Program Notes
We were saddened to learn of the untimely death of Daniel Jabbour on April 13, 2014.
Celebrating The Life Of Daniel Jabbour: An Intersection Of Psychedelics, Activism And Technology
A transcript of this podcast is being created at https://www.fanscribed.com/transcripts/7-376-jabbor-coming-out-of-the-psychedelic-closet/ — we’ll finish it with a handful of volunteers but the more who can help, the faster it will be completed.
FOR THIS PODCAST:
Guest speaker: Daniel Jabbour
For anyone under the age of 30, this may be the most important podcast in the salon. Daniel Jabbor is a young entrepreneur and drug policy activist who, among many other accomplishments, and in a very short period of time, founded the now 4,000+ strong Psychedelic Society of San Francisco. Today’s podcast features two of Daniel’s talks, one from the recent Palenque Norte Lecture Series at the 2013 Burning Man Festival, and another from a psychedelic conference at which he detailed some of the successes of the SSDP, Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. No matter what your age, this is an important message for you to think about. If you know history, you know that quite often it is the young people who are the ones to change its course. These talks by Daniel Jabbor will give you more positive hope for the future than you have had in a long time.
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Daniel Jabbour.]
“The War on Drugs was started as a way to control and segregate various groups of society.”
“The drug war is increasingly a war on youth. Over 50% of marijuana arrests in this country [the U.S.] are people under 29 years old.”
“We desire to alter our state of consciousness. It’s an evolutionary thing.”
The Psychedelic Society of San Francisco
Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP)
Students for Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP) is the only international network of students dedicated to ending the war on drugs. At its heart, SSDP is a grassroots organization, led by a student-run Board of Directors. We create change by bringing young people together and creating safe spaces for students of all political and ideological stripes to have honest conversations about drugs and drug policy. Founded in 1998, SSDP comprises thousands of members at hundreds of campuses in countries around the globe.
Be sure to visit
http://www.eff.org
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
To begin, I first would like to thank Max H. and Phil M. for their generous donations to the salon.
00:00:39 ►
Also, my thanks goes out to Conrad D. and to Mike, who sent a recording of an interesting talk and a cool t-shirt from Mike.
00:00:46 ►
And then there are two people who deserve special recognition for having been long-time patrons of the salon,
00:00:51 ►
and they are Stabila from Florida and Corey S. from Germany.
00:01:00 ►
It just continues to amaze me how all of you fellow salonners support these podcasts in such a wide variety of ways,
00:01:05 ►
but it sure does let me know that I’m not the only one who realizes that, hey, we’re all in this together.
00:01:07 ►
Which brings me to the introduction of today’s talk.
00:01:11 ►
Two talks, actually, and they are both from a young man who has long been one of my heroes,
00:01:17 ►
Daniel Jabbour.
00:01:19 ►
Although Daniel and I have never met, for several years now, several of my friends have been keeping me aware of the awesome work that he’s been doing.
00:01:28 ►
Hopefully, you’ll not only think about what Daniel has to say in these talks, but you’ll also take action on them.
00:01:36 ►
At the very least, I hope that you pass this podcast on to at least one person who is in college or even younger, just to let them know that if they want to,
00:01:45 ►
they can join in an ever-growing wave of young people who are, well, they’re going to make
00:01:50 ►
the 60s seem very uneventful, I think.
00:01:53 ►
And whether you realize it or not, the young elders in our community are taking over.
00:01:59 ►
And I suspect that before they’re done, they’ll have brought an end to one of the longest and most vile wars in human history, the so-called War on Drugs, but what is actually a war on
00:02:11 ►
people of color and a war on consciousness itself.
00:02:16 ►
In just a moment, you’ll hear Christopher Pezza introducing Daniel Jabbour as he takes
00:02:21 ►
stage at the 2013 Burning Man Festival to deliver his Palenque Norte lecture.
00:02:28 ►
And in Pez’s introduction, you’re going to hear more about this remarkable young man.
00:02:33 ►
Following his Palenque Norte lecture, I’m going to play another talk given by Daniel.
00:02:39 ►
It was given in April of 2011 at the Entheo Visioning Conference that was held in San Francisco.
00:02:46 ►
And in that presentation, Daniel talks more about his work with SSDP, Students for a Sensible
00:02:52 ►
Drug Policy.
00:02:53 ►
So now let’s join Pez and some of our fellow salonners who were able to make it to the
00:02:59 ►
playa this year as they welcome Daniel Jabbour.
00:03:04 ►
All right, everybody.
00:03:05 ►
Make yourselves comfortable.
00:03:07 ►
Thanks for being here at Palenque Norte.
00:03:10 ►
We have a great lineup today.
00:03:13 ►
Rick Doblin, Daniel Pinchbeck, Roland Griffith.
00:03:16 ►
Many people will be here later this evening, so stick around all day.
00:03:20 ►
And we’re serving tea next door, the Full Circle Tea House, all day as well.
00:03:24 ►
So check that out.
00:03:26 ►
So up next we have Daniel Jabbour, and Daniel’s part of Camp Soft Landing here.
00:03:31 ►
He is helping actually co-run this speaker series.
00:03:35 ►
And Daniel’s an entrepreneur in the San Francisco Bay Area
00:03:38 ►
who also is a drug policy activist who founded the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco,
00:03:44 ►
which holds talks similar to these regularly Society of San Francisco, which holds talks
00:03:45 ►
similar to these regularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. So I encourage you to join their
00:03:51 ►
meetup group and check them out online. And with that, I’m very excited to introduce Daniel.
00:03:58 ►
Thanks, Chris. All right. So like Chris said, I’m Daniel.
00:04:07 ►
And like many speakers before me today, I’m here to talk about psychedelics.
00:04:11 ►
Could have guessed that, probably.
00:04:15 ►
But what brought me to think about this topic in the first place?
00:04:18 ►
Well, like Chris mentioned, I’m the founder of the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco,
00:04:21 ►
which is a group that works to foster discussion, education, and community between consciousness seekers. I’m also a hacker and a builder.
00:04:29 ►
I’m also a drug policy activist, and I’ve done lobbying at the state and national level.
00:04:35 ►
I started a Students for Sensible Drug Policy chapter in college. If any of you are in school
00:04:40 ►
or know anybody that’s in school, I highly encourage them to join their school’s chapter of SSDP
00:04:45 ►
or to start one.
00:04:47 ►
It’s the nation’s largest student group
00:04:50 ►
working to end the war on drugs,
00:04:52 ►
and they’ve done some really great work.
00:04:55 ►
So I have a confession for this crowd,
00:04:58 ►
and it’s actually kind of maybe a little embarrassing
00:05:02 ►
because it’s unusual.
00:05:04 ►
Up until college, I was a
00:05:06 ►
pretty straight-edge kid. I hadn’t really used any drugs at all. I didn’t even smoke pot until I got
00:05:15 ►
to college. And the reason why is that, you know, I was always kind of a geek and, you know, I like
00:05:23 ►
to believe that my educators didn’t lie to me, but they did.
00:05:27 ►
And, you know, I’m sure you guys know about D.A.R.E. and what it teaches you.
00:05:32 ►
You know, there’s a lot of real dangers that exist with drugs, but to make up lies just is crazy.
00:05:38 ►
And when I got to college, I saw people I respected, people that were around me that were smart and capable people using drugs,
00:05:45 ►
and it made me question everything I was taught.
00:05:48 ►
In fact, it started kind of an existential crisis for me.
00:05:52 ►
But maybe that was a good thing, because then I found mushrooms, my first psychedelic.
00:05:58 ►
And it changed my life.
00:05:59 ►
I learned more about myself and my interactions with the world around me in one afternoon than I think I had previously in my entire life.
00:06:09 ►
And since then, I’ve become quite the psychonaut.
00:06:12 ►
I’ve been using psychedelics as a practice and part of enriching my life.
00:06:17 ►
And I’ve tried to be open whenever possible about my psychedelic use to my friends, family, employers in many cases, because the
00:06:28 ►
drug war is only going to be won when we put a face on ourselves, much like the gay rights
00:06:33 ►
movement succeeded through coming out.
00:06:36 ►
It’s an important phase, I think, of social justice movements where, you know, we’re not
00:06:41 ►
visible necessarily.
00:06:43 ►
where we’re not visible, necessarily.
00:06:47 ►
But what I wanted to talk about today is that there’s something going on that can’t be stopped.
00:06:52 ►
Psychedelics are at least as popular now as they were in the 1960s.
00:06:57 ►
Maybe even more so.
00:06:59 ►
The 60s was heralded as the nexus of psychedelics,
00:07:03 ►
and it’s an awesome thought to me
00:07:06 ►
that psychedelics are as popular now.
00:07:09 ►
And they’re only becoming more prevalent every day.
00:07:14 ►
So drugs are super popular.
00:07:16 ►
And the last 40 years of the drug war
00:07:19 ►
has been a total waste.
00:07:22 ►
And the reason is simple, I think.
