Program Notes
Guest speaker: Ethan Nadelmann
[NOTE: All quotations are by Ethan Nadelmann.]
“The War on Drugs, this policy of punitive prohibition, is a horror in our society, something that cannot be morally justified, cannot be justified in terms of health, can certainly not be justified in terms of public safety, that cannot be justified in terms of any kind of fiscal prudence that I’ve ever heard of.”
“The War on Drugs is a cancer in our society, in our American society and in global society.”
“There’s never been a drug-free society, and there’s never going to be a drug-free society. We are moving increasingly into a world in which there will be ever-more psychoactive drugs available.”
“The stand-bys, you know, the old faithfuls of tobacco and alcohol and marijuana and coca cocaine and opium, they’ve been with us for thousands of years in one way or another, and they’re going to continue to be part of our society and our lives, whether we like it or not.”
“When drug treatment gets owned by the criminal justice system, drug treatment simply becomes a synonym for coerced abstinence.”
“We need to aim to cut America’s incarcerated population in half, to pick a rough number.”
“We need to get that term, over-incarceration, into the popular dialogue, into the popular language.”
“One of the definitions of power is when somebody tells you to do something, and you do it without asking why. That’s the definition of power. Somebody tells you to do it and you do it without even asking why, that’s the power of the prison-industrial complex today.”
“California used to be known as the state of higher education and is now known as the state of higher incarnation.”
“When you live in a society where one of the most powerful political forces is the organization which earns its livelihood from keeping its fellow citizens behind bars, I don’t know of any other free society in which that is the case. That’s a distortion.”
“I define recovery as getting to the point where your drug use, if you use drugs, is no longer impairing your life. … That’s the objective, to get on with your life.”
“It’s about accepting that each one of us, who have struggled with drugs, has to find their own path. And that the role of the state should certainly not be to get in the way and optimally to facilitate this.”
“That we are each sovereign over our own minds and bodies, that is the core principle that we have to keep putting out there.”
Drug Policy ACTION Network
Drug Policy Alliance Network
A New PATH
Parents for Addiction Treatment and Healing
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:24 ►
And I hope you didn’t think that I’d forgotten about you,
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because every day for the past ten days or so now,
00:00:30 ►
I’ve been thinking that I really need to get this podcast out.
00:00:34 ►
You know, my plan a few weeks ago was to produce three or four podcasts over the holiday season,
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but that obviously didn’t work out.
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And it wasn’t because I was out partying.
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In fact, I didn’t even attend a single holiday party this year.
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All I did was goof off.
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I can’t even remember the last time there were so many days in a row
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during which I didn’t get a single thing accomplished.
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But I’m here to tell you that I feel great, I’m well-rested,
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and I’m looking forward to an exciting year ahead.
00:01:05 ►
So let me begin this year by, first of all, passing along my sincere thanks to some of our fellow salonners
00:01:12 ►
who were kind enough to make a donation to help offset the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:01:18 ►
So a big 2010 thank you to Mark C., Stephen K., Howard F., John F., Andrew O., Sancho from the Blita podcast, and Black Beauty,
00:01:32 ►
who you also know from Bebe’s Bungalow podcast and whose silken voice you hear after the end of each talk here in the salon.
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Also, Bebe is the one who provided the chapter introductions for my audiobook, The Genesis Generation.
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I really don’t know what to say to all of you other than, hey, thank you very much.
00:01:51 ►
I sincerely appreciate your generosity.
00:01:55 ►
Now, there is one other donor that I would like to thank, and like my fellow podcasters, Sancho and Bebe,
00:02:01 ►
I think he has already contributed more than his share to our community,
00:02:06 ►
and that person is my dear friend Bruce Dahmer, who also made a major contribution to the salon
00:02:12 ►
last week. Bruce, as you know, has been featured here in the salon a couple of times and is the
00:02:18 ►
only person so far that I’ve podcast on my other channel, matrixcast.com. And even without the donation, Bruce was very much on my mind last week
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because of all the buzz about the movie Avatar.
00:02:33 ►
You probably know this already, but Bruce wrote what may be the first modern book about avatars back in 1998.
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And although he wasn’t a consultant on the movie,
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I do know that he gave James Cameron a copy
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of his book several years ago. And while it may be just a coincidence, the font that was used for
00:02:53 ►
the movie title is the same one Bruce used 12 years ago for his book. So much for the trivia,
00:02:59 ►
but Bruce, your donation was not a trivial gesture. and I want you to know how much your love and support have meant to me during these past few years, and I certainly look forward to many more adventures together in the years ahead.
00:03:14 ►
Well, I guess I’d better save the rest of my chatter for after today’s talk, which is one I’m really excited about playing for you.
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Our guest speaker today is the one and only Ethan Nadelman,
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and in just a minute you’ll see why I say
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the one and only.
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Of all the spokespersons
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for the tribe,
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I think that Ethan
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is not only the best informed
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and most articulate,
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he’s also great fun
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to listen to.
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I’ve only had the pleasure
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of hearing him in person twice,
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and both times
00:03:41 ►
were really fascinating.
00:03:43 ►
The first time I heard him speak
00:03:44 ►
was at the 2006 Burning Man Festival, where I produced
00:03:48 ►
the Planque Norte lectures that he was a part of.
00:03:51 ►
Unfortunately, my recording of his talk that day didn’t come out too well.
00:03:55 ►
But late last year, when he came to town to speak at an event sponsored by the wonderful
00:04:00 ►
organization Parents for Addiction Treatment and Healing, or PATH,
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I got to hear him again.
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And although this recording isn’t a whole lot better than the Burning Man one,
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it’s still very much worth your time to hear, I think.
00:04:17 ►
So now let’s join Ethan Nadelman as he brings us up to speed on the state of affairs we commonly call the war on drugs,
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even though we know that this is a war on you and me.
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War on Drugs, even though we know that this is a war on you and me.
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I have the wonderful blessing of introducing to you our keynote speaker, who is Ethan Nadelman.
00:04:41 ►
I met Ethan about 10 years ago in L.A., and I have been a fan since then.
00:04:48 ►
I will follow this man anywhere because I really believe what he has to say is so, so true.
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Ethan is the founder and executive director of Drug Policy Alliance, the leading organization in the United States promoting alternatives to the war on drugs.
00:04:58 ►
Dr. Nadelman is widely regarded as the outstanding opponent of drug policy reform, both in the United
00:05:06 ►
States and abroad. He was a former professor of politics at Princeton, and his speaking
00:05:12 ►
and writing on drug policy have attracted international attention. We are so, so privileged
00:05:19 ►
to have you with us here, Ethan. Thank you.
00:05:42 ►
Thank you. Mary, thank you. Gretchen, thank you. I guess it’s been a few years since I was last here in this church. And for me, this is the tail end of a two-week trip.
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Last week, we were in Albuquerque, New Mexico, as Gretchen mentioned.
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And it was really an extraordinary gathering.
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I mean, over 1,000 people.
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How many of you were there, by the way?
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Just raise your hands.
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Okay, so about seven or eight people.
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And it was just an extraordinary gathering because it was people coming from across the political spectrum.
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People coming from across the drug use spectrum, right?
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From people who, you know, love their drugs, love their marijuana, their psychedelics,
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and for whom it’s a positive thing in their lives,
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to people who, you know, just can’t ever touch these things again because of the devastation that’s happened in their lives, to people who just can’t ever touch these things again
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because of the devastation that’s happened in their lives,
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to people who don’t care about drugs as well,
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people from across the drug law spectrum,
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from the people in LEAP who’ve enforced these laws for many years
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to people who just got out of prison,
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serving five, ten, and twenty-year sentences
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for having been behind bars or have been arrested or harassed.
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And all of these people coming together with really only one thing in common,
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which was the view that the war on drugs, that this policy of punitive prohibition,
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is a horror in our society, something that just cannot be morally justified,
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cannot be justified in terms of health,
00:07:04 ►
certainly cannot be justified in terms of health, certainly cannot be justified
00:07:05 ►
in terms of public safety, cannot be justified in terms of any kind of fiscal prudence that
00:07:10 ►
I’ve ever heard of. I really come to get it. I will say for those of you who were not there,
00:07:16 ►
just mark on your calendar, and I know I’m jumping ahead here, but November 2nd or 5th,
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2011, just under two years from now, lots of warning.
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In Los Angeles, not that far from here, it’s going to be…
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New Mexico was extraordinary, electrifying is the word people keep using about it.
00:07:35 ►
Two years from now, being here in California where so much is happening, you’ve got to be there.
00:07:41 ►
You’ve got to be there.
00:07:42 ►
So one way or another, mark your calendar, save up your money.
00:07:45 ►
It doesn’t cost a hell of a lot.
00:07:46 ►
We do one of the least expensive three-day conferences in the world.
00:07:50 ►
We try to subsidize the whole thing, so make your best efforts.
00:07:53 ►
Now, just to get a read here, first of all, is there anybody?
00:07:57 ►
Does everybody here agree?
00:08:00 ►
How many of you think that the war on drugs has failed?
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Please raise your hands.
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Okay, put it down.
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How many think the war on drugs has not really been tried yet?
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We’ve got to give it more of a shot.
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Okay.
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How many of you believe that marijuana should be made legal?
