Program Notes
Guest speakers: Mitchell Gomez, Lex Pelger, and Margie Weiss-Hoffman
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https://dancebreak.net/2017/tipper-friends-nocturnal-edition-2017/Date these talks were recorded: May 2017
For this entry in the Psychedelic History Project, here are three short lectures from the stage of the Tipper and Friends festival in Florida. Mitchell Gomez of DanceSafe starts with his work in festival harm reduction, Lex Pelger talks about psychoactive storytelling, and Margie Weiss-Hoffman. She became an activist about the use of confidential informants after her daughter was murdered in a police sting gone wrong. For more information on her work, see: The Rachel Morningstar Foundation.
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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.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:30 ►
And today, Lex Pelger is bringing us the second installment of his new psychedelic history project.
00:00:37 ►
You know, it really wasn’t all that long ago when a lot of festival promoters were very skeptical about allowing any discussion whatsoever about drugs from one of their official stages.
00:00:44 ►
And so I find it very refreshing to see how much this has changed. Drugs First speaker, you already know from our previous podcast. It is Mitchell Gomez, the executive director of DanceSafe.
00:01:07 ►
Next comes our own Lex Pelger, and Lex is followed by Margie Weiss-Hoffman.
00:01:13 ►
So let’s join them now.
00:01:16 ►
Everybody always tells me they can trust their guy, but you don’t know your guys, guys, guys, guys, guy.
00:01:22 ►
But I promise you, he’s almost certainly a guy that you wouldn’t chill with.
00:01:27 ►
On today’s Psychedelic History Project,
00:01:30 ►
we’ll hear three short lectures
00:01:31 ►
from the stage of the Tipper and Friends Festival in Florida.
00:01:35 ►
Tipper and his team have always been great
00:01:36 ►
about reaching out to us
00:01:37 ►
and working to ensure a focus on harm prevention
00:01:40 ►
and harm reduction for their community.
00:01:43 ►
First, Mitchell Gomez of DanceSafe shares to the large crowd around the main stage
00:01:47 ►
about his work in festival harm reduction.
00:01:50 ►
As Tipper’s manager Dave says, always DanceSafe at every event.
00:01:56 ►
This, by the way, includes the upcoming Eclipse Super Festival in Oregon.
00:02:01 ►
Then you’ll hear me speaking about the importance of sharing stories.
00:02:05 ►
And finally, the most powerful speaker of all, Margie Weiss Hoffman,
00:02:09 ►
who became an activist about the use of confidential informants after her daughter was murdered and a police sting gone wrong.
00:02:16 ►
For more information on her work, go to rachelmorningstarfoundation.com. dot com.
00:02:37 ►
You could fit what is theoretically a functionally equivalent dose of heroin on a piece of water.
00:02:42 ►
In terms of things that get sold as MDMA, there’s a galaxy of different drugs now.
00:02:46 ►
Most of them fall in the substituted cathinone class the drugs that the media has decided to call bath salts is a term i absolutely despise but it’s what
00:02:52 ►
most of you have probably heard uh things like methylone ethylone butylone alpha alpha pyro
00:02:57 ►
ventalone uh and the list literally grows longer every week i mean every week you see new
00:03:03 ►
substituted cathinones showing up on the
00:03:05 ►
dark web. Anything that shows up on the dark web shows up at a rave about three months later. That’s
00:03:09 ►
why I pay such close attention to the dark web. And again, an issue that we’ve had sort of
00:03:16 ►
recurring at Swanee at a few different events is the misrepresentation of ketamine, drugs showing
00:03:23 ►
up that people are just convinced is ketamine,
00:03:25 ►
but there’s a whole galaxy of different drugs now that get sold as ketamine, including 3-methoxy
00:03:30 ►
PCP. This is a PCP analog that behaves a little bit as ketamine. PCP is a dissociative. It feels
00:03:36 ►
a little bit like ketamine. So things like deschloroketamine, it’s ketamine where they
00:03:40 ►
kick the chlorine molecule out, but now you have a totally different drug. And a lot of times you’ll have people think, oh, you know, it’s close, you know,
00:03:47 ►
it’s like it’s ketamine-ish. Important to remember that H2O is water and H2O2 will kill you.
00:03:54 ►
Adding a molecule and subtracting a molecule does not mean that it’s close. It just doesn’t mean
00:03:58 ►
that. And so this is an important thing to know, but there’s, you know, a lot of ways, you know,
00:04:03 ►
if you know about the substances you’re interested in, if you educate yourself about them, if you don’t have a
00:04:08 ►
test kit, one of your neighbors probably does. You know, test kits are, it used to be so hard to find
00:04:13 ►
test kits at festivals, and now it’s just not, so you don’t have excuses anymore. You used to have
00:04:17 ►
excuses. If you went to a festival and nobody had a test kit, you had an excuse. You don’t have that excuse anymore. Ask your neighbors.
