying. “We are stewards of the Earth.”
Reyes frames the query plainly: How are you connecting your neighborhood to the land? Which may imply assembling natural first-aid kits for youth organizers, as Valencia does, or figuring out which vegetation to show to when typical drugs isn’t accessible. For Dimas’ mom, vegetation have been by no means “alternative” drugs — they have been the drugs.
That is the place decolonizing drugs comes into view: not simply returning plant information to the communities which have carried it, however actively rejecting the extractive logics that separate folks from land and from one another. In that body, herbalism turns into each inheritance and emergency plans — a means of conserving alive the information that received our ancestors by way of collapse, so it could possibly get us by way of, too.
Or, as Valencia says, “Our survival is dependent on us having a reciprocal relationship with all living beings.”
