Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Emanuel Sferios
http://www.mdmathemovie.com/Today’s podcast features a conversation that Lorenzo had with Emanuel Sferios, the founder of DanceSafe and the producer of “MDMA The Movie”. In addition to discussing the movie that Emanuel is producing their conversation included a discussion of the way young people now perceive the differences between MDMA, Ecstasy, and Molly. Also their discussion touched on the current medical uses of MDMA and ways in which parents can talk with their children about drugs in an honest and sensible way.
MDMA the Movie
Ecstasy Data.org - Anonymous Drug Testing
Students for Sensible Drug Policy
The Secret Chief Revealed: Leo Zeff, MDMA Pioneer
By Myron J. Stolaroff
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0966001966
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:26 ►
Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And for the first time in almost 500 podcasts, I’m going to make a slight change to my normal format. As you know by now, my
00:00:32 ►
format has always been to introduce a talk or interview, play it, and then make a few
00:00:37 ►
comments. Well, today I’m going to intersperse my comments as I play a recording of a conversation
00:00:43 ►
that I had recently with Emanuel Seferis, rather than saving them for the end of the program. And here’s why. If you’ve been paying
00:00:52 ►
attention, then you realize that it’s been quite a long time since I conducted an interview myself.
00:00:58 ►
My reasons are numerous and not really important here. But after watching several of Emanuel’s
00:01:04 ►
talks on YouTube,
00:01:10 ►
I decided that his input is something that we can all get a lot out of here in the salon.
00:01:17 ►
And having failed to find someone to conduct the interview for me, I decided to do it myself.
00:01:23 ►
But there was a rub, of course. The last time that I did an interview myself, I was still using Windows, but now it’s been almost four years since that foul Windows code from Microsoft has touched my PC
00:01:30 ►
and until I decided to do this interview there hasn’t been a single thing that I couldn’t do easier and better with Linux
00:01:38 ►
and over those four years I haven’t experienced a single virus, any malware
00:01:43 ►
and my machine hasn’t locked up with a blue screen of death even once.
00:01:47 ►
But in wanting to record a Skype conversation, I ran into my first technical challenge with Linux.
00:01:55 ►
And this caused me to have to reschedule my conversation a couple of times as I struggled to find a way to record a Skype conversation on my machine.
00:02:04 ►
And by Monday morning, I was sure that I’d found a way to record a Skype conversation on my machine.
00:02:08 ►
And by Monday morning, I was sure that I’d found a way to do it,
00:02:09 ►
kludgy as it was.
00:02:13 ►
Unfortunately, after we made our connection,
00:02:18 ►
and even though I had tested my setup with the Skype Echo Lady,
00:02:20 ►
it turned out that Emmanuel couldn’t hear me when I was recording my end of the conversation.
00:02:23 ►
So I turned off the recorder
00:02:25 ►
for my voice and, well, our conversation proceeded nicely. My plan then was to go back and record my
00:02:32 ►
questions later and then insert them into the recording of Emanuel’s answers. And, well, that
00:02:37 ►
turned out to be a really dumb idea because, well, it just sounded really stilted and just didn’t work right. So, what to do?
00:02:46 ►
Well, I’ve decided to insert my comments after each answer that Emanuel gave to my questions,
00:02:52 ►
and more or less do a running commentary on what he said.
00:02:56 ►
Now, the only reason I’m going into so much detail here is to let you know that
00:03:00 ►
while Emanuel and I did have a really interesting exchange of ideas,
00:03:04 ►
in this format he didn’t actually have a chance to state any disagreements or clarifications to
00:03:09 ►
what I’m saying. And for that, Emmanuel, I sincerely apologize. Hopefully I haven’t misstated anything
00:03:16 ►
here that you might object to, but if so, please let me know and I’ll be sure to add your corrections
00:03:21 ►
to a future podcast. So now, let’s get on with the show, as they say.
00:03:27 ►
Well, if you listened to my program from last week,
00:03:30 ►
you heard Rick Doblin, the founder of MAPS,
00:03:33 ►
giving his 2015 Palenque Norte lecture at Burning Man.
00:03:37 ►
And you heard him mention that Emanuel Seferis
00:03:40 ►
happened to be in the audience at the time.
00:03:42 ►
So you also know that Emanuel is the person who founded DanceSafe,
00:03:46 ►
which is, in my opinion, one of the most important organizations
00:03:50 ►
that we have in the festival, dance, and psychedelic community.
00:03:55 ►
And you’re going to hear more about that in a few moments.
00:03:57 ►
But instead of starting at the beginning, so to speak,
00:04:01 ►
my first question for Emanuel came from something that I heard him say
00:04:04 ►
in a YouTube talk where he pointed out the current thinking among young people concerning their
00:04:10 ►
perceived differences in the use of the terms ecstasy, molly, and MDMA. And here’s what he had
00:04:17 ►
to say. I’ve been an advocate from the beginning of getting away from slang or street terms for drugs.
00:04:26 ►
And this is even more imperative when you look at the MDMA market,
00:04:31 ►
which is hands down the most adulterated drug market in the world.
00:04:35 ►
There are hundreds of drugs sold under these slang names.
00:04:39 ►
And most of the time users buying Ecstasy or Mali aren’t getting MDMA.
00:04:46 ►
But what first dawned on me how dangerous these slang terms are was when I first started DanceSafe
00:04:55 ►
and realized that at that time, back in 1998, 1999, young people didn’t even know that Ecstasy was its own drug or its own molecule, MDMA.
00:05:10 ►
To them, ecstasy were just these little pills that you purchased.
00:05:14 ►
Some of them made you feel good and some of them made you feel bad.
00:05:19 ►
And when I asked, well, what do you think’s in them?
00:05:21 ►
They would say, oh, different drugs, heroin, cocaine.
00:05:24 ►
You know, they would list the drugs that they had heard the names of. They didn’t even know
00:05:29 ►
that ecstasy was supposed to be MDMA. So, and that makes sense when you think about it, right?
00:05:37 ►
In the world of these young people, when slang terms are being used, the scientific information can just
00:05:47 ►
get lost, and their language and understanding is based on their visual, tactile, and auditory
00:05:51 ►
world, which is a social world where people are selling ecstasy.
00:05:57 ►
We began our education process by explaining that ecstasy is supposed to be in the domain.
00:06:05 ►
You’re not getting good or bad ecstasy.
00:06:08 ►
You’re getting real or fake ecstasy.
00:06:12 ►
And I can tell you why I’ve gotten away from that strategy now
00:06:18 ►
and are dumping the slang terms completely.
00:06:21 ►
And that’s the history you asked about, right?
