Speaker 1: Hello Psychoactive listeners. This week on Psychoactive, We're going to
Speaker 1: do something really different. Rather than me interviewing someone, I'm
Speaker 1: taking the opportunity to have you here a podcast who
Speaker 1: are on being interviewed. It's called Ephemeral. It's hosted by
Speaker 1: Alex Williams, who's also a producer on this podcast. Now.
Speaker 1: His podcast tells stories about nostalgia, memory in the past.
Speaker 1: I think you'll like it. Ephemeral is a production of
Speaker 1: iHeart three D Audio for full exposure listen with that phones.
Speaker 1: This episode of Ephemeral talks frankly about drug history, policy,
Speaker 1: study and use. These views do not necessarily represent those
Speaker 1: of iHeartMedia, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees, and
Speaker 1: should not be construed as medical advice or encouragement to
Speaker 1: use any type of psychoactive substance. Slow Show, whoa what
Speaker 1: always late, lugging tests, tyre phone calls a formal morning
Speaker 1: brand brund Drund doing drugs right, how you're hitting your
Speaker 1: answer the question brendon you're doing drugs? This exploration has
Speaker 1: led into a new and dangerous area smoking grass, popping,
Speaker 1: many's shooting speed or dropping at it is there anyone
Speaker 1: out there who still isn't clear about what doing drugs does? Okay,
Speaker 1: last time, this is your brain, This is drugs, This
Speaker 1: is your brain. Are and drugs? Any questions? Drugs? Drugs?
Speaker 1: Drugs from pot to cot alcohol to adderall crack cocaine
Speaker 1: to caffeinated coffee. Almost all of us use one form
Speaker 1: of drug or another. And even though there's a constant
Speaker 1: flow of drug commentary coursing through our news media and entertainment,
Speaker 1: it can be an uncomfortable subject to talk about, amplified
Speaker 1: by the fact that rhetoric on drugs can be difficult
Speaker 1: to trust. And that's a shame. Oh man, they are
Speaker 1: so fascinating. Almost every department at a university could have
Speaker 1: an entire course about drugs. If you look in the
Speaker 1: social sciences, you could have of course all about drugs,
Speaker 1: and anthropology, in criminology and political science, and in sociology
Speaker 1: and in history and in economics, all six. In the arts,
Speaker 1: you could have it in music, you could have it
Speaker 1: in literature, you could have it in the visual arts.
Speaker 1: So you were talking about one of the great interdisciplinary
Speaker 1: subjects that exist out there. Hi, I'm Ethan Nadelman. I've
Speaker 1: devoted most of my adult life to working to end
Speaker 1: the war on drugs. Started off doing that as a
Speaker 1: professor at Princeton and started an organization called the Drug
Speaker 1: Policy Alliance and gentlemen looked up to Ethan Nadelman, which
Speaker 1: became the leading organization of the world advocating for an
Speaker 1: end to the War on drugs. And then about four
Speaker 1: years ago I stopped doing that and took a little
Speaker 1: time off, and now I've started my own podcast called Psychoactive.
Speaker 1: How much do you know about drugs? Well, I'll tell you, Alex,
Speaker 1: I'm no expert on the sort of biochemistry, pharmacology aspects
Speaker 1: of it, but apart from that, I know a lot
Speaker 1: about drugs. I've been reading and studying and talking to
Speaker 1: people and using drugs for most of my adult life.
Speaker 1: I sometimes joke that growing up Jewish, my first taste
Speaker 1: of alcohol was when I was seven days old at
Speaker 1: my brists. I remember being nine ten years old and
Speaker 1: going to synagogue on Saturday, and at the end of
Speaker 1: services they would lay out the little Mona Chevit's wine,
Speaker 1: these little tiny plastic cups. My friends and I we
Speaker 1: would have a few of these, and we knew if
Speaker 1: we had four or five of them. We would feel
Speaker 1: a little tipsy and maybe fall asleep at lunch, and
Speaker 1: then it was the whole bar mits the scene when
Speaker 1: I was thirteen, when we all started getting drunk. We
Speaker 1: weren't supposed to, but you know, we'd be drinking by
Speaker 1: ka tonics and screwdrivers. In a Jewish community in a
Speaker 1: suburb of New York. Basically most people dragged, but I
Speaker 1: don't remember anybody who would drink to excess. The most
Speaker 1: powerful drug education I remember getting I must have been
Speaker 1: in junior high school. It was actually an anti smoking set.
