017 - The Case for Cognitive Liberty

Program Notes

Date this lecture was recorded: July 4, 2017

This week we feature the underground chemist and cognitive liberty hero Casey Hardison. He served almost 10 years in the UK on drug charges, but now he’s free and sharing his story from the Shulgin Farm on the Fourth of July.

MAPS - Volume 10 Number 2 Summer 2000 - p. 11

An Amateur Qualitative Study of 48 2C-T-7 Subjective Bioassays
by Casey Hardison
Casey Hardison, a graduate student at the University of Idaho, conducted an informal survey of 2C-T-7 users at the Entheobotany conference in Palenque, Mexico in February 2000. Noticing that quite a few people were conducting bioassays of the material, Hardison seized the opportunity to perform some informal impromptu research. He designed a survey which was handed out to conference attendees, and received 48 responses. The results of this survey were published in the Summer 2000 issue of the MAPS Bulletin under the title “An Amateur Qualitative Study of 48 2C-T-7 Subjective Bioassays.”

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ►

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

00:00:24 ►

And I’m really looking forward to listening to today’s podcast myself.

00:00:29 ►

What we’re about to sit in on is a conversation between Symposia’s Lex Pelger

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and an old friend of mine who also happens to be a hero of the worldwide psychedelic community, Casey Hardison.

00:00:42 ►

And if you go to our podcast number 12 from this Salon 2 series, Thank you. Ended that story with a mention of the first and probably the only large-scale investigation of humans using 2CT7,

00:01:08 ►

the largest one at least that was documented, and it was documented by Casey.

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Now, that report is available both on Arrowwood and on the MAPS website, which I’ll link to in today’s program notes.

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But from my perspective, Casey, although he’s still quite young from my perspective,

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But from my perspective, Casey, although he’s still quite young from my perspective, but when it comes to life experience and being on the front lines of the war on people who don’t use the government’s approved pharmaceuticals, the so-called war on drugs, well, I don’t even still agree with some of the things that I’ve done myself.

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So I take my hat off to the one and only Casey Hardison.

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Now let’s hear from the man himself.

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Today’s show is made possible through your crowdfunded support on Patreon.

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Unlike other crowdfunding sites,

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Patreon lets you chip in a few bucks a month to help us keep the lights on.

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Find out more at patreon.com slash symposia.

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I’m Lex Pelger, and this is Symposia on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

00:02:40 ►

Here I am coming to you for the first time from Dr. Bruce Dahmer’s Digibar.

00:02:45 ►

I started in on processing Timothy Leary’s archives for the Psychedelic History Project,

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and if you want to see any of those gems as I sort through these 16 boxes of clippings,

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I’m starting an Instagram feed at thepsychedelichistoryproject.

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We’ll have Bruce Dahmer on the show soon to talk more about his work on the origin of life and asteroid capture and the many events he’s doing this summer at festivals,

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but for now, I want to flow

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an idea out to you in the audience. In the coming weeks, we’re going to be changing up programming

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a little bit. On Mondays, you can still catch interviews with key figures in the world of

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psychedelic science and drug policy reform. But on Thursdays, I’m thinking to have a little bit

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more voice of the people kind of events. Stories from one of the psychedelic story events around the countries, shorter interviews with people about their drug experiences,

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more content out here from in California, a little bit more reportage from the road.

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And so if you have ideas for that or want to submit content, feel free to email me as always

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at lexatsymposia.com. Another reason you can reach out for me is about events.

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If you’re in Baltimore on Thursday, July 27th, by the way,

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Symposia will be hosting Addiction and the Drug War,

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a conversation with Neil Franklin at the Ubley Blake Center.

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And he, as you hopefully know, is the executive director of LEAP,

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which recently renamed themselves the Law Enforcement Action Partnership.

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And they are some of the most effective voices

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in the war on drugs

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because they are mostly a bunch of former cops.

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And also, following Neil,

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will feature drug war stories

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curated by David Facunle

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and Deborah Pierce Facunle,

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who are the founders and facilitators

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of Discover Me, Recover Me,

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which is an intervention program providing aid in social trauma recovery through storytelling.

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It sounds like it’s going to be a great night.

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And to ensure this event is accessible to the public, this event is pay what you will.

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So there’s one great event coming up.

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Please let me know about more so we can get more people out to meet the others.

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Now for the main event, I suspect this week’s guest, Casey Hardison,

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doesn’t need much of an introduction.

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He is a legendary underground chemist who got busted in the United Kingdom

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with the largest psychedelics manufacturing lab that the Brits had ever seen.

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He used his trial as a testing ground for arguments for the right to cognitive liberty

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and the right to alter one’s own consciousness. The defense didn’t work in keeping him out of prison, but it did make

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him a hero to a generation of psychonauts. We’re very happy to have him here on the show,

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broadcasting from the Shulgin Farm on the 4th of July. Here’s a hero of cognitive liberty, Casey Hardison.

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Well, I just want to say thank you to Casey Hardison for coming here to Sasha Shulgin’s farm on the 4th of July

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to talk about cognitive liberty and drugs.

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Welcome to Psychedelic Salon.

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Thank you so much.

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What a pleasure indeed to be here at Shulgin Farm on the 4th of July, where one of the

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progenitors of the idea of cognitive liberty was practicing his own cognitive liberty for

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many, many, many years.

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Thank you very much.

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And it’s nice that we don’t have to be doing this one from prison.

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It’s really nice that we don’t have to be doing it from prison, though I was really

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hoping Lorenzo would.

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It’s really nice that we don’t have to be doing it for prison.

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Though I was really hoping Lorenzo would.

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But before we get to that one, I was curious about the beginning, about where you came from.

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And maybe if you were raised in any kind of spiritual traditions.

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Curiosity.

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Quite interestingly, I was raised in a bit of a spiritual tradition. My grandmother was um uh obviously uh come from an old school

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of world and old world and she was uh baptist in general christian in general uh but my family my

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father my mother didn’t have any subscription to that whatsoever and when i by the time i became

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linguistically of age to be aware of my world, my father was sober and Alcoholics Anonymous,

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and my mother was an Al-Anon,

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so I had the 12-step God, the God as you understand him,

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or her, or it, or whatever, if there is one.

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And that is how I came to it.

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That’s how I came to the idea of having had a spiritual awakening

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as a result of these steps.

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So the idea that one could have a spiritual awakening

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was in my mind from a very early age.

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Wow, so the 12 steps got you started on this path before the drugs ever did.

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They certainly got me started on the idea of a spiritual awakening

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before the drugs ever did.

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Though I’m sure I had great drugs as I was being squeezed out of my mama’s womb.

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And, you know, the natural and, you know, endogenous drugs that were helping me get through that, you know, is it anoxic or stage that was happening there.

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I’m actually pretty convinced that some of these molecules that we have flooding our systems are designed entirely to get us through those kind of moments.

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And are not designed they just happened over evolutionary time to uh work um and they got reproduced successfully yeah i think that’s where i think really do think that’s where uh i got the

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idea that one could actually have a spiritual awakening so when i got to lsd uh after eight

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years of sobriety myself and alcoholics anonymous

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uh i really had a spiritual awakening it was it was such a uh such a

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an expansive opening uh a journey into an entirely new space a new way of being a new

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state of mind that i deeply deeply appreciated appreciated. From the very first time?

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From the very first LSD experience.

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I was primed for it, I think.

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I had known that Bill Wilson, who was a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous,

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had used LSD in kind of the divination of coming up with the 12 steps.

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And I’d also known that people had taken a lot of psychedelics

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at the Grateful Dead shows that I was going to

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and that some people had spiritual awakenings, spiritual emergencies.

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I couldn’t call it that.

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I didn’t have the language for that at that time as far as spiritual emergence.

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But many, many people did, and I had heard about those kind of things.

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So I was primed.

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My head was already primed for it when I took LSD for the first time.

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I was also watching.

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My friend was like hey

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let’s rent the brief history of time and uh he you know middle you know it’s right as it’s starting

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he’s like oh by the way I’ve got some acid that a friend of ours had made or supplied or I mean

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he’d made it but uh um yeah it was quite a interesting moment and i’m so grateful i did and so grateful that my life

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took that turn it was such an amazing turn to go from building log homes in the uh you know the

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panhandle of idaho to uh going to school it’s like i went down to the school that very i mean i

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stayed awake all through the sunrise and went down to the school and demanded they let me in.

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It’s like a bit of a Ken Kesey story.

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Maybe it’s a bit of a Ken Kesey story.

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I know he took some acid while he was working in the hospital or something.

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I don’t know if he was just experimenting on himself or the government actually got to him first,

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but I’m not familiar with the actual ins and outs of that.

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But yeah, the opportunity presented itself.

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I took it, and I am so glad I did.

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So what was your early experiences with these like?

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I mean, how did they change things right away?

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The changing right away was both kind of a bit of messianic and a bit of I could see things clearer.

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I could see patterns in humans that I wasn’t seeing before.

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I could see patterns in the ways of my own being that I hadn’t seen before.

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I think the real change was that I woke up linguistically.

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I woke up to the power of my words to create my world.

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Which of the fields you were studying fascinated you the most

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and seemed the most helpful for trying to get close to this thing?

