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629 - The Rose Garden 002

Oct 28, 2019, 33 min read

Program Notes

A Video Podcast

Today we feature our first video podcast from the Psychedelic Salon. Our normal audio podcast features the audio portion of this short documentary. However, the best way to experience this program is to watch the video version, which you may also download in various formats.
Free Leonard Pickard
Guest speakers: David Luke, Ben Sessa, Mark McCloud, Julian Vayne, Michael Dupler, Gregory Sams, Carlo Rovelli, Nese Devenot, Shane Mauss, and Dr. David Nutt

These interviews were recorded in 2019.

In preparation of the audio edition of Leonard Pickard’s The Rose of Paracelsus, Kat Lakey has traveled far and wide while gathering recordings from friends of Leonard’s, all of whom have volunteered to read and record a chapter for this project. After meeting with some of these volunteers, Kat also recorded brief interviews with them. These interviews are presented in this video podcast. Some of these people, such as Nese Devenot, and Dr. David Nutt, have appeared before in the Psychedelic Salon. Also included in the interviews in today’s podcast are Dr. Carlo Rovelli, David Luke, Ben Sessa, Mark McCloud, Julian Vayne, Gregory Sams, Shane Mauss, and attorney Michael Dupler. During the months ahead you will also hear each of them read one of the chapters from The Rose of Paracelsus.
In case you missed it, here is an overview of this project.
The Rose Garden (001) - Introduction

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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ►

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

00:00:24 ►

And today’s podcast comes with a twist, because it’s actually a videocast.

00:00:30 ►

However, I’m also podcasting the audio from this short documentary here in our regular format.

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If you go to psychedelicsalon.com and click on the program notes page for this podcast,

00:00:42 ►

which is program number 629, the first thing you’ll see is the

00:00:46 ►

embedded video of this program. And my advice to you is to download a copy of the video to your

00:00:52 ►

phone so you’ll have it handy to show to your friends. It’s available in several size formats

00:00:58 ►

in case you need to save some memory. Also today I’m going to do something that I’ve never done

00:01:03 ►

here in the salon before. I’m going to urge our fellow salonners who live here in the States

00:01:08 ►

to become involved in a bit of political action

00:01:11 ►

Now, don’t get nervous here because I’m not going to urge you to promote any particular party or candidate

00:01:17 ►

This is about the war on drugs

00:01:19 ►

And I think it’s important that you do something right now

00:01:23 ►

because I think we’re entering into the final phase of this war on people who use non-prescription drugs.

00:01:30 ►

And that should be the full title of what people so casually call the war on drugs.

00:01:35 ►

It’s a war on people, my friends. It’s a war on us people. You and me.

00:01:41 ►

You and me.

00:01:47 ►

And unless you’ve actually been doing something to help bring this insane war on consciousness to an end,

00:01:52 ►

well, then I guess maybe you’re claiming you have a deferment because you have bone spurs or something.

00:01:54 ►

Don’t worry.

00:01:58 ►

I’m not suggesting that you join some group and go march in the streets.

00:02:01 ►

Well, that’s great if it’s something that works for you, but I happen to believe there’s a much more effective way to spend your time on the front lines fighting the drug war. Now, over the years,

00:02:09 ►

I’ve had a lot of experience marching and demonstrating in various protest movements,

00:02:14 ►

and those experiences have been important in solidifying my resolve to continue the resistance.

00:02:20 ►

It’s always good to be around like-minded people. And if you’ve never participated in a march or demonstration,

00:02:26 ►

then I highly recommend doing it, at least once,

00:02:30 ►

not so much in hopes of changing the system, but because it’ll be good for you.

00:02:34 ►

And what I’m urging you to do right now, however, is much more personal,

00:02:39 ►

and I think collectively we may actually be able to make a difference this time.

00:02:44 ►

You see, it doesn’t take a PhD in political science to see that people all over the globe are beginning to get restless.

00:02:51 ►

There are a lot of reasons for this, and I’m sure that we all aren’t going to agree about why this is happening.

