681 - Street Drugs Update

Program Notes

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Guest speakers: Annie Oak and Rachel Clark

Ann Shulgin (1933 - 2022) … photo by Jon Hanna

Today’s podcast features the first of a series of Palenque Norte Lectures that I’ll be podcasting over the next few months. And our guest speakers are Annie Oak and Rachel Clark.

Annie, among many other activities, is the managing edidor of Lucid.news. Her co-presenter is Rachel Clark whose column “Your Psychedelic Auntie” is featured in Lucid.news. Rachel also works with the DanceSafe Project and is one of the most up-to-date people I know of when it comes to psychedelic substances currently being widely used at festivals and other large events.

If you plan on attending an event at which you may be tempted to try something new, be sure to listen to what Rachel and Aannie are reporting.

Annie Oak is the founder of the Women’s Visionary Congress and co-founder of the nonprofit Women’s Visionary Council.

Lucid News

Your Psychedelic Auntie

DanceSafe

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Well, it’s been quite a while since I posted my last podcast, which I guess makes me sound

00:00:23 ►

as if I’m going to a confession or

00:00:26 ►

something. But well, besides the fact that I’m now an octogenarian, I’m also recovering from

00:00:32 ►

my second bout of COVID this year. And while the worst has passed, well, my energy level hasn’t

00:00:38 ►

returned to where it was a few weeks ago. I actually began working on this podcast over

00:00:43 ►

a month ago, so I guess I better

00:00:45 ►

quit procrastinating and get on with it. Today’s podcast features the first of a series of Planque

00:00:52 ►

Norte lectures that I plan to podcast over the next few months. For those who are new to the

00:00:58 ►

salon, the Planque Norte lectures have been held at the Burning Man Festival every year since 2003. Of course,

00:01:05 ►

there was no burn in 2020 and 2021, so this year’s talks were the first since the pandemic began.

00:01:13 ►

Now, my wife and I launched this series of talks at the 2003 festival, in spite of being told that

00:01:19 ►

nobody was going to attend a lecture during the afternoon at Burning Man. But we gave it a try because we wanted to keep alive the spirit of the Palenque and

00:01:29 ►

Theobotany conferences in Mexico that came to an end in 2001.

00:01:34 ►

Now, some of us alumni of those conferences talked about restarting them, but, well, we

00:01:39 ►

never were able to pull it off.

00:01:41 ►

So I thought, well, why not give it a try at Burning Man?

00:01:46 ►

The last year that my wife and I were able to attend Burn was in 2007. However, with no help from me, the Planque Norte lectures

00:01:53 ►

are still going on, and there have been a lot of people who have kept this lecture series alive.

00:01:59 ►

In particular, the series owes a great deal to Camp Soft Landing for the support and infrastructure that they

00:02:05 ►

provide for these talks each year. And there are a lot of people who come together each year to

00:02:10 ►

build Camp Soft Landing. Without them, Palenque Norte would have ceased to be. So thank you all

00:02:17 ►

ever so much. Several years ago, I gave the URL and control of PlanqueNorte.com to a group of young people in the Bay Area.

00:02:26 ►

Over time, and I’m not really sure how, but these talks came to be organized and scheduled in the Burning Man program.

00:02:34 ►

Each year, a wonderful man from Dallas, Texas has traveled to the Playa for the annual festival and recorded these talks for us.

00:02:42 ►

and recorded these talks for us.

00:02:46 ►

His name is Frank Nunchio, and without him,

00:02:50 ►

all of the Planque Norte lectures from these past years would have been lost.

00:02:54 ►

Frank, our entire community is grateful for your support for this project.

00:02:59 ►

Without you, Frank, some essential psychedelic history would have been lost forever.

00:03:04 ►

I also want to thank Bruce Dahmer for his long-term support of this lecture series.

00:03:08 ►

Bruce was one of our speakers at the very first Planque Norte Talks, and he’s given a new talk every year since then.

00:03:11 ►

And soon I’ll be podcasting Bruce’s talk from this year.

00:03:15 ►

And now, here is the Planque Norte Lecture by Annie Oak and Rachel Clark

00:03:19 ►

at the 2022 Burning Man Festival.

00:03:23 ►

I’m Annie Oak, also known as Vesper, out here on the playa.

00:03:30 ►

And it’s my great pleasure to introduce Rachel Clark of DanceSafe.

00:03:38 ►

What is your official title at DanceSafe these days, Rachel?

00:03:43 ►

I’m DanceSafe’s education manager, so I do all of our,

00:03:46 ►

everything that’s front-facing, everything that’s written by DanceSafe comes from me.

00:03:52 ►

Mitch Gomez of DanceSafe was here doing a talk at Palenque Norte earlier this week.

00:04:00 ►

Amazing crew, DanceSafe, non-profit harm reduction activists for many many years

00:04:07 ►

and Rachel is your psychedelic auntie she writes the your psychedelic auntie

00:04:18 ►

column for Lucid news our psychedelic news site, lucid.news.

00:04:27 ►

I have the great pleasure of being managing editor, and I am Rachel’s editor when she

00:04:33 ►

submits answers to questions that we gather from our readers and our staff.

00:04:40 ►

It’s really fun to gather really challenging questions for Rachel.

00:04:44 ►

We really think about it hard.

00:04:47 ►

What great questions could we possibly come up with?

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And Rachel is our psychedelic auntie and answers the questions for us.

00:05:01 ►

So today for this talk, we’re going to do a couple of things. We’re

00:05:06 ►

going to read the questions and answers for the July Yours Psychedelic Auntie column,

00:05:13 ►

which has some very good questions that will be useful for you here at Burning Man and

00:05:20 ►

at other festivals. We’re going to remember some past questions and some future

00:05:27 ►

questions that will appear in future columns. We’re going to take some questions from you,

00:05:33 ►

our audience. And then I’d like to say a few words about Ann Shulgin, senior matriarch of the psychedelic community worldwide,

00:05:46 ►

who recently passed from this world,

00:05:50 ►

co-author of P.Kahl and T.Kahl with her late husband, Sasha Shulgin.

00:05:58 ►

And this is a photo of Anne.

00:06:11 ►

This is a photo of Anne, and we’re going to read her entry from P. Call about psychedelics and dying.

00:06:17 ►

And then we’re going to take her photo and some of her ashes to the temple.

00:06:26 ►

So maybe what we’ll do is start with some of the questions. Could I ask you a question from the July Your Psychedelic Auntie column?

00:06:37 ►

You can read many months’ worth of Your Psychedelic Auntie questions and answers at lucid.news, our news site.

00:06:50 ►

This is what the front of the Your Psychedelic Auntie column looks like.

00:07:00 ►

It’s our columnist, Rachel Clark.

00:07:16 ►

And we had a really great question for the July issue of Your Psychedelic Monty.

00:07:18 ►

I’m going to move over. So we get questions from our readers at Lucid News and we also come up with questions.

00:07:52 ►

And we asked people to come up with really challenging questions for us. And we had a particularly great question that was posed for the July issue.

00:08:03 ►

Here’s the question, and then we’ll let Rachel read the answer.

00:08:09 ►

If you’re doing MDMA with a group of people of various sizes and experience levels, what

00:08:18 ►

are some different dosages that might be considered with this kind of mixed group?

00:08:27 ►

This was my question.

00:08:30 ►

The reason I asked this question is because at festivals and gatherings like Burning Man,

00:08:36 ►

it’s often the case that you’re roaming around with a group of people

00:08:41 ►

of various sizes and experience levels and

00:08:47 ►

it’s not necessarily ideal to give everyone the same dosage because when

00:08:54 ►

you do that people who might be slightly smaller perhaps female body or just a

00:09:02 ►

person who is slightly smaller or of a different experience level, will get too high a dose

00:09:08 ►

and might not have an optimal experience

00:09:13 ►

because they’ve gotten too high a dose that might be the perfect dose

00:09:17 ►

for a more experienced or perhaps larger person.

00:09:22 ►

So it seems to me that it’s really important to have a good dosing strategy

00:09:28 ►

for people of different sizes who might not need the larger dose and how to do that. And

00:09:39 ►

Rachel had a great answer and I’ll let her read part of her answer and then just share

00:09:45 ►

her thoughts with us.

00:09:46 ►

Then we’ll have another question and we’ll take your questions.

00:09:50 ►

Well, if it’s alright, Annie, I’ll just kind of add an answer to this as opposed

00:09:55 ►

to reading it directly.

00:09:56 ►

Is that okay?

00:09:57 ►

Hi everyone, I’m Rachel.

00:09:58 ►

I use she, her pronouns.

00:09:59 ►

I’m with DanceSafe.

00:10:00 ►

We’re here right now.

00:10:01 ►

It’s very exciting.

00:10:02 ►

It’s never happened before.

00:10:03 ►

For those of you that are not familiar with DanceSafe, we’re a dance company.

00:10:04 ►

We’re a dance company that’s’s very exciting. It’s never happened before. For those of you that are not familiar with

00:10:09 ►

DanceSafe, we’re a 501c3 public health nonprofit specialized in testing your drugs, teaching you

00:10:14 ►

about drugs, consent, sex, whatever else, all the taboo subjects for the pursuit of fulfillment,

00:10:19 ►

whatever, what have you. And MDMA is the thing that we’re probably best known for talking about

00:10:24 ►

because in the 90s, we were founded in response to this issue of pressed pills of MDMA is the thing that we’re probably best known for talking about because in the 90s,

00:10:25 ►

we were founded in response to this issue of pressed pills of MDMA that actually contained

00:10:30 ►

DXM, which our founder, Emmanuel Zafarios, found out. So he would go to, this is just

00:10:35 ►

an essential context, right? He would go to raves in the Bay Area underground in the 90s,

00:10:40 ►

and he would ask people, okay, what is it that you’re taking? And they said, we don’t know.

00:10:44 ►

We have no idea what’s in these pills.

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Sometimes we feel awesome and sometimes we feel really sick.

00:10:50 ►

And he started a pill testing program that is now known as Drugs Data,

00:10:53 ►

which some of you or all of you might be familiar with.

00:10:56 ►

And so MDMA and DanceSafe have a very intertwined history.

00:11:00 ►

So this is a really important question for us that we get all the time,

00:11:03 ►

especially because the experience of being floored, which, again, some of you might be familiar with, So this is a really important question for us that we get all the time.

00:11:05 ►

Especially because the experience of being floored, which again, some of you might be

00:11:09 ►

familiar with, isn’t necessarily desirable.

00:11:12 ►

Being too high on MDMA to the point that you are just lying on your back, chewing on your

00:11:15 ►

own face and going like this and asking people, how are you over and over again?

00:11:20 ►

That’s the experience, right?

00:11:21 ►

How are you doing?

00:11:22 ►

Like that.

00:11:23 ►

As well as the experience of

00:11:25 ►

underdosing, which is a surprisingly unpleasant experience on MDMA for a lot of people. I would

00:11:30 ►

say most people really don’t like being underdosed. So sometimes people will actually come to me and

00:11:34 ►

say, oh, I think that my Molly was actually meth or it had a cathinone in it or something was wrong

00:11:40 ►

with my MDMA, even though it tested as expected. And I asked them a few questions and poke around and it turns out that they just took too low of a dose. So this really

00:11:49 ►

unpleasant, physically anxious, uncomfortable experience that they had was the product of not

00:11:54 ►

doing enough. There’s this phenomenon that I refer to as the breakthrough of MDMA that,

00:12:00 ►

yeah, it might be familiar, right? The breakthrough of MDMA is when you take enough

00:12:05 ►

that the experience moves from being just physical

00:12:07 ►

to being mental as well.

00:12:08 ►

You are interested in other people

00:12:10 ►

and what they have to say.

00:12:11 ►

You’re curious about other people’s lives.

00:12:13 ►

The empathy component is there.