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Biology, botany, anthropology, physics, linguistics.

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That’s all?

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Yeah, you know, that seems to be a good collection to start with.

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That is a good one.

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Chemistry.

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But chemistry is where you ended up getting most of your…

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Chemistry is the central science,

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and so to consolidate myself around that,

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we call chemistry the central science

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because I can’t even move my lips right now

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and this microphone can’t pick up this sound

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and you can’t hear this without chemistry doing its magic,

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which is governed by the laws of physics

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and sometimes really easily expressible in mathematics and sometimes not.

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And so that holy trinity there, chemistry, physics, and mathematics became the core around

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which I constellated everything.

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And I really, really, really, really appreciated evolutionary anthropology and medical anthropology

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for its influence on my mind.

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And then you bring in the anthropology of belief systems and a focus on the five great rituals, birth, death, puberty, marriage, reproduction.

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All religion seems to be consolated around those parts or belief systems.

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They usually have something to say about each of them.

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And back to sex leverage and who you can fuck and who you can’t uh what are the rules of uh what are the social mores related to sexual reproduction

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parenting and all that stuff um and then later in my years to focus on death and dying and the the

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mindsets that we’ve created around that, particularly in relation to something like Ernest Becker’s denial of death or,

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uh,

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the movie or the documentary that they made on early two thousands called

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flight from death is really important on that conceptualization to realize that

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our culture,

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our culture is a response to our death terror and,

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uh,

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that,

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you know,

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everything we see around us,

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uh,

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you know,

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I drive a vehicle equipped with safety

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belts uh for my death terror and i think some of the drugs should be sold at the drugstores

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with their little warning labels so that we can say oh this is the things you got to worry about

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and uh yeah i’ve i’ve just been fascinated by learning and linguistics, chemistry and physics and biology are probably the core of what I’m most interested in.

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I say linguistics, medical anthropology is, especially when you look at the attempting to try to categorize it, you you can observe things but you’re going to inherently

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interpret interpret what you’re observing and you can say things and you can listen to people say

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things about what they find therapeutically effective uh and you’re still going to wind

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up interpreting you’re going to make your own linguistics up about it your own semiotics your

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own symbolic structure about it uh and the same with cognitive liberty it all goes it goes

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back to this idea that of language and that’s why quite interestingly you find uh freedom of thought

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conscience and religion grouped together both in the european convention on human rights and in the

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universal declaration of human rights freedom of thought conscience and religion and that’s all

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back to this idea that uh the complex symbolic constructs we form in our mind can be really important to us and can be therapeutically effective.

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There’s this quite interesting sentence that I read once upon a time and I’ve repeated many, many times.

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Therapeutic efficacy boils down to a declaration made by a sufferer or a healer.

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And the sufferer and the healer can be the same person.

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The declaration is listened with

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credibility or faith and it causes that uh that emotional psychological spiritual transformation

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that leads to well-beingness and healing or therapeutic efficacy and uh for some could be

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you know faith healing in the church you know whoosh hand on the forehead you know, faith healing in a church, you know, whoosh, hand on the forehead, you know, singing in tongues or whatever. And for others, you know, and actually to keep the biblical

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examples going, there’s the woman who said, if I could but touch his robes, I will be healed.

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She made that declaration to herself. Then she touched his robe, Jesus’s robes, according to

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the story. And Jesus turned and beamed at her and said, Your faith and your declaration hath healed you.

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And so it’s what do we declare for ourselves,

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especially in psychedelic or in theogenic space,

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in relation to the experiences we’re having.

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How did those studies, the intellectual studies,

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help you to start figuring out your own mind

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and the constructs in there with the help of the drugs well it’s very

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interesting when you’re in psychedelic space and you understand that our or that my words create

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my world that i am actually languaging into existence uh the experience i’m having um it

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helps me be more mindful of the words i use as I’m experiencing psychedelic effect.

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Or even just, you know, I think psychedelics actually go way beyond the idea of these particular substances

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that we get all fascinated about.

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Life is psychedelic. It is mind manifesting.

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And cleaning up my language has been probably the greatest thing I’ve ever done for myself.

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Cleaning up. How so?

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Becoming tight,

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uh,

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with my words and becoming aware that,

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uh,

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if I’m not programming someone like you guys listening right now,

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if I’m not programming someone out there with my words,

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if I’m listening,

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I’m being programmed.

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and the general idea is that be aware of the programming, the environment I surround myself in with the audio environment, the phonemes that are being expressed in my environment.

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And if I hang out with a bunch of people that have real larval thinking modes, then I’m going to wind up with real larval thinking modes.

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that have much more enlightened, very tight linguistic prowess,

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then I find that I raise up myself in that same tight linguistic prowess,

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and I become much more effective at causing transformation for myself and for others,

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especially with my words.

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Hmm, makes sense.

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There’s a Terrence line,

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Thou shalt never consume media, thou shalt always create it.

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Yeah, sorry, Terrence.

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That’s really nice and lovely. And we’re obviously going to consume some media occasionally.

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And even your media just now.

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Thanks, hon.

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Thanks.

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So where did your studies take you then?

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Well, I mean, they obviously gave me the skills and the mindset to become a psychedelic chemist.

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You know, the tool set that I developed working at the chem labs for five and a half years

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and the linguistic mindset that I developed through all that anthropology

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and all the linguistics and all the stuff there in school was really important.

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I also wound up getting involved in landmark education for many years,

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and they really focus on linguistics.

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I had actually trained for three years to become a forum leader with them.

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And, you know, they found out, Dave, the center manager in Seattle,

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found out one day, my girlfriend at the time, we were late.

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And he’s like, why were you late?

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And he asked her.

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And she’s like, well, you know, because Casey had to pick up 10 pounds of weed and i got pulled into the office there and he’s like well

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casey we can’t have you dealing weed so you either got to give that up or you got to go and i’m like

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well i’m kind of invested in that so i think i would go i’ll be back after i end the drug war

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still working on that thanks dave ah so you’re so Landmark was important for you too. Very,

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very important. That’s great. Yeah. Very significant. And matter of fact, there was a

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moment in the trial when I was actually running my own trial, the judge stopped me at the, and

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he said, Mr. Hardison, are you sure you’re not legally trained? And I said, no, I’m not. He’s

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like, well, how did you learn to speak like that? And I just said, I have to credit Landmark

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education because I really learned communication skills right there. Wow. So how did it evolve

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that you started becoming an underground psychedelic chemist? Well, I don’t remember

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what happened. I bought a book and it had that flyer in it. Maybe it was just the MAPS bulletin

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and it had the flyer for the Entheobotany seminars. And I had it and I tried to go

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one year and then i couldn’t

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muster up the money and they wouldn’t give me the scholarship and then um uh the next year i

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i had more time to think about it and so i uh really focused on getting like the money together

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and i got a scholarship from my my university from the anthropology department and but i got

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the scholarship but i couldn’t i still needed to pay for the flights and stuff,

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and my friend K-Dog Loving Hawk decided that he was going to call his parents

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and say, Mom, we really need to go to this, and you really need to pay for it.

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And she bought it.

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She totally bought it.

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It was awesome.

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That’s a great mom.

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It was really awesome.

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And I owe her to this day for my life so much.

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And so a lot really coalesced around going to that?

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Well, that was a coming home.

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That was like a, I mean, that really was a welcome home type experience.

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It was like I was at an international gathering of pharmacophiles and theogen aficionados.

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There were 60 of us for the first week and another, I don’t know, people mixed over for the next week.

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There was like 120 people gathered near the Mayan temples in Palenque

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and taking lots of psychedelics and sharing stories.

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The linguistics was fabulous because you get people

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with all these linguistic groups and the language crossover and the learning the accelerated learning

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that took place there was just absolutely fabulous plus i was at these mayan temple sites which was

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just fabulous to run around on psychedelics and uh particularly to cd7 because i took a lot of it

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while i was there lorenzo actually told that story i I was with Lorenzo that day. I was with him.

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Yeah.

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He loved that one.

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You come charging in being like, we’re doing a research study.

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Exactly what happened.

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I love this line that he wrote in the, here we go.

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We’re going to break some anonymity from my subjective bioassay research study.

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Lorenzo was the line in there.

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Minimal haunting by my usual demons.

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I’m like, I still use that to this day.

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I love that line so much. It was good it was really good yeah no i just i didn’t know i was going

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to do that i had no idea that i was going to so i was actually laying on the pool there at

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chan ka which is the place we were at the comfort center and i’m just laying at this one spot

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and i’m i’m like i’m pretty overwhelmed with the 2cd7 at this moment i’m kind of my arm over my

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head and i’m like i open my eyes and I look up

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and there’s this like psychedelic

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super eagle cloud structure

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zooming over my head.

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And I look up and I sit up

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and I’m looking around

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and I could just tell other people

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are having these deep psychedelic experiences

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at the same time as me.

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And I’m like, holy shit.

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I can actually study this.

00:21:40 ►

I can actually ask these people

00:21:41 ►

a bunch of questions.

