Program Notes
Guest speaker: Mitchell Gomez
https://dancesafe.org/Date this lecture was recorded: 2017
Mitchell Gomez of DanceSafe walks us through what is happening with drugs in the wild and what his organization is doing to reduced harm at festivals, parties and other psychoactive gatherings of the tribe.
On the street today, MDMA is strong, ketamine is cut, and fentanyl is everywhere. Mitchell also explains more about DanceSafe’s drug education, harm reduction and reagent testing services.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon
00:00:22 ►
2.0.
00:00:24 ►
And today the good people at Symposia
00:00:27 ►
are bringing to us an interview with Mitchell Gomez, who is the executive director of DanceSafe.
00:00:33 ►
You may remember that in February of 2016, I podcast an interview with Emmanuel Sefras,
00:00:39 ►
who founded DanceSafe in 1998 and who spoke spoke about the then-new movie about MDMA,
00:00:46 ►
or Ecstasy as it was originally called in the street.
00:00:49 ►
A lot has happened since then, particularly in the realm of new drugs and new safety concerns
00:00:55 ►
with parties both large and small.
00:00:58 ►
As you know, DanceSafe has two fundamental operating principles,
00:01:02 ►
harm reduction and peer-based popular education.
00:01:06 ►
So now let’s join Lex Pelger and Mitchell Gomez as he brings us up to date with some of the latest information from the world of festivals, parties, and other psychedelic gatherings.
00:01:18 ►
Today’s show is made possible through your crowdfunded support on Patreon.
00:01:22 ►
Unlike other crowdfunding sites, Patreon lets you chip in a few bucks a month
00:01:26 ►
to help us keep the lights on.
00:01:28 ►
Find out more at patreon.com slash symposia.
00:01:50 ►
I’m Lex Pelger, and this is Symposia on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:02:01 ►
Mitchell Gomez is doing more to help keep young people safe than any anti-drug program in the entire United States of America.
00:02:04 ►
He is the executive director of Dance Safe. They are the
00:02:05 ►
boots-on-the-ground group who does drug education at festivals, harm reduction at parties, and
00:02:10 ►
reagent testing of drugs at any venue with a promoter compassionate enough to allow them to do
00:02:15 ►
it. They’re even now testing for fentanyl. Mitchell Gomez and I appeared again on the
00:02:20 ►
Tipper stage in Florida recently. You’ll hear that on the next Thursday segment of this show.
00:02:25 ►
Because of that meeting, we decided to sit down
00:02:27 ►
for an update of psychoactives out there in the wild.
00:02:31 ►
And one last piece of news
00:02:32 ►
to help explain my rather erratic movements lately
00:02:35 ►
and my quick decision to flee New York City.
00:02:38 ►
It’s actually all good news,
00:02:40 ►
and I can finally share it with you.
00:02:42 ►
My girlfriend Claire is pregnant with a baby girl.
00:02:46 ►
That’s why I’m moving to Boulder
00:02:46 ►
and it’s why I’m soon going to be a proud papa.
00:02:50 ►
So now the real trip begins.
00:02:53 ►
But until then, here’s the always wonderful Mitchell Gomez.
00:03:02 ►
I’m pleased to be here with Mitchell Gomez,
00:03:04 ►
the executive director of DanceSafe. Great to be here, Lex. People, the executive director of DanceSafe.
00:03:06 ►
Great to be here, Lex.
00:03:08 ►
People might not have heard of DanceSafe.
00:03:09 ►
What is a typical offering that you would do at a festival for harm reduction?
00:03:16 ►
Yeah, so we always try to work with promoters.
00:03:19 ►
We try to make sure that our services are tailored to whatever their particular comfort level is.
00:03:24 ►
And that often depends on geographical location.
00:03:28 ►
Some promoters are okay with certain things we do at certain sites
00:03:32 ►
and are not okay with things we do at other sites.
00:03:35 ►
So it’s not always about the promoter.
00:03:37 ►
Sometimes it’s about the venue as well.
00:03:40 ►
But we always try to come in with a proposal that encompasses all of what we do.
00:03:46 ►
So we try to come in and say we want to give out free water.
00:03:48 ►
We want to give out free earplugs.
00:03:50 ►
We want to give out free condoms.
00:03:51 ►
We want to give out this entire body of health information literature that we’ve developed, a lot of it dealing with drugs, but some of it also dealing with things like heat stroke, things like sunburn, sexual health, affirmative consent,
00:04:06 ►
knowing your rights.
00:04:08 ►
We always try to push for having test kits on site or being able to do on-site testing.
00:04:15 ►
That is something that a lot of promoters are uncomfortable with and something that
00:04:19 ►
we’re always happy not to do if a promoter isn’t comfortable with either of those things,
00:04:24 ►
although we do approach them separately. I think that having test kits on site and doing on-site testing are separate
00:04:29 ►
issues, so we do always approach those separately. And then we sort of work with the promoter to
00:04:35 ►
figure out what they’re comfortable with, what local law enforcement might be comfortable with,
00:04:39 ►
what the venue owners might be comfortable with. And then often the hardest piece of the puzzle is what the promoter’s
00:04:46 ►
attorney might be comfortable with. So those are generally the cooks in the kitchen. And we try to
00:04:52 ►
come to a place that everybody is comfortable, everybody is happy that we’re there. The only
00:04:59 ►
thing that DanceSafe as a sort of general rule will not negotiate on is providing free water. If a promoter asks us
00:05:08 ►
not to give out free water because they are trying to increase their water bottle sales,
00:05:14 ►
that tells me a lot about that promoter. It tells me a lot of things that I don’t really
00:05:18 ►
think are appropriate. And there’s real liability for being involved in an event that is not providing free water.
00:05:27 ►
And so that’s the one that we, we generally won’t negotiate on.
00:05:31 ►
Um, that’s a good line in the sand.
00:05:34 ►
Yeah.
