Program Notes
Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: John Gilmore
https://ssd.eff.org/Electronic Self Defence Tools from EFF
Date this lecture was recorded: September 1, 2017
[NOTE: All quotations are by John Gilmore]
“The U.S. still has the world’s largest prison population in absolute numbers and per capita. We imprison more people than the next ten countries put together. It’s insane. It’s a warped part of our culture.”
“[Some of the opposition to the Drug War] comes from people who are making money from the Drug War. I’m not talking about cartels and gangs. We haven’t seen any opposition from cartels, which is interesting. What we see is opposition from police officers, police unions, police chiefs’ associations, district attorneys, drug court judges, prison guards’ unions, probation officers. All of these people are putting their kids through college on the swelled prison population of the Drug War. And they’re afraid, if it goes away, we’re not going to need to pay them any more, or they might have to focus on some harder and more dangerous crimes and more dangerous criminals. Most of the people who are selling pot are not going to slit your throat. And so, 99% of the resistance to legalization comes from cops and prison guards, basically.”
Marijuana Policy Project
MAPS.ORG
Electronic Frontier Foundation Tools
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Transcript
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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I’d like to begin today’s program by thanking Dan Oh for making another donation to the salon to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
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And also, I should mention that if you want to have your name in Volume 1 of Lorenzo’s Chronicles,
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well, you need to join me on Patreon.com by the last day of this month.
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You see, the monthly donations
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are all made on the last day of the month,
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and since I’ll be publishing
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this new book in December,
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and it’ll be published in the public domain
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so you’ll be able to get it for free,
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well, those who join us on Patreon
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in December are going to be included
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in Volume 2 when it comes out next year,
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but the window on Volume 1 is closing rapidly.
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And finally, I’d like to thank longtime fellow salonner, frequent volunteer, and Patreon supporter Dan N.,
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who made a significant Bitcoin donation to the salon the other day.
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As you know, I began accepting Bitcoin donations
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several years ago with the plan to hold all of my coins until I get really old.
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And with the rise in the price of Bitcoin, those donations over time have really added up.
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For example, a donation of 200.
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So today, even a donation the equivalent of $20 given in Bitcoin could be worth a lot more five years from now.
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But in any event, Dan N. just made a significant donation to the salon with some of the Bitcoin that he’s been storing up.
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So thanks again to the two Dans who
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are both benefactors of note today. Now for today’s program I’m going to take us back to the most
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recent Burning Man festival where we are going to get to listen to John Gilmore’s 2017 Palenque
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Norte lecture. While most people today know John as one of the founders of the Electronic
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Frontier Foundation, whose work we’ve discussed here in the salon on several occasions,
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us old-time internet geeks first knew him as the founder of the alt-hierarchy on Usenet,
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and he’s also been very active in drug policy reform. Now John’s talk at Palenque Norte this year was done in the form of a long
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Q&A session focusing on drug policy and the current work of MAPS, where he’s a member of
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the board of directors. So now let’s join the crowd in the big tent at Camp Soft Landing and
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listen to the recording of this talk that was made for us by fellow salonner Frank Nunzio.
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And by the way,
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if you’re new to this podcast, or if you don’t know much about Burning Man, then I should let you know that I didn’t add any music to this recording. What you’re going to be hearing in
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the background is exactly what it sounds like at the festival. Sometimes the music around your
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camp may be loud, and well, sometimes you’ll barely hear it, like in this recording. But the music around your camp may be loud, and, well, sometimes you’ll barely hear it, like in this recording.
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But the music that you will be hearing in the background is coming from a nearby theme camp.
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But I’ll bet you’ll be surprised at how quickly your brain tunes it out.
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So now here is John Gilmore speaking at the 2017 Palenque Norte Lectures.
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2017 Palenque Norte Lectures.
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So, since I work on a variety of different stuff,
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and I’m never quite sure why people come to hear me,
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I figure I should ask you what it is you want to hear about from me.
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So, well, let’s start with drug policy.
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To do that, for my personal story, I really have to start with Silicon Valley.
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I was a computer programmer, and I learned business from the guys who hired me.
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And then I started making my own businesses in Silicon Valley.
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And two of them succeeded and made me a millionaire.
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And when the second one sold, I had more money. You know,
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I was raised middle class. I didn’t ever have a lot of money. My parents, my dad always had to work to support the family. You know, it’s the usual story. And so having all this money made
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me nervous. And I thought, if I dump this on my heirs, on my brothers and my parents or whatever,
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if I get hit by a bus, they’re going to be completely,
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their lives will be destroyed by receiving all this money.
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And actually, I had a brother who got, from a stock gift I had given him,
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received a million dollars at one point.
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He burned through that million in a year
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and you know came out worse than when he started so i didn’t want that to happen so instead i
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thought okay i want to spend this down on something that will make the world better
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i want to like give back to the society that gave me all this money. And so I thought, okay, what can I really work on
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that would make the world better?
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I didn’t have huge piles of money.
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I wasn’t a Rockefeller or a George Soros or somebody like that.
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But I could say spend $10 million over 10 years
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trying to make something better.
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It’s like, well, the environment,
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you could barely make a dent in it with that um arts and things not really my thing and so i started
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looking but drug policy was already was a terrible situation right 600 000 people arrested every year 2.2 million in prison
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basically for nothing
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for using a substance that somebody else disapproves of
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institutionalized racism
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across the criminal justice system
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particularly around drug crimes
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and so lots of things you could work on
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and it had been getting worse since
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the 1930s, but it started to get better in 1996 when gay rights activists passed medical
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marijuana in California because it would help people with AIDS when nothing else would help.
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In particular, instead of wasting away from having no appetite, it would give them an appetite and
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they would eat and they would survive longer, not forever, but longer. And that raised the public
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sympathy to say, if you’re dying of a disease no one knows how to cure and marijuana
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helps, you can have it. We won’t arrest you for using marijuana. So that had happened in 96.
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I sold my company in 2000 and saw that things were starting to go the right direction. Maybe
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I could make things go faster and stronger in that direction. So I wouldn’t be
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pushing a boulder uphill the whole way. I’d start to add some force to it as it rolled down the hill.
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And so I decided I would spend 10 years and 10 million dollars trying to end the drug war.
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trying to end the drug war.
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Well, that’s kind of a vague, you know, how do you end the drug war?
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You know, it’s got 50 different facets.
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And so I just started giving money to all the different nonprofits that were working on different parts of that.
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So to Normal that was working on marijuana stuff,
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and the Marijuana Policy Project, the Drug Policy Alliance,
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MAPS, the November Coalition that works on prison conditions,
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the Mothers Against Abuse and Misuse in Oregon
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that was working on teaching people the difference
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between using drugs and abusing drugs.
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People working on reforming sentencing,
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getting rid of mandatory minimum sentences.
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Just so many different angles on the drug war.
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And over that 10 years, I gradually learned which organizations were effective.
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At first, I didn’t know what my strategy was. So the strategy was work with everybody and
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figure out what works. But eventually, I figured the strategy was, it’s time to stop just talking about fixing the drug war and actually
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do it so a bunch of the organizations were just there educationally to teach people that drugs
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would be okay but not to actually change any laws and so i stopped focusing on those organizations and started focusing on the ones that manipulated
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the political system to actually change the laws about drugs and particularly about marijuana.
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And the best organization doing that at the time was the Marijuana Policy Project based
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out of Washington, D.C., headed by Rob Campia.
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They work in multiple states at once,
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working with local activists, figuring out what the laws are there,
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how you run an initiative, what the limits on that are,
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how many signatures you have to gather,
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what kind of opposition will show up,
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what do the newspapers think about the issue,
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and sort of building up a coalition of people who can put in the money
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and the time to collect the signatures, run a campaign committee
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that would draft an initiative and get people to vote for it.
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an initiative and get people to vote for it.
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And so over the 10 years from 2000 to 2009, we went from having medical marijuana in four states to 14 states.
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But that was progress.
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That was significant progress.
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You know, four states could just sort of be an outlier,
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but by the time you’ve got like a quarter of the states
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having medical marijuana,
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it’s hard for people to say,
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oh, that’s just a flash in the pan, right?
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It was more of a trend,
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and the trend was heading in our direction
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of locking up fewer people,
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making it more culturally normal to use marijuana.
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But across those 10 years, we also didn’t legalize marijuana for adults anywhere,
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and that disappointed me.
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We tried in several states states Alaska and Nevada in particular
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but we didn’t know what we were doing
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as far as running initiatives
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and one of the things I learned is
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if you’re going to put a law in front of the voters
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on the ballot
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and you want it to pass
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you have to write it in such a way
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that more than half the people will vote for it.
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It seems simple in retrospect,
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but most of these initiatives were written by activists,
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and they wrote what they wanted the law to say,
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not what the public wanted the law to say.
