Speaker 1: Ephemeral is production of iHeart three D audio. For full exposure,
Speaker 1: listen with that phones. This episode of Ephemeral talks frankly
Speaker 1: about drug history, policy, study, and use. These views do
Speaker 1: not necessarily represent those of iHeartMedia, Protozoa Pictures, or their
Speaker 1: executives and employees, and should not be construed as medical
Speaker 1: advice or encouragement to use any type of psychoactive substance.
Speaker 1: Flow whooa always late, local tests, fired, phone calls, a
Speaker 1: formal morning rund line rund run und doing drugs right
Speaker 1: at your mind? Answer the question, brandom, you're doing drugs?
Speaker 1: This exploration has led into a new and dangerous career.
Speaker 1: Smoking rash, popping Manny's, shooting speed or dropping acid is
Speaker 1: running one out there who still isn't clear about what
Speaker 1: doing drugs does. Okay, last time, this is your brain,
Speaker 1: This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs and
Speaker 1: questions drugs, drugs, drugs. From pot to cot, alcohol to
Speaker 1: adderall crack, cocaine to caffeinated coffee, almost all of us
Speaker 1: use one form of drug or another. And even though
Speaker 1: there's a constant flow of drug commentary coursing through our
Speaker 1: news media and entertainment. It can be an uncomfortable subject
Speaker 1: to talk about, amplified by the fact that rhetoric on
Speaker 1: drugs can be difficult to trust. And that's a shame.
Speaker 1: Oh man, they are so fascinating. Almost every department at
Speaker 1: a university could have an entire course about drugs. If
Speaker 1: you look in the social sciences, you could have of
Speaker 1: course all about drugs, anthropology, in criminology, of political science,
Speaker 1: and in sociology, and in history and in economics, all six.
Speaker 1: In the arts, you could have it in music, you
Speaker 1: could have it in literature, you could have it in
Speaker 1: the visual arts. So you were talking about one of
Speaker 1: the great interdisciplinary subjects that exist out there. Hi, I'm
Speaker 1: Ethan Nadelman. I've devoted most of my adult life to
Speaker 1: working to end the war on drugs. Started off doing
Speaker 1: that as a professor at Princeton and started an organization
Speaker 1: called the Drug Policy Alliance, and gentleman looked up to
Speaker 1: Ethan Nadelman, which became the leading organization of the world
Speaker 1: advocating for an end to the war on drugs. And
Speaker 1: then about four years ago I stopped doing that and
Speaker 1: took a little time off, and now I've started my
Speaker 1: own podcast called Psychoactive. How much do you know about drugs? Well,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you, Alex, I'm no expert on the sort
Speaker 1: of biochemistry farm a college aspects of it, but apart
Speaker 1: from that, I know a lot about drugs. I've been
Speaker 1: reading and studying and talking to people and using drugs
Speaker 1: for most of my adult life. I sometimes joke that
Speaker 1: growing up Jewish, my first taste of alcohol was when
Speaker 1: I was seven days old at my brists. I remember
Speaker 1: being nine ten years old and going to synagogue on Saturday,
Speaker 1: and at the end of services, they would lay out
Speaker 1: the little mona chevits wine and these little tiny plastic cups.
Speaker 1: My friends and I we would have a few of these,
Speaker 1: and we knew if we had four or five of
Speaker 1: them we would feel a little tipsy and maybe fall
Speaker 1: asleep at lunch. And then there was the whole bar
Speaker 1: Mitzvah scene when I was thirteen, where we all started
Speaker 1: getting drunk. We weren't supposed to, but you know, we'd
Speaker 1: be drinking Vika tonics with screwdrivers. In the Jewish community
Speaker 1: in a suburb of New York, basically most people drank,
Speaker 1: but I don't remember anybody who would drink to excess
Speaker 1: the most powerful drug education I remember getting. I must
Speaker 1: have been in junior high school. It was actually an
Speaker 1: anti smoking set. The Surgeon General has determined a cigarette
Speaker 1: smoking is dangerous to your health. They brought in one
Speaker 1: of those fake lungs is a machine, and they connected
Speaker 1: a cigarette to it and showed what happened to the
Speaker 1: stake long when it got all yellow and disgusting. One
Speaker 1: thing about this machine, it will never get heart disease
Speaker 1: or cancer from smoking. But when it came to the
Speaker 1: other anti drug stuff, I gotta admit I don't have
Speaker 1: any recollection if they even did it back in the
Speaker 1: late sixties early seventies. They must have, but I don't recall.
Speaker 1: With marijuana, I remember being about seventeen and seeing a
Speaker 1: bunch of my friends who were getting high and just
Speaker 1: noticing they all kind of fell asleep. So that was
Speaker 1: not that appealing, So it wasn't really I started college,
Speaker 1: and I distinctly remember the first off getting high there.
Speaker 1: I was moving from one apartment to another. The marijuana
Speaker 1: is coming on and we're moving a refrigerator, and you know,
Speaker 1: the whole thing starts to become eighteen year olds laughing
Speaker 1: and almost dropping a refrigerator down a flight of stairs.
