Program Notes
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Guest speaker: David Nutt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_NuttDr. David Nutt speaking at the 2016 Glastonbury Festival
Date this lecture was recorded: June 2016
[NOTE: All quotations are by David Nutt
“The drinks industry is keen to keep its monopoly over drugs. And it fought battles over the last 150 years to make sure that no other drug got into the market. When acceptable versions of drugs like opium and cannabis and cocaine became available to the public, systematically, the drinks industry created opposition to them, created fear about them, and eventually got them banned.”
“Most of the justification for keeping drugs illegal is because, supposedly, they are harmful. But as you know, and hopefully some of you have read some of my work over the years, know that most of the illegal drugs are less harmful than alcohol.”
“We know that probably the majority of politicians know that they are lying about drugs.”
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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.
00:00:23 ►
And once again, I would like to thank
00:00:25 ►
Samuel G., who made a direct donation to the salon to help with some of our expenses. Thanks
00:00:31 ►
a lot, Samuel. I really appreciate your continuing support. Well, as you know, if you’ve been
00:00:38 ►
listening to some of my recent podcasts, in a couple of days I’m going to be heading to
00:00:42 ►
Orcas Island, Washington to participate in the Imagine Music and Arts Festival.
00:00:48 ►
And in addition to hanging out and meeting as many people as I can, on Saturday I’ll be making a presentation titled Psychedelics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.
00:00:59 ►
And if all goes well, I’ll be able to play a recording of that talk here in the salon a little later this year.
00:01:06 ►
Also, as you know, the 2018 Burning Man Festival has now come to a conclusion,
00:01:13 ►
and thousands of, I’m sure, very tired and dusty revelers are slowly making their way home,
00:01:19 ►
where, well, it’s probably going to take a while for them to get back into the swing of the default world.
00:01:24 ►
where, well, it’s probably going to take a while for them to get back into the swing of the default world.
00:01:31 ►
But once that recovery period is over, I expect to receive recordings of some of the Planque Norte lectures that were held this year, and to play them for us here in the salon.
00:01:35 ►
Now, speaking of festivals, back in the summer of 2016, just after that year’s Glastonbury Festival,
00:01:43 ►
I received an email from fellow salonner Paul Harley
00:01:46 ►
who attached recordings of talks that were given there
00:01:49 ►
by Dr. David Nutt and by Graham Hancock.
00:01:53 ►
Now at the time I was in the middle of several other projects
00:01:56 ►
and due to my inability to get organized
00:01:58 ►
well Paul’s email and recordings kind of slipped through the cracks
00:02:03 ►
but fortunately I recently
00:02:05 ►
found them, and so we’re going to get to listen to these talks now, just a couple of years late.
00:02:11 ►
I’m sorry about that, Paul, but as my mother often said, better late than never. So I’m going to do
00:02:17 ►
what I’m thinking of as sort of a double album here in the salon, and podcast David Nutt’s
00:02:23 ►
presentation right now, and then in
00:02:25 ►
two days I’ll podcast Graham Hancock’s talk. Since the next day I’ll be leaving for Orcus and won’t
00:02:31 ►
be able to post a program next week. Now if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, you’re
00:02:37 ►
already familiar with Dr. David Nutt because I talked about him on numerous occasions, particularly back in 2008 and 2009.
00:02:46 ►
Back then, Dr. Nutt was the chairman of the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs,
00:02:52 ►
and as such was one of the most senior people in the British government
00:02:56 ►
who was working on educating the rest of us about drugs, psychoactive drugs in particular.
00:03:02 ►
And in doing so, Dr. Nutt published a paper in which he
00:03:06 ►
cited numerous statistics that proved that taking MDMA was safer than horseback riding.
00:03:13 ►
And for that, he got fired from his post as the government’s top advisor about these substances.
00:03:19 ►
Well, back at that time, the dope fiend and I were exchanging ideas here in our podcast,
00:03:25 ►
that time, the Dope Fiend and I were exchanging ideas here in our podcast, and the Dope Fiend even interviewed Dr. Nutt for his Dopecast. And so we were all very much up to speed with the
00:03:32 ►
trials and tribulations of Dr. Nutt. But now, almost a decade has passed since he was ushered
00:03:37 ►
out of his government post. And, in fact, two years have passed since this talk at Glastonbury was given. However, as you will now hear, the words and wisdom of Dr. David Nutt remain both important and provocative yet today.
00:03:53 ►
So, now here is Dr. David Nutt speaking to some like-minded souls at the 2016 Glastonbury Festival.
00:04:04 ►
So, the first thing to say is I’m a psychiatrist.
00:04:07 ►
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.
00:04:13 ►
The men amongst you will realize that there is no one, but I pretend not to go there at all.
00:04:20 ►
I’ve always been interested in the brain, 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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of, but you’d also like to optimize, like to know how best to make your brain do the
00:04:37 ►
things that would be useful for you.
00:04:39 ►
And one of the most interesting and profound insights that I had in my life was when I was about 15.
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And my father, who was a wise man, a civil servant, not an academic, but a product of the war,
00:04:56 ►
so he didn’t go to university, but he was extremely clever.
00:05:00 ►
And he was reading a book one day, and I came home from the house or something, and he said,
00:05:04 ►
you should read this.
00:05:06 ►
And this was a description by a man called
00:05:08 ►
Robert Hoffman, who presumably
00:05:09 ►
you’ve all heard of Robert Hoffman.
00:05:12 ►
And it was Hoffman’s description
00:05:14 ►
of how he accidentally
00:05:15 ►
petted a small dose of a
00:05:18 ►
substance called LSD into his mouth
00:05:20 ►
when he was working on it
00:05:21 ►
as a medicinal elixir.
00:05:24 ►
And that was a very important message because, of course, in those days, still at school,
00:05:29 ►
we were doing mouth pipetting like he did.
00:05:31 ►
But that’s all gone now, so we won’t have any accidents like that in the future.
00:05:34 ►
However, Hoffman’s accident was quite interesting because he was expecting, I think, nothing,
00:05:41 ►
but experienced a very profound alteration in consciousness. And his description
00:05:47 ►
that was really intriguing to me was not the fact that the world seemed different or that
00:05:52 ►
music was louder or more melodic or more important, but it was his description of how the cycle
00:06:00 ►
home, his normal 30-minute cycle home, seemed to take seven hours.
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And I remember thinking at that time, well, that is intriguing, isn’t it?
00:06:11 ►
So, obviously, the brain works out what time is.
00:06:16 ►
And if a drug like LSD can change the way the brain perceives time,
00:06:20 ►
this has got to be a really important tool for studying brain mechanisms. If you want
00:06:26 ►
to understand timekeeping, then
00:06:27 ►
you probably should
00:06:29 ►
give people LSD and see how well they
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register time.
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So those of you
00:06:35 ►
who go to work late regularly, you may just have
00:06:38 ►
some differences in those
00:06:40 ►
receptors, etc., that LSD work on.
00:06:43 ►
And I was
00:06:44 ►
so intrigued by
00:06:45 ►
that insight that
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I went back to school and I started talking
00:06:50 ►
to my teachers.
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And they said, we don’t talk about that here.
00:06:55 ►
I said, okay, why
00:06:56 ►
is that? And they said, well, because it’s illegal
00:06:58 ►
now. So I started asking,
00:07:00 ►
well, why is LSD illegal when it’s such an
00:07:01 ►
interesting tool to study the brain?
00:07:04 ►
And of course, they couldn’t give me an answer,
00:07:06 ►
nor can anyone else.
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Has anyone got the answer?
00:07:10 ►
There is no reason why LSD is illegal,
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other than the fact that the American government decreed it should be illegal.