00:21:44 ►

And I popped up and I ran over to sasha’s

00:21:46 ►

uh little cabana there and i ran over to his cabana and i’m like i’ve got to do this i’m

00:21:50 ►

going to do this i’m going to do this and i had wrote down a list of questions all right you know

00:21:54 ►

on my way over i was like you know i started you know trying to assemble it and then uh i get to

00:21:58 ►

sasha i’m like what do you think i should ask and blah blah blah and then we came up with a

00:22:02 ►

a bit of a more coherent structure to mine.

00:22:05 ►

I had a pretty coherent structure, but he made a couple of suggestions that were really cool.

00:22:08 ►

Dosage and duration and things like that.

00:22:10 ►

And then I wrote it up on my computer and hitchhiked back into town and then came back.

00:22:17 ►

And it’s like I was still high.

00:22:18 ►

And I came back and I started handing out these flyers to people, including Larry or Lorenzo.

00:22:38 ►

And I started handing out these flyers to people, including Larry or Lorenzo, and I – yeah, nobody, not a single one of those persons knew they were going to become research participants until I generated that survey, and they filled it out.

00:22:41 ►

And, yeah.

00:22:43 ►

And I believe that’s available online, right?

00:22:45 ►

People can read that it’s uh yeah it’s at the maps bulletin volume 10 number two which is the terence mckenna death issues which is quite

00:22:50 ►

interesting and the back matters says something really important on the death issue i’m going to

00:22:54 ►

return to that right now which is the idea that if psychedelics can secure that death has no sting

00:22:59 ►

then this community will have done the greatest service to humanity that could possibly be done

00:23:03 ►

for suffering humanity.

00:23:06 ►

It’s like, you know, that death has no sting.

00:23:14 ►

And that line from his talk at Esalen in 99 is on the back matter of that particular volume 10, number 2,

00:23:19 ►

MAPS bulletin, found at the MAPS website, maps.org.

00:23:20 ►

Nice.

00:23:27 ►

Nothing like an unexpected research paper at Palenque. Yeah, no, it was an impromptu study, a total impromptu study.

00:23:30 ►

And Carla was there, Carla Higdon.

00:23:33 ►

Unfortunately, she’s no longer with us.

00:23:41 ►

Carla Higdon was there with her really lovely partner, Alex,

00:23:43 ►

and we were having a great time together.

00:23:44 ►

I’m like, can I get this published in the bulletin? She’s like, absolutely, and we got it in the bulletin.

00:23:48 ►

Crazy enough, Daryl LeMaire, who is Sasha’s kind of scale-up guy,

00:24:00 ►

Sasha would make something and pass it off to Daryl.

00:24:03 ►

Daryl would make it.

00:24:04 ►

They’d check activity.

00:24:05 ►

They’d share it amongst their research group.

00:24:07 ►

And Daryl lived out near Myron.

00:24:09 ►

And they would share it.

00:24:11 ►

And their partners were into psychedelic therapy at that time.

00:24:14 ►

And then Daryl would learn to scale it up.

00:24:22 ►

He’d be like, well, let’s see how you can make this in larger amounts.

00:24:24 ►

And Daryl would read that scale it up. He’d be like, well, let’s see how you can make this in larger amounts. And Daryl would read that particular maps bulletin.

00:24:30 ►

And he sent me this letter, pretty damn cryptic.

00:24:35 ►

It was like, you know, I experimented with these things, made lots of them.

00:24:39 ►

Here’s this little smart pills booklet.

00:24:41 ►

You can find that online at the Daryl LaMere vault at arrowid.org.

00:24:46 ►

Arrowid.org, Erowid.org,

00:24:56 ►

O-R-G, I mean. He wrote this little cryptic letter to me, and I kind of ignored it. I kind of got a little, you know, a flash of paranoia, as I sometimes do, just for like, I’m not so sure. And it was like

00:25:00 ►

the first time that I experienced like, oh shit shit now i’m becoming public because i’ve written this article there’s people that are starting to ask questions of me

00:25:08 ►

and then so i just kind of went back out on like i was on string cheese doing like some

00:25:13 ►

bunch of string cheese incident shows at the time and uh went back out and did some more of them and

00:25:17 ►

then i came back to my post office box and there was another letter from him was like boy i’m trying

00:25:21 ►

to give you something i got something you want we need to talk blah blah blah just a moment was like, boy, I’m trying to give you something. I got something you want. We need to talk, blah, blah, blah, blah. It was just a lot more like, you know, in my face about it. And I

00:25:28 ►

actually respected that. I was really liked that. And, uh, he, uh, I, he gave me his phone number

00:25:33 ►

in that letter. And I was in the Moscow, Idaho post office. And right next to my postal box was

00:25:38 ►

like, you know, a few feet away was the post was a phone. And I dialed him up right there through

00:25:43 ►

some quarters in it and and went for it.

00:25:49 ►

And agreed to meet him the full moon of March of 2001 to pick up this lab equipment, which was all I needed, a sufficient laboratory to make lots of psychedelics.

00:25:57 ►

It was older equipment, but it was still able to do the trick.

00:26:01 ►

So that’s the origin story.

00:26:02 ►

That’s the origin story.

00:26:04 ►

And it kind of starts there on

00:26:05 ►

that deck actually it starts in room 48 of chon cough we’re going to put it one spot i mean but

00:26:12 ►

then again does it start on the lakeshore when i got the lsd or does it start when i was born

00:26:16 ►

billions of years ago 3.48 years and 4 billion years ago according to bruce damer uh where does

00:26:22 ►

it start i don’t know um so what were the place your bets place your

00:26:26 ►

bets where does it start so what how did it go as you were first starting to practice manufacturing

00:26:32 ►

these things and testing them figure out what worked god so the first thing i had to do is i

00:26:36 ►

had all the material to make 2cd and the very first thing i had to do was uh do the Wilsmeyer hack synthesis of making the benzaldehyde,

00:26:45 ►

the 2,5-dimethoxybenzaldehyde.

00:26:49 ►

And the first couple of times I, well, the first time I ran it,

00:26:54 ►

I wasn’t really sure that I had done it effectively,

00:26:56 ►

and I didn’t have, you know, any GCMS or FTIR or any equipment to figure that out.

00:27:04 ►

But then I just, I was able to figure that out. But then I was able to figure that out.

00:27:08 ►

It took me a couple shots and I’m like, oh no, I definitely have it. This is the right thing.

00:27:12 ►

And I was going down the right path. And so the first few

00:27:16 ►

steps was making 2CD and

00:27:17 ►

yeah, it was really a serious blessing eating my

00:27:24 ►

first molecule.

00:27:29 ►

What was it like to have one that you synthesized yourself?

00:27:32 ►

It was fucking incredible, man. I was sitting there at the family ranch in Idaho,

00:27:34 ►

and I had my double-decker school bus there,

00:27:37 ►

and I just made this in it, and I’m out on the couch,

00:27:39 ►

and I’ve, you know, I’ve tripped there a number of times,

00:27:42 ►

and I’m looking over this family farm,

00:27:44 ►

and, you know, I got this set of trees

00:27:46 ►

that are down across our like the creek

00:27:48 ►

that runs down the family farm and there’s you know

00:27:50 ►

there’s again eagles and there’s eagles up

00:27:52 ►

and they’re just hanging out and they’re just really

00:27:54 ►

you know just so majestic

00:27:56 ►

in this place where I’m at and I’m like

00:27:57 ►

I knew like from the

00:28:00 ►

second time like the first time I took acid

00:28:02 ►

I knew my life had changed the second

00:28:04 ►

time like the first time I took mushrooms i knew my life had changed the second time like the first time i took mushrooms that was all right that was messianic that was like

00:28:08 ►

holy fucking shit they’re going to crucify me for what i know and what i intend and what i want

00:28:13 ►

and um i’m sitting there and i’m like sitting there on this couch i got this couch futon thing

00:28:17 ►

on the outside my bus um and i’m sitting there um just observing everything, and noticing the trees warble and do their Persian carpets kind of dance,

00:28:28 ►

and just thinking, holy shit, I’ve totally found my way.

00:28:33 ►

I’m indoctrinated into the apoptes, those who had seen the holy,

00:28:38 ►

because I am definitely experiencing it right now.

00:28:40 ►

And not only have I seen the holy, i can make this and cause others to see it

00:28:45 ►

and i was like fucking hell how far have i come yes and uh that was a serious blessing that moment

00:28:54 ►

i really appreciated it wow so uh so what did you start to learn to synthesize after that

00:29:00 ►

uh well i kept doing the d a couple of times i went around the corners with the d

00:29:05 ►

several times and then i um i eventually said it’s time to make 2cb and so i made some 2cb

00:29:15 ►

and that was i’m gonna holy shit and that’s like oh god i’ve done it again now really and now i’m

00:29:21 ►

out and running and that was so great because it was like it had that really lovely,

00:29:28 ►

not only was it that touched within and the ability to work in the entheogenic space

00:29:31 ►

to heal suffering and transformation,

00:29:34 ►

especially for those who I was giving it to

00:29:36 ►

and for myself.

00:29:40 ►

I started calling it 2CB, Who You Want to Be.

00:29:43 ►

And it was really amazing and i

00:29:47 ►

uh took i had a little bit of it and i took some up to a conference and started giving it away and

00:29:52 ►

it was a really successful moment and then shortly thereafter i’d gone to the whistler

00:29:57 ►

and theobotany seminars conference and i had met an incredible dude named clay adam prepsky

00:30:02 ►

who is unfortunately now dead.