Speaker 1: The Surgeon General has determined a cigarette smoking is dangerous
Speaker 1: to your health. They brought in one of those fake lungs.
Speaker 1: This is a smoking machine, and they connected a cigarette
Speaker 1: to it and showed what happened to this fake long
Speaker 1: when it got all yellow and disgusting. One thing about
Speaker 1: this machine, it will never get heart disease or cancer
Speaker 1: from smoking. But when it came to the other anti
Speaker 1: drug stuff, I gotta admit I don't have any recollection
Speaker 1: if they even did it back in the late sixties
Speaker 1: early seventies. They must have, but I don't recall. With marijuana.
Speaker 1: I remember being about seventeen and seeing a bunch of
Speaker 1: my friends who were getting high and just noticing they
Speaker 1: all kind of fell asleep. So that was not that appealing.
Speaker 1: So it wasn't really I started college, and I distinctly
Speaker 1: remember the first top getting high. There. I was moving
Speaker 1: from one apartment to another. The marijuana is coming on,
Speaker 1: We're moving a refrigerator, and you know, the whole thing
Speaker 1: starts to become eighteen year olds laughing and almost dropping
Speaker 1: and refrigerator down a flight of stairs. So that was
Speaker 1: the start, and then I became a regular marijuana consumer,
Speaker 1: but never a daily user. I had a kind of
Speaker 1: almost anti addictive personality where you hear a lot in
Speaker 1: the context of drugs, and indeed, the title of Ethan's
Speaker 1: podcast is psycho active basically means mind altering. You think
Speaker 1: there's a whole host of drugs the drug I take
Speaker 1: every day of my cholesterol that's not psychoactive. Psychoactive suggests
Speaker 1: that and somehow it's altering consciousness. Now that could be
Speaker 1: in obvious ways, like psychedelics or like with cannabis, but
Speaker 1: it could even be true of things like coffee and tobacco,
Speaker 1: where when we consume them we're somewhat aware of their
Speaker 1: subtle psychoactive effects, but we don't really notice them until
Speaker 1: we stop doing that. The single most common one is caffeine.
Speaker 1: Something like the world consumes caffeine, either in the form
Speaker 1: of coffee or tea or some other plant products that
Speaker 1: contain it. Probably the second most universalist alcohol. Obviously there
Speaker 1: are prohibitions on it in the Islamic world, but generally speaking,
Speaker 1: it's a fairly universal thing. And if you go back
Speaker 1: to historic clay, 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 bang.
