332 - Living in the Exile Nation

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Charles Shaw
Watch a video of this talk
[NOTE: All quotations are by Charles Shaw.]

“Having a felony conviction, and having a drug conviction, essentially makes you a second class citizen.”

“For the lower classes, the poorer classes, which generally in this country are people of color, drug laws have always been used as a way to control them.”

“And if you take away the distinction between tobacco and alcohol and cannabis and cocaine or alkaloids or whatever, what you’ve got is a war against altering consciousness.”

“But what they’re trying to stop more than anything is ideas. Because what it is is a war of ideas. And it is a war of control, a breaking away from an external control factor, like a government, or a religion, or an ideology, or an economy that enslaves you, and thinking outside the box in revolutionary terms to try to solve it.”

“It’s no secret that psychedelics change consciousness. It’s no secret that they’re revolutionary. I mean, we’ve known this for a while. What is absolutely fascinating to me is how easily that culture was dismissed.”

“The true revolutionary leaders, I think, are going to be the ones who figure out how to not go in the street and how to disseminate the revolution by other means.”

“I also think that the real revolution is going to come from women, personally. I think enough guys have tried to lead the revolution, and it’s always the same thing because men have the same intentions, we always enter into a war paradigm. And we’ve gotta stop that war paradigm, and at least the feminine will allow us to get out of that war paradigm and get into something that is a collaborative negotiation of disputes and grievances. But I don’t know what’s that going to look like.”

Charles Shaw “Living in the Exile Nation” - Burning Man 2012 from Palenque Norte on Vimeo.
Charles Shaw’s Exile Nation Project
“Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics, and Spirituality” by Charles Shaw

“The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade” by Alfred W. McCoy

Rolling Jubilee
Banks sell debt for pennies on the dollar on a shadowy speculative market of debt buyers who then turn around and try to collect the full amount from debtors. The Rolling Jubilee intervenes by buying debt, keeping it out of the hands of collectors, and then abolishing it. We’re going into this market not to make a profit but to help each other out and highlight how the predatory debt system affects our families and communities. Think of it as a bailout of the 99% by the 99%.

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

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salon.

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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Well, here we are once again with me just getting over another head cold,

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but nonetheless feeling relief in not being completely inundated by political advertising day and night.

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To tell the truth, I was going to make a little statement about the U.S. elections right now,

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but the more I thought about what I wanted to say, well, the more it sounded like just all of the other political messages that I’m tired of hearing.

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So I’ll just let this election pass without any more comments by me,

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other than to say that although I wasn’t surprised, I was once again disappointed that my candidate for president hardly even got mentioned.

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And she was Jill Stein of the Green Party,

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the only person in the race to whom I could actually give my vote

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and not just be voting against someone and for the lesser of two evils.

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So it looks like four more years with evil the lesser,

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which isn’t actually something to be very excited about.

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What I am excited about, however,

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is the fact that thanks to several donors who hail from places as far removed from here as

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Chicago, Sweden, Germany, Norway, and places in between, our hosting expenses have now been

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covered through the end of this year. And so now it’s up to me to get some more podcasts out.

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been covered through the end of this year, and so now it’s up to me to get some more podcasts out.

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But I want to be sure that our donors know how much I appreciate their help. It’s what makes it possible for these talks to reach so many people around the world, and I certainly couldn’t

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do it without you. And let me just say a quick word about the status of the unheard Terrence

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McKenna tapes. There are two reasons that I’m not playing them just yet.

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The main reason is that I want to first podcast

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all of the Planque Norte lectures from Burning Man,

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and in the order in which they were presented,

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which means that there are more than a dozen talks already in the queue.

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The other reason is that I’m still waiting to hear from my nemesis’ attorneys,

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as he’s both promised and threatened on several occasions.

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Hopefully they’ll yet get in touch with me so that we can see if we can work things out amicably

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without all of the name-calling that seems to be his favorite tactic right now.

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So it’ll be sometime next year before we pick back up on the McKenna talks.

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However, in case you’ve forgotten about all the people who spoke at Burning Man

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at the Palenque Norte lectures, well, we’re still in for many treats,

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including Daniel Pinchbeck, Paul Stamets, Robert Forte, John Gilmore,

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Rick Doblin, Allison and Alex Gray, and several others whose names escape me at the moment.

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But the name that’s on the tip of my

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tongue right now is that of Charles Shaw, who we’ll be hearing from in just a moment.

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I first met Charles a couple of years ago when I emceed a MAPS conference at which he was speaking,

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and I’d already known about his book, Exile Nation, but to meet Charles in person for me

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was a real treat. Although I’ve been around

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the tribe for quite a while, I have to admit that after spending some time with Charles, I

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came to the conclusion that no one I’d met before him had even come close to the street cred that he

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has. You see, the main thing that I think that is maybe lacking by many of us is a good understanding of what it’s like to not only be an enemy of the state

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in its war on non-prescription drugs, but to be a person of color as well.

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As you already know, the war on drugs was originally, and continues to be today, primarily a race war.

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So, if you are white and male, like me, well, I’m afraid that we really don’t know

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deep down and from a personal point of view how terribly devastating this war is on poor people,

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young black and brown men in particular. And I guess that I should mention that while Charles

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himself is white, his life’s trajectory has taken him to the other side of life where

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he experienced firsthand the ways in which poor people and people of color are the ones

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who are suffering the most from our drug laws.

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So I hope that as we listen to Charles Shaw’s story right now that you’ll come away with

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a deeper sense of just how unjust the war on drugs truly is.

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And hopefully you’ll come away with more empathy

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for those who have been caught in the web of unjust drug laws.

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Hi guys, how are you doing tonight?

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Thanks for joining us for the Planque Norte Speaker Series

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in this very dusty Tuesday on the playa.

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Welcome to the Crystal Cavern in Camp Above the Limit.

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My name is Kirk Benton

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and I have the honor

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of introducing Charles Shaw. He’s

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an activist and author of the

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critically acclaimed Exile

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Nation and he’s going to talk to you guys about

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the war on consciousness and drugs.

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Thank you very much, Charles.

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Alright, thanks. Thank you.

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Thanks for coming out, everybody.

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Tuesdays usually hit or miss out here, particularly when there’s a dust storm.

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So I’m glad you guys all came out.

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I’ve been giving this talk for the last couple of years in various formats.

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But this is the one I’ve been giving kind of on the festival circuit this year.

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I call it Living in the Exile Nation.

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And it really is about this idea of two separate cultures existing in the United States

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and two different statuses of existence in the United States.

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The exile nation is my metaphor, for lack of a better word, really,

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for the people that live in a state of disenfranchisement within our culture here.

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Very much like Jim Crow and apartheid laws,

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having a felony conviction and having a drug conviction essentially makes you a

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second-class citizen.

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Although there isn’t an official designation that puts you in a lower caste in the eyes

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of the government or the society, there is a cultural sentence that shoves you into a

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place.

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And there is a lot of social backlash that involves not being able to get a job,

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not being able to build a life,

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and living your entire existence with this kind of scarlet C for convict on your chest.

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And this also relates to the other flip side of this,

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which is the literal definition of exile

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which are the millions and millions of people at this point over the last seven

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years that have been deported from the United States mostly people that had

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spent a good significant portion of their life in the United States and when

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we’re talking about Mexican-Americans,

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this is the largest single group. Many of them came over here when they were children.

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They lived American lives, went to American schools, hung out with American kids, spoke American English, and didn’t know anything about Mexico. For whatever reason, they get in trouble

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with the law, and their paperwork hasn’t you know cleared and they don’t have full

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citizenship and it takes about you know it can take up to 40 years to get naturalized these days

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and every time you make a little mistake on your form it goes back to the bottom of the pile and

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so on and so forth if you don’t have money to pay an immigration lawyer then you can’t get it

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advanced up back up to where it was. And so these people who largely exist,

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particularly the parents kind of outside the culture,

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speaking Spanish and keeping with the Mexican cultural ways that they had,

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their children are doing the exact opposite, becoming Americans.

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But when they get in trouble, they’re all deported back to Mexico

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or the nearest Spanish-speaking country,

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if they’re Salvadoran or Guatemalan or Costa Rican or Argentine.

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And they’re stripped of their identity, stripped of their resources, and left to fend for themselves.

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And in the case of Mexico, they dropped them in three of the biggest war zones that exist in that country related to the Mexican drug war, right?

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So it’s a significant problem.

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It’s not just a kind of a subcultural issue.

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By the latest and most accurate statistics,

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there are currently 2.5 million people in prison.