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Raise your hands.
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And how many of you are opposed to legalizing marijuana?
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Raise your hands.
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Okay.
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And how many of you believe that essentially all drugs should be made legal?
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Raise your hands.
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Okay. And how many of you are against should be made legal? Raise your hands.
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Okay, and how many of you are against legalizing all drugs? Raise your hands.
00:08:29 ►
Okay, about split. And how many aren’t sure about that? Raise your hands.
00:08:32 ►
Okay, so I’ll say a little more about the not sure, and then the rest are a little bit split there.
00:08:37 ►
And so what I’m going to do is basically assume that you’re there with me now based upon what you said.
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Now, I’m not here to persuade you, as I would with many audiences,
00:08:50 ►
about what’s so terribly wrong with the war on drugs.
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What I want to talk about here really is what’s happening in terms of the movement to reform.
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There’s how do we take this stuff to the next level?
00:09:00 ►
What’s going on right now? Why is it going on right now? And where are we headed?
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And I also want to throw out different thoughts and thinking, some of which I’ve
00:09:07 ►
been talking about for a while, some of which are much more new because things are changing
00:09:10 ►
so much right now, about the way, useful ways, I think, for us to talk about this.
00:09:18 ►
You know, part of what drives me, I mean, the key thing, I think, part of it is just
00:09:22 ►
this view that the war on drugs, as I said yesterday someplace else,
00:09:26 ►
is a cancer in our society, in our American society and in global society.
00:09:31 ►
Drugs are not the cancer, right?
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Drugs are drugs.
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I mean, drugs are plants or chemicals.
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They can be used as medicines.
00:09:38 ►
They can be used recreationally.
00:09:39 ►
They can be used spiritually.
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They can be used to ease pain.
00:09:42 ►
And they can be used in horribly destructive ways as well, right? The dose is the poison. Drugs have always been here, they’re always going
00:09:48 ►
to be here. There’s never been a drug-free society, except maybe the Eskimos because
00:09:52 ►
they couldn’t grow anything, but leave that aside. And there’s never going to be a drug-free
00:09:56 ►
society. We are moving in, increasingly into a world in which there will be ever more psychoactive
00:10:03 ►
drugs available, being devised by the legal pharmaceutical companies
00:10:08 ►
and by the underground pharmaceutical creators.
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I mean, one way or another, this stuff is not changing.
00:10:15 ►
The standbys, you know, the old faithfuls of tobacco and alcohol and marijuana
00:10:20 ►
and coca cocaine and opium, you know, whatever,
00:10:24 ►
they’ve been with us for thousands of years in one way or another, and they’re going to
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continue to be part of our society and our lives, whether we like it or not.
00:10:34 ►
But we’re also entering a new world in which the pharmaceuticals are going to loom ever
00:10:40 ►
larger in our consciousness, in our presence.
00:10:43 ►
I mean, how many tens of millions of young boys, mostly, are now on, in a sense, a Ritalin
00:10:48 ►
or Adderall?
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And I don’t say that’s a terrible thing.
00:10:51 ►
I think we’re doing too much of it.
00:10:53 ►
But I also know so many young people who have benefited from this.
00:10:57 ►
You know, I mean, all the antidepressants and the Prozacs and what have you, you know,
00:11:02 ►
and the Viagra, you know.
00:11:03 ►
I mean, one day, I’m not there yet, but, you know, one day I’ll thank God for Viagra, I’m sure, you know.
00:11:09 ►
And so, you know, this is the wave of the future.
00:11:13 ►
As we understand more about brain chemistry, about treating things, that’s going to be part of it.
00:11:17 ►
And as is always the case, the substances, the chemicals that people discover or devise to make sick people feel normal will also
00:11:26 ►
be used to make normal people feel a little better than normal.
00:11:30 ►
And that’s part of what it means to live with drugs.
00:11:33 ►
I mean, you know, we understand that drugs are here to stay.
00:11:37 ►
We understand this notion of creating a drug-free society is a joke.
00:11:42 ►
It’s a terrible joke, of course, because it’s the joke that has put
00:11:46 ►
millions of people behind bars, that has arrested tens of millions of people just in the society
00:11:51 ►
alone. It’s the joke that stood in the way of harm reduction policies to prevent the
00:11:55 ►
spread of HIV and Hep C. It’s the joke that led to propagandizing of our children. It’s
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the joke that led America for the last century to inflict horrific policies all around
00:12:06 ►
the world, from South America
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to Southeast Asia to almost everywhere
00:12:09 ►
we could touch. It’s been
00:12:12 ►
that very, very bad joke.
00:12:14 ►
And it is, in a way, of course,
00:12:15 ►
that notion of a drug-free society.
00:12:18 ►
It is ultimately a sort of totalitarian
00:12:20 ►
kind of notion, right?
00:12:22 ►
That, you know, this notion that we
00:12:23 ►
need to get ever, ever closer to a drug-free society,
00:12:29 ►
however that’s hypocritically defined
00:12:30 ►
by the people who use that term, right?
00:12:33 ►
That we need to pay any price and bear any burden
00:12:35 ►
to reduce the number of people
00:12:36 ►
using these forbidden substances.
00:12:38 ►
That is the type of thinking, the mentality,
00:12:42 ►
which emerged in the late 1980s
00:12:43 ►
in the horrific drug war of our age, right? It reminds me of other sort of movements for totally controlling
00:12:50 ►
people, for trying to get them to embrace a sort of ideology, a purist ideology in which
00:12:55 ►
you treat those who don’t go along, who don’t agree as somehow sinful, as somehow worthy
00:13:01 ►
of punishment, who at, people to be treated
00:13:05 ►
until they get the message, until they buy into the right way, until they accept the
00:13:10 ►
gospel of drug freeness as the only permissible way and subject to the sanctions of the state
00:13:15 ►
if they don’t.
00:13:16 ►
Now that, fortunately, that language is failing.
00:13:23 ►
It’s losing its legitimacy.
00:13:25 ►
A few days ago, Judge Jim Gray, who’s in the audience here, will be on the panel later,
00:13:29 ►
he and I were at an event in L.A. and there was a young fellow from the Californians for a drug-free California.
00:13:36 ►
Or the drug-free Californians for a drug-free California.
00:13:38 ►
Something like that.
00:13:40 ►
But, I mean, and his rhetoric rang so hollow, I think, not just to me, but to the high school kids sitting in the audience.
00:13:45 ►
It was, what are you talking about?
00:13:47 ►
And you see, I mean, it continues to lurk, of course, right?
00:13:49 ►
It continues to exist in the fact that zero tolerance policies in the schools, right?
00:13:57 ►
I mean, those are things, zero tolerance policies.
00:14:00 ►
You read the stories about kids being kicked out, not just for a joint, you know, but for a Swiss Army knife, or for an aspirin,
00:14:08 ►
or something else like this, something that might look like an aspirin. I mean,
00:14:11 ►
you know, that’s part of the manifestation, and it’s part
00:14:15 ►
of what we need to keep mocking and fighting against at the
00:14:19 ►
PTA level, at the community board level, that’s part
00:14:23 ►
of uprooting this thing.
00:14:25 ►
It continues to lurk in the fact that the principal way in which people who are poor get drug treatment today,
00:14:34 ►
what’s called drug treatment, is through the criminal justice system.
00:14:39 ►
But remember, people say, oh, I can get into a treatment program.
00:14:41 ►
I don’t have the money to pay for my own thing.
00:14:43 ►
The only way I can get it is by getting arrested first. And then you go into something which may or may can get into a treatment program. I don’t have the money to pay for my own thing. The only way I get it is by getting arrested first.
00:14:45 ►
And then you go into something which may or may not be a decent treatment program,
00:14:50 ►
but in which the only acceptable basis for you graduating from that program
00:14:55 ►
is a series of clean urines in which you establish you are drug-free,
00:15:01 ►
regardless of whether that’s the best approach for you or not.
00:15:03 ►
It means that
00:15:05 ►
when drug treatment gets owned by the criminal justice system, it then becomes, drug treatment
00:15:10 ►
simply becomes a synonym for coerced abstinence. Abstinence, not abstinence which may be your
00:15:16 ►
best way of getting a drug home behind you, but abstinence which is your only alternative
00:15:22 ►
or the state will continue to deprive you of your freedom. So that notion of drug
00:15:28 ►
freeness needs to be disabused as much as possible.
00:15:32 ►
It’s part of what we have to keep fighting for. And even those of us who hang
00:15:36 ►
on to sobriety every day, who know that we can never use drugs again,
00:15:40 ►
who pride ourselves in counting the days and months and years of being sober
00:15:44 ►
need to attack that drug-free notion that what may be right for ourselves in our own lives and for our families
00:15:52 ►
should not be the basis of a societal-wide drug policy,
00:15:57 ►
should not be the basis for a criminalization policy regarding drugs.
00:16:11 ►
policy regarding drugs. Now, I think the second thing is, I find myself, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to be sort of reflecting, because I’ve been on the road for two weeks,
00:16:16 ►
almost never on the road for two weeks, and I’ve been speaking to varied audiences and
00:16:20 ►
just picking up all these ideas and thoughts and sense of the changing momentum and movement.
