Program Notes
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Date this lecture was recorded: September 28, 2020
Guest speaker:
Gary Smith
https://psychedelicalex.com/
Today’s podcast features attorney Gary Smith who has just published a major compendium of drug laws in the United States as well as in several other nations. In this wide-ranging interview, which took place during a live session of the Psychedelic Salon, you may be surprised at what could happen to you if the federal government finds both cannabis and a firearm in your home. Even if you have a doctor’s medical marijuana recommendation and a licensed firearm you have committed a felony.
Psychedelica Lexa comprehensive survey ofthe laws governing psychedelics
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
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salon.
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And I’m very pleased to be able to bring
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you the first of what will be our regular or somewhat regular updates on laws that govern
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the use of cannabis and psychedelics. I’m about to play a recording of the live salon that I
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hosted on September 28th and my guest that evening was longtime fellow salonner Gary Smith. Now Gary is an Arizona-based attorney who has
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just published a major compendium of the laws that govern the use of plants and chemicals
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that have been outlawed by various governments. So now I’ll just pick up on the recording after
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we’ve all exchanged a few pleasantries. I think we can go ahead and get started. Gary didn’t know
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exactly what was going to go on tonight,
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and I told him basically we’re just kind of like a loose-knit family
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that gets together and shoots the breeze from time to time.
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So it’s not like Pressure City, like giving a lecture somewhere or something.
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But anyhow, Gary, welcome to the Psychedelic Salon.
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Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Actually, you’ve been with us here for a long time, but we just didn’t know it, right?
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If you say so. How’s the audio quality on your end, by the way? I’ve got this running through
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my home studio stuff, just trying to get a better microphone on the mix. So is it good?
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I think it’s perfect.
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Yeah, real good.
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Okay, fantastic.
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So, you know, I gave everybody, I don’t know, did any of you have a chance to listen to
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the podcast I put out yesterday?
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A couple of you.
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Not too many.
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Oh, okay.
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A couple of you, not too many.
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Okay, well, basically, it was a preview of some of the questions that Gary is prepared to answer. But, you know, I guess we should get a little background, Gary.
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Gary’s an attorney in Phoenix, and he has written this book called Psychedelica Lex.
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And let me put a picture of that on the screen if I can.
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There it is.
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If I make it big, it kind of breaks up a little bit.
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I just really wish I was still in law school so I could walk into the law library and ask for that book.
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You know, I think that that is a classic cover.
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And, of course, that translates from the Latin psychedelic law.
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And the thing is, Gary actually some time ago asked me if I would write an introduction to it, and I agreed.
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And then he sent me the manuscript, and I remembered why I quit practicing law.
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It is so, the language is so obtuse and everything, and I’ve taken years to break myself from that. And on the other hand, you know, I really don’t have any business writing an introduction to a law book because I’m so far removed from it, you know.
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And so I just didn’t feel like I could.
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But one of the things, and we can go through, I’d like to talk about the book a little bit before we get into other questions and answers.
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Because I think that that you know
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I just look at everything from a you know kind of a humorous point of view if I can and I thought
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you know this is really the first major compendium of psychedelic laws around the world and the first
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chapter has to deal with famous people who broke the law by using psychedelic.
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You want to comment on that, Gary?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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And you’re right.
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It is a compendium of the different laws that impact psychedelics here in the United States
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and around the world, although this is written from a U.S. law perspective.
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And the short story for why that is, I went looking for this book for myself so I could use it
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and I couldn’t find a book. So I’m like, all right, I guess I’ll write it. So that’s really
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honestly the short story of how the book came about. I saw a need and decided to fill the need.
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So to answer your second question though, you’re absolutely right. My early chapters are supposed to gently introduce
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the reader into this topic. And I did that intentionally because I just assumed most people
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that would be coming to this probably would have had a similar experience as I did, which is you
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start with zero knowledge. And then, of course, you grow up in the 1970s, where it’s just say no,
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and I’m a dare kid, you know, and so crammed full of all that propaganda of what psychedelics are
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not. So I knew I had to overcome all of those decades of prejudice. So there you go. It was
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very simply a chapter aimed at making people comfortable by seeing and understanding that folks similarly situated or even better off or in higher level positions like famous artists and actors and actresses and industrialists have a history with this too.
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And it’s a good history for them.
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It was successful.
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It was positive experiences with positive outcomes. So to the extent that people don’t like to stand
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out in a crowd, I tried to surround them with a comfortable crowd. Now you’ve been involved in
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practicing psychedelic law and cannabis law for some time now, right? Yeah. So I jumped into this a squeak more than a decade ago now when Arizona
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came around back in 2010 with what is its current medical marijuana law. It’s actually the second
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time Arizona passed a medical marijuana law because the first one the legislature killed
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within months of it passing. But back in 2010, it came up again, and most lawyers were afraid to touch the subject. So I took a look at it and thought, that looks like a hell of a lot of fun to me. I’m diving in with both feet, and did. And in the process of learning all about cannabis and cannabis laws, which didn’t exist until now, so we’re creating them on the fly, I necessarily started banging into all these different psychedelics. And I got
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intensely curious and just kept diving deeper and deeper and deeper. And the more I learned,
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the hungrier I got. So now I do kind of consider myself a psychedelics lawyer.
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How did your contemporaries and your colleagues treat you once you kind of stepped out of the psychedelic legal closet, so to speak?
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So even the greatest skeptics are a little bit in awe at it. It’s kind of like being the cool kid at school again. Not that I ever had that experience. I shouldn’t say again, because I was
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never the cool kid at school. But you all know what that’s like. Most people early on thought it was just a flash
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in the pan, wouldn’t last. And here I am a decade into it. And it’s the mainstay of my practice.
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And it’s exciting. Every day is a new challenge. It’s a lot of fun. Sometimes I want to pull what’s
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left of my hair out. But overall, positive and enjoyable. And part of the reason why I wrote the book was for the next generation,
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because bringing all these psychedelic substances and entheogens up to the same
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level as cannabis is going to take effort.
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It’s going to take a lot of sharp minds.
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How about the prosecutors and judges?
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How are they accepting your defense in these cases?
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Prosecutors are still prosecutors.
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I have had the pleasure of speaking with several of them. Some are actually remarkably sympathetic.
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And here’s the weird thing. Once I came out being a cannabis lawyer and a psychedelics lawyer,
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like everybody comes out to me now. People you would be shocked to learn
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are advocates of psychedelics come out to me. And I love that they do that. And I’m truly honored
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that they do that because I know for a lot of high level professionals, even like myself,
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you kind of have to fly under the radar and not really call attention to yourself because the
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implications are just so ornery. So when people do come to me and share their stories, it really thrills me to no end
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because it really does suggest a faith and trust. But that being said, yeah, I mean,
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people in really high levels are absolutely enmeshed in this and enjoying whatever it is they do.
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Yeah, you know, when I was still working for Verizon and I was speaking on their behalf at conferences and stuff,
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one night I was out to dinner with a bunch of execs
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for one of the big Internet companies at the time.
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It might have been Netscape.
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And this one guy kind of got me off the side.
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He was one of their vice presidents.
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And he said, hey, I heard you just got back from the cannabis cup.
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You know, I’ve been trying to keep that really quiet. But, you know, the word gets around pretty quick.
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Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I’m not shy or hiding it anymore.
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You know, early on, I was a little trepidatious because I just didn’t know what the social stigma would be.
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But these days, I’m out there in the open.
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One of my clients, I’m very lucky that they’re open to me advising them
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and also open to me sharing with the public that I do advise them,
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is the Peyote Church here in Arizona.