Speaker 1: Marijuana has a history going back ten thousand years, but
Speaker 1: it's not been as universally used. And then, of course tobacco,
Speaker 1: once it came out of the Americas and made its
Speaker 1: way to Europe and then to the rest of the world,
Speaker 1: and because it was so remarkably addictive, really got a
Speaker 1: kind of global use. So I would probably say caffeine's
Speaker 1: first alcohol, second tobacco products, third cannabis for and that heroin, morphine,
Speaker 1: other pharmaceutical opioids that are made from it. Would probably
Speaker 1: be in fifth place. Then you work your way down
Speaker 1: and a whole lot of other things that may be
Speaker 1: used by tens or hundreds of millions of people, like
Speaker 1: cot or cava from South Pacific, or beetlenut used in
Speaker 1: South Asia, so there are more localized ones that haven't
Speaker 1: sort of spread around the world. One of the most traditional,
Speaker 1: if sometimes over exaggerated, applications of psychoactive substances is to
Speaker 1: stimulate one's creative mind. I know people who are artists
Speaker 1: and find the merril wanda really does help them on
Speaker 1: the creative side. On the other hand, I'll tell you
Speaker 1: when it comes to the intellectual stuff, I'll beginning all
Speaker 1: these great ideas, they don't seem as such value the
Speaker 1: next day when looked at in the light of day
Speaker 1: when I'm straight Interestingly, though, with psychedelics, there are insights
Speaker 1: that I've had on doing those the psychedelics that were
Speaker 1: almost life transformative for me, and I'm more likely to
Speaker 1: remember it coherently in a way as well. You think
Speaker 1: about some of the famous people, I mean the Nobel
Speaker 1: Prize winners, Steve Jobs and who say that but for psychedelics,
Speaker 1: they never would have invented with the invented or discovered
Speaker 1: what they discovered, and you don't hear that as often
Speaker 1: with marijuana or any other drug. You know, there have
Speaker 1: been indigenous peoples using these drugs throughout history. Ayahuasca, mushrooms, paoti,
Speaker 1: or mescaline, the toura, the plant which can be actually
Speaker 1: deadly poisonous, but in minimal doses can be a very
Speaker 1: highly psychedelic type of drug LSD 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 field. Albert Hoffman sort of
Speaker 1: accidentally invents LST protectively and then that thing has its
Speaker 1: kind of heyday in the fifties and s extees first
Speaker 1: among us sort of elite strata, and then Timothy Learry
Speaker 1: drop out of turn on Tune, and drop out drop
Speaker 1: becomes 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 my 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: Pollen 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 for 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: except into 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 oxycoda.
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 through
Speaker 1: a racking withdrawal of it. But the fact that matters
Speaker 1: if you have a reliable dose. The worst side effect,
Speaker 1: oftentimes it's constipation. 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 of 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 Prograham. 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 high a hundred times and
Speaker 1: it's not going to kill you. It appears that if
Speaker 1: you're on an opioid prescription and you combine it with marijuana,
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 did 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 den 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 to 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 demon eyes. The first opium prohibition
Speaker 1: laws were in the eighteen seventies and eighties in the
Speaker 1: Data and in California, very racist laws and the fear
Speaker 1: that the Chinese were basically addicting and seducing and turning
Speaker 1: white women into sex slaves. That's when heroin gets invented,
Speaker 1: actually by Bear Pharmaceutical as a copt for president. What
Speaker 1: happened was you had as 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 aroma, whereas heroin,
Speaker 1: especially if you're injecting and not smoking, it no aroma,
Speaker 1: so it's easier to hide from the cops. It's what
Speaker 1: we call the perverse consequences of prohibition, where when you
Speaker 1: prohibit a drug like opium or coca or some other
Speaker 1: things like that, people tend to say, Okay, let's synthesize it.
Speaker 1: Let's make it easier to smuggle, easier to consume discreetly,
Speaker 1: and we push people away from the less dangerous, more
Speaker 1: natural plant product towards a much more compact and potent version.
Speaker 1: And that brings us to one of the most controversial
Speaker 1: polemics about mind altering substances that for decades, the US
Speaker 1: and by extension, the world, has been waging a war
Speaker 1: on drugs. America's public enemy Number one in the United
Speaker 1: States is drug abuse. Nixon declared a war on drugs
Speaker 1: fifty years ago. In order to fight and defeat this enemy,
Speaker 1: it is necessary to wage a new all out offensive.
Speaker 1: That rhetoric those ideas the huge growth in the enforcement agencies,
Speaker 1: and then it kind of quieted down during the Jimmy
Speaker 1: Carter days when you actually had a fairly progressive mindset
Speaker 1: for a few years. Then Reagan and that Reagan generation
Speaker 1: pushed it to the max, making a final commitment not
Speaker 1: to tolerate drugs by anyone, anytime, any place. And unfortunately,
Speaker 1: it was very much of a bipartisan effort. I mean
Speaker 1: Tip O'Neill, the very famous influential Democratic Speaker of the House,
Speaker 1: liberal Democrat Massachusetts, he was totally on board the war
Speaker 1: on drugs too. You know, you look a little like
Speaker 1: Tip O'Neill mhm. And a lot of people say that.
