Program Notes
Guest speakers: Earth and Fire Erowid
Fire & Earth, founders of Erowid.org
(Photo by Bill Radacinski, taken at the
100th birthday celebration for Dr. Albert Hofmann)
In this highly original talk, Earth andFire, the founders of Erowid.org, provide a clear and convincing argument for the positive role “Drug Geeks” can play in civilized society. They also provide some interesting ways in which to think of this newly-evolving human culture.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
3D Transforming Musical Linguistic Objects
00:00:10 ►
Delta Machines is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. Well today I’m going to play a recording
00:00:26 ►
from the 2002 Mind States Conference that Kevin Whiteside sent to me. It’s a talk that
00:00:32 ►
Earth and Fire gave titled The Role of Drug Geeks in Society. Actually I think they just
00:00:38 ►
called it Drug Geeks, but as you’ll hear from their talk there’s a lot more to it than just being a geek.
00:00:46 ►
Not that anybody really wants to be a geek, huh?
00:00:49 ►
Other than people like you and me.
00:00:52 ►
Anyhow, I’m assuming that you all know Earth and Fire from their website, arrowid.org.
00:00:57 ►
That’s E-R-O-W-I-D dot org.
00:01:00 ►
And if you haven’t been to the Arrowid website, then why not? www.arrowid.org Some of us maybe are. I don’t know. Do you think of yourself as a drug geek?
00:01:28 ►
I hadn’t really thought of it that way until I heard this talk.
00:01:33 ►
But, well, let’s just listen to Earth and Fire explain what they mean by that term,
00:01:35 ►
and you can decide for yourself.
00:01:44 ►
So our talk this morning is about drug geeks, what we call drug geeks, and their role in
00:01:45 ►
the
00:01:47 ►
wider community.
00:01:50 ►
When we started,
00:01:51 ►
we sort of talked a little bit about how Arrowhead was created.
00:01:54 ►
And when we started Arrowhead, we were
00:01:55 ►
mostly creating it for ourselves, and
00:01:57 ►
for a few very close friends.
00:02:00 ►
And
00:02:00 ►
as we started
00:02:03 ►
to get visitors, we didn’t have any idea who those visitors were.
00:02:07 ►
We could sort of guess, but pretty quickly we had a reasonable number of visitors,
00:02:12 ►
and we sort of just imagined them as being general people within the community of people interested in psychoactives.
00:02:18 ►
We didn’t really have a very good idea of who they were.
00:02:22 ►
After a while, it became sort of obvious, a lot of the people who were visiting
00:02:27 ►
the site regularly, the people who were interacting with us were people who were a lot like our
00:02:32 ►
friends and our community and us.
00:02:33 ►
And we, in the last couple of years, have begun to characterize people as drug geeks,
00:02:38 ►
for the lack of a better term.
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We would love a different term because some people really don’t like being called a drug
00:02:43 ►
geek, even if they are.
00:02:49 ►
So we’ve sort of been developing a concept in our own minds of this character
00:02:56 ►
because in order to help us better serve the needs of this particular character type that uses air a lot.
00:03:04 ►
serve the needs of this particular character type that uses Arabic a lot.
00:03:08 ►
And so the drug geek, to us, is an individual who self-identifies as being knowledgeable and interested in psychoactives.
00:03:13 ►
And beyond that, they’re more interested in the details of psychoactives
00:03:23 ►
enough that if, say, a question comes up,
00:03:26 ►
they’re just sitting around with their friends and a question comes up,
00:03:29 ►
and you’re willing to actually go and try and find the answer to the question.
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Maybe you’ll go and you’ll look that up on the web,
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or you’ll pull out a book and try and find the answer to the question.
00:03:38 ►
You have a book that you can pull out that might have the answer to the question.
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A lot of people who come to conferences like this
00:03:45 ►
are actually fairly classic drug geeks.
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Not everyone, or maybe you have friends who are drug geeks
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or partners who are drug geeks and you’ve been dragged along or something.
00:03:55 ►
But the general character that we’ve encountered
00:03:59 ►
or have all of our friends are drug geeks.
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or have all of our friends are drug geeks.
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It’s not that uncommon a character
00:04:09 ►
in the people that we meet.
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But it is, like in the general population
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where we go and sort of meet people
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at parties and other contexts
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where people haven’t gone somewhere
00:04:18 ►
like this or meeting people.
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Most people aren’t spending
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all of their time focused
00:04:24 ►
on information about psychoactive plants and chemicals.
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I don’t know what that’s like, but…
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I’m not too off to ask them.
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One of the first things I would say about the drug geek character
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is that it has been somewhat surprising to me over time
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as I’ve had this concept in mind,
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that really this particular character doesn’t necessarily use a lot of psychoactives. They might, but
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they don’t necessarily. There’s a whole range of people who are more interested in the information
00:04:55 ►
than they are in actually taking the psychoactives.
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In some ways, that relationship, the relationship to the information and to the substances as less as sort of a thing to ingest
00:05:09 ►
and more as kind of a hobby of interest, provides a potentially longer-term relationship for people.
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There’s something to do when you’re kind of a little tired or burned out from taking LSD.
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You can spend all of your time trying to figure out how it works and talking to people about how it works
00:05:25 ►
and looking up references on it.
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And so it’s sort of interestingly in the people that we’ve gotten to know
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that there’s sort of this, a lot of times,
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people who aren’t really interested in the information when they’re younger
00:05:39 ►
will often sort of take a bunch and then stop.
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And it sort of just kind of, you get tired of it.
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will often sort of take a bunch and then stop.
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And it sort of just kind of, you get tired of it.
00:05:51 ►
And so over time, we’ve developed a sort of concept of a number of subtypes, of broken down, break the drug geeks down into subcategories.
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First of these, and these are in no particular order,
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first of these is what we’re calling the collector.
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The individual who likes to collect substances.
