462 - Psychedelic Advocacy

Program Notes

Guest speakers:
Ashley Booth and Amy Ralston Povah

Today’s podcast features Ashley Booth, scientist and psychedelic advocate, and Amy Ralston Povah, a victim and hero of the War on Drugs. The talk by Ashley was given at the 2014 Palenque Norte Lectures at the Burning Man Festival, and the talk by Amy was given at a Venice, California salon hosted by Ashley in celebration of Bicycle Day 2014. Together these talks will give you a lot of things to talk about, both with friends who agree with you and the old Nancy Reagan just say no crowd… . As Ashley says, “By being a psychedelic advocate, I’m not saying that psychedelics are good for everyone, by any means. I would just like it to be an opportunity for people who would like to try it.”

Ashley Booth’s Website
Aware Project
Aware Project on Facebook

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

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

00:00:22 ►

salon.

00:00:23 ►

And today I’m thinking once again about

00:00:26 ►

Burning Man. But since I’m not going to be able to make it there myself this year, I thought that,

00:00:31 ►

well, I’d just go back to the 2014 Palenque Norte lectures and see who I’ve missed and haven’t

00:00:38 ►

podcast yet. Interestingly, to me at least, the name at the top of the list is someone who is also at the top of my list of people that I’ve begun to think about as one of our young elders.

00:00:51 ►

But now that I just said that I’m remembering that one should never imply that a woman particularly a young woman is an elder.

00:00:59 ►

But I’m sure that you know what I mean that I’m using the word elder in the sense of being a very wise person.

00:01:06 ►

And Ashley is definitely wise beyond her years, in my opinion.

00:01:11 ►

And as you’re going to hear, Ashley Booth is promoting conversations about psychoactive compounds

00:01:17 ►

in order to have intelligent, level-headed discussions about the responsible uses of psychedelics

00:01:23 ►

for both clinical and therapeutic

00:01:25 ►

purposes. Through her own inner work, she’s developed a passion for removing the stigma

00:01:30 ►

and fear surrounding psychedelics. Her strength comes from combining a background in the sciences

00:01:36 ►

with a bigger and deeper view of humanity in the world. And as you’re going to hear,

00:01:42 ►

Ashley also inspires audiences to question the default world’s thinking about psychedelics.

00:01:48 ►

And so now, here is Ashley Booth delivering her Planque Norte lecture at the 2014 Burning Man Festival.

00:01:58 ►

So I’d like to introduce Ashley Booth.

00:02:00 ►

Ashley is a scientist, philosopher, and advocate currently working as an oceanographer in Los Angeles

00:02:05 ►

Ashley uses her scientific background to break through the war on drugs rhetoric

00:02:10 ►

and have an intelligent and scientifically based conversation

00:02:13 ►

about the safety and use of psychedelic substances

00:02:16 ►

so we’re very excited to have her here with us today

00:02:19 ►

without further ado, here’s Ashley

00:02:21 ►

Thanks Pez

00:02:21 ►

Alright, start out Without further ado, here’s Ashley. Thanks, Pez.

00:02:27 ►

All right, start out.

00:02:31 ►

I’d like you to please raise your hand if you’ve had your mind blown by something unexpected

00:02:35 ►

that changed the course of your life forever.

00:02:39 ►

Okay, now please keep your hands up

00:02:41 ►

if one of those occurrences happened at Burning Man.

00:02:45 ►

Okay, that was almost everyone.

00:02:48 ►

And keep them up if that was under an altered states of consciousness.

00:02:54 ►

Also, pretty much everyone.

00:02:56 ►

Awesome.

00:02:57 ►

Well, I’m in good company here.

00:02:58 ►

You can take your hands down now.

00:03:01 ►

So today I’m going to talk a little bit first about my own personal story, the need for psychedelic advocacy.

00:03:09 ►

The title of my talk is Psychedelic Advocacy, Communicating with the Default World.

00:03:15 ►

And then give you some tools about how to communicate about such a controversial topic.

00:03:23 ►

So to start off, I’m actually an oceanographer by training and profession.

00:03:28 ►

And it’s kind of funny because marine biologists and oceanographers,

00:03:33 ►

the Scientific American Journal says that that is one of the most depressing jobs in science.

00:03:42 ►

And I’ve definitely felt that because being an environmentalist and seeing what

00:03:47 ►

we’re doing to the environment can really get you down sometimes. And I know that that was the case

00:03:53 ►

for me. And to be honest, for a while, I really kind of hated people because it was just, I saw

00:03:59 ►

them as the enemy to what was being, you know, destroyed, which was something so beautiful. But then

00:04:07 ►

my first Burning Man happened, which was about eight years ago now. And that experience really

00:04:17 ►

affected me deeply in two ways. One, just being a part of this community and being able

00:04:22 ►

to see how people interact with each other and what people can create really renewed my faith in humanity.

00:04:30 ►

And I don’t say that lightly.

00:04:32 ►

It was such a profound experience.

00:04:35 ►

And then the second thing was that I had the opportunity to try MDMA for the first time.

00:04:42 ►

And given the name Ecstasy, I would think it was going to be a pretty

00:04:47 ►

good time it’s been a pretty good marketing but uh what i didn’t expect was it to be such a a

00:04:54 ►

lasting and profound experience for me because being from a science background and being the

00:05:00 ►

daughter of an engineer and a mathematician, I’ve always been very head

00:05:05 ►

focused, very, you know, logic based. And to be able to come into this experience and have my

00:05:13 ►

heart open and be able to connect with people that in a way that I’ve never been able to do before

00:05:18 ►

was profound. And it permeated the entire rest of my life in all areas, you know,

00:05:25 ►

not just, you know, when I’m under the influence of this psychoactive compound,

00:05:30 ►

but it was on all parts of my life.

00:05:34 ►

And so fast, oh, so then, you know, as any good scientist would do,

00:05:41 ►

given the breakthrough of this kind of magnitude, I felt more research was

00:05:45 ►

needed. So fast forward about seven years now, I found myself in a 5-MeO DMT ceremony.

00:05:55 ►

And if you’re not familiar with 5-MeO, it’s not NN DMT, which is what more people have heard of,

00:06:01 ►

which is Terence McKenna’s Elf Machines.

00:06:11 ►

5-MeO is actually a compound found in the venom ducks of the Sonoran Desert Toad, of all things.

00:06:15 ►

It’s also found in many plants and actually even is made by our own bodies naturally.

00:06:18 ►

So it’s a really fascinating compound. And it’s one of the most powerful psychedelics that we know of.

00:06:24 ►

It’s one of the most powerful psychedelics that we know of.

00:06:31 ►

And through that experience, and in the context that I did it in, which was a very intentional, comfortable, supportive environment,

00:06:37 ►

I was able to go to a place that I had never thought existed.

00:06:44 ►

And my heart was, you know, it started to be kind of warmed up

00:06:48 ►

through the use of MDMA and the people that I’ve met

00:06:52 ►

through the Burning Man community.

00:06:55 ►

It just blew me open.

00:06:57 ►

And it was such a paradigm shift for me

00:07:01 ►

that when I kind of came back from my experience, I mean, I was just so

00:07:07 ►

full of gratitude from having, being able to have the opportunity to be able to even, you know,

00:07:13 ►

know about this substance, let alone try it. And, and then it just struck me that so few people

00:07:20 ►

know about this and, you know, 5-MeO is pretty obscure and, you know, most this and you know 5meo is pretty obscure and you know most people that you

00:07:26 ►

know have such a contorted view of what psychedelics are in the first place and so i felt like i was

00:07:34 ►

like activated in a way and that i wanted to be a part of this change to uh kind of heal humanity

00:07:42 ►

and it it changed my perspective from that kind of

00:07:45 ►

environmentalist, like we need to save

00:07:48 ►

the environment from these people

00:07:50 ►

to we need to heal

00:07:52 ►

humanity one individual

00:07:54 ►

at a time

00:07:55 ►

so that it heals the whole system.

00:07:59 ►

And so I became

00:08:00 ►

very much more human focused

00:08:02 ►

and in an effort

00:08:04 ►

to became very much more human-focused. And in an effort to figure out ways that I could communicate that

00:08:11 ►

and be able to contribute to that change,

00:08:13 ►

I was thinking about, well, what are my strengths?

00:08:15 ►

My strengths are being a scientist.

00:08:17 ►

And so I’ve been using my scientific background

00:08:20 ►

to be able to kind of do my own literature review

00:08:23 ►

of the scientific research

00:08:25 ►

that’s being done on psychedelics um to be and then being a bridge to be able to communicate that

00:08:30 ►

to other people and in in the same effort i’ve been also interested in just breaking through

00:08:39 ►

the rhetoric that we’ve all been fed about what psychedelics are. And what my goal is, is really

00:08:48 ►

to ignite curiosity in everyone. And so if we can, you know, if someone just has a little, a little,

00:08:57 ►

a little spark that might, you know, encourage them to go, you know, on their own research path,

00:09:05 ►

you know, encourage them to go, you know, on their own research path, then, you know, we might,

00:09:11 ►

we might, more people might have a different perspective to be able to move forward in their life. So before I move on, I’m going to have asked for a little bit of audience participation.

00:09:18 ►

And so before I get into that, I wanted to just speak one word about legality.

00:09:30 ►

It is illegal to possess any scheduled substance.

00:09:34 ►

Most of the psychedelics that we all are familiar with are scheduled.

00:09:38 ►

But the thing is that we’re also blessed with freedom of speech in this country.

00:09:42 ►

And so you can talk about your experiences openly, but I would be very cautious about talking ever about

00:09:47 ►

selling, buying, or making any kind of scheduled substance. It’s just not a good idea. So as I go

00:09:55 ►

forward in my talk, you know, please, if you do feel comfortable to speak out when I have an

00:09:59 ►

opportunity, share your own experiences. And before I move on, I want to define what psychedelic is because it’s

00:10:08 ►

kind of a fuzzy term. And a lot of classically, I think psychedelics, you know, LSD is definitely

00:10:18 ►

one of the classic psychedelics. It’s something that, you know, often has a visionary kind of

00:10:23 ►

component to it, but something that changes your perspective.

00:10:26 ►

And the word psychedelic actually means mind manifesting.

00:10:30 ►

So it’s allowing you to tap into something that’s inside of you

00:10:33 ►

that you may not have normally been able to do

00:10:34 ►

in your kind of baseline consciousness.

00:10:38 ►

But there are also other kinds of compounds like MDMA,

00:10:42 ►

which may not fall into that classic category,

00:10:48 ►

but can also be considered psychedelic. And so I’m kind of using a more broader term of anything that you can use to kind of change your perspective, both of the world and of your own process.

00:10:59 ►

All right.

00:11:00 ►

So, again, hands up if you’ve taken psychedelics.

00:11:07 ►

Okay, that’s pretty much everybody in the room.

00:11:10 ►

And does anyone want to briefly just say one of the reasons why they decided to take psychedelics?

00:11:19 ►

I took psychedelics because I found out that a lot of my favorite writers

00:11:24 ►

had written some very influential books as a result of taking psychedelics.

