Program Notes
Guest speaker: Mark Haden
Date this lecture was recorded: July 2017
It’s rare to meet someone eager to tackle the law but in this interview with Mark Haden, the Executive Director of MAPS Canada, he wrestles with the thorniest problem of all: how to regulate these drugs.
You can see more about him and the work of MAPS Canada at:
http://www.mapscanada.org/whoweare/board/13-mark-haden
Mark’s research and writing is at: http://www.markhaden.com/
Also, if anybody wants a first look at the Psychedelic History Project treasures, the first 500 items are scanned in. Reach out to help look them over, clean them up or add the metadata to these unique articles gathered from Timothy Leary’s archive: https://www.instagram.com/thepsychedelichistoryproject/
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon
00:00:23 ►
2.0.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:30 ►
And today, our friends at Symposia are bringing us an interview with Mark Hayden,
00:00:33 ►
who is the Executive Director of MAPS Canada.
00:00:38 ►
And full disclosure here, even though I’m a lawyer myself,
00:00:42 ►
I, well, I left the practice of law over 30 years ago,
00:00:45 ►
and so I haven’t taken the time to give much thought to the state of drug laws at this interesting point in time. And to be brutally honest here, well,
00:00:52 ►
I don’t really expect to live long enough to see a clear end to the war on drugs. But that said,
00:00:59 ►
even in my wildest dreams back during the time when I was practicing law, I never thought that I’d
00:01:05 ►
live to see the day that, well, at least here in California, I can go online and select some
00:01:11 ►
cannabis from a very wide array of choices and then have it delivered to my house within an hour.
00:01:18 ►
So, at least out here on the West Coast, I’ve lived to see more relaxation of the drug laws than I ever expected
00:01:25 ►
to see. Now, interestingly, at least to me, today we’re going to be hearing from the Executive
00:01:32 ►
Director of MAPS Canada. And in just a couple of days, I’m going to be playing another recording,
00:01:39 ►
and this is from a panel discussion that was held in February of 1991. And one of the speakers that you’re going to hear from
00:01:47 ►
is a young Rick Doblin,
00:01:49 ►
who proudly tells us that at the time,
00:01:52 ►
MAPS now has 130 members.
00:01:55 ►
Big change from them to now, huh?
00:01:57 ►
So as we’re listening to Mark Hayden right now,
00:02:01 ►
it seems to me it would be good to keep in mind
00:02:03 ►
that while we’re not going to get everything that we want right now, it seems to me it would be good to keep in mind that while we’re not going to get
00:02:05 ►
everything that we want right away, nonetheless it’s important to have a long-range vision,
00:02:11 ►
and that’s what Rick Doblin had back in 1991, and while maps may not have exactly followed the path
00:02:18 ►
that he chose in every instance, well, it seems to me his vision has certainly been reached in many ways.
00:02:24 ►
Well, it seems to me his vision has certainly been reached in many ways.
00:02:30 ►
Now, let’s join Symposia’s Lex Pelger for his interview with Mark Hayden.
00:02:36 ►
Today’s show is made possible through your crowdfunded support on Patreon.
00:02:42 ►
Unlike other crowdfunding sites, Patreon lets you chip in a few bucks a month to help us keep the lights on.
00:02:45 ►
Find out more at patreon.com slash symposia.
00:03:05 ►
I’m Lex Pelger, and this is Symposio on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:03:12 ►
This week, I’m very excited to present an interview with Mark Hayden.
00:03:20 ►
He is a counselor of children, he is an expert on drug policy, and he is the executive director of MAPS Canada.
00:03:26 ►
In this episode, he wrestles with the thorny issues about how to regulate these drugs as they emerge from the dark marketplaces to the light. Of course, there’s lots of disagreements
00:03:31 ►
about how to regulate these drugs, but it’s great to sit down with someone who’s trying to wrestle
00:03:37 ►
with these tough questions. One other item before we get to the interview, I’ve gotten the first
00:03:43 ►
stash scanned in from the Psychedelic History Project.
00:03:46 ►
So now there’s about 500 newspaper articles from Tim DeLery’s archives safely in the computer.
00:03:53 ►
So if there’s anybody out there like to volunteer to help clean up the files, apply the metadata,
00:03:58 ►
get a first look at these great pieces of psychedelic history that we found, reach out.
00:04:03 ►
It would be great to have all the help we can get
00:04:05 ►
to turn this into a great archive.
00:04:08 ►
Now here’s Mark Hayden of Maps Canada.
00:04:17 ►
I am sitting here on a lovely tree-lined street
00:04:20 ►
in Vancouver, Canada,
00:04:22 ►
in a beautiful home filled with art,
00:04:26 ►
sitting next to Mark Hayden of Maps Canada. Thanks for joining us. Hello, Lex. I think the first thing I wanted to know
00:04:32 ►
was how did you come about being involved to be running Maps Canada?
00:04:38 ►
Well, I worked for decades in the addiction services. My final role was that of supervisor. I ran a clinic.
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And it was the organization that I worked for said that they were evidence-based.
00:04:53 ►
And the evidence for psychedelic treatments in helping with addictions is profound.
00:05:01 ►
Specifically, Ibogaine, there’s many examples. ibogaine for the treatment of heroin addiction
00:05:05 ►
psilocybin for tobacco addiction lsd for alcoholism the evidence is compelling and clear
00:05:11 ►
and when i would talk to my organization about doing what we did better using the tools of
00:05:18 ►
psychedelics i got very little positive response and so eventually I needed to be louder.
00:05:27 ►
It was interesting because I speak at many conferences,
00:05:30 ►
and often my academic interest, what I usually speak about,
00:05:34 ►
is a post-prohibition public health regulation of all currently illegal drugs.
00:05:41 ►
And so I’m often the solution guy who’s on the panel at the end of the conference.
00:05:47 ►
And Rick Doblin would appear on the same panel in many different countries. And so I would watch
00:05:51 ►
Rick’s gig about psychedelics, and he would watch my gigs about how we should regulate drugs after
00:05:56 ►
prohibition ends. And I eventually realized that I needed him and he needed me. I needed him because
00:06:03 ►
I wanted to wear a hat that I could talk
00:06:05 ►
on the podium about psychedelics without getting flack from my organization. And so I needed to
00:06:12 ►
have a Maps Canada hat so that I could talk widely about psychedelics and their potential for healing.
