610 - Beyond the Medical Model for Psychedelics

Program Notes

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Annie Oak and Ismail Ali

Guest speakers: Annie Oak and Ismail Ali

Date this lecture was recorded: February 26, 2019.

Thanks to the new wave of research, psychedelics are poised to soon have legal medical use. MDMA- and psilocybin-assisted therapy are entering their final trials with “breakthrough therapy” designation by the FDA. But what’s beyond the medical model? Psychedelics have also long been used in personal, cultural, and sacramental contexts. Independently of any diagnosed disease, psychedelics can aid in the betterment of well people and support creative and spiritual growth. Regardless of whether psychedelics are legally sanctioned, there will always be “recreational” use in uncontrolled contexts. In a future society that recognizes these uses, what exactly do the systems look like that support risk reduction - and benefit maximization? In today’s podcast, Annie Oak from the Women’s Visionary Congress and Ismail Ali from MAPS discuss this issue.

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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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And today, thanks again to fellow salonner Mike Margolius,

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we’re going to listen to a conversation between Annie Oak and Ishmael Ali,

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who participated in one of the Psychedelic Seminars series that Mike hosts in San Francisco.

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Now, if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, you already know about Annie Oak,

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because she’s appeared here in the salon on at least eight previous occasions.

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And as you know, Annie is the co-founder of the Women’s Visionary Congress and her theme camp at Burning Man is the host for the Planque Norte lectures each year.

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Also, we’ll be hearing from Ishmael Ali, who is an attorney for MAPS and the chair of the board of directors for

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Students for Sensible Drug Policy. So let’s join them now and see if they have some new ideas about

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psychedelic medicine that we may want to explore. Before we get the show started, though, I want to

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make a few thank yous. So first thank you is to the San Francisco Psychedelic Society.

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thank you is to the San Francisco Psychedelic Society. They’re doing a really awesome job having community events regularly here in the Bay Area. And wherever you are in the world,

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I encourage you to find your local psychedelic society as well. I want to acknowledge here that in the past, historically, there have not been enough women, people of

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color, people from different communities having these kinds of conversations and

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we want to see more of that and we’re here to encourage all communities to

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have the kind of conversation we’re going to have tonight. We want to make

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sure that this kind of conversation is open to everybody. And we want to move beyond only a very narrow

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group of people having these kinds of conversations, sitting on the boards of organizations,

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making policies. We really want to open up that conversation to a much wider group of communities

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who should be part of those conversations. And on that, I just want to give a shout out to

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the people here who are here for the first time for an event about this topic.

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There’s a lot of interest expanding in every direction right now. We’re going to talk about

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that a bit tonight. But for those of you that are here for the first time welcome i’m grateful for your presence here for the poc for the queer people

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for the trans people for the people that are outside that are used to being in the margins

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welcome and for everyone here i hope that we can keep in mind that a lot of this conversation

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we’re having having is pushing those of us in every direction

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out to the margin and hopefully closer in over time.

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So thank you.

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So I want to talk about something that happened last week

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that is going to make it easier for more communities,

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more people to have these kinds of conversations.

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It was a Supreme Court ruling.

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Did you guys hear about this Supreme Court ruling?

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Who here heard about this Supreme Court ruling last week?

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The Tims versus Indiana case.

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Right.

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This ruling was a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court.

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And it had to do with something we call policing for profit.

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And it was a ruling about civil forfeiture cases

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and about setting limits on how police can seize the assets of people they simply believe

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might be involved in a crime. And this kind of civil forfeiture has a chilling effect on speech

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and on the kind of conversations that we want to

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be having on these topics. And what happened was, it was a case in Indiana. A guy was arrested for

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selling several hundred dollars worth of heroin, and they seized his $42,000 Land Rover,

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his $42,000 Land Rover, which he did not purchase with the proceeds from the drug sale. And he sued to get his Land Rover back. And the local state courts wouldn’t do it, went up to the Supreme

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Court. And the Supreme Court ruled that the prohibition on excessive fines, which is laid out in the

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Eighth Amendment attached to the Bill of Rights, also applies to state governments.

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And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, yes, can we have a round of applause, came back

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to the court to write this unanimous ruling.

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In a time of real political polarization,

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the court was united on this ruling. I’m going to read just a very short excerpt of this ruling

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because it’s an important ruling. This was a profound moment. For good reason, the protection

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against excessive fines has been a constant shield throughout Anglo-American history.

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constant shield throughout Anglo-American history. Exorbitant tolls undermine other constitutional liberties. Excessive fines can be used, for example, to retaliate against or

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chill the speech of political enemies. Thank you, RBG. Yeah.

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This is an important ruling for people who want to talk about drug policy for people who want to

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talk about cognitive liberty and for people who just want to exercise their first amendment rights

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so thank you very much and it’s encouraging because it’s part of a larger trend um around

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criminal justice reform generally and i want to just like zoom out for a bit

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because one of the things that Annie and I agreed on

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when we were kind of thinking about

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what we wanted to share today

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was the importance of starting with the criminalization

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and the context of criminalization

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and the real impact of that on people’s day-to-day lives

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because it’s easy and exciting to get caught up in a lot of the

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changes that are occurring and it especially for people who are who have bodies or identities

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that are not used to being criminalized or that don’t are not criminalized unless they’re doing

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something illegal and even then they sometimes get away with it it’s easy to kind of forget that

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we are talking about all of this the medical, the creation of all these alternative systems in that context. And instead of giving like a whole history of the

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war on drugs, it’s kind of, it’s encouraging to see like small shifts happening with civil

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asset forfeiture, with bail reform, with just a general, dare I say, bipartisan attitude about

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criminal justice reform that I believe does and will, in addition to this

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case, have a lot of impacts on drugs, drug policy, how we talk about them, which is somewhat relevant

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in the medical context and very relevant for what goes beyond, which we’ll get to shortly.

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So I want to talk about the medical model for a second because the topic of this conversation

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is going beyond the medical model. So let’s start with what lies in the medical model.

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I think it’s important to understand that prohibition has pushed the medical model for

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psychedelics. It is the primary reason why the medical model has been pushed so hard by

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activists, by people raising money. It’s an artifact of prohibition. And it’s important to

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take a look at this and also to acknowledge that the medical model offers the promise of much

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greater access to psychedelic-assisted therapy for people who are suffering from PTSD, depression,

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trauma, and there’s a lot of talk about this these days. It’s really great to see this become

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part of the larger conversation. And for a little bit of context on that, essentially,

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there are a lot of ways to look at it, but we’ll talk about a little bit about what’s going on

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at the state and local level around psilocybin there’s a lot of excitement there but just to kind of add on to what annie said part of

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the reason the medical model kind of is directly in response to prohibition is the fact that

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working through the federal system working through a medical system that’s regulated at the federal

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level is basically some of the most protection that a system can have in the sense

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that for changes that occur at state or local levels, there’s still the risk of the federal

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government intervening or these different entities intervening. So the idea is if you start with

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the most legit, the most regulated framework and work backwards from that, then at the very least

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that progress is protected. And this is particularly relevant now when we have formerly the Attorney General Jeff Sessions and now William Barr, both of whom

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are not exactly friendly toward a lot of the changes that have happened in cannabis law at

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the state level. So we know that there’s kind of this all, there’s this constant back and forth

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between state regulatory systems and the federal government that would be really, really nice to avoid if we could with psychedelic access.

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I think it’s also really important to take a step back and look at some of the real flaws

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in the medical model.

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And one of, I think, the most obvious examples of this is the opioid crisis, right?

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the opioid crisis, right? So I’d like to just drop into what we call kind of a shared reality here on a couple of data points. The latest CDC figures that just came out, Center for Disease Control,

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said in 2017, more than 70,000 people died of overdose, drug overdose deaths in the U.S., and that’s about 130 people a day.

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It’s up 10% from 2016, and opioids were responsible for about 68% of those overdose

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deaths, two out of three fatal overdoses, six-fold increase since 1999, and 36% of those fatal overdoses involved prescription opioids.

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Americans are now more likely to die from opioid overdose than car crashes. It’s actually bringing

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down our overall life expectancy in the U.S. So I think it’s important to look really critically and ask some really critical questions

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about the medical model for drug delivery systems. Now, the opioid crisis is especially impacting

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women. This is a really important point. The CDC says between 1999 and 2017, deaths from drug overdoses increased 260% among women 30 to 64 years in age, with the

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biggest increase in my demographic, women aged 45’s huge. Overdose deaths due to antidepressants

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increased 300% in this period for women aged 50 to 59, and almost 400% among women ages 60 to 64.

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So we’re talking about a very literal capital C crisis.

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That’s right. And we’re also talking about this desire for people to change their consciousness,

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dipping into a medical model for opioids that’s creating an enormous amount of death and suffering

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in this regard, especially for women. So that to me makes me

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wonder, like, you know, we can tease out different effects of what contributed to the crisis,

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what contributed to the abuse or perversion of a medical model, which at its heart is about

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access to essential medicine for people who are suffering. So what’s complicated here?

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Like what exactly about the opioid system or the medical model

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is it that you think we should really be looking at?

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Well, according to the CDC,

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it says women are more likely than men to experience chronic pain

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and become dependent faster on substances.

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So that’s an important thing to keep in mind.

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And I think also we should now really pay close attention

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to the many class action lawsuits

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that have been lodged against companies

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that produce and distribute opioids

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that are now in the courts.

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Purdue Pharma, Insys Pharmaceuticals.

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That’s right, Johnson & Johnson.

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Hundreds of counties in the U.S.

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and states have filed these lawsuits against these companies, right, for ignoring warning

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signs about off-label use, promoting the drugs as non-addictive. The Mass Attorney General,

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Massachusetts Attorney General, has sued the Sackler family that owns Purdue Pharma,

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that produces the painkiller OxyContin. And they

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say that Purdue Pharma put a premium on selling higher dosages and offered the OxyContin savings

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card, right? Prescription discount card to encourage which they claim they’re alleging

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produced a higher rate of addiction. At the same time, you have lawsuits against

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Insys Pharmaceutical, which interestingly

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is the company, one of the companies that manufactures Fentil in the United States,

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and also happened to put about $500,000 fighting legal access to cannabis in the state of Arizona,

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while simultaneously pursuing a license from the DEA to create synthetic THC.