00:02:58 ►

But there is one issue that does affect us all here in the psychedelic community,

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and that’s the issue of minimum mandatory

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sentences. Frankly, minimum mandatory sentences have had and are continuing to have a much more

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significant impact on poor people and people of color than they do on white people like me.

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Unfortunately, while most people see the unfairness of sending a person to prison for life if their third strike

00:03:25 ►

was a minor offense, like shoplifting or something, but let’s be honest, it has a greater impact on us

00:03:32 ►

if it happened to somebody in our own family, somebody we can relate to. And that’s where I

00:03:37 ►

think Leonard Picard’s story can be of some help to us, because people who need to understand this

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story, the story about the minimum mandatory

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sentences, are the old white men who are making our laws. Those are the ones who need to understand

00:03:51 ►

that the three strikes laws can hit close to their own home, just as it does in the black and brown

00:03:56 ►

communities. I know it really sucks to say this, but that’s the way the world works. As my old

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friend Judge Tom Stovall once told me, son, sometimes you just

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got to take the bull by the tail and face the situation. And while the situation of mandatory

00:04:14 ►

minimum sentencing isn’t very pretty, we all have to face the fact that somehow we’ve got to get a

00:04:19 ►

bunch of politicians with other things on their minds to take a few minutes and listen to our pleas.

00:04:31 ►

I don’t see protest marches as getting this done. In my opinion, what needs to be done is to get this video seen by as many people who are involved in the political process as possible.

00:04:36 ►

It doesn’t matter what the party or candidate is that they support. Everybody in the U.S. political

00:04:41 ►

arena needs to be aware of the horrors being inflicted on prisoners, their families, and their friends because of these senseless laws.

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This short video, which features world-renowned intellectuals who are all supporting the release of Leonard Picard, a Harvard Kennedy School graduate,

00:04:59 ►

is something that you can use to start up a conversation about these laws with almost anybody you’re close enough

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to talk with. My friend Myron Stolaroff, well into his 80s, would bring up psychedelics with

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strangers all the time. And if you have this video on your phone, you can do the same thing.

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Who knows, you just may happen to show it to some young millennial who winds up working in the next

00:05:21 ►

White House administration, and they might bring it up with the president,

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which actually is about the only way Leonard is going to be released,

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with a presidential pardon.

00:05:31 ►

So spread the word, and, well, you may be surprised

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at the good you can do down the line.

00:05:36 ►

But right now, you should go watch the video,

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and if you aren’t in a position to do that right now,

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well, here’s the audio track from it.

00:05:52 ►

William Leonard Picard’s The Rose of Paracelsus on Secrets and Sacraments is nothing short of literary masterpiece. For those unfamiliar with Leonard Picard, he is currently in federal prison

00:05:58 ►

serving out two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. He was

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arrested back in 2000 for allegedly manufacturing LSD

00:06:06 ►

at a defunct missile silo in Kansas.

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Incarcerated for a nonviolent drug conviction,

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he has already completed nearly 20 years in maximum security prison,

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and during that time, he wrote the Rosa Paracelsus on paper and pencil

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despite the hellish circumstances.

00:06:23 ►

My name is Kat, and I’m currently producing an upcoming serial podcast called The

00:06:27 ►

Rose Garden for the Psychedelic Salon. This summer, I was fortunate enough to travel across Europe

00:06:32 ►

and interview a wide variety of people within the psychedelic community, many of whom will be

00:06:36 ►

contributing to the Rose Garden podcast over the next couple of years. I spoke with some of them

00:06:41 ►

at Breaking Convention, Europe’s largest conference on psychedelic consciousness, held at the University of Greenwich in London.

00:06:49 ►

So, William Leonard Picard is somewhat of a heroic character.

00:06:55 ►

I think he’s a victim of a very out-of-date legal system.

00:07:12 ►

very out of date legal system, a man who I think with best intentions was very much a freedom fighter for cognitive liberty and a psychedelic martyr.

