Jag Davies - Drug Policy Alliance

Hey, what's up, everybody? Joe here, Psychedelics Today. Today on the show, we have Jag Davey from the Drug Policy Alliance. He is the Communication Strategy Director over there at Drug Policy Alliance. We have a great talk going all over the map talking about drug policy, what does the Drug Policy Alliance do, harms of prohibition and criminalization of drug use, talk about some of the great things happening in Portugal. We really go all over the place. Jag has some really cool stuff in the works, including a conference coming up that DPA is helping put on in Atlanta over October 11th through 14th called the Reform Conference, reformconference.org. For more info on that, that is going to be really cool. There's also a conference later in the year, I think in University of Washington, might be late October on End of Life Liberty, End of Life Liberty Project and DPA are putting on this thing about psychedelics and end of life care. So you would also, you know, not only have the ability to control when your life ends, but when and if you choose to use psychedelics around end of life, which is a really big deal. Imagine you could enjoy the last couple months of your life for the last couple weeks of your life, instead of just being riddled with anxiety and depression. Huge, huge, huge. We get into harm reduction at festivals and parties, university stuff too. We even get into some legal stuff around stop and frisk and how that was a super racist policy tied into marijuana. Yeah, we just really go all over the place and have a great time. The main reason we had him on was to talk about how medicalization and rescheduling of a drug doesn't really mean that it's going to have a change in the legal status of the drug. We have a lot of room left for reform on this stuff. So now for a few announcements, got a couple of breathwork workshops coming up. One on June 4 here in Breckenridge. Also a three-day kind of residential in June 23, the weekend of that, Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon. That's going to be really amazing. Some other folks are helping out too, but we're going to do my normal breathwork workshop. Also in Breckenridge, July 8 and August 6. I want to let you also know about Boston. If you're in the Northeast, this group Kyle and I both used to facilitate with June 2 and 3 in Massachusetts. That's Friday night from 7 to 9 this Saturday, 9 a.m. to 8. Check that out at bostonholotropic.com. For more info on my events, you can check out Psychedelics Today on the events page or breckbreath.com, B-R-E-C-K-B-R-E-A-T-H.com. Keep a lookout for more announcements coming out about our new improved psychedelic integration self-care class. We're going to have a lot to say about that over the next month. If you want to learn more, sign up on the email list or check us out on Facebook and you'll catch all the action and discussion there. I believe that's it for now. Thank you all for your time and see you on the next episode. Ladies and gentlemen, hello. Welcome back to the show. Today, we have Jack Davies, who is the Communication Strategy Director for the Drug Policy Alliance, a very important organization in our world. Jack's doing some great work. Jack, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me today on Psychedelics Today. I'm psyched. Really happy to have you here. We first touched base on Twitter. I don't know what I was doing, but I was talking to somebody about how I believed that criminal penalties would go down as soon as legalization for prescription would happen for psychedelic drugs. You caught that right away and said, nope, that's a pretty typical misconception. There's really nothing to changing of schedule would impact penalties. Let's maybe dig into that. What's going on there? Yeah, it raises so many interesting questions. The medical system in our country is so limited in some ways. When a drug is FDA approved, it's FDA approved for a particular use. What psychedelic researchers are trying to do now is to get a certain protocol for psychedelic-assisted therapy approved, where if you are in a government sanctioned, medically supervised facility with therapists, you could use certain psychedelics as part of the therapy, but that wouldn't change any of the criminal penalties for using it outside of that setting, outside of the regulated system. Quite a lot of heavily criminalized drugs, I mean, cocaine, methamphetamine, ketamine, have medical uses and are in schedules two or three. And of course, prescription opioids have been very heavily criminalized, have very severe mandatory minimums in a lot of places, even though they're not schedule one. So I mean, for example, with marijuana, it's very, very severe. It's very severe. It's very severe. It's very severe. So the marijuana DPA's position is that it should be descheduled, basically taken out of the Controlled Substances Act altogether, because none of the schedules are an appropriate place. But it really highlights the need. I mean, on some level, what we really need is to scrap the whole drug scheduling system and come up with a new one that allows for substances that have a very easily identifiable medical use to be safely accessible in some way. Because of course, with any illegal drug, they're generic. I mean, that's part of the reason no pharmaceutical company is going to spend millions of dollars, put marijuana through FDA clinical trials when it's a generic plant that decides for the fact that the government has been very obstructive with marijuana research. But in the same thing goes for MDMA or other substances. And the only way MAPS and Hefter have been able to do, which is amazing, is through non-profit fundraising. But that's not really feasible with all drugs. But what is happening, irrespective of a drug schedule, as we've seen with marijuana, the criminal penalties for it can be reduced and even eliminated. And so we're really. We're really trying to, at DPA, take a more holistic approach that also addresses ending the criminalization of people who use psychedelics. That's actually not that far-fetched politically. A lot of jurisdictions in the U.S. have policies in place to divert low-level drug offenders. And there's at least 60 supermajority. Supermajority support for ending the prosecution of people who use any illegal drug. So the best example is Portugal, internationally, where they ended the criminalization of all drugs, including psychedelics, in 2001. And since then, drug use has gone down among young people. But overdoses, AIDS, all have gone drastically, drastically down. And people are. Because people are able to get help through the health system