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There are an additional 7. half million that are being actively

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monitored by the state every day on supervision, probation, or parole. There are an additional

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13 million people walking around with a previous felony conviction that has marred them for life.

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There is an additional 65 million people in this country

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who cannot pass a background check

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because of an arrest or conviction that they have on their record.

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65 million people is about a fifth of the population of this country.

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Now add all of those people up,

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and add up all of their family members,

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their parents and their children and their brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and wives and cousins

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who have all been affected by this,

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and you are looking at a significant portion of this nation’s population,

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well over a third, if not more, maybe up to half,

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that have been directly affected by drug laws or our criminal justice system.

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And when you look at the actual numbers, violent crime, sociopathic behavior,

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all of these things stay almost constant in every population and every social dynamic.

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You have a roughly like 10% variance deviation from the norm as far as sociopaths go.

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You know, variance, deviation from the norm as far as sociopaths go.

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And violent crime, which is the primary issue that has been hung out for our need for drug laws to protect from crime.

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And then when we don’t believe that, then we say it’s to protect the children or what have you.

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But crime has steadily gone down for over 40 years.

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And crime is at its lowest rate and the murder rates at its lowest rate since the Johnson administration, the mid-60s.

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Crime peaked in 1975-ish and then again in 1992. stagflation crisis, the changing cultural mores that were opening up things like sexual freedom

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and chemical freedom and artistic freedom through Hollywood and the whole director’s revolution.

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And all of that was kind of leading to a society that had been like lied to and hustled by their

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leaders for so long. Vietnam was the kind of final straw.

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And, you know, you figure if a culture looks at its most exalted leaders and they all are lying, cheating, and stealing and murdering,

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what’s the point of obeying any laws anyway, right?

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It was like a cultural rebellion.

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The crime wave in the early 90s was about the crack epidemic, pure and simple.

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The crime wave in the early 90s was about the crack epidemic, pure and simple.

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One of the worst scourges, is the word, to ever hit our culture.

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And so if you’re a conservative, you look at all this and you go, whoa, that’s great.

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It’s great that there’s that many people in prison.

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It means we’re doing our job.

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That’s why crime’s so low.

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Okay, well, you look at the people in prison, you realize that on average about 60% of them are there for drug related crimes

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non-violent crimes

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crimes of consciousness, crimes of lifestyle

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crimes of cognitive liberty

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what they had on them

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or what they ingested into their body

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or whose body

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they were trying to get into

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these are all the vice crimes that we end up

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punishing people for forever.

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And meanwhile, of course, it’s a trite analogy by now,

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but the people on Wall Street can loot billions and trillions

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from people’s retirement savings and go unpunished all the time.

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So why is this? Why do we punish those people?

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Well, and not the people on Wall Street.

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Well, our society is ordered into three classes.

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All Western civilization is.

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For 10,000 years we’ve been modeling our civilization after Babylon and Samaria.

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And I don’t know whether they got it from up here or down here,

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or wherever they got the idea. But the pyramid and that paradigm

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all represents a kind of a three-class system.

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The best way to kind of understand how things operate in this world

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is to pick up George Orwell’s 1984 and flip to the middle.

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There’s a little book inside

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that was supposed to be written by

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Emanuel Goldstein, who’s the kind of Trotsky character

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in the book. And it’s called The Theory

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and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, right? And it basically just explains everything that we

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talk about today when we talk about the 1% ruling the world. The 1%, the Occupy Movement, all that.

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It’s just the most modern and contemporized iteration of this eternal struggle between the high, the middle, and the low.

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So for the lower classes, the poorer classes, which generally in this country are people of color,

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drug laws have always been used as a way to control them, right? It’s a way of attacking a culture.

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It’s a way of legally kind of removing a culture from a mixed space. The first drug laws were in San Francisco

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in the late 1800s,

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meant to keep nice middle-class white women

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out of opium dens,

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because there was kind of an epidemic

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around the turn of the century

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with opium in household products

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and bored women sitting at home

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doing nothing but taking them all day long

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and getting strung out, right?

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Coca-Cola had cocaine in it.

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It was kind of an interesting time that ultimately

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led to the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, which is the first kind of global piece of drug policy

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that the U.S. tried to push on everyone else. So do we really want to stop them from using drugs?

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No, of course not. Why do you say that, Charles? Well, I say that because what ends up happening

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in an economy that is prosperous

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is that the lower classes are given work.

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They’re given employment.

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And that employment gives them wages, which they then turn back into the economy

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by buying goods and services, right?

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Simple equation.

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Well, we brought all of these immigrants to our country

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to create that working class that would build our nation

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for us. And then when we became prosperous, we gave them all a great living. And we had

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social programs and we had all kinds of things for a little brief period of time. And then

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things changed. And the economy changed and the world changed, and suddenly we weren’t the same.

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We weren’t as rich, we weren’t as powerful, but we kept growing in population.

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And pretty soon, that labor became surplus.

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It became surplus population.

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It became too many people, not enough jobs, not enough work.

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So what happens to a community when the factory

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is sent away? Well, in most of the cities of this country, in the poorer areas, vice crimes become

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the replacement economy, and the kind of fight against the vice crimes becomes the other

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replacement economy. So in the Midwest, for example, where

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I lived, it was a very prosperous manufacturing and agricultural region. But over the last 30 years,

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it de-industrialized and offshored the labor to cheaper markets. And big agro came in and bought

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up all the family farms and put all the farmers out of business.

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So half of them turned to

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police force, prison guard,

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probation officer,

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court supervisor,

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and the other half

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turned to selling drugs.

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What they all had in common was that they had to feed their

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children, feed their families, pay their rent.

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When you’re a young black kid from the city,

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and you’ve had no opportunities for decent education,

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and you have no advancement opportunities,

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but you can get this here bag of something something,

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and you can go on the corner, and in a couple hours,

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you might have a couple thousand dollars,

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and that thousand dollars buys you respect,

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buys you clothing, it buys you a car,

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it buys you a home, it buys you all these things

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that working a decent, honest job doesn’t get you anymore.

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And so, okay, is the war on drugs about stopping this,

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about stopping this illegal activity?

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Well, not really,

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because that money still circulates in the economy.

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And so the people that are living here

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are still spending that cash.

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It’s going around one way or the other.

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It’s still circulating.

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So it’s surplus labor or surplus population.

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Now that’s what they deal with

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largely in the lower classes

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and it’s a simple operation.

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Most of the time their lives are very hard. Most of the time, their lives are very hard.

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Most of the time, they’re looking for an escape.

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Drugs provide a very easy escape.

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Most of the drugs that are most popular in those classes are anesthetizing drugs, alcohol, heroin, tobacco.

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Cocaine is a little bit different

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cocaine is a crazy drug

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that affects everybody

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kind of almost the same way

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but what it does do is create a lot of money

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really fast

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and

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I’m going to get into the governmental

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aspects of it

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the government’s input

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and their history in this I saying, their history

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in this way. By the way, I’ve been working 20-hour days on Fractal Nation for the last like

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eight days, so I’m a little bit tired today. So if I space out for a second, it’s just because

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I’m trying to regain my train of thought. So anyway, if you look on any street corner in any

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American city, you’ll see a liquor store and you’ll see a bunch of people hanging around that liquor store.

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And you don’t see that in affluent neighborhoods in the same way, although the same substances are there.

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In poor neighborhoods, you see street dealing.

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You see open-air markets.

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So that becomes an easy target for police who are based on a quota system and need to make a certain amount of rest every day, every week, every month in order to advance themselves in the police force.

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There’s also all the drug units from the DEA on down that only make their money from seizures.

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So however, whatever they take when they raid somebody or arrest somebody is what they keep.

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And that keeps them eating and it keeps their kids in school and with a home and so on and so

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forth. Right. So the whole battle of supplying and arresting and policing drugs in the lower classes is just a game.

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It’s just a series of jobs. It’s economic activity.

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And it’s an ability to weed out and control and monitor most of the people in that class.

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Because otherwise, what are they doing?

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They’re sitting around angry unemployed and

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eventually they start talking to each other when they start talking to each other they start

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sharing their grievances and when they start sharing their grievances they start talking

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about what they can do to change their grievances and this is what we saw in the 1960s and 70s

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with the black nationalist movement well first with the civil rights movement but it was a

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non-violent movement and they killed dr king and the black movement said. First with the civil rights movement, but it was a nonviolent movement,

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and they killed Dr. King,

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and the black movement said,

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okay, we’re not going to take this shit anymore.

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We’re going to take what’s ours,

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and they started to get organized,

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and they started to scare the living daylights

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out of white America.