00:07:24 ►
The government is ill-equipped and slow to legislate
00:07:26 ►
on social justice issues,
00:07:28 ►
whether we’re talking about drugs or new technologies
00:07:31 ►
like file sharing,
00:07:32 ►
or the idea of downloading digital blueprints for weapons
00:07:35 ►
and printing a handgun with a 3D printer.
00:07:38 ►
Yes, some of these things are scary,
00:07:40 ►
but the government can’t stop the distribution of material
00:07:43 ►
or behavior that it makes illegal through legislation.
00:07:46 ►
And we aren’t that far away from downloading digital drugs either.
00:07:50 ►
As brain-computer interfaces become more and more advanced
00:07:53 ►
to the point where our thoughts can interface with software,
00:07:57 ►
we’re already making some really cool strides on that.
00:08:00 ►
We have rat brains that can fly flight simulators.
00:08:04 ►
Imagine having a backup co-pilot that was just like a
00:08:08 ►
petri dish with a weird rat brain in it. It could be built.
00:08:14 ►
Imagine being
00:08:16 ►
able to think about a search term and Google it. How will that change education?
00:08:20 ►
Or imagine downloading a new digital drug and altering our consciousness.
00:08:25 ►
When I started the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco,
00:08:28 ►
I did so with the goal of helping to spread education
00:08:31 ►
and positive information with the world.
00:08:34 ►
We’ve only been around for about two years,
00:08:37 ►
not even two years,
00:08:38 ►
and 4,000 members later,
00:08:41 ►
we’ve been nurturing something so much more
00:08:43 ►
than just education and information, I think.
00:08:46 ►
We host a variety of types of events, film screenings, lectures, discussions.
00:08:51 ►
But I think that one of the biggest things that we provide that I didn’t even try to provide
00:08:56 ►
is a space where people can come together and talk about their experiences and integrate their
00:09:01 ►
experiences. I used to work in an office building in San
00:09:06 ►
Francisco. Now I work in a warehouse. I think I like it better. But when I worked in the office
00:09:12 ►
building, there was a law office across the hall. And this lady cornered me one day when I was on
00:09:19 ►
the way to the bathroom. And she saw me putting up posters for a psychedelic society event and she was like, I just want you to know that psychedelics
00:09:26 ►
are a deep, fundamental part
00:09:29 ►
of my personal practice
00:09:31 ►
and I take them very seriously
00:09:33 ►
and she just wanted to share that with somebody
00:09:37 ►
and she told me she’s not out at work
00:09:38 ►
and she even used that phrase,
00:09:40 ►
not out at work.
00:09:43 ►
And that she came to one of our events
00:09:46 ►
and was just amazed at being able to have conversations
00:09:49 ►
because I think that, you know,
00:09:51 ►
especially with the older community,
00:09:53 ►
people that maybe got married and has kids, had kids,
00:09:57 ►
you know, perhaps a lot of them have lost touch
00:10:00 ►
with friends that use psychedelics
00:10:02 ►
or with access to psychedelics.
00:10:03 ►
So I think that the psychedelic society I’ve seen, and here at Burning Man too,
00:10:08 ►
I think we see this tremendous cross-generational effect happening.
00:10:12 ►
And I think that’s really beautiful and pretty rare in most cultures
00:10:15 ►
where there are elders that certainly have wisdom that us youngins don’t have.
00:10:22 ►
And I think that elders can look to the younger folks as well for information on cutting-edge science
00:10:27 ►
or new research chemicals or what have you.
00:10:30 ►
I think that’s really cool.
00:10:33 ►
In fact, I have another short little story,
00:10:36 ►
which is that I was at Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco,
00:10:39 ►
which is this hippy-dippy organic grocery store.
00:10:42 ►
And I was picking up 5-HTP,
00:10:45 ►
and I’m in the nutritional supplement aisle,
00:10:47 ►
and I’m looking for it.
00:10:48 ►
And there’s this old lady with gray hair
00:10:50 ►
hunched over looking for something, too.
00:10:52 ►
And she’s like, oh, what are you looking for?
00:10:54 ►
And I told her 5-HTP.
00:10:55 ►
And she starts, like, pulling out the different brands
00:10:58 ►
and explaining what’s different about them.
00:11:00 ►
And she’s like, what are you taking it for?
00:11:02 ►
And I was like, well, you know,
00:11:03 ►
after an experience with MDMA or certain psychedelics, I like to take 5-HTP because my brain is using a lot of its
00:11:10 ►
serotonin. And she said, wow, aren’t you smart for your age? You know, because she was impressed that
00:11:17 ►
like young people care about their health or whatever. And we started talking about psychedelics.
00:11:23 ►
So it’s amazing how much, yeah, that cross-generational effect happens. And we started talking about psychedelics. So it’s amazing how much that cross-generational effect happens.
00:11:28 ►
And we had a really great chat.
00:11:30 ►
So as I said before, San Francisco was the outright nexus of psychedelics
00:11:34 ►
when they were first embraced by the counterculture of the 60s.
00:11:38 ►
The problem at the time was that psychedelics became synonymous with counterculture alone.
00:11:43 ►
And the mainstream culture feared and rebelled against these compounds.
00:11:48 ►
Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a member of either the mainstream culture or the counterculture.
00:11:53 ►
Most of my closest friends are the biggest freaks in the world, and I’m totally proud of them.
00:11:57 ►
But there’s also nothing wrong with building a mainstream culture
00:12:01 ►
that enriches one’s life through spiritual, psychedelic, or psychotherapeutic practice.
00:12:07 ►
And ultimately, I’d like to think that we’re building a community
00:12:09 ►
around the practice of enriching our lives
00:12:12 ►
through the psychedelic experience,
00:12:15 ►
altering our consciousness to help us perceive
00:12:17 ►
and understand the world around us.
00:12:20 ►
So I’d like to contrast the movement of the 60s to today’s a bit.
00:12:24 ►
For decades, institutionally-based, federally federally sanctioned psychedelic research was banned following the prohibition of these compounds when the drug war began.
00:12:34 ►
And while the government might not have halted research entirely, I’m sorry, and while the government halted research entirely, it’s now back.
00:12:42 ►
And there are many speakers here that will talk about it, so I won’t go into it too deeply. But when Nixon began the war on drugs, it wasn’t an attempt to curb
00:12:52 ►
addiction. It was an attack on the free-spirited counterculture that favored psychedelics.
00:12:58 ►
The origins of the drug war have never been about reducing the harms that drugs cause to individuals.
00:13:02 ►
If it was, we’d eliminate prohibition as we have well documented its failure. Rather, the war on drugs was started as a way to control and segregate
00:13:10 ►
various groups of society. Just to go back in history a little bit, because I think it’s scary
00:13:15 ►
and it’s important not to repeat it. In 1937, Harry Arslinger, director of the Federal Bureau
00:13:22 ►
of Narcotics, testified before Congress saying, quote, marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.
00:13:30 ►
Most marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers.
00:13:35 ►
Their satanic music, jazz, and swing result from marijuana usage.
00:13:41 ►
This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with the Negroes.
00:13:47 ►
That’s actual congressional testimony in 1937.
00:13:53 ►
The assault on psychedelics began in the late 19th century when peyote was described as the
00:13:59 ►
cause of murder, mayhem, and insanity amongst the lazy American Indians. Then in the 1960s, the drugs were used as part of a massive rebellion
00:14:08 ►
against the government’s authority and an immoral and unnecessary war in Vietnam.
00:14:13 ►
Together with the press, the government convinced the public
00:14:16 ►
that drugs would lead to social chaos and spiritual disaster.
00:14:22 ►
A speaker last night, Ken Adams, said in 1988 when he met Terrence McKenna,
00:14:27 ►
virtually no one would discuss psychedelics in public at all.
00:14:30 ►
It would ruin their career, or their family, or their lives.
00:14:36 ►
Now, Leary famously talked in the 60s
00:14:38 ►
about turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.
00:14:41 ►
And I see nothing wrong with turning on or tuning in.
00:14:44 ►
But it’s the dropping out that had me worried or has me worried.
00:14:47 ►
I think psychedelics have a profound effect on us.
00:14:50 ►
And how can we journey without context or ritual
00:14:53 ►
or supportive community around their use?
00:14:56 ►
I would argue that we shouldn’t be trying to drop out of our culture.
00:15:00 ►
But instead, we should try to model our cultural practices
00:15:03 ►
around what we think is right.
00:15:06 ►
Psychedelics weren’t always counterculture.
00:15:10 ►
In fact, the irony is, when LSD was first synthesized,
00:15:14 ►
it was used by bougie white therapists
00:15:16 ►
with their upper-class white clients,
00:15:18 ►
who could afford therapy, of course.
00:15:21 ►
And it was hardly countercultural.
00:15:23 ►
And psychedelics and science share a rich history as well.
00:15:27 ►
Many of the people and organizations that helped develop
00:15:29 ►
the ideology of technology, of the computer as we know it today,
00:15:35 ►
including Doug Engelbart, Xerox PARC, Apple Computer,
00:15:38 ►
Microsoft Windows, they can all be attributed
00:15:40 ►
to countercultural figures and the movement
00:15:43 ►
of the late 1950s and 60s.