00:06:17 ►
And he needed me because he wanted to run a study up in Canada and he wanted to have Canadians
00:06:22 ►
write checks and get Canadian tax receipts.
00:06:27 ►
And he couldn’t do that from the States.
00:06:29 ►
So that was the birth of Maps Canada.
00:06:32 ►
I guess my first question I’ll ask now, it’s what I usually end with,
00:06:38 ►
how would you regulate the world if you were put in charge of the drug situation?
00:06:40 ►
I write and speak about this a lot.
00:06:42 ►
So all drugs are different.
00:06:44 ►
I’m actually interested in the regulation of all drugs,
00:06:49 ►
from heroin to psychedelics to cannabis to crack cocaine because we need, prohibition doesn’t work,
00:06:54 ►
so we need to have a different model. And all drugs should be regulated differently depending on the risk-benefit profile. But let’s talk about psychedelics. So what are the risks of psychedelics?
00:07:01 ►
So the risks of all drugs can be put on a continuum, actually three continuums,
00:07:07 ►
which is addiction potential, toxicity, and behavior. So let’s look at those three
00:07:16 ►
risks with psychedelics. So addiction potential. I worked for the addiction services for 30 years,
00:07:24 ►
and I would always have a caseload,
00:07:26 ►
and nobody ever walked into my office saying, I can’t stop taking LSD. It never happened.
00:07:31 ►
You cannot become addicted to the classics. Now, you can have a problematic relationship with some
00:07:36 ►
other ones, but the classic psychedelics is essentially zero in terms of addiction potential.
00:07:42 ►
Let’s look at toxicity. So Albert Hoffman, who invented LSD,
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argued that LSD was one of the least toxic drugs
00:07:49 ►
on the face of the earth.
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And the argument that he made for that
00:07:52 ►
was the window of efficacy to harm.
00:07:58 ►
So what do I mean by that?
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I mean, if you take the last prescription drug
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that you took, and it doesn’t really matter what it is,
00:08:06 ►
and you take six times the dosage, you’ve probably done yourself harm.
00:08:10 ►
So the one to six ratio is very, very common with most prescription drugs.
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With LSD, it’s in the thousands.
00:08:18 ►
To actually demonstrate harm from LSD, you have to do thousands of times the dosage that you would do as an active dosage.
00:08:24 ►
So the
00:08:25 ►
toxicity is incredibly low. In fact, one could argue that LSD is less toxic than water. If you
00:08:33 ►
do a thousand times the dosage of water, what’s the dosage of water in a day? Let’s say six,
00:08:37 ►
eight cups, ten cups, whatever. If you multiply any of those numbers by a thousand, you’re going
00:08:42 ►
to die. Water can kill you if you take
00:08:45 ►
enough of it. So one could actually argue that LSD is less harmful than water. So the toxicity
00:08:52 ►
of the classical psychedelics is incredibly low. So addiction potential is virtually zero.
00:08:58 ►
Toxicity is incredibly low. But there are problems. And certainly, one of the things I do is Google alerts.
00:09:05 ►
And I Google alert all the classic and other psychedelics.
00:09:09 ►
And so every single day I have any media attention to any psychedelic in North America comes to my inbox.
00:09:16 ►
And there’s a lot of issues with media attention to psychedelics and certainly the problems that happen with psychedelics.
00:09:23 ►
But it’s always one thing. It’s always lack of supervision. People who do these in situations
00:09:30 ►
where they are not guided and not supervised and they behave badly. And so all of the problems of
00:09:36 ►
psychedelics come down to that one factor, which is lack of supervision. So in a post-prohibition
00:09:41 ►
world, if we wanted to reduce the harms and maximize the benefits of psychedelics, what we would do is we would provide a context for people to experience them in a supervised scenario.
00:09:54 ►
So let’s think big picture for a second.
00:09:58 ►
So who would regulate?
00:10:06 ►
regulate. So if you look at the options for regulation, governments, first of all, the first option, wouldn’t work very well because governments swing all over the map. You know, we have left,
00:10:11 ►
we have right, we have in the middle, we have governments that swing widely in terms of belief
00:10:16 ►
systems. And so it’s unstable. If government tried to regulate it, what we would have is an
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unstable regulation process that would be shifting constantly.
00:10:26 ►
That wouldn’t work.
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We need to have stable governance that is based on public health principles.
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And you can’t do that within the context of politics.
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So that won’t work.
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Can you do it within the context of commercialization?
00:10:41 ►
Well, no, because commercialization has the agenda to increase sales. That’s not going to work. So you need to have some organization that is arm’s length from
00:10:50 ►
government and also arm’s length from big business. So the model that I propose is a commission. So a
00:10:57 ►
commission that has legislative authority, can regulate the finances of it, can have a stable public health vision, and have the authority to essentially sell and regulate and manage the money associated with the sales from all currently illegal drugs.
00:11:15 ►
And then within the commission, they have an arm for psychedelics, they have an arm for cannabis, an arm for cocaine, an arm for heroin.
00:11:21 ►
They would all be regulated differently.
00:11:24 ►
cocaine and arm for heroin that would all be regulated differently. Within the psychedelics arm, they would then say you can apply for a license to supervise psychedelics and you would
00:11:34 ►
have psychedelic supervisors as a new profession. And within that profession, you can have the
00:11:42 ►
supervision based on a whole variety of different models. You could supervise based on Aboriginal models. You would have peyote people. You would have
00:11:49 ►
ayahuasca people. But you could also have dance parties. You could have the therapists showing up.
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It doesn’t really matter. You could have people wandering through the forest. It doesn’t matter
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what the circumstances of the supervision are. What matters is there’s somebody responsible,
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and the responsible for set, which is the expectation of the person,
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will be screened and briefed and set up for the experience.
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They’re responsible for the setting, what is the environment they’re taking it in.
