Drugs

Flow whooa always late, local tests, fired, phone calls, a formal morning rund line rund run und doing drugs right at your mind? Answer the question, brandom, you're doing drugs? This exploration has led into a new and dangerous career. Smoking rash, popping Manny's, shooting speed or dropping acid is running one out there who still isn't clear about what doing drugs does. Okay, last time, this is your brain, This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs and

questions drugs, drugs, drugs. From pot to cot, alcohol to adderall crack, cocaine to caffeinated coffee, almost all of us use one form of drug or another. And even though there's a constant flow of drug commentary coursing through our news media and entertainment. It can be an uncomfortable subject to talk about, amplified by the fact that rhetoric on drugs can be difficult to trust. And that's a shame. Oh man, they are so fascinating. Almost every department at

a university could have an entire course about drugs. If you look in the social sciences, you could have of course all about drugs, anthropology, in criminology, of political science, and in sociology, and in history and in economics, all six. In the arts, you could have it in music, you could have it in literature, you could have it in the visual arts. So you were talking about one of the great interdisciplinary subjects that exist out there. Hi, I'm

Ethan Nadelman. I've devoted most of my adult life to working to end the war on drugs. Started off doing that as a professor at Princeton and started an organization called the Drug Policy Alliance, and gentleman looked up to Ethan Nadelman, which became the leading organization of the world advocating for an end to the war on drugs. And then about four years ago I stopped doing that and took a little time off, and now I've started my

own podcast called Psychoactive. How much do you know about drugs? Well, I'll tell you, Alex, I'm no expert on the sort of biochemistry farm a college aspects of it, but apart from that, I know a lot about drugs. I've been reading and studying and talking to people and using drugs for most of my adult life. I sometimes joke that growing up Jewish, my first taste of alcohol was when

I was seven days old at my brists. I remember being nine ten years old and going to synagogue on Saturday, and at the end of services, they would lay out the little mona chevits wine and these little tiny plastic cups. My friends and I we would have a few of these, and we knew if we had four or five of them we would feel a little tipsy and maybe fall asleep at lunch. And then there was the whole bar Mitzvah scene when I was thirteen, where we all started

getting drunk. We weren't supposed to, but you know, we'd be drinking Vika tonics with screwdrivers. In the Jewish community in a suburb of New York, basically most people drank, but I don't remember anybody who would drink to excess the most powerful drug education I remember getting. I must have been in junior high school. It was actually an anti smoking set. The Surgeon General has determined a cigarette

smoking is dangerous to your health. They brought in one of those fake lungs is a machine, and they connected a cigarette to it and showed what happened to the stake long when it got all yellow and disgusting. One thing about this machine, it will never get heart disease or cancer from smoking. But when it came to the other anti drug stuff, I gotta admit I don't have any recollection if they even did it back in the late sixties early seventies. They must have, but I don't recall.

With marijuana, I remember being about seventeen and seeing a bunch of my friends who were getting high and just noticing they all kind of fell asleep. So that was not that appealing, So it wasn't really I started college, and I distinctly remember the first off getting high there.

I was moving from one apartment to another. The marijuana is coming on and we're moving a refrigerator, and you know, the whole thing starts to become eighteen year olds laughing and almost dropping a refrigerator down a flight of stairs. So that was the start, and then I became a regular marijuana consumer, but never a daily user. Had a kind of almost anti addictive personality where you hear a lot in the context of drugs, And indeed, the title

of Ethan's podcast is psychoactive basically means mind altering. You think there's a whole host of drugs. The drug I take every day I deal with my cholesterol that's not psychoactive.

Psychoactive suggests that and somehow it's altering consciousness. Now, that could be in obvious ways, like psychedelics or like with cannabis, but it could even be true of things like coffee and tobacco, where when we consume them we're somewhat aware of their subtle psychoactive effects, but we don't really notice them until we stopped doing that. The single most common one is caffeine. Something like the world consumes caffeine, either in the form of coffee or tea or some other

plant products that contain it. Probably the second most universalist alcohol. Obviously, there are prohibitions on it in the Islamic world, but generally speaking, it's a fairly universal thing. And if you go back historically, you have indigenous groups all around the world having no contact with outer societies that somehow figured out that that piece of food or that thing, if left to ferment and then consumed, would have quite a bank Marijuana has a history going back ten thousand years,