Speaker 1: So that was the start, and then I became a
Speaker 1: regular marijuana consumer, but never a daily user. Had a
Speaker 1: kind of almost anti addictive personality where you hear a
Speaker 1: lot in the context of drugs, And indeed, the title
Speaker 1: of Ethan's podcast is psychoactive basically means mind altering. You
Speaker 1: think there's a whole host of drugs. The drug I
Speaker 1: take every day I deal with my cholesterol that's not psychoactive.
Speaker 1: Psychoactive suggests that and somehow it's altering consciousness. Now, that
Speaker 1: could be in obvious ways, like psychedelics or like with cannabis,
Speaker 1: but it could even be true of things like coffee
Speaker 1: and tobacco, where when we consume them we're somewhat aware
Speaker 1: of their subtle psychoactive effects, but we don't really notice
Speaker 1: them until we stopped doing that. The single most common
Speaker 1: one is caffeine. Something like the world consumes caffeine, either
Speaker 1: in the form of coffee or tea or some other
Speaker 1: plant products that contain it. Probably the second most universalist alcohol. Obviously,
Speaker 1: there are prohibitions on it in the Islamic world, but
Speaker 1: generally speaking, it's a fairly universal thing. And if you
Speaker 1: go back historically, you have indigenous groups all around the
Speaker 1: world having no contact with outer societies that somehow figured
Speaker 1: out that that piece of food or that thing, if
Speaker 1: left to ferment and then consumed, would have quite a
Speaker 1: bank Marijuana has a history going back ten thousand years,
Speaker 1: but it's not been as universally used. And then, of
Speaker 1: course tobacco one came out of the Americas and made
Speaker 1: its way to Europe and then to the rest of
Speaker 1: the world, and because it was so remarkably addictive, really
Speaker 1: got a kind of global use. So I would probably
Speaker 1: say caffeine's first alcohol, second tobacco products, third cannabis for
Speaker 1: oi and that heroin morphine other pharmaceutical opioids that are
Speaker 1: made from it would probably be in fifth place. Then
Speaker 1: you work your way down and a whole lot of
Speaker 1: other things that may be used by tens or hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of people, like cot or cava from South Pacific,
Speaker 1: or beetle nut used in South Asia, so there are
Speaker 1: more localized ones that haven't sort of spread around the world.
Speaker 1: One of the most traditional, if sometimes over exaggerated, applications
Speaker 1: of psychoactive substances is to stimulate one's creative mind. I
Speaker 1: know people who are artists and find the Meryl want
Speaker 1: it really does help them on the creative side. On
Speaker 1: the end they hand. I'll tell you when it comes
Speaker 1: to the intellectual stuff, I'll beginning all these great ideas,
Speaker 1: they don't seem as such value the next day when
Speaker 1: looked at in the light of day when I'm straight interesting. Though,
Speaker 1: with psychedelics, there are insights that I've had on doing
Speaker 1: those the psychedelics that were almost life transformative for me,
Speaker 1: and I'm more likely to remember it coherently in a
Speaker 1: way as well. You think about some of the famous people,
Speaker 1: I mean the Nobel Prize winners, the jobs and others
Speaker 1: who say that but for psychedelics, they never would have
Speaker 1: invented with the invented or discovered what they discovered. And
Speaker 1: you don't hear that as often with marijuana or any
Speaker 1: other drug. You know, there have been indigenous people's using
Speaker 1: these drugs throughout history. Ayahuasca, mushrooms, payot or mescaline, the toura,
Speaker 1: the plant which can be actually deadly poisonous, but in
Speaker 1: minimal doses can be a very high at least psychedelic
Speaker 1: type of drug l s D where the key ingredient
Speaker 1: or good comes from a mold. There are histories in
Speaker 1: Europe of these outbreaks of the town going crazy, and
Speaker 1: it appears to be when this mold took off in
Speaker 1: the local wheat or rye fields. Albert Hoffman sort of
Speaker 1: accidentally invents ls be protectively and then that thing has
Speaker 1: its kind of heyday in the fifties and sixties, first
Speaker 1: among the sort of elite strata, and then Timothy Learry
Speaker 1: turn on tune and drop out, drop out of becomes
Speaker 1: the thing used by millions, drop out of junior executive.
Speaker 1: Many people benefit enormously, other people just do it for yucks,
Speaker 1: and some minority of people get really hurt by this.