00:07:20 ►

I don’t even get me started on the moral and ethical position there of an innocent man with a victimless crime

00:07:28 ►

scapegoated and demonized in this way because it fits the political agenda of an archaic right-wing

00:07:35 ►

system that

00:07:36 ►

just cannot understand pharmacology or people or clinical medicine or indeed society and culture.

00:07:44 ►

You know, he’s always been one of those controversial figures

00:07:48 ►

in the underground history of the United States.

00:07:52 ►

This is William Leonard Pickard. This is the missile silo bus.

00:07:58 ►

This is the alleged LSD chemist of quite some skill and notoriety.

00:08:04 ►

I feel like I’ve known him a very, very long time of quite some skill and notoriety.

00:08:05 ►

I feel like I’ve known him a very, very long time,

00:08:07 ►

and he’s a very easy and nice person to get to know.

00:08:10 ►

And anything I can do to help him, given his circumstances

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of being locked up for two consecutive life sentences for a non-violent offence,

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and that’s a phrase I’m going to repeat many times

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because it’s very important for people to understand and to remember

00:08:23 ►

and to recognise that this man’s life was taken away for allegedly a violation of

00:08:29 ►

the law for something that did not involve harm or violence to another human being

00:08:33 ►

in fact it involved harm or violence to no one. William Leonard Pickard is a unsung hero of

00:08:41 ►

this world and he’s currently serving a life sentence in jail for alleged

00:08:48 ►

work that is there to serve humanity.

00:08:52 ►

And he’s written an amazing book on paper and pencil inside that prison, an extraordinary

00:08:58 ►

book.

00:09:02 ►

I met with Carlo Rovelli in Lisbon, Portugal.

00:09:06 ►

Carlo is a leading theoretical physicist and the founder of Loop Quantum Gravity Theory.

00:09:11 ►

His book, Seven Lessons in Physics, has been translated into 41 languages.

00:09:17 ►

And Carlo is one of the 100 people selected for 2019’s Global Thinkers of Foreign Policy magazine.

00:09:24 ►

I think that the Rose is truly a unique book.

00:09:29 ►

It’s an extraordinary book for the way it is written, first of all,

00:09:36 ►

with this extraordinary rich and profound language,

00:09:41 ►

full of resonances, full of things.

00:09:43 ►

But much more for what is inside.

00:09:46 ►

It’s not an essay, it’s not really a novel,

00:09:49 ►

it’s a strange story, which I think is neither real nor imagined.

00:09:55 ►

It’s both at the same time.

00:09:57 ►

It’s a description of reality from a different perspective, in a sense.

00:10:03 ►

Nishay Devano is a psychedelics researcher and postdoctoral scholar in medicine, society,

00:10:09 ►

and culture at the Department of Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University’s School

00:10:13 ►

of Medicine.

00:10:14 ►

One thing I really like that was posted on Leonard’s Twitter was a question about the

00:10:21 ►

cover of the book, because it looks like there’s this liquid stain.

00:10:26 ►

And he asked, like, you know,

00:10:27 ►

oh, I wonder why there’s this liquid

00:10:29 ►

that’s still on the cover of the book.

00:10:31 ►

And I really feel like there is this intentional exploration

00:10:35 ►

of the way that language affects consciousness.

00:10:38 ►

And so it’s like the book is itself steeped in acid in a way.

00:10:41 ►

And so by reading it and kind of going into it

00:10:44 ►

with that trust and

00:10:45 ►

openness to the ambiguity of the style that it does really have a profound impact on you once

00:10:52 ►

you kind of get carried along far enough on that narrative so I just like to yeah encourage people

00:10:57 ►

to stick with it and talk about it and unpack it because there’s a lot going on there.

00:11:02 ►

It has layers and layers one on top of the other ones.

