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510 - Do Psychedelics Matter_

Jul 06, 2016, 75 min read

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Guest speaker: Professor David Nutt

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1906860165Today’s podcast features the 2016 talk that Professor David Nutt gave at the annual Glastonbury Festival. His topic was “Do psychedelics matter?”.
Although demonised, and attracting severe criminal penalties for users during the half century of the “war on drugs”, psychedelics are now undergoing a renaissance – both in terms of scientific research and in people’s personal and spiritual worlds. It is once again a time of oriented explorations of the mystery of consciousness. As we all know, when it comes to the war on drugs, “the emperor has no clothes”, and there is no one in a better position to say this than a man who once was the UK’s “Drugs Czar” but who lost his position when he began speaking the truth about drugs and refused to continue supporting the establishment’s party line.

Professor David Nutt’s Twitter handle:
@ProfDavidNutt
Drugs Without the Hot Air by David Nutt
Island by Aldous Huxley

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511 - Psychedelic Book of the Dead

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

00:00:19 ►

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

00:00:24 ►

And can you tell that I’ve kind of slipped into a relaxed summer schedule?

00:00:29 ►

Each week lately, I’ve been planning on getting back to posting a new podcast on Monday,

00:00:34 ►

but it seems like I don’t get up to speed until the middle of the week,

00:00:38 ►

which is a bit strange because being retired with no fixed schedule to maintain

00:00:43 ►

means, well, that every day, even the weekends,

00:00:46 ►

well, they’re all more or less the same.

00:00:49 ►

I’m actually looking forward to when my two youngest granddaughters go back to school

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and I get to pick them up once in a while.

00:00:56 ►

At least I keep up with what day it is then.

00:01:00 ►

Ah, the trials and tribulations of us old guys.

00:01:04 ►

Guys who have more free time on our hands than we used to.

00:01:08 ►

So, as you listen to this podcast while you’re commuting to or from work, or even at work for that matter,

00:01:15 ►

well, think about how much better off you are than us retired people.

00:01:20 ►

But, for what it’s worth, I wouldn’t trade my slow-moving leisure for any kind of job.

00:01:26 ►

I most definitely have it better than almost anybody else in the world today.

00:01:30 ►

So complaining, however, is what us humans do, and hopefully you can see my smile right now.

00:01:37 ►

But two people who haven’t taken the summer off, but who instead have made donations to help offset some of the expenses here in the salon are Roger O. and Emily R. And I’ll do my best to honor your wonderful

00:01:52 ►

contributions by getting back into a Monday podcast groove again very soon. In any event,

00:01:58 ►

I thank you very much for your support. Now, I know that a lot of our fellow salonners attended the Glastonbury Festival,

00:02:06 ►

and in the early days of these podcasts, when the Dope Fiend was doing the Dopecast,

00:02:12 ►

the recordings of he and his friends that he made during the festival were always one of my

00:02:17 ►

favorites. Sadly, the Dopecast is no longer, and while I’m sure that there are a lot of podcasts from in and around the

00:02:26 ►

Glastonbury Festival, I no longer feel that I have the same personal connection that I

00:02:31 ►

did when the Dope Fiend was still podcasting.

00:02:34 ►

However, today I’m pleased to let you know that the salon once again has a friend who

00:02:39 ►

attended the festival this year.

00:02:41 ►

His fellow salonner, Paul Harley.

00:02:44 ►

And while attending the festival this year, he was able to capture a couple of talks that Paul Harley The Common is incredibly honored to invite Graham Hancock and Professor David Nutt

00:03:05 ►

to speak in the Temple on Saturday afternoon from 1400.

00:03:09 ►

They will cover the topic of, and answer your questions related to,

00:03:14 ►

Do Psychedelics Matter?

00:03:16 ►

Although demonized and attracting severe criminal penalties for users

00:03:21 ►

during the half-century of the War on Drugs,

00:03:24 ►

psychedelics are now

00:03:25 ►

undergoing a renaissance, both in terms of scientific research and in people’s personal

00:03:30 ►

and spiritual worlds. It is once again a time of oriented explorations of the mystery of

00:03:36 ►

consciousness. So today I’m going to play David Nutt’s talk. I think that most of our

00:03:43 ►

fellow slaughters already know about all that Professor Nutt has talk. I think that most of our fellow Sauners already know about all that

00:03:46 ►

Professor Nutt has done to help bring a sensible end to the war on drugs, particularly in the UK,

00:03:52 ►

where he was the chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, and I’m told that this

00:03:59 ►

position is similar to what the U.S. calls his drug czar. In this position, however, Professor Nutt frequently clashed with other government officials

00:04:09 ►

in, well, he thought that among other things, that cannabis is a safe medicine and that

00:04:14 ►

horse riding is even more dangerous than taking ecstasy.

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Not surprisingly, his outspoken honesty caused him to lose his government position.

00:04:24 ►

Today, Professor Nutt teaches and conducts research at Imperial College London.

00:04:29 ►

As our longtime salonners know, both the Dope Fiend and I began talking about Professor Nutt’s work

00:04:35 ►

even before he was forced to leave his government position.

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I remember at least one of his talks that the Dope Fiend attended, recorded in podcast.

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So during the years that the Dopecast was still being produced, I guess there probably have been close to a million

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young people who learned about Professor Nutt’s work. And I suspect he really doesn’t realize what

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a big icon he is in the worldwide psychedelic community. So when Paul sent me this recording

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last week, I knew right away that I’d

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be podcasting it right after the Jonathan Ott talk that I was working on at the time.

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Now, if you listened to Jonathan’s talk last week, you know that it was given in 1996,

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and one of the things that he mentioned was the possibility that Western thought,

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Western civilization itself, was grounded in the psychedelic experience.

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Now, let’s flash forward 20 years to the Glastonbury Festival, and guess what? Without

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any planning on my part whatsoever, we’re going to hear Professor Nutt say something very similar.

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So, do you think that maybe there’s something to this idea after all?

00:05:43 ►

So do you think that maybe there’s something to this idea after all?

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Now let’s listen to what Professor David Nutt had to say to a packed room at the 2016 Glastonbury Festival,

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which came to an end, well, a little over a week ago, I guess.

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And yes, I’ve done my best to clean up the audio, and hopefully you’ll allow for the difficulties often involved in recording these talks at festivals.

00:06:08 ►

So I’ll kick off, and I’ll tell you about me and what we’re doing, and then we’ll take questions.

00:06:16 ►

So the first thing to say is I’m a psychiatrist, and as I like to tell people, the name I’m not.

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There are not many jobs in medicine that are fitting.

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I like to tell people that they’re like nuts.

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There are not many jobs in medicine that are fitting.

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The men amongst you will realise that there is another one,

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but we intend not to go there.

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And I’ve always been interested in the brain.

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And it seemed to me that, like most of you,

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the brain is something that you cherish and you would probably like to understand more,

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but you’d also like to optimise, you’d like to

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know how

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best to make your brain do the things that

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would be useful for you.

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And one of the

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most interesting and profound

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insights

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I had in my life

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was when I was about 15

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and my father, who was a wise

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man, a civil servant, not an academic,

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but a sort of product of the war,

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so he didn’t go to university,

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but he was extremely clever.

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And he was reading a book one day,

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and I came home from, I think, Scouts or something,

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and he said, you should read this.

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And this was a description by a man called Albert Hoffman,

00:07:21 ►

who presumably you’ve all heard of Albert Hoffman.

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And it was Hoffman’s description of how he’d accidentally pipetted a small dose of a substance called

00:07:31 ►

LSD into his mouth when he was working on it as a medicinal chemist. And that was a

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very important message because, of course, in those days, still at school, we were doing

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mouth pipetting like he did. And that’s all gone now, so we won’t have any accidents like that in future.

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However, Hoffman’s accident was quite interesting because he was expecting, I think, nothing,

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but experienced a very profound alteration in consciousness.

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And his description that was really intriguing to me was not the fact that the world seemed different

00:08:03 ►

or that music was louder or more melodic or more important, but it was his description of how the cycle

00:08:13 ►

home, his normal 30-minute cycle home, seemed to take seven hours. And I remember thinking

00:08:21 ►

at that time, well, that is intriguing, isn’t it? So obviously the brain works out what time is.

00:08:28 ►

And if a drug like LSD can change the way the brain perceives time,

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it’s got to be a really important tool for studying brain mechanisms.

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If you want to understand timekeeping, then you probably should give people LSD

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and see how well they registered time.

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And so those of you

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who go to work late regularly, you may just

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have some differences in those

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receptors, etc., that LSD work on.

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And I was

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so intrigued by

00:08:57 ►

that insight that

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I went back to school and I started

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talking to my teachers.

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And they said, we didn you talk about that here?

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I said, okay, why is that?

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And they said, well, because it’s illegal now.

00:09:11 ►

So I started asking, well, why is LSD illegal

00:09:13 ►

when it’s such an interesting tool to study the brain?

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And of course, they couldn’t give me an answer,

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nor can anyone else.

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Anyone got the answer?

00:09:22 ►

There was no reason why LSD is illegal other than the fact that the American government decreed it should be illegal.

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And that rather irritated me because I’ve never been one to believe that the politicians really had any better insights into life than we have.

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And in fact, in my 20 years of working with them, I know now I was right.