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And a weird thing happened right around that time,

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which was that just around the time

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that all of these soldiers in Southeast Asia

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were starting to rebel against their superior officers, fragging and all that. Fragging is when you throw a grenade and blow up

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your boss. Refusing to go out on patrol, insubordination, desertion, right? At the same

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time that was a rampant epidemic in Vietnam, there were also riots and severe civil unrest in the cities,

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like 35 major urban riots between 1965 and 1968.

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So what happened?

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Right around that time, right around 1968, Nixon comes into office,

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and the whole game changes.

00:20:58 ►

And pretty soon, Southeast Asia is flooded with heroin, cheap, high-grade heroin.

00:21:05 ►

Where did that heroin come from?

00:21:07 ►

Well, it started in Laos, and it was grown by these people called the Hamang

00:21:11 ►

that were a peasant tribe that lived in the hills and grew opium,

00:21:15 ►

and they had done this for thousands of years.

00:21:17 ►

And they were right-wingers.

00:21:20 ►

They were anti-communists.

00:21:21 ►

And so our CIA flies in there and makes a deal with them,

00:21:24 ►

and so in exchange for trafficking their opium, They were anti-communists. And so our CIA flies in there and makes a deal with them.

00:21:31 ►

And so in exchange for trafficking their opium, we provided them with weapons and training.

00:21:38 ►

And we sent them in to fight in Cambodia and to try to repel communist forces, right?

00:21:45 ►

That same heroin that ended up, went through Thailand, got refined, ended up in Vietnam,

00:21:49 ►

created an epidemic amongst the 10 million people that were serving in country at the time, to the point that by 1970, one-third of all active duty service men had a major addiction problem.

00:21:57 ►

And the Nixon administration considered it like public health issue and national security issue,

00:22:02 ►

like number one, two, or or three right up there at the top

00:22:05 ►

they were absolutely terrified of a wave of like drug addicted angry highly trained and often armed

00:22:15 ►

veterans coming back from southeast asia and taking out their frustrations of their experience

00:22:24 ►

on the government

00:22:25 ►

at the exact same time that there is a black revolution

00:22:28 ►

and a student revolution going on.

00:22:30 ►

It was like a perfect storm nightmare for the powers that be.

00:22:35 ►

Well, that same heroin that ended up in Southeast Asia

00:22:38 ►

somehow miraculously ended up in the ghettos of America.

00:22:43 ►

And suddenly there’s the first real big heroin epidemic

00:22:45 ►

right in the late 60s. And the net result of that is that it kind of destroyed the movement.

00:22:52 ►

Drugs came in and it separated the leaders from each other. It got them caught up so that they

00:22:59 ►

were caught up in difficult situations with women and with money and with crimes and other things that compromise them, compromise their ability to lead, their ability to have trust in them, to have integrity in their word, so on and so forth.

00:23:15 ►

Geniuses like Huey Newton were destroyed by crack cocaine, for example, later, right?

00:23:21 ►

So many of the great minds were destroyed on heroin.

00:23:24 ►

And then there was a lull.

00:23:26 ►

There was a kind of an economic restructuring. There was a right-wing revolution in the early

00:23:30 ►

80s. And that fire in the black community got rekindled. And through the late 70s,

00:23:38 ►

it started to grow again. Bob Marley started singing international hits about revolution

00:23:44 ►

and about the black man rising up

00:23:46 ►

and then suddenly he catches this aggressive form of cancer and dies and i’m just going to leave

00:23:50 ►

that in your lap and you can think about that your own way look up alex uh what’s his name

00:23:56 ►

he wrote the covert war on rock alex constantine amazing book uh goes into all of the old COINTELPRO files about rock stars and movement leaders that were

00:24:08 ►

targeted by COINTELPRO and all of the questionable circumstances with those people’s deaths that were

00:24:14 ►

never reported in the public. Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley were both, according to Constantine,

00:24:22 ►

hits by the CIA because of their support of the black nationalist movement.

00:24:26 ►

Jimi Hendrix started playing benefits for the Black Panthers right before he was killed, right?

00:24:30 ►

Right before he died, sorry.

00:24:32 ►

So in the 80s then, America found itself in the exact same situation it found itself in in Vietnam,

00:24:40 ►

which was they needed to fight a covert war that was not authorized by Congress in another country

00:24:46 ►

where they couldn’t fund it from taxpayer budgets or congressional budgets,

00:24:53 ►

and they had to be real quiet about it.

00:24:56 ►

And so they trafficked all this opium in Vietnam,

00:24:59 ►

and then when they needed to go into Central America, into Nicaragua, into El Salvador,

00:25:06 ►

into Costa Rica,

00:25:08 ►

they started doing it with cocaine.

00:25:12 ►

And massive amounts of cocaine came north from the south, and guns went south.

00:25:16 ►

And the money stayed in the middle.

00:25:19 ►

Panama, to be specific.

00:25:21 ►

Which is why Manuel Noriega is in a hole

00:25:24 ►

and will never get out.

00:25:25 ►

It’s because he was the middleman between the Medellin

00:25:28 ►

and the Cali cartels and the Reagan administration

00:25:32 ►

under the supervision of former Vice President George Herbert

00:25:37 ►

Walker Bush, former director of the CIA,

00:25:41 ►

who was involved during the end of the Vietnam War

00:25:45 ►

when all of this activity was still going on.

00:25:49 ►

In fact, it’s the same team.

00:25:51 ►

If you look at the names involved,

00:25:53 ►

the same people that ran the Air America operation in Southeast Asia

00:25:56 ►

ran the same operation in Central America.

00:25:59 ►

Okay.

00:26:01 ►

So where did we learn this?

00:26:02 ►

We learned this from the colonial empires.

00:26:04 ►

We learned this from the British in particular who fought two wars with china so that they could have the right to get

00:26:09 ►

the chinese people strung out on opium that they were growing in india uh the french the spanish

00:26:16 ►

the dutch the portuguese all had opium monopolies they had sugar cane. They had alcohol, whiskey, rum. They had tobacco. They had tea. They had spices. These are like the things that drove the colonies. And later they was special, anything that altered consciousness, was very profitable.

00:26:50 ►

And this allowed expansion of the colonies, expansion of the independent companies that were running it,

00:26:56 ►

and a kind of autonomous operation that wasn’t necessarily supervised by the governments.

00:27:01 ►

The United States picked up an opium monopoly when it took over the Philippines from Spain, but what it chose to do was to make it illicit so that the prices could be driven up,

00:27:10 ►

and it could be, you know, much more profitable on the back end, and they could essentially

00:27:16 ►

cater to a big growing political movement towards temperance. That was happening at the time, right?

00:27:22 ►

It’s important when we talk about war on consciousness

00:27:25 ►

and a war on drugs to understand

00:27:27 ►

that this battle’s been going on for a very long time.

00:27:30 ►

And if you take away the distinction

00:27:31 ►

between tobacco and alcohol and cannabis

00:27:33 ►

and cocaine or alkaloids or whatever,

00:27:35 ►

what you’ve got is a war against altering consciousness.

00:27:40 ►

And so, like, in the 1800s, for example,

00:27:42 ►

alcohol was an absolute devastating force across America, particularly in the working classes.

00:27:49 ►

It was so much so that the women of America got together, formed a movement, and had prohibition ultimately passed.

00:27:57 ►

It was the housewives, the mothers, the sisters of all of these alcoholic men, millions of them,

00:28:05 ►

something like, you know, they estimated one-third of the country

00:28:08 ►

was like awash in alcoholism,

00:28:10 ►

that the man would go off to the factory or the mine or whatever

00:28:14 ►

and work all week, bring home or get the money, go to the bar,

00:28:18 ►

drink it up, and then come home with nothing.

00:28:20 ►

And this is like a story that was told over and over and over again.

00:28:32 ►

And the government didn’t like people drinking because the ethnic groups that came over from europe would get together and the germans would get together in the beer halls and the irish would

00:28:36 ►

get together in the pubs and they would talk politics and they would talk about how they were

00:28:40 ►

getting screwed over by the overclasses and what they were going to do about it and they it was a very vibrant culture that the protestants and the english didn’t like

00:28:48 ►

very much right chicago where i came from was a perfect example of this cauldron of mixing and

00:28:53 ►

like where all these crazy laws came from and even the great chicago fire was blamed on

00:28:58 ►

an irish woman because it was a political move to try to demonize the Irish, right? So, you know, the fight against prohibition lasted quite a long time.

00:29:09 ►

It was like, you know, a 40-year-long movement before they got it passed,

00:29:12 ►

and then another, like, what was it, 14 years that they had it before they repealed it?

00:29:18 ►

And in that time, the public opinion shifted drastically.