Speaker 1: And then you go into the kind of quiet age
Speaker 1: of psychedelics, and I say, now we are in this period,
Speaker 1: an extraordinary period in the history of human beings and drugs,
Speaker 1: where we're having this sort of psychedelic renaissance. Part of
Speaker 1: it is because of the work of organizations like MAPS,
Speaker 1: the Multidiscipinary Association of Psychedelic Studies created by Mike Buddy
Speaker 1: Rick Doblin back in the eighties. Psychedelics, when used wisely,
Speaker 1: have the potential to help heal us help inspire us
Speaker 1: and perhaps even to help save us. Part of it
Speaker 1: because of a range of academics that have just kept
Speaker 1: pushing to get this going. Part of it because Michael
Speaker 1: pollan sort of breakthrough book, Changing Your Mind. What happened
Speaker 1: to psychedelics in the sixties that they became so stigmatized
Speaker 1: that research stopped. Now you have all these companies trying
Speaker 1: to create new psychedelic products. So you have this sort
Speaker 1: of psychedelic renaissance where the media is mostly focused on
Speaker 1: the upside layout the case for legalization of psychedelics and
Speaker 1: and why this is an opportunity of investors. We're used
Speaker 1: numbers of people are having positive experiences where people understand
Speaker 1: the significance of setting like using these drugs in the
Speaker 1: right type of environment. So I think we're probably in
Speaker 1: a period in history where more people are using these
Speaker 1: things than ever before. And I also expect that there's
Speaker 1: gonna be some tragedies. There are going to be some
Speaker 1: people who get hurt. The media is gonna jump on that,
Speaker 1: We're gonna start to see the pendulum swing backward. But
Speaker 1: I think there's a level of consciousness and awareness and
Speaker 1: acceptance and normalization happening both with cannabis and with psychedelics. Now,
Speaker 1: unlike anything we've seen before, medical use of psychoactive drugs
Speaker 1: can be rife with complications. Take for example, the array
Speaker 1: of pharmaceuticals derived from the opium plant. In the United States,
Speaker 1: our medical system prescribes opioids, so most people have had
Speaker 1: some form of opioid in their life. We come out
Speaker 1: of getting our wisdom, teeth removes, we come out of
Speaker 1: some minor surgery, so the doctor may prescribe like an oxycodon.
Speaker 1: Go to place like Japan, I think, where it's very low.
Speaker 1: You go to parts of the developing world where it's
Speaker 1: under prescribed and many people die in pain. Opioids one
Speaker 1: of these things where interestingly, if you have access even
Speaker 1: to heroin, to pharmaceutical grade heroine, and you know the
Speaker 1: dose and you're using the same dose, you can basically
Speaker 1: consume heroin every day of your adult life and live
Speaker 1: to be years old. You can have a job, you
Speaker 1: can have sex with your partner, you can drive a car.
Speaker 1: You can do it all because your body develops a
Speaker 1: certain tolerance. If you stop using it, you'll feel sick
Speaker 1: and feverish or even worse. While your body goes to
Speaker 1: a racking withdrawal of it. But the fact that there is,
Speaker 1: if you have a reliable dose, the worst side effect
Speaker 1: oftentimes it's instipatient. When you combine heroin with alcohol or
Speaker 1: with a benzodiazepine type drug, in modest amounts, it can
Speaker 1: be a really great high. But the problem is if
Speaker 1: you double or triple that dose, you stop breathing. We
Speaker 1: think about people dying give an alcohol overdose, but the
Speaker 1: deadly thing is that alcohol is oftentimes the hidden thing
Speaker 1: that's causing an overdose with another drug where the media
Speaker 1: headline says heroin, but it was actually heroin plus booze.
Speaker 1: And it was only with the recent emergence of ventonyl
Speaker 1: taking the opioid epidemic to a new level of urgency.
Speaker 1: This synthetic opioid that's fifty times more powerful than heroin,
Speaker 1: Graham prograam. That's the first opioid where people just take
Speaker 1: it all by itself and they can just stop breathing.
Speaker 1: You know, with marijuana, you can have fifty times the
Speaker 1: amount you need to get a hundred times and it's
Speaker 1: not going to kill you. It appears that if you're
Speaker 1: on an opioid prescription and you combine it with Marriwana,
Speaker 1: you can cut your prescribed dose in half just by
Speaker 1: having a little bit of marijuana with it, because the
Speaker 1: marijuana potentiates it. There's a bunch of research studies out
Speaker 1: there that showed that in states that are approved medical marijuana,
Speaker 1: they appear to have lower overdose rates than did other
Speaker 1: places because people were either substituting the marijuana for the
Speaker 1: opioids for pain relief, or they were combining it with
Speaker 1: the opioid and therefore taking less of the opioid because
Speaker 1: they didn't need as much. I know, I get totally
Speaker 1: lost on it, but I didn't want to ask about
Speaker 1: opium classic you know, smokable opium, you know, like I
Speaker 1: feel like I see most of like media with like
Speaker 1: opium then and I imagine it was a scene in
Speaker 1: the US at some point, and it's not really anymore. Well,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you. I mean, I feel I've been a
Speaker 1: bit professionally negligent and never having actually smoked opium. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's on my two do list, my bucket list. You know,
Speaker 1: I got to do this if I'm really going to
Speaker 1: be a serious, you know person talking about drugs. But
Speaker 1: by and large. The opium dent was a common thing
Speaker 1: in Asia, and then it came to America when people
Speaker 1: came from China in the middle of late nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: They then became incredibly demonizes. The first opium prohibition laws
Speaker 1: were in the eighteen seventies and eighties in the Data
Speaker 1: and in California, very racist laws, and the fear that
Speaker 1: the Chinese were basically addicting and seducing and turning white
Speaker 1: women into sex slaves. Works wonders. When heroin gets invented,
Speaker 1: actually by Bear Pharmaceutical as a cost sur president, what
Speaker 1: happened was you had a some of the switch going
Speaker 1: on from opium to heroin, and then people begin to
Speaker 1: realize that if you want to smuggle this stuff, it's
Speaker 1: a lot safer to smuggle a white powder like heroin
Speaker 1: than it is to smuggle opium. And if you want
Speaker 1: to consume it, opium gives off a distinct a roma,
Speaker 1: whereas heroin, especially if you're injecting and not smoking, it
Speaker 1: no aroma, so it's easier to hide from the cops.