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For viewers who may not know this, there are a whole litany of attorney ethics rules,
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and amongst those is confidentiality. And this means that lawyers cannot share with third parties
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any information about their clients, even including who their clients are. In this particular instance,
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my client is open-minded about it, so I have permission to identify myself as their lawyer. So now when I tell people I’m also general counsel to a peyote church, now the
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eyebrows really go up and people get really intrigued. It’s actually not that exciting
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because they just don’t have a lot of legal need. They fought their fights decades before I ever
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showed up. But look, it’s a fantastic organization. I’m proud to represent them. And I think they’re
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doing wonderful, wonderful work. Well, you want to talk about the book a little bit. I, you know,
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I read through it. Well, I didn’t completely read it page for page because some of it was a
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little dense legalese. And I’m wondering, your target audience, I know it would be, you know,
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a lawyer who gets
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approached for the first time with any kind of a cannabis or a psychedelic claim of some kind
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look for some you know where do I start because there’s really no place but is it just lawyers
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what about law school students are you looking at them as well I’m looking at literally everybody
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so here’s what I hope I accomplish with the book,
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but readers will tell me if I succeeded. I wrote the book to be multi-functional.
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So if you’re a practicing lawyer, you could pull this book off of your shelf
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and actually put it to use in your daily practice. There’s tons of annotations
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inside of it to a variety of cases, statutes, regulations, other sources.
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But I also really made a genuine effort to write it at a level that was accessible to non-lawyers.
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Because trust me, I get it. Legalese is dense. It’s difficult to read, often painful to read.
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Even lawyers don’t like reading stuff that other lawyers wrote. So I really tried to take that to heart. And I, before publishing it,
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passed copies around to a variety of friends in my circle who weren’t all necessarily lawyers
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and asked them, take a whack at it with a pen, mark it up any way you want. And I took back
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probably, oh golly, about 14 different sets of red lines from different people and tried to match the reading level of the book to be as level and balanced as I could.
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It was really nice for me to see and to remember why I quit practicing law.
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Those problems are just complex. You know, like you said, from international treaties on down, and no matter what happens here
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in Portland or in Oregon in the next couple months, you still have all the federal and
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international laws to deal with that probably aren’t going to be enforced unless you’re a big
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dealer or something, right? Yeah, I wholly agree, and I really appreciate you bringing that up,
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because most people have this misperception that, you know, you just change one law and suddenly now this stuff is available.
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And that’s so far from accurate. There are multiple layers starting, like you said,
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from international treaties where the United States is legally beholden to certain behaviors,
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which includes legal obligation to keep certain laws and statutes on our books and certain
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regulatory agencies in place in order to fulfill those international treaty obligations.
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Then you step on down from there, you’ve got federal statutes, of course. Step on down from
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there, you’ve got federal regulations. Then you step on down from there, you’ve got state statutes.
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And then you step on down from there, you’ve got state regulations. And then there may yet be an
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additional level based on the city in which you live. It could be municipal ordinances or statutes. So it’s what I
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call like the five fingers of regulation, and you’ve got to deal with all of them. Otherwise,
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you’re only getting a partial correction, and the best example of that is cannabis today.
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You know, state by state, the individual state laws are changing, but the federal law remains wholly unchanged, as does the international treaties over cannabis.
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So in order for the feds to relax, they kind of have to get in a comfort zone where they are going to be more willing to effectively turn away from some of the aspects of these international treaties.
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turn away from some of the aspects of these international treaties.
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So, and I don’t want to get into the pros and cons of the debate, whether or not cannabis is going to get legalized here on the federal level. I mean, we’ve talked, we beat that to death. But
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let’s say someday that the U.S. just completely legalizes cannabis. What does that do to
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international obligations that other countries have? Would it be a domino effect? That is a great question. I would assume it would have to be,
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you know, the United States being one of the biggest markets in the world, and that’s for
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literally anything, not just cannabis. You know, we’ve got a huge presence at the UN,
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we have huge influence at the UN, I would think that the UN treaty and the way the UN
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approaches the treaty would necessarily have to yield. And if you look around the world right now,
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most other nations are looking at quite seriously decriminalizing and legalizing cannabis. You know,
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Mexico’s on the cusp of it, for goodness sakes. Canada’s already there. Several European nations
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are looking at it. Israel’s already there. You know, one of my
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favorite cannabis strains, Durban poison, hails from South Africa. So, you know, we’re on every
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continent. And by the way, if I can just give a plug to the Durban poison, the best thing to
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happen to yoga ever. So before we continue on, you and me, let’s see if anybody else has some
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questions while we’re here still fresh and all.
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You can wave your hands or just unmute your mics or whatever.
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Go ahead, Noah.
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Hey, how’s it going, guys?
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My name is Noah.
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Sorry about my dog.
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Don’t feel badly.
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I had to lock my cats out of the room here.
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They keep meowing at the door.
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You just can’t hear them, but they’re there.
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So my question is just what’s your opinion, And maybe you can talk about it a little bit.
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Um, uh, with, uh, the state states legalizing cannabis, uh, mama Colorado, uh, here, uh,
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where it’s pretty much completely legal. Um, and, uh, except for a little bit of growing stipulations, but, um, and, uh, firearms use,
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um, cause, uh, specifically, uh, the federal government for, uh, for the, all the paperwork
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that you have to sign, they put specifically, if you are a user of cannabis, you cannot own a
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firearm. So I was just wondering what your thought about that is with being a user of cannabis and, you know, disqualifying your Second Amendment rights.
00:16:48 ►
Sure. Great question. So you’re absolutely correct.
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There’s federal statute, criminal statute that says you cannot simultaneously possess cannabis and a gun.
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The mere fact that you have them in proximity means you’re looking at additional felony charges and a whole lot of trouble. Now, adding to the story, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but stop me if you are.
00:17:11 ►
A couple of years ago, some woman went into a gun shop to purchase a firearm, and she had her
00:17:18 ►
cannabis patient card from her state. And she went in to buy this gun. And although at the time the FFL forms
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did not ask about cannabis use, possession, or a cannabis card, I think she had a point she was
00:17:34 ►
trying to make. So she volunteers all this information, at which point the guy won’t sell
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her the gun. So big hullabaloo lawsuit, long story short, now ATF’s forms include a specific question
00:17:48 ►
asking if you have a cannabis card.
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And if the answer is checked yes, you don’t get the gun.
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So had this woman just simply not done this and not created a publicity stunt to try to
00:18:00 ►
force the issue, I have to question if the form would ever have that question on it
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today. But directly answering your question, I don’t understand why that prohibition continues.
00:18:14 ►
I think it is a form of discrimination, an unfair form of discrimination at that.
00:18:19 ►
But you have to look at this from a federal prosecutor’s perspective or a federal legislator’s perspective.
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And their response to you is going to very clearly be, hey, the felony statute is still in the books for cannabis.
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And we haven’t changed federal law.
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The fact that your local state law may have changed is of zero impact at the federal level. So maybe your individual state might no longer have a law that says you can
00:18:46 ►
be charged with gun possession at the state level. Federally, it’s still fair game. So you’re
00:18:53 ►
absolutely right. It’s an enduring risk. It is something that needs to be looked at and really
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should be changed, but it hasn’t changed yet. Cool. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
00:19:03 ►
Of course. Of course. I’m sorry it’s a
00:19:05 ►
disappointing answer, but it’s honest. Gary, let me clarify that whether or not you checked
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anything on the form or that was on the form or if you had a gun before the, you know, for years
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and then you have cannabis, under federal law, if you have the two together, it’s a felony. Is that
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right? Yes. Correct. Correct. No matter how long you’ve had the gun or whatever.