00:12:15 ►

And if you don’t break through and hit that point,

00:12:18 ►

it is more of an amphetamine-like experience

00:12:20 ►

because MDMA is an amphetamine, right?

00:12:22 ►

Methylene, dioxin, amphetamine.

00:12:24 ►

So when we’re dosing people, in clinical trials,

00:12:28 ►

the typical dose is either 80 or 125 milligrams,

00:12:31 ►

and 125 milligrams tends to be kind of like the general therapeutic dose

00:12:37 ►

that is recommended across the board right now,

00:12:39 ►

which obviously isn’t ideal for everyone.

00:12:41 ►

It used to be that it would be recommended to start with 100 milligrams of MDMA. And people sometimes think that it’s a little bit extra how many

00:12:51 ►

questions I ask them before advising on dosing. Like, what’s the direction of the wind, the

00:12:56 ►

position of the stars? Like, how many pieces of fruit have you had in the last seven weeks? Stuff

00:13:00 ►

like that. And they’re like, why do you need to know this? And it really does help to collect that kind of information. So if someone, for instance, is very sensitive to stimulants,

00:13:09 ►

then the physical experience of rolling might be really uncomfortable for them if they become

00:13:13 ►

too stimulated from a higher dose, which noting that MDMA by itself isn’t particularly stimulating

00:13:19 ►

for most people. MDA is more stimulating, things like that. So when you’re dosing people in a group,

00:13:25 ►

it’s important to collect information first, have kind of like an intake of people’s experience

00:13:30 ►

levels. How long have you been rolling for? When was the last time that you rolled? Do you know

00:13:34 ►

your typical dose? And a lot of people who take pressed pills, for instance, have no idea what

00:13:39 ►

their dose is. Like if you’ve been taking presses, even if you think you know how much is in them you don’t there is no way to quantify the amount of MDMA in a pressed pill even if you test it with reagents

00:13:51 ►

unless you send it to an overseas lab like energy control in Spain so even if you send it to a lab

00:13:57 ►

like drugs data they can’t actually quantify the amount of MDMA in a pill in the United States. It’s not permitted by the DEA. So quant,

00:14:06 ►

as we call it, is a more complicated metric. So a lot of people go years without having any idea

00:14:12 ►

what their dose of MDMA is. And the first time that they take a rock of MDMA, they think that

00:14:18 ►

they can eyeball it. You know, the density of a crystal is impossible to eyeball. And then someone

00:14:22 ►

is rolling their face off and loses an entire night to the amnesia of being too high. So generally speaking, if someone,

00:14:30 ►

for instance, has rolled relatively frequently, as in within the last month, their dose will be

00:14:35 ►

higher. That’s an informed consent issue. People don’t always want to space their rolls out more.

00:14:40 ►

That’s not your decision, although you can decide that you don’t feel comfortable supplying for them

00:14:45 ►

if that’s their decision, right? Like that’s a dynamic that can get complicated. Um, but generally

00:14:50 ►

speaking, my recommendation is for people that have not rolled before, um, between 115 and 120

00:14:56 ►

milligrams is generally pretty, pretty good as a sweet spot for a lot of people. And my recommendation

00:15:01 ►

is to titrate up or down by five milligrams each time

00:15:05 ►

until you find a dose that works for you. So the lowest dose that you’re able to fully and

00:15:10 ►

comfortably roll on is a dose that I recommend sticking with for as long as possible. Because

00:15:16 ►

as soon as you start upping that dose over time, you do build a tolerance over time. Like people

00:15:21 ►

that have been rolling for many years, like decades, typically will need a

00:15:25 ►

higher dose within a few years, even if they’re spacing it out by six months or a year at a time,

00:15:30 ►

it usually happens. And I, as far as I’m aware, we don’t really know why that is yet.

00:15:35 ►

So that is normal. Be aware of that. Um, it is fairly typical for people to start with a hundred

00:15:40 ►

milligrams and end up at 130, et cetera. If someone is really sensitive or wants

00:15:45 ►

a lower experience, you can start at 90 milligrams or 100 milligrams, stuff like that. I generally

00:15:50 ►

don’t recommend going anywhere under 80 for someone for their first time rolling, because

00:15:56 ►

that is a recipe for someone not fully coming up and being anxious and uncomfortable and feeling

00:16:01 ►

like they took too much Adderall for six hours, which sucks. Underdosing, not a pleasant experience in my opinion. That’s the gist of it at least.

00:16:12 ►

Thank you, Rachel. In your answer to this question in your column,

00:16:18 ►

you also suggested some protocols for how to keep track of how large dose people in a group setting

00:16:30 ►

were taking. Sometimes that’s difficult to keep track of when you’re all out on some group adventure.

00:16:38 ►

You’ve got some really good suggestions for how to do that. Could you talk a

00:16:42 ►

little bit about that?

00:16:50 ►

Sure. So something that’s becoming more and more popular right now, and by that I mean I like doing it, and therefore I assume that it’s becoming more and more popular,

00:16:54 ►

and I hope it becomes more popular because it’s a great idea, is actually keeping a log of people’s

00:17:00 ►

doses and their dose times. So if you’re having, for instance, a house roll with your friends,

00:17:04 ►

have a whiteboard or a sheet of paper or something like that. Whiteboard’s great because you can

00:17:08 ►

erase the evidence where everyone’s name is written in a column and then you have a row

00:17:15 ►

for different times, whatever. And people write down the time, the dose, and the drug for every

00:17:22 ►

drug that they do. And this is super, super helpful for many

00:17:26 ►

reasons. One of which is that it helps you get an idea of what dose works for you on a particular

00:17:30 ►

drug and also gives you an idea of why something might’ve gone wrong if you start feeling terrible

00:17:35 ►

later. So for instance, if someone, especially if you’re writing down medications on the board as

00:17:40 ►

well, that’s very helpful because if someone writes down that they’re on acetalopram Lexapro and they take a dose of GHB at some point in the night and they start feeling sick and they

00:17:51 ►

get spins and they get nauseous, then that may or may not have anything to do with the Lexapro,

00:17:56 ►

but it might be an interesting clue as to why someone reacted poorly to their experience.

00:18:01 ►

And this is great for MDMA as well. If you’re dosing someone who has only

00:18:05 ►

taken press pills or has no idea what their dose is, and you give them 130 milligrams and they say,

00:18:10 ►

oh, that was too strong for me. Great. Next time you know that you can bump it down by 5, 10, 15,

00:18:16 ►

even 20 milligrams and move over from there. So very useful way of keeping track of things. Just

00:18:21 ►

burn the evidence when you’re done, whatever you do.

00:18:31 ►

Thank you. We were all really, we editors, were really blown away by that suggestion.

00:18:39 ►

And also you noted that if somebody really has, as you mentioned, an adverse reaction

00:18:45 ►

and they’re taking another substance or medication, and they require some sort of additional care by caregivers,

00:18:51 ►

that information is recorded somewhere.

00:18:54 ►

Somebody knows in advance all of the other medications,

00:19:00 ►

substances that person took, and at what dosage,

00:19:04 ►

which is sometimes useful for

00:19:07 ►

caregivers to know if that person is getting additional care. So keeping the

00:19:13 ►

log I think is a great idea. I wanted to ask you a follow-up question about MDMA.

00:19:20 ►

It’s been really hot here on the fly up. Oh my gosh.

00:19:27 ►

It was really hot during build week.

00:19:29 ►

We got multiple dust storms.

00:19:33 ►

It’s been really hot the last couple of days and the triple digits were going to head straight

00:19:38 ►

into more triple digit heat over the weekend. MDMA, as we know, impacts your ability to regulate your

00:19:47 ►

temperature and hydration needs. It’s been very difficult even for experienced

00:19:56 ►

burners to stay ahead of the hydration curve out here, especially if you’re

00:20:02 ►

altered. I’ve been telling new people in our camp,

00:20:07 ►

put electrolytes in your water bottle, make every sip count. Every sip, electrolytes.

00:20:15 ►

Drink them before you go to sleep. What kind of advice would you have for people in terms of

00:20:22 ►

heat regulation? with MDMA?

00:20:25 ►

One of the suggestions that Mitch Gomez had the other day is roll at night

00:20:29 ►

when it gets cooler.

00:20:31 ►

Do your MDMA at night.

00:20:33 ►

It hasn’t been really getting cooler at night here on the Playa,

00:20:36 ►

which is also an interesting new experience.

00:20:40 ►

Until about, well, this morning, it was about 2.30, 3 in the morning,

00:20:45 ►

it started to get cool enough that we noticed the temperature actually dropping.

00:20:48 ►

But up until then, it was pretty warm.

00:20:51 ►

So other strategies for managing temperature regulation impact of MDMA

00:21:00 ►

or other substances that may impact your ability to regulate your temperature that you should be aware of out here to avoid heat injury?

00:21:11 ►

This is a really important question out here.

00:21:14 ►

Were any of you here during the heat wave of 2017?

00:21:18 ►

Yeah, so our outlets melted in the shade, right?

00:21:21 ►

That’s right, it was 115 in the shade.

00:21:23 ►

That was brutal. And even being

00:21:26 ►

out here, I was like, am I just, am I weakening to this environment or is it just hotter than I

00:21:32 ►

remember it being? And I think that it is hotter than I remember it being in prior years. Um,

00:21:37 ►

generally speaking, I would say that as a blanket statement, the number one danger of doing MDMA is

00:21:43 ►

overheating actually like the number one danger. It MDMA is overheating, actually. Like the number one danger.

00:21:46 ►

It is extremely dangerous to overheat on MDMA.

00:21:49 ►

Your core body temperature really rises significantly when you roll.

00:21:52 ►

Even if you don’t feel it necessarily, even if you don’t notice it overtly,

00:21:57 ►

it is a side effect that most frequently lands people in the hospital is hyperthermia.

00:22:03 ►

And hyperthermia or heat injury

00:22:05 ►

can come with all sorts of side effects. There’s different tiers to it. There’s heat exhaustion,

00:22:11 ►

heat stroke, and people use them interchangeably, but they are distinct conditions. I would say

00:22:16 ►

probably many people at the burn have experienced heat exhaustion this weekend.

00:22:21 ►

Undoubtedly, some people have experienced heat stroke as well. Heat stroke is

00:22:25 ►

a potentially life-threatening condition. It is extremely dangerous. And when you’re rolling,

00:22:31 ►

there is a dual effect. Physically, there’s the hyperthermic effect, so the increase in

00:22:36 ►

body temperature, core body temperature. And then the hyperthermic effect can lead to all sorts of

00:22:42 ►

other complications, especially because MDMA has

00:22:45 ►

been shown to be more neurotoxic in the heat as well, actually. So the hotter you are while you’re

00:22:50 ►

rolling, the higher your likelihood of actual neurotoxicity is, which is why as much of a

00:22:55 ►

devastating, I’m so sorry to be the bearer of this news, fact of reality that it is, rolling in a hot

00:23:01 ►

tub ain’t it? I’m so sorry. Everyone in the 70s is like,

00:23:06 ►

Quail eggs in hot tubs in the 70s, right?

00:23:11 ►

So these things are really important to consider out here,

00:23:15 ►

especially because when you are hyperthermic,

00:23:17 ►

that state can advance really rapidly in direct sunlight.

00:23:21 ►

And the symptoms will be different depending on how hyperthermic you are.

00:23:25 ►

Generally,

00:23:31 ►

a core body temperature of 104 degrees or higher is a medical emergency and can cause neuronal cell death after a few minutes of being in heat that high internally. Like if you’re 104 degrees outside

00:23:38 ►

of your body, that doesn’t mean you’re cooking, right? But there’s a reason that, for instance,

00:23:43 ►

at insomniac events in the med tents, they have enormous ice baths outside of the field medical tents where they will just

00:23:49 ►

dunk your entire body in ice water to cool you down. And there is a lot of complication with

00:23:55 ►

dealing with heat exhaustion and heat illness because if you cool someone too rapidly in

00:23:59 ►

certain cases, that can also be a medical emergency, right? Like you can’t win out here.