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They’re responsible for the substance itself,
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making sure that it’s clean and pure and a known dosage,
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the responsible for the safety of the environment,
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and the responsible for giving people known dosage.
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So the safety discussions will happen.
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So if they tick those boxes,
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setting safety dosage,
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are all controlled by the supervisor, these circumstances of it can
00:12:47 ►
vary widely. It doesn’t really matter. So then you would have a new profession being formed.
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It’s called psychedelic supervisor. And within the context of psychedelic supervisor, you would
00:12:58 ►
probably have different branches. There would be, I mean, the skill of supervising people at a multi-day dance festival is completely different from the skill of supervising people who are coming to you for post-traumatic stress treatment.
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So psychedelic psychotherapy is different from running a dance party.
00:13:17 ►
So there would be different streams within that that would require different levels of skill.
00:13:22 ►
Now, I’ve talked about this.
00:13:24 ►
I wrote a paper on this.
00:13:24 ►
You can find it at markhayden.com. And I’ve written lots of skill. Now, I’ve talked about this. I wrote a paper on this. You can find it at
00:13:25 ►
markhaden.com. And I’ve written lots of papers. And this particular paper was the one that took
00:13:31 ►
the longest to write because I kept sharing my ideas at various conferences. And I would get
00:13:37 ►
feedback. And I’d have to think about the feedback long and hard. And mostly the feedback that I got was somebody in the audience would stand up and say,
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hey Mark, I love psychedelics
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and what I do with my wife
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when I’m taking a psychedelic in bed,
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I do not want to be supervised
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and I really had to think about that.
00:13:59 ►
So that was a challenge.
00:14:01 ►
It was a very significant challenge
00:14:02 ►
and I really had to wrap my head around that
00:14:04 ►
and so what we did is we developed a stream for self-supervision. And so self-supervision or
00:14:13 ►
supervising friends should be allowed, but it is reasonable to assume that the people who want to
00:14:19 ►
self-supervise are willing to be trained. So in order to get a certificate of self-supervision, you can, and what
00:14:27 ►
you have to do is sign up for a training program, and it’s maybe a few weekends that probably
00:14:31 ►
includes some kind of experience. And again, the issues of set, setting, safety, and dosage are
00:14:38 ►
discussed. And then at the end of the day, you can get a certificate that allows you to access the
00:14:44 ►
medicine and use it with yourself or with friends. But what you can’t do is you can’t
00:14:49 ►
sell the service and you can’t provide therapeutic interventions for others. You cannot hang
00:14:56 ►
up a shingle and say, I’m going to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, come and pay me. So the level
00:15:01 ►
of expertise for therapy is different. So we would have two streams. We would have the certificate stream, which allows for self-supervision, and we that they would respond to a professional body of therapists where they
00:15:27 ►
essentially can be disciplined if they step out of line. So they would be similar to any other
00:15:33 ►
profession from medicine to youth,
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because we really struggled with that, and we rewrote it many times. So how would we recommend
00:15:57 ►
youth be in this model? So in order to answer that question, we dove into the literature,
00:16:05 ►
So in order to answer that question, we dove into the literature. And we looked first at the Aboriginal literature, and we said,
00:16:09 ►
how do youth access psychedelics experiences in Aboriginal contexts?
00:16:13 ►
How do the Paiute folks do it? How do the Ayahuasca folks do it in terms of youth?
00:16:18 ►
And what we observed is it’s all over the map.
00:16:21 ►
So in many Ayahuasca communities, there is no age barrier.
00:16:27 ►
And there is none.
00:16:28 ►
By that I mean pregnant women show up and drink ayahuasca.
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They show up with their nursing babies.
00:16:35 ►
Their toddlers fall around the group and trip all over the place.
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Their young children come and go and walk in and out of the ceremonies.
00:16:42 ►
And teenagers are there as well.
00:16:44 ►
There is no age issue. It’s just done in family context and it’s walk in and out of the ceremonies, and teenagers are there as well. There is no age
00:16:45 ►
issue. It’s just done in family context, and it’s done in community context, and age is no barrier
00:16:51 ►
at all. It’s never discussed. Peyote folks can be different. So the Peyote traditions can very
00:16:58 ►
strategically involve young people at significant ages, things like puberty, for example, then you’re invited into the tent
00:17:05 ►
with the elders. And so within the aboriginal world, it was hard to make clear statements
00:17:12 ►
because there is no one model. So then we looked at alcohol access. And we looked at the various
00:17:18 ►
states in the United States that allow alcohol access with parental supervision. And I thought
00:17:23 ►
that was an important thing to acknowledge.
00:17:25 ►
So, and again, it wasn’t a specific age.
00:17:28 ►
If the parents are supervising, it’s okay,
00:17:30 ►
is essentially what the legislation in some states say.
00:17:34 ►
And then we looked at health access.
00:17:41 ►
So if you want, because what we’re actually advocating for
00:17:44 ►
is a health service. So if we want because it what we’re actually advocating for is is a health service so if we
00:17:47 ►
want to look at health how do youth access health and again it’s it’s it’s based on level of maturity
00:17:56 ►
so in terms of health legislation they talk about mature versus immature minors. And an immature minor is essentially a baby who shows up in the arms of their mother.
00:18:08 ►
The mother makes the decision.
00:18:10 ►
The baby doesn’t have an opinion about what happens.
00:18:12 ►
It’s the mother that will decide.
00:18:14 ►
The mother says, you know, we’ve got this infection on the foot and please do this and that and the other.
00:18:17 ►
And the mother discusses with the doctor and the decision is made by the mother.
00:18:21 ►
But later on in this infant’s life, when the infant becomes a mature minor,
00:18:26 ►
and they can walk into the doctor and say, I’m sexually active, I want to be on the pill,
00:18:32 ►
what the doctor has to assess is, does this individual know what they’re asking for? Are
00:18:39 ►
they able to make an independent decision about their request for health service? And if the
00:18:44 ►
doctor concludes that, yes, this is an independent person
00:18:47 ►
who understands what they’re asking for,
00:18:48 ►
they can provide the health service.
00:18:52 ►
So when you’re providing health services,
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there isn’t a clear age cutoff.