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They have a lot less insight.

00:09:54 ►

So then a few months later, we had a show and tell at the school. I was at Bristol Grammar

00:09:59 ►

School. Are there any Bristol Grammar School people here? No, they’re still studying to their A-levels, I know, yeah. So we had a

00:10:07 ►

chemistry lab to open, and I went along, and I’d made a molecular model of LSD, which I

00:10:13 ►

put up. This is the, what, this is, because we’re talking now about 1967, and with the

00:10:19 ►

whole of the Haight-Ashbury, don’t look so confused. Someone needs to tell them what Haight-Ashbury was.

00:10:29 ►

San Francisco, the Summer of Love in 1967. Haight-Ashbury was the place where young Americans

00:10:35 ►

went to listen to the Grateful Dead and to take LSD because they didn’t want to fight

00:10:41 ►

this war in Vietnam. So the whole nature of music and art and to some extent politics was changing at that time. Anyway, I showed

00:10:51 ►

my molecule and everyone else was showing things like benzene or ethanol. I thought

00:10:59 ►

a little more about it then. A few years later, when I became a psychiatrist, I started working

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with people who were psychotic. And of course, there’s been a theory for a long time that

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psychosis could be caused by something in the brain that is rather like LSD, because

00:11:18 ►

one of the experiences of psychedelic drugs like LSD is to make your brain work rather differently,

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to give you altered perceptions of vision or hearing or thinking.

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And there’s been an understanding theory that LSD can actually mimic psychosis.

00:11:41 ►

And that got me interested in the whole question of how we use drugs to explore not only things like the nature of timekeeping, but also to maybe model psychosis so we can perhaps look for novel treatments?

00:11:52 ►

Because we have treatments of psychosis, but the reality is there isn’t one kind of treatment, although there are many different drugs.

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They all work in the same way.

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And they’re not wonderfully good. They are good for some people, but they don’t help everyone.

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And they also have a lot of side effects. In fact, something we are doing now, just

00:12:12 ►

as an aside, is we are doing a study using salicybin, magic mushroom juice, to produce

00:12:18 ►

effects in the brain which are sort of similar to psychosis, to look for new kinds of approaches to drugs that might help people.

00:12:29 ►

The reality is, though, that when we look at the nature of psychedelic experiences in the brain,

00:12:37 ►

we know now that drugs like LSD and the precursors, drugs like psilocybin,

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and going back even further to drugs like ayahuasca.

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But we know that they all work on a serotonin receptor in the brain.

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And there was a lot of hope back in the 70s

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that if LSD was causing psychosis,

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if we could block the receptor it worked at,

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then we could potentially have a new treatment.

00:13:05 ►

Unfortunately, that failed.

00:13:06 ►

That approach failed.

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It hasn’t completely died because, interestingly, just a few months ago, a new treatment for

00:13:16 ►

a kind of psychosis, which you see in people with Parkinson’s disease, has been licensed

00:13:21 ►

in the USA based on blocking those receptors,

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those 5-HC receptors that NSD works on.

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So it’s not been a fruitless exercise,

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but it certainly hasn’t transformed

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the way in which we think about psychosis.

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But of course, over the last 20 years or so,

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the whole role of receptors like serotonin receptors

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in other disorders became much, much more understood,

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particularly in disorders like depression, anxiety, and stress.

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And that’s where this film does really get quite interesting now,

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because when you look at the action of psychedelic drugs to stimulate these receptors, you see that they may, in some ways,

00:14:06 ►

replicate or even surpass the impact of more traditional drugs

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like antidepressants on these receptors.

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And that’s actually one area where our research is going at present.

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Because some of you may know that we reported just a few months ago,

00:14:24 ►

and it’s freely available online, if you

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search nut and psilocybin

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you’ll find a paper in Lancet

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a few months ago

00:14:31 ►

where we did for the first time

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an experiment where we took

00:14:36 ►

people who had difficulty to treat

00:14:38 ►

depression, their depression had

00:14:39 ►

failed to respond to two

00:14:42 ►

conventional treatments, usually

00:14:44 ►

two different sorts of antidepressants.

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But in fact, all but one of them had had psychotherapy as well.

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And then we gave them a single psychedelic experience with psilocybin.

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The dose was 25 milligrams, a fairly big dose.

00:15:00 ►

They had quite a profound experience, lasting three to four hours. And most of them,

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not everyone, but most of them felt quite a lot better. And some of them have stayed

00:15:13 ►

well. Some of them have stayed well now up to a six-month follow-up, and some of them

00:15:16 ►

have stayed well for nearly six months. And that was really the first controlled trial

00:15:22 ►

of these drugs, or any of these kind of drugs, for the treatment of depression.

00:15:29 ►

But we’re not the first people to think of that.

00:15:30 ►

In fact, the main point of my talk, which I’m going to get onto now, is that we have resurrected this kind of research,

00:15:38 ►

which was being done quite extensively back in the 1950s and 60s.

00:15:48 ►

quite extensively back in the 1950s and 60s. And we’ve done it because, as I’ve already shown you, it makes sense to do it. And it is rather, well, it’s distressing, and actually

00:15:55 ►

I think it’s actually insulting, and it’s outrageous, really, that science and medicine

00:16:00 ►

and you people haven’t been allowed to access this kind of approach simply because

00:16:06 ►

of the politics that surrounds psychedelics. So that’s what I’m going to talk about for

00:16:12 ►

the rest of my talk, but we can take questions on the medicine later.

00:16:18 ►

So let’s go back in history. You could argue that we, modern western society

00:16:28 ►

is the only society in the history of humanity

00:16:31 ►

that has not used mind-altering drugs

00:16:35 ►

and encouraged the use of mind-altering drugs

00:16:38 ►

and that’s rather humbling I think

00:16:41 ►

so you can see cultures going native cultures in both the Americas.

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The word shaman, shaman is a Siberian word for wise people

00:16:56 ►

who would use another kind of mushroom in psilocybin,

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the Amanita muscaris mushroom in Siberia,

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to produce changes in mood and mental state.

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Clearly, Hindu religion, any religion has got six armed gods.

00:17:11 ►

They were using something.

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It was called soma, and it was probably a combination of psilocybin and ephedra, the stimulant ephedra.

00:17:22 ►

So cultures forever have used it. And perhaps

00:17:26 ►

the most important one, of course, are the ancient Greeks. If I had a slide, I’d show

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you this wonderful slide of a Greek vase which dates back to something like 1500 years BC.

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And the ancient Greeks were very well aware of the therapeutic as well as recreational value

00:17:46 ►

of many drugs

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they really popularized and developed

00:17:51 ►

the way of cultivating and preserving wine

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but they knew, like most of you do

00:17:57 ►

that wine is not enough

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and every year

00:18:03 ►

towards the end of the summer

00:18:05 ►

when the Jews started getting a bit heavier

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interestingly, a bit like you

00:18:11 ►

the Athenian intellectuals

00:18:14 ►

instead of coming to Glastonbury

00:18:18 ►

they would go north

00:18:19 ►

it was a lot drier there interestingly

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it was called the Elysian Fields

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so the Champs Elysees in Paris is named after the Elysian Fields, which are north of Athens.

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And the Greek intelligentsia went north from Athens to the Elysian Fields.

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Because in those fields, they were growing, or growing on the rye and the barley that they were cultivating there,

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was a fungus called ergot.

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And they knew that if they ate the ergot, they would get high.

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So they would go with the gift of Dionysius, the god Dionysius,

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who was the god of alcohol.

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They’d take their urns of wine, and they would go, and they would drink wine,

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and they’d chew on the ergot fungus and they would have

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a wonderful experience. So wonderful that they recreated it on the images on their pottery,

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which is how we know about it today. And the reason they did that was actually in many

00:19:17 ►

ways the same reason as you come here. They wanted to escape from the city, they wanted

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to spend time in the country. But they also

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wanted to have a different way of thinking. They wanted to change their thought processes

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so they could go back and carry on doing the same stuff they did before, but perhaps better.

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They kind of wanted to cleanse their mind. They wanted to make themselves better, improved,

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to different. And you think, well, that sounds like quite

00:19:46 ►

a good idea, really, doesn’t it? What shall we do today, dear? Well, let’s go up to the

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Elysian Fields and have a couple of days drinking and taking psychedelics. And then what? Well,

00:19:58 ►

we’ll come back and then we’ll build democracy. That would be a good thing to do, wouldn’t

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it? And they did. And they wrote, of course, they would be a good thing to do, wouldn’t it? And they did, and

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they wrote, of course, they developed concepts which still underpin our society today, the

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concepts of literature and art, etc. So we know that these works, if used appropriately

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in a socially acceptable way, can have huge benefits to society. In fact, you know, you

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could argue, I’m not sure I’d go this far, but you could argue that Western society

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is built out of that kind

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of experience that the Greeks

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may well have gotten from taking

00:20:32 ►

psychedelics.

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So where did it all go wrong?