Speaker 1: Then under the first George Bush took off like crazy.
Speaker 1: All of us agree that the gravest domestic threat facing
Speaker 1: our nation today is drugs. The first drugs are was
Speaker 1: a guy named William Bennett say the War on drugs
Speaker 1: was a failure. It was not. It was not. It
Speaker 1: was not Who really was masterful at advancing a right wing,
Speaker 1: reactionary political agenda in America by playing on the fears
Speaker 1: around drugs among middle class American parents. Talk to your
Speaker 1: kids about office of drugs. Help your children to just
Speaker 1: say no. But you know. The truth is you can
Speaker 1: go back to the refor madness, days of the dirt.
Speaker 1: It's matri juana, the burning weed with its roots in hell.
Speaker 1: In this film you will see the ease with which
Speaker 1: this vicious plan can be grown in your neighbor's yard,
Speaker 1: ruled into harmless looking cigarettes hidden in an innocent shoe.
Speaker 1: Some people say that what brought us alcohol prohibition was
Speaker 1: the war on drugs, but it was focused on alcohol.
Speaker 1: Americans praise passing of the dry law and then promptly
Speaker 1: perceived by every possible means to repeal Eighteenth Amendment. You
Speaker 1: can go back even further in history and see other
Speaker 1: war on drugs happening in other parts of the world.
Speaker 1: There were times in Europe when there were efforts to
Speaker 1: crack down tobacco. China launched its own warrn opium in
Speaker 1: the nationalist phase in only twentieth century. If you look
Speaker 1: at what's going on the Philippines right now, in some
Speaker 1: other Asian countries, they have sometimes vicious wars on drugs.
Speaker 1: They don't exceed ours in terms of mass incarceration, but
Speaker 1: in terms of the brutality and authorizing police to conduct
Speaker 1: extra judicial killings. The President of the Philippines do to day.
Speaker 1: He gave his cops a green light to just go
Speaker 1: and shoot people. So wars on drugs are not uniquely
Speaker 1: American phenomenon, but the United States took it the furthest
Speaker 1: in terms of mass incarceration. We also had our kind
Speaker 1: of prohibitionists abstinence only mentality, and we became the chief
Speaker 1: proselytizer and promoter of global drug prohibition from the early
Speaker 1: twentieth century until the early years of the Obama administration.
Speaker 1: Substance abuse generally legal and illegal. There's a problem locking
Speaker 1: somebody up for twenty years. It is probably not the
Speaker 1: best strategy. Domestically, the issue has oftentimes been tied up
Speaker 1: with race. If you ask why are some drugs legal
Speaker 1: and other drugs illegal, it has relatively little to do
Speaker 1: with the relative dangers of drugs and almost everything to
Speaker 1: do with who use it and who is perceived to
Speaker 1: use particular drugs. So that connection in the American consciousness
Speaker 1: of drugs with black people, brown people especially, or with
Speaker 1: Chinese people in the late nineteenth century, that's always been
Speaker 1: a very prominent element. And that same racism and discrimination
Speaker 1: based on ethnicity has played out not just in the US,
Speaker 1: but many other countries around the world as well. Because
Speaker 1: most of these drugs were being imported from abroad. You
Speaker 1: saw that become a big issue in foreign policy. Mexico,
Speaker 1: for example, at one point Nixon closed the border. It's
Speaker 1: become a big issue with cocaine coming out of Bolivia, Peru,
Speaker 1: ofttimes via Colombia and in Mexico. So it became a
Speaker 1: number one issue in our relationships with some of those countries.
Speaker 1: Sometimes there were countries like Paraguay where you basically had
Speaker 1: the narcos takeover government. It was a complicated issue in Afghanistan.
Speaker 1: So there's always been that international dimensioned where to appeal
Speaker 1: to the rent, we've gotta stop drugs from coming to
Speaker 1: this country. When it comes to keeping drugs away from kids,
Speaker 1: people were 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 of
Speaker 1: high school kids, we're saying marijuana was easy to get
Speaker 1: and In fact, since we started legalizing marijuana, you know,
Speaker 1: beginning with Colorado Washington in twelve, there's been almost no
Speaker 1: increase in analysts and marijuana use. The big increase has
Speaker 1: been among people in their forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties.