00:29:25 ►

And every time you look at a drug epidemic or a crime outbreak in our days,

00:29:29 ►

in current times, what you see is the same type of pattern.

00:29:33 ►

The response by the public is to want more enforcement,

00:29:37 ►

to want more restriction, more control, right,

00:29:41 ►

in the interest of preserving order, right?

00:29:47 ►

control, right, in the interest of preserving order, right? So, like, after prohibition,

00:29:54 ►

in came the whole, you know, 60s consciousness revolution, right? You know, after the war and all that. So, you had a bunch of drinkers go off to war, and then they had kids, and then their

00:29:58 ►

kids went off to college, which most of them didn’t get to do. They didn’t get to go to college. You

00:30:02 ►

know, they got to get a job, maybe get a GI bill or something like that if they were lucky.

00:30:08 ►

But their kids were born into affluence, and their kids got to experiment.

00:30:11 ►

Here’s where we’re moving into the middle of the high, middle, low paradigm.

00:30:15 ►

And the middle class has always been in this state of flux,

00:30:18 ►

and they basically are always trying to overtake the high.

00:30:22 ►

They’re trying to take their place and rise to a higher station

00:30:25 ►

and force that upper class back down into the middle.

00:30:30 ►

And the way they do that is usually

00:30:31 ►

to enlist the help of the lower classes

00:30:33 ►

to fight their battles for them,

00:30:34 ►

promising them these utopian world,

00:30:36 ►

which never materializes.

00:30:38 ►

And once the war is done

00:30:39 ►

and the revolution has taken place,

00:30:41 ►

they’re shoved back down to where they were.

00:30:43 ►

And over and over and over, through time immemorial,

00:30:46 ►

as Orwell says, this struggle has happened.

00:30:50 ►

So the middle classes, they get more affluence,

00:30:52 ►

they get to expand their consciousness more in an intentional way.

00:30:55 ►

They have free time to explore and experiment.

00:30:59 ►

And that’s what started to happen in the 60s.

00:31:03 ►

And once again, what ended up happening when they experimented

00:31:07 ►

was that revolutionary ideas started to percolate.

00:31:12 ►

And instead of the whole kind of Marxist revolution theory,

00:31:17 ►

which they had seen for so long,

00:31:18 ►

suddenly there was an even more insidious and dangerous revolution,

00:31:21 ►

which was this revolution of values, of morals, of sex, of drugs, of rock and roll.

00:31:29 ►

And this was like an epic transformation of our culture.

00:31:33 ►

And we came very close to a full-on revolution at the end of the 60s and in the early 70s.

00:31:40 ►

So ever since then, we’ve had this extremely drastic policy towards drugs,

00:31:48 ►

but it’s been kind of like separated out.

00:31:54 ►

So if you’re poor or black, you’re most likely going to go to prison and most likely get arrested for it.

00:31:58 ►

If you’re affluent and white, depending on what you do, you can mostly get away with it.

00:32:01 ►

If you’re rich, you can get anything you want.

00:32:06 ►

But what they’re trying to stop more than anything is ideas,

00:32:12 ►

because what it is is a war of ideas, and it is a war of control, breaking away from an external control factor like a government or a religion or an ideology or an economy that

00:32:21 ►

enslaves you, and thinking outside the box box in revolutionary terms to try to solve it.

00:32:29 ►

So why am I sitting in the middle of the Black Rock Desert talking to you guys?

00:32:35 ►

Like, who on earth had the crazy idea to come out here?

00:32:39 ►

And what kind of a culture do we live in where we have to come out here to talk about something

00:32:47 ►

like this or to experiment with something like this i mean originally burning man was created

00:32:52 ►

so that there would be a free autonomous zone for people to do whatever they wanted to do

00:32:57 ►

and the feds were like whatever you guys are crazy you want to go hang out in the desert go for it

00:33:02 ►

knock yourself out they figured it would last a week, once, and they’d never go back.

00:33:10 ►

Ultimately, it became a money-making thing, an economy,

00:33:14 ►

an economic engine that powers much of the state of Nevada’s economy,

00:33:21 ►

beyond the gambling and prostitution.

00:33:27 ►

Burning Man’s like the third largest city in nevada when it’s here and there are entire towns all the way from san francisco to here

00:33:33 ►

that have built that have been built and rebuilt simply on the money the burners spend going back

00:33:37 ►

and forth every year i just uh spent a couple of months in Portugal at Boom Festival in a country where the drug laws have been changed to decriminalize personal use.

00:33:51 ►

And this happened because a drug epidemic destroyed an entire generation in Portugal, the people of my generation, Gen Xers.

00:33:59 ►

We’re all in our 40s now, late 30s.

00:34:03 ►

We’re all in like our 40s now, late 30s.

00:34:11 ►

And almost everybody I met at Boom Festival who was of that generation was ravaged by this drug epidemic. And it was heroin that hit Portugal primarily.

00:34:15 ►

And it came in because when Portugal lost its colonies in the mid-1970s after this awful disastrous war to try to retain Angola and a couple others

00:34:27 ►

and East Timor, they lost their connection to their cultural usage of hashish and marijuana,

00:34:35 ►

which came from, you know, mostly Angola.

00:34:39 ►

And it was, you know, spliff culture is what happens in Portugal.

00:34:42 ►

And everybody’s smoking spliffs all day long.

00:34:45 ►

It’s, you know,

00:34:51 ►

coffee spliff. It’s like a simple thing like Amsterdam, right? Suddenly it was gone. And in its place, like people started pushing opium and pushing heroin and people started

00:34:55 ►

smoking heroin instead. And before you know it, they, the other thing is the Portuguese

00:35:01 ►

were not like really integrated in much of the European cultural or economic system.

00:35:07 ►

So they were kind of isolated.

00:35:08 ►

They were kind of holding on to their old cultural values much more and much longer.

00:35:14 ►

They kind of had an inferiority complex.

00:35:16 ►

They were kind of isolated.

00:35:18 ►

And in the end, they weren’t too hip, is really what it boils down to.

00:35:22 ►

They didn’t have the same cultural exposure that Paris and London and Berlin had.

00:35:27 ►

You know, they were kind of isolated, communist.

00:35:30 ►

And so a drug epidemic was, you know, like cancer that just swept through them.

00:35:35 ►

But the Portuguese are also kind of a homogenous culture, and they kind of all got together.

00:35:39 ►

And they said, okay, we need to solve this.

00:35:41 ►

And so they took a governmental approach, and they voted in a plan where they decriminalized the drugs

00:35:46 ►

and they created a social service system where people can go, if they get in trouble with the law,

00:35:51 ►

they go and instead of getting booked and processed and going to jail,

00:35:55 ►

they go and see a panel of three social workers who assess them and then give them a treatment plan.

00:36:00 ►

And they’re sent off into treatment.

00:36:02 ►

So it’s a harm reduction program instead of a punitive

00:36:05 ►

program and it’s wildly successful and everybody in drug policy across the world is always talking

00:36:10 ►

about you have to go to portugal okay so there’s boom and boom is a dedicated psychedelic festival

00:36:15 ►

and people come there to blow their heads open in a way that would even shame most burners

00:36:20 ►

right but it doesn’t mean that it’s a free-for-all. Even in that country,

00:36:27 ►

on the way into boom, there were 70 heavily armed paramilitary or military raids,

00:36:33 ►

paramilitary raids, cops and military, that took, you know, a significant cash of like kilos of

00:36:40 ►

drugs, guns, knives, counterfeit euro, the whole nine yards, 70 of them, right? So even in a

00:36:46 ►

place where they say you can have them, the police are still going to be there attacking you,

00:36:50 ►

controlling you, taxing you for your lifestyle choice, right? So this is why we call it a war.

00:36:59 ►

And it’s a war on consciousness because it is about controlling how you think and act.

00:37:05 ►

And it comes at us not just through what we put into our bodies to expand our consciousness,

00:37:09 ►

but also what we receive directly through the Internet, through television, through mass media in particular.

00:37:16 ►

Mass media is all about this stuff called perception management.

00:37:20 ►

It’s about literally managing how you perceive things.

00:37:29 ►

It used to be called public relations, and before it was called public relations, it was called propaganda.

00:37:36 ►

And what it aspires to do is to keep you in the dark and keep you believing a myth.

00:37:43 ►

A myth, a cultural myth that binds you to the culture of the nation state.

00:37:46 ►

And with us, we’ve got a whole bunch of them in America, you know,

00:37:49 ►

and they’re all fucking ridiculous if you actually, like,

00:37:51 ►

pick up a history book and start to look into them.