00:24:04 ►

So definitely rolling at

00:24:05 ►

night is a big deal. But another really important thing to keep in mind is that the key cooling

00:24:09 ►

points on your body are the back of your neck, under your arms, your groin, and your wrists.

00:24:15 ►

It’s not your face and your chest like people think they are. It’s where your blood vessels

00:24:19 ►

are closest to your skin. So if you see someone trying to cool someone down with heat exhaustion

00:24:23 ►

by dabbing their forehead, make sure that you redirect them to dab on the back of their neck or on their wrists or

00:24:28 ►

something to cool them down. And for yourselves too, if you find yourself feeling like you’re

00:24:32 ►

having a panic attack out in the heat because heat exhaustion feels like a panic attack,

00:24:36 ►

it’s scary to be heat exhausted. Like in med tents at festivals all the time, people come in being

00:24:41 ►

like, I think I was dosed. I’m freaking out, and they’re having a heat exhaustion panic attack.

00:24:46 ►

Like, it’s frightening.

00:24:47 ►

Your body feels terrible.

00:24:49 ►

So cool yourself really quickly on the back of your neck and on the insides of your wrists, inside of your inner thighs slash groin area, and under your arms.

00:24:56 ►

That will get you a lot cooler a lot faster.

00:25:01 ►

Is there anything I missed there?

00:25:02 ►

Was it the whole question?

00:25:02 ►

Is there anything I missed there?

00:25:03 ►

Was that the whole question?

00:25:09 ►

Just to say that if you don’t have access to a cold bath,

00:25:14 ►

we’re a little ways away from the 9NC medical unit here.

00:25:16 ►

We go right to our cooler water.

00:25:22 ►

So if somebody rolls up into your camp and they’re rolling and they’re hot and they’re having a really dysphoric experience,

00:25:26 ►

cooler water ASAP.

00:25:28 ►

We get a towel or an essential wipe or a washcloth.

00:25:33 ►

We go to our cooler water.

00:25:35 ►

It’s as cold, it’s the coldest thing we have out here that most people have access to.

00:25:40 ►

Right immediately to the back of the neck, on the wrists, it really helps.

00:25:47 ►

It’s amazingly simple.

00:25:49 ►

Most people have coolers.

00:25:51 ►

You can do it really quickly

00:25:53 ►

and then get them out of the sun,

00:25:55 ►

of course, get them seated down,

00:25:57 ►

get some electrolytes in them.

00:25:59 ►

We do this in the tea house a fair bit.

00:26:02 ►

Really simple.

00:26:04 ►

One more thing about this as well.

00:26:05 ►

I’m feeling inspired by the water action that’s going on right now.

00:26:08 ►

Everyone’s like, ooh, I’m at risk.

00:26:12 ►

One other thing that’s really good to note as well is the issue of hyper and hyponatremia.

00:26:18 ►

How many of you are familiar already with specifically what that means?

00:26:22 ►

Okay, not all of you.

00:26:23 ►

That’s good to know because these

00:26:25 ►

two terms, which can feel a little paradoxical at first, hypernatremia and hyponatremia, what they

00:26:30 ►

mean is too much or too little salt to water ratio in your body. So when you are sweating a lot,

00:26:38 ►

which is often really subconscious, right? Obviously you’re not like, it’s time to sweat.

00:26:43 ►

You just do it um when you’re

00:26:46 ►

sweating a lot you lose a lot of salt you lose a lot of water and people are usually only replenishing

00:26:50 ►

the water and not the salt and if you have any background in biology if you’ve ever looked into

00:26:56 ►

the mechanism of how cells transmit information between each other that’s where electrolytes come

00:27:01 ►

in there is a delicate balance of electrolytes, including sodium, potassium, things like that, that will allow your cells to effectively communicate and

00:27:10 ►

send electrical signaling between each other. So when your electrolyte balance is thrown off,

00:27:14 ►

when you don’t have an accurate or when you don’t have a proper homeostatic relationship between

00:27:20 ►

these different electrolytes, that can make you feel really sick as well so one

00:27:25 ►

example of this is hyponatremia is when you have too much water and too little

00:27:30 ►

salt you’ve been over hydrating without taking in enough salt and this is a

00:27:34 ►

sneaky one right a lot of people tend to not really legitimize these things

00:27:38 ►

because it’s so basic they’re like oh yeah hydrate in the desert yeah we all

00:27:42 ►

know this right but it is kind of comical that everyone’s like,

00:27:47 ►

yo, we know, drink water in the desert.

00:27:49 ►

And the medical tents are full of people

00:27:51 ►

who did not drink water in the desert

00:27:52 ►

because the effects that it can have on your body

00:27:55 ►

are kind of staggering.

00:27:57 ►

And hyponatremia is often overlooked

00:27:58 ►

because people don’t think about

00:28:00 ►

what it can feel like to drink too much water

00:28:02 ►

that can also make you feel really sick.

00:28:08 ►

And that happens when people are overcompensating over correcting on MDMA when they’re trying to cool themselves down or stay hydrated it’s

00:28:12 ►

not even like MDMA is excessively dehydrating it’s that it dries your

00:28:16 ►

mouth out and raises your core body temperature which makes you want to

00:28:20 ►

drink more water so people sometimes will, when I do medical stuff at

00:28:26 ►

festivals as not a medical professional, by the way, that is not my gig, but I do medical stuff

00:28:30 ►

for fun. Um, but sometimes people will present with things like, um, involuntary muscle cramping

00:28:37 ►

when they’re just, when they’re tripping on acid, they’re coming on acid and their fingers are

00:28:41 ►

contracting involuntarily and they have these horrible, painful spasms.

00:28:46 ►

And they’re like, I don’t understand what’s going on.

00:28:48 ►

And I asked them the questions, have you had any food today?

00:28:51 ►

No, I haven’t had much food today.

00:28:53 ►

Have you had any water today?

00:28:54 ►

Yeah, I’ve been having tons of water.

00:28:55 ►

Don’t worry.

00:28:56 ►

And I’m like, okay, let’s feed you some cashews and see what happens.

00:28:59 ►

You give them a little bit of a salty snack and suddenly the muscle cramps go away.

00:29:04 ►

Interesting, right?

00:29:04 ►

Like one of the major symptoms of heat illness and heat stroke is muscle cramping and rigidity.

00:29:09 ►

Like muscle pain is a really major indicator of heat illness.

00:29:13 ►

So all of these things are related to electrolyte balance, which is why it’s really important.

00:29:17 ►

Like the electrolyte thing is no joke.

00:29:19 ►

A lot of people don’t understand what electrolytes actually do.

00:29:22 ►

So again, hypernatremia, natremia being the salt

00:29:25 ►

balance, means you have too much salt to water. You’re dehydrated. You haven’t been taking enough

00:29:30 ►

water and yeah. Hyponatremia, you have too little salt to water ratio. You’re over hydrated. So

00:29:37 ►

eat some Cheez-Its or whatever else is available. This talk brought to you by Cheez-Its.

00:29:42 ►

Okay. Thank you. Yes, please, your question.

00:29:48 ►

Is it true that MDMA closes your pores and makes you not sweat?

00:30:28 ►

guard by them. I’m like, where did that come from? Because as far as I know, there is absolutely no basis whatsoever for that, but it still makes you do a double take, right? Of like,

00:30:34 ►

did I just miss something major here? Like I’ve never, I’ve actually never heard that

00:30:40 ►

before, which leads me to believe that it is absolutely not true.

00:30:54 ►

That’s probably true because I’ve heard this very long time ago. never heard that before which leads me to believe that it is absolutely not true totally yeah it’s very common with drugs as well like that whole thing about oh if you do lsd and you sweat and you touch your dog your dog will trip balls that is absolutely not true you’re

00:30:59 ►

not going to get anyone else high while you sweat otherwise drug deals would look very different you plug on the treadmill you give a little hug you say thanks for the molly and then you go roll

00:31:11 ►

and you know stuff like that um so there are many things that that are kind of like as as far as i

00:31:18 ►

have information about right like there is there is a chance that i simply don’t know about this fun fact about MDMA,

00:31:28 ►

but it is extraordinarily unlikely.

00:31:31 ►

Everybody sweats while they roll.

00:31:36 ►

Like, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody not sweat buckets while they roll,

00:31:40 ►

so there’s zero, zero reason why their pores would be closed in the process.

00:31:42 ►

Interesting, though, right?

00:31:48 ►

I think the exception to that might be someone who’s actually having a heat stroke.

00:31:57 ►

Yes, yes. That is absolutely true. So heat stroke. Yes. So they said that the exception to that rule might be people who are having heat stroke, which is completely and totally

00:32:01 ►

true. That’s a good point. Thank you. Because one of the differentiators between heat exhaustion and heat stroke is that heat

00:32:07 ►

exhaustion, you are still sweating.

00:32:09 ►

Heat stroke, you stop sweating.

00:32:11 ►

You have kind of like red, hot skin.

00:32:13 ►

You are not sweating anymore.

00:32:15 ►

So that could be where that came from, is that people experiencing heat stroke stop

00:32:21 ►

sweating.

00:32:21 ►

And that is just a different issue altogether of hyperthermia that gets to the

00:32:25 ►

point of it being a medical emergency not directly from a new man right yeah look at

00:32:30 ►

yes and there’s i mean there’s a human biology is really

00:32:50 ►

complicated right and i’m not here to speak with 100 certainty on these things as someone who’s

00:32:55 ►

not a medical professional who’s not a doctor right and simultaneously if you go to any of the

00:33:00 ►

cuddle puddle art installations at burning man you will see quite a lot of sweat going on.

00:33:06 ►

So just from people rolling together in their onesies,

00:33:09 ►

like you ever peeled a onesie off of someone that was rolling?

00:33:12 ►

Shit is damp.

00:33:13 ►

It is moist.

00:33:15 ►

So keep in mind the issue of not sweating anymore

00:33:20 ►

could be related to the ambient temperature that you’re in.

00:33:23 ►

Like sometimes you are exerting yourself and you just don’t sweat that much. It’s true. It can happen. But if you feel yourself

00:33:29 ►

feeling ill in the process, um, if other people are noticing, if you’re noticing that someone,

00:33:35 ►

you know, is feeling ill and they are quite hot to the touch and they are not sweating,

00:33:40 ►

then that is a cause to seek medical attention. Try cooling them first, always seek medical attention,

00:33:47 ►

cool them either order depending on the severity of the situation.

00:33:52 ►

At the tea house next year, we’re going to give away electrolytes.

00:33:56 ►

I think it’s the simplest, least expensive, most direct thing we can do.

00:34:02 ►

Of course, we serve tea.

00:34:04 ►

Our herbal teas are hydrating, but the

00:34:07 ►

Pu-erh, the aged Chinese black tea that we serve, will dehydrate you like any other caffeinated

00:34:16 ►

substance. So we’re going to do that next year. If you don’t have access to electrolytes, if you didn’t bring them,

00:34:28 ►

if you can’t get them through your camp,

00:34:31 ►

you can always go down to one of the medical stations.

00:34:35 ►

The closest one here is 9 o’clock in the sea.

00:34:38 ►

The Zendo crew who spoke here yesterday also give away electrolytes.

00:34:43 ►

You don’t necessarily need to be a Zendo

00:34:46 ►

guest. If you’re feeling like you really need some extra electrolytes, you can go to one

00:34:50 ►

of the Zendo’s here at 9 and C or on the other side of the city and get some electrolytes.

00:34:57 ►

And make every sip of water count out here. You’ll feel a lot better.