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Well,

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that’s a really quite difficult question to answer, but I suppose

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we have to blame the Romans

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because they took over Greece and they

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were rather

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more militaristic and a bit more sort of rudimentary in terms of their perspectives on life, and

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they liked fighting rather than thinking. And to some extent, the subsequent 2,000 years

00:20:58 ►

have been limited in terms of people’s access to these drugs and to the knowledge of these

00:21:03 ►

drugs, and we’ve tended to rely on alcohol. And of course, alcohol is a great drug. I guess we will use

00:21:12 ►

it, yes? Yes, a few of you haven’t. Sometimes I give this talk and there are some people

00:21:18 ►

who’ve never used alcohol, but there are relatively few. Alcohol is pervasive in our society.

00:21:23 ►

It has been for a very long time.

00:21:25 ►

One of the problems with alcohol, one of the reasons alcohol is so pervasive, is that it

00:21:30 ►

figures so strongly in the Bible. In fact, as hopefully you will know, I mean, I’ll give

00:21:36 ►

you an example. The reason alcohol was so powerful in ancient times was rather shown

00:21:44 ►

by what’s in the floor in front of us.

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In those days, if you drank water like this, you’d probably die.

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Whereas wine was one way of keeping water

00:21:54 ►

in a manner which was actually safe because the alcohol killed the bugs in it.

00:21:59 ►

So alcohol has been life-saving in terms of providing

00:22:02 ►

drinking fluid. But of course, alcohol has been life-saving in terms of providing a drinking fluid. But of course,

00:22:06 ►

alcohol has also become part of the symbolism of our religion. So Christian religion has

00:22:12 ►

used alcohol. The wedding at Cana, what did Jesus do? Well, he made the wedding go well

00:22:18 ►

because he turned water into wine, because the tradition of Jewish weddings at the time was to have wine to celebrate.

00:22:27 ►

And the church then, of course, took that, it took that accepted drug,

00:22:35 ►

and it turned it into part of the religious assemblies.

00:22:38 ►

You know, I mean, if you take communion, you, both, you know,

00:22:43 ►

all, certainly Catholic and Anglican communions, you drink wine. And whether you

00:22:49 ►

believe that’s the blood of Christ or it’s a symbolic, the fact is the church has had

00:22:54 ►

a hegemony on drugs for the last 2,000 years. And the church has evolved into the drinks

00:23:01 ►

industry, which started with the church and then became a separate industry.

00:23:05 ►

And the drinks industry is extremely keen to keep its monopoly over drugs.

00:23:11 ►

And it’s fought battles over the last 150 years to make sure that no other drug really

00:23:17 ►

got on the market.

00:23:18 ►

Then accessible versions of drugs like opium and cannabis and cocaine became available to the public systematically.

00:23:30 ►

The drinks industry has created opposition to them, stranglehold on the control of these substances.

00:24:01 ►

Well, that’s immoral, personally, I think. I don’t see it can be any justification for limiting people’s access to substances that change their mind,

00:24:10 ►

particularly not if you do it on the pretext of harm.

00:24:15 ►

And this, of course, is where the whole story gets extremely murky.

00:24:21 ►

Most of the justification for keeping drugs illegal is because

00:24:26 ►

supposedly they’re harmful

00:24:28 ►

but as you know and hopefully some of you

00:24:30 ►

have read some of my work over the years

00:24:32 ►

most of the so called illegal

00:24:34 ►

drugs are less harmful

00:24:36 ►

than alcohol

00:24:37 ►

and that’s therefore what

00:24:40 ►

scientifically

00:24:41 ►

the justification for

00:24:44 ►

that illegality

00:24:45 ►

is gone. And of course

00:24:47 ►

it was my protesting

00:24:49 ►

the government’s continued

00:24:51 ►

resistance

00:24:53 ►

or intransigence to

00:24:55 ►

having a rational drug

00:24:57 ►

policy that eventually got me sacked as their

00:24:59 ►

advisor in 2009.

00:25:02 ►

Now, there’s an interesting

00:25:04 ►

sort of… in 2009. When you look at the three pillars that underpin the restrictive attitude and a very hostile attitude that

00:25:25 ►

society has to drugs.

00:25:27 ►

You see there are politicians.

00:25:30 ►

Most of the politicians

00:25:31 ►

know that drug policies in this country are

00:25:33 ►

wrong. Many of the drugs

00:25:35 ►

ministers have said so, but

00:25:37 ►

they only say it when they’ve left office. They never

00:25:39 ►

say it when they’re in office.

00:25:41 ►

But we know that probably the majority

00:25:43 ►

of politicians know that they’re lying about drugs, it’s

00:25:46 ►

probably because they know they’re lying about most things, but that’s another story.

00:25:50 ►

And then of course we’ve got the, as I said, the drinks industry. The drinks industry has

00:25:55 ►

been systematic, particularly in the last 30 years in trying to prevent access of cannabis

00:26:01 ►

and drugs like MDMA to any kind of legal market because they’re terrified

00:26:05 ►

that it will undermine their profitability.

00:26:10 ►

And then the third arm in this world, rather dangerous and very effective opposition, have

00:26:17 ►

been the media.

00:26:18 ►

And we have a peculiar media in this country.

00:26:21 ►

I don’t know.

00:26:22 ►

Some of you look rather young.

00:26:24 ►

You probably don’t even know what a newspaper is.

00:26:26 ►

But believe me, there are such things.

00:26:29 ►

And they have a lot of influence amongst older people, particularly older voters.

00:26:34 ►

And newspapers such as the Moray and the Sun and the Caligar have systematically tried to create hysteria about drugs.

00:26:44 ►

And they’ve done it for the last 30 or 40 years,

00:26:48 ►

and they continue to do it.

00:26:49 ►

And that’s why we have the Psychoactive Substances Act,

00:26:51 ►

which I’ll talk about in a minute.

00:26:53 ►

So newspapers, politicians, and the drinks industry together

00:26:56 ►

are a very disturbing and very powerful coalition.

00:27:01 ►

And they really have held us back.

00:27:04 ►

And there are a lot of people who have been punished and prosecuted

00:27:07 ►

because they dared to challenge that authority.

00:27:13 ►

But beyond that, there’s a whole other story,

00:27:16 ►

and this is really the key of my talk,

00:27:17 ►

which is that not only have we, by trying to regulate recreational use of these drugs,

00:27:26 ►

unfairly criminalised a lot of people.

00:27:28 ►

There are a million young people in this country,

00:27:30 ►

probably a few of you in this audience,

00:27:31 ►

judging by the smell,

00:27:32 ►

who’ve got criminal records for smoking cannabis.

00:27:36 ►

But we created an underclass.

00:27:37 ►

Actually, the truth is,

00:27:39 ►

the cannabis underclass probably can’t afford to come here.

00:27:43 ►

So, because this million people who’ve got criminal records for cannabis possession,

00:27:48 ►

they don’t have work jobs, and they really struggle to get work,

00:27:53 ►

and they are at an extremely disadvantage.

00:27:57 ►

But beyond that, we’ve created another underclass of people who’ve got medical problems

00:28:02 ►

for which they cannot get access to treatments.

00:28:04 ►

class of people who’ve got medical problems for which they cannot get access to treatments.

00:28:12 ►

And almost all the so-called illegal drugs that the newspapers know the names of and can spell, cannabis, MDMA, LSD, I was going to say psilocybin, but I don’t think you can spell that. But those drugs that are illegal today all have huge medical potential.

00:28:31 ►

And to deny access of patients to their therapeutic possibilities is…

00:28:39 ►

Even if these drugs were dangerous it would be outrageous

00:28:45 ►

to deny patients who should be allowed to make

00:28:47 ►

their own minds up about the

00:28:48 ►

benefit. But when these drugs

00:28:51 ►

are dangerous, when you have a drug like

00:28:53 ►

cannabis which is safer than alcohol

00:28:54 ►

to deny it to patients

00:28:56 ►

to break down the doors of people with

00:28:59 ►

multiple sclerosis just to

00:29:01 ►

find that they’ve got some cannabis and to prosecute

00:29:03 ►

them as happens on a regular basis.

00:29:05 ►

To my mind, it’s ridiculous.

00:29:10 ►

It’s actually, as a taxpayer,

00:29:13 ►

it’s insulting.

00:29:14 ►

Why should my money go to giving police overtime?

00:29:17 ►

So they can smash people’s doors down at six in the morning

00:29:19 ►

and be like,

00:29:20 ►

I don’t want my tax money spent on that.

00:29:23 ►

And why should these people,

00:29:24 ►

who have got no other recourse

00:29:25 ►

other than to a so-called illegal drug,

00:29:28 ►

why should they be subject to that kind of harassment?

00:29:30 ►

What kind of society does that?

00:29:33 ►

And why do they do it?

00:29:34 ►

And of course, as I’ve said, I’ve told you why they do it.

00:29:37 ►

They do it because politically it’s powerful.

00:29:41 ►

The people that take drugs tend not to vote,

00:29:43 ►

so it doesn’t matter if you lose their votes.

00:29:46 ►

There’s a powerful lobby against them through the drinks industry.

00:29:48 ►

And also now, even more so probably,

00:29:52 ►

depending on what happens in the restructuring

00:29:56 ►

of the Conservative Party after the Brexit,

00:29:59 ►

it may become even more likely.