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And so then 30% of the public would vote for it
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after a long, expensive campaign,
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and we didn’t change the law in those states.
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So we learned you can’t get too far ahead of the public when working on initiatives.
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You have to go out and talk to people, do focus groups, do polling,
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figure out what the public has sympathy for and what
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the public won’t stand for, and then go somewhere in between those and say, okay, we’ll give
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the public an opportunity to vote something they want into the law.
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And as we learn more about that, we realized that the public’s compassion
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for people who have serious illnesses
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is really what drove the medical marijuana successes,
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and so we focused on that,
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and in some states like California,
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we could pass an initiative that said
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any doctor can prescribe this, can recommend this for any condition.
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In more conservative states, we had to put up an initiative that said,
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it can only be used for these six conditions, for glaucoma or serious pain or multiple sclerosis or whatever and then make some way you could appeal to the
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health department of the state to add more conditions to it so we just kept pushing things
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along that way but the result me coming out of the tech world i I got discouraged. I spent 10 years at this, and we basically got
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more of the same.
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Not a revolution, just a little
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more of the same.
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And so
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I thought, okay,
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well, after that, well, I also
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worked on psychedelics, and I’ll talk about that
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in a minute. But
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marijuana, the reason to work on marijuana
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is it’s three times as popular
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as all the other illegal drugs put together. So if you can solve the legal issues for marijuana,
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you’ve solved three quarters of the drug problem. You’ve taken out three quarters of the money.
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You’ve taken out three quarters of the crime. You’ve taken out three quarters of the crime, taken out three quarters of the cops of the work they have to do.
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And so marijuana is kind of the big kahuna in drug policy.
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But I didn’t want it to be the only thing I worked on.
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And so I also did a bunch of work around psychedelics as well.
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And little bits on opiates and international drug policy
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and things like that.
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But mostly marijuana and psychedelics.
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So I’ll finish up a little bit with marijuana
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and then we’ll do psychedelics.
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At the end of my 10 years
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that I had said I’ll spend this much money
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and this much time
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I went back and re-evaluated
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okay what am I doing now
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should I continue this
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should I change do something else
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go back into industry
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just go off and retire somewhere
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and I got discouraged
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because we hadn’t really made that much progress.
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One of the things I was doing was trying to apply what I knew about business to charity work.
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So having measurable goals, like in a business, your main goal is make a profit, right? If you
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continually lose money, eventually you go out of business.
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So you have to avoid that.
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You have to figure out where you’re spending more than you’re bringing in
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and change that around
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so you’re bringing in more than you’re spending.
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When you’re trying to change the world,
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you need a different kind of metrics,
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but you should still have metrics to understand
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are you succeeding or failing?
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What do you have to change?
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So my metric was the prison population.
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And throughout that decade of 2000 to 2009, the prison population continued to grow
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from about 2 million to like 2.2 or 2.3 million people.
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So that was discouraging too.
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Like we were changing medical marijuana around
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the edges but we weren’t really changing the heart of the drug war so I thought
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well what should I do here and so I sort of opened myself up to look at doing
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other things talk to other people about startups I might want to get into or just open myself to other opportunities
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and maybe it’s kismet but what happened is no other interesting opportunities came along
00:16:54 ►
so I said okay I’ll continue working on drug policy even though I don’t think I’m very effective at it. Right? I don’t know what else better to do.
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What I didn’t
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know was the
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prison population had actually started
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dropping in 2009.
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But
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the statistics take a
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couple of years to collect and publish.
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We didn’t figure this out until 2011.
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But we were having
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an effect. It just was slow and hard to notice.
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And so the population has been dropping slightly every year since about 2009.
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We are making a dent in the problem.
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We’re not done by any means,
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but the U.S. is still the world’s largest prison population in absolute numbers
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and per capita. I mean, we imprison more people than the next 10 countries put together.
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It’s insane. It’s a warped part of our culture. And even fixing, even eliminating the drug war entirely would only reduce that
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prison population by six or seven hundred thousand people. So that, it’s a chunk out
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of 2.2 million, right, but it’s not the whole job. But still, you know, if we can knock
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a third of it out of there, then other people can go like,
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okay, I’m going to work on the violence,
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and I’m going to work on the gangs,
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and I’m going to work on the corruption,
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and the petty crime, whatever,
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and sort of figure out how we can make progress
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in areas other than drug policy.
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The other thing that happened after 2009
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was we actually started running and winning
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legalization initiatives
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first in Colorado and Washington
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and then in Oregon and Alaska two years later
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and then two years later
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in four more states
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2016 California
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Massachusetts Arizona Four more states. 2016, California, Massachusetts, Arizona,
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and which one am I missing?
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Pardon?
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Nevada, yeah, exactly, right here.
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Washington was one of the first to go.
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Oh, D.C.
00:19:24 ►
Yeah, D.C. is an interesting case.
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It turns out that the Constitution gives total control over the laws of D.C. to Congress.
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But that’s cumbersome, right, because they don’t want to deal with parking tickets and stuff like that.
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So they have basically authorized a local government there to make most of its own
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laws, but Congress can override them within 30 days anytime they want to. So it turned out that
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D.C. has initiatives, but the initiatives can be canceled by Congress, because the Constitution gives them the power to run the entire thing.
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So activists there made an initiative that repealed the crimes for marijuana possession and marijuana use,
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and giving away marijuana.
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They couldn’t make an initiative that would make new laws that would make it legal for a business to sell pot
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because Congress would come in and wipe that out.
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But Congress couldn’t really get rid of the repeal of the other laws.
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I mean, they would have had to,
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Congress would have had to make their own law that outlawed pot there
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after the citizens took it away.
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And that was too much work for Congress to think about
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doing, so they didn’t do it. So that part stuck. So it’s legal to have pot there, but not legal
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to sell it in stores. And the D.C. City Council is actively interested in making it possible to sell it in stores, but they’re figuring their way through the minefield of getting it past Congress.
00:21:12 ►
The other interesting part about the D.C. initiative,
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it was led by the NAACP,
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the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
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the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
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and it was deliberately pitched as a response to racism,
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to say, D.C. has this disjoint culture, it’s got the political class that comes in that is largely white and European,
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largely white and European and it has a resident class that is largely black
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and comes out of the south
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and these are not necessarily downtrodden blacks
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there’s all different levels in the culture there
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there’s a very strong black culture of service,
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of having the white tie and tails,
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the best service in the restaurants,
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the best everything,
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and people taking pride in their work and all of that.
00:22:20 ►
But anyway, they pitched the law, the reform,
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as saying these white people who run things have been busting us black people in the district forever.
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And the way to stop it is to make it legal so they can’t bust us anymore.
00:22:36 ►
And it got like 75% of the vote for legalization.
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It was the highest vote for legalization in any state.
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for legalization. It was the highest vote for legalization in any state.
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So that kind of talks about the marijuana end of drug policy. We have initiatives.
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We now have Legal Pot in eight or nine states. We are going to run an initiative in Michigan in 2018 to legalize it for adults.
00:23:15 ►
We’re going to run another one in Utah to legalize medical marijuana, also in 2018.
00:23:23 ►
And so we’re making more progress on that front and sort of creeping out state by state.
00:23:26 ►
The big issue there is what do the feds do?
00:23:31 ►
And so far, not only the feds,
00:23:34 ►
but the local politicians have always been opposed to fixing the drug laws and fixing the marijuana laws.
00:23:40 ►
And so one of the questions was,
00:23:43 ►
so where does the opposition to legalization comes from?
00:23:47 ►
Some of it is just sort of basic conservatism
00:23:50 ►
like I understand the world the way it is
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and I don’t understand how it would be then
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so I don’t want it to change.
00:23:57 ►
But some of it comes from people who are making money
00:24:02 ►
from the drug war.
00:24:04 ►
I’m not talking about cartels and gangs.
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We haven’t seen any opposition from cartels, which is interesting.
00:24:12 ►
What we see is opposition from police officers,
00:24:17 ►
police unions, police chiefs associations,
00:24:21 ►
district attorneys, drug court judges,
00:24:30 ►
prison guards unions, probation officers,
00:24:36 ►
all of these people are putting their kids through college on the swelled prison population of the drug war.
00:24:38 ►
And they’re afraid if it goes away, we’re not going to need to pay them anymore.
00:24:47 ►
away, we’re not going to need to pay them anymore. Or they might have to focus on some
00:24:52 ►
much harder, more dangerous crimes and more dangerous criminals. Most of the people who are selling pot are not going to slit your throat. And so, 99% of the opposition to legalization
00:25:10 ►
And so 99% of the opposition to legalization comes from cops and prison guards, basically.