00:35:03 ►

One thing to add, my personal hack for this is, I’m just going to plug

00:35:07 ►

artisan nutfins. They are so good and they’re super salty and they’re gluten-free. And berries,

00:35:14 ►

if you can carry around berries and something like a salty cracker, the two of those combined

00:35:20 ►

are extremely helpful for helping you rehydrate if you eat them in conjunction with water if you

00:35:26 ►

don’t have access to electrolytes you do get electrolytes through food right um so having the

00:35:31 ►

salt having the sugar having the potassium those things will all help to re-regulate um they’re

00:35:36 ►

more electrolytes than that those are just the ones that i think of off the top of my head

00:35:39 ►

immediately and those are really helpful if you find yourself feeling really weak especially if you’re trying to like re-jumpstart your system. If you haven’t been eating enough

00:35:48 ►

food or drinking enough water, having those together can be really helpful.

00:35:53 ►

Thank you. That’s a hot tip. Great. Let’s go to another question that we got for your psychedelic auntie and shipped to another substance.

00:36:06 ►

This substance, this question focuses on psilocybin mushrooms.

00:36:14 ►

I get killer headaches after a journey when I drink mushroom tea or do a larger dose of mushrooms.

00:36:22 ►

Why is that? Is there anything I can do about it?

00:36:26 ►

Is it hurting me in any way?

00:36:29 ►

And you had a very interesting answer about headaches,

00:36:35 ►

partially due to hydration.

00:36:38 ►

But I thought we’d include that in our answers today.

00:36:44 ►

Sure.

00:36:49 ►

So the whole thing about headaches in the first place is it’s really complex because headaches aren’t fully understood as a condition.

00:36:53 ►

The experience of having a headache can be due to all kinds of different things, including

00:36:57 ►

vasodilation. Your blood vessels are too wide. Vasoconstriction. Your blood vessels are too

00:37:02 ►

small. Like you can’t win, right? As well as

00:37:05 ►

caffeine withdrawal, excessive caffeine consumption, stimulant consumption, there’s all kinds of, or

00:37:11 ►

vasodilin consumption, something that dilates your blood vessels. So propranolol, for instance,

00:37:16 ►

some people get headaches on propranolol, which dilates your blood vessels, lowers your blood

00:37:21 ►

pressure. So it’s not straightforward why people get headaches like

00:37:25 ►

this and then there are things like migraines which are actually neurological conditions and

00:37:29 ►

cluster headaches which are total question mark what are cluster headaches who knows

00:37:33 ►

and the way that each individual headache is going to manifest is going to be different every time

00:37:39 ►

so again reiterating i’m not a medical professional, but I am really, really good at getting headaches and I get the whole rainbow of headaches.

00:37:47 ►

Like they love me and we have a really positive, continuous relationship.

00:37:52 ►

Um, so the first thing to note is that there are headaches that are considered to be emergencies

00:37:57 ►

and there are headaches that are not.

00:37:59 ►

And I would say, generally speaking, most headaches are not considered to be emergencies,

00:38:03 ►

but there is one specific kind of headache called a thunderclap headache that comes on really, really abruptly

00:38:10 ►

and super intense, like a railroad spike through your head kind of intense. And thunderclap headaches

00:38:15 ►

can sometimes be an indicator of an underlying problem. So an example of thunderclap headaches

00:38:21 ►

that came around a few years ago, between 2014 and 2017, there was this drug called 4-FA, 4-fluoramphetamine.

00:38:27 ►

Anyone heard of 4-FA?

00:38:29 ►

Okay.

00:38:30 ►

So 4-FA was really popular in the Netherlands for a few years as an MDMA replacement because

00:38:35 ►

people found that they could take it every weekend without the depletion.

00:38:38 ►

It was marketed as a better molly, et cetera.

00:38:41 ►

There was also an MDMA shortage at that time due to the un demanding that a bunch of

00:38:46 ►

safral was destroyed and stuff like that so the drug market was all crazy for a while and 4fa

00:38:52 ►

entered the market and for a while people were using it generally like without significant

00:38:58 ►

incident but over time the reports of adverse effects started piling up. And one of the major adverse effects

00:39:05 ►

from 4FA was thunderclap headaches leading to stroke. And there was a paper released in 2017

00:39:13 ►

about transient stroke that was experienced from cerebral hemorrhage, right? So the blood vessels

00:39:19 ►

are, the blood pressure spikes to the point that blood vessels basically bleed into the surrounding area. It’s a brain bleed. And this was a cause of emergency visits for a few years

00:39:30 ►

in the Netherlands, and there were papers released about it, etc. So there was actually a warning on

00:39:35 ►

Psychonaut Wiki, which is my favorite database for drug information if you’re not familiar with it.

00:39:39 ►

It’s amazing. There’s an explicit warning saying, if you experience a severe headache on 4FA,

00:39:46 ►

seek emergency treatment immediately. So that’s an example of a thunderclap headache, a headache

00:39:51 ►

on drugs where you should be like, oh shit, I don’t know if this is okay or not. And if someone else

00:39:56 ►

is, especially if they’re experiencing a headache, if you’re with someone in your group and they’re

00:40:01 ►

experiencing a headache that is so debilitating that they go non-verbal or are barely verbal or are like rocking or crying or something like that,

00:40:08 ►

then they should seek medical attention for sure. Because headaches can sometimes indicate that

00:40:12 ►

there is, for instance, a cerebral hemorrhage, a brain bleed, and a surrounding tissue.

00:40:16 ►

But then there are other reasons for headaches too. Like I did mushrooms and I had a really

00:40:20 ►

intense emotional experience and I saw God and I cried a lot. And it was really, uh, just like so emotionally overwhelming that my blood pressure spiked and now I have a headache

00:40:29 ►

or, um, I didn’t realize I didn’t drink caffeine today. Now I have a headache while doing mushrooms

00:40:34 ►

or I’m dehydrated. Now I have a headache while doing mushrooms. And it’s totally possible that

00:40:39 ►

there are some additional mechanisms here too. Um, so LSD specifically is, or mushrooms and LSD are

00:40:47 ►

actually being studied as effective treatments for cluster headaches. So this is kind of paradoxical,

00:40:51 ►

right? Like you have these things that are being studied as a treatment for a certain kind of

00:40:54 ►

severe debilitating headache, and yet people are reporting having headaches on them.

00:41:01 ►

But yeah, in part of this answer and looking over it, basically my take on this is if this headache is disrupting your experience on any substance,

00:41:10 ►

if you have a headache or any physical response that’s disrupting your experience, change something about how you’re doing this drug.

00:41:16 ►

It doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a medical emergency attached to it, but you might want to take a lower dose of it.

00:41:21 ►

You might want to try Lemon Tech instead of taking mushrooms straight. You might want to try eating at a different time of day, doing it in a different environment,

00:41:28 ►

baby proofing your surroundings so you’re less prone to really overwhelming emotional experiences.

00:41:34 ►

Anything that you could do to slightly adjust the parameters of the experience and see how your body

00:41:40 ►

responds to this. This gives you clues, right? It’s totally possible. Like I said,

00:41:49 ►

there could be some biological mechanism behind why some people experience headaches on mushrooms.

00:41:55 ►

I believe that there are actually some studies in here about this. But keep an eye out for really severe headache symptoms, especially in people that have been consuming stimulants, because

00:41:59 ►

that’s definitely where we see the highest incidence of headaches. Stimulant headaches suck.

00:42:05 ►

And sometimes they can be a product of spiking blood pressure, hypertension,

00:42:09 ►

so be mindful of those.

00:42:12 ►

Thank you for that information.

00:42:14 ►

I also just want to say that one of the reasons that I value

00:42:18 ►

and many people value DanceSafe so much

00:42:21 ►

is that you provide fact-based information.

00:42:24 ►

And when you work

00:42:26 ►

at festivals and events as you do at events that I produce I am one of the

00:42:33 ►

co-owners and founders of Take Three Presents who produce private immersive

00:42:40 ►

art parties we’ve been doing it for ten years. And the Tea House is the center

00:42:48 ►

of those parties. And we work with DanceSafe, who comes in and provides fact-based drug

00:42:55 ►

education and information and harm reduction services at our events and works very closely

00:43:01 ►

with our medics. We have a whole medic team who work with us

00:43:07 ►

at our events and the DanceSafe people are well trained and know exactly when

00:43:14 ►

to refer people who come to them for information to our medical professionals

00:43:20 ►

and you do that at many many events and I just want to say thank you to both DanceSafe and medical providers,

00:43:30 ►

such as RGX Medical and other medical providers

00:43:33 ►

who provide professional medical support at events,

00:43:37 ►

as our emergency services department is doing here at Burning Man.

00:43:44 ►

Thank you so much. It’s really essential.

00:43:48 ►

So thanks for working so well with those folks. I want to give Rachel an opportunity to pose

00:43:57 ►

a question that Rachel has received either prior to this moment or a question that we’ve not yet covered on the column.

00:44:11 ►

And a question of your choice, Rachel, and then we’ll take a question from the audience.

00:44:17 ►

How’s that?

00:44:18 ►

Okay, a question of my choice.

00:44:21 ►

Let’s go with fentanyl.

00:44:23 ►

Right.

00:44:23 ►

I’m sure that this is a hot button one that everyone

00:44:26 ►

is interested in. This is going to be hard to narrow down because there’s so many things to

00:44:32 ►

say about fentanyl, right? Fentanyl is now the centerpiece of, it is sort of a microcosm of how

00:44:41 ►

misinformation about drugs travels in the United States, how people struggle

00:44:45 ►

to obtain accurate information about substances, even when there are public service announcements

00:44:50 ►

going out about them. How many of you have been seeing those stories about the cops touching

00:44:55 ►

someone who’s overdosing and then they overdose and they narc in themselves and things like that?

00:45:00 ►

There seems to be a new one every three to five days at this point at at least so um one quick

00:45:07 ►

thing about fentanyl that i want to touch on is uh first i want to touch on overdose

00:45:13 ►

identifying fentanyl overdose the second thing is i want to touch on misinformation about fentanyl

00:45:20 ►

specifically fentanyl being absorbed through your skin, which I’m sure many of you have heard about

00:45:25 ►

and might have questions about. So the first thing about fentanyl overdose, right now we’re seeing a

00:45:32 ►

surge in people kind of vaguely doing a hand-wavy attribution of anyone having a negative reaction

00:45:37 ►

to anything being a fentanyl overdose. We see this with people who come in and there’s someone who’s tripping

00:45:45 ►

really hard, periodically making big motions, and they’re like, he’s overdosing on fentanyl,

00:45:50 ►

we have to Narcan him, which demonstrates an immediate, huge lack of understanding of what

00:45:56 ►

opioids actually do. Like, what does even just consuming an opioid look like? And to give a

00:46:02 ►

baseline about that, an opioid is a central nervous system

00:46:05 ►

depressant generally across the categorization. And that means that opioids as a class will

00:46:12 ►

depress respiration, so your breathing rate. And that is the number one cause of concern

00:46:21 ►

with opioids in terms of physical safety safety is that when your breathing slows too

00:46:26 ►

much, your heart will stop eventually. So respiratory depression leads to respiratory

00:46:32 ►

arrest leads to cardiac arrest. So cardiac arrest is when your heart stops. It’s not the same as a

00:46:37 ►

heart attack. They’re different things. So when we’re looking at an opioid overdose,

00:46:43 ►

the symptoms related to an opioid overdose are respiratory, largely.

00:46:48 ►

Someone who is breathing very slowly, I think that it’s about four to seven breaths per minute is when you’re really concerned.

00:46:58 ►

I think it’s six breaths per minute, and you are there in an acute respiratory depression state. So if someone is breathing normally but unconscious,

00:47:08 ►

that is an immediate indicator that they are not experiencing opioid overdose.

00:47:14 ►

It is the characteristic of an opioid overdose is the breathing is too slow.