00:04:32 ►
I’m not keeping track of time, by the way, so feel free to tap me on the shoulder when we’re getting close to 10 minutes. I don’t know where we’re at. But yeah, it’s a really, really different
00:04:38 ►
world in terms of drug consumption. And I’m a general anti-prohibitionist. I truly believe that
00:04:44 ►
the police or the government
00:04:46 ►
telling people what drugs they should or shouldn’t consume is not a valid use of police power,
00:04:50 ►
that this is not something that belongs to the government. And so I don’t know what the ideal
00:04:58 ►
model of distribution looks like in a post-prohibition world. I don’t know if we sell
00:05:02 ►
heroin and cocaine and LSD at 7-Eleven, but I do genuinely believe that selling them at 7-Eleven would be an improvement over what we do
00:05:09 ►
now. And so that’s a big statement to make, and I’ll back it. If anyone wants to come talk to me
00:05:13 ►
at a dancing booth, I will justify that statement to you in a way that you’ll go home believing.
00:05:17 ►
I promise I can do that. But that being said, I have two clauses for my general anti-prohibitionist stance.
00:05:27 ►
One is that if you dose someone, if you give somebody a drug without telling them,
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I genuinely believe that you should probably spend a little bit of time in jail to think about that decision.
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It is fucked up to do that. Don’t do that.
00:05:40 ►
And my other sort of general escape from my anti-prohibition stance is misrepresentation.
00:05:47 ►
Don’t sell someone something as something other than what it is.
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There are plenty of people who like research chemicals.
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They like exploring.
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They like these things.
00:05:55 ►
So just tell people what you’re doing and tell them what it is.
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And you know what?
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I don’t care.
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You people do whatever you want to do.
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I love you all no matter what drugs you like.
00:06:04 ►
I really, really do.
00:06:06 ►
But don’t lie to people about what it is that they’re taking,
00:06:09 ►
and don’t take people’s word for it.
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These terms, things like molly, things like ecstasy, things like doses,
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those terms are not drug names.
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They’re branding terms.
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It means that this is something that you’re trying to sell,
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and I’m going to call it this to sell it to you.
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That’s all that means.
00:06:25 ►
And if you don’t do reagent checking, or ideally someday I’ll own a nice big alpha inference spectroscopy device,
00:06:30 ►
and I’ll have that out here, and if anyone has 50 grand, come talk.
00:06:34 ►
And, you know, if you don’t have reagent checking, you just don’t know what it is that you’re consuming.
00:06:38 ►
And especially with people who like to mix substances, you know, we know pretty well what mixtures, you know, if you
00:06:46 ►
take LSD and MDMA, I’m not suggesting you do, I’m not suggesting you don’t, but as a community, as
00:06:51 ►
medical professionals, as people who study these things, we generally know what those mixtures do.
00:06:56 ►
And there are mixtures that have a reputation for being relatively non-problematic because
00:07:00 ►
they’re relatively non-problematic. You know, mixing LSD and MDMA is not pharmacologically likely
00:07:05 ►
to throw you into the hospital.
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But when you take 25-IN-bombs that was sold as acid
00:07:10 ►
and methadone that was sold as ecstasy, we really don’t know.
00:07:13 ►
And now these new drugs are being rolled out so quickly
00:07:16 ►
that if you don’t do drug checking, if you don’t educate yourself
00:07:18 ►
about what these things are, it’s really just impossible
00:07:22 ►
to even speculate what these substances might do in combination.
00:07:26 ►
And it’s a really, like, as somebody who really believes in the positive power of entheogenic substances,
00:07:32 ►
it really is terrifying to see how adulterated the market has gotten.
00:07:35 ►
I think I’m probably running close, but I’ll end with my last one.
00:07:38 ►
Oh, three minutes. Look at that. Beautiful.
00:07:41 ►
So just know, educate yourselves as much as you can
00:07:46 ►
if you guys have never been on Erowid
00:07:47 ►
actually here we have perfect internet
00:07:49 ►
so you can go on Erowid, you can read about different substances
00:07:51 ►
it’s a wonderful, wonderful resource
00:07:53 ►
I think it’s going north of several million
00:07:56 ►
trip reports on Erowid now
00:07:57 ►
you can just read all about different substances
00:07:59 ►
you can sort them by different combinations
00:08:01 ►
people love Erow. That’s great. But, you know,
00:08:09 ►
it’s sort of the old saying that Tim Leary used to say was know your mind, know your
00:08:13 ►
substance, know your source. At this point, I feel like we need to drop know your source.
00:08:18 ►
Everybody always tells me they can trust their guy. But you don’t know your guy’s guy’s
00:08:23 ►
guy’s guy’s guy. But I promise you you he’s almost certainly a guy that you wouldn’t chill with.
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Like, I promise you that about that guy.
00:08:32 ►
So knowing your source is something that needs to be replaced with know your reagent kit.
00:08:36 ►
I think that’s the last one of that list.
00:08:41 ►
But, you know, there’s a lot of components to harm reduction.
00:08:44 ►
Even when you know what you’re taking, you have to take care of yourself.