00:06:26 ►
What happened was through the late 90s and into the early 2000s, the market was so adulterated
00:06:34 ►
that most ecstasy you purchased was not MDMA.
00:06:41 ►
Ecstasy, again, back then was predominantly pressed tablets dyed various colors with logos in them, green clovers, pink Teletubbies, et cetera.
00:06:54 ►
At that time, if you found loose powder or crystal MDMA, it generally was MDMA.
00:07:04 ►
powder or crystal MDMA, it generally was MDMA.
00:07:09 ►
And that’s because the press tablets were largely being manufactured in Europe,
00:07:12 ►
Eastern Europe, and were being smuggled over,
00:07:17 ►
whereas the smaller chemists in the U.S. or Canada didn’t have pressing machines,
00:07:23 ►
and they were selling MDMA or ecststasy if you want to call it that
00:07:28 ►
uh and loose powder form and they were small chemists who you know still kind of believed
00:07:33 ►
in the power of the medicine um they were making enough money they weren’t trying to maximize their profits by selling bunk.
00:07:46 ►
And so if you found loose powder back then, it generally was MDMA.
00:07:50 ►
And the dealers at that time, to distinguish it from the press tablets,
00:07:56 ►
which were largely fake, gave it a different name.
00:08:01 ►
And interestingly, they started calling it Molecule,
00:08:06 ►
which later morphed into Molly.
00:08:10 ►
And so in this tactile visual world of young people,
00:08:13 ►
now suddenly a new name appeared,
00:08:16 ►
and Molly is the predominant name now because at least in the U.S. now today,
00:08:18 ►
the majority of MDMA,
00:08:20 ►
the majority of what’s supposed to be MDMA,
00:08:26 ►
is in the form of loose powder.
00:08:32 ►
Now, that’s not because the small chemists in the U.S. are making more of it.
00:08:45 ►
It’s because today China has entered the game, and there’s so many new synthetic drugs being sold and purchased over the dark net and shipped through regular mail systems.
00:08:49 ►
And all of that now is loose powder.
00:08:57 ►
So today, when you find MOLLE in a loose powder format, it does not at all mean it’s pure MDMA,
00:09:03 ►
even though the myth is still there, because back in the late 90s, that was the case.
00:09:05 ►
And as you may have heard me say in the past, it was back in the early to mid-1980s when I first became involved with MDMA that for a year
00:09:13 ►
or so all that we saw were little 120 milligram white tablets with no logo or embossing at all.
00:09:20 ►
They were just little white pills. But then sometime in late 1985 or so, the pills more or
00:09:27 ►
less disappeared, and we started getting it in little vials of white powder, which at the time
00:09:33 ►
were 100% pure MDMA. The adulterated stuff hadn’t yet begun to appear. And so I mentioned to Emanuel
00:09:41 ►
that when the powder form first appeared, hardly any of us had a scale capable of properly measuring our MDMA.
00:09:50 ►
And so we just guessed as to the size of the dose that we were taking.
00:09:54 ►
And, well, we eyeballed it.
00:09:55 ►
That’s what we called it.
00:09:57 ►
Yeah, that’s really a big problem today.
00:10:00 ►
And it’s made harm reduction efforts a lot more difficult.
00:10:03 ►
and it’s made harm reduction efforts a lot more difficult.
00:10:09 ►
It was really an important and wise decision back in the early days when it was legal to press them into tablets
00:10:12 ►
because MDMA is the kind of drug you should take orally
00:10:16 ►
and you should take in a proper dose at the beginning.
00:10:20 ►
And then, as you know, the protocols were that about two to three hours into it, you could take a small booster dose between one-third and one-half of your original dose.
00:10:32 ►
These were the protocols developed in the late 70s, early 80s by the therapeutic community.
00:10:40 ►
We would call that proper dosing. And when the tablets come with known doses, they lend themselves to that oral intake,
00:10:53 ►
and you can break the tablet in half or thirds to get your booster dose if you want. when it’s all loose powder, not only do young people not know or have the ability to weigh
00:11:10 ►
their dose accurately, but it also lends itself to insufflation, snorting, finger dipping.
00:11:22 ►
And this is not really the appropriate way to use MDMA. Combine that with
00:11:28 ►
the fact that so much of what’s out there is actually methadone, mephedrone, or other
00:11:35 ►
cathinone class stimulants, which are more similar to cocaine and other type of stimulants that you can use in small amounts and
00:11:45 ►
redose all the time.
00:11:46 ►
What we’re really seeing today is Molly is shifting more towards that kind of
00:11:52 ►
stimulant type behavior rather than a psychedelic behavior where you take a
00:11:56 ►
no dose, you come up, have a plateau and you come down.
00:11:59 ►
This really, you know,
00:12:03 ►
is dangerous and is a result of prohibition and the lack of honest education and known pure pharmaceutical grade drugs that should be available to adults.
00:12:23 ►
When Emanuel mentioned some of the dangers associated with prohibition,
00:12:28 ►
it reminded me of another talk that he gave in which he spoke about the fact that some national drug surveys are showing a significant decrease in the use of ecstasy among our younger friends.
00:12:35 ►
Apparently, many of these surveys only ask about ecstasy, not MDMA and not Molly.
00:12:41 ►
And since so many people no longer equate the word ecstasy with MDMA and not Molly. And since so many people no longer equate the word ecstasy with MDMA
00:12:46 ►
and think of it as a combination of things like heroin and cocaine, they, of course,
00:12:52 ►
say that they don’t use it. And so I asked him to comment about that.
00:12:57 ►
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It was one of my main efforts when I founded DanceSafe, and that continues today also. You know, the general
00:13:09 ►
public confuses all of the words together, and that’s very dangerous for the, well,
00:13:22 ►
understanding of what’s really going on. Here’s a great example.
00:13:25 ►
I just watched this video a few days ago,
00:13:28 ►
a news show from Tallahassee on the dangers of Mali.
00:13:33 ►
And they were interviewing basically poor working class people
00:13:38 ►
who were addicted to what they were calling Mali
00:13:44 ►
and checking themselves into rehab and staying up
00:13:48 ►
for you know two weeks at a time snorting molly every day and it was uh obvious to anyone that
00:13:57 ►
knows mdma that the drug that was they were referring to here was not MDMA and was almost certainly either alpha-PVP,
00:14:08 ►
which is given the nickname Flocka,
00:14:10 ►
methadone, or some other cathinone drug,
00:14:14 ►
which would work if you used it that way, right?
00:14:17 ►
MDMA would not work if you tried snorting it
00:14:19 ►
throughout the day multiple days in a row.
00:14:22 ►
We know that.
00:14:23 ►
You have to put a week at least between your use in order for your serotonin to be replenished
00:14:28 ►
before you can feel the drug again.