00:47:18 ►

In addition to that, if someone has lost consciousness

00:47:21 ►

and they have really slow breathing in addition to kind of

00:47:25 ►

like either a blue or ashen tint to extremities like lips and fingertips and toes, that is a sign

00:47:32 ►

of hypoxia. That is a sign of oxygen deprivation to those areas. So those are two of the main

00:47:39 ►

symptoms of opioid overdose that is becoming like a real problem not every opioid overdose

00:47:45 ►

is necessarily life-threatening sometimes people’s respiration slows

00:47:50 ►

extremely and they never end up needing CPR and if they don’t get an arc and

00:47:55 ►

they’re okay sometimes that does happen but typically an opioid overdose is a

00:48:00 ►

medical emergency so that’s one good thing to know. And that leads me into the next bit about

00:48:07 ►

people misunderstanding what it means if someone is passed out. And keep an eye out for this,

00:48:10 ►

because I’m about to release a piece through DanceSafe that has been on my radar for almost

00:48:15 ►

an entire year about how to figure out why someone lost consciousness. I have, for instance, heard

00:48:22 ►

at so many festivals I’ve been at this year, oh, well, 30 people wore Narcan this weekend.

00:48:28 ►

Okay, that doesn’t actually mean that that person experienced an opioid overdose.

00:48:32 ►

Like, it is currently a typical standard reaction by medical that if someone is unconscious and experiencing any sort of, even if it’s just alcohol poisoning, right? You can’t necessarily know what caused

00:48:45 ►

someone to lose consciousness in that way. So administer Narcan, it won’t hurt them.

00:48:50 ►

But the problem is that now we see someone administers Narcan, someone wakes up and everyone

00:48:54 ►

is like, oh my God, they overdosed on fentanyl. So correlation does not necessarily equal causation.

00:48:59 ►

If you see someone lose consciousness, or if you hear that someone was Narcan,

00:49:03 ►

repeat the facts of the

00:49:05 ►

situation. Please try to avoid conjecture here. The facts of what you saw. Here’s how long this

00:49:11 ►

person was unconscious for. Here’s what they were looking like before they went unconscious. Here

00:49:15 ►

are their symptoms during being unconscious. Here’s what revived them and how quickly they

00:49:19 ►

were revived. Here’s how they were acting after being revived. All of those things help paint the

00:49:24 ►

profile of what happened to this person. But if we continue to make assumptions about the cause of revived. Here’s how they were acting after being revived. All of those things help paint the profile

00:49:25 ►

of what happened to this person. But if we continue to make assumptions about the cause of someone

00:49:29 ►

losing unconsciousness and attributing it to fentanyl without knowing for sure that fentanyl

00:49:34 ►

was involved, we continue to perpetuate misinformation around the substance. It doesn’t

00:49:38 ►

matter what the drug is. Misinformation around drugs makes it hard to know what happened to

00:49:43 ►

someone and people deserve to know what happened to them.

00:49:46 ►

Imagine how frightening it would be if someone passed out from alcohol poisoning

00:49:50 ►

after having done a bump of cocaine previously in the night, right?

00:49:53 ►

Like six hours ago they did a bump of cocaine,

00:49:56 ►

they passed out from alcohol poisoning, someone Narcan’d them.

00:49:58 ►

They woke up because having Narcan sprayed into your nose feels fairly invasive,

00:50:02 ►

and everyone’s like, dude, I think you overdosed on fentanyl.

00:50:05 ►

That’s really traumatic.

00:50:07 ►

And it really makes it difficult to tell what substances fentanyl is ending up in

00:50:11 ►

and who’s being affected by it.

00:50:13 ►

So I do want to touch base on that.

00:50:15 ►

That’s a quick note around this.

00:50:18 ►

I think I just wrapped both of those points in there.

00:50:21 ►

And now I’m feeling like I should touch on nitrous as well,

00:50:24 ►

the hypoxia

00:50:25 ►

thing, but I don’t know if we have time for that. Okay, cool. Nitrous real quick. Um, how many of

00:50:32 ►

you have heard that nitrous kills brain cells? Cool. Yeah. So, um, nitrous oxide is an extremely

00:50:39 ►

well-tolerated gas. It is used in medicine. It is used in surgery. It is used

00:50:45 ►

in all sorts of contexts.

00:50:47 ►

It was used in the 1700s in ye olde

00:50:50 ►

nitrous parties where they would

00:50:51 ►

inhale it out of silk bags and go

00:50:53 ►

partying together like this is a real thing.

00:50:57 ►

And nitrous

00:50:58 ►

is generally like a

00:51:00 ►

really tame

00:51:01 ►

substance in terms of the physical risk

00:51:03 ►

profile. Where the risk comes in is from

00:51:08 ►

a few things. Number one is B vitamin inhibition. This is actually the greatest concern of doing

00:51:15 ►

nitrous regularly is B vitamin inhibition. The way that nitrous works, it makes your body less

00:51:23 ►

efficient at processing, but This is like a simplified version

00:51:27 ►

of this, right? It makes your body less capable of processing and metabolizing B vitamins.

00:51:32 ►

So even if you’re supplementing B vitamins after doing nitrous, your body will still have a

00:51:37 ►

refractory period of a few days where it’s less capable of using B vitamins in your system. So

00:51:43 ►

it’s still good to supplement B vitamins before,

00:51:46 ►

during, and after nitrous use. Um, but it’s, it’s really important to space out your nitrous use.

00:51:52 ►

Um, I teach a class called drugs who are, I did for a while where, um, we would just like do a

00:51:57 ►

whole semester of, of drug stuff for free. And, um, we had a whole segment on nitrous and I was

00:52:03 ►

like, if you’re going to do nitrous, then make sure that you’re spacing out your use.

00:52:06 ►

Because if you find yourself during a session kind of like spasming at all, going like this involuntarily or jerking at all, that could be a sign of early neuropathy.

00:52:17 ►

Neuropathy is nerve damage.

00:52:19 ►

And B vitamins are directly related to neuropathy. So if you have a B vitamin, what’s the word I’m looking for?

00:52:26 ►

B vitamin deficiency,

00:52:28 ►

then neuropathy is quite dangerous.

00:52:30 ►

You can actually,

00:52:31 ►

people lose limbs from neuropathy.

00:52:33 ►

It’s really dangerous.

00:52:34 ►

And I had someone in my class contact me

00:52:36 ►

and be like,

00:52:37 ►

oh my God, I didn’t listen.

00:52:39 ►

I did nitrous four times in a week

00:52:41 ►

in large sessions

00:52:42 ►

and my entire right hand

00:52:44 ►

has been numb for two

00:52:45 ►

weeks now and it will go away like most of the time i would say it will go away you have to go

00:52:51 ►

and get b vitamin shots in your butt sometimes which sucks or i mean you feel great afterwards

00:52:56 ►

depending there are quite a few nurses at burning man who give out b vitamin ash shots

00:53:01 ►

and people leave and they’re like wow wow, that really woke me up.

00:53:10 ►

So it does work and you can reverse that a lot of the time. But if you are experiencing severe vitamin B depletion from doing nitrous, then that can be really dangerous. And the other thing is

00:53:15 ►

take breaths of oxygen, please. If you are consistently intentionally depriving yourself

00:53:22 ►

of oxygen over the course of a half hour long sesh then yeah

00:53:25 ►

you could have hypoxia lack of oxygenation to your extremities which could cause cell damage like you

00:53:33 ►

do not want to deoxygenate your body so take breaths between balloons and during hits of

00:53:39 ►

nitrous space out your nitrous use supplement vitamins, you’ll just pee out any excess and

00:53:45 ►

it’ll smell like horse shrek piss. So yeah, I just wanted to note that about nitrous because

00:53:51 ►

everyone is like, that wah-wah sound is the sound of your brain cells popping. And that is

00:53:56 ►

just not the case. And we all are aware of Burning Man’s love of nitrous oxide.

00:54:05 ►

Thank you. That’s really helpful nitrous oxide. Thank you.

00:54:05 ►

That’s really helpful.

00:54:07 ►

Personal note,

00:54:08 ►

if you happen to be going to a party

00:54:09 ►

at a high elevation,

00:54:12 ►

like a ski resort,

00:54:16 ►

and you’re up at 7,000 feet,

00:54:19 ►

getting less oxygen,

00:54:21 ►

do note that if you’re doing nitrous.

00:54:24 ►

Just note.

00:54:26 ►

You’re getting a little less oxygen, do note that if you’re doing nitrous. Just note you’re getting a little less oxygen. Personal experience. I’d also like to talk briefly about drug checking. One of the things I

00:54:39 ►

greatly value about Bansafe is that they provide drug checking services at events.

00:54:46 ►

They will set up a booth, as they do at Take 3 events,

00:54:50 ►

and they will provide anonymous, free drug checking

00:54:54 ►

to check your substances for adulterants, misrepresentation.

00:55:02 ►

And this helps avoid inadvertently ingesting substances that

00:55:08 ►

are dangerous like fentanyl. As an event producer and harm reduction activist I’m

00:55:16 ►

the one who goes to the owners of those venues, the retreat center, the casino hotel, and I say,

00:55:27 ►

Hi, we have rangers.

00:55:29 ►

We learned how to run a ranger crew after being rangers out here at Burning Man.

00:55:35 ►

We have medics.

00:55:38 ►

We have, of course, a good working relationship with your security team,

00:55:43 ►

which we do.

00:55:45 ►

a good working relationship with your security team, which we do. And we also have GanttSafe, which we’re going to bring in to do on-site drug checking here

00:55:53 ►

at your venue.

00:55:56 ►

And the reason that we do this is because we believe that this will help reduce injury, illness, and potentially death for the

00:56:07 ►

people who are going to our event. And of course, as you know, the rate of drug

00:56:17 ►

overdose due to fentanyl and other substances has escalated greatly in the

00:56:23 ►

last couple of years years and so many people

00:56:25 ►

are touched by this phenomenon that when I say this to the owners and operators

00:56:32 ►

of casino hotels and venues they look at me and they say oh but yes of course

00:56:38 ►

because dance safe is preventing people from having these adverse events.

00:56:46 ►

And I say, thank you so much for understanding.

00:56:48 ►

They work directly with our medical crew who are licensed and working at our event.

00:56:56 ►

Thank you for understanding.

00:56:57 ►

People get it.

00:56:59 ►

I wish Burning Man got this.

00:57:03 ►

Mitch Gomez went to the Burning Man organizers and said,

00:57:07 ►

could we please set up a dance safe booth at Center Camp and do drug checking

00:57:13 ►

and offer fentanyl test strips for people to test their substances for fentanyl,

00:57:21 ►

earplugs, condoms, electrolytes, all of the harm reduction materials

00:57:28 ►

the Dense offers.

00:57:29 ►

And apparently, according to what he said here at Palenque Norte, he was turned down.

00:57:39 ►

And I asked him, I raised my hand and I said, what will it take for the organizers of Burning

00:57:48 ►

Man to change their mind? Do they really need to renegotiate their permit with the BLM?

00:57:54 ►

What will it take to offer those basic services? And he said, it will take community pressure.

00:58:02 ►

will take community pressure.

00:58:06 ►

It will take pressure from the community of people who want to make those services easily available.

00:58:11 ►

And I really just want to give him credit

00:58:13 ►

for being willing to be the lightning rod

00:58:16 ►

and center of that effort

00:58:19 ►

and all of DanceA for potentially offering those services here on the playa.

00:58:24 ►

And then I took a box of fentanyl test strips from him

00:58:27 ►

and some information for how to properly use them, and we’re going to start

00:58:31 ►

distributing them in the tea house, because that’s something that

00:58:35 ►

camp managers can do. So any thoughts

00:58:39 ►

about that?

00:58:43 ►

If you look at the DanceSafe Twitter Twitter you’ll see all my thoughts about

00:58:45 ►

that this topic is a real thorn in our side there’s there’s a really

00:58:52 ►

interesting article that was released recently about disco Donnie and the

00:58:55 ►

Rave Act and I forget which probably might have been a billboard publication

00:58:59 ►

but if you get the opportunity to I really recommend reading it it is so

00:59:03 ►

interesting the Rave Act which actually stands for reducing Americans if you get the opportunity to, I really recommend reading it. It is so interesting.