00:08:46 ►
Drink lots of water. Make sure to drink some
00:08:48 ►
electrolytes. Sit down and chill out.
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We have hammocks here. It’s an amazing, amazing
00:08:52 ►
venue for, in terms of how serious they take
00:08:54 ►
harm reduction and how we have harmonia.
00:08:56 ►
You have a friend who’s having a difficult experience.
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You can take them to medical. They’re not going to
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get arrested. They’re going to get taken care of by
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people who really care about them.
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And that is sadly unusual for venues. I mean, that’s not a normal situation at a lot of
00:09:09 ►
places, but here it’s, it is really 100% okay. If you have any questions about if your friend’s
00:09:14 ►
doing okay or not, don’t have any questions because there are people who are trained to
00:09:18 ►
know if they’re doing okay or not. And you can take them to those people and it’s totally okay.
00:09:22 ►
And I guess the thing I wanted to end with is that I don’t want anyone to feel like I’m being down on drugs.
00:09:27 ►
I’m, like I said, somebody who tremendously believes in the power of these substances to be beneficial to people’s lives if they use them responsibly and if they use them well and they have a community that supports them.
00:09:38 ►
All of these problems that we’re talking about, including problems that I haven’t talked about, things like fentanyl and heroin killing 40-ish people a day. Things like bags of heroin of unknown strength. Xanax bars, fake Xanax bars
00:09:50 ►
are now being pressed with synthetic opiates. Misrepresentation of LSD, MDMA, ketamine. All of
00:09:56 ►
these things are not drug problems. These are all drug prohibition problems. Everyone. Everyone.
00:10:01 ►
all drug prohibition problems.
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Every one.
00:10:03 ►
Every one.
00:10:09 ►
So get politically involved.
00:10:12 ►
Start fighting to end the drug war because in a world with regulated access
00:10:14 ►
to these substances,
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every one of those problems goes away.
00:10:17 ►
They vanish overnight.
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And so we know the solution to these problems.
00:10:21 ►
The solution is for the government
00:10:22 ►
to stop telling you what to do with your own mind.
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And so on that note, I’ll hand you over to Lex.
00:10:28 ►
But I love you all, and DanceSafe loves you.
00:10:30 ►
And, uh…
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Beautiful, huh?
00:10:40 ►
Alright, hi everybody.
00:10:42 ►
I’m Lex. I’m the host of Symposia.
00:10:44 ►
And what we try to do is bring people together around drugs and education and information about them.
00:10:52 ►
And the back story is we actually started off doing conferences and lectures and things like that. And they were really powerful.
00:11:00 ►
But at the end of those, we started doing storytelling nights. And we’d get perhaps the elders who were speaking that day to tell a personal drug story.
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And then we’d have an open mic that the people coming would start telling their drug stories.
00:11:11 ►
And we started to realize that was the most powerful part.
00:11:15 ►
That was where the most amazing data was, was all the people sitting right here who know more about drugs than any scientist funded by neither the FDA.
00:11:24 ►
You can only kill a couple of thousand mice and cut up their brains
00:11:27 ►
before you’re not learning that much more as you are listening to the people here.
00:11:32 ►
And so what we hope to accomplish and what it’s great to see here
00:11:38 ►
is such a sense of community and people learning from each other.
00:11:42 ►
And so what we did today in underneath the shade structure was
00:11:45 ►
another open mic storytelling, people sharing their own trip reports. And if you’d like to
00:11:50 ►
share one of those, you could really help somebody out somewhere in the world. And you could, and it
00:11:55 ►
could also be right here. That’s what we want to encourage people to do is talk to each other about
00:11:59 ►
not only the good trips, because I think we all know about what the good trip might be like,
00:12:04 ►
but share the tough ones, share the ones that felt really shitty and it took you about six months to learn why it
00:12:09 ►
actually might have been a helpful experience and so we if you want to come to the symposia
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corner over in the art market we have a microphone set up and you can share your personal drug
00:12:22 ►
experience of any kind there and we’ll put onedelic Salon podcast so a lot of people can listen to it.
00:12:28 ►
We actually have an episode coming out on Monday from Boulder, Colorado.
00:12:32 ►
And I listened to the stories for the third time this morning to check them over,
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and I found myself crying again.
00:12:38 ►
They were so powerful, the beautiful ones.
00:12:40 ►
And the really hard ones were amazing lessons.
00:12:44 ►
I’ve been gathering stories about how people take drugs for about 10 years now, and it
00:12:48 ►
never ceases to amaze me how everybody gets high in a different way.
00:12:53 ►
And the story that you’re going to share, maybe in a group of friends, maybe on this
00:12:58 ►
podcast, could be just the thing that somebody needs to hear somewhere in the world that
00:13:03 ►
was an experience that happened to them or will happen to them. And the crap you went through might be just
00:13:10 ►
the thing that they need to hear. And that’s the other campaign that we got together with
00:13:16 ►
with MAPS and BPA and a bunch of other great drug organizations is the Psychedelics Because
00:13:22 ►
campaign. And you can do that hashtag on any of the social media feeds.