00:11:29 ►

And I wanted to become a famous writer.

00:11:31 ►

So I just decided to do what they did.

00:11:34 ►

Awesome.

00:11:36 ►

Great.

00:11:36 ►

And then is there anyone in the room that has decided to not take psychedelics?

00:11:43 ►

And would they like to share their reasons for not doing them?

00:11:48 ►

Not, no, never done them.

00:11:51 ►

Okay, well, we’ll just move right along then.

00:11:54 ►

Okay, yeah, anyone that’s done them and now chooses not to do them,

00:11:58 ►

does anyone want to share?

00:12:00 ►

I don’t not do them, but I do them very occasionally,

00:12:04 ►

and usually in a ceremonial context.

00:12:07 ►

The Dionysian aspect has sort of lost its appeal for me.

00:12:10 ►

But as far as going deep, going far,

00:12:13 ►

and exploring what my consciousness has to offer,

00:12:16 ►

rather than the hedonism, which I think is important,

00:12:18 ►

I’ve definitely grown up.

00:12:22 ►

I think that’s my maturation process.

00:12:24 ►

I’m no longer doing it for the pleasure of it.

00:12:27 ►

Yeah, that leads really well into my next question,

00:12:30 ►

which was, has anyone done psychedelics

00:12:32 ►

in a ceremonial or intentional setting

00:12:34 ►

that would like to share?

00:12:36 ►

Great talk, by the way.

00:12:38 ►

So I think of all the ones I’d like to sort of mention,

00:12:44 ►

my 5-MeO experience was really very profound.

00:12:48 ►

And for me, even for my first mushroom trip to that,

00:12:51 ►

it’s always been about feeling like I’m pushing my perception.

00:12:55 ►

It’s like I’m getting a higher resolution across all of my senses.

00:12:59 ►

And that was one in particular.

00:13:01 ►

And it’s also something I’ve felt,

00:13:04 ►

even with some no substances and some crazy breathing exercises,

00:13:08 ►

but really allowed me to leave my ego for a brief moment and then sort of bear witness as it came back online.

00:13:18 ►

And that was a pretty profound experience for me.

00:13:20 ►

Thanks for sharing.

00:13:22 ►

So I kind of broke up, you know, some of the reasons why we choose to do psychedelics into three categories.

00:13:30 ►

One, escape.

00:13:32 ►

You know, a lot of, not just psychedelics, but many, any other kind of altering, mind-altering substances or drinks.

00:13:40 ►

You know, alcohol is one, you know, definitely used for escape in a lot of cases.

00:13:44 ►

drinks, you know, alcohol is one, you know, definitely used for escape in a lot of cases.

00:13:49 ►

And, you know, escape can be, you know, either can be something that’s used for something that can be very harmful to the body and personal growth. But on the flip side, it can also be

00:13:55 ►

something sometimes we just need a break from our brains just to reset sometimes. And, you know,

00:14:00 ►

that’s also something that we need. Another category might be healing.

00:14:06 ►

You know, psychedelics can be very cathartic, you know, and I’ll talk a little bit more about some

00:14:11 ►

of the science on some of these different compounds and a little bit later that are

00:14:14 ►

used for healing and in clinical contexts. And then lastly, celebration. And Rick Doblin,

00:14:23 ►

who’s the head of MAPS, which is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies,

00:14:28 ►

phrased it this way, and I thought this was really great.

00:14:30 ►

He said, you know, instead of saying recreational use,

00:14:34 ►

which has a lot of, like, negative baggage associated with it,

00:14:37 ►

he said celebration.

00:14:39 ►

And I really like that, and I think Burning Man is a perfect example of that,

00:14:43 ►

is, you know, a lot of people taking psychedelics just to celebrate life and celebrate people and celebrate just being alive.

00:14:54 ►

And I think that that is just a legitimate reason for doing this than anything else.

00:15:01 ►

So another aspect associated with that

00:15:05 ►

is just creativity.

00:15:08 ►

Burning Man is, again, another amazing example of that

00:15:11 ►

and how much creativity flows from these substances.

00:15:16 ►

I mean, this place is built for this

00:15:19 ►

and it’s such a beautiful illustration.

00:15:23 ►

All right, so now I’m going to move in a little bit more toward,

00:15:25 ►

move into the importance of what psychedelic advocacy is

00:15:30 ►

and the need for psychedelic advocacy in our world.

00:15:33 ►

So what do I mean by psychedelic advocate?

00:15:36 ►

I’ve been thinking about, you know, how can I be more vocal?

00:15:41 ►

How can I come out of the closet as someone that does psychedelics?

00:15:46 ►

How can I be a living example of someone that takes psychedelics in a mindful way

00:15:51 ►

that is benefiting a lot from these experiences?

00:15:57 ►

Because I think a lot of us, and I know that I did before I started doing any of these kinds of psychoactive compounds,

00:16:03 ►

I had a lot of baggage just thinking about,

00:16:06 ►

oh, who are the people that take these drugs?

00:16:08 ►

And I had these kind of dark thoughts of these people sort of doing them

00:16:12 ►

because they’re trying to escape from some dark part of themselves

00:16:17 ►

or I don’t even know what.

00:16:21 ►

But to be able to be out there and and just be that living example

00:16:28 ►

i think is a really important uh aspect because not um not only is i mean the state of the world

00:16:34 ►

right now i mean especially just in our country depression is just rampant you know and i mean

00:16:40 ►

this is really uh illustrated you know by rob, by Robin Williams that just passed away recently.

00:16:47 ►

I mean, it’s really heartbreaking to see that, you know, we wear these facades

00:16:54 ►

and that it’s hiding something that’s kind of festering right underneath.

00:17:01 ►

And, you know, I wonder if he had had more tools to be able to tap into whatever it is that he was dealing with,

00:17:10 ►

that he may still be around.

00:17:12 ►

But as it is, he gets to become a reminder for all of us that we need to deal with that stuff.

00:17:18 ►

We can’t hide it behind something.

00:17:21 ►

hide it behind something.

00:17:26 ►

And, you know, it’s not just the, you know,

00:17:31 ►

kind of traumatic experiences that we also need to be healing from,

00:17:33 ►

but it’s also just kind of like daily maintenance.

00:17:36 ►

Like, I don’t think that our culture really does a good job of this.

00:17:40 ►

Daily stresses and daily pressure just from all sorts of things.

00:17:42 ►

And if you don’t have a constructive outlet for that, I think that it creates a lot of pain that then kind of can come out in more unhealthy sort of bigger ways. When

00:17:52 ►

if we had just done a little bit more maintenance on an every, you know, everyday sort of basis,

00:17:57 ►

you know, there are many tools that are out there, you know, yoga, breath work, you know,

00:18:01 ►

running, hiking, being in nature. These are all things that help us clear a lot of that stuff.

00:18:07 ►

But the thing is that psychedelics are a really powerful tool for this.

00:18:11 ►

And the thing is that they’re not actually in the toolbox right now

00:18:15 ►

for most of society.

00:18:17 ►

And so this is a really,

00:18:19 ►

and this is why I’ve decided to be a psychedelic advocate

00:18:22 ►

and encourage psychedelic advocacy

00:18:24 ►

is because I think it needs to be a psychedelic advocate and encourage psychedelic advocacy is because I think

00:18:26 ►

it needs to be on the table.

00:18:27 ►

One of the things that I also want to keep

00:18:29 ►

to point out is that

00:18:30 ►

by being a psychedelic advocate, I’m not

00:18:34 ►

saying that psychedelics are good for everyone

00:18:36 ►

by any means.

00:18:38 ►

I just

00:18:39 ►

would like it to be an opportunity

00:18:41 ►

for people who would like to try it

00:18:44 ►

and be able to have a context around people who can try it in a setting

00:18:50 ►

that is conducive for growth and healing.

00:18:53 ►

So some of the research that I’ve been reading through up is on one of the ones

00:19:00 ►

that MAPS has been getting a lot of press with right now is using MDMA or ecstasy

00:19:06 ►

for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. And this is really fascinating

00:19:11 ►

because what they do is they give MDMA to a person with post-traumatic stress disorder

00:19:19 ►

in a sort of psychotherapy context. And they found that

00:19:26 ►

after two of these settings,

00:19:29 ►

two of these therapy settings,

00:19:33 ►

that these people are,

00:19:37 ►

that 83%,

00:19:39 ►

83 or 86% of people

00:19:41 ►

are cured of PTSD.

00:19:44 ►

Not, you know, on meds for the rest of their life Not on meds for the rest of their life,

00:19:48 ►

not in therapy for the rest of their life, cured.

00:19:50 ►

I mean, it’s really incredible.

00:19:53 ►

And it’s something that, you know,

00:19:55 ►

it’s getting press and it deserves to get press.

00:19:57 ►

And one of the reasons why this works,

00:19:59 ►

which I think is really fascinating being a scientist

00:20:01 ►

and, you know, very head-focused in my own way,

00:20:04 ►

is that it affects memory

00:20:07 ►

in the way that we process our memories.

00:20:10 ►

Because I think the way that most of us think

00:20:12 ►

about how memories work is that maybe,

00:20:14 ►

okay, we have some sort of experience.

00:20:17 ►

We write down the experience on a piece of paper

00:20:19 ►

and then we put it in a file folder.

00:20:21 ►

And then when we want to remember it,

00:20:22 ►

we come back to the file folder,

00:20:23 ►

pull the memory out, read it again, and then, you know, have the memory and then

00:20:29 ►

put it back. But what analogy that actually is more close to the truth is that when we

00:20:35 ►

pull that memory out of that file folder and look and read the memory, we actually rewrite

00:20:42 ►

it every time we remember it, and then it goes back in. So every

00:20:46 ►

time you remember something, it can get imprinted with whatever your present state of mind is.

00:20:52 ►

So with people that have PTSD, they’ve had a massive amount of trauma. That trauma and that

00:21:00 ►

emotional stress gets written into the memory, And then when they remember the memory,

00:21:05 ►

the stress and the emotions come up again.

00:21:07 ►

But the stress of it coming back up

00:21:11 ►

can even amplify it even more.

00:21:13 ►

And then the amplification of that trauma

00:21:17 ►

can get rewritten into the memory again.

00:21:19 ►

So you’re kind of amplifying it every time.

00:21:23 ►

And so what MDMA does, which is really fascinating,

00:21:26 ►

is that when they do this MDMA-assisted therapy,

00:21:29 ►

the person, when they’re remembering their trauma,

00:21:32 ►

they’re in a very much more calm, loving, compassionate space.