00:59:10 ►

The RAVE Act, which actually stands for Reducing Americans’ Vulnerability to Ecstasy,

00:59:16 ►

which is not what the actual PAST Act was called, but that was the original act,

00:59:22 ►

is what it’s colloquially known as, is the excuse that a lot of promoters use for not offering drug checking services at their events. And the fact of the matter is that no one has ever actually been prosecuted under the

00:59:28 ►

RAVE Act.

00:59:28 ►

It’s been around for 20 years and no one has ever actually experienced legitimate legal

00:59:34 ►

repercussions for it because it is so full of holes.

00:59:37 ►

And the excuse that people use is that it will be condoning drug use if there is drug checking available on site,

00:59:51 ►

which, I mean, I don’t even know how I can begin to unpack that here in the span of two minutes, but it is an extremely complicated issue to explain.

01:00:01 ►

But what I will say is that the legality of distributing drug checking materials

01:00:08 ►

is different from state to state, just as BLM can pull you over for weed on this land, even though

01:00:14 ►

you’re in Nevada, where weed is a bit, like you could possess weed, you know, but once you’re here

01:00:20 ►

at Burning Man, you can’t anymore because it’s federal land. In Arkansas, fentanyl test strips are a felony to possess.

01:00:29 ►

Just having the materials to test your drugs for fentanyl is a felony in Arkansas.

01:00:35 ►

So the fact that every state has its own individual laws around drug checking really makes things messy.

01:00:42 ►

But then you also have the fact that the Biden administration formally endorsed harm reduction measures.

01:00:47 ►

The CDC formally recommends fentanyl test strips as a harm reduction measure.

01:00:52 ►

And the fact that if you look on Marijuana Moment, the publication,

01:00:55 ►

you can see the letter that the Department of Justice

01:00:58 ►

released in response to a letter they received from the Amend the Rave Act moms

01:01:03 ►

who started this thing because their kids

01:01:05 ►

died because promoters would not allow things like cooling spaces and free water and drug checking

01:01:11 ►

because they were saying that it would allow them to be prosecuted under the rave act so the

01:01:16 ►

department of justice was contacted by the amend the rave act people saying is it okay to provide

01:01:22 ►

harm reduction tools at events and the do DOJ said, yes. There are these

01:01:26 ►

federal things in place that can be utilized, that can be shown to people in positions of power by

01:01:33 ►

saying this is a federally endorsed activity that mitigates risk, prevents needless suffering and

01:01:41 ►

death, and improves people’s quality of life. And the fact that it is still a criminalized activity that is stigmatized to the point of it being a felony in Arkansas

01:01:49 ►

speaks volumes about the way that America hates people who use drugs that they consider to be less than their own.

01:01:56 ►

And that includes drugs that are less than alcohol.

01:01:59 ►

That also now includes drugs that are less than psychedelics, as psychedelic exceptionalism rises in the ranks, and now people are considering their drugs to be the good drugs, other people’s

01:02:10 ►

drugs to be the bad drugs, right? In an effort to push the psychedelic movement forward, there has

01:02:16 ►

been an intentional separating, well, we’re not like them, our drugs are good. Which is ironic,

01:02:22 ►

because up until recently, all of those substances and all the people that use them

01:02:27 ►

were viewed with the same general level of vitriol so that’s a whole other can of worms but that’s

01:02:33 ►

um that’s my take on not having drug checking at events especially because administering

01:02:39 ►

fentanyl strip testing is nitpicky and difficult it is hard to do fentanyl strip testing right. If you don’t read

01:02:46 ►

our instructions, honestly, our instructions for how to use fentanyl strip tests, you will do it

01:02:52 ►

wrong. You will get results that you don’t trust. It is not an easy process. I’ll be the first to

01:02:58 ►

say that. We’re all aware of it. So not being able to have people that are supporting others

01:03:02 ►

in the process of using these materials, being put in a position of having to distribute them on an individual basis,

01:03:08 ►

really reduces our ability to train peer educators and take some of this load off of this centralized org.

01:03:14 ►

The goal is for everyone in this room to know how to do this themselves.

01:03:20 ►

So I’d like to personally call on event producers to step up.

01:03:23 ►

This is a matter of community health and safety.

01:03:27 ►

It’s a moral imperative.

01:03:29 ►

120,000, 140,000 people a year are dying of some form of drug overdose in the U.S. right now,

01:03:40 ►

and that number is escalating.

01:03:41 ►

So I really do feel that it is incumbent upon people

01:03:46 ►

who care about this to step forward,

01:03:47 ►

especially if they’re an event producer.

01:03:50 ►

It takes courage, and this is a moment in history

01:03:53 ►

when some courage is needed in this question.

01:03:57 ►

So thank you so much, Dan Sigg, for offering those services.

01:04:02 ►

We’d like to take a question or two from the audience

01:04:05 ►

please. Who’s got a question? Yes sir.

01:04:10 ►

Hi, thank you for doing this. I’m a drug policy researcher and so I have about a million questions.

01:04:16 ►

But I’ll ask just like one that is applicable for a lot of people in this room. I think a lot of people have heard around consuming MDMA and other

01:04:28 ►

drugs that affect serotonin pathways that take some 5-HTP afterwards, something like that’s

01:04:36 ►

the idea, is that you feel that’s well supported by evidence are there other things that people

01:04:45 ►

should or could consider I went up to or a ramp down from experience could you

01:04:54 ►

please repeat the question so the question is around doing MDMA and taking

01:04:59 ►

supplements or other substances that can improve the safety profile and the

01:05:04 ►

quality of the experience,

01:05:05 ►

including things like the ever-popular silver bullet 5-HTP.

01:05:11 ►

And I’m really happy that you asked this question

01:05:12 ►

because 5-HTP, I have a bone to pick,

01:05:15 ►

not with 5-HTP, but with the social conceptions around 5-HTP.

01:05:20 ►

In recent years, the popularity of MDMA has exploded. Like, I don’t know if any of you guys

01:05:27 ►

have been to a mainstream EDM event in recent years, but it is all MDMA as far as the eye can

01:05:35 ►

see. It is unbelievable how much molly is being consumed. It’s huge. Um, and there is now kind of

01:05:43 ►

a cultural narrative around 5-HTP where people think,

01:05:46 ►

oh, okay, well, I can roll as long as I take 5-HTP afterwards. And my favorite is,

01:05:51 ►

as long as you eat a healthy diet and exercise, like eating a healthy diet and exercising makes

01:05:56 ►

you exempt from basic human biology of depleting all of your limited reserves of a natural resource

01:06:01 ►

in your brain at the same time. So with 5-HTP, this is

01:06:06 ►

not a diss on it, but I will say that I recommend waiting a full 24 hours after you dose before

01:06:12 ►

taking 5-HTP. It is uncommon, but some people do experience symptoms of mild serotonin syndrome

01:06:18 ►

from taking 5-HTP during or right after their role. Um, so that, that again is like not everybody’s experience,

01:06:26 ►

but when it does happen, people have contacted us being like, I went to the hospital because I felt

01:06:31 ►

so sick. So just don’t risk it for the biscuit, like just wait a full 24 hours. It’s okay.

01:06:37 ►

5-HTP as far as I’m aware of the current research on, on it is supported as being a positive, kind of like a symptomatic relief for after you

01:06:47 ►

roll. It’s not a neuroprotectant as far as I am aware at this point in time. Obviously,

01:06:53 ►

the world of drug research changes on a daily basis. There is always new information coming out.

01:07:00 ►

How about those new images of the universe being like, oh wow, this thing’s way older than we thought

01:07:05 ►

for all these years. Like the same, it happens with drugs all the time.

01:07:09 ►

So for the time being, I would say feel free to take 5-HTP after you roll, wait a full 24 hours,

01:07:16 ►

do not view it as a silver bullet. It’s not going to save you or protect you from the fact that MDMA

01:07:20 ►

does indeed have a substantial serotonin depleting mechanism. And you do have to

01:07:26 ►

wait periods of time. My personal recommendation is to roll once or twice a year. That is my

01:07:32 ►

recommendation. I know every time I say that, eyebrows go into people’s hair and down to the

01:07:37 ►

back of their head and to their butt. They’re like, what do you mean? And the reason that that’s

01:07:42 ►

my recommendation is because there tends to be a diminishing return effect for people.

01:07:49 ►

The more frequently that you roll, the less rewarding the experience becomes for you.

01:07:53 ►

I am not in a position to say the current research on long-term neurotoxicity or anything like that related to doing MDMA too frequently.

01:08:04 ►

like that related to doing MDMA too frequently. As far as I know, at this point in time,

01:08:09 ►

generally, if people roll really often and then take a long period off, things tend to seem to normalize and go back to the way that they were. Like there doesn’t seem to be any substantial

01:08:13 ►

risk of long-term issues. However, behaviorally, rolling really frequently can make you depressed.

01:08:20 ►

It does happen. People do end up having behavioral changes from doing Raleigh too often.

01:08:26 ►

So other vitamins and supplements, the way that I view all of this is kind of through the lens of

01:08:31 ►

as long as you’re checking interactions, it’s probably not going to hurt you to take supplements

01:08:37 ►

before and during your role. If you want a neuroprotective effect, you’re going to want

01:08:42 ►

to take supplements before and during your roll, not afterwards.

01:08:46 ►

Afterwards is to make you feel better.

01:08:49 ►

So go ahead and do it.

01:08:51 ►

Currently, the most supported supplements that I know of are alpha lipoic acid and acetylalcarnitine.

01:08:57 ►

That is ALA and Alcar, as well as there are other ones like grapeseed oil and EGCG and other things like that.

01:09:05 ►

They’re detailed on RollSafe, if you like that website.

01:09:09 ►

Just make sure you check interactions with medications.

01:09:11 ►

Interactions are super sneaky.

01:09:13 ►

Things like grapefruit juice can interact with your SSRIs and stuff like that.

01:09:17 ►

Interactions are wild.

01:09:19 ►

The chain goes way down.

01:09:21 ►

Yeah.

01:09:20 ►

goes way down.

01:09:22 ►

Yeah.

01:09:26 ►

You mentioned a good

01:09:27 ►

fact about

01:09:28 ►

the pandemic.

01:09:31 ►

I’m curious

01:09:32 ►

just to read

01:09:33 ►

a little on

01:09:34 ►

not everybody

01:09:36 ►

in my lifetime

01:09:37 ►

could be

01:09:38 ►

where we are

01:09:38 ►

right now

01:09:39 ►

in terms of

01:09:40 ►

the second

01:09:41 ►

world

01:09:41 ►

renaissance

01:09:41 ►

in Wisconsin.

01:09:42 ►

Yes.

01:09:43 ►

And there’s

01:09:44 ►

a lot of

01:09:44 ►

nuance.

01:09:45 ►

I’m just curious aboutnaissance and what’s happening. And there’s a lot of nuance. I’m just curious about,

01:09:47 ►

and I’m a huge supporter of what’s happening

01:09:50 ►

in much ways, but I’m curious

01:09:52 ►

for you to riff on that nuance.

01:09:54 ►

What’s the shadow of what’s happening?

01:09:56 ►

Sure, yeah.

01:09:57 ►

I’ll preface this by saying that

01:09:59 ►

there is no

01:10:01 ►

universal solution

01:10:03 ►

to ending the war on drugs right now.

01:10:06 ►

There isn’t.

01:10:07 ►

There is the whole decrim versus legalization debate.

01:10:10 ►

Both of those have their pros and their cons.

01:10:13 ►

One of the pros of decriminalization is that it removes an element

01:10:18 ►

of kind of like capitalist violent structure

01:10:21 ►

that tends to arise when we regulate a system.