00:30:00 ►

There’s a strong American puritanical influence

00:30:04 ►

funding groups in

00:30:06 ►

Britain, particularly the so-called

00:30:07 ►

Centre for Social Justice

00:30:09 ►

that Ian Duncan Smith runs. This Centre for

00:30:12 ►

Social Justice has funding from

00:30:14 ►

some arms

00:30:16 ►

length from American

00:30:18 ►

charities which derive

00:30:20 ►

their income from

00:30:21 ►

the defence and military industry.

00:30:24 ►

And their ambition is to make sure that the world becomes or stays as much

00:30:28 ►

American as it can. And that is true. That isn’t democracy

00:30:32 ►

at all. And we really need to make sure we don’t

00:30:36 ►

fall prey to the simple semantics. It’s great, isn’t it? Why would you

00:30:40 ►

not have the centre for social justice?

00:30:43 ►

But what they mean by social justice is you’ve

00:30:46 ►

got to do what they say, and that really is not to do anything other than to talk about it.

00:30:52 ►

Where does LSE really come from? Well, it comes from an interesting period in my life

00:30:58 ►

which I’ve already alluded to, the 1960s and the Vietnam War. Because the reason LSE is illegal is because it was changing

00:31:10 ►

the way people viewed the war. Now, again, I’m looking around here. A lot of you weren’t

00:31:17 ►

even born. Some of you weren’t even thought of before the Vietnam War. But anyway, the

00:31:22 ►

Vietnam War was a war, the last war the Americans fought to try to maintain the world order through their military might.

00:31:31 ►

And they fought it in Vietnam, which is why it’s called the Vietnam War, and that’s the

00:31:35 ►

place over in Southeast Asia, which most Americans didn’t know that, because they didn’t even

00:31:39 ►

know what it was. But they were young American men your sort of age were being told to go and fight. And initially there was voluntary service and then so many were getting killed

00:31:50 ►

that people wouldn’t volunteer anymore. So then the American government decided it had

00:31:54 ►

to have conscription. So basically if you were over 18 and you’re, and I remember this

00:32:01 ►

vividly, I remember on the television watching this this if you were born on an odd day of the week

00:32:06 ►

if your birthday was an odd day of the month

00:32:08 ►

you’d get conscripted

00:32:09 ►

and you could go to a foreign country

00:32:12 ►

that you’d never heard of really

00:32:13 ►

or at least you didn’t know where it was

00:32:14 ►

and live in a jungle

00:32:18 ►

being eaten by mosquitoes

00:32:20 ►

and cockroaches

00:32:21 ►

being shot at by an enemy

00:32:23 ►

that you didn’t ever see, fighting

00:32:26 ►

for a cause you didn’t understand. And it’s not surprising that many young Americans said,

00:32:34 ►

I don’t want to do this. And then they went to Haight-Ashbury, they went to San Francisco,

00:32:38 ►

they got to Asia, they listened to the Grateful Dead, and they thought, this is a better world.

00:32:44 ►

I actually don’t want to be a soldier, I don’t want is a better world. I actually don’t want to

00:32:46 ►

be a soldier. I don’t want to be in the military. I don’t want to kill people for no reason

00:32:50 ►

at all other than they have a different belief system than me. And MSN was the first drug

00:32:56 ►

to be banned simply because it changed people’s perception. Because even then, the Americans could not

00:33:06 ►

buy a drug

00:33:08 ►

just because they didn’t like it.

00:33:10 ►

So they had to create hysteria

00:33:12 ►

about it. And they did.

00:33:14 ►

The American press was remarkable,

00:33:15 ►

even better than the Sun, in creating

00:33:17 ►

hysteria. They created ridiculous levels

00:33:19 ►

of hysteria about LSD.

00:33:22 ►

It’s not even clear to me whether anyone

00:33:24 ►

ever died of LSD.

00:33:26 ►

We know, obviously, that even back in the

00:33:28 ►

60s, tens of thousands

00:33:30 ►

of people were dying from alcohol and tobacco

00:33:31 ►

every year. But the American government

00:33:33 ►

decided to, in common with

00:33:35 ►

the newspapers, create historical

00:33:37 ►

stories. A woman gives birth to a frog.

00:33:41 ►

LSD

00:33:42 ►

fed eight groups to the

00:33:43 ►

actors. You know to the actress utterly absurd

00:33:46 ►

kinds of headlines like that

00:33:48 ►

and you might say this is laughable

00:33:51 ►

it’s laughable

00:33:53 ►

that anyone could change the law

00:33:54 ►

based on such ridiculous

00:33:56 ►

and absurd

00:33:57 ►

forces

00:33:59 ►

but that’s what they did then

00:34:01 ►

and that’s what we have just done now

00:34:03 ►

some of you know May the 27th this country Well, that’s what they did then, and that’s what we have just done now.

00:34:06 ►

Some of you know, yes?

00:34:13 ►

May the 27th, this country, your country, the country that you voted for,

00:34:17 ►

you voted into power, the Conservative Party,

00:34:21 ►

this country has done something that no other country in the world has ever done.

00:34:27 ►

It has banned any drug that changes your mind. Whether that drug exists today or whether it will ever be made in the future, irregardless of

00:34:35 ►

whether it’s harmful or not. And we do that. The Psychoactive Substances Act became law

00:34:41 ►

on the 27th of May, and essentially everything’s illegal.

00:34:47 ►

I think even holding your breath for more than 30 seconds to get high is illegal.

00:34:55 ►

It’s hard to talk about this without kind of gagging really.

00:34:59 ►

How can a country like ours, which has got a tradition of liberty and scientific endeavor, how can

00:35:07 ►

it do something as utterly, utterly controlling as that? And the answer is very simple. The

00:35:15 ►

answer is because the sun told them to. The sun created hysteria, has over the last two

00:35:22 ►

or three years created hysteria around the use of nitrous oxide.

00:35:27 ►

The reason it’s done that is because footballers use nitrous oxide.

00:35:31 ►

Footballers use nitrous oxide because it’s the only drug they can be tested for.

00:35:35 ►

So that was done, if you think, sometime, I don’t think.

00:35:39 ►

But the sun didn’t get hysterical when Prince Harry used nitrous oxide.

00:35:44 ►

But it got very hysterical when Raheem Sterling used nitrous oxide.

00:35:50 ►

And the Sun has had a campaign over the last few years to get nitrous oxide banned based on the fact that footballers use it.

00:35:58 ►

But banning nitrous oxide was difficult.

00:36:06 ►

difficult. There also, of course, there have been other legal highs, such as methadone and other stimulants, and also synthetic and other noises of common law. And those are

00:36:11 ►

all going to be put together as an eternal legal high, and the campaign to get rid of

00:36:16 ►

them has led to a law which bans everything. Other than alcohol, tobacco and caffeine.

00:36:26 ►

And that’s outrageous.

00:36:28 ►

It’s truly outrageous.

00:36:29 ►

And when I speak to friends around the world,

00:36:31 ►

they say, you must be joking.

00:36:32 ►

You can’t ban things that don’t exist,

00:36:34 ►

but you can and you have.

00:36:36 ►

And the reality is anything that affects your brain now,

00:36:40 ►

whether it’s being discovered and used for treating illness

00:36:43 ►

or treatment or recreation uses, de facto illegal, because that’s what the government said. And that’s going to have

00:36:51 ►

a massively deleterious effect on research, because it’s been really difficult to do research

00:36:56 ►

with psychedelics now. They’re illegal. Our psilocybin study, we managed in the end to treat 20 patients with psilocybin.

00:37:07 ►

It took us two and a half years to go through all the regulations to get psilocybin to give to our patients.

00:37:21 ►

Each dose of psilocybin ended up costing £1,500. Now, there is no

00:37:29 ►

drug in the world that’s that good. Why is that? Because when I work with psilocybin,

00:37:36 ►

I am treated as a criminal. They assume that, as are all my colleagues, it’s not just me,

00:37:42 ►

assume that, as are all my colleagues, it’s not just me,

00:37:43 ►

we have

00:37:46 ►

to have special police checks.

00:37:48 ►

Only four hospitals in Britain

00:37:50 ►

are allowed to hold

00:37:52 ►

cannabis, because

00:37:53 ►

it’s deemed as too dangerous.

00:37:56 ►

I’m a doctor, I can prescribe heroin,

00:37:58 ►

which is massively more

00:38:00 ►

dangerous. 1,300

00:38:01 ►

deaths a year from heroin,

00:38:03 ►

no deaths from cannabis, but I can prescribe

00:38:06 ►

cannabis because I’m a doctor. Not heroin because I’m a doctor, but I can’t do anything

00:38:09 ►

with cannabis because it’s controlled as a schedule 1 drug like MDMA, like cytosine.

00:38:14 ►

This is utterly, utterly stupid. It’s a waste of your money because you funded my research,

00:38:19 ►

thankfully, or at least those of you who pay taxes. And it holds the film back.

00:38:26 ►

We were the first people in 50 years

00:38:29 ►

to have done a study with RSD in this country.

00:38:33 ►

We did it. Thank you.

00:38:41 ►

We did it.

00:38:42 ►

He was like, why did you do it?

00:38:44 ►

And the answer is because it had to be done.

00:38:46 ►

You know, you can’t have a drug which changed the world.

00:38:49 ►

You can’t have the only drug to be banned because it changed the way people think.

00:38:53 ►

And you can’t understand what it does in the brain.

00:38:55 ►

And of course, the study’s been remarkable.