00:37:56 ►

And, you know, the founding fathers and freedom and liberty and all of this,

00:37:58 ►

and they’re just, like, these ideas.

00:38:01 ►

And then this guy Leo Strauss came around.

00:38:04 ►

He started talking about this idea of, you know,

00:38:08 ►

a culture can only be held together if it has a common enemy.

00:38:11 ►

So there needs to be a common enemy to point it at.

00:38:14 ►

And a flag to unite it behind.

00:38:15 ►

Right?

00:38:19 ►

And there is this thing called the noble lie,

00:38:22 ►

which is where it’s okay in the interest of the greater good to lie to the ignorant masses

00:38:24 ►

because they don’t really understand

00:38:26 ►

and we’re just taking care of them, right?

00:38:29 ►

I mean, all of this is about keeping people in the dark

00:38:31 ►

and keeping them pliable.

00:38:33 ►

It also ultimately boils down to money.

00:38:37 ►

When we talk about cognitive liberty

00:38:38 ►

and we talk about self-medicine

00:38:41 ►

and treating oneself and learning and expanding.

00:38:47 ►

I don’t know how many other people here, but I’m a medical cannabis patient.

00:38:50 ►

And I consider myself a legitimate medical cannabis patient in that I take it for like legitimate ailments.

00:38:58 ►

I got like crushed joints and surgery all over the place and my bones ache all the time and blah, blah, blah.

00:39:05 ►

And wow, why did it take until I was only in my mid-30s to be able to get the permission to do this

00:39:10 ►

like we have in California, right?

00:39:12 ►

But ultimately, what is that all about?

00:39:15 ►

And it’s like pharmaceutical company can patent this and make money.

00:39:19 ►

If you grow it in your ground, well, not only do you get the benefits of it

00:39:23 ►

and there’s no taxation on it, but you can like amass a lot of money and do other things you know um you know there was a

00:39:31 ►

lot of understanding by the government by how much the drug underground the brotherhood of eternal

00:39:36 ►

love for example of one of many uh underground drugcing movements funded the revolutionary movements of the day,

00:39:46 ►

gave them lots of money, right?

00:39:48 ►

Gave SDS and the Black Panthers and so on.

00:39:51 ►

And that stuff is still going on,

00:39:53 ►

and the government knows this.

00:39:55 ►

It’s kind of gotten weird,

00:39:56 ►

but the weed economy supports

00:39:58 ►

a lot of subversive activity in California,

00:40:01 ►

and it is the number one cash economy.

00:40:04 ►

And what’s going on this year

00:40:06 ►

is kind of funny

00:40:07 ►

because after, what has it been,

00:40:08 ►

96 to 22,

00:40:10 ►

almost 15 odd years

00:40:11 ►

of Prop 215 being passed

00:40:14 ►

and dispensaries and systems

00:40:17 ►

going up all over California

00:40:19 ►

and billions of dollars being made

00:40:21 ►

in that economy.

00:40:23 ►

This year it all came almost crashing down to nothing,

00:40:28 ►

except for specific municipalities and counties

00:40:31 ►

who had voted it as okay,

00:40:33 ►

because the Obama administration was losing voters in California,

00:40:37 ►

losing right-wing and centrist voters.

00:40:40 ►

And they sacrificed medical cannabis

00:40:42 ►

in order to boost their numbers with conservatives and moderates.

00:40:47 ►

Now, I know this because when they raided Oaksterdam University and shut down all of the dispensaries inside Oakland,

00:40:54 ►

one of my friends who is American for Safe Access kind of intervention person,

00:41:00 ►

they go and protest whenever there’s a raid on a clinic or a dispensary.

00:41:05 ►

person they go and protest whenever there’s a raid on a clinic or a dispensary she talked to the lead dea agent and asked him why uh they were raiding this clinic that had been around for a

00:41:11 ►

long time and why now and the agent said because obama’s losing votes and he said, and frankly, we’re OK with this because when you guys close, the black market opens up and we know who all those people are and they’re going to get really fat and they’re going to sell a lot of weed and we’re going to wait for the right moment and we’re boils down to. And most of what went on in California right after Obama took office and then over the first couple of years was smashing grab jobs.

00:41:53 ►

So when Obama first called off the feds because he said, okay, no more federal raids on medical cannabis clinics,

00:41:58 ►

what happened was that the state, local, county, municipal law enforcement came in in their place.

00:42:06 ►

county municipal law enforcement came in in their place and instead of going through the process of a federal raid and a federal uh you know uh what is it when they uh injunction and all that to shut

00:42:13 ►

you down uh this was just smash and grab the cops just came in they knew when a dispensary was doing

00:42:19 ►

well they would wait for them to sell all their product and they would come in take all the money

00:42:24 ►

take all the product and just leave and destroy the place.

00:42:27 ►

Shoot the dog if there was a dog there.

00:42:29 ►

That’s like common policy.

00:42:32 ►

It’s no secret that psychedelics change consciousness.

00:42:35 ►

It’s no secret that they’re revolutionary.

00:42:40 ►

I mean, we’ve known this for a while.

00:42:42 ►

What is absolutely fascinating to me is how easily that culture was dismissed

00:42:47 ►

so that today a simple stereotype of a guy in a tie-dye saying something really weird

00:42:53 ►

will dismiss an entire hour of scientific research vetted and proven

00:43:01 ►

that a doctor can tell you about psychedelic medicine.

00:43:04 ►

One bad stereotype.

00:43:07 ►

And I believe, and I’m sure the people who live through it believe,

00:43:11 ►

that this is a direct result of the propaganda

00:43:13 ►

that began with the right wing and Reagan in 1980

00:43:16 ►

and was inculcated into now two generations.

00:43:20 ►

My generation is Gen Xers and then the Echo Boomers,

00:43:24 ►

who’ve grown up thinking that

00:43:26 ►

like hippies were stupid and Woodstock was crazy

00:43:28 ►

and you know we should just if you do drugs

00:43:30 ►

they’re bad and yada yada yada

00:43:32 ►

and this whole idea of the word

00:43:34 ►

drug and the word substance and all this stuff

00:43:36 ►

it’s like it’s all basic

00:43:38 ►

programming meant to change

00:43:40 ►

like how we look at the whole thing by casting

00:43:42 ►

it in moral terms

00:43:43 ►

you know it’s not it’s a health issue it’s a biochemical issue change how we look at the whole thing by casting it in moral terms.

00:43:48 ►

It’s a health issue. It’s a biochemical issue.

00:43:52 ►

It’s a metabolic thing more than anything else. Ultimately, all the substances you put in your body are a catalyst towards natural reactions. So what are we really

00:43:55 ►

talking about here? How do we differentiate between this drug here and this drug here?

00:44:00 ►

And what it all boils down to is, is it profitable?

00:44:03 ►

Can it be patented? can it be used for social

00:44:06 ►

control this is what i like to call the scatter shod version of my talk the sleep deprivation 2.0

00:44:13 ►

version um i uh i’ve lived through this myself by the way i, part of my whole journey involved me becoming a drug addict for 10

00:44:27 ►

years. I was a crack addict, by the way. I liked to smoke crack a lot. And I saw, I crossed

00:44:36 ►

the cultural divide and went into the part of society that they don’t want nice middle

00:44:41 ►

class white boys going into. And I saw exactly how that world operates.

00:44:46 ►

Because, you know, when you see a neighborhood flooded with drugs

00:44:49 ►

and flooded with guns, you know they had to come from somewhere.

00:44:53 ►

And as, you know, Dick Gregory used to say,

00:44:56 ►

our people don’t own transport planes.

00:44:59 ►

Our people don’t own semi-trucks.

00:45:01 ►

Our people don’t own or don’t manufacture submachine guns. Somebody had

00:45:08 ►

to come in and sell them all that stuff. Somebody had to move all that stuff from somewhere.

00:45:13 ►

You know, Jimmy down the block didn’t move 500 kilos from Columbia. Somebody had to do

00:45:18 ►

that, right? Anyway, I’m sorry that I’m rambling on Palenque Norte because I’ve been really honored to be a part of this.

00:45:26 ►

And I’m really honored that I’m in the company of people that I am speaking in this series.

00:45:34 ►

It is a nice kind of completion to a long journey that at one point had me doubting I was going to get out.

00:45:43 ►

And I went through prison and and I went through recovery,

00:45:47 ►

and I put my life back together,

00:45:48 ►

and I faced down the ultimate question with suicide

00:45:52 ►

and was saved by shamanic medicine, by ayahuasca,

00:45:56 ►

literally saved at the last moment.