Speaker 1: The ones who did have access to it, the ones
Speaker 1: who because it was illegal, didn't want to use it.
Speaker 1: We're the ones where that you see a double tripping,
Speaker 1: quadrupling abuse. All of this begs the question how effective
Speaker 1: is the war on drugs or has it been effective
Speaker 1: at all? I mean, it's very hard to find any
Speaker 1: examples of success. Fifty years ago when most heroin was
Speaker 1: coming from Turkey through what's called the French Connection into
Speaker 1: the US, and there was a period when we were
Speaker 1: able to crack down on Turkey and crack down the
Speaker 1: French connection, and there was a brief shortage of heroin
Speaker 1: in the US. Or there was another moment when there
Speaker 1: was a laboratory in Mexico producing fentanyl and d e
Speaker 1: A and Mexican police succeeded in shutting it down and
Speaker 1: that cut off the flow of ventinyl briefly. But apart
Speaker 1: from a couple of rare examples, There are thousands of
Speaker 1: cases of trying to reproduce that success and failing simply
Speaker 1: because where there is a demand, there's going to be spot.
Speaker 1: And you crack down in one place, it's gonna pop
Speaker 1: up somewhere else. You knock out disproduction area, it's gonna
Speaker 1: pop in another production area. You popped out of this
Speaker 1: drug traffic that you network, that's gonna pop in another
Speaker 1: drug trafficking network. You make it harder to expert the
Speaker 1: stuff to the US, and Americans are gonna start producing
Speaker 1: and stuff you cracked down on meth labs in the
Speaker 1: US Mexico, that's gonna step up. And of course it's
Speaker 1: ludicrits because our borders are so open that if there
Speaker 1: were a market for her in this country of ten
Speaker 1: times what's currently coming in and would come in, there's
Speaker 1: no way to stop it. Not when you have endless
Speaker 1: numbers of shipping containers and boats and planes and you
Speaker 1: name it, and people coming in. There's no way to
Speaker 1: keep drugs out of the country. But it always appealed
Speaker 1: to politicians sense of playing on people's fears around what
Speaker 1: was coming in from abroad. I just think the evidence
Speaker 1: of the drug war in terms of reducing the use
Speaker 1: of drugs or making them less available. They've made them
Speaker 1: less available than if they were fully legal, But the
Speaker 1: negative consequences in terms of incarcerations, in terms of now
Speaker 1: maybe one to one and a half trillion dollars wasted
Speaker 1: on the war on drugs over the last fifty years,
Speaker 1: in terms of people using drugs that are more dangerous
Speaker 1: because they come from the black market, In terms of
Speaker 1: violations of civil liberties and human rights, in terms of
Speaker 1: empowering gangsters. Never mind the millions and millions and millions
Speaker 1: of people, disproportionately young men of color who have been
Speaker 1: locked up and arrested and have their lives derailed. Never
Speaker 1: mind a hundreds of thousands of people who have been
Speaker 1: 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 in
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 broader 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 nine seven I finished my PhD. I got a
Speaker 1: job teaching at Princeton Politics and Public Affairs, and interestingly,
Speaker 1: the dean invited me to teach a class on drug
Speaker 1: policy there, and then I wrote in three articles in
Speaker 1: eighty nine, and as a result I got catapulted into
Speaker 1: like these two bursts of fifteen minutes of fame, and
Speaker 1: tonight's great debate is the war on drugs of failure.
Speaker 1: We have eight hundred thousand Americans arrested last year simply
Speaker 1: for possessing a joint where I was all over the
Speaker 1: national media, all over television on the other side of this,
Speaker 1: Ethan Naman, Ethan Nathan specialist today, Ethan Naemanthanman, thanks so
Speaker 1: much for joining us this morning. Ethan Nadelman, thanks very
Speaker 1: much for being here. Ethan Aedeman, Welcome to democracy now, Ethan,
Speaker 1: it's a pleasure. Welcome to freedom Watch, Ethan Nadelman, Welcome
Speaker 1: to our show. That was only in my young thirties
Speaker 1: and I was speaking around the world in a major events.