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It doesn’t make a difference.
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You’re not grandfathered in because you owned the gun
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first and then got the cannabis later.
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You’re not going to escape the implications of that.
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Just like fighting.
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I’m a guy who lives in Arizona.
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The most pro-gun state
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there is. Even our guns have guns.
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That’s how pro-gun Arizona
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is.
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It’s like if you find cannabis out in the wild and you bring it in, it’s still illegal to have it. Correct.
00:19:51 ►
You know, if I was a cannabis activist, rather than try to beat down that part of the law
00:19:59 ►
to get some publicity, what I would say is I would start going to church groups and say,
00:20:06 ►
you know, if you have marijuana in a gun, it’s a felony.
00:20:09 ►
Shouldn’t it be the same with alcohol?
00:20:10 ►
Look at all the problems with alcohol and guns.
00:20:13 ►
You know, I think you could get some press spin going on something like that at least.
00:20:17 ►
Oh, I would hope you were right about that.
00:20:21 ►
Unfortunately, people still have a funky prejudice about cannabis that they
00:20:26 ►
don’t take to other things. You know, alcohol forever gets a hall pass. Yeah, it’s going to
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be a generational thing. I think, you know, that my grandkids are not going to be anti-cannabis,
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even though they don’t have it around them or anything, you know, except when I’m there.
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So, you know, but, you know, they’re all all cool they know what’s going on and they’re whole generations like that yeah oh i totally agree uh you know it’s
00:20:50 ►
interesting you say that too i mentioned earlier when we were chatting that like people come up
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and like out themselves to me all the time now um millennials have such a different outlook and
00:21:02 ►
approach on psychedelics as compared to baby boomers or my
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generation gen x um millennials are just way more blase about it um i think the the fact that they’re
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raised full-time with an internet made a huge difference in in their psyches so you know the
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available immediate access to more data and the ability to spot check on the fly of what you’re being told is true or not makes a huge difference in the discussion.
00:21:33 ►
Yeah, it’s gotten where I really don’t want to know what some of the things my grandkids know because they’re not with the internet.
00:21:39 ►
They’re just so far ahead of us.
00:21:41 ►
Does anybody else have a question here right now they’d like to get in
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so I don’t hog the conversation? I mean I’m curious if there are any examples of you know
00:21:52 ►
implications like you know having a cannabis card because I mean I never heard about you know not
00:22:00 ►
being allowed to have a cannabis card and a firearm license at the same time. Are there any other things like that, you know, that just, you know, the average uninformed person
00:22:09 ►
like me, just be good to know, like, you know, if you have a CDL license, I don’t know, that kind of
00:22:16 ►
thing. Yeah, okay, so let’s start with some basics. First off, when we’re talking anything
00:22:22 ►
federal level, understand cannabis still 100% totally illegal, no legal nothing.
00:22:28 ►
So, I mean, there are very, very, very, very, very narrow exceptions.
00:22:33 ►
So narrow, not even worth bringing into the conversation.
00:22:35 ►
The next thing you have to do is look at what your individual state law says.
00:22:39 ►
And here in Arizona, we’ve got part of our statutes that include that employers in the right circumstances can discriminate against you since you have a card.
00:22:51 ►
And if you’re consuming cannabis and it’s really driven by sort of like a life health safety thing.
00:22:56 ►
So it’s the obvious stuff. You don’t want somebody driving your commercial truck while they’re stoned out of their mind.
00:23:03 ►
That’s logical. I personally don’t
00:23:05 ►
have a problem with that. I think reasonable regulation is totally okay. So you’re going to
00:23:10 ►
bang into stuff like that. But then there’s this other invisible layer where it’s not necessarily
00:23:16 ►
a statute that’s saying you do or don’t get this benefit, but instead it’s how certain businesses
00:23:21 ►
treat you. And I’ll give you a real life example that I personally experienced. So insurance, if you need life insurance or disability insurance or health
00:23:30 ►
insurance, your insurers are free to discriminate against you as much as they want. And my example
00:23:37 ►
is I’m in my fifties now. So I’m starting to look at retirement and I’m looking at retirement
00:23:41 ►
planning and I’m doing all that boring adult stuff that people do, like, you know, shopping for annuities, because that’s what adults are supposed to do,
00:23:48 ►
at least I’m told. So I put in an application for a disability long-term care policy, and there’s
00:23:56 ►
insurance you can get so that if you’re old and you end up, like, in a nursing home, they can
00:24:00 ►
actually pay for some of that as part of the insurance coverage. And I fill out the application honestly, and one of the questions asks,
00:24:09 ►
do you have a cannabis card or do you consume cannabis?
00:24:12 ►
And the answer is yes to both of those.
00:24:14 ►
I filled it out honestly.
00:24:16 ►
Now, with that application, they also come and give you a blood test and a urine test.
00:24:22 ►
And I’m not a heavy user. So when they took my test,
00:24:25 ►
it actually turned up negative. But because I said yes, they still held that against me. And I
00:24:31 ►
was denied the long-term care coverage component of the policy simply and strictly because I checked
00:24:37 ►
the box yes. Now mind, my blood chemistry, I have the blood of a 30-year-old. I’m practically
00:24:43 ►
vegetarian. My cholesterol levels
00:24:45 ►
are something you would envy. I’m in reasonably good shape, and I would otherwise have qualified
00:24:51 ►
for that policy at their best rates. But because of the cannabis, they literally wouldn’t even give
00:24:56 ►
me the policy. And the real irony there, Gary, is that the cannabis is what’s helping to keep
00:25:02 ►
you healthy, too, you know? It’s working in their favor, you know, trust me. I know, I know, I know.
00:25:08 ►
So it’s an enduring frustration and, and you know,
00:25:12 ►
this spills over into a lot of other things. The cannabis industry itself,
00:25:15 ►
one of their chief gripes, they can’t bank.
00:25:18 ►
Federal lending institutions won’t take them as clients because the risk to the
00:25:23 ►
bank is too great.
00:25:24 ►
They could lose their charter and have the bank prosecuted for money laundering.
00:25:29 ►
And that’s what’s brought such big crime into the whole thing
00:25:32 ►
because it’s a cash business, you know?
00:25:34 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:25:35 ►
The analogy I like to use, if anybody watched Breaking Bad,
00:25:41 ►
there’s an episode where Skyler, Walter’s wife, goes to their storage unit,
00:25:47 ►
and in the storage unit are pallets of $100 bills all stacked up, oh golly, at least four or five
00:25:53 ►
feet high. That is literally what the cannabis world is like right now. It’s an all-cash business,
00:26:00 ►
and there are a few very intrepid, brave banks who are willing to take on these
00:26:06 ►
clients, but they’re state chartered and federally chartered. But for most of the biz, it’s all cash.
00:26:11 ►
And I mean, literally all cash. And that’s really a magnet for crime.
00:26:19 ►
Oh, yeah. Yeah. If they would simply normalize banking, like 80% of the headaches would just go away and people would chill out.
00:26:28 ►
Yeah, even if they didn’t legalize cannabis across the board, if they legalized the banking of dispensaries and cannabis companies, that would sure solve a lot of criminal problems, I think.
00:26:41 ►
Oh, my God, yeah. Not to mention the tax reporting would be more accurate and honest, and the tax revenues collected would be bigger. But that’s also part of the problem, is there’s another IRS regulation 280E that says that these cannabis businesses, and by implication you could easily hypothecate a future psychedelics business, they are not permitted normal, ordinary write-offs that literally every other business enjoys. So the net result of that is these cannabis businesses pay an
00:27:11 ►
effective tax rate three times greater than what any other business pays. So your corner deli,
00:27:17 ►
you know, gets to write off the meats, the salaries, the wrapping paper, the electric bill,
00:27:23 ►
all that. Your cannabis companies can’t.