but it's not been as universally used. And then, of course tobacco one came out of the Americas and made its way to Europe and then to the rest of the world, and because it was so remarkably addictive, really got a kind of global use. So I would probably say caffeine's first alcohol, second tobacco products, third cannabis for oi and that heroin morphine other pharmaceutical opioids that are

made from it would probably be in fifth place. Then you work your way down and a whole lot of other things that may be used by tens or hundreds of millions of people, like cot or cava from South Pacific, or beetle nut used in South Asia, so there are more localized ones that haven't sort of spread around the world. One of the most traditional, if sometimes over exaggerated, applications

of psychoactive substances is to stimulate one's creative mind. I know people who are artists and find the Meryl want it really does help them on the creative side. On the end they hand. I'll tell you when it comes to the intellectual stuff, I'll beginning all these great ideas, they don't seem as such value the next day when

looked at in the light of day when I'm straight interesting. Though, with psychedelics, there are insights that I've had on doing those the psychedelics that were almost life transformative for me, and I'm more likely to remember it coherently in a way as well. You think about some of the famous people, I mean the Nobel Prize winners, the jobs and others who say that but for psychedelics, they never would have

invented with the invented or discovered what they discovered. And you don't hear that as often with marijuana or any other drug. You know, there have been indigenous people's using these drugs throughout history. Ayahuasca, mushrooms, payot or mescaline, the toura, the plant which can be actually deadly poisonous, but in minimal doses can be a very high at least psychedelic type of drug l s D where the key ingredient

or good comes from a mold. There are histories in Europe of these outbreaks of the town going crazy, and it appears to be when this mold took off in the local wheat or rye fields. Albert Hoffman sort of accidentally invents ls be protectively and then that thing has its kind of heyday in the fifties and sixties, first among the sort of elite strata, and then Timothy Learry turn on tune and drop out, drop out of becomes the thing used by millions, drop out of junior executive.

Many people benefit enormously, other people just do it for yucks, and some minority of people get really hurt by this. And then you go into the kind of quiet age of psychedelics, and I say, now we are in this period, an extraordinary period in the history of human beings and drugs, where we're having this sort of psychedelic renaissance. Part of it is because of the work of organizations like MAPS, the Multidiscipinary Association of Psychedelic Studies created by Mike Buddy

Rick Doblin back in the eighties. Psychedelics, when used wisely, have the potential to help heal us help inspire us and perhaps even to help save us. Part of it because of a range of academics that have just kept pushing to get this going. Part of it because Michael pollan sort of breakthrough book, Changing Your Mind. What happened to psychedelics in the sixties that they became so stigmatized that research stopped. Now you have all these companies trying

to create new psychedelic products. So you have this sort of psychedelic renaissance where the media is mostly focused on the upside layout the case for legalization of psychedelics and and why this is an opportunity of investors. We're used numbers of people are having positive experiences where people understand the significance of setting like using these drugs in the right type of environment. So I think we're probably in a period in history where more people are using these

things than ever before. And I also expect that there's gonna be some tragedies. There are going to be some people who get hurt. The media is gonna jump on that, We're gonna start to see the pendulum swing backward. But I think there's a level of consciousness and awareness and acceptance and normalization happening both with cannabis and with psychedelics. Now, unlike anything we've seen before, medical use of psychoactive drugs can be rife with complications. Take for example, the array

of pharmaceuticals derived from the opium plant. In the United States, our medical system prescribes opioids, so most people have had some form of opioid in their life. We come out of getting our wisdom, teeth removes, we come out of some minor surgery, so the doctor may prescribe like an oxycodon. Go to place like Japan, I think, where it's very low. You go to parts of the developing world where it's

under prescribed and many people die in pain. Opioids one of these things where interestingly, if you have access even to heroin, to pharmaceutical grade heroine, and you know the dose and you're using the same dose, you can basically consume heroin every day of your adult life and live to be years old. You can have a job, you can have sex with your partner, you can drive a car. You can do it all because your body develops a certain tolerance. If you stop using it, you'll feel sick

and feverish or even worse. While your body goes to a racking withdrawal of it. But the fact that there is, if you have a reliable dose, the worst side effect oftentimes it's instipatient. When you combine heroin with alcohol or with a benzodiazepine type drug, in modest amounts, it can be a really great high. But the problem is if

you double or triple that dose, you stop breathing. We think about people dying give an alcohol overdose, but the deadly thing is that alcohol is oftentimes the hidden thing that's causing an overdose with another drug where the media headline says heroin, but it was actually heroin plus booze. And it was only with the recent emergence of ventonyl taking the opioid epidemic to a new level of urgency. This synthetic opioid that's fifty times more powerful than heroin,