when they're ready for it. The thing is, I mean, the thing is that's tricky, I think, for a lot of people who are passionate about psychedelics is that, you know, from a political standpoint, there's actually not a huge benefit in separating out psychedelics. Psychedelics support for legalizing them is not any. Better than support for legalizing heroin or methamphetamine. So all of the attention on its medical uses hasn't changed people's assumptions about, you know, what legally regulating them more broadly. But what people do support is removing, you know, reprioritizing law enforcement and public health resources around drugs more generally. And so, you know, in the broader scope of the drug industry, the drug war, it's a rel. You know, there's thousands and tens of thousands of people arrested for MDMA and psychedelics every year, which is a. There's a million and a half arrests in the country altogether for drugs. And almost all of those are just drug possession. And so, you know, psychedelics are a relatively small part of the overall drug war. But those harms of people getting arrested and people feeling unsafe to be able to use psychedelics fall disproportionately on people who are, you know, young and in more vulnerable situations, people from marginalized communities where they're more likely to have a police interaction or more likely to feel like their safety is in danger. So I think it's important for people who are passionate about psychedelics to advocate for, you know, reducing the role of criminalization of psychedelics. uh, outside of the medicalization model. In addition to it, it's a complimentary approach. It doesn't have to be, uh, one or the other, but I mean, if you look, I mean, if you go back in history and you look at every system of drug control we've had, it's always been racialized and, uh, stratified by class. I mean, going back to the late 1800s, um, you know, when, uh, Chinese immigrants who smoked opium were criminalized and when the first anti-drug laws were passed or the early 1900s when, uh, Mexican American people were criminalized for using marijuana and the first marijuana laws were passed. Um, at the same time, there was a system for, you know, white middle-class people who were addicted to opiates to get, you know, opiates through the medical system. And they weren't, they, they were sort of considered victims. If anything, they weren't, uh, considered scapegoats and you go all through history and who has access to prescription drugs in the medical system has always been based on class, um, and based on race. And so I think if the, um, psychedelic advocacy movement isn't explicitly, um, anti-racist, um, and coming from a clear social justice perspective, ultimately it's going to perpetuate the, the system we've had historically in the U S where, you know, well off white people have good access to legal drugs and everyone else is heavily punished for them. Um, you, you see this dynamic in, uh, places that have legalized marijuana to some degree where, um, like in Colorado, marijuana arrests have gone way down across the board of everyone, but the people who are still getting arrested are, you know, people who are still getting arrested. Our young black and brown people, uh, homeless people who are more likely to have interactions with the police because public smoking isn't local, isn't legal. Sorry. Um, and so if you don't, uh, uh, reform a policy with that, with those dynamics in mind of, of who, which groups benefit and which groups are left out, then given the society that we're in, it's going to fall in to the, the default one. So, I mean, for, for example, in marijuana legalization, now a lot of our battle is around not, uh, whether marijuana will get legalized, but how it gets legalized. Uh, we were very happy, uh, with what came out of California last year where, uh, we helped draft and fund, um, proposition 64 there. And it has a lot of explicit measures written into it that provide some sort of atonement and reparations for the harm that's done, has been done on community, certain communities by the drug war. So some of the tax revenue will be reinvested in those communities. And a lot of the tax revenue gets in, uh, reinvested in education in low income neighborhoods. Um, and there's provisions built in to try to limit the degree of big businesses coming in right away. Um, and it also has resentencing provisions in it because, okay, you think about it now, all of a sudden marijuana is legal and you have, you know, all these wealthy white people mostly investing in it. Um, and then what about all the people who were marijuana entrepreneurs the past 20 or 30 years who, you know, ended up with felonies on their record, you know, um, you know, they're, they're some of the, they're cut out. Cause I mean, historically, I mean, going back over the past 20 years, almost all of the medical marijuana measures would exclude people with felonies on their record from participating in the legal market. So it ends up with this really ironic situation where the people who have suffered the most harms of prohibition, I have a lot of expertise in marijuana entrepreneurship are cut out of the, the gains that, that are had. Um, so there, you know, that is going to be a constant bat ongoing battle in the coming years. decades really uh to ensure that that marijuana legalization is done in a equitable way uh there it's it's you know it could play out in a lot of different ways so that's going to be part of the fight going forward there's this analogy i hear once a while statement what is it the future is here now just unevenly distributed and i'm seeing it in yeah poor populations well in colorado right there's it's kind of expensive to obtain recreational or medical marijuana and it's cheaper to buy from the black market in a lot of ways still uh underprivileged people are acquiring it that way so exposing themselves not only to simple possession and smoking in public but through illegal acquisition means and there's veteran groups really pushing hard for access because you know a lot of veterans are very poor welfare or maybe not even be pulling welfare because they don't think they deserve it so they're probably putting themselves at risks in similar ways very interesting stuff yeah it seems very complex do you know how like with in terms of like the racism and uh with the drug war has uh what are the arrests like in portugal are they is it still targeted with minorities or underprivileged people have you ever researched any of that well they're not making any arrests for drug possession anymore like no one okay brought into even for public drug use i mean no one is