00:16:26 ►
And so I’m sort of reflecting, and if I seem a little more halting or hesitant than I often times are,
00:16:31 ►
for some of you who may be speaking, I hope you’ll forgive me.
00:16:33 ►
But it’s just a moment for me to reflect before going home.
00:16:36 ►
One of the things that I also find myself saying more and more is about…
00:16:52 ►
more and more, is about, it’s not, it’s talking about our massive incarceration, our problem of over-incarceration, as an abomination.
00:16:57 ►
Really?
00:16:58 ►
This peculiar form of American exceptionalism.
00:17:03 ►
Most of us, I imagine, are very proud of our country,
00:17:06 ►
although we’re embarrassed at who was in the White House for the last eight years,
00:17:10 ►
and we’re embarrassed about things we’ve done, about ugly things.
00:17:13 ►
But nonetheless, we are a great nation, but a great nation always has its flaws.
00:17:18 ►
And one of the flaws we have, one of the ones that we’ve accepted essentially,
00:17:23 ►
is that we should lead the world
00:17:26 ►
in incarcerating our fellow citizens.
00:17:28 ►
That we should have the highest incarceration rate
00:17:30 ►
of any society today.
00:17:31 ►
The highest incarceration rate of any democracy
00:17:34 ►
ever. That we should be incarcerating
00:17:36 ►
black men at a rate
00:17:38 ►
that exceeds the rates of incarceration
00:17:39 ►
at the highest levels of the Soviet gulags
00:17:42 ►
under Stalin.
00:17:44 ►
We’ve accepted that in a way.
00:17:46 ►
It’s become the kind of stink in the room that we barely smell anymore
00:17:50 ►
because we’ve become used to it, right?
00:17:53 ►
And that that’s what needs to be taken down.
00:17:57 ►
And it’s why more and more I find myself talking about the need to reduce our reliance
00:18:01 ►
on the criminal justice system as a moral imperative,
00:18:04 ►
to reduce our reliance on the criminal justice system as a moral imperative.
00:18:11 ►
That we need to aim to cut America’s incarcerated population in half to pick a rough number.
00:18:23 ►
Senator Jim Webb from Virginia, who I’ve gotten to know a little bit this year,
00:18:25 ►
I can’t figure it out.
00:18:29 ►
He’s emerging as something of a champion for us on Capitol Hill.
00:18:32 ►
This is a former Navy secretary from Ronald Reagan.
00:18:33 ►
He’s from Virginia.
00:18:35 ►
He’s a Vietnam War hero, right?
00:18:45 ►
But he’s a contrarian, intelligent, thoughtful guy who’s a writer and a journalist and all these sorts of things. And after he got elected in late 06, and somebody asked him whether he wanted to be considered for vice president in early 07.
00:18:52 ►
And he responded, I don’t want to be considered for anything
00:18:56 ►
until I figure out why we lock up so many people in America.
00:19:00 ►
I said, huh?
00:19:01 ►
And it turned out it wasn’t just a throwaway lie.
00:19:03 ►
He started holding hearings on this sort of stuff.
00:19:06 ►
He started speaking about it.
00:19:07 ►
Now he’s trying to get an independent commission appointed by Congress.
00:19:10 ►
I’ll talk about that later.
00:19:12 ►
But one of the things he said is, what’s going on here with our incarceration rates?
00:19:15 ►
Why are we incarcerating people at three, five, seven, eight times the rate of most other nations?
00:19:20 ►
Is it that Americans simply have more evil people than anywhere else?
00:19:26 ►
Or is it that there’s something
00:19:27 ►
fundamentally wrong with
00:19:29 ►
our approach to this?
00:19:31 ►
And obviously he assumes it’s the latter.
00:19:34 ►
And I think most of us assume it’s the latter
00:19:36 ►
as well. We’ve become accustomed
00:19:38 ►
to this level of incarceration.
00:19:40 ►
And I think it actually permeates
00:19:41 ►
some of our own thinking. We somehow think that
00:19:43 ►
you keep using drugs, you’re not going to jail.
00:19:46 ►
Or that even people get involved in other nonviolent crimes, that prison has to be the first resort.
00:19:52 ►
That you deserve to be punished.
00:19:54 ►
That you deserve to be punished by the loss of your freedom.
00:19:57 ►
Now, if you look, I just had an opportunity to go to Europe.
00:20:00 ►
I was in Denmark and a few other places.
00:20:02 ►
And you see there’s a presumption there that, wait a second, prison should be the last resort.
00:20:08 ►
That people who use drugs don’t really need to be behind bars.
00:20:12 ►
And people who sell drugs, we haven’t quite figured out what to do with them yet,
00:20:15 ►
but aren’t there some other ways to deal with this sort of stuff?
00:20:18 ►
And that people who commit other sorts of offenses, nonviolent offenses,
00:20:22 ►
aren’t there problems about restitution, other sorts of ways of dealing with this? And while people who steal or hurt other people do deserve
00:20:29 ►
to be punished, does that mean that prison is the best way to punish them? Is it the
00:20:33 ►
best thing for society, and the best thing for them and their families and even the people
00:20:38 ►
who were victimized by them? So it’s addressing that. The more we get out there, the more
00:20:44 ►
we can talk about the moral imperative
00:20:46 ►
of needing to reduce America’s problem of over-incarceration,
00:20:50 ►
the more we use the language that Senator Webb is using of over-incarceration,
00:20:55 ►
that we need to get that term, over-incarceration, into the popular dialogue,
00:21:00 ►
into the popular language, right? You know, one of the things that, of course, is driving this, among many things, is that we become accustomed to it.
00:21:12 ►
But while we became accustomed to it, a very powerful political force emerged in our society, which was and is the quote-unquote prison industrial complex.
00:21:26 ►
And I never really used to use that phrase until about this year,
00:21:30 ►
because I don’t like jargon, right?
00:21:32 ►
Prison industrial complex, right?
00:21:35 ►
But then when we put together Proposition 5 last year,
00:21:40 ►
you know, I mean, the opponents of Prop 36 kept trying to whittle it away
00:21:44 ►
and cut it and nickel and dime it, and we kept beating them in court.
00:21:47 ►
We just beat them in court again, you know.
00:21:49 ►
But still, it’s – thank you.
00:21:54 ►
We did Prop 5, which if it had passed, would have been the biggest reform of prisons and sentencing in American history.
00:22:02 ►
It would have shifted a billion dollars a year from prison
00:22:05 ►
and parole to treatment and rehabilitation. It would have reduced the California prison
00:22:10 ►
population by 25,000 to 30,000 people very quickly and in ways much more responsibly,
00:22:15 ►
I think, than is now being forced by the courts. The good thing the courts are forcing this,
00:22:19 ►
but there was a method to what we were trying to do there. It also, unlike all the other
00:22:24 ►
initiatives on the ballot, would have been a net savings to the taxpayer because the a method to what we were trying to do there. It also, unlike all the other initiatives
00:22:25 ►
on the ballot, would have been a net savings to the taxpayer. Because the billion dollar
00:22:31 ►
a year cost of treatment and rehabilitation, it would have been more than paid for by the
00:22:34 ►
reduction in incarceration costs. And then what happened? We even talked to the prison
00:22:39 ►
guards union and they said, we think the prisons are full enough. We’re worried about working
00:22:43 ►
conditions for our prison guards and we don’t really need all, you know, we think the prisons are full enough. You know, we’re worried about working conditions for our prison guards and, you know, we don’t really need all, you
00:22:48 ►
know. And we thought we had an understanding that they would stay out. And I think maybe
00:22:51 ►
the head of the union was speaking in good faith when he said they didn’t see having
00:22:56 ►
to jump in. But, you know, in the fall of last year, you know, there were tough union
00:23:01 ►
elections in the prison guards union and parole officers started worrying about losing their jobs, and all of a sudden they said, okay, a decision was made in Sacramento by key people, we’re going to nail this one.
00:23:24 ►
Dianne Feinstein and Jerry Brown as the faces of their ads.
00:23:27 ►
You know, how often a week before the election you had all four or five,
00:23:32 ►
Yves Schwarzenegger, his four predecessors, and one wannabe governor, Meg Whitman,
00:23:33 ►
all standing up at a press conference together.
00:23:36 ►
How often does that happen?
00:23:42 ►
And the one thing they had in common was that they wanted to nail Prop 5.
00:23:43 ►
They did.
00:23:46 ►
Jerry Brown we had a relationship with.
00:23:47 ►
We could get to him.
00:23:49 ►
You know, one of the key drafters,
00:23:50 ►
my colleague Dan Abramson,
00:23:52 ►
you know, called him up and at first,
00:23:52 ►
Brown starts ranting and raving about this stuff
00:23:54 ►
and then Dan starts saying,
00:23:56 ►
well, actually, that’s not right, Jerry.
00:23:58 ►
That’s not right.
00:23:59 ►
All of a sudden, Jerry Brown started getting quiet
00:24:01 ►
because obviously he didn’t know what was in it.