00:07:19 ►
And that rather irritated me,
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because I’ve never been one to believe that politicians really had
00:07:25 ►
any better insights into life than we have. And in fact, in my 20 years of working with
00:07:31 ►
them, I know now I was right. They have a lot less insights.
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So then a few months later, we had a show and tell at the school.
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I was at Bristol Grammar School.
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Are there any Bristol Grammar School people here?
00:07:49 ►
No, they’re still studying for their A-levels, I know.
00:07:53 ►
So we had a chemistry lab that was open
00:07:56 ►
and I went along and I’d made a molecular model of LSD
00:07:59 ►
which I put up.
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Because we’re talking now about 1967
00:08:05 ►
and with the whole of the
00:08:07 ►
hate Ashbury
00:08:08 ►
don’t look so confused
00:08:11 ►
if hate
00:08:12 ►
someone needs to tell them what hate
00:08:15 ►
San Francisco
00:08:18 ►
the summer of love in 1967
00:08:19 ►
hate Ashbury was the place
00:08:21 ►
where young Americans went to
00:08:23 ►
to listen to the Grateful Dead
00:08:25 ►
and to take LSD because they didn’t want to fight this war in Vietnam.
00:08:29 ►
So the whole nature of music and art and to some extent politics was changing at that time.
00:08:37 ►
And anyway, I showed my molecule and everyone else was showing things like benzene or ethanol.
00:08:46 ►
And I thought a little more about it then. But then a few years later when I became a psychiatrist I
00:08:53 ►
started working with people who were psychotic and of course there’s been a theory for a
00:08:58 ►
long time that psychosis could be caused by something in the brain that is rather like LSD,
00:09:06 ►
because one of the experiences of psychedelic drugs like LSD
00:09:09 ►
is to make your brain work rather differently,
00:09:12 ►
to give you altered perceptions of vision or hearing or thinking.
00:09:18 ►
And there’s been a long-standing theory that LSD could actually mimic psychosis.
00:09:23 ►
And that got me interested
00:09:25 ►
in the whole question of
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can we use drugs
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to explore not only
00:09:31 ►
things like the nature of timekeeping but also
00:09:33 ►
to maybe model
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psychosis so we can
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perhaps look for novel
00:09:39 ►
treatments because we have
00:09:41 ►
treatments for psychosis but
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the reality is there is only
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one kind of treatment although there are many different drugs 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 and
00:09:56 ►
they also have a lot of side effects and in fact something we are doing now just as an aside is we
00:10:01 ►
are doing a study using psilocybin, magic mushroom juice, to
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produce effects in the brain which are sort of similar to psychosis, to look for new kinds
00:10:13 ►
of approaches to drugs that might help people. The reality is, though, that when we look
00:10:21 ►
at the nature of psychedelic experiences in the brain, we know now that drugs like LSD and precursors, drugs like psilocybin, and going back even further to drugs like ayahuasca, we know that they all work on a serotonin receptor in the brain.
00:10:43 ►
and there was a lot of hope back in the 70s that if LSD was causing psychosis
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if we could block the receptor it worked at
00:10:48 ►
then we could potentially have a new treatment
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unfortunately that failed, that approach failed
00:10:55 ►
it hasn’t completely died
00:10:57 ►
because interestingly just a few months ago
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a new treatment for a kind of psychosis
00:11:05 ►
which you see in people with Parkinson’s disease
00:11:07 ►
has been licensed in the USA
00:11:10 ►
based on blocking those receptors,
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those 5-HT 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,
00:11:35 ►
particularly in disorders like depression, anxiety, and stress.
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And that’s where this field does really get quite interesting now,
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because when you look at the action of
00:11:48 ►
psychedelic drugs to stimulate these receptors, you see that they may in some ways replicate
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or even surpass the impact of more traditional drugs like antidepressants on these receptors.
00:12:03 ►
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,
00:12:12 ►
and it’s freely available online.
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If you search nut and psilocybin,
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you’ll find a paper in Lancet Psychiatry just a few months ago,
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where we did for the first time an experiment
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where we took people who had difficulty
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and were difficult to treat depression.
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Their depression had failed to respond
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to two conventional treatments,
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usually 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
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with psilocybin.
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The dose was 25 milligrams, a fairly big dose.
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They had quite a profound experience,
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lasting three to four hours.
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And most of them, not everyone,
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but most of them felt quite a lot better.
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And some of them have stayed well.
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Some of them have stayed well now.
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We’ve done a six-month follow-up,
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and some of them have stayed well. Some of them have stayed well now up to a six-month follow-up, and some of them have stayed well for nearly six months.
00:13:08 ►
And that was really the first controlled trial of these drugs,
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or any of these kind of drugs, for the treatment of depression.
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But we’re not the first people to think of that.
00:13:18 ►
In fact, the main point of my talk, which I’m going to get on to now,
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which is that we have resurrected this kind of research,
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which was being done quite extensively back in the 1950s and 60s.
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And we’ve done it because, as I’ve already shown you,
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it makes sense to do it.
00:13:40 ►
And it is rather, well, it’s distressing,
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and actually I think it’s actually insulting and it’s rather, well, it’s distressing, and actually I think it’s actually insulting, and it’s outrageous, really,
00:13:45 ►
that science and medicine and you people
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haven’t been allowed to access this kind of approach
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simply because of the politics that surrounds psychedelics.
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So that’s what I want to talk about for, really, the rest of my talk,
00:14:02 ►
but we can take questions on the medicine later.
00:14:06 ►
So let’s go back in history.
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You could argue that we,
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modern Western society,
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is the only society in the history of humanity
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that has not used mind-altering drugs
00:14:23 ►
and encouraged the use of mind-altering drugs.
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And that’s rather humbling, I think.
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You can see cultures going,
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native cultures in both the Americas.
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The word shaman, shaman is a Siberian word
00:14:40 ►
for wise people who would use
00:14:44 ►
another kind of mushroom than psilocybin,
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the Amanita muscaris mushroom in Siberia to produce changes in mood and mental state.
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Clearly, Hindu religion, any religion has got six armed gods.
00:14:59 ►
They were using something.
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It was called soma, and it was probably a combination of psilocybin
00:15:08 ►
and ephedra, the stimulant ephedra. So cultures forever have used it. And perhaps the most
00:15:14 ►
important one, of course, are the ancient Greeks. And if I had a slide, I’d show you
00:15:19 ►
this wonderful slide of a Greek vase, which dates back to something like 1500 years BC.
00:15:28 ►
And the ancient Greeks were very well aware of the therapeutic as well as recreational
00:15:34 ►
value of many drugs. They really popularized and developed the way of cultivating and preserving wine. But they knew, like most of you do, that wine
00:15:45 ►
is not enough. And every year, when towards the end of the summer, when the Jews started
00:15:55 ►
getting a bit heavier, the, interestingly, a bit like you, the Athenian intellectuals
00:16:02 ►
and intelligentsia would, instead of coming to Glastonbury
00:16:06 ►
they would go north
00:16:07 ►
it was a lot drier there interestingly
00:16:09 ►
it was called the Elysian Fields
00:16:12 ►
so the Champs-Elysées in Paris
00:16:14 ►
is named after the Elysian Fields
00:16:17 ►
which are north of Athens
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and the Greek intelligentsia went
00:16:20 ►
north from Athens to the Elysian Fields
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because in those fields they were 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, 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 and they’d chew on the ergot fungus and they would have a wonderful experience.
00:16:54 ►
So wonderful that they recreated it on the images on their pottery, which is how we know about it today.
00:17:02 ►
And the reason they did that was actually in many ways the same reason as you come here. They wanted to escape from the city. They
00:17:10 ►
wanted to spend time in the country. But they also wanted to have a different way of thinking.