01:10:24 ►

So when we legalize something, let’s say that we’re talking about legalizing psychedelics,

01:10:28 ►

for instance, classical psychedelics, or even better, no, let’s talk about legalizing plant

01:10:33 ►

medicines. I have plans in the near future to have plant medicines tattooed all over my legs,

01:10:39 ►

but including the opium poppy cot, which contains cathinone,

01:10:45 ►

which is a bath salt,

01:10:47 ►

which grows in Southeast Asia,

01:10:49 ►

ephedra, which also grows in Southeast Asia and is used to make meth,

01:10:51 ►

things like coca, the coca leaf.

01:10:53 ►

These are all plant medicines too, right?

01:10:55 ►

So why are they never included in the dialogue?

01:10:59 ►

If you want to say that you believe

01:11:01 ►

that the superior psychedelics

01:11:02 ►

are psychedelics like mushrooms and LSD,

01:11:05 ►

and let’s throw ketamine in there too, whatever, then just say so. Don’t cover it under the guise

01:11:11 ►

of, oh, we prefer the natural drugs, because you don’t. You don’t prefer the natural drugs.

01:11:15 ►

Otherwise, you’d be advocating for safer access to opium poppy too, and bath salts and stuff like

01:11:21 ►

that. So the way that this dichotomy has gotten set up is very much people who use drugs

01:11:29 ►

have been in community with each other since the beginning of this whole thing.

01:11:34 ►

Like since the very origins of, for instance, Chinese immigrants coming through

01:11:40 ►

and building the railroads and having opium dens where opium was being prescribed

01:11:45 ►

to hysterical women, white women. But as soon as Chinese immigrants were using opium, all of a

01:11:51 ►

sudden opium was a dangerous and undesirable substance. Same with the cocaine fields,

01:11:57 ►

black laborers being given cocaine to increase their productivity. But then all of a sudden,

01:12:01 ►

as soon as that became organizing, then the narrative was

01:12:05 ►

flipped to black men will rape your wives, and that was widely publicized, even though it was

01:12:10 ►

white merchants that were giving black laborers cocaine. So this whole thing started from a place

01:12:16 ►

of racism and generational impoverishment. The prison industrial complex arose out of the war

01:12:22 ►

on drugs. It is fed by the war on drugs. And people who use drugs have all been grouped together

01:12:26 ►

as being undesirable members of society

01:12:29 ►

since the beginning of this whole thing,

01:12:31 ►

since the Spanish conquistadors came over

01:12:33 ►

and started executing indigenous peoples of South America

01:12:36 ►

for using coca before deciding that they actually really liked it

01:12:40 ►

and making it into a wine and shipping it to Europe.

01:12:44 ►

So the way that I see this current

01:12:47 ►

revolution is that as we are building a legal framework for psychedelics to be incorporated

01:12:56 ►

into therapies and to be distributed, et cetera, we have to recognize that the way that psychedelics

01:13:02 ►

are getting integrated into this pipeline is into the exact same pipeline that makes most Americans say, don’t call me an ambulance. I can’t afford it.

01:13:11 ►

Who will have access to these things? Is it the same people who have always had access first?

01:13:18 ►

Because that’s the way it’s going right now. And although there are efforts that are ramping up,

01:13:23 ►

and although the cultural narrative is changing

01:13:25 ►

people of color are still already behind in this movement because they have been excluded from this

01:13:30 ►

movement again so the the stage is uneven right now the playing field is not set for this to be

01:13:38 ►

a just movement and simultaneously we are working with what we can so there is a tragic optimism to this right

01:13:47 ►

like tragic optimism is the antidote to toxic positivity of recognizing that the way that this

01:13:53 ►

system is set up is looking pretty bleak and yet we are trying and i think that where things fall

01:13:59 ►

apart is when people within these movements start pitting themselves against each other

01:14:03 ►

in terms of stepping on each other’s successes in order to rise to the top. Like we have certain for-profit

01:14:10 ►

psychedelic patents that are going through in efforts to patent holding hands with people

01:14:15 ►

in psychedelic therapy, things like that. That is stepping on shoulders. Like what is your end goal

01:14:21 ►

and how is it showing through in what you’re trying to do? Are you just contributing to the exact same system of medical violence that is currently

01:14:28 ►

existent? How are you addressing medical racism? How are you addressing the fact that ketamine

01:14:32 ►

treatments are $700 a session and insurance doesn’t cover the most of the time?

01:14:37 ►

Yeah?

01:14:37 ►

To that point around medical treatments,

01:14:40 ►

$700. T o t h e p o in t ab o u t$ 700 ketamine treatments,

01:14:44 ►

that’s kind of exactly what we need to happen, right?

01:14:47 ►

Because 700 dollars getting the treatments are great, they don’t have a price tag.

01:14:51 ►

So surely we need like, I know about the holding hands thing, or like a foot, or a big, big, half a tail.

01:14:58 ►

But at the end of the day, like, you can say those guys didn’t exist, those guys spent half a billion dollars to improve their synthetic corn mushroom

01:15:06 ►

whilst they’re like, spitting pressure, like, treating this person, right?

01:15:11 ►

Now obviously it’s gonna be like a representative, right? Like, don’t have any insurance.

01:15:16 ►

But these guys are gonna like, change it to be 700% ethical treatments, $4,000 ayahuasca treatments in Mexico

01:15:24 ►

to a $10 co p a y t o g o an dd o h o l y 4, 000 eye p u s, t o M e x i co f or a$ 10 copay

01:15:25 ►

to go and do all your hand muscle treatments.

01:15:29 ►

So to summarize

01:15:32 ►

from my understanding of the concern is

01:15:33 ►

aren’t patents necessary to

01:15:35 ►

move through the process of making these things

01:15:38 ►

accessible in the first place due to the cost effectiveness

01:15:40 ►

of producing medicines in the United States?

01:15:42 ►

My take on this is

01:15:44 ►

basically where I stand, we are not ready for legalization. We are ready for decriminalization, but we are not

01:15:52 ►

ready for legalization. That’s my personal take on this. This is not a dance safe stance. And the

01:15:56 ►

thing is that we’re split within dance safe. Like we have different opinions on these things.

01:16:00 ►

I’m not a drug policy expert. I read about drugs, like everything about all across the spectrum, like a GP of drugs.

01:16:08 ►

But the way that I look at this personally is that right now, our medical systems don’t have ceilings on prices for drugs.

01:16:18 ►

There is no oversight in our medical system right now.

01:16:21 ►

Until we have been able to get our shit together enough to establish basic oversight in healthcare, how do we expect to be able to implement accessibility measures?

01:16:30 ►

And the problem is that once these systems are set in stone, it becomes even more difficult to

01:16:35 ►

uproot them and try again. So my concern with this, as I see it, is that the way that we’re

01:16:40 ►

laying this foundation right now is going to make it even more difficult to change things after they’ve been put into place because that’s what ends up happening right is that we

01:16:48 ►

establish a system and then people are upset about the system and we we have 40 hour work weeks and

01:16:56 ►

very little time to learn and to be activists and to be involved in things it’s not people’s fault

01:17:02 ►

but interest falls off pretty quickly because we don’t have time to become excessively interested in undoing things that have already happened.

01:17:09 ►

And the legal ramifications of doing so are really complex. It just becomes very difficult

01:17:15 ►

to respond after things are already in place. I hope that kind of responds to your question.

01:17:20 ►

I see that, but I’m just going to… Thank you thank you i want to make sure that we’ve got some time

01:17:27 ►

yeah we could we could go off on this forever forever um but the last thing that i’ll say

01:17:31 ►

about this good drug bad drug dichotomy is that um at one point in time people that came back from

01:17:38 ►

vietnam and were physically dependent on heroin were viewed in a very similar light as people that did psychedelics at Woodstock.

01:17:49 ►

Right?

01:17:50 ►

Socially, the stigma around people who used drugs

01:17:54 ►

in a capacity that was misunderstood and alienated

01:17:57 ►

was distributed across the spectrum.

01:18:00 ►

Like, it doesn’t even matter the specific drugs involved.

01:18:04 ►

So many places will say no drugs. Like, it doesn’t even matter the specific drugs involved so many places will

01:18:05 ►

say no drugs like it doesn’t matter what the drug is are you including alcohol in there why not if

01:18:09 ►

i showed you a picture of someone pissing on the side of a building while blackout drunk would you

01:18:12 ►

say and i said oh that’s xp70 that they’re on you’d be like whoa we got to criminalize this

01:18:17 ►

so we’ve established this this relationship with other people that use drugs where we consider them to be less than if they use drugs that we don’t understand or that have, for instance, a more tenuous physical

01:18:31 ►

safety profile. Then you have people like Dr. Carl Hart writing his book where he talks about

01:18:36 ►

how he enjoys using a little bit of heroin recreationally. That’s a positive part of his

01:18:40 ►

life. And we can’t even wrap our heads around that. Just like people who have never used psychedelics can’t even wrap their heads around why anyone would want to be put in a position

01:18:48 ►

where you put your hand in your pocket and you can’t tell where your hand ends and your pocket

01:18:52 ►

begins. Like, what sounds appealing about that if you don’t have that experience? What sounds

01:18:56 ►

appealing about a K-hole when you can’t move your mouth, but you can feel that you’re in a strip of

01:19:00 ►

orange and an infinite sea of white light. Unless you understand and try to understand

01:19:05 ►

why people have the relationships with drugs that they do,

01:19:08 ►

recognize that people’s

01:19:09 ►

individual relationships with the substances

01:19:12 ►

that they consume are their fucking business,

01:19:14 ►

we’re not

01:19:16 ►

ready for legalization yet.

01:19:18 ►

That’s what I think.

01:19:19 ►

We have time for one more question.

01:19:22 ►

One more question for the audience?

01:19:24 ►

Surely.

01:19:26 ►

Thank you.

01:19:30 ►

I have an error report written on it.

01:19:36 ►

I think we have one more question.

01:19:38 ►

Well, it’s really just a comment, which is that I think there’s much more to be learned about him.

01:19:45 ►

He has a good subject to call hard.

01:19:47 ►

And I don’t know as much about him as I’d like to.

01:19:52 ►

I could probably read more of what he’s written.

01:19:56 ►

But personally, I would like to take a walking tour of the east side of Vancouver

01:20:03 ►

to our east side of Vancouver and maybe the streets of San Francisco,

01:20:08 ►

particularly the central building,

01:20:11 ►

and Market Street maybe,

01:20:14 ►

or the Carhartt,

01:20:15 ►

just ask him to think about

01:20:17 ►

what he’s observing,

01:20:19 ►

think about what it means

01:20:22 ►

for certain populations

01:20:23 ►

to use certain substances because I think

01:20:27 ►

we have to recognize that maybe not every so-called drug, maybe not every substance,

01:20:35 ►

given certain causes and conditions and circumstances, maybe they’re not all people who cannot be I can’t summarize.

01:20:48 ►

So the comment was,

01:20:50 ►

you would like Dr. Carl Hart to take a walk in the Tenderloin

01:20:53 ►

in the Upper East Side

01:20:54 ►

and consider that maybe not all drugs are actually created equal.

01:21:00 ►

This is maybe the number one roadblock that I come up against

01:21:03 ►

when I’m talking to people about drugs as part of DanceSafe,

01:21:05 ►

is this mentality that not all drugs are created equal, which is understandable.

01:21:10 ►

I used to feel the same way, and many of my colleagues used to feel the same way.

01:21:14 ►

It is definitely…

01:21:21 ►

So here’s the thing about this.

01:21:23 ►

So here’s the thing about this.

01:21:32 ►

The way that I explain drug use to people when I teach my class is that drugs and people are relationships.

01:21:36 ►

It is a relationship between two things.

01:21:40 ►

If you put a pile of heroin on a table, it’s an inert substance.