00:30:14 ►

He OD’d on methadone one day, trying to come off a psychedelic trip.

00:30:19 ►

Just took a slug of someone’s methadone, wanted to go to bed, and had respiratory collapse and never woke up.

00:30:23 ►

And it’s a total fucking tragedy, because he’s an absolutely brilliant theoretical chemist. And I’d met him there.

00:30:25 ►

One day I get this random call from him.

00:30:27 ►

And he’s like, hey, got a venue?

00:30:29 ►

I’m like, got a venue?

00:30:30 ►

What do you mean?

00:30:30 ►

He’s like, do you have a venue?

00:30:32 ►

And I’m like, what the fuck is a venue?

00:30:35 ►

And I thought about it for a moment.

00:30:36 ►

I’m like, oh, yeah, I got a lab.

00:30:37 ►

I didn’t say that over the phone.

00:30:38 ►

I’m like, yeah, I got a venue.

00:30:39 ►

He’s like, okay, I’ll be there in a few hours.

00:30:41 ►

So he flew from Arizonarizona to spokane i picked him up at the airport and he’s carrying a bottle of you know half a liter of uh uh the the methylene deoxy phenol 2 propanone

00:30:51 ►

labeled shampoo he’s carrying it on the plane which you could do before 9-11

00:30:57 ►

which you can’t do now anyway so he shows up with this and i oh shit i guess this is what we’re

00:31:03 ►

doing and i made my first batch of mdma and then him and I jetted off to the Shamanism and Tantra Conference in Nepal and continued our adventures.

00:31:12 ►

Wow.

00:31:12 ►

So two CB, then MDMA.

00:31:14 ►

Which ones came after that?

00:31:16 ►

LSD, DMT, or LSD, mescaline, DMT.

00:31:19 ►

Actually, I think it was mescaline, LSD, DMT.

00:31:22 ►

No, it was LSD, mescaline, DMT.

00:31:24 ►

Wow.

00:31:31 ►

Isn’t mescaline one of the holy grails of artificial synthesis?

00:31:33 ►

Oh, it’s so ridiculously easy.

00:31:38 ►

Get your 3, 4, 5-tramethoxybenzaldehyde and do your little nitrostyrene reaction.

00:31:42 ►

And you can do it exactly like the nitrostyrene reaction for 2CH, and then you reduce it with LAH and with tetrahydrofurane

00:31:49 ►

and quench that LAH properly.

00:31:52 ►

Careful with the LAH.

00:31:53 ►

Don’t get any water on it.

00:31:54 ►

And you have your prototypical psychedelic phenethylamine.

00:32:00 ►

Wow.

00:32:02 ►

Were there any syntheses that you were particularly proud of?

00:32:05 ►

Really tough to pull off? Well, with the MDMA

00:32:08 ►

we did the nitromethane

00:32:09 ►

synthesis because you didn’t need the

00:32:11 ►

methylamine.

00:32:14 ►

You could make it, if you do the nitromethane

00:32:16 ►

version, you could make the methylamine in situ.

00:32:18 ►

It’s quite ridiculously easy.

00:32:20 ►

You can find the write-up on it, Ritter’s write-up

00:32:21 ►

on it, and Gonzo’s write-up on it

00:32:23 ►

00:32:24 ►

the Rhodium Archive.

00:32:27 ►

If you scroll down and look for the archives in the Vaults of Erowid.

00:32:36 ►

Oh, man.

00:32:37 ►

So you were off and running then.

00:32:39 ►

You had all the big players under your belt at that point.

00:32:42 ►

Exactly.

00:32:43 ►

I was off and running, and I was in Nepal.

00:32:46 ►

Had a venue.

00:32:47 ►

I had a venue all the way back at the house that I packed up.

00:32:50 ►

What were those years like to be an underground synthesizer?

00:32:54 ►

I mean, how much fear versus how much fun?

00:32:56 ►

That’s a great question, fear versus fun.

00:32:58 ►

Very, very little fear.

00:33:01 ►

Shit tons of fun.

00:33:07 ►

shit tons of fun i was having i went on this kind of experience where i started generating what i could what i’d like to call an endless summer um it was just like one amazing experience

00:33:13 ►

event uh just amazing love and great people and the connectivity the hyper-connectivity that developed as a result of that was unprecedented in my life.

00:33:28 ►

And, you know, just the love and the camaraderie and the…

00:33:33 ►

In fact, I wound up living with the Bushmen in Namibia as a result of this work.

00:33:38 ►

You know, it’s like if I hadn’t been interested in psychedelics,

00:33:41 ►

I would have never met the, you know, the beautiful woman that I went to Namibia with

00:33:45 ►

and lived with the Bushmen.

00:33:49 ►

Were you working with other plant medicines through this, or were you sticking straight

00:33:53 ►

to syntheses?

00:33:55 ►

No, I was working with other plant medicines.

00:34:00 ►

Certainly from my personal experience, ayahuasca, ibogaine, my partner and I at the time were, well, she and more than I, I was just really holding space for her and really supporting her.

00:34:12 ►

I was an Ibogaine therapist, underground Ibogaine therapist, and helping people, you know, get off of heroin and cocaine addictions and having some good successes.

00:34:26 ►

heroin and cocaine addictions and um having some good successes we learned a great number of things the most importantly was how uh how vital it is to have a support group to integrate back into or

00:34:33 ►

integrate into to help you stay clean from heroin or cocaine or to develop uh more moderation or

00:34:42 ►

you know better habits with care of oneself especially when you’re talking

00:34:46 ►

about uh um the psychosomatic or the uh the social problems one’s generating for oneself

00:34:54 ►

the psycho-spiritual problems one’s generating for oneself um it’s really important to

00:35:01 ►

address those issues.

00:35:11 ►

That’s a good lesson because I hear a lot of that, especially around the New York City recovery scene about, well, there’s this thing.

00:35:12 ►

You just take it once and then you’re fine.

00:35:14 ►

And it’s not.

00:35:15 ►

It’s so much more work that comes afterwards.

00:35:21 ►

Yeah, no, it’s like – I mean I – when you say the New York scene, are you talking about – it’s like Dana showed up at that. So that’s the reason actually I went to England was because i was going to the first abigail conference to support uh my friend who was putting that on

00:35:27 ►

uh she subsequently become my partner and and we uh uh she was doing that underground abigail

00:35:34 ►

therapy and um i i showed up really to support her but there i met dana and uh i know that lots

00:35:41 ►

off had come up with the ibogaine treatment for heroin addiction cessation just through mere observation.

00:35:48 ►

And I think it is really important that there’s an integrated community that can help support people to generate a new linguistic mindset.

00:35:59 ►

And just for anyone out there who doesn’t know, Dana Beal is one of the great life forces behind the Abigain movement.

00:36:06 ►

Getting the idea out there that this plant medicine can do a hell of a lot for people with opiate or alcohol or behavioral addictions.

00:36:12 ►

Yeah, absolutely.

00:36:13 ►

The reverie that one experiences under the influence of Abigain is vital to possibly unwinding the psychosomatic problems one might have,

00:36:21 ►

or psychospiritual problems one might have developed for themselves through their experiences this particular organism on planet earth and that much have been fascinating

00:36:30 ►

for you to watch with knowing fucking recovery knowing the history of acid with bill wilson and

00:36:36 ►

seeing abigain at work yeah absolutely i really uh appreciated i really really appreciate it i mean i

00:36:41 ►

also really have deep appreciation for the uh i have amazing reverence for the fact that the 12-step community creates a community that is supportive of transforming one’s lives.

00:36:54 ►

And having people around that support and uplift and encourage the transformations is really important.

00:37:02 ►

the transformations is really important.

00:37:04 ►

You know, it’s like,

00:37:05 ►

I can’t imagine what it’d be like to take Ibogaine,

00:37:06 ►

come off of heroin,

00:37:07 ►

kick heroin,

00:37:08 ►

and then go right back

00:37:08 ►

to the exact same group of people

00:37:10 ►

that you spent your life using heroin with.

00:37:12 ►

That would,

00:37:13 ►

I just can’t see that being very effective,

00:37:15 ►

but I understand people’s ties

00:37:16 ►

to their family and their community

00:37:17 ►

and how difficult that might be.

00:37:20 ►

I don’t have direct experience

00:37:22 ►

because I’ve never really become a heroin addict.

00:37:28 ►

Not that I haven’t have direct experience because I’ve never really become a heroin addict not that I haven’t used it, I just never developed a long term affinity for it

00:37:31 ►

I think that it’s really really

00:37:36 ►

very vital that people create new communities for themselves

00:37:40 ►

if they want to let go of some of the spiritual pathologies, it’s not that you can’t

00:37:44 ►

go back to that community,

00:37:46 ►

especially if you’re more grounded, more upright, more mindful,

00:37:50 ►

and reintegrate into those communities and possibly not use drugs with them.

00:37:54 ►

But there’s the risk.

00:37:55 ►

I mean, what life do you want?

00:37:56 ►

Who do you want to be?

00:37:58 ►

Did you experience any pushback from any of these fellowships,

00:38:02 ►

talking about psychedelics?