00:25:19 ►
And the politicians, when it comes to criminal justice issues, they tend to ask the cops for their opinion.
00:25:29 ►
You know, if somebody says you ought to change the laws, they’ll get the head of a police union or something in to say, we think this is a good idea or we think this is a bad idea.
00:25:33 ►
And on drug policy, they always think it’s a bad idea to improve it.
00:25:34 ►
Right?
00:25:40 ►
The police love the idea that if they pretend to smell pot, they get to search your car.
00:25:41 ►
Right?
00:25:45 ►
Because they want to search your car and you might actually know your rights and tell them no. So anyway, we have managed to defuse some of that opposition because there’s
00:25:55 ►
a small fraction of police officers and judges and such who have been through the mill on
00:26:01 ►
the drug war, who have seen their colleagues die in service
00:26:05 ►
of trying to bust people, have busted a whole lot of thousands of people themselves and
00:26:11 ►
seen the drug sales go right back on immediately after they bust one guy and somebody else
00:26:17 ►
will be out there selling drugs.
00:26:18 ►
It’s like they can see the futility that this approach is not solving the problem.
00:26:23 ►
the futility that this approach is not solving the problem.
00:26:27 ►
And so an organization was formed in the early 2000s called Law Enforcement Against
00:26:31 ►
Prohibition that is composed of
00:26:36 ►
solely former law enforcement officers and a few current ones
00:26:39 ►
who believe that we’ve been
00:26:44 ►
going the wrong direction.
00:26:45 ►
And this is actually one of the most radical drug reform organizations that exists.
00:26:52 ►
Most of the organizations in drug policy won’t really tell you what they personally believe.
00:26:59 ►
Like, they might personally believe that all drugs should be legal for anybody,
00:27:04 ►
for adults, for kids, whatever.
00:27:06 ►
You know, when they grew up, they were 15, they smoked pot,
00:27:10 ►
it didn’t do them any harm, you know,
00:27:13 ►
but they don’t want to say that publicly
00:27:15 ►
because it turns off a certain fraction of the people.
00:27:18 ►
So they’ll say, well, we believe in responsible adult use.
00:27:22 ►
You know, and they’ll focus on one drug and not all drugs because
00:27:26 ►
that also, you know, what do you mean?
00:27:28 ►
Any kid could go and buy heroin?
00:27:31 ►
You know,
00:27:33 ►
law enforcement
00:27:34 ►
against prohibition
00:27:35 ►
has been working on the front lines against
00:27:38 ►
heroin.
00:27:40 ►
And those guys
00:27:41 ►
think the only way to
00:27:44 ►
fix this problem is to make all those drugs legal for everybody.
00:27:49 ►
Right?
00:27:49 ►
Making them illegal has not solved the problem.
00:27:53 ►
My own brother who had spent his million dollars in a year was a crack addict.
00:28:00 ►
That’s part of how he spent that money.
00:28:03 ►
And he went to prison
00:28:05 ►
for being a crack addict
00:28:07 ►
and going to prison did not help him with his crack addiction
00:28:11 ►
he would have done a whole lot better
00:28:14 ►
getting medical treatment or something like that
00:28:16 ►
counseling, something
00:28:18 ►
prison was not really the answer
00:28:21 ►
so the law enforcers are really out there, the ones that are willing to speak out.
00:28:31 ►
And what they tell me is when they talk to their colleagues who are still in law enforcement,
00:28:37 ►
a whole lot of them agree with them but won’t say anything publicly.
00:28:43 ►
They don’t want to rock the boat.
00:28:45 ►
They don’t want to be discriminated against
00:28:47 ►
by their fellow officers.
00:28:48 ►
They want to get promoted through the ranks.
00:28:51 ►
And so they shut up about it,
00:28:53 ►
but they’ll tell their colleagues in private,
00:28:56 ►
keep on talking about this.
00:29:00 ►
I’ve been talking for a long time.
00:29:02 ►
Do you all have any comments, questions?
00:29:05 ►
Yes.
00:29:10 ►
Do I see any progress in the rights and opportunities given to convicted felons?
00:29:18 ►
Some.
00:29:21 ►
It’s small improvements around the edges.
00:29:24 ►
It’s hard to around the edges.
00:29:28 ►
It’s hard to get rid of that stigma overall.
00:29:33 ►
But there’s a campaign called Ban the Box that has popped up in various states and various cities.
00:29:39 ►
And by the box they say,
00:29:42 ►
check this box if you’ve ever been arrested
00:29:44 ►
or if you’ve ever been convicted of a crime.
00:29:47 ►
And this shows up on employment applications
00:29:50 ►
and landlord applications and things like this.
00:29:54 ►
And so in some cities, it’s not legal to ask somebody
00:29:58 ►
whether they are a former convict.
00:30:00 ►
Once they’ve served their time, they’re back in society
00:30:04 ►
and you can’t discriminate
00:30:05 ►
against them by asking,
00:30:08 ►
you know,
00:30:09 ►
did you go to prison?
00:30:11 ►
That’s one improvement.
00:30:15 ►
Another improvement
00:30:16 ►
is
00:30:16 ►
as we’ve learned more
00:30:19 ►
about what the public will accept
00:30:21 ►
in marijuana legalization
00:30:24 ►
laws,
00:30:25 ►
we’ve been able to make the laws better
00:30:28 ►
for people who were convicted under the old drug laws.
00:30:34 ►
So in Alaska, we ran an initiative, I think in 2002,
00:30:39 ►
that would have given not just amnesty
00:30:42 ►
to all the people who were busted under the old laws, but would
00:30:47 ►
form a commission to study paying reparations to the people whose lives had been destroyed
00:30:52 ►
by the drug war.
00:30:55 ►
Well, the public didn’t like that.
00:30:57 ►
Actually, they didn’t vote for that.
00:30:59 ►
It didn’t pass.
00:31:00 ►
So we never found out what kind of reparations would be just.
00:31:07 ►
And people kind of gave up on that idea for a while. And when we passed the first legalization initiatives in Colorado
00:31:12 ►
and Washington, we tried to be very conservative in what we asked the public for, because we wanted
00:31:19 ►
it to pass. We wanted to set a precedent that place in this country it would be legal to smoke pot.
00:31:26 ►
But after we had a few of those victories under our belt, we started going,
00:31:31 ►
okay, what can we do for all the people who were victims under the old laws?
00:31:36 ►
And what we discovered in doing focus groups is people didn’t like the idea of automatically getting rid of all of those convictions.
00:31:47 ►
They felt like if the law was X on this date and you broke it,
00:31:53 ►
then you deserve to be punished for that.
00:31:56 ►
You knew what you were getting into and you did wrong.
00:32:00 ►
But they seemed totally willing for people to go back to the judge that sentenced them
00:32:06 ►
and ask to be resentenced under the new law.
00:32:11 ►
And we put this in the California Initiative,
00:32:14 ►
and tens of thousands of people have gone back into the judicial system.
00:32:23 ►
Initially, it was people who were currently
00:32:25 ►
in prison.
00:32:28 ►
The judicial system
00:32:30 ►
put priority on getting those people
00:32:32 ►
out. So if you
00:32:34 ►
had grown pot
00:32:35 ►
without a license,
00:32:38 ►
because there were no licenses available,
00:32:40 ►
and
00:32:41 ►
you were serving time for that,
00:32:44 ►
you could go back and be resentenced under the new law
00:32:47 ►
that just makes it like a civil issue,
00:32:50 ►
like you needed to get your license to sell that pot.
00:32:55 ►
And so thousands of people got out of prison for that,
00:32:58 ►
and then tens of thousands came along in the next wave,
00:33:02 ►
getting their previous convictions overturned
00:33:06 ►
so that they can honestly say,
00:33:08 ►
I am not a convict.
00:33:10 ►
I was not convicted of that crime.
00:33:12 ►
I was resentenced under the new law,
00:33:15 ►
and it’s not a crime anymore.
00:33:18 ►
Or I’m not a felon.
00:33:19 ►
Maybe I committed a misdemeanor, but I’m not a felon.
00:33:23 ►
So baby steps
00:33:25 ►
other
00:33:28 ►
questions
00:33:28 ►
how do you know about
00:33:32 ►
how to write
00:33:33 ►
the right message so that people
00:33:35 ►
are receptive essentially to the ballot
00:33:37 ►
you’re going to propose
00:33:38 ►
well you have to go to each
00:33:42 ►
state and
00:33:43 ►
talk to people there.
00:33:46 ►
Basically, first when you’re just deciding which states to work in, you do polls.
00:33:53 ►
So you’ll have people who encounter people at the grocery store and just ask,
00:33:59 ►
can I ask you a few questions?
00:34:01 ►
How do you feel about marijuana, blah, blah, blah.