00:24:03 ►
He’d only heard about it from people
00:24:04 ►
in the prison guard criminal justice system. He said, oh, we’ll have to
00:24:08 ►
get together right away. We’ve got to talk. Well, he didn’t return the next dozen calls
00:24:12 ►
from Dan Abramson. And a week later, he shows up in ads being paid for by the prison guard
00:24:17 ►
system. Now, the definition of power, right, one of the definitions of power is when somebody tells you to do something
00:24:26 ►
and you do it without even asking why. That’s a definition of power. Somebody tells you to do
00:24:34 ►
something and you do it without even asking why. That’s the power of the prison industrial complex
00:24:39 ►
today. And that’s why I use that phrase. When they tell elected officials and others they want
00:24:43 ►
them done, people don’t stop and say, well, wait a second.
00:24:46 ►
Let me see the fine print.
00:24:47 ►
What’s this really about?
00:24:48 ►
What’s really going to happen?
00:24:48 ►
What’s it going to cost the taxpayer?
00:24:50 ►
What’s it going to do to human lives?
00:24:51 ►
What impact is it really going to have on drug abuse in our society?
00:24:54 ►
They don’t stop to ask.
00:24:55 ►
They just do it.
00:24:57 ►
That prison industrial complex.
00:24:58 ►
So I’ll tell you something.
00:25:01 ►
Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell speech in 1961 surprised many, many Americans
00:25:06 ►
by speaking about and warning about the looming power, the power of the military industrial complex.
00:25:11 ►
I hope it doesn’t take until January 2017 for President Obama to give a speech warning about the ominous influence of the prison industrial complex.
00:25:22 ►
Because that is part of what’s pushing this thing
00:25:25 ►
and driving this thing.
00:25:26 ►
We need to find ways,
00:25:27 ►
and I don’t have any answers about what we do about this.
00:25:30 ►
I don’t have answers for this thing.
00:25:32 ►
But we have to push them into the defensive.
00:25:35 ►
We have to get them to the position
00:25:36 ►
where they, too, are thinking creatively
00:25:39 ►
about how to reduce the number of people behind bars.
00:25:41 ►
Yes!
00:25:46 ►
I mean, it’s your state.
00:25:48 ►
It’s your state. I don’t know how you
00:25:50 ►
feel about what is it, the highest paid state
00:25:52 ►
employees in the state are the
00:25:53 ►
prison guards, right?
00:25:56 ►
You know, California used to be known as the state
00:25:58 ►
of higher education is now known as the state
00:25:59 ►
of higher incarceration, right?
00:26:02 ►
You’ve got students standing up and striking
00:26:04 ►
because they don’t want to have one-third, you know,
00:26:05 ►
tuition pay raises, right? But there’s no money,
00:26:08 ►
you know, and one of the places where the money
00:26:10 ►
is going is that ever-growing prison
00:26:11 ►
industrial complex, right?
00:26:13 ►
I mean, that’s something that fundamentally
00:26:16 ►
needs to change. And even
00:26:18 ►
in New York, you know, we’ve
00:26:20 ►
led the country in New York in reducing
00:26:22 ►
the prison population. New York State’s prison
00:26:23 ►
population has declined by, I think, more than 10% in recent years,
00:26:27 ►
in part because of Rockefeller drug law reforms, for a whole set of other reasons.
00:26:31 ►
But even there, some of the prisons were empty.
00:26:33 ►
They couldn’t close them, right?
00:26:36 ►
Because what about the jobs of the people working there?
00:26:38 ►
Those guys are at the front of the line to make sure they keep getting paid by the government,
00:26:41 ►
to keep empty prisons open, right?
00:26:44 ►
That sort of power. So we need to take that on as well, right? It’s about trying to challenge that
00:26:51 ►
power, challenge that power, and hold people accountable, hold people accountable. I’ve
00:26:56 ►
got to tell you, the prison guards are not popular. I mean, prison guards union, I should
00:26:59 ►
say. I mean, prison guards, you know, look, they do a dangerous job, and this is not about
00:27:03 ►
them as human beings or as individuals.
00:27:05 ►
But a union, when you live in a society where one of the most powerful political forces is the organization,
00:27:14 ►
which earns its livelihood from keeping its fellow citizens behind bars,
00:27:19 ►
I don’t know of any other free society in which that is the case.
00:27:25 ►
That’s a distortion.
00:27:27 ►
And once again, we’ve become accustomed to it,
00:27:29 ►
but it’s something that can be challenged in moral terms as well.
00:27:34 ►
Now, I was saying that one of the things that drives me
00:27:36 ►
is this feeling about the horrific nature of the drug war.
00:27:41 ►
But the other part, and it’s a part that gives me,
00:27:43 ►
it’s an everyday challenge
00:27:46 ►
but it’s also
00:27:48 ►
something I just love about
00:27:50 ►
you know building the
00:27:53 ►
Drug Policy Alliance and being involved
00:27:54 ►
in building this movement
00:27:55 ►
and working with wonderful allies
00:27:58 ►
from the marijuana groups
00:28:00 ►
Normal and MPP, Americans for Safe Access
00:28:02 ►
ASA which is active in San Diego
00:28:03 ►
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, the Harm Reduction Coalition,
00:28:07 ►
the folks working on the psychedelics issues, the folks working against mandatory minimums,
00:28:10 ►
all of these wonderful organizations.
00:28:12 ►
And quite frankly, you should join as many of these as possible,
00:28:15 ►
and I hope not one of you will leave this room without joining the Drug Policy Alliance.
00:28:19 ►
You can sign up someplace around here, back in the back there.
00:28:23 ►
Margaret Dooley, Margaret Stand margaret’s my colleague margaret who has been a key organizer around pop 36 who played a pivotal
00:28:33 ►
role in pop 5 who works out of our la office but lives in san diego um so she’s your local right
00:28:39 ►
here but please don’t leave here without joining but one of the great challenges in all of this is really in building a movement of people who are coming from such different places.
00:28:50 ►
Jim Gray was just saying this to me.
00:28:51 ►
We’re all coming from wildly different places and coming to the same conclusion.
00:28:55 ►
And I want to talk about that a bit.
00:28:58 ►
Because, look, it’s in the nature of any movement.
00:29:02 ►
When people say, why can’t we just all get along together?
00:29:05 ►
Why do we have to keep fighting with one another? And my response to that is, give it up.
00:29:10 ►
The reason we keep fighting with one another is because we’re human beings, right?
00:29:14 ►
You can’t have a powerful political movement without fighting with one another and arguing with one another
00:29:19 ►
and getting into all sorts of things, right? You can’t have a political movement in which the people you hate the most are your fellow allies, right? Because your enemies are there over there.
00:29:30 ►
You don’t hang out with them. But you hang out and you have to compete, right? For credit
00:29:35 ►
and for funding and over girlfriends and boyfriends and over tactics and strategies, you know,
00:29:40 ►
with your fellow allies. So it’s inevitably part of the process and let’s not pretend
00:29:43 ►
that it can’t be. But the key, course to building a movement is keeping your eye on the prize. It’s remembering
00:29:49 ►
that no matter how much we fight and struggle and sometimes even really dislike one another,
00:29:52 ►
that nonetheless we have a common objective that what unites us is more important than anything
00:29:57 ►
else that pushes us apart. That’s a pivotal thing for us always to remember. Now that’s not always
00:30:02 ►
easy, right? Some of us are Republicans, Independents, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians, you have it, and we don’t agree. I oftentimes
00:30:09 ►
keep my political views on a whole host of other subjects quiet. I don’t talk about that
00:30:14 ►
stuff oftentimes, right? Because I have a mission. I have a mission to bring the people
00:30:19 ►
together about this, right? But it’s not always easy. That’s what’s so beautiful when you
00:30:24 ►
come to our
00:30:25 ►
international biennial conferences.
00:30:27 ►
You’re seeing people
00:30:27 ►
coming from these different places
00:30:29 ►
and sometimes they’re looking around
00:30:30 ►
and like, you know,
00:30:31 ►
here’s somebody
00:30:31 ►
who’s got 12 years of sobriety
00:30:33 ►
and right next to him
00:30:34 ►
is somebody, you know,
00:30:34 ►
with marijuana leaves
00:30:36 ►
in their, you know,
00:30:37 ►
dreadlocks and shit, you know?
00:30:39 ►
And what are they doing here?
00:30:40 ►
And there’s a session
00:30:41 ►
on psychedelics
00:30:41 ►
and there’s a session
00:30:42 ►
on people in recovery
00:30:43 ►
against the drug war, huh?
00:30:46 ►
It’s a constant challenge.
00:30:48 ►
But part of it is
00:30:49 ►
finding
00:30:51 ►
the language of this.
00:30:54 ►
I was speaking to one of you earlier
00:30:55 ►
who’s a pain physician in town
00:30:57 ►
and I was saying, I remember
00:30:59 ►
I was up in Bozeman, Montana
00:31:01 ►
a couple months ago.
00:31:04 ►
Bozeman, I’ve never been to Montana before. People in Bozeman are very proud of being from Bozeman. They love Bozeman, Montana, a couple months ago. Bozeman, I’ve never been to Montana before.
00:31:06 ►
People in Bozeman are very proud of being from Bozeman.
00:31:08 ►
They love Bozeman.
00:31:09 ►
Bozeman’s got a lot of local pride.
00:31:12 ►
And I was there for a few reasons.
00:31:14 ►
In the morning, I spoke to an annual meeting of pain physicians,
00:31:19 ►
and mostly from Montana, but also the surrounding states.
00:31:23 ►
And that evening, I went to a gathering of the cannabis folks.