Speaker 1: It's what we call the perverse consequences of prohibition, where
Speaker 1: when you prohibit a drug like opium or coca or
Speaker 1: some other things like that. People tend to say, Okay,
Speaker 1: let's synthesize it, let's make it easier to smuggle, easier
Speaker 1: to consume discreetly, and we push people away from the
Speaker 1: less dangerous, more natural plant product towards a much more
Speaker 1: compact and potent version. And that brings us to one
Speaker 1: of the most controversial polemics about mind altering substances. That
Speaker 1: for decades, the US and by extension, the world, has
Speaker 1: been waging a war on drugs. America's public enemy Number
Speaker 1: one in the United States is drug abuse. Nixon declared
Speaker 1: a war on drugs fifty years ago. In order to
Speaker 1: fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage
Speaker 1: a new all out offensive. That rhetoric, those ideas, the
Speaker 1: huge growth in the enforcement agencies, and then it kind
Speaker 1: of quieted down during the Jimmy Carter days when you
Speaker 1: actually had a fairly progressive mindset for a few years.
Speaker 1: Then Reagan and that Reagan generation pushed it to the max,
Speaker 1: making a final commitment not to tolerate drugs by anyone, anytime,
Speaker 1: any place. And unfortunately it was very much of a
Speaker 1: bipartisan effort. I mean, Tip O'Neill the very famous influential
Speaker 1: Democratic Speaker of the House, Liberal Democrat Massachusetts. He was
Speaker 1: totally on board the war on drugs too. You know,
Speaker 1: you look a little like Tip O'Neill. Mhm. A lot
Speaker 1: of people say that then under the first George Bush
Speaker 1: took off like crazy. All of us agree that the
Speaker 1: this domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs. The
Speaker 1: first drugs are was a guy named William Bennett say
Speaker 1: the War on drugs was a failure. It was not.
Speaker 1: It was not, It was not who really was masterful
Speaker 1: at advancing a right wing, reactionary political agenda in America
Speaker 1: by playing on the fears around drugs among middle class
Speaker 1: American parents. Talk to your kids about Office of Drugs.
Speaker 1: Help your children to just say no. But you know,
Speaker 1: the truth is you can go back to the refor
Speaker 1: madness days of the third mat Juana, the burning weed,
Speaker 1: with its roots in Hell. In this film you will
Speaker 1: see the ease with which this vicious plan can be
Speaker 1: grown in your neighbor's yard, ruled into harmless looking cigarettes
Speaker 1: hidden in an innocent shoe. Some people say that what
Speaker 1: brought us alcohol prohibition was the War on drugs, but
Speaker 1: it was focused on alcohol Americans praise passing of the
Speaker 1: dry law and then promptly perceived by every possible means
Speaker 1: to repeat eighteenth Amendment. You can go back even further
Speaker 1: in history and see other war on drugs happening in
Speaker 1: other parts of the world. There were times in Europe
Speaker 1: when there were efforts to crack down tobacco. China launched
Speaker 1: its own warrn opium in the nationalist phase in only
Speaker 1: twentieth century. If you look at what's going on the
Speaker 1: Philippines right now, in some other Asian countries, they have
Speaker 1: sometimes vicious wars on drugs. They don't exceed ours in
Speaker 1: terms of mass incarceration, but in terms of the brutality
Speaker 1: and authorizing police to conduct extrajudicial killings the President of
Speaker 1: the Philippines do to day. He gave his cops a
Speaker 1: green light to just go and shoot people. So wars
Speaker 1: on drugs are not uniquely American phenomenon, but the United
Speaker 1: States took it the furthest in terms of mass incarceration.
Speaker 1: We also had our kind of prohibitionists abstinence only mentality,
Speaker 1: and we became the chief proselytizer and promoter of global
Speaker 1: drug prohibition from the early twentieth century until the early
Speaker 1: years of the Obama administration. Substance abuse generally legal and illegal.