00:34:03 ►
Or they’ll call you on the phone. Some statistically valid sample, maybe they’ll call 1,000 or 2,000
00:34:10 ►
people in a state with hundreds of thousands of people. And from those answers, you get
00:34:17 ►
a feeling of, okay, if 60% of the people in the state like the idea of legalizing pot for adults. Then what are the
00:34:27 ►
details of that? Can it be sold in corner stores or can only be sold in specialized pot stores?
00:34:35 ►
What age can 18 year olds get it or only 21 year olds? What are how many people are allowed to
00:34:42 ►
grow it and how many people are allowed to sell it
00:34:45 ►
and all of those details can also turn people off to your initiative even if they support the
00:34:52 ►
general idea they might not like the details so you ask a subset of people you sort of gather a
00:34:58 ►
focus group of 20 or 30 people and pay them to spend the afternoon listening to ideas about marijuana reform
00:35:09 ►
and saying what they feel about them.
00:35:12 ►
And if you do that a couple times and you get consistent answers, then you kind of know,
00:35:17 ►
okay, we think we know the gestalt of this state.
00:35:19 ►
They’re willing to go this far.
00:35:21 ►
And you write up the initiative to do that.
00:35:28 ►
All right. Pinky pinky microphone is coming my question my question is um what do you think about decriminalization compared to
00:35:40 ►
regular to um legalization because if we could get enough
00:35:45 ►
people that
00:35:46 ►
18 year olds that are in the service
00:35:49 ►
are drinking beer
00:35:50 ►
and 18 year olds want to
00:35:52 ►
smoke pot and do
00:35:54 ►
we could get enough
00:35:56 ►
voters if we did a huge
00:35:59 ►
thing maybe
00:36:00 ►
where we just voted to decriminalize
00:36:03 ►
it rather than legalization because that way
00:36:08 ►
if it’s decriminalized they can’t keep arresting people right yeah decriminalization is actually
00:36:16 ►
already the law in almost half the states um it’s a possession of pot at least for the first couple times you got caught
00:36:27 ►
even if you get caught with less than an ounce
00:36:29 ►
in most states it’s now a civil fine
00:36:33 ►
it might cost you 200 or $500
00:36:36 ►
but it doesn’t give you a criminal record
00:36:39 ►
in Alaska
00:36:40 ►
it’s legalized
00:36:44 ►
I’m from there.
00:36:46 ►
It’s terrible.
00:36:47 ►
You can’t really get it.
00:36:49 ►
They do everything they can to not help you.
00:36:54 ►
And people just shouldn’t be in jail for it, you know.
00:36:58 ►
Well, I agree.
00:36:59 ►
People shouldn’t be in jail for it.
00:37:01 ►
And the challenge is how do you make that transition happen
00:37:05 ►
when you started off with a whole state government
00:37:08 ►
and politicians that were opposed to fixing it.
00:37:12 ►
Alaska is a particularly hard case
00:37:14 ►
because the legislature has been so hostile to fixing it.
00:37:19 ►
It’s been legal there since the 70s
00:37:22 ►
because of our personal rights, individual rights in your home. You were allowed to smoke since the 70s because of our personal rights, individual rights in your home.
00:37:26 ►
You were allowed to smoke since the 70s.
00:37:28 ►
But it’s like since we’ve been trying to legalize it, it’s like they’ve just been really bad.
00:37:34 ►
You know, that’s all.
00:37:35 ►
But it was legalized in Alaska in the 70s with the Raven Law.
00:37:41 ►
Right.
00:37:42 ►
Well, and even in a place like Ohio, it was decriminalized in the 70s.
00:37:47 ►
There was a little wave of decrim that happened back then,
00:37:50 ►
and it has lasted until now.
00:37:53 ►
But one of the things that’s going on is only 24 out of the 50 states
00:37:59 ►
have initiatives.
00:38:02 ►
In the rest, you have to work with the legislature to change the laws.
00:38:07 ►
And so the Marijuana Policy Project in particular
00:38:10 ►
has been learning how to do lobbying in state legislatures
00:38:14 ►
because we’re running out of states
00:38:18 ►
where we can pass initiatives.
00:38:21 ►
So it turns out it’s much easier
00:38:24 ►
to get the legislature to pass a decriminalization law
00:38:28 ►
than one that sets up a whole regulatory system for pot shops.
00:38:33 ►
And so what we do in each of these states is we’ll start off probably proposing a medical marijuana law,
00:38:43 ►
finding some legislature who is sympathetic because someone in their family had a disease
00:38:47 ►
and was helped by it, or had kids who had
00:38:51 ►
seizures or whatever, have constituents who have people with that issue.
00:38:57 ►
And we’ll get them to introduce
00:38:59 ►
a medical marijuana law, pass it through one house
00:39:04 ►
in the first year maybe, pass it through one house.
00:39:08 ►
In the first year, maybe, probably it doesn’t even pass in any house,
00:39:10 ►
but maybe it gets a few committee hearings.
00:39:14 ►
The next year, maybe we find, you know,
00:39:18 ►
we hire someone who was termed out of the legislature and can’t be a legislator anymore, but he knows all the legislators.
00:39:22 ►
He’ll go in and be a lobbyist to work on this and they’ll
00:39:26 ►
find someone who will sponsor it in the other house of the legislature so now we’ve got bills
00:39:31 ►
happening in both halves maybe the senate will pass it and the house won’t maybe after another
00:39:37 ►
year or two of working on this both houses will pass it but we have a bad governor and he vetoes it or she
00:39:45 ►
vetoes it. We just keep working in like 10 or 12 states at a time, nudging these things forward
00:39:53 ►
wherever we can make progress and kind of hanging back where we’ve got a bad committee chairman who
00:39:59 ►
just won’t let the bill through, a bad governor who won’t sign anything. Eventually those people turn over and when
00:40:05 ►
a good governor comes in, we’ve got the legislature primed to pass a law. We start them with medical
00:40:12 ►
marijuana because it gets like 80 to 90 percent public support. And so, you know, if you look
00:40:22 ►
at the vote totals for medical marijuana, it’s higher than for any politician.
00:40:27 ►
So you can convince a politician, if you support this, you will become more popular.
00:40:33 ►
You’ll get more votes.
00:40:35 ►
We move on from medical marijuana.
00:40:37 ►
Once that’s passed and implemented, then we’ll say, okay, how about decriminalization?
00:40:43 ►
Stop clogging up the courts with these stupid low level
00:40:46 ►
pot busts and in many cases
00:40:49 ►
we can even get the cops to say
00:40:52 ►
yeah we should stop wasting our time on this stuff and let us
00:40:55 ►
focus on more serious issues
00:40:58 ►
and once you get the legislature
00:41:01 ►
to do decriminalization then you can start thinking about
00:41:04 ►
legalization.
00:41:07 ►
And in some places like D.C., legalization without stores, but it’s better than no legalization at all.
00:41:15 ►
In some states, so far no state legislature has passed a full legalization with stores.
00:41:22 ►
We’re working on a bunch of them.
00:41:25 ►
We think probably either Rhode Island or New Hampshire or Vermont
00:41:29 ►
will be the first to do it
00:41:32 ►
because we’ve had legislatures in all of those.
00:41:37 ►
We’ve passed it through multiple houses of the legislature
00:41:42 ►
but not gotten it past governors.
00:41:47 ►
So when the governors change out it’ll probably happen and my guess is in the next year or two
00:41:51 ►
so
00:41:55 ►
going through that process we have been able to introduce
00:42:01 ►
decrim measures in 10 or 12 states, and many of them have
00:42:05 ►
passed in the last four or five years. So we are making progress there.
00:42:13 ►
Question?
00:42:26 ►
Thank you.
00:42:28 ►
I think you brought up a really good point when you were saying a lot of the resistance
00:42:30 ►
comes from people whose careers
00:42:32 ►
are kind of based on making money off of this.
00:42:36 ►
Do you have any thoughts
00:42:37 ►
on how to kind of redirect that energy
00:42:38 ►
and take away some of those people’s fear
00:42:41 ►
that they’re going to lose their careers
00:42:42 ►
and kind of divert them
00:42:44 ►
and then maybe make them less of an enemy and more at least a passive barrier.
00:42:52 ►
Any thoughts on that?
00:42:53 ►
I had a strategy on that, but so far it has failed.
00:43:01 ►
My strategy was to couple the pot issue with the public pensions issue.
00:43:09 ►
It turns out that in almost every state,
00:43:13 ►
they have thousands or tens of thousands of employees
00:43:16 ►
that work for the state or the local governments.