00:05:34 ►
Yeah.
00:05:34 ►
That’s, that’s, and we, and we do run up against that a couple of times a year, a couple of
00:05:37 ►
times a year, we have promoters who reach out about having dance safe on site and they
00:05:42 ►
don’t want us to provide free water.
00:05:44 ►
And occasionally that ends up being a deal breaker.
00:05:46 ►
But for me, that’s a deal breaker.
00:05:49 ►
But other than that, everything is up for negotiations.
00:05:52 ►
We’ve had events where we submit all of our information to the promoter,
00:05:58 ►
sometimes months in advance.
00:06:01 ►
Their medical director looks at it, their attorney looks at it, the venue looks at it,
00:06:06 ►
and sometimes they’ll even ask us to pull specific pieces of literature.
00:06:10 ►
And that’s something that I always push back on. I always try to have it be a conversation and have
00:06:15 ►
it be a dialogue. But in the end, if there’s something on a piece of literature that they’re
00:06:20 ►
really not comfortable with, I’m willing to not have that piece of literature out.
00:06:26 ►
The heroin card in particular is often a point of contention, mostly because it talks about
00:06:34 ►
how to clean needles.
00:06:37 ►
It talks about how to clean a rig so that you don’t spread sexually transmitted diseases,
00:06:41 ►
but it is instructions on preparing drug consumption.
00:06:47 ►
And so that’s one that attorneys are often uncomfortable with.
00:06:50 ►
What do people tend to be most interested in of all this drug information and sex information
00:06:54 ►
and harm reduction information that you’re providing?
00:06:57 ►
What really sparks on the attendees?
00:06:59 ►
Well, interestingly, when we’re not doing testing, that is always the most asked question,
00:07:04 ►
right? People see DanceSafe, they come up, they say, hey, are we’re not doing testing, that is always the most asked question, right?
00:07:05 ►
People see DanceSafe, they come up, they say, hey, are you guys doing testing?
00:07:09 ►
That’s always the big question.
00:07:11 ►
Often that’s always the big question because we’re at these huge events that in people’s minds there’s no way that DanceSafe could be on site.
00:07:20 ►
So they see us and they’re really confused about how we’re there.
00:07:23 ►
And the reason we’re able to be there is that we’re always willing to negotiate on our services. So like
00:07:29 ►
in an event like Tomorrow World, you know, this is a, you know, what, 60, 70,000 person event in
00:07:34 ►
terms of turnstile turns, owned by, you know, multinational, multi-million dollar entertainment companies. So in an event like that, we often got asked, you know,
00:07:48 ►
maybe 100, 200 times a night if we were doing on-site testing,
00:07:52 ►
which is frustrating to have to tell them that we’re not doing it.
00:07:58 ►
Thankfully, there are other organizations out there that don’t ask for permission to be on-site.
00:08:04 ►
They just set up and renegade Venn test kits.
00:08:07 ►
And we always make sure to let them know when we’re not going to be doing on-site testing
00:08:13 ►
at an event, and they make sure to try to be there.
00:08:16 ►
So, I mean, they try to be everywhere.
00:08:18 ►
You know, they have independent sellers, so there’s a lot of independent test kit sellers
00:08:21 ►
out there.
00:08:23 ►
We also sell our test kits wholesale online.
00:08:27 ►
And so people can even buy our test kits wholesale, and they can do that with our kits as well.
00:08:32 ►
So that’s a word of the wise for all of you renegade harm reductionists out there who might want to be the test kit slinger at one of these events.
00:08:40 ►
That would be a great way to do on-the-ground harm reduction if you could, if DanSafe is allowed to do testing there.
00:08:48 ►
Now, what would – if the world were sane and you were at – in Portugal at the Boom Festival where testing is legal, what would an ideal testing setup look like for you at a festival where people are doing lots of drugs from lots of perhaps unknown sources?
00:09:02 ►
Yeah.
00:09:03 ►
So I think there’s a lot of important components to this.
00:09:07 ►
The first is making sure that everybody knows that we’re there
00:09:10 ►
and that you can utilize these services.
00:09:12 ►
A lot of times when you explain what DanSafe does to people,
00:09:15 ►
especially in an event where we are doing testing,
00:09:18 ►
if they’ve never heard of it before,
00:09:20 ►
they’re very confused about how this is happening.
00:09:24 ►
Sometimes they’re paranoid that maybe
00:09:25 ►
this is a law enforcement honeypot. And so making sure that people know that we’re there,
00:09:31 ►
knowing what we do, and knowing that we’ve been doing this for 20 years. We’re not some new
00:09:36 ►
organization that’s just popping up and maybe there’s some questionable things going on.
00:09:41 ►
We’ve been doing on-site testing for nearly 20 years now.
00:09:49 ►
In 20 years, no volunteer has ever gotten in trouble for doing on-site testing.
00:09:53 ►
No promoter has ever gotten in trouble for having DanceSafe on-site.
00:09:57 ►
And no patron of our services has ever been arrested because of coming to the booth.
00:10:10 ►
So that’s important to know that this is something that we’ve been doing for a very long time. And even at events where we’re doing testing, a casual person walking past the booth and looking in is never going to see a person holding a baggie. We do it in a way that it’s very discreet. It’s very easy to ignore.
00:10:17 ►
Even if law enforcement is sort of unofficially supportive of what we’re doing, we don’t want to
00:10:22 ►
throw anything in their faces where they feel like they have to do something about it. And so we make sure that if a person’s
00:10:29 ►
walking by the booth, they’re never going to see this process happening. Now, in a world where
00:10:34 ►
these legal issues were not a concern, where we could really do it right, giant signs explaining
00:10:41 ►
what we’re doing, I think the testing would actually be divided into three separate components. The first would be reagent testing, because even if you have a GCMS box
00:10:49 ►
truck, which is part number three of this, even if you have an analytical lab on site,
00:10:55 ►
reagent checking can still give you information that you’re not going to get other ways. And so
00:11:00 ►
I think that’s really important to do reagent checking first. Can you describe those two systems briefly?