00:13:25 ►
And it’s about coming out of the psychedelic closet.
00:13:28 ►
This is probably a crowd that’s probably pretty far out of the psychedelic closet in general.
00:13:35 ►
How like, oh, yeah.
00:13:41 ►
And part of the power is preaching to the choir.
00:13:45 ►
Part of it is listening to each other and passing these lessons on to each other,
00:13:49 ►
all the different ways that these things can go down.
00:13:52 ►
But the other type of evangelical work you can do here,
00:13:56 ►
it’s telling your aunts and your uncles, your parents and your grandparents,
00:13:59 ►
your friends who you really don’t think are into this stuff.
00:14:02 ►
Because, yes, there is a lot of data that’s backing up
00:14:05 ►
how helpful mushrooms and MDMA can be from Johns Hopkins and NYU
00:14:10 ►
and all this peer-reviewed research.
00:14:12 ►
But that peer-reviewed research really works on federal health bureaucrats
00:14:17 ►
and journalists who are too lazy to go out there and get a real story.
00:14:21 ►
If everyone can always say, oh, well, that data is shoddy.
00:14:24 ►
That’s just, you know, fake news kind of science.
00:14:28 ►
And they won’t deny your personal story.
00:14:32 ►
You know, if just today I heard somebody say that they took mushrooms for the first time
00:14:37 ►
and their smoking habit went away like that and it never came back.
00:14:43 ►
And I usually hear something like that kind of story once every event we do at this open mic tour we’re doing around the country right now.
00:14:52 ►
I mean, just the anti-addiction power of these substances alone are overwhelming.
00:14:57 ►
And to study that is really difficult.
00:15:00 ►
To turn into peer-reviewed data isn’t easy to do.
00:15:03 ►
But you take a thousand
00:15:05 ►
stories from a thousand believable people, and that’s where the real data is. That’s
00:15:09 ►
how you help change the hearts and minds of the people close to you. And the nice part
00:15:14 ►
is, the reason it’s great to come out of the psychedelics closet right now is because the
00:15:19 ►
data’s on your side. Your grandma saw that nice young doctor Sanjay Gupta on the TV,
00:15:25 ►
on your side. Your grandma saw that nice young doctor Sanjay Gupta on the TV, and he said weed was helpful for aging. And she might believe him. And maybe, just maybe, if you
00:15:31 ►
say, you could try this CBD that I have in my hand right now that you can get online
00:15:35 ►
from a place like Elixinol. It can heal aging in general. Weed is a wonder drug for aging.
00:15:42 ►
And to offer that to your grandparents, and they might be listening,
00:15:45 ►
give them a salad for their arthritis and things like that.
00:15:48 ►
It’s tough. It’s not easy to come out and say these things to people you think might attack you or think less of you for it,
00:15:54 ►
but it could be the most powerful thing that you do.
00:15:57 ►
The community that forms around this kind of stuff is amazing.
00:16:01 ►
On this tour, we just put a naked microphone in the middle of the
00:16:05 ►
stage. We don’t schedule any speakers. We don’t get any of the big wigs to come. It
00:16:08 ►
is simply our people. The people I’m looking at right now, and they come up to tell one,
00:16:13 ►
and they usually don’t waste your time with a, I took acid, and I saw God, and then I
00:16:18 ►
went home. Usually, it’s a tough thing that happened, Or it’s a crazy story of healing or beauty. And those are the kind
00:16:26 ►
of ones that we learn from so much from each other. And that’s mostly what I would encourage
00:16:32 ►
you to do. Just tell more people. You know this stuff works for you. Around here, it can even feel
00:16:37 ►
blasé. Of course these drugs are helpful. But you can’t forget the prohibitionists are right.
00:16:46 ►
are helpful. But you can’t forget the prohibitionists are right. And when they say these bad stories about things like acid, the worst stories I’ve ever heard about drugs came from these
00:16:51 ►
kind of communities of the people who believe in drugs. But usually somebody knows one person
00:16:56 ►
who, one psychedelic trip, put them over the edge, and they didn’t come back. That stuff
00:17:01 ►
does happen. We can’t lie about that and say it never does, because it does
00:17:05 ►
happen often enough. And the best harm reduction we can do is talk to each other. Pass on the hints,
00:17:11 ►
pass on the tips, pass on what worked for you, test your medicines, know what combinations your
00:17:16 ►
friends are taking, and always have somebody who knows what you’re getting into right now,
00:17:22 ►
where you’re at, and where it’s going.
00:17:28 ►
So if you want to share these stories, again, we’re in the back of the art gallery.
00:17:32 ►
We also have the Symposium Magazine where we try to feature a lot of voices,
00:17:35 ►
not just the same old white men you hear at all the conferences.
00:17:39 ►
They’re great. I plan to be an old white man someday.
00:17:42 ►
But we need a lot more diversity around here.
00:17:47 ►
And if you want to submit your story to Symposium Magazine, that would be great. We need to hear all the stories that we can get.