00:43:19 ►
They have promised those people pensions when they retire,
00:43:22 ►
but they don’t actually have enough money to fund those because like 10 or 20 years ago, they thought they’d get great returns
00:43:31 ►
in the stock market and they slacked off on putting money in for those pensions. And now
00:43:37 ►
they’re underfunded. So when this whole cohort of cops retires the money for their retirement is in doubt
00:43:46 ►
and so I thought
00:43:49 ►
okay, we could maybe make
00:43:52 ►
friends with the cops on this and say
00:43:54 ►
we will dedicate some fraction of the tax revenue
00:43:58 ►
from legalized pot to paying the police
00:44:01 ►
pension fund to let them retire
00:44:04 ►
and that way to paying the police pension fund to let them retire.
00:44:09 ►
And that way, you know, the rest of the municipal employees and the state employees, they still have to work out those pensions.
00:44:13 ►
But at least the police pensions would be, like, solved.
00:44:16 ►
Their issue is done.
00:44:18 ►
And the state has less of an overhang of problem to work out.
00:44:22 ►
So I pitched this.
00:44:21 ►
of problem to work out.
00:44:24 ►
So I pitched this,
00:44:27 ►
and part of the idea is it’s hard to get pot reform activists
00:44:33 ►
to agree to give money to cops.
00:44:38 ►
Right?
00:44:39 ►
These are the enemy.
00:44:41 ►
These are people who have caused most of the harm
00:44:43 ►
that relates to marijuana, right? By tearing up families, putting people in prison
00:44:48 ►
for years at a time. And
00:44:52 ►
the idea of the taxes from it going to those
00:44:56 ►
bastards is not popular.
00:44:59 ►
But I thought, okay, suppose we don’t pay them
00:45:04 ►
with the taxes, we pay them to retire.
00:45:14 ►
And I thought that, you know, that might sell to the activists.
00:45:17 ►
And it was pretty well acceptable to activists.
00:45:20 ►
But it turns out the cops didn’t want to play ball on that.
00:45:24 ►
They were like, this sounds like we’re in didn’t want to play ball on that. They were like,
00:45:25 ►
this sounds like we’re in it for ourselves,
00:45:27 ►
and we’re not.
00:45:31 ►
Right.
00:45:33 ►
So it never came together
00:45:35 ►
as sort of a grand bargain with the cops.
00:45:39 ►
Instead, the tax revenues,
00:45:42 ►
tax revenues from pot
00:45:43 ►
should probably go into the general fund of the state
00:45:47 ►
to just be
00:45:48 ►
spent for whatever the state needs
00:45:50 ►
but
00:45:51 ►
because we’re doing this through initiatives
00:45:54 ►
and initiatives have to appeal
00:45:56 ►
to the public we tend
00:45:58 ►
to put in things that are popular
00:46:00 ►
with the public to spend money on
00:46:02 ►
like schools
00:46:04 ►
or drug treatment
00:46:06 ►
for the people who are still using drugs.
00:46:10 ►
Like, you know, we’ll tax the drug users
00:46:13 ►
to help the drug users,
00:46:14 ►
and then they won’t be a burden on the rest of society.
00:46:21 ►
So that tends to be where some of the money goes.
00:46:24 ►
We try to put as much as we can into the general fund
00:46:27 ►
so that if an earthquake happens,
00:46:29 ►
you can use it to fix the earthquake.
00:46:31 ►
If you’ve got infrastructure,
00:46:34 ►
you can spend it on infrastructure
00:46:36 ►
instead of it being dedicated to one purpose forever.
00:46:41 ►
More questions?
00:46:43 ►
Yeah.
00:46:46 ►
So we have a Republican Congress and a
00:46:48 ►
Republican President and you mentioned the importance
00:46:50 ►
of the you know the feds
00:46:52 ►
I was wondering if you have any predictions
00:46:54 ►
for how things will play out at the
00:46:56 ►
federal level over the next seven years
00:46:58 ►
seven is more hopeful
00:47:04 ►
so I’m happy to leave it at 7
00:47:06 ►
right
00:47:08 ►
on drug policy
00:47:10 ►
I think
00:47:11 ►
if we play our cards right
00:47:14 ►
we will continue making progress
00:47:16 ►
drug reform
00:47:20 ►
some
00:47:22 ►
kinds of drug reform
00:47:24 ►
is popular among Republicans
00:47:27 ►
it turns out that
00:47:29 ►
Democrats and Independents
00:47:31 ►
support legalization of marijuana
00:47:35 ►
more heavily than Republicans do
00:47:37 ►
but there’s still a significant chunk
00:47:38 ►
of like 35-40% of Republicans
00:47:42 ►
who support it
00:47:43 ►
and so usually what we do is we form a bipartisan
00:47:49 ►
coalition and get voters from all sides who happen it’s not it’s not so much an issue that divides
00:47:57 ►
people on republican versus democrat grounds there’s now the Republican Party and some people
00:48:07 ►
in it profess
00:48:09 ►
a belief that states should have
00:48:11 ►
the right to make their own laws and not
00:48:13 ►
be interfered with by a more centralized
00:48:15 ►
government.
00:48:18 ►
They don’t always
00:48:19 ►
act that way when it
00:48:21 ►
comes down to it, but it’s a
00:48:23 ►
good talking point when talking to them
00:48:25 ►
to say, okay, if you’re a conservative and you believe each state should be able to make
00:48:32 ►
its own laws about gay marriage, about taxation, about zoning and property rights and inheritance
00:48:41 ►
and all that stuff, why can’t they make their own laws about drugs?
00:48:44 ►
and inheritance and all that stuff, why can’t they make their own laws about drugs?
00:48:51 ►
And they’ll think about it as opposed to just going, we hate drugs.
00:49:04 ►
Is there any ongoing effort or do you think there will be any results in the legalization of psychedelics?
00:49:14 ►
Ah, yeah, let’s go into psychedelics. If you look at polls about psychedelics,
00:49:30 ►
what you discover is that with medical marijuana, we get like 80% of the public in favor of it.
00:49:38 ►
With recreational marijuana, we get something like 50, 54, 55% nationwide.
00:49:41 ►
Higher in some places, lower in others. If you do a poll and you ask,
00:49:45 ►
should LSD be legal for anyone to take,
00:49:48 ►
you get like 10 to 12% of people who believe in it.
00:49:52 ►
It’s really going to be hard to do this through the ballot box.
00:49:57 ►
So the strategy that the drug reform movement
00:50:01 ►
has been following on psychedelics,
00:50:04 ►
well, it’s a combination
00:50:06 ►
on the legal front what’s happening is
00:50:09 ►
medicalization
00:50:11 ►
we’re playing on the same sympathies that brought medical marijuana
00:50:15 ►
into the mainstream to say
00:50:18 ►
find some terrible diseases
00:50:22 ►
or conditions that these substances can help
00:50:25 ►
and then the public will say
00:50:27 ►
it’s okay for those people to use this
00:50:30 ►
and in the case of psychedelics
00:50:36 ►
it turns out they’re wonderful
00:50:38 ►
for a whole bunch of conditions
00:50:39 ►
particularly psychological conditions
00:50:42 ►
the process of taking a psychedelic
00:50:46 ►
sort of kicks you out of the rut
00:50:50 ►
that you were in of seeing the world
00:50:52 ►
in a certain way and acting in certain
00:50:55 ►
responses to what happens around you
00:50:58 ►
and gives you an opportunity
00:51:01 ►
to see those things from a different angle
00:51:04 ►
and to not follow the same path that you would have followed when you were straight.
00:51:10 ►
And in people whose disability comes from getting stuck doing the same thing over and over,
00:51:20 ►
it’s a great kick in the ass to get them out of that.
00:51:22 ►
And so the classic one that we started with actually is obsessive compulsive disorder.
00:51:29 ►
Where people just feel like they have to wash their hands every ten minutes or whatever.
00:51:33 ►
Or they feel unclean.
00:51:35 ►
They can get beyond that if they do some psychedelics.
00:51:41 ►
But post-traumatic stress disorder is another
00:51:45 ►
where you’ve been through some terrible traumatic experience
00:51:48 ►
you were in a car wreck, you got raped
00:51:50 ►
you were in a war and were fired on
00:51:53 ►
or had people blow up around you
00:51:57 ►
or you shot people who shouldn’t have been shot
00:51:59 ►
and you hate yourself for that
00:52:01 ►
whatever it is, people get stuck in that,
00:52:06 ►
and they can’t get beyond their emotional reaction.
00:52:09 ►
They get re-triggered by circumstances,
00:52:13 ►
by ordinary circumstances around them
00:52:15 ►
that wouldn’t trigger you or me necessarily,
00:52:18 ►
but that make them relive the terrible experience they had.
00:52:23 ►
And by taking psychedelics in a supportive, safe environment
00:52:26 ►
with a therapist who will help them talk their way through it,
00:52:31 ►
we’ve been running clinical trials now since back in the 1990s.