00:14:30 ►
So whatever they were talking about in this scare tactic news report was not MDMA,
00:14:37 ►
but yet so many more of these types of reports are coming out,
00:14:41 ►
and the public is very confused, and even experts, right?
00:14:44 ►
They had toxicologists on here
00:14:46 ►
talking about, you know, molly and MDMA interchangeably very inaccurately. So I had a
00:14:54 ►
conversation with Joseph Palamer, who is a researcher epidemiologist, and he has been struggling to get his studies published around this fact
00:15:08 ►
that the most accurate survey organization that we have around illicit drug use
00:15:17 ►
is called Monitoring the Future, but they have yet to update their language.
00:15:24 ►
So they ask young people,
00:15:25 ►
have you taken ecstasy,
00:15:27 ►
you know,
00:15:28 ►
in the last month,
00:15:28 ►
last year,
00:15:29 ►
et cetera.
00:15:29 ►
And that’s how they compile statistics of,
00:15:31 ►
you know,
00:15:32 ►
trends on illicit drug use.
00:15:34 ►
And of course,
00:15:35 ►
uh,
00:15:35 ►
they’re saying,
00:15:36 ►
uh,
00:15:36 ►
no,
00:15:37 ►
I,
00:15:37 ►
I,
00:15:38 ►
I’ll never take ecstasy.
00:15:39 ►
Right.
00:15:40 ►
But they don’t ask these kids if they’ve taken Molly.
00:15:42 ►
And in the minds of these young people,
00:15:47 ►
ecstasy and Molly are different things. So it looks as though Mali use or MDMA use or probably the best way to say it is intended MDMA use
00:16:00 ►
because people are really looking for MDMA when they take Mali, even if they’re getting a cathinone instead.
00:16:06 ►
So the monitoring, the future studies make it appear that intended MDMA use is lower
00:16:13 ►
than it really is because they’re only asking young people to take an ecstasy.
00:16:18 ►
They don’t even understand what the difference between ecstasy and Mali.
00:16:23 ►
On top of the fact that there is a great deal of confusion about the terms being used for MDMA,
00:16:29 ►
there remains also the big problem of determining exactly what that white powder is
00:16:35 ►
that one has bought most likely from a stranger.
00:16:38 ►
So I asked Emmanuel about how someone who wasn’t at an event
00:16:42 ►
that had a DanceSafe testing booth present could test it
00:16:45 ►
themselves. Well, they can actually purchase a testing kit off the DanceSafe website, a home
00:16:53 ►
testing kit, which is very reliable in identifying MDMA versus a cathinone. But it doesn’t detect purity. So if they purchase something that had
00:17:07 ►
MDMA plus something else in it, the color change using their home reagent kits may mask the
00:17:14 ►
presence of other adulterants. So we like to say that these home reagent kits, while fairly reliable at positive identification, cannot detect purity.
00:17:27 ►
So the only way to know whether the sample you have is pure is to send it to a laboratory for gas chromatography testing.
00:17:35 ►
And there is one that they can use.
00:17:38 ►
And I started this back in 1999.
00:17:42 ►
It’s now being managed by the Arrowids.
00:17:46 ►
And the web address is
00:17:48 ►
ecstasydata.org.
00:17:50 ►
Fortunately, it costs some money,
00:17:51 ►
and potentially up to a two-week
00:17:53 ►
turnaround, but if you’re willing to wait,
00:17:55 ►
I strongly recommend that
00:17:58 ►
you know what you’re taking before you take it.
00:18:00 ►
Then you can send just a little bit,
00:18:02 ►
20 milligrams is all you need to send into the lab,
00:18:04 ►
and you can go back to the website and check the results no longer than two weeks, I believe.
00:18:11 ►
So that’s ecstasydata.org.
00:18:13 ►
And if you go to ecstasydata.org on their homepage,
00:18:18 ►
you will see the latest 100 test results of substances that were sent in for testing.
00:18:24 ►
Scrolling down the list, I discovered some really interesting results.
00:18:28 ►
For example, the little pills called Blue Mercedes that were being sold in Vancouver,
00:18:33 ►
Canada just this past December contained not only MDMA, but procaine, methamphetamine,
00:18:39 ►
and caffeine.
00:18:40 ►
And a little pill called UPS that actually looked like a mini version of the UPS logo contained caffeine, lycodine, methamphetamine, benzocaine, procaine, and acetaminophen, which sounds like a truly horrible combination to me.
00:18:59 ►
It’s a really interesting list, and you’ll probably be surprised about some of the findings that are
00:19:05 ►
posted there. And by the way, you aren’t required to reveal any personal information when you send
00:19:11 ►
something in for testing. You can remain anonymous and still have your substance tested. And the
00:19:16 ►
prices for testing vary with the type of substance, but for a pill, it’s only $40. Now, when you send
00:19:24 ►
something in to be tested, you’re asked to let
00:19:26 ►
them know the city and state where the pill slash material was obtained, the approximate date of the
00:19:32 ►
acquisition, what it was sold as, and what you suspect it to be, if those are different, and the
00:19:38 ►
name that the pill is known by, if any, like a crown or dolphin or something like that, and the name that it was sold as, if it was
00:19:46 ►
known by something else in your area. So far, they have almost 4,000 test results posted, and
00:19:52 ►
the results can be sorted by city and state, as well as in other ways. It’s really an exceptional
00:19:58 ►
service, and is managed by my friends Earth and Fire Arrowwood, who are also the founders of Arrowwood.org,
00:20:05 ►
which you’ve heard me speak about many, many times.
00:20:08 ►
Next, I mentioned how impressed I was back in 1999 to learn that he had founded DanceSafe
00:20:14 ►
and had begun doing free testing at some raves up in Northern California.
00:20:18 ►
What many people don’t know, or don’t remember, is that back then there was a major push in the U.S. to ban
00:20:26 ►
electronic dance music because some small-minded conservatives like Joe Biden thought that by
00:20:32 ►
eliminating raves and other venues featuring electronic music that they could stop the use
00:20:38 ►
of MDMA, which was then being widely used at these events. And by the early 2000s, organizations such as the Electronic Music Defense and Education Fund
00:20:49 ►
were actively fighting these laws.
00:20:52 ►
And it was in that atmosphere of severe paranoia on the part of politicians and law enforcement people
00:20:58 ►
that Emanuel took the, what I consider, very bold step of setting up a free testing service
00:21:04 ►
to check out the contents of
00:21:05 ►
pills and powders being sold at these venues. I can still remember my friends and I talking about
00:21:11 ►
how brave these DanceSafe people were. And by the way, I still think that it was an exceptionally
00:21:18 ►
courageous thing to do, particularly back then. And so I asked Emmanuel where his courage came from.