00:38:57 ►

We’ve understood the nature of hallucinations now.

00:38:59 ►

We’ve understood the nature of the change in the ego,

00:39:02 ►

the sense of becoming part of the universe that these drugs produce,

00:39:05 ►

and we’ll hear about that from the next speaker,

00:39:06 ►

we can now show you a brain map

00:39:10 ►

that makes sense of this.

00:39:12 ►

And I think that’s critical.

00:39:14 ►

Because we cannot win the argument about drugs

00:39:19 ►

by relying on common sense.

00:39:21 ►

You’ve seen that.

00:39:23 ►

We can’t even now win the moral argument. This government

00:39:26 ►

has told us that taking drugs

00:39:27 ►

is immoral unless you

00:39:29 ►

take alcohol. Any other

00:39:31 ►

psychoactive drug, other

00:39:33 ►

than alcohol, that changes the way you feel is

00:39:35 ►

illegal. So they’ve made that moral decision.

00:39:38 ►

They told us it’s not

00:39:39 ►

based on harm anymore, it’s based on

00:39:41 ►

morality. So we can’t win the moral argument.

00:39:44 ►

The only way we can win the argument is through science. We have to show them, scientists like me,

00:39:50 ►

have to show them that the science is really worthwhile. That the science underpins the

00:39:58 ►

potential therapeutic value. And at the very least, these drugs should be made available

00:40:03 ►

for medical treatment

00:40:06 ►

and research

00:40:06 ►

and whether they’re going to recreation use or not

00:40:09 ►

who cares

00:40:10 ►

because the reality is they’re not dangerous anyway

00:40:12 ►

thank you very much So we’ve got 15 minutes or so for questions.

00:40:37 ►

Yeah, so the question is, if I’m…

00:40:40 ►

Yeah, they asked me that question in the independent yesterday,

00:40:43 ►

but I couldn’t write it.

00:40:43 ►

I mean, I had a side domestic.

00:40:46 ►

My mother died yesterday, unfortunately, so I’m not staying.

00:40:49 ►

I’ve just come to give this talk, and then I’m going to go home and sort things out.

00:40:52 ►

But they asked me to do that.

00:40:53 ►

But I will do it, and I’ll tell you what I’d do.

00:40:55 ►

I’d say the reality is this.

00:40:59 ►

What was the question?

00:41:00 ►

The question was, if I was the Prime Minister, I’d be better than Boris anyway.

00:41:14 ►

But what I’d do is very straightforward.

00:41:16 ►

I would apply science, I’d apply rational approach to drugs,

00:41:20 ►

I would use good policy, which we have seen developed elsewhere in the world.

00:41:24 ►

We’ve got good models now.

00:41:25 ►

It’s not that we’re going into the dark by saying, make medical cannabis available.

00:41:30 ►

Two-thirds of Americans, that’s 220 million people, the richest people in the world, have access to medicinal cannabis.

00:41:38 ►

But in Britain, we don’t.

00:41:40 ►

Why don’t we have access to medicinal cannabis?

00:41:43 ►

Because the drugs minister thinks if we had medicinal cannabis,

00:41:46 ►

it would encourage you not to use cannabis.

00:41:49 ►

Some of you clearly are taking notes.

00:41:53 ►

I would say this.

00:41:55 ►

I would say based on the knowledge we have of drug harms,

00:41:59 ►

drugs which are less harmful to the user

00:42:02 ►

than alcohol

00:42:04 ►

should be available.

00:42:07 ►

They should be available in a regulated fashion.

00:42:10 ►

And I say that for two reasons.

00:42:12 ►

I say that for the moral reason,

00:42:14 ►

why should you, those of you,

00:42:16 ►

what strength is that you’re drinking?

00:42:17 ►

What’s that magnet?

00:42:21 ►

Yeah, you see, it’s like a half a joint, you know,

00:42:23 ►

you’ve got to be very careful.

00:42:24 ►

Yeah, you see, it’s like a half a joint, you know, you’ve got to be very careful.

00:42:33 ►

If alcohol kills 26,000 people a year in Britain, then it should get a lot of young people.

00:42:39 ►

So anything that’s less harmful to the user than alcohol, I think we have a moral right to make it very good. And we should definitely ban wine boxes.

00:42:43 ►

See, that’s it. We should limit the sale of alcohol to small units.

00:42:50 ►

So there’s the moral argument, but there’s also the health argument.

00:42:53 ►

I believe that if people have access to drugs such as cannabis and such as MDMA

00:43:00 ►

or other stimulants and nitrous oxide even,

00:43:04 ►

in contradiction for the condoms, we would actually have less harm.

00:43:08 ►

Alcohol is hugely expensive. It costs six billion or more a year just to police drunkenness.

00:43:13 ►

Not here obviously, but on the streets of our cities it’s happening.

00:43:17 ►

So I think we should have a regulated market. We should control alcohol. I think alcohol is too cheap.

00:43:22 ►

What you’re drinking, you’re paying a third the price I paid

00:43:26 ►

when I was a student for alcohol,

00:43:27 ►

and that’s why consumption has gone up.

00:43:29 ►

Last year in Britain,

00:43:31 ►

there was a 6% increase

00:43:33 ►

in mortality in women from alcohol.

00:43:37 ►

6% in one year in mortality.

00:43:40 ►

Alcohol is the leading cause of death in men,

00:43:42 ►

under 50 in this country,

00:43:44 ►

and it will be the leading cause of death in women, 50 in this country, and it will be the leading cause of death in women under 50 by the end of this decade.

00:43:49 ►

So we have to control alcohol, and the way to control alcohol is to give people access to safer drugs,

00:43:53 ►

not to stop access to other drugs.

00:43:56 ►

So that’s what I did.

00:43:56 ►

But drugs are more harmful to the user than alcohol, so drugs like heroin, crack, cocaine.

00:44:02 ►

I was still keeping legal, hoping that sensible people like you would then switch to some really MDMA or nitrodox.

00:44:08 ►

Any other questions? Yes.

00:44:17 ►

So the question is, what can you do to help ordinary people?

00:44:20 ►

You’re not ordinary people, you’re very special people.

00:44:21 ►

But you’re not ordinary people.

00:44:22 ►

You’re very special people.

00:44:24 ►

You know, you’ve… You know, I mean, you’ve…

00:44:27 ►

You know, you’ve taken a whole hour out of your precious gas

00:44:30 ►

to be trying to come and listen to me.

00:44:31 ►

I’m very touched by that.

00:44:34 ►

And I think it’s…

00:44:36 ►

How many of you follow me on Twitter?

00:44:40 ►

How many of you know what Twitter is?

00:44:43 ►

You could write it in the mud, I think.

00:44:46 ►

So I’d like you all to follow me on Twitter,

00:44:48 ►

ProfDavidNut.

00:44:50 ►

That’s pretty easy, isn’t it?

00:44:51 ►

Because that way I can tell you what issues are happening,

00:44:54 ►

when things are going on.

00:44:56 ►

And I’d also like you to follow drug science.

00:44:59 ►

When I was sat by the government from the ACMD,

00:45:02 ►

I realised that something had to be done.

00:45:06 ►

Because once I’d gone, there was no voice.

00:45:10 ►

I was pretty certain that the people that followed me on the ACMD would not dare step out of line.

00:45:16 ►

Because they’d seen what happened to me, and they would have been carried by it.

00:45:19 ►

So I thought, we’ve got to do something different.

00:45:22 ►

So I decided what to do was I set up a charity called Drug Science. So you can follow Drug Science, it’s online, and if you want to,

00:45:28 ►

if you like things like what we do, you can donate. It’s a charity, you get by on things

00:45:33 ►

like my lectures and donations. Follow us, because we are beginning to develop a kind

00:45:41 ►

of campaign which at the very least will educate people.

00:45:45 ►

The great thing about drug science is it’s now where

00:45:48 ►

journalists go.

00:45:50 ►

If journalists want to know about drugs, they come to

00:45:52 ►

drug science. And I’m inundated

00:45:54 ►

as I say. Three or four times

00:45:56 ►

a day I get a journalistic inquiry

00:45:57 ►

to do something.

00:46:00 ►

And the more

00:46:01 ►

power to drug science, the more we can

00:46:04 ►

actually be the voice.

00:46:06 ►

And if we’re the voice, it’s much harder for newspapers like The Sun or The Mail to lie about drugs,

00:46:11 ►

because if other journalists ring us up and they say,

00:46:13 ►

well, what’s the truth? We tell them the truth.

00:46:16 ►

So we’ve got to stop the disinformation that’s been so powerful in terms of driving drug policy.

00:46:23 ►

So that’s the first thing.

00:46:24 ►

The second thing you can do

00:46:25 ►

is there’s a book called Drugs Without the Hot Air.

00:46:28 ►

Have you heard of that?

00:46:29 ►

You’ve got it. Good. Drugs Without the Hot Air.

00:46:31 ►

Good.

00:46:33 ►

Next time, if I’m here next year and you’re here next year,

00:46:36 ►

could you all bring your copies so I can sign them

00:46:38 ►

please, right?

00:46:39 ►

That’s a very important book because that book

00:46:42 ►

supports my charity. All the proceeds go to

00:46:44 ►

my charity. I wrote it, by the way, in case you’re wondering who the author was.