00:17:16 ►
They wanted to change their thought processes so they could go back and carry on doing the
00:17:22 ►
same stuff they did before, but perhaps better. They kind
00:17:25 ►
of wanted to cleanse their mind. They wanted to make themselves better, improved, different.
00:17:32 ►
And you think, well, that sounds like quite a good idea, really, doesn’t it? What should
00:17:37 ►
we do today, dear? Well, let’s go up to the Elysian Fields and have a couple of days drinking
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and taking psychedelics.
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And then what?
00:17:48 ►
Well, we’ll come back and then we’ll build democracy.
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You know, that would be a good thing to do, wouldn’t it?
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And they did. And they wrote, of course, they developed concepts
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which still underpin our society today.
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Concepts of literature and art, etc.
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So we know that these drugs, if used appropriately, in a socially
00:18:05 ►
acceptable way, can have
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huge benefits to society.
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In fact, you could argue, I’m not
00:18:12 ►
sure I’d go this far, but you could argue that Western
00:18:13 ►
society is built out of that
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kind of experience that the
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Greeks may well have gotten from
00:18:19 ►
taking psychedelics.
00:18:22 ►
So where did it all go wrong?
00:18:24 ►
Well, that’s a really quite difficult
00:18:27 ►
question to answer, but I suppose we have to blame the Romans, because they took over
00:18:31 ►
Greece, and they were rather more militaristic, and a bit more sort of rudimentary in terms
00:18:38 ►
of their perspectives on life, and they liked fighting rather than thinking. And to some extent, the subsequent 2,000 years have
00:18:46 ►
been limited in terms of people’s access to these drugs and to the knowledge of these
00:18:52 ►
drugs. And we’ve tended to rely on alcohol. And of course, alcohol is a great drug. You
00:18:58 ►
know, we’ve all used it, yes? Yes, a few of you haven’t. Anyway, maybe, sometimes I give this talk,
00:19:06 ►
and there are some people who’ve never used alcohol,
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but there are relatively few.
00:19:09 ►
Alcohol is pervasive in our society.
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It has been for a very long time.
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And one of the problems with alcohol,
00:19:15 ►
one of the reasons alcohol is so pervasive,
00:19:18 ►
is that it figures so strongly in the Bible.
00:19:21 ►
In fact, as hopefully you will know,
00:19:23 ►
I mean, I’ll give you an example
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the reason alcohol was so powerful in ancient times
00:19:29 ►
was rather
00:19:30 ►
it’s rather shown by what’s in the floor in front of us
00:19:34 ►
in those days if you drank water like this
00:19:37 ►
you’d probably die
00:19:38 ►
whereas wine was one way of keeping water
00:19:42 ►
in a manner which was actually safe
00:19:45 ►
because the alcohol killed the bugs in it.
00:19:48 ►
So alcohol has been life-saving in terms of providing a drinking fluid.
00:19:54 ►
But of course, alcohol has also become part of the symbolism of our religion.
00:19:59 ►
So Christian religion has used alcohol.
00:20:01 ►
The wedding at Cana, what did Jesus do?
00:20:04 ►
Well, he made the wedding go well
00:20:06 ►
because he turned water into wine,
00:20:08 ►
because the tradition of Jewish weddings at the time
00:20:12 ►
was to have wine to celebrate.
00:20:15 ►
And the church then, of course, took that.
00:20:18 ►
It took that accepted drug
00:20:22 ►
and it turned it into part of the religious ceremonies
00:20:25 ►
if you take communion
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you
00:20:28 ►
certainly Catholic and Anglican
00:20:34 ►
communions, you drink wine
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and whether you believe that’s the
00:20:38 ►
blood of Christ or it’s a symbolic
00:20:40 ►
the fact is the church
00:20:41 ►
has had a hegemony on drugs for the last
00:20:44 ►
2000 years is the church has had a hegemony on drugs for the last 2,000 years.
00:20:47 ►
And the church has evolved into the drinks industry, which started with the church,
00:20:51 ►
and then became a separate industry.
00:20:53 ►
And the drinks industry is extremely keen to keep its monopoly over drugs.
00:20:59 ►
And it’s fought battles over the last 150 years to make sure that no other drug really got on the market.
00:21:07 ►
When accessible versions of drugs like opium and cannabis and cocaine
00:21:14 ►
became available to the public systematically,
00:21:18 ►
the drinks industry has created opposition to them,
00:21:23 ►
created fear about them, created fear about them,
00:21:26 ►
and eventually got them banned.
00:21:34 ►
So, as I said, the reason we as a society that doesn’t use mind-altering drugs is largely because of the pressure that the drinks industry put on politicians
00:21:39 ►
to maintain their stranglehold on the control of these substances.
00:21:46 ►
And that’s extremely, well, that’s immoral, personally, I think.
00:21:50 ►
I don’t see it can be any justification
00:21:53 ►
for limiting people’s access to substances that change their mind,
00:21:59 ►
particularly not if you do it on the pretext of harm.
00:22:03 ►
And this, of course, is where the whole story
00:22:05 ►
gets extremely murky. Most of the justification for keeping drugs illegal is because supposedly
00:22:15 ►
they’re harmful. But as you know, and hopefully some of you have read some of my work over
00:22:20 ►
the years, most of the so-called illegal drugs are less harmful than alcohol.
00:22:27 ►
And that’s therefore what, you know, so scientifically the justification for that
00:22:33 ►
illegality is wrong. And of course it was my protesting the government’s continued
00:22:40 ►
resistance, intransigence to having a rational drug policy
00:22:46 ►
eventually got me sacked as their advisor in 2009.
00:22:50 ►
And there’s an interesting sort of…
00:22:53 ►
APPLAUSE
00:22:54 ►
And when you look at the three pillars that underpin the restrictive attitude
00:23:11 ►
and the very hostile attitude that society has to drugs,
00:23:15 ►
you see there are politicians.
00:23:18 ►
Most of the politicians know that drug policies in this country are wrong.
00:23:23 ►
Many of the drug ministers have said so,
00:23:25 ►
but they only say it when they’ve left office.
00:23:27 ►
They never say it when they’re in office.
00:23:29 ►
But we know that probably the majority of politicians
00:23:32 ►
know that they’re lying about drugs.
00:23:34 ►
It’s probably because they know they’re lying about most things,
00:23:36 ►
but that’s a funny story.
00:23:39 ►
And then, of course, we’ve got, as I said, the drinks industry.
00:23:43 ►
The drinks industry has been systematic, particularly
00:23:46 ►
in the last 30 years in trying to prevent access of cannabis and drugs like MDMA to
00:23:52 ►
any kind of legal market because they’re terrified that it will undermine their profitability.
00:23:58 ►
And then the third arm in this rather dangerous and very effective opposition have been the media.
00:24:07 ►
And we have
00:24:08 ►
a peculiar media in this country.
00:24:10 ►
Some of you look rather
00:24:12 ►
young. You probably don’t even know what a newspaper is.
00:24:14 ►
But believe me, there are
00:24:16 ►
such things. And they have a lot
00:24:18 ►
of influence amongst older people,
00:24:20 ►
particularly older voters.
00:24:22 ►
And newspapers such as the Mail
00:24:24 ►
and the Sun and the Telegraph
00:24:26 ►
have systematically tried to create hysteria about drugs. And they’ve done it for the last
00:24:35 ►
30 or 40 years, and they continue to do it. And that’s why we have the Psychoactive Substances
00:24:40 ►
Act, which I’ll talk about in a minute. So newspapers, politicians and the dreams industry together are a very disturbing and very powerful coalition. And they really have held us back.