00:45:59 ►

When I had decided and stockpiled the drugs I was going to use to kill myself

00:46:03 ►

and decided on the date and everything, and then by chance a person I had only met once before on the drugs I was going to use to kill myself and decided on the date and everything,

00:46:05 ►

and then by chance a person I had only met once before on the day I got out of prison four months earlier

00:46:10 ►

dropped by this party I was at that I was invited to at the last second

00:46:15 ►

and told me about this ayahuasca when I uncontrollably blurted out to her

00:46:20 ►

that I was going to commit suicide when I went home.

00:46:23 ►

And I made a pact to stick

00:46:25 ►

around for two weeks until this ceremony came. I didn’t know anything about it. I just kind

00:46:30 ►

of knew it was weird. You threw up a lot. But I had like this whole death, rebirth,

00:46:35 ►

purging experience that like had me skipping home in the morning. And I started a whole

00:46:40 ►

new life on January 15th, 2006. And a year later, I got here. I started growing my hair on

00:46:47 ►

that day, and I committed to going to Burning Man on that day. I can’t tell you why. I just did.

00:46:54 ►

And I grew dreads down to here until this March. Seven years of healing that went into me. Seven

00:47:00 ►

years of work with this and other shamanic medicines and plants and MDMA which was what got me sent to prison because I was turned on to MAPS’s work almost 10 years ago

00:47:11 ►

and was you taking it to try to get through the post-traumatic stress disorder that I had from

00:47:15 ►

a lifetime of violence and abuse and rape and you know street insanity being a drug addict

00:47:22 ►

um you know so like I have such an incredible

00:47:25 ►

connection to this medicine

00:47:28 ►

and this culture.

00:47:30 ►

It pains me to see how

00:47:32 ►

underground it’s been forced. I mean, I’m very glad

00:47:34 ►

that MAPS has done their diligent work to get

00:47:36 ►

it out into the open and get a lot of great

00:47:38 ►

media these days.

00:47:39 ►

And getting to just start to maybe

00:47:41 ►

begin changing people’s attitudes.

00:47:45 ►

But we still got a long way to go.

00:47:47 ►

And there are more police out here than there’s ever been before.

00:47:50 ►

And as the head of like a very large sound camp that had to deal with this last year,

00:47:55 ►

they are out here in a way that they’ve never been before.

00:47:57 ►

And they’re not out here to bust people.

00:47:59 ►

Why?

00:48:00 ►

Because almost everybody who comes here has money.

00:48:02 ►

And almost everybody who comes here is white.

00:48:05 ►

And they all go home to some productive endeavor, or they start all over again and get into the Burning Man cycle.

00:48:11 ►

Either way, they’re not a threat.

00:48:13 ►

They’re out here having fun, and we are taxing them for their fun.

00:48:16 ►

And that’s what the police do here.

00:48:19 ►

They don’t want to bust you because it costs too much money, it’s too much paperwork,

00:48:22 ►

it’s too much of a hassle to take you from here to Gerlach, Empire,

00:48:26 ►

Carroll, Pershing, Wapahoe, Washoe, whatever it is, Reno,

00:48:30 ►

and bust you, so what they do is they tax you.

00:48:33 ►

And we’re like shooting fish in a barrel out here.

00:48:36 ►

So they’ll just find where we all are,

00:48:39 ►

and one by one go in and bust us,

00:48:40 ►

and charge us as much as we can possibly imagine,

00:48:43 ►

because we will pay it because

00:48:45 ►

it keeps us from going to prison and they walk out of here millions of dollars richer i don’t know

00:48:51 ►

what pisses me off more like being put sent to prison over the use of the substances i choose

00:48:57 ►

or allowing the police force to get fatter and richer and buy second cars for themselves over the use of my, you know,

00:49:06 ►

substances. It’s a vehicle and we have to find a way to stop it. And the thing is, like,

00:49:12 ►

I was blessed, you know, at Boom, I had a huge European crowd and they’re really plugged into

00:49:17 ►

this stuff and they’re politically active. I got to tell you, I could do 20, 30 gigs across this country

00:49:25 ►

and barely draw, you know, 100 people talking about this stuff

00:49:29 ►

because people don’t want to hear it.

00:49:32 ►

It bores them. It scares them.

00:49:34 ►

It means they have to do something.

00:49:36 ►

It’s a drag, man. It’s a fucking drag.

00:49:40 ►

Why do I want to be involved? Why do I want to go fight that?

00:49:42 ►

I just, I’m fine. They’re going to leave me alone.

00:49:44 ►

I’m just going to do my shit over here. Why do I have to be involved? Why would I want to go fight that? I just, I’m fine. They’re going to leave me alone. I’m just going to do my shit over here.

00:49:46 ►

Why do I have to go get political about it?

00:49:49 ►

And you’re right, you don’t if you can get away with it.

00:49:51 ►

But do you really want to hide?

00:49:54 ►

Like, do you really want to live under the fear of criminal justice and losing your life?

00:49:57 ►

Do you really want to feel ashamed to not be able to tell other people, hey, you know what?

00:50:01 ►

Like, I use psychedelics.

00:50:06 ►

I’m afraid they’re going to look at you with that crazy, like, oh, you’re one of those people, aren’t you?

00:50:11 ►

You know, fear is an amazing motivator. So I always encourage people to speak out,

00:50:16 ►

to own your shit, to stand proud with your use, to talk about what it’s done for you in a positive

00:50:21 ►

way to everybody that you can. Don’t be a proselytizer. Don’t be obnoxious.

00:50:26 ►

But just make things happen.

00:50:28 ►

Get involved in your communities.

00:50:29 ►

Get involved in initiatives to change laws.

00:50:31 ►

Get involved in initiatives to repeal drug laws.

00:50:35 ►

Try to do something.

00:50:36 ►

But more than anything else, tell your friends, tell your family, tell your mom

00:50:40 ►

that it’s not all that they told you,

00:50:42 ►

that it’s actually something different.

00:50:44 ►

that it’s not all that they told you, that it’s actually something different. It’s on all of us to make this the world that we want, and if we really want the

00:50:52 ►

freedom for our children that we’ve been fighting for and our parents were

00:50:56 ►

fighting for, then something’s got to give. And we are in this unique moment in

00:51:03 ►

time where we just might see that opening

00:51:05 ►

to make something happen.

00:51:08 ►

So keep your eyes on it.

00:51:11 ►

And I’m going to open up for some questions

00:51:13 ►

if anybody has them.

00:51:15 ►

I know that given the disjointed nature

00:51:17 ►

of my sleep-deprived talk,

00:51:18 ►

if you don’t have questions for me,

00:51:20 ►

I won’t take offense to it.

00:51:22 ►

We love you, Charles.

00:51:23 ►

Thank you, Ken.

00:51:24 ►

Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

00:51:26 ►

Thank you very much.

00:51:30 ►

You’re an inspiration.

00:51:32 ►

I would wonder if you had some

00:51:34 ►

comments to make about

00:51:36 ►

as a cultural agent

00:51:38 ►

that’s

00:51:40 ►

basically advocating for a

00:51:42 ►

criminal culture

00:51:44 ►

at this time.

00:51:45 ►

What are the consequences of that for you?

00:51:47 ►

Just speak to that a little bit.

00:51:49 ►

I’ve been thinking about it a lot,

00:51:51 ►

about how people like McKenna and Leary

00:51:54 ►

and things we were talking about earlier,

00:51:56 ►

the price that brought into their personal lives

00:51:58 ►

to stand up and be honest and just speak the truth.

00:52:02 ►

How’s that affecting you now?

00:52:04 ►

I don’t think anyone really

00:52:06 ►

takes me seriously so i think i skirt through a lot um it’s different now because i’m in my 40s

00:52:13 ►

and i cut my dreads off and i’m not a fire spinner and i’m not kind of in all of these easily

00:52:19 ►

dismissible things that people can just look at somebody and chuck them out. But I mean, you know, you got to look at it on paper. What am I? You know, I’m like a three time felon, you know, drug convictions all

00:52:32 ►

up and down the block, a history of crack addiction, like, you know, like, you know,

00:52:37 ►

post-traumatic stress disorder. So I’ve had like insane behavior my whole life. Like if you,

00:52:40 ►

if I was running for president and they had to get dirt on me, trust me, it would take a year

00:52:44 ►

just to get through all the dirt. I mean, it’s like crazy. So I don’t

00:52:48 ►

think that I’ve ever been like a threat in that sense, uh, to the, to the establishment because

00:52:54 ►

I don’t fit in. I never have. I’m kind of a freak of nature. Leary was Harvard. He was Harvard. He

00:53:01 ►

was with the best and the brightest and and he was of the proper class.