forced into the they they what they do it's an interesting system and having universal health care helps but they refer you to a what they call a quote and it's translated as a quote-unquote dissuasion commission where you you have the option voluntarily of going in and meeting with you know a therapist and a few different experts from the drug industry and they're from different service providers from different fields um and if you want help uh or access to any services they kind of let you know what's available to you but they don't if you don't come into that meeting they don't then come and arrest you like they would in the u.s if you're on parole and it's a meeting or something right um and uh so yeah i mean i'll be injured with drug trafficking i'm not sure that's one of the sort of devil in the detail kind of things some countries have decriminalized uh uh drugs to some degree but the threshold limit is very low and so the police can basically take anyone they want and call them a drug trafficker even if they had a tiny amount on them you know because it's up to their discretion wow um you know and so yeah then it does end up perpetuating the same system so um and hasn't been been very effective um i mean even in new york where i've been living the past few years i've been living in new york and i've been living the past few years uh new york passed a marijuana decriminalization law in 1977 mostly by you know an effort led by white parents who were you know tired of you know they're they're like high school age kids you know getting arrested and ending up in in the jail you know in sketchy circumstances um and for like 20 years or 15 years after 1977 there were barely any marijuana arrests in new york just like in the hundreds a year um and then but then when stop and frisk and broken windows and all that stuff happened in the 90s and 2000s marijuana arrests shot up because what there was there was a provision in the law that if marijuana was in quote-unquote public view then uh you would get you would it was still a misdemeanor and so in poor neighborhoods um and black and brown neighborhoods the police would go around stopping and frisking people and making them take them to the police station and they would take them to the police station and they would take the marijuana out of their pocket and then it's in public view and arresting them so that's the point where there were uh a few up until a few years ago like 40 50 000 arrests a year just for marijuana possession just in new york city and almost all young black and latino men um between 18 and 25 you know it's like taking a whole generation and branding them for life as criminals and cutting them out of the system um and now i mean de blasio ran on a platform of improving that the current mayor of new york um and it's you know it's down to like 15 000 a year but that's still massive and it's still all in you know black and brown communities i mean it's like the marijuana arrests in the white communities in new york city are like zero and it's the same thing in other you know very liberal cities you get seattle or san francisco or portland these cities we think of as being very progressive in a lot of ways um they often have some of the highest uh you know uh uh disproportionate rates of arrests for drugs between black and white people um so it's it's a very like entrenched system we're going up against but at the same time i mean i'm kind of shocked i've you know been doing you know in the time i've been doing this kind of work public opinion has changed a lot where now you have 60 something percent support for ending arrests of of all people who use drugs um but the political system is always like slow to catch up um and you know at the lo almost all criminal justice policies are at the local and state level You know, like 90 something percent of law enforcement is, you know, state and local law enforcement. The federal government has like limited. That's how even, you know, the federal government forever, you know, through the Clinton and Bush and even the beginning of Obama was totally against medical marijuana and trying to shut it down. But it was able to survive anyway. So, you know, we're at a moment now of having to play a lot of defense federally. But I think the cat's out of the bag to a large degree with with marijuana legalization is more in question is what will happen with broader criminal justice reforms that that impact more marginalized people. One of the top reasons for deportations is marijuana possession and drug possession. Marijuana possession in the last years we had data available was the fourth most common criminal cause of deportation. Wow. A lot of times this could be an old thing from 10 or 20 years ago. There are stories from Colorado of people, you know, in a legal state getting deported for having a prior marijuana conviction, you know. So it's, you know, the broader criminal justice policies are definitely suffering a setback in some ways. But a lot of states are also even in conservative states. I mean, in Louisiana right now. In Texas, there's big criminal justice reform. So, I mean, a lot of the southern states have passed criminal justice reforms over the past few years, sort of the strange bedfellow of like financial conservatives and libertarians and social justice, you know, progressives. And it's, you know, I mean, there's sort of even a political consensus that sentencing reform. And, you know, at least we're scaling back mass incarceration is the sensible thing to do. Like, you know, majorities of Republicans support sentencing reform or at least some forms of it. You had during the president, the Republican presidential debates last year, you had, you know, Jeb Bush and other candidates sort of saying, oh, we can't arrest our way out of the drug problem and saying things that were like surprisingly reasonable, sort of, you know, and the shame. Of course, is that the one person who was really, really retrograde on it is the one who got elected and has appointed like the worst of the worst. So it's kind of a very paradoxical moment where we have all this momentum in some ways. And then sort of like the most like we could not have like sat around and dreamt this up, you know, just the worst of the worst drug warriors in the cabinet right now. What's your take on that? Or do you think there's actually going to be a little bit of pushback or backward motion? Yeah, there's definitely backward motion. I mean, to some degree, like with a lot of other issues, the reforms under Obama have been overstated in the media. You know, you know, a lot of the headlines recently have been, you know, Jeff Sessions