00:52:38 ►
And we’ve treated something like 105 or 108 subjects with MDMA.
00:52:49 ►
And more than 60% of them got better after taking MDMA with therapy.
00:53:00 ►
And if you look two years out, it’s more like 66% or 70%.
00:53:06 ►
A few people will relapse,
00:53:11 ►
but other people will make further progress even after the treatment is over.
00:53:16 ►
And this is very surprising.
00:53:20 ►
The drugs that we have for treating things like PTSD
00:53:23 ►
basically numb people out.
00:53:27 ►
They, you know, they’re antidepressants.
00:53:30 ►
They’re things like Paxil and Zoloft.
00:53:34 ►
They make it hard to feel and they don’t work immediately.
00:53:38 ►
And they have a lot of side effects.
00:53:44 ►
And they don’t cure people. They they suppress the symptoms but the problem goes on
00:53:49 ►
and and you have to take them every day so you’re subject to those side effects every day
00:53:56 ►
when we use psychedelics to treat ptsd we give the patient typically two or three doses of the psychedelic, spaced
00:54:08 ►
out maybe a month apart, and with supportive talk therapy in between.
00:54:14 ►
And after that three doses, they’re done.
00:54:17 ►
They get insights in the process of spending a day on psychedelics that break them out
00:54:24 ►
of their rut, and they don’t need to take the drug
00:54:26 ►
over and over again to stay out of the rut once they realize i don’t have to be trapped in this
00:54:34 ►
then they can do that in their straight life as well as when they’re on psychedelics And so it actually provides a significant number of cures in a field where the Food and Drug Administration is the regulatory agency in the U.S. that regulates all of these drugs for every kind of disease, but in particular for psychiatric drugs.
00:55:04 ►
every kind of disease, but in particular for psychiatric drugs.
00:55:08 ►
They have never seen a drug like this before.
00:55:12 ►
Both psilocybin and MDMA are going through clinical trials approved by the FDA and are getting results
00:55:16 ►
that are just off the charts.
00:55:20 ►
So that’s the path that we’ve
00:55:24 ►
been taking as a strategy to free up these drugs,
00:55:28 ►
is convince the regulators by following their own rules,
00:55:33 ►
by reading the thousands of pages of regulations,
00:55:37 ►
and following them, and saying,
00:55:40 ►
if you want a substance to be a drug that’s legal to sell in the United States,
00:55:44 ►
you have to prove two things about it.
00:55:47 ►
First, you have to prove that it’s safe for people to take
00:55:50 ►
when a doctor prescribes it for them,
00:55:53 ►
or for over-the-counter drugs when they choose to take it,
00:55:56 ►
in a certain dosage.
00:55:58 ►
And second, you have to prove that it’s effective
00:56:01 ►
at solving some problem for somebody.
00:56:04 ►
that it’s effective at solving some problem for somebody.
00:56:12 ►
We have shown safety in those hundred-some patients.
00:56:17 ►
None of them have had any major issues as a result.
00:56:19 ►
Nobody’s had heart attacks.
00:56:23 ►
Nobody’s had brain tumors.
00:56:28 ►
Of all the things that could go wrong,
00:56:33 ►
none of them have gone wrong among that patient population.
00:56:37 ►
And we’ve shown amazing efficacy for PTSD.
00:56:47 ►
So the process of getting a drug approved goes through three phases.
00:56:50 ►
In the first phase, you give it to ordinary healthy people,
00:56:52 ►
and you look for bad effects.
00:56:55 ►
And that’s phase one.
00:56:59 ►
We went through almost all of phase one years ago, decades ago.
00:57:04 ►
We also, in the case of the illegal drugs, the government has spent a lot of money
00:57:06 ►
studying those drugs to find bad things about them.
00:57:11 ►
There’s a whole institute called the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
00:57:14 ►
It gets more than a billion dollars every year of your tax money,
00:57:20 ►
totally dedicated to proving by science that drugs that are already illegal are bad for you.
00:57:31 ►
And not a penny of that money can be spent
00:57:34 ►
on looking for any good that those drugs can do.
00:57:38 ►
It’s in their charter. It’s all about bad.
00:57:42 ►
But we can use that research to show the government spent $200 million trying
00:57:50 ►
to find bad things about MDMA, and look at this little thing in the corner that they
00:57:54 ►
found. Everything else, negative results. It wasn’t bad. So we don’t have to spend that money. They spend it already. So that was phase one. Phase two is you give the
00:58:09 ►
drugs to people who have a problem and you see if it solves their problem. You’re working on efficacy.
00:58:14 ►
You’re also looking for side effects and safety issues. That’s the phase we just completed with
00:58:21 ►
that hundred some patients in five different studies.
00:58:25 ►
Phase three, you take what you learned about the drug in those first two phases, you decide
00:58:31 ►
on a particular dosage and a particular condition and a particular set of treatment outcomes
00:58:37 ►
that you’re measuring, and you do that in a larger population where you’re going to
00:58:42 ►
see much more subtle effects. And that’s
00:58:46 ►
phase three and that’s the phase we are just entering with MDMA and will soon be entering
00:58:52 ►
with psilocybin. Now the catch to all this is doing this kind of drug research is not
00:59:01 ►
cheap. You’re basically, you’re a charity, but you’re being a pharma company.
00:59:06 ►
And while the pharma companies, when they tell you it takes $10 billion to make a new drug successful,
00:59:15 ►
there’s a lot of fudge factors in there.
00:59:19 ►
They’re counting the interest that you could have earned on the money that you spent on doing that,
00:59:26 ►
because you could have just put the money in the bank and made interest on it.
00:59:29 ►
So, you know, we count that as part of the cost.
00:59:33 ►
They’re counting all the costs of all the drugs that they tried that didn’t work,
00:59:38 ►
because they say, well, to get to one drug that works, we’ve got to try ten that don’t.
00:59:43 ►
And so that artificially inflates
00:59:46 ►
what it costs to go through that process.
00:59:48 ►
It may cost them billions in the long run.
00:59:51 ►
But on the psychedelics, we already know
00:59:55 ►
millions of people are taking MDMA every
00:59:58 ►
weekend. Some of you may have done it
01:00:01 ►
last night. And
01:00:04 ►
we know there are very few reported problems
01:00:08 ►
from those people
01:00:09 ►
so
01:00:12 ►
we already have sort of an evidence base
01:00:17 ►
and we’re not testing drugs
01:00:20 ►
that we don’t know whether they work
01:00:22 ►
the reason we are pushing MDMA through this process is because before it was made illegal,
01:00:30 ►
therapists were already using it with their patients and we knew it worked.
01:00:34 ►
The only reason we’re jumping through these hoops at the FDA, it’s not to prove that it’s
01:00:40 ►
efficacious.
01:00:40 ►
We know it’s efficacious.
01:00:42 ►
It’s just to push the bureaucratic buttons
01:00:46 ►
so that they will make the determination that this is illegal medicine.
01:00:51 ►
So the result is we don’t have any failed drugs to roll in the costs of.
01:00:57 ►
We just have the costs of the people we actually pay to do the studies,
01:01:01 ►
the airlines we pay to fly the patient to the place where they get the treatment,
01:01:12 ►
you know, the statisticians we pay to munch the data and produce graphs and charts that FDA will read, etc. That’s where the money is going. We are, so in doing phase three for MDMA in the United States, we estimate will cost between 25 million, treating about 200 to 300 patients.
01:01:38 ►
And we have raised almost half of that money.
01:01:43 ►
And we’re working hard at raising the other half.
01:01:49 ►
Now, you know,
01:01:51 ►
25 million sounds like a lot of money.
01:01:55 ►
But it’s cheap compared to the criminal justice system.
01:02:01 ►
It’s cheap compared to what we spend on cops and prisons
01:02:04 ►
and all of that stuff.
01:02:07 ►
And it’s also cheap compared to what we spend on disability for PTSD.
01:02:14 ►
It turns out that veterans are a very sympathetic group with the public.
01:02:20 ►
If somebody has a service-related issue that they got PTSD from being in a war,
01:02:26 ►
the public thinks we ought to be trying to treat them, and we ought to be taking care of them.
01:02:31 ►
And people who can’t go out much and can’t work because they have PTSD,
01:02:35 ►
they get triggered into violent reactions every time they hear a loud noise or something.
01:02:42 ►
Those guys are on disability, and we are paying them every month just to live
01:02:46 ►
and if we had a treatment that cost 5,000 bucks
01:02:50 ►
that could put them back in normal life
01:02:52 ►
we would save so much money
01:02:54 ►
well we haven’t been able to convince
01:02:59 ►
the people who fund those things
01:03:02 ►
that they should put the money into our studies
01:03:05 ►
because there’s still a big stigma
01:03:07 ►
with using an already illegal drug to do medicine
01:03:10 ►
so instead
01:03:13 ►
it turns out like 95% of the money we raise
01:03:17 ►
at MAPS to do these studies
01:03:19 ►
comes from people who have taken psychedelics
01:03:24 ►
in their personal lives,
01:03:25 ►
and it was a positive thing for them,
01:03:28 ►
and they want to see them freed up for broader use by the public.