00:21:24 ►
back then. And so I asked Emanuel where his courage came from.
00:21:33 ►
Sure. I don’t know where I got my courage from. I’ve always been a rebel rouser, I guess,
00:21:47 ►
and an activist since I was a teenager. And I had done needle exchange prior to starting dance safe and before uh volunteering for the berkeley needle exchange i did prison uh reform work with an organization in downtown oakland and that’s
00:21:55 ►
where i really learned the disastrous effects of the drug war right mostly these are african
00:22:01 ►
american families who had male relatives in prison for life.
00:22:05 ►
I think this was just after three strikes.
00:22:07 ►
It was like, so, you know, I sort of got into drug policy reform through a racial and social justice background.
00:22:16 ►
I’d never been to a rave.
00:22:18 ►
But I had used MDMA 10 years previously as a teenager therapeutically, and it really transformed me, I would say,
00:22:28 ►
saved my life.
00:22:30 ►
So now we cut, I’m living in San Francisco 10 years later, an activist, and a friend
00:22:37 ►
of mine gives me some MDMA again, and I get online to research it, right?
00:22:41 ►
Because back in 86, when I first did it, 86, 87, 88 time period,
00:22:47 ►
there was no internet. You had to go to the library. I remember going,
00:22:53 ►
now you’re old enough to remember the index of periodical literature, this giant, massive volume
00:22:59 ►
green books where you could look up a topic and it would tell you every magazine that did an article
00:23:04 ►
on it.
00:23:08 ►
I think back then there were a total of three articles on MDMA.
00:23:09 ►
So I got online.
00:23:13 ►
I said, wow, what have we learned about this drug in the last 10 years? That’s when I discovered how adulterated the market was and that the Dutch government had a program.
00:23:20 ►
They were funding or peer counselors would go out and set up booths at these events
00:23:25 ►
with this little chemical reagent and test pills to help young people avoid ingesting the fake ones
00:23:32 ►
that were causing the majority of medical emergencies.
00:23:36 ►
And I just said to myself, wow, this is great.
00:23:38 ►
I want to do this here.
00:23:39 ►
This is a way I can honor a drug that was very helpful to me,
00:23:52 ►
This is a way I can honor a drug that was very helpful to me, also expand harm reduction to, well, to be quite frank, a white middle class community. at least in the United States, was perceived as something that only applied to gays and IV drug users.
00:24:10 ►
Gays, addicts, and IV drug users, right?
00:24:12 ►
But not to my kids, right?
00:24:13 ►
It was essentially needle exchange and don’t kick the addict out of the shelter just because they relapse,
00:24:19 ►
but work with them a little bit.
00:24:20 ►
That was pretty much harm reduction, right?
00:24:22 ►
But now we had a situation where prohibition was creating grave dangers for party drug recreational users that included a lot of well-educated, middle-class white kids. look, here’s a way to expand the philosophy of harm reduction to apply to a broader segment of the population,
00:24:47 ►
which I felt would also reverberate and help improve our drug policy around some of these other drugs, too.
00:24:55 ►
That, in a nutshell, is kind of why I started DanceSafe.
00:24:58 ►
And then I had really no idea what I was getting myself into.
00:25:06 ►
idea what I was getting myself into. And really, my experience entering the rave community,
00:25:12 ►
you know, training young people in peer counseling, learning about the culture,
00:25:16 ►
I fell in love with the culture, right? That’s the one thing, right? I had used MDMA prior to that, in small groups of friends, or in very strict therapy settings, I had never been to and used the drug in a social setting with thousands
00:25:28 ►
of people. I was astounded at the camaraderie and the lack of violence and the ethnic and racial mixing that took place in these Oakland raves.
00:25:46 ►
White kids were a minority.
00:25:49 ►
Asians, Latinos, African Americans, white kids,
00:25:54 ►
all together having a wonderful time, not a single fight.
00:25:58 ►
I remember most of the young people, probably 9 to 10 p.m.
00:26:02 ►
is when they would take their ecstasy. And you get to, like, midnight, and, like, there would be spontaneous eruptions of cheering and expressions of love and hugging of everybody, strangers.
00:26:16 ►
It was so different from the punk, alcohol-driven culture that I came of age with.
00:26:23 ►
I was astounded.
00:26:28 ►
driven culture that I came of age with, I was astounded. It was positive. And the only problems were these medical emergencies that were happening, which we were able to learn was happening because
00:26:33 ►
of DXM, dextromethorphan, and the fake pills were really driving the crisis back then. And that was
00:26:41 ►
one of the main excuses used for the crackdown. There were so many hospitalizations because you take a high dose of dextromethorphan, it’s not going to kill you, but you’re going to be on the floor and able to move.
00:26:54 ►
And nobody knows.
00:26:54 ►
So I carried kids to ambulances and we were testing their friends.
00:26:59 ►
What did they take?
00:27:00 ►
What did they take?
00:27:00 ►
And they would bring it to the table.
00:27:02 ►
We would test it.
00:27:03 ►
And we correlated these medical emergencies with DXM.
00:27:07 ►
That was a big media fight that I was trying to do at the time by getting this word out about about that.
00:27:14 ►
I then asked Emmanuel whether at the time he had any concerns about being arrested himself because of the testing services that he was providing.
00:27:23 ►
himself because of the testing services that he was providing.
00:27:26 ►
Yeah, I guess I was.
00:27:34 ►
I remember hiring a needle exchange lawyer and having many, many meetings with a strategy for when I or another volunteer or a user approaching the booth got arrested.
00:27:41 ►
I was convinced 100% I was going to be in court defending myself in the same way that needle exchange volunteers defended themselves originally, using the necessity of defense, right? Saying, okay, maybe what we’re doing is illegal, but it’s preventing even greater harm. And that tactic had been very successful. And now, you know,
00:28:06 ►
needle exchange is legal in many states and tolerated in most others. And I think we’re
00:28:12 ►
seeing a lot of progress around opiate harm reduction. But the interesting thing is it never
00:28:18 ►
happened. In fact, you know, DanceSafe was testing pills in over two dozen cities across the country,
00:28:27 ►
and nobody ever got arrested. Here in the Bay Area, I actually worked out sort of don’t ask,
00:28:34 ►
don’t tell, you know, wink-wink agreements with the local police. And I remember the first time
00:28:40 ►
they thanked me for what I was doing. So I think that the Fed crackdown hadn’t quite really started in the Bay Area at that time.
00:28:50 ►
But really, I had the – I know local officials, including law enforcement, were extremely supportive.
00:28:59 ►
They understood what we were doing.