00:11:06 ►

The part which are obviously

00:11:07 ►

fantasy, but even those

00:11:10 ►

in their own way are

00:11:11 ►

profoundly real. It’s a marvelous book

00:11:14 ►

because it’s a book of ideas,

00:11:15 ►

it’s a book of knowledge,

00:11:17 ►

it’s a book of description

00:11:19 ►

of how the mind can see

00:11:21 ►

the world, and

00:11:23 ►

even more, it’s a book that illuminates

00:11:27 ►

aspects of reality of the world of humans deeply and from a beautiful

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perspective which is deeply moral deeply ethical with a profound sense of compassion for humanity and appreciation of the complexity of the beauty of life.

00:11:48 ►

It’s a unique book. It’s fantastic.

00:11:51 ►

Julian Vane is an occultist and author

00:11:53 ►

with over three decades of experience

00:11:56 ►

engaging with and writing about esoteric culture.

00:11:59 ►

So it’s this enormous, sprawling, kind of epic book.

00:12:03 ►

You know, there’s a few things,

00:12:05 ►

a few pieces of text that I’ve read,

00:12:07 ►

both kind of, I think it’s probably

00:12:09 ►

Storming Heaven is one maybe example of that,

00:12:12 ►

maybe Acid Dreams,

00:12:13 ►

like these kind of big, grand narrative things.

00:12:15 ►

This is very different.

00:12:15 ►

This is a grand narrative

00:12:16 ►

from an individual perspective.

00:12:19 ►

And it has such a beautiful blend

00:12:22 ►

of the poetry and the science and the politics and the religiosity

00:12:28 ►

and all of these things together in it. I think that there are bits of psychedelic literature

00:12:34 ►

that do the poetry side of things really well. There are bits of psychedelic literature that

00:12:38 ►

do the kind of personal experience thing really well. There are bits of psychedelic literature

00:12:41 ►

that do the kind of scientific analytical stuff really well. And I bits of psychedelic literature that do the kind of scientific, analytical stuff

00:12:45 ►

really well. And I think the thing for me about the rose is that it weaves these things together

00:12:50 ►

in the most remarkable way. It kind of plaits all these strands together through the lens of the

00:12:56 ►

story of Leonard and the Six. Gregory Sams is an author, a fractal artist, and an organic natural foods pioneer.

00:13:06 ►

It’s unique because it’s the only psychedelic piece of literature there is that is, it’s

00:13:13 ►

a story, it’s not about what I did or personal experiences, and it’s an incredible story and much of it is based on truth and

00:13:27 ►

some is, I hope not, but it’s an incredible book and it’s a great work of literature.

00:13:37 ►

I’m constantly going to my, checking things up on Google saying, is this really this guy

00:13:43 ►

that you’re describing, is this really this guy that you’re describing?

00:13:45 ►

Is this really this character I look up?

00:13:46 ►

Yeah, he certainly was the, you know,

00:13:50 ►

Russian head of drug control and policy

00:13:54 ►

and warlords and professors.

00:14:00 ►

I mean, it’s an extraordinary book.

00:14:03 ►

That’s all I can say.

00:14:09 ►

Ben Sessa is an addictions psychiatrist, an MDMA psychotherapist,

00:14:11 ►

as well as a psychedelic researcher and writer.

00:14:15 ►

The book Rose is such an interesting piece of work,

00:14:18 ►

partly because of who it was written by and the way in which it was written,

00:14:22 ►

and it was written in prison, and the story itself, you know,

00:14:27 ►

uncovering this really fascinating, hidden, clandestine community.

00:14:30 ►

Great that this has been brought to people’s attention.

00:14:35 ►

It’s interesting as a reader to wonder how much is true and how much is fiction and how are those two things weaving around one another.

00:14:39 ►

Can’t wait for the film.

00:14:40 ►

People wonder whether the story of the book is true or false.

00:14:44 ►

I think it’s

00:14:47 ►

very much both. It’s definitely profoundly true. I mean, there’s no reason to doubt that

00:14:53 ►

this is a real story, and at the same time it’s obviously enormously exaggerated in the

00:14:58 ►

way of being presented. There are details which are clearly imagination,

00:15:06 ►

but this is not falsity. It’s a way of presenting aspects of reality

00:15:12 ►

from a larger perspective, in a sense,

00:15:15 ►

from a deeper perspective.