Speaker 1: There's a problem locking somebody up for twenty years. It
Speaker 1: is probably not the best strategy. Domestically, the issue has
Speaker 1: oftentimes been tied up with race. If you ask why
Speaker 1: are some drugs legal and other drugs illegal, it has
Speaker 1: relatively little to do with the relative dangers of drugs
Speaker 1: and almost everything to do with who use it and
Speaker 1: who is perceived to use particular drugs. So that connection
Speaker 1: in the American consciousness of drugs with black people, brown people,
Speaker 1: especially with Chinese people in the late nineteenth century, that's
Speaker 1: always been a very prominent element. And that same racism
Speaker 1: and discrimination based on ethnicity has played out not just
Speaker 1: in the US but many other countries around the world
Speaker 1: as well. Because most of these drugs were being imported
Speaker 1: from abroad, you saw that become a big issue in
Speaker 1: foreign policy met to cult for example, at one point
Speaker 1: Nixon closed the border. It's become a big issue with
Speaker 1: cocaine coming out of Olivia, Peru, oft times via Colombia
Speaker 1: and in Mexico. So it became a number one issue
Speaker 1: in our relationships with some of those countries. Sometimes there
Speaker 1: were countries like Paraguay where you basically had the narclas
Speaker 1: takeover government. It was a complicated issue in Afghanistan. So
Speaker 1: there's always been that international dimension where to appeal to
Speaker 1: the renter if we've gotta stop drugs from coming into
Speaker 1: this country. When it comes to keeping drugs away from kids,
Speaker 1: people worry about, oh, we legalized marijuana for adults, more
Speaker 1: kids are gonna be using it. But that was bullshit.
Speaker 1: Throughout the last fifty years, if you ask who's had
Speaker 1: the best access to marijuana in America, it's always been
Speaker 1: the kids, the adolescent. Even as marijuana he's went up
Speaker 1: and down, up and down, up and down, always eighty
Speaker 1: percent of high school kids. We're saying marijuana is easy
Speaker 1: to get. And in fact, since we started legalizing marijuana,
Speaker 1: you know, beginning with Colorado Washington in twelve, there's been
Speaker 1: almost no increase in analysts and marijuana use. The big
Speaker 1: increase has been among people in their forties, fifties, sixties, seventies,
Speaker 1: and eighties. The ones who did have access to it,
Speaker 1: the ones who because it was illegal, didn't want to
Speaker 1: use it. We're the ones where that you see a
Speaker 1: double trippling quadrupling abuse. All of this begs the question
Speaker 1: how effective is the war on drugs or has it
Speaker 1: been effective at all? I mean, it's very hard to
Speaker 1: find any examples of success. Fifty years ago when most
Speaker 1: heroin was coming from Turkey through what was called the
Speaker 1: French Connection into the US, and there was a period
Speaker 1: when we were able to crack down on Turkey and
Speaker 1: crack down the French connection, and there was a brief
Speaker 1: shortage of heroin in the US. Or there was another
Speaker 1: moment when there was a laboratory in Mexico brucing FENTONYL
Speaker 1: and d e A, and Mexican police succeeded in shutting
Speaker 1: it down and that cut off the flow of ventinel briefly.
Speaker 1: But apart from a couple of rare examples, there are
Speaker 1: thousands of cases of trying to reproduce their success and
Speaker 1: failing simply because where there is a demand, there's going
Speaker 1: to be suppot and you crack down in one place,
Speaker 1: it's gonna pop up somewhere else. You knock out disproduction area,
Speaker 1: it's gonna pop in another production area. You pop out
Speaker 1: of this drug traffic and you network that's gonna pop
Speaker 1: in another drug trafficking network. You make it harder to
Speaker 1: expert the stuff to us, and Americans are gonna start
Speaker 1: producing and stuff you cracked down on nest labs in
Speaker 1: the US Mexico, that's gonna step up. And of course
Speaker 1: it's ludicrous because our borders are so open that if
Speaker 1: there were a market for heroin in this country of
Speaker 1: ten times what's currently coming in, it would come in.
Speaker 1: There's no way to stop it. Not when you have
Speaker 1: endless numbers of shipping containers and boats and planes and
Speaker 1: you name it, and people coming in. There's no way
Speaker 1: to keep drugs out of the country. But it always
Speaker 1: appealed to politicians sense of playing on people's fears around
Speaker 1: what was coming in from abroad. I just think the
Speaker 1: evidence of the drug war in terms of reducing the
Speaker 1: use of drugs or making them less of available, they've
Speaker 1: made them less available than if they were fully legal.
Speaker 1: But the negative consequences in terms of incarcerations, in terms
Speaker 1: of now maybe one to one and a half trillion
Speaker 1: dollars wasted on the War on drugs over the last
Speaker 1: fifty years, in terms of people using drugs that are
Speaker 1: more dangerous because they come from the black market, in
Speaker 1: terms of violations of civil liberties and human rights in
Speaker 1: terms of empowering gangsters. Never Mind the millions and millions
Speaker 1: and millions of people, disproportionately young men of color, who
Speaker 1: have been locked up and arrested and have their lives derailed.
Speaker 1: Never Mind the hundreds of thousands of people who have
Speaker 1: been fired from their jobs for testing positive for marijuana use,
Speaker 1: even though it was having no impact on their job
Speaker 1: performance at all. America was profoundly irrational around drugs, and
Speaker 1: much the same way we were with alcohol prohibition. We
Speaker 1: understood that these drugs could be problematic and dangerous. We
Speaker 1: then made this silly assumption that if we banned them,
Speaker 1: the problem would go away, maybe reducing the number of consumers,
Speaker 1: but dramatically increasing the broad or set of problems that resulted. So,
Speaker 1: if you can't stop drugs from being made, bought, shipped,
Speaker 1: or consumed, and the battle for those efforts is just
Speaker 1: as costly as any war with no end in sight,
Speaker 1: what should we be doing instead? Re Educating people on
Speaker 1: issues of drug regulation by separating political rhetoric from actual
Speaker 1: data was to become the subject of Ethan's life's work.