Speaker 1: This feels like a serious altered state of consciousness right now.
Speaker 1: But there was a single moment that cemented it all
Speaker 1: for Ethan, a clarity about where he fit in this
Speaker 1: world of drug discourse. And it just so happened to
Speaker 1: come while he was tripping. I did mushrooms for the
Speaker 1: first time in seven years. It wasn't really an epiphany.
Speaker 1: It was more a kind of realization that this was
Speaker 1: my calling in life, to teach people about drugs, and
Speaker 1: that it did not matter if I was going to
Speaker 1: stay in academia or go into journalism or writing or
Speaker 1: politics or run an advocacy organization. And out of the blue,
Speaker 1: I got a phone call from a guy named George Soros,
Speaker 1: prominent financier who was not yet well known. It's 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: and how are you to accomplish our common objectives. George's
Speaker 1: instincts on the issue are right eid and educated about
Speaker 1: harm reduction and needle exchange and medical neural want and
Speaker 1: all that issues. And we have formed an effective partnership
Speaker 1: which resulted in my setting up this organization, first within
Speaker 1: this foundation and then independently in what became the Drug
Speaker 1: Policy Alliance. I support the Drug Policy Alliance because it
Speaker 1: fosters debate on drug policy, because the war on drugs
Speaker 1: represents an extraordinary violation of human rights, because whether you
Speaker 1: use drugs or not, you deserve to be treated with respect, kindness,
Speaker 1: and dignity. The Drug Policy Alliance or d p A
Speaker 1: is a New York based nonprofit that is still in
Speaker 1: existence today. Ethan would serve as the organization's executive director. Initially,
Speaker 1: it was just about putting out the ideas, but beginning
Speaker 1: around we realized that there were a few issues were
Speaker 1: a majority of Americans thought that the war on drugs
Speaker 1: who've gone too far. One of those was that a
Speaker 1: majority of Americans had come to believe that people who
Speaker 1: use marijuana as a medicine with a doctor's recommendation should
Speaker 1: not be treated as criminals. And the other was that
Speaker 1: most Americans believed that if somebody got arrested for possessing
Speaker 1: any drug, even heroin and meth amphetamine, and they had
Speaker 1: a drug problem and they weren't violent, they should be
Speaker 1: given at least a few opportunities for drug treatment before
Speaker 1: they got put away, and that gave us a foot
Speaker 1: in the door to pass other ballot initiatives. The time
Speaker 1: to vote on recreational marijuana is here, So we began
Speaker 1: to get much more political, beginning in the late nineties,
Speaker 1: to see how do we pass these reforms through the
Speaker 1: ballot initiative process, through state legislation, through Congress, and then
Speaker 1: of course the public education side. And bit by bit
Speaker 1: I built up the organization. So when I stepped down,
Speaker 1: were about seventy five people working at Drug Policy Alliance.
Speaker 1: We had a budget of or fifteen million, offices and
Speaker 1: about half a dozen states around the country, some doing
Speaker 1: some work internationally as well. Really saw myself as building
Speaker 1: not just an organization, but really a political movement to
Speaker 1: end the war on drugs and to promote alternatives that
Speaker 1: were grounded in science, compassion, health, and human rights. Because
Speaker 1: issues around drugs are so complex. Part of making the
Speaker 1: Drug Policy Alliance an effective resource was keeping its objectives clear.