00:24:52 ►
And there are a lot of people who’ve been punished and prosecuted because they dared
00:24:58 ►
to challenge that authority. But beyond that, there’s a whole other story, and this is really the key of
00:25:05 ►
my talk, which is that not only have we, by trying to regulate recreational use of these
00:25:13 ►
drugs, unfairly criminalised a lot of people. There are a million young people in this country,
00:25:19 ►
probably a few of you in this audience, again, judging by the smell, who’ve got criminal
00:25:22 ►
records for smoking cannabis.
00:25:29 ►
But we created an underclass. Actually, truth is, the cannabis underclass probably can’t afford to come here. So because when you, this million people who’ve got criminal records
00:25:36 ►
for cannabis possession, they don’t have work jobs. They really struggle to get work and
00:25:41 ►
they are extremely disadvantaged.
00:25:46 ►
But beyond that we’ve created another underclass of people who’ve got medical problems for
00:25:51 ►
which they cannot get access to treatments. And almost all the so-called illegal drugs
00:25:59 ►
that the newspapers know the names of and can spell, cannabis, MDMA, LSD. I was going to say psilocybin,
00:26:10 ►
but I don’t think they can spell that. But those drugs that are illegal today all have
00:26:17 ►
huge medical potential. And to deny access of patients to their therapeutic possibilities,
00:26:27 ►
even if these drugs were dangerous,
00:26:32 ►
it would be outrageous to deny patients,
00:26:34 ►
who should be allowed to make their own minds up about the relative risk-benefit.
00:26:39 ►
But when these drugs aren’t dangerous,
00:26:41 ►
when you have a drug like cannabis, which is safer than alcohol,
00:26:44 ►
to deny it to patients,
00:26:45 ►
to break down the doors of people with multiple sclerosis,
00:26:49 ►
just to find that they’ve got some cannabis
00:26:51 ►
and to prosecute them,
00:26:52 ►
it happens on a regular basis.
00:26:54 ►
To my mind, it’s ridiculous.
00:26:58 ►
It’s actually, as a taxpayer,
00:27:01 ►
it’s insulting.
00:27:02 ►
Why should my money go to giving police overtimes and they can
00:27:06 ►
smash people’s doors down at six in the morning? I don’t want my tax money spent on that. And
00:27:12 ►
why should these people who have got no other records other than to a so-called illegal
00:27:15 ►
drug, why should they be subject to that kind of harassment? What kind of society does that?
00:27:22 ►
And why do they do it? And of course, as course as I’ve said I told you why they do it
00:27:25 ►
they do it because politically
00:27:27 ►
it’s powerful
00:27:29 ►
the people that take drugs tend not to vote
00:27:32 ►
so it doesn’t matter if you lose their votes
00:27:34 ►
there’s a powerful lobby
00:27:36 ►
against them through the drinks industry and also
00:27:37 ►
now and even more so
00:27:40 ►
probably depending on what happens
00:27:42 ►
in the
00:27:42 ►
restructuring of the Conservative Party after the Brexit,
00:27:48 ►
it may become even more right-wing.
00:27:49 ►
There’s a strong American puritanical influence funding groups in Britain,
00:27:55 ►
particularly the so-called Centre for Social Justice that Ian Duncan Smith runs.
00:28:00 ►
This Centre for Social Justice has funding from somewhat arm’s length
00:28:05 ►
from American
00:28:06 ►
charities which derive
00:28:08 ►
their income from
00:28:09 ►
the defence and military industry
00:28:12 ►
and their ambition is to make sure that
00:28:14 ►
the world becomes or stays as much
00:28:16 ►
American as it can
00:28:17 ►
and that is truly, that isn’t democracy
00:28:21 ►
at all
00:28:21 ►
we really need to make sure we don’t
00:28:24 ►
fall prey to the simple semantics I mean it’s great isn’t democracy at all. And we really need to make sure we don’t fall prey to the simple semantics.
00:28:27 ►
I mean, it’s great, isn’t it?
00:28:28 ►
Why would you not have
00:28:29 ►
a centre for social justice?
00:28:32 ►
But what they mean by social justice
00:28:34 ►
is you’ve got to do what they say.
00:28:37 ►
And that really is not to do anything
00:28:38 ►
other than drink alcohol.
00:28:41 ►
And where does it really come from?
00:28:43 ►
Well, it comes from
00:28:43 ►
an interesting period
00:28:46 ►
in our life, which I’ve already alluded to, the 1960s and the Vietnam War. Because the
00:28:54 ►
reason LSD is illegal is because it was changing the way people viewed the war. Now, again,
00:29:03 ►
I’m looking around here. A lot of you weren’t even born. Some
00:29:07 ►
of you weren’t even thought of before the Vietnam War. But anyway, the Vietnam War was
00:29:12 ►
the last war the Americans fought to try to maintain the world order through their military
00:29:18 ►
might. And they fought it in Vietnam, which is why it’s called the Vietnam War. And that’s
00:29:24 ►
a place over in Southeast Asia, which most Americans didn’t know about.
00:29:28 ►
They didn’t even know where it was.
00:29:30 ►
But they were young American men your sort of age were being told to go and fight.
00:29:34 ►
And initially there was voluntary service.
00:29:37 ►
And then so many were getting killed that people wouldn’t volunteer anymore.
00:29:41 ►
So then the American government decided it had to have conscription.
00:29:42 ►
wouldn’t volunteer anymore. So then the American government decided it had to have
00:29:44 ►
conscription. So basically
00:29:46 ►
if you’re over 18
00:29:47 ►
and you’re…
00:29:49 ►
And I remember this vividly. I remember on the television
00:29:51 ►
watching this. If you were born
00:29:53 ►
on an odd day of the week, an odd day.
00:29:55 ►
If your birthday was an odd day of the month,
00:29:57 ►
you’d get conscripted and you could go
00:29:59 ►
to a foreign country that you’d never heard of
00:30:01 ►
really, or at least you didn’t know where it was.
00:30:04 ►
And you’d live in a very… in a jungle being eaten by mosquitoes and cockroaches,
00:30:10 ►
being shot at by an enemy that you didn’t ever see,
00:30:15 ►
fighting for a cause you didn’t understand.
00:30:18 ►
And it’s not surprising that many young Americans said,
00:30:23 ►
I don’t want to do this.
00:30:25 ►
And then they went to Haight-Ashbury, they went to San Francisco, they dropped acid, they listened to the Grateful
00:30:29 ►
Dead, and they thought, this is a better world. I actually don’t want to be a soldier, I don’t
00:30:35 ►
want to be in the military, I don’t want to kill people for no reason at all, other than
00:30:40 ►
they have a different belief system than me. And LSD was the first drug to be banned
00:30:47 ►
simply because it changed people’s perception. Because even then, the Americans could not
00:30:55 ►
ban a drug just because they didn’t like it. So they had to create hysteria about it. And
00:31:02 ►
they did. The American press was remarkable, even better than The Sun, in creating hysteria about it. And they did. The American press was remarkable, even better
00:31:05 ►
than the Sun, in creating hysteria. They created ridiculous levels of hysteria about LSD.
00:31:11 ►
It’s not even clear to me whether anyone ever died of LSD. We know, obviously, that even
00:31:16 ►
back in the 60s, tens of thousands of people were dying from alcohol and tobacco abuse.