00:17:49 ►
Submit an audio version, type up a version, we’ll put it online,
00:17:53 ►
and somewhere, you might save somebody.
00:17:56 ►
You might save somebody for a really rough couple of months,
00:17:58 ►
you might save their life with telling what happened to you.
00:18:01 ►
So come out of the closet and enjoy the rest of your festival. Thank you.
00:18:04 ►
hat for you. So come out of the closet and enjoy the rest of your festival. Thank you.
00:18:15 ►
My name is Paul Levine. I’m the director of Purple Hat Productions. We produce the Purple Hatter’s Ball here. I’m one of the co-producers of Sewanee Hulaween. And I was one of the founders
00:18:22 ►
of the Bear Creek Festival and some other festivals that we had here at Spirit this morning.
00:18:31 ►
If you would have told me back when we started doing festivals here in 2004 that I’d be sitting on the amphitheater talking about taking acid and ketamine,
00:18:39 ►
you really wouldn’t have believed it. I wanted to take a minute to tell the story of how Bear Creek
00:18:47 ►
got started and subsequently how Rachel Hoffman was sort of introduced into this scene and
00:18:54 ►
then I want to introduce Margie Weiss to tell you more about Rachel’s story. We had a festival outside of Tallahassee called Down on the Farm for four years, 2004 to 2006.
00:19:09 ►
When that went away, we kind of picked up and we started working on the Bear Creek Festival.
00:19:17 ►
My partner back then, Lyle Williams, who’s here, had a beautiful piece of property over
00:19:22 ►
there in Quincy, and we were going to have the Bear
00:19:25 ►
Creek Festival about a month before the event strangely enough on the Board of County Commissioners
00:19:32 ►
influenced by the conservative factions of that community decided to revoke our permit and as it
00:19:40 ►
worked out we we moved over here to the spirit of the Sewanee, and it was a wonderful kind of thing that happened there.
00:19:49 ►
It felt like a tragedy, but it ended up being the best possible thing because it brought our community to this incredible park.
00:19:57 ►
When we were working on the property in Quincy, Florida, a lot of young college students from Florida State,
00:20:05 ►
Florida a lot of young college students from Florida State a lot of people your age that I see out there in the audience right now would come out to this
00:20:09 ►
beautiful piece of property and help us clear trails and build fences and do
00:20:13 ►
whatever was necessary to get us ready to have the first Bear Creek and through
00:20:19 ►
that process and also through the previous festival down the farm this
00:20:22 ►
wonderful live music community developed from Florida State
00:20:27 ►
and around these events
00:20:29 ►
and it became a really big family.
00:20:31 ►
I’m sure I know a lot of you feel that way that are here this weekend about what
00:20:35 ►
Tipper is creating in his community and the community that comes out to all the events here at the Spirit of the Suwannee.
00:20:43 ►
Rachel Hoffman was a part of that community.
00:20:46 ►
She came out to the, down on the farm in the Bear Creek site, and she helped us clear that
00:20:51 ►
land, and she rolled up her sleeves, and she sweat, and partied with us, and did, you know,
00:20:58 ►
whatever we had to do to get that thing going. And Rachel was an incredibly bubbly, vivacious young woman.
00:21:06 ►
She was enthusiastic about life.
00:21:08 ►
She loved to cook.
00:21:09 ►
She was so supportive of her friends.
00:21:12 ►
Margie is wearing the hat Rachel used to wear here
00:21:14 ►
at the Spirit of the Swan when she was dancing
00:21:16 ►
out there with y’all.
00:21:21 ►
She also loved really good weed.
00:21:26 ►
And she helped her friends on occasion participate in that.
00:21:31 ►
She got in some trouble, and some police officers arrested her
00:21:36 ►
and decided that they told her that she was going to go to jail,
00:21:43 ►
but she didn’t want to go to jail, that she could help them for four years to get that off of her record.
00:22:02 ►
and lots of things that she wanted to do. And then she agreed to help them.
00:22:07 ►
And in one of the worst cases of police negligence that I can recall,
00:22:17 ►
they sent this beautiful young woman out there with heart of criminals
00:22:22 ►
and tried to have her sell them cocaine in ecstasy because she had
00:22:27 ►
a small marijuana offense.
00:22:32 ►
They also gave her a gun to sell to those people so that they’d have a more strict sentence
00:22:36 ►
once they busted them.
00:22:38 ►
But as it turned out, they used the gun to kill her.
00:22:43 ►
And I guess the reason that we’re up here today is to remind
00:22:47 ►
you that these things still do happen and to remember Rachel Hoffman but you
00:22:54 ►
know for me the legacy and Margie’s going to tell you more about
00:22:58 ►
the Morningstruck Foundation and how to help but the legacy after 10 years is yes, is to this confidential informant reform,
00:23:07 ►
looking closely at drug reform and all those things,
00:23:11 ►
but it’s also to remember how her death
00:23:14 ►
brought a community really close together,
00:23:16 ►
people that will be bonded by that forever,
00:23:19 ►
that love each other and are looking out for each other,
00:23:22 ►
and hopefully that are going out into the world
00:23:24 ►
and spreading the message that this still goes on, that we need to out for each other and hopefully they’re going out into the world and spreading the message you know that this still goes on that we need to
00:23:27 ►
look after each other and really look after each other and help each other to
00:23:30 ►
stay out of trouble and to stay safe. Everybody please give a warm welcome to Rachel Hoffman’s Month of March of Ways.