01:03:33 ►
5% of the money comes from people who want to cure PTSD or something like that,
01:03:38 ►
and the rest comes from trippers who want the cops to lay off
01:03:42 ►
and let people use these for what they’re good for.
01:03:44 ►
who want the cops to lay off and let people use these for what they’re good for.
01:03:50 ►
I find that a little sad.
01:03:59 ►
But I’m also glad that so many millions of people have had the experience of using psychedelics illegally and have learned that they’re good for something.
01:04:04 ►
Yeah.
01:04:01 ►
and have learned that they’re good for something.
01:04:04 ►
Yeah.
01:04:12 ►
So it seems like some of the drivers that led you to work on legalizing marijuana and psychedelics was incarceration.
01:04:15 ►
Now, there is another side which you mentioned is psychedelics, marijuana,
01:04:20 ►
do have health aspects that are good and which actually drive the legalization.
01:04:27 ►
Now, my question is, within the category of drugs,
01:04:33 ►
some of them may not have clinical, basically, positive aspects
01:04:39 ►
and may be even more negative than they’re positive for people. So my question is, how do you balance this drive to drive decriminalization?
01:04:51 ►
And on the other hand, should all drugs be basically legalized,
01:04:55 ►
or should some of them, if they have no good effects for people, remain illegal?
01:05:03 ►
Right.
01:05:05 ►
Well, it’s an interesting thing.
01:05:11 ►
One thing I learned in the first 10 years of drug policy
01:05:15 ►
is I looked around at who was working on
01:05:18 ►
fixing the legal issues around which drugs,
01:05:21 ►
and what I discovered is almost in every case,
01:05:27 ►
the people who were working on fixing the marijuana laws
01:05:31 ►
were people who smoked marijuana.
01:05:32 ►
The people who were working on fixing the psychedelic laws
01:05:35 ►
were people who used psychedelics.
01:05:36 ►
People who were working on opiates were people who were shooting heroin.
01:05:41 ►
And that was almost universally true
01:05:46 ►
and what I realized is
01:05:49 ►
there’s a bit of prejudice
01:05:52 ►
in the drug using community
01:05:54 ►
for the drugs that people like
01:05:57 ►
and against the drugs that other people like
01:05:59 ►
now it turns out
01:06:02 ►
if you think about it
01:06:04 ►
there’s no reason that the government needs to outlaw a drug that has no useful benefits.
01:06:11 ►
There are no laws against drinking lye.
01:06:18 ►
It’s under the kitchen cabinet. You can get it any time you want. Go ahead and drink it.
01:06:23 ►
Why aren’t you drinking it? It’s perfectly legal.
01:06:26 ►
Go right ahead.
01:06:28 ►
The reason people take
01:06:30 ►
drugs is because they like the effect they get
01:06:32 ►
from it. They get
01:06:33 ►
some positive benefit from it.
01:06:37 ►
And so to say,
01:06:38 ►
well,
01:06:38 ►
we shouldn’t let people
01:06:42 ►
use that drug because I don’t get a
01:06:44 ►
positive benefit from it,
01:06:45 ►
is not a very good reason, because some subset is getting a benefit.
01:06:50 ►
So while I’m working on marijuana and psychedelics,
01:06:55 ►
partly because I have personal experience with those,
01:06:58 ►
and I do believe they have positive benefits for society,
01:07:01 ►
I’m trying to get past my drug chauvinism to understand that, you
01:07:08 ►
know, and I’ve been living with a man who’s in constant pain, actually, for two years.
01:07:13 ►
And he is on a wide variety that the medical community does not know how
01:07:30 ►
to treat well. And opiates are the best tool for the job, even though they suck in a whole
01:07:39 ►
bunch of ways. One of the worst ways they suck is they stop working. It takes more and more
01:07:47 ►
to have the same effect over time. And when you start taking more and more, you get more
01:07:55 ►
and more side effects. You get more and more digestive complications. You get more and
01:07:59 ►
more losing your judgment. You get more and more nodding off and being unable to finish a sentence.
01:08:06 ►
Your pain is well controlled, but you don’t have much
01:08:08 ►
of a life.
01:08:11 ►
Right. And so
01:08:12 ►
further exploration of
01:08:14 ►
different
01:08:16 ►
opiates and different ways of using
01:08:18 ►
them and different
01:08:19 ►
combinations of those
01:08:22 ►
drugs, I think is all for
01:08:24 ►
the good. And I think is all for the good
01:08:25 ►
and I think if people get a benefit from them
01:08:27 ►
even if they don’t have a medical issue
01:08:29 ►
I think they should be allowed to use them
01:08:31 ►
I also read a paper that was written
01:08:36 ►
by one of the last doctors in the UK
01:08:38 ►
who was allowed to prescribe opiates for addicts
01:08:44 ►
throughout many decades in England to prescribe opiates for addicts.
01:08:49 ►
Throughout many decades in England,
01:08:52 ►
until I think the 1970s or early 80s,
01:08:56 ►
under pressure from the United States, the laws were changed.
01:09:01 ►
If a physician determined that you were addicted to a drug, they could prescribe you a steady supply of it.
01:09:06 ►
We, in our greater wisdom in the United States, basically forced them to get rid of that.
01:09:12 ►
But this doctor had experience over a decade or more with such patients.
01:09:19 ►
And he said they were from all walks of society from carpenters to stenographers
01:09:27 ►
to corporate executives
01:09:28 ►
they were using opiates or they were using cocaine
01:09:32 ►
or whatever
01:09:33 ►
and he said about
01:09:38 ►
on average 10% of people would voluntarily quit them
01:09:42 ►
every year which meant
01:09:44 ►
on average they were
01:09:46 ►
using them for about ten years. And when they could get a prescription from their doctor
01:09:55 ►
and just go down to the pharmacy and fill it and it cost them $27 to get a month’s supply
01:10:00 ►
of opiates, they had a life and their life was fine.
01:10:05 ►
They could be productive and do what they needed to do in the world
01:10:08 ►
and have families and businesses and all that stuff.
01:10:11 ►
And when the UK government forced him to stop supplying those people with opiates,
01:10:19 ►
their lives went to hell.
01:10:22 ►
They ended up buying their drugs on the street because they were still
01:10:26 ►
addicted and getting uncertain quality and uncertain quantities, getting drugs that were
01:10:33 ►
not what they were advertised as and having uncertain supply. Their lives really went
01:10:40 ►
downhill and it was hard to hold a job. It’s like all the things that we attribute to addiction it turns out we’re not a problem with
01:10:49 ►
addiction they were a problem with the legal regime so this doc had a really
01:10:55 ►
powerful argument to say just let people use these things if they’re addicted and
01:11:02 ►
they tend to solve their own problem.
01:11:06 ►
And you don’t need to solve it for them.
01:11:10 ►
Yes?
01:11:12 ►
I’m curious about the strategy with corporate interests,
01:11:16 ►
and in specific with, not specific,
01:11:20 ►
but with the vantage point of um the ends justifying the means um can you be a little more specific like well like um you know there’s traders with hedge funds
01:11:34 ►
and stuff and you can monetize there’s a lot of money in drugs right right people a lot of people
01:11:38 ►
entrusted and you could have a lot of arbitrage how How do you form alliances with corporations or big tobacco? Is that a thing?
01:11:45 ►
It’s a difficult area to work in.
01:11:47 ►
Okay.
01:11:49 ►
Right.
01:11:50 ►
So this has become an issue around the marijuana industry
01:11:54 ►
as opposed to the marijuana legalization movement
01:11:58 ►
because the two groups have slightly different aims.
01:12:03 ►
The legalization movement basically wants it to be freely available to everybody
01:12:08 ►
and available in any store or whatever.
01:12:11 ►
And the marijuana industry wants to be able to make money out of it,
01:12:15 ►
corner the market in some way,
01:12:18 ►
be the preferred supplier in their state, in their neighborhood, or whatever,
01:12:24 ►
have products that nobody else has
01:12:26 ►
so that people have to come to them to get them, etc.
01:12:30 ►
And navigating those differences
01:12:36 ►
has been a challenge sometimes, depending.
