Richard Hartnell ‘16| University of California, Santa Cruz

Richard Hartnell once got expelled from his hometown community college for earning too many credits. Subsequently, he joined a circus collective in Oakland and spent the next half decade touring the US and EU. Subsequently, he earned a full scholarship from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he majored with honors in cognitive science and neuroscience in order to satisfy an ensuing curiosity about the intersection of entheogens and creativity. Richard began with SSDP as the new founder of a dormant chapter at UC Santa Cruz. During his short stint directing the chapter, he brought the new group into a status as one of the most active chapters in the organization, earning two nominations in the first year for Rising Star Chapter and Rising Star Activist and another nomination for Outstanding Chapter the year following. The chapter has found success in their high-profile, high-impact harm reduction campaigns; in their first year, UCSC prevented hundreds of doses of fake MDMA from going out to the student body and reduced drug-related 911 calls at the campus’s annual ⁴⁄₂₀ party by 90%. Personally, RIchard keeps up his commitments as a psychedelic advocate by volunteering as a psychedelic crisis counselor, working to re-integrate psychedelics as a promising avenue in psychology research, and making psychedelic art.