00:31:27 ►
Each of them had about 250 people there.
00:31:30 ►
In fact, the gathering of the cannabis folks was very interesting
00:31:32 ►
because I walked into something, it wasn’t a holiday inn,
00:31:34 ►
but something like a holiday inn,
00:31:35 ►
and there was like 250 people in a room like this,
00:31:38 ►
and there’s tables around, and this is marijuana plant, like up to here.
00:31:42 ►
Right?
00:31:43 ►
And I’m like, wow, that’s medical. It’s a medical plant, right? And then somebody tugs up my sleeve and goes, like up to here. And I go, wow. I mean, you know, that’s medical.
00:31:45 ►
It’s a medical plant, right?
00:31:46 ►
And then somebody tugs up my sleeve and goes,
00:31:48 ►
come see my plant.
00:31:49 ►
I mean, so I saw it.
00:31:51 ►
Montana legalized medical marijuana a few years ago,
00:31:53 ►
and so things are opening up.
00:31:54 ►
But one of the things I was careful to say
00:31:56 ►
was when I talked to the pain docs in the morning,
00:32:02 ►
and they’re, you know, they’re dealing with all the oppression
00:32:04 ►
of oversight and people.
00:32:06 ►
And I said, one thing I was careful to say,
00:32:09 ►
I said, listen,
00:32:11 ►
I can’t perceive,
00:32:14 ►
I don’t see one single basis
00:32:17 ►
in ethics or science, medicine,
00:32:21 ►
even the Bible, that matter,
00:32:23 ►
for any one of you professionals
00:32:25 ►
in the field of pain management
00:32:27 ►
to refrain from recommending marijuana
00:32:30 ►
even in its smoked form
00:32:31 ►
when there’s evidence that
00:32:33 ►
that’s what’s going to work.
00:32:35 ►
This notion that you can’t smoke
00:32:37 ►
your medicine, hey, smoking your medicine
00:32:39 ►
may not be the best way to take it,
00:32:41 ►
but for some people, it may be the best way to take it.
00:32:44 ►
And there is a whole benefit cost ratio when you think about which medicines are the best medicines to take it, but for some people, it may be the best way to take it. And there is a whole benefit-cost ratio
00:32:46 ►
when you think about which medicines are the best medicines to use.
00:32:49 ►
There is no absolute principle in medicine.
00:32:51 ►
You know, first do no harm.
00:32:53 ►
Well, first do no harm means that you give somebody a recommendation
00:32:56 ►
so that person is not a criminal for using a medicine in a smoke form even,
00:33:00 ►
which is the best thing for them,
00:33:02 ►
then that is the right thing to do,
00:33:04 ►
ethically, medically, and what have you.
00:33:06 ►
There is no basis.
00:33:08 ►
And that evening, I went and talked to the cannabis group.
00:33:13 ►
They said, let me tell you something.
00:33:15 ►
We know, most of us here, in that room there,
00:33:18 ►
we are the ones who love cannabis.
00:33:20 ►
Cannabis has been good to us, right?
00:33:24 ►
But when you’re celebrating cannabis, whether you’re talking about its medicinal benefits Cannabis has been good to us, right?
00:33:30 ►
But when you’re celebrating cannabis, whether you’re talking about its medicinal benefits or the other benefits that you perceive about cannabis,
00:33:33 ►
don’t damn the opioids.
00:33:37 ►
Don’t damn the physicians using opioid medications.
00:33:49 ►
Because quite frankly, even though the opioid medications may be more dangerous and the risk of overdose and death is greater. They are also powerful and effective medicines for tens of millions of people and have been so for millennia.
00:33:50 ►
And the people in that area are dealing with levels of discrimination and ignorance and
00:33:56 ►
intimidation by law enforcement, by medical boards, by law enforcement authorities, very
00:34:01 ►
much like what you in the cannabis field are dealing with as well.
00:34:04 ►
and authorities, very much like what you in the cannabis field are dealing with as well.
00:34:10 ►
It’s not about juxtaposing and saying, this, my drug is better than your drug.
00:34:12 ►
When I remember some of my allies in the marijuana reform movement,
00:34:19 ►
they would say, you know, we’ve got to legalize marijuana so that we can crack down on the bad drugs.
00:34:21 ►
No, stop that. Stop that.
00:34:28 ►
Yes, marijuana is not as dangerous and it can be made with better beneficial properties than methamphetamine or cocaine, what have you.
00:34:30 ►
There are lots of problems with the stimulant drugs.
00:34:31 ►
We all know that.
00:34:34 ►
And they can be harder to control and they can be more problematic.
00:34:37 ►
But that doesn’t mean that those people deserve to go to prison.
00:34:41 ►
If you want to say let’s bang up on violent criminals, okay.
00:34:43 ►
But when we already have 2.4 million people behind bars,
00:34:48 ►
why don’t we just make the argument its own term without saying let’s bang up on somebody else instead?
00:34:49 ►
Right?
00:34:53 ►
I mean, that’s part of what it means to build this sort of thing like this.
00:34:59 ►
I’ll tell you, when it comes to what does it mean to be in recovery, well, there are many definitions of recovery, really.
00:35:02 ►
I mean, we can hold on.
00:35:03 ►
Some of us can say, no, there’s only one definition. I accept that. But whether you want to, and I’m not going to battle over
00:35:09 ►
the words we use, but for people who have struggled with drug addiction, there are many
00:35:16 ►
paths. And sobriety is not an end in itself, right? Sobriety is a means to an end. Sobriety is a means to learning
00:35:28 ►
to live in a society full of drugs in a way that drugs no longer do harm to you or that
00:35:33 ►
you no longer do harm to others because of the availability of these drugs. But sobriety
00:35:39 ►
is one means. Millions of people cling on to sobriety and need to and should be clinging
00:35:45 ►
on to sobriety and counting those days and taking pride in that and being as drug-free,
00:35:49 ►
drug-free, because that’s what they need. But it’s not the only path. There are others
00:35:55 ►
for whom a medication, whether it may be methadone or buprenorphine or even pharmaceutical heroin,
00:36:00 ►
which is increasingly being used in Europe and Canada. It may be other types of things.
00:36:04 ►
heroin, which is increasingly being used in Europe and Canada. It may be other types of things. It may be antidepressant drugs or anti-anxiety drugs. It’s understanding that
00:36:10 ►
for many people, this is no longer their drug of abuse, but it is their medication and used
00:36:16 ►
in the proper way. I sometimes feel bad for people who are in sobriety and oftentimes
00:36:20 ►
find themselves feeling they have no choice but to live in immense pain
00:36:25 ►
because they’re afraid to take the pain medications that could be properly prescribed,
00:36:29 ►
and because they just don’t know if they can take that chance, right?
00:36:33 ►
I know people in recovery for whom, you know,
00:36:35 ►
in fact, you see this more and more in the medical cannabis dispensaries and in their clientele,
00:36:39 ►
people who have been severely addicted to cocaine, meth, heroin, alcohol,
00:36:45 ►
and now what do they do?
00:36:46 ►
They smoke marijuana.
00:36:48 ►
And smoking marijuana, even sometimes a hell of a lot of it,
00:36:52 ►
and maybe they’re even addicted to marijuana,
00:36:53 ►
because you can be addicted to marijuana,
00:36:55 ►
addicted in the sense that you use a drug in ways that cause harm to yourself
00:36:59 ►
or cause harm to others, right?
00:37:01 ►
But nonetheless, for them, marijuana, or I have friends for whom,
00:37:06 ►
you know, they had cocaine, heroin, whatever, and now you know what it is? They’re marijuana and wine.
00:37:11 ►
And they’re not addicted, they’re not dependent, or maybe they’re a little dependent, but they lead
00:37:15 ►
dynamic, full lives, right? And for them, a toke in the evening, a glass of wine with dinner,
00:37:21 ►
they put those other things behind them, and they found that they can stabilize at this level. For other people, in the harm reduction world you see
00:37:29 ►
this, people who had let their lives get out of control using injecting drugs, well they’ve
00:37:34 ►
now found that just taking the drugs orally, or relegating their use to the edges of their
00:37:39 ►
life, to the weak edge of the times when their kids aren’t around, that they found ways to
00:37:43 ►
control this stuff. So I define recovery, and I’m not imposing this definition on anybody else,
00:37:48 ►
and we can use another word if you like,
00:37:49 ►
but I define recovery as getting to the point where your drug use,
00:37:55 ►
if you use drugs, is no longer impairing your life,
00:37:59 ►
is no longer impairing your living.
00:38:02 ►
That that’s the real objective.
00:38:03 ►
It’s to get on with life.
00:38:05 ►
It’s so that the availability and availability of these chemicals in your life, right,
00:38:10 ►
are not destroying or undermining it.
00:38:13 ►
It’s that you have control, whether it’s in denying them or in controlling them.
00:38:18 ►
And I realize that this is a risky and dangerous message.