wants to bring back the war on drugs and, you know, may implying that it had gone away. You know, and drug arrests have. They are pretty much near their all time high incarceration for drugs has gone down very slightly, which is pretty incredible because it was skyrocketing for so long. But it's still near its all time high. You know, his Obama's budgets never really prioritized the public health approach over a criminal justice approach. So it was still, you know, his rhetoric was pretty incredible sometimes, you know, talking, really addressing like the harms of mass incarceration and his. You know. You know, he made some sense and sensible things about marijuana, you know, that it's not more harmful than alcohol, which should be should be common sense. You know, that is something the vast majority of the public agrees with for a sitting president to say it was pretty cool. But there was it wasn't like there was that big a shift. It was actually we had a huge, huge bipartisan, you know, sentencing reform was actually the one issue in Congress. It still is. It's one of the few issues that the Democrats. And Republicans can agree upon. And it was actually Jeff Sessions in the Senate last year who was the main opponent to sentencing reform and was able to shut it down. But overall, like we've been we're moving in the right direction. Oh, yeah. I mean, a lot of our our work, too, is also, you know, so DPA's goal is reducing the role of criminalization in drug policy and instead implementing a health based policy. And so I think that's a really important thing. And I think that's a really important thing. for some reason, it became like this boogeyman. And there are a lot of festivals that are doing harm reduction work. I mean, one of the biggest ones of the transformational festival world, Lightning in a Bottle, we're working really closely with them. They have sent out harm reduction messages beforehand that we work on with them. And, you know, I don't think they, yeah, they don't allow drug checking. That's, you know. I'm kind of curious what, like, if you are doing harm reduction at festivals, how is that different than, say, the Zendo project? Yeah, we work with the Zendo project. Oh, you work with them. You know, we include each other in what we do that, you know, it's really trying to, like, mainstream and what they're, that model, basically, that you should have mental health services, or, you know, that should be one of the things that is, you know, sort of standard, standard for event producers. And that is just, like, commonsensical. I mean, you're less likely to have problems that end up in the media or end up drawing attention from the wrong people if you, you know, just acknowledge, like, that, you know, people are inherently going to have difficult experiences and you need to be able to deal with them. I mean, Zendo, it's interesting, you know, a lot of the people they deal with are not on psychedelics, but are just, you know, having a mental health issue. Or just, you know, they didn't sleep for too long, they got lost, or had some kind of break where they needed, you know, some, like, emotional support or just a place to lie down. So, yeah, it's, you know, it makes sense for, from an event producer standpoint to have that. Yeah. Yeah. Do you see any ever pushback? Do you see any ever pushback from the event producers of, you know, with that rave act overlooming of being like, well, is that kind of supporting drug abuse? Like, I don't, or drug use at a festival and they don't want people there? Like, you ever see that? Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, they don't want to come off as condoning or supporting drug use. And, you know, even Burning Man has been very careful over the years. You know, when I worked at what they called the precursor, it was called, you know, the precursor to the event, it was called Sanctuary back in, like, 2005 and 6. It was, like, technically unsanctioned by the Burning Man organization. You know, they were, like, really nervous about us doing it and didn't want us talking about it publicly. So, yeah, I mean, the trick would be actually, if there's any insurance people listening, to find an insurance person for festivals who gets that, oh, it's actually, the company's going to be less liable to put in a claim. Because the event producers always blame it on the insurance companies. Interesting. Which I don't know how much truth there is in that completely. But, you know, you would think even from an insurance company's perspective, they want to have services that are going to ensure people don't die and that people have a good time or just, you know, basic stuff that there's, like, free water accessible. You know, a lot of times it's, like, very, very basic stuff or, you know, just some chill out space. Yeah. Even if, you know, they don't have a mass spectrometer there. Although that would be ideal. In Portugal, at the Boom Festival there, they publicized the results. So they have a big projector screen where they post what's in the drug. You know, if there's a bad batch of something, they'll post it up, you know, and send it out on Twitter, you know. So, I mean, that's always just been fascinating to me that I think it shows, I guess, the background of people who are interested in psychedelic research generally come from a more privileged background. Right. These people are open about their interest in psychedelic research publicly and, you know, is that generally people don't seem to be that worried, number one, about being a criminal per se. People just assume, oh, I'm not going to get caught for that. Or they find it kind of made their peace with the system, you know, or they think that, oh, well, the only other alternative is, you know, complete free market legalization, you know, and we don't want that, obviously, either, where it gets totally out of control and is marketed, you know, by Pfizer or whatever. I think there's just been like a limited set of options available. And I think even people, it's just interesting how we internalize our own, like, oppression in some ways where, yeah, I mean, most people who come to psychedelic research events generally want to be able to use psychedelics outside of a medically supervised setting and have had beneficial, physical experiences in those settings and want that as well. I think there's an assumption that it'll happen automatically on its own. And I think we can't assume that. Now's a really important moment. I mean, what could happen is once psychedelic therapy becomes legal, a lot of the people funding psychedelic research who are well off are like, hey, I got mine. And, you know, the