00:29:01 ►
They knew you’re never going to stop this drug. Right. It was the feds
00:29:05 ►
who ended that and that led up to the Rave Act that, you know, Biden authored and was passed in
00:29:13 ►
- And that really crushed the the rave community then. And, you know, what we said
00:29:20 ►
then certainly applied. Well, you may crush this culture, but you’re not going to stop the use of ecstasy.
00:29:25 ►
You’re just going to drive it more underground where, you know, educators and outreach harm reduction workers can’t reach the users to help reduce the harms.
00:29:36 ►
And the greatest irony is that now electronic dance music has come back with a vengeance.
00:29:43 ►
It’s not even underground. It is
00:29:45 ►
the mainstream music of the new generation. These festivals have, you know, 100,000 people
00:29:51 ►
attending over a two, three day period, and there are 100 of them around the country. And
00:29:56 ►
so, you know, once again, prohibition and drug war tactics have proved an abysmal failure in every way you look at it.
00:30:07 ►
Shifting gears a bit, I brought up the fact that in the mainstream media there has been ever more talk about the dangers of MDMA,
00:30:14 ►
and it almost seems as if they are reporting another ecstasy-related death every week.
00:30:30 ►
unfortunately, MDMA-related fatalities, let’s call them those for lack of a better term,
00:30:33 ►
we could say ecstasy molly-related, that might be better, fatalities,
00:30:41 ►
because you never know what drug is involved, right, have quadrupled over the last decade. There were about three to five fatalities a year back in 98, 99, 2000.
00:30:48 ►
I know because I always contact the families of the deceased. I try to find out as much as I can
00:30:56 ►
about the causes, the environmental conditions, right, which contribute to the medical emergencies. Today, it’s about 15 to 20 a year.
00:31:11 ►
And part of my movie is going to be asking that question, and hopefully by the end, making,
00:31:19 ►
you know, a conclusion. Why are fatalities increasing? And my suspicion right now, I’m fairly confident that
00:31:29 ►
it’s twofold. It has to do with the influx of cathinones on the market, leading to very
00:31:38 ►
different ingestion behaviors, and the fact that pressed tablets have shrunk and mostly we’re seeing loose powder
00:31:48 ►
also leading to different kind of ingestion behaviors.
00:31:53 ►
So people are taking very, very large doses accidentally,
00:31:57 ►
which increases the risk of hyperthermia, heat stroke events.
00:32:03 ►
So on the one hand, we have all these new drugs,
00:32:06 ►
many of which have more danger. So they have different safety profiles in MDMA. And
00:32:13 ►
while it’s hard to know exactly what drug contributed to a fatality, because oftentimes
00:32:20 ►
toxicology reports are not made public. And when parents get the toxic report back
00:32:28 ►
and they discover that there are two or three drugs in the bloodstream,
00:32:32 ►
that often inclines them not to go public with what their son or daughter had taken
00:32:38 ►
because it makes it look like their son or daughter was a drug abuser,
00:32:43 ►
that they had intentionally taken
00:32:45 ►
all these different drugs, not understanding that they accidentally consumed these other
00:32:51 ►
drugs because they were being misidentified when it was sold to them.
00:32:56 ►
But nonetheless, there was a New York study, New York Public Health Department that analyzed the 2013 deaths and discovered that
00:33:06 ►
methadone was involved in about half, MDMA in about half, and MDMA plus methadone overlapped
00:33:13 ►
that too. So we’re seeing the cathinones, particularly methadone, contributing to
00:33:19 ►
fatalities. But beyond that, we’re seeing methadone increase the dosages that people are taking because the dose of methadone is very different from MDMA.
00:33:33 ►
A good starting dose for methadone could be 250, 300 milligrams, and then you can redose a couple hours later and keep taking another 100 milligrams.
00:33:42 ►
It’s more like a cocaine-style drug. And when
00:33:45 ►
a young person’s buying molly and they’re actually just getting a methadone or a cathadone,
00:33:52 ►
but they think they’re taking MDMA, then one time they go and they buy their molly and it ends up
00:33:58 ►
being pure MDMA and they take a 300 milligram dose to start, that’s way too high.
00:34:09 ►
So this is another reason why we’re seeing an increase in fatalities.
00:34:16 ►
I want to jump in here and reiterate what Emmanuel just said about taking too big a dose of MDMA.
00:34:23 ►
I’ve already told my own story about this in the video that’s titled Confessions of an Ecstasy Advocate,
00:34:26 ►
which you can find on the homepage at psychedelicsalon.com. So I won’t repeat that here, but there’s another example that I’d like to give
00:34:32 ►
you. I know that many of our fellow salonners are big fans of the Joe Rogan podcast, and so you may
00:34:39 ►
have already listened to Joe’s interview with Ethan Nadelman last August. It’s his podcast number 683. Well, during
00:34:46 ►
their discussion about MDMA, Joe stated that he had only tried it one time and that while it was
00:34:52 ►
a great experience, the next day was a real tough one for him. But then he added that maybe it was
00:34:57 ►
because he took too big a dose. He took two pills, a double dose, right off. Now, I’m not giving Joe a hard time here because I’ve done the
00:35:06 ►
same thing. Back in the early days when MDMA first hit the streets, we had next to no knowledge about
00:35:12 ►
how to use it. And since acid and mushrooms always provided a bigger bang with an increased dose,
00:35:19 ►
well, that same we figured should be true for MDMA. But it isn’t the same at all. For one thing, the mechanism the
00:35:26 ►
brain uses for processing these different substances varies quite a bit. As we heard from
00:35:32 ►
Rick Doblin last week, their research has now shown that for therapeutic work, a 75 milligram
00:35:39 ►
dose seems optimal for most people. But like Joe, I consider myself a hardhead, and so sometimes I
00:35:47 ►
use way more than what was needed for a good trip. For me, and I weigh around 180 pounds,
00:35:53 ►
I have no idea how many stones that is for you Brits, but at my weight and for my metabolism,
00:36:00 ►
I discovered through much trial and error that the perfect dose for me was around 120 milligrams.
00:36:08 ►
Now, getting back to my conversation with Emanuel,
00:36:10 ►
I also pointed out the fact that although deaths from ecstasy slash molly has quadrupled over the past decade,
00:36:19 ►
the total number of deaths per year worldwide is only 15 to 20.
00:36:27 ►
number of deaths per year worldwide is only 15 to 20, whereas on average here in the States,
00:36:33 ►
there are over 90 deaths in traffic accidents each and every day, and that number is about the same from accidental falling. So while it is a tragedy that anyone is dying from the use of substances
00:36:39 ►
that are denied to us because of prohibition, these are nonetheless very safe substances when
00:36:46 ►
properly used by people who know what they are taking and what they are doing.