00:38:04 ►

None whatsoever because I left AAA.

00:38:06 ►

Okay.

00:38:08 ►

The only pushback I ever felt from any sort of fellowship

00:38:10 ►

was that day with the center manager of Landmark Education.

00:38:15 ►

Can’t be a drug dealer and be a forum leader at the same time.

00:38:18 ►

And I can see the reasonability of that.

00:38:22 ►

So it was…

00:38:23 ►

Yeah, there’s no pushback from any of those my father was uh an interesting

00:38:29 ►

experience because uh he had been sober for so many years but he eventually came right around

00:38:33 ►

matter of fact at one point my dad uh out on a motorcycle tour was very curious to find sasha

00:38:38 ►

and came here and spent several days with sasha trying to understand what the fuck was going on

00:38:43 ►

with his son.

00:38:47 ►

And he came back and he was totally

00:38:47 ►

impressed with what I was doing.

00:38:48 ►

Sasha had won him over.

00:38:50 ►

My dad had never

00:38:50 ►

didn’t take anything.

00:38:52 ►

I don’t think Sasha

00:38:53 ►

offered him anything.

00:38:54 ►

But whatever Sasha

00:38:55 ►

said to him

00:38:56 ►

worked.

00:38:57 ►

Wow.

00:38:58 ►

My dad was the kind of dad

00:38:59 ►

that was crazy enough

00:38:59 ►

to check up on me like that.

00:39:00 ►

And I love him for that.

00:39:02 ►

He was always that way.

00:39:03 ►

Check in.

00:39:04 ►

Checking shit out.

00:39:12 ►

And yeah. up on me like that and i love him for that he was always that way check in checking shit out and uh yeah that was really fucking funny he comes back because i mean you know he tells me it’s been a couple days with sasha i’m like have you fucking done that that was that was funny

00:39:18 ►

uh that’s pretty good to get the acceptance from parents i think that’s what we’re all looking for

00:39:23 ►

um now was there as you were probably getting a small name for yourself for being a synthesizer,

00:39:30 ►

was there pushback from people close to you who were worried for you or worried about where this might be taking you?

00:39:34 ►

There were people that were worried.

00:39:36 ►

There were people that were genuinely worried, concerned that I was being more vocal than was required. But I actually had this funny thing go on where I thought,

00:39:45 ►

because I was part of this entheogenia

00:39:48 ►

or entheogene,

00:39:49 ►

that this race or stock of beings

00:39:51 ►

that who knew they were divine within,

00:39:52 ►

that I was part of this community,

00:39:53 ►

that I was actually in a kind of protected realm.

00:39:57 ►

I was wrong about that.

00:40:00 ►

And for anyone out there

00:40:02 ►

having similar grandiose ideas

00:40:04 ►

about how protected they are because of these molecules,

00:40:07 ►

I’d urge them to kind of think again and be a little bit quieter, a little bit calmer,

00:40:11 ►

especially if you’re up to anything clandestine that the government might be concerned about.

00:40:16 ►

I once for the year would say you shouldn’t be an activist and a producer at the same time.

00:40:24 ►

Yeah, it’s probably less wise to be an activist and a producer at the same time. Yeah, it’s probably less wise to be an activist and a producer at the same time.

00:40:28 ►

And I was both back then. I was definitely both back then.

00:40:31 ►

And so when I got arrested, I was able to really push hard on the activism, on the cognitive liberty front, on the idea that we should have the right to think for ourselves, provided we harm no one.

00:40:45 ►

Yeah, so in terms of protection, did you have any idea that this bus was coming?

00:40:50 ►

Did you have an inkling?

00:40:51 ►

No. As a matter of fact, I said probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever said.

00:40:54 ►

I’m sure maybe others will argue with this, but finding more dumb things.

00:40:59 ►

But the dumbest thing I possibly ever said, I said to this beautiful woman I was in the vehicle with,

00:41:02 ►

and I said, I feel like I’m flying under the radar.

00:41:05 ►

Four hours or five hours later, I’m being arrested.

00:41:07 ►

How many did they mob you with?

00:41:10 ►

Well, where I was, just one guy actually approached me.

00:41:13 ►

I was in this sanctuary cafe in Brighton, and this guy came down and leaned into my ear,

00:41:17 ►

and he said, Mr. Hardison?

00:41:19 ►

And the moment he said that, the way he said it, I’m like, oh, he’s a cop.

00:41:23 ►

I’m being arrested.

00:41:25 ►

And I said,, and the way he said it, I’m like, oh, he’s a cop. I’m being arrested. And I said, yes, sir.

00:41:27 ►

He’s like, I’m here to arrest you for being concerned with the manufacturer of controlled substances.

00:41:30 ►

And I’m like, well, how would you like to do this?

00:41:32 ►

And he said as quietly as possible, and I’m like, that works for me.

00:41:36 ►

And then I got him to police all my equipment that I had sitting out there,

00:41:38 ►

and in the cafe where I was recording, a good friend of that same girl, a beautiful woman,

00:41:41 ►

the cafe where I was recording a good friend of that same girl

00:41:43 ►

beautiful woman

00:41:44 ►

played just absolutely

00:41:47 ►

I mean angels music the way she

00:41:49 ►

sang all about love

00:41:51 ►

super lovely stuff and I was recording her

00:41:53 ►

and they brought me out of there

00:41:56 ►

calmly and quietly and offered me

00:41:57 ►

a cup of tea and I did

00:41:59 ►

yes they did

00:42:01 ►

this is England remember

00:42:03 ►

would you like a couple of would you like a couple of tea

00:42:05 ►

with your arrest

00:42:06 ►

and of course

00:42:07 ►

I had to smart off

00:42:08 ►

so I said tea

00:42:09 ►

Earl Grey hot

00:42:10 ►

just to fuck with them

00:42:12 ►

but

00:42:13 ►

they put me in a paper suit

00:42:15 ►

and took me to the

00:42:16 ►

police station

00:42:17 ►

and attempted to question me

00:42:18 ►

the next day

00:42:19 ►

and I just ignored them

00:42:20 ►

through several days

00:42:23 ►

of attempting to question me

00:42:24 ►

and quite early on in my uh

00:42:29 ►

experience i knew that i was gonna have to represent myself if i wanted to represent

00:42:32 ►

myself on the basis of cognitive liberty and uh so i did i had a barrister who had been actually

00:42:39 ►

suggested to me by a very very uh dear friend who was in a very high position

00:42:46 ►

in British society.

00:42:49 ►

And she suggested to him,

00:42:53 ►

and I got the guy.

00:42:54 ►

His name’s Rudy Fortson.

00:42:55 ►

He’s a great guy and all,

00:42:56 ►

but he just felt professionally embarrassed

00:42:59 ►

to represent me on drug charges

00:43:00 ►

on the basis of

00:43:01 ►

a cardinal of liberty, human rights.

00:43:04 ►

And I said, said well if you’re

00:43:05 ►

you know you got a forked tongue and speak for the queen then you certainly can’t speak for me

00:43:09 ►

and i’ve got to do this myself so i um so i chose to represent myself and went said about studying

00:43:17 ►

said about studying that law that uh um that the judge wondered whether i’d actually studied law

00:43:22 ►

formally and i faked it till i made it through that experience and i learned a lot really rapidly and uh

00:43:30 ►

curiously enough it’s like i was tried in lewis crown court and that’s where uh you know they had

00:43:35 ►

issued a warrant for thomas pain way back when for sedition or something and you know and that’s

00:43:42 ►

a really fitting thing to be doing talking about you know drugs and drug policy and drug law and a court built with opium money you know the uh the courtroom

00:43:50 ►

i was in was super opulent but the cells below were the originals and uh um yeah they were old

00:43:56 ►

and uh dark and manky and uh lots of boogers lots of blood blood, lots of spit, piss on the…

00:44:05 ►

I don’t know, it was disgusting.

00:44:06 ►

But yeah, it was down in there that I took my breaks from the trial

00:44:11 ►

and formulated my next moves.

00:44:15 ►

And I just kept pushing forward on the idea

00:44:17 ►

that I should have the right to think for myself

00:44:19 ►

and that you can’t make me guilty by statute

00:44:21 ►

for actions that are intrinsically innocent.

00:44:23 ►

If it’s intrinsically innocent for a tobacco grower to grow tobacco,

00:44:27 ►

then why isn’t it intrinsically innocent for someone to grow weed?

00:44:31 ►

If it’s intrinsically innocent to produce alcohol,

00:44:33 ►

then why isn’t it intrinsically innocent to produce LSD?

00:44:38 ►

All these things are about altering our mental functioning.