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And sort of the concept is often to collect as many different types of…
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I see people raising their hands out there.
00:06:18 ►
Maybe we can have a little stand-up.
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Like to have a small sample of as many different types of psychoactives as I can.
00:06:28 ►
And often it’s not enough for a dose.
00:06:29 ►
Often the plant isn’t even necessarily to take them.
00:06:32 ►
But it’s to have sort of a collection of reference samples of various types of psychoactives.
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The first time we encountered that, I don’t know,
00:06:41 ►
I meet all these people and interesting types that we encounter.
00:06:44 ►
And the first time we encountered that was, I don’t know, six, five, these people and interesting types that we encounter.
00:06:45 ►
And the first time we encountered that was, I don’t know, six, five, five and a half years,
00:06:48 ►
five years ago or so. And we were talking to this person who was very knowledgeable,
00:06:52 ►
and he said, do you want to see my baseball card collection?
00:06:56 ►
And we’re like, I don’t know. Maybe, I guess.
00:07:01 ►
It seemed relatively obvious that he was talking about something related to psychoactive plants and chemicals,
00:07:04 ►
but we had really no idea what it was that he was talking about something related to psychoactive plants and chemicals, but we had really no idea what it was that he was talking about.
00:07:06 ►
So we went to his house, and he pulled out this box that was filled with bags,
00:07:14 ►
paper bags with plastic bags inside.
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Little bits of tinfoil.
00:07:20 ►
Yeah, little vials and things.
00:07:23 ►
And he pulled out each one by one.
00:07:25 ►
And they were all labeled very carefully.
00:07:27 ►
And he would describe where he’d gotten,
00:07:29 ►
sort of generally where he’d gotten the substance.
00:07:31 ►
He had 2C-D.
00:07:32 ►
He had three types of 2C-D.
00:07:34 ►
And he had, oh, this 2C-D was produced in Santa Cruz
00:07:37 ►
by a chemist who was him.
00:07:39 ►
This 2C-D was produced here.
00:07:41 ►
Oh, and he told this little story about,
00:07:44 ►
like he tried the 2C-D and that
00:07:45 ►
he described the story.
00:07:47 ►
But a lot of things he hadn’t taken.
00:07:49 ►
The 2C-D?
00:07:53 ►
And he would pull out
00:07:54 ►
vials and he would have
00:07:55 ►
the camera
00:07:57 ►
he would pull out
00:08:00 ►
a vial and smell it and have you smell it
00:08:02 ►
as he was telling the story about where he
00:08:03 ►
met the person who had given him
00:08:06 ►
this and what his experience had been.
00:08:09 ►
It was
00:08:09 ►
very interesting.
00:08:12 ►
Since then, we’ve met several other
00:08:14 ►
I don’t know how many, but
00:08:16 ►
more than four or five other people
00:08:18 ►
who qualify as the collector type.
00:08:21 ►
They’re mildly
00:08:22 ►
interested in drawing the things, but they’re substantially
00:08:24 ►
more interested in having this sort of array in a collection.
00:08:27 ►
One of our friends, net friends I call him, is looking to create little paperweights of plastic encased,
00:08:38 ►
one dose of each drug inside of a clear plastic case kind of thing.
00:08:42 ►
each drug inside of a clear plastic case.
00:08:45 ►
He’s seen that with you go to the DEA or sometimes they’ll have
00:08:49 ►
these little paper weights. I’ve seen the paper weights with
00:08:51 ►
a single dose of some scheduled substance.
00:08:54 ►
He’s wondering if maybe they’re accepted from the law
00:08:58 ►
by virtue of being completely inaccessible and totally unusable.
00:09:03 ►
A few other examples of the collector character type
00:09:05 ►
would be people who collect LSP blotter art.
00:09:09 ►
That’s a relatively common one.
00:09:11 ►
Or people who collect…
00:09:11 ►
We’ve had people submit images to us
00:09:14 ►
of their collections of ecstasy tablets
00:09:16 ►
where they’ve got 50 different imprints of ecstasy tablets
00:09:19 ►
or that sort of thing.
00:09:20 ►
The next subtype that we talk about is the taster. The taster is the person who wants to have tried everything.
00:09:34 ►
These are people who sort of pride themselves on having tried every substance that they can get their hands on,
00:09:39 ►
and often won’t necessarily be interested in trying a second time. And so a lot of times this geek character will sort of talk effusively
00:09:48 ►
about their one experience with this drug.
00:09:52 ►
And be able to compare the various experiences.
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That’s sort of part of the concept is to be able to compare,
00:09:57 ►
by having tried everything once,
00:10:00 ►
be able to compare the experiences of all the various combinations of substances.
00:10:05 ►
I think perhaps D.M. Turner is an example
00:10:08 ►
of a character like that who sort of wrote
00:10:10 ►
about a wide variety of chemicals.
00:10:15 ►
Next character type is the daredevil.
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Shows some characteristics with the taster,
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but in this character type, it’s sort of about
00:10:23 ►
pushing the limits of dosage and experience
00:10:26 ►
by doing higher dosages and having stronger and more mind-bending experiences
00:10:31 ►
than other people have had on the substances.
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It’s probably not the safest of the character types.
00:10:37 ►
It’s not entirely clear that this is sort of drug-eat type.
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A lot of times, a lot of people who are sort of dare-doubling
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aren’t really interested in gathering information,
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which is sort of part of the definition of the geek, but is more kind of just a crazy, you know, get fucked up kind of model.
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But there are, but there are.
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But we’ve met daredevils who, I mean, they’re interested in sort of exploring the ranges beyond what most people have taken.
00:11:01 ►
In order to be able to write about them and share about them and document those experiences.
00:11:08 ►
The next grouping, which is a pretty large grouping,
00:11:11 ►
is a group we call the plant geeks.
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The plant geeks are the people who focus their geekery on the plant kingdom.
00:11:17 ►
They grow things, they collect seeds,
00:11:20 ►
they spend most of their time focused on developing and gathering information about plants.