00:15:45 ►
An old saying from geek culture about the early days states,
00:15:50 ►
two major products have come out of Berkeley, LSD and Unix.
00:15:55 ►
Unix being the basis of much of today’s serious computing.
00:15:59 ►
PCR, an important DNA process widely used in every genetics lab in the country practically,
00:16:04 ►
was invented by Carey Mullis, who was quoted as saying,
00:16:09 ►
quote, what if I had not taken LSD ever? Would I still have invented PCR?
00:16:13 ►
I don’t know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.
00:16:18 ►
Even the identification of DNA itself by Dr. Crick was supposedly influenced by LSD.
00:16:25 ►
Too many acronyms.
00:16:28 ►
It is a coincidence that our first…
00:16:30 ►
Sorry.
00:16:31 ►
Is it a coincidence that our first sort of modern psychedelic revolution
00:16:35 ►
in the 1960s coincided perfectly with the computer revolution
00:16:39 ►
and the biomedical revolution?
00:16:41 ►
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but I think it’s awfully poetic
00:16:44 ►
to think they
00:16:45 ►
might have been related. And if that’s true, what does it mean for the modern psychedelic revolution?
00:16:52 ►
Ayahuasca, for example, a brew that is traditionally used by indigenous people in South America.
00:16:58 ►
Western culture didn’t discover ayahuasca until the 16th century, when Christian missionaries
00:17:03 ►
from Spain and Portugal first encountered indigenous cultures using the brew.
00:17:07 ►
Their earliest writings describe it as the work of the devil.
00:17:11 ►
And through a melding of cultures, though, today,
00:17:14 ►
there’s a number of modern religions integrating both the shamanic practices,
00:17:18 ►
like drinking ayahuasca, with Christianity that those missionaries had,
00:17:22 ►
such as the Santo Daime or the UDV.
00:17:25 ►
I’m not even going to try to pronounce it.
00:17:28 ►
Both the Santo Daime and the UDV churches now have members and churches throughout the world, including in the U.S.
00:17:35 ►
And while the main psychedelic compound in ayahuasca, DMT, is a Schedule I drug in the U.S.,
00:17:41 ►
meaning it has absolutely no use or medical benefit, according to the federal government,
00:17:46 ►
the legal status of DNT-containing plants
00:17:49 ►
is a little bit of a gray area for these religions
00:17:53 ►
because the Supreme Court allowed the UDV to import and use ayahuasca
00:17:58 ►
pursuant to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 2006.
00:18:02 ►
And that win in 2006 by the Supreme Court was huge because it forced the DEA to give
00:18:11 ►
back the ayahuasca that they had seized to the church and acknowledged that they had the right
00:18:16 ►
to use it for religious purposes. Similarly, the Native American church has been allowed to use
00:18:22 ►
peyote for religious purposes in the U.S.
00:18:26 ►
And this recent court ruling in 2006, I think, proves that psychedelics are back.
00:18:31 ►
And while the religious arguments for psychedelics might be an easier legal battle,
00:18:36 ►
the medical argument is also strong and moving forward with organizations like MAPS.
00:18:42 ►
Psychedelic science is back.
00:18:45 ►
like maps. Psychedelic science is back. Peer-reviewed, double-blind, institutionally based, and federally sanctioned psychedelic research has returned after decades of bans
00:18:50 ►
on psychedelic research. Now, psychedelics have obviously long been known to have tremendous
00:18:55 ►
potential in psychotherapy. Their unique ability to access the unconscious, mind,
00:19:00 ►
and shut down control centers of the brain allows for deep and powerful insight
00:19:05 ►
but again i won’t go too far into the science of it because there are many better speakers
00:19:11 ►
that will talk on that later but i would like to talk about um
00:19:16 ►
we’re just moving on so i think the widespread proliferation of ayahuasca is a clear example that the returning role of psychedelics in our culture, and it’s much more than the UDV and the Santo Daime.
00:19:31 ►
In fact, in the Bay Area, since I moved there, I discovered that there’s this vibrant community of ayahuasca circles and medicine circles, modern shamans, sort of neo-shamans, popping up.
00:19:42 ►
And it’s not just in the Bay Area, though.
00:19:41 ►
sort of neo-shamans popping up.
00:19:43 ►
And it’s not just in the Bay Area,
00:19:45 ►
though if you were to look at a heat map of the world,
00:19:46 ►
the Bay Area would certainly be very bright,
00:19:49 ►
second maybe only to South America.
00:19:51 ►
But it’s popping up all over the world.
00:19:55 ►
We’re starting to see circles everywhere,
00:19:56 ►
places you wouldn’t expect it.
00:19:59 ►
And I think that it’s a really fascinating practice.
00:20:06 ►
As sort of a scientific engineering guy, I had a hard hard time sitting with a shaman the first time
00:20:08 ►
it seemed a little kooky
00:20:09 ►
but I think that
00:20:11 ►
there’s certainly a lot to learn
00:20:14 ►
from indigenous cultures
00:20:15 ►
there’s certainly a lot of kookiness too
00:20:17 ►
but I think there’s a lot to learn there
00:20:19 ►
and I think that the sort of shamanic ritual
00:20:22 ►
provides this context
00:20:23 ►
for the use of psychedelics.
00:20:25 ►
It provides a space for integration.
00:20:26 ►
It provides a facilitator.
00:20:28 ►
It provides certain aspects of community that I think are really important to psychedelic practice.
00:20:35 ►
But is this the nouveau psychedelic community?
00:20:41 ►
And just like that paralegal who cornered me in the hallway
00:20:45 ►
to tell me how important her psychedelic practice was to her
00:20:48 ►
and just like in ayahuasca ceremonies
00:20:52 ►
I constantly meeting psychologists and lawyers and doctors
00:20:55 ►
and other professional folks
00:20:56 ►
this isn’t the counterculture anymore
00:20:58 ►
it’s bleeding our way into all of our culture
00:21:01 ►
and what does this all mean? if psychedelics are going to be a part of our culture. And what does this all mean?
00:21:05 ►
If psychedelics are going to be a part of our culture,
00:21:07 ►
they need to break free of stigma and secrecy.
00:21:10 ►
We need ritual and context around them,
00:21:12 ►
just as indigenous cultures had.
00:21:15 ►
And it’s up to us to invent this context,
00:21:17 ►
not just at events like Burning Man
00:21:19 ►
and other large-scale festivals,
00:21:21 ►
but in our everyday default world.
00:21:24 ►
I have so many questions. What will our
00:21:26 ►
culture look like when psychedelics are mainstream? Will we regulate these medicine circles that are
00:21:31 ►
popping up all over the world? Will there be guidelines for guides, facilitators, or shamans
00:21:36 ►
to follow? As MAPS starts to open psychedelic clinics all around the world, how will that affect our societies? You know, I think, and also what would the
00:21:48 ►
legislation be, you know, surrounding all of this? I think it’s super fascinating. And I believe that
00:21:53 ►
a small group of people can change history because it happens all of the time. But the psychedelic
00:21:58 ►
community isn’t even that small anymore. The 60,000 people here at Burning Man are only just
00:22:02 ►
the beginning. So I implore you,
00:22:06 ►
come out to your friends, come out to your family, come out to your loved ones, be open and honest
00:22:10 ►
about how psychedelics have touched you and changed your life, and consider talking to your
00:22:16 ►
legislators. Anyone can make an appointment with their legislators, and it’s surprisingly easy to
00:22:21 ►
be a citizen lobbyist. Just wear a tie or a dress and go in with some information.
00:22:27 ►
It’s going to be a fascinating time ahead.
00:22:30 ►
The psychedelics have had an amazing resurgence in recent years.
00:22:33 ►
The biggest Western civilization has seen
00:22:35 ►
since the original discovery of these compounds
00:22:37 ►
by the pharmaceutical companies in the 1960s.
00:22:40 ►
I hope that the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco,
00:22:43 ►
Palenque Norte, and all of you continue to provide a forum for psychedelic explorers to discuss their experiences, learn about psychedelic compounds from honest information sources, and perhaps get involved with drug policy reform in the future.
00:22:59 ►
The war on drugs has had a lot of negative consequences.
00:23:03 ►
When we’re talking about consciousness-altering drugs,
00:23:06 ►
we’re talking about drugs that affect the mind.
00:23:09 ►
And for the government to ban these compounds,
00:23:12 ►
ultimately, I believe it’s a form of mind control.
00:23:15 ►
It’s our cognitive liberty to use psychedelics
00:23:18 ►
as the arbitrators of our own minds.