00:44:41 ►

You know, I managed to force the government into admitting

00:44:44 ►

that this was about alteration of mental functioning uh you know i managed to force the government into admitting that this was about

00:44:45 ►

alteration of mental functioning and that um and that they extend that long-standing tradition

00:44:50 ►

and tolerance of altering mental functioning to alcohol and tobacco users but uh i could never

00:44:55 ►

get them to extend that to me um uh i have yet to do that i know in time that that principle will

00:45:02 ►

be what is at the core of all of this it’s like like whether it’s a, you know, a private palliative, a sacramental freedom, or cognitive liberty,

00:45:10 ►

these principles will endure, and they will cause the transformation in time. And, you know, just

00:45:15 ►

getting arrested and being able to speak my piece and becoming really public on the issue

00:45:21 ►

of cognitive liberty has spread that meme around the world intensely

00:45:25 ►

and it’s really important that we keep spreading the idea that we should have the right to alter

00:45:30 ►

our mental functioning as we see fit provided we don’t harm others which is a john stewart

00:45:34 ►

mill principle of basic liberty i should have the privacy to be secure in my person’s papers

00:45:42 ►

and possessions from unreasonable intrusions into my mind

00:45:46 ►

or how I operate my mind

00:45:47 ►

and the substance in which I choose to do that with.

00:45:52 ►

Of the people sitting in the court

00:45:53 ►

as you were pushing these ideas forward,

00:45:55 ►

did you see anyone where you felt like

00:45:57 ►

you were making a connection?

00:45:58 ►

Yeah, I felt like I was really making a connection

00:46:00 ►

with a couple of the jurors.

00:46:01 ►

Actually, I found this one girl

00:46:02 ►

that came in on the jury one day

00:46:04 ►

and I’m like, she’s been up all fucking night partying her ass off

00:46:07 ►

she’s totally with me and and in the end there was a it was a complex trial and i had i was facing uh

00:46:15 ►

i was facing nine charges uh they whittled it to eight like in the middle of it and then

00:46:20 ►

um you know we whittled that down and i managed to get six convictions out of those

00:46:25 ►

charges um it’s quite interesting i didn’t get convicted of making 2ci which is quite wise

00:46:31 ►

because i hadn’t made it and i escaped conviction for mescaline which i had made but they couldn’t

00:46:36 ►

understand that i had not used sasha’s method that i had actually just decided to follow my

00:46:41 ►

own version of just i mean hell it was just a benzaldehyde i was just needed to make a nitrostyrene and reduce it and i’d have mescaline and they had the bottle that said mns

00:46:50 ►

on it which is mescaline nitrostyrene in my mind and it was orange and it was yum yum orange even

00:46:55 ►

or mostly yummy orange it’s kind of a little bit more yellow but uh um it uh um

00:47:00 ►

they just couldn’t figure out because i you know they tried me on the basis of Sasha’s pathways.

00:47:07 ►

However Sasha wrote it in the book,

00:47:09 ►

that’s how they tried me.

00:47:12 ►

And because Sasha did a different reaction from Esalen than I did,

00:47:16 ►

I managed to escape that conviction.

00:47:19 ►

But six overall.

00:47:21 ►

But six overall.

00:47:23 ►

And then it was, what, nine different prisons over the course of almost ten years?

00:47:28 ►

That’s correct.

00:47:29 ►

Nine different prisons in 9.27 years.

00:47:33 ►

There was one time, this is actually significant,

00:47:36 ►

my life, I’ve lived my life in many different places.

00:47:39 ►

My father was an aerospace engineer and a consultant,

00:47:41 ►

so he’s on the move to different jobs.

00:47:44 ►

And so I wound up in lots of different schools lots of different towns and had to learn to make new friends wherever i

00:47:49 ►

went and so that’s a really good beneficial thing but one day i woke up in a prison cell and i’d

00:47:54 ►

been in that prison cell that same cell for three years and i woke up in there and i’m like

00:47:58 ►

this is the longest i’ve lived in any one spot since I left home.

00:48:09 ►

What did it take for you to persevere in there?

00:48:12 ►

The real thing it took was acceptance, which I had right away.

00:48:19 ►

And the next thing it took was tolerating living with a bunch of people who thought very larvally, thought very, you know, in the first, second, and third circuits at most of the Leary circuit system.

00:48:25 ►

They thought, you know, in that biosevabular mode or the anal-emotional territorial mode,

00:48:30 ►

and recognizing that and observing it, I could play with it because I knew, you know,

00:48:34 ►

the power struggles that people were trying, attempting to be in and things like that,

00:48:37 ►

and I could just stay out of it for the most part.

00:48:41 ►

It was really quite simple once I realized that I could turn my cell

00:48:45 ►

into an Augustinian cave and you know it’s my

00:48:48 ►

sanctuary it’s like you know I open my cell door and have nice music playing on there

00:48:52 ►

beautifully decorated cell because I could do that in England and I had my own blankets on my bed

00:48:56 ►

I had a really nice Pendleton Raven wool blanket on my bed

00:49:00 ►

that my partner had bought for me at the time

00:49:03 ►

and that really helped and so it really

00:49:08 ►

helped having the support of all the people that were sending me money to make phone calls and uh

00:49:12 ►

helping me um helping me with legal paperwork and um you know just talking to me when i called them

00:49:20 ►

listening to what i had to say and that really was very helpful. I didn’t do a lot of suffering in there.

00:49:26 ►

It was very minimal, minimal haunting by my usual demons.

00:49:30 ►

And it was, you know, I read, you know, I had a newspaper every day,

00:49:37 ►

so I had a Times of London, generally every day,

00:49:40 ►

like probably 95% of the time that I was in prison,

00:49:42 ►

I had either a wing newspaper or I ordered my own newspaper in.

00:49:47 ►

And then I had a new scientist and economist coming every week.

00:49:50 ►

I had the BBC television and programming, which is fucking superb.

00:49:53 ►

It’s so amazing.

00:49:55 ►

And I had, you know, good libraries and great gyms

00:49:59 ►

and fabulous meal opportunities, meal choices.

00:50:05 ►

Like who would have thunk you can go to prison and actually have five meal choices?

00:50:07 ►

You have to choose it two weeks in advance,

00:50:09 ►

but I tell you it’s way better than getting fucking dung out in the middle of some desert

00:50:12 ►

so I can boil it for my children whilst being raped.

00:50:15 ►

You know, it’s way better than all of that.

00:50:17 ►

And I had, you know, hot and cold running water, you know, a flushing toilet.

00:50:22 ►

Sometimes I had to share a cell, but probably 90% of the times I didn’t. Maybe only 85, I flushing toilet. Uh, sometimes I had to share, share a cell, but probably 90%

00:50:25 ►

of the times I didn’t, maybe only 85. I don’t know. I had a single cell, so I had my own sanctuary,

00:50:31 ►

you know, and realizing that it was absolutely awesome. I read lots of books. I had smuggled

00:50:36 ►

cell phones so I could call people at night and, um, keep, keep in communication. And, um,

00:50:43 ►

I played, you know, amazing amounts of chess i mean just like sometimes

00:50:46 ►

it’d be like an entire day would go by and all i had done was walk out of my cell door and start

00:50:52 ►

playing chess with somebody and it’s bang up time and it’s evening and i’ve just finished playing

00:50:56 ►

chess and it’s really you know it’s really cool to being able to take that time for myself because

00:51:03 ►

man there was nowhere else i was going to get it in my life,

00:51:05 ►

nowhere else since,

00:51:05 ►

if I got that kind of time and freedom

00:51:07 ►

to focus and be with myself.

00:51:10 ►

So England really was that much more civilized.

00:51:13 ►

Oh, it’s a way civilized place.

00:51:15 ►

Yeah.

00:51:15 ►

I mean, it’s like,

00:51:16 ►

we didn’t have the gang problems

00:51:18 ►

and the prison rape problems.

00:51:21 ►

It was devoid of that,

00:51:22 ►

which was quite amazing

00:51:23 ►

because you got to ask the question,

00:51:24 ►

what is wrong with America?

00:51:26 ►

That that’s such a problem.

00:51:29 ►

I’d also ask you as a great line

00:51:30 ►

that to look at the humanity of a nation,

00:51:31 ►

look at how it treats its prisoners.

00:51:33 ►

Yeah, absolutely.

00:51:34 ►

And this nation is just so bad.

00:51:36 ►

Yeah.

00:51:37 ►

So amazingly bad.

00:51:38 ►

And that Louisiana is the most arresting,

00:51:41 ►

the most incarcerated people per capita

00:51:44 ►

of anywhere on the globe.

00:51:48 ►

More than Iran, more than China, more than any other bogeyman you might think it is Louisiana and they are on Angola prison yeah absolutely that’s one of the

00:51:52 ►

most rottenest places on earth I hear I saw some programs from there and so what

00:51:57 ►

was it like finally when you got that last walk out it was quite interesting

00:52:02 ►

it was uh it was an amazing experience in that it was at one

00:52:05 ►

moment i was a prisoner and they had let the handcuffs off of me and i went on to escorted

00:52:09 ►

onto this uh plane back to the united states and the moment i got onto the plane i was suddenly a

00:52:16 ►

free human being one moment they’re treating me like like i’m a criminal the next moment not a

00:52:23 ►

single person around me except my partner

00:52:25 ►

had any idea that i’d just been through a prison experience well one of the stewardess did i

00:52:31 ►

imagine the captain maybe did but you know the stewardess knew but nobody none of it suddenly

00:52:35 ►

i was a normal free person able to wander up and down the plane aisles and go to the you know just

00:52:40 ►

go to the bathroom wow i wouldn’t say normal Wow. I wouldn’t say normal, though. What?

00:52:46 ►

I wouldn’t say normal, but free.