00:27:26 ►
Every dollar that comes in is completely taxable.
00:27:30 ►
Yeah, yeah, it’s high crime, but there’s a lot of that going on, isn’t there, in this country?
00:27:34 ►
Yeah, and that’s part of the problem.
00:27:36 ►
Congress is in some ways de-incentivized to make a change because they collect way more tax if they don’t.
00:27:43 ►
Yeah.
00:27:42 ►
because they collect way more tax if they don’t.
00:27:43 ►
Yeah.
00:27:47 ►
Let’s also, could you point out the difference?
00:27:50 ►
Because, you know, people just generally say,
00:27:52 ►
yeah, mushrooms are legal in Denver now,
00:27:54 ►
and they’re going to be legal in Oregon and D.C.
00:27:58 ►
What about the differences in these laws between, say, these three places?
00:28:00 ►
Sure.
00:28:09 ►
So, again, I have to start with the notion that federally it’s all illegal. So, you know, everything we’re talking about federally doesn’t exist. You can’t do it.
00:28:23 ►
If you look around the country, there are little pockets of legalization opening up in discrete cities. And again, Oregon, as you just referenced, is taking the audacious step of trying to open psilocybin to the whole state. And it’s IP34, their initiative,
00:28:27 ►
which is on the ballot for November. Meanwhile, like two, three weeks ago, I was reading DC has a
00:28:33 ►
deprioritization initiative, and I’ll explain the difference. So what Oregon is trying to do
00:28:41 ►
is to create an entire structure of, I’ll call them psilocybin centers.
00:28:48 ►
I think that’s what the term is in the initiative.
00:28:51 ►
And they want to have these psilocybin centers under some sort of a regulatory agency that’s yet to be created.
00:28:59 ►
The initiative would have to pass first.
00:29:01 ►
And that center will be staffed by people of some yet to be determined suitable
00:29:06 ►
qualification. It’s not necessarily all going to be, you know, PhDs or psychiatrists. And an
00:29:14 ►
individual, if they’re suitably licensed by this hypothetical future program, will be able to go
00:29:20 ►
to this psilocybin center and partake in psilocybin at the center. And then the initiative
00:29:28 ►
goes on to provide that there’s an integration session that the center must offer you. You’re
00:29:33 ►
not required to accept it. You could theoretically, you know, go have your psilocybin experience and
00:29:38 ►
go home afterwards and never talk to anybody about it again if you didn’t want to. But they have to
00:29:43 ►
make the integration available, which I think is very important, and I love that they included that. I think that was
00:29:47 ►
very wise, and also wise that they made it an option. Now, compare that to D.C. What D.C. is
00:29:54 ►
proposing with their initiative is no structure at all. I kind of call it like Fight Club. It’s
00:30:01 ►
like the first rule of Fight Club is don’t talk about Fight Club. So what D.C. is proposing is just to deprioritize law enforcement at the local level so that you as an individual could possess a certain quantity of, say,
00:30:14 ►
psilocybin mushrooms without having fear that the police will be specifically coming to look for you.
00:30:22 ►
But be clear, a deprioritization of criminal enforcement
00:30:26 ►
is not decriminalization, and it also doesn’t mean the police are going to be hands-off.
00:30:32 ►
What it means is, if their initiative passes, you want to be discreet, you want to keep it out of
00:30:37 ►
sight, out of conversation, out of public eye, you know, do at home what you would do at home,
00:30:42 ►
and leave it at home, and don’t flash it around.
00:30:52 ►
Because if you do, their initiative would absolutely allow the police to still arrest you and charge you and you could go to jail for it.
00:30:56 ►
So it’s, you know, sort of a fight club or a don’t ask, don’t tell kind of a scenario.
00:30:59 ►
Two very different approaches. I don’t know which one’s better.
00:31:02 ►
Maybe a hybrid of the two is the best. Who knows?
00:31:05 ►
But I like that they’re both happening simultaneously.
00:31:10 ►
I hope they both pass so that the whole country can observe and learn from those experiences.
00:31:18 ►
And that’s one of the great things about having 50 states is each little state can be its own little test crucible and, you know, let the best program win.
00:31:29 ►
That’s kind of what I thought about cannabis, Gary, you know, because there are so many different ways of going about it, like the Washington way, the Colorado way.
00:31:36 ►
You know, I lobbied against Prop 64 here in California because I thought it was just, you know, overregulated. But in any event, I do think it’s like you just said, it’s an advantage having 50 states try all these different approaches because we can really maybe come up
00:31:45 ►
with the best of, you know, in the computer industry, we used to call them Bob’s, the best
00:31:50 ►
of the best. Yeah, wholly agree. And while it’s still very early in the life of some revivification
00:31:59 ►
of psychedelics, this is the time to experiment with different programs and get the, you know,
00:32:05 ►
the right fit. You want the shoe that’s going to let you walk for a good long distance without
00:32:10 ►
causing blisters. So I’m all in favor of the experiment. And I hope that federal prosecutors
00:32:16 ►
and lawmakers will take the same sort of hands-off approach that they did with cannabis all these
00:32:22 ►
years. You know, we had the benefit during the Obama administration of the Cole and Ogden memos, where essentially the U.S. Attorney’s
00:32:32 ►
Office was under a semi-official order not to come in and not raid or bust programs that were
00:32:39 ►
in well-regulated states that had, you know, medical programs that were under some level of
00:32:44 ►
supervision and oversight. And for the most part, they stayed hands-off and it’s worked well. well-regulated states that had, you know, medical programs that were under some level of supervision
00:32:45 ►
and oversight. And for the most part, they stayed hands-off and it’s worked well. But unfortunately,
00:32:51 ►
during Trump’s tenure, Jeff Sessions repealed the Colin Ogden memo. So now the U.S. attorney’s
00:32:58 ►
offices around the country are technically free to come in and raid and bust up literally every cannabis enterprise everywhere.
00:33:07 ►
The fact that they still haven’t done it, I think, is just simply grace of the situation.
00:33:14 ►
But in a second Trump term, if that happens, I wouldn’t be so sure that cannabis is free.
00:33:30 ►
that cannabis is free. I would even go so far as to say I fear a Trump second term because of that.
00:33:35 ►
I mean, the man has demonstrated he is willing to do anything for political favor. And point to fact, if you ever visit the blog on my Psychedelic Alex website, I wrote an article
00:33:41 ►
about this. And I think in the right circumstance, if Trump thought that it would benefit him politically, either on a personal level for self-aggrandizement or to punish an enemy, he would do it. And it logically follows, where would you do that raid? Nancy Pelosi’s district.
00:34:10 ►
If he ramrods this new court appointee through with a six to three majority for the indefinite future, you know, it’s just kind of all over but the shouting for a long time, I think.
00:34:13 ►
I fear so. Yes, I fear so.
00:34:19 ►
But interestingly, I’m so glad you brought that up because you gave me a segue to something I didn’t want to talk about.
00:34:19 ►
So thank you. I had a very lovely interview yesterday with Dr. Doug’s daughter, who is a comparative religion professor.
00:34:31 ►
And in our conversation, I started to get a greater crystallization in my mind of an idea I’ve got that might give some religious argument to a broader legalization.
00:34:46 ►
give some religious argument to a broader legalization. And I’ll explain that in a moment.
00:34:53 ►
But first thing I wanted to say antecedent to that was that both he and I agree that the current makeup of the court and the current law, there’s a federal law called RFRA, Religious Freedom
00:34:58 ►
Restoration Act, actually lends a little more credence to a religious-based argument in favor of psychedelics.