00:11:29 ►
Gathering information about the academic, all variety of information,
00:11:33 ►
academic, historical, cultural use of psychoactive plants.
00:11:39 ►
And sort of the relationship between humans and plants as allies.
00:11:44 ►
And sort of the relationship between humans and plants as allies.
00:11:53 ►
A bunch of the plant geeks we’ve met have been very much on the lower frequency use line.
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People are sort of gardener types.
00:12:01 ►
And they will taste the plants while they’re working with the mother.
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They’ll trim the plant and taste a little bit, but aren’t really looking to trip for it often. It’s fairly common.
00:12:06 ►
One plant that we, perhaps one of the earlier plant geeks that we sort of, well, I think
00:12:11 ►
that’s not true, but that we met was, we met in a sort of tropical area, sort of, sort
00:12:16 ►
of area, who had lived in that area and had a garden, both an outdoor and indoor greenhouse garden,
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and had a wonderful wide array of plants, psychoactive plants that they grew.
00:12:31 ►
And we visited and were taking photos of the plants while we were there.
00:12:35 ►
And we got to one plant, and she asked not to photograph this particular plant
00:12:42 ►
because she had a special relationship with this particular plant
00:12:45 ►
and she didn’t want to ruin that relationship
00:12:47 ►
by sharing that with the outside world
00:12:49 ►
and didn’t want photographs taken of this particular plant.
00:12:51 ►
That’s sort of one of the characteristics,
00:12:54 ►
I would say, of the…
00:12:56 ►
probably a little piece, but of the plant game.
00:12:59 ►
I think that, you know, it’s…
00:13:01 ►
We’ve met other…
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Like, another person that we know,
00:13:04 ►
their entire house and their entire yard is just filled with salvia. You go to their house and it’s, we’ve met other, like another person that we know, their entire house and their entire yard is filled with salvia.
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You go to their house and it’s just sort of, you know,
00:13:11 ►
kind of stepping over the salvia plants.
00:13:13 ►
Hundreds and hundreds of plants.
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And there’s, you know, there’s another cactus,
00:13:19 ►
another person, another plant, a cactus collector,
00:13:22 ►
has his cactus collection spread over like five properties, and he’s got hundreds
00:13:26 ►
and hundreds and hundreds of these cactus,
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and he’s growing them from seed and propagating
00:13:30 ►
them, and that’s all
00:13:32 ►
his entire focus is just on
00:13:33 ►
the cactus. There’s obviously the whole world
00:13:35 ►
of mycology that’s this whole separate field,
00:13:38 ►
mushroom collecting, mushroom hunting,
00:13:40 ►
mushroom cultivation,
00:13:43 ►
the knowledge
00:13:44 ►
about that particular field.
00:13:47 ►
Where are we?
00:13:50 ►
So then there’s sort of another obvious subtype is the chemistry people
00:13:55 ►
who spend all their time focusing on chemistry.
00:13:57 ►
You might put Sasha in that grouping or a variety of other people.
00:14:02 ►
The ones who are always drawing molecules on napkins
00:14:05 ►
and showing them to people.
00:14:09 ►
I have sort of a funny story about that
00:14:11 ►
from Burning Man this year.
00:14:11 ►
We were at Burning Man
00:14:12 ►
and we had a dome,
00:14:14 ►
the Arrowhead Dome,
00:14:15 ►
mostly people just coming by to visit us.
00:14:18 ►
We had a whiteboard up on the wall
00:14:19 ►
so people could leave notes
00:14:20 ►
and so people could draw things
00:14:21 ►
if they were, you know,
00:14:22 ►
for whatever reason.
00:14:24 ►
We were sitting there one day and a chemist, we were standing and talking
00:14:28 ►
with a chemist and he drew a picture of…
00:14:33 ►
Methylenedioxy…
00:14:36 ►
Aminorex.
00:14:36 ►
Aminorex, isn’t it? Is that right?
00:14:39 ►
Yeah.
00:14:39 ►
Yeah. So he drew a Methylenedioxy Aminorex, which I had never necessarily seen before,
00:14:47 ►
and he asked if we’d heard whether anyone had made it or whatever.
00:14:50 ►
And we had a little discussion about that, and he left.
00:14:53 ►
And so we had this little molecule drawing now on a whiteboard on the wall,
00:14:57 ►
and a little while later, a couple of people came in and we were talking to them,
00:15:01 ►
and one of them we had never met before, and he looked over at the wall and was like,
00:15:03 ►
oh, that’s sort of interesting, and he went over
00:15:05 ►
and stood in front of it for a minute and
00:15:07 ►
started thinking, and he started drawing,
00:15:10 ►
he started drawing out a synthesis
00:15:11 ►
path for this particular molecule.
00:15:14 ►
And he stood up and
00:15:16 ►
stood and looked at it for a little while, and I was like,
00:15:18 ►
that’s not quite right, and changed a couple of things.
00:15:20 ►
And I was like, yeah, and, you know, I mean, I know
00:15:21 ►
nothing, but I thought, oh, good.
00:15:23 ►
You know?
00:15:26 ►
And then they left, yeah, you know, I mean, I don’t know, I’m good, you know. And then they left, and then…
00:15:28 ►
The first chemist came back, and he’s like, oh, that’s a pretty good idea, yeah, that looks like that.
00:15:35 ►
And through the next, we locked that up, because we thought that was just so funny.
00:15:39 ►
But over the next couple of days, several other chemists came by by and were like, oh, and we had this discussion.
00:15:49 ►
Several other chemists confirmed that, yes, that was in fact a fine,
00:15:52 ►
proper synthesis of methylene dioxide and minorex,
00:15:54 ►
even though methylene dioxide and minorex has never, to our knowledge,
00:15:56 ►
been made by man.
00:15:58 ►
It was sort of this novel fear.
00:16:01 ►
Let’s see.