Graham prograam. That's the first opioid where people just take it all by itself and they can just stop breathing. You know, with marijuana, you can have fifty times the amount you need to get a hundred times and it's not going to kill you. It appears that if you're on an opioid prescription and you combine it with Marriwana, you can cut your prescribed dose in half just by having a little bit of marijuana with it, because the

marijuana potentiates it. There's a bunch of research studies out there that showed that in states that are approved medical marijuana, they appear to have lower overdose rates than did other places because people were either substituting the marijuana for the opioids for pain relief, or they were combining it with the opioid and therefore taking less of the opioid because

they didn't need as much. I know, I get totally lost on it, but I didn't want to ask about opium classic you know, smokable opium, you know, like I feel like I see most of like media with like opium then and I imagine it was a scene in the US at some point, and it's not really anymore. Well, I'll tell you. I mean, I feel I've been a bit professionally negligent and never having actually smoked opium. I mean,

it's on my two do list, my bucket list. You know, I got to do this if I'm really going to be a serious, you know person talking about drugs. But by and large. The opium dent was a common thing in Asia, and then it came to America when people came from China in the middle of late nineteenth century.

They then became incredibly demonizes. The first opium prohibition laws were in the eighteen seventies and eighties in the Data and in California, very racist laws, and the fear that the Chinese were basically addicting and seducing and turning white

women into sex slaves. Works wonders. When heroin gets invented, actually by Bear Pharmaceutical as a cost sur president, what happened was you had a some of the switch going on from opium to heroin, and then people begin to realize that if you want to smuggle this stuff, it's a lot safer to smuggle a white powder like heroin

than it is to smuggle opium. And if you want to consume it, opium gives off a distinct a roma, whereas heroin, especially if you're injecting and not smoking, it no aroma, so it's easier to hide from the cops. It's what we call the perverse consequences of prohibition, where when you prohibit a drug like opium or coca or

some other things like that. People tend to say, Okay, let's synthesize it, let's make it easier to smuggle, easier to consume discreetly, and we push people away from the less dangerous, more natural plant product towards a much more compact and potent version. And that brings us to one of the most controversial polemics about mind altering substances. That for decades, the US and by extension, the world, has been waging a war on drugs. America's public enemy Number

one in the United States is drug abuse. Nixon declared a war on drugs fifty years ago. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all out offensive. That rhetoric, those ideas, the huge growth in the enforcement agencies, and then it kind of quieted down during the Jimmy Carter days when you actually had a fairly progressive mindset for a few years.

Then Reagan and that Reagan generation pushed it to the max, making a final commitment not to tolerate drugs by anyone, anytime, any place. And unfortunately it was very much of a bipartisan effort. I mean, Tip O'Neill the very famous influential Democratic Speaker of the House, Liberal Democrat Massachusetts. He was totally on board the war on drugs too. You know, you look a little like Tip O'Neill. Mhm. A lot of people say that then under the first George Bush

took off like crazy. All of us agree that the this domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs. The first drugs are was a guy named William Bennett say the War on drugs was a failure. It was not. It was not, It was not who really was masterful at advancing a right wing, reactionary political agenda in America by playing on the fears around drugs among middle class American parents. Talk to your kids about Office of Drugs.

