The Psychedelic Missouri Freedom Conference - St. Louis

My professional area of interest is in fast-acting psychopharmacological agents (e.g. ketamine, psychedelics) to treat mood and addiction disorders. I am currently involved in neuroimaging and clinical trials. This is the convergence of my interests in systems neuroscience, neurotransmitters, synaptic plasticity, and psychiatry. The only thing that excites me as much as the prospect of being a part of the accelerating field of neuroscience is the opportunity to use these interventions to change human lives.

Co-founder, Director, and CEO Satya Inc. Oregon's First Vertically Integrated Psilocybin Company

Kimberly Kowalski served with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Dept. as an officer and detective from 1990-2000. She is the widow of STLMPD Det. Jeffry Kowalski. Now retired, she advocates for police widows and expansion of PTSD coverage for first responders.

William Wisner MBA is an Army veteran and the Executive Director of Grunt Style Foundation, a national nonprofit organization committed to providing resources for service members, veterans, and their families. Established in April of 2021, Grunt Style Foundation is making a positive impact on mental health and wellness, transition and sustainment, food insecurities, and stopping homelessness. Will and his organization accomplish this by assisting veterans in transition and providing sustainment for those experiencing food and shelter insecurities. Through their partnerships, Grunt Style Foundation hosts monthly workshops where veterans can have one on one access to career advisors, veteran affairs representatives, legal aid and other services critical to veterans and their families in transition. The Grunt Style Foundation is proud to be part of the solution through their Deployments program which is a small repeatable process that distributes necessary resources in support of junior-enlisted service members and their families at select military installations across the United States.

Founder, Humble Warrior Wellness Center

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​Elaine Brewer is a fitness and wellness professional and founder of Humble Warrior Wellness Center, a nonprofit that aids in mental health, mindfulness and resiliency for military and first responder communities.

Charlotte Jones is an Adjunct Professor at St. Louis University on cannabis extraction and product manufacturing and owns a microgreens company serving the St. Louis area.

Ron Hicks served in the Missouri House of Representatives from 2012-2016 and 2018-2022 representing St. Charles, Missouri.

When writer / director Seth Ferranti received a twenty-five year LSD kingpin conviction, after faking his suicide and landing on the US Marshals Top-15 Most Wanted list, he thought his life was over. As a first time, non-violent offender, the lengthy sentence attracted media attention from The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Washington Times, and others.

As a drug dealing teen Ferranti sold LSD and marijuana at 15 East Coast colleges, crisscrossing across five states- Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Maryland- a wanna-be rock star and Hunter S. Thompson-style outlaw whose hero’s were Henry Rollins, Axl Rose, and Jim Morrison. He followed the Grateful Dead and considered himself a counter culture rebel, not a criminal, as he was breaking laws which he thought were wrong.

He stands by those convictions today and see’s himself more as an activist who was a little ahead of the times. A trailblazer of the legal cannabis and psychedelic movements. As a twenty-two year old from the suburbs, who basically grew up as a military brat in California and overseas, the prison sentence Ferranti received due to the War on Drugs was longer than he’d lived to that point.

But despite the unjust sentence, Seth decided to rise above his past and focus on his future. He began building a writing and journalism career from inside the belly of the beast. With unlimited access to criminals and their stories Ferranti started crafting raw portrayals of prison life and crack era gangsters. Discovering a passion and talent for writing Ferranti also studied the trade earning an associates, bachelors, and masters degree while in prison.

With hope for his future renewed Ferranti started penning prison and gangster stories for Vice, Don Diva, FEDS, Hoopshype and others. He took it one step further and established his brand, Gorilla Convict, from prison. Ferranti became a true-crime publisher and built a website documenting stories that the mainstream media was not willing to share.

These stories reside in his books- Prison Stories, Supreme Team, and Street Legends, among others, and his 500 blog entries written by him and other prisoners. Along with the hundreds, if not thousands of pieces Ferranti wrote for other publications and websites, he became the most prolific prison writer of the War on Drugs era. In February 2015, after serving 21 years, he was released from the Bureau of Prison, to seek his fortune.

Back in the world Ferranti continued his writing career as a journalist penning pieces for Vice, Ozy, The Daily Beast, Dazed, Merry Jane, and features for Penthouse and Real Crime Magazines, among others. He also started writing and publishing comic books under his imprint GR1ND Studios and embarked on his true passion, filmmaking.

Fresh out of prison Ferranti wrote and directed a web-series, Easter Bunny Assassin, played the antagonist in an indie feature, Dog Days, wrote and played the lead in The Precious and the Damned, and joined forces with Shawn Rech and Transitions Studios to make White Boy, a feature documentary on Richard Wershe Jr. that aired on STARZ and became a Top Ten hit on NETFLIX.

Ferranti starred in the Season One Finale of Vice TV’s I was a Teenage Felon. Has appeared on Fox News, Inside Edition, and News Nation as a subject matter expert, and is currently directing several documentary projects- Nightlife, Dope Men, Tangled Roots, The Secret History of The LSD Trade, and Generation ECSTASY- which are in various stages of production. He also has numerous scripted and television projects in development. 

Martin Smith is the president of the Kentucky Hemp Farmers Association, founder of United Global Co-Opportunities, a nutraceutical company, veteran of the United States Navy (1989-1992), and an advocate working on ibogaine & psilocybin access in Kentucky.