Program Notes
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Date this lecture was recorded: March 15, 2021Guest speakers: Jennifer Stell and Alex Karasik
https://baystaters.webflow.io/
Today’s podcast features a conversation that we recently had in the live salon. Our guests were Jennifer Stell and Alex Karasik who are working with the Baystaters for Natural Medicine in Massachusetts. This group came together, online, in October of 2020. Already they have convinced the city councils in three Massachusetts towns to decriminalize drugs. I am hoping that hearing how they did it will inspire you to follow their lead.
Baystaters for Natural Medicine
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:31 ►
And I want to welcome you to the first podcast of my 17th year of podcasting from here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:38 ►
Originally, I planned on posting this yesterday, making it the last podcast of my 16th year.
00:00:44 ►
But, alas, my highly refined ability to procrastinate took hold yesterday,
00:00:48 ►
so here we are today, as my dad used to say, a day late and a dollar short.
00:00:54 ►
Well, what I want to play for you right now is a recording from last Monday’s live salon.
00:01:06 ►
Our guests were Jennifer Stell and Alex Krasik, who are involved with a Massachusetts organization called the Bay Staters for Natural Medicine. As you’ll hear in just a moment, what I find unique about this group is not only have they convinced the city councils
00:01:12 ►
of three cities in their state to decriminalize psychedelic substances, but their group has only
00:01:18 ►
been around since last October. That’s right, in October of 2020 they came together online and since then they’ve been
00:01:27 ►
making big news in the war on drugs. Well, after listening to everything that they’ve accomplished
00:01:32 ►
already and how they have done it in such a short time and during the pandemic at that, well, I’m
00:01:39 ►
hoping that you’ll be inspired to get involved yourself. If you live in Massachusetts, you can
00:01:44 ►
join their group or if you live Massachusetts, you can join their group.
00:01:49 ►
Or if you live elsewhere, you can get something like this going in your own hometown.
00:01:56 ►
Today, well, we seem to have a lot of momentum building to bring an end to the war on drugs.
00:02:02 ►
So don’t wait for somebody else to do your part. Right now, today is the time for you to stand up and be counted. We really need your help.
00:02:06 ►
Here now is a recording of last Monday’s conversation in the psychedelic salon.
00:02:12 ►
What I’d like to do is to kind of get a little input from you, Alex,
00:02:18 ►
about what the Bay Staters is all about and how you guys are going about doing your, you know, going after
00:02:27 ►
your objective. And then we’ll maybe open up for some questions and take it from there. So,
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and then what I’m going to do is I’m going to clean out any gaps where there’s people
00:02:38 ►
pausing and stuff like that. And I’ll podcast it to the larger audience. So any links that you have or ways that people can get in touch with you or support your work
00:02:49 ►
or just find out more about how they can reproduce what you’re doing, you know, stuff like that,
00:02:54 ►
you can send me offline and I’ll put that all in the program notes and it’ll go out tomorrow.
00:02:59 ►
And by the way, tomorrow is sort of an auspicious day for us here in the salon.
00:03:04 ►
And by the way, tomorrow is sort of an auspicious day for us here in the salon.
00:03:13 ►
Your podcast that I put out of tonight’s conversation will be the last podcast of the 16th year of podcasting.
00:03:15 ►
So it’s the last day of my 16th year.
00:03:17 ►
The next day is St. Patrick’s Day.
00:03:20 ►
It’s the anniversary of the beginning of the 17th year of podcasting. So very auspicious that we’re able to talk about something that’s
00:03:25 ►
near and dear to my heart. And that’s bringing an end to this insane war on people who use
00:03:30 ►
drugs that aren’t approved by a pharmaceutical company, you know?
00:03:34 ►
Yep. Yep. Actually, Jennifer joined as well. She was the other person I invited from Bay
00:03:41 ►
Stater. So she’s going to follow up as well. Okay, good. So tell
00:03:49 ►
us about how did your organization get started? Is it like 2017 or something you guys started or
00:03:54 ►
did I get that wrong? No, it’s a fairly new organization. We’re not even six months old,
00:04:03 ►
but we’ve accomplished a lot in a very short time.
00:04:07 ►
There’s a lot of changes going on in the state of Massachusetts right now.
00:04:12 ►
And to be honest, we, our organization, Bay Staters for Natural Medicine, has been at the forefront of a lot of really big changes in the legal aspect of psychedelics. We have successfully decriminalized
00:04:30 ►
or been one of the leaders of decriminalizing ethnogenic plants in three towns now, and we’re
00:04:40 ►
looking to target Boston next. And after Boston, we believe a lot of other places
00:04:46 ►
will be falling suit after.
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So we see that as part of a larger strategy
00:04:52 ►
to ultimately decriminalize
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and then eventually legalize these plants and medicines
00:05:00 ►
throughout the entire state.
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So we’ve been able to decriminalize in the first town,
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which is the hometown of myself at the moment. And Jen was a part of this with me where we talked to
00:05:16 ►
the team members of city council and did some grassroots organization reaching out to all of those city council members.
00:05:26 ►
And then there was a city council vote in which Jen and I were the two speakers.
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And Somerville was the first town in Massachusetts to decriminalize psychedelics.
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And we’re super proud of that.
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Cambridge, Massachusetts followed after that. of that Cambridge Massachusetts followed after that
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and uh Northampton followed after that so Cambridge is where Harvard University is where
00:05:51 ►
Timothy Leary and the Harvard Psychedelic Club all got started and um there’s there’s a lot of
00:05:57 ►
psychedelic history that comes from Massachusetts that we’re super proud of. And we saw what was going on in other parts of the country
00:06:05 ►
and acted very quickly. And we were led by a great leader, James Davis, who also was a Somerville
00:06:14 ►
resident. He’s originally from Kansas, but he just started this group on social media. And a lot of
00:06:21 ►
people have joined. We’re over a thousand people following the social media accounts, at least at the moment. And we’ve got dozens of people showing up regularly to meetings. So we’re super effective. We’re moving very quickly. We know how to talk to these local lawmakers and how to get stuff done and get this legislation passed at a really quick rate and it’s been quite a whirlwind and we only see
00:06:47 ►
things going up once Boston itself makes this change and right now we’re talking trying to
00:06:53 ►
reach out to city councilors there again we think that’s going to mean big big changes for the rest
00:06:59 ►
of the state so we’re super proud of the work we’ve done so far, and we only see things continuing to go in a more positive direction.
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Also, for a young organization, you guys have really made some amazing headway.
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So let’s rewind a bit.
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Now, this all started with a social media post.
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How did you guys come together?
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How did you organize?
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Actually, I could answer that.
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There’s a kid named
00:07:28 ►
Chi on LinkedIn who’s part of the
00:07:30 ►
Decriminalize Nature movement
00:07:31 ►
across the country. He had
00:07:34 ►
reached out to James and myself
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and asked if we would be interested
00:07:38 ►
in starting this grassroots movement.
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Quite frankly, I never even used
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LinkedIn that much, so I was
00:07:44 ►
skeptical at first.
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And then James had reached out to me and we talked about, you know, why we thought this is something that needs to happen.
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And from there, we there was four other people that she had gotten connected with us.
00:08:01 ►
And we just started making phone calls and deciding where do we want to be?
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What kind of organization do we want to be?
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What kind of group of people do we want to have?
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And after that, we went on social media,
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started asking for help.
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People like Alex joined up
00:08:19 ►
and were just hit the ground running
00:08:21 ►
and have been amazing assets to our movement.
00:08:26 ►
And from there, we’ve just continued to grow.
00:08:29 ►
Did this begin before the pandemic?
00:08:32 ►
No, we started in October.
00:08:34 ►
Oh, wow.
00:08:35 ►
00:08:37 ►
Hey, Mike, you had a question?
00:08:40 ►
I was wondering what social media platforms work best for you?
00:08:44 ►
I was wondering what social media platforms work best for you?
00:08:51 ►
I think right now Instagram is one that we get the most feedback from,
00:08:55 ►
but we are also on Facebook as well.
00:08:59 ►
But I think we get the most interaction from people on Instagram.
00:09:07 ►
Now, Alex said you guys on Facebook maybe, maybe that is you have like a thousand people how how do you how do you organize on a local basis when you uh want to do something like
00:09:13 ►
go to somerville or whatever uh cambridge or whatever uh you know how do you get the on the
00:09:18 ►
ground people organized yeah well um we we do everything virtually because of the moment in time that we’re in
00:09:29 ►
and we try to regularly have action hour meetings in which we have stated goals and break down who’s
00:09:36 ►
going to do what and a lot of it’s pretty straightforward at at this point after we’ve done it a few times now. We know which city
00:09:46 ►
councillors to reach out to who we’ve built relationships with in some of
00:09:51 ►
these places and our local members in those towns are the key people when it
00:09:57 ►
comes to the individual cities and towns. So James the founder and myself
00:10:03 ►
are from Somerville so that was a very natural place for us to start.