Help your children to just say no. But you know, the truth is you can go back to the refor madness days of the third mat Juana, the burning weed, with its roots in Hell. In this film you will see the ease with which this vicious plan can be grown in your neighbor's yard, ruled into harmless looking cigarettes

hidden in an innocent shoe. Some people say that what brought us alcohol prohibition was the War on drugs, but it was focused on alcohol Americans praise passing of the dry law and then promptly perceived by every possible means to repeat eighteenth Amendment. You can go back even further in history and see other war on drugs happening in other parts of the world. There were times in Europe

when there were efforts to crack down tobacco. China launched its own warrn opium in the nationalist phase in only twentieth century. If you look at what's going on the Philippines right now, in some other Asian countries, they have sometimes vicious wars on drugs. They don't exceed ours in terms of mass incarceration, but in terms of the brutality and authorizing police to conduct extrajudicial killings the President of the Philippines do to day. He gave his cops a

green light to just go and shoot people. So wars on drugs are not uniquely American phenomenon, but the United States took it the furthest in terms of mass incarceration. We also had our kind of prohibitionists abstinence only mentality, and we became the chief proselytizer and promoter of global drug prohibition from the early twentieth century until the early years of the Obama administration. Substance abuse generally legal and illegal.

There's a problem locking somebody up for twenty years. It is probably not the best strategy. Domestically, the issue has oftentimes been tied up with race. If you ask why are some drugs legal and other drugs illegal, it has relatively little to do with the relative dangers of drugs and almost everything to do with who use it and

who is perceived to use particular drugs. So that connection in the American consciousness of drugs with black people, brown people, especially with Chinese people in the late nineteenth century, that's always been a very prominent element. And that same racism and discrimination based on ethnicity has played out not just in the US but many other countries around the world

as well. Because most of these drugs were being imported from abroad, you saw that become a big issue in foreign policy met to cult for example, at one point Nixon closed the border. It's become a big issue with cocaine coming out of Olivia, Peru, oft times via Colombia and in Mexico. So it became a number one issue in our relationships with some of those countries. Sometimes there were countries like Paraguay where you basically had the narclas

takeover government. It was a complicated issue in Afghanistan. So there's always been that international dimension where to appeal to the renter if we've gotta stop drugs from coming into this country. When it comes to keeping drugs away from kids, people worry about, oh, we legalized marijuana for adults, more kids are gonna be using it. But that was bullshit. Throughout the last fifty years, if you ask who's had the best access to marijuana in America, it's always been

the kids, the adolescent. Even as marijuana he's went up and down, up and down, up and down, always eighty percent of high school kids. We're saying marijuana is easy to get. And in fact, since we started legalizing marijuana, you know, beginning with Colorado Washington in twelve, there's been almost no increase in analysts and marijuana use. The big increase has been among people in their forties, fifties, sixties, seventies,

and eighties. The ones who did have access to it, the ones who because it was illegal, didn't want to use it. We're the ones where that you see a double trippling quadrupling abuse. All of this begs the question how effective is the war on drugs or has it been effective at all? I mean, it's very hard to

find any examples of success. Fifty years ago when most heroin was coming from Turkey through what was called the French Connection into the US, and there was a period when we were able to crack down on Turkey and crack down the French connection, and there was a brief shortage of heroin in the US. Or there was another moment when there was a laboratory in Mexico brucing FENTONYL and d e A, and Mexican police succeeded in shutting it down and that cut off the flow of ventinel briefly.

But apart from a couple of rare examples, there are thousands of cases of trying to reproduce their success and failing simply because where there is a demand, there's going to be suppot and you crack down in one place, it's gonna pop up somewhere else. You knock out disproduction area, it's gonna pop in another production area. You pop out of this drug traffic and you network that's gonna pop

in another drug trafficking network. You make it harder to expert the stuff to us, and Americans are gonna start producing and stuff you cracked down on nest labs in the US Mexico, that's gonna step up. And of course it's ludicrous because our borders are so open that if there were a market for heroin in this country of ten times what's currently coming in, it would come in. There's no way to stop it. Not when you have endless numbers of shipping containers and boats and planes and

you name it, and people coming in. There's no way to keep drugs out of the country. But it always appealed to politicians sense of playing on people's fears around what was coming in from abroad. I just think the evidence of the drug war in terms of reducing the use of drugs or making them less of available, they've made them less available than if they were fully legal.