00:16:06 ►
I’d say the next and last character subtype that we have is the photo geek.
00:16:07 ►
I’m one of those.
00:16:11 ►
People who like to collect photos of drugs.
00:16:16 ►
Sort of avoid the illegalities of actually ever possessing any substances and instead have pictures of them all.
00:16:18 ►
So if you have me come up to you this week and say,
00:16:23 ►
can I take a picture of that?
00:16:25 ►
You’ll know why that is.
00:16:26 ►
I mostly ask people if I can take pictures of them.
00:16:28 ►
We were at an outdoor party a couple of years ago,
00:16:31 ►
and it was like 3 a.m. or something like that,
00:16:35 ►
and this nice little wafer girl came up and said,
00:16:37 ►
do you need any E or anything else?
00:16:40 ►
And I said, no, but could we take a picture of the ex-ex-ex-ex?
00:16:45 ►
She’s like, oh, I don’t know about that.
00:16:48 ►
I’ll have to go ask my boyfriend.
00:16:49 ►
And so we walked over to her boyfriend,
00:16:52 ►
who was obviously the person who was carrying all the material.
00:16:55 ►
And she asked him, it’s like, well, I don’t know.
00:16:58 ►
I’m like, well, I don’t know if you’ve heard the website Arrow.
00:17:01 ►
And people were running.
00:17:02 ►
Oh, great.
00:17:04 ►
And so we then spent
00:17:06 ►
the next two hours sort of talking about sort of the drug trade and sort of, you know, taking
00:17:10 ►
pictures of all the things we had. So we’re definitely sort of in the photo-eating category.
00:17:19 ►
When we talk about this, it often, to me, when I try to think of how things sound to the general populace
00:17:26 ►
sometimes, and sort of the drunken characters often sound sort of obsessive. You know, you
00:17:30 ►
can do sort of odd characters who are focusing on this, you know, unaccepted field and, you
00:17:37 ►
know, very, you know, obsessive characters. And, but most of them, it’s just, you know, it’s the hobbies. It’s like being a gardener or like
00:17:48 ►
being a mechanic or like being a whatever. It’s just that the field is so un…
00:17:53 ►
It’s marginalized and apologized in the wider society. One of the ways that… So we have
00:18:01 ►
this image of this drug of several different subtypes of characters who form what we call
00:18:06 ►
the drug geek.
00:18:07 ►
And it’s,
00:18:09 ►
because we’ve interacted with so many
00:18:12 ►
around the site, and sort of we realize
00:18:14 ►
that a fairly substantial portion
00:18:16 ►
of sort of the power users of heroin
00:18:17 ►
or other information
00:18:19 ►
resources are qualified as sort of
00:18:22 ►
drug geeks or academic types.
00:18:28 ►
We’ve sort of looked into how to think about that. One of the things we’ve come across is the idea of transactive memory or transactive
00:18:34 ►
knowledge, which is, I think the phrase was created by Daniel Wagner, who the model is…
00:18:44 ►
Daniel Wegner, who the model is.
00:18:45 ►
Sure.
00:18:50 ►
The basic idea that he talks about is, he talks about it in a couple of ways,
00:18:54 ►
is that within any given grouping, he talks about it mostly in terms of families, I believe,
00:18:57 ►
that within given groupings, social groupings,
00:19:06 ►
the tasks and information storage in memory are sort of divided up among various people.
00:19:08 ►
That within, say, a couple,
00:19:11 ►
one person might be the expert on a particular topic,
00:19:13 ►
and because they’re the expert on that topic,
00:19:15 ►
the partner who’s not the expert doesn’t even really try to remember information
00:19:18 ►
about that particular thing,
00:19:20 ►
because their partner is the holder of that particular memory.
00:19:23 ►
They don’t need to.
00:19:23 ►
I don’t need to be able to remember all the things that he remembers, because it’s more
00:19:27 ►
efficient if we each remember half of it.
00:19:29 ►
So the idea of transactive memory is that your memory is stored in a…
00:19:33 ►
You can retrieve memories through a transaction of some sort.
00:19:37 ►
And there’s this idea that in any organization or organism, the various knowledges about
00:19:43 ►
how to do things might be stored in individual members
00:19:46 ►
that aren’t…
00:19:47 ►
The example that a friend gave
00:19:50 ►
was that
00:19:51 ►
you don’t need to learn something
00:19:54 ►
if you know an expert
00:19:55 ►
at that topic.
00:19:57 ►
You can leave that out.
00:20:00 ►
A couple of other good examples of that that I liked
00:20:02 ►
from Daniel Wagner were
00:20:03 ►
between men and women,
00:20:06 ►
information about, like men and women in couples, information about child-rearing before they have children.
00:20:11 ►
It’s pretty much, you know, women store that information and the men pretty much don’t.
00:20:15 ►
I thought that was sort of interesting.
00:20:16 ►
Is there a traditional, is there a little bit of anthropology into it that has looked at that
00:20:22 ►
and has seen that basically if you give, if you tell men information sort of casually about baby stuff,
00:20:28 ►
you know, they’re boys mostly, and you give the same kind of presentation to girls,
00:20:32 ►
and then quiz them later, a lot of times the girls will have retained it better
00:20:35 ►
just because they have sort of self-identified a lot of times with retaining that information,
00:20:41 ►
where boys have sort of self-identified as not retaining that information.
00:20:42 ►
retaining that information, where boys that sort of self-identify does not retain that information.
00:20:44 ►
And so there’s this effect with
00:20:46 ►
in the drug geek
00:20:50 ►
kind of model that people
00:20:52 ►
who self-identify as knowledgeable on the subject
00:20:54 ►
are more likely to retain the information,
00:20:56 ►
where people who don’t self-identify as knowledgeable
00:20:58 ►
will not retain the information as well.