00:35:07 ►
And now let me explain what I mean by that. So RFRA, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act,
00:35:13 ►
is the reestablishment of an old basis that the Supreme Court used to use to review religious
00:35:20 ►
questions. So in the context of psychedelics, for example, and this actually is
00:35:27 ►
what caused RFRA to be created, it used to be that the court applied what was called the Sherbert
00:35:32 ►
test. And Sherbert comes from a case by the name of Sherbert, not a delicious dairy beverage that
00:35:37 ►
you would enjoy, somebody named Sherbert. And the Sherbert test was this compelling interest test,
00:35:43 ►
where if the court was being challenged with the question of, hey, your federal law, the way it’s written or the way it’s being enforced infringes on my religious freedoms.
00:35:55 ►
The court would have to go through this analysis and decide, is this federal law supported by a compelling interest that would justify a bona fide infringement of religious
00:36:06 ►
freedom. But then in 1990, and this is crazy, this was on the Scalia court of all things,
00:36:13 ►
Smith versus Oregon came out and it was a peyote case where a couple of Native Americans had put
00:36:20 ►
in for unemployment because part of their religious observance as members of their Native
00:36:25 ►
American church, I can’t remember what the specifics were, but they had to put in for
00:36:30 ►
unemployment and they were denied unemployment on the premise that, you know, peyote use is not
00:36:36 ►
considered okay federally. And under the Scalia court, and Scalia wrote the majority opinion,
00:36:43 ►
they did away with the Sherbert test
00:36:45 ►
and instead just imposed this sort of very blanket federal law trumps religious
00:36:51 ►
issues or concerns, period. That freaked out everybody. And within three years, Chuck Schumer
00:37:00 ►
ended up introducing and very quickly got passed by a huge margin, this was during the
00:37:07 ►
Clinton administration, RFRA, which restored the Sherbert test. So now there’s this compelling
00:37:11 ►
interest test that the court must once again employ when being challenged with religious
00:37:18 ►
questions. Now, the reason I say this is encouraging is amongst this, the court’s not really allowed to ask the depth of
00:37:26 ►
your sincerity of religious belief. That’s not fair game. Because imagine having to like go
00:37:33 ►
through some sort of a religious piety test. It’s, you know, like the elections test in Gulliver’s
00:37:40 ►
Travels. What are we gonna do? Crack eggs open from different ends and decide which one’s better? It’s goofy. But then you’ve got Hobby Lobby. And you all may remember Hobby Lobby
00:37:49 ►
from a few years ago, which Hobby Lobby didn’t want to pay for certain abortion-related medical
00:37:55 ►
services as part of their company health plan because the owners of the company had a strong
00:38:00 ►
Christian conviction that spoke against that particular practice.
00:38:05 ►
And they won the argument.
00:38:06 ►
So now Hobby Lobby, and resultingly no company,
00:38:09 ►
has to provide those services if they don’t choose to because of religious conviction.
00:38:14 ►
So since the court now is leaning more towards favoring,
00:38:18 ►
allowing religions to practice as they want,
00:38:21 ►
I think that arguably helps.
00:38:24 ►
So now let me give you my harebrained
00:38:26 ►
theory that I’m starting to cook up. And I will tell you up front, I haven’t thought through it
00:38:29 ►
all the way. I could be completely wrong here, but I do know in the brief research I’ve done thus far,
00:38:35 ►
nobody’s come up with this yet. So here’s my theory. And it comes about as a result,
00:38:40 ►
I just happened to have these on the desk for my conversation yesterday, so I’ll hold them up to
00:38:43 ►
the camera. There’s a few books that really tipped me off to this. The first,
00:38:49 ►
which I don’t know if you can see that on the screen, is John Allegro’s book, The Sacred Mushroom
00:38:54 ►
and the Cross. And for those of you who might not be familiar with John Allegro, he is one of the
00:39:00 ►
original translators of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He translated the Copper Scroll, and Allegro, who’s now dead, he’s been dead for many years, was a very well-respected linguist. And what he was
00:39:12 ►
able to do, taking his linguistic skills, was to go back to these most ancient of source documents.
00:39:18 ►
Again, he translated the Copper Scroll, for goodness sakes, and ended up finding that a lot of the more contemporary and by contemporary like ancient
00:39:28 ►
greek not not like you know last week but ancient greek translations were just wrong
00:39:33 ►
and indeed he found lots of references to these archaic cults that used amanita mushrooms, and these cults gave rise to early proto-Judaism and early proto-Christianity.
00:39:49 ►
So, okay, this tells me there is an archaeological basis and also a religious history that ties
00:39:56 ►
psychedelics to the entire Abrahamic lineage. Then you add to the pile the next book,
00:40:03 ►
which is The Psychedelic Gic gospels written by jerry
00:40:05 ►
and julie brown i’ll hold that up too so you can see it if you haven’t read this one yet
00:40:09 ►
and the browns and by the way they’re they’re on the circuit you can actually talk to them
00:40:17 ►
meet them they’re on facebook i’m actually facebook friends with them uh and they do
00:40:21 ►
lectures on this the browns went and just started church hopping around Europe
00:40:25 ►
looking for iconography, and damn it all, they didn’t find a bunch of it. And inside their book,
00:40:31 ►
there’s a fantastic middle section here of color plates with a bunch of different color photos
00:40:37 ►
from inside churches. And it’s the artwork, it’s the sculptures, it’s the stained glass,
00:40:43 ►
and there’s mushroom images everywhere so again this
00:40:48 ►
tells you early christianity these people who are like physically literally building these churches
00:40:52 ►
had this in mind uh and then uh about oh god two months ago i read an article um from an
00:41:01 ►
archaeological journal called tel aviv out of Israel. And it was talking about this
00:41:07 ►
2300 year old altar, where they took scrapings off the altar and discovered cannabis resin.
00:41:15 ►
Now, if you look at the biblical recipe for anointing oil, cannabis oil is part of that.
00:41:22 ►
And it’s been misinterpreted over the years as cassia,
00:41:25 ►
which is just this inert, nothing, crappy little flower that actually doesn’t have any particular
00:41:30 ►
good use. And that apparently amongst a lot of scholars was always a very unsatisfying ingredient,
00:41:37 ►
and it was long believed that cassia was a misinterpretation. Because think about it,
00:41:43 ►
if you’ve got some sort of special anointing oil
00:41:45 ►
that’s supposed to have and impart special powers,
00:41:49 ►
wouldn’t you expect it to have an ingredient
00:41:51 ►
that would do that?
00:41:52 ►
And lo and behold, archaeologists find
00:41:54 ►
a 2,300-year-old altar with cannabis oil on it.
00:41:58 ►
So stringing all of that together, here’s my theory.
00:42:01 ►
I think, and also with support of Riffer, no less, that there is an
00:42:07 ►
argument to be made that people in the Abrahamic lineage, be it Christianity, Judaism, or even
00:42:13 ►
Islam, because it also arises from this lineage, they may have a religious birthright to experience
00:42:21 ►
archaic forms of their own religion. And I’m not saying this in a manner to, you know,
00:42:28 ►
cast aspersions towards any religious group or sect or division,
00:42:32 ►
but, you know, people do get curious about the histories of the religion
00:42:35 ►
and the various ways it’s practiced.