00:11:06 ►
Yes.
00:11:07 ►
So the three systems I would ideally like to have would be reagent checking, FTIR, and then a GCMS setup, which would require really a box truck.
00:11:18 ►
So the reagent checking are chemicals that you get in little droppers.
00:11:23 ►
They’re liquids.
00:11:24 ►
You take just a few milligrams
00:11:26 ►
of a sample. It’s a very, very tiny amount. Drop the reagent on it, and then you get a color
00:11:32 ►
reaction from that reagent. And you compare those color reactions against charts that have been
00:11:37 ►
developed of known reactions. So if it matches all of your reagents, that means that the sample does have that substance in it, or at least a substance very like it.
00:11:49 ►
There’s stereoisomers that reagent checking can’t differentiate, but those are generally not a concern.
00:11:55 ►
It tells you the primary composition.
00:11:58 ►
The next thing would be an FTIR.
00:12:00 ►
So that’s Fourier Transformer Infrared Spectroscopy.
00:12:03 ►
The one I really want is made
00:12:05 ►
by a company called Bruker. It’s a device called the Bruker Alpha. There’s a library that was
00:12:11 ►
developed by a company called Tic Tac in the UK that has literally thousands of known new
00:12:17 ►
psychoactive substances. Thousands. And so this allows you to identify everything in a sample, including cutting agents,
00:12:29 ►
as long as there’s a known match. If they have a match for it in the library, it tells you what it
00:12:34 ►
is. Then the GCMS gas chromatography mass spec would be something you would have to build into
00:12:40 ►
a truck. It really requires a sort of more sterile laboratory environment.
00:12:50 ►
And that would be for samples that don’t match anything in the FTIR database.
00:12:52 ►
You could then run GCMS.
00:13:01 ►
You would have to have a chemist on site who is trained in structural elucidation, which is the process of looking at this raw data and figuring out what that sample is.
00:13:05 ►
So you would probably really only be using that a few times a night,
00:13:11 ►
but it also tells you percentages. So if you had a sample on the FTIR that reacted as both MDMA and methamphetamine, and you wanted to be able to get what percentage it was,
00:13:19 ►
you could also run that through the GCMS and it would tell you the percentages.
00:13:23 ►
So then after you identify the sample, you take a photograph of the original sample.
00:13:27 ►
That’s particularly useful when dealing with press pills or blotter that has ink on it.
00:13:33 ►
Load it into your computer, do a printout of what testing was done and what the results
00:13:38 ►
were, print that out and post it on the side of the truck.
00:13:41 ►
I mean, in an ideal world, if you have things that are incredibly problematic,
00:13:47 ►
you have samples of, let’s say, cocaine
00:13:49 ►
that were cut with fentanyl,
00:13:50 ►
you would really want a way to push that out
00:13:52 ►
either via social media,
00:13:55 ►
the festivals often have their own internal apps now,
00:13:59 ►
or printing out hundreds of copies of these things
00:14:02 ►
and widely distributing them within the festival itself.
00:14:06 ►
So that’s what drug checking looks like in an ideal world.
00:14:10 ►
Wow, if the world were sane.
00:14:12 ►
So if any partiers out there have deep pockets, buy an infrared checker from Brugger for this guy.
00:14:19 ►
Yeah, we’re probably going to be doing some fundraising around that later this year.
00:14:24 ►
Yeah, we’re probably going to be doing some fundraising around that later this year.
00:14:33 ►
It’s in the neighborhood of $60,000, but that comes with some upgraded optics and casing for using it in the field.
00:14:37 ►
And that also comes with a warranty and the database that we need.
00:14:45 ►
So all said and done, $60,000 I feel is not an outrageous amount of money to be able to provide that much more specificity in terms of giving people answers about what it is they’re consuming.
00:14:48 ►
Because the reality is with reagent drug checking, far too often what we can tell a person is
00:14:55 ►
this is definitely not what you thought it was, but we can’t give them any more information
00:15:00 ►
than that.
00:15:01 ►
And so that’s a difficult answer to give somebody is that,
00:15:05 ►
you know, this is not MDMA. It’s also not, you know, methadone, ethylene, butylone,
00:15:10 ►
alpha-pyroben. We can give them a long list of what it’s not, but we can’t tell them what it is.
00:15:17 ►
And I hate giving that answer. And unfortunately, it’s an answer that we give more and more every year as the release date of new psychoactive substances.
00:15:28 ►
The life cycle where an NPS comes out, it starts to get popular.
00:15:34 ►
Yeah, new psychoactive substance.
00:15:36 ►
Sorry.
00:15:36 ►
So a new drug is released.
00:15:40 ►
Generally, these are synthesized either in China or India.
00:15:44 ►
They often show up on the dark web a few months before they show up on the clear web.
00:15:49 ►
But because these things aren’t illegal, there’s often a brief time period when you can order them on a regular website using your credit card.
00:15:58 ►
And then these things become popular.
00:16:01 ►
There’s usually one or two media scares around them.
00:16:07 ►
The DEA gets interested in it. They emergency schedule it. And then usually Congress follows up six months later and permanently
00:16:13 ►
schedules them. The speed at which that process is happening has actually been getting faster and
00:16:18 ►
faster and faster. So it used to be that a new sample would come out, a new substance would come
00:16:22 ►
out. Sometimes we would have years, sometimes decades.
00:16:26 ►
You know, 5-MeO DMT was popular for a very long time before it was emergency scheduled in 2010.
00:16:34 ►
Now these cycles are getting faster, which means we have new drugs being released at a faster rate.
00:16:42 ►
And so it’s harder and harder to know what the reagent reactions are
00:16:46 ►
going to be, what the health risks might be, what combinations of these drugs might do in terms of
00:16:53 ►
pharmacological effect or psychological. And so it used to be that we had a few years to figure
00:16:59 ►
these things out before the DEA got interested, made them illegal, and then the next ones got released.