00:15:17 ►

If you’ve not been trained to read literature

00:15:19 ►

and you’re not familiar with that

00:15:20 ►

kind of Victorian style of writing,

00:15:23 ►

it can seem very obtuse and inaccessible, but I think

00:15:27 ►

that there’s a lot of really important ideas and a lot of beautiful wisdom in the way that

00:15:34 ►

it’s presented and the way the style of it allows for, once you get into it and pick

00:15:39 ►

up the feel of it, you’re brought into this world and you go through these experiences as the

00:15:46 ►

protagonist goes through them and then by the end of it it’s like in a way i i read the book and

00:15:52 ►

this is something i haven’t talked to anyone about but i read the book as because the first most of

00:15:56 ►

it 90 of it is before the lead-up to letter going to prison and all of that in a way for me is preparation to understand

00:16:07 ►

what happened in those final pages that you needed to have gone through and walked by his side

00:16:14 ►

through all of these transformative adventures in order to see why he made certain decisions

00:16:21 ►

why things fell out at the end and you need to have patience for that, and you need to be able to kind of trust

00:16:26 ►

that the narrative has a reason to seem so obscured of two.

00:16:30 ►

So I think that talking about it and helping people access that level of it

00:16:34 ►

will be helpful in kind of getting the message out and sharing it.

00:16:37 ►

The power of the whole package of the story, of the book, of the way it was written,

00:16:44 ►

of the whole package of the story, of the book, of the way it was written,

00:16:50 ►

moved me so deeply that I struck up a relationship with Leonard through email correspondence, occasional phone calls,

00:16:53 ►

and then was honoured to take part in the whole podcast project.

00:16:57 ►

I was asked to be involved and I leapt at the opportunity.

00:17:01 ►

I thought it was a great honour to be able to read something of this book.

00:17:05 ►

I was extremely flattered to be asked to be involved. I’ve been exchanging a few emails

00:17:12 ►

with Leonard over the years anyway, and then the book came out and I got sent a copy, and

00:17:17 ►

I was then very flattered to be asked to read a couple of chapters. It’s a great piece of

00:17:23 ►

work, and I support not just the dissemination of this book

00:17:28 ►

and the story because of what it is,

00:17:30 ►

but I think we need to draw attention to Leonard’s plight.

00:17:34 ►

I mean, Leonard, like many, many people around the world,

00:17:37 ►

are essentially prisoners of conscience.

00:17:39 ►

It’s absolutely immoral and unethical to be locking people up

00:17:42 ►

for these outdated, archaic drug laws that are damaging our society.

00:17:49 ►

David Luke is the director of Breaking Convention, as well as the senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Greenwich.

00:17:56 ►

We don’t have a war on drugs, we have a war on some people who use some drugs.

00:18:03 ►

It’s a kind of an anachronism. And I think we’ll look

00:18:07 ►

back on this as a bizarre legal blip in our historical record. You know, like a hundred

00:18:17 ►

years ago in this country, homosexuality was illegal, witchcraft was illegal, but psychedelics were not illegal.

00:18:26 ►

And they were being used and written about by intellectuals and medical doctors and academics.

00:18:33 ►

Fast forward another 50 years, and witchcraft has even been repealed, as has homosexuality.

00:18:40 ►

And somehow psychedelics are illegal, but it’s just another cultural prejudice and bias

00:18:45 ►

and I think in time we’ll come out of this brief period of the dark ages of cognitive liberty

00:18:52 ►

and psychedelics will also be legally available.