00:31:21 ►
But the American government decided to collude with the newspapers,
00:31:25 ►
create hysterical stories, woman gives birth to a frog, LSD fed ape, rapes TV actress,
00:31:33 ►
you know, sort of utterly absurd kinds of headlines like that. And you might say this
00:31:39 ►
is laughable. It’s laughable that anyone could change the law based on such ridiculous and
00:31:46 ►
absurd forces. But that’s what they did then, and that’s what we have just done now. Some
00:31:54 ►
of you know, yes? May the 27th, this country, your country, the country that you voted for,
00:32:03 ►
you voted into power, the Conservative Party.
00:32:06 ►
This country has done something that no other country in the world has ever done.
00:32:11 ►
It has banned any drug that changes your mind.
00:32:15 ►
Whether that drug exists today or whether it will ever be made in the future,
00:32:22 ►
irregardless of whether it’s harmful or not. I mean, do you
00:32:28 ►
know that? The Psychoactive Substances Act became law on the 27th of May, and essentially
00:32:34 ►
everything’s illegal. I think even holding your breath for more than 30 seconds to get
00:32:40 ►
high is illegal. And it’s hard to talk about this without kind of gagging, really.
00:32:48 ►
How can a country like ours, which has got a tradition of liberty and scientific endeavour,
00:32:55 ►
how can it do something as utterly, utterly controlling as that?
00:33:02 ►
And the answer is very simple.
00:33:04 ►
The answer is because the sun
00:33:05 ►
told them to.
00:33:07 ►
The sun created hysteria,
00:33:10 ►
has over the last two or three years
00:33:11 ►
created hysteria
00:33:12 ►
around the use of nitrous oxide.
00:33:16 ►
The reason it’s done that
00:33:18 ►
is because footballers use nitrous oxide.
00:33:20 ►
Footballers use nitrous oxide
00:33:21 ►
because it’s the only drug
00:33:22 ►
they can’t be tested for.
00:33:24 ►
So they’re not as dumb as you think sometimes, are they?
00:33:28 ►
But the Sun didn’t get hysterical when Prince Harry used nitrous oxide.
00:33:33 ►
But it got very hysterical when Raheem Sterling used nitrous oxide.
00:33:39 ►
And the Sun has had a campaign over the last few years to get nitrous oxide banned
00:33:42 ►
based on the fact that footballers use it. But banning nitrous oxide was difficult. They also, of course,
00:33:51 ►
there have been other legal highs, such as methadone and other stimulants, and also synthetic
00:33:58 ►
cannabinoids have become one. And those have all been grouped together in the term legal
00:34:03 ►
highs, and the campaign to get rid of them has led to a law which bans everything.
00:34:09 ►
Other than alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine.
00:34:15 ►
And that’s outrageous. It’s truly outrageous.
00:34:18 ►
And when I speak to friends around the world, they say, you must be joking.
00:34:21 ►
You can’t ban things that don’t exist, but you can, and we have.
00:34:24 ►
world, they say, you must be joking. You can’t ban things that don’t exist, but you can,
00:34:29 ►
and we have. And the reality is anything that affects your brain now, whether it’s being discovered and used for treating illness or recreational use, is de facto illegal, because
00:34:37 ►
that’s what the government said. And that’s going to have a massively deleterious effect
00:34:42 ►
on research, because it’s been really difficult to do research with psychedelics now. They’re illegal. Our psilocybin study,
00:34:52 ►
so we managed in the end to treat 20 patients with psilocybin. It took us two and a half years to go through all the regulations to get psilocybin to give to our patients.
00:35:10 ►
Each dose of psilocybin ended up costing £1,500.
00:35:17 ►
Now, there is no drug in the world that’s that good.
00:35:22 ►
Why is that? Because when I work with psilocybin
00:35:25 ►
I am treated as a criminal
00:35:27 ►
they assume that
00:35:29 ►
as are all my colleagues
00:35:31 ►
it’s not just me
00:35:32 ►
we have to have special police checks
00:35:36 ►
only four hospitals in Britain
00:35:39 ►
are allowed to hold cannabis
00:35:41 ►
because it’s deemed as too dangerous
00:35:44 ►
I’m a doctor I can prescribe heroin which is massively more dangerous are allowed to hold cannabis because it’s deemed as too dangerous.
00:35:46 ►
I’m a doctor.
00:35:47 ►
I can prescribe heroin,
00:35:49 ►
which is massively more dangerous.
00:35:52 ►
1,300 deaths a year from heroin,
00:35:54 ►
no deaths from cannabis,
00:35:57 ►
but I can prescribe heroin because I’m a doctor,
00:35:59 ►
but I can’t do anything with cannabis because it’s controlled as a schedule 1 drug,
00:36:02 ►
like MDMA, like psilocybin.
00:36:04 ►
This is utterly, utterly stupid.
00:36:06 ►
It’s a waste of your money
00:36:07 ►
because you funded my research, thankfully.
00:36:09 ►
Or at least those of you who pay taxes.
00:36:13 ►
And it holds the field back.
00:36:16 ►
We are the first people in 50 years
00:36:18 ►
to have done a study with LSD in this country.
00:36:22 ►
We did it.
00:36:23 ►
Thank you.
00:36:31 ►
We did it.
00:36:33 ►
People say, why did you do it?
00:36:35 ►
And the answer is because it had to be done.
00:36:38 ►
You can’t have a drug which changed the world.
00:36:40 ►
You can’t have the only drug to be banned because it changed the way people think.
00:36:42 ►
And not understand what it does in the brain.
00:36:44 ►
And of course, the study has been remarkable.
00:36:46 ►
We’ve understood the nature of
00:36:48 ►
hallucinations now. We’ve understood the nature of
00:36:50 ►
the change in ego, the sense of
00:36:52 ►
becoming part of the universe that these drugs
00:36:54 ►
produce, and you’ll hear about it for the next speaker.
00:36:56 ►
We can now show
00:36:58 ►
you a brain map
00:36:59 ►
that makes sense of this.
00:37:01 ►
And I think that’s critical
00:37:03 ►
because we cannot win the argument about drugs by relying on common sense.
00:37:10 ►
You’ve seen that.
00:37:12 ►
We can’t even now win the moral argument.
00:37:14 ►
This government has told us that taking drugs is immoral unless you take alcohol.
00:37:20 ►
Any other psychoactive drug other than alcohol that changes the way you feel is illegal.
00:37:25 ►
So they’ve made that moral decision.
00:37:27 ►
They told us it’s not based on harm anymore, it’s based on morality.
00:37:31 ►
So we can’t win the moral argument.
00:37:33 ►
The only way we can win the argument is through science.
00:37:37 ►
We have to show them, scientists like me have to show them, that the science is really worthwhile.
00:37:45 ►
That the science underpins the potential therapeutic value.
00:37:50 ►
And at the very least, these drugs should be made available
00:37:52 ►
for medical treatment and research.
00:37:56 ►
And whether they go into recreational use or not, who cares?
00:37:59 ►
Because the reality is they’re not dangerous anyway.
00:38:02 ►
Thank you very much.
00:38:03 ►
APPLAUSE because the reality is they’re not dangerous anyway. Thank you very much.
00:38:26 ►
So we’ve got 15 minutes or so for questions, if people want to ask.
00:38:27 ►
Yes, down here.
00:38:30 ►
Yeah, so the question is, if I’m… Yeah, they asked me that question in the Independent yesterday,
00:38:32 ►
but I couldn’t write it.
00:38:33 ►
I mean, I had a slight domestic.
00:38:35 ►
My mother died yesterday, unfortunately, so I’m not staying.
00:38:39 ►
I’ve just come to give this talk,
00:38:40 ►
and then I’m going to go home and sort things out.
00:38:42 ►
But they asked me to do that.
00:38:43 ►
But I will do it, and I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d say that the reality
00:38:47 ►
is this. The question was, if I was Prime Minister, I’d be better than Boris anyway.