00:17:11 ►
Now, because the cycles are so short, all of those problems have been amplified by the speed at which these things are being released.
00:17:13 ►
Mary, you’re around faster and faster.
00:17:16 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:17:16 ►
It’s a pharmacological whack-a-mole is the game. And the reality is that we – before Dr. Shulgin passed away, he released his two published books and there were some unpublished notes.
00:17:46 ►
psychoactive substances that could be created just by doing simple substitutions on molecules that we know have an effect on human consciousness when you consume them.
00:17:51 ►
We’re talking about tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands of drugs that you
00:17:55 ►
could make just going off of today’s technology and today’s known psychoactive drugs.
00:18:02 ►
Very few people have started working on any of the salvinorid analogs.
00:18:06 ►
So that’s a whole family with a lot of different places that you could do theoretical substitutions
00:18:11 ►
on. We’re just now starting to see more of the true LSD analogs. So things like 2,5-I-N-BOM,
00:18:19 ►
those are actually pharmacologically closer to chocolate than they are to LSD.
00:18:23 ►
But now we’re actually starting to see things like 1P-LSD, LSZ, LSM.
00:18:28 ►
So we’re starting to see more of the true LSD analogs, but that’s another big family that we’re just sort of just now scratching the surface on.
00:18:37 ►
The same thing with the PCP analogs, which often experientially are very close to ketamine.
00:18:43 ►
So we’re starting to see more and more PCP analogs.
00:18:47 ►
We’re starting to see more and more ketamine analogs like deschloroketamine.
00:18:51 ►
And so we’re starting to see more of these things at a faster rate.
00:18:56 ►
And as quickly as you could possibly outlaw them, there’s already, like I said, tens of thousands that we know are probably psychoactive.
00:19:06 ►
And so it’s not really a game that you can win in the way that the U.S. has been trying to play it.
00:19:13 ►
For the latest cycle, what about this summer?
00:19:16 ►
What’s been the interesting trends you’ve been observing at the start of this festival season?
00:19:21 ►
Yeah, so we’ve been seeing more and more samples of MDMA
00:19:26 ►
that are actually MDMA.
00:19:28 ►
That’s nice.
00:19:30 ►
Yeah, there is a new
00:19:32 ►
synthesis route that was developed
00:19:34 ►
in Europe a few years ago that was
00:19:36 ►
rather than keep it proprietary,
00:19:38 ►
the synthesis was actually published
00:19:40 ►
by the people who discovered it
00:19:41 ►
on sort of
00:19:44 ►
drug chemistry forums.
00:19:46 ►
They clearly wanted there to be more MDMA available.
00:19:50 ►
They were not interested in making as much money as they could.
00:19:53 ►
They were more interested in fixing the problems of misrepresentation within the markets.
00:19:58 ►
About the guy wanting to give back on the formula.
00:20:00 ►
I love that kind of stuff.
00:20:01 ►
You know, you can see it on the dark web dealers, too too where it’s just like, oh, you’re a good soul.
00:20:05 ►
I can tell.
00:20:06 ►
You never get to meet you.
00:20:07 ►
Right, right.
00:20:08 ►
Clearly a lot of these guys – I mean these guys are running a business, but they’re also – that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily this sort of cutthroat, this sort of stereotypical.
00:20:17 ►
When people think of a drug kingpin, they think of the guys sitting in the jungle somewhere with their machetes and machine guns.
00:20:23 ►
sitting in the jungle somewhere with their machetes and machine guns.
00:20:32 ►
But with the advent of the dark web, we’ve really – it’s a way that is – it’s a type of dealing that’s really removed a lot of the potential violence from the market.
00:20:34 ►
And that’s a real dynamic.
00:20:38 ►
That’s a real thing and it’s not one that we should shy away from talking about.
00:20:49 ►
The Silk Web – or Silk Road, sorry, the Silk Road arrest, he actually tried to argue that he had developed Silk Road as a means of harm reduction.
00:20:51 ►
His argument along that was undercut a bit by some of the other things he did.
00:20:56 ►
And there’s some question about whether or not he actually, if they actually got the
00:20:58 ►
right guy for that.
00:20:59 ►
So that’s a separate question.
00:21:02 ►
But you do see people talking about the dark web in that way and it really does seem to operate that way.
00:21:08 ►
When people are leaving star rating reviews for their drug dealers that are available for the public – not the public, but for other purchasers to see, it does change the dynamic of how drug dealers operate.
00:21:25 ►
I think that’s a positive effect on the market.
00:21:29 ►
I think that’s part of why we’ve been seeing more and more real MDMA.
00:21:33 ►
And like I said, this group developed a new method of production.
00:21:40 ►
It’s using a precursor called PMK glycinate that doesn’t require saffron oil.
00:21:47 ►
And so that’s also been cutting down on the deforestation in Cambodia that was being driven in large part by MDMA production.
00:21:55 ►
MDMA production was responsible for a lot of the deforestation that was happening in Southeast Asia as people were just desperate to get their hands on
00:22:05 ►
saffron oil.
00:22:07 ►
And now we have a precursor that doesn’t require that.
00:22:09 ►
And it’s a precursor that, like I said, they – rather than keep it proprietary,
00:22:17 ►
they published how to turn PMK glycinate into PMK.
00:22:22 ►
From PMK, you can go to pipernol, then from pipernol to MDA.
00:22:25 ►
And then MDA to MDMA is a sort of trivial process.
00:22:30 ►
And so this has been responsible, I think,
00:22:33 ►
for the change in the marketplace.
00:22:35 ►
At some events now, we’re seeing upwards of 80%
00:22:38 ►
of what we test as MDMA is MDMA.
00:22:40 ►
Wow.
00:22:42 ►
Yeah, yeah.