00:18:56 ►

I have no doubt we will look back in 5, 10, 20 years, however long it takes,

00:19:01 ►

we will look back at this period of history as the most awful,

00:19:12 ►

heinous political folly that locked people up and caused the destruction of society. Not the drugs,

00:19:17 ►

the drug laws themselves. We’ll look back and hang our heads in shame at pursuing this crazy war of drugs. Mark McLeod’s collection, also known as the Institute of Illegal Images, is the most

00:19:23 ►

comprehensive collection of decorated LSD blotter paper in the world.

00:19:28 ►

As such, the collection has been the target of two criminal trials

00:19:32 ►

where McLeod was forced to defend not only the collection, but also his own liberty.

00:19:38 ►

The longest war in the U.S. history is being fought by people like Leonard Picard and someday we’ll thank him.

00:19:50 ►

But at the moment he’s about to complete 20 years in prison which is a very, very somber

00:19:59 ►

feeling especially when you have no release date to keep in mind.

00:20:03 ►

especially when you have no release date to keep in mind.

00:20:09 ►

The feeling you have when you’re facing life sentence is a very, very unique and different feeling.

00:20:12 ►

There’s nothing like going to court against the Drug Enforcement Agency

00:20:16 ►

with a life sentence in front of you,

00:20:19 ►

something which I enjoyed three months before Leonard.

00:20:23 ►

I was acquitted, but Leonard wasn’t.

00:20:26 ►

And it’s because 9-11 happened between our trials,

00:20:30 ►

and there was no mercy in the heart of a jury by the end of 9-11.

00:20:35 ►

And had it been sooner, he would have probably been released,

00:20:41 ►

because what jury wants to put a person in jail for two consecutive life

00:20:46 ►

sentences? You’ve got to be crazy, especially for not hurting anybody and just bringing light to

00:20:52 ►

the world. Michael Dupler is an entrepreneur and a friend of William Leonard Picard’s.

00:21:00 ►

So once you’re in the human warehouse, once you’re locked up, you will start your

00:21:05 ►

appeals which generally will get you nothing and you just sit there and

00:21:09 ►

nobody thinks about you. So the law is the law and it’s really going to take an

00:21:14 ►

active populist movement to get it changed. People are going to have to be

00:21:18 ►

voted into office and others out of office based upon reforming the criminal

00:21:24 ►

justice system, specifically the laws regarding drugs and psychedelics.

00:21:28 ►

The individual human stories, though, like the story of Lennox,

00:21:32 ►

really, really need to be put out.

00:21:33 ►

The story of people who, say, in North America are still in jail for life,

00:21:38 ►

for crimes associated with no violence,

00:21:41 ►

but simply the production or distribution of marijuana,

00:21:44 ►

which has been decriminalized in other parts of the states.

00:21:47 ►

You know, so we really need to have, like, intelligent thought about this.

00:21:50 ►

We must not let those prisoners down.

00:21:52 ►

We must not just forget about them.

00:21:54 ►

I think we need to keep in touch with Leonard and tell him that there’s always hope

00:21:59 ►

and that we’re trying very hard to get the mandatory minimum sentences altered and changed.

00:22:05 ►

I mean, the statement I always say is drugs don’t kill people, prohibition does.

00:22:10 ►

I work as an addiction psychiatrist, and every single case of drug harm and drug death I

00:22:14 ►

come across is as a result of the prohibition of that drug, not the pharmacology of that

00:22:20 ►

drug.

00:22:20 ►

So we have to fight fastidiously these cases because this needs to change.

00:22:27 ►

Shane Moss is a psychedelic stand-up comedian, as well as a writer and a film producer.

00:22:32 ►

I think the policies surrounding psychedelics are actually criminal, rather than the people

00:22:40 ►

that the policies are labeling to be criminals. And that’s a tough sell for a lot of people that want to think that, you know,

00:22:49 ►

we have this just world that we live in and we don’t put people in jail for nothing.

00:22:55 ►

So even say you believe someone should be in jail for breaking the law

00:23:01 ►

and there’s reasons why we have these laws,

00:23:06 ►

for breaking the law and there’s reasons why we have these laws. One thing these policies do is make it so that scientists have a near impossible time legally researching psychedelics.