00:23:21 ►
It’s easy to make the mistake
00:23:23 ►
of trying to measure social justice movements in the brevity of our own minds. It’s easy to make the mistake of trying to measure social justice movements
00:23:26 ►
in the brevity of our own lives. Movements don’t work that way, unfortunately. And despite the
00:23:33 ►
long road that social justice movements must take, drug policy reform has never had more wind
00:23:40 ►
in its back. The psychedelic movement has never had more wind at its back. In the next
00:23:46 ►
decade, we will see psychedelic compounds become legal pharmaceuticals. We are already seeing a
00:23:51 ►
modern interest and coming out of psychedelic users. It’s exciting to witness this history
00:23:57 ►
unfolding, and I cannot wait to see the political, scientific, and cultural significance psychedelics will play in our lifetime.
00:24:11 ►
In 1853, a white minister delivered a sermon talking of the end of slavery,
00:24:14 ►
which was inconceivable in his lifetime.
00:24:19 ►
And I want to leave you with what Reverend Theodore Parker said all those years ago,
00:24:24 ►
fighting a battle against slavery that he knew he would not be able to see the end of.
00:24:25 ►
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
00:24:30 ►
And he went on, my eyes are not good enough to see the end of that arc,
00:24:35 ►
but I know that it’s there.
00:24:38 ►
Thank you.
00:24:46 ►
So do we have some time for questions?
00:24:52 ►
I mean, I always operated under the assumption that law enforcement is monitoring us.
00:24:53 ►
I think that… Oh, yeah, absolutely.
00:24:54 ►
So the question is, how do you put yourself out there, and correct me if I’m wrong,
00:24:58 ►
without law enforcement, you know, sort of putting you on a list
00:25:01 ►
or being aware of you or targeting you in some way?
00:25:04 ►
And I think that, you know, it’s naive to think that law enforcement ever provided privacy to us.
00:25:12 ►
You know, all this NSA wiretapping stuff, it’s caused a lot of people to wake up and realize,
00:25:16 ►
holy shit, the government is centralizing all this information. And information is super powerful.
00:25:21 ►
You know, just from call records, not even the data of the call, but just the call
00:25:26 ►
records, you can figure out networks of people. If you have the call records of a few individuals,
00:25:30 ►
you can start to see who a drug dealer is or who the leader of a certain organization is.
00:25:36 ►
And I feel that, and maybe this is a little controversial to say, but I feel that
00:25:44 ►
if you’re afraid of being on a list,
00:25:46 ►
you probably already are.
00:25:50 ►
Now, that said,
00:25:52 ►
I think that these lists are probably really long.
00:25:56 ►
And I don’t think that the government
00:25:58 ►
is really systematically targeting individuals
00:26:00 ►
who use psychedelics and talk about them in an intelligent way.
00:26:04 ►
Maybe we saw a little bit more of that in the 60s,
00:26:07 ►
but that hasn’t seemed to occur in the modern psychedelic revolution.
00:26:11 ►
You know, I haven’t seen too many, like, really politically motivated arrests occurring.
00:26:16 ►
I think that the majority of arrests occur from people that don’t know their rights
00:26:19 ►
and, you know, that subject themselves to being searched.
00:26:25 ►
And I think also my own personal philosophy on this is
00:26:29 ►
I think it depends how much you have to lose in a way.
00:26:34 ►
If you’re, let’s say, moving large quantities of psychedelics,
00:26:38 ►
probably not a good idea to also be a political activist
00:26:40 ►
because you have a lot to lose.
00:26:44 ►
But I try to make sure I’m not breaking
00:26:48 ►
more than one law at a time. I try to make it a misdemeanor.
00:26:52 ►
I don’t have my rights. And I think that
00:26:55 ►
will keep you pretty safe. In America, we’re incredibly lucky at how much freedom of speech
00:27:00 ►
we have. I have friends who are activists around the world
00:27:04 ►
in some countries where they might get
00:27:05 ►
beheaded for speaking in public.
00:27:07 ►
At least we’re getting put on
00:27:09 ►
a long list.
00:27:12 ►
Any other? Yeah.
00:27:14 ►
So, the question
00:27:16 ►
is, I haven’t talked about singularity
00:27:18 ►
and everything coming together
00:27:19 ►
in one.
00:27:22 ►
I have a couple personal
00:27:23 ►
thoughts on this. I think it’s really interesting. I think
00:27:26 ►
that the connectedness of the internet is a beautiful and wonderful thing. It’s bringing
00:27:29 ►
together ideas and people in a way that we’ve never seen before. I think that as brain-computer
00:27:33 ►
interfaces, which I touched on, advance to a certain point, we’re going to be able to alter
00:27:37 ►
our consciousness through them, maybe even understand the nature of our consciousness.
00:27:41 ►
But I think it’s, you know, personally, I’m a little, I’m a skeptic. But I think it’s, you know, personally I’m a little, I’m a skeptic.
00:27:46 ►
And I think it’s a little too early to, like, predict certain things occurring.
00:27:51 ►
Like, you know,
00:27:51 ►
I’d love to be able to download
00:27:52 ►
my consciousness into a computer
00:27:54 ►
and have it live forever.
00:27:55 ►
But I don’t think we know enough
00:27:56 ►
about consciousness
00:27:56 ►
to know if that’s even possible.
00:27:58 ►
Perhaps consciousness is just
00:27:59 ►
an inherent property of the universe
00:28:01 ►
and we are doing nothing more
00:28:02 ►
than channeling it.
00:28:05 ►
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of possibilities there.
00:28:09 ►
I’m neither a theoretical physicist nor a singularity expert,
00:28:14 ►
but I think there’s a lot of cool stuff going on.
00:28:18 ►
So the question is, am I worried that as the medical community embraces psychedelics
00:28:24 ►
that patents will sort of get in the way
00:28:27 ►
or commercialism will get in the way?
00:28:30 ►
There’s a few things to point out.
00:28:31 ►
The first is that most psychedelic compounds were patented.
00:28:33 ►
LSD was patented, for instance.
00:28:35 ►
And patents only last for about 20 years,
00:28:37 ►
so they’re long since expired.
00:28:39 ►
So most psychedelic drugs, if they were legal to manufacture
00:28:42 ►
by pharmaceutical companies, would be generic drugs,
00:28:46 ►
and they would be free to compete against each other. In fact, MAPS, which is currently working through the FDA clinical trial process with MDMA, at the end of that process, they’ll have spent millions and millions of dollars to get it to be a legal pharmaceutical, and they won’t have a patent on it.
00:29:02 ►
So anyone will be free to synthesize it
00:29:05 ►
and sell it and compete against them.
00:29:06 ►
There’s a five-year period.
00:29:08 ►
Okay, there’s a five-year period. There we go.
00:29:10 ►
But after that five-year period…
00:29:12 ►
So I think ultimately they’re pivoting themselves
00:29:15 ►
to be sort of in this position of being the leaders
00:29:18 ►
of the counseling aspect
00:29:21 ►
and the psychotherapeutic context
00:29:24 ►
and running the clinics
00:29:25 ►
and coming up with, you know, perhaps lobbying around that. But, and I think that’s a smart
00:29:30 ►
approach. So I think that, you know, most psychedelics are generics. So I’m not too
00:29:36 ►
worried about patents. I think if you do develop something that’s new and you want to patent it,
00:29:40 ►
and it has a certain medical benefit, well, you know, that’s how our society operates.
00:29:44 ►
If we want to talk about disrupting that, I’m happy to have that conversation, but I think it’s a
00:29:47 ►
different one, you know. And, you know,
00:29:51 ►
I think that with most psychedelics, too, or a lot of psychedelics, they can be
00:29:55 ►
grown in your backyard. There are hundreds of species of plants and animals
00:29:59 ►
even that have psychedelics. We have psychedelics in our brains.
00:30:04 ►
So I’m not, you know,
00:30:07 ►
I think that as long as we allow for individuals
00:30:09 ►
to cultivate their own psychedelics
00:30:11 ►
and bearing in mind that a lot of these are already generic,
00:30:14 ►
I think we’re okay.
00:30:16 ►
I think it already is.
00:30:17 ►
You know, I think that cannabis legalization,
00:30:19 ►
the writing’s on the wall,
00:30:21 ►
and I think that the next edge or part of the wedge
00:30:24 ►
is going to be psychedelics
00:30:25 ►
you know in terms
00:30:28 ►
of cannabis alone you know we’re close
00:30:29 ►
to half of our states almost having
00:30:31 ►
legal medicinal cannabis
00:30:33 ►
laws passed
00:30:35 ►
not all of them have dispensaries some of them are a little
00:30:37 ►
screwed up but
00:30:38 ►
you know I think in the next election cycle
00:30:41 ►
we’ll probably see another state or two with full
00:30:43 ►
legalization maybe we’ll see a few more with medical marijuana so we’ll kind of get over this halfway tipping point and I think in the next election cycle, we’ll probably see another state or two with full legalization.
00:30:47 ►
Maybe we’ll see a few more with medical marijuana.
00:30:49 ►
So we’ll kind of get over this halfway tipping point.
00:30:54 ►
And I think if you look at how alcohol prohibition was repealed, it’s peeled back in layers and stages.
00:31:00 ►
In fact, we still in some places have weird laws around alcohol that just haven’t gotten repealed.
00:31:03 ►
So I think that’s what’s going to happen.