00:53:06 ►

And they had ideations that he got from Huxley,

00:53:10 ►

you know, about spreading it up the chain.

00:53:12 ►

And we know, we have the story about Kennedy and all that.

00:53:15 ►

I mean, think about that.

00:53:16 ►

So, like, I think that people like me and, like, you know,

00:53:20 ►

even like Daniel Pinchbeck, like, nobody really, like,

00:53:23 ►

even though he’s kind of the most visible of this kind of cadre of writers,

00:53:26 ►

like, I mean, he’s not like perceived as a threat.

00:53:29 ►

He’s perceived as like, you know,

00:53:31 ►

somebody who like has his spiel and thinks that he’s a big lizard from,

00:53:35 ►

you know, from the Mayans.

00:53:37 ►

And that’s kind of like the attitude of the government.

00:53:39 ►

Like who is this person?

00:53:41 ►

Whatever.

00:53:41 ►

This is not a threat.

00:53:43 ►

But as things change and as, like, movements rise and as people are looking for something new,

00:53:51 ►

I think that there are people who are speaking their mind now that will become those leaders and will become those threats.

00:53:58 ►

I don’t know if that’s going to be me or not.

00:54:00 ►

I don’t aspire for it.

00:54:01 ►

What I do is to speak my truth because it’s the deal I made with

00:54:06 ►

that power up there when it gave me a second life. That power said, I’ll let you live and I’ll give

00:54:11 ►

you joy. And I said, I will give you my life back for that. And I will spend my life spreading this

00:54:18 ►

word and talking about my shame so that you can see that there is pride in shame, that we can own it and get past it.

00:54:27 ►

And so I don’t do this to organize a movement.

00:54:30 ►

I gave up on politics.

00:54:31 ►

I used to be an organizer for the Green Party.

00:54:33 ►

I used to get into the street and get my ass beat by police.

00:54:36 ►

I thought that was cool.

00:54:38 ►

I cried for the Occupy movement.

00:54:40 ►

They were fools.

00:54:42 ►

They never should have done that.

00:54:44 ►

They just set themselves up for

00:54:46 ►

two things. One, to get beat to a pulp, and two, to justify the police presence from here on out.

00:54:53 ►

To normalize the site of Ninja Turtles, as I call them, riot cops, marching down the streets of

00:54:59 ►

tanks and sonic dispersal cannons in the streets of all of this high-tech weaponry that is called

00:55:07 ►

non-lethal crowd control you know low frequency guns that make you shit yourself these are all

00:55:14 ►

real i’ve seen them high frequency things that shatter your eardrums and disorient you

00:55:20 ►

microwaves that hit you and fry your system for a second

00:55:25 ►

to the point where you drop in compliance.

00:55:29 ►

They spend a lot

00:55:30 ►

of money on this stuff and they want to use it.

00:55:32 ►

And they know what’s coming.

00:55:35 ►

Everything that’s

00:55:36 ►

going on here is because they know what’s coming

00:55:38 ►

and they’ve known for a long time.

00:55:40 ►

And as things start to collapse, people rise

00:55:42 ►

up. And the best

00:55:44 ►

way to control them, they think, is through direct force.

00:55:49 ►

So the true revolutionary leaders, I think, are going to be the ones to figure out how to not go in the street

00:55:55 ►

and how to disseminate the revolution by other means.

00:56:00 ►

I’d like to be a part of it, I could say.

00:56:02 ►

I’d like to be a part of it, I could say.

00:56:11 ►

But at this point, my friends that are in the military, CIA, intelligence,

00:56:15 ►

they’re not operative type people, but they’re sources and they’re people that you talk to.

00:56:22 ►

And FBI in particular, they are obsessed with Arabs, foreigners.

00:56:25 ►

They literally feel like they’re being besieged on all sides, and everything at home is to keep everybody at home tamped down. So I don’t

00:56:31 ►

I mean I wish I could like give you an answer that didn’t sound either like

00:56:36 ►

trite or megalomaniacal you know because I just don’t know. It’s so easy to

00:56:42 ►

discredit someone these days too. With the internet you can have a fake video and a rumor totally ruin somebody overnight.

00:56:50 ►

If they have a big enough reach.

00:56:52 ►

I also think that the real revolution is going to come from women personally.

00:56:57 ►

I think enough guys have tried to lead the revolution and it’s always the same thing because men have the same intention.

00:57:04 ►

We always enter into a war paradigm. Guys have tried to lead the revolution, and it’s always the same thing because men have the same intention.

00:57:10 ►

We always enter into a war paradigm, and we’ve got to stop that war paradigm.

00:57:19 ►

Man, at least the feminine will allow us to get out of that war paradigm and get into something that is a collaborative negotiation of disputes and grievances.

00:57:23 ►

But I don’t know what that’s going to look like. You know, I as I understand it, Oregon and Colorado are looking at legalization this November.

00:57:31 ►

What do you think? Where do you think that’s going to head?

00:57:34 ►

Do you think that’s going to start paving the way for some sane drug policy in this country?

00:57:37 ►

I think a memo went down from the White House recently that said, don’t interfere with legalization because it’s an awesome opportunity for us to make some

00:57:46 ►

money. I think they see that not

00:57:48 ►

only can they tax it, but they can also

00:57:50 ►

tax people who get, they’ll

00:57:52 ►

still bust you for it, but instead of it being

00:57:54 ►

a criminal offense, it’ll be a ticketable

00:57:56 ►

offense, and they’ll just

00:57:57 ►

add 20 more cops to every force

00:58:00 ►

to go out and bust every weed smoker with a ticket.

00:58:02 ►

And they’re going to start making money that way.

00:58:04 ►

That’s why I think the shift happened i mean uh prop uh what was it i’m sorry 18

00:58:09 ►

the legalization initiative in california got shot down because it had more money

00:58:14 ►

and because uh conservative voters were angry they felt that they had been duped by proposition 215

00:58:21 ►

moderates and conservative because you know almost% of the state voted for it.

00:58:25 ►

It was overwhelmingly positive in favor of medicinal marijuana in 1996,

00:58:29 ►

except that the conservative and moderates thought that they were voting

00:58:32 ►

for terminally ill patients to be able to have cannabis in their last days,

00:58:39 ►

not like, well, I take it for my, you know,

00:58:48 ►

meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, meh, well I take it for my you know people abusing it the black market getting involved and turning out

00:58:50 ►

Dr. Mills and all this stuff and get your

00:58:52 ►

recommendation online that shit pisses off

00:58:54 ►

the right wing and they got really upset by it

00:58:56 ►

and what they’ve been trying to figure out

00:58:58 ►

since then is how we can integrate legalization

00:59:00 ►

into it

00:59:01 ►

and I think they want to do it

00:59:03 ►

I know that Philip Morris has bought

00:59:05 ►

50,000 acres in Mendocino

00:59:08 ►

County. I know that

00:59:10 ►

there is a patent out

00:59:11 ►

not only for a Monsanto

00:59:14 ►

type cannabis plant, but also

00:59:16 ►

a killer weed that can be dropped

00:59:18 ►

into the

00:59:19 ►

existing females all over.

00:59:22 ►

So basically one

00:59:23 ►

runaway male plant in the

00:59:25 ►

right place can wipe out like hundreds and hundreds of acres of female plants and just

00:59:31 ►

pollinate them all at once. And it’s like a ripple effect. And there’s genetically modified

00:59:37 ►

versions of this that have been patented, you know, that I’ve heard people talk about. And I

00:59:40 ►

definitely have heard about the, you know, and seen the documentation on like the whole

00:59:45 ►

land buying and the whole like

00:59:47 ►

trying to get a hold, get inside

00:59:49 ►

the industry.

00:59:53 ►

I think we should

00:59:54 ►

be pretty ready to see pot get

00:59:55 ►

legalized starting in small places

00:59:58 ►

and roaming around just like the 70s.

01:00:00 ►

And, you

01:00:02 ►

know,

01:00:02 ►

depending on the economics

01:00:05 ►

it’ll either like continue to grow

01:00:07 ►

until it’s not an issue or you know

01:00:09 ►

there’ll be another conservative backlash in 20 years

01:00:11 ►

you know

01:00:12 ►

awesome wow

01:00:15 ►

thanks for coming out on a Tuesday guys

01:00:17 ►

I appreciate it thanks for putting up with my

01:00:19 ►

rambling sleep deprived talk

01:00:21 ►

again my

01:00:22 ►

book is Exile Nation

01:00:24 ►

my website is Exile Nation.

01:00:27 ►

My website is ExileNation.org.

01:00:29 ►

I also am a documentary filmmaker.