00:21:38 ►

And so when they rewrite the memory,

00:21:40 ►

they’re not rewriting it with the same amount of trauma

00:21:43 ►

because those emotions haven’t come up again

00:21:46 ►

and so it’s very effective in that

00:21:49 ►

you’re not rewriting that trauma

00:21:51 ►

so that’s just one example and what’s really kind of interesting

00:21:55 ►

is when I found out about this I was talking with my boyfriend

00:21:57 ►

and I said well if they’re doing this in this psycho

00:22:00 ►

therapeutic setting well I wonder if we could do it

00:22:04 ►

you’ve had some rough childhood

00:22:07 ►

moments that maybe we can process through. So last New Year’s, we took some MDMA and

00:22:14 ►

just kind of found a quiet spot for ourselves and talked about his childhood, his relationship with his mom, in a way that he was able to open up and feel a lot

00:22:28 ►

more compassion for her and be able to process that. And what’s really amazing that since that

00:22:37 ►

one little session together that we had, he’s been able to kind of understand and be much more

00:22:44 ►

compassionate towards his

00:22:45 ►

mother.

00:22:45 ►

And his relationship with her has really improved quite a bit.

00:22:50 ►

So, I mean, even in that, you know, I wasn’t, I’m not a trained therapist.

00:22:54 ►

I really just sort of held space for him and just asked questions to kind of clarify what

00:23:00 ►

he was going through.

00:23:01 ►

And it was really effective.

00:23:04 ►

So, you know, it was so easy to

00:23:07 ►

illustrate how how powerful these things are so they’re psychedelics are not or again i’m

00:23:13 ►

are not just uh are not the only tools that we have in this toolbox for for mindful for

00:23:18 ►

mindfulness we also have um you know yoga and breath work. My boyfriend and I recently just tried holotropic breathing,

00:23:26 ►

which is really fascinating.

00:23:29 ►

I don’t know if anyone has heard of it,

00:23:30 ►

but it was developed by Stongroff,

00:23:35 ►

who was one of the original psychedelic scientists,

00:23:39 ►

and he developed this breathing technique put to music

00:23:43 ►

such that you could actually reach altered states of consciousness

00:23:48 ►

just with breath.

00:23:50 ►

It was really wild.

00:23:52 ►

So I highly recommend it.

00:23:53 ►

It’s legal.

00:23:53 ►

It’s just your breath.

00:23:55 ►

It’s very therapeutic, so I highly recommend checking it out.

00:23:58 ►

But I mean, I see psychedelics as a tool

00:24:02 ►

to kind of get us towards this state of mindfulness,

00:24:06 ►

towards this state of higher consciousness.

00:24:08 ►

It’s not necessarily a means to it.

00:24:12 ►

It’s just one tool in our toolbox.

00:24:15 ►

So one of the other important things in being a psychedelic advocate is keeping in mind,

00:24:22 ►

you know, when we’re talking to people,

00:24:25 ►

what the main concerns are that people might have about psychedelics,

00:24:28 ►

because we’ve been fed all of this rhetoric for so long,

00:24:31 ►

and there’s such a contorted view that we really need to make sure that,

00:24:36 ►

especially being in this kind of subculture of people that are using psychedelics in a way

00:24:41 ►

for all of these more beneficial and positive uses,

00:24:44 ►

that are using psychedelics in a way for all of these more beneficial and positive uses,

00:24:50 ►

we need to make sure that we still are tapped into what the rest of the world thinks about these things and be able to know how to communicate with them.

00:24:52 ►

So knowing what the safety risks of these things are,

00:24:55 ►

because that’s one of the things that most people are concerned about.

00:24:57 ►

They’ve been told that these are so dangerous.

00:25:00 ►

And so knowing the resources about what the safety is,

00:25:04 ►

And so knowing the resources about what the safety is,

00:25:07 ►

arrowid.com is a huge resource to our community for people to be able to know how much to take these things

00:25:12 ►

and if there are any kind of interactions that these substances can have

00:25:16 ►

with other things you may take,

00:25:17 ►

whether it be alcohol or any other kind of prescription drugs.

00:25:20 ►

And also just knowing what some of the myths are.

00:25:23 ►

You know, when I, I mean, everyone’s kind of heard of the story of somebody taking acid and

00:25:27 ►

jumping off a building thinking they could fly.

00:25:31 ►

I looked into that. It seems like it’s a complete urban legend.

00:25:35 ►

And it just keeps getting regurgitated over and over again.

00:25:40 ►

Who knows where it started, but it’s kind of maddening that

00:25:43 ►

this misinformation just keeps getting recycled over and over again.

00:25:48 ►

Because it really is just kind of fear-based.

00:25:52 ►

Everyone’s heard of the kind of bad trip.

00:25:55 ►

And one of the things that I just am volunteering with the Zendo this year.

00:26:00 ►

The Zendo is a project associated with MAPS that’s creating a safe space for people

00:26:06 ►

that are having a challenging experience on psychedelics

00:26:08 ►

so that they can have someone to talk to

00:26:11 ►

to be able to process through what they’re going through

00:26:14 ►

and maybe turn something that might have been something

00:26:15 ►

that could be considered a bad trip

00:26:18 ►

into something that’s actually very healing

00:26:21 ►

and an instigator of growth.

00:26:25 ►

And so instead of saying, you know, bad trip,

00:26:28 ►

maybe saying something that’s more like challenging

00:26:30 ►

is a better way of thinking about it.

00:26:33 ►

Again, there was an experience with a friend

00:26:35 ►

where he was having a really challenging time

00:26:38 ►

at a festival we were at and didn’t, you know,

00:26:42 ►

we want to be just having like a good time sometimes, but sometimes it can be very challenging. And what I pointed out was that, you know, we want to be just having like a good time sometimes,

00:26:45 ►

but sometimes it can be very challenging.

00:26:47 ►

And what I pointed out was that, you know, this is why we come out here.

00:26:51 ►

We don’t come out just because it’s easy.

00:26:53 ►

We come out also because of the challenging times

00:26:56 ►

and because afterwards we know that we’ve grown so much

00:26:59 ►

and that that is also part of it.

00:27:02 ►

Being an oceanographer and related to the ocean,

00:27:05 ►

the analogy that I really like to use is,

00:27:07 ►

it’s like being a crab,

00:27:10 ►

and crabs shed their exoskeleton to grow every time,

00:27:17 ►

because they don’t have bones that can grow on the inside like us.

00:27:20 ►

So they have to shed their shells,

00:27:22 ►

and then what they do is they’re all soft and squishy,

00:27:24 ►

so if you’ve heard of soft-shell crabs, that’s what’s happened.

00:27:27 ►

They then breathe in all this water, and they get almost twice as big, and then they recalcify their shell again.

00:27:33 ►

So, you know, after we’ve had these really, you know, challenging experiences, you know, we’ve shed off this shell,

00:27:39 ►

we can be very soft and tender afterwards, and we need the support network around us

00:27:45 ►

to be able to continue and integrate that growth.

00:27:49 ►

So that’s a little analogy that I take with me whenever I go.

00:27:54 ►

So who here has had experiences

00:27:57 ►

where they felt that psychedelics

00:28:00 ►

have led to a different perspective?

00:28:05 ►

Okay, that’s most of you. Any increases in creativity? psychedelics have led to a different perspective. Okay.

00:28:06 ►

That’s most of you.

00:28:07 ►

Any increases in creativity?

00:28:11 ►

Yep.

00:28:12 ►

Any increases in playfulness?

00:28:15 ►

Yep.

00:28:16 ►

Increases in compassion?

00:28:19 ►

Yeah, so these are all really beautiful things

00:28:21 ►

that can come out of psychedelic use

00:28:23 ►

and ones that I think need to

00:28:25 ►

be communicated more. And I think we can all agree that there’s things here that deserve to be shared.

00:28:32 ►

So this leads me into how do we talk about psychedelics to people that may have a lot of

00:28:39 ►

cultural or societal baggage associated with what psychedelics mean.

00:28:43 ►

or societal baggage associated with what psychedelics mean.

00:28:46 ►

So I want to go over a couple of sort of tools to communicate about something that is so controversial.

00:28:54 ►

And I think the most important thing to keep in mind here

00:28:56 ►

is it’s not their responsibility

00:29:01 ►

to understand you in the way that you communicate.

00:29:04 ►

But if you choose to understand you in the way that you communicate.

00:29:08 ►

But if you choose to, you can… If you want someone else to understand where you’re coming from,

00:29:11 ►

you need to take responsibility for your own communication

00:29:14 ►

so that you can meet them where they are and that they can hear you.

00:29:19 ►

Because I can’t expect anyone to be able to read my mind.

00:29:22 ►

So it’s me seeing where they’re at and meeting them there.

00:29:27 ►

And a good way to start off something like that is just to ask questions and see where people are at.

00:29:32 ►

Because if I start talking about something that may make somebody too uncomfortable too quickly,

00:29:39 ►

they’ll turn off and they won’t be able to listen anymore. And so just asking people questions, you know,

00:29:47 ►

about what kinds of, you know, mindful work they’ve done,

00:29:50 ►

maybe what kinds of, what they’ve heard about psychedelics

00:29:54 ►

or any other kinds of substances,

00:29:55 ►

just so you can kind of get a baseline of where people are coming from

00:29:59 ►

because it’s you that are meeting them where they’re at.

00:30:03 ►

So you’ve got to get an idea of where that is to begin with.

00:30:06 ►

Again, you know, through this process, it’s a process of coming out.

00:30:14 ►

And in the last year, I’ve had a lot of coming out experiences

00:30:18 ►

in that I both came out to my parents that I did psychedelics

00:30:24 ►

and had that conversation.

00:30:27 ►

And I also took my younger brother to his first festival.

00:30:31 ►

And both of those experiences, you know, while it was stressful at the time,

00:30:36 ►

I feel so grateful that I did that.

00:30:38 ►

And now I’ve really started the conversation to be able to be more open.

00:30:44 ►

Like I don’t have to feel like I’m hiding

00:30:47 ►

a part of myself anymore. Uh, I used to have, uh, two Facebook pages because I felt like there was

00:30:53 ►

certain people that I, you know, could open up to. And then there were other people that I couldn’t

00:30:57 ►

open up to and I wanted to keep them separate and I want to control the situation. But

00:31:02 ►

there are parts of myself that I feel so passionately about,

00:31:06 ►

psychedelics being just one of them.

00:31:09 ►

And as long as I keep feeling like I need to hide parts of myself,

00:31:13 ►

then I’m not really being true to myself

00:31:17 ►

and true to those parts of myself.

00:31:18 ►

And I think that that’s something that we all need to keep in mind

00:31:20 ►

as we go through this process of kind of awakening and opening up.

00:31:28 ►

I’ll wait till the art car goes by. So as a psychedelic advocate, you know, I’m trying to

00:31:33 ►

be an ambassador for this movement and someone that, again, ignites this curiosity. And that’s

00:31:39 ►

the kind of phrase that I’ve been sticking in my head. It’s like igniting curiosity,

00:31:42 ►

sparking curiosity, which then leads to this igniting consciousness, really. And so that we can all start healing each other and make

00:31:51 ►

this world a much more beautiful place. Let me skip back to my brother, bringing my brother to

00:31:59 ►

his first festival. That was a really, I was so anxious to bring him because I knew he was going to be open

00:32:06 ►

to it. But at the same time, you know, there’s so much baggage that we carry around about our

00:32:11 ►

childhood and the way that we, you know, the things, the stories that we make up about the

00:32:15 ►

people that we grew up with or the people, our family members. And, you know, they may not even

00:32:20 ►

necessarily be true anymore. And I think that part of my own growth process

00:32:25 ►

has just been to challenge myself

00:32:27 ►

to be able to keep pushing.