00:31:06 ►
And I think right now with psychedelicsics we’re attacking it from two angles we’re attacking it from a religious freedom angle
00:31:08 ►
and we’re attacking it from a medical angle
00:31:10 ►
with the work that MAPS is doing
00:31:11 ►
I think we need to broaden that religious angle
00:31:15 ►
because I think that the medical model is great
00:31:17 ►
but most people aren’t sick
00:31:18 ►
there are a lot of sick people
00:31:21 ►
and it’s awesome that psychedelics can benefit them
00:31:24 ►
but I think the majority of psychedelic users unfortunately. There are a lot of sick people, and it’s awesome that psychedelics can benefit them,
00:31:31 ►
but I think the majority of psychedelic users are the betterment of well people, and I think that’s an important aspect of it, and I think that that’s going to be more likely covered under
00:31:36 ►
religious freedom, and I know that the R word can be a little bit of a turnoff for most people. It’s
00:31:42 ►
a turnoff for me, in fact, the religion word.
00:31:45 ►
But I think we need to embrace that and broaden that definition to include spiritual practice
00:31:51 ►
like that of Burning Man and like that of that paralegal in the hallway that told me about how
00:31:56 ►
psychedelics are an important practice to her. I think that’s all religious use. And I’d like to
00:32:01 ►
see us get there. Yeah, well, the question is, do I think the war on drugs will end anytime soon, especially
00:32:07 ►
with the prison lobby? Well, I think in terms of prisons,
00:32:11 ►
that’s going to collapse eventually. We’re the jailingest country in the world.
00:32:15 ►
We have 5% of the world’s population. We have 25% of the world’s prisoners.
00:32:20 ►
We incarcerate more people per capita than any country in the world, including a lot of evil
00:32:23 ►
countries.
00:32:27 ►
So we’re the evilest in that regard.
00:32:32 ►
But I don’t think that movements end.
00:32:39 ►
I think that oppression is this thing that is going to always be chasing you or sort of coming at you.
00:32:41 ►
And it’s up to us to hack away at it.
00:32:46 ►
You know, I think that, again, social justice movements,
00:32:48 ►
they span hundreds of years.
00:32:51 ►
So you don’t really get to win, you just get to fight.
00:32:54 ►
But there are wins that happen all the day.
00:32:57 ►
In terms of what’s happening with cannabis right now,
00:32:58 ►
that’s really visible.
00:33:04 ►
But I think the day that MDMA is forced to be rescheduled because of MAPS’s work will be a pretty triumphant one as well.
00:33:08 ►
So yeah, wins are coming.
00:33:11 ►
Yeah, I think both are coming.
00:33:13 ►
I mean, certainly 3D printers can’t print chemicals right now.
00:33:17 ►
I mean, we can print DNA strands, which is interesting.
00:33:21 ►
I actually interned a little bit at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab,
00:33:23 ►
and we took the genes out of jellyfish that made them glow
00:33:26 ►
and put it in ivy plants.
00:33:28 ►
So we had this glow-in-the-dark plant.
00:33:31 ►
And that was pretty cool, and it actually got me thinking,
00:33:34 ►
what if we took the gene out of, I don’t know, the ayahuasca vine
00:33:38 ►
and put it in some harmless bacteria,
00:33:41 ►
and then you could just culture DMT in your closet?
00:33:46 ►
So that sort of stuff would be really interesting.
00:33:49 ►
But also I think brain computer interfaces are a really fascinating thing and I think
00:33:53 ►
that as they advance to the point where we can interface very cleanly with the computer
00:33:59 ►
in terms of getting and receiving information, maybe we’ll have actual programs we can run
00:34:04 ►
and jack in and feel.
00:34:07 ►
I’m not sure how that will look.
00:34:08 ►
Some researchers have, of course,
00:34:11 ►
electrodes are old school, and they can do that,
00:34:13 ►
but it’s not very high precision.
00:34:15 ►
Some researchers are experimenting with waves of light
00:34:17 ►
that can activate neurons,
00:34:19 ►
but they’re actually genetically modifying the neurons
00:34:21 ►
ahead of time to be sensitive to the light,
00:34:24 ►
and then they can trigger them.
00:34:26 ►
So I think as the brain-computer interface stuff advances,
00:34:29 ►
right now it’s still kind of crude.
00:34:30 ►
We’ll get to those digital drugs eventually.
00:34:33 ►
Yeah.
00:34:35 ►
Yeah, the lady.
00:34:36 ►
Mm-hmm.
00:34:37 ►
No, totally.
00:34:38 ►
I think the first thing is
00:34:39 ►
just try to be as educated you can about the topic.
00:34:42 ►
I think that’s always your first offense.
00:34:45 ►
You know, Anybody that…
00:34:47 ►
Oh, I received a question.
00:34:48 ►
Sorry, I keep forgetting. Any tips on
00:34:50 ►
coming out or how to remain professional
00:34:52 ►
if you’re an engineer
00:34:53 ►
when you come out about
00:34:56 ►
your psychedelic use? I think that
00:34:58 ►
the first defense is being educated.
00:35:00 ►
If you can speak intelligently
00:35:02 ►
about these topics, I think people will automatically
00:35:04 ►
respect you a little bit more if you can combat someently about these topics I think people will automatically respect you a little bit more
00:35:05 ►
if you can combat some of the things they might say at you
00:35:08 ►
or help them understand it
00:35:10 ►
because I think a lot of people just fear what they don’t know
00:35:12 ►
and I think that’s a common human trait
00:35:16 ►
I think education is a big part of it
00:35:19 ►
and certainly it’s also knowing yourself
00:35:22 ►
I don’t think that everybody has to walk around necessarily.
00:35:25 ►
Like, if you’re a school teacher, maybe it’s not a good idea to be super public right now in our culture.
00:35:32 ►
And that’s a sacrifice you’d have to make.
00:35:34 ►
But, you know, I’m an engineer, and I’ve, you know, I certainly don’t write on my professional resume that I’m the founder of the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco.
00:35:42 ►
But people Google me, and, you know and they’ll find me on YouTube or whatever.
00:35:46 ►
And I had a former employer tell me, in fact,
00:35:49 ►
you know, we Googled you,
00:35:50 ►
and we first saw these results,
00:35:52 ►
and we were like, whoa, what’s going on?
00:35:54 ►
And then they listened to one of my YouTube talks,
00:35:56 ►
and they were like,
00:35:58 ►
yeah, the arguments you made sounded rational,
00:36:00 ►
and I couldn’t disagree with any of them,
00:36:03 ►
so I think that it goes a long way
00:36:05 ►
to just kind of talk intelligently about these things.
00:36:09 ►
So the question is sort of
00:36:11 ►
would it help the stigma a bit if people went
00:36:14 ►
to places where psychedelics were legal, used them there
00:36:17 ►
and then came back and reported on their experiences
00:36:19 ►
kind of roughly.
00:36:22 ►
So yeah, I think that’s great.
00:36:27 ►
But I don’t think that most people have the means to travel abroad and use psychedelics.
00:36:29 ►
It’s great if you can.
00:36:31 ►
Personally, I’ve only ever drank ayahuasca in the US.
00:36:33 ►
I would love to go do it in Peru.
00:36:36 ►
Maybe I will eventually.
00:36:38 ►
But, yeah, I’m not personally sure
00:36:42 ►
how much that really helps change somebody’s mind.
00:36:46 ►
It’s kind of a fine line, right?
00:36:48 ►
Like, I used a psychedelic, but it was legal where I was.
00:36:52 ►
But it’s an interesting thought.
00:36:55 ►
You know, it’s also an interesting thought to think about, you know, of course, when, like, C-Steed or some of these organizations that are building cities out in international water
00:37:06 ►
started popping up, there was talk of creating like psychedelic utopias in international water.
00:37:12 ►
And I think that’s kind of interesting. I’d like to go visit one of those.
00:37:15 ►
So sure. The question is, what does the Psy Society of San Francisco do?
00:37:20 ►
So we host a variety of events, lectures, film screenings, discussions, social gatherings.
00:37:28 ►
And there’s no psychedelic use at our events.
00:37:31 ►
We try to keep them above board so we don’t get shut down.
00:37:35 ►
But we’ve done, like, we had a mycologist come out and walk us through Golden Gate Park
00:37:40 ►
and identify all the species of mushrooms, whether they were psychedelic or not.
00:37:45 ►
We have done film screenings of a couple cool movies. We’ve had some great international
00:37:51 ►
speakers. We host a book club once a month. So it’s really just a space. We try to create safe
00:37:56 ►
spaces to just foster discussion and community between psychedelic folks. And we’ve made some
00:38:01 ►
good friends in the Bay Area, too. There’s a lot of other amazing supporting organizations.
00:38:06 ►
So the question is,
00:38:07 ►
are there any sort of political changes
00:38:09 ►
that are eminent or are there any emerging parties
00:38:12 ►
that are working to end the drug war?
00:38:15 ►
And I would say in America, unfortunately,
00:38:16 ►
we have a two-party system,
00:38:17 ►
so I don’t really think about too much
00:38:20 ►
what third parties are doing.