00:10:08 ►
We have Boston members now who are going to be taking that on in a similar way in Boston next.
00:10:12 ►
So the people who are living in those towns are the people who can be most effective in terms of reaching out to these local politicians.
00:10:22 ►
And in a lot of ways, that’s just what it comes down to.
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We write, bombard them with letters.
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We contact them as much as we can.
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And we find that there’s usually a couple people on the council
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who are very enthusiastic.
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And then a lot of the rest of the councils tend to follow their lead.
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So it becomes a very organic thing after a while with how much we’re expanding.
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Like there’s members of our group who go very far out to western Massachusetts
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and central Massachusetts as well.
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So that’s the effective strategy we’ve been doing that works.
00:11:02 ►
Are you having in-person meetings with the city councils and the council
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members or is this all virtual for the most part it’s it’s been all virtual uh there’s there’s been
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a couple meetings in person but it’s really not been that necessary so far and it’s made things go quicker as well so it’s it’s really been to our advantage in a few
00:11:27 ►
ways that that was my guess is i was thinking that that you’re more likely to get a meeting
00:11:33 ►
with somebody uh virtually right now in this situation than when you used to go i used to
00:11:38 ►
try to get to talk with council members and reps and yeah, it’s impossible to get a meeting with them. So, uh, this may be, uh,
00:11:46 ►
a time to, to, uh, get ahead. As Jennifer was saying,
00:11:50 ►
it might be a perfect time to start to really getting more active about the
00:11:54 ►
whole thing.
00:11:55 ►
Yep. Yep. Uh, it’s, it’s strange.
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This is one area of our lives where, uh,
00:12:02 ►
things have been super productive at a very quick rate when nothing
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else in the world seems to be going like that.
00:12:08 ►
So do you have a protocol or a pattern that you approach Congress or representatives with
00:12:16 ►
council people with and or is it just kind of, you know, just make it up as you go along
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kind of thing?
00:12:23 ►
So usually we have people reach out um we have
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what’s called action hours and in that action hour we all introduce ourselves there’s usually about
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between six and ten of us on a call at a time um and it’s people that can make it for that
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specific time we do them four times a month and and we ask people to reach out to their local representatives
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and with that we send usually a template that it has like what we want to say. We send a flyer with
00:12:54 ►
some information on it as well as the personal part which is your story. So you write like an
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elevator pitch of your story and then the stuff that we send you
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goes underneath it, and then the flyer gets attached. So they’re pretty uniform, except for
00:13:10 ►
the stories are all individualized. So when we send this information, not only are they getting
00:13:15 ►
hard information of why, you know, legalizing substances is a necessity in our state, but also
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why it’s important to the individual that’s writing the
00:13:27 ►
letter. You know, I realize you guys have more than your hands full, but you’ve been so successful
00:13:32 ►
in such a short period of time. Are you inviting people to come to these gatherings, online
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gatherings from out of your state or just strictly Massachusetts?
00:13:42 ►
out of your state or is this strictly Massachusetts?
00:13:48 ►
Well, anyone’s welcome to join,
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but the focus really is on people from Massachusetts because that’s who our most successful advocates have been.
00:13:56 ►
And we see that as how it will continue to be.
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If anyone’s ever interested in just seeing how one of these action meetings
00:14:02 ►
work and how we do, We’re totally open to that.
00:14:05 ►
But in terms of what one could effectively do with the grass work,
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grass grassroot work we do,
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it is a local person who is most effective in talking to a local politician
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and saying, these are our needs as, as I was,
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I was thinking of more,
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more along the lines of you guys inspiring other people and letting them see a copy of your templates, things like that, that other communities could try to replicate it without you, you know, diverting any of your bandwidth to that.
00:14:35 ►
But if they just sat in, kept their mouth shut, and got a copy of a template and learned, I think that would be very valuable if they could do that.
00:14:42 ►
learned, I think that would be very valuable if they could do that.
00:14:48 ►
We have, we’ve had a couple of meetings with people from other states that had joined just to see how it is that we run our meetings and get, you know, an idea of the kind of
00:14:54 ►
material that we’re sending out and how we send it out.
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So it’s, anybody’s welcome to join, especially if you want to do that.
00:15:01 ►
We’re all for it because we believe that this is something that should be happening
00:15:04 ►
across the country um and decriminalized nature actually is a has a
00:15:11 ►
countrywide um following and they have different chapters um all throughout each state so um
00:15:19 ►
we’re kind of partnered up with them uh as. So we do invite people to come if they want, because we’d love to be a part of their movement as well.
00:15:30 ►
You have had such success in a short time.
00:15:34 ►
And where Alex really caught my attention when he got a hold of me to see if we could start spreading the word more about this,
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is that your approach to start with city councils, I hadn’t seen anybody doing that before.
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Everybody I know has been going right to the state legislature, you know, and lobbying them.
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And, you know, which seems like, well, that’s what you do if you want the state to change. But if you
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get all the cities, major cities changing, you know, the state legislatures, you know,
00:16:02 ►
there go my people, let me get out in front and lead them, you know.
00:16:06 ►
So I think that’s a brilliant approach.
00:16:08 ►
And obviously it seems to have some, it’s working.
00:16:14 ►
Yeah, as a group, we’re working out right now,
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if we want to pursue that state level bill for a um a vote for the statewide um ballot initiative but
00:16:31 ►
we’re having so much success with the way we’re approaching it at the moment
00:16:35 ►
we’re kind of debating amongst ourselves if we should go that route because what what we’re doing works. And if in a year or two, we’re at 90% of local townships
00:16:48 ►
going the path that we’ve seen Somerville and Cambridge and Northampton going, and hopefully
00:16:54 ►
Boston soon. If most of the state is already on board, and it’s not a statewide thing yet,
00:16:59 ►
there might be better places for us to put our resources at that point because it might be effectively successful at a statewide level, even though it’s not officially there yet. So
00:17:11 ►
we’re working that out and seeing if there’s anything bigger picture plans we might want to
00:17:18 ►
make for two years or so from now. And it’s really exciting to just even be thinking about things on that scale.
00:17:31 ►
Are there concerns about if some jurisdictions that you put it to a ballot measure, it fails,
00:17:37 ►
there being a split in different jurisdictions and how that would play out in your goals for statewide legalization, I’m sorry, statewide decrim. Yeah, I mean, it’s possible that you go that route and then it doesn’t pass uh where right now that
00:17:48 ►
there’s momentum and we’re seeing that there’s the culture of the different cities kind of almost
00:17:55 ►
getting jealous of each other and wanting to uh keep up with one another so we’re finding that
00:18:00 ►
works really well and it is a lot of work. You need 80,000 signatures to get something on
00:18:05 ►
the ballot. And it’s not that we don’t think we can do that. It’s just, you also need, it’s about
00:18:12 ►
a $10 million budget in the past we’ve seen as well. And we are very grassroots organization.
00:18:18 ►
And those things kind of do seem a little lofty at the moment. I’m sure we can get there, but what we’re doing works at the moment. So we’re kind of pretty comfortable with the way things are going and the path that we’ve been taking. So yeah, we’re satisfied at the moment.
00:19:06 ►
Yeah, it seems to me that if, you know, say the majority of the population of the state via the cities have voted for that, have is in favor of decrim right now. So, you know,
00:19:11 ►
it’s just going to get a courageous politician looking for a career ahead to jump on this bandwagon. But I think you guys are doing all the heavy lifting and upfront work because
00:19:16 ►
it is a grassroots movement. And fortunately, it’s a generational issue as well, and so many more young people are moving into the FDA and DEA and politics that, you know, they’re not all drug users, but they all have friends and families that are.
00:19:34 ►
And now so many young people have grandparents that are using medical marijuana that I think that the stigma has shifted a little bit, or a lot, actually.
00:19:43 ►
the stigma has shifted a little bit or a lot actually.
00:19:51 ►
Hey, where’s law enforcement in, in, with, with your relationship?
00:19:54 ►
Do you guys have relationship with local law enforcement?
00:19:56 ►
How has law enforcement interacted with the, the different cities where you’ve succeeded?
00:20:01 ►
They’ve been fairly cooperative.
00:20:03 ►
I’m not sure exactly if we’ve directly been in touch with them
00:20:07 ►
but i can tell you in somerville like the the mayor um has a close relationship with them and
00:20:14 ►
the the essence of the atmosphere of decriminalizing which we is what we officially
00:20:20 ►
have done is uh an understanding that this is the bottom of your priority list.