00:23:43 ►
Thank you. So the best trip that I’ve been on in the last nine years
00:23:49 ►
is the 10th annual Purple Hatties Ball in two weeks.
00:23:52 ►
Y’all know.
00:23:54 ►
It’s magical because of all the spiritual love going on
00:23:58 ►
and people take care of one another.
00:24:01 ►
Better there than anywhere else in the whole wide world.
00:24:05 ►
It’s kept me going all these years.
00:24:07 ►
And I love Paul because he’s kept me going. And my maiden name was
00:24:12 ►
Levine, so we’re related. We’re family.
00:24:17 ►
Now, speaking of magical and spiritual, I have her hat.
00:24:20 ►
I’m going to fly it to Mike, and he can
00:24:24 ►
pass it around to anybody who wants to put it on and I promise you, you will get the blue suits.
00:24:34 ►
So I was told to start this speech with a joke. So to go along with the spirituality of this place, I’ll share my joke that I was sitting by her grave with the rabbi,
00:24:50 ►
and Rachel had this joke.
00:24:52 ►
She had red hair and curls and freckles,
00:24:55 ►
and I always used to tell her friends,
00:24:58 ►
M stood for mischief instead of morning sky.
00:25:02 ►
And I was up after yoga,
00:25:06 ►
meditation we had on Mother’s Day,
00:25:09 ►
the last Mother’s Day I believe here,
00:25:12 ►
because now we’re having it on June.
00:25:16 ►
And it was really nice this year,
00:25:19 ►
on the side,
00:25:20 ►
to just be alone with Mike and my daughter.
00:25:25 ►
And I never had a chance to feel that, so it was a blessing.
00:25:29 ►
But this Mother’s Day, I told them Rachel’s joke.
00:25:33 ►
And she was embarrassed by it, but she liked to play beer pong.
00:25:38 ►
She liked to have fun.
00:25:39 ►
And anybody around her was smiling.
00:25:43 ►
It was just, she was my favorite person
00:25:46 ►
and everybody else’s favorite person to be with
00:25:49 ►
because she loved life that much.
00:25:51 ►
And she was so nurturing.
00:25:53 ►
And she always stood up for the underdog.
00:25:56 ►
How does a dolphin like a woman?
00:26:00 ►
It was her joke.
00:26:02 ►
And if you can make people laugh, then you can get into beer pong.
00:26:05 ►
And so the answer is, when you grab a woman from behind, she flips and goes,
00:26:12 ►
Ah! Ah!
00:26:15 ►
But I’m telling this to the rabbi, and he says,
00:26:18 ►
Oh my God, we’re in a cemetery, and you’re talking about duck fucking?
00:26:23 ►
And I said, I don’t know about you, but I was talking about women and dolphins.
00:26:27 ►
But I’m telling this joke here.
00:26:32 ►
And all of a sudden, the leaves are floating all over the place.
00:26:37 ►
And it was like Rachel saying, Mom, don’t embarrass me.
00:26:42 ►
And I walked on the hill, and I got to the artist’s tent.
00:26:47 ►
And Chris Manamorphis said, I just felt Rachel 10 minutes ago,
00:26:52 ►
and I started to cry.
00:26:54 ►
And I added butterflies to the squirrel.
00:26:58 ►
And I have a tapestry that they made and presented to me the next Mother’s Day.
00:27:04 ►
And it’s this girl born on Rachel’s birthday,
00:27:10 ►
Kayla Sandwich.
00:27:12 ►
And she has her arms outstretched,
00:27:16 ►
butterfly in her heart, butterflies are flying around.
00:27:21 ►
And it says, get the word out, get the message out.
00:27:25 ►
And the message is, in this war on drugs, which really, it’s not the drugs that are
00:27:32 ►
going to kill you, it’s the lack of transparency that goes on within this so-called confidential
00:27:41 ►
informant system. And if you remember anything from all of us up here talking,
00:27:48 ►
remember to say no if you think you’re in trouble
00:27:53 ►
and if you’re scared,
00:27:55 ►
because fear is false evidence appearing real.
00:28:00 ►
It’s just a boogeyman.
00:28:02 ►
The police do not have any authority
00:28:04 ►
to give you any kind of legal sentence.
00:28:08 ►
They’re not the court or the jury.
00:28:10 ►
And we need all of you to study and learn how to reach and vote through your vote
00:28:21 ►
to get standardized documentation and record keeping and surveys
00:28:27 ►
so that we can reveal the magnitude of this problem.
00:28:31 ►
And only then is trust and respect going to return to law enforcement.
00:28:35 ►
Because there’s so many, there’s some bad cops out there.