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Right. So I think it’s important to ask some really tough questions to be a real critical

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thinking about medical models right let’s really think about this hard and and also no matter what

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you think about capitalism your thoughts on that know that large pharmaceutical companies are developing

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therapies using psychedelic materials, and that we should examine their drug development models

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also closely, how they’re making these drugs available to patients, how these companies try

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to influence providers, how they do training of people who will be providing these

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substances. One of the cases that a lot of people have been talking about, of course, is concerning

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a company called Compass Pathways, set up to be the first legal provider of synthesized psilocybin.

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They got $38 million in funding, 12 to 15 sites in the U.S., mass clinical study to test the drug as treatment for depression.

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It’s a $14 billion market.

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This is a relatively small company, but there are a lot of big companies right behind them, right?

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And some of them are already in the market.

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And some of them are already in the market.

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So I want to talk about this for a bit because there is rightfully, I think, a lot of attention to the bringing on of big players.

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And I want to tease this out part a little bit because, you know, the Purdue Pharma,

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Insys Pharmaceuticals, a lot of these companies are kind of really good targets because they’ve

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done things that clearly have caused harm.

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And I’m actually, in my own mind, kind of compare

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some of these opioid lawsuits to what you saw with cigarette companies, where it was definitely

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clear that cigarette companies knew for at least 10 years, maybe longer, what cigarettes could do,

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and then prevented the information from getting to the consumer. So I want to put a pin in that

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for transparency, because we’re going to come back to it. And at the same time, we’re seeing this response from the public about pharma in general, about medicine in general. And I would

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say that that kind of, in some ways, underlies or kind of comes out of this distrust that I think

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has kind of developed over time with the pharmaceutical industry, given that so much of

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the model is based on palliative treatment over the course of an extended period of time without necessarily

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resulting in a treatment. And I think that there’s this really interesting push and pull between

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people who are wanting to relieve their suffering, to engage with these systems through medical

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frameworks, which have a lot of benefits, which we’ll go into in a bit as well. But really looking critically at, in fact, how some of these delivery systems have failed, actually,

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to help the people that they’re most kind of supposed to help.

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And let’s look at how pharmaceutical companies operate, right?

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They try to get a market share.

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They try to get a return for investors and their

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venture funders. Let’s look at a couple things that Compass Pathways has done. First,

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they got non-profit status, then to get some intellectual property. Then they became a

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for-profit. They have pursued contracts that give them power over the research of

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academics who worked with them. They’ve lavished researchers with expensive dinners and paid trips

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and attempted to block the publication of research if it interfered with their commercial interests.

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None of this is particularly unusual. Pharmaceutical companies do this all the time, right? This is, there’s no psychedelic

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exceptionalism here. This is, this is what pharmaceutical companies sometimes do, right?

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And I want to complicate that a bit because one of the things that I’ve noticed is that,

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especially people that I’ve seen in my generation. And we’re not able to unsee the collateral damage

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of these major venture capital-backed frameworks.

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We’re not able to unsee the fact that the pursuing of profit

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did underlie many of the decisions that Insys made,

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that Purdue made, that a lot of these cigarette companies made.

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So when I’m thinking about the medical model and thinking about these concerns or kind of like these realities that you share the shared consensual reality of what pharma is really like

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um i’m curious what what about the what about the delivery of the medicine do you think could be done differently

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or should be done differently?

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Or what do you think we should be looking for?

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Well, let’s go back to some of the arguments that they made.

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They say, well, you know, these intellectual property practices are needed for a sustainable

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business model, right?

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They got a patent in the

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UK for psilocybin manufacturing methods. It will give them a cost advantage. It will make it harder

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for others to enter the market. And, you know, it could make the drug more expensive, right,

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for consumers, right? But, you know, this is how businesses do business they they try to they try to to get

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a corner on the market and make money back for their investors uh so and and they’re also you

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know have a contract with the lab that produces their psilocybin and they they’re trying to block

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the attempts of other non-profits like the usona institute to produce the psilocybin too so this is

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this is um sort of you know what they do what other pharmaceutical companies do i think it’s

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important to to anticipate that compass pathways is only a small company that they’re much bigger

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companies behind them coming up into this market because it’s huge. Yeah, I’ve been thinking

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lately, how many people here are involved in the cannabis industry? Right. There’s probably a good

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chunk of people here. Yeah. One of the things that I’ve been kind of saying in response to that is

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that like, I appreciate and think it’s critical that we bring attention to these issues. And I

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really do believe that in five or eight years, we’re going to be looking back on this like,

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as this quaint time where there are only like one or two large for-profit entities that are bringing money into the space.

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Right. Well, let’s look at one of the bigger companies that’s already in this space,

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because these companies are already here. So there have been some concerns about the launching

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of esketamine, ketamine nasal spray, by Janssen. It’s a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson,

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by Janssen. It’s a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, a massive pharmaceutical company, right? And this kind of nasal spray will be used to treat depression together with oral antidepressants.

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And it looks like it’ll be approved by the FDA. And the question is, how will it be used? Will it

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be used for long-term treatment? You know, will it be used every week?

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Of course, the question is the potential for addiction, right? We’re right back to the opioid

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question, right? Is this a way to a better drug delivery system to, will this lead to addiction

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to ketamine? Of course, you know, lots of ketamine clinics are already offering intravenous ketamine. Do we really need this drug delivery system?

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My point here is that with huge entities like Johnson & Johnson entering the market, we

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have to ask really hard questions.

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And to your point about different structures, yes, I think we need to create different structures,

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but know that we’re up against the Johnson and Johnsons

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of the world. We can’t make that go away. I want to add a little bit more context to

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what’s going on with Johnson and Johnson, because it is a really illustrative kind of example here.

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And as you mentioned, what’s likely being announced is that Johnson and Johnson will

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be releasing this nasal spray for ketamine, for S-ketamine, excuse me, which for people who are suffering depression and who have tried other treatments

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and don’t have access to other kinds of ketamine treatments, for example, is great because it means

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that there may be another drug on the market that can actually work. And as many of you here in the

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room know, racemic ketamine, generic ketamine, is already approved

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for a different indication for anesthesia.

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It’s already used by ketamine providers.

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It’s really cheap.

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And it’s off patent.

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So you’ve got current access to generic ketamine that already exists.

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access to generic ketamine that already exists.

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There are providers in this room that are able to get the medicine in that context legally,

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provided legally.

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And because S-ketamine is a minor shift and the delivery system, fancy nasal spray, which actually doctors will have to give you.

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They’re actually doing it so the doctors will have to give you the nasal spray, which is

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interesting because this is not particularly challenging.

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It’s not like an IV where you need someone with a bag

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and someone’s going to put something in your vein.

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It’s like a very different delivery system.

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But the point is that the fact that these drugs are off-patent,

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that MDMA is off-patent, that psilocybin itself cannot be patented for various reasons,

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these drugs are off patent, that MDMA is off patent, that psilocybin itself cannot be patented for various reasons, does not mean that people with money and intelligence and a really good

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working knowledge of how patents and intellectual property works will not do what they can to

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secure that information, protect their investments, do what they’ve got to do.

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It’s complicated. And I want to just back up and say, there’s some really good things to

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the medical framework in general. Like we’re talking a lot about the way it’s applied

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which is definitely problematic and i think we should go back to that but there are people and

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we’re going to talk a little bit about kind of underground work and non-medical frameworks as

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well but there are people who really need high quality quality controlled product in a safe setting with professionals

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that have accountability I would love for my grandmother and for people like

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her who are managing neurological issues like Parkinson’s to get something that

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has been vetted that I can get consistently forever that I don’t have

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to make sure it’s in stock at CBCB to pick up.

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I would love for there to be some route of access to the super high quality, super vetted

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medicine in a context where there’s some sort of licensing accountability for the people

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who are providing it.

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And not everyone necessarily requires a level of sensitivity.

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One of the things that I’ve learned and been looking at, back to the ketamine example,

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is that one of the things that’s really interesting about ketamine in particular,

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and it’s a good kind of thing to be tracking right now as we get closer to legal access of MDMA and psilocybin and other substances is that with ketamine, you have a whole process of accountability and systems that are being built

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around it between practitioners, best practices, et cetera, which are happening in a legal gray area

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or in a legal area, but it’s still gray. It’s still gray in the sense that there hasn’t been

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the kind of like oversight or guidance from American Medical Associations or different entities like that, like there have been.

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So we’re now in a place where we have a lot of fertile ground to build these best practices,

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to build these systems, and to think about, well, what are the creative ways that we want to make

00:25:38 ►

sure that people do have access, whether it’s in this highly vetted context, and what happens when

00:25:42 ►

we go outside? So. Well, I want to go back to

00:25:46 ►

something that you brought up, which is the issue of accountability. I think accountability is really

00:25:51 ►

important, especially in markets where monopolies have a lot of power, right? So let’s talk about

00:25:59 ►

how monopolies work in a market. They often try to get a monopoly on a substance

00:26:05 ►

or a therapy or a delivery system

00:26:09 ►

that allows them to make more money in a market

00:26:13 ►

and keep out competitors,

00:26:15 ►

pay back their shareholders, et cetera.

00:26:18 ►

So, but it’s not just for profit,

00:26:21 ►

it’s nonprofits as well.

00:26:22 ►

Maps will have a monopoly on MDMA for five years.

00:26:25 ►

Yeah, we’ll have data exclusivity, yeah, which means that we’ll be the only ones that will be

00:26:29 ►

able to sell generic MDMA upon approval for five years after. That’s right. And big players like

00:26:35 ►

Johnson & Johnson try to go for a monopoly. Small players like Compass Pathways, they do,

00:26:41 ►

you know, they have their tactics for trying to get a monopoly going.