movement could actually, you know, there'd be less urgency in some ways, less funding available to, you know, I think it's very important at this point where there's all this interest in the movement is still sort of setting its agenda to be sure that there's like complementary approaches outside of medicalization. And even if even if you're just interested from a purely scientific research perspective, you're not sure about psychedelics. I mean, assuming a lot of people listening to the show are enthusiasts about psychedelics in one way or another. But even if you're just curious about psychedelics, you're not sure about psychedelics. And I think it's very important that we think about their research potential. Their, you know, research is still incredibly limited by the whole sort of drug war context that we're in. I mean, it's amazing that these people doing psychedelic research have been able to get their clinical trials done and to fund them and get them approved through all these institutions. But they are walking a tightrope. It's really hard to do what they do. It was only through decades of, you know, playing it safe and working their way up that they've got to this point. And there's a lot of questions in research that are not being answered. You know, in academia tends to be inherent people and it tends to be more liberal, but, you know, it tends to be conservative in a lot of ways. And so ultimately, the yeah, the whole decision making around how research gets done needs to be changed. You know, like right now, the DEA still decides who gets a license and who doesn't. Their job is drug enforcement, and they're a very politicized agency. You know, that should be like science and health agencies that determine who gets, you know, a license to be able to do research. And yeah, there's a lot, you know, a lot of things that can't be done outside of the very, you know, the placebo controlled, double blind paradigm. You know, in order for something to be considered a medicine in the U.S., it's just very, very limited. I mean, the DEA says psychedelics and marijuana don't have medical uses. They're actually technically correct because, you know, we've decided generally that the FDA decides what is a safe and approved medicine, but only certain drugs have the incentives to be put through this very specific set of clinical trials that are required to, uh, you know, get them approved for prescription use and get them, get that, you know, safe and effective, uh, tag from the FDA. Um, so ultimately, yeah, I mean, we should, in New Zealand a few years ago, they passed a bill to create a new commission that would regulate, uh, synthetic drugs where a company, if they had a drug to sell that's on the market that they wanted to sell, they had to pay for the safety testing to prove that it was safe and then they could bring it to market. Um, and funnily enough, the bill never ended up getting enacted because it required animal studies as part of the safety tests and animal rights activists, which I consider myself an animal rights supporter as well. So I don't know where I come on this one, but, you know, um, animal rights activists ended up like scuttling it because, um, it required, uh, animal trials in order to prove its safety, um, with these new synthetic drugs. But ultimately we kind of need like a new FDA that, you know, has that basic concept for what we call recreational drugs or drugs, you know, even things that aren't necessarily recreational, but, you know, I mean, there's so many things like Kava or, you know, Kratom or Kratom, however you say it, which is now starting to face criminalization that's used by millions of people. Um, there's so many different things that don't fit into that model and don't have an incentive to be put through FDA clinical trials. Um, do you have any news about the Kratom update? Like what's going on with that right now? I wish I had some recent news to report. I mean, so what happened last year was that the DEA, uh, tried to emergency schedule it. Um, I remember that. Yeah. And tons of different groups and people fought back. And it was the first time the DEA actually withdrew and did an emergency scheduling. Um, the battle now is at the state level. So, you know, the, the because like i was saying earlier most criminal justice policies are made at the state level so uh there's five or six states that have moved to that have already criminalized kratom at the state level um and a bunch more states had introduced bills this year that uh most of them were killed because there is a real community out there of people who care about kratom who who are really um on top of this stuff um and you know and it's a big industry too i i didn't i i was like the point person at dpa trying to figure out our response and i didn't realize you know the american kratom association estimates three to five million people use it i'm like wow i i mean i knew it was a lot but we didn't know there was such a huge community out there um and you know part of the danger is that is that you know sort of the abstinence only model um because people just assume that you know oh you're just switching from one drug to another you know and i think that's sort of like a model you know this framework that just like refuses to die you know the abstinence only thing um you know we're also there's all this data coming out about how uh marijuana is uh helping people get off opiates or cut back on their opiate use a lot of time like states that have medical marijuana have lower rates of opioid overdoses because people are at least like cutting back on their opioids if not putting them all together uh with medical marijuana um and psychedelics of course kratom uh are also you know there's studies going on looking at the the association there as well i remember watching a documentary on youtube somewhere but i think the place was in maine it was like a little retreat center and their whole thing to help people get off of opiates was like high doses of cannabis um just like lots of dabs smoking non-stop to produce almost like an uncomfortable uncomfortable effect and over you know i'm guessing people stay there for a few months but i thought that was a really interesting concept i'm sure you know people probably pretty controversial of switching one substance to another substance yeah yeah i think it depends how it's done i mean a lot a lot of treatment of what we call quote unquote treatment in this country is very ineffective and scientifically unproven um that's the thing even like when the the government devotes resources to you know sort of the public quote-unquote public health approach it's still very