But the negative consequences in terms of incarcerations, in terms of now maybe one to one and a half trillion dollars wasted on the War on drugs over the last fifty years, in terms of people using drugs that are more dangerous because they come from the black market, in terms of violations of civil liberties and human rights in

terms of empowering gangsters. Never Mind the millions and millions and millions of people, disproportionately young men of color, who have been locked up and arrested and have their lives derailed. Never Mind the hundreds of thousands of people who have been fired from their jobs for testing positive for marijuana use, even though it was having no impact on their job performance at all. America was profoundly irrational around drugs, and much the same way we were with alcohol prohibition. We

understood that these drugs could be problematic and dangerous. We then made this silly assumption that if we banned them, the problem would go away, maybe reducing the number of consumers, but dramatically increasing the broad or set of problems that resulted. So, if you can't stop drugs from being made, bought, shipped, or consumed, and the battle for those efforts is just as costly as any war with no end in sight,

what should we be doing instead? Re Educating people on issues of drug regulation by separating political rhetoric from actual data was to become the subject of Ethan's life's work.

In I finished my PhD, I got a job teaching at Princeton Politics and Public Affairs, and interestingly, the dean invited me to teach a class on drug policy there, and then I wrote it three articles and as a result I got catapulted into like these two bursts of fifteen minutes of faith and tonight's great debate is the war on drugs of failure. We have eight hundred thousand Americans arrested last year simply for possessing a joint where I was all over the national media, all over television

on the other side of this. Ethan Nathan, specialist today, Ethan Nathan, thanks so much for joining us this morning. Ethan Nadelman, Thanks very much for being here. Ethan Aedeman, Welcome to Democracy Now. Ethan, it's a pleasure. Welcome to Freedom Watch. Ethan Nadelman, Welcome to our show. That was only in my young thirties and I was speaking around

the world and a major events. This feels like a serious altered state of consciousness around But there was a single moment that cemented it all for Ethan, a clarity about where he fit in this world of drug discourse. And it just so happened to come while he was tripping I did mushrooms in nine for the first time

in seven years. It wasn't really an epiphany. It was more a kind of realization that this was my calling in life to teach people about drugs, and that it did not matter if I was going to stay in academia or go into journalism or writing or politics or run an advocacy organization. And out of the blue I got a phone call from a guy named George Soros, prominent financier who was not yet well known it He was interested in this issue, and we hit it off and he said to me, well, look, I'm a busy man,

but as substantial resources. So let's assume I want to empower you to accomplish our common objectives. George's instincts on the issue are right. I then educated about harm reduction and needle exchange and medical neural want and all the issues, and we have formed an effective partnership which resulted in my setting up this organization, first within this foundation and then independently in what became the Drug Policy Alliance. I support the Drug Policy Alliance because it fosters debate on

drug policy. Because the world were under represents an extraordinary violation of human rights, because whether you use drugs or not, you deserve to be treated with respect, kindness, and dignity. The Drug Policy Alliance or d p A is a New York based nonprofit that is still in existence today.

Ethan would serve as the organization's executive director. Initially, it was just about putting out the ideas, but beginning around we realized that there were a few issues were a majority of Americans thought that the war on drugs had gone too far. One of those was that a majority of Americans had come to believe that people who use marijuana as a medicine with a doctor's recommendation should not

be treated as criminals. And the other was that most Americans believed that if somebody got arrested for possessing any drug, even heroin and meth amphetamine, and they had a drug problem and they weren't violent, they should be given at least a few opportunities for drug treatment before they got put away. And that gave us a foot in the

door to pass other ballot initiatives. Time to vote on recreational marijuana is here, so we began to get much more political, beginning in late es to see how do we pass these reforms through the ballot initiative process, through state legislation, through Congress, and then of course the public education side, and bit by bit I built up the organization. So when I stepped down that we're about seventy five

people working at Drug Policy Alliance. We had a budget of or fifteen million, offices and about half a dozen states around the country, some doing some work internationally as well. Really saw myself as building not just an organization, but really a political movement to end the war on drugs and to promote alternatives that were grounded in science, compassion, health, and human rights. Because issues around drugs are so complex. Part of making the Drug Policy Alliance an effective resource

was keeping its objectives clear. I'd say one third of our work focused on ending marijuana prohibition, first from article and then more broadly. The second third focused on rolling back the role of the War on drugs and mass incarceration, and the last third focused on treating drug use and addiction truly as a health issue, not a criminal issue. It was basically those three things and seeing myself engaged in sort of the first generation of a multi generational struggle.