00:21:01 ►
And that sort of pertains
00:21:02 ►
to the wider society because
00:21:03 ►
the education system
00:21:07 ►
in a lot of ways has told people to not self-identify as knowledgeable about psychoactive drugs.
00:21:14 ►
That there’s sort of this sense that I was taught, at least in high school, that there
00:21:22 ►
isn’t, all you can really know is sort of how to avoid them.
00:21:25 ►
You can’t really sort of, like, learn to have sort of a rational relationship with them.
00:21:30 ►
There’s a couple of ways that that particular role within a community can play out.
00:21:35 ►
And sort of opposite sides of it are, in one example, the drug geek can be a resource which empowers the people around them.
00:21:44 ►
Because they’ve got access to the information through this particular knowledgeable person around them,
00:21:48 ►
they’re more likely to learn things because they’ve got somebody around who they can ask questions of,
00:21:53 ►
who knows how to go and find the answers to particular questions.
00:21:56 ►
And so in that model, the people around the drug geek all develop their knowledge to a greater degree because of the drug geek.
00:22:04 ►
And in the other example, the drug geek is, because the drug geek knows so much,
00:22:09 ►
the people around them feel as though they don’t have to know as much,
00:22:13 ►
because they can always just go and ask the question.
00:22:15 ►
You know, the drug geek will tell them how much MDMA they should do.
00:22:18 ►
They don’t need to know.
00:22:19 ►
They don’t need to have that information themselves.
00:22:20 ►
They can just go and find that, you know, when they need it,
00:22:23 ►
and they don’t have to somebody else will take care
00:22:26 ►
of that for them.
00:22:26 ►
So one of the sort of danger sides
00:22:29 ►
of the drug or the geek character
00:22:31 ►
is that, an example
00:22:34 ►
is sort of in modern medicine, a lot of
00:22:36 ►
people, it seems,
00:22:38 ►
sort of disempower themselves around
00:22:40 ►
doctors, where doctors will tell them
00:22:41 ►
something, they will prescribe them something, and they
00:22:43 ►
won’t themselves go and look out the
00:22:45 ►
information about it to verify it. A friend
00:22:48 ►
was describing going
00:22:50 ►
to South America and realizing
00:22:52 ►
that he wanted to take
00:22:53 ►
anti-malaria pills,
00:22:56 ►
methaplenone,
00:22:57 ►
whatever that is.
00:23:00 ►
And he just,
00:23:01 ►
the doctor prescribed it for him, and he
00:23:03 ►
sort of assumed it was a good idea to take it
00:23:05 ►
and started taking it
00:23:06 ►
and got really sick after taking it
00:23:08 ►
and then when he went and looked it up
00:23:11 ►
he realized that in fact
00:23:12 ►
it has a very high incidence of liver problems
00:23:16 ►
and other types of problems
00:23:17 ►
and he realized that he had sort of just
00:23:20 ►
sort of given over the power
00:23:23 ►
of sort of medicating himself to someone else and
00:23:25 ►
hadn’t really sort of taken responsibility to kind of figure out whether that was something
00:23:28 ►
people admired or not.
00:23:30 ►
And so there’s definitely sort of, when you, if there’s this, if there’s a character, if
00:23:34 ►
there’s characters like, for instance, like Erowid is, like one of the problems that I
00:23:38 ►
have with doing Erowid is talking to people, a lot of times they ascribe far too much authority
00:23:43 ►
to the things that might show up on the site than is really appropriate. Because any particular document or anything
00:23:49 ►
that we write could be several generations away from being accurate. And so that’s sort
00:23:56 ►
of a problem.
00:23:57 ►
Sort of along those lines, one of the problems for the drug geeks is that as an expert, it
00:24:03 ►
sometimes can become, it’s a fairly obvious thing, but can become somewhat easy to be dismissive of other people’s views
00:24:08 ►
as well, that because you’re the knowledgeable, because the particular drug geek is the knowledgeable
00:24:13 ►
person, it can be a problem to not be accepting the feedback of the people around you, especially
00:24:19 ►
in a field like psychoactive plants and chemicals, because they’re really, it’s not like the
00:24:24 ►
answers are all out there.
00:24:25 ►
The answers are, in fact, coming from people who are using them.
00:24:28 ►
And so there needs to be both directions of communication about that.
00:24:34 ►
One of the things that makes drug geeks
00:24:38 ►
slightly different than geeks in other contexts,
00:24:43 ►
which is, I mean, geeks in a lot of contexts sort of fill the role
00:24:46 ►
of providing new information, like in computer geeks,
00:24:50 ►
a lot of times the hackers and things are the people
00:24:52 ►
who are sort of discovering a lot of the new information.
00:24:55 ►
But with drug geeks, it’s even more sort of present
00:24:58 ►
that it’s a lot of the types of research,
00:25:01 ►
like Jonathan Ott or Sasha Shulgin and stuff,
00:25:05 ►
not exactly illegal,
00:25:08 ►
but they’re certainly not funded by
00:25:10 ►
NIDA and funded by
00:25:12 ►
your tax dollars.
00:25:14 ►
So one of the interesting things about that is that
00:25:16 ►
we sort of got this
00:25:18 ►
view of it when we went to NIDA, is that
00:25:20 ►
in the establishment,
00:25:22 ►
from the establishment viewpoint,
00:25:24 ►
it’s surprising if new data comes out of the drug-using community.
00:25:30 ►
In the drug-using community, it’s kind of surprising if information that’s useful and accurate
00:25:34 ►
comes out of the establishment.
00:25:37 ►
And so one of the examples we have of that is that Edward Boyer, who wrote an article on… He wrote an article
00:25:45 ►
titled Websites with
00:25:48 ►
Misinformation about Illegal Drugs,
00:25:49 ►
which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine
00:25:51 ►
in August of 2001.