00:20:26 ►
And from everything we’ve heard, there’s no backlash. There’s no issues. Somerville and
00:20:33 ►
Cambridge are fairly liberal, open-minded places. And they’re also very condensed. Somerville is the
00:20:42 ►
16th or 14th most condensed city in America. So our local law
00:20:46 ►
enforcement do have issues to deal with. And it does seem reasonable. I think that this shouldn’t
00:20:54 ►
be at the top of their priority, even for the individual members of law enforcement involved.
00:21:01 ►
I think if I had to guess, most of them are just fine with what we’ve done so far.
00:21:10 ►
Charles in Oregon, uh, how has the decrim already come in now for,
00:21:16 ►
for psychedelics the first year that it was voted and how has it been accepted
00:21:20 ►
by the state so far?
00:21:23 ►
Well, I’m not a real maven on this issue, but I mean, I haven’t really seen any, you know, any chatter issues in local community about anything adverse occurring.
00:21:36 ►
What was the vote?
00:21:37 ►
What percentage of people voted in favor of that amendment or whatever?
00:21:42 ►
Well, like I said, I’m not a maven on the issue, but I mean, it did pass.
00:21:47 ►
You know,
00:21:47 ►
and my understanding is that there was broad public support both for D-Crim
00:21:52 ►
and for the psilocybin services initiative here.
00:21:59 ►
So that’s, that’s, you know, the whole country, I think,
00:22:03 ►
is wising up to the proposition that we’re spending an awful lot of money keeping people in jail and arresting them and taking their property away.
00:22:12 ►
When we’ve got other things we could be spending money on, like fixing our roads and schools and et cetera.
00:22:18 ►
Right now, schools are going to have to be rebuilt in some structure for ventilation and things like that, filtering out the air.
00:22:24 ►
So, you know, there’s a lot of better ways to spend our money than putting up people that are smoking pot. and some structure for ventilation and things like that, filtering out the air.
00:22:29 ►
So, you know, there’s a lot of better ways to spend our money than putting up people that are smoking pot.
00:22:36 ►
Now, I’m not saying that meth isn’t a big problem and that we don’t have drug problems, but I’m saying that, you know, that we’re maybe persecuting the wrong people here.
00:22:41 ►
I think we all know that. I agree with that.
00:22:44 ►
Well, and I think the other thing to look at is that just because, you know, someone’s on meth doesn’t mean that their
00:22:49 ►
behaviors are actually criminal. They could be stemming from something else like
00:22:53 ►
having, being homeless or suffering a trauma. And so having different resources available to
00:23:00 ►
those people would be much more effective than throwing them into jail and throwing them into lockdown facilities where then the rest of their lives are determined
00:23:11 ►
because when you get out and you have a record, it’s difficult to get funding for housing.
00:23:17 ►
It’s difficult to get food stamps to get on your feet or to get any kinds of assistances
00:23:22 ►
that you need from the states.
00:23:24 ►
It’s even difficult to get scholarships for colleges.
00:23:28 ►
So when you’re put away for any kind of drug right now,
00:23:32 ►
it affects the long term of your life.
00:23:35 ►
It makes it much more difficult.
00:23:37 ►
And I think there’s much better ways to treat those people
00:23:40 ►
than just locking them up because not all of them are criminals.
00:23:44 ►
I really appreciate you pointing that out, Jennifer. And that’s exactly right.
00:23:47 ►
You know, that, that people that get addicted to meth are,
00:23:50 ►
are in a similar situation as alcoholics. You know, they, they,
00:23:54 ►
there is some physical problem there.
00:23:56 ►
And I was very fortunate that at the only time I,
00:24:00 ►
I actually got introduced to meth,
00:24:02 ►
it was a time I was a family man and really serious about that. And I could have got addicted to it. It’s the most addicting thing I’d ever tried in my life.
00:24:10 ►
And I can see how it’s just so easy to fall into that. And then once you do, of course,
00:24:16 ►
it’s just downhill. So that’s a really excellent point. And I shouldn’t have dismissed meth addicts
00:24:22 ►
like that because I can see how I actually could
00:24:25 ►
have become one. So, you know, it’s a slippery slope and treatment, of course, is what we need.
00:24:32 ►
And, you know, we’re not putting alcoholics in jail and they’re actually causing a lot more
00:24:37 ►
damage to families, I think, than meth addicts probably. So in the long run, so just we need
00:24:43 ►
to balance these things and get our head on straight, I think.
00:24:46 ►
But to be clear, Jennifer, you and Alex are advocating for decrim of plant medicines,
00:24:52 ►
or is it all drugs?
00:24:55 ►
So the movement in both Cambridge and Somerville started off being just for plant medicines,
00:25:01 ►
but then we felt with the momentum that we had that we might
00:25:05 ►
as well go to just decriminalize everything. So both Somerville and Cambridge have chosen to
00:25:12 ►
not pursue criminalizing all substances at this point. We’re also looking to have Northampton do
00:25:19 ►
the same thing where we decriminalize everything and then hopefully in Boston as well. If they just go for the plant medicines, well, then that’s another bonus for us.
00:25:28 ►
You know, that’s one step still in the right direction for us.
00:25:31 ►
But it’s where we saw what happened in Oregon and how, I mean, it passed pretty easily.
00:25:39 ►
It was kind of a why not just throw it in there and see what happens.
00:25:42 ►
And we did and it works.
00:25:45 ►
So we’re just – let’s keep at it.
00:25:48 ►
Are you separating for future initiatives?
00:25:50 ►
Are you aiming to separate the two,
00:25:53 ►
or are you aiming to put a complete decrim as your spear going forward?
00:25:58 ►
So currently we have two separate bills that are being filed.
00:26:01 ►
One is for decriminalizing and the cultivation of
00:26:05 ►
psychedelics and plant medicines. The other one is for the decriminalization of everything.
00:26:11 ►
So there are two separate bills at this point.
00:26:16 ►
So anybody else have some questions you want to chime in here with?
00:26:20 ►
Looking at getting involved? You’ve been so successful in Massachusetts.
00:26:48 ►
For those of us that live in more conservative states or plan to live in more conservative states or perhaps cities that are more conservative than the city council and say, you know, I want magic mushrooms decriminalized, or is there a better approach to approach conservative city council on the matter?
00:26:55 ►
Well, we found that in Somerville, at least, there was one council member who was particularly enthusiastic about what we were doing.
00:27:03 ►
council member who was particularly enthusiastic about what we were doing.
00:27:11 ►
And we can’t underscore how much momentum has been a part of our success.
00:27:18 ►
When this one city councilor who was so gung-ho about what we were doing made himself express himself and let himself be known where he’s, there were like two or three others who were like,
00:27:26 ►
just below his level of enthusiasm, who were like, yes, we’re definitely voting for this.
00:27:31 ►
Thank you for doing this. And all that. And then, you know, it became clear that the majority
00:27:36 ►
of a vote that was going to happen was going to go in our favor. And what’s been really great about what we’ve passed so far is that um the votes have all been
00:27:47 ►
um entirely unanimous in our favor except for no Northampton it was one person uh detracted but
00:27:54 ►
um we had the entire city council in Somerville and Cambridge uh voting in our favor and I do
00:28:00 ►
think that there’s something to be said about everybody else on a council going in that direction.
00:28:05 ►
So I would try to find kind of do research on who these city councillors are and target the most seemingly liberal or open minded of them and work with them and see if you can get them to convince others.
00:28:20 ►
And you really do on these councils just need a majority vote for these things to pass.
00:28:26 ►
So that’s the approach we’ve taken.
00:28:30 ►
I understand that in Massachusetts, we might have more opportunities to target these people
00:28:36 ►
than you would in more conservative places.
00:28:39 ►
But I’m sure that there’s some of these people that exist on some of these local councils
00:28:44 ►
throughout the country.
00:28:47 ►
And it’s worth just doing some of that particular research on seeing what they voted for in the past and seeing where their politics might lie.
00:28:54 ►
And this issue can be argued, I think, from multiple political perspectives.
00:28:59 ►
I think there’s definitely a libertarian argument here.
00:29:03 ►
So if someone has a political ideology that leans that
00:29:06 ►
way, it can definitely be lobbied in that direction. And even a conservative, small government
00:29:12 ►
minded person, I think you could try to make a convincing argument for. So there’s quite a few
00:29:18 ►
angles here that I think are worth pursuing. But just do your research on these councillors and their voting records and
00:29:25 ►
I think you’ll be surprised how open a lot of people are because like Lorenzo
00:29:30 ►
was saying the overwhelming majority of the population of the country believes
00:29:34 ►
in this so some of these people are going to numerically fall in line with
00:29:39 ►
that as well so that’s that’s all you know every city council that I I’ve – and there’s only – I’ve only been involved to maybe six different city councils to their meetings.