limited because most of the treatment is through the criminal justice system anyway you know um and uh you know they're having you know putting money it's like dare and you know these progr you know this sort of like just say no approach that's discredited and unrealistic um so yeah it's it's not just a matter of like uh getting a public health approach but actually like a real public health approach that's based on evidence and not uh sort of ideology right yeah i think i mean it's it's interesting to think about what if um psychedelics are you know used more broadly in our society once you branch out you know the the therapists that have done the research studies so far are pretty small relatively small tight-knit group you know and as uh because they've done it in stage one and stage two of fda clinical trials they're about to start stage three which is hundreds of people in much much larger amounts and where they have to there's dozens of therapists and lots of sites um and then eventually once it's you know if it is made more widely available you know how how the cultural association with it changes you know um you know i think it's it's it's a very interesting question um and i think it's a very interesting question um and i think it's a very In the experience itself. There was an article that came out on Symposia today by Nicholas Langlitz, who's a really interesting anthropologist, about a study that was done with mescaline in the late 19th century, where they gave it to a group of European Americans and then they gave it to a group of Native Americans. And they had completely opposite experiences where the European Americans had like hellish experiences and described it as being pretty dreadful in general, whereas the Native Americans had felt a connection with a higher power. And yeah, that has everything to do with your association with it. So I think, you know, that goes back to removing, you know, by removing the criminalization. Of psychedelics that will help change the image of who is a psychedelic user, you know, and who can be open about their psychedelic drug use. I mean, one of the best things, you know, for changing public opinion is people who are functioning drug users to come out about their use. But certain groups of people have it easier doing that than others. I mean, for a lot of people, your job, you know, your. Family to keep, you know, you could lose your kids, you know, for something like that in a lot of places. And so, you know, not not everyone can do that, but, you know, it needs to be done in a responsible way. I mean, that's it's the same thing. I think people who are enthusiastic about psychedelics often I find harbor a lot of misperceptions about people who use other substances or create. Sort of like a dualism of like good drugs and bad drugs and these these aren't or that they aren't even drugs, you know, it's it's something else where that that's not really helpful. And, you know, I mean, for example, I always like to point out when I give a talk in front of audiences about psychedelics that, you know, nine out of 10 people who try heroin or methamphetamine or crack cocaine don't go on to get addicted and have problems. That's according to the federal government's own data. And it's similar with psychedelics. You know, we don't ever see those people, those people, people who are a functional heroin user or a functional methamphetamine user who use a bit once or twice a month on a weekend. You don't hear their stories generally because they're the stigma is so great that why would you volunteer that information? The only stories you hear of people who've really hit rock bottom, you know, and where they're exposed. And so whether or not someone even is perceived as having a problem with drugs depends so much on their status. You know, if you're in a socially socioeconomically marginalized situation, one small arrest or one crazy night out partying that went wrong or, you know, can totally destroy your whole life, your job, your family, where for a lot of other people, if you're, you know, you have a bit of a buffer, you know, there's always been. Good legal access to drugs for well-off white people. Yeah. Like, for instance, we have prescription crystal meth. Dr. Carl Hart kind of pointed this out online a while ago that Adderall is almost identical to crystal meth. It's just, you know, pumped out in a different facility. You know, that said, people making it out of brake fluid and batteries, you know, that's a little dicey. So actually. Yes, absolutely. Can we talk about the Office of Academic Engagement at DPA briefly? Yeah, sure. My colleague, Julie Netherland here, a couple of years ago started DPA's Office of Academic Engagement, which does a couple of different things. One, it provides sort of resources to academics to help them become more engaged with policymaking and with tools to help make their work more. Public DPA actually has a bit of a academic history to it because we were more of a think tank when we started founded by a Princeton professor in the early 90s as the Linda Smith Center as more of a think tank and gradually in the late 90s, early 2000s became a political advocacy organization. But we always, you know, really prioritize a sort of rigorous academic quality to our work and working closely with academics. You know, we've had a lot of, you know, a lot of great students, you know, who care about the issues we do, because there are a lot of the people on the front lines who are who are out there like our board member, Dr. Carl, Carl Hart, a good thing to know about for your for all you out there is we are organizing our biennial conference, the International Drug Policy Reform Conference right now, which is October 11th to 14th in Atlanta. And that is an amazing conference. When I first went to that back in 2005, it was sort of a. Life changing event for me in connecting psychedelics with. all these other different movements going on with formerly incarcerated people working on organizing and harm reduction people and people from all over the place at every level of society. And I organized the psychedelics track for the reform conference. And in past years, we've had really interesting sort of panels with maps and with people, a lot of psychedelic researchers, but also people working on psychedelics from different angles. And we really, it's not just people giving an hour long academic presentation. A lot of people, there are academics, but we organize it in a way to foment debate and discussion, where it's more of a round table conversation than people sort of speaking at you and reading from a paper for an hour. So I highly, yeah, I highly