00:36:50 ►
Right.
00:36:51 ►
And I actually think what you had said just a second ago is an understatement.
00:36:54 ►
I do like to always clarify the number of people dying from MDMA worldwide is tiny,
00:37:11 ►
worldwide is tiny, tiny compared to almost all other illicit drugs and many legal prescription drugs too. Even aspirin kills 400 people a year. So I like to say that and put that in context and
00:37:17 ►
clarify, you know, because the actual safety profile of a drug should be a large consideration on what our drug policy should be around it.
00:37:31 ►
It’s one of the reasons that cannabis is now being legalized.
00:37:36 ►
The public now knows and is very aware it’s a very safe drug, much safer than alcohol, etc.
00:37:41 ►
Well, MDMA is in that class, too.
00:37:43 ►
It’s an extremely safe drug.
00:37:46 ►
But nonetheless, I have devoted a large part of my life to reducing those fatalities because I care.
00:37:54 ►
So I don’t want to present a skewed perspective as I talk about fatalities around MDMA.
00:38:29 ►
The real takeaway point is that even though these fatalities are extremely low, the ones that do happen are easily preventable with appropriate education and regulation of the environments around MDMA are heat stroke. They’re not overdoses. It’s not like the person is pushing their euphoria limits and just taking too much. When you call it an overdose,
00:38:36 ►
you put the blame on the victim. There’s a public perception that the user was being irresponsible.
00:38:43 ►
that the user was being irresponsible.
00:38:47 ►
But really, these are heat stroke deaths that are highly correlated with the ambient temperature.
00:38:52 ►
For example, Shelley Goldsmith,
00:38:54 ►
whose story we’ll be telling in our movie,
00:38:56 ►
because we’re following her mother,
00:38:59 ►
who has become an advocate to amend the RAVE Act
00:39:03 ►
to exempt harm reduction efforts from being used against
00:39:08 ►
promoters, because the venue in which Shelley, where she was at, where she had taken her
00:39:14 ►
MDMA, was over 100 degrees inside.
00:39:18 ►
Also, I’ve been working with Heather Brooks, whose son, Brooks died just four or five months ago, probably six months ago,
00:39:27 ►
during the summer in the Washington Gorge at a festival called Paradiso. I remember that weekend
00:39:34 ►
because even here in Northern California, we felt the heat wave. And it was 105 degrees
00:39:40 ►
during this event when Bo Brooks collapsed and eventually died.
00:39:47 ►
So if we understand that serotonin-based drugs inhibit your thermoregulation,
00:39:55 ►
make you more likely to suffer heat stroke,
00:39:58 ►
then we can regulate entertainment industries, provide safe settings and prevent
00:40:07 ►
these strategies from happening. But unfortunately, the RAVE Act, which holds promoters accountable
00:40:12 ►
for drug use at their events, makes them reluctant to work with DanceSafe or other public health
00:40:18 ►
groups to acknowledge that drugs are being used and make the environment safer because they’re
00:40:24 ►
afraid that that’s going to be used against them as a violation of the RAVE Act and they could have their assets confiscated and go to jail.
00:40:30 ►
Very directly, lawyers and insurance reps for these promotion companies are telling them not to work with public health because it’s too much of a risk.
00:40:39 ►
That is incredible and that needs to change.
00:40:45 ►
incredible and that needs to change. I can remember back when Joe Biden’s RAVE Act was being debated in Congress and everybody I knew was saying that this act would actually result
00:40:50 ►
in these events becoming less safe for participants because of the liability that was placed on
00:40:56 ►
organizers if they allowed DanceSafe and other organizations to properly test the drugs that
00:41:02 ►
inevitably were to be found at these events.
00:41:05 ►
In fact, unless I’m mistaken, even the Burning Man organization didn’t allow drug safety to be
00:41:11 ►
featured in any theme camps for fear of seeming to encourage drug use. I think that’s changed now,
00:41:18 ►
but that was the way for a long time. The Rave Act seems to me to be a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences.
00:41:26 ►
Absolutely, and that’s why Dede’s campaign is focusing on what’s known as unintended consequences of the law, right?
00:41:35 ►
She’s taking a somewhat conservative approach, saying, well, she’s not trying to overturn the law entirely. She just wants to amend it so that certain promoter behaviors
00:41:48 ►
are exempted. And anything that tries to improve the safety of events is like a no-brainer.
00:41:56 ►
She doesn’t believe Joe Biden ever intended for his law to send this chill through the industry and prevent common sense safety measures.
00:42:09 ►
Recently, I’ve been exchanging correspondence with some young parents who were involved in
00:42:14 ►
the rave scene when they were younger themselves and who now have children of their own who
00:42:18 ►
pretty soon will be reaching an age where they’re going to be exposed to the drug culture through
00:42:23 ►
their friends and schoolmates.
00:42:30 ►
And while the parents understand many of the facts about how to use these substances safely,
00:42:36 ►
they nonetheless are not quite sure how to go about being completely honest with their own children, but without exposing themselves to having their children taken away from them by
00:42:41 ►
overzealous drug warriors. In fact, there is a current case here in the
00:42:45 ►
states where a Navy veteran who is suffering from PTSD and is treating his condition with medical
00:42:51 ►
marijuana has had his five children taken away from him and his wife simply because they were
00:42:57 ►
planning on moving from Kansas to Colorado so that he could grow cannabis for other veterans
00:43:02 ►
who are suffering from PTSD. Just his planning to move to another state caused those screwheads in Kansas to take his children away.
00:43:11 ►
Veterans’ children taken away on the grounds of child endangerment.
00:43:16 ►
Wow, what a country, huh?
00:43:18 ►
So my question to Emanuel was whether he would be covering topics like this in the documentary that he’s now making.
00:43:26 ►
Yes, and that’s an interesting question precisely because my documentary is going to center around that.
00:43:34 ►
The fact is I now have a teenager who’s interested in psychedelics,
00:43:41 ►
and I have the same fears that all parents have.
00:43:44 ►
And it really is challenging knowing how to deal with that.
00:43:47 ►
How do you talk to your teenager about drugs?
00:43:49 ►
There are lots of issues that complicate that process.
00:43:54 ►
Primarily, number one, is prohibition, right?
00:43:59 ►
But I’ve walked the talk.
00:44:02 ►
I am open and honest with her.
00:44:01 ►
I’ve walked the talk.
00:44:04 ►
I am open and honest with her.
00:44:12 ►
I’ve told her about my past drug use and how to use responsibly if you choose it to.
00:44:21 ►
I’ve ensured her that I would pay for her to send any powder she finds to Ecstasy Data to test,
00:44:24 ►
that she should never take a mystery powder unless it’s gas chromatography tested. Maybe know, I mean, maybe in some way she’s lucky that she has a parent with the knowledge that I have.