00:22:43 ►
For a long time, that number almost never broke 50%.
00:22:46 ►
Yeah.
00:22:48 ►
They also have been,
00:22:49 ►
these European groups have been producing pills that are orders of magnitude
00:22:56 ►
more sophisticated than the historical sort of,
00:23:00 ►
you know,
00:23:00 ►
home pressed MDMA pills.
00:23:02 ►
So they’re extremely difficult to counterfeit.
00:23:05 ►
They’ll often be one color on one side and a different color on the other side.
00:23:10 ►
They’re pressed as hard as any pharmaceutical tablet that you would ever see.
00:23:15 ►
Sometimes they’re coated in a UV reactive coating.
00:23:19 ►
It’s not like just buying a star press.
00:23:24 ►
You can get a cheap pill press you can get on eBay now.
00:23:28 ►
It’s not like you just go buy a star press on eBay and you’re able to counterfeit them super easily.
00:23:34 ►
These are not round.
00:23:36 ►
They’re often different shapes.
00:23:37 ►
There’s been dominoes, Red Bull logos.
00:23:41 ►
Part of the problem with these pills is that they’re usually pressed as two pills.
00:23:46 ►
So they’re scored down the back and they’re pressed in the neighborhood of 210 to we’ve
00:23:50 ►
seen as high as 400 milligrams of MDMA in a pill.
00:23:55 ►
Right.
00:23:56 ►
So and the reason this is being done is in a lot of European countries, if you have less
00:23:59 ►
than either five or 10 pills in your pocket, it’s a civil infraction, not a criminal infraction.
00:24:07 ►
So if you press your pills at 200 milligrams and the country you’re in allows you to have five in your pocket,
00:24:13 ►
that functionally doubles the number of doses you can carry without risking arrest.
00:24:18 ►
Wow, prohibition driving the rat race again.
00:24:21 ►
Yeah, yeah.
00:24:23 ►
And so that’s why we’re seeing these and the messaging does not
00:24:26 ►
always travel with the press uh they’re extremely inexpensive particularly in europe and so the
00:24:34 ►
problem is somebody pays uh you know 15 or 20 dollars for a pill and they assume that that must
00:24:40 ►
be one dose right so the the because md is so inexpensive in Europe now, the retail price on these pills, even
00:24:49 ►
when they reach the US, is often comparable to what people are used to paying for pills.
00:24:55 ►
And so people assume when they pay, you know, 8, 10, 15, 20, whatever they’re paying for
00:25:02 ►
their pills, they assume that when they buy a pill
00:25:05 ►
that’s within this sort of normal price range, that it must be a single dose.
00:25:10 ►
And if you’re used to getting pills that are pressed at 70 milligrams, which for a lot
00:25:15 ►
of US produced pills is totally normal.
00:25:18 ►
So people will start with two, maybe they’ll take a third an hour in.
00:25:21 ►
And if you got sold a pill that’s 250 or 300 milligrams and you pop two of them and then wait 10 minutes and pop a third and you’re now approaching a gram of MDMA being consumed at one time, that’s a dose that is potentially very problematic in terms of what’s going to happen, not just psychologically, but physiologically. That’s a dose that vastly increases your risk of heat stroke.
00:25:50 ►
If you have pre-existing heart conditions, you’re probably approaching a very dangerous
00:25:54 ►
place in terms of blood pressure and heart rate.
00:25:57 ►
And a lot of people don’t know they have pre-existing heart conditions.
00:26:00 ►
We’ve had not a huge number, but a fair number of deaths over the years where people took MDMA in relatively normal recreational doses and ended up dying from an undiagnosed heart condition that they didn’t know they had.
00:26:17 ►
Wow. Yeah. Apparently for young people, that’s one of the biggest unseen killers is a genetic heart condition that you just don’t see until your heart gets stressed. And just so people know, generally in like a medical supervised setting,
00:26:29 ►
125 milligrams of pure MDMA would be a pretty standard medical dose. You might go as high as
00:26:35 ►
- So on the street, you might get half of that. But he’s saying that you could get three to four
00:26:40 ►
times that with a regular pill if it is dosed as high as it can go.
00:26:45 ►
We’ve started to see a lot of pills that are in the 250 to 300 range and a handful
00:26:51 ►
that are even over that.
00:26:53 ►
And those are often scored twice.
00:26:55 ►
So I think those 400-ish milligram presses are actually meant to be broken into quarters.
00:27:01 ►
So now if you’re in a country where you can legally carry 10 pills and you have 10 of
00:27:05 ►
those in your pocket, that’s actually enough that a person is probably conducting business.
00:27:10 ►
They’re probably selling these. But they’ve now pressed them at such a high dose that you can
00:27:16 ►
walk around with 40 doses of MDMA in your pocket and you’re really only risking a civil infraction.
00:27:21 ►
You’re risking a ticket. And so it’s really changed the dynamic
00:27:25 ►
by these countries creating, instead of creating a dosage unit or milligram limit that they would
00:27:33 ►
have on possession, they just said, oh, we’re just going to say less than five pills. And so that
00:27:39 ►
really encouraged these groups. That’s my theory anyway. I’ve never gotten to talk with any of the people running these high-quality, large-scale pill presses, but it’s an explanation that makes
00:27:50 ►
sense to me. There’s not a lot of financial reason that you would press 400 milligrams of MDMA into
00:27:56 ►
a single pill. There’s just no financial reason to do that. But we’ve now reached a point where the retail price on MDMA in the Netherlands is now under $20 a gram.
00:28:09 ►
That’s retail, not wholesale.
00:28:12 ►
Right.
00:28:34 ►
the production tends to be clustered, is now so low because of this new precursor that the price on retail pills in Europe has been completely crashed.
00:28:36 ►
And I think we’re going to start seeing that in the U.S. as well.
00:28:40 ►
So more safety, more actual MDMA out there.
00:28:43 ►
And not to say that MDMA is a safe drug at those incredibly high doses.