Speaker 1: I'd say one third of our work focused on ending
Speaker 1: marijuana prohibition, first for medical and then more broadly. The
Speaker 1: second third focused on rolling back the role of the
Speaker 1: War on drugs in mass incarceration, and the last third
Speaker 1: focused on treating drug use and addiction truly as a
Speaker 1: health issue, not a criminal issue. It was basically those
Speaker 1: three things and seeing myself engaged in sort of the
Speaker 1: first generation of a multi generational struggle. The d p
Speaker 1: A also drew a diverse crowd of supporters, each with
Speaker 1: their own agendas. I relished when I was building Drug
Speaker 1: Policy Alliance have people coming from every perspective. I could
Speaker 1: look at the audience and seeing one row there was
Speaker 1: a guy who had hemp leaves in his hair, something
Speaker 1: that's for your couples. Next to them was somebody who
Speaker 1: was anti marijuana but anti incarceration. I think a man
Speaker 1: working out to or she feels more like a man
Speaker 1: if you're gonna have a bottle of suns. Sitting next
Speaker 1: to them was a guy who had been incarcerated for
Speaker 1: fifteen years on a minor cocaine charge. And now come
Speaker 1: the dads. We can see that's no duck walk anymore.
Speaker 1: Sitting next to them was a guy who'd been a
Speaker 1: law enforcement officer for twenty five years and realized the
Speaker 1: drug wars futile. I hate this job. I hate this job,
Speaker 1: and I don't need it. Sitting next to them would
Speaker 1: be a young woman from Vietnam who was doing needle
Speaker 1: exchange programs and pushing in city. You're gonna give it
Speaker 1: a sho You're gonna give it giving the shot. Sitting
Speaker 1: next to them would be a person working for a
Speaker 1: labor union trying to persuade the labor unions to embrace
Speaker 1: marijuana legalization. We have on this strike we wanted the
Speaker 1: minute we started across this railroad yard. Sitting next to
Speaker 1: them 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. So next to them
Speaker 1: would be somebody who was going from the Coca Growers
Speaker 1: Union Latin America? Where did you get this stuff? And
Speaker 1: for me, the challenge is how do you take all
Speaker 1: of those people and understand that they are in a
Speaker 1: common struggle. The line I used to use is who
Speaker 1: are we the Drug Policy Alliance? Who are we the
Speaker 1: 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 believed that the war on drugs is the
Speaker 1: wrong way to go. And then 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 acquire.
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 of the country
Speaker 1: which is just ideologically on the other side. They move in,
Speaker 1: they're invested in it, but then there's a big part
Speaker 1: of the country, which is just part of the conventional
Speaker 1: anti drug discourse. And the challenge therefore is how do
Speaker 1: you bring him to a new way of thinking. How
Speaker 1: do you get a parent whose kid died of an
Speaker 1: overdose and whose first instinct is to just about and
Speaker 1: execute all the drug dealers, how do you get them
Speaker 1: to understand that that's not going to solve anything, and
Speaker 1: there's another way to deal with this. How do you
Speaker 1: get cops to understand why legalizing is actually going to
Speaker 1: be good, not just for the broader society, but from
Speaker 1: where they sit. One of my challenges is talking to
Speaker 1: people in the marijuana psychedelics world and getting them to
Speaker 1: understand that the same principles they bring to marijuana psychedelics
Speaker 1: also have to apply in some way to the drugs
Speaker 1: like opioids, and that's ampheta means not that we would
Speaker 1: make them legally available in the same way, but that
Speaker 1: the principles around sovereignty of your own mind and body
Speaker 1: have to extend even to those growing The Drug Policy
Speaker 1: 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 of both
Speaker 1: academic and popular publications, but at some point my most
Speaker 1: creative writing goes and interact thing with billionaires. So I'm
Speaker 1: trying to raise money from the amount of time I
Speaker 1: was spend interacting with media, I had to balance with
Speaker 1: running organization. I could also only accept so many public
Speaker 1: speaking engagements, So there were the things that I decided
Speaker 1: to pull back from in order to build an organization
Speaker 1: and to empower young people so that they could becoming
Speaker 1: the next generation of leaders in this area. In January,
Speaker 1: after more than two decades at the Helm, Ethan stepped
Speaker 1: down from the d p I. When I stopped bringing
Speaker 1: Drug Policy Alliance, I was just happy not to talk
Speaker 1: about drugs for a while, because I was talking about
Speaker 1: drugs around the clock forever and ever. I go on
Speaker 1: a vacation, start chatting with some people you meet and
Speaker 1: they say, oh, what do you do? Instantly I'd blah
Speaker 1: blahla la la la, you know, the same thing over
Speaker 1: and over again. So it was nice to just kind
Speaker 1: of shut up for a while, and so retired. Ethan
Speaker 1: took a turn living the quiet life until one day
Speaker 1: he got a call from a filmmaker friend of his.