00:29:51 ►
But in the ones I’ve been to, it seems like there’s always one or two hot young council people, both men and women, who obviously are looking at becoming mayor, maybe a governor or something like that.
00:30:06 ►
And I don’t know what the statistics would be, but I would investigate the attitudes of new young voters who are coming on the rolls,
00:30:15 ►
the ones that are going to be here for a long time, and what their attitudes are on this.
00:30:19 ►
And I start feeding this information to the council because the ones that are going to want to be elected for the next 20 or 30 years are those are the people that they’re going to be their constituents and
00:30:28 ►
they need to be looking at their needs and uh i i think that some of that information would be
00:30:33 ►
fantastic if it’s in your favor if not just don’t show it to them yeah you know the other thing i
00:30:40 ►
might want to add is that um in the conservative areas, numbers are going to be your best friends.
00:30:46 ►
And so the more people you have that are advocating for it with all different stories, I feel like the better off you are to get a response.
00:30:55 ►
So if they’re just getting one email or one guy walking in, they may respond.
00:30:59 ►
But if they have 15 different people from that area sending in letters and saying, hey, this is my story.
00:31:05 ►
And there’s 10 different stories at the foot of the sky that he’s reading. It’s going to be much
00:31:10 ►
more effective. Also, a lot of the more conservative states have higher rates of opiate overdoses and
00:31:17 ►
alcohol problems. You could also go that angle because who doesn’t know somebody that hasn’t
00:31:23 ►
struggled from either anxiety, depression, or some kind of substance abuse these days.
00:31:29 ►
I know right now I’m working as a nurse and overnights we get an insane amount of alcohol detoxers coming in several a night.
00:31:38 ►
And so it’s an epidemic at this point. And these people, when things open back up, are going to need help.
00:31:41 ►
It’s an epidemic at this point.
00:31:44 ►
And these people, when things open back up, are going to need help.
00:31:51 ►
And so treating people for mental health, making it more effective, but also just hitting them with the numbers and looking at states that have already started to decriminalize
00:31:56 ►
and shown their statistics that opioid use has gone down in states where cannabis is
00:32:01 ►
legal.
00:32:02 ►
Mental health is, you know, improving in states where psychedelics
00:32:07 ►
have better access and where programs are more accessible to people that can get into them. So
00:32:13 ►
everything is with, they love their information, they love their facts. So I would bring numbers
00:32:21 ►
and facts. And another fact I think coming out of this pandemic or that’s in the pandemic is PTSD.
00:32:30 ►
There’s a lot of mental health issues that are going to be coming out of this and already are. for psychedelics for post-traumatic stress disorder, is put sort of a medical stamp of approval on psychedelics,
00:32:48 ►
not just medical marijuana, too.
00:32:50 ►
Plus all the work that Harvard and John Hopkins has done,
00:32:54 ►
Charlie Grove has done at UCLA.
00:32:56 ►
There’s a lot of scientific information that the younger people know about right now,
00:33:00 ►
but isn’t into the mainstream.
00:33:07 ►
right now, but isn’t into the mainstream. But I think some of these issues about how research itself could be eased a great deal. It’s very difficult to do psychedelic research
00:33:13 ►
because of the drug laws. You know, I’ve seen this up front and up close and personal with
00:33:18 ►
Charlie Grobe and the hoops he had to jump through. So that’s another angle is to open up the avenues for medical
00:33:27 ►
research. And especially like in a place like Cambridge in Boston, where there is a lot of
00:33:32 ►
research going on that I think that there’s a constituency for that as well. Yeah, I forget
00:33:39 ►
his name, but we our organization was just endorsed by a very big Harvard medical doctor.
00:33:47 ►
So that was a huge push for us.
00:33:49 ►
And on a personal note, I got involved in the psychedelic world because I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:33:58 ►
I was almost killed in a robbery in Chicago.
00:34:01 ►
And for me, psilocybin was instrumental in my recovery. And my motivation
00:34:08 ►
is this from for doing this is that it’s a reciprocal thing for what these plant medicines
00:34:13 ►
have done for me. And I made that clear to the city council at the time too. And you can’t really
00:34:20 ►
tell somebody who has an experience like that, that their story is not true or valid when they’re
00:34:26 ►
hearing that testimony in a city council meeting or something like that so there were people on
00:34:31 ►
the council who had their reservations who didn’t believe enough information or facts were in quite
00:34:37 ►
yet and they are entitled to opinion but they also still ultimately voted in our favor because
00:34:43 ►
it is very hard to just tell somebody that they’re wrong when they’re telling you something directly
00:34:50 ►
affected and helped them. So yeah, that, that, you know, what Jennifer was saying, how you’re,
00:34:56 ►
you’re prefacing everything with their personal stories before you get into your
00:35:01 ►
presentation. I think that’s, that’s really key to what you’re doing because like you just said, Alex,
00:35:06 ►
that when somebody tells you their story,
00:35:09 ►
you can’t say, oh, you’re lying.
00:35:11 ►
They’re not gonna give you a hard time about that.
00:35:14 ►
So you have them kind of on your side already.
00:35:17 ►
Yeah, so what you’re doing is so important.
00:35:21 ►
And I think when you’re done with Massachusetts,
00:35:24 ►
you could head to a’re done with Massachusetts, you could head
00:35:25 ►
to a national level with your experience. And so, you know, just for some of us that are thinking
00:35:31 ►
about doing this, just listening in, you know, writing down notes, trying to make an outline,
00:35:37 ►
because I’m pretty sure that I’ll try and do this in the future at some place that I’m living.
00:35:46 ►
do this in the future at some place that I’m living. But, you know, somehow if you could put together an outline with some bullet points that, you know, places to emphasize that have worked for
00:35:52 ►
you, you know, it just would help those of us that right now are completely in the dark, but want to
00:35:59 ►
try and do this. Yeah, I agree. I think our organization does need to create some kind of
00:36:07 ►
tangible framework of what we’ve done so far so other people can model the success we’ve had.
00:36:14 ►
It is fairly straightforward what’s happened, but this is the moment in time that the enthusiasm
00:36:20 ►
is there and you just kind of need to fill fill in the steps for it i think at this
00:36:27 ►
point the the knowledge is out there and there’s people with stories like jennifer and myself
00:36:32 ►
who are very eager to to tell them and i think that you’re also not going to have too much
00:36:39 ►
trouble finding those people who who want to say them in any part of the country where it works
00:36:43 ►
like jennifer mentioned in some of the more conservative parts of the country,
00:36:47 ►
that’s where some of these opioid epidemics have hit the worst and the hardest.
00:36:53 ►
And I don’t think people will be closed off to hearing an alternative voice of what could make people in their family or community feel better
00:37:02 ►
or give a shot at trying after they’ve tried everything
00:37:05 ►
else. So it’s very important to combine our personal stories with the stats and facts and
00:37:14 ►
all that. You’ve got to come prepared with everything. And I do think all that stuff’s
00:37:19 ►
available to everybody in every part of the country. And again, some of the places where
00:37:24 ►
it seems like it’s the hardest to do, you might also
00:37:27 ►
have the most personal stories to work with as well.
00:37:31 ►
Yeah, I know.
00:37:32 ►
I’ve seen a lot of things with older people talking about, oh, I’ve been able to get off
00:37:39 ►
my medicines and stuff like that.
00:37:41 ►
But I haven’t seen any parents and grandparents saying, you know, my grandson or
00:37:47 ►
granddaughter was arrested for possession of meth or opioids and went to jail and it’s ruined their
00:37:53 ►
life. We don’t hear those kinds of stories enough that, you know, the war on drugs is not just
00:37:59 ►
hurting the people who get addicted to drugs and are using them the wrong way, but the families of
00:38:04 ►
the people that are incarcerated are suffering equally, I think, or not equally, but almost as
00:38:09 ►
much in many different ways. So that’s an expansion of the story. But for every one person in prison,
00:38:16 ►
there’s probably at least a half a dozen or more who are directly affected by that.
00:38:21 ►
Yeah, it’s a real tragedy. Here in Massachusetts in Massachusetts especially the opioid epidemic hit very hard I
00:38:28 ►
personally grew up with two people who have since passed away from it so and and when I
00:38:34 ►
went to see a doctor about what had happened to me in Chicago I was prescribed some stuff that I
00:38:41 ►
really didn’t need quite frankly and that was more of a detriment to my mental health than a benefit.