01:12:42 ►
On the other hand,
01:12:44 ►
the whole thing about big tobacco and big marijuana
01:12:47 ►
is a smokescreen
01:12:50 ►
it’s a fake concern that’s thrown up
01:12:55 ►
by the opposition movement
01:12:57 ►
and there’s a group in the opposition
01:13:01 ►
called SAM
01:13:02 ►
it stands for Sane Alternatives on Marijuana or something
01:13:09 ►
like that. It’s run by a former congressman and a guy who is sort of an activist for family values. And they are basically old-style prohibitionists in new sheep’s clothing.
01:13:31 ►
They don’t want the marijuana laws to change.
01:13:34 ►
Whenever we propose a change, they say,
01:13:36 ►
oh, that’s too radical, you should do something smaller, simpler.
01:13:41 ►
Slow down the process of fixing the marijuana laws.
01:13:45 ►
We think 600,000 people in prison is too many.
01:13:49 ►
We ought to get them out as soon as possible.
01:13:51 ►
They’re like, no, slow it down.
01:13:54 ►
And when they say we already have big tobacco
01:13:58 ►
and big tobacco is just going to come in and make big marijuana
01:14:01 ►
and turn everybody into marijuana addicts,
01:14:05 ►
and make them suck money out of them forever.
01:14:10 ►
It’s not actually a real thing.
01:14:14 ►
In almost 20 years of working in this movement,
01:14:17 ►
I have never seen a tobacco company express any interest in bringing out a marijuana product.
01:14:23 ►
I mean, if you think about it,
01:14:26 ►
they’re some of the most hated companies on the planet.
01:14:31 ►
Right?
01:14:32 ►
If they were going to branch out of tobacco
01:14:35 ►
and get into something else,
01:14:36 ►
why would they take a hugely controversial thing like marijuana?
01:14:41 ►
Why don’t they go into, like,
01:14:42 ►
buying companies supplying clean water or consumer goods, soap, anything?
01:14:51 ►
They could be a conglomerate moving into any field.
01:14:55 ►
Why would they move into one that’s so fraught with issues as marijuana?
01:15:00 ►
They’ve got too many issues already.
01:15:03 ►
So instead, this is just a scare tactic.
01:15:08 ►
Yeah, go ahead.
01:15:10 ►
And is that true for other areas as well,
01:15:13 ►
with aligning the corporate interests with policy change?
01:15:16 ►
Or are there some players that you work together with?
01:15:21 ►
Well, so there are people we can work together with? Well, so there are people we can work together with
01:15:26 ►
and
01:15:27 ►
a great example
01:15:31 ►
of doing it wrong
01:15:33 ►
happened in Ohio a few years ago
01:15:36 ►
where
01:15:37 ►
a group of 10 investors got
01:15:40 ►
together. These were rich people
01:15:42 ►
who were politically connected in the state
01:15:44 ►
who said,
01:15:46 ►
this medical marijuana stuff is happening all over the country. Let’s make it happen
01:15:50 ►
in Ohio, but give ourselves the monopoly. Each of them put half a million dollars in,
01:15:57 ►
so they had five million dollars to run an initiative. They got to write it themselves and put it up in front of the public.
01:16:14 ►
They wrote into the initiative the GPS coordinates of the places that were allowed to grow marijuana.
01:16:20 ►
And curiously, they owned all of those pieces of property.
01:16:26 ►
So if the public had voted for this, they would have voted in a monopoly to those property holders. These are the only ten people in the whole state who can grow
01:16:31 ►
marijuana. And interestingly, the public didn’t buy it. And the legislature hated it. And the legislature
01:16:48 ►
came out strongly against it. Now we expect legislatures
01:16:51 ►
to come out against us every time we propose a good pot law.
01:16:56 ►
I mean, to make a reform. But
01:16:59 ►
they particularly hated the idea of building
01:17:03 ►
a monopoly into the state constitution.
01:17:10 ►
And so, in fact, they put on the same ballot an initiative that would amend the state constitution
01:17:17 ►
to prevent any future initiative from making a monopoly.
01:17:21 ►
initiative from making a monopoly.
01:17:25 ►
And the voters voted for that one and not
01:17:28 ►
for the one that would have made the marijuana
01:17:30 ►
monopoly.
01:17:33 ►
So those guys
01:17:34 ►
basically got their
01:17:35 ►
toes burned. They spent
01:17:38 ►
five million bucks and didn’t get their monopoly.
01:17:41 ►
So
01:17:42 ►
it turns out like a year or two
01:17:44 ►
later they came to the Marijuana Policy Project and said,
01:17:47 ►
Okay, we know we fucked up. Let’s work together.
01:17:52 ►
You guys seem to know how to pass marijuana laws that actually will get passed.
01:17:58 ►
We’ll provide some of the funding. Activists will provide some of the funding.
01:18:03 ►
And together we’ll make this work and
01:18:07 ►
we had a negotiation where they’re like okay we understand we can’t have a permanent monopoly on
01:18:14 ►
everything what can we get and we’re like well how about if you get priority in applying for the licenses. Like, for the first six months,
01:18:27 ►
this set of people can get a license,
01:18:29 ►
and then after that, anybody can get a license
01:18:31 ►
to grow pot or to sell it or whatever.
01:18:38 ►
The idea is to give them some incentive
01:18:42 ►
to donate the money
01:18:43 ►
so that we get a positive public policy change
01:18:48 ►
and we give them a temporary benefit for it.
01:18:53 ►
So as a non-profit,
01:18:57 ►
the Marijuana Policy Project is for public benefit.
01:19:00 ►
That’s what we exist for,
01:19:02 ►
is to try to educate the public
01:19:04 ►
and make things better.
01:19:06 ►
So we’re in there looking out for the public interest. These donors are in there looking
01:19:10 ►
out for their own private interest, and we cut a deal where we’ll give them some temporary
01:19:16 ►
advantage in return for the public getting the long-term benefit.
01:19:23 ►
Negotiating that is sometimes tricky because some of them try to play hardball and say,
01:19:28 ►
if you don’t give us what we want, we’ll just walk. And sometimes we have to say,
01:19:33 ►
all right, sucka, see you later. We’ll go work in this state where the people are more reasonable.
01:19:37 ►
And you won’t get your monopoly here. You won’t get anything here because you don’t know how this
01:19:42 ►
dynamic works. You don’t know this field
01:19:45 ►
and we do. And so we play hardball back with them and maybe we come to something and maybe
01:19:50 ►
we don’t. But we can make progress in some states. So I’m getting signs that we’re low
01:20:00 ►
on time. Got any short questions?
01:20:02 ►
on time. Got any short questions?
01:20:05 ►
I found it interesting that
01:20:07 ►
people want to decriminalize but they don’t want to
01:20:09 ►
take the time to set up
01:20:10 ►
the infrastructure for dispensaries.
01:20:14 ►
I wonder,
01:20:15 ►
it’s my understanding that dispensaries are
01:20:17 ►
not Fed regulated.
01:20:19 ►
They’re only state regulated so they’re only taxed by states
01:20:21 ►
which makes them cash only businesses.
01:20:25 ►
Correct? Yeah. They’re not federally approved at all everything that happens in a state where the
01:20:33 ►
like when an adult smokes a joint in nevada and it’s legal under state law it’s still illegal
01:20:39 ►
under federal law there just isn’t a federal cop on every corner to bust you for it.
01:20:46 ►
Are localized government policies benefiting from that additional funding?
01:20:52 ►
Oh, yeah. Actually, here in Nevada, the initiative that we passed was supposed to take effect
01:20:59 ►
in January, this next January. The governor said, why are we waiting until January?
01:21:07 ►
I want that tax revenue to start coming in in July because I’ve got a budget hole to fill.
01:21:12 ►
So he proposed to the legislature that they lop six months out of the schedule
01:21:16 ►
and let the dispensaries open up to selling to any adult six months early.
01:21:22 ►
And the result will be they’ll collect about $50 million in taxes
01:21:26 ►
that they wouldn’t have collected,
01:21:28 ►
and that will go for social services or whatever other hole was in his budget.
01:21:33 ►
All right.
01:21:35 ►
And our next speaker will be Rick Doblin of MAPS,
01:21:40 ►
who has just appeared in the back.
01:21:44 ►
So stick around, and he’ll be speaking in a couple of minutes.
01:21:51 ►
Thank you, John.
01:21:56 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:21:58 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:22:03 ►
And if you are interested in listening to Rick Doblin’s talk
01:22:06 ►
that John just mentioned, you can listen to it right now, because I featured that talk last
01:22:12 ►
month in my podcast 550. Also in today’s program notes, which you will find at psychedelicsalon.com,
01:22:20 ►
I’ve included a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s surveillance self-defense tools that you can use to provide better security and privacy for your internet experience.
01:22:32 ►
Also on that EFF site you’ll find other cyber tools that I’m sure you’re going to be interested in.
01:22:39 ►
But for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:22:43 ►
Be well, my friends.