00:26:47 ►

ways. They have their tactics for trying to get a monopoly going. Monopolies are not very good at regulating themselves, right? The nature of monopolies, they’re incentivized to

00:26:52 ►

perhaps even conceal ethical violations, not reveal them because there’s too much money at stake,

00:27:00 ►

right? I want to argue for really strong independent regulatory

00:27:06 ►

bodies for people involved in psychedelic assisted therapies

00:27:12 ►

independent oversight awareness of conflict of interest I think they’ll

00:27:18 ►

always be attempts by monopolies and whatever market we’re talking about to

00:27:22 ►

try to co-opt regulatory bodies. And I think that

00:27:26 ►

in our quest for critical thinking about these issues, it’s going to be really important to

00:27:32 ►

always be vigilant and fight for independence of regulatory oversight and to be alert for efforts

00:27:39 ►

to undermine any independent regulatory body and for the whole community of people who keep track

00:27:48 ►

of these issues to do that collectively. And this is a critical point because we’re at this

00:27:52 ►

interesting, we’re like, if anyone here who’s like grown their hair out, like there’s like an

00:27:56 ►

awkward phase where like your hair like sits on your head, fine. And then when it’s long, it’s

00:28:01 ►

fine. But when it’s the middle, it’s like this weird poofiness. We’re in the weird poofy phase of the psychedelic renaissance, if you will,

00:28:07 ►

in the sense that we have a lot of options.

00:28:12 ►

Wear a hat or…

00:28:13 ►

No, but actually, we’re in this place where there’s an interplay.

00:28:18 ►

There’s still an ongoing dialogue between the community, broadly defined,

00:28:23 ►

people who are actively taking

00:28:25 ►

psychedelics who are engaged with psychedelic culture who are interested in

00:28:28 ►

bringing people into it who believe that they could benefit from it in a medical

00:28:31 ►

context and the creation of the capital I industry and I think like going back

00:28:36 ►

to this cannabis example we have this time where we can learn from things that

00:28:41 ►

happen in other industries and other spaces, from ketamine and Johnson & Johnson

00:28:46 ►

to what’s going on with Compass

00:28:47 ►

to what’s going on in the cannabis industry

00:28:49 ►

and kind of pick and choose from these different systems

00:28:51 ►

to kind of build something

00:28:54 ►

both within the regulatory, medical regulatory framework

00:28:56 ►

in the best way that we possibly can

00:28:58 ►

and do that in a way that’s aligned

00:29:03 ►

with the needs and expectations of us all.

00:29:06 ►

Not you all, us all.

00:29:07 ►

Those of us who are participating in this dialogue.

00:29:10 ►

So maybe now is a good time to talk a little bit about some of the stuff that MAPS is doing.

00:29:13 ►

Yes.

00:29:13 ►

Because I think that it is critical to be concerned about these things.

00:29:19 ►

And I think that it’s also important that we as an organization, that MAPS as an organization is able to be

00:29:26 ►

transparent about how we’re responding to these real concerns and how we are hoping

00:29:32 ►

to model something different.

00:29:33 ►

Yes.

00:29:34 ►

And I would just like to say that this conversation about oversight and regulatory bodies has

00:29:39 ►

been going on for years, years and years and years.

00:29:43 ►

And many people in the Maps community have been

00:29:45 ►

part of this conversation. And it’s really moving forward with much greater urgency now for all the

00:29:50 ►

reasons. And I’m really happy to see that happen. Yeah. And I think there’s probably four pieces,

00:29:54 ►

kind of three and a half pieces that I think would be relevant here that are worth throwing in

00:29:57 ►

because we’re in the midst of developing systems. And it’s in some ways novel in the sense that we’re trying to create systems of accountability

00:30:09 ►

for something that kind of hasn’t been done before, at least in the overground and the

00:30:12 ►

visible way.

00:30:13 ►

And at the same time, we’re building off of systems that exist in a lot of other places,

00:30:18 ►

in a lot of other modalities of healing, in a lot of other conflict resolution contexts.

00:30:24 ►

So we’re really trying to

00:30:25 ►

like pick and choose the best that we can and hold that close. So there’s a few things. One,

00:30:30 ►

your point about the independent advisory board is a real, or the independent certifying

00:30:34 ►

board is really important, I think. And right now we have the entities like MAPS and COMPASS

00:30:40 ►

and USONA and HEFTA that are doing drug development. And in the process of the drug

00:30:44 ►

development, they’re also developing therapy modalities

00:30:45 ►

or treatment modalities.

00:30:49 ►

And that’s all fine and good.

00:30:51 ►

It’s really beautiful because in some ways

00:30:52 ►

it’s the birth of this new method,

00:30:53 ►

or at least the birth of the visible piece

00:30:56 ►

of these modalities.

00:30:58 ►

But you’re right, we don’t yet have

00:31:01 ►

super visible, active third-party actors.

00:31:04 ►

There’s definitely CIIS. There’s other people that are doing trainings. There’s other entities that are

00:31:08 ►

doing that. But because we’re still kind of in this awkward phase, we’re still waiting for people

00:31:14 ►

that are not working in the drug development context, maybe therapists, maybe not,

00:31:18 ►

who are interested in creating these oversight bodies. The fact is a lot of major industries,

00:31:24 ►

including pharma, have consumer

00:31:26 ►

oversight bodies, have consumers and people who are looking at these issues from totally kind of

00:31:31 ►

separated, kind of outside of the conflict of interest perspectives, because at least in theory,

00:31:37 ►

those systems believe that that independent oversight is important. So we agree and think

00:31:41 ►

it’s critical that that happens. So first off, yes. And my understanding is that there are efforts between therapists, you know, outside of the MAPS network,

00:31:49 ►

outside of any kind of formal network that are creating these like third party professional

00:31:52 ►

certification bodies, which is really exciting because that means that we have more people,

00:31:56 ►

which means more dialogue and sure, more opinions and more perspectives. But I think that’s generally

00:31:59 ►

a good thing. So that’s one. The other is the creation of the actual code of ethics for the MDMA therapists, which,

00:32:07 ►

of course, draws on codes of ethics from other kinds of therapy, including Hikomi, and other

00:32:12 ►

kind of forms of altered state consciousness, because people, as you may know, are more

00:32:18 ►

sensitive in these altered states and do require a certain duty of care, a certain expectation

00:32:22 ►

of care for treatment providers that traditional systems of accountability may not be prepared to or have the range to

00:32:29 ►

engage with.

00:32:30 ►

So part of building a code of ethics, though, is also a code of accountability.

00:32:35 ►

And it’s like, what exactly do you do when someone violates the code of ethics?

00:32:39 ►

Because when your whole society is built on exile and isolation, and anytime anyone does

00:32:44 ►

something wrong, you send them to jail, which is really hard to advocate for when you’re working with people in the underground, because we’ve kind of developed a suspicion to the criminal legal system for some reason or another.

00:32:55 ►

It’s really hard to create systems of accountability that are not just replications of that isolate and exile.

00:33:00 ►

And I think that that’s a big piece.

00:33:01 ►

We’ll come back to that.

00:33:02 ►

But I think I want to flag that because a lot of what we’re trying to do is not just about the psychedelics.

00:33:07 ►

It’s not just about the modality.

00:33:08 ►

A big piece of it is the modality of healing and the access to treatment.

00:33:11 ►

But it’s also all these auxiliary pieces, including, well, what happens when something goes wrong?

00:33:17 ►

What do we do now so we’re not dealing with the Purdue of LSD in 15 years?

00:33:23 ►

I’m not even sure how that would work, but you might

00:33:26 ►

have seen that someone did a protest against Purdue. They made a giant heroin spoon and they

00:33:30 ►

put a giant heroin spoon in front of the Purdue offices. And it’s like a massive piece of art.

00:33:35 ►

Like what’s the, is it like a giant sheet of blotter acid? That would be like the protest

00:33:38 ►

against the LSD, the corporate LSD guys. But yeah, so those are two pieces. And then I guess

00:33:43 ►

the last is

00:33:45 ►

something I’m really excited about,

00:33:46 ►

which is the creation of the actual ethical framework

00:33:49 ►

or corporate social responsibility framework for MAPS

00:33:52 ►

and the public benefit corporation.

00:33:53 ►

So I want to spend just a second talking about that

00:33:55 ►

because it’s really interesting.

00:33:56 ►

And I think response to some of the concerns

00:33:57 ►

that you were mentioning that we have

00:33:59 ►

about pharma in general.

00:34:01 ►

So as Annie mentioned earlier,

00:34:02 ►

we have like these major concerns about pharma.

00:34:04 ►

Usually it’s backed by venture capital. Usually there are all these interests that are really focused on

00:34:09 ►

bringing back profit, which is maybe in tension with healing people. So that means that for people

00:34:17 ►

that like MAPS who are trying to develop a drug in the pharmaceutical framework, you’re right,

00:34:22 ►

no psychedelic exceptions, and we are doing regulatory compliance. We’re following FDA’s rules. You know, we’ve definitely made some

00:34:27 ►

changes within FDA, too. We’ve definitely done some policy work in there. But for the most part,

00:34:31 ►

we’re doing a process of regulatory compliance of following the FDA’s rules in order to show

00:34:35 ►

that the FDA ought to approve this particular drug. So we have a couple things that are

00:34:39 ►

particularly interesting, and one being this model that we’re working at with MAPS, which is

00:34:44 ►

the nonprofit entity, which is what MAPS, which is the nonprofit

00:34:45 ►

entity, which is what I work for, which is the sole investor in a for-profit public benefit

00:34:51 ►

corporation, which is actually going to be selling the MDMA and training the therapists.

00:34:55 ►

The reason this is relevant is because it’s very unusual for a company to have

00:34:58 ►

one stakeholder and for that stakeholder to be a nonprofit. So this kind of hybrid public

00:35:04 ►

benefit core model is relatively new.

00:35:05 ►

It’s something that was developed in the last 15, 20 years.

00:35:08 ►

And it’s exciting because it means to me

00:35:10 ►

that MAPS has this opportunity to create a model

00:35:15 ►

for a pharmaceutical company

00:35:17 ►

that’s operating within the FDA framework

00:35:19 ►

that does more than just bring Schedule I drug to market,

00:35:24 ►

but also offers an

00:35:27 ►

alternative vision for what drug sales, drug distribution, what drug access can look like

00:35:35 ►

with all of these other pieces in mind. One more piece that I’ll add is because MDMA therapy,

00:35:41 ►

and I would say that this is probably true of psilocybin, and I think will

00:35:45 ►

likely be true of a lot of other psychedelic modalities, not as true with ketamine, but true

00:35:49 ►

in other contexts, is that we’re not necessarily working on a palliative care model. We’re not

00:35:53 ►

necessarily saying take the MDMA home and take it, microdose it every day for, you know, the next

00:35:57 ►

however long before you’re okay. The model is about treatment. The model is about actually

00:36:01 ►

changing people’s mental health state for the long term. So I just bring all that up because we’re trying to push some boundaries here. I can’t predict

00:36:13 ►

about how, I can’t predict how successful it will be. But I do hope that, and I want this to kind

00:36:18 ►

of, I really want MAPS and the Public Benefit Corporation to at least show what’s possible given the context, the

00:36:27 ►

constraints that we have. I recognize that I personally and we personally, I think that we

00:36:33 ►

can and should bring a lot of critique and accountability and visibility to these issues.