00:38:48 ►
And I felt very lost and frustrated because this was the person I thought I was supposed to go to to help me work those things out.
00:38:57 ►
And in my opinion, just the opposite was true.
00:39:00 ►
And I think that a lot of people are over prescribed things.
00:39:06 ►
is true. And I think that a lot of people are over prescribed things and especially where we’re coming from, it’s ravaged a lot of local communities. So I think that’s also part of
00:39:15 ►
what people are seeing all over the country and really want to see some fundamental changes. And
00:39:21 ►
it does rip apart communities as well as individuals.
00:39:28 ►
Yeah, that’s true. The opioid epidemic in the small rural communities, as I understand it,
00:39:34 ►
has become pretty pervasive. And in a smaller community, it really does affect the whole
00:39:40 ►
community. In a big town like Boston, it’s little pockets of communities,
00:39:45 ►
maybe neighborhoods even,
00:39:46 ►
but in a town of 5,000 people,
00:39:49 ►
it’s the whole town.
00:39:50 ►
If it’s even 50 people who are addicted.
00:39:53 ►
Yeah.
00:39:54 ►
I had some time in Missouri recently,
00:39:59 ►
and I stunned at seeing billboards
00:40:03 ►
carrying the word fentanyl right there,
00:40:09 ►
urging people in to find treatment for it.
00:40:13 ►
The fellow I was visiting, he grew up there,
00:40:18 ►
and he described an interesting thing, a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy
00:40:23 ►
that the young people in his area experience,
00:40:28 ►
they see themselves depicted as running clandestine meth factories and sort of think,
00:40:38 ►
well, I guess that’s what I’m supposed to do and step right into that life without really an awareness of why or what they’re doing.
00:40:50 ►
He pointed to an aspect of the tragedy that I’d never really looked at,
00:40:56 ►
the role of seeking your identification as you’re growing up and being presented with images that you relate to as crackheads and meth addicts doesn’t work.
00:41:14 ►
So a deep thing.
00:41:17 ►
Yeah, it kind of goes along the lines of why DARE failed, because they weren’t really teaching kids about what drugs are, how they’re used appropriately,
00:41:24 ►
because they weren’t really teaching kids about what drugs are, how they’re used appropriately,
00:41:27 ►
what are the effects when they’re used bad.
00:41:31 ►
What it ended up doing was teaching a lot of kids what drugs are and how to use them.
00:41:37 ►
And so I think it’s like the same mentality when you’re constantly being shown something,
00:41:41 ►
you’re desensitized to how awful it can be.
00:41:43 ►
And in some ways it’s been glorified.
00:41:47 ►
Yeah, yeah. That’s great. Yeah. awful it can be and in some ways it’s been glorified um yeah that’s right yeah so what about the approach of including uh native american religious practices that have
00:41:56 ►
incorporated psychedelic drugs or recently in utah someone has started a church because there’s based upon psilocybin as a sacrament and
00:42:08 ►
that the state has such strong
00:42:12 ►
religious freedoms that they feel like this is a legal
00:42:16 ►
approach. Have you guys used anything like
00:42:20 ►
that also as a background for arguing
00:42:23 ►
decriminalization?
00:42:26 ►
We’ve actually been very careful about how we approach with the Native Americans,
00:42:31 ►
because what we don’t want to do is take away from them.
00:42:34 ►
Peyote is something that is not grown easily, and it’s native to a lot of their practices.
00:42:40 ►
So we had actually reached out to find out if they wanted peyote actually put on the bill.
00:42:46 ►
And we chose not to, although we wrote all ethanogen plants, we didn’t name them out because we didn’t want to list peyote as something that we wanted people to go out and use because we didn’t want it to become something difficult for the indigenous people to be able to get.
00:43:04 ►
it to become something difficult for the indigenous people to be able to get.
00:43:12 ►
However, what we’re working on is trying to establish a committee right now, like an advisory committee that will be comprised of law enforcement and people of all different backgrounds.
00:43:21 ►
But one of the several of the people that have to be on that board are going to be Native Americans, because we want to include them in this conversation.
00:43:30 ►
We don’t want to be taking anything more from them that has already been taken,
00:43:33 ►
and want to support them in any way that we can. So we are making them a part of the advisory
00:43:39 ►
board. It’s mandatory that at least two of them will be represented when the decision to
00:43:46 ►
decriminalize and the bill is actually written and voted on happens. Hey, Jennifer, if you didn’t
00:43:53 ►
articulate specific medicines that qualify as entheogens, then what is the legal definition
00:44:00 ►
of entheogen and how does law enforcement know which medicines you’re referring
00:44:05 ►
to? So currently we just have, I mean, it’s any psychedelic plant substance. So it wouldn’t
00:44:12 ►
include things like MDMA or acid as of yet. So they’re just plant derived psychedelics.
00:44:21 ►
plant-derived psychedelics.
00:44:29 ►
Is that sufficient in the knowledge base of law enforcement?
00:44:35 ►
Is that specific enough or is that too broad that they can have wiggle room in enforcement?
00:44:37 ►
I think once the bills are written, we will definitely get more specific to it
00:44:41 ►
all.
00:44:43 ►
And I believe everything will be spelled out once it’s all actually written
00:44:48 ►
and everything’s decided on.
00:44:50 ►
But honestly, the feeling that I’m getting from most law enforcement
00:44:54 ►
is it’s really not a priority to them.
00:44:57 ►
So pushing that envelope doesn’t seem like it’s something in their best interest.
00:45:02 ►
They have much bigger fires to put out around here
00:45:05 ►
than catching people that are trying to heal their minds
00:45:09 ►
and heal their communities,
00:45:11 ►
or even just people on possession charges
00:45:14 ►
because of addiction.
00:45:15 ►
It takes up a lot of their time,
00:45:16 ►
and there’s a lot of other things that are going on out there
00:45:19 ►
that are being missed
00:45:21 ►
because they’re spending too much time
00:45:23 ►
fighting a losing battle, quite frankly.
00:45:29 ►
So anybody else have some questions that you’d like to ask about this?
00:45:34 ►
Or you in favor of this?
00:45:38 ►
Anybody not in favor of decriminalizing?
00:45:43 ►
I don’t think we have any of those here. I did ask a little bit of
00:45:48 ►
something here. First of all, yeah. Well, first of all, congratulations. I didn’t know that you
00:45:55 ►
guys had, I mean, it seemed like I heard about Somerville and Cambridge, but not Northampton.
00:46:01 ►
So that must have been fairly recently that that happened.
00:46:09 ►
So, but Boston really should probably be a bit,
00:46:13 ►
bit of a heavier lift to some degree. It doesn’t seem like even like Marty,
00:46:17 ►
you’re the mayor, there’s even all that crazy about cannabis, you know,
00:46:22 ►
up until recently. So do you have any idea of like how,
00:46:29 ►
what has happened, what, what that’s, what that might entail, you know, to like to get through, I guess?
00:46:33 ►
Do you have any sort of special sort of like strategy for Boston itself?
00:46:40 ►
Well, it’s definitely been more work so far.
00:46:49 ►
We are still like at least weeks, if not months away from getting to that point with boston but i mean the the core of it is still uh reaching out to lawmakers and and counselors the same way
00:46:58 ►
that we had been with everything else just the the grassroots part of it is just a bigger hill to climb ultimately and um boston
00:47:08 ►
is actually you know a relatively tiny city for being one of the well-known major cities in america
00:47:14 ►
it’s actually not uh a huge um amount of space that it takes up relative like we refer to greater
00:47:23 ►
boston a lot of the times as like
00:47:25 ►
somerville and cambridge and the surrounding parts of it and people who come from those places
00:47:30 ►
consider themselves as being from boston and it’s true so um you know in some respects it is
00:47:40 ►
we’re approaching it in a very similar way as we have the other towns that we’ve been successful in because the people that make them up are the same.
00:47:49 ►
And it’s very hard to point to Somerville and Cambridge and say that these places are anomalies relative to Boston.
00:47:58 ►
So the culture is similar enough that we think we’re going to be successful ultimately with a very similar approach.
00:48:09 ►
Austin is a lot more heavy lifting, though.
00:48:11 ►
I will say that.
00:48:13 ►
And for us right now, Marty’s no longer the mayor.
00:48:16 ►
He moved up to Washington.
00:48:17 ►
So we have a step in Kim Janey, who is a little more liberal with the cannabis industry.
00:48:23 ►
who is a little more liberal with the cannabis industry.
00:48:27 ►
And her focus is going to be on social and economic equity applications and making cannabis more socially,
00:48:31 ►
economically and socially equitable for people to create better access.