00:32:30 ►

If I feel uncomfortable about something

00:32:31 ►

or I’m feeling resistance,

00:32:33 ►

and I think, well, why am I even concerned about this, really?

00:32:37 ►

To kind of keep probing into that

00:32:40 ►

to see what it is that I’m resisting.

00:32:43 ►

Because it may be something unconscious that I don’t even know about

00:32:47 ►

and not really even logically based.

00:32:49 ►

And so that was a really good example for me

00:32:51 ►

to be able to just push through some of that subconscious baggage

00:32:55 ►

that I was carrying around and just be open.

00:32:58 ►

And he had an amazing time and he came up to me and he said,

00:33:02 ►

actually, I knew that this was going to be a really an amazing time but everyone’s so nice and I’m just you know really glad that you brought me

00:33:10 ►

here and it you know I started tearing up because I just you know that was exactly that was exactly

00:33:17 ►

what I wanted to hear and and and I accomplished my goal and it was just you know it it ended up

00:33:23 ►

not being that scary in the end.

00:33:26 ►

One of the other things to keep in mind while we’re communicating with people is, and again,

00:33:32 ►

meeting people where they’re at, is to be careful of our language. Because language can trigger a

00:33:38 ►

lot of things for people. Especially when we’re, you know, around a sub-community of people that

00:33:42 ►

has our own jargon. We kind of use this language over and over again,

00:33:46 ►

like things like fractals and chakras.

00:33:50 ►

But people outside of this sub-community of ours

00:33:53 ►

doesn’t know what we’re talking about.

00:33:56 ►

And if we use that kind of language,

00:33:58 ►

it can either turn people off or we might lose them.

00:34:03 ►

So we really need to be careful about that.

00:34:06 ►

And then also, you know, it’s a funny thing

00:34:10 ►

about trying to describe experiences.

00:34:12 ►

And I think it’s by design that we can’t actually

00:34:15 ►

completely convey an experience fully to someone

00:34:18 ►

so that they can feel like they’ve experienced it themselves.

00:34:22 ►

Because if we could do that,

00:34:23 ►

then we would need to go out and

00:34:25 ►

experience those things. But if we, since we can’t, you have to go and have that experience.

00:34:31 ►

I can only just kind of convey and spark your curiosity to go and do that. You know, it’s just

00:34:37 ►

like, I remember, you know, when I was prepubescent and really wondering what an orgasm felt like,

00:34:43 ►

you know, there’s no way to describe that to someone that hasn’t experienced it.

00:34:48 ►

And I was so curious and so anxious to be able to have that experience.

00:34:52 ►

But there’s no way to convey that to someone.

00:34:54 ►

It’s something that they have to experience for themselves.

00:34:57 ►

And I think that psychedelics are something that’s such a great tool for that

00:35:01 ►

because it’s not something…

00:35:02 ►

It’s allowing people to have their own experience.

00:35:03 ►

something that’s such a great tool for that because it’s not something it’s allowing people to have their own experience it’s something that it’s not coming from externally necessarily it’s

00:35:10 ►

something that can come up and bloom and blossom from internally and something that i think our

00:35:16 ►

society i think we’ve had a little bit too many crutches on instead of going out and hiking a mountain ourselves we go and watch someone on tv

00:35:25 ►

do it you know uh you know when when i think it’s important that we continue challenging ourselves

00:35:32 ►

and continuing to push our own experiences and to continue exploring another important thing

00:35:38 ►

is to be able to that everyone um that does psychedelics is to do your homework. Because especially when you’re communicating with people,

00:35:48 ►

they’re going to have a lot of questions.

00:35:51 ►

And if you don’t know the answers to those things,

00:35:54 ►

or at least have a good enough, you know, maybe you don’t know,

00:35:57 ►

but you’ve got some good websites that are good resources to look those things up on,

00:36:02 ►

it’s going to make it a little bit harder for them to understand

00:36:04 ►

and feel like you’re giving them good information. Great websites for that. Reset.me

00:36:10 ►

is becoming bigger and bigger and a lot of trip reports and a lot of great resources for people

00:36:14 ►

looking to get into psychedelics in a mindful way. Arrowhead.com is also a really great resource

00:36:20 ►

for both safety as well as many other types of books and other resources there.

00:36:26 ►

So, you know, there’s so much out there that we have access to. So make sure you’re, you know,

00:36:33 ►

knowing, you know, to be able to kind of anticipate those questions from people.

00:36:39 ►

This was a hard lesson for me as a scientist because I’m always one that just likes facts and logic.

00:36:48 ►

And so I’ll give people a whole bunch of facts,

00:36:50 ►

but the thing is that you can give people facts

00:36:53 ►

until you’re blue in the face,

00:36:55 ►

and that’s not necessarily going to change their mind about anything.

00:36:58 ►

What really has helped me in my own communication

00:37:02 ►

is adding an element of my own personal story and

00:37:05 ►

adding an emotional element to it. I have been a vegetarian for eight years and a vegan for about

00:37:13 ►

four. And that’s one of those controversial, very emotionally charged kind of subjects. And so when

00:37:21 ►

trying to talk to people about that, instead of talking to people directly about some of the facts and reasons why I do it, I talk kind of more

00:37:31 ►

from like the perspective of I. And so a good kind of mantra to keep in mind is how can

00:37:39 ►

I speak from I? How do I speak from my own experience? Instead of saying, oh, you know,

00:37:45 ►

from I? How do I speak from my own experience? Instead of saying, oh, you know, when you do this, this happens. Instead say, when I do this, this happens. It really allows you

00:37:50 ►

to own your own experience. It’s a really pretty powerful tool that I’ve been using

00:37:54 ►

recently. And it also allows people to get more in touch with you and see you as the

00:37:59 ►

person having the experience. And I find that people are less prone to dig their heels in and be a little bit

00:38:08 ►

more stubborn maybe. Because sometimes, I know it’s the same with me, if someone’s trying to

00:38:15 ►

convince me of something, I’ll just take the counterpoint or the opposite point just because

00:38:19 ►

I’m being kind of, just for the sake of being and thinking the opposite.

00:38:26 ►

But you want to keep the person on your side.

00:38:31 ►

And so sometimes it’s not about necessarily, you know,

00:38:34 ►

you’re not trying to convince anyone of anything

00:38:35 ►

because you can’t really do that.

00:38:37 ►

The change has to come from within.

00:38:39 ►

So all you’re trying to do is, again, spark that curiosity.

00:38:43 ►

And a way that I’ve found that’s really

00:38:46 ►

useful to be able to do this is when

00:38:47 ►

talking with someone about the reasons why I do some of these

00:38:50 ►

things that are a little out of the norm

00:38:51 ►

is to instead of trying to talk directly

00:38:54 ►

to the person in a way that

00:38:55 ►

might feel a little confrontational

00:38:58 ►

I’ll make up a hypothetical person

00:39:00 ►

that I’m talking to and say, oh well

00:39:01 ►

I was talking about the same topic with a friend of mine

00:39:04 ►

the other day and this is what I was saying to them. And then the person that I’m actually with and say, oh, well, I was talking about the same topic with a friend of mine the other day, and this is what I was saying to them. And then the person

00:39:07 ►

that I’m actually with in that moment can just observe that conversation that I’m having

00:39:11 ►

with this hypothetical person, and then they can make a decision for themselves rather

00:39:17 ►

than feeling like they need to make a decision or make a counterpoint or something right

00:39:21 ►

in that moment. They can be in their own experience and just witness that.

00:39:26 ►

And then that might, again, spark something that they can go research again later.

00:39:32 ►

You know, and a lot of times when I do talk about my experiences, I do get a little choked up because

00:39:38 ►

these have been the most powerful experiences of my life. And it gets me really emotional.

00:39:46 ►

And when I am vulnerable and let those emotions out

00:39:50 ►

with the people that I’m communicating with,

00:39:52 ►

that speaks louder than any other words that I can say.

00:39:55 ►

They can see and feel how much these compounds

00:39:59 ►

and how much these experiences have made in my life

00:40:03 ►

in such a way that no words that could ever really do.

00:40:09 ►

So I want to go back to a little audience participation. I’m going to give you guys

00:40:16 ►

about two minutes to pair off with someone that either you’ve come with or you’ve not come with,

00:40:22 ►

either you’ve come with or you’ve not come with and just give a little

00:40:25 ►

take turns giving your own

00:40:27 ►

little spiel about

00:40:28 ►

why you do psychedelics

00:40:30 ►

think about some of the ways that I’ve talked about

00:40:33 ►

communicating in different ways

00:40:35 ►

and so yeah

00:40:37 ►

just take this opportunity to

00:40:38 ►

think about how you would communicate that

00:40:40 ►

to someone else

00:40:41 ►

so I’ll give you two minutes starting now

00:40:44 ►

alright wrap up your conversations you would communicate that to someone else. So I’ll give you two minutes starting now.

00:40:51 ►

All right, wrap up your conversations and we’ll just wrap up real quick and then move into questions. I hope that was useful for you guys just to be able to have a little bit of practice

00:40:57 ►

and talk about that with someone else. So one of the things that I’m about to launch, well, about to start the process of, is creating a psychedelic advocacy social media campaign.

00:41:12 ►

So right now I just have a holder page on psychedelicadvocacy.com.

00:41:18 ►

I also have a Twitter account, psychedelicadvo.com.

00:41:23 ►

Or.com.

00:41:24 ►

It’s Twitter, so no.com

00:41:25 ►

and then

00:41:27 ►

the purpose of

00:41:30 ►

both those things is to

00:41:32 ►

start kind of creating

00:41:33 ►

positive psychedelic

00:41:36 ►

messages and memes so that people

00:41:38 ►

can share those and then also using the hashtag

00:41:41 ►

psychadvo

00:41:42 ►

so that people

00:41:44 ►

when they post something

00:41:45 ►

that might show psychedelics in a positive light,

00:41:49 ►

whether it be science or somebody else’s personal experience

00:41:51 ►

or in some kind of ceremonial context,

00:41:54 ►

people can put that on their post and share that.

00:41:58 ►

And then we can also then create a community of people

00:42:02 ►

sharing this positive psychedelic message.

00:42:04 ►

So follow up on that when you get off Playa

00:42:07 ►

and keep in touch.

00:42:10 ►

And so I’d just like to end with the fact that

00:42:13 ►

as an advocate,

00:42:15 ►

we’re not really trying to convince anyone of anything,

00:42:18 ►

you know,

00:42:18 ►

because that’s not even possible, really.

00:42:21 ►

Change only comes from within.

00:42:23 ►

So all we’re, you know,

00:42:24 ►

as a psychedelic advocate, all I’m trying to do is spark consciousness and through that

00:42:31 ►

sparking of curiosity, you know, ignite consciousness. And with that, I will take any questions.

00:42:39 ►

Thank you.