00:36:37 ►

And I don’t think I’m going to stop the venture capital funder from putting a bunch of money

00:36:42 ►

behind the next big Lsd thing so instead

00:36:46 ►

i think that the thing that i want to do and i believe that we can and should do within this

00:36:50 ►

community whether it’s at the psychedelic society level whether it’s maps whether it’s different

00:36:55 ►

random groups is how do we build in systems of transparency accountability visibility

00:37:02 ►

that we then ask the public,

00:37:05 ►

ask our community to hold ourselves responsible to,

00:37:08 ►

hold ourselves accountable to,

00:37:09 ►

to, at the very least,

00:37:12 ►

impact the spaces that we’re working in

00:37:14 ►

and the treatments that we’re working in.

00:37:16 ►

I don’t necessarily know what’s going to happen,

00:37:20 ►

but I believe that with kind of help

00:37:24 ►

from transformative economic models, whether it’s cooperative ownership of farm and manufacturing distribution of cannabis, whether it’s collectively owned dispensaries, whether it’s a pharmaceutical company that has one shareholder and is trying to do something that may not be completely in pursuit of profit but is actually in pursuit of other things, what would that actually look like?

00:37:47 ►

So I think over the next few years, we’re going to see.

00:37:49 ►

I mean, MAPS will be selling MDMA soon, within the next couple of years.

00:37:54 ►

So having some of this stuff in place really matters.

00:37:57 ►

Yeah, and I think encouraging transparency and independent oversight

00:38:02 ►

and having the community get involved in these conversations

00:38:07 ►

is really critical. And I really look forward to seeing what kind of structures are created.

00:38:13 ►

It’s creating an entirely new world of accountability and oversight and asking

00:38:23 ►

some difficult questions and coming up

00:38:25 ►

with new systems which is really exciting actually and and I think I

00:38:29 ►

would argue especially important for women right because when women undergo

00:38:36 ►

psychedelic assisted therapy they are perhaps in some cases more vulnerable to sexual exploitation, to being abused by unethical

00:38:47 ►

providers. And so not just women, of course, but I, you know, from my own perspective, I think it’s

00:38:54 ►

really important to stand up and really be in defense of people who are receiving this therapy

00:39:01 ►

and make sure they’re not re-traumatized by unethical practitioners.

00:39:05 ►

So now might be a good time to talk about accountability, which is like the sexiest

00:39:09 ►

topic.

00:39:10 ►

Everyone loves talking about how we’re going to hold people accountable.

00:39:12 ►

Oh, yeah.

00:39:12 ►

Let’s talk about accountability.

00:39:13 ►

Right.

00:39:13 ►

So we have this context now where the progress in the medical model is creating a super strong

00:39:22 ►

demand for what what do you call

00:39:25 ►

unsupervised social use uh unsupervised self-experimentation there we go there we go so

00:39:29 ►

we have a lot of movement happening in the medical framework very exciting yes access to medicine

00:39:36 ►

complicated capitalism politics all that’s happening but that means that there’s a lot of

00:39:41 ►

movement happening in the underground and that is is challenging for a few different reasons.

00:39:50 ►

How is that coming up for you?

00:39:53 ►

It’s a big challenge.

00:39:54 ►

The focus and attention, media attention on medical models has created a very strong demand for transformative social experiences in community settings.

00:40:08 ►

I want to be clear here, the vast majority of people who use psychedelics will use them in

00:40:13 ►

social settings, not in clinical settings, right? We just have to remind ourselves of this.

00:40:21 ►

Totally. You know, most people will seek out a social setting to have this kind

00:40:28 ►

of transformative experience. But now that the medical model is making this great promise for

00:40:33 ►

transformation and healing to remove yourself or a person from pain, it’s creating enormous pressure

00:40:40 ►

on social systems that are created to create containers for psychedelic

00:40:46 ►

experiences. And myself and many other people who produce transformative and immersive art events

00:40:55 ►

are really thinking carefully about best practices for unsupervised self-experimentation and really trying to share what we believe to be

00:41:08 ►

good best practices for creating these kinds of containers. And I want to say that part of this

00:41:16 ►

is a really beautiful interplay between people who are working within the medical model and people

00:41:22 ►

who are working within, let’s just call it the social model, right? Because in the events that I produce and many other people produce,

00:41:32 ►

there are, for example, quiet spaces where people can receive direct care. At the events that we

00:41:40 ►

produce in my production company that I run with my partners, Take Three Presents.

00:41:45 ►

We have a quiet space where people can come for direct care and direct support.

00:41:51 ►

And we recruit people who are trained within the medical model to staff those spaces, to create support in those spaces because they’ve received some really advanced training.

00:42:03 ►

And, of course, the MAPS and the

00:42:06 ►

Zendo project do the same thing, right? Create supportive care spaces for people in social

00:42:12 ►

settings and reach out to people trained within the medical model to provide that expertise and

00:42:18 ►

that training. It feeds back into the social model very nicely. So let’s talk about this for a little bit because we started this conversation

00:42:28 ►

thinking about how medicalization,

00:42:30 ►

this idea of creating legal access

00:42:32 ►

through a medical framework,

00:42:33 ►

which is federally viable, is safer,

00:42:36 ►

but it’s in response in some ways to prohibition.

00:42:38 ►

It may not be how access would organically occur,

00:42:42 ►

but for that framework.

00:42:43 ►

So I’m thinking now about risk reduction

00:42:45 ►

and about how you know i want to go down the line a little bit more into where we uh where we can

00:42:52 ►

vision what things would look like independently of that framework but right now we’re still

00:42:56 ►

operating in a framework where there is the concern about criminality there is the concern

00:43:00 ►

there is the very real lack of mental of access to mental health care services in the world generally, much less at events. I was just at an event last week speaking to event

00:43:12 ►

producers who are working with cannabis in the Bay Area because there are a lot of event producers

00:43:17 ►

that really want to have cannabis-infused events. And it’s interesting, and I appreciate that

00:43:23 ►

producers of cannabis events are thinking about how to take care of people who are dosing themselves in these spaces.

00:43:30 ►

Something that I don’t, I mean, hear at least so actively with other kinds of safe consumption sites for alcohol, like bars.

00:43:37 ►

And I’d be really interested in thinking more about, like, what are the norms?

00:43:47 ►

thinking more about like what are the norms for now while we’re still, you know, operating within this prohibition of supreme, what are the norms that we should be thinking about in these social

00:43:50 ►

contexts, whether it’s for individual guides who work with individuals or with groups or who are

00:43:55 ►

throwing events? What are the things that we should be thinking about? Well, I think that we

00:44:01 ►

should acknowledge that people can have transformative experiences in social settings.

00:44:08 ►

That social settings where people are exposed to art, to music, to community, can also be a transformative experience.

00:44:26 ►

and that people who are producing events must just assume for the point of argument that people may come to their events, and they may take psychedelic substances,

00:44:33 ►

and they may have transformative experiences,

00:44:37 ►

and they may also need a certain amount of support.

00:44:40 ►

Let’s go back to the idea of the quiet space and direct care and Zendo and those kinds of services.

00:44:48 ►

It’s really important to offer these kinds of services as best practices.

00:44:53 ►

It’s also really important to understand that people who work in these services are exposing themselves to liability when they work in these services, when they donate their time, when they volunteer

00:45:06 ►

to provide that kind of support. And this came in sharp relief, you know, two years ago at

00:45:12 ►

Lightning in a Bottle where a participant died who had been in the Zendo, who had received care

00:45:20 ►

from medical providers at the event. This woman’s family just sued everybody, right?

00:45:26 ►

They sued MAPS.

00:45:27 ►

They sued Lightning in a Bottle, which was the event where this took place.

00:45:30 ►

They sued the medical provider.

00:45:33 ►

You know, it requires a certain amount of courage because there is a lot of liability

00:45:38 ►

involved.

00:45:39 ►

And it’s very possible that people volunteering themselves for these services could really

00:45:46 ►

expose themselves to liability and they need to be protected and they need to ask themselves

00:45:51 ►

what kind of protection is MAPS offering me if I volunteer in the Zendo?

00:45:56 ►

I think it’s a really important question.

00:45:58 ►

Totally.

00:45:59 ►

I’m happy to report that we do have liability insurance at this point.

00:46:02 ►

Excellent.

00:46:03 ►

But I think that those are good questions. And I think from the perspective of people

00:46:05 ►

who are engaging with these spaces,

00:46:10 ►

especially like in the current paradigm,

00:46:12 ►

to be thinking about like,

00:46:14 ►

well, what’s that like edgy place

00:46:16 ►

between what we are able to legally do

00:46:20 ►

and what we must do ethically

00:46:23 ►

to create safety for people

00:46:24 ►

who we know will not necessarily follow

00:46:26 ►

the law independently of your opinion of whether or not it’s the right thing to do a psychedelic

00:46:32 ►

in a social context or at a festival right the reality that people do it means that for us as a

00:46:37 ►

community bringing that responsibility forward and kind of really not letting go, not isolating and separating ourselves from the reality that

00:46:47 ►

the people who are seeking these experiences are a lot like us and are a lot like our family

00:46:53 ►

members who maybe will never take a psychedelic drug until it’s given to them by their doctor

00:46:59 ►

in a white coat. And in the meantime, while people are seeking these experiences in uncontrolled contexts, outside of clinical contexts, really bringing awareness of what is motivating that, knowing that we can’t know the different places that people are coming from, that the least we can do is treat them with a dignity and respect of having access to the services that sometimes in a legal gray area must be provided because we as a community are deciding

00:47:32 ►

that we want to participate actively participate in the creation of safe spaces for people who are

00:47:38 ►

just seeking themselves just seeking that non-dual state that alicia was

00:47:43 ►

joking about earlier absolutely i i think it’s i’d like to go back to a question of best practices here.