00:38:20 ►
I realize that for people who hang on and for whom AA and NA have been so pivotal,
00:38:24 ►
to say that there are other people who can put a problem behind them and continue to use it is a
00:38:29 ►
risky and scary thing because it suggests that maybe you can do it as well. So there’s always
00:38:32 ►
that. But the flip side, to deny that, to say that there is only one path, that there’s only one path
00:38:38 ►
to recovery, it’s not true. It’s not consistent. It may be a message that’s dangerous for some
00:38:44 ►
people, but it’s not consistent with the truth be a message that’s dangerous for some people,
00:38:45 ►
but it’s not consistent with the truth,
00:38:47 ►
with the truth of millions and millions of people’s lives.
00:38:49 ►
A friend of mine in New York was invited to join a recovery coalition,
00:38:53 ►
and he said to the guys there, he said,
00:38:57 ►
he said, look, I still drink wine, and I smoke the occasional joint.
00:39:02 ►
Am I in recovery by your terms? And he
00:39:06 ►
was surprised when I said, yes you are.
00:39:09 ►
If your drugs are
00:39:10 ►
no longer undermining your life.
00:39:12 ►
Part of our moving forward is a movement.
00:39:15 ►
Because remember,
00:39:16 ►
we have all
00:39:18 ►
different sorts of relationships with drugs.
00:39:20 ►
Good, bad, and indifferent.
00:39:22 ►
But we have to keep our
00:39:24 ►
eye on the prize, which is ending the intense war on drugs,
00:39:29 ►
the policy of punitive prohibition.
00:39:33 ►
Another way to think about this stuff,
00:39:37 ►
I sometimes look at the areas of pain medication and addiction treatment.
00:39:42 ►
pain medication and addiction treatment.
00:39:47 ►
And I think, you know, if somebody, if you or somebody you love is in intense pain, and you’re
00:39:52 ►
the doctor, let’s say it’s your child or your parent,
00:39:57 ►
and the doctor says to you, well, which
00:40:00 ►
pain-killing drug would you prefer I give them? Would you
00:40:04 ►
prefer I administer morphine or Dilaudid or Demerol or fentanyl or codeine or methadone or diamorphine?
00:40:15 ►
And the odds are your answer is going to be, doctor, I don’t care.
00:40:19 ►
I want you to do whatever is going to help my loved one, you know,
00:40:23 ►
take away their pain as much as possible while retaining their basic humanity, their basic personhood.
00:40:29 ►
And if the doctor then says to you, well, how would you like me to administer it?
00:40:33 ►
Would you prefer I do it in an oral form, injectable form, a patient-controlled analgesic, a patch, how about a lollipop?
00:40:37 ►
You know, and you’ll say, doctor, I don’t care.
00:40:42 ►
Whatever’s going to work best to accomplish that bottom line.
00:40:46 ►
And when we think about pain management, that really is it.
00:40:48 ►
It’s about reducing the pain as much as possible
00:40:51 ►
while retaining people’s essential personhood.
00:40:53 ►
And what the drug might be, we rely on our physicians
00:40:55 ►
as well as our own personal experience to get a sense
00:40:58 ►
about the best forms of administration of the best drugs.
00:41:01 ►
Well, in dealing with addiction, especially opioid addiction,
00:41:04 ►
once again, I think that the answer is, if you
00:41:07 ►
get addicted to opioids, or especially, let’s say, street
00:41:12 ►
heroin, whatever, and the question is, how do you get that addiction
00:41:15 ►
behind you, right? The question is, what’s going to work best?
00:41:19 ►
Maybe it’s going to be methadone, right? Fred, we know the scientific evidence
00:41:23 ►
from dozens of countries is that methadone maintenance, done right,
00:41:26 ►
dosed correctly, with respect to the patient, probably works the bestest for the mostest
00:41:30 ►
in terms of taking the issue of drugs out of your life.
00:41:33 ►
It’s your medication, right?
00:41:35 ►
I know people who have been on methadone for many years, and they have families, and they
00:41:38 ►
drive cars, they have a business, they have families, what have you, and they say, I am
00:41:42 ►
no more a methadone addict than a diabetic is an insulin addict.
00:41:46 ►
Right? Forget how I got this problem, but this is my medication now. Right?
00:41:51 ►
But for other people, in Germany they used to ban methadone, they had 50,000 people on codeine made of it.
00:41:56 ►
It was working pretty well. In France, which used to ban methadone, they had 50,000 people on buprenorphine. Right?
00:42:02 ►
And you know, other people say we used oral morphine, and now you see happening in, as I say,
00:42:06 ►
Europe, you know, in Germany,
00:42:08 ►
in Switzerland, the Netherlands, England, Spain,
00:42:10 ►
and Canada, and
00:42:12 ►
in a few months, Denmark will start
00:42:13 ►
prescribing diamorphine, the name for
00:42:15 ►
heroin, right, in a pharmaceutical
00:42:18 ►
form. And people getting
00:42:20 ►
into these clinics and these programs,
00:42:22 ►
and, you know,
00:42:23 ►
just being able to normalize their lives.
00:42:28 ►
Because what we know about these opioids is ultimately they don’t destroy your organs.
00:42:32 ►
They make you constipated, but they don’t destroy your organs, right?
00:42:36 ►
I mean, you can live to be 90 or 100 taking pharmaceutical doses of opioids.
00:42:40 ►
It’s not like alcohol to your liver or smoking cigarettes to your lungs
00:42:44 ►
or even stimulants if you take too many than what they can do to your heart.
00:42:49 ►
So why can’t we do that?
00:42:52 ►
The Vancouver study called NAOMI, North American Opiate Medication Initiative on Heroin Maintenance,
00:42:58 ►
one of the things they did was they did in a double-blind study,
00:43:04 ►
they gave some of the people in the study
00:43:06 ►
who had been long-term injecting heroin users,
00:43:09 ►
they gave them Dilaudid instead.
00:43:12 ►
I don’t know, how many of you have ever taken Dilaudid?
00:43:13 ►
Do you know? Anybody raise your hand?
00:43:15 ►
Okay.
00:43:16 ►
Long-term injecting heroin users given Dilaudid
00:43:19 ►
could not tell the difference between Dilaudid and heroin.
00:43:23 ►
What does that tell you?
00:43:25 ►
It tells you that a pain medication that’s been used probably by millions of people
00:43:29 ►
is essentially identical to heroin.
00:43:31 ►
What makes heroin heroin?
00:43:33 ►
The fact that it’s called heroin.
00:43:34 ►
Exactly.
00:43:35 ►
Right?
00:43:35 ►
It’s the whole thing around it.
00:43:37 ►
The whole thing around it.
00:43:39 ►
You know?
00:43:40 ►
But if you change the name,
00:43:42 ►
there was somebody in Vienna who gave a doctor, he talked to the city council and he said, but if you change the name, there was somebody in Vienna who gave a doctor, he gave a talk to the city council, and he said, you know, this is wonderful medication, and it’s effective in reducing illegal heroin use, in reducing crime and arrests, how people improve their health, you know, and he kept referring to diamorphine, diamorphine.
00:43:59 ►
And finally, the people on the city council said, so, I mean, why aren’t we using diamorphine widely?
00:44:03 ►
He goes, well, the problem is that the other name for diamorphine is heroin.
00:44:07 ►
But it’s about the name.
00:44:09 ►
It’s about that thing, and it’s getting past that thing.
00:44:12 ►
It’s about accepting that each one of us who has struggled with drugs has to find her own path,
00:44:19 ►
and that the role of the state should be certainly not to get in the way and optimally to facilitate
00:44:26 ►
this. And it’s also drawing
00:44:28 ►
on the evidence that when the state gets
00:44:29 ►
out of the way, or that even when the
00:44:32 ►
state uses its resources to facilitate,
00:44:35 ►
it
00:44:36 ►
lands up being a net savings
00:44:38 ►
for the taxpayer.
00:44:40 ►
Because when you reduce those emergency
00:44:41 ►
visit costs and those arrest costs,
00:44:44 ►
you can pay for stuff like this.
00:44:45 ►
Analogously, there’s a wonderful study.
00:44:48 ►
There’s in Toronto and in Seattle, they’ve come up with something called wet housing.
00:44:57 ►
They figured out that the Skid Row alcoholics, basically,
00:45:05 ►
of which there are still many in every city in America,
00:45:08 ►
that they were costing taxpayers
00:45:10 ►
roughly a few hundred thousand dollars a year
00:45:13 ►
because they would land up either in local jail
00:45:15 ►
or in the emergency room
00:45:17 ►
20 to 30 times a year, if not more.
00:45:20 ►
And that was nothing you do.
00:45:22 ►
These people might well die if they stop drinking.
00:45:26 ►
I mean, it was that level.
00:45:29 ►
What they do
00:45:30 ►
is they say, we’re going to provide
00:45:32 ►
a house,
00:45:34 ►
housing, where you
00:45:36 ►
can go.
00:45:38 ►
And it’s not going to be an alcohol-free house.
00:45:41 ►
You can drink there.
00:45:43 ►
We’re not going to provide you
00:45:44 ►
with a booze, but you can drink there. We’re not going to provide you with the booze, but you can drink there.
00:45:49 ►
People came. Some people, you know,
00:45:52 ►
you apply housing for drunks so they can drink. I mean, what next?
00:45:57 ►
Well, what happened?
00:46:00 ►
They did a study that was just published in JAMA, the General American Medical Association.
00:46:04 ►
Turns out people lived in the house.
00:46:06 ►
Only a few rules.
00:46:07 ►
You had to be civil.