01:21:50 ►

It is literally just a pile of heroin on the table. What matters is the ecosystem in which that substance interacts with any living anything that comes into contact with it, right?

01:21:58 ►

So the way that I do this is visualize a table with a bunch of stacks of, with a bunch of empty glass tubes on it. And as I’m talking to someone, if I’m doing a profile of their drug use, for instance,

01:22:09 ►

let’s say that I’m talking to someone about cocaine, right?

01:22:12 ►

By the way, does anyone know the difference between cocaine and crack?

01:22:16 ►

It’s baking soda.

01:22:21 ►

The difference between cocaine and crack is baking soda.

01:22:24 ►

Because you can rock cocaine into crack and smoke it. It’s more bioavailable

01:22:26 ►

that way. If you smoked regular cocaine, you would destroy most of it. You wouldn’t really get high.

01:22:31 ►

Ergo, we have heavily criminalized the process of smoking cocaine. It is not a different substance.

01:22:38 ►

And so let’s talk about someone doing cocaine, right? Like someone comes up to me and they say,

01:22:42 ►

I want to try coke. What should I know? I would ask them a billion questions. And we have this table with all these

01:22:48 ►

cylinders, these glass tubes on it. Let’s say one of them on the far right is physical risk.

01:22:54 ►

Start with physical risk. Do you have an arrhythmia? Do you have a family history of

01:22:58 ►

heart disease? Have you ever had a heart attack? Are you prone to being frightened? Are you prone

01:23:03 ►

to panic? All these things might

01:23:05 ►

increase a person’s physical risk around doing something like cocaine, because cocaine is more

01:23:10 ►

cardiotoxic than meth, for instance. Significantly so, actually. So if you have a heart condition

01:23:16 ►

and you’re doing cocaine, then your risk of sudden cardiac arrest and death is way higher with

01:23:21 ►

cocaine than with meth, no matter how you’re doing it really well that’s not true actually if you’re smoking crack and smoking meth

01:23:27 ►

that would be more direct comparison so we’re looking at the physical risk too

01:23:33 ►

right so let’s put some marbles in there if this person has an arrhythmia okay

01:23:36 ►

there’s your baseline level of risk it’s going to be higher with cocaine than

01:23:39 ►

another person’s and got two tables next to each other the other person’s like no

01:23:42 ►

heart conditions you just be my lord Then the next one over is mental health. How is this person’s housing? How is their

01:23:51 ►

relationship with their friends? How’s their relationship with their parents? How’s their

01:23:55 ►

security monetarily? Do they have access to healthcare? How’s their mental health been?

01:24:01 ►

Are they on any medications? All of these things will influence how the marbles stack up.

01:24:06 ►

Then we have something like mushrooms.

01:24:08 ►

Knock all these tubes off.

01:24:11 ►

Okay, physical health.

01:24:12 ►

Very few things to be concerned about with mushrooms, right?

01:24:15 ►

But what if someone has a family or personal history of mood or psychotic disorders?

01:24:20 ►

What if someone has a personal or family history of panic?

01:24:23 ►

What if someone doesn’t have housing?

01:24:25 ►

What if someone has kind of like a baseline higher level of psychosis

01:24:29 ►

or psychotic tendencies, right?

01:24:31 ►

Like I know a few people who will be walking down the street

01:24:35 ►

and they’ll say, I feel like I hear people talking about me.

01:24:38 ►

That immediately puts your risk level of mushrooms much higher.

01:24:42 ►

It’s higher than it would be with cocaine in terms of mental health, for instance. How many people’s lives have had significant challenges from experiencing a

01:24:51 ►

prolonged psychotic episode that was an indicator of a latent mental health condition following an

01:24:57 ►

acutely stressful experience of any kind, including potentially one of mushrooms?

01:25:03 ►

People experience psychosis and the development of

01:25:05 ►

latent mental health conditions just from not sleeping for three days, going through a traumatic

01:25:09 ►

breakup, getting in a car crash. The same thing can happen with any substance if the situation

01:25:13 ►

is right. If you’re at a rave and you’re on mushrooms and the cops pull up in helicopters,

01:25:19 ►

that shit can really do a number on you. Your quality of life could be totally tanked.

01:25:25 ►

do a number on you. Your quality of life could be totally tanked. I personally know many people who’ve had this experience. So it’s not about the specific substance itself. It’s about the

01:25:33 ►

relationship that the substance has with the person. It is a dynamic. People say that doing

01:25:38 ►

opioids feels like being in love. How many of you have ever stayed in a toxic relationship even though you knew that it

01:25:48 ►

was harming you and other people knew that it was harming you? Then you owe your allegiance

01:25:53 ►

to people who are struggling with their relationship with a substance

01:25:56 ►

because it is harder than you think it is. So when we’re talking about the physical aspect of things,

01:26:03 ►

the tenderloin, I have had plenty of experience in the tenderloin. I’m very familiar with what you’re talking about. It’s frightening. And also, how much of that is actually a root cause of poverty and people not having housing?

01:26:23 ►

ask people what they’re doing to get themselves on their feet and found out that every single thing that they’ve done has been pulled out from under them

01:26:26 ►

because the systems that America provides for people to get themselves

01:26:28 ►

together are broken on purpose so it’s more complicated than just that and this

01:26:36 ►

is something that again I could talk about for ages but I’m gonna have to not

01:26:39 ►

be a mycog thank you I think it’s a really important discussion that we should all be having on some level right now, no matter where you are on that discussion line.

01:26:55 ►

We should all be talking about this. So thank you.

01:26:59 ►

I just want to say some extra special thanks to you, Richard Clark,

01:27:05 ►

and all the good people of DanceSafe

01:27:07 ►

for providing fact-based information about substances,

01:27:17 ►

harm reduction services, drug checking, such important services.

01:27:21 ►

Please support them.

01:27:23 ►

Please support their presence at events.

01:27:26 ►

Please support the individuals

01:27:28 ►

who work with DanceSafe.

01:27:30 ►

Hugely, vitally

01:27:31 ►

important right now.

01:27:34 ►

You can go to lucid.news

01:27:36 ►

and read

01:27:37 ►

Rachel’s monthly

01:27:40 ►

column as your

01:27:41 ►

Psychedelic Auntie

01:27:42 ►

on Lucid News.

01:27:48 ►

It’s an honor to be your editor and to work with you. And I look forward to more questions from all of you. You can go to the lucid.news site,

01:27:57 ►

send your questions in. We’ll give them to Rachel and she’ll answer them in print for the benefit of all leaders

01:28:05 ►

on the site and elsewhere.

01:28:08 ►

So thank you.

01:28:10 ►

We are out of time.

01:28:13 ►

Natalie Metz and Jessica Fagan are coming on to talk.

01:28:20 ►

No?

01:28:21 ►

Just Natalie?

01:28:22 ►

That already happened.

01:28:23 ►

Got it?

01:28:24 ►

Just Natalie. Just Natalie. the Mets is next and we

01:28:32 ►

didn’t have time today to talk about and Shogun great researcher and pioneer of

01:28:40 ►

psychedelic assistive therapy we’re going to post a shrine and information

01:28:45 ►

about her and her work at the temple.

01:28:51 ►

So please go there to read about her and her work

01:28:58 ►

and take a few moments to thank her for her years of service.

01:29:04 ►

Read P. Call and T. Call, which she co-authored with Sasha Shobin,

01:29:09 ►

a great, great woman, a great researcher, a great mentor, and a great friend to many of us.

01:29:16 ►

And with that, we will turn it over to Natalie.

01:29:22 ►

Is Natalie here?

01:29:24 ►

She’s on her way do we have a couple of more minutes

01:29:28 ►

I guess we might can we have a two minutes of quiet story time can we just sit back and close our eyes and listen to some writing from P. Call?

01:29:50 ►

Let’s do it.

01:29:51 ►

If we have a couple of minutes, let’s just do it.

01:29:58 ►

This is writing from P. Call, Ann Shulgin.

01:30:04 ►

She’s writing about a spiral opening, a doorway to the

01:30:10 ►

other side that occurred for her. And we’ll just take a few moments to quietly

01:30:18 ►

rest and listen to this. This is Ann Shulgin from Pekal.

01:30:34 ►

We stopped and looked around us at the earth, the sky, and each other. Then I saw something forming in the air slightly above the level of my head. I thought that it was perhaps a few feet from me, then realized I couldn’t actually locate it in space at all.

01:30:49 ►

It was a moving spiral opening up there in the cool air,

01:30:54 ►

and I knew it was a doorway to the other side of existence

01:30:58 ►

that I could step through if I wished to be finished

01:31:03 ►

with this particular life I was living, and that

01:31:08 ►

there was nothing threatening or menacing about it. In fact, it was completely friendly. I also knew

01:31:17 ►

that I had no intention of stepping through it, because there was still a great deal I wanted to do in my

01:31:26 ►

life and I intended to live long enough to get it all done. The lovely spiral

01:31:35 ►

door didn’t beckon, it was just matter-of-factly there. Any fear I might have had of death, of the actual crossing of the border, was

01:31:50 ►

left behind at that moment. I was seeing the way through and there was nothing to

01:31:58 ►

be frightened of. As I gazed up at the energy-charged patch of sky, I was again aware of being unsurprised, because some part of me remembered this.

01:32:30 ►

I have done all I want to. But I have no fear of the journey itself, nor of what lies on the other side of that opening. I know that when I get there, I will recognize the territory

01:32:39 ►

very well indeed, and that it will be truly a returning home.

01:32:50 ►

Anne Shulgin died on July 9th at the age of 91.

01:32:57 ►

She pioneered the field of psychedelic-assisted therapy,

01:33:01 ►

and together with her husband the legendary chemist Alexander

01:33:06 ►

Sasha Shogan and realized the therapeutic potential of MDMA and 2cb

01:33:14 ►

for healing and personal exploration she understood that these and other

01:33:22 ►

psychoactive compounds have the power to access and help integrate

01:33:28 ►

the different layers of our psyches,

01:33:32 ►

and in particular, the shadow.

01:33:36 ►

Ann and Sasha’s two historic books

01:33:39 ►

describing the properties of these materials,

01:33:43 ►

P.C.A.L., A Chemical Love Story, published in 1991, and T.C.A.L.L.

01:33:49 ►

The Continuation, published in 1997, document the community of healers, scientists, scholars,

01:33:59 ►

and psychonauts who they collaborated with to bring this knowledge forward.

01:34:06 ►

These books, among the many that Anne contributed to over her long career as an author, also

01:34:14 ►

told stories about her relationship with Sasha and their culture of collective psychedelic

01:34:23 ►

inquiry.

01:34:24 ►

their culture of collective psychedelic inquiry.

01:34:30 ►

When publishers found this work too controversial to print,

01:34:35 ►

the Shulgens launched Transform Press to share their findings.

01:34:37 ►

They were censored.

01:34:47 ►

And like all good revolutionaries and artists, they found a way to circumvent that censorship by becoming publishers.

01:34:51 ►

You can go to Transform Press.

01:34:53 ►

You can read P. Call and T. Call,

01:34:57 ►

which is in print, of course.

01:35:00 ►

And you can read more about Anne’s work in the temple,

01:35:11 ►

and invoke her when you need a little advice from the disembodied guardian angels.

01:35:16 ►

Thank you.

01:35:24 ►

I hope that you will re-listen to this before the next event you attend.

01:35:28 ►

And be sure to pass it along to any of your friends who may also need this kind of information.

01:35:34 ►

Also, I recommend subscribing to Lucid News and keeping up with the latest information about the psychedelic community.

01:35:45 ►

psychedelic community. Lucid News is right up there with Arrowhead in my book when it comes to a trusted source about the war on drugs as it continues to evolve. And for now, this is Lorenzo

01:35:53 ►

signing off from cyberdelic space. Namaste, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

681 - Street Drugs Update

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Program Notes

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