00:18:57 ►
It’s just about ability to make an independent decision
00:19:01 ►
about what you’re asking for.
00:19:03 ►
So we put all of that information
00:19:05 ►
together and we said, okay, so how should youth access psychedelics? And essentially what we said
00:19:11 ►
is, yes, youth can access psychedelics if they do it within the context of a mature adult. Back to
00:19:21 ►
the aboriginal piece, all of the aboriginal access to psychedelics is based on adult wisdom.
00:19:29 ►
So there is an adult leader who has a significant place in the community who are involving the youth in a significant way based on the wisdom of the culture.
00:19:38 ►
So in our model, what we suggested is the youth could access psychedelics experiences, but they would be guided by adults
00:19:45 ►
in a variety of different contexts.
00:19:48 ►
They would be encouraged to bring their parents
00:19:50 ►
to the experience and do the parent-child bonding thing
00:19:53 ►
which psychedelics can be very powerful for.
00:19:56 ►
So they would be encouraged to participate with their parents,
00:19:59 ►
but if they really don’t want to show up with their parents
00:20:01 ►
and they want to access the experience,
00:20:03 ►
they can so long as there is a person who has been trained to provide the service to youth, and that would be a licensed professional.
00:20:14 ►
Wow.
00:20:15 ►
That is courageous.
00:20:18 ►
So few people tackle this question of youth stuff at all because it’s so fraught with controversy.
00:20:24 ►
I love that you you
00:20:25 ►
can have your magic mushrooms but you can only get them from your grandmother right right right
00:20:30 ►
right um yeah that that’s a that’s a wonderful way of thinking about it it’s such a hard problem
00:20:36 ►
grapple with the only person i know trying to socially answer that question is jonathan thompson
00:20:41 ►
of psychedelic parenting he talks a lot about making a Western model
00:20:45 ►
combining the old wisdom on this stuff with the youth.
00:20:49 ►
Yes.
00:20:50 ►
And that’s a great solution.
00:20:52 ►
Yes.
00:20:52 ►
I wanted to circle back to what you were saying about access, though,
00:20:56 ►
because I can hear probably in the ears of some listeners,
00:20:59 ►
I think it’s a great idea of the self-administration stream
00:21:03 ►
that you were talking about,
00:21:04 ►
but the barrier of a couple of weekends of training is still fairly high considering that the access to the two deadliest drugs, alcohol and tobacco, is so easy.
00:21:26 ►
that easily when their toxicity is so much less, I think would concern some people that there’s still a system in place that will keep someone from taking magic mushrooms, even though you can
00:21:31 ►
just go and pick them off the ground around here. Well, if the goal is to maximize the benefit and
00:21:38 ►
minimize the harm, if we think about, let’s answer that question from the big picture.
00:21:44 ►
Let’s look at the history of psychedelic drugs.
00:21:47 ►
Psychedelic drugs have always been available in Aboriginal contexts in the context of healing and celebration of transitions.
00:21:56 ►
And the transitions are everything from puberty to seasonal changes.
00:22:00 ►
And the healing ranges from psychological to physical.
00:22:02 ►
And the healing ranges from psychological to physical.
00:22:12 ►
So a wide range of healing traditions can be observed in a variety of different aboriginal communities.
00:22:18 ►
And if we look around the world today, we can see the Huichol use of peyote.
00:22:22 ►
We can see aboriginal use of ayahuasca in a variety of different traditions.
00:22:25 ►
We can see the Curendos use of mushrooms in Mexico. We can see shamanic use of amanita mascaro in Russia, in Siberia. And so we can look at all
00:22:33 ►
of these traditions that echo throughout ancient history, and we can say, what’s the commonality
00:22:38 ►
here? And the commonality is they’ve been used within a cultural context for healing and celebrations.
00:22:46 ►
And the celebrations are spiritual and ritualistically binding to a culture with a certain set of belief systems.
00:22:56 ►
And they’ve always been done supervised by adults.
00:23:00 ►
And there’s always a training program involved with these things.
00:23:03 ►
And there’s always a training program involved with these things.
00:23:14 ►
You know, if you want to become the shaman of the culture, you involve in decades of working with learning the songs and learning the rituals and learning the belief systems and learning to be a healer to the community.
00:23:19 ►
So Aboriginal has massive, long healing trajectories.
00:23:24 ►
And so to ask somebody to participate in a couple of weekends, I don’t think is actually a barrier at all. And as a society, we want to adopt a wise approach.
00:23:30 ►
And all of the harms come from lack of understanding of how to structure these things.
00:23:35 ►
And so asking people to participate in a process where they learn to approach these sacred medicines with wisdom, I think is absolutely and completely reasonable.
00:23:47 ►
That makes sense and is well said, because I still think the best model I’ve ever seen
00:23:52 ►
anybody propose for the West is Aldous Huxley’s novel, The Island. I think I still haven’t read
00:23:58 ►
anything better of how the West might incorporate this stuff. And it actually goes back to a Gary
00:24:02 ►
Snyder quote that I’ve never been able to find, but I quote all the time. And he said it’s going to take us three generations to incorporate these drugs because the first will be the teenage years and the overconsumption without quite knowing what’s happening.
00:24:24 ►
figuring out some of the science. And what he hopes to see was the third generation, which I think is, I hope is starting now, where we take this Aboriginal indigenous wisdom that you’re
00:24:29 ►
talking about and combine that with this biochemistry peer-reviewed science approach
00:24:34 ►
and find rituals that will work in this Western mindset that is not an Aboriginal mindset,
00:24:40 ►
that is not an Eastern mindset, and try to figure out what works for us here and
00:24:45 ►
now. Absolutely, I agree. I mean, what were the last four decades have actually been a historical
00:24:52 ►
anomaly. Psychedelics have always been used by societies within the cultural context of
00:24:58 ►
spirituality and healing. And they’ve never been targeted in the way they were in the 60s.
00:25:05 ►
In fact, it wasn’t psychedelics that got targeted.
00:25:07 ►
It was the youth that were using that was targeted.
00:25:09 ►
If you think about why psychedelics became criminalized,
00:25:12 ►
it was because the Vietnam War and the separation between the status quo and the hippies.