Speaker 1: In I finished my PhD, I got a job teaching
Speaker 1: at Princeton Politics and Public Affairs, and interestingly, the dean
Speaker 1: invited me to teach a class on drug policy there,
Speaker 1: and then I wrote it three articles and as a
Speaker 1: result I got catapulted into like these two bursts of
Speaker 1: fifteen minutes of faith and tonight's great debate is the
Speaker 1: war on drugs of failure. We have eight hundred thousand
Speaker 1: Americans arrested last year simply for possessing a joint where
Speaker 1: I was all over the national media, all over television
Speaker 1: on the other side of this. Ethan Nathan, specialist today,
Speaker 1: Ethan Nathan, thanks so much for joining us this morning.
Speaker 1: Ethan Nadelman, Thanks very much for being here. Ethan Aedeman,
Speaker 1: Welcome to Democracy Now. Ethan, it's a pleasure. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Freedom Watch. Ethan Nadelman, Welcome to our show. That was
Speaker 1: only in my young thirties and I was speaking around
Speaker 1: the world and a major events. This feels like a
Speaker 1: serious altered state of consciousness around But there was a
Speaker 1: single moment that cemented it all for Ethan, a clarity
Speaker 1: about where he fit in this world of drug discourse.
Speaker 1: And it just so happened to come while he was
Speaker 1: tripping I did mushrooms in nine for the first time
Speaker 1: in seven years. It wasn't really an epiphany. It was
Speaker 1: more a kind of realization that this was my calling
Speaker 1: in life to teach people about drugs, and that it
Speaker 1: did not matter if I was going to stay in
Speaker 1: academia or go into journalism or writing or politics or
Speaker 1: run an advocacy organization. And out of the blue I
Speaker 1: got a phone call from a guy named George Soros,
Speaker 1: prominent financier who was not yet well known it He
Speaker 1: was interested in this issue, and we hit it off
Speaker 1: and he said to me, well, look, I'm a busy man,
Speaker 1: but as substantial resources. So let's assume I want to
Speaker 1: empower you to accomplish our common objectives. George's instincts on
Speaker 1: the issue are right. I then educated about harm reduction
Speaker 1: and needle exchange and medical neural want and all the issues,
Speaker 1: and we have formed an effective partnership which resulted in
Speaker 1: my setting up this organization, first within this foundation and
Speaker 1: then independently in what became the Drug Policy Alliance. I
Speaker 1: support the Drug Policy Alliance because it fosters debate on
Speaker 1: drug policy. Because the world were under represents an extraordinary
Speaker 1: violation of human rights, because whether you use drugs or not,
Speaker 1: you deserve to be treated with respect, kindness, and dignity.
Speaker 1: The Drug Policy Alliance or d p A is a
Speaker 1: New York based nonprofit that is still in existence today.
Speaker 1: Ethan would serve as the organization's executive director. Initially, it
Speaker 1: was just about putting out the ideas, but beginning around
Speaker 1: we realized that there were a few issues were a
Speaker 1: majority of Americans thought that the war on drugs had
Speaker 1: gone too far. One of those was that a majority
Speaker 1: of Americans had come to believe that people who use
Speaker 1: marijuana as a medicine with a doctor's recommendation should not
Speaker 1: be treated as criminals. And the other was that most
Speaker 1: Americans believed that if somebody got arrested for possessing any drug,
Speaker 1: even heroin and meth amphetamine, and they had a drug
Speaker 1: problem and they weren't violent, they should be given at
Speaker 1: least a few opportunities for drug treatment before they got
Speaker 1: put away. And that gave us a foot in the
Speaker 1: door to pass other ballot initiatives. Time to vote on
Speaker 1: recreational marijuana is here, so we began to get much
Speaker 1: more political, beginning in late es to see how do
Speaker 1: we pass these reforms through the ballot initiative process, through
Speaker 1: state legislation, through Congress, and then of course the public
Speaker 1: education side, and bit by bit I built up the organization.
Speaker 1: So when I stepped down that we're about seventy five
Speaker 1: people working at Drug Policy Alliance. We had a budget
Speaker 1: of or fifteen million, offices and about half a dozen
Speaker 1: states around the country, some doing some work internationally as well.
Speaker 1: Really saw myself as building not just an organization, but
Speaker 1: really a political movement to end the war on drugs
Speaker 1: and to promote alternatives that were grounded in science, compassion, health,
Speaker 1: and human rights. Because issues around drugs are so complex.
Speaker 1: Part of making the Drug Policy Alliance an effective resource
Speaker 1: was keeping its objectives clear. I'd say one third of
Speaker 1: our work focused on ending marijuana prohibition, first from article
Speaker 1: and then more broadly. The second third focused on rolling
Speaker 1: back the role of the War on drugs and mass incarceration,
Speaker 1: and the last third focused on treating drug use and
Speaker 1: addiction truly as a health issue, not a criminal issue.
Speaker 1: It was basically those three things and seeing myself engaged
Speaker 1: in sort of the first generation of a multi generational struggle.