00:44:29 ►
But I certainly want to show in this film appropriate alternative models of drug education and communication between parents and teenagers.
00:44:43 ►
and communication between parents and teenagers,
00:44:46 ►
because one of the big problems that makes drug use so dangerous is there are no authorities young people can trust around drug information.
00:44:51 ►
Teachers won’t talk to them honestly because they’re afraid if they do,
00:44:54 ►
they’re going to get accused of promoting drug use.
00:44:56 ►
Parents are afraid to talk to their kids honestly about drugs because,
00:44:59 ►
well, if their kid goes and tells their friend,
00:45:01 ►
oh, well, my mom said that blah, blah, blah, blah,
00:45:03 ►
and then they go and tell their parents and their parents like are alarmed, you know,
00:45:07 ►
they can feed back negatively. You know, it’s just unfortunate that honest conversations are
00:45:14 ►
stifled because of drug war culture. And hopefully my movie will demonstrate that and lead to some
00:45:20 ►
progress on that front. And one of the things I want to highlight in my movie is all the various ways people use the drug, right?
00:45:28 ►
I’m sort of taking the audience on an exploration of MDMA,
00:45:33 ►
answering some questions.
00:45:34 ►
One is, who uses it and why?
00:45:37 ►
Why are some people dying and what can we do about it?
00:45:40 ►
What is the best drug policy, best drug education,
00:45:44 ►
models we can use, and how do you talk
00:45:46 ►
to us about drugs? Those are kind of the five main questions I’ll be answering as I, you know,
00:45:50 ►
the sort of overall story arc of the film. And the first one, you know, who uses this drug and why?
00:45:56 ►
It really spans a wide spectrum. On the one hand, we have very strict medical use for the treatment
00:46:02 ►
of debilitating ailments like PTSD.
00:46:10 ►
So I’ll be following the story of two veterans who have used the drug for that purpose. It’s a really compelling friendship story, very emotional, amazing.
00:46:14 ►
We’ve already filmed most of that.
00:46:16 ►
Then I’ll also be filming a wealthy conservative couple with kids in Canada
00:46:20 ►
who use the drug four times a year for, you know, sort of couples counseling for their
00:46:26 ►
own relationship. That’s a very, very common way of use that I think a lot of the public doesn’t
00:46:31 ►
know about because they think it’s just this sort of countercultural rave drug. And then, of course,
00:46:36 ►
we’re also going to show the party, you know, festival use side. We follow a young woman who
00:46:42 ►
takes it with her best friend on her birthday and is a
00:46:45 ►
very responsible user of MDMA. Tests it first, etc. So we’re actually showing three types of use in the film.
00:46:56 ►
I then mentioned the fact that back in the 1980s when I first became involved with MDMA,
00:47:03 ►
that perhaps the most widespread use of it in the
00:47:06 ►
Dallas, Texas area was by couples who were just taking it together and discovering that while
00:47:11 ►
under its influence, they were able to talk about issues that they had been keeping from one another
00:47:17 ►
and that this, without even the help of a trained therapist, did an awful lot to help them work out the kinks of their relationship.
00:47:27 ►
Yeah, yeah, very common.
00:47:28 ►
You know, really, I benefited tremendously, as I mentioned earlier in the interview when I was a teenager.
00:47:46 ►
empathy, including self-acceptance that the drug provides people,
00:47:50 ►
is healing and therapeutic in so many ways.
00:47:54 ►
At least for a large segment of the population. I recently read a study, I want to pursue more,
00:47:58 ►
that correlates that with a genetic oxytocin receptor.
00:48:02 ►
Did you see that study?
00:48:05 ►
Yeah, it’s sort of like a next generation of MDMA studies.
00:48:10 ►
I think the researchers had the foresight to wonder,
00:48:14 ►
well, some people get this profound,
00:48:16 ►
and most people, I believe,
00:48:18 ►
and I’ve talked to thousands, remember.
00:48:20 ►
I’ve talked to personally, face-to-face,
00:48:23 ►
thousands of young people who have used this drug. And most of them do receive this profound healing empathy and insight.
00:48:35 ►
But there are some people that don’t. And they scratch their head and they said, well, you know,
00:48:40 ►
I have fun on it. It’s stimulating, but I just, just you know i’ve never really had the effect that
00:48:45 ►
other people have right and ironically even sasha right didn’t really get the magic right and has
00:48:53 ►
told me in my interview with her that you know sasha really didn’t like mdma too much right
00:48:58 ►
yeah yeah the irony of ironies right like he recognized its potential and then when he gave
00:49:03 ►
it to leoff, of course,
00:49:07 ►
that he’s really the Johnny Appleseed of MDMA,
00:49:10 ►
went around training therapists on how to use it. But this recent study was,
00:49:14 ►
they actually looked at the genetic profiles
00:49:18 ►
of a number of MDMA users
00:49:21 ►
and had them, surveyed them to find out
00:49:24 ►
what their experiences were like and correlated
00:49:26 ►
an oxytocin gene to with people who had more profound empathy effects from the drug so there’s
00:49:37 ►
a lot more research that needs to happen but you know I’m inclined to suspect that that’s correct.
00:49:48 ►
Oxytocin is the hormone of love and bonding, right?
00:49:55 ►
It’s what comes out in mothers when they give birth and are breastfeeding and fascinating stuff.
00:50:02 ►
I then mentioned the fact that of the several hundred people that I’ve helped during their first time use of MDMA,
00:50:08 ►
that almost without exception, their first response was that they had actually felt like that before.
00:50:11 ►
For me and for many of my friends,
00:50:14 ►
it brought us back to one of those wonderful days of childhood when everything seemed perfect.
00:50:18 ►
Yeah, yeah.
00:50:20 ►
You know, I said this myself,
00:50:23 ►
and I have witnessed a number of other people say this the first time they take MDMA.
00:50:31 ►
And that is something along the lines of, oh, my God, how can this be illegal?
00:50:38 ►
Right?
00:50:39 ►
Because, you know, you’re fed all this drugs are bad kind of thing.
00:50:47 ►
They bring the worst out in you.
00:50:49 ►
They disinhibit you and you do embarrassing things.
00:50:51 ►
That’s the general conception of drugs.
00:50:53 ►
And, you know, whether people that haven’t done drugs, that’s what they think mostly,
00:50:57 ►
whether it’s cocaine, heroin, LSD, whatever.
00:50:59 ►
They just think, oh, they’re addictive.