00:38:22 ►
I mean, it’s interesting
00:38:23 ►
because they’re sort of making a statement, right?
00:38:25 ►
But they’re not viable candidates, generally.
00:38:29 ►
I think that the Democrats and the Republicans
00:38:32 ►
pretty much suck on drug policy.
00:38:35 ►
I have talked to a lot of Democrats
00:38:38 ►
on the Hill when I’ve done my lobbying
00:38:40 ►
that behind closed doors
00:38:41 ►
will tell me they smoke weed, basically,
00:38:44 ►
or tell me their kids do, or tell me their kids do or
00:38:45 ►
tell me they think it should be legal but they have this fear of saying that in public because
00:38:49 ►
they predominantly they think they’re going to lose votes but um i think that’s slowly changing
00:38:54 ►
we’re starting to see like for instance i saw a newspaper headline a couple of months ago where
00:38:59 ►
a politician in new england i believe said even if it costs me votes i don’t support medical
00:39:04 ►
marijuana and it was the first
00:39:06 ►
time I had seen a quote from a politician
00:39:08 ►
acknowledging that this is changing.
00:39:10 ►
Because I think previously there
00:39:12 ►
was this attitude that unless
00:39:14 ►
you are tough on drugs, you’re going
00:39:16 ►
to look like you’re soft on drugs and lose votes.
00:39:18 ►
But I think that there’s actually a middle
00:39:19 ►
ground there, which is you can acknowledge
00:39:21 ►
that the goal should be to reduce the harms
00:39:23 ►
that drugs cause and not be tough on drugs, you know. And I think it’s slowly starting. All right. Well,
00:39:31 ►
thank you very much, everybody.
00:39:40 ►
So we’re here to talk about the global youth movement to end the war on drugs.
00:39:47 ►
A little bit about me.
00:39:49 ►
Who is this guy anyway?
00:39:50 ►
Daniel Jabbour.
00:39:51 ►
I have no credentials, no PhDs, no MDs after my name.
00:39:54 ►
I feel kind of odd in the docket there.
00:39:58 ►
So I founded the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco.
00:40:01 ►
We co-sponsored this wonderful conference today. I hope you guys will get
00:40:06 ►
a chance to check out our site if you haven’t heard of us. We have an email list you can
00:40:09 ►
sign up for just outside the door as well. I also started as students for sensible drug
00:40:14 ►
policy chapter in college. I’ve engaged in lobbying at the state and national level,
00:40:21 ►
and I’ve worked with various drug policy organizations, including the Drug
00:40:25 ►
Policy Alliance, Normal, and SAVER. So I want to talk about the youth movement behind drug policy,
00:40:31 ►
and there’s really no greater organization to talk about than Students for Sensible Drug Policy,
00:40:35 ►
or SSDP. SSDP is the largest grassroots organization working to find alternatives
00:40:42 ►
to the failed war on drugs. We empower young people to come up with alternatives to punitive drug war policies,
00:40:49 ►
and we focus on policies that specifically affect students.
00:40:53 ►
We have over 180 active college chapters around the United States.
00:40:57 ►
This is just a map of our college chapters I pulled off our site last night.
00:41:01 ►
And we also have international chapters in Canada, the
00:41:05 ►
UK, Mexico, Poland, Colombia, and Nigeria. We have national staff in many of those countries
00:41:12 ►
as well as the United States and D.C. Now, what are we fighting for and why are we fighting?
00:41:19 ►
The drug war is increasingly a war on youth. Over 50% of marijuana arrests in this country are people under 29 years old.
00:41:29 ►
And there are a few main battles the SSTP has chosen to take on.
00:41:34 ►
The first one I’d like to talk about is the Higher Education Act, which controls the FAFSA and financial aid.
00:41:39 ►
If you’ve applied for college and financial aid, you’ll probably know what I’m talking about.
00:41:43 ►
And the Higher
00:41:45 ►
Education Act actually takes away aid for students with drug convictions. There’s only
00:41:48 ►
one checkbox on the FAFSA that has to do with criminal history and asks if you’ve been convicted
00:41:52 ►
of a drug crime. You could have been convicted for rape or murder or really anything else
00:41:57 ►
and you’d get financial aid, but if you were convicted on a drug crime, you would be denied.
00:42:01 ►
And also the Office of National Drug Control Policy has spent more than one and a half billion dollars on its media campaigns since 1998.
00:42:08 ►
And these put on those TV ads that I’m sure you guys have seen.
00:42:12 ►
I mean, they’re a joke.
00:42:13 ►
Like, young people know they’re a joke.
00:42:15 ►
You know, the kids getting hit on their bicycles outside the Wendy’s or this is your brain on drugs or whatever.
00:42:20 ►
But they’re more harmful than just being a joke.
00:42:21 ►
First, they’re a complete waste of money.
00:42:23 ►
That’s billions of dollars.
00:42:21 ►
But they’re more harmful than just being a joke.
00:42:23 ►
First, they’re a complete waste of money.
00:42:24 ►
That’s billions of dollars.
00:42:30 ►
And second, the government conducted a study in 2006 to track the effectiveness of these ads. And not only did they find that these ads had no reduction in drug use,
00:42:34 ►
but they actually increased drug use in certain at-risk populations.
00:42:38 ►
The government’s response, of course, was to bury the research and continue with their advertising.
00:42:44 ►
So, again, on the why we’re fighting front, recently hundreds of students converged in
00:42:50 ►
Denver at our 13th annual conference.
00:42:53 ►
Last year at our 2011 conference, we had it in D.C., and we had hundreds of college students
00:43:00 ►
there from practically all the states in our country.
00:43:03 ►
We’ve had hundreds of other
00:43:05 ►
conferences as well at the state and regional level. But last year we held our 12th annual
00:43:08 ►
conference with over 400 students, and students around the country descended on DC to learn
00:43:13 ►
about drug policy, communication, and lobbying techniques. Students learned the same cutting-edge
00:43:20 ►
storytelling techniques that corporate CEOs pay thousands of dollars for.
00:43:29 ►
And the goal was to get these students to return to their communities to train others.
00:43:35 ►
And also they would get a chance to use those skills on Capitol Hill that week by lobbying our own Congress.
00:43:41 ►
All 400 of us, SACP helped set up meetings, in-person meetings with our representatives.
00:43:48 ►
And we were lobbying to end the Office of National Drug Control Policy’s media budget, which again puts on those ads, and we won. The media budget was cut to zero dollars last year for the first time since it launched.
00:43:54 ►
And that was a huge win, and that was in no small part to our lobbying that week in D.C.
00:43:59 ►
And really, we surprised the shit out of these Congress people, because they expect, oh,
00:44:03 ►
students resent us for drug policy, we can be a bunch of hippies, and they’re going to
00:44:06 ►
come in, and we’re going to talk about weed, and like, you know, they’re not going to be
00:44:09 ►
professional, but no, we put ties on. We had our little one-pagers, and we addressed them
00:44:14 ►
in their language, and we addressed them like serious people there to talk about policy,
00:44:18 ►
and really, it surprised the shit out of them. So, it was pretty awesome.
00:44:24 ►
So that’s one thing that we have taken on.
00:44:26 ►
Another thing we’ve taken on is the Higher Education Act.
00:44:29 ►
Since 2000, students with drug convictions have lost access to financial aid
00:44:33 ►
as a result of an amendment that was added to the Higher Education Act
00:44:36 ►
by Representative Mark Sauter.
00:44:38 ►
Sauter actually is no longer in Congress.
00:44:40 ►
He, of course, was Republican and was ousted on a sex scandal.
00:44:46 ►
longer in Congress. He, of course, was Republican and was ousted on a sex scandal. So in early 2006, SSDP forced Congress to scale back the law so only students who were convicted in
00:44:51 ►
college would be subject to aid elimination. And in 2008, that was further scaled back
00:44:56 ►
to allow students access to regain their aid after they’ve had a conviction through some
00:45:01 ►
process, usually rehabilitation or something like that. But Staudter added this amendment in the first place to a 257-page bill in committee without any debate
00:45:10 ►
or a recorded vote whatsoever.
00:45:12 ►
I mean, most Congress didn’t even know this was added to the Higher Education Act.
00:45:15 ►
Unfortunately, it’s just the way that policy kind of works sometimes.
00:45:19 ►
But we’ve had some wins there, and we certainly had them with the media campaigns.
00:45:23 ►
That’s been great.
00:45:24 ►
Another project of ours is On the Record.
00:45:27 ►
Basically, the idea for this campaign came up in 2007,
00:45:30 ►
when John Perry, who may or may not be in the room,
00:45:33 ►
then leader of the Franklin Pierce SSTP chapter,
00:45:36 ►
and dozens of other students followed presidential candidates
00:45:39 ►
to town hall meetings during the New Hampshire primaries.