00:47:49 ►

Totally. Because there are a lot of people,

00:47:51 ►

myself included, and many other people who produce events who are actively really exploring and

00:47:58 ►

looking at best practices. So here’s some best practices that I really embrace and that I think are current best

00:48:06 ►

thinking for reducing risk in social settings where these substances may be used.

00:48:14 ►

For example, I really support events that do not serve alcohol.

00:48:20 ►

Alcohol is the business model for most of the entertainment industry.

00:48:24 ►

The events I produce, we do not run a bar.

00:48:27 ►

We do not run our business model on alcohol sales.

00:48:30 ►

And we don’t let other people run bars at our events.

00:48:34 ►

We work with a community of artists.

00:48:37 ►

The artists cannot use alcohol in their art pieces, right?

00:48:41 ►

We’re removing this business model from our events. We have to be more creative about

00:48:49 ►

financing and about how we think about entertainment, quote unquote, right? Another thing we do,

00:48:59 ►

we always offer sobriety support groups. If you want to be supported in your sobriety at our event,

00:49:05 ►

we will have several of those groups a day where you can come and be supporting your sobriety.

00:49:10 ►

We need to support people who are acting on sobriety in their own lives. I think it’s really

00:49:16 ►

important to do that. A couple other things. We create direct care spaces. We also run internal security at our events. We have a group of rangers

00:49:29 ►

who are our health and safety team. We have a rapid response and de-escalation team for conflict

00:49:36 ►

at the events. We have a mediation group that considers conflicts and complaints, you know,

00:49:43 ►

from people throughout the year in between events,

00:49:47 ►

and we recruit from people with training in the therapeutic community to serve on these

00:49:52 ►

volunteer teams, we create that knowledge and those best practices internally inside our community

00:50:00 ►

instead of outsourcing them. One thing we do outsource is if there’s a conflict and or

00:50:08 ►

somebody has been involved in a consent violation, we go to the larger community of therapists.

00:50:18 ►

And I want to give a shout out here for the California Institute for Integral Studies.

00:50:27 ►

here for the California Institute for Integral Studies. They train terrific therapists who will not judge you based on the drugs you do or the kind of sex you have. Thank you. And we can,

00:50:34 ►

if somebody in our community needs that kind of therapeutic support, we can do a referral

00:50:40 ►

out to a CIS therapist or other groups of therapists in the community.

00:50:46 ►

So these therapists receiving training for providing psychedelic-assisted therapy

00:50:52 ►

are creating an enormous wealth of knowledge that we can reach out to

00:50:57 ►

to help solve conflict in our community.

00:51:00 ►

Conflict destroys community if you don’t address it,

00:51:06 ►

community. Conflict destroys community if you don’t address it, if you don’t create safe spaces to make sure that consent is something that’s upheld. And when people, for example, have a

00:51:15 ►

situation where their consent is not respected, that something happens, that there’s a process

00:51:20 ►

for investigating that and making sure that community values are upheld.

00:51:27 ►

So I want to draw attention to the fact that some of you may have noticed that a lot of what we’re

00:51:30 ►

talking about is not actually about psychedelics. It’s about the frameworks within which they’re

00:51:36 ►

used. And I think that’s an important kind of meta point because I’ve been kind of joking lately,

00:51:43 ►

I don’t know if it’s very funny, but psychedelics are like the glittery rainbow gate into our shadow.

00:51:49 ►

And it’s really fun and it is really encouraging and really interesting to be able to talk about unsupervised social use or creative kind of context or treatment and healthcare.

00:52:01 ►

And, like, it is really interesting to talk about the psychedelia. I mean, we’re in San Francisco.

00:52:06 ►

We’re like, you know, this community here

00:52:08 ►

is kind of in some ways birthed out

00:52:10 ►

of what we know as American psychedelia.

00:52:13 ►

And that to me is really exciting

00:52:17 ►

because it tells me that there’s like

00:52:19 ►

kind of norms being built and things being established.

00:52:23 ►

But they’re not just about the

00:52:25 ►

tripping. They’re about how we treat each other. They’re about the safety that we consider baseline

00:52:32 ►

for the people that are in our community. The standard of care that many people that are

00:52:37 ►

working in these events, that are working in these spaces, are holding themselves to is higher than

00:52:41 ►

what most people, what most event spaces, what most producers are talking, are thinking about. So this might be a good transition into the future. Right. So for the

00:52:50 ►

future, I would like to advocate for something that I believe is a best practice. And this is

00:52:56 ►

on-site, on-demand reagent testing. Right. What I mean by reagent testing,

00:53:03 ►

yeah. Can we have some applause for this

00:53:06 ►

best practices best practices people sometimes acquire substances they’re not exactly sure

00:53:19 ►

what’s in these substances they should be trained to learn how to use commercially available reagent testing kits

00:53:26 ►

that can be bought on Amazon online through DanceSafe, which is a great nonprofit organization.

00:53:33 ►

Amazon just stops carrying them. What? Like this week. Oh, bad, bad, bad. Amazon and a bunch of

00:53:38 ►

other online retailers stopped carrying them this week. I think there was a guidance or something

00:53:41 ►

happened. Yeah, support DanceSafe. DanceSafe. DanSafe.org. We’re going to give you a big shout out. All right. I believe that people who produce

00:53:49 ►

events should invite DanSafe or other organizations to come and provide on-demand

00:53:57 ►

reagent testing at their events so that people can make sure that whatever substance they’re

00:54:04 ►

taking is the substance they think it is, so that they are not sure that whatever substance they’re taking is the substance they

00:54:05 ►

think it is, so that they are not taking adulterated substances. And in particular,

00:54:11 ►

they’re not taking substances that might be contaminated by fentanyl, right? It’s a synthetic

00:54:17 ►

opioid. It’s very cheap to produce. It’s very small. It’s easy to smuggle.

00:54:22 ►

So let’s data point again. This is really important. It’s

00:54:26 ►

20 to 50 times more potent than heroin, right? And in 2017, where we have the last data for this,

00:54:38 ►

the incidence of overdose deaths from fentanyl increased 45%, right? In 2017, it’s showing up in heroin,

00:54:49 ►

oxycodone, Xanax, and cocaine. Here’s a data point for you. 37% of the cocaine-related overdose

00:54:55 ►

deaths in New York City in 2016 involved fentanyl. Thank you for saying that because a lot of people

00:55:02 ►

use cocaine, maybe more, especially in

00:55:05 ►

social public settings than they use heroin. Right. And a lot of people are overdosing from

00:55:11 ►

fentanyl and cocaine. So if you have, if you or your friends use cocaine, I know this is a little

00:55:14 ►

bit of deviance from the topic, but it’s critical public health information that I think everyone

00:55:17 ►

should know. If you or someone you know uses cocaine, get fentanyl test strips, use it. People

00:55:22 ►

are overdosing a lot. It’s very sad. We don’t want more of our friends to die.

00:55:25 ►

That’s right.

00:55:26 ►

I think that event producers should offer reagent testing, including testing for fentanyl, right?

00:55:32 ►

This is really important.

00:55:34 ►

This is a public health outreach.

00:55:35 ►

You can keep people from dying.

00:55:36 ►

You know, researchers at University of California, San Francisco said in December that fentanyl contamination most likely spreads

00:55:46 ►

because of heroin and prescription pill shortages, also because it’s cheaper for wholesalers than

00:55:52 ►

heroin, and low-level dealers often don’t know they’re selling it, right? There could also be

00:55:58 ►

contamination, cross-contamination in packaging. There are all sorts of reasons it could show up,

00:56:02 ►

but it’s in the supply of substances that people are doing. And event producers in social settings should offer

00:56:11 ►

fentanyl testing and reagent testing. So this is a good segue, I think,

00:56:14 ►

to full loop this conversation, actually, because one, we can have a whole event on

00:56:21 ►

why fentanyl is so prevalent. But the reason I want to use it to kind of,

00:56:25 ►

I want to come back to the topic of criminality and criminalization.

00:56:28 ►

Because one of the reasons fentanyl is so prevalent

00:56:32 ►

is that when our whole system for fighting the war on drugs

00:56:39 ►

is based on supply-side reduction,

00:56:42 ►

which basically means fumigating coca crops in the Andes,

00:56:47 ►

trying to burn every single poppy

00:56:51 ►

in the entirety of the country of Afghanistan.

00:56:55 ►

It also means that people who are smuggling drugs

00:56:59 ►

in underground contexts

00:57:01 ►

are incentivized to basically proliferate drugs that are smaller,

00:57:09 ►

that are easier to smuggle. The existence of fentanyl in the drug supply, the poisoning of

00:57:14 ►

the drug supply by fentanyl is a direct result of prohibition. It’s directly coming out of

00:57:21 ►

the criminalized framework that we’re currently in. And on that, I kind of want to zoom out a little bit,

00:57:27 ►

because we’re talking a lot about safe spaces for people and events.

00:57:31 ►

And I think that it’s critical here to also remember

00:57:34 ►

what it means to have a safe space for people in the world,

00:57:38 ►

which I think comes down to criminality of identities, of behaviors.

00:57:50 ►

And one of the interesting places where this overlaps is the question about medicalization. So what exactly does medicalization do to criminalization?

00:57:54 ►

So what happens when we make something medically illegal? Does that mean that criminal penalties

00:57:57 ►

no longer exist? The answer, unfortunately, is no. As many of you know, selling legal drugs in illegal contexts remains illegal. So even if

00:58:09 ►

MDMA becomes medically available, even if psilocybin becomes medically available,

00:58:14 ►

the FDA approval alone is not going to actually change the criminality.

00:58:18 ►

And until people feel safer outside of their doctor’s office, we may not see the proliferation of these organic,

00:58:26 ►

free communities that we’re looking for. So I think we need to talk about other things,

00:58:30 ►

like sentencing and decriminalization. And I think for us to be thinking about

00:58:33 ►

psychedelic systems of the future, we have to be thinking, if we really want to be visionary,

00:58:37 ►

we have to be thinking about them in decriminalized context, where we can really

00:58:41 ►

imagine what it would look like for an organic community led accountable collaborative ideally cooperatively owned vision of something can emerge yes yeah i i

00:58:53 ►

agree with that and and i also i also think that it’s this is going to be a progression it’s going

00:58:59 ►

to take time in the meantime there needs to be some critical outreach done. I’d like to give an

00:59:05 ►

example again of best practices. I’m the co-founder of a nonprofit called the Women’s Visionary

00:59:11 ►

Council. We produce the Women’s Visionary Congress, which is going to happen again in June.