00:25:20 ►
The baby boom generation had a massive number of young people mature at the same time in a society, which is unusual.
00:25:27 ►
And then this war was fought, and the young folks said, we don’t want to fight.
00:25:31 ►
They didn’t want to be plucked off their comfortable couches and given a gun and dropped into a jungle and told to kill people.
00:25:38 ►
They were actually quite happy the way they were.
00:25:40 ►
And they didn’t believe in the war.
00:25:41 ►
They didn’t see it as being relevant for them, and they didn’t want to fight.
00:25:41 ►
and they didn’t believe in the war.
00:25:43 ►
They didn’t see it as being relevant for them and they didn’t want to fight.
00:25:45 ►
And the Nixon administration
00:25:46 ►
decided to criminalize these people
00:25:49 ►
because they were arguing against the status quo.
00:25:53 ►
And they also, the loosening of the sexual mores,
00:25:55 ►
there was a certain sexual behaviors
00:25:57 ►
that were seen as normal
00:25:59 ►
and the young folks were walking around topless
00:26:02 ►
and it was seen as completely offensive to the status quo.
00:26:05 ►
So the dominant culture did what dominant cultures often do in targeting what they see as an unwanted group, is they criminalize their drug use.
00:26:16 ►
And that’s been true for centuries.
00:26:19 ►
And so during the 60s, when these things became criminalized, it wasn’t actually about the drugs. It was about something else. And the process of criminalizing prevents the actual traditions from developing and maturing and that control what people use, how they use it, and how they behave when they’re using a substance. So the process of drug prohibition killed the development of the cultural norms that all societies have used to control people’s drug
00:26:52 ►
using behaviors. If you look around the world today and you look at a benign relationship that
00:26:57 ►
a culture has with a drug, what you see is that it’s being controlled by social rituals and social norms, and sometimes sacred rituals, but not always
00:27:06 ►
sacred rituals. And drug prohibition prevents the development and the maintenance and the creation
00:27:12 ►
and structure of those social norming behaviors. So then what we have is out-of-control drug use.
00:27:18 ►
And if you go to the downtown east side in Vancouver and you look at somebody crawling
00:27:21 ►
down the sidewalk, picking at it in cocaine psychosis or crystal meth crazy behavior, really what’s happened here is drug prohibition. And drug
00:27:32 ►
prohibition has killed the socially controlling mechanisms that have always been used for
00:27:38 ►
centuries around controlling drug using behavior. So as we end drug prohibition, and cannabis is the crack in
00:27:47 ►
the prohibitionist wall, so as we end drug prohibition, we really need to adopt a process
00:27:53 ►
of social wisdom. And the fear that I have is we’ll commercialize it, and then drugs will be
00:27:59 ►
given to the commercial companies of the world, and we’ll have endless bad behavior and we’ll see it as a money game. And so that’s not wise as a society. If we can adopt a wise approach, what we will do
00:28:11 ►
is we will ritualize it. And we will structure drug use with a whole variety of social norms
00:28:16 ►
and social rituals that determine what people use, how they use it, and how they behave when
00:28:20 ►
they’re using it. And if cannabis is first, psychedelics would be very wise to do as the second drug because they’re so easily structured. They’re so easily ritualized
00:28:32 ►
and there’s so many traditions to draw on. And then we can take those traditions and apply it
00:28:37 ►
to other drugs as well. And so what was your perspective from being here in Canada, watching
00:28:43 ►
drug prohibition roll across the United
00:28:45 ►
States, as well as seeing the psychedelic revolution here while working with addiction
00:28:50 ►
and seeing these threads come together? That’s an interesting question. And certainly what I saw
00:28:56 ►
as a younger person, as psychedelics went into the community at first. It was full of love, joy, and spirituality. And
00:29:05 ►
there was a cultural revolution that was incredibly positive. And because it wasn’t guided by elders,
00:29:15 ►
it deteriorated. It wasn’t woven into the culture. And essentially, it went wrong.
00:29:28 ►
essentially, it went wrong. And it went wrong quite badly. So there was no understanding,
00:29:33 ►
although there was limited understanding of the real thoughtfulness that needs to go into the set,
00:29:40 ►
the setting, the dosage, and the safety issues. So some people understood that, and some people didn’t. And there certainly wasn’t an understanding of how to work with different medicines and
00:29:46 ►
different drugs. And so, you know, cannabis was in the mix, psychedelics were in the mix, LSD was
00:29:51 ►
prominent, but then cocaine came in the mix, and then injection drug use came into the mix.
00:29:58 ►
And quite frankly, the whole community became sicker and sicker and sicker. And it wasn’t guided by elders. It wasn’t guided by
00:30:07 ►
well-thoughtful, structured, ritualistic practices. The maximizing the benefits and
00:30:14 ►
the minimizing the harms was not part of the discussion. And so behavior became worse,
00:30:21 ►
and infectious diseases then came into the mix, and it became, quite frankly, a mess.
00:30:27 ►
And the prohibition made it worse. So now that we’re ending prohibition, what we need to go back
00:30:34 ►
and say, let’s rethink this. Let’s adopt a wise approach to this whole process. Let’s think about
00:30:40 ►
how we can structure these things using a wide variety of ritualistic practices.
00:30:46 ►
And I’m interested in ritualistic behaviors from all drugs.
00:30:49 ►
It’s very easy to understand ritualistic behaviors when we’re talking about psychedelic drugs.
00:30:54 ►
But rituals also apply to injection of heroin.
00:31:06 ►
rituals, around the injection of heroin, and you swab the site, and you do it in a ritualized,
00:31:12 ►
structured way that includes health as a component, you can improve people’s injection practices.
00:31:18 ►
So ritualistic behaviors can be used in a whole variety of different contexts with drugs. It’s not just shamanic rituals with ayahuasca, but it’s ritualistic behaviors with all kinds of things. So let’s look at cannabis in the context of ritualized, because cannabis really isn’t
00:31:30 ►
ritualized. You know, maybe some people would argue, well, we smoke it at rock concerts,
00:31:35 ►
and they would say, therefore, it’s ritualized. I disagree. I think it’s a profoundly unritualized
00:31:41 ►
behavior. People will smoke a joint walking down the street. They’ll smoke a joint at the beach.