encourage that. People to check that out in Atlanta. We're also doing a conference on psychedelics and palliative care with the University of Washington's law school in Seattle two weeks after that on October 27th. So NAU in the Northwest, check that out. Sounds awesome. I'm kind of close to a palliative care doctor and tried to bring up the psychedelic impact to people at end of life, and it was not accepted well. So I'll probably pass this along. I think it's because, you know, you're not a doctor. What do you know? Shut up, idiot. It's like, oh, come on. Like, listen, I've been studying this stuff for a long time, more time than you spent in drug school. I mean, medical school. And yeah, it's a weird thing. And I'm glad you guys are doing that. Is that a DPA sponsored conference? Yeah, it's co-organized. It's co-organized by DPA in a group called the End of Life Liberty Project. They were one of the main groups who have fought and won for right to die litigation in a number of states, I think, including Colorado. That just happened, I think. Yeah. And she sort of, after working on that for a while, it's sort of, you know, if you have a right to die, you should also have a right to live to your fullest, at least in, if in no, other time in your final moments. So in a lot of ways, that's one of the more politically acceptable options to people at the end of life. I mean, it's pretty normal to give people morphine then, you know, and sedate them. If we're able to do that, we may as well give them a chance to experience psychedelics. What's that conference called again? It is called, oh, I can't remember. I can't remember the name right now. Let me, let me look real quick. Yeah, no problem. I was just Googling all over. There's obviously a lot of websites on this. Psychedelics and Palliative Care and the University of Washington and the Drug Policy Alliance. You'll, you'll find us. Yeah. And also, you know, yeah, we're very active on all of the interwebs on Twitter and Facebook and Snapchat now, even. Ooh, Snapchat, nice. Oh, really? I'm excited. I'm adding you right now. Yeah, I almost, I'm starting to actually enjoy it way more than Instagram or Facebook, to be honest. Oh, cool. Finally. There's something else. Yeah, I'm most active on Twitter these days. So you can find me there. I do need to do Twitter more. It's, it's awesome. There's so much actual debate happening. Yeah, I find out a lot about a lot of interesting people doing interesting work in very specific fields, that I didn't know about otherwise. Yeah. Do you have any advice on maybe students or anybody that wants to get involved in any policy work or just helping with reforming drug policy and psychedelics and? Yeah, yeah. I would say, like, look at if you feel like getting involved on a personal level, you know, look at the groups in your area who are doing organizing around criminal justice and harm reduction. And who the, the people, the boots on the ground are who've been doing that work for years. I mean, there's some places where there's not, not much, but there are a lot of just about every town and city in the country, you know, has really interesting criminal justice organizing going on now. And, you know, get involved with them and, you know, bring up the issue of psychedelics and what, you know, getting that community, finding ways to get that community on board. I think it's easy. I go to a lot of psychedelics conferences and a lot of conferences on broader drug policy reform issues. And it's surprising there is barely any overlap. There is some overlap, but it's very small of the people who are there. We tend to get ourselves into silos. So, you know, if you're if you care about psychedelics, you know, go to a harm reduction conference or get involved with the local harm reduction group or You know, the local criminal justice reform organizing or the local in a lot of places, marijuana is still heavily criminalized and there's a lot of very important work going on around ending marijuana arrests. You know, most marijuana arrests are still near an all time high, you know, still 42 states to go. And even in the states where it is legal, there's still issues. So I think focusing at the local. Level is where, you know, you can have the most impact in a lot of ways. But, yeah, I hope, you know, I mean, more generally, I yeah, I hope that people who care about psychedelics get more invested and involved in ending the criminalization of psychedelics more broadly. And, you know, avoid thinking of that as sort of something we do 10 or 20 years. I think a lot of people in the psychedelic research field are very reticent to talk about, you know, they have good reason to be very careful about not associating themselves with a political movement. That's how they in some ways, that's how they've been able to get their psychedelic research approved is by playing it straight within these mainstream institutions and not, you know, associating themselves with like the marijuana legalizers or whoever. But what the political reality where 10 or 20 years ago was very different from the way it is now. And I think ultimately for people who care about psychedelic research, it will help their cause to get engaged politically and to build a broader base of support because the groups of people feel like it's a lot of an echo chamber among people who are interested in psychedelics for to a large degree. I'm in a bit of a bubble. So I probably that, you know, my own sense of reality is kind of warped. And like, of course, it would feel that way to me is, you know, I think, yeah, that that's where there's there's the most opportunity. Cool, Jack, I want to run this quick story by you about what's happening here in my where I live. There is a district attorney who has this, quote unquote, tough on drugs. Dance, you know, he ostensibly is doing some restorative justice stuff, but I think it's all political moves. There was a case that was so when he was running for reelection recently, got called out in this event for having gone. I don't know if it was on the record, but saying publicly, anybody who legally consumes marijuana through recreational medical means should give up their driver's license. So obviously, I'm a little awkward around him. I don't really want to engage him because he said something like that publicly. And then to next level, there is a recent court case. Someone died. Apparently, somebody who wanted to, you know, is probably on his way out anyway, just from substance abuse all over the map. He was looking for a way out is what I've heard. He smoked a fentanyl patch and died. Jeez. He texted somebody and said, how do you do this? The