00:52:47 ►

Probably not normal.

00:52:48 ►

Okay.

00:52:52 ►

Yeah, it’s probably, I’m an outlier on some graph or two.

00:52:52 ►

Yeah.

00:52:57 ►

And so what did you do once you came home?

00:52:59 ►

First thing I did is make love.

00:53:05 ►

I had to figure out whether it still worked.

00:53:06 ►

It did.

00:53:07 ►

It was all fine.

00:53:07 ►

Everything was fine.

00:53:08 ►

Yeah.

00:53:12 ►

And because, you know, that 9.27 was entirely without sex with others. And, you know, it was, so I went for the cuddling and the sex.

00:53:20 ►

And then we actually wound up at the Coeur d’Alene Resort in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho,

00:53:38 ►

And then we actually wound up at the Coeur d’Alene Resort in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, which is all of 500 yards, maybe 700 yards from the place where I buried myself in the pea gravel and had that spiritual awakening where I knew that this was my path.

00:53:41 ►

And so that very morning, we stayed up all night.

00:53:46 ►

That very morning with the sun rising, we went out to that spot in the pea gravel.

00:53:48 ►

Wow, full circle.

00:53:49 ►

To celebrate that completion.

00:53:54 ►

That full circle, I had done what I said I would do.

00:54:01 ►

I had honored my word to myself and to others.

00:54:05 ►

Are there any regrets from the time before that?

00:54:06 ►

The only real regret,

00:54:08 ►

the real genuine regret is that I was not available

00:54:09 ►

to be near my father

00:54:11 ►

when he died

00:54:11 ►

whilst I was in prison.

00:54:13 ►

I mean, he had sailed a boat

00:54:14 ►

that I had bought him

00:54:14 ►

with the proceeds of crime

00:54:15 ►

up over the North Atlantic

00:54:17 ►

to come visit me in prison.

00:54:21 ►

And he,

00:54:24 ►

that’s the same kind of guy that went and saw Sasha

00:54:26 ►

remember

00:54:26 ►

and I wasn’t there for him

00:54:29 ►

and a friend of mine just a few days ago

00:54:31 ►

who I hadn’t seen since before

00:54:32 ►

who actually took the photo of me naked in the bus

00:54:35 ►

that people love and cherish

00:54:36 ►

naked in the bus making drugs

00:54:39 ►

I went and visited her the other day

00:54:41 ►

and she was like

00:54:43 ►

why did you go so fucking far away?

00:54:47 ►

That’s what really was hard for your father, was that you’d gone so far away.

00:54:53 ►

She had went and saw my father the night before his death.

00:54:57 ►

She’d seen him three times in that month that he was dying.

00:54:59 ►

I was talking to him from a cell phone and a shady person cell in England,

00:55:07 ►

and I couldn’t be there for him.

00:55:09 ►

That is a regret.

00:55:11 ►

And I regret that I never got to see my grandmother’s eyeballs again.

00:55:15 ►

She died in a dementia state, but at the age of 99,

00:55:20 ►

I’d got out two days before her 100th birthday, and she died a few weeks earlier.

00:55:25 ►

But in some aspects,

00:55:27 ►

maybe I was spared ever seeing her in that state

00:55:29 ►

because the last time I saw her,

00:55:30 ►

she was super lovely and vibrant.

00:55:32 ►

And I took a picture of her that day

00:55:34 ►

and it still sticks in my mind now.

00:55:37 ►

So I got to see her,

00:55:39 ►

my last days with her that way.

00:55:43 ►

So those are the only regrets. I mean mean it’s like the rest of it was just

00:55:46 ►

life experience it’s this is my life and this is what i was experiencing so how did your activism

00:55:52 ►

continue once you uh got back here well obviously uh god it continues to this moment right here at

00:55:58 ►

this microphone um i uh um you know right as got out, I was interviewed by a number of different people, um, on this basic principle.

00:56:09 ►

And my activism continues and I speak about it.

00:56:12 ►

I continue to write about it.

00:56:13 ►

Uh, I continue to be a proselyte for the meme of cognitive liberty.

00:56:18 ►

Um, I think thinking for myself, it’s funny that I even think that, I think that thinking for myself, outside of what authority dictates I should be thinking,

00:56:27 ►

the narrow field, the narrow parameters that authority thinks I should operate my mind at,

00:56:33 ►

is a really important principle.

00:56:39 ►

It’s one of the most important principles I know of to ever embrace humanity.

00:56:45 ►

You know, the idea that there was a guillotine at one time to chop people’s heads off,

00:56:49 ►

especially for spreading heretical ideas, makes total sense.

00:56:55 ►

And the idea, if you cut off the fountain in which someone speaks some meme,

00:57:02 ►

some idea into the populace, if you cut that fountain off by cutting their head off,

00:57:07 ►

then you’re in a really great situation.

00:57:09 ►

When Cicero was killed,

00:57:10 ►

some woman that hated him took his tongue out and nailed it to the wall.

00:57:14 ►

Don’t like the way people, I mean, in Cicero’s oratories,

00:57:17 ►

or, you know, that book of collections of those,

00:57:20 ►

there’s some wisdom in there.

00:57:21 ►

There’s some real interesting stuff.

00:57:23 ►

Yeah, I know the idea of taking someone’s tongue out

00:57:24 ►

or cutting someone’s head off makes complete sense

00:57:28 ►

or excommunicating them for heretical ideas

00:57:32 ►

and heresies or heresis simply means to choose

00:57:34 ►

other than what is part of the orthodox doctrine.

00:57:38 ►

And the idea that I’ve chosen something that’s unorthodox

00:57:43 ►

to the powers that be, as far as many of the powers that be, it’s that’s unorthodox to the powers that be as far as many

00:57:46 ►

of the powers that be it’s totally un totally not unorthodox and the fact that they’ve definitely

00:57:50 ►

used these and tried to weaponize these molecules and they understand the states that these produce

00:57:54 ►

and you know they’ve created uh psychological operations to like uh study these things and to

00:58:00 ►

inculcate these things into groups of people and to uh oppress other groups of people and to inculcate these things into groups of people and to, uh, uh, oppress other groups of

00:58:06 ►

people and to, uh, that, you know, these are not unknown to the government. They have studied these

00:58:12 ►

and use these and not very often for good means. And the fact that I totally disregarded them and,

00:58:19 ►

uh, their, their dictates to pursue my own path and my own freedom,

00:58:25 ►

they found upsetting.

00:58:27 ►

And I wish they didn’t find it upsetting.

00:58:31 ►

I wish they’d just let us do what we want.

00:58:33 ►

And, you know, provided we don’t harm others.

00:58:35 ►

I mean, that’s really a simple principle.

00:58:36 ►

That’s so fucking simple.

00:58:38 ►

The idea that if you harm others, there’s already rules against that.

00:58:41 ►

We’ve already formulated those over, know a couple you know a couple thousand

00:58:46 ►

years of the idea of the rule of law uh and then specifically in the last few hundred years with

00:58:53 ►

the you know uh the law is king rather than the king is law if we just look at that we’ve actually

00:58:59 ►

created all the laws that are necessary to stop people uh from harming others uh from their actions or not

00:59:08 ►

necessarily stop them but at least punish them or bring that bring the full weight of the law to

00:59:12 ►

bear on them for their responsibilities um if i’m using psychoactive substances and i’m harming no

00:59:17 ►

one i do not see how this affects the government maybe i’m not going to buy that you know buy some

00:59:23 ►

product that they want to make lots of tax money on. Maybe I’m actually going to be pro-environment. Maybe I’m going to be anti-war and anti-authoritarian, which these all things might be harms for them, the long-term idea of a tyrannical government. government but you know governments are instituted to protect property of every sort of every sort

00:59:45 ►

in my mind is property that you know i want them to protect my use of my mind effectively

00:59:50 ►

and they haven’t done that yet but we are here at shogun farm uh in california where

01:00:00 ►

you know several hundred psychedelic substances were made

01:00:05 ►

on the benches that are meters from me at this very moment.

01:00:11 ►

And my first exposure to what would become the meme of cognitive liberty

01:00:17 ►

was in Sasha’s books, and I believe it was actually in T-Cal,

01:00:22 ►

his conversations on the Constitution there

01:00:24 ►

towards the end of the the novel portion of it right before all the uh what people consider the recipe

01:00:31 ►

portions of it tcal tryptamines i have known and loved it’s a companion book to phenethylamines i

01:00:38 ►

have known and loved which has a subtitle of a chemical love story. And Tico has the, you know,

01:00:46 ►

it’s the continuation of that chemical love story.

01:00:49 ►

And that was the first place I had heard

01:00:50 ►

about this conceptualization of cognitive liberty

01:00:53 ►

or freedom of thought.

01:00:54 ►

And I don’t think he even,

01:00:55 ►

Sasha didn’t use the words cognitive liberty.

01:00:57 ►

It wasn’t quite, it was a few years later,

01:01:00 ►

I asked Richard Glenn Boyer

01:01:01 ►

whether it was him who had come up with it.