00:31:43 ►
profoundly un-ritualized behavior. People will smoke a joint walking down the street, they’ll smoke a joint at the beach, and there’s a whole variety of different contexts for it. And now that
00:31:48 ►
we’re, as a society, going through the process of legalizing it, I think we need to have some real
00:31:55 ►
thoughtful discussions about how to put it into some kind of container, in some kind of context.
00:32:01 ►
And with some fascination, I watched that starting to develop.
00:32:06 ►
Stephen Gray’s book,
00:32:09 ►
Cannabis and Spirituality, is an example.
00:32:12 ►
So in the release of his book,
00:32:14 ►
he had a whole variety of different speakers and they were talking about people
00:32:16 ►
who are now providing what they call green ceremonies.
00:32:19 ►
And they’re bringing people together in circles,
00:32:21 ►
in community,
00:32:22 ►
and they’re providing a variety of different
00:32:24 ►
spiritual structures to the experience. I think that’s important. I think if governments were
00:32:31 ►
wise, they’d be finding those people and encouraging them because it gives it a context.
00:32:37 ►
In this case, it’s a spiritual context, but it’s a context that is important, and it provides a context so the behavior is woven into the society in a way that maximizes the benefit and minimizes the harms, which is really the goal with all currently illegal drugs.
00:32:57 ►
It’s great to have your perspective from up here where Canada might be winning the race to a sane approach to cannabis.
00:33:06 ►
the race to a sane approach to cannabis. But cannabis is such a tricky one out of all the drugs because not only is it an intriguing industrial material, but it’s also a great
00:33:12 ►
intoxicant and a great spiritual medicine and also just a great medicine. And so the ways to
00:33:18 ►
regulate this where, yes, we want people to be able to access this to enjoy themselves, but it
00:33:22 ►
also needs to be as cheap a possible medicine for elderly patients when this is the best thing to heal them.
00:33:29 ►
And how to regulate that stuff, I just – it’s been really hard to see anybody who’s done a great job of it, even across the United States.
00:33:38 ►
But you also have been doing a lot of work here where Vancouver specifically is leading the way, and it’s in harm reduction.
00:33:46 ►
And I know that sometimes in the psychedelic world, people don’t know as much about the
00:33:50 ►
harm reduction side of things, which is a shame, and it’s why I’m going to be featuring
00:33:54 ►
more lectures and talks on here about harm reduction.
00:33:57 ►
But Vancouver is the epicenter of sane reaction to the drugs that would typically be called hard.
00:34:05 ►
There are two safe injection facilities here,
00:34:08 ►
the only two in North America that are legal,
00:34:10 ►
and there is such a humane reaction in general
00:34:14 ►
to people who are choosing to inject drugs for whatever reason.
00:34:18 ►
And so I’d be curious on your take of watching insight arise
00:34:23 ►
in these other harm reduction facilities up here.
00:34:25 ►
Well, the dialogue in Vancouver has included the voice of the users. So I think about why
00:34:35 ►
Insight was first started. There was a conference, a gathering, where a variety of people spoke and argued for it. And the people that spoke for it
00:34:48 ►
were health practitioners, specifically nurses, were present at that particular event.
00:34:55 ►
The drug-using group that is the downtown Eastside politically active group called VANDU,
00:35:01 ►
Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, that is the politically active voice
00:35:05 ►
of probably the most marginalized population in Vancouver, spoke loudly. Parents were present.
00:35:11 ►
In fact, there was a lawyer, he was a public prosecutor, and he got up on the stage and he said,
00:35:18 ►
while I spend my life prosecuting criminals, I don’t want my drug-using, my heroin-using son to die in the
00:35:25 ►
streets of the back alleys of Vancouver. I would like him to be able to access a supervised injection
00:35:30 ►
site. So we had parents stepping up, we had drug users stepping up, intravenous drug users, and we
00:35:38 ►
had healthcare practitioners stepping up to the plate. And what we’ve seen in Vancouver over the decades is the overdose death crisis
00:35:48 ►
comes and goes. We’re experiencing one now with fentanyl, absolutely, but it has happened before.
00:35:54 ►
And in fact, it comes and it goes. And it will, even if we did nothing, imagine that fentanyl
00:36:00 ►
crisis will subside and then it will come back. So we’ve watched this for many
00:36:06 ►
decades, is overdose death rates rise and fall. And so we really need to fundamentally approach
00:36:12 ►
it differently. And the variety of voices that came together to advocate for insight were strong.
00:36:19 ►
And politically, it was very interesting because we had a mayor, Mayor Philip Owen, who was a right-winged, moneyed politician.
00:36:31 ►
So he was the last person you would ever expect to step up to the podium and to support the creation of a supervised injection site.
00:36:39 ►
And what he said is, I need to do the right thing.
00:36:42 ►
And he just, he did something different.
00:36:44 ►
Every other mayor had stood on the corner of Main and he just, he did something different. Every other mayor
00:36:45 ►
had stood on the corner of Main and Hastings, which is the center of our open drug scene.
00:36:50 ►
And every other mayor before he arrived on the scene, when asked by the media, what are you going
00:36:56 ►
to do about this mess in your city? Every other mayor would blame a different level of government.
00:37:02 ►
And they’d say, I’m helpless. It’s somebody else’s problem. And Mayor Philip Owen said, no, it’s my problem. It’s my city. I’m going to try to address
00:37:10 ►
this. And he went over to Europe and he took some healthcare practitioners. He took a media person
00:37:16 ►
and he did a tour and he came back to Vancouver with a vision. And he basically said, we need to
00:37:23 ►
start a fundamentally different approach to drugs in our society. And he basically said, we need to start a fundamentally different approach
00:37:25 ►
to drugs in our society.
00:37:27 ►
And it wasn’t just supervised injection site.
00:37:29 ►
It was a large, it was bigger than that.
00:37:31 ►
It was about prescription of heroin.
00:37:33 ►
It was about providing services to active drug users
00:37:36 ►
that wasn’t based on abstinence.