00:48:36 ►
So we’re hoping that we can make her an ally.
00:48:40 ►
And like Alex said,
00:48:41 ►
just take the momentum that we’ve already got two of your,
00:48:44 ►
your bigger cities that have already told you, this what we want and the people are saying this.
00:48:49 ►
But there are quite a few conservative people in Boston that might be harder to convince than we’ve had so far.
00:49:03 ►
I think Carl’s got his hand up there. to maintain the privatized prison labor force that factors into the whole business of the current state of affairs. that I think would be challenging to effectively address,
00:49:46 ►
other than, I guess, by raising public awareness
00:49:50 ►
of what the situation is in that regard.
00:49:55 ►
So I just wanted to toss that into the mix.
00:49:57 ►
Thank you.
00:49:58 ►
So, Carl, I’m living in Texas currently,
00:50:02 ►
and certainly that’s an important consideration.
00:50:06 ►
I feel like it would be almost hopeless to approach, although I’m sure 70% of
00:50:26 ►
the population here would like to smoke pot without, you know, worrying about going to prison.
00:50:33 ►
The way state politics work is going to be very difficult to overcome.
00:50:38 ►
Yeah, I agree. I’m in Florida, so it’s a similar local situation.
00:50:52 ►
And then a little quote.
00:51:02 ►
If your friends aren’t telling you they’re getting high,
00:51:05 ►
you have to wonder why your friends are lying to you.
00:51:11 ►
It was aimed at basically our demographic.
00:51:15 ►
So I was like, yeah, that’s true.
00:51:22 ►
Yeah, and Boston does have a reputation,
00:51:29 ►
a bit of a reputation as being a racist city that I don’t think is completely undeserved. If you look at the statistics of incarceration rates and things like that.
00:51:34 ►
And the war on drugs is just explicitly racist as far as our organization is concerned.
00:51:48 ►
and this could be also a big part of local governments showing that they’ve listened to what’s happened this past year in terms of the Black Lives Matter movement and what happened
00:51:53 ►
with George Floyd and showing that they’re listening and that this is a step that they
00:51:57 ►
could dramatically take to change that perception at least Boston, but also across the country. It’s just undeniable
00:52:06 ►
when you pull up those facts and statistics that people of color are disproportionately
00:52:12 ►
arrested and incarcerated. And this could really be a meaningful way of showing that
00:52:19 ►
we acknowledge what’s been going on and actively happening and part of how we’re working and
00:52:25 ►
dealing with that. So I think things should be framed in that way as well to bring in some groups
00:52:30 ►
of different backgrounds and motivations that might not be explicitly coming from the same
00:52:36 ►
place as we are, but that social equity angle is something that is appealing as well for some different perspectives.
00:52:47 ►
I don’t know how, of course, none of us know how this is going to play out, but, you know,
00:52:52 ►
the current administration has been talking about programs like Roosevelt had where they have more,
00:52:59 ►
you know, rebuilding the infrastructure of the country, the national parks, things like that.
00:53:04 ►
rebuilding the infrastructure of the country, the national parks, things like that.
00:53:16 ►
And I would think that if they do institute job programs like that, the people that are being released from prison because of the decriminalization laws would be able to find some work somewhere, too.
00:53:23 ►
And so there’s a way to shift that labor and make it a little more fair where they’re actually getting paid more than a dollar a day or wherever they get, you know.
00:53:29 ►
So that’s a really good point. The prison labor is huge, you know. It’s a huge industry and private prisons. I see some state just voted to no longer have private prisons. I don’t remember
00:53:36 ►
what one that was, but that’s a step in the right direction, I think. Yeah, sure.
00:53:41 ►
Andrew.
00:53:51 ►
So, any other further questions or, you know, comments you’d like to add here tonight?
00:53:55 ►
I don’t want to keep everybody here longer than they need to be.
00:54:01 ►
Alex, you have, or you and Jennifer, do you have any, like, remarks?
00:54:08 ►
But, you know, what can we do to help you? You know, none of us here, I don’t think, are in Massachusetts,
00:54:14 ►
but in the podcast I’ll put out tomorrow, there’ll be a lot of people from Massachusetts.
00:54:19 ►
How do they get involved in your organization? Let’s say they’re in Massachusetts and they want to get involved. Jennifer, do you want to answer that? Sure. So some of the ways they can get involved
00:54:29 ►
is they can get us on Instagram and direct message us and we will send them the information that they
00:54:39 ►
need to send to their city reps. They can join any one of our action hours. They can reach out to us on Facebook.
00:54:49 ►
We also have our own website, so they can go on base daters.com or for natural medicine.com
00:54:55 ►
and contact us that way. So really any way that, that they feel comfortable getting in touch with
00:55:03 ►
us, but we would love to hear from
00:55:05 ►
anybody. And as far as how you can help us, this is a huge help, just getting the word out there.
00:55:11 ►
I think also getting other states listening. So wherever this is broadcast through to all these
00:55:16 ►
other states, people are listening. And what they need to really hear is that you can be part of a
00:55:22 ►
movement and make a difference, Because I never thought I could.
00:55:25 ►
And when this kid reached out to me and said, hey, you want to do this?
00:55:28 ►
I was like, yeah, sure.
00:55:29 ►
But I had no idea that it was going to go in the direction it did and that we were going to get done what we’ve already gotten done.
00:55:36 ►
And we’re talking about doing the things that we’re doing.
00:55:39 ►
And I’m just one person.
00:55:41 ►
Alex is just one person.
00:55:42 ►
We live in Massachusetts.
00:55:44 ►
And we don’t have friends in high places and lots of money.
00:55:48 ►
Like we’re just normal, average, everyday people. And many of the people that we work with have amazing stories and have had amazing journeys.
00:55:57 ►
And like Alex said before, you just you can’t deny what people are saying when there’s hundreds of us already that are saying this is what we did
00:56:06 ►
and this worked for us. You’ve got to look at something that there’s some validity in it.
00:56:11 ►
And so just spreading the word and educating people and letting people know that it starts
00:56:16 ►
with one person and it can turn into something amazing. But it’s not just for people who went
00:56:23 ►
to school to be activists or, you know, it’s just anybody
00:56:26 ►
can join. We have all walks of life that are helping us right now. All different career paths,
00:56:34 ►
all different levels of education, all different levels of income. And so it’s just, there’s all
00:56:41 ►
of us and collectively we’re getting it done. And so if one person can find another person and that person can find somebody, you can do it in your state.
00:56:50 ►
And it may take more effort and more time and reach out.
00:56:54 ►
We’ll help you with whatever we can.
00:56:56 ►
But it is possible.
00:56:59 ►
I think there’s two really important takeaways that you have brought to us here tonight. One of them, and I’ve had friends that have worked in Normal and all of these other organizations for years,
00:57:10 ►
and after four or five years, they all burn out.
00:57:13 ►
And to hear that you guys started in October, you know, after almost a year of the pandemic,
00:57:20 ►
and you’re doing most of your organization online, this is something brand new.
00:57:26 ►
Anybody that’s ever felt like they should volunteer for something, this might be a time to really look seriously at this.
00:57:32 ►
This is something that people making a difference.
00:57:34 ►
They’re not just asking for money.
00:57:36 ►
They’re asking for time and your stories.
00:57:39 ►
And so this seems to me to be a movement that you guys are beginning in Massachusetts that everybody here is thinking of somebody in their state probably that they could kind of gear up about this and send this on to.
00:57:52 ►
So you guys have done something pretty amazing, and I have to applaud you for it.
00:57:56 ►
I think we all do.
00:58:10 ►
I could also ask about Jennifer and Alex, you know, what your particular tie to this movement happens to be. Like, is it something where you’ve used psilocybin or you’ve known people that have been positively impacted by this?
00:58:19 ►
Or have you been negatively impacted by the war on drugs?
00:58:22 ►
What’s your own personal tie to this movement?
00:58:27 ►
Sure.
00:58:27 ►
Well, Jennifer and I were actually both the two people that gave the testimony
00:58:32 ►
right before the Somerville City Council.