00:23:14 ►

Now, why wouldn’t you research anything? Dr. David Nutt is a professor of neuropsychopharmacology

00:23:22 ►

at the Imperial College London.

00:23:29 ►

He was chair of the UK’s advisory committee on the misuse of drugs until 2009.

00:23:36 ►

It’s almost a 10-year anniversary of my being fired by the government.

00:23:38 ►

I was the government’s drug czar, the chief drug advisor.

00:23:45 ►

And I’ve been advising them for about 10 years as their head pharmacologist.

00:23:47 ►

And in that time, we’ve done some pretty systematic,

00:23:51 ►

certainly the most detailed, transparent, systematic research on comparative drug harms that’s ever been done.

00:23:55 ►

The problem is it came to the wrong result.

00:23:57 ►

It showed that in Britain, alcohol was way more harmful

00:24:01 ►

than the drugs that are vilified in the press,

00:24:04 ►

like MDMA and LSD and

00:24:05 ►

mushrooms. When this report was published, I went on the radio and then the TV and I

00:24:12 ►

told the truth. I said alcohol is more harmful than LSD and I got sacked because that was

00:24:17 ►

absolutely not a statement that the government could bear to have heard. Because you spent

00:24:22 ►

50 years telling people how dangerous LSD was and suddenly

00:24:25 ►

a chief scientist is telling them

00:24:27 ►

that they got it wrong.

00:24:30 ►

Temporary science, the way I view

00:24:32 ►

science, is a way to

00:24:34 ►

look further on the appearances

00:24:35 ►

and to the immense complexity

00:24:37 ►

of reality, of what

00:24:40 ►

we know already and the immensity

00:24:42 ►

of what we don’t know yet.

00:24:43 ►

And the dream of knowing more.

00:24:48 ►

The future of psychedelics, it’s only going to get weirder. We’re discovering more of

00:24:56 ►

them, we’re learning much more about them all the time. We’re learning how to use them in the best and safest ways possible,

00:25:06 ►

and we’re discovering more and more potential beneficial uses for them all the time as well.

00:25:13 ►

And I think in time, the laws will change to fit the appropriate risk and potential benefit of these extraordinary molecules.

00:25:24 ►

risk and potential benefit of these extraordinary molecules.

00:25:31 ►

So in relation to psychedelics, I’m really hopeful that at the very least in the Western countries, psilocybin will be made a medicine, rescheduled as a medicine within my lifetime.

00:25:40 ►

And I’m 68, so I hope they do it quickly because I don’t know how many more years I’ve got.

00:25:44 ►

And I’m 68, so I hope they do it quickly because I don’t know how many more years I’ve got.

00:25:49 ►

Of course, in other countries, particularly in Latin and South America,

00:25:55 ►

we don’t have the same problems as we have because you have full access to the natural herbs like ayahuasca,

00:25:56 ►

which makes things a bit easier.

00:26:03 ►

But my hope is that psilocybin will be a medicine in the UK within five years.

00:26:10 ►

Few had told me in 1970 that in my lifetime there would be same-sex marriage in the United States.

00:26:11 ►

I’d say, you’re crazy.

00:26:12 ►

And when the movement started, I thought, well, this is going to take forever.

00:26:15 ►

And boom, it happened relatively quickly.

00:26:18 ►

Social change, and this is really social change we’re talking about, can happen quickly, especially

00:26:23 ►

if the younger generations get

00:26:25 ►

active and politicians realize if they want their votes, they’re going to have to open

00:26:28 ►

their minds a little bit.

00:26:29 ►

If you have the up of coke and the down of opium, then you have the weird of the psychedelic.

00:26:35 ►

And that weird, in that weirdness, lies the possibility of any number of types of radical

00:26:40 ►

action, social change, reimagination of the world.

00:26:44 ►

And the people who at least nominally believe that they are in control of the world fear this.