00:46:08 ►
You know, you only get kicked out.
00:46:09 ►
You didn’t get kicked out for drinking, right?
00:46:11 ►
You got kicked out if you were really horribly obnoxious or not taking care of your housing responsibilities.
00:46:18 ►
The levels of arrest and emergency room admissions dropped dramatically. The savings to taxpayers was tremendous. You
00:46:30 ►
know what else happened? The people in the housing, now that they had a place where they
00:46:34 ►
could drink as much as they wanted, started drinking less. Why? Well, the most obvious
00:46:42 ►
reason, and this applies to all drugs, right, is that one reason why people, especially people who are really hard up, use drugs,
00:46:51 ►
is that when you don’t have four walls, privacy to call your own, drugs provides that.
00:46:58 ►
Drugs gives you that space. You get high, you get drunk, it closes out, right?
00:47:03 ►
You get high, you get drunk, it closes out, right?
00:47:08 ►
You know, you’re sleeping on a grate, you’re living in fear of stuff, you know?
00:47:11 ►
It closes out, it separates you.
00:47:28 ►
And when you provide people literally with four walls of their own and a bed and a space where they can close the door keep killing that pain, to closing out, to creating your inebriated psychological walls diminishes, right?
00:47:32 ►
You know, I mean, it’s about, I was debating somebody the other day, and he kept advocating
00:47:37 ►
for this approach where the police focus on the heavy-duty criminals, you know, the
00:47:43 ►
ones who, you know, the old 20-80 rule that 20% of heroin users consume 80% of heroin,
00:47:49 ►
20% of alcohol users consume 80% of the alcohol.
00:47:52 ►
That’s true with many, many drugs.
00:47:53 ►
It’s also true with 20% of people, criminals can commit 80% of the crime.
00:47:57 ►
It is true.
00:47:58 ►
Public opinion in support of ending marijuana prohibition is growing miraculously,
00:48:02 ►
I just said, among various sectors of society in terms of support for making marijuana
00:48:05 ►
legal. But I don’t forget the
00:48:07 ►
1970s
00:48:08 ►
when people got overconfident.
00:48:12 ►
When people started to think,
00:48:13 ►
it’s our time! When they
00:48:15 ►
started to make unreasonable demands on elected
00:48:17 ►
officials to embrace our objectives right now,
00:48:19 ►
which was foolish and which was premature.
00:48:22 ►
When they ignored the
00:48:23 ►
fact that there was a rising counter-movement
00:48:25 ►
that was gaining ground and appealing to people’s fears.
00:48:29 ►
When they ignored the fact that when 10% of American high school kids
00:48:32 ►
were saying that they were smoking marijuana daily,
00:48:34 ►
that was a problem that needed a responsible solution, not a poo-pooing.
00:48:39 ►
It meant that this is the time, as we’re building a movement,
00:48:43 ►
when we have to get tougher and smarter.
00:48:46 ►
It’s precisely when things seem to be on your side,
00:48:49 ►
it’s precisely when you see the obstacles rolling away,
00:48:52 ►
when you see it making momentum like we’ve never made before,
00:48:56 ►
that’s the moment when you double up on your defenses.
00:49:00 ►
You don’t get reckless. You don’t get incautious.
00:49:03 ►
You know, I’m out there, I’ve seen my friends over here before, about, you know, for me, for the first time this year, I made a decision
00:49:09 ►
that I was going to start talking about my own marijuana use in the present tense, not just the past or that, you know, being sneaky about it.
00:49:19 ►
To say, yes, I am a marijuana user. I am somebody who uses marijuana occasionally.
00:49:24 ►
I am somebody who’s found the beneficiary of my life.
00:49:26 ►
And saying that openly and publicly
00:49:27 ►
in major media places would have me.
00:49:29 ►
And I made decisions I thought the language was changing.
00:49:32 ►
But that doesn’t mean I’m going to get reckless and careless.
00:49:35 ►
And keep in mind,
00:49:37 ►
the more and more people that come out and say I am,
00:49:39 ►
it means the more and more chances
00:49:41 ►
that somebody coming out and saying I am
00:49:42 ►
is going to wind up doing something stupid.
00:49:44 ►
And then become the poster child of our opposition,
00:49:47 ►
because that person who came out,
00:49:49 ►
look what they were doing with their kids in the back seat.
00:49:51 ►
Look what they were doing.
00:49:52 ►
This is not the time.
00:49:54 ►
It means that for those of us who do use drugs,
00:49:56 ►
who do enjoy drugs,
00:49:57 ►
ever before it means that one of the best elements of reform
00:50:00 ►
is to ensure that we ourselves are using drugs responsibly,
00:50:04 ►
that we are being judicious in responsibly, that we are being
00:50:05 ►
judicious in our language, that we are being smart and thoughtful.
00:50:09 ►
And the last thing I’m going to say is that there’s a core principle underlying this entire
00:50:14 ►
struggle.
00:50:17 ►
It’s a core principle which needs to become part of the popular dialogue in our country
00:50:22 ►
and around the world, but it’s one that you virtually never hear an elected official say.
00:50:27 ►
And it’s this.
00:50:28 ►
That nobody but nobody
00:50:30 ►
deserves to be punished
00:50:32 ►
simply for what
00:50:34 ►
we put in our bodies.
00:50:36 ►
Action harms others.
00:50:38 ►
Nobody but nobody deserves to be punished
00:50:40 ►
or discriminated against or amongst
00:50:41 ►
based solely upon what we put in our bodies
00:50:44 ►
if we don’t hurt anybody else.
00:50:45 ►
Get behind the wheel of a car?
00:50:46 ►
Different story.
00:50:47 ►
Hurt somebody?
00:50:48 ►
Different story.
00:50:48 ►
Don’t tell me that your addiction to disease
00:50:50 ►
made you do it because you still need
00:50:52 ►
to be held responsible.
00:50:53 ►
That’s the nature of any responsible,
00:50:55 ►
civilized society.
00:50:57 ►
But whatever I put in here,
00:50:59 ►
whatever you put in your own body,
00:51:01 ►
is your own business.
00:51:02 ►
It is not the state’s.
00:51:03 ►
It is not your employer’s.
00:51:04 ►
So long as you are doing so in a responsible way that does no harm to other people. That
00:51:09 ►
core principle, that I am sovereign, that we are each sovereign of our own minds and
00:51:14 ►
bodies, that is the core principle we have to keep putting out there. Because in a world
00:51:19 ►
in which people keep believing in drug testing and in saying that we have more and more
00:51:24 ►
surveillance systems, external surveillance of where our bodies are,
00:51:27 ►
internal surveillance about drug testing, what drugs we put in here.
00:51:30 ►
We need that core principle.
00:51:32 ►
It’s a core element of what it means to fight for freedom.
00:51:35 ►
And it’s not just the freedom of people who can use drugs responsibly.
00:51:38 ►
It’s also the freedom of people who are addicted to drugs.
00:51:41 ►
It’s about their entitlement, their basic right, their human right,
00:51:44 ►
not to be treated as a criminal,
00:51:46 ►
either because they use responsibly
00:51:48 ►
or because they are addicted
00:51:49 ►
to this substance.
00:51:50 ►
Now, that principle may seem removed
00:51:52 ►
from the broader incarceration
00:51:53 ►
of millions of people
00:51:54 ►
around the world on drug charges.
00:51:56 ►
It may seem removed
00:51:57 ►
from the broader Jim Crow nature
00:51:58 ►
of the war on drugs today.
00:52:00 ►
It may seem removed
00:52:01 ►
from the whole massive
00:52:02 ►
incarceration system,
00:52:03 ►
but it’s not.
00:52:04 ►
It is the sort of not.
00:52:06 ►
It is the peace, it’s the core
00:52:07 ►
that if we can popularize this
00:52:10 ►
principle, we’ll land up
00:52:11 ►
bringing the drug war down and leading
00:52:13 ►
to a fundamentally different system, a different
00:52:15 ►
way of dealing with drugs in our society
00:52:18 ►
based upon science, compassion,
00:52:20 ►
health, and human rights.
00:52:22 ►
Thank you very much.
00:52:29 ►
You’re listening to The psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives
00:52:31 ►
one thought at a time
00:52:33 ►
wow see what I mean
00:52:37 ►
what I wouldn’t give to
00:52:39 ►
have every elected official in the land
00:52:42 ►
listen to one of Ethan’s talks
00:52:43 ►
how any rational human being could continue to support the war on drugs after listening to Ethan, I don’t know.
00:52:51 ►
And while I realize that under the present so-called educational system in the United States,
00:52:57 ►
this idea isn’t possible, but just think of how interesting a high school or college drug education class would be if they played this talk and then discussed it
00:53:07 ►
rather than just being bombarded over and over with just-say-no platitudes.
00:53:13 ►
Too bad old Nancy Reagan didn’t know how to spell very well.
00:53:17 ►
Had she been better educated, she may have known that her little just-say-no idea
00:53:22 ►
would have actually been a winner had she spelled it K-N-O-W.
00:53:27 ►
But, hey, that’s another story.
00:53:30 ►
And speaking of other stories,
00:53:32 ►
I want to read to you an email that I received a week or so ago
00:53:35 ►
that has given me much to think about.