00:46:49 ►

And that’s the book that most of you should give to your parents.

00:46:55 ►

Some of you perhaps not.

00:46:56 ►

Some give to your children.

00:46:57 ►

But most of you give to your parents, right?

00:46:59 ►

Give them to your parents and say, Mom, Dad, this is your Christmas present.

00:47:04 ►

This book will change

00:47:05 ►

the way you think about drugs. And by the way, if there’s anything you don’t understand,

00:47:10 ►

speak to me and I’ll explain it to you. So you want to begin a dialogue with your parents

00:47:13 ►

as well as educating them. And use that book as a template for having this dialogue, because

00:47:19 ►

we need to have a dialogue. There is so much misinformation from supposed reputable sources like newspapers

00:47:26 ►

that we have to challenge it. And I can’t, you know, I’ll do my best, but if all of you

00:47:32 ►

were challenging it, every time someone lies about drugs, you say, hang on, read the book,

00:47:37 ►

go on the drug site, okay? Yes. Yeah, what do you say to young children? No, this is really, there’s a chapter in it.

00:47:47 ►

Yeah, no, no, no.

00:47:48 ►

There’s a chapter in it.

00:47:49 ►

I’ll start with four.

00:47:50 ►

I think children need to learn.

00:47:51 ►

One of the saddest things we have in this country,

00:47:54 ►

the last government removed any directive,

00:47:57 ►

removed any requirement to teach about drugs at school.

00:48:03 ►

That’s disgusting.

00:48:04 ►

You know, the only

00:48:06 ►

app materials

00:48:08 ►

it teaches, teachers don’t have to teach about

00:48:10 ►

schools don’t have to teach about drugs at all.

00:48:12 ►

If they want to teach about drugs,

00:48:14 ►

the only free material

00:48:16 ►

they can get is provided

00:48:18 ►

by the Scientologists.

00:48:22 ►

And they give a lot out.

00:48:25 ►

It’s outrageous. There is no government sponsored support

00:48:28 ►

for it

00:48:28 ►

if I get funding we would set up a schools programme

00:48:32 ►

but you’ve got to start with four

00:48:34 ►

look

00:48:35 ►

as soon as children see their parents

00:48:38 ►

usually being drunk or stoned

00:48:39 ►

they need to know what’s going on

00:48:41 ►

a lot of kids at four or five

00:48:43 ►

will be going to school hungry

00:48:44 ►

because their mother’s drunk and hasn’t woken up,

00:48:47 ►

or they’ll be beaten up by their father.

00:48:49 ►

Kids need to know about drugs,

00:48:51 ►

because it impinges on so many people’s lives.

00:48:55 ►

So the point is in there.

00:48:56 ►

What do you say to a five-year-old?

00:48:58 ►

You tell them that people get intoxicated and they can do bad things,

00:49:01 ►

and if they’re getting beaten up by a drunk father,

00:49:05 ►

then they should talk to the school.

00:49:07 ►

At every age, you should be approaching the truth.

00:49:13 ►

People will say,

00:49:14 ►

people say, well, education,

00:49:15 ►

drugs education doesn’t work.

00:49:18 ►

What they mean is,

00:49:19 ►

drugs education doesn’t stop people taking drugs.

00:49:22 ►

Well, that’s not what we’re trying to do.

00:49:24 ►

What we’re trying to do is stop people being harmed by

00:49:26 ►

drugs. And this is one of the worst

00:49:28 ►

things. For the last 10 years

00:49:30 ►

we’ve had both this current

00:49:31 ►

government, the last government, and the last Labour government

00:49:34 ►

their drugs policy, which

00:49:36 ►

we oppose continuously,

00:49:39 ►

had the sole measure,

00:49:40 ►

the sole measure of success

00:49:41 ►

was how many people use drugs.

00:49:45 ►

And I would say to them, and this is what I got said,

00:49:47 ►

well, look, hang on, does that include alcohol?

00:49:51 ►

No.

00:49:52 ►

Why not?

00:49:53 ►

Because it’s not a drug.

00:49:56 ►

Why do you want to stop people using drugs?

00:49:58 ►

Because they’re harmful.

00:49:59 ►

But if they’re less harmful than alcohol,

00:50:01 ►

won’t we reduce net harm?

00:50:03 ►

We’re not going to talk about that.

00:50:05 ►

Or we’re going to lie about it.

00:50:07 ►

So the premise is that

00:50:10 ►

if we stop people using drugs,

00:50:12 ►

there will be less harms.

00:50:13 ►

So I say to them now,

00:50:14 ►

well, okay,

00:50:15 ►

so you think there’s less use of drugs.

00:50:18 ►

Okay, well, how come

00:50:19 ►

deaths from cocaine reached an all-time high last year,

00:50:23 ►

deaths from heroin are going up.

00:50:25 ►

How come that’s happening?

00:50:27 ►

And there is no relationship between use and harm.

00:50:30 ►

Because what we’re doing is we’re actually increasing the harms of drugs

00:50:35 ►

and the people we’re using by this policy we’re adapting

00:50:38 ►

and having it all in the black market.

00:50:41 ►

So I suppose the bottom line is you’ve got to have a more rational government.

00:50:52 ►

Now, there is hope. Don’t give up. The Lib Dems, some Lucas have endorsed a policy document legalising cannabis

00:51:12 ►

that I helped put together, which was endorsed by the Lib Dem Spring Assembly.

00:51:18 ►

There will be debate in Parliament about it.

00:51:20 ►

So we’ve got seven MPs that are openly supporting legal candidates.

00:51:26 ►

Make damn sure those of you

00:51:28 ►

who are in their constituencies,

00:51:30 ►

you vote for them, please.

00:51:32 ►

One more?

00:51:36 ►

So the question is, how can

00:51:38 ►

we use social media to try to

00:51:40 ►

promote and develop

00:51:42 ►

the vision

00:51:44 ►

of drug science? I should say, it’s important, drug science is a charity, it’s not just me.

00:51:48 ►

I’ve got a whole group of real experts,

00:51:49 ►

almost all the experts on drugs in Britain are on drug science.

00:51:54 ►

Unfortunately, that’s one of the reasons the government’s laws on drugs are so bad,

00:51:59 ►

because they don’t even make the laws correct, they’re not even chemically correct.

00:52:03 ►

The latest law on cannabis you might be interested in,

00:52:05 ►

on synthetic cannabinoids,

00:52:07 ►

the latest proposed law on synthetic cannabinoids,

00:52:11 ►

currently captures something like 35 licensed medicines under this act.

00:52:18 ►

The government doesn’t even know its own laws.

00:52:21 ►

It doesn’t even understand what it’s doing,

00:52:22 ►

because most of the experts work for drug science. So, we’re

00:52:26 ►

communicating. So, I tweet.

00:52:28 ►

Drug science has a website. We do Facebook.

00:52:31 ►

At some point,

00:52:32 ►

we will have a campaign. So, we’re going to…

00:52:34 ►

What I’m trying to do now, I think the

00:52:36 ►

key issue, the big… for us

00:52:38 ►

in this country at present, is a technical issue.

00:52:41 ►

And it’s about how

00:52:42 ►

we can get cannabis,

00:52:44 ►

medical cannabis available. And all it takes is for

00:52:49 ►

the Home Secretary to write a letter, what’s called a statutory implement, and say that

00:52:58 ►

cannabis is no longer a Schedule 1 drug, which means you have to have a special licence,

00:53:03 ►

it takes a year and costs £5,000 to hold it, but it’s a Schedule 2 drug, which means you have to have a special license. It takes a year and costs £5,000 to hold it.

00:53:06 ►

But it’s a Schedule II drug, alongside

00:53:08 ►

heroin. So we could store cannabis

00:53:09 ►

alongside heroin in our pharmacies

00:53:12 ►

and not worry too much, because

00:53:13 ►

if people are going to break into that pharmacy, they’re not going to

00:53:16 ►

take the cannabis, are they?

00:53:17 ►

If we make cannabis a Schedule II drug,

00:53:20 ►

that’s what Americans are almost certainly going to do

00:53:22 ►

this year. That would make it a medicine.

00:53:25 ►

And a stroke.

00:53:26 ►

And it doesn’t even need a

00:53:28 ►

voter power. We can just have the

00:53:29 ►

Home Secretary saying, yep,

00:53:31 ►

there’s enough evidence it’s a medicine, let’s put it

00:53:33 ►

back in the medical category, schedule two.

00:53:36 ►

And immediately

00:53:37 ►

that would happen. So we need a campaign

00:53:39 ►

for that. And everyone should, if we start

00:53:41 ►

a campaign, you should really sign

00:53:44 ►

up for that. At some point

00:53:45 ►

that’s going to happen. 100,000 people

00:53:48 ►

have signed the campaign, the petition

00:53:50 ►

called Ease Our Pain.

00:53:51 ►

At least over 100,000. So there will be a debate

00:53:53 ►

in Parliament about cannabis

00:53:55 ►

and medicine. And then I think we should

00:53:58 ►

do the same for psilocybin, because

00:53:59 ►

we know we’ve got this good evidence of its value in

00:54:01 ►

depression, and MDMA

00:54:03 ►

as a medicine for post-traumatic stress disorder.