00:26:50 ►

And I think with psychedelics, they’re a particular threat to any kind of established power

00:26:57 ►

because they make people question things and questioning things takes power away from the people that are providing

00:27:09 ►

the narrative. They help people question things that they are involved with and identify with

00:27:16 ►

and in the case of our role today so much of power is about getting people to think that

00:27:23 ►

they’re agreeing to things or believing in things or wanting things that are actually engineered so there’s a good

00:27:29 ►

YouTube video the engineering or a series called the engineering of consent

00:27:32 ►

I think that psychedelics are like the antidote of engineering of consent because you’re able to see oh these scripts came from somewhere

00:27:39 ►

like I’ve made this up I don’t want to participate in this and that’s a threat to the powers that be.

00:27:48 ►

Psychedelics are illegal because they allow us to see through the mask.

00:27:55 ►

But psychedelics in particular definitely encourage free thinking and people to question authority.

00:28:00 ►

And government, by its very nature and definition, wants people who don’t question authority.

00:28:03 ►

And that includes what passes for democracy in the West.

00:28:09 ►

You know, a movement for social change can be measured by the way it treats its prisoners. And the movement for social change, if it forgets its prisoners, it forgets itself.

00:28:14 ►

Mercy is the missing quality on earth right now.

00:28:18 ►

And please, show some mercy to this guy. I hope now judges have the open-mindedness and the authority to realise and to take the

00:28:32 ►

right decision which is to make the match.

00:28:36 ►

If Leonard ever gets to see this, I wish him the best of luck and a great deal of love.

00:28:41 ►

So I wish that Leonard in his own, can be a free man again.

00:28:48 ►

Free Leonard Picard. Please, go to freelenardpicard.org.

00:28:52 ►

That’s freelenardpicard.org.

00:28:55 ►

You can find his address. He loves to receive mail.

00:28:58 ►

And keep him in your thoughts.

00:29:00 ►

Psychedelics are slowly becoming mainstream, and medicalization seems inevitable.

00:29:05 ►

psychedelics are slowly becoming mainstream and medicalization seems inevitable but currently there are over 2 000 americans serving life sentences in prison for non-violent drug charges

00:29:10 ►

if you would like to know more about the rosa paracelsus and william leonard picard

00:29:15 ►

please pick up a copy of his book and follow along with us

00:29:18 ►

as we dive into this literary work one chapter at a time, on The Psychedelic Salon.

00:29:37 ►

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

00:29:40 ►

While it may no longer be possible for Leonard to believe that he will ever walk free once again

00:29:45 ►

and do things that you and I take for granted, little things like seeing a tree,

00:29:51 ►

but just because it’s tough for him to believe that right now

00:29:53 ►

doesn’t mean that those of us who are in more fortunate circumstances

00:29:57 ►

shouldn’t give up working for his release

00:29:59 ►

and for the release of all prisoners being held under these three strike laws.

00:30:04 ►

and for the release of all prisoners being held under these three strike laws.

00:30:12 ►

Over the year ahead, we’ll be playing a chapter-by-chapter audio version of Leonard Picard’s Rose of Paracelsus,

00:30:14 ►

and I hope that you’ll be joining us for those readings.

00:30:19 ►

In the meantime, however, you may want to listen to podcast number 609,

00:30:24 ►

which is a three-and-a-half-hour-long overview of this masterful piece of literature. And then you should make the decision about what your role is going to be

00:30:29 ►

during what I think will be the final year of the war on drugs.

00:30:33 ►

Will you be standing side by side with those of us on the front lines

00:30:36 ►

by talking to anyone who will listen about ending the three strikes laws?

00:30:41 ►

Or are you going to take a deferment for bone spurs?

00:30:47 ►

three strikes laws? Or are you going to take a deferment for bone spurs? Well, it’s your decision,

00:30:51 ►

but my guess is that you’re going to figure out your own best way to stand up and be counted.

00:30:58 ►

We’re all in this together, you know. Now go to freelenardpicard.org and get started.

00:00:00 ►

For now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.

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