00:42:37 ►
And, you know, you can look at really Orthodox Christians across the world
00:42:42 ►
versus more Protestant Christians, same as Jews,
00:42:45 ►
same as Muslims, they all practice very different ways. And if you took a very, say,
00:42:50 ►
reformed Jew and put them next to a Hasidic Jew, you’re going to see two very different ways of
00:42:55 ►
practicing Judaism. A core that’s common, but the physical actions, the rules and regulations are
00:43:01 ►
different. So I think in the sense that you’re allowed the right
00:43:06 ►
to explore the different permutations of your religion, there may be an argument here that
00:43:10 ►
these proto forms of the religion have evidence of psychedelic use and therefore might arguably
00:43:17 ►
be a basis for permission. Now, all that being said, I’m absolutely not telling anybody tomorrow,
00:43:23 ►
run out and say, you know, mushrooms for Jesus. That is not what I’m saying. Although I’m not not saying that either. What I am saying is that I am now commencing a search for more historical record and archaeological evidence to see if I can really piece this argument together and support it with reliable evidence that, like, if you were literally in a court of law, a
00:43:46 ►
judge could look at that and say, yes, I’m admitting that evidence, and yes, it’s a compelling
00:43:50 ►
argument.
00:43:51 ►
So, Gary, if somebody that hears this podcast actually comes across some evidence like that
00:43:58 ►
that could help you, how do they tell you about it?
00:44:01 ►
How do they get it to you?
00:44:02 ►
Sure.
00:44:03 ►
Well, you can reach out to me through my
00:44:06 ►
law firm, although I’d prefer if you reached out to me through my Psychedelic Alex website.
00:44:10 ►
You can email me there. I am admin at psychedelicalex.com. You can also find me
00:44:17 ►
through Facebook and my YouTube channel. Just, you know, all those different social media
00:44:21 ►
platforms have some method of messaging. So you can grab me in any one of those.
00:44:27 ►
Yeah, I would suggest that unless somebody is actually a lawyer herself or himself, they should not contact your firm unless they want a referral or something like that.
00:44:37 ►
Yeah, exactly.
00:44:38 ►
And that’s mostly just in fairness to my partners and staff.
00:44:41 ►
I don’t want to flood them with my hobby stuff.
00:44:43 ►
And to be fair, the psychedelics aspect of my life is my hobby stuff, although it is part of my job too.
00:44:50 ►
If there’s other podcasters or local societies that would like to ask you questions or visit
00:44:58 ►
with you, would you be willing to make like Zoom appearances and get in touch with them?
00:45:03 ►
Oh yeah, absolutely. And in fact, that was exactly what i did yesterday with doug so um he actually reached out to me wanting
00:45:09 ►
to interview me and just coincidence i wanted somebody with a religious background to interview
00:45:14 ►
as well so uh i said let’s uh interview each other and we’ll each take a copy of the show and use it
00:45:20 ►
and he thought that was swell and i thought that was swell and we did it and tomorrow send me the
00:45:24 ►
the link to that show too.
00:45:26 ►
And I’ll put it in the program notes for here so people can come and listen
00:45:29 ►
to that. I’d like to hear that myself.
00:45:31 ►
We’ll do. I haven’t even begun editing yet.
00:45:34 ►
Just so everybody knows, I do a YouTube channel.
00:45:38 ►
So all of my stuff is video,
00:45:39 ►
which I’ve had to teach myself how to do video editing.
00:45:43 ►
And I’m one of the few people who is only just, you know,
00:45:46 ►
1% grateful for the pandemic because it forced me to stay home and learn this
00:45:51 ►
stuff.
00:45:52 ►
So I tried to make beneficial use of this rotten,
00:45:54 ►
terrible time in lockdown and make the most out of it.
00:45:58 ►
You can’t really see a lot of it just because we’re on the computer here,
00:46:02 ►
but during pandemic over the last four or five
00:46:06 ►
months, I built an entire studio here in my house. We had an extra bedroom we weren’t using, and this
00:46:12 ►
is where I host Psychedelic Elects. Cool. That sounds like it worked out pretty well for you,
00:46:17 ►
at least. It sounds like more than one percent, but that’s okay. Yeah, that’s not unreasonable,
00:46:28 ►
that’s okay. Yeah, that’s not unreasonable. But to that extent, if the editing on my show is crappy,
00:46:33 ►
that’s all me. So every show I’m learning a little bit more about editing, it gets, you know, incrementally better each show. I think within a year, it’ll almost look like somebody
00:46:38 ►
above third grade is actually editing it. Well, don’t feel bad. I can’t even listen to any of my first 100 podcasts.
00:46:45 ►
It’s like fingernails on a blackboard for me, you know. Oh, yeah. And we’re all like that. Let me
00:46:51 ►
circle back to the Supreme Court for one more minute here, because the religious, you know,
00:46:56 ►
the separation of church and state, which doesn’t really seem to be very effective from my perspective,
00:47:02 ►
but that, you know, it’s like we can’t, if you’re a sitting
00:47:08 ►
senator and you’re interviewing a potential Supreme Court justice, you can’t say, does your
00:47:13 ►
religion affect you at all? And yet, you know, isn’t that supposed to be the backbone of your
00:47:17 ►
life? Why can’t we ask them questions about their religion? Yeah, well, you hit the nail on the head.
00:47:26 ►
about their religion. Yeah, well, you hit the nail on the head. It’s the whole separation of church and state facade that we pretend exists. I think there are ways to ask clever questions to get
00:47:34 ►
around that problem. In case, in point here, you know, Trump just proposed or nominated a replacement justice who is, according to the news over the last two days,
00:47:49 ►
part of some really fringe Christian group that considers men to be dominant over women,
00:47:57 ►
which to me, if that’s actually accurate, and I don’t know that it is, I really don’t.
00:48:02 ►
But if that’s accurate, that’s damnably weird and creepy.
00:48:05 ►
I wouldn’t actually want somebody like that on the Supreme Court. You know, imagine a female justice
00:48:12 ►
who has to obey their non-justice husband. You’re going to tell me that wouldn’t impact decisions
00:48:18 ►
on the court? Come on. That’s fair game in my mind. Sort of an anti-Ginsburg. Yeah, it’s like literally the opposite.
00:48:27 ►
If you took her and flipped her inside out, yeah.
00:48:31 ►
Oh, God, what was that?
00:48:33 ►
The Handmaid’s Tale.
00:48:35 ►
I mean, it’s like right out of The Handmaid’s Tale.
00:48:38 ►
My wife read the books.
00:48:39 ►
I didn’t read the books.
00:48:40 ►
I got sucked into the show, and, like like the first two seasons just creeped me out,
00:48:46 ►
and if this is even an inkling of how these people believe, yeah, I don’t want them near my court.
00:48:52 ►
Unfortunately, there may be literally nothing any of us can do about it. Let me just go on the record
00:48:58 ►
here, because she’s been a professor at Notre Dame and still is for a long time now. And for them to give her that platform to get
00:49:06 ►
where she is, I am hereby stating I will never again cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame. I am
00:49:11 ►
getting all connection with them. I don’t want anything to do with them anymore.
00:49:16 ►
Well, and that’s a fair commentary on just critical thinking as a whole.
00:49:20 ►
So for the benefit of your audience, I mean, I’m a 30-year veteran lawyer. I’m AV rated.
00:49:26 ►
I’m actually a participating panelist with the American Arbitration Association. I do both
00:49:32 ►
arbitrations and mediations. I’ve authored more than one legal treatise. I’ve actually authored
00:49:38 ►
three of them. I’m licensed in multiple states. I have as impressive a resume as you would want.
00:49:44 ►
And I’m telling you,
00:49:45 ►
don’t be impressed by people in power. Don’t be impressed by people with high degrees. They can
00:49:51 ►
be as stupid and aberrant as anybody else. You really have to pick and choose and be a critical
00:49:57 ►
thinker. Don’t fall for the cult of personality. That is exactly how our country got in the
00:50:03 ►
situation it’s in right now.