00:42:41 ►

So, first of all, congratulations on coming out thank you must feel very liberating um and

00:42:49 ►

it sounds like you’ve had some really positive uh reactions from you know opening up to people

00:42:54 ►

has there been any um negative uh reactions or uh times you didn’t go as expected? And if so, how did you manage it?

00:43:07 ►

I think I’ve kind of erred more towards the cautious side.

00:43:13 ►

And I’m kind of more on the slow, the long play for this.

00:43:21 ►

You know, this is not something we’re going to change overnight.

00:43:21 ►

the long play for this.

00:43:24 ►

This is not something we’re going to change overnight.

00:43:27 ►

And so I’ve been kind of seeding things,

00:43:35 ►

seeding little things that may have to do with psychedelics

00:43:36 ►

in the various relationships and contexts that I’m around.

00:43:39 ►

But I haven’t really had any experiences

00:43:42 ►

where there was somebody completely negative.

00:43:44 ►

But I think I’m a pretty good judge at figuring out where people are at

00:43:48 ►

so that I’m not pushing too many buttons at the same time.

00:43:52 ►

So I think sometimes we need to open people up slowly.

00:43:56 ►

And just as a follow-up, in terms of opening people up slowly,

00:44:01 ►

for those that you really might feel could benefit,

00:44:05 ►

but that’s a big jump right off the bat,

00:44:08 ►

any good strategies for how to get them slowly in that direction?

00:44:15 ►

Yeah, totally.

00:44:16 ►

Well, as I said, the holotropic breathing that I just did with my boyfriend recently

00:44:21 ►

was a huge, crazy, crazy experience. You know, anything that they can,

00:44:27 ►

a practice of mindfulness, different kinds of yoga practices are a great resource. I actually,

00:44:34 ►

after I came out, after I had my 5MEO experience, I got into a nine-month Kundalini Yoga teacher

00:44:40 ►

training program because I was like, I need more tools to be able to help integrate this experience and be able to integrate it into my everyday life. And so yoga is a huge,

00:44:49 ►

huge resource for that just to get people in that mindfulness state. And then also just,

00:44:56 ►

you know, and then the holotropic breathing, you know, hardly anybody has heard of that.

00:45:01 ►

And it’s a huge, you know, huge huge healing and resource and what was kind of interesting was because when we did the um the intro to that uh a lot of the people were talking

00:45:11 ►

about psychedelics and ayahuasca ceremony so even if you brought someone in there that has

00:45:14 ►

no experience with psychedelics and just breathing a lot of people were kind of talking about it so

00:45:19 ►

you know that’s kind of just opening up um you know, allowing people to meet other people that are in the community and other living examples of people doing psychedelics in mindful ways.

00:45:31 ►

All right.

00:45:31 ►

Awesome.

00:45:32 ►

Thank you very much.

00:45:34 ►

Before I forget to say it, since this talk was given in August of 2014, about a year ago, a few things have changed. And Ashley’s Twitter handle, for one,

00:45:45 ►

but the best way, I think, to probably stay up to date on Ashley’s activity

00:45:49 ►

is on her personal website, which may be found at

00:45:52 ►

ashleybooth, A-S-H-L-E-Y-B-O-O-T-H,

00:45:57 ►

all one word, ashleybooth.net.

00:46:00 ►

And I’ll link to her sites in today’s program notes,

00:46:04 ►

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

00:46:07 ►

and I guess that maybe I should add a little comment about holotropic breathing

00:46:12 ►

since there are probably a lot of our fellow salonners who have practiced it

00:46:17 ►

in fact I tried it myself about 14 years ago

00:46:20 ►

when it was all the rage out here in California

00:46:22 ►

but what is interesting to me is that

00:46:26 ►

Ashley didn’t know about it until about a year or so ago. So I guess my question is, has holotropic

00:46:32 ►

breathing peaked and almost disappeared, or is it making a comeback? And maybe some of our fellow

00:46:38 ►

slauners will leave a comment in today’s program notes if they know how widespread that practice is Thank you. involved in psychedelics themselves. Also, I hope that you picked up on Ashley’s urging of us to transition from talking about

00:47:08 ►

recreational use of psychedelics to using celebration instead.

00:47:13 ►

As I think back to some of the more memorable times that I’ve had while under the influence

00:47:19 ►

of psychoactive substances, I can honestly say that I never thought of those times as

00:47:24 ►

mere recreation.

00:47:26 ►

To me, recreation is playing baseball or fishing or something like that. But the times that I’ve

00:47:32 ►

had on psychedelics can most assuredly be called celebrations. So I like that a lot and plan on

00:47:39 ►

using it myself from now on. You know, I’ve been involved with psychedelics for a long time now, and one of the

00:47:46 ►

things that really amazes me is the fact that new information and new ways of looking at things,

00:47:52 ►

even by simply replacing a single word, celebration for recreation, for example,

00:47:57 ►

still kind of jumps up and surprises me. But Ashley really hit home with me when she suggested changing the phrase bad trip

00:48:05 ►

to challenging trip. Now, that may be a simple thing for you, but for many years I’ve been

00:48:11 ►

bragging about the fact that over many hundreds of trips I’ve never had a bad one. But Ashley

00:48:18 ►

just now gave me a major insight when I realized that while I have never considered any of

00:48:23 ►

my trips to be bad,

00:48:25 ►

well, there have been quite a few that have been extremely challenging. So, hey, thanks

00:48:30 ►

for that, Ashley. Another thing that her talk just now caused me to think about is when

00:48:36 ►

she was talking about telling her parents that she used psychedelics. And I’m here to

00:48:40 ►

tell you that doing such a thing gains great respect for me, because in my own case, well, I never told my parents.

00:48:49 ►

In my dad’s case, of course, I couldn’t have because he died in 1975,

00:48:53 ►

and I didn’t become involved in psychedelics until 1984.

00:48:57 ►

Now, I’ll be 73 years old next week, but my mother didn’t die until I’d turned 62.

00:49:04 ►

That’s right, I was 62 years old and still hadn’t come out of the psychedelic closet to my mother didn’t die until I’d turned 62. That’s right, I was 62 years old and still

00:49:06 ►

hadn’t come out of the psychedelic closet to my mother. At that time, I’d already been wearing

00:49:11 ►

my hair long and in a ponytail for about 10 years before she died, but she always associated my long

00:49:18 ►

hair with me being a computer geek. She never liked it, and she always tried to get me to cut it.

00:49:24 ►

Until the last time I saw her,

00:49:25 ►

that is. And not long before she died, in a very weak voice, she said, Larry, I really like your

00:49:32 ►

ponytail. Well, I can’t even express what that meant to me and still means to me today. Sadly,

00:49:40 ►

I now realize that my mother and I should have been talking about psychedelics all along.

00:49:44 ►

I now realize that my mother and I should have been talking about psychedelics all along.

00:49:50 ►

You see, she was an epileptic and took an unbelievably high dose of phenobarbital every day.

00:49:53 ►

In fact, she took it all the time that she was pregnant with me.

00:49:59 ►

I was born with a lot of it in my blood, but, you know, back then nobody cared about those things.

00:50:03 ►

But getting back to coming out of the psychedelic closet with your parents,

00:50:10 ►

it’s something that you should do now, today, or as soon as you can. Because my hunch is that no matter what your age right now, letting your parents know what you think about psychedelics may just open some

00:50:15 ►

interesting new relationships for you. Don’t knock it until you’re tripped with your parents,

00:50:19 ►

by the way, or your kids, I should add. But before I get more carried away with myself, I’d better get on with

00:50:26 ►

today’s program and introduce today’s second speaker, who is a person that I consider to be

00:50:32 ►

at the very top of the hero list of the good guys who became involved in the war on drugs.

00:50:37 ►

Her name is Amy Ralston Pova, and my wife and I were fortunate enough to get to meet and listen

00:50:43 ►

to Amy over a decade ago at one of Kathleen Wirt’s famous salons in Venice, California.

00:50:49 ►

Well, guess what?

00:50:51 ►

Those salons have now been rekindled by none other than Ashley Booth.

00:50:56 ►

And on the bicycle day just past, Amy was the featured speaker at Ashley’s salon.

00:51:03 ►

So I’m going to let Amy tell her story herself right now, but

00:51:06 ►

I think that a spoiler is necessary first for any of our fellow salonners who don’t already know

00:51:11 ►

Amy’s story. And basically it’s this. Rather than roll over and rat out some truly deplorable,

00:51:19 ►

despicable, and cowardly people, Amy spent nine years, a little bit more than nine years of her life

00:51:26 ►

locked up in prison.

00:51:29 ►

She is a hero of the highest order in my book, and I do apologize in advance for the audio

00:51:34 ►

quality, but Amy’s story may be one of the most important talks that you’re going to

00:51:39 ►

hear this year.

00:51:40 ►

So now, here is Amy.

00:51:42 ►

So now, here is Amy.

00:51:52 ►

Okay, so anyway, I’m honored to be here, and it’s been a really long journey.

00:52:05 ►

I first joined MDMA in March of 1984, and I was set up on a blind date and was with some friends. And by that time, I had spent quite a bit of time exposed to drug culture,

00:52:13 ►

881, 882, 883.

00:52:16 ►

Some of you don’t know those years, but I was a model,

00:52:20 ►

and I was out in the club scene a lot.

00:52:22 ►

So I kind of burned out.

00:52:24 ►

And I was staying home a lot, and I wanted some spiritual nourishment.

00:52:29 ►

And so anyway, I got roped into this blind date.

00:52:32 ►

Couldn’t stay on my blind date.

00:52:34 ►

And my friends asked me if I wanted to try some ecstasy.

00:52:37 ►

I’d heard of it, but I was sort of like, no, I don’t think so.

00:52:42 ►

I’ve had a bad experience with a coiled wand.

00:52:50 ►

And so I never embraced Nancy Reagan’s just say no policy.

00:52:52 ►

And she talked me into it.

00:52:53 ►

I said, okay, fine.

00:52:59 ►

So it wasn’t very long before I realized when this started kicking in that this was something very different, very unique,

00:53:02 ►

and not your average recreational drug.

00:53:05 ►

So I was like, oh my gosh.

00:53:08 ►

I was in kind of a dive place,

00:53:12 ►

and the music and the smoke and the people,

00:53:14 ►

I was like, I’ve got to get out of here.

00:53:16 ►

So I went outside to get some fresh air,

00:53:18 ►

and I was walking like a sobriety test,

00:53:22 ►

and I just kept saying, I love myself.

00:53:26 ►

What is this stuff?

00:53:28 ►

And then I rolled my head back, and there was a full moon directly above me.

00:53:34 ►

And that was the first time I heard my inner voice.

00:53:37 ►

And very, very clearly, whether it was the moon or whatever,

00:53:41 ►

I felt a very strong voice that said, go home.

00:53:46 ►

And if you’ve ever experienced a spiritual awakening,

00:53:50 ►

like Ashley described,

00:53:52 ►

and I’m sure a lot of you have,

00:53:53 ►

because of psychedelics,

00:53:56 ►

it was kind of shocking,

00:53:57 ►

because I’d never heard something so loud

00:54:01 ►

that was not my own thought.