00:59:17 ►

One of the important things that we’ve been doing for four years is doing risk reduction workshops.

00:59:21 ►

We teach people how to use naloxone to prevent opioid

00:59:25 ►

overdose. Can you mention really quickly what’s naloxone for the people who don’t know? Because

00:59:29 ►

it’s critical that we know. Naloxone blocks opioid receptors in the body and prevents people from

00:59:34 ►

dying of an opioid overdose. We teach people how to use naloxone. We teach people how to use a milligram scale accurately to weigh precisely so that they don’t overdose

00:59:48 ►

themselves.

00:59:49 ►

We teach volumetric measuring.

00:59:52 ►

And we also teach people how to use reagent testing kits, which they can get on their

00:59:56 ►

own.

00:59:57 ►

So these are best practices for right now.

01:00:00 ►

And I think that this is knowledge that should be shared. I believe firmly that knowledge

01:00:07 ►

should not be put behind some sort of wall, that it should be shared openly among all community

01:00:15 ►

members. Now, while this is happening, I think that as we move towards medical use of substances, that people within the medical model should continue

01:00:30 ►

to push for decriminalization, for sentencing reform, and for getting substances out of Schedule

01:00:38 ►

Because all those people who are donating all those tens of millions of dollars to MAPS need those substances out of

01:00:46 ►

schedule one to stop being prosecuted for just exploring those substances on their own.

01:00:54 ►

Yeah. Coming back to this whole medical framework, one of the things that we missed is that

01:00:58 ►

some of like this system, the medical system, the criminal legal system, we talk a lot about, we critique them a lot.

01:01:09 ►

And a lot of people argue that they’re working badly.

01:01:17 ►

Some people, myself included, are more of the belief that they’re working very well.

01:01:22 ►

are more of the belief that they’re working very well,

01:01:26 ►

but that these kind of secondary impacts,

01:01:29 ►

this collateral damage is kind of part of the system.

01:01:32 ►

It’s actually something that can’t really be unstuck from its current state.

01:01:33 ►

And I think that one of the challenges that comes up

01:01:38 ►

when thinking about whether it’s sentencing reform

01:01:42 ►

or the medical model

01:01:44 ►

is that we’re really trying to break our way out

01:01:50 ►

of these boxes that for many years

01:01:56 ►

have been presented to us as the only frameworks

01:01:58 ►

within which this stuff can happen.

01:02:00 ►

And part of the attention that I see

01:02:02 ►

coming from places like Oregon and Denver where they’re looking at alternative systems that are outside of the federal system, that are outside of the attention that I see coming from places like Oregon and Denver where they’re

01:02:06 ►

looking at alternative systems that are outside of the federal system that are outside of the

01:02:09 ►

medical model or that are kind of adjacent to or related to the medical model but may not

01:02:13 ►

be existing in the federal framework is really an enthusiasm for what that

01:02:22 ►

could look like without those constraints.

01:02:27 ►

I can’t not, I can’t like totally remove my realist lens.

01:02:35 ►

I’m thinking like, what would actually work?

01:02:37 ►

What can we actually do?

01:02:39 ►

But part of the many, one of the many values I think that psychedelics offer is the ability to recognize

01:02:47 ►

not only that there is a box in the first place, that the boundaries that we’re working within

01:02:52 ►

are boundaries that are kind of imposed, but also the possibility that we as individuals,

01:03:01 ►

as a collective, as people empowered within the political civic process,

01:03:05 ►

do have options to push and to seek systems that are not necessarily fitting in that.

01:03:10 ►

Now, it’s going to be really hard to convince people that the citizens of any random state

01:03:18 ►

should create from scratch a whole psychedelic system that is going to be effective in making

01:03:24 ►

sure that people get good psychedelic therapy.

01:03:25 ►

That’s a big lift.

01:03:26 ►

But it’s not like they’re not going to try.

01:03:29 ►

It’s not like they’re not going to try.

01:03:30 ►

They’re going to try in Oregon.

01:03:32 ►

They’re going to try in Denver.

01:03:34 ►

And this is just the beginning.

01:03:35 ►

It’s really just the tip of the iceberg for state initiatives, right, in addition to FDA

01:03:42 ►

federal regulation.

01:03:43 ►

Totally.

01:03:44 ►

There’s efforts in Oakland going on. Shout out to y’all. There’s efforts in Oakland going on.

01:03:46 ►

Shout out to y’all.

01:03:47 ►

There’s efforts in Oakland going on.

01:03:49 ►

There are people talking about efforts in California.

01:03:52 ►

There’s obviously what a lot of people here know about

01:03:54 ►

in Oregon, in Denver.

01:03:55 ►

There is inevitably going to be attention

01:03:58 ►

that works outside of these frameworks

01:04:00 ►

that I was talking about earlier,

01:04:01 ►

outside of the federal medical framework,

01:04:03 ►

outside of even pushing Congress to reschedule. So that brings me to what we need to do

01:04:11 ►

and what we can do as a community to ensure that we’re prepared for that kind of attention from

01:04:16 ►

venture capital, from really, really enthusiastic people in different states that are like,

01:04:22 ►

we’re not going to wait for FDA approval.

01:04:25 ►

This is critical. We’re urgent. We’re in a crisis. We’re in an overdose crisis.

01:04:30 ►

We are in crisis of suicide, of despair deaths, of pain, of suffering, of isolation. There’s a

01:04:37 ►

lot going on. Climate crisis. People are freaked out. We don’t really have the time to wait.

01:04:42 ►

Right. They’re not going to wait for FDA to, you know,

01:04:46 ►

go through all the hoops, right?

01:04:47 ►

Most of this crowd didn’t wait for FDA approval.

01:04:49 ►

Uh-uh.

01:04:52 ►

So I think that

01:04:53 ►

brings me then to, like, what

01:04:55 ►

are these pieces that need to be

01:04:57 ►

included? And I want to say, I know that we

01:04:59 ►

have a few more minutes before we want

01:05:01 ►

to take questions. Right.

01:05:04 ►

I want to list just a few

01:05:05 ►

things that i really would love to see us start to develop and i think are already happening um

01:05:10 ►

one the question about rites of passage and the stewarding of knowledge yes i say that because

01:05:19 ►

one thing that we that we will really want to acknowledge that i really want to acknowledge is that this psychedelic uh the remembering that’s happening around psychedelics right now is not

01:05:30 ►

happening in a vacuum for many it’s something that’s been happening for 50 60 years 600 6 000

01:05:37 ►

and for many it’s longer and older and i think one of the things to remember for people who are

01:05:43 ►

engaging with these topics is that when

01:05:46 ►

you especially participate in plant medicine practices that have indigenous roots, that

01:05:52 ►

continue to be practiced and taught by indigenous people, that continue to be held by people who

01:05:58 ►

have been criminalized, not just for the substances that have been at the center of their practice, but also their literal identities, their literal cultural practices,

01:06:09 ►

their actual prayer, puts a lot of responsibility, I think, on people coming from the global north

01:06:19 ►

or the west or the people with fair skin who are engaging with these practices. And I think when we’re thinking

01:06:25 ►

on the large scale about what we need to do, it doesn’t just mean taking from systems that

01:06:32 ►

already exist. It means looking at what has worked and incorporating that into what we do know,

01:06:37 ►

which is right now existing in a country with 320 million people. It’s a lot. It’s a lot. The

01:06:43 ►

scaling of those systems is really big.

01:06:45 ►

So rites of passage, questions about initiation.

01:06:48 ►

And one big piece that I really want to make sure we talk about

01:06:51 ►

is this question about intergenerational knowledge

01:06:53 ►

and the transfer of knowledge.

01:06:55 ►

Because, you know, my parents are immigrants.

01:06:59 ►

They come from old, long-standing cultures

01:07:02 ►

in different places of the world.

01:07:04 ►

And one of the things that we’ve noticed in my family

01:07:06 ►

is how challenging it is in this context to,

01:07:11 ►

in the American context,

01:07:12 ►

to really continue the threads of tradition that have existed.

01:07:15 ►

So I think part of what we can do here

01:07:17 ►

is maybe not build new ones per se,

01:07:21 ►

but certainly reach back, reach back in our own ancestry

01:07:24 ►

and reach back to what those in our own ancestry and reach

01:07:25 ►

back to what those lineages look like and pull from that. Each one of us has that. I think we

01:07:33 ►

have to wrap up. I think we have to keep, I think we could keep talking for a lot longer, but I think

01:07:36 ►

we have to take questions. I think we do. I’d like to, and I agree with what you’re saying about

01:07:40 ►

reaching back into lineages, acknowledging that communities have been using

01:07:47 ►

these substances for many thousands of years and we need to acknowledge many different ways of

01:07:54 ►

knowing beyond qualitative and quantitative research right really different ways of knowing

01:08:01 ►

traditional ways of knowing indigenous ways of, and respect and honor that together with the medical model as it moves forward.

01:08:12 ►

And I want to say one more thing before we take questions. I want to imagine future psychedelic

01:08:18 ►

systems grounded in respect for human rights. This is a human rights issue. Cognitive liberty is a human rights issue.

01:08:26 ►

A racist drug war is a human rights issue. This, for me, is a human rights discussion.

01:08:31 ►

Always has been and always will be, fundamentally. And we should be in alliance with other people

01:08:39 ►

fighting for human rights and justice around the world. Thank you. We could go on and on and on.

01:08:54 ►

Thank you, Annie and Izzy. We’ll take questions from this microphone over here. Come up, step up,

01:09:00 ►

and if you want to line up over here, everyone who wants to ask a question.