00:25:54 ►
And because of that, it talks a bit about
00:25:55 ►
heroin, and because of that, we’ve got…
00:25:57 ►
He’s a very nice gentleman. We’ve gotten a chance
00:25:59 ►
to get to know him a little bit, and he told
00:26:01 ►
a story about… He actually contacted
00:26:03 ►
us, which I hadn’t
00:26:05 ►
connected this with him, he contacted us a couple of years ago to ask us about the information
00:26:10 ►
we had up about GHB addiction, problems people were having with addiction with GHB, and to
00:26:16 ►
ask where we had gotten that information and how long we had had that up, and he was noticing
00:26:20 ►
that we had started publishing information about that pretty close to, if not before,
00:26:25 ►
anything had ever come out about that in the scientific journals.
00:26:28 ►
And he just thought that that was the most amazing thing, and, you know, oh, how could that possibly be?
00:26:33 ►
And, you know, there’s sort of this really interesting, it’s like, well, I think that that is happening all the time.
00:26:37 ►
You know, how would the journals know that there was a problem with GHB addiction
00:26:40 ►
if there weren’t people who were experiencing that who were probably writing about it or contacting us and telling us, it seems
00:26:45 ►
quite likely that we would…
00:26:46 ►
It’s not necessarily us, but
00:26:49 ►
it’s obvious that
00:26:51 ►
the people who are using the things and the people
00:26:53 ►
who are trying things are more likely to know
00:26:55 ►
the ab reactions
00:26:57 ►
and things like that than the people who are
00:26:59 ►
only occasionally talking to them.
00:27:02 ►
One of the
00:27:03 ►
other stories that, I don’t know if people know,
00:27:07 ►
Kit Bonson, she works at the FDA,
00:27:09 ►
and she did sort of an Internet survey in the mid-’90s, I guess.
00:27:15 ►
She was trying to find out information about the interaction between SSRIs and psychedelics
00:27:21 ►
and was asking people if they had tried taking Prozac or whatever
00:27:26 ►
and then trying LSD or mushrooms or MUA and asking people whether or not they experienced
00:27:33 ►
a decrease in effects and things like that.
00:27:35 ►
And she was completely blown away at the time, she said, by how sophisticated the responses
00:27:43 ►
she got were.
00:27:44 ►
She got emails back from when she
00:27:45 ►
put a thing on the Usenet or something
00:27:47 ►
and a couple of emails, and she got these
00:27:49 ►
replies back, which
00:27:51 ►
cited
00:27:53 ►
essays, citing a series of
00:27:55 ►
journal articles, and
00:27:57 ►
things that she’d never heard of.
00:27:59 ►
She’d looked into the area
00:28:01 ►
and had failed to find a number of things
00:28:04 ►
that had been pointed out to her by people who
00:28:06 ►
were just sort of the drug-using community.
00:28:08 ►
And so that was something
00:28:10 ►
that was struck out to her. And that people would
00:28:12 ►
write in and talk about the pharmacology of
00:28:13 ►
the interactions of the neurons
00:28:15 ►
and how various chemicals
00:28:17 ►
and various combinations of chemicals were
00:28:19 ►
interacting with, and she was just
00:28:21 ►
extremely surprised by that.
00:28:24 ►
Well, the other thing was that, I mean, sort of simple, we talked about this
00:28:28 ►
a little bit yesterday, but when we went to NIDA, their expectations were so low for us
00:28:33 ►
that when we showed up and, you know, were able to speak in complete sentences, that
00:28:37 ►
they were completely, they were completely surprised.
00:28:40 ►
They were very surprised.
00:28:41 ►
I had four or five different people comment on how surprised they were, how sophisticated
00:28:44 ►
they were. Well, you people really or five different people comment on how surprised they were, how sophisticated they were.
00:28:45 ►
Well, you people really seem to know what you’re talking about.
00:28:48 ►
It’s like, well, I mean, that’s what I do with all of my time.
00:28:51 ►
You know, I mean, sure, I’m not, I don’t have a PhD,
00:28:54 ►
but I don’t know why I’m all on here.
00:28:57 ►
Well, that sort of leads us to the next point.
00:29:01 ►
Another sort of interesting point for me is that the drug geeks are,
00:29:04 ►
in my experience,
00:29:06 ►
probably just as often self-educated as classically educated.
00:29:12 ►
There’s a certain number of the drug geek types who go and get a degree or a higher degree
00:29:19 ►
in the field of their choice of geekery.
00:29:22 ►
in the field of their choice of geekery.
00:29:27 ►
But most often the interest,
00:29:31 ►
the development into the drug geek character comes before they go and get that education.
00:29:33 ►
They’re doing that in order to further their drug geekery.
00:29:35 ►
They aren’t becoming drug geeks by going to a university
00:29:38 ►
and gathering the information that way.
00:29:44 ►
Oftentimes the information that way? Oftentimes,
00:29:46 ►
the information
00:29:47 ►
that the geek community knows
00:29:50 ►
is information
00:29:51 ►
that’s not even available
00:29:52 ►
in universities.
00:29:53 ►
You can’t, like,
00:29:55 ►
well, you,
00:29:56 ►
like, for instance,
00:29:57 ►
if you’re a person
00:29:57 ►
who’s really interested
00:29:58 ►
in chemistry,
00:29:59 ►
you might go
00:29:59 ►
and get your chemistry degree,
00:30:01 ►
but they’re not going
00:30:02 ►
to teach you
00:30:02 ►
how to make LSD.
00:30:03 ►
They’re not going
00:30:04 ►
to teach you
00:30:04 ►
how to make and be made, probably. I mean, maybe, I don’t know. If you’re not going to teach you how to make LSD. They’re not going to teach you how to make NBMA, probably.
00:30:07 ►
I mean, maybe, I don’t know.
00:30:08 ►
They’re not going to be able to learn what the details of cultivating selvia are
00:30:14 ►
by going to a botany class, because they’re not going to be focused in that particular direction.
00:30:21 ►
Where are we?