Speaker 1: The d p A also drew a diverse crowd of supporters,
Speaker 1: each with their own agendas. I relished when I was
Speaker 1: building drug policy alliance did have people coming from every perspective.
Speaker 1: I could look at the audience and see in one
Speaker 1: row there was a guy who had hemp leaves in
Speaker 1: his hair. It was something for your couple. Next to
Speaker 1: them was somebody who was anti marijuana, but anti incarceration.
Speaker 1: I think a man working outdoors. She feels more like
Speaker 1: a man. You can have a bottle of suns. Sitting
Speaker 1: next to them was a guy who had been incarcerated
Speaker 1: for fifteen years on a minor cocaine charge and now
Speaker 1: comate dads. We can see that's not duck walk anymore.
Speaker 1: Sitting next to them was a guy who's been a
Speaker 1: law enforcement officer for twenty five years and realized the
Speaker 1: drug war resute tile. I hate this job. I hate
Speaker 1: this job, and I don't need it. Sitting next to
Speaker 1: them would be a young woman from Vietnam who was
Speaker 1: doing needle exchange programs and pushing in city. You're gonna
Speaker 1: give it, You're gonna give the shot. Sitting next to
Speaker 1: them would be a person working for a labor union
Speaker 1: trying to persuade the labor unions to embrace marijuana legalization.
Speaker 1: MR we have on this strike we wanted the minute
Speaker 1: we started across this railroad car. Sitting next to them
Speaker 1: would be somebody who's a leading psychedelics researcher. Like knocking
Speaker 1: at the door with a brick. When the door is opened,
Speaker 1: you don't carry the brick inside. Sitting next to them
Speaker 1: would be somebody who was going from the coca growers
Speaker 1: union in Latin America? Where did you get this stuff?
Speaker 1: And for me, the challenge is how do you take
Speaker 1: all of those people and understand that they are in
Speaker 1: a common struggle. The line I used to use is
Speaker 1: who are we did of Policy Alliance? Who are we
Speaker 1: the drug policy reform movement? We're the people who love drugs,
Speaker 1: we're the people who hate drugs, and we're the people
Speaker 1: who don't give it damn about drugs. But every one
Speaker 1: of us believe that the war on drugs is the
Speaker 1: wrong way to go, and that therefore what matters is
Speaker 1: not your relationship to drugs, which might be fantastic or horrific.
Speaker 1: It's about understanding that a punitive, criminalized, moralistic approach is
Speaker 1: inevitably going to result in more harm than good, and
Speaker 1: what we need is rationality, compassion, respect for human rights,
Speaker 1: respect for science. Even though the vantage points on this
Speaker 1: issue are innumerable, there's no point in preaching to the choir.
Speaker 1: The really interesting conversations for me are sometimes with people
Speaker 1: who may not fully share my set of values, who
Speaker 1: are more instinctually conservative or don't agree with some of
Speaker 1: the human rights elements, but they're open, and for me,
Speaker 1: it's like, how do I get past their instinctive defenses
Speaker 1: to try to open them up to seeing things in
Speaker 1: a new way. You know, there's twenty percent of the
Speaker 1: country which is just ideologically on the other side. They
Speaker 1: move in, they're invested in it, But then there's a
Speaker 1: big part of the country which is just part of
Speaker 1: the conventional anti drug discourse. And the challenge therefore is
Speaker 1: how do you bring him to a new way of thinking.
Speaker 1: How do you get a parent whose kid died of
Speaker 1: an overdose and whose first instinct is to just go
Speaker 1: out and execute all the drug dealers, how do you
Speaker 1: get them to understand that that's not going to solve
Speaker 1: anything and there's another way to deal with this. How
Speaker 1: do you get cops to understand why legalizing is actually
Speaker 1: gonna be good not just for the broader society, but
Speaker 1: from where they sit. One of my challenges is talking
Speaker 1: to people in the marijuana psychedelics world and getting them
Speaker 1: to understand that the same principles they bring to marijuana
Speaker 1: psychedelics also have to apply in some way to the
Speaker 1: drugs like opioids and no antheta means not that we
Speaker 1: would make them letally available in the same way, but
Speaker 1: that the principles around sovereignty of your own mind and
Speaker 1: body have to extend even to those growing The Drug
Speaker 1: Policy Alliance didn't leave a lot of time for much else.
Speaker 1: A lot of my time was consumed with basically building
Speaker 1: an organization. I used to write a lot in both
Speaker 1: academic and popular publications, but at some point my most
Speaker 1: creative writing goes and interacting with billionaires. So I'm trying
Speaker 1: to raise money from the amount of time I was
Speaker 1: spend interacting with media I had to balance with running organization.
Speaker 1: I could also only accept so many public speaking engagements,
Speaker 1: so there were the things that I decided to pull
Speaker 1: back from in order to build an organization and to
Speaker 1: empower young people so that they could becoming the next
Speaker 1: generation of leaders in this area. In January, after more
Speaker 1: than two decades at the Helm, Ethan stepped down from
Speaker 1: the dp AM. When I stopped bringing drug policy alliance,
Speaker 1: I was just happy not to talk about drugs for
Speaker 1: a while, because I was talking about drugs around the
Speaker 1: clock forever and ever. I go on a vacation, start
Speaker 1: chatting with some people you meet and they say, oh,
Speaker 1: what do you do? Instantly I'd be bla, la la
Speaker 1: la la lah, you know, same thing over and over again.
