Nicole Rose & The Prisoner’s Herbal

"Creating this community garden, and teaching families in your area how to grow food and look out for each other – that is abolition. We’re humanizing people again, and working for community health and ecological health, and all of those things are completely opposite to what the prison-industrial complex is trying to do. So in that way, herbalism is abolition."

Today we’re honored & excited to share with you our interview with Nicole Rose of Solidarity Apothecary in the UK! Nicole is an herbalist who is working tirelessly to bring herbal medicine to incarcerated individuals, those who have been released from prison, and the families and communities who have been impacted by the state violence and the prison-industrial complex. She recently completed her new book The Prisoner’s Herbal, which Katja helped edit and which we’re going to help distribute in the US.

We talked about how Nicole’s personal experience of finding support from wild plants during her own incarceration shaped her work as an organizer and as an herbalist, the sad state of healthcare and nutrition in prisons, why herbalists should care about what happens to prisoners, what prison abolition really means and how we can move as a society in that direction, and how we can all support and care for incarcerated people in ways large and small.

To get your own copy of The Prisoner’s Herbal and support the work Nicole is doing, visit:

Solidarity Apothecary

Also mentioned in this episode:

IWOC – Incarcerated Workers Organizing CommitteeBlack Permaculture NetworkSolitary Gardens

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Our theme music is “Wings” by Nicolai Heidlas.