00:54:06 ►

And so I went inside.

00:54:08 ►

I told my friends, look, I need to go home.

00:54:10 ►

And so they accommodated me.

00:54:11 ►

I went home.

00:54:13 ►

I knew I had to go look in the mirror.

00:54:17 ►

I went to the bathroom, turned the lights on, went to the mirror,

00:54:19 ►

and I’d never seen pupils dilated before. So needless to say, I took a journey and kind of swam into my pupils and said things I never would have said.

00:54:28 ►

And I had a full-on spiritual awakening.

00:54:32 ►

So that same night, somebody walked up to me, tapped me on the shoulder, and insisted that he had to see me again.

00:54:40 ►

He said, there’s something about you.

00:54:42 ►

You’ve captivated me.

00:54:44 ►

Corny pickup line, I know, but it worked.

00:54:47 ►

So I wasn’t interested in giving him my phone number, but I just rattled it off.

00:54:52 ►

I said, if you can remember my phone number, you can call me.

00:54:54 ►

I just wanted to go home.

00:54:56 ►

So that man, eight months later, was the man I married.

00:55:01 ►

He was the number two person in the nation to take MDMA recreational. Michael

00:55:08 ►

Clegg was the first person who took MDMA recreational, also there in Dallas, if I didn’t say I’m

00:55:16 ►

from Dallas. And my husband was a Stanford Law School graduate. He knew Michael Clegg.

00:55:22 ►

I never met Michael Clegg, but I had heard

00:55:25 ►

that Pauline Clegg turned

00:55:27 ►

my husband on to ecstasy.

00:55:30 ►

My husband never did drugs.

00:55:32 ►

He was a

00:55:33 ►

health freak and

00:55:35 ►

very successful. Didn’t really fit the mold.

00:55:38 ►

But he

00:55:39 ►

opened

00:55:42 ►

me up to metaphysics,

00:55:44 ►

introduced me to a lot of books,

00:55:47 ►

I deified him,

00:55:48 ►

he was the love of my life.

00:55:50 ►

He also had a lot of demons.

00:55:53 ►

And because I have to

00:55:54 ►

rush through this story and

00:55:56 ►

jump through so I can also get to some

00:55:58 ►

very pertinent parts of it,

00:56:00 ►

if there’s any holes and you want more information,

00:56:03 ►

you can seek me out

00:56:04 ►

and I’m happy to share more.

00:56:06 ►

But after three years, well, his demons were triggered by alcohol, two drinks,

00:56:12 ►

and this other person would emerge that I really hadn’t met, who we called Word Herald.

00:56:18 ►

He acknowledged that this was an entity that was very, very different from the wonderful person I had married.

00:56:27 ►

And if you’ve ever been in a relationship with somebody

00:56:29 ►

who has a dual personality like that,

00:56:31 ►

it’s a lot of trauma,

00:56:36 ►

because when your heart is invested,

00:56:38 ►

you experience a lot of pain.

00:56:41 ►

After three years, I had to move to Los Angeles.

00:56:44 ►

I just had to

00:56:45 ►

get away. And he was a very manipulative person, so it didn’t work out where I could just divorce

00:56:50 ►

him and leave. It was a situation where I just kind of needed to sort of finesse my

00:56:56 ►

way out of the relationship and say, look, we’re going to remain good friends. But he

00:57:01 ►

lived in Dallas. I lived in Los Angeles. And we stayed on good terms. He wanted a reconciliation. Again, I got to move forward. One year after I was

00:57:10 ►

out in Los Angeles, I found out that he was arrested in Germany. And so that was kind

00:57:19 ►

of shocking. He traveled to Europe a lot because he had a business called Intercert, but I was contacted by his lawyer that was assigned to him, and he asked me to please retain a lawyer for Sandy who would go over to Germany, and I did.

00:57:46 ►

And I was asked to go, again, I’m speeding forward real fast,

00:57:53 ►

to go find some funds that he had sequestered in some clandestine vaults.

00:58:00 ►

And if you know anything about the conspiracy statute and the drug war kicked in, thank you, George Bush Sr., mostly Reagan Bush, but George Bush Sr. used it as a campaign platform,

00:58:06 ►

and that’s when all the laws really kicked in and changed.

00:58:10 ►

So conspiracy is if you do one thing, one overt act,

00:58:14 ►

you’re guilty for everything that everybody else did.

00:58:17 ►

And by involving myself or even getting some money

00:58:22 ►

and moving it or hiring a lawyer or whatever,

00:58:26 ►

that triggers the conspiracy statute, which…

00:58:30 ►

Excuse me.

00:58:34 ►

I’m talking really fast, but anyway.

00:58:36 ►

So six months after I did that and visited my husband and found out about his arrest,

00:58:45 ►

I pulled into my garage and I was rushed by guys who were pointing guns at my face.

00:58:54 ►

Back then they were just wearing plain clothes.

00:58:56 ►

It wasn’t swat like everything is today.

00:58:59 ►

And they flanked me and dragged me out of my car, into my house, and that’s when the pictures start.

00:59:11 ►

Okay.

00:59:12 ►

So if anyone here doesn’t really understand what the big deal is with NSA and the massless surveillance data gathering

00:59:27 ►

that they do of our personal emails and stuff,

00:59:31 ►

I can explain what’s wrong with it.

00:59:34 ►

It’s once you become a target,

00:59:35 ►

or once the government has some interest in you personally,

00:59:39 ►

it’s infinitely easier now for them

00:59:42 ►

to just look up your phone number

00:59:44 ►

and immediately

00:59:46 ►

find out who you communicate with and it lends you wide open to their harassment tactics,

00:59:53 ►

which they didn’t even have that back when this happened to me.

00:59:56 ►

So I just pressed it’s so overwhelming.

01:00:09 ►

Because first of all, we entered through the kitchen.

01:00:12 ►

There were people in every room of my house who were pulling drawers out.

01:00:16 ►

Everything was in the floor.

01:00:19 ►

Refrigerator contents were in the floor.

01:00:21 ►

Everything was just crazy.

01:00:23 ►

This door was not, it wasn’t even there. So

01:00:27 ►

until you’ve walked through your home and seen a hole in your home where a door used

01:00:31 ►

to be, you can’t really process it. So I really couldn’t even process what was happening to

01:00:38 ►

me. But they, this is after we tacked it up. I didn’t even think to take any pictures very

01:00:44 ►

much of the damage that was done.

01:00:47 ►

And what pictures I did have, I only got a few back

01:00:49 ►

because they take everything every time they would raid me.

01:00:52 ►

But this was the first raid.

01:00:54 ►

And I was in a room over here.

01:00:57 ►

They threw me in a chair,

01:00:58 ►

and they started telling me that,

01:01:00 ►

we know that your husband is in prison,

01:01:03 ►

and we know that you know

01:01:05 ►

that he is in trouble

01:01:07 ►

and he is a really bad guy.

01:01:11 ►

And it turned into the classic

01:01:13 ►

good guy, bad guy routine

01:01:14 ►

where somebody was screaming at me

01:01:16 ►

that I’m in deep shit,

01:01:18 ►

I’m looking at a lot of time

01:01:19 ►

and then somebody comes in

01:01:21 ►

who’s the attractive guy

01:01:23 ►

and says, back up, back up, leave her alone.

01:01:26 ►

You know, like the back off guy is, would you like some water?

01:01:29 ►

Amy, would you like, you know, somebody please get her some water.

01:01:32 ►

So you’ve got kind of that energy going on.

01:01:34 ►

And this guy, the designated good guy, kneels down

01:01:38 ►

and he puts his hand on my knee and he’s like,

01:01:41 ►

Amy, we’re your friends.

01:01:44 ►

And while they’re destroying my home and that

01:01:48 ►

never ceases, I can hear him downstairs. I was downstairs and then there was also a basement

01:01:54 ►

level and you can just hear the destruction going on. And he said, look, we want to talk

01:02:01 ►

to you. And so then the process starts

01:02:05 ►

where they start asking questions.

01:02:08 ►

And if you know the Miranda rights,

01:02:09 ►

anything you say can and will be used against you.

01:02:12 ►

Before you know it,

01:02:14 ►

they’re putting words into your mouth.

01:02:16 ►

They’re like, you know,

01:02:16 ►

you know that Sandy was arrested, right?

01:02:19 ►

You know he’s in Germany.

01:02:20 ►

And just a nod of your head

01:02:22 ►

can later turn into that agent testifying,

01:02:25 ►

saying she admitted it, she knew.

01:02:27 ►

So I was in such shock at what had happened to me.

01:02:33 ►

It really had an adverse effect,

01:02:35 ►

because I think sometimes that maneuver works on people where it scares them.

01:02:38 ►

For me, I was just like a clam.

01:02:41 ►

I just was just like still trying to process what the fuck is going on here.

01:02:47 ►

So I just kind of let him do his maneuver. And that’s when the whole test begins. When

01:02:58 ►

you’re put in a situation where you’re told you’ll either cooperate with us or we’re going to indict you, and you’re looking at 20 to life.

01:03:07 ►

And for me, that signals, it represents an energy that has surfaced on this planet time and time again.

01:03:17 ►

We know about McCarthyism, same thing, witches, Jews, you name it.

01:03:24 ►

It’s just about demonizing a certain group of people

01:03:26 ►

and then having a governmental body or somebody come to you

01:03:30 ►

and try to threaten you and control your actions through fear.

01:03:35 ►

So because this whole thing started with such a beautiful experience,

01:03:41 ►

my talk was about faith over fear.

01:03:43 ►

Because going forward, I had to make a decision

01:03:46 ►

as to what to do. But I’m going to show you just a little bit about what I was put through

01:03:51 ►

for two years. They told my attorney, I got to leave that day, but they told my attorney

01:03:56 ►

that they thought I was an invaluable tool, and they wanted me to infiltrate Sandy’s organization,

01:04:04 ►

and they wanted me to infiltrate Sandy’s organization, wear a wire,

01:04:11 ►

and I was just like, no, this isn’t going to happen.

01:04:14 ►

So this was the first raid.

01:04:17 ►

Excuse me.

01:04:19 ►

So those were the first raid.

01:04:21 ►

This was the second raid.

01:04:23 ►

Excuse me, the third raid.

01:04:25 ►

The second one I didn’t take any pictures of.

01:04:33 ►

And the second one was just a break-in where they tried to stage it and make it look like something had broken into my house.

01:04:35 ►

But when people break into your house, they steal something.

01:04:37 ►

They didn’t steal anything.

01:04:39 ►

They just completely trashed it again.

01:04:49 ►

And then the third time I had moved and they got another warrant and continued the harassment tactics.

01:04:50 ►

So one was one side of my bed.

01:04:52 ►

This was the other side of my bed.

01:04:55 ►

This is just different rooms. This is the kind of crazy stuff they do because there’s other bottles they don’t touch.

01:04:59 ►

That kind of stuff.

01:05:01 ►

This is the vacuum, light plugs,

01:05:06 ►

completely tearing everything apart, throwing.