00:30:22 ►
Well, so, one of the things things I have here is,
00:30:29 ►
part of the concept for us in thinking about this character is that
00:30:36 ►
because it’s such a large percentage of our audience,
00:30:38 ►
it’s not all, but it’s certainly a large part of our audience,
00:30:41 ►
is how to present information which better serves that particular community,
00:30:46 ►
helps them to better serve the communities around them,
00:30:49 ►
as well as how to, through acknowledging this particular role,
00:30:54 ►
perhaps help those people to better understand themselves,
00:31:00 ►
better recognize that they are playing that role,
00:31:04 ►
and treat it in a way
00:31:07 ►
which is most useful.
00:31:09 ►
One of the things
00:31:11 ►
that really crystallized
00:31:13 ►
this thing was a couple of years ago
00:31:15 ►
we had one person write in
00:31:17 ►
who said
00:31:18 ►
I’m the
00:31:21 ►
person in my
00:31:22 ►
peer group
00:31:24 ►
who is the source of information. I know where to look things up. I have the person in my peer group who is the source of information.
00:31:27 ►
I know where to look things up.
00:31:28 ►
I have the books.
00:31:29 ►
I have all of this.
00:31:31 ►
But I can’t find the information on this particular topic.
00:31:35 ►
And so that sparked this ongoing kind of conversation between us and other people we work with about that person
00:31:46 ►
who is actively trying to inform the people around them.
00:31:49 ►
It’s a lot of ways like what DanSafe is trying to do by creating a peer-based network of
00:31:57 ►
information providing.
00:31:59 ►
But a lot of times the people that we interact with are more focused on information than the people that DanSafe is mostly trying to communicate with, which is sort of the user community.
00:32:10 ►
And the question that comes up for us is how can we sort of provide tools or create systems by which accurate information can get dispersed more widely into the geek community.
00:32:26 ►
And one of the
00:32:27 ►
problems with that is that
00:32:30 ►
if you have
00:32:33 ►
if we have these characters of drug geeks
00:32:36 ►
who have their clusters of friends around them
00:32:37 ►
who they’re providing information to
00:32:39 ►
how do the clusters
00:32:42 ►
of people around the drug geek
00:32:44 ►
know that the information the drug geek is providing them with is accurate?
00:32:48 ►
If the information that they’re being provided isn’t accurate,
00:32:53 ►
this is a large problem with this particular system.
00:32:57 ►
Because if you’re giving your trust over to this person
00:32:59 ►
to provide you with the information,
00:33:01 ►
in a lot of cases that’s happening because those people
00:33:07 ►
aren’t the type of people to go and check the data and check the references and ask
00:33:10 ►
for references and make sure that that’s correct information. So how to balance those two sides
00:33:17 ►
of it to make sure that the systems work and that people take enough responsibility for
00:33:22 ►
their own information gathering
00:33:26 ►
to double check
00:33:28 ►
things or make sure that the person that they’re trusting
00:33:30 ►
has the
00:33:30 ►
information.
00:33:34 ►
So we’re mostly done
00:33:36 ►
but one of the ideas
00:33:38 ►
that you’ve talked about which is not
00:33:40 ►
we haven’t really talked about very seriously
00:33:42 ►
is like for instance the idea of like a
00:33:44 ►
drug geek certification course,
00:33:45 ►
or something like that, where you would
00:33:47 ►
take your first level drug geek
00:33:49 ►
free, you know, class, and you’d
00:33:51 ►
go through and you’d learn the basics, and
00:33:53 ►
one of the, you know, like, what are memes
00:33:55 ►
that need to be spread about how
00:33:57 ►
to be a drug geek in relationship
00:33:59 ►
to your community? Like, for instance,
00:34:02 ►
providing references
00:34:03 ►
to the things that you say, and
00:34:05 ►
encouraging people who hear
00:34:08 ►
a drug geek speak to
00:34:09 ►
ask them where that information came from.
00:34:11 ►
One of the things that’s really sort of
00:34:13 ►
missing in a lot of the interactions
00:34:16 ►
that we experience
00:34:17 ►
is that somebody asks a question
00:34:19 ►
and they accept the answer that they’re
00:34:22 ►
given without sort of asking the next question
00:34:24 ►
of, oh, well, how do you know that?
00:34:25 ►
And where does that come from?
00:34:26 ►
And what’s the source for that?
00:34:29 ►
Is as important almost, or perhaps as important,
00:34:32 ►
as the sort of the strict answer that you’re given.
00:34:36 ►
I have one other note here we skipped slightly earlier,
00:34:38 ►
but it’s also interesting for me to know that
00:34:42 ►
the drug geek characters are not only the ones, the people who are more likely to go out and search for information,
00:34:48 ►
and therefore more likely to be the people who visit Erwin,
00:34:50 ►
but they’re also the people who are more likely to collect the information from their friends and submit it back to us.
00:34:55 ►
And so it’s sort of this two-way relationship that they’re the people we’re communicating most of.
00:34:58 ►
They actually care to be helping with the gathering of the information as well.
00:35:01 ►
with the gathering of the information as well.
00:35:08 ►
I think it’s incredibly important to provide information without making recommendations.
00:35:13 ►
That’s really important to me.
00:35:14 ►
It’s really difficult to frame information
00:35:17 ►
in a way that it doesn’t just become a recommendation.
00:35:20 ►
People take things as recommendations,
00:35:21 ►
even if you say this is not a recommendation.
00:35:24 ►
So how to communicate to them that you’re really, really, really not recommending this.
00:35:29 ►
You’re just telling them what you know.
00:35:33 ►
Well, to me, I think that the academic character can definitely be one of the most,
00:35:39 ►
an extremely important part of friends and family and community and wider culture.
00:35:45 ►
Andy, I mean, I think even with a bit of obsessiveness in there,
00:35:48 ►
that that’s, I mean, in some ways I want my information provider to be a little bit obsessive.