00:54:07 ►

And I think if we could all push for just those three drugs

00:54:09 ►

to be put out of Schedule 1 and Schedule 2,

00:54:13 ►

we could really make a huge difference for a lot of people fast.

00:54:16 ►

So finally again, I’m so pleased.

00:54:18 ►

I want to see at least another 1,000 signed up tonight.

00:54:20 ►

Last question.

00:54:24 ►

Do I think Brexit’s going to make any difference? Well, it’s going to

00:54:28 ►

make a difference in a number of ways. It’s certainly a distraction. One thing about Europe,

00:54:33 ►

whatever you think about Brexit, the European Directorate of Justice, they developed a policy

00:54:39 ►

five years ago based on the harm scale that we developed. And they said all new drugs

00:54:44 ►

should be assessed under the harm scale. And developed. And they said all new drugs should

00:54:45 ►

be assessed under the harm scale. And if they’re very harmful, they should be criminalised.

00:54:50 ►

If they’re moderately harmful, they should be subject to civil sanctions. And if they’re

00:54:54 ►

not harmful, they should be legal. And our government, no scale. And our government said

00:55:00 ►

no, we’re not interested in doing anything that you’re doing on drugs. And of course,

00:55:06 ►

we’ve gone on now to make everything illegal, even if it’s harmless.

00:55:08 ►

So Europe is good for drugs, because Europe

00:55:10 ►

is rational. Most European countries,

00:55:12 ►

particularly Netherlands,

00:55:14 ►

Belgium now, Spain,

00:55:16 ►

Portugal, they have much more rational drug policies.

00:55:19 ►

So I think Brexit could

00:55:20 ►

actually make things worse, because

00:55:21 ►

if we end up being controlled by these

00:55:24 ►

ultra-puritan,

00:55:25 ►

right-wing American lobby groups, it could be more problematic. But who knows? I mean,

00:55:30 ►

so, you know, I’m not optimistic, but don’t give up, because you never know. You know,

00:55:34 ►

there might be a chance for change. Oh, this guy’s got a last question. No synthetic alcohol?

00:55:39 ►

Well, this is an interesting… So it seems to me, a few years ago, 10 years ago now,

00:55:43 ►

11, I was writing a government report called the Fawcett Report on drugs and the brain.

00:55:50 ►

And we were brainstorming for a year on the future of drugs.

00:55:53 ►

I spent most of my professional career actually working in the field of alcohol dependence.

00:55:58 ►

And for the first 20 years, I was trying to treat people with alcohol dependence.

00:56:02 ►

I was trying to stop people being intoxicated, stop people craving, stop people dying of cirrhosis. And then in general, this

00:56:10 ►

brainstorming process kind of came to me. Well, we can never do that. Alcohol is intrinsically

00:56:15 ►

toxic. For those of you who drink, there’s only a few of you here, I see this is good,

00:56:19 ►

but let me just tell you, sir. If alcohol was treated like a food additive, suppose one day, you

00:56:29 ►

know, suppose alcohol didn’t exist and suddenly you discover this wonderful solvent which

00:56:35 ►

you could put into trifles to make them taste better. Yes, you said, I’m going to make my

00:56:40 ►

fortune selling alcohol trifles. You go to the Food Standards Agency and you say,

00:56:45 ►

can I sell this?

00:56:46 ►

And they say, do toxicology testing.

00:56:48 ►

You do toxicology testing.

00:56:50 ►

You come back and you say, can I sell it?

00:56:52 ►

And they say, yes, you can sell alcohol.

00:56:54 ►

It is toxic.

00:56:55 ►

So the maximum exposure in a year for alcohol,

00:57:01 ►

if you treat it like other food additives,

00:57:05 ►

is a glass of wine

00:57:06 ►

per year.

00:57:09 ►

So we know that.

00:57:11 ►

We’ve known that for a long time.

00:57:13 ►

The reason we don’t enforce those rules

00:57:15 ►

is because it’s not a food additive.

00:57:16 ►

It’s a food.

00:57:17 ►

And it’s exempt.

00:57:19 ►

And that’s the problem.

00:57:20 ►

We blind ourselves.

00:57:21 ►

So, 4 million premature deaths a year from alcohol.

00:57:25 ►

We could get rid of almost all of those by replacing it.

00:57:27 ►

I know.

00:57:28 ►

Science, the science we’ve done, could give us.

00:57:31 ►

It has given us.

00:57:32 ►

I’ve taken it.

00:57:33 ►

My wife has taken it.

00:57:34 ►

We had parties over Christmas.

00:57:36 ►

We’ve had synthetic.

00:57:37 ►

We’ve got alternatives to alcohol.

00:57:40 ►

They don’t like alcohol, but they don’t watch your liver and your gut and your brain, etc.

00:57:44 ►

And you don’t get so much of a hangover.

00:57:45 ►

And they’re reversible, and it’s perfect.

00:57:47 ►

The question is, how do you develop it?

00:57:49 ►

And the answer is, in Britain, we can’t develop it,

00:57:51 ►

because, de facto, it is now illegal.

00:57:55 ►

So we are thinking about going overseas,

00:57:57 ►

because you guys will just have to die of your liver cirrhosis,

00:58:00 ►

and the rest of the world can live longer.

00:58:02 ►

Maybe that’s a good point to end. Thank you all very much. Thank you. You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

00:58:25 ►

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

00:58:30 ►

And before I forget to say it,

00:58:33 ►

I’ve put a link to Professor Nutt’s book,

00:58:36 ►

Drugs Without the Hot Air,

00:58:37 ►

in the program notes for today’s podcast.

00:58:40 ►

As we just heard him say,

00:58:42 ►

this would be a great book for you to give to your parents

00:58:44 ►

if they are still in the dark about these substances.

00:58:48 ►

To give you a brief idea of what the book covers, here are a few of the chapter titles.

00:58:53 ►

Is ecstasy more dangerous than horse riding?

00:58:57 ►

How can we measure the harms done by drugs?

00:59:00 ►

Why do people take drugs?

00:59:03 ►

Cannabis, and why did Queen Victoria take it?

00:59:07 ►

If alcohol were discovered today, would it be legal?

00:59:11 ►

What is addiction? Is there an addictive personality?

00:59:15 ►

Can drugs improve performance?

00:59:19 ►

Psychedelics, should scientists try LSD?

00:59:23 ►

The future of Drugs?

00:59:27 ►

And What Should I Tell My Kids About Drugs?

00:59:33 ►

That’s not all of the chapter heads, but it’s some of the ones that kind of interested me at first glance.

00:59:38 ►

And after taking a peek inside this book, as Amazon allows,

00:59:42 ►

I bought a copy for myself and downloaded it to my Kindle,

01:00:06 ►

which is another reason this podcast is a bit late this week. I’m Dr. Bill S. before. And that last chapter, What to Tell Our Children About Drugs, for me could be titled,

01:00:13 ►

What Should I Tell My Grandchildren About Drugs? Because they are now at the ages where they are noticing their grandfather’s somewhat unruly ways. And well, I want to be sure not to mess them up

01:00:18 ►

too much. So guidance from someone with Professor Nutt’s background seems to me to be important here.

01:00:24 ►

If you’re still living at home, well, then maybe you should give your parents a copy of this book. guidance from someone with Professor Nutt’s background seems to me to be important here.

01:00:29 ►

If you’re still living at home, well then maybe you should give your parents a copy of this book before the next big family gathering. It could surely be a great source for some

01:00:35 ►

interesting conversation around the dinner table. Now as I was preparing this podcast,

01:00:41 ►

I noticed that Professor Nutt also gave an interview to the BBC in which he discussed the work of Aldous Huxley. And so I gave that a listen, which is something

01:00:51 ►

I’d like to do for you right now. However, this is only a very brief part of the interview, but

01:00:56 ►

I think that you’ll find it worth listening to. With me to introduce their good read are the

01:01:01 ►

psychiatrist David Nutt, professor at Imperial College London,

01:01:07 ►

chair of the charity Drug Science,

01:01:11 ►

and perhaps most famous for being sacked from his role as drug czar by the last Labour government because he challenged their drug policy.

01:01:15 ►

David, would you launch things with your choice for Goodread?

01:01:19 ►

What is it?

01:01:20 ►

My choice is Island by Ardus Huxley, his last novel.

01:01:25 ►

And though not necessarily his best,

01:01:27 ►

certainly it’s, to me, the most meaningful

01:01:29 ►

because it sums up a life of thought.

01:01:33 ►

It’s a remarkable book from a remarkable man.

01:01:35 ►

I mean, Huxley, Aldous, was undoubtedly one of the greatest intellects

01:01:39 ►

in the history of humanity,

01:01:41 ►

and he tries to pull it all together in this book.

01:01:44 ►

It’s a sort of utopia,

01:01:46 ►

it’s a fantasy about a utopia. Well actually no, it’s not really a fantasy, it’s more a program,

01:01:52 ►

it’s more a kind of directive for the future of humanity. Well at least that’s how I read it and

01:01:57 ►

if you get in it there are discourses on philosophy, on religion, on medicine, on psychotherapy. He starts suggesting how CBT might develop.

01:02:10 ►

He actually goes into some theories around mindfulness.

01:02:12 ►

It really is a philosophy of how humans can live better.