00:39:01 ►
What would I do? What I’d do is very straightforward. I would apply science, I’d apply a rational approach to drugs.
00:39:07 ►
I would use good policy, which we have seen developed elsewhere in the world.
00:39:11 ►
We’ve got good models now.
00:39:13 ►
It’s not that we’re going into the dark by saying,
00:39:16 ►
make medical cannabis available.
00:39:18 ►
Two-thirds of Americans, that’s 220 million people,
00:39:23 ►
the richest people in the world have access to medicinal cannabis
00:39:25 ►
but in Britain we don’t
00:39:27 ►
why don’t we have access to medicinal cannabis?
00:39:30 ►
because the drugs minister thinks if we had medicinal cannabis
00:39:33 ►
it would encourage you not to use cannabis
00:39:35 ►
some of you clearly aren’t taking notes
00:39:38 ►
I would say this
00:39:41 ►
based on the knowledge we have of drug harms, drugs which are less harmful to the user than alcohol should be available.
00:39:54 ►
They should be available in a regulated fashion. And I say that for two reasons.
00:39:59 ►
I say that for the moral reason. Why should you, those of you, what strength is that you’re drinking? What’s that Magnus?
00:40:06 ►
Yeah, you see, that’s like a half a joint.
00:40:08 ►
You’ve got to be very careful.
00:40:11 ►
If
00:40:11 ►
drinking alcohol kills
00:40:13 ►
26,000 people a year in Britain,
00:40:15 ►
a lot of them young people.
00:40:18 ►
So anything that’s less harmful
00:40:20 ►
to the user than alcohol, I think we have
00:40:22 ►
a moral right to make available.
00:40:24 ►
And we should definitely ban wine boxes. See that? Yes, we should limit the sale of alcohol to small
00:40:32 ►
units. So there’s the moral argument, but there’s also the health argument. I believe
00:40:39 ►
that if people had access to drugs such as cannabis and such as MDMA or other
00:40:45 ►
stimulants and nitrous oxide
00:40:47 ►
even, in quantities it wouldn’t
00:40:50 ►
harm them. We would actually have
00:40:51 ►
less harm. Alcohol is a hugely expensive
00:40:54 ►
drug. It costs 6 billion
00:40:55 ►
or more a year just to police drunkenness
00:40:57 ►
and not here obviously but on the
00:40:59 ►
streets of our cities itself.
00:41:01 ►
So I think we should have a regulated market. We should control
00:41:04 ►
alcohol. I think alcohol is too cheap. What you’re drinking, you’re paying a third
00:41:09 ►
the price I paid when I was a student for alcohol, and that’s why consumption’s gone
00:41:13 ►
up. Last year in Britain, there was a 6% increase in mortality in women from alcohol. 6% in
00:41:23 ►
one year in mortality. Alcohol is the leading
00:41:25 ►
cause of death in men
00:41:27 ►
under 50 in this country, and it will be the leading
00:41:29 ►
cause of death in women under 50
00:41:32 ►
by the end of this decade.
00:41:33 ►
So we have to control alcohol, and the way to control
00:41:36 ►
alcohol is to give people access to safer drugs.
00:41:38 ►
Not to stop access
00:41:39 ►
to other drugs. So that’s what I do.
00:41:41 ►
But drugs which are more harmful to the user
00:41:43 ►
than alcohol, so drugs like heroin, crack,
00:41:46 ►
cocaine, I would still keep illegal,
00:41:47 ►
hoping that sensible people like you
00:41:50 ►
would then switch to some really
00:41:51 ►
MDMA or nitroxyl.
00:41:55 ►
Any other questions? Yes.
00:41:58 ►
So the question is, what can you
00:42:00 ►
do to help ordinary people? You’re not ordinary people,
00:42:02 ►
you’re very special people.
00:42:04 ►
You know, you can… a whole hour out of your precious gas and be time to come and
00:42:12 ►
listen to me. I’m very touched by that. I would like you, how many of you follow me
00:42:18 ►
on Twitter? How many of you know what Twitter is? You could write it in the mud, I think.
00:42:27 ►
So I’d like you to all follow me on Twitter, ProfDavidNutt.
00:42:31 ►
That’s pretty easy, isn’t it?
00:42:32 ►
Because that way I can tell you what issues are happening, when things are going on.
00:42:37 ►
And I’d also like you to follow drug science.
00:42:40 ►
When I was sat by the government from the ACMD,
00:42:44 ►
I realized that something had
00:42:47 ►
to be done, because once I’d gone, there was no voice. I was pretty certain that the
00:42:53 ►
people that followed me on the ACMD would not dare step out of line, because they’d
00:42:57 ►
seen what happened to me, and they would have been carried by it. So I thought, we’ve got
00:43:01 ►
to do something different. So I decided what to do was, I set up a charity called
00:43:05 ►
Drug Science. So you can follow Drug Science,
00:43:07 ►
it’s online, and if you want,
00:43:09 ►
if you like what we do, you can donate.
00:43:12 ►
It’s a charity, it gets by on
00:43:14 ►
things like my lecture fees
00:43:15 ►
and donations. Follow us.
00:43:18 ►
Because we
00:43:19 ►
are beginning to
00:43:21 ►
develop a kind of campaign,
00:43:23 ►
which at the very least will educate people.
00:43:27 ►
The great thing about drug science is it’s now where journalists go.
00:43:31 ►
If journalists want to know about drugs, they come to drug science.
00:43:34 ►
And I’m inundated, as I say.
00:43:36 ►
Three or four times a day I get a journalistic inquiry to do something.
00:43:41 ►
And the more powers of drug science the more we can we can actually
00:43:46 ►
be the voice and if we have the voice it’s much harder for newspapers like the
00:43:50 ►
Sun or the Mail to lie about drugs because if other journalists ring us up
00:43:54 ►
and they say what’s the truth we tell them the truth so if we’ve got to stop
00:43:58 ►
the disinformation that’s been so powerful in terms of driving drug policy
00:44:04 ►
so that’s the first thing. The second thing you can do
00:44:06 ►
is there’s a book called Drugs Without
00:44:08 ►
the Hot Air. Have any of you heard of that?
00:44:11 ►
You’ve got it. Good. Drugs Without
00:44:12 ►
the Hot Air. Good.
00:44:15 ►
Next time, if I’m here next year
00:44:16 ►
and you’re here next year, could you all bring your copies
00:44:18 ►
so I could sign them, please?
00:44:21 ►
That’s a very important book
00:44:22 ►
because that book supports my charity.
00:44:24 ►
All the proceeds go to my charity.
00:44:26 ►
I wrote it, by the way, in case you were wondering who the author was.
00:44:30 ►
And that’s the book that most of you should give to your parents.
00:44:36 ►
Some of you, perhaps not. Some give to your children.
00:44:39 ►
But most of you give to your parents, right?
00:44:41 ►
Give them to your parents and say,
00:44:42 ►
Mum, Dad, this is your Christmas present.
00:44:50 ►
This book will change the way you think about drugs. And by the way, if there’s anything you don’t understand, speak to me and I’ll explain it to you. So
00:44:53 ►
you want to begin a dialogue with your parents as well as educating them. And use that book
00:44:58 ►
as a template for having this dialogue, because we need to have a dialogue. There is so much
00:45:03 ►
misinformation from supposed reputable sources like newspapers that we need to have a dialogue. There is so much misinformation from supposed
00:45:06 ►
reputable sources like newspapers that we have to challenge it. And I do my best, but
00:45:12 ►
if all of you are challenging it, every time someone lies about drugs, you say, hang on,
00:45:18 ►
read the book, go on the drug site. You have to shout, I can’t… Yeah, what do you say to young children?