00:37:38 ►
So it was the whole range of different services
00:37:41 ►
that he advocated for,
00:37:43 ►
which included supervised injection sites.
00:37:46 ►
They became the popular thing that the media took a hold of, but it was really within the context
00:37:51 ►
of providing a wide range of harm reduction services. And then he was booted out by his
00:37:59 ►
political party, his right-wing party, and then we had an election in our city. And the election
00:38:04 ►
was essentially fought around the issue of should we create a supervised injection site. And Larry
00:38:10 ►
Campbell, who was an RCMP officer who then turned into our city coroner and then wanted to be the
00:38:16 ►
city mayor, argued that we needed a supervised injection site, and he was a very charismatic individual, and he won. And so the citizens of
00:38:27 ►
Vancouver got behind Larry Campbell, and he said, we will open a supervised injection site, and lo
00:38:32 ►
and behold, he did. But there was some interesting politics there, because it was led by the city.
00:38:38 ►
Now, the city doesn’t have health money. The city doesn’t run any health services.
00:38:43 ►
So Larry, rather paradox paradoxically got up and
00:38:45 ►
said, we will open a supervised injection site. But he actually really meant, you know, I will
00:38:50 ►
leverage the people who have health money to create this service. But he couldn’t do it himself. He
00:38:57 ►
runs policing services. He doesn’t run health services. The city doesn’t run health. The
00:39:02 ►
province runs health. So it was an interesting little drama that happened is what you had was a city politician providing a vision for a health organization and the health organization got in line and then provided the service.
00:39:20 ►
Yeah.
00:39:21 ►
And it is.
00:39:31 ►
If anybody wants to look up the history of Insight and the activism of the users, it’s a beautiful story led by an activist poet who passed not too long ago. But it’s very inspiring about how much activism and sharing stories can really change the world.
00:39:37 ►
Well, it was a battle.
00:39:39 ►
We had a battle fought in Vancouver.
00:39:41 ►
The battle was captured in a film called The Fixed Story of an Addicted City by Nettie Wilde. And really, that film dramatically portrays the conflict between the two voices. And
00:39:54 ►
the two voices were manifest in the Van Du Group and the Chinese Downtown Business Association.
00:40:01 ►
So they spoke very loudly against each other, and Nettie Weil filmed it all.
00:40:07 ►
And it’s really interesting to go back and look at that film and see what the people who opposed
00:40:12 ►
Insight said, and then what the research demonstrated actually happened. Because all of
00:40:18 ►
the fear-based soundbites did not come true. You know, it’ll create a social disturbance, it’ll attract undesirable,
00:40:26 ►
it’ll send a wrong message to our children, it’ll create bad behavior. All of that,
00:40:32 ►
those fear-based soundbites that were predicted, none of it happened. So the fear-based soundbites
00:40:39 ►
of the drug prohibitionists clearly, from a view of the evidence, did not come true.
00:40:46 ►
prohibitionists, clearly from a view of the evidence, did not come true. They’ve been consistently wrong when they make predictions about ending drug prohibition or even creating
00:40:51 ►
new services. And the whole prohibitionist rhetoric is always not true when you look at it through the
00:41:00 ►
lens of science. And in this tough battle, what was the messaging strategies and the
00:41:07 ►
activism techniques that seemed to help the most to win the hearts and minds of the locals?
00:41:12 ►
We need to take care of our children. We need to take care of our children. Our children are dying.
00:41:19 ►
And if we allow our children to access a supervised injection site, they won’t die.
00:41:24 ►
our children to access a supervised injection site, they won’t die.
00:41:27 ►
That would work.
00:41:28 ►
That’s great.
00:41:35 ►
Because it is, just for those out there, if you’ve never been to Vancouver’s downtown east side, it is rather remarkable because it is more open drug use and a harder life
00:41:40 ►
than I’ve seen almost anywhere in public on this continent.
00:41:45 ►
a harder life than I’ve seen almost anywhere in public on this continent. On the flip side,
00:41:51 ►
there is a genuine sense of humanity going on. And I don’t know if it’s just because Canadians tend to be nicer people, but when they walk by the users on the street, there’s a little bit
00:41:55 ►
more acknowledgement of like, these people exist and they are there. They’re not my people,
00:41:59 ►
but I understand that they are people. And being around a place like New York, there is just such a chasm between us and them, it feels like.
00:42:08 ►
And things can be so hard right in front of you, and it gets ignored.
00:42:12 ►
And so all the people I know doing harm reduction in the United States, they say, we want to be like Vancouver.
00:42:17 ►
Right.
00:42:18 ►
Well, I think the voice, to some extent, there’s a variety of forces that have created that.
00:42:24 ►
But just thinking about it
00:42:26 ►
from a public health perspective, one of the public health variables that increases life expectancy
00:42:34 ►
is empowerment. If you want to track how long people live, one of the best ways to do that is
00:42:42 ►
to look at the sense of power and control people have in their lives. So a public health intervention is empowerment. So the role that Vandu has played,
00:42:54 ►
the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, the voice of the marginalized people in our city,
00:42:58 ►
the voice of the injection drug using community, is, one can argue, is a public health intervention.
00:43:04 ►
The more they are included, the more
00:43:06 ►
their voice is heard, the more they’re allowed to speak loudly on the podium, the healthier they
00:43:12 ►
will be as a community. And certainly they’ve been speaking loudly for their needs and they’ve
00:43:17 ►
been listened to. And so they are part of the dialogue in Vancouver and they advocate for their
00:43:22 ►
own needs very clearly and they’ve done it skillfully.
00:43:30 ►
Wow, that’s a beautiful idea. Just giving people a platform is a way to give them health.
00:43:35 ►
And it’s interesting. I know the woman who started it, well, Anne Livingston is a bit of a hero of mine, and she began the organization. And so to work with, honestly, a mentally ill,
00:43:50 ►
So to work with, honestly, a mentally ill, marginalized, intravenous drug using, physically unwell population is really challenging.
00:43:52 ►
And Anne did it incredibly skillfully.
00:43:56 ►
And she really brought people into a place of community.