Speaker 1: When Darren Aronovski first reached out to me. He asked
Speaker 1: me if I want to do a podcast in psychedelics,
Speaker 1: and my response was nope, I want to do it
Speaker 1: on all drugs. Psychoactive, which debuted in July, features one
Speaker 1: on one interviews with leading minds from across the ideological
Speaker 1: spectrum and frank discussions about drugs from science to policy,
Speaker 1: and even stories of personal drug use. The thing about
Speaker 1: the podcast was it gave me a reason to re
Speaker 1: engage with the whole issue of drugs and drug policy.
Speaker 1: So it's given me a reason to touch base again
Speaker 1: with people who I missed and I like, you know,
Speaker 1: I can talk with the former president of Columbia, President
Speaker 1: Santo's welcome. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you,
Speaker 1: and I'm very very glad to be here with you.
Speaker 1: But I've known him since two thousand and twelve and
Speaker 1: met with him when he was president. One of the
Speaker 1: challenges is are they gonna peet the people who want
Speaker 1: to tune in one week to hear about the latest
Speaker 1: and psychedelics research, the next week about the overdose problem,
Speaker 1: the next week about Afghanistan, the next week about the
Speaker 1: latest book by Michael Pollan, and that's what we're gonna see.
Speaker 1: Will you be an audience where the common link is
Speaker 1: it's me as a host, psychoed subject. But that's going
Speaker 1: to cover incredibly wide spectrum of issues. I got one
Speaker 1: more question. I know you've been asked this before, but
Speaker 1: I feel like I need to, Like, I mean, what
Speaker 1: is the upshot of it look like? Like Like? What's a
Speaker 1: better world look like? What's a better America? Is that
Speaker 1: all 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, anthetam and 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 government'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 ely
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 as
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 learned 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: the great blessing in life is to find a way
Speaker 1: to get paid for something you're passionate about and then
Speaker 1: you enjoy doing. Not many people get that, but I
Speaker 1: looked into that by finding my calling in an early
Speaker 1: age and effectively getting paid to do what I wanted
Speaker 1: to do with my life, whether it was my appreciation
Speaker 1: of marijuana, or my anger and seeing people getting busted,
Speaker 1: or my mushroom trip or what have you? No regrets.
Speaker 1: This episode of Ephemeral was written an assembled by Max
Speaker 1: and Alex Blind, with producers Trevor Young and Matt Frederick.
Speaker 1: Ethan Needelman's weekly podcast is Psychoactive, a co production of
Speaker 1: iHeart Radio and Darren Aronofsky's Protozoa Pictures. Find out wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to podcasts and find us at a femeral
Speaker 1: dot show. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the
Speaker 1: iHeart Radio Apple Podcasts wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1: Next week, we'll be hearing from Maya Salivitz, one of
Speaker 1: the most brilliant journalists in the world covering drug issues,
Speaker 1: who's got a new book out on the pioneers of
Speaker 1: harm reduction. A man named Nico Adrian's, who was himself
Speaker 1: a heroin injector, founded the first needle exchange he gave
Speaker 1: people clean needles and he took the used ones off
Speaker 1: the street. This meant that when HIV did show up
Speaker 1: in the next three or four years, Rotterdam had a
Speaker 1: much lower rate of infection amongst its IVY drug users.
Speaker 1: And so when the HIV virus was discovered, Amsterdam and
Speaker 1: the rest of the Netherlands was like, oh wow, we
Speaker 1: have something here in Rotterdam that can work for this.
Speaker 1: So they just expanded needle exchange very broadly.