00:35:54 ►
I mean, I want them to actually, you know, go out there and find out the answers to things,
00:35:58 ►
and I want them to, and so, you know, you’d want to do that in some level of moderation, I think.
00:36:03 ►
I would prefer more moderation. More think. I would prefer more moderation.
00:36:05 ►
More moderation.
00:36:06 ►
More moderation in my own life.
00:36:08 ►
You know, I would rather sit down and read, you know, journal articles than go running.
00:36:14 ►
And so, I mean, it’s sort of like, oh, okay, I’m going to set this down.
00:36:19 ►
We also enjoy it a lot, so, you know, we’re not.
00:36:23 ►
And so that’s, I mean, it’s definitely, I mean, me, that’s a difficult thing.
00:36:26 ►
I don’t know over the long…
00:36:28 ►
I continue to try to work on ways to incorporate…
00:36:32 ►
Like I have to go to walk to the mailbox
00:36:34 ►
in order to get the journal.
00:36:36 ►
Mailbox is a long way.
00:36:42 ►
That’s probably another subtype
00:36:46 ►
I was thinking about that earlier
00:36:47 ►
sort of
00:36:49 ►
exactly that, the people who
00:36:51 ►
pay attention to and have
00:36:53 ►
probably read up on techniques for
00:36:56 ►
walking people through difficult experiences
00:36:58 ►
and have knowledge about how that goes
00:37:00 ►
and are the people
00:37:02 ►
that people come to when they have those experiences
00:37:04 ►
I think a lot of times I think a lot of times the people who are sort of book-knowledgeable people
00:37:11 ►
often, because people go to ask them questions about,
00:37:13 ►
so how does LSP work again?
00:37:16 ►
Those people end up being sort of dragged into situations like,
00:37:20 ►
oh, this guy’s having a bad trip.
00:37:22 ►
You deal with him. You know about LSP.
00:37:24 ►
And so people who are not necessarily appropriate for that like, oh, this guy’s having a bad trip. You deal with him. You know about LSD.
00:37:26 ►
And so people who are not necessarily appropriate for that,
00:37:28 ►
don’t have any training for that at all,
00:37:30 ►
get pulled into those situations.
00:37:32 ►
I think that’s fairly common.
00:37:37 ►
Ready?
00:37:38 ►
Thank you. So, are you a drug geek or not?
00:37:56 ►
If so, what kind of drug geek are you?
00:38:00 ►
My bet is that most of us have probably fit more than one of those categories at one time or another,
00:38:06 ►
or probably still do in some regards.
00:38:09 ►
Now, those of you that know Earth and Fire are really aware of how modest these two people are,
00:38:17 ►
and from their presentation that you just heard, you might think,
00:38:21 ►
gee, isn’t it great that these two nice people have published
00:38:25 ►
a little website with such important information?
00:38:28 ►
Well, let me tell you, Arrowhead is no ordinary website.
00:38:33 ►
Just listen to a couple of these statistics from their site.
00:38:37 ►
Actually, these came from the November 2005 newsletter they sent out.
00:38:42 ►
Daily visitors.
00:38:44 ►
This is how many different people come to their
00:38:46 ►
site every day. 47,437 pages served on a daily basis. This is how many different pages people
00:38:56 ►
look at each and every day. As of November 2005, it was up to 447,926. Now just think about that for a minute.
00:39:07 ►
On each and every day of the year,
00:39:09 ►
almost 50,000 people read close to a half a million pages of information
00:39:14 ►
that they’re provided free.
00:39:16 ►
It’s for anybody who’s interested.
00:39:19 ►
And by the way, those 50,000 visitors each day are not just drug geeks,
00:39:24 ►
although it warms the cockles of my heart to think there could be that many out there
00:39:29 ►
coming by every day
00:39:30 ►
but law enforcement officers, parents, doctors
00:39:34 ►
they’re also among each and every day’s visitors
00:39:37 ►
this is a huge online resource
00:39:40 ►
and one that I think is really unparalleled anywhere on the net
00:39:43 ►
and all of it started with just two people, Earth and Fire.
00:39:49 ►
Of course, now they have some help from Sylvia, Christopher, and good old Scott Oa, along
00:39:54 ►
with a few dozen other volunteers who helped out in crunches.
00:39:58 ►
And get this, this entire operation is supported by only 1,150 donors.
00:40:04 ►
This entire operation is supported by only 1,150 donors.
00:40:08 ►
Quite frankly, I don’t know how they do it with so little support.
00:40:11 ►
Which brings me to my next point.
00:40:15 ►
If you’re not already one of the 1,150 tribe members who are helping to get this important information out to the world,
00:40:18 ►
then why aren’t you?
00:40:21 ►
You know, even if you can only afford a gift of 25 a year it’ll bring be a big help and even that
00:40:29 ►
level you’ll receive their excellent newsletter which is published a couple times a year so just
00:40:35 ►
go to arrowid.org donations and you’ll find out about that you know along with the maps bulletin
00:40:41 ►
and the entheogen review the arrowid newsletter newsletter, which they call Arrowwood Extracts,
00:40:48 ►
is a must-reading if you really want to know what’s going on in the psychedelic community.
00:40:54 ►
So, thank you, Earth and Fire, for all you’ve done and continue to do for our community.
00:40:59 ►
You know, you guys are just at the very top of my list of drug geeks I admire, admire greatly.
00:41:08 ►
And a big thank you to John Hanna for producing the Mind States conferences,
00:41:13 ►
Kevin Whitesides for making this recording for us,
00:41:16 ►
and of course to our friends Shatul Hayuk for the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:41:22 ►
And to all of you who have joined us again here today,
00:41:25 ►
hey, thanks a lot for being here.
00:41:28 ►
It’s really nice to know you’re with us.
00:41:31 ►
For now,
00:41:31 ►
this is Lorenzo, signing off
00:41:33 ►
from Cyberdelic Space.
00:41:36 ►
Be well, my friends.