00:50:11 ►
Yeah, you know, I can still remember as a, I was in college when I met one of the, the first time I met a high-ranking politician, and the guy was a real jerk and wasn’t very bright, and I thought,
00:50:16 ►
my God, you know, are they all like that? And I’m afraid too many of them are.
00:50:21 ►
Yeah, unfortunately, these days, particularly like in the afterglow of Citizens United, where money just poured into politics, you’re not getting the best and brightest.
00:50:33 ►
You’re not getting the conscientious legislator.
00:50:36 ►
You’re getting the lackeys and lapdogs of big money.
00:50:40 ►
And they’re going to serve big money.
00:50:42 ►
and they’re going to serve big money.
00:50:46 ►
Something I’ve been harping on here for a long time is the fact that, you know,
00:50:51 ►
we can get irritated at these personalities because they all rub us the wrong way,
00:50:54 ►
but it’s really the system that allows them to get to the top.
00:50:57 ►
You know, we really have to be looking at the system itself, I think.
00:50:59 ►
Oh, absolutely.
00:51:03 ►
You know, the current politicians, fine, vote them in, vote them out, whatever. You’re going to continue this cycle endlessly until you change that system.
00:51:07 ►
And I think top of the list, although people are going to gripe and say it’s an infringement of First Amendment rights, I don’t agree.
00:51:13 ►
Top of the list, get the dirty money out of politics.
00:51:16 ►
Make the money as transparent as possible.
00:51:19 ►
The singular biggest problem with the Citizens United decision is it allows unlimited donations,
00:51:32 ►
and they’re blind. You can’t see and I can’t see who’s giving the money. And I think if you could shed light, literal light on it, and out these people and let the rest of the country see
00:51:38 ►
who’s putting money in and how and where and why, that would be a game changer.
00:51:42 ►
and how and where and why, that would be a game changer.
00:51:46 ►
I agree with you.
00:51:49 ►
Of course, there’s a problem of disseminating information.
00:51:52 ►
How do you get it down to the Trump base?
00:51:59 ►
You know, how do you explain that Trump has paid $750 a year when he did pay taxes,
00:52:00 ►
and he had 10 years he didn’t pay taxes,
00:52:04 ►
and here we’re trying to struggle hoping we get another handout from the government, how do you get that to the Trump people where they understand it?
00:52:11 ►
I don’t know that you do. And then, you know, that’s really a wholly different issue too.
00:52:17 ►
You know, the news came out. We all can read it. And some people are just impervious to facts.
00:52:24 ►
What can you do?
00:52:26 ►
Well, you know, I asked that sort of a rhetorical question because I saw some of the good old boys down in my state of Texas where I’m still licensed to practice were being interviewed about it.
00:52:36 ►
And they were saying, good on him.
00:52:38 ►
You know, you’re supposed to cheat the government out of all your taxes.
00:52:41 ►
He did really good.
00:52:42 ►
And they’re all proud of him for doing that.
00:52:44 ►
Yeah.
00:52:43 ►
him out of all your taxes he did really good and they’re all proud of him for doing that yeah well and you know really what that comes back to is good citizenship and patriotism
00:52:51 ►
if if you are in that group that believes taxes are bad and taxes are evil and nobody should pay
00:52:58 ►
taxes what you’re really saying is that you want a world in which it’s strictly might that rules and you really
00:53:08 ►
don’t give a shit about your neighbor. Yeah. And you know, then what’s the point of a country?
00:53:12 ►
If you don’t care about the people in your country, if you don’t see that there is common good
00:53:18 ►
and common elevation and coming together and working towards common purpose and common cause,
00:53:24 ►
then what is the point of a country?
00:53:26 ►
I don’t want to live where we’re going to have private roads
00:53:30 ►
and I have to pay tolls every time I turn left or right.
00:53:33 ►
I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no fire department
00:53:36 ►
and if my house is burning, oh well, that’s on me.
00:53:39 ►
I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no streetlights,
00:53:42 ►
no highways, no schools.
00:53:46 ►
I don’t know anybody who does. Unfortunately, the propaganda of government bad, taxes bad, somehow took root and festered in
00:53:55 ►
the hearts of people and blossomed into whatever we’re seeing now. And it’s a shame. It’s a genuine
00:54:01 ►
shame. You know, I always kind of get beat down when I say this. I don’t get any support for it. But, you know, this country, first of all, population wise, only India and China have more people than we do. So it’s a really big group of people to get together. I mean, it’s not like Finland with 10 million people. You know, it’s a lot of folks.
00:54:26 ►
Finland with 10 million people. You know, it’s a lot of folks. And if you’ve ever studied anything about the Civil War, you know, it has never ended. You know, it’s still going on. You know, we have
00:54:30 ►
statues of General Lee, a Civil War general on the enemy side, and is standing on U.S. government
00:54:38 ►
property. You know, we’re honoring, maybe like putting up a statue of Hitler, if you, you know,
00:54:43 ►
want to do comparisons. But that’s, we wouldn’t do that because the Confederacy has never gone away.
00:54:49 ►
You know, I lived in the Deep South for a long time, and it’s just not going to go away.
00:54:54 ►
I think that we’ve got at least two countries here if we want to unify people.
00:54:58 ►
But I just don’t think there’s any way you’re going to get the good old boys in the Deep South
00:55:04 ►
and the
00:55:06 ►
chardonnay crowd in new york to come together and let alone california heck we can’t even agree with
00:55:12 ►
ourselves you know sure um and i’ll say something that’s even more cynical and disappointing
00:55:19 ►
that was pretty cynical but i’m going to be even worse. I’m born and raised in New York, just outside of New York City. I have lived at various times in New York, California, North Carolina, and here in Arizona. And I got bad news. Racism is everywhere, everywhere. It’s pockets or worse in some places, but it’s absolutely everywhere. You know, growing up in the shadow of New York
00:55:45 ►
City as I did, it’s a very racist place. I absolutely remember going to public school
00:55:51 ►
and, you know, the groups of black kids would sit in one section of the lunchroom away from the
00:55:57 ►
groups of white kids. And this was the norm all the years I was growing up. And it’s sad and it’s tragic. And it continues today.
00:56:07 ►
That’s right. That’s right. Even if you go red state, blue state, you still have the racism in
00:56:13 ►
both sections. You know, it’s like you said, it’s universal. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And like even like my
00:56:18 ►
time in North Carolina, I lived for a year in Raleigh and I worked literally at the Capitol.
00:56:24 ►
So there’s a mall there that all
00:56:26 ►
the state buildings are at. And at lunchtime, you’d go outside and you’d see this repeat during
00:56:31 ►
lunchtime. You’d have clusters of black people all together and clusters of white people all
00:56:36 ►
together. They’d mix a little bit, but you could plainly tell that there were invisible lines.
00:56:42 ►
And then it’s sad. And here you know, here in my home state of
00:56:46 ►
Arizona, the past 20 something years, we’re about the whitest state in the nation. So we don’t see
00:56:52 ►
it a lot here, just because we don’t have the diversity here. Yeah, the city I lived in when
00:56:57 ►
I went to high school, had one black family, four people in that whole city. And I just got together.
00:57:05 ►
We had an online reunion for our 60th reunion.
00:57:08 ►
And there are now something almost like 30 families in the city.
00:57:12 ►
You know, it’s still just totally, you know, a white city.
00:57:15 ►
And it’s on, you know, about 100 miles outside of Chicago.
00:57:18 ►
But that’s a problem that’s, you know, superimposed on top of all these other problems.