00:28:49 ►
It’s not. It’s too bad when stoner is represented as so damn safe because, you know.
00:28:50 ►
Yeah, I agree.
00:28:57 ►
You know, killing yourself from a purely pharmacological effect of MDMA is possible but unlikely.
00:29:08 ►
The problem is that even at recreational doses, it impacts your ability to thermoregulate. And so when you have MDMA consumption clustered at events that are being held outdoors in the summer, there are real risks there.
00:29:11 ►
I mean, we shouldn’t shy away from that.
00:29:13 ►
We shouldn’t ever be afraid to say that there are real risks to drug consumption, even for
00:29:20 ►
drugs that have a reputation for being very safe, like MDMA.
00:29:24 ►
And that’s sort of the weird tightrope that DanceSafe walks,
00:29:26 ►
is that from non-drug users, we’re often accused of somehow being promotional.
00:29:33 ►
I think part of that is that when you’ve been raised in a society that lies so often about drugs,
00:29:39 ►
that being honest about the relative risk of drugs to other things that humans do
00:29:43 ►
does actually come across as promotional. But the fact is, if you have crushed up powder in a pill and you’re feeding
00:29:50 ►
it to a stranger, statistically, you’re far more likely to kill somebody if you give them crushed
00:29:55 ►
up peanuts in a capsule than crushed up MDMA. That’s just statistically true. And we shouldn’t
00:30:02 ►
lie about that either. But taking MDMA in a hot environment
00:30:06 ►
is certainly a good way to increase your risk of heat stroke. And even taking MDMA in a cool
00:30:14 ►
environment, we do have a handful of deaths that have occurred from recreational doses in cool
00:30:20 ►
environments and we don’t really know why. It’s a small number. It’s somewhere between 5 and
00:30:25 ►
10 over the last 20 years. So we’re talking about very small numbers in terms of the total number of
00:30:31 ►
recreational MDMA users out there. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s an individual
00:30:36 ►
tragedy for those people and their families when these events happen. And it’s important to be
00:30:41 ►
honest about the fact that taking MDMA is not a risk-free activity. There are, there are real risks associated with it, especially your first time, because
00:30:49 ►
you don’t necessarily know how you’re going to react to a given drug the first time you
00:30:53 ►
use it.
00:30:54 ►
Start small, huh?
00:30:55 ►
Start small.
00:30:57 ►
Uh, starting not at an event is something that I think we should really push as a community.
00:31:01 ►
Uh, I think if it’s going to be your first time trying a new
00:31:05 ►
substance, maybe doing it at home with friends in a cool environment with easy access to medical
00:31:11 ►
care, if that’s required, is probably not a terrible idea. So what about the negative trends
00:31:17 ►
you’ve been seeing this summer in terms of danger on the circuit? The two most worrying things that
00:31:23 ►
I think we’re seeing right now, actually, I’m going to say three, the three most worrying things we’re seeing right now is we are still seeing a lot of blotter that does not react as LSD.
00:31:35 ►
There’s a lot of different things that could fit on blotter.
00:31:38 ►
So we don’t really know what it is when it doesn’t react with the Ehrlich’s reagent.
00:31:42 ►
But we definitely are still seeing a lot of 25I N-bomb
00:31:45 ►
and we’re knowing that, we know that because we’re seeing people die from 25I. So that’s still
00:31:51 ►
happening. I really thought when China cracked down on 25I N-bomb that we would see a decrease
00:31:58 ►
in the number of these incidents. That has not happened yet. The crackdown only happened,
00:32:02 ►
incidents. That has not happened yet. The crackdown only happened
00:32:04 ►
I want to say maybe a year, year
00:32:06 ►
and a half ago. A single
00:32:08 ►
gram of 2,5-I is enough
00:32:10 ►
to lay several thousand doses.
00:32:12 ►
It’s possible that the people who
00:32:14 ►
were selling 2,5-I just still have
00:32:16 ►
a lot of it.
00:32:19 ►
There are now
00:32:20 ►
microgram active benzos.
00:32:22 ►
You could theoretically lay blotter
00:32:24 ►
that would act as
00:32:25 ►
benzodiazepine like Xanax. There are also now microgram-active opiates, and we have seen
00:32:33 ►
blotter paper laid with opiates. Now, thankfully, those were being sold as opiates. It was just a
00:32:41 ►
way of moving microgram-active opiates. So they weren’t being misrepresented as LSD, but it was still blotter paper that is functionally heroin.
00:32:51 ►
And that’s a thing now.
00:32:53 ►
It exists.
00:32:54 ►
The police have seized it.
00:32:55 ►
That has happened.
00:32:56 ►
It’s not theoretical.
00:32:59 ►
And like I said, we’re still seeing a lot of the N-bombs and we’re starting to see a lot of the NBOH substances now as well.
00:33:05 ►
There have not been as many deaths associated with like 25I NBOH, but there have been a handful of pretty serious medical incidents.
00:33:15 ►
And these are very new drugs.
00:33:18 ►
You know, maybe a grand total of a few hundred people have ever consumed these things.
00:33:26 ►
hundred people have ever consumed these things. And so as these things start moving into the market, I strongly suspect that we’re going to see the same problems that we saw with the
00:33:31 ►
NBOM families, with the NBO families, I guess is how you would say that.
00:33:36 ►
Have you seen any, for the NBOMEE series, have you seen anything
00:33:42 ►
linking the people who have such negative reactions?
00:33:46 ►
You know, it’s really difficult to say, but it does seem like most of them, it was their first time getting NBOM.
00:33:56 ►
So there’s reports online of people who intentionally purchased NBOM, have used it for a long time, have used it at progressively higher
00:34:05 ►
doses, who are not having these same sorts of problems. We have a lot of very young users who
00:34:13 ►
have died from 2,5i in particular, 2,5i NBOM, and it seems like it’s people who are using it for the
00:34:22 ►
first time. So it may just be that there are people who are, for lack of a better term, allergic to that family of drugs.