00:43:58 ►
And she allowed them a voice.
00:44:04 ►
And then she would say things like, you know, if you want to have power, if you want to speak, you need to learn how to do it on the podium. So she would train people with speaking skills, you know, and she would bring people
00:44:08 ►
together and they created a board. And then she would say, well, if we want to function as a board,
00:44:11 ►
we have to be able to function as a bureaucracy, which is what they are. So they need to be trained
00:44:17 ►
in terms of how you communicate around the boardroom table. So they have communication
00:44:22 ►
skills and then they have to write because they have to document what their issues are. So then they have to have writing
00:44:28 ►
skills. And so it was quite interesting to me to hear, you know, I worked in the addiction services
00:44:34 ►
and occasionally a client would wind up in my office. And what he would say is,
00:44:39 ►
I found recovery through Van Du. You know, I found healing in Vandu.
00:44:46 ►
Now, Vandu is not a treatment organization.
00:44:48 ►
It’s a politically active group.
00:44:50 ►
And so when people talk about it being a healing for them,
00:44:54 ►
it makes sense to me.
00:44:55 ►
It’s not set up to be a healing organization,
00:44:58 ►
but the outcome of empowering people is profoundly healing.
00:45:02 ►
Community is the way to treat the hole that drugs are trying to fill.
00:45:06 ►
Yes, absolutely.
00:45:08 ►
And so one thing I definitely want to ask about,
00:45:10 ►
you have some exciting stuff coming up here with MAPS Canada
00:45:12 ►
and the research and crowdfunding.
00:45:15 ►
We do.
00:45:16 ►
We just kicked off a crowdfunding campaign.
00:45:18 ►
We finished our stage two clinical trial for a psychedelic to become legal in Canada. Within the context of health, we need to do a stage one, two, and three clinical trial for a for a psychedelic to become legal in canada within the context of
00:45:26 ►
health we need to do a stage one two and three clinical trial we finished our stage two and now
00:45:31 ►
we’re just kicking off our stage three when we finish our stage three clinical trial mdma assisted
00:45:36 ►
psychotherapy will be legal in canada and so we need to fund it you can’t do these things on the cheap. It has to be rigorous science with the
00:45:46 ►
oversight of Health Canada. And the only way to fund it is by the people. Large pharmaceutical
00:45:52 ►
companies will never support what we’re doing because, quite frankly, we’re taking people off
00:45:55 ►
of mental health medications. And we only give MDMA three times. So there’s no business model.
00:46:05 ►
Nobody’s going to make any money on this.
00:46:06 ►
In fact, large pharmaceutical companies
00:46:08 ►
will not do well from what we’re doing.
00:46:10 ►
So therefore, we have to appeal to the people.
00:46:14 ►
And so what we’re doing is
00:46:15 ►
we’re launching a crowdfunding campaign,
00:46:17 ►
and we’re asking everybody to both spread the word
00:46:20 ►
as widely as we can and to contribute.
00:46:24 ►
And it doesn’t matter what you contribute.
00:46:26 ►
Some people contribute lots
00:46:27 ►
and some people contribute a little bit.
00:46:28 ►
If everybody contributes something,
00:46:30 ►
we’ll be able to fund this thing
00:46:32 ►
and we will legalize MDMA-assisted psychotherapy
00:46:35 ►
for post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:46:37 ►
And if you go to the mapscanada.org site,
00:46:41 ►
you’ll see the Donate Now button.
00:46:44 ►
And that’s all it takes.
00:46:46 ►
That is all it takes.
00:46:47 ►
I encourage anyone out there to give this campaign because it is a powerhouse of a drug
00:46:51 ►
for trauma in all of these different ways.
00:46:54 ►
And a last question concerning that, how would you most like to see the model for MDMA specifically,
00:47:01 ►
since that seems to be the first one that will be rolling out?
00:47:04 ►
Again, if you were put in charge of the health bureaucracy of Canada?
00:47:09 ►
Well, I’m going to gaze firmly into my crystal ball and make a prediction. So I believe what
00:47:15 ►
will happen is we will demonstrate that it is effective in the treatment of post-traumatic
00:47:20 ►
stress disorder. And so the government will look at that and say, yes, we will give you the authority to use this.
00:47:30 ►
We’ll apply for special access to do it quickly.
00:47:32 ►
We’ll start to open clinics.
00:47:34 ►
And we’ll hire a bunch of therapists,
00:47:36 ►
and we’ll be providing MDMA-assisted psychotherapy
00:47:38 ►
for post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:47:40 ►
And who we’ll be treating will be soldiers and police
00:47:43 ►
and fire and ambulance first responders, who are, generally speaking, a highly traumatized population. And so the public will see that we’re using a psychedelic to treat people. And all of the old fear-based prohibitionist soundbites of, you know, bad people use bad drugs, will suddenly be clearly untrue. You know, this is something, a new model is being
00:48:06 ►
developed here. And so if they lied to us about cannabis, and it doesn’t seem to be a great
00:48:14 ►
problem now that cannabis is legalized, and they’ve lied to us about MDMA, so maybe we really
00:48:19 ►
need to rethink psychedelics. And I think at the end of the day, what we will do is we will say we
00:48:25 ►
need to bring psychedelics into a public health paradigm, into a spiritual paradigm, and to a
00:48:31 ►
ritualistic paradigm. And our society will have access to these medicines to improve both our
00:48:37 ►
health and our spirituality. I like your crystal ball. Thanks so much, Mark. You’re welcome.
00:48:41 ►
I like your crystal ball.
00:48:42 ►
Thanks so much, Mark.
00:48:43 ►
You’re welcome.
00:48:51 ►
Thanks again for listening to Symposia on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:48:52 ►
Do us a favor.
00:48:55 ►
Go to iTunes or Stitcher and leave a rating or review.
00:48:56 ►
Tell your friends.
00:48:58 ►
That’s how you can really help us out.
00:49:02 ►
Thanks to Matt Payne, who engineered the sound,
00:49:04 ►
Joey Witt for the intro music,
00:49:06 ►
California Smile for the outro music,
00:49:08 ►
and Brian Norman who produced the show.