00:45:42 ►
The goal of that, armed with sick medical marijuana patients, a cheap video camera, and YouTube, we put every presidential candidate
00:45:49 ►
on the record about medical marijuana policy. We demanded them to answer whether or not
00:45:54 ►
they would use federal resources to prosecute patients and their providers. And this is
00:45:58 ►
actually responsible for Barack Obama’s promise to end the federal raids in states with medical
00:46:03 ►
marijuana laws, which of course we all know, yes, hasn’t happened.
00:46:07 ►
But at least we got him on the record.
00:46:09 ►
And now he’s going against what he said he was going to do.
00:46:12 ►
But this was in no small part of this, John.
00:46:14 ►
Thank you, John.
00:46:16 ►
This was in no small part to SSTP’s efforts.
00:46:19 ►
And we repeated that again this year,
00:46:20 ►
where about 40 students followed candidates around New Hampshire.
00:46:24 ►
Within less than a week, they were able to capture videos of Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich,
00:46:28 ►
and Ron Paul. And these videos also were instantly posted on YouTube, and it led to several big
00:46:34 ►
media wins. They were pretty well-received, and we saw them on some major media networks.
00:46:39 ►
Another thing we focus on at SSTP is Good Samaritan policies. So Good Samaritan policies, if you aren’t familiar,
00:46:46 ►
these protect individuals from being charged or prosecuted for drug or alcohol offenses
00:46:49 ►
after calling 911 for themselves or a friend.
00:46:52 ►
You can imagine this is a pretty sensible thing.
00:46:54 ►
If someone is dying, you should be able to call 911 without fear of repercussions.
00:46:59 ►
SSTP has fortunately passed these kinds of policies at campuses across the country,
00:47:03 ►
and we’ve also been influential in statewide initiatives.
00:47:06 ►
Last year, we passed it in New York, Illinois, and Connecticut, and this year, we were able
00:47:10 ►
to pass it already in D.C., as well as Florida.
00:47:13 ►
And we received several major media hits as a result of this.
00:47:17 ►
David here was published in the Huffington Post for his effort.
00:47:21 ►
He was a leader at the University of Connecticut and worked on Connecticut’s
00:47:25 ►
Good Samaritan Policy. In Florida, we mobilized chapters across the state to put pressure
00:47:30 ►
on the governor to sign the bill into law, and in New York, our students also played
00:47:33 ►
a vital role in lobbying for the passage of the New York law.
00:47:37 ►
Another win that we’ve had, a student at Lynn State Technical College in Lynn, Missouri,
00:47:42 ►
contacted SSTP when he found out that a proposed policy would illegally drug test their students.
00:47:48 ►
And our staff quickly mobilized and called the president of the college and promised to sue him if he proceeded.
00:47:53 ►
We were pleased to work with the ACLU to coordinate plaintiffs,
00:47:56 ►
and our team of scrappy pro bono lawyers and law students who serve on our board drafted SSTP’s amicus brief,
00:48:02 ►
and we were able to get the school to not institute any legal drug testing policy.
00:48:09 ►
Another win we had last year, the UN granted consultative status to SSDP,
00:48:14 ►
and that makes us the only U.S.-based drug policy organization to hold a seat at the UN’s committee that handles drug policy.
00:48:21 ►
And hopefully our students will be rubbing elbows with diplomats and weighing in on pro-policy from a youth perspective.
00:48:30 ►
Another case you guys may or may not be familiar with was this famous bong hits for Jesus case.
00:48:34 ►
This was something that happened in Alaska. Rather than describing it, I’ll show you another
00:48:39 ►
quick video.
00:48:40 ►
January 2002. The Olympic torch is passed in Juneau, Alaska.
00:48:45 ►
Students from Juneau Douglas High School attend the school-sanctioned event.
00:48:49 ►
But across the street, 18-year-old senior Joseph Frederick, shown here in his yearbook,
00:48:54 ►
displays a 14-foot banner reading, Bong Hits for Jesus.
00:48:58 ►
The school principal takes it and suspends him.
00:49:01 ►
Teach who should teach, not limit free speech.
00:49:04 ►
Five years later, the free speech case comes to the U.S. Supreme Court
00:49:08 ►
where Principal Deborah Morse’s lawyer, Kenneth Starr,
00:49:12 ►
argues she acted in accord with the school system’s anti-drug mission.
00:49:15 ►
Schools should be able to put a stop to these kinds of pro-drug culture messages.
00:49:21 ►
They disagree.
00:49:22 ►
As members of Students for a Sensible Drug Policy,
00:49:25 ►
they traveled to Washington to demonstrate for student speech rights. If they are learning at
00:49:31 ►
such a young age that, you know, freedom of speech is more a myth than a fact, then that is sort of
00:49:34 ►
a dangerous precedent to set for our country. Hundreds of students turned out to show their
00:49:38 ►
support for Joseph’s case. Some held signs and chanted, while others came on class trips, hoping to sit in on the court’s proceedings.
00:49:49 ►
I think you guys get the idea, but basically this was an important ruling.
00:49:52 ►
Although we didn’t win the case completely, we were able to get the court on the record in their case law
00:49:59 ►
to protect the discussion of drug policy.
00:50:02 ►
What was not protected as a result of that case
00:50:05 ►
was advocating drug use,
00:50:06 ►
which the court interpreted bomb hits for Jesus to mean.
00:50:09 ►
It’s actually really comical if you read the court brief
00:50:11 ►
to see how they interpreted that sentence
00:50:13 ►
and broke it down to say,
00:50:14 ►
well, it really means take bomb hits for Jesus,
00:50:16 ►
which is encouraging drug use,
00:50:18 ►
and that speech is not protected.
00:50:19 ►
But had they say something like,
00:50:21 ►
you know, maybe the policy should be such that,
00:50:24 ►
you know, then it would have be such that, you know,
00:50:26 ►
then it would have been protected.
00:50:28 ►
So it was an important win, even if it wasn’t a complete win,
00:50:31 ►
because it did protect the discussion of drug policy in schools.
00:50:33 ►
So we at least got that far.
00:50:37 ►
But I think that throughout Americans’ history,
00:50:41 ►
it’s been the young people that have promoted and enacted the most influential,
00:50:43 ►
positive, and powerful changes in our society,
00:50:50 ►
whether you’re talking about the civil rights movement or any social justice movement. And what makes the social justice movement succeed is having a strong student base. None of them have ever succeeded
00:50:55 ►
without a big, bold student movement. And we’ve got a movement now. We’re growing, and we’re taking
00:51:00 ►
over. And there’s a good reason for this. SSTP is training the leaders of tomorrow.
00:51:06 ►
And they return to their community, they train others,
00:51:08 ►
and ultimately some of these leaders will be future leaders in our country.
00:51:13 ►
Another amazing thing about SSTP is it’s truly cross-political.
00:51:16 ►
We have conservatives, we have liberals, we have law students, doctors, scientists.
00:51:20 ►
And the skills that people learn, you know, lobbying and at SSTP, they take them beyond drug policy.
00:51:27 ►
A lot of SSTP alum have gone on to start companies, not just engaged in drug policy, but many of them also went on political careers.
00:51:34 ►
Now, I’d like to take a step back and just kind of give, you know, I’ve talked a lot about some of the wins we’ve had,
00:51:38 ►
but sometimes it seems small, like, okay, you can talk about this, but you can’t talk about this in school.
00:51:44 ►
And I just want to talk for a minute about the timeline of a social justice movement.
00:51:47 ►
One problem we commonly make is we measure social justice movements in the brevity of
00:51:52 ►
our own lives.
00:51:52 ►
Movements don’t work that way.
00:51:55 ►
Consider racial justice.
00:51:56 ►
You know when it began?
00:51:57 ►
The first day, the first slave was brought to America.
00:52:01 ►
And it took more than 150 years before there was an actual abolitionist
00:52:05 ►
movement in this country, in the middle of the 19th century, when a Eurotarian minister
00:52:10 ►
named Theodore Parker, in 1853, gave a sermon in which he talked about ending slavery. He
00:52:15 ►
said, quote, the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. And
00:52:22 ►
then he also said, my eyes are not good enough to see the end of that
00:52:25 ►
arc, but I know that it’s there. Four years later, Dred Scott challenged the constitutionality of
00:52:31 ►
slavery. And the only case where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on slavery, it upheld it. And it
00:52:36 ►
upheld it brutally. Chief Justice Roger Taney said that blacks were insubordinate and inferior
00:52:42 ►
beings that had no rights and would never have the rights
00:52:45 ►
that the white man was bound to respect.
00:52:48 ►
That is actual language from a Supreme Court decision in our country in 1857.
00:52:52 ►
And four years later, the Civil War broke out.
00:52:55 ►
In 1865, the 13th Amendment was passed,
00:52:57 ►
prohibiting and ending slavery in this country.
00:52:59 ►
And everybody thought, we did it. It was a great victory.
00:53:02 ►
But within four or five years of that, the Black Codes were passed.
00:53:05 ►
The Supreme Court undercut the 14th Amendment.
00:53:07 ►
Jim Crow laws got institutionalized.
00:53:09 ►
And we had another hundred years of racial subjugations.