00:45:26 ►
No, this is really… There’s a chapter in it.
00:45:29 ►
Yeah, no, no, no. There’s a chapter in it.
00:45:31 ►
I start with four.
00:45:32 ►
I think children need to learn…
00:45:34 ►
One of the saddest things we have in this country,
00:45:36 ►
the last government removed any directive,
00:45:40 ►
they removed any requirement to teach about drugs at school.
00:45:45 ►
That’s disgusting.
00:45:47 ►
You know, the only materials that teachers…
00:45:51 ►
Teachers don’t have to teach about…
00:45:53 ►
Schools don’t have to teach about drugs at all.
00:45:55 ►
If they want to teach about drugs,
00:45:57 ►
the only free material they can get
00:45:59 ►
is provided by the Scientologists.
00:46:04 ►
And they give a lot out.
00:46:07 ►
It’s outrageous.
00:46:08 ►
There is no government-sponsored support for it.
00:46:11 ►
That’s one of the things drug science wants to do.
00:46:13 ►
If I get funding, we would set up a schools programme.
00:46:15 ►
But you’ve got to start before.
00:46:17 ►
Look, as soon as children see their parents
00:46:20 ►
usually being drunk or stoned,
00:46:22 ►
they need to know what’s going on.
00:46:24 ►
A lot of kids at four or five will be going to school hungry because their mother’s drunk and hasn’t woken up.
00:46:29 ►
They’ll be beaten up by their father.
00:46:31 ►
Kids need to know about drugs because it impinges on so many people’s lives.
00:46:38 ►
So the book is in there.
00:46:38 ►
What do you say to a five-year-old?
00:46:40 ►
Well, you tell them that people get intoxicated and they can do bad things.
00:46:44 ►
And if they’re
00:46:45 ►
getting beaten up by a drunk father then they should
00:46:47 ►
talk to the school.
00:46:49 ►
At every age you should be
00:46:51 ►
approaching the truth.
00:46:55 ►
People will say, people say
00:46:57 ►
drugs education doesn’t work.
00:47:01 ►
What they mean
00:47:01 ►
is drugs education doesn’t stop people
00:47:03 ►
taking drugs. Well that’s not what we’re trying to do
00:47:06 ►
what we’re trying to do is stop people being harmed by drugs
00:47:08 ►
and this is one of the worst things
00:47:10 ►
for the last 10 years we’ve had both this current government
00:47:14 ►
the last government and the last Labour government
00:47:16 ►
their drugs policy which we oppose continuously
00:47:20 ►
had the sole measure of success
00:47:24 ►
was how many people use drugs.
00:47:27 ►
And I would say to them, and this is why I got sacked,
00:47:30 ►
well, look, hang on, does that include alcohol?
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No.
00:47:34 ►
Why not?
00:47:35 ►
Because it’s not a drug.
00:47:38 ►
Why do you want to stop people using drugs?
00:47:40 ►
Because they’re harmful.
00:47:41 ►
But if they’re less harmful than alcohol,
00:47:44 ►
won’t we reduce net harm? We’re not going to to talk about that or we’re going to lie about it so so the we the
00:47:51 ►
premise is that we if we stop people using drugs there will be less harms so i say to them now
00:47:56 ►
right okay so this you think people there’s less use of drugs okay well why how come deaths from
00:48:02 ►
cocaine reached a whole time an all-time high last year?
00:48:06 ►
Deaths from heroin are going up.
00:48:08 ►
How come that’s happening?
00:48:09 ►
And there is no relationship
00:48:11 ►
between use and harm. Because what we’re doing
00:48:14 ►
is we’re actually
00:48:15 ►
increasing the harms of drugs in the
00:48:18 ►
people who are using it by
00:48:19 ►
these policies we’ve adapted.
00:48:21 ►
And having it all in the black market.
00:48:23 ►
So I suppose the bottom line is you’ve got to have a more rational government.
00:48:27 ►
Now there is hope. Don’t give up.
00:48:32 ►
The Lib Dems, some of you may know, they did exist.
00:48:36 ►
There’s eight of them left. And there’s one other, there’s a green lady
00:48:40 ►
called Lucas from Brighton.
00:48:49 ►
Six of the Lib Dems and Caroline Lucas have endorsed a policy document legalising cannabis that I helped put together, which was endorsed
00:48:55 ►
by the Lib Dem Spring Assembly, and there will be debate in Parliament about it. So
00:49:01 ►
we’ve got seven MPs that are openly supporting legal
00:49:05 ►
cannabis. Make damn sure
00:49:07 ►
those of you who are in their constituencies,
00:49:10 ►
you vote for them, please.
00:49:12 ►
One more?
00:49:14 ►
So the question
00:49:16 ►
is, how can we use social media to
00:49:17 ►
try to promote
00:49:20 ►
and develop the
00:49:21 ►
vision of drug science? I should say,
00:49:24 ►
it’s important, drug science is a charity, it’s not just me.
00:49:26 ►
I’ve got a whole group of real experts,
00:49:28 ►
almost all the experts on drugs in Britain
00:49:30 ►
are on drug science.
00:49:33 ►
Unfortunately, that’s one of the reasons
00:49:34 ►
the government’s laws on drugs are so bad,
00:49:38 ►
because they don’t even make the laws correct,
00:49:40 ►
they’re not even chemically correct.
00:49:42 ►
The latest law on cannabis you might be interested in,
00:49:44 ►
on synthetic cannabinoids, the latest in, on synthetic cannabinoids.
00:49:46 ►
The latest proposed law
00:49:48 ►
on synthetic cannabinoids
00:49:49 ►
currently captures
00:49:52 ►
something like 35
00:49:53 ►
licensed medicines under
00:49:56 ►
this act. The government doesn’t even
00:49:58 ►
know its own laws.
00:50:00 ►
It doesn’t even understand what it’s doing.
00:50:01 ►
Because most of the experts work for drug science.
00:50:04 ►
We’re communicating. I tweet. Drug most of the experts work for drug science. So we’re communicating.
00:50:05 ►
So I tweet.
00:50:07 ►
Drug science has a website.
00:50:08 ►
We do Facebook.
00:50:09 ►
At some point, we will have a campaign.
00:50:12 ►
And so we’re going to…
00:50:13 ►
What I’m trying to do now,
00:50:14 ►
I think the key issue,
00:50:15 ►
the big…
00:50:16 ►
For us in this country at present,
00:50:17 ►
is a technical issue.
00:50:19 ►
And it’s about how we can get cannabis,
00:50:22 ►
medical cannabis available.
00:50:25 ►
And all it takes is for the Home Secretary to write a letter,
00:50:33 ►
write what’s called a statutory interim,
00:50:35 ►
and say that cannabis is no longer a Schedule 1 drug,
00:50:39 ►
which means you have to have a special licence,
00:50:41 ►
which takes a year and costs £5,000 to hold it.
00:50:44 ►
But it’s a Schedule II drug, alongside heroin.
00:50:47 ►
So we could store cannabis alongside heroin in our pharmacies
00:50:50 ►
and not worry too much,
00:50:52 ►
because if people are going to break into that pharmacy,
00:50:54 ►
they’re not going to take the cannabis, are they?
00:50:56 ►
If we make cannabis a Schedule II drug,
00:50:59 ►
like the Americans are almost certainly going to do this year,
00:51:01 ►
that would make it a medicine.
00:51:03 ►
And it adds a stroke.