01:02:16 ►

Of course, it’s on a utopia. It’s set on an island.

01:02:19 ►

It’s set on this mythical island where people have worked out

01:02:22 ►

that you can, by using rational approaches to humanity,

01:02:27 ►

live a better life and actually be more human

01:02:29 ►

and be more fulfilled and understand what you’re doing

01:02:32 ►

and actually die better as well.

01:02:34 ►

So it’s utopian in that sense,

01:02:36 ►

but I think it’s almost like a roadmap for Western society.

01:02:41 ►

I mean, there’s something in that, isn’t there, David?

01:02:43 ►

As a novel, this really doesn’t work that well.

01:02:47 ►

I mean, it is an essay with examples, if you like.

01:02:51 ►

Yeah, that’s right. Absolutely.

01:02:52 ►

I mean, it’s a weak novel, but it’s a phenomenal thought piece.

01:02:57 ►

And for me, it’s been hugely…

01:02:59 ►

I mean, I have built my life around this novel

01:03:01 ►

because particularly the concept of using mosca a drug to help people

01:03:07 ►

come to terms with a better life i mean that’s something that was impressed me as a undergraduate

01:03:13 ►

when i read it and it’s something which i have worked towards and in fact only last week we

01:03:18 ►

achieved in a sense the huxty dream of using a psychedelic drugs in this case psilocybin

01:03:23 ►

to help people come to terms with very difficult to treat depression so the book hasley dream of using a psychedelic drug, in this case psilocybin, to help people come to terms with very difficult-to-treat depression.

01:03:27 ►

So the book has a lot of meaning for me.

01:03:29 ►

It’s probably why I’m a psychiatrist,

01:03:31 ►

because the book essentially looks at different aspects of psychology,

01:03:35 ►

thinks through different theories,

01:03:38 ►

and gives hope that if we do approach the human condition

01:03:43 ►

with a rational view, which is both humanistic and scientific,

01:03:46 ►

we can have a better outcome, and that’s what I’ve tried to do.

01:03:49 ►

So you don’t think that Huxley’s being slightly naive

01:03:52 ►

in his idea that this drug that they all take freely on the island

01:03:56 ►

that gives them good trips and indeed bad trips sometimes,

01:04:00 ►

that it’s going to be the salvation of people?

01:04:03 ►

Because an awful lot of weight is put on that,

01:04:05 ►

although there are other theories of how people should live.

01:04:07 ►

Well, naive in the sense that Western society hasn’t adopted it,

01:04:12 ►

but optimistic in the sense that there is still hope.

01:04:16 ►

I mean, personally, I think there’s a lot of opportunities

01:04:18 ►

for using mind-altering drugs to improve mental states,

01:04:23 ►

not only of people who are ill,

01:04:24 ►

but people who actually are seeking to be better.

01:04:30 ►

Now, if you haven’t already read Island,

01:04:33 ►

well, then what are you waiting for?

01:04:35 ►

I’ve read it several times myself,

01:04:37 ►

and most likely will read it yet again one more time before I die.

01:04:41 ►

And as many reviewers have pointed out,

01:04:44 ►

it may not be Huxley’s best novel, but as a

01:04:48 ►

summary of his life’s intellectual work, it is truly revealing. As you know, my wife was Dr.

01:04:55 ►

Charlie Grobe’s research nurse during the initial phase of his end-of-life psilocybin study,

01:05:00 ►

and Charlie was a close friend of Laura Huxley, to whom he introduced me. And on more

01:05:06 ►

than one occasion, I heard Laura tell people that of all the books that Aldous wrote, he always

01:05:12 ►

considered Island to be his very best work. She never said his best novel, but his best work.

01:05:18 ►

And I think that Professor Nutt has correctly picked up on that fact. You really owe it to

01:05:23 ►

yourself to read Island.

01:05:29 ►

To my mind, it’s even more significant than The Doors of Perception,

01:05:34 ►

which was a key book in the intellectual lives of people like Terence McKenna and Timothy Leary.

01:05:38 ►

However, getting back to Professor Nutt’s latest book,

01:05:42 ►

I want to close today by reading a few highlights from its final chapter,

01:05:45 ►

What Should I Tell My Kids About Drugs?

01:05:49 ►

Unlike a novel, I don’t think that this will be a spoiler that gives away the ending.

01:05:55 ►

But in the event that you are a parent who is worrying about educating your child about drug safety,

01:06:00 ►

I hope that this will encourage you to buy the book and talk about it with your family.

01:06:05 ►

So here now are a few bits of good advice that I hope you’ll follow.

01:06:08 ►

To begin with, Professor Nutt says,

01:06:13 ►

one important harm reduction measure is to delay experimentation.

01:06:17 ►

And I have to say that that’s something I totally agree with.

01:06:21 ►

In my own case, before I was even in my teens,

01:06:27 ►

I was sneaking alcohol out of my dad’s liquor cabinet and smoking cigarettes with my school chums.

01:06:33 ►

But it wasn’t until I was over 40 years old that I tried my first illegal drug, ecstasy.

01:06:36 ►

And it was actually legal at the time I first tried it.

01:06:44 ►

Now after taking MDMA, or ecstasy as it was called at the time, it was almost another year before I even tried cannabis.

01:06:46 ►

I was definitely a late bloomer.

01:06:50 ►

So my gateway drugs were alcohol and tobacco.

01:06:55 ►

And today I’m very glad that I hadn’t begun using other substances sooner.

01:06:58 ►

But that’s a choice each of us has to make on our own.

01:07:02 ►

However, if you or your friends do begin experimenting earlier,

01:07:05 ►

Dr. Nutt has this to say as well, and I quote,

01:07:10 ►

The first time you take any drug, it will have a bigger effect on you as you haven’t developed any tolerance, end quote,

01:07:14 ►

which he goes on to point out as being even more problematic for young people.

01:07:19 ►

And as an aside here, I found that after trying a wide variety of substances

01:07:24 ►

that even for an aside here, I found that after trying a wide variety of substances that even for an experienced user,

01:07:27 ►

the first time that any psychoactive substance is used, well, that effect will usually be much more sublime the first time that you use it.

01:07:35 ►

I call it the virgin rush, and trust me, if you’ve not yet tried MDMA, be sure to make that first time special,

01:07:43 ►

preferably in a small setting with only one or two friends.

01:07:46 ►

But definitely don’t waste your virgin rush of MDMA at a club or somewhere with live music.

01:07:52 ►

Do it right and you’ll be very glad that you waited for the right moment.

01:07:57 ►

Now, here are the 11 starting points that Professor Nutt recommends for discussing drugs with young people.

01:08:05 ►
  1. Alcohol and tobacco are drugs.
01:08:09 ►
  1. All drugs can potentially cause harm as well as pleasure.
01:08:15 ►
  1. Start telling your kids about drugs from an early age and be prepared to discuss your
01:08:21 ►

drinking and smoking with them.

01:08:23 ►
  1. Never inject.
01:08:27 ►
  1. Don’t use solvents.
01:08:30 ►

They kill about one person each week and usually kill instantly.

01:08:34 ►
  1. Don’t take drink and drugs at the same time.
01:08:39 ►

And I’ve learned that this is particularly true with substances like MDMA.

01:08:44 ►

Because besides being more dangerous, well, for me, alcohol kills true with substances like MDMA, because besides being

01:08:45 ►

more dangerous, well, for me, alcohol kills the effects of the MDMA, and, well, it ruins

01:08:50 ►

the trip.

01:08:52 ►

Number seven, a criminal record could ruin your career.

01:08:57 ►

And, actually, that’s why it took me so long before I first began my own experimentation.

01:09:02 ►

As you know, I was a lawyer living and practicing in Texas,

01:09:05 ►

and, well, at the time, people were going to jail for 30 years for a single joint.

01:09:10 ►

And, well, that kept me on the sidelines more than anything else at the time.

01:09:15 ►

Number eight, find good sources of advice.

01:09:19 ►

Number nine, if you do take drugs, including alcohol and tobacco,

01:09:24 ►

be clear why you’re doing it.

01:09:27 ►

Ten, if you do get into trouble with drugs, get help quickly.

01:09:32 ►

And eleven, if you do use drugs, make sure they don’t interfere with your schoolwork.

01:09:39 ►

School might seem like a waste of time now, but you can seriously damage your choices for the future

01:09:44 ►

if you fall behind in your work and waste your opportunities. Well, I guess that this should probably be about enough preaching by me to last you for the rest of this year.

01:09:56 ►

But every once in a while, my dad genes come out.

01:09:59 ►

And while I know that there are a lot of old people like myself here in the salon, for the most part our fellow salonners are under 35, which means that you either are still in school yourself or you have a young family that will be needing your guidance sooner than you might expect.

01:10:15 ►

In his book, Professor Nutt recommends talking with your children about drugs even before they become teenagers, and I completely agree with him.

01:10:21 ►

even before they become teenagers.

01:10:23 ►

And I completely agree with him.

01:10:27 ►

Get that conversation going at the dinner table tonight.

01:10:33 ►

Make it easy for your children to talk with you about these amazing, powerful, and fascinating substances.

01:10:37 ►

It may be the most important thing that you ever teach your children.

01:10:42 ►

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

00:00:00 ►

Be well, my friends.

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