00:57:23 ►
And it’s sort of universal. It’s sort yeah absolutely and america hasn’t dealt with it
00:57:30 ►
it needs to but it hasn’t happened yet and that might be the purpose of psychedelics yeah oh for
00:57:38 ►
sure for sure but before we go here does anybody else else have another question you want to squeeze in? Go ahead, Charles.
00:57:46 ►
With the theory that you’re proposing about a religious freedom argument for psychedelics,
00:57:51 ►
to what extent does one need to be involved in an organized religious practice to claim that?
00:57:57 ►
Okay, so there are definitely religions that are acknowledged today that have permission,
00:58:03 ►
even from the DEA, to engage in psychedelics.
00:58:07 ►
You can look around the country. There are peyote churches. Again, the one that I represent
00:58:13 ►
is just one example. The Native American church, although it is meant for Native Americans,
00:58:19 ►
they do allow non-Natives to participate. I mean, you’ve got to ask permission, etc.
00:58:24 ►
Ayahuasca churches are making tremendous inroads right now.
00:58:27 ►
They’ve had some good luck with litigation against the DEA.
00:58:32 ►
So there are opportunities.
00:58:34 ►
The hard part is like starting something from scratch.
00:58:38 ►
My review of the law just doesn’t lend itself to the creation of a psychedelic religion out of nothing.
00:58:47 ►
There have been past attempts that predate RFRA.
00:58:51 ►
One of these was an LSD church, of all things, the Neocleptonian Church.
00:58:57 ►
In fact, I have a reference to it in the book.
00:59:00 ►
They had early run-ins, and people got convicted and lost their appeals
00:59:05 ►
and they ended up going to prison over it.
00:59:07 ►
So it’s bloody hard.
00:59:09 ►
And that’s why I gave the caution earlier,
00:59:11 ►
don’t just jump out tomorrow and say, mushrooms for Jesus,
00:59:15 ►
and start taking mushrooms because you’ll probably get arrested.
00:59:21 ►
Lorenzo?
00:59:22 ►
Yeah, go ahead, Michael.
00:59:22 ►
Lorenzo yeah go ahead Michael
00:59:23 ►
yeah I think you should
00:59:26 ►
you can refer
00:59:28 ►
to more details on this
00:59:30 ►
Chief Justice John
00:59:32 ►
Roberts he had that decision
00:59:34 ►
I believe in
00:59:35 ►
the second
00:59:38 ►
decision or first in
00:59:40 ►
2006 February
00:59:42 ►
it was
00:59:44 ►
Gonzalez versus UDV Church, that ayahuasca religion.
00:59:49 ►
Yeah.
00:59:50 ►
That decision he made, or he wrote the opinion, it has through the history of, you know can join one of these churches.
01:00:28 ►
It took away that you need to be a Native American to be in the peyote religion.
01:00:35 ►
So basically, it legalized psychedelics.
01:00:39 ►
And for some reason, at the time, people said, oh, no, that’s not going to happen.
01:00:45 ►
They’re going to change it.
01:00:46 ►
But nothing has ever challenged this.
01:00:50 ►
They never went back.
01:00:52 ►
And I think the court said, you know, you guys got to do this over again.
01:00:57 ►
Are you familiar with that decision?
01:01:01 ►
Yeah, I am.
01:01:02 ►
Anthony Gonzalez versus UDV Church.
01:01:07 ►
Yeah. I really recommend reading it. It’s very profound. Yeah, I reference it in my book, although in fairness to this conversation,
01:01:12 ►
I can assure you, I don’t have it memorized, so I can’t hope to quote it to you. But my comment
01:01:18 ►
earlier wasn’t meant to suggest that you couldn’t start a new religion. You absolutely can,
01:01:23 ►
and there are definite pathways by which to start a new religion. What I was really focusing on was, I don’t think you could
01:01:30 ►
start a new psychedelic religion because until you have achieved recognition as a religion,
01:01:36 ►
you’re just using psychedelics illegally. And I think you’re going to risk getting in trouble,
01:01:39 ►
which is why I also suggested that the better path, if you’re looking to go that way, is to
01:01:44 ►
hook up with an existing religion that
01:01:47 ►
has already received that recognition. And maybe if it’s appropriate,
01:01:51 ►
you grow out of their doctrine and branch off.
01:01:55 ►
And there are some examples of this, the peyote church of which I have as a
01:02:00 ►
client,
01:02:01 ►
they were founded by a gentleman who was originally in the Native American church,
01:02:07 ►
but he wanted to take it more multicultural and multiracial and wasn’t being permitted to do that.
01:02:14 ►
So he broke off and started this multiracial, multicultural peyote church. The other thing I
01:02:20 ►
wanted to point out too, also relative to peyote, was that the Native American church’s use of peyote
01:02:25 ►
is a perfect, perfect example of the revival of an archaic practice of religion, because the Native
01:02:33 ►
American church is, you know, in the last hundred years more contemporary, and these Native Americans
01:02:39 ►
revived the old peyote cults that predate even them in order to create this modern religion
01:02:46 ►
that has embraced aspects of Christianity and also aspects of the traditional peyote use.
01:02:52 ►
And they absolutely enjoy a ton of protection under federal law. So I think that a revival
01:02:58 ►
of an archaic practice stands a reasonable better argument than a brand new religion saying, hey, we stumbled upon this
01:03:05 ►
new revelation, and, you know, we’ve got to drop tons of acid in order to get there. I think that’s
01:03:12 ►
a hard sell, a much harder sell. Which circles back to the original use of mushrooms in Christianity
01:03:18 ►
as a possibility of reviving that religion. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, a hat tip to Terrence McKenna’s archaic
01:03:25 ►
revival, I think that would be the natural progression of Terrence’s theory and belief.
01:03:33 ►
And I, again, you’re going to start looking for this evidence, and if the argument’s there, by
01:03:37 ►
God, let’s go fight a fight in court on behalf of literally every Christian Jew and Muslim in the
01:03:43 ►
world, because it would be, according to this argument, their religious birthright.
01:03:48 ►
And it doesn’t matter if you want to partake. You don’t have to.
01:03:51 ►
But at least knowing that you have the right to do so is what matters.
01:03:55 ►
I’ll tell you what, Gary, we’re kind of out of time tonight,
01:03:58 ►
but I’d like to see if you’d be willing to come back maybe quarterly or something like that
01:04:02 ►
and give us an update on what’s been going on.
01:04:04 ►
Happy to. You name it, I’ll come anytime. Okay. Well, listen, everybody, I appreciate you being
01:04:09 ►
here tonight. I’ll see some of you Thursday morning. But until the next time, keep the old
01:04:14 ►
faith and stay high. Thanks, everybody. It was fun. As you just heard, Gary will be back with us,
01:04:23 ►
well, whenever there’s some new information about legalities you may encounter
01:04:28 ►
as we continue to fight the war on people who don’t agree with Big Pharma having the exclusive right to supply our medicines.
01:04:37 ►
In fact, it’s my plan to have Gary back on at the end of this year,
01:04:40 ►
and he’ll discuss the results of various ballot measures that are being voted on in less than a month now. And no matter where you stand politically, it seems to
01:04:50 ►
me that you’re going to want to get out and vote, particularly if legalization of drugs is on your
01:04:56 ►
ballot. You may not realize it, but voting isn’t available to a very significant number of our
01:05:02 ►
fellow humans. If you don’t use it, the day may arrive when you lose it completely.
01:05:07 ►
So put on your mask and get out and vote.
01:05:10 ►
In my opinion, it’s never been more important than it is today.
01:05:14 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:05:18 ►
Namaste, my friends.