00:34:31 ►
And the only way they find that out is by taking them.
00:34:36 ►
And so – but that’s pure supposition.
00:34:38 ►
It’s not clear that that’s the case, that it’s always been first-time users.
00:34:43 ►
But it does seem to be clustered among younger users and among people who are doing these things for the first time.
00:34:49 ►
That’s good to know.
00:34:50 ►
But really, that’s about it.
00:34:53 ►
Geographically, we see it everywhere.
00:34:55 ►
It’s blotter, which is just by far the easiest thing for people to smuggle.
00:35:01 ►
And so it’s something that we see everywhere.
00:35:04 ►
It’s something that I don’t think is going to go away
00:35:06 ►
when a single gram of powder is thousands of doses it’s virtually impossible to stop anyone
00:35:12 ►
from smuggling that substance there’s just too much stuff that moves around the planet as part
00:35:18 ►
of our global commerce system you know something like 200 shipping containers an hour come into
00:35:24 ►
this country.
00:35:32 ►
And so the idea that you would somehow stop a single gram of powder from being brought into the country is frankly ludicrous.
00:35:33 ►
There’s just no way to catch it.
00:35:36 ►
The other two things we’ve as cocaine that are either heavily adulterated with amphetamine or methamphetamine or are completely replaced by amphetamine and methamphetamine, including plenty of samples that visually look like cocaine, smell like cocaine.
00:35:59 ►
Everything from an end-user point of view looks and smells correct.
00:36:04 ►
Everything from an end user point of view looks and smells correct.
00:36:06 ►
Reportedly, they also numb your gums.
00:36:10 ►
So they’re probably putting some sort of lidocaine into the sample.
00:36:13 ►
They have really whoever is doing this, right?
00:36:13 ►
A huge problem.
00:36:21 ►
Whoever is doing this has gotten very, very good at packaging amphetamines to look and feel like cocaine.
00:36:25 ►
So we’re seeing a lot of those at some events, we’ve been seeing nothing but those.
00:36:28 ►
We’ve been testing samples all weekend long,
00:36:31 ►
and we have zero that are consistent with just cocaine.
00:36:35 ►
So at the very least, all of the cocaine has been cut with amphetamine or methamphetamine.
00:36:40 ►
Wow.
00:36:41 ►
So that’s been a big problem.
00:36:40 ►
Wow.
00:36:43 ►
So that’s been a big problem.
00:37:00 ►
The other thing that we have started to see is in January of this year, there was a major ketamine bust in Taiwan that was then traced back to a major ketamine production village.
00:37:08 ►
This is the second time that a village in China has been caught producing huge amounts of ketamine the first one was hundreds of
00:37:11 ►
thousands of pounds of precursor and finished ketamine
00:37:15 ►
this one wasn’t quite as large but it was still a substantial amount
00:37:19 ►
it seems very likely that these villages represented
00:37:23 ►
the majority of the global ketamine production.
00:37:28 ►
John Lilly’s heaven finally found.
00:37:32 ►
Yeah.
00:37:32 ►
Yeah.
00:37:34 ►
I think the bust in – I want to say the bust in Taiwan.
00:37:37 ►
Hold on.
00:37:38 ►
Let me look at the list real quick.
00:37:44 ►
yeah so just in January of this year there was the bust in Taiwan
00:37:45 ►
where they netted
00:37:48 ►
$180 million worth of ketamine
00:37:54 ►
and that’s based on Chinese prices
00:37:56 ►
so we’re talking about thousands of pounds of ketamine
00:37:58 ►
and so when these busts happen
00:38:02 ►
the 2015 bust led to a major disruption in the ketamine market.
00:38:06 ►
And it seems like this early 2017 bust has done the same.
00:38:10 ►
So we’ve started to see a lot of methoxetamine, 3-MeO-PCP, deschloroketamine.
00:38:17 ►
So it’s all ketamine and PCP analogs.
00:38:19 ►
Those are the two sort of classical dissociatives being sold as ketamine.
00:38:24 ►
the two sort of classical dissociatives being sold as ketamine.
00:38:30 ►
And even when a sample is ketamine, it’s reacting very, very slowly.
00:38:38 ►
We’re having samples show up at the lab that are cut a third of the way with other things.
00:38:47 ►
And so we’re seeing ketamine that on reagent reactions does not match, experientially doesn’t match.
00:38:50 ►
People are getting sold ketamine that is heavily stepped on.
00:38:53 ►
And so sometimes the bags are mixed unevenly.
00:38:58 ►
So they’re doing huge rails all night and then they get to the one part of the bag that’s mostly ketamine.
00:39:07 ►
So that’s a problem as well when things are – in fact, in some ways, adulteration is just as big a problem as misrepresentation because it changes potency you don’t necessarily know how a person is going to
00:39:11 ►
react to snorting whatever random thing was cut into it are there any certain cutting agents that
00:39:17 ►
you see a lot of yeah there’s one uh hold on i actually have a baggie of one on my wall right now
00:39:22 ►
uh so when i see things show up at the, I’ll often purchase the cutting agent and then run reagent tests on it to see if it reacts on our charts.
00:39:35 ►
So there’s one called MSM.
00:39:36 ►
It’s methyl sulfon – wait, hold on.
00:39:41 ►
So methyl sulfonylmethene.
00:39:43 ►
So, methyl sulfonylmethene.
00:39:50 ►
It’s a dietary supplement that people use for God knows what.
00:39:50 ►
Hold on.
00:39:51 ►
Let’s see what MSM is used for.
00:39:52 ►
I’m not even sure.
00:39:59 ►
It looks like it is used for biologically active sulfur.
00:40:06 ►
So, apparently for people who are trying to increase their sulfur intake and don’t want to eat a bunch of eggs.
00:40:14 ►
So it looks like it’s marketed as something that can possibly treat osteoarthritis.