00:58:35 ►
So, you know, in terms of my story, I’ve already touched on this a little bit,
00:58:40 ►
but I was almost killed in a robbery in Chicago,
00:58:43 ►
coming back from living in Asia for a
00:58:45 ►
few years. And I had plans to go move to California and start a whole new life and get in the tech
00:58:52 ►
industry out there. And what happened to me really derailed my plans in life. I had a diagnosed
00:59:00 ►
post-traumatic stress disorder, but I didn’t know that in the immediate aftermath at
00:59:05 ►
the time. And I had to eventually move back home to Massachusetts and deal with that. And I took
00:59:11 ►
it upon myself to try psilocybin after my bad experience with the medication that the doctor
00:59:19 ►
prescribed me that I mentioned earlier. And that was a very profound and for me personally, groundbreaking
00:59:26 ►
experience that changed my perspective on what happened to me. And even now to this moment,
00:59:33 ►
I feel like I’m putting that experience, that terrible experience to use to have something
00:59:41 ►
positive come out of it. And so already, I’m almost grateful that something
00:59:47 ►
so terrible happened to me, because it led me down this path of other things. And also,
00:59:52 ►
like I mentioned before, I have a couple of friends over the years who have passed away from
00:59:57 ►
the opioid epidemic. And I can see firsthand that the war on drugs does not work. I grew up going to the Malden Junior Police, where I was from.
01:00:10 ►
And like Jennifer was mentioning, they showed me when I was like seven or eight,
01:00:15 ►
like, here’s all these drugs and what they look like and how people use them.
01:00:19 ►
And I didn’t have a context of that before.
01:00:22 ►
We’ve approached things so badly for so long throughout
01:00:25 ►
my whole lifetime that I could see and demonstrably experience that um this is just a no-brainer
01:00:32 ►
situation of of something for me and something I couldn’t be happier to be involved in and um
01:00:39 ►
yeah that that’s it for me I’ll let Jennifer tell her story as well. So my involvement is pretty much all of the above.
01:00:48 ►
I was diagnosed with chronic cluster headaches when I was eight,
01:00:51 ►
which are a very debilitating form of migraine.
01:00:55 ►
And then when I was 12, I was diagnosed with chronic migraine as well.
01:00:59 ►
I was on, I don’t know how many treatments, how many procedures,
01:01:04 ►
experimental things that I’ve been a part of over the years.
01:01:07 ►
I think I suffer from medical PTSD, quite frankly, from it with with no reprieve.
01:01:14 ►
I ended up addicted to opiates and heroin later on in life.
01:01:19 ►
I’d been through the rehabs and the detoxes. And the last time that I relapsed, it was really bad.
01:01:27 ►
And a friend of a friend reached out and said, hey, I know somebody doing Ibogaine treatments in Virginia.
01:01:34 ►
Would you like to go?
01:01:35 ►
And I said, yep.
01:01:36 ►
I called the woman.
01:01:37 ►
I took my life savings, flew down to Baltimore, spent a week there, received an Ibogaine treatment,
01:01:49 ►
spent a week there, received an Ibogaine treatment, which broke me of my, I wouldn’t say addiction to opiates, but it got rid of the cravings, it got rid of the withdrawal, it reset my brain to where I
01:01:56 ►
was before I was in a pre-addicted state and gave me a really good head start. There was a ton of
01:02:01 ►
work that came after that, which stillilocybin helped with. But during my
01:02:06 ►
experience in Baltimore, the woman had asked me if I’d ever tried using psilocybin for my cluster
01:02:16 ►
headaches and my migraines. And I had said no. So when I got home, I got a hold of some psilocybin.
01:02:22 ►
I took about four grams. And for the next six months of my life, I got a hold of some psilocybin. I took about four grams and for the next six months
01:02:26 ►
of my life, I didn’t have headache or migraine, which was pivotal for me. That was the biggest
01:02:34 ►
life-changing experience I’ve ever had. It is so much bigger for me than even breaking my addiction because I feel like it’s part of the reason why I was
01:02:45 ►
addicted. So also in my, when I was about 17, I was arrested for two ounces of cannabis
01:02:53 ►
and I was tried as an adult and I was given an option to either spend 10 years in prison or go
01:02:59 ►
to this facility in New York state for two and a half years. So I chose that. It ended up being a very
01:03:07 ►
abusive environment. And many of us that went there have suffered a lot of trauma. So psilocybin
01:03:14 ►
has also helped me to break free of that. I was lucky enough to be able to still come home and
01:03:22 ►
start a life. But I know lots of people that were also arrested
01:03:26 ►
for cannabis that just are still stuck behind
01:03:29 ►
because they had a record and it has stayed with them.
01:03:34 ►
So yeah, that’s where I’m at.
01:03:38 ►
I’m very passionate about it.
01:03:39 ►
There’s a lot of people out there like us
01:03:42 ►
that just need to know that there’s a community of us
01:03:45 ►
that want to help them. And there is help. You’re not hopeless anymore.
01:03:51 ►
I know this is not exactly on the topic of what we’re talking about tonight, but Jennifer,
01:03:55 ►
you’re the first person I’ve talked with who actually used psilocybin for cluster headaches.
01:04:01 ►
At Harvard, Dr. Andrew Sewell started a study on cluster headaches. And I
01:04:06 ►
actually recorded a talk he gave at Plankton Arche at Burning Man podcast. Unfortunately,
01:04:12 ►
he died young, but he was following up on the LSD use for cluster headaches. But do you know
01:04:19 ►
of other people that are using psilocybin as well? Yeah, so there’s actually three other people in our group that are using psilocybin for either cluster headaches or migraines. The group Cluster Busters has actually
01:04:31 ►
been a major force in getting some of those studies conducted. He’s been, Bob Wald has been
01:04:38 ►
going at it for years, trying to let people know. That’s actually where i found out i did some of my research
01:04:45 ►
after i was told about it and had made the decision was because of the um testimonies
01:04:50 ►
that are on their website um but currently harvard is doing a study on both cluster headaches and
01:04:57 ►
migraines separately um i tried to get in the study but unfortunately because i’d already had
01:05:01 ►
success i didn’t qualify for it um but yeah
01:05:05 ►
so they are doing studies right now on the effectiveness of it and um it’s it’s something
01:05:10 ►
like 10 out of you know 15 people are are having massive recoveries i still have to use it every
01:05:19 ►
so often i’m not one of those people that was a one and done but there are plenty of people out there that use it one time and never have an attack ever again
01:05:27 ►
which is it’s for anybody that suffered with any kind of pain I can’t tell you
01:05:33 ►
what a lifesaver it was to me and to them you know my mother suffered from
01:05:39 ►
migraines and I watched her suffer just it was horrible sometimes and then I
01:05:43 ►
found out about people I met one person had cluster headaches and I watched her suffer just, it was horrible sometimes. And then I found out about people,
01:05:45 ►
I met one person who had cluster headaches
01:05:47 ►
and I learned more about cluster headaches.
01:05:48 ►
And apparently there’s so much worse than migraines.
01:05:53 ►
I think that maybe close to half the people
01:05:55 ►
that cluster headaches at least attempt suicide.
01:05:58 ►
It’s really like one of the most painful things
01:06:00 ►
that can happen.
01:06:01 ►
And it’s very encouraging to know that it’s not just LSD, but maybe psilocybin also, not maybe,
01:06:07 ►
but psilocybin also works. So it’s,
01:06:09 ►
it’s a psychedelic that seems to be working.
01:06:12 ►
Yeah. And I’m not sure what the cause is. But,
01:06:16 ►
and I was so amazed at how well it worked. I, you know,
01:06:22 ►
I’ve been on so many other things with all these false promises to find
01:06:26 ►
something and and as it was kind of maddening at the same time because it’s like oh this simple
01:06:31 ►
thing that grows out of the ground could have saved me years and years and years of my life
01:06:36 ►
um because if somebody had told my mother years ago that all you have to do is go go get some
01:06:42 ►
cow shit and take some mushrooms off of it and feed it to your
01:06:45 ►
kid and she’ll be she’ll be good um my mother would have done that in a heartbeat um you know
01:06:50 ►
and and i think it would have changed the entire course of my life um but i wouldn’t be here so
01:06:55 ►
um but yeah for those that have suffered and continue to suffer right now getting the word
01:07:02 ►
out and making it accessible to them so it’s not something that they have to worry about when they’re trying to trip and get better. Oh my
01:07:08 ►
God, is somebody going to come hang down my door? Because somebody said I was in possession of
01:07:13 ►
these things. So yeah. Have you reached out at all to Massachusetts General Hospital? I know
01:07:20 ►
just about a week ago, they announced that they were going to get back into the game of um
01:07:25 ►
research for um psychedelics so i have to think that something like what’s going on with the
01:07:31 ►
decrim movement may or may not be of interest to them so um i have what do you know about the
01:07:38 ►
have you done any outreach for those guys we haven’t currently reached out to them we’re
01:07:43 ►
trying to figure out where we fit
01:07:45 ►
in the mix of that, honestly,
01:07:47 ►
because we do believe that the research needs to happen,
01:07:53 ►
because it’s not only gonna give us insights
01:07:55 ►
in medications, but also just the way the mind
01:07:58 ►
and the psyche works,
01:07:59 ►
and might help make better practices for therapists,
01:08:03 ►
things that are more effective down the road.