01:00:32 ►

I have a film up there called The Exile Nation Project,

01:00:35 ►

which is an oral history archive of interviews of people who have gone through the criminal justice system

01:00:37 ►

and been involved in our drug laws.

01:00:39 ►

I would check it out when you get a chance.

01:00:41 ►

I’m currently in post-production on a new documentary

01:00:43 ►

about the whole deportation issue.

01:00:46 ►

And I hope all of you come down to 2 o’clock

01:00:49 ►

and E to Fractal Nation,

01:00:52 ►

because we are opening tonight and tomorrow.

01:00:54 ►

And we’re going to have a big opening ceremony tomorrow night.

01:00:57 ►

And if we had another half hour,

01:00:59 ►

I’d tell you all about why I do this type of work out here

01:01:01 ►

and about what building community and post-apocalyptic training is,

01:01:04 ►

but I’ll save that for another day. Again, Chris and everyone

01:01:08 ►

and Annie and the Tea House and Palenque,

01:01:11 ►

thank you for letting me be a part of this. This is a true honor and I’m

01:01:16 ►

really, really psyched to have been able to talk with you guys today.

01:01:21 ►

Thanks, Charlie. We’re happy

01:01:24 ►

to have you with us.

01:01:25 ►

And just to let you know, I’m not sure if you noticed the chandelier here,

01:01:29 ►

but the chandelier has seen other psychedelic discussions

01:01:33 ►

when it was living above Tim Leary’s dining room table in his house.

01:01:38 ►

So we brought it out here to sort of set the space.

01:01:41 ►

So we have Ken Adams coming on up next.

01:01:45 ►

He’s going to talk about producing

01:01:46 ►

the Terrence McKenna experience movie.

01:01:48 ►

And then we’re going to screen the movie

01:01:50 ►

at about 8.30 right after the sun goes down.

01:01:53 ►

So stick around.

01:01:54 ►

Take a five to ten minute water break.

01:01:56 ►

Encourage your friends to come over

01:01:57 ►

and we’ll keep having an awesome time.

01:01:59 ►

So thank you guys.

01:02:02 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:02:05 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:02:11 ►

Well, since my throat is still a little bit scratchy,

01:02:14 ►

I don’t want to stretch it by doing a lot of talking right now.

01:02:18 ►

However, there are a couple of things that I want to be sure you didn’t miss.

01:02:21 ►

One of the things that Charles mentioned just now

01:02:24 ►

was how the heroin

01:02:26 ►

epidemic hit the streets in Vietnam during the American War there via the Golden Triangle. And

01:02:32 ►

in case you’re interested in that history, there’s a really terrific book that covers that story in

01:02:38 ►

great detail. That story and more, in fact. It’s titled The Politics of Heroin CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade

01:02:46 ►

and it’s by Alfred W. McCoy

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who happens to be a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin

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and for anyone interested in the deep background about the drug war

01:02:57 ►

well, I think this book is probably required reading

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I’ve got a copy of the original publication from 1972

01:03:04 ►

as well as the 1991 edition,

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but there’s now an even later edition available, and I can promise you that after reading that

01:03:13 ►

book, you’ll never again see the CIA and the U.S. government in the same light as you did before

01:03:19 ►

reading it. Another thing that Charles mentioned was his expectation that the state of Oregon would be one of the first states to legalize cannabis

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well guess what the measure failed in Oregon this time but it did pass in both the state of Washington and the state of Colorado

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so a rocky mountain high can now be a legal part of a ski vacation, at least for those who can afford

01:03:45 ►

such things. And the one thing that I’d like to pass along about those legalization votes is this.

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Over and over and over you’re going to be hearing the phrase that recreational use of cannabis has

01:03:58 ►

now been approved in two states. But think about that for a moment. The way that this vote is being

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framed still I think marginalizes pot smokers.

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How many times have you ever heard about the recreational use of alcohol?

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I’ve never heard booze called a recreational drug, even though that’s how it’s almost always used.

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So the cannabis community here on the West Coast is encouraging everybody to drop the word recreational

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and instead say that

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responsible adult use has been approved. And since I’m on this little rant, I just can’t let this

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pass. Recently, I heard one of my friends say that there have been times when he’d been using

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cannabis so much that he didn’t seem to be able to get high and had to stop using it for a few

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days so that it would, quote, work again. Now, stop and think about that for a minute. Just because

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he wasn’t feeling high, it didn’t mean that all of the other benefits of cannabis were denied him.

01:04:56 ►

Maybe he wasn’t high, but he still received the anti-cancer, anti-aging, and anti-dementia

01:05:02 ►

benefits, along with a whole host of other good things that

01:05:05 ►

come from using this magical herb. So while he didn’t feel as if he was getting high,

01:05:11 ►

nonetheless, his responsible adult use of the plant still provided him with many reasons to

01:05:17 ►

keep on toking. And in fairness, I’m sure that he agrees with this and just had a moment where he

01:05:23 ►

didn’t completely think through his comments.

01:05:25 ►

And of course, you know, I’ve done the same thing on more than one occasion.

01:05:29 ►

So I’m not giving him a hard time here.

01:05:32 ►

I’m just reminding all of us to think through what we’re saying from time to time, especially myself.

01:05:39 ►

One last thought and then I’m out of here.

01:05:42 ►

My nose is stopping up again.

01:05:44 ►

Pleasant thought to pass along to you, isn’t it?

01:05:47 ►

Anyway, I’ve been remiss lately in not saying much about what’s going on with the Occupy movement.

01:05:53 ►

And unless you’re specifically looking for news about it, you may think that it’s faded away.

01:05:58 ►

But that’s far from the mark.

01:06:01 ►

While the initial phase of getting people’s attention and exposing the fact that our

01:06:06 ►

police departments are rapidly becoming militarized, well that phase has ended. But the quiet behind

01:06:13 ►

the scenes work of the movement continues. For instance, there have been many home foreclosures

01:06:18 ►

that have been prevented after some of our occupiers became involved. And during the recent super storm on the east coast of the U.S.,

01:06:26 ►

it was people from Occupy Wall Street who collected food and other supplies

01:06:30 ►

to give out during the recovery period.

01:06:33 ►

In fact, during the storm, I also saw some of our old friends like Tim Poole

01:06:37 ►

and other video streamers reporting live from the scene,

01:06:41 ►

which means that this new form of citizen journalism

01:06:44 ►

that sprung

01:06:45 ►

up at the Occupy movement is still alive and well.

01:06:48 ►

But my favorite tactic that the movement is now using is one called Rolling Jubilee, which

01:06:55 ►

is a bailout of the people by the people.

01:06:58 ►

Basically, Rolling Jubilee is a project that buys debt for pennies on the dollar.

01:07:04 ►

However, instead of collecting the debt or hounding the people for the money, it abolishes the debt.

01:07:10 ►

For example, in one case I read about, they bought $14, 000 w or t h o f ba d cre d i t c a r dd e b t f oro n l y$ 500.

01:07:17 ►

And then instead of hounding the debtors from here to their graves, they simply forgave the debt.

01:07:22 ►

They just tore up the notes and canceled it.

01:07:25 ►

And since one out of every seven Americans is now being vigorously pursued by debt collectors,

01:07:31 ►

well, it seems to me that the Occupy movement is going to find a lot of allies with this program.

01:07:37 ►

And this is all being done through donations to rollingjubilee.org, which as of right now has already raised over $100,000 in donations

01:07:46 ►

that is going to be used to cancel over $2 million of debts.

01:07:51 ►

And I’ll put a link to their website in the program notes for this podcast,

01:07:56 ►

which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.org.

01:07:59 ►

And I think it would really be worth your time, if you live here in the States at least,

01:08:04 ►

to take a quick look at their website, particularly the page of stats concerning the mountain of debt

01:08:10 ►

that’s crushing almost everyone here, particularly the students who collectively owe over a trillion dollars

01:08:17 ►

for educations that so far haven’t provided the high-paying jobs needed to pay off their debt.

01:08:24 ►

so far haven’t provided the high-paying jobs needed to pay off their debt.

01:08:29 ►

Well, for somebody who wanted to avoid politics today,

01:08:32 ►

I guess that I’ve only partially succeeded.

01:08:39 ►

But I hope that between my few words and the brilliant talk by Charles Shaw that we just heard,

01:08:44 ►

that maybe you have some new ideas about ways in which you can add your mind to helping us all create a more just, loving, and joyous society,

01:08:50 ►

both for ourselves and for those who are going to come after us

01:08:53 ►

and play this strange game of human life on planet Earth.

01:08:59 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:09:03 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

332 - Living in the Exile Nation

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