Speaker 1: So it was nice to just kind of shut up
Speaker 1: for a while, and so retired. Ethan took a turn
Speaker 1: living the quiet life until one day he got a
Speaker 1: call from a filmmaker friend of his. When Darren Aronovski
Speaker 1: first reached out to me, he asked me if I
Speaker 1: want to do a podcast at psychedelics, and my response
Speaker 1: was nope, I want to do it on all drugs. Psychoactive,
Speaker 1: which debuted in July, features one on one interviews with
Speaker 1: leading minds from across the ideological spectrum and frank discussions
Speaker 1: about drugs, from signs to policy, and even stories of
Speaker 1: personal drug use. The thing about the podcast was it
Speaker 1: gave me a reason to re engage with the whole
Speaker 1: issue of drugs and drug policy. So it's given me
Speaker 1: a reason to touch base again with people who I missed,
Speaker 1: and I like, you know, I can talk with the
Speaker 1: former president of Columbia. President Santo's welcome. Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for joining me. Thank you, and I'm very very
Speaker 1: glad to be here with you. But I've known him
Speaker 1: since two thousand and twelve and not with him when
Speaker 1: he was president. One of the challenges is are they
Speaker 1: gonna peet the people who want to tune in one
Speaker 1: week to hear about the latest and psychedelics research, the
Speaker 1: next week about the overdose problem, the next week about Afghanistan,
Speaker 1: the next week about the latest book by Michael Pollan,
Speaker 1: And that's what we're gonna see. Will it be an
Speaker 1: audience where the common link is it's me as a
Speaker 1: host PSYCHOEDDI drugs the subject, But that's going to cover
Speaker 1: incredibly wide spectrum of issues. I got one more question.
Speaker 1: I know You've been asked this before, but I said,
Speaker 1: feel like I need to, Like, I mean, what is
Speaker 1: the upshot of it look like? Like? What's a better
Speaker 1: world look like? What's a better America? Is that all
Speaker 1: drugs being legal? I mean, I think, first of all,
Speaker 1: simple possession of any substance for your own use should
Speaker 1: not be a crime, even if it's messa amphetamine, heroin,
Speaker 1: some synthetic drugs. If you're only using it for your
Speaker 1: own use, it's a matter of personal freedom, human rights, sovereignty, civilibrities,
Speaker 1: you name it. None of the governor's business, none of
Speaker 1: my employer's business. That's that when it comes to how
Speaker 1: we make it available and whether we make it legally
Speaker 1: available over the counter, we need to come up with
Speaker 1: the balanced, sensible taxation policies, regulatory policies. But I think
Speaker 1: ultimately it boils down to accepting that there's almost never
Speaker 1: been a drug free society in human history. There's certainly
Speaker 1: not going to be one in the future. And that's
Speaker 1: the challenge is not how to get rid of drugs.
Speaker 1: It's not how to build a moat between drugs and ourselves,
Speaker 1: or even between drugs and our children, because that's impossible.
Speaker 1: It's really how to learn how to live with these drugs,
Speaker 1: these plants and chemicals. So they call us the least
Speaker 1: possible harm and in many cases the greatest possible benefit,
Speaker 1: where we can turn what's been this kind of big crisis,
Speaker 1: ugly problem involving people dying of overdose and vast numbers
Speaker 1: of people getting arrested incarcerated into a small problem, whereas
Speaker 1: people still get hurt, but not as severely or as
Speaker 1: frequently as they do now, and where people still go
Speaker 1: to jail because they're not obeying the rules around legally
Speaker 1: regulated markets, but if they do, it's a much smaller
Speaker 1: number and not for so long. Where we have honest
Speaker 1: drug education, where young people learn that there's no such
Speaker 1: thing as a good or bad drugs, they're only good
Speaker 1: or bad relationships with drugs, and more responsible or less
Speaker 1: responsible ways to use that say that, you know, the
Speaker 1: great blessing in life is to find a way to
Speaker 1: get paid for something you're passionate about and then you
Speaker 1: enjoy doing. Not many people get that, but I looked
Speaker 1: into that by finding my only in an early age
Speaker 1: and effectively getting paid to do what I wanted to
Speaker 1: do with my life, whether it was my appreciation of
Speaker 1: marijuana or my anger at seeing people getting busted, or
Speaker 1: my mushroom trip or what have you. No regrets. This
Speaker 1: episode of Ephemeral was written an assembled by Max and
Speaker 1: Alex Williams, with producers Trevor Young and Matt Frederick Ethan
Speaker 1: Nadelman's weekly podcast is Psychoactive, a co production of iHeart
Speaker 1: Radio and Darren Aronofsky's Protozoa Pictures. Find out wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to podcasts and find us at e Fhemeral Dot Show.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio
Speaker 1: Act Apple Podcasts. Wherever you listen to your favorite ships
Speaker 1: wo