01:05:08 ►

It’s like a tornado hits your home.

01:05:11 ►

Again, a picture can never, ever, ever replace the trauma

01:05:16 ►

and the emotion when you see your home like this.

01:05:20 ►

This is how, I was in a duplex by this time,

01:05:24 ►

so this is how I normally look. This is the left wall. This is the, I was in a duplex by this time, so this is how I normally look.

01:05:26 ►

This is the left wall, this is the right wall, and there was also a couch, and they ripped the, you know, as they did.

01:05:34 ►

And they also brought stuff up from a store, I mean, kind of like a basement, and boxes,

01:05:40 ►

and they just would dump everything all over your house because none of this stuff was in my living room.

01:05:46 ►

I think just for shock value is why they do a lot of this stuff

01:05:51 ►

because it’s just craziness.

01:05:54 ►

So I, for two years, they wanted me to cooperate.

01:05:59 ►

They infiltrated my friends.

01:06:01 ►

They broke into my employer’s office.

01:06:03 ►

They rifled through his files, didn’t

01:06:06 ►

steal anything again. Later, I found out they were looking for ledgers, but they went to

01:06:12 ►

so many of my friends. So nobody is safe because I promoted nightclubs, and I also worked full

01:06:20 ►

time for a guy who had the gas shut off valve in the event of an earthquake. And those

01:06:25 ►

people are put into a situation where they’re

01:06:27 ►

threatened. Why are you working with this

01:06:29 ►

woman? You know that she’s involved in a big

01:06:31 ►

drug conspiracy. We can

01:06:33 ►

audit your books. They kind of rain terror

01:06:36 ►

on those people too to the point where

01:06:37 ►

those people ostracize you.

01:06:40 ►

They’re like, look, you know,

01:06:41 ►

can you just sort of

01:06:44 ►

go away because they want the heat to go away.

01:06:46 ►

They tried to get several of my friends to say that they’d seen me sell drugs.

01:06:50 ►

Not one person would, which is amazing because, you know, if you have anybody who has an axe to grind, then there you go.

01:06:58 ►

So they take me to Waco, Texas.

01:07:02 ►

And that’s another thing.

01:07:04 ►

I can’t digress too much, but this

01:07:06 ►

whole thing is about money, and it’s driven by money, and all of that kicked in in the

01:07:11 ►

80s, where small towns were given money if they could show they were prosecuting federal

01:07:17 ►

drug cases, and Waco had nothing to do with this case. Our case was out of Dallas, but

01:07:22 ►

they moved the case to Waco. I met many women in prison who had their cases moved from Austin to

01:07:28 ►

Waco, San Antonio to Waco. Why Waco? Well,

01:07:31 ►

because there was one judge there, and that judge was completely corrupt.

01:07:36 ►

He’s also the one who gave all the French Davidians

01:07:39 ►

so much time, even though the jury didn’t think that the victims

01:07:44 ►

that were tried later would get that amount of time.

01:07:47 ►

Anyway, I get 24 years.

01:07:51 ►

I’m held responsible for all the ecstasy that Sandy manufactured.

01:07:55 ►

Sandy cooperated, and later he came back to the U.S., and he got three years probation only.

01:08:02 ►

He wasn’t even disbarred because he was a lawyer.

01:08:05 ►

Anyway, so then after a year in Waco,

01:08:10 ►

I get to go to federal prison in Dublin.

01:08:14 ►

And again, this is my mom, my dad, and my grandmother.

01:08:17 ►

So this is kind of what prison looks like now,

01:08:20 ►

only replace that with a black family, an Asian family, Hispanic family,

01:08:26 ►

because we’ve become the biggest penal colony on the planet.

01:08:31 ►

And anyone who exercises their right to go to a trial, the Thornburg Memorandum under

01:08:36 ►

the Bush administration said pump them to the highest amount of time you can get them,

01:08:41 ►

so you’re penalized if you go to trial.

01:08:46 ►

you can get them. So you’re penalized if you go to trial. And the good thing that happened to me when you surrender and you don’t allow fear to dictate your decisions, because I

01:08:52 ►

could have cooperated. Even my parents were like, why don’t you just plead guilty? Why

01:08:56 ►

don’t you just do what they want you to do? Well, because some of us can’t be corrupted.

01:09:01 ►

I wasn’t going to sell my soul. I wasn’t going to do to others what I saw them doing to me.

01:09:06 ►

And basically, they want you to testify against anybody who does go to trial,

01:09:11 ►

who won’t cooperate.

01:09:13 ►

And I was more willing to surrender myself to this journey

01:09:17 ►

and experience it and see what happens

01:09:20 ►

and put my faith in God than I was to crawl into bed with the federal government.

01:09:25 ►

So John Beresford, some of you may or may not know who John is.

01:09:30 ►

John was the first person to ever order LSD from Sandoz in this country.

01:09:39 ►

And he was a doctor.

01:09:42 ►

Aldous Huxley told him about LSD. John, when he ordered it, he didn’t know how much he was getting. He ordered one gram. And I wanted to get all the details correct. So I’m going to touch with Dieter. And Dieter works for Albert Hoffman, because I wanted to make sure I told this exactly right, because there’s a lot of

01:10:05 ►

versions of this story.

01:10:08 ►

So, that

01:10:09 ►

was, that’s 4,000, some people

01:10:11 ►

say 10,000 hits. Dieter said,

01:10:13 ►

no, it’s 4,000, 4,000 hits.

01:10:17 ►

John

01:10:17 ►

is the one who came up

01:10:20 ►

because it’s liquid, and he was like,

01:10:21 ►

you know, how can I dispense this?

01:10:23 ►

And he came up with the idea of the sugar cubes.

01:10:26 ►

So anytime you see the sugar cube thing, that was John’s idea.

01:10:31 ►

And John and Michael Hollingshead created something called

01:10:36 ►

Agoros Scientific Something Together.

01:10:39 ►

And John wanted to do it, like, therapeutically

01:10:43 ►

and be very responsible in an environment.

01:10:48 ►

And Michael was a little bit more cavalier about it or whatever.

01:10:52 ►

He turned on Timothy Leary and some other people.

01:10:55 ►

There’s some debate about some of those facts.

01:10:57 ►

I’m not going to get into that.

01:10:58 ►

But John never wanted any notoriety.

01:11:01 ►

In fact, he always wanted to just kind of downplay everything. And so

01:11:06 ►

when you read about it, you see a lot about Michael Holland’s head, but you don’t see

01:11:09 ►

much about John Beresford. John later became obsessed with the fact that people were going

01:11:16 ►

to prison for LSD, and he felt somewhat responsible. He is Buddhist, and he gave all of his inheritance

01:11:24 ►

away, everything basically that he had to the Buddhist monks in Canada so that they he is Buddhist and he gave all of his inheritance away

01:11:25 ►

everything basically that he had to

01:11:26 ►

the Buddhist monks in Canada

01:11:29 ►

so that they would have

01:11:30 ►

buy some land and have a place

01:11:32 ►

and he came here to the US

01:11:34 ►

and I don’t know how he did it because he didn’t have a car

01:11:36 ►

but he would just

01:11:37 ►

appear at prisons

01:11:40 ►

to visit us

01:11:42 ►

anyone who was in for psychedelics

01:11:44 ►

and later other people didn’t matter.

01:11:47 ►

He felt so much compassion for prisoners.

01:11:52 ►

And you’ll see that on his mullet

01:11:56 ►

is this little guy.

01:11:58 ►

He passed away,

01:12:00 ►

and I’m wearing that with me today.

01:12:03 ►

But John talked to Albert Hoffman a lot about

01:12:07 ►

the prisoner situation. He always wanted somebody to get behind the, to put a face on this and

01:12:15 ►

to care and to want to talk about it. So he, again, he traveled around and devoted his

01:12:22 ►

life. Jonathan Ott, some of you may know who Jonathan Ott

01:12:25 ►

is. The beautiful thing about being in prison is that the community heard about my story

01:12:32 ►

and Nancy Martz and other people who were serving time for LSD. And they literally took

01:12:38 ►

time out of their lives to come and visit, which, I mean, that’s huge to think that somebody

01:12:42 ►

in this crazy world we’re all so busy would go to a prison

01:12:46 ►

and visit somebody they don’t even know, and you have to

01:12:47 ►

lie, because the prisons

01:12:50 ►

won’t let anybody visit unless you

01:12:51 ►

fill out a form and say you knew that person.

01:12:54 ►

So it really is

01:12:55 ►

remarkable that these people

01:12:57 ►

came out of the woodwork.

01:13:00 ►

Mickey Norris,

01:13:02 ►

Chris Conrad, and Virginia

01:13:03 ►

Reznor also came and visited me a lot.

01:13:06 ►

They’re very much involved in the marijuana movement, and Virginia’s no longer with us.

01:13:11 ►

They put me on the cover of Shattered Lives,

01:13:13 ►

and these people really got involved in trying to help me regain my freedom, and others.

01:13:20 ►

And they’re the unsung heroes.

01:13:22 ►

So anyway, they did a free aiming campaign.

01:13:27 ►

I did a lot of praying when I was in prison and asking for a sign from God

01:13:34 ►

because we had a pack going in.

01:13:36 ►

And there were times, you know, I was in there for nine years, three months.

01:13:41 ►

There’s times where you’re kind of like, where are you?

01:13:45 ►

But all of a sudden, it’s almost like you sort of pass some invisible test

01:13:49 ►

because all of a sudden, it’s like a floodgate of activity has surged for me.

01:13:55 ►

And Glamour magazine, David France contacted me, and he did a feature on my story.

01:14:01 ►

Because he did a feature, it was easy to send the article to politicians.

01:14:07 ►

I filed for executive clemency. President Clinton was in by this time. And because it

01:14:15 ►

was, nobody’s going to write a letter for you when they don’t know what you actually

01:14:19 ►

did. And you can’t send people your transcripts, and the transcripts don’t say what happened

01:14:23 ►

anyway. But because of the article, I got

01:14:26 ►

over 15 sitting politicians

01:14:28 ►

who wrote letters saying, this is an

01:14:30 ►

outrage, this is not what

01:14:32 ►

we passed, this is not what

01:14:34 ►

we intended, but DOJ

01:14:36 ►

took the laws that they gave

01:14:38 ►

them that they said were intended

01:14:40 ►

for kingpins, which were

01:14:42 ►

letting kingpins go free,

01:14:44 ►

and the wives and girlfriends and ancillary people

01:14:47 ►

were doing the long sentences that they say

01:14:50 ►

were supposedly intended for kingpins.

01:14:53 ►

So there was a ridiculous flop.

01:14:55 ►

The sad thing is that nothing has changed.

01:14:58 ►

Nobody has tried to repeal the laws,

01:15:01 ►

that they themselves were outraged that this was even going on.

01:15:04 ►

It’s still going on. So here’s Chris Conrad and Nikki. This is just two days after I got out of prison,

01:15:14 ►

and it was a shock. They just called me into the office, and they were like, you’re going home.

01:15:20 ►

And Virginia Reznor, who’s no longer with us, Heather did time for LSD and so did her boyfriend.