00:51:01 ►
They give you all this pleasure, this kind of nasty pleasure that can take away your willpower, and then you do embarrassing things, right? Well, you know,
00:51:09 ►
to the degree that we’ve all sort of internalized that, you know, myth around illegal drugs,
00:51:18 ►
when you take MDMA, it is like diametrically the opposite for many people. It brings the best out in you.
00:51:25 ►
It makes you sort of think caring and compassionate thoughts about people that you may have had a grudge against.
00:51:31 ►
Nobody feels guilty after they’ve taken MDMA.
00:51:36 ►
It’s almost impossible to, right?
00:51:38 ►
So in many ways, MDMA is the perfect drug to sort of end the drug war, right?
00:51:45 ►
To erase the drug stigmas and the sort of medieval, guilt-ridden propaganda around drugs that even still today drives the drug war.
00:51:59 ►
Although my original intent in talking with Emanuel was to learn more about MDMA, the movie that he is currently producing,
00:52:07 ►
I almost forgot to ask him who the intended audience was for the movie and how he was going to go about releasing it.
00:52:15 ►
Great. I’m glad you asked that.
00:52:16 ►
You know, I always think big.
00:52:32 ►
But what I tell people at first is I’m not producing a niche documentary on a psychedelic that is only going to be appealing to people in the know.
00:52:42 ►
I am producing a drug policy reform documentary that intentionally is going for a mainstream audience. This is why I’ll be dealing with drug policy issues and drug education,
00:52:47 ►
how to talk to your kids about drugs, etc.
00:52:49 ►
So my goal is to have a mainstream release either sell to a large distributor
00:52:56 ►
or put 300,000 into marketing a producer-controlled release
00:53:02 ►
and get this movie seen in hundreds of theaters around the country
00:53:05 ►
before you go to the secondary markets
00:53:09 ►
of theatrical release in Europe and Australia.
00:53:11 ►
I want this to be an international film.
00:53:14 ►
I think it has international appeal.
00:53:15 ►
I’ve already received emails from a number of distributors
00:53:18 ►
in European countries asking me to, you know, can they distribute it?
00:53:22 ►
So I really have high hopes this is going to be a
00:53:26 ►
very well received film that makes a lot of money. And to that end, we have an investment vehicle
00:53:33 ►
already and our first three investors have come on board. So the best way to help right now is
00:53:38 ►
to spread the word that we’re looking for investors to join our LLC and become part owners in it
00:53:46 ►
and help produce the best drug policy reform film yet made that pivots around what I believe should
00:53:55 ►
and will end up being the second drug legalized after marijuana.
00:54:01 ►
Yeah, the best way to find out more about the film is to go to MDMAthemovie.com.
00:54:08 ►
We have an email sign-up, which you won’t get bombarded.
00:54:13 ►
Maybe one email a month, we send out an update on how the film is going.
00:54:17 ►
We also have a lot of pre-release videos on there. I do want to say that 95% of what we’ve put up
00:54:26 ►
on the website as pre-release videos
00:54:27 ►
will not be in
00:54:29 ►
the actual documentary.
00:54:31 ►
We are saving the best
00:54:33 ►
for last.
00:54:35 ►
But nonetheless,
00:54:37 ►
our pre-release stuff is really, really good.
00:54:39 ►
We interviewed Julie Holland, Rick Doblin,
00:54:41 ►
Matthew Baggett, etc.
00:54:44 ►
People can check that out.
00:54:45 ►
And there’s a blog where they can read our previous updates and they can forward any potential investors to the website where all the emails come directly to me.
00:54:58 ►
Finally, I asked Emmanuel if he had any final comments for us.
00:55:03 ►
Yeah, there is.
00:55:02 ►
Daniel, if he had any final comments for us.
00:55:03 ►
Yeah, there is.
00:55:15 ►
Since you say that most of your audience is young people, I want to thank them because I have a lot of hope in the younger generation of psychedelic users today. I don’t criticize the older generation for their chosen tactics, but I, that the progression of the movement now is really inspiring,
00:55:28 ►
where sort of the early generation of psychedelic activists kind of stuck with a very strict academic and medical model.
00:55:38 ►
The younger generation has become much more out and proud about their sort of sacred and or recreational use. They’re going
00:55:46 ►
on the offensive more, criticizing prohibition for jeopardizing lives, right? Instead of just
00:55:51 ►
being defensive, they’re being offensive. And I think that’s what we need right now. We need to
00:55:57 ►
take back from the drug warriors the label of protecting the children, because the truth is
00:56:02 ►
prohibition endangers children,
00:56:12 ►
prohibition kills, and we need to legalize and regulate these drugs so that adults can have safe legal access and we can reduce access of unregulated criminal markets to our children.
00:56:21 ►
And if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, then you already know that the main reason I’ve been doing these podcasts is to do what I can to help end this insane war on drugs by presenting some actual facts about drug prohibition so as to counter the more or less brain-dead people who think that just saying no is the way to go.
00:57:07 ►
Thank you. I’m in my 70s, I’ve actually come back to that way of thinking. You know, the main thing that I think us older people can provide these days is a little perspective in the benefit of our experience,
00:57:11 ►
mainly our experience in figuring out what doesn’t work and how quickly things can go wrong.
00:57:17 ►
But when it comes to the use of drugs in our society,
00:57:21 ►
we need to be sure that the youngest among us are having their opinions heard. After all, it isn’t going to be all that long before today’s 20-year-olds have become the
00:57:31 ►
old people, but they’re the ones who are going to be living through the decades ahead, and in my
00:57:36 ►
opinion, they should have a much larger role in determining how their world works. During the
00:57:41 ►
American war in Vietnam, I can remember my friends saying that whether a nation
00:57:46 ►
goes to war should actually be decided by people under 30, because they’re the ones who are going
00:57:51 ►
to be paying for it, and that all of the fighting should be restricted to people over 60. Now
00:57:57 ►
wouldn’t that make for a much different world today? Well, I hope that you’ve been able to
00:58:03 ►
take something away from today’s podcast that will spur you on to becoming more involved in helping to shape the policies that are needed to bring an end to the establishment’s war on people who use non-prescription drugs.
00:58:16 ►
There’s still a lot of work to be done, and if you’re in college these days, then becoming involved with Students for a Sensible Drug Policy would be a great first step.
00:58:24 ►
becoming involved with Students for a Sensible Drug Policy would be a great first step.
00:58:28 ►
And if there isn’t a chapter of SSDP on your campus,
00:58:32 ►
well then maybe you should be the person to organize one at your school.
00:58:35 ►
And whether you are a student, a parent, or a grandparent,
00:58:41 ►
sitting down with your closest friends and family to listen to what Emanuel has to say here in this podcast is something that may make more of a difference in the lives of
00:58:45 ►
those you love than you might suspect. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:58:52 ►
Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.