00:53:38 ►
And I hope it’ll get you to thinking, too.
00:53:41 ►
This email comes from Chow, and its subject line really caught my eye.
00:53:45 ►
It was, Blue Collar Psychedelia. And here’s what Chow had to say. Lorenzo, a recurring
00:53:53 ►
theme has come up in a series of conversations with various friends, centering on the idea
00:53:58 ►
of what I will simply call Blue Collar Psychedelia for those who can only seek out those profoundly spiritual
00:54:25 ►
moments, those moments of mind-bending beauty and clarity from the confines of their current
00:54:31 ►
life situation.
00:54:32 ►
I need not remind you that times are tough.
00:54:36 ►
Many of my friends find themselves both unemployed and unable to find work, or currently employed
00:54:41 ►
but with the looming fear of a layoff just around the bend.
00:54:46 ►
It’s at times like these that we do what we can to get by. We live in shitty apartments,
00:54:51 ►
perhaps work two or three minimum wage jobs and eat as healthy as our budget will allow.
00:54:57 ►
And it’s also at times like these that the need for consciousness expansion,
00:55:02 ►
the need for new perspectives on the same old problems, is in high demand.
00:55:07 ►
Our imaginations and the promise for real change are in need of a reawakening like never before.
00:55:14 ►
The question I would like to present to you is as follows.
00:55:17 ►
Is there a way for the blue-collar voyager to have in on this movement?
00:55:21 ►
to have in on this movement?
00:55:23 ►
Or are we simply confined to hearing reports
00:55:24 ►
from those voyagers
00:55:25 ►
privileged enough
00:55:26 ►
to have the free time
00:55:27 ►
and proper space
00:55:28 ►
to conduct these
00:55:29 ►
mind, body, and soul journeys
00:55:31 ►
many of us can only dream of going on?
00:55:35 ►
This is an amazing moment in time,
00:55:37 ►
a historic moment
00:55:38 ►
for the psychedelic community.
00:55:40 ►
We have the chance
00:55:41 ►
to reignite and build
00:55:42 ►
a more sane, responsible,
00:55:44 ►
and balanced community of psychedelic voyagers.
00:55:47 ►
I would hate to see this reawakening of the human spirit be confined only to those who have the privilege of finding the proper set and setting,
00:55:55 ►
simply because monetary means have delivered them to this position in their life.
00:56:00 ►
Many in my generation will not have the same opportunities for monetary prosperity as those who have come before.
00:56:07 ►
We understand this and are trying to let that reality sink in.
00:56:11 ►
But we have also come to understand that serious consciousness expansion and exploration is not something reserved for only the select few.
00:56:21 ►
Is there a podcast or an interview somewhere that you could point us to that would address some of the concerns I have brought up? Thank you. The resources you could share with us would be greatly appreciated. Your show has been a bright light in an increasingly dark time,
00:56:47 ►
and I thank you kindly for the work you put into it.
00:56:50 ►
I look forward to being more and more involved with this bold and burgeoning psychedelic community as it forges ahead,
00:56:56 ►
with or without the consent of governing bodies and the culture at large.
00:57:01 ►
Peace. Ciao.
00:57:04 ►
Well, Ciao same. Go to a festival, go to a conference, go to Burning Man. And I guess the reason I’ve been
00:57:26 ►
saying the same thing over and over is because that’s about the only thing I’ve figured out
00:57:30 ►
myself. That’s how I did it. But you hit the nail on the head when you pointed out that only a very
00:57:37 ►
few people can afford to do that. In fact, lack of money was the main reason I didn’t go to Burning
00:57:43 ►
Man myself last year. And now that I think of it, the main reason I didn’t go to Burning Man myself last year.
00:57:50 ►
And now that I think of it, the only festivals and conferences I’ve attended recently have been ones where I got in free and had my expenses paid in exchange for speaking.
00:57:55 ►
So your question applies also to my current situation.
00:58:00 ►
And I sure wish I had some answers myself, but my guess is that between us all, we should be able to come up with some new paradigm for what you call blue-collar psychedelia.
00:58:10 ►
And by the way, I think you’ve hit on a terrific tagline there, Chow.
00:58:15 ►
And you are also correct in saying that no doubt a significant number of our fellow salonners would call themselves just that.
00:58:24 ►
And that includes a
00:58:25 ►
lot of my closest friends as well as how I see myself.
00:58:29 ►
Now one of the things about your idea, Chow, that has captivated me is the fact that for
00:58:34 ►
years a bunch of us have been complaining about how in ancient times the class of high
00:58:40 ►
priests, pun intended, forced the common person out of the inner sanctum of the temple
00:58:46 ►
and kept all the mushrooms for themselves.
00:58:49 ►
Before that, there was only blue-collar psychedelia, because there were no priests claiming to
00:58:54 ►
intervene for them.
00:58:56 ►
And what Chow points out so well is that we seem to be carrying on in that tradition by
00:59:01 ►
not taking the time to figure out a way for people who don’t have any extra cash to be able to share in this great work. We’ll see you next time. Thank you. and seeing in these past couple of years, I now think that it won’t be too long before we see what I think of as
00:59:46 ►
sort of large holographic wired telephone booths
00:59:50 ►
where I can jack into a little group conversation
00:59:53 ►
where, in holographic form at least, we could sit around a fire,
00:59:57 ►
passing a bag of vapor around and telling our stories to one another.
01:00:02 ►
Now that may not sound like much, may not sound like an ayahuasca adventure,
01:00:07 ►
but I’ll tell you what, sharing stories around a fire is really what it’s all about, I think.
01:00:12 ►
In fact, right now I’m thinking of one of the stories in the latest of the Dope Tribe Dispatches
01:00:18 ►
from dopefiend.co.uk, where one of the tribe members told about his five-day train ride across Russia and on to China,
01:00:28 ►
where he shared a cabin with an old Mongolian woman smuggler in her exploding whipped cream can.
01:00:36 ►
What I wouldn’t give to hear that story in person, or almost in person, like a good hologram might produce.
01:00:43 ►
And that tech is here now, by the way.
01:00:45 ►
It’s just too expensive at the moment to get out of the lab,
01:00:49 ►
but it’ll be here sooner or later, and when it becomes affordable,
01:00:53 ►
maybe we can all combine our resources and set up a few nodes of our own to share locally.
01:00:59 ►
I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m sure that all of us and our friends can come up with parts of it.
01:01:06 ►
I’ll do what I can to set up ways to exchange
01:01:08 ►
ideas and try things out.
01:01:10 ►
And sure, I’d be more than happy
01:01:12 ►
to have guests on to discuss
01:01:14 ►
that. But why don’t we
01:01:16 ►
make it a point this year to
01:01:17 ►
figure out a number of ways for
01:01:19 ►
our friends without money and jobs to
01:01:22 ►
actually form the core
01:01:23 ►
of the worldwide psychedelic movement.
01:01:26 ►
You know, Timothy and Terrence are gone now,
01:01:28 ►
but they did help us find some of the others.
01:01:31 ►
Now it’s up to you and me and the rest of the tribe
01:01:34 ►
to figure out new and better ways to spend time in one another’s company,
01:01:38 ►
at least virtually.
01:01:41 ►
It was, I don’t know how many years ago,
01:01:43 ►
but several years ago I was a speaker at a conference that Bruce Dahmer organized, and it was held entirely in cyberspace.
01:01:50 ►
Now, compared to today, the tech was somewhat primitive, but the experience was fantastic.
01:01:55 ►
I can still remember what I think of as me standing in a big auditorium, talking to someone whose avatar was standing next to mine in a little chat space
01:02:05 ►
while we were both listening to the master of ceremonies present awards. In fact, I may have
01:02:11 ►
even written about it in the spirit of the internet a while back. My point being that it was a very
01:02:17 ►
real experience of being in the presence of a large number of people, all the while sitting in
01:02:23 ►
a corner of my apartment. So I know that something like that is at least possible.
01:02:28 ►
So now, hey, it’s up to you.
01:02:31 ►
Any and all ideas will be very much appreciated.
01:02:34 ►
And I guess we can start by putting them in the comments section of the program notes
01:02:38 ►
for this podcast, which you can find via psychedelicsalon.org.
01:02:43 ►
And from there, we’ll figure out what to do next.
01:02:46 ►
And I know how it is.
01:02:47 ►
You probably have a couple of ideas already,
01:02:50 ►
but you aren’t at your computer right now.
01:02:52 ►
And unfortunately, if you’re like me,
01:02:54 ►
you’re liable to forget about them and this podcast
01:02:57 ►
by the time you get home tonight.
01:03:00 ►
But I hope you don’t let this pass you by,
01:03:02 ►
because you may be the one with exactly the idea that is needed to help our community become even more inclusive.
01:03:10 ►
It’s a great challenge you’ve presented us with, Chow.
01:03:13 ►
So, hey, thanks for getting it started.
01:03:17 ►
Well, that should keep you busy for a while, so I’ll go ahead and close today’s podcast by reminding you that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareLight 3.0 license.
01:03:34 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:03:43 ►
page, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:03:48 ►
And if you are interested in the philosophy behind the Psychedelic Salon, you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is available as an audiobook that you
01:03:54 ►
can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:03:57 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:04:03 ►
Be well, my friends.