00:51:05 ►
And it doesn’t even need a vote of parliament. We can just have
00:51:07 ►
the Home Secretary saying,
00:51:10 ►
yep, there’s enough evidence, it’s a medicine,
00:51:12 ►
let’s put it back in the medical category,
00:51:13 ►
schedule two. Or immediately
00:51:16 ►
that would happen. So we need
00:51:18 ►
a campaign for that. And everyone should,
00:51:20 ►
if we start a campaign, you should
00:51:21 ►
really sign up for that. At some
00:51:24 ►
point, that’s going to happen. 100,000 people have signed the campaign, the should really sign up for that. At some point, that’s going to happen.
00:51:25 ►
100,000 people have signed the campaign, the petition called Ease Our Pain,
00:51:30 ►
at least over 100,000.
00:51:31 ►
So there will be a debate in Parliament about cannabis and medicine.
00:51:35 ►
And then I think we should do the same for psilocybin,
00:51:38 ►
because we’ve now got this good evidence of its value in depression,
00:51:41 ►
and MDMA as a medicine for post-traumatic stress disorder. And I
00:51:46 ►
think if we could all push for just those three drugs to be put out of Schedule 1 into
00:51:51 ►
Schedule 2, we could really make a huge difference to a lot of people of us. So follow me again
00:51:56 ►
on Twitter, please. I want to see at least another thousand signed up tonight. Last question.
00:52:03 ►
Do I think Brexit’s going to make any difference?
00:52:06 ►
Well, it’s going to make a difference in a number of ways.
00:52:08 ►
It’s certainly a distraction.
00:52:11 ►
One thing about Europe, whatever you think about Brexit,
00:52:13 ►
the European Directorate of Justice,
00:52:16 ►
they developed a policy five years ago
00:52:19 ►
based on the harm scale that we developed.
00:52:22 ►
And they said all new drugs should be assessed under the harm scale.
00:52:26 ►
And if they’re very harmful, they should be criminalised.
00:52:29 ►
If they’re moderately harmful, they should be subject to civil sanctions.
00:52:33 ►
And if they’re not harmful, they should be legal.
00:52:36 ►
And our government, my scale, and our government said,
00:52:39 ►
no, we’re not interested in doing anything that Europe are doing on drugs.
00:52:43 ►
And of course, we’ve gone on now to make everything illegal even if
00:52:46 ►
it’s harmless. So Europe was good for
00:52:48 ►
drugs because Europe is rational
00:52:49 ►
most European countries particularly Netherlands
00:52:52 ►
Belgium now
00:52:54 ►
Spain, Portugal they have much more
00:52:56 ►
rational drug policies. So I
00:52:58 ►
think Brexit could actually make things worse
00:53:00 ►
because if we end up being
00:53:02 ►
controlled by these ultra puritan right
00:53:04 ►
wing American lobby groups
00:53:05 ►
it could be more problematic
00:53:07 ►
but who knows, I mean so I’m not optimistic
00:53:10 ►
but don’t give up because you never
00:53:12 ►
know, there might be a chance for change
00:53:13 ►
oh this guy’s got his last question
00:53:15 ►
you’ll have to say it a lot louder
00:53:18 ►
my synthetic
00:53:20 ►
alcohol, well this is an interesting
00:53:21 ►
so it seems to me over the, a few years ago
00:53:24 ►
10 years ago now, eleven,
00:53:26 ►
I was writing a government
00:53:28 ►
report called the Foresight Report on drugs
00:53:30 ►
and the brain.
00:53:31 ►
And we were brainstorming for a year on the future
00:53:34 ►
of drugs. I spent most
00:53:36 ►
of my professional career actually working
00:53:38 ►
in the field of alcohol dependence.
00:53:40 ►
And for the first twenty years, I was trying
00:53:42 ►
to treat people with alcohol dependence,
00:53:44 ►
I was trying to stop people being intoxicated, stop people craving, stop people dying of
00:53:49 ►
cirrhosis.
00:53:51 ►
And then during this brainstorming process, it kind of came to me, we can never do that.
00:53:56 ►
Alcohol is intrinsically toxic.
00:53:58 ►
For those of you who drink, there’s only a few of you here, I see this is good, but let
00:54:01 ►
me just tell you, sir, if alcohol was treated like a food additive, suppose one day, you know, suppose alcohol didn’t exist, and suddenly
00:54:12 ►
you discover this wonderful solvent, which you could put into trifles to make them taste
00:54:17 ►
better. Yes, you said, I’m going to make my fortune selling alcohol trifles. You go to
00:54:22 ►
the food standards agency, and you’d say, can I sell
00:54:26 ►
this? And they’d say, do toxicology testing.
00:54:27 ►
You do toxicology testing.
00:54:29 ►
And you’d come back and you’d say, can I sell it?
00:54:31 ►
And they’d say, yes, you can sell alcohol.
00:54:33 ►
It is toxic.
00:54:35 ►
So the maximum exposure
00:54:37 ►
in a year
00:54:38 ►
for alcohol, if you treat it
00:54:42 ►
like other food additives,
00:54:44 ►
is a glass of wine per year.
00:54:49 ►
So we know that.
00:54:50 ►
We’ve known that for quite a long time.
00:54:52 ►
The reason we don’t enforce those rules
00:54:54 ►
is because it’s not a food additive.
00:54:56 ►
It’s a food, and it’s exempt.
00:54:58 ►
And that’s the problem.
00:54:59 ►
We blind ourselves to alcohol.
00:55:00 ►
So, 4 million premature deaths a year from alcohol.
00:55:04 ►
We could get rid of almost all of those by replacing it.
00:55:07 ►
I know.
00:55:07 ►
The science we’ve done could give us.
00:55:11 ►
It has given us.
00:55:11 ►
I’ve taken it.
00:55:12 ►
My wife has taken it.
00:55:13 ►
We had parties over Christmas.
00:55:16 ►
We’ve had synthetic.
00:55:16 ►
We’ve got alternatives to alcohol.
00:55:19 ►
They’re unlike alcohol, but they don’t wash your liver and your gut and your brain, etc.
00:55:23 ►
And you don’t get so much of a hangover and they’re reversible
00:55:26 ►
and it’s perfect. The question is how do
00:55:28 ►
you develop it? And the answer is
00:55:29 ►
in Britain we can’t develop it because
00:55:31 ►
de facto it is now illegal.
00:55:34 ►
So we are thinking about
00:55:36 ►
going overseas because
00:55:37 ►
you guys will just have to die of your liver cirrhosis
00:55:40 ►
and the rest of the world can live on it.
00:55:42 ►
Maybe that’s a good point to end. Thank you all very much. Thank you.
00:55:57 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:56:00 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:56:09 ►
Unfortunately, Dr. Nutt’s alcohol replacement beverage doesn’t seem to have made much headway since this talk was given.
00:56:14 ►
I did a quick search and the last news report about it that I found was almost a year old.
00:56:18 ►
Nonetheless, I do hope that he can eventually bring it to market. Just imagine being able to get a buzz on without worrying about liver damage or having a hangover the next day.
00:56:26 ►
And I have to admit being taken aback when Dr. Nutt mentioned that his mother had just died the
00:56:33 ►
day before his presentation. Now, most of us have, well, sadly been involved in all that has to take
00:56:39 ►
place after someone close to us dies. And the fact that Dr. Nutt appeared at the festival as scheduled,
00:56:46 ►
even though everyone there would have understood had he not shown up,
00:56:49 ►
well, that speaks volumes about the quality of his character.
00:56:54 ►
Well, I’m going to sign off for now,
00:56:57 ►
and in a couple of hours I’ll be online in Zoom,
00:57:01 ►
visiting with some of our fellow slauners,
00:57:03 ►
and in two days I’ll be back here
00:57:05 ►
online and play Graham Hancock’s Glastonbury presentation for you. So for now, this is Lorenzo
00:57:11 ►
signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.