01:15:29 ►

And John Beresford was very involved with them as well.

01:15:33 ►

So these lovely ladies, well, Virginia and Mickey,

01:15:37 ►

they did an exhibit and traveled all over the nation

01:15:40 ►

and set up the exhibit to put a face on the prisoners.

01:15:43 ►

And they’re really the unsung heroes

01:15:45 ►

because it was really lonely back then.

01:15:49 ►

It’s becoming more, there’s more awareness.

01:15:52 ►

I don’t know if you know, but John Legend has just gone all in

01:15:55 ►

and said he’s going to launch a campaign to end mass incarceration.

01:16:00 ►

He’s even performing at two prisons.

01:16:03 ►

So thank you, John Legend,

01:16:08 ►

because as Elizabeth Taylor stepped up for AIDS and then everybody got involved when she did,

01:16:12 ►

I have a feeling that a whole bunch of artists are going to follow in Legend’s footsteps.

01:16:18 ►

So, John, I’d like for you guys to look at the posters over there

01:16:23 ►

because it shows the period.

01:16:27 ►

I threw his memorial, and unfortunately I didn’t see him.

01:16:32 ►

I was making plans to go see him when I got the call

01:16:34 ►

that he had passed away September 07.

01:16:38 ►

And so it has the period where he has the LSD

01:16:43 ►

and also his work with prisoners,

01:16:45 ►

and then the last years when he was married to a woman named Virginia Blythe.

01:16:51 ►

So I really want to honor John, and I encourage all of you to learn a little bit more about him.

01:16:57 ►

He met with the Dalai Lama, and the Dalai Lama told him,

01:17:01 ►

you don’t have to reincarnate anymore.

01:17:03 ►

You’re done.

01:17:06 ►

Unless he wants to. So anyway, this is the same poster that’s over there. At the memorial, because

01:17:18 ►

John was so devoted to prisoners, which is what I’m devoted to now, I have the Can’t

01:17:21 ►

Do Foundation, and I work tirelessly to try to spotlight

01:17:25 ►

the women I left behind, hot prisoners, and other people who are serving draconian sentences.

01:17:32 ►

We released balloons with the names and pictures of prisoners and sent them up to John. This

01:17:40 ►

is a friend of John who came in and interviewed all of the LSD people who were in prison, John Humphrey.

01:17:49 ►

Ron Breton is a friend of John’s.

01:17:53 ►

John was determined to create an LSD museum.

01:17:58 ►

A lot of people have tried, but nobody’s done it.

01:18:00 ►

John’s passion was to create an LSD museum.

01:18:04 ►

I didn’t have it because Ron just got it to me,

01:18:07 ►

so I had to get it in the thing,

01:18:08 ►

but there’s only one picture,

01:18:10 ►

and there was an LSD museum in Pasadena,

01:18:13 ►

and I’ll show it to you,

01:18:14 ►

but anyway, this is the only picture of it,

01:18:18 ►

and so John’s dream did come true,

01:18:22 ►

but after a while, the foundation for that, they just couldn’t continue to support it financially.

01:18:32 ►

And that’s John’s widow, Virginia.

01:18:36 ►

And lastly, these are all women I did time with.

01:18:40 ►

Sue Ann Charlton, she served time for LSD.

01:18:44 ►

Her parents were a work on the Manhattan Project.

01:18:48 ►

They were all scientists.

01:18:49 ►

And if you don’t know what that is, that was the atom bomb.

01:18:52 ►

And the kids lived out in the desert.

01:18:56 ►

And she has a fascinating story.

01:18:58 ►

Doritji was in for marijuana.

01:19:00 ►

I was in for the DMA.

01:19:02 ►

And Nancy Marks got 30 years for LSD.

01:19:07 ►

And anyway, I just encourage you. for marijuana. I was in for the BMA. And Nancy Marks got 30 years for LSD. Anyway,

01:19:07 ►

I just encourage you. I got out and

01:19:10 ►

started a Can Do Foundation.

01:19:12 ►

And I encourage you guys

01:19:13 ►

to just keep in mind

01:19:15 ►

anytime you have an opportunity to talk to somebody

01:19:18 ►

that we really have

01:19:20 ►

got to rein in the drug war and put

01:19:21 ►

an end to it altogether.

01:19:24 ►

And also, I did a documentary called 420,

01:19:28 ►

which is a couple of days from now.

01:19:33 ►

It’s about the drug war, but I focused on marijuana

01:19:36 ►

and the whole 420 holiday as well.

01:19:39 ►

If you guys want to ask me about that, I have some of those if somebody’s interested.

01:19:45 ►

Anyway, thank you for having me, and I really, really appreciate you.

01:19:49 ►

Thank you.

01:19:54 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:20:01 ►

So, does Amy’s story make you angry?

01:20:04 ►

Just think of it.

01:20:06 ►

That low-life scum asshole of a lawyer husband of hers

01:20:09 ►

not only didn’t get disbarred, he didn’t spend any time in prison.

01:20:13 ►

He only got three years probation.

01:20:15 ►

While Amy, who was only involved by the fact that she helped that jerk get a lawyer,

01:20:20 ►

well, she spent nine years, nine years in prison.

01:20:27 ►

Now, if you don’t think that is seriously fucked up, then you must be a narc or something. The next time you hear someone say that the United

01:20:32 ►

States is the best country on earth, well, you should tell them Amy’s story and ask them how

01:20:37 ►

that squares with being a decent country. And before you get too lost in the details of her

01:20:43 ►

story, please keep in mind that the drug that sent her husband off into the darkness was alcohol, not MDMA.

01:20:51 ►

And I think the other thing that should be taken away from Amy’s story is that, well, it doesn’t take all that much for the government goons to drag you into prison on a conspiracy charge.

01:21:01 ►

In some cases, just knowing about the criminal activities of another

01:21:05 ►

may be enough to get you into a world of trouble.

01:21:08 ►

So be careful, be very careful about who you’re involved with.

01:21:13 ►

If you don’t watch out and you’re acting just like a good Samaritan as Amy did,

01:21:17 ►

well, you could wind up in prison too.

01:21:20 ►

Hers is a cautionary tale that we must all keep in mind

01:21:23 ►

as we become ever more involved in psychedelic advocacy.

01:21:28 ►

And I hope you made a note of the fact that cops and DEA agents are not, most definitely not, your friends.

01:21:36 ►

My God, those assholes trashed Amy’s home on three occasions before throwing her in jail for a crime that she had nothing to do with and no knowledge

01:21:45 ►

of. Let’s face it, drug cops and DEA agents are low-life bastards and they deserve all the bad

01:21:52 ►

things that are drawn into their lives. Hopefully their children will see them for what they are and

01:21:57 ►

abandon them in their old age. And yes, I know that some of our fellow slaughters are DEA agents

01:22:03 ►

and drug cops. All I can say is that I feel really sorry for you and hope that you can find a way to get out of the horrible job you’re in

01:22:10 ►

before your karma is so black that it’ll take a hundred more lifetimes to clean it.

01:22:17 ►

Well, now that I’ve had a chance to vent a little, I feel much better.

01:22:22 ►

Hopefully I haven’t left you in too bad a mood right now.

01:22:24 ►

But as you

01:22:26 ►

know, it’s not all lollipops and

01:22:28 ►

sunshine. Sometimes we

01:22:29 ►

have to take the bull by the tail and

01:22:31 ►

face the situation.

01:22:34 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo

01:22:35 ►

signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:22:38 ►

Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

462 - Psychedelic Advocacy

Program Notes §

Previous Episode §

Next Episode §

Similar Episodes §

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

00:00:22 ► §

00:00:23 ► §

00:00:26 ► §

00:00:31 ► §

00:00:38 ► §

00:00:51 ► §

00:00:59 ► §

00:01:06 ► §

00:01:11 ► §

00:01:17 ► §

00:01:23 ► §

00:01:25 ► §

00:01:30 ► §

00:01:36 ► §

00:01:42 ► §

00:01:48 ► §

00:01:58 ► §

00:02:00 ► §

00:02:05 ► §

00:02:10 ► §

00:02:13 ► §

00:02:16 ► §

00:02:19 ► §

00:02:21 ► §

00:02:21 ► §

00:02:27 ► §

00:02:31 ► §

00:02:35 ► §

00:02:39 ► §

00:02:41 ► §

00:02:45 ► §

00:02:48 ► §

00:02:54 ► §

00:02:56 ► §

00:02:57 ► §

00:02:58 ► §

00:03:01 ► §

00:03:09 ► §

00:03:15 ► §

00:03:23 ► §

00:03:28 ► §

00:03:33 ► §

00:03:42 ► §

00:03:47 ► §

00:03:53 ► §

00:03:59 ► §

00:04:07 ► §

00:04:17 ► §

00:04:22 ► §

00:04:30 ► §

00:04:32 ► §

00:04:35 ► §

00:04:42 ► §

00:04:47 ► §

00:04:54 ► §

00:05:00 ► §

00:05:05 ► §

00:05:13 ► §

00:05:18 ► §

00:05:25 ► §

00:05:30 ► §

00:05:34 ► §

00:05:41 ► §

00:05:45 ► §

00:05:55 ► §

00:06:01 ► §

00:06:11 ► §

00:06:15 ► §

00:06:18 ► §

00:06:24 ► §

00:06:31 ► §

Program Notes

Previous Episode

Next Episode

Similar Episodes

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

00:00:22 ►

00:00:23 ►

00:00:26 ►

00:00:31 ►

00:00:38 ►

00:00:51 ►

00:00:59 ►

00:01:06 ►

00:01:11 ►

00:01:17 ►

00:01:23 ►

00:01:25 ►

00:01:30 ►

00:01:36 ►

00:01:42 ►

00:01:48 ►

00:01:58 ►

00:02:00 ►

00:02:05 ►

00:02:10 ►

00:02:13 ►

00:02:16 ►

00:02:19 ►

00:02:21 ►

00:02:21 ►

00:02:27 ►

00:02:31 ►

00:02:35 ►

00:02:39 ►

00:02:41 ►

00:02:45 ►

00:02:48 ►

00:02:54 ►

00:02:56 ►

00:02:57 ►

00:02:58 ►

00:03:01 ►

00:03:09 ►

00:03:15 ►

00:03:23 ►

00:03:28 ►

00:03:33 ►

00:03:42 ►

00:03:47 ►

00:03:53 ►

00:03:59 ►

00:04:07 ►

00:04:17 ►

00:04:22 ►

00:04:30 ►

00:04:32 ►

00:04:35 ►

00:04:42 ►

00:04:47 ►

00:04:54 ►

00:05:00 ►

00:05:05 ►

00:05:13 ►

00:05:18 ►

00:05:25 ►

00:05:30 ►

00:05:34 ►

00:05:41 ►

00:05:45 ►

00:05:55 ►

00:06:01 ►

00:06:11 ►

00:06:15 ►

00:06:18 ►

00:06:24 ►

00:06:31 ►

00:06:37 ►

00:06:44 ►

00:06:48 ►