01:01:03 ►

And he, I don’t think he was very clear in his communication with me, but it was between Thomas Roberts, Sasha Shulgin, and Richard Glenn Boyer whether it was him who would come up with it and he I don’t think he was very clear in his communication with me but it was between

01:01:07 ►

Thomas Roberts, Sasha Shulgin and Richard Glenn Boyer that came up with the principle

01:01:11 ►

or the words for cognitive liberty another fancy way of saying freedom of thought. Hi kids.

01:01:17 ►

And

01:01:18 ►

cognitive liberty just really puts it down to the

01:01:24 ►

nuances of the biochemistry i should have the

01:01:26 ►

right to have the cognitions i want period that’s good and that actually brings me one of the hard

01:01:33 ►

questions i like to have near the end which is if you were put in charge of regulating how these

01:01:39 ►

substances could be put out in the world with some certain harm reduction that perhaps is necessary

01:01:44 ►

what would you do that’s very interesting that you asked me that question because that’s one could be put out in the world with some certain harm reduction that perhaps is necessary,

01:01:46 ►

what would you do?

01:01:51 ►

It’s very interesting that you asked me that question because that’s one of the things I spent a very long time on my prison cell bed studying and thinking about.

01:01:56 ►

And in my August 8th appeal against appeal against conviction,

01:02:09 ►

arguments in support of appeal, somewhere in the second half of it where I’m talking about the common law, I talk about these ideas of reasonable differentiations directly related to the object of

01:02:17 ►

regulation that are of interest to anybody who is attempting to protect the public purse from the harms that could be attendant to drug use.

01:02:29 ►

And so there are reasonable distinctions, differentiations that are to be made between drug use harmful to others and drug drug drug use harmful to oneself.

01:02:36 ►

Drug use harmful to others that are able to make competent informed choice and drug use that are harmful to those who aren’t able to make competent informed choice

01:02:45 ►

and you know ways of differentiation between the use of police power and the use of health

01:02:52 ►

and emergency powers and there are clearly written down there and if you would be so kind

01:02:59 ►

as to attach them to the I’ll make sure that you get them they are quite to this day still i’ve read them i went

01:03:06 ►

back and read them a few months ago to this day they still are the most concise formulation of a

01:03:11 ►

regulatory structure that i can think of and they are in completely operable now under the misuse

01:03:16 ►

of drugs act in the united kingdom and under the controlled substance act in the united states of

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america you can actually put them in effect now, where we’d get a smart Secretary of State

01:03:25 ►

regulating effectively for the use of these molecules, their production, their supply,

01:03:31 ►

their import, export, all those verbs that are regulated by the law.

01:03:35 ►

That would be great to see. Okay, we’ll make sure to have a link to that in the show notes.

01:03:39 ►

All right, this is totally available on Erewid. It’s the draft arguments in supported grounds.

01:03:44 ►

It’s 44 pages long. The whole thing starts a few paragraphs before for the idea of the how

01:03:50 ►

would you regulate uh and i boil it down to this with respect to drug use it could be called

01:03:57 ►

self-administration the law the principles of law afford three reasonable differentiations

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fairly related to the object of regulation,

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which is reducing drug harm. A primary differentiation between drug use that is

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reasonably safe to the agent and does not result in harm to others, and drug use that is reasonably

01:04:14 ►

safe to the agent and results in harm to others. A secondary differentiation between drug use that

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is reasonably risky to the agent and does not result in harm to others, and drug use that is reasonably risky to the agent and does not result in harm to others, and drug use that is reasonably risky to the agent and results in harm to others. A tertiary differentiation between

01:04:30 ►

drug use harmful only to the agent following competent informed choice and drug use harmful

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only to the agent not following competent informed choice. These reasonable differentiations based on

01:04:40 ►

the outcome of drug use, not on the idea of drug use, but on the actual outcome,

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are neutral with respect to the drug,

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the agent’s intent,

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and the setting in which drug use occurs.

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Only in this way are autonomous individuals separable from the public interest

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and education and health measures

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separable for the need for police power.

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And I use that word only advisably

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because I studied that paragraph.

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I mean, that paragraph,

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that section of that thing,

01:05:06 ►

I swear I put six months of thinking into.

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And we’ll link to that in the show notes.

01:05:13 ►

Thank you.

01:05:15 ►

And the last question that I think I’d like to ask is

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what advice you might have for any aspiring young chemists out there

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who want to be making their own medicine?

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The first thing I’d ask you to do is read Andrew Sewell’s So You Want to Be a Psychedelic Researcher.

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And then apply that to the idea that you want to be a psychedelic chemist.

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And then really examine your motives.

01:05:39 ►

Like, what are you doing this for?

01:05:41 ►

Who do you want to be? It’s like, are you willing to stand up and not grass your friends up and stand up and say, I want to be counted for this and stand on the

01:05:49 ►

principles of cognitive liberty and freedom and sacramental freedom and the idea of the right to

01:05:54 ►

privacy in relation to the palliatives that you might want to use? Are you willing to stand up?

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If you’re not willing to stand up, then get the fuck out of the kitchen. Straight up. That’s what

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you’re hearing from me. Second thing I’d say is paul scudder’s electron flow and electron electron flow and

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organic chemistry because it’s a fabulous book that boils down all the mechanisms to about 20 of

01:06:13 ►

them 20 common pathways for all chemistry if you’re going to be doing synthesis if you’re doing

01:06:19 ►

extractions you know be aware be safe be aware of the you know you know, what are the flammability issues?

01:06:25 ►

What are your health issues?

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Like, take care of yourself and those around you.

01:06:28 ►

Don’t be dumb.

01:06:29 ►

Never boil an ether to dryness.

01:06:32 ►

Things like that.

01:06:33 ►

Be smart.

01:06:34 ►

Understand your lab.

01:06:35 ►

You know, understand.

01:06:36 ►

Take some classes.

01:06:37 ►

Like, work in a lab.

01:06:38 ►

Don’t just, you know, run off at the hilt thinking that you can actually do this.

01:06:43 ►

Because, you remember, swords cut both ways and

01:06:45 ►

this could cut you really bad and be

01:06:47 ►

prepared

01:06:48 ►

I’m not advising that you do

01:06:53 ►

chemistry unlawfully

01:06:55 ►

because that would be possibly conspiratorial

01:06:58 ►

and unlawful isn’t that amazing that I can’t

01:07:00 ►

even advise you to do that

01:07:00 ►

but do as you will it shall be the whole of the law

01:07:03 ►

that’s perfect and in fact that’s one last question I should ask even advise you to do that. But, you know, do as you will. It shall be the whole of the law.

01:07:07 ►

That’s perfect. And in fact,

01:07:09 ►

that’s one last question I should ask some of your Cognitive Liberty stature.

01:07:11 ►

What are your thoughts on the dark web and the availability

01:07:13 ►

of everything you can get there now?

01:07:16 ►

If you want to understand my thoughts on the

01:07:18 ►

dark web, you might want to read

01:07:19 ►

Drugs, the Internet, and Change by

01:07:21 ►

Charlotte Walsh, my former

01:07:23 ►

wife, and Cognitive Liberty advocate. And that’s found in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, the Internet, and Change by Charlotte Walsh, my former wife, and cognitive liberty advocate.

01:07:27 ►

And that’s found in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs.

01:07:30 ►

The dark web is absolutely the death knell for the war on drugs.

01:07:36 ►

You know, it’s getting to the point where it doesn’t even have to be dark anymore.

01:07:38 ►

It’s just like there’s just so much sales of drugs going on.

01:07:41 ►

There’s no way that the genie is so fucking far out of the bottle.

01:07:44 ►

As it says on the back of T-cal by nick sunders he says the psychedelic genie is out of the bottle

01:07:49 ►

and can never be put back again and i can see through the door into the lab onto the little

01:07:55 ►

dashboard over there a copy of t-cal where that is printed on the very back cover of it

01:07:59 ►

psychedelic genie cannot be put back in the bottle again. The war on drugs is over.

01:08:08 ►

They’re just going to kind of fight it for a while until they run out of money.

01:08:14 ►

And they see the futility in attempting to imprison everybody because they just can’t do it.

01:08:16 ►

Psychedelic Genie is out of the bottle.

01:08:20 ►

Well, thank you so much, Casey Hardison, for taking the time to talk to us.

01:08:25 ►

It’s been a great rundown, and I appreciate your time here on this 4th of July weekend at the Shulgin Farm.

01:08:28 ►

It is a fabulous place to be for the 4th of July because this is where freedom has really been rang for,

01:08:32 ►

really been sang and rang for many, many years.

01:08:35 ►

It also happens to be the wedding anniversary

01:08:38 ►

of Sasha and Anne.

01:08:40 ►

So it’s obviously a beautiful day

01:08:41 ►

to be celebrating around here.

01:08:44 ►

Lots of love to you all.

01:08:46 ►

Keep it shiny side up.

01:08:51 ►

Thanks again for listening to Symposia on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.

01:08:56 ►

Do us a favor.

01:08:57 ►

Go to iTunes or Stitcher and leave a rating or review.

01:09:00 ►

Tell your friends.

01:09:01 ►

That’s how you can really help us out.

01:09:09 ►

Thanks to Matt Payne who engineered the sound sound joey whip for the intro music california smile for the outro music and brian norman who produced the show

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

017 - The Case for Cognitive Liberty

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