01:08:06 ►
That being said, the two companies that are funding Mass General are not interested in
01:08:15 ►
really being a part of the movement to better people, but to profit.
01:08:20 ►
And so one of them is actually going after the state of Oregon, and they’re trying to patent the way they do treatments out there. So it’s not even just trying to patent the chemicals, the chemical. So that way it’ll make it difficult for practitioners that want to be
01:08:46 ►
able to practice this and give it to their patients or people without licenses that just
01:08:52 ►
want to do it out of their home safely. It’s going to make that kind of access very limited
01:08:58 ►
and it’s going to just push a lot of that back underground. So we’re turning that one lightly as we figure out how do we approach this because we do want the research, but we don’t want big pharma and big money to continue profiting.
01:09:16 ►
You know, I can see how your stories are so effective with city councils.
01:09:27 ►
with city councils and and one another story that you might want to add to your mix is find some researcher uh maybe at harvard or wherever uh that has gone through the process of trying to get a
01:09:33 ►
psychedelic study approved uh for example dr grove his study his landmark study about psilocybin and
01:09:41 ►
abuse is the first you know got studied and published in journals and it’s an
01:09:45 ►
important study he i know for a fact he spent seven years working on approval uh and every
01:09:52 ►
three or four months he’d have to submit a new you know answer questions submit but seven years
01:09:57 ►
of not giving up is what he went through all of that research could have been done six years
01:10:02 ►
earlier had had there not been all of these war on drugs laws.
01:10:06 ►
And so you might want to get a scientist on your side telling his story about how difficult it is to do the research.
01:10:12 ►
I’m not sure how much city council are going to listen to scientists, Lorenzo.
01:10:16 ►
They’re city council, you know.
01:10:18 ►
But I have one thing to say, and this is just an observation on my part. You guys are very, very good
01:10:27 ►
representatives for your cause. When you’re asked a question, there’s no pregnant pause.
01:10:34 ►
You’re not searching for an answer. You’re pretty practiced at this. And I’m personally very
01:10:40 ►
impressed with that, because that’s what you have to have when you’re dealing with politicians if
01:10:45 ►
you give them any opening they will jump in and rip it up so i’m just kudos to you thank you
01:10:54 ►
that’s yeah and and uh larry that you reminded me of uh you know we we talked a while back i
01:11:02 ►
talked about one of my old sales training techniques. If a politician says, yeah, but we can’t decriminalize meth because of all the meth addicts.
01:11:10 ►
And then you come back just like Jennifer did to me and say, well, I know how you feel.
01:11:14 ►
I felt the same way.
01:11:16 ►
But let me tell you what I found.
01:11:18 ►
Feel, felt, found answers so many questions or puts people so, you know, disarms them, that you, if you, they know that
01:11:28 ►
you felt the same way at one time, and then you found something, people want to find what you
01:11:33 ►
found sometimes, and not every time, but, and Larry, I agree with you about politicians, except
01:11:39 ►
me, or, and scientists, except maybe in Boston, you would think that scientists are, well, maybe,
01:11:43 ►
but we’re talking about local government, these are people that their last thing, they were citizens.
01:11:48 ►
It’s not like they’re in the House of Representatives or in the state legislature
01:11:52 ►
or anything. They’re just on the city council, which means that
01:11:55 ►
they most likely are not extremely polished politicians. That’s all I can say.
01:12:01 ►
That’s a good point. You saved the scientists for the state
01:12:04 ►
legislature then. Yeah. Which saved the scientists for the state legislature then.
01:12:05 ►
Which we do have about 12 state reps currently that are on board with our mission.
01:12:11 ►
And we do have a couple of scientists, actually, and one of them is doing research in the cannabis industry.
01:12:18 ►
So she could even just talk about how difficult getting licensing and things for that is, but yeah, we do,
01:12:28 ►
we have a couple of doctors and a couple of scientists as well that,
01:12:30 ►
that are part of our mission.
01:12:36 ►
Well, it sounds like, like we don’t have any real good advice to give you,
01:12:38 ►
but we have a lot of advice we can get from you. Go ahead, Justin.
01:12:39 ►
I didn’t mean to interrupt you.
01:12:42 ►
No worries. Yeah, no worries. What have you, I just interested now that you’ve started since October, 2020, I mean, yeah, no worries. What have you, I’m just interested now that you’ve started since October
01:12:45 ►
- I mean, what have you learned anything about like psychedelics, like legally or socially or
01:12:54 ►
medically that you didn’t know starting out, especially as it pertains to Massachusetts? I
01:13:00 ►
mean, like, like arrest statistics or like history type things. What has surprised you about what you’ve discovered, basically, about the substance itself, basically?
01:13:13 ►
That’s a little hard to articulate, to be honest.
01:13:17 ►
We haven’t seen it.
01:13:19 ►
I think part of it’s to this strange moment in time with COVID going on too.
01:13:25 ►
We haven’t really seen arrests dramatically go down,
01:13:30 ►
but the police in general have been really hands-off culturally in the past year anyway.
01:13:38 ►
So it’s hard to really gauge those stats.
01:13:41 ►
I think on another year, those would be a bit more striking or dramatic.
01:13:47 ►
But this year, I don’t think there’s been anything
01:13:49 ►
too crazy in the past few months to point to,
01:13:52 ►
to say, look how much this stuff has gone down.
01:13:55 ►
But, you know, there’s been no major issues.
01:14:00 ►
There’s been no incidents.
01:14:01 ►
We both, we all keep track of the police blotters and all that and nothing’s happened
01:14:07 ►
since decriminalizing. So we have that to point to at least to be like, look,
01:14:11 ►
the world doesn’t fall apart once you take this action.
01:14:15 ►
So I think that’s the best answer we have at the moment for that.
01:14:21 ►
Well, in a few months,
01:14:23 ►
maybe after a few more cities that you’ve had
01:14:25 ►
presentations to and you want to come back and talk about it some more and
01:14:29 ►
give us an update we’d love to have you come back here and do that.
01:14:35 ►
Well let’s plan on that we’ll stay in touch and Alex when you think you guys
01:14:41 ►
have some new updates and news that we’d all be interested in, just let me know and we’ll get you in here right away.
01:14:48 ►
Because I think I’m going to put this out to the whole salon because I think that you’re going to give a lot of ideas to people.
01:14:55 ►
And like I said, the fact that it’s a brand new organization with a lot of success right off the bat in the COVID pandemic is significant.
01:15:03 ►
And I think that’s going to get the attention of a lot of people.
01:15:05 ►
At least I hope it does because you guys have certainly done something good.
01:15:10 ►
Thanks so much. Yeah. And keep an eye out in the news for Boston guys.
01:15:14 ►
Like we’re,
01:15:15 ►
we’re really hoping that’ll come through because that’s going to be very
01:15:19 ►
dramatic for the big picture of, of what we’re doing.
01:15:23 ►
But my, my youngest son graduated from Boston University,
01:15:26 ►
so I hear Boston news from him all the time,
01:15:28 ►
even though he doesn’t live there.
01:15:30 ►
He’s hooked on Boston,
01:15:31 ►
so I will definitely pass this along to him as well.
01:15:36 ►
Excellent.
01:15:37 ►
Great.
01:15:37 ►
Well, listen, go ahead, Jennifer.
01:15:39 ►
Do you have something you want to say?
01:15:40 ►
Oh, no, I was just saying, great.
01:15:42 ►
I appreciate all the support.
01:15:46 ►
Well, listen, everybody, I think this has been fascinating for all of us, and I look forward to keeping up. I’m going to start
01:15:52 ►
checking the news a little more closely for legalization efforts in Boston. There’s so many
01:15:58 ►
going on around the country that I’ve just sort of not paid too close attention to a lot of them.
01:16:02 ►
Yours is sort of a unique way you’re doing it.
01:16:06 ►
So we will definitely keep up and keep publicizing it for you and do what we can to help.
01:16:11 ►
And, Alex, if you’ll send me any links, I’ve got the link to the Bay Staters website
01:16:15 ►
and any other links that you want, I’ll put them in the program notes for this.
01:16:19 ►
So everybody else, listen, appreciate it.
01:16:23 ►
We’ll be getting together Thursday morning for the European people over
01:16:26 ►
7.30 at night in London.
01:16:29 ►
But until the next time we get
01:16:31 ►
together, keep the old faith and
01:16:32 ►
stay high.
01:16:35 ►
And for
01:16:39 ►
now, this is Lorenzo signing
01:16:40 ►
off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:16:43 ►
Namaste, my friends.