00:53:12 ►
Was it as bad as slavery? No.
00:53:15 ►
But next to slavery, it was the worst system of racial subjugation we could have imagined.
00:53:19 ►
And it lasted for another hundred years until our contemporary civil rights movement started in the 1960s.
00:53:25 ►
And it resulted in the deaths of many people in a struggle that didn’t seem possible to win.
00:53:30 ►
Then in the 1960s, we had this trio of Civil Rights Act.
00:53:32 ►
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed.
00:53:34 ►
In 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed.
00:53:37 ►
In 1968, the Fair Housing Act was passed.
00:53:39 ►
Of course, these protected voting and housing rights to not discriminate based on race.
00:53:47 ►
And at one point we did it.
00:53:48 ►
We actually knocked out Jim Crow,
00:53:49 ►
and we substituted for a legal infrastructure of civil rights enforcement.
00:53:53 ►
But then what happened?
00:53:54 ►
It wasn’t enforced.
00:53:56 ►
And then it turns out that just as Jim Crow had been a successor system to slavery,
00:54:00 ►
two years after these laws were passed, Richard Nixon declared the war on drugs.
00:54:06 ►
In 1968, there were only a couple hundred thousand people in prison in this country
00:54:10 ►
for all offenses combined. And then one day not too long ago, there were 2.4 million.
00:54:15 ►
That was a successor system to racial subjugation. Just as Jim Crow had been a successor to slavery,
00:54:21 ►
the drug war had succeeded Jim Crow. And that brief little history lesson is 300 years,
00:54:27 ►
and we’re still not through it. Was it better in 1965 than it was in 1865? Of course. Is it better
00:54:34 ►
now? Of course it is. Is it over? It is not. So movements, they’re never over. They have no end
00:54:40 ►
points. They have victories, they have defeats, And they go on longer than our lifetimes.
00:54:49 ►
You hack away at the jungle of oppression, and the jungle comes back and takes the road,
00:54:50 ►
and you’ve got to hack it again.
00:54:54 ►
And you not only have to keep fighting because the forces of oppression,
00:55:00 ►
sorry, you have to keep fighting because the forces of oppression are relentlessly clever at finding new ways.
00:55:05 ►
I’m sure most of the civil rights movement had no idea that the drug war was going to be another way to continue our system of racial subjugation
00:55:07 ►
but the good news is
00:55:09 ►
that truth, justice, logic, science
00:55:12 ►
they’re all on our side
00:55:14 ►
90% of the rights that we wake up and take for granted
00:55:17 ►
and enjoy every day
00:55:18 ►
didn’t exist or weren’t enforced until 40 or 50 years ago
00:55:23 ►
and so I leave you thinking about what Theodore Parker said in 1853,
00:55:27 ►
knowing that he would not see the end of the struggle he was fighting,
00:55:30 ►
but knowing that there was always a reason to keep on fighting.
00:55:33 ►
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
00:55:37 ►
Thank you.
00:55:41 ►
I think we should have some time for questions,
00:55:43 ►
and of course if you guys would like to find out more about SSDP or make a donation,
00:55:47 ►
you’re welcome to check out our website at schoolsnotprisons.com.
00:55:50 ►
The biggest roadblocks?
00:55:51 ►
Well, I think this is a war that’s going to be won around dinner tables.
00:55:54 ►
I think that it’s not about necessarily any particular lobbying thing,
00:55:58 ►
although there’s a lot of things to be done.
00:56:00 ►
But I think that it’s important for, just like I mentioned the racial justice movement,
00:56:06 ►
I really wanted to get into women’s rights and I really wanted to get into gay rights because these are all
00:56:08 ►
social justice movements and just like the
00:56:10 ►
gay rights movement had sort of this turning point
00:56:12 ►
of, you know what, we need to come out
00:56:14 ►
I think drug users
00:56:16 ►
need to come out and I think that
00:56:18 ►
we know this from the polling
00:56:19 ►
you’re something like 86% likely to vote
00:56:22 ►
yes on a marijuana legalization
00:56:24 ►
ballot measure
00:56:25 ►
if you know someone who smokes pot, even if you don’t yourself.
00:56:28 ►
But, you know, you’re much less likely to if you don’t know somebody.
00:56:31 ►
So I think ultimately what we need to do is we need to come out.
00:56:35 ►
We need to be proud of who we are.
00:56:37 ►
We need to be respectful, you know, decent members of society.
00:56:41 ►
And we need to prove to people that drugs are, you know,
00:56:48 ►
drugs are a part of our culture. They’re a part of our consciousness, right? I mean,
00:56:55 ►
every kid, his first drug experience is probably twirling around in a little circle, right? And like no drug dealer tells them to do that, right? We desire to alter our state of consciousness.
00:57:01 ►
It’s an evolutionary thing. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:57:05 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:57:09 ►
We desire to alter our state of consciousness.
00:57:13 ►
It’s an evolutionary thing.
00:57:15 ►
Well, you can sure say that again, Daniel.
00:57:18 ►
I remember spinning in little circles until I got dizzy when I was a kid,
00:57:23 ►
and I’ve watched my own children and
00:57:25 ►
grandchildren doing the same thing. It appears to be a deeply instinctive thing to do when you’re a
00:57:31 ►
child. Nobody has to teach you. You just do it. And I now think that I’ve finally found a perfect
00:57:38 ►
example of how different American society is today than it was a couple of generations back.
00:57:47 ►
different American society is today than it was a couple of generations back. Because I really had to chuckle when Daniel began his talk by confessing that he hadn’t even smoked pot until he got to
00:57:53 ►
college. Well, don’t be embarrassed, Daniel. I was over 40 years old before I finally got around to
00:58:00 ►
it. But hey, better late than never, I always say.
00:58:12 ►
Also, I hope that you picked up on how Daniel was able to quite easily enter into a discussion about psychedelics with an older lady that he encountered at a health food store.
00:58:16 ►
I’m sure that if you saw me in a grocery store, and of course, if I didn’t have my ponytail,
00:58:23 ►
well, there’d be no way that you would think by my appearance that I had any interest at all in psychedelics.
00:58:29 ►
But you’d be wrong.
00:58:31 ►
So, right now, rather than have me go on with another one of my favorite stories,
00:58:36 ►
what I think would be much better use of your time would be for you to, say, call a friend,
00:58:41 ►
or if you’re my age or close to it, perhaps a grown child of yours, or
00:58:46 ►
even your own parents if they’re still alive, and then come out of the psychedelic closet to them.
00:58:53 ►
That doesn’t mean that you have to use psychedelic medicines yourself, but if you support the idea
00:58:59 ►
that humans should be free to explore their own consciousness any way they please, as long as they don’t cause harm to anyone else.
00:59:07 ►
If you believe that, then let your friends, relatives, co-workers, and even people you casually strike up a conversation with,
00:59:15 ►
know that you support the use of psychedelic medicines in research.
00:59:19 ►
And that always works as a great conversation starter.
00:59:22 ►
And that always works as a great conversation starter.
00:59:26 ►
You know, with the holiday season coming upon us,
00:59:31 ►
this would really be a great way to spice up the conversation around your family dinner table.
00:59:36 ►
You know, you don’t have to say that you’ve ever even thought about using them yourself.
00:59:43 ►
The entire conversation can be focused on the current medical research that, at long last last has finally begun again. After all, even the Pentagon, the U.S. Pentagon,
00:59:47 ►
has approved the medical use of MDMA, or ecstasy,
00:59:52 ►
for research into becoming a possible treatment for PTSD for war veterans.
00:59:58 ►
And since that’s the case, then how can your family avoid the fact that,
01:00:02 ►
well, perhaps maybe they too should begin to pay more attention to what’s going on in the world of psychedelic research.
01:00:09 ►
And as long as I’m preaching here, I also want to urge our fellow salonners who are in college right now to get involved with the SSDP, the Students for a Sensible Drug Policy.
01:00:26 ►
sensible drug policy. Just go back and listen once again to Daniel’s talks and give some thought to how far he’s come in such a short time and how his work, along with that of all the rest of the
01:00:31 ►
SSDP activists, quite a few of whom I’ve met at conferences by the way, well that work’s resulted
01:00:37 ►
in many positive results on a quite large scale already. So don’t think that just because you
01:00:43 ►
weren’t in college during the 60s that you missed the bus. My friends, you don’t think that just because you weren’t in college during the
01:00:45 ►
60s that you missed the bus. My friends, you didn’t miss a thing because the 60s were only
01:00:51 ►
the foundation for what is now getting underway. A new generation is taking the lessons learned
01:00:58 ►
about how to end an unpopular war and, now with the power of today’s digital technology,
01:01:06 ►
popular war, and now with the power of today’s digital technology, they’re applying those lessons to ending the current war that has actually engulfed the entire world. A true world war,
01:01:12 ►
the so-called war on drugs. It’s time. So let’s at least start talking about it to our families.
01:01:20 ►
They should know where we stand in this world war that we’re all engaged in, whether we like it or not.
01:01:27 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:01:31 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.