00:28:40 ►
There’s some really good ones too.
00:28:41 ►
And I see us as a bridge to making this world a safer and better place.
00:28:47 ►
And it’s through the Purple Hatter’s Ball that we’ve been able to pull together
00:28:51 ►
Rachel Morningstar Foundation.
00:28:56 ►
Rachel, my sacrificial lamb, Morningstar, shining light on a new day.
00:29:01 ►
You don’t have to remember the last name.
00:29:03 ►
You don’t have to remember if it’s Hoffman or Weiss.
00:29:06 ►
It’s just my beautiful Rachel Morningstar.
00:29:09 ►
And on there, I want you to click on to snitching.org
00:29:15 ►
or.com.
00:29:19 ►
Alexander Natapoff wrote this book
00:29:21 ►
and she has created a lot of reform because there’s so much that goes on within the system.
00:29:28 ►
And then once you start seeing how much corruption and lying, we should not have confidential informants.
00:29:38 ►
We should have cooperative informants.
00:29:40 ►
People who are informed, people who have knowledge, people who are not going to lose their lives,
00:29:47 ►
people who are not going to get out of breaking the law. So please help us make that happen.
00:29:54 ►
And I love all of you. Thank you so much.
00:29:57 ►
Come to Purple Hatter’s Ball.
00:30:08 ►
Do we have time for questions?
00:30:13 ►
Thank you.
00:30:16 ►
If anybody wanted to come up and ask any of the panelists any questions,
00:30:19 ►
we probably have time for a few.
00:30:22 ►
What are your feelings on Kratom?
00:30:24 ►
Kratom. What’s your feelings on kratom? What’s your feelings about kratom?
00:30:28 ►
What’s your feelings about kratom?
00:30:32 ►
Kratom. I guess about kratom, kratom.
00:30:36 ►
It’s a fascinating plant. I was actually asked about it earlier today by a spinal pain patient
00:30:40 ►
who’s taking tons of oxycodone every day. And it is a
00:30:44 ►
fascinating plant from Southeast Asia
00:30:46 ►
that works on your opiate receptors.
00:30:48 ►
Not quite as strong, but it’s a decent painkiller in itself.
00:30:52 ►
But for people addicted to opiates who want to get off,
00:30:55 ►
it can be a really powerful bridge for getting off opiates.
00:31:00 ►
And for some people, it’s the painkiller they switch to
00:31:03 ►
for whatever kind of chronic condition they have going on.
00:31:06 ►
There is a fairly strong movement towards banning this, even though it’s kind of the last legal opiate that people can use as a plant medicine.
00:31:15 ►
But at this point, you can still get it online from some reputable vendors, and it can really be a useful tool for people.
00:31:23 ►
That’s what I’d say.
00:31:26 ►
Apparently, except for Illinois.
00:31:27 ►
I’m sorry, Chicago.
00:31:34 ►
One last one, sure.
00:31:42 ►
Psychedelic psychotherapy?
00:31:43 ►
Yeah, so she asked about the future of psychedelic psychotherapy? Yeah.
00:31:48 ►
Yeah, so she asked about the future of psychedelic psychotherapy.
00:31:50 ►
I was actually at Psychedelic Science about three weeks ago.
00:31:58 ►
The largest gathering of psychedelic psychotherapists and researchers and interested parties that has ever been organized in the world.
00:32:00 ►
I think there’s about 3,700 people is what I was told.
00:32:03 ►
We absolutely own the Marriott in Oakland. It was the largest, I mean, incredible, incredible, incredible conference. So the current timeline, if everything
00:32:09 ►
goes as planned, and so far it looks like everything is, is that by 2021, the phase
00:32:14 ►
three clinical trials on MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for soldiers with treatment-resistant PTSD
00:32:19 ►
will be done. And by 2022, MDMA will be a prescription medicine. This is going to be,
00:32:26 ►
will be done and by 2022 MDMA will be a prescription medicine. This is going to be, yeah, I mean that’s a big deal. So this is all thanks to Rick Doblin and the team at MAPS. They’ve
00:32:32 ►
really taken a lead on this. He’s an incredible, incredible person. Somebody who I deeply,
00:32:36 ►
deeply respect. And yeah, everything is sort of going according to plan. We actually have
00:32:41 ►
a little weird silver lining of the Trump administration is the new head of the FDA is a really hardcore libertarian who basically believes that drug
00:32:48 ►
companies should be able to do whatever the hell they want. And in general, that’s a very dangerous
00:32:52 ►
thing, but we have a four-year period where we can really push hard on MDMA type of psychotherapy
00:32:57 ►
and really make progress on that in a way that might not have been possible under any other
00:33:01 ►
administration in history. And it looks like by 2022, that’s basically going to be done. This is going to be inpatient medication. It’s not going to be you go to
00:33:07 ►
your doctor and they write you a script and you go pick up your pharmaceutical MDMA at the
00:33:11 ►
pharmacy and take it home. That’s going to be, centers are going to be set up. I believe they’re
00:33:17 ►
going to start in Boulder and Portland, I think are the first two centers they have planned.