00:40:19 ►
But we’ve been seeing it show up at the lab, cut into ketamine a lot.
00:40:23 ►
In fact, we’ve also been seeing it at events where we’re testing.
00:40:29 ►
We often get a lot of reports about people who are having unexpected results to ketamine.
00:40:35 ►
And it seems like those seem to be clustered around areas where we later see MSM cut into ketamine. So there may be something about this cutting agent that changes the bioavailability of ketamine or is reacting with people’s medications.
00:40:43 ►
It’s always so unclear with black markets what the sort of end result is.
00:40:49 ►
But yeah, like I said, if you’re cutting these sort of experimental dietary supplements into
00:40:54 ►
your ketamine and now people are snorting it, or with ketamine, a lot of ketamine users
00:40:59 ►
actually use IM.
00:41:01 ►
So people are injecting ketamine on a fairly regular basis. I think it’s probably the
00:41:05 ►
most often injected of the sort of club drug family of drugs. Yeah. And so, yeah, it’s – so
00:41:17 ►
those are the three big ones is the misrepresentation of blotter, the fact that right now it seems like
00:41:23 ►
almost all of the cocaine that we’re testing is cut with amphetamine or methamphetamine, and then the degradation of the ketamine market,
00:41:31 ►
both with misrepresentation and with ketamine that’s been cut with other things, probably
00:41:36 ►
due to this large bust in China.
00:41:40 ►
Wow, it’s amazing, those down ripple effects.
00:41:42 ►
So cocaine’s bunk and the MDMA is good.
00:41:41 ►
Wow, it’s amazing those down ripple effects.
00:41:44 ►
So cocaine’s bunk and the MDMA is good.
00:41:51 ►
I don’t use bunk and good, but we’ll say that most of the MDMA is properly represented right now and most of the cocaine is not being properly represented right now.
00:41:54 ►
Wow.
00:41:55 ►
I think my last question before I let you go back to work is if there are people out there who are putting on events
00:42:02 ►
and want to have harm reduction services.
00:42:06 ►
What would you recommend DanceSafe could do or what would you recommend for practices for them who want to get started?
00:42:13 ►
Yeah, there is a document that was put together that’s basically best practices for harm reduction for festivals.
00:42:19 ►
Anybody can reach out to me on DanceSafe and I’m happy to send that their way.
00:42:24 ►
I might even just actually host that on the site soon.
00:42:26 ►
That’s actually – it was produced by – in part by the Drug Policy Alliance.
00:42:31 ►
And so I’ll have to get permission from all the cooks to put it on our website.
00:42:36 ►
But I can certainly try to do that.
00:42:39 ►
There’s also a Request Our Services button.
00:42:42 ►
People can just hop on the DanceSafe website, request our services.
00:42:46 ►
There’s a little form they fill out.
00:42:48 ►
All of that information comes in to me and I send it to the appropriate chapter or if there’s not a chapter in the area, National handles it directly.
00:42:56 ►
I’m also always willing and happy to come and speak at events.
00:42:59 ►
I’ve been speaking at a lot of events this summer.
00:43:01 ►
At all of the Tipper events i always speak usually along with you
00:43:05 ►
it’s always a good time if anyone ever wants to come hear me and lex uh rant together about the
00:43:09 ►
drug war that’s always a good opportunity to do it uh yeah i spoke uh at uh lib this year actually
00:43:17 ►
did two talks at lib this year uh did a talk at sonic bloom and so i’m always happy to come and
00:43:23 ►
speak about harm reduction i’m also always super happy to just talk with promoters on a one-on-one basis, find out what it is they’re comfortable with, what it is they’re trying to do with their event in terms of harm reduction services, medical services, security, because all three of those work together.
00:43:43 ►
And so, yeah, that’s the sort of best way to get involved. And for companies that aren’t
00:43:47 ►
interested in directly working with DanceSafe, there are partner organizations out there. There
00:43:51 ►
are other people doing harm reduction. If the drug checking makes you uncomfortable, we’re always
00:43:57 ►
happy to leave that alone. You know, we don’t, at events where we’ve been asked not to bring
00:44:03 ►
test kits and do on-site testing, that’s how we operate.
00:44:06 ►
We did Tomorrow World all three years and we were always – it’s always frustrating to have to tell people all night long that, no, we’re not doing testing at this event.
00:44:16 ►
But we would always rather be there providing our other services, providing education, acting as sort of first eyes on the ground, you know, making sure that everybody is doing OK, then not be there at all.
00:44:28 ►
That makes sense. Yeah. Thank you so much for your work.
00:44:32 ►
And for all you listeners out there, if you know, if you pay 40 bucks for your drugs over a course of a weekend,
00:44:37 ►
I think you should consider donating 40 dollars to DanceSafe to work towards that infrared tester.
00:44:43 ►
It seems only fair for all the work
00:44:45 ►
that they’re doing out there.
00:44:46 ►
And we accept Bitcoins as well.
00:44:48 ►
Good, good and untraceable.
00:44:50 ►
Or if you get him to come to your event,
00:44:52 ►
it’s always a good time.
00:44:53 ►
He’s an excellent speaker, as you can tell.
00:44:55 ►
And so thank you so much for your work
00:44:57 ►
and taking the time to talk with us today.
00:44:59 ►
Yeah, thank you, Lex.
00:44:59 ►
Have a great day.
00:45:03 ►
Thanks again for listening to Symposia on the Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:45:07 ►
Do us a favor.
00:45:08 ►
Go to iTunes or Stitcher and leave a rating or review.
00:45:12 ►
Tell your friends.
00:45:13 ►
That’s how you can really help us out.
00:45:16 ►
Thanks to Matt Payne who engineered the sound,
00:45:19 ►
Joey Witt for the intro music,
00:45:21 ►
California Smile for the outro music,
00:45:22 ►
and Brian Norman who produced the show.