01:09:05 ►

step up and if you want to line up over here everyone who wants to ask a question hi thank you both so much for being here um so i uh i run a publication and i’m extremely preoccupied with

01:09:16 ►

the question of how to create better media around psychedelics um and all of the range of topics that you’ve brought up here

01:09:27 ►

and sometimes i kind of feel like my heart is like failing me a little bit because it’s like

01:09:31 ►

you know there’s this wonderful world that we can imagine and that some of us have even

01:09:37 ►

participated in or witnessed where there’s this like community support and you have these different

01:09:42 ►

types of spaces where you can participate and there’s guides who can

01:09:45 ►

help you and there’s medical testing and like we’re all able to envision this even better world

01:09:51 ►

from there but then you look at reality for the vast majority of america and it’s like i don’t

01:09:55 ►

even i’m not even sure how to signpost the the spaces on the way from where most of the world is

01:10:01 ►

to where to the place that we can see who are in this community and so from that most of the world is, to the place that we can see who are in this community.

01:10:06 ►

And so from that perspective of trying to create something better

01:10:11 ►

and signpost it and show it to the world,

01:10:13 ►

I’m curious about what the two of you think

01:10:16 ►

of the current state of media on psychedelics

01:10:19 ►

and what you think is most important to be representing to the world?

01:10:25 ►

I have something, a quick thing to say, I think.

01:10:27 ►

Yeah, so that’s a really good, important question.

01:10:29 ►

Thank you for asking.

01:10:30 ►

We have this kind of challenging dynamic in the U.S.

01:10:34 ►

where we treat psychedelics or drugs, I would say,

01:10:38 ►

and sex in the same way where it’s like highly glorified

01:10:42 ►

and also highly stigmatized at the same time,

01:10:43 ►

which causes a lot of mixed messages to people and it makes it really challenging to be a consumer of media in general.

01:10:50 ►

I just want to give an example because that brings up for me, has anyone here seen the show,

01:10:54 ►

not the movie, but the show Dear White People? First off, watch it, please, if you haven’t.

01:10:59 ►

Fairskin People and Not Fairskin People and White People or Not, because it’s just really good. But

01:11:03 ►

I bring it up because there’s a really good scene in it in the second season where um there’s these two

01:11:08 ►

characters that are uh it’s basically like the archetype of the black social justice activist

01:11:14 ►

leader on campus and then the like white um editor of like the satirical news magazine that says

01:11:22 ►

stuff that’s kind of racist sometimes which is is kind of like this big, ongoing,

01:11:27 ►

they kind of play these two archetypes.

01:11:28 ►

So like the person that’s like,

01:11:29 ►

hey, don’t be offended, I’m just joking.

01:11:31 ►

And the other person’s like,

01:11:32 ►

we’re talking about our literal lives, stop it.

01:11:33 ►

So it’s kind of this interesting back and forth

01:11:35 ►

and it kind of depicts that dialogue really interestingly.

01:11:39 ►

But there’s a scene where they just like come to a head.

01:11:42 ►

They like can’t agree.

01:11:43 ►

They’re like, we’re gonna solve this the old fashionedfashioned way and it cuts to a scene with like loud music it’s like a party

01:11:49 ►

they’re at a bar all of the vibes are like this is a rager party and then it slowly zooms into

01:11:56 ►

them on the side on the couch rolling on mdma just like holding each other and talking like on the

01:12:01 ►

side like watching people dancing like, like we really want to talk

01:12:05 ►

this about. And I really appreciate it because it’s, it plays on the trope of MDMA, which is

01:12:10 ►

like all about like the party rave craziness and the lights. But, and then like, and it shows

01:12:14 ►

something, but I think it’s fairly realistic, which is people who are talking in a heart to

01:12:18 ►

heart context on the side of the dance floor with each other whispering, you know, while everyone

01:12:22 ►

else is partying. So I just say that because I think that it would be interesting to see a more realistic depiction of drug use in

01:12:29 ►

media, one that isn’t necessarily like the vice style, which is like, this is what meth users

01:12:34 ►

look like. This, you know, it’s like a very, like, there’s a lot of stigma and like sensationalism

01:12:38 ►

that occurs. And I think that humanizing people who use drugs is a critical first step, which is

01:12:43 ►

about things that they do that aren’t used drugs. It’s like who they are and other things. So I And I think that humanizing people who use drugs is a critical first step, which is about

01:12:45 ►

things that they do that aren’t used drugs.

01:12:48 ►

It’s like who they are and other things.

01:12:49 ►

So I think like from the perspective of a media publication, like first maybe start

01:12:53 ►

by working with people who use drugs and who are willing to talk about that and are willing

01:12:56 ►

to be open about that.

01:12:57 ►

There’s some people that are increasingly being visible about their relationship to

01:13:01 ►

drugs and drug use and people who are openly talking about their past injection use or whatever and i think that bringing that stuff forward and really

01:13:07 ►

destigmatizing that is critical um in general that’s yeah i think what’s missing for me uh

01:13:13 ►

in a lot of the media coverage of the medical model in the michael pollan book in a lot of

01:13:20 ►

media that comes out about uh the promise of psychedelic therapy is the question of risk

01:13:26 ►

reduction. There’s not enough conversation about how to build risk reduction into social systems,

01:13:34 ►

into thinking about social events, into reaching out to many communities that could benefit from

01:13:41 ►

this knowledge. I think it’s absolutely essential.

01:13:50 ►

If anybody wants to talk with me about risk reduction, I’m Annie at Take3Presents.com.

01:13:57 ►

That’s T-A-K-E numeral three presents. I want to have a larger discussion about risk reduction.

01:14:02 ►

And notice I’m not calling it harm reduction, which is a term I don’t particularly like because it assumes all use is harmful Which I don’t think is true

01:14:07 ►

So I want the media to embrace

01:14:10 ►

Risk reduction in many more different forms for many more different communities in a less stigmatized way

01:14:20 ►

Are you guys I have a question that’s

01:14:26 ►

Hi, you guys. I have a question that’s related to the ways in which we’re thinking about the future of creating safe and legal access to psychedelics and the different modalities

01:14:30 ►

beyond the medical model that that might become available. And one idea that’s been propagated

01:14:35 ►

is the idea of creating a licensure model where a person would potentially go in to a center. So

01:14:41 ►

this is like getting a driver’s license and go and sit with a person that would

01:14:46 ►

help show them how to appropriately or safely use the psychedelic. And then they would receive a

01:14:51 ►

license so that then they can go to a place that might look like currently looks like a cannabis

01:14:55 ►

dispensary to go and purchase the drug. And then there’s a certain sort of set of rules around the

01:15:01 ►

ways in which they can use the psychedelic or the plant medicine,

01:15:09 ►

whatever it might be. And so anyways, I just, I’ve been thinking a lot about that model lately, and I was curious to hear both of your opinions about that concept.

01:15:19 ►

Sure. Where’s the risk reduction part of it?

01:15:29 ►

um where’s the risk reduction part of it uh do people will people get get instruction on on how to ingest the drug properly on how to take care of themselves on how to weigh it how to know whether

01:15:36 ►

or not it they’re becoming addicted uh whether they have an unhealthy relationship with it

01:15:43 ►

whether you know like it’s know, like it’s a holistic

01:15:46 ►

approach I’m looking for, right? I think that the issue that comes up for me there,

01:15:54 ►

and this is true of anything that involves licensing, is really who’s excluded and how.

01:15:59 ►

I think that the, and this is a big point, I’m really glad this came up because this is a big point with the medical model as well like the the fact that uh many people with different identities

01:16:11 ►

are excluded from the medical model is part of how it works that’s kind of what i was trying to say

01:16:16 ►

earlier where like the reason the reason it’s considered as legit legitimate as it is is

01:16:22 ►

partially because it’s so exclusive so i think that my main concern with having a license where not just for like practitioners who are offering,

01:16:28 ►

but specifically for people to utilize psychedelics is that that creates this interesting

01:16:32 ►

kind of bureaucratic and possibly kind of very significant barrier to people. And if we’re

01:16:38 ►

criminalizing people who are not, you know, haven’t gone through that process, but aren’t

01:16:43 ►

criminalizing people who are, then my

01:16:45 ►

question is, what does it take to get that license? It’s kind of what you were asking. It’s like,

01:16:48 ►

what does that actually mean? Because if I’m thinking about context of indigenous use, like,

01:16:52 ►

I don’t, I would not trust, like, any government entity, really, to create a system where indigenous

01:16:59 ►

practices were authentically represented, because it’s never done that before. The U.S. government

01:17:03 ►

has never done that. We’ve broken treaties.

01:17:05 ►

We’ve done so many things that have made it really hard

01:17:07 ►

for indigenous communities to trust the U.S. government

01:17:09 ►

for extremely good reason.

01:17:10 ►

I would wonder, like, well, what would be different

01:17:12 ►

about this licensing structure?

01:17:13 ►

Like, if we’re going to be talking about

01:17:14 ►

legal access psychedelics,

01:17:15 ►

and if we’re not talking about these indigenous frameworks,

01:17:17 ►

then it’s a no-go for me.

01:17:19 ►

Yeah, who’s the licensing body?

01:17:20 ►

How much does the license cost?

01:17:22 ►

We need answers.

01:17:22 ►

What do you have to do to get

01:17:25 ►

the license can you be banned from getting the license because because you’re a felon because

01:17:29 ►

you’re a felon uh-uh it’s like well who makes those decisions yeah right is that thanks by the

01:17:36 ►

state yeah it’s a good question yeah questions uh hey you two thanks so much uh for having this

01:17:42 ►

talk i love you both and this has given me life i had i wrote down like my sauciest question that i wanted to ask oh yeah like four and five times

01:17:49 ►

and then you just covered it over the course of the talk um so i have only one left and it’s this

01:17:53 ►

um i was there in the room when uh when david brauner handed uh the like five million dollar

01:17:58 ►

giant check to rick doblin uh and used the phrase legalized l LSD for personal sacrament as his like end game kind

01:18:06 ►

of goal.

01:18:06 ►

Right.

01:18:07 ►

And I also, thanks so much, Annie, for facilitating psychedelic spaces.

01:18:13 ►

I also am an event producer among a bunch of as many other roles in this community as

01:18:16 ►

I can play.

01:18:17 ►

My question is about internalized drug stigma in our community.