00:33:21 ►
You can go in if you have PTSD. And the nice thing is, once a drug is approved for prescription use, in almost every case, a doctor or a therapist who believes that
00:33:30 ►
drug would be useful for something else can prescribe it off-label. So for people with autism,
00:33:35 ►
you know, they have a hard time sort of learning how to read emotional and social cues. There’s
00:33:39 ►
been a lot of sort of both anecdotal and some research I believe in either Israel or Spain that showed
00:33:45 ►
that a single therapy of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy can help autistic patients learn
00:33:50 ►
how to emotionally read people for the rest of their lives. This vastly improves their quality
00:33:55 ►
of life. For a marriage counselor, for people who are having marriages, they’re having trouble,
00:33:59 ►
you can go in as a couple and get MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. We’re talking four years. Now once
00:34:04 ►
that happens, we start the lawsuits and we try to move MDMA from Schedule therapy. We’re talking four years. Now, once that happens, we start the
00:34:05 ►
lawsuits and we try to move MDMA from Schedule 1 to Schedule 3. Now the legal penalties are
00:34:10 ►
lower, the risk is lower, and all of these things start to sort of work in tandem. And
00:34:15 ►
so, yeah, and then I believe psilocybin is next. They’re going to be doing psilocybin
00:34:19 ►
research for cluster headaches, yeah, LSD research for alcoholism, all of these things are happening.
00:34:25 ►
What we really need is public support, funding, you know, the average cost to develop a prescription drug is somewhere between 1 billion to develop a prescription drug.
00:34:36 ►
Rick Doblin was able to vastly decrease that by using the DEA’s and NIDA’s own studies that they had funded that were designed to show how dangerous MDMA was.
00:34:47 ►
And because all of those studies failed so horribly, he was able to use them as the safety
00:34:51 ►
and efficacy studies that he would have had to pay for himself for the MDMA psychotherapy. And
00:34:56 ►
that is the most incredible example of legislative jujitsu that I’m aware of in the history of
00:35:02 ►
mankind. I mean, it’s just incredible. He literally took hundreds of millions of dollars
00:35:07 ►
of drug war prohibitionist propaganda research
00:35:11 ►
and flipped it to cut the cost
00:35:13 ►
of MDMA psychotherapy research in half.
00:35:16 ►
And that’s really something
00:35:17 ►
that I don’t really fully understand
00:35:19 ►
about Rick is his ability to do that.
00:35:22 ►
And so, yeah, this is important research,
00:35:25 ►
and part of that is like Lex said,
00:35:27 ►
it’s all of us coming out,
00:35:29 ►
I always call it the fractal closet,
00:35:30 ►
you can call it the psychedelic closet,
00:35:31 ►
but coming out of the fractal closet,
00:35:33 ►
and it’s a term that I actually had a lot of debate
00:35:36 ►
with people who, I know some older folks
00:35:39 ►
who were coming out as gay in the 1960s,
00:35:41 ►
and one of them was a little bit offended by that term,
00:35:44 ►
and I said, no, this is really, it’s a parallel, because in the 50s and 60s, it wasn’t illegal
00:35:47 ►
to be gay.
00:35:48 ►
But it was illegal to be caught performing a gay sex act, and they would do all the shit
00:35:52 ►
they do with drugs.
00:35:53 ►
They’d kick down doors, and they’d try to find guys in bed with their partners.
00:35:56 ►
This is a history of America that’s a dark, dark history, but that’s something that happened
00:35:59 ►
in this country.
00:36:01 ►
And it’s the same thing.
00:36:01 ►
It’s not illegal to be somebody who believes in the power of psychedelics. It’s not even illegal to be a psychedelic user. Just don’t let them catch you
00:36:09 ►
with the thing. The molecule is what’s illegal. So you don’t have to be afraid about talking to
00:36:14 ►
your parents about the fact that LSD saved your life or the fact that psilocybin helped you quit
00:36:18 ►
smoking. You don’t have to be afraid to be open about that because it’s important information
00:36:23 ►
for people to know that this isn’t just medical.
00:36:26 ►
This is something that’s happening in the world right now.
00:36:29 ►
There are people with PTSD being helped
00:36:32 ►
by underground psychotherapists who are risking
00:36:34 ►
their licensing and their lives to provide relief
00:36:38 ►
for PTSD patients that the federal government
00:36:40 ►
will not allow them to provide, and that’s fucked.
00:36:43 ►
So fight for the end of all of this system.
00:36:46 ►
Fight to make it better.
00:36:47 ►
And all of us love you.
00:36:48 ►
And you should all go have dinner
00:36:49 ►
and take a little chill out.
00:36:50 ►
And then come back and we’ll hear a tip of rage.
00:36:54 ►
Yeah.
00:36:58 ►
Thank you.
00:37:04 ►
Come back in two weeks for Purple Hatter’s Ball.
00:37:10 ►
Everybody one more round of applause for the Droppers.