gentleman told him. But said, be very careful because this could kill you. This person that he texted was brought up on manslaughter charges. Oh, yeah. For a text, even though it said this can kill you. And he was acquitted, obviously. But the fact that this particular person, the district attorney in particular, was willing to bring charges to somebody like this blows my mind. And this is Colorado, right? This isn't, you know, theoretically, I'm feeling like this is a progressive place. But this is the Wild West, open carry everywhere. Kind of a wild place. Still a lot of people hate marijuana here, even though it's this, you know, big revenue thing for the state. I don't know. Any commentary on that whole thing? Yes. Yeah. I mean, quote, unquote, you know, nominally progressive states are a lot of the worst ones on criminal justice more broadly. And, yeah, we've been doing a lot of work around opposing these new, quote, unquote, drug-induced homicide laws, yeah, this is where there's been this huge opportunity where we've been able to pass a lot of good reforms and harm reduction measures as a result of the attention on the opioid crisis but then at the same time there's simultaneously like this backlash you know of people wanting to respond to it with like more criminalization and like demonizing drug quote-unquote drug dealers who are usually just small-time petty you know quote-unquote petty dealers who are users themselves who are just supporting their habit you know and yeah that's something we have to be really on guard against with the opioid crisis is not falling back into the old patterns of demonizing you know assuming that all the evidence over decades shows that cracking down on on through enforcement does nothing to limit the supply people are going to get it from somewhere you know all it does is make it much more dangerous for everyone involved and lock up ridiculous amounts of people but um yeah enforcement only makes it more dangerous and a lot of there's actually been a very positive trend in criminal justice reform just the past couple years of uh progressives getting involved in district attorney elections and getting good district attorney elections and getting good district attorney elections and getting good uh civil rights lawyer was just uh won the democratic primary in philadelphia and i'll be the next da philadelphia who has made a career out of suing the police department in philadelphia um because you know part of judges get blamed a lot in the war on drugs but it's actually the prosecutors who have all the power the war on drugs and mass incarceration has been a massive shift of of judicial power to prosecutorial power not more than like 95 percent of people behind bars behind bars for drugs did not go through a trial and were found guilty they pleaded guilty because they have these crazy mandatory minimums on the books people get threatened by the prosecutors of all the power they threaten these people with yeah you know look you can go to trial but i'm going to throw the book at you and give you you know 30 to life or you can take a five or ten year plea deal or whatever everyone's going to take the plea deal because they like very little chance of winning in the trial um because everything is stacked against them especially if they don't have the power to do it so i think it's a really big deal and i think it's a really big deal um because everything is stacked against them especially if they don't have money to pay for a lawyer which is people in the system at that point um so yeah the the the district attorneys in the country could end mass incarceration tomorrow and it's an elected office they just there's just this like knee-jerk reaction that like oh i have to be tough on crime you know or if one you know bad thing happens i you know i'm gonna uh you know i'm gonna it's gonna be my neck on the line you know you know all the evidence shows the opposite that it's better for public safety to not have people cycling through prison because then they end up you know becoming more violent and you know their whole life is you know you become a second class citizen um how much do you feel that the private private prisons play a role in this yeah that's a good question where i think the conventional wisdom is also a bit misleading sometimes on it you know private prisons are maybe eight to ten percent of all prisons and i think that's a good question because i think that's a good question and they're definitely a nefarious phenomenon you know in general but uh you know i think there's a lot of other entrenched interests as well that play a similar or greater part in you know the financial benefits of mass incarceration there's so many corporations that benefit from the free prison labor inside of it even the non-private prisons contract out a lot of their work or with companies you know so you know all you know the marriott is like a huge produce uh provider of um you know like textiles and the food running the cafeterias the medical uh all providing all the medical care for it that's those are huge industries um and so it's just so sort of entrenched in some ways um you know the prison guards union because you know there's been this most people go to prison are from poor urban areas but uh or disproportionately from poor urban areas at least and most prisons are way out in rural areas so for a lot of small rural communities there they become economically dependent on the jobs from the prison because they're the only jobs around um so they don't want the politicians from those places don't want to lose the local prison because they'll you know they're getting re-elected depends on that um or at least they think it does but so yeah there's uh that's why yeah i mean a lot of the the work is sort of on the local level you know getting those politicians to realize that it's not in their self-interest that's great advice keep locking up a lot of people so many people um that they're going to be held accountable for it yeah so i think we've taken quite a bit of your time i really appreciate it jack was there anything you might want to add uh before we wrap here not much um yeah we went through quite a lot all right yeah check out drug policy alliance get on our email list drugpolicy.org follow us on facebook twitter all that good stuff snapchat we're we're pretty active all around the country um and we have offices in colorado california new york a lot of places do a lot of local events and organizing um so yeah uh thank you yeah it's great to see how much work you've been doing yeah thanks jack i really appreciate it i hope to talk to you again in the future you you , you,