01:18:21 ►

Because I was also in front of my computer like uh in the week coming

01:18:25 ►

up to burning man this year watching all of the news come out of all of our friends getting shaken

01:18:29 ►

down because the cops all know that we’re going out to the desert to take psychedelics and uh the

01:18:34 ►

response from so many of these events is always like oh no no no i mean somebody might come and

01:18:39 ►

like might do that and we can’t stop them but like we nobody we know is taking psychedelics

01:18:43 ►

burning man and uh and i i think that that’s coming to a to a kind of a tipping point of like And we can’t stop them. But nobody we know is taking psychedelics and burning men.

01:18:52 ►

And I think that that’s coming to a kind of a tipping point of like our plausible deniability is disappearing.

01:19:06 ►

And the cops’ plausible deniability that they were there to shake down hippies for a kind of like the real tipping point or like the the the like the impending like ignition of that sort of conflict and where it’s going to go and how that

01:19:10 ►

has to or how that may play out on our way to like just being able to be like yeah you know i i go to

01:19:17 ►

church with my friends every week or every month and we take this drug in the mountains and it’s

01:19:20 ►

our communion i’d like to take that on. I’m a journalist by training.

01:19:26 ►

Journalists have a saying, follow the money.

01:19:28 ►

This is all about money, right?

01:19:31 ►

This shakedown that law enforcement, you know,

01:19:33 ►

puts people through is all about raising revenue.

01:19:37 ►

And it’s a balancing game, you know,

01:19:40 ►

when you’re in a group of event producers

01:19:43 ►

like the Burning Man organization

01:19:44 ►

and you’re having your event on federal land, and federal authorities control that land,

01:19:50 ►

they set the terms of the shakedown. And if you want to have your event on that land,

01:19:56 ►

you have to negotiate your way through that reality, right? Now, you can choose not to have events on federal land

01:20:07 ►

where you will be subjected to that.

01:20:10 ►

You can get the Nevada congressional delegation involved

01:20:14 ►

to push back on local law enforcement organizations.

01:20:19 ►

There are a lot of ways you can go about it,

01:20:20 ►

but it ultimately becomes political.

01:20:23 ►

It’s about the money, right? Forfeiture

01:20:26 ►

is about the money. You know, it’s policing for profit. It funds local police departments when

01:20:33 ►

they seize your house or your vehicle or your bank account before you’re convicted. Let’s remember

01:20:39 ►

this, before conviction, right? So this, this shakedownakedown of drug users is about revenue.

01:20:47 ►

And it’s, I think-

01:20:48 ►

And racism.

01:20:49 ►

Pardon?

01:20:50 ►

And racism.

01:20:51 ►

Thank you, and racism.

01:20:53 ►

And remembering that you need to find

01:20:58 ►

other funding vehicles for your local police department

01:21:01 ►

to wean them off of this source of money.

01:21:04 ►

Oh God. Or to keep them from

01:21:07 ►

shaking down and abusing all the people of color in the community because the drug laws are racist.

01:21:12 ►

You have to find other systems. You have to reform your own social systems from within.

01:21:19 ►

Law enforcement plays a role in society, but they shouldn’t look to shaking down drug users to fund their operations

01:21:28 ►

right interesting note on that and specifically in this particular case so what actually justified

01:21:33 ►

the increased enforcement around burning man last year was specifically funding for the opioid

01:21:38 ►

crisis so because the federal government has been injecting money into all these local law

01:21:41 ►

enforcement entities in the last two years in combat the opioid crisis, which basically means that a lot of local law enforcement

01:21:47 ►

agencies are getting more tanks and other things.

01:21:50 ►

So it’s interesting because that particular situation is a direct function of the belief

01:21:58 ►

or at least the statement that what we’re doing, what they’re doing is trying to tackle

01:22:03 ►

this large problem.

01:22:04 ►

But I think that also one of the things that you brought up is pretty relevant because it kind of

01:22:09 ►

comes back to this question of exceptionalism, like how do we treat people who use different

01:22:12 ►

kinds of drugs? And I think that you’re right, there is increasingly less like deniability,

01:22:19 ►

like within this community and the people that we’re kind of around that psychedelics may or

01:22:23 ►

may not be involved in some people’s experiences. i think that that makes it easier unfortunately for people who have had

01:22:31 ►

psychedelic experiences or who engage with the psychedelic community to overly focus i think on

01:22:36 ►

issues that we believe like only directly affect us and i’m saying us very loosely here and i say

01:22:41 ►

that because we haven’t touched even on the major debate that’s happening right now around safe consumption sites in the United States for people who inject drugs and people who smoke drugs.

01:22:51 ►

And I think that the reason I bring that forward is because there is, I think, a need for people who are certainly criminalized for their use in these kind of recreational, social, more liberated contexts.

01:23:04 ►

for their use in these kind of recreational, social, more liberated contexts.

01:23:09 ►

And to be aware of that when we’re talking about numbers here,

01:23:14 ►

like a lot of the actual enforcement and harm is on people who are using different kinds of drugs.

01:23:19 ►

And I think that while we have the privilege to talk about drugs this openly on a live stream on the Internet and be like, this is how you do things in the best way. We really critically engage. And here it’s easier in some ways

01:23:26 ►

because there is a dialogue in the state of California

01:23:29 ►

around how to actually deal with

01:23:31 ►

different kinds of consumption in public health contexts.

01:23:34 ►

But all over the country, people are fighting.

01:23:36 ►

I mean, people are still fighting in syringe exchanges,

01:23:38 ►

even with decades and decades of information on that.

01:23:40 ►

So I think, I just bring that up

01:23:42 ►

because I think this like exceptionalism issue

01:23:44 ►

that we kind of touched on at the beginning too is really like, it’s a really thin line.

01:23:47 ►

And I try to stay far away from it. In my mind, if people are choosing to engage with, if people

01:23:55 ►

are choosing to ingest drugs or engage with drug use in communities, and they have the privilege

01:23:59 ►

to talk about it or engage with it, and, you know, while they certainly are experiencing side effects,

01:24:04 ►

like tend to be more

01:24:05 ►

free and non-criminalized compared to other populations we definitely have an obligation

01:24:09 ►

to start engaging with these issues that are more risky i would love for people in the psychedelic

01:24:13 ►

community to be talking about safe consumptions as i talked about that at the site at the

01:24:16 ►

sf psychedelic society when i ended i was like y’all better be talking about safe consumption

01:24:19 ►

because i think that if we’re not thinking about our brothers and sisters that are using drugs that

01:24:22 ►

are not you know on the front cover of of the New York Times in a good way, then we’re kind of missing the point of solidarity between us and the people that we’re really trying to help.

01:24:34 ►

I would agree with that.

01:24:41 ►

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

01:24:48 ►

So, if you’re frustrated by what appears to be the slow pace of getting psychedelic medicines and cannabis approved for medical use,

01:24:56 ►

well, you may want to compare the U.S. drug laws with those of other nations.

01:25:01 ►

Granted, there now are two countries in which so-called recreational cannabis use is legal,

01:25:07 ►

but the rest of the world, including America, is really pretty far behind. Then again, this country

01:25:13 ►

is orders of magnitude ahead of places like China, where just two ounces of cannabis is a crime whose

01:25:20 ►

punishment is death. Did you get that? Two ounces of pot in China can get you a death

01:25:26 ►

sentence. In fact, China, with a population of over 1 billion people, claims that there are only

01:25:33 ►

24,000 marijuana users in the entire country. Now, to put that number into perspective,

01:25:40 ►

it has been reported that in the U.S., over one quarter of all high school students have already tried marijuana.

01:25:47 ►

Now, can Chinese teenagers be that far behind their American peers?

01:25:51 ►

Do you really believe that there are more high school students in Louisville, Kentucky smoking pot than all of the high school students in China combined?

01:26:01 ►

What I’m trying to say is that while things could certainly be better on the drug war front here in the States,

01:26:07 ►

well, at least we still can have conversations like the one we just listened to,

01:26:11 ►

and I think it’s your job to keep this conversation going.

01:26:16 ►

One of the things that I enjoyed about the conversation we just heard is the pairing of an elder with a younger.

01:26:23 ►

Of course, Annie may not want to be called an elder,

01:26:26 ►

but that title has to do with experience and not simply age.

01:26:31 ►

And when it comes to experience in promoting events for the psychedelic community

01:26:35 ►

that are as risk-adverse as possible,

01:26:38 ►

I don’t know anyone who has more experience in that area than Annie.

01:26:42 ►

So, to me, she is a young-in-age elder.

01:26:46 ►

And since Ishmael has a Doctor of jurisprudence degree, he can hardly be considered young. But I think you know

01:26:52 ►

what I’m pointing out here. It is these ongoing discussions between someone with a lot of

01:26:57 ►

experience in the trenches and someone who is at least a generation younger that I think is going

01:27:02 ►

to provide a good intellectual foundation for our future. However, there is still at least a generation younger, that I think is going to provide a good intellectual foundation for our future.

01:27:06 ►

However, there is still at least one elephant in the room, old white men.

01:27:12 ►

At the beginning of this program, we heard Annie Elk say, and I quote,

01:27:17 ►

We want to move beyond only a very narrow group of people having these conversations

01:27:23 ►

and sitting on the boards of

01:27:25 ►

organizations making policies, we really want to open up those conversations to a much wider group

01:27:31 ►

of communities who should be a part of those conversations, end quote. And I agree with her.

01:27:38 ►

Of course, to state that thought a little more precisely, and not as politically correct,

01:27:43 ►

what she is saying is the same thing

01:27:46 ►

that we’ve been hearing from a lot of people recently.

01:27:48 ►

The message is that it’s time for us old white men to step aside.

01:27:53 ►

However, I can’t do anything about the fact

01:27:56 ►

that there aren’t enough women being offered speaking slots at various events.

01:28:00 ►

That is up to the event organizers.

01:28:03 ►

So rather than criticize us old white men who take the trouble and time to go to these events and speak,

01:28:09 ►

why not tell the organizers that you’re tired of so many male speakers?

01:28:14 ►

If you truly want fewer old white men speaking at your events, well then stop inviting us.

01:28:19 ►

It’s really that simple.

01:28:22 ►

Okay, that’s enough grumpiness for now from this old white man.

01:28:27 ►

But it did feel really good to get it off my chest.

01:28:30 ►

So thanks for listening.

01:28:32 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.

01:28:36 ►

Be well, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

610 - Beyond the Medical Model for Psychedelics

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