The d p A also drew a diverse crowd of supporters, each with their own agendas. I relished when I was building drug policy alliance did have people coming from every perspective. I could look at the audience and see in one row there was a guy who had hemp leaves in his hair. It was something for your couple. Next to them was somebody who was anti marijuana, but anti incarceration. I think a man working outdoors. She feels more like

a man. You can have a bottle of suns. Sitting next to them was a guy who had been incarcerated for fifteen years on a minor cocaine charge and now comate dads. We can see that's not duck walk anymore. Sitting next to them was a guy who's been a law enforcement officer for twenty five years and realized the drug war resute tile. I hate this job. I hate this job, and I don't need it. Sitting next to them would be a young woman from Vietnam who was

doing needle exchange programs and pushing in city. You're gonna give it, You're gonna give the shot. Sitting next to them would be a person working for a labor union trying to persuade the labor unions to embrace marijuana legalization. MR we have on this strike we wanted the minute we started across this railroad car. Sitting next to them would be somebody who's a leading psychedelics researcher. Like knocking at the door with a brick. When the door is opened,

you don't carry the brick inside. Sitting next to them would be somebody who was going from the coca growers union in Latin America? Where did you get this stuff? And for me, the challenge is how do you take all of those people and understand that they are in a common struggle. The line I used to use is who are we did of Policy Alliance? Who are we the drug policy reform movement? We're the people who love drugs, we're the people who hate drugs, and we're the people

who don't give it damn about drugs. But every one of us believe that the war on drugs is the wrong way to go, and that therefore what matters is not your relationship to drugs, which might be fantastic or horrific. It's about understanding that a punitive, criminalized, moralistic approach is inevitably going to result in more harm than good, and what we need is rationality, compassion, respect for human rights,

respect for science. Even though the vantage points on this issue are innumerable, there's no point in preaching to the choir. The really interesting conversations for me are sometimes with people who may not fully share my set of values, who are more instinctually conservative or don't agree with some of the human rights elements, but they're open, and for me, it's like, how do I get past their instinctive defenses to try to open them up to seeing things in

a new way. You know, there's twenty percent of the country which is just ideologically on the other side. They move in, they're invested in it, But then there's a big part of the country which is just part of the conventional anti drug discourse. And the challenge therefore is how do you bring him to a new way of thinking.

How do you get a parent whose kid died of an overdose and whose first instinct is to just go out and execute all the drug dealers, how do you get them to understand that that's not going to solve anything and there's another way to deal with this. How do you get cops to understand why legalizing is actually gonna be good not just for the broader society, but

from where they sit. One of my challenges is talking to people in the marijuana psychedelics world and getting them to understand that the same principles they bring to marijuana psychedelics also have to apply in some way to the drugs like opioids and no antheta means not that we would make them letally available in the same way, but that the principles around sovereignty of your own mind and body have to extend even to those growing The Drug

Policy Alliance didn't leave a lot of time for much else. A lot of my time was consumed with basically building an organization. I used to write a lot in both academic and popular publications, but at some point my most creative writing goes and interacting with billionaires. So I'm trying to raise money from the amount of time I was spend interacting with media I had to balance with running organization.

I could also only accept so many public speaking engagements, so there were the things that I decided to pull back from in order to build an organization and to empower young people so that they could becoming the next generation of leaders in this area. In January, after more than two decades at the Helm, Ethan stepped down from the dp AM. When I stopped bringing drug policy alliance, I was just happy not to talk about drugs for a while, because I was talking about drugs around the

clock forever and ever. I go on a vacation, start chatting with some people you meet and they say, oh, what do you do? Instantly I'd be bla, la la la la lah, you know, same thing over and over again. So it was nice to just kind of shut up for a while, and so retired. Ethan took a turn living the quiet life until one day he got a call from a filmmaker friend of his. When Darren Aronovski first reached out to me, he asked me if I want to do a podcast at psychedelics, and my response

was nope, I want to do it on all drugs. Psychoactive, which debuted in July, features one on one interviews with leading minds from across the ideological spectrum and frank discussions about drugs, from signs to policy, and even stories of personal drug use. The thing about the podcast was it gave me a reason to re engage with the whole issue of drugs and drug policy. So it's given me a reason to touch base again with people who I missed, and I like, you know, I can talk with the

former president of Columbia. President Santo's welcome. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, and I'm very very glad to be here with you. But I've known him since two thousand and twelve and not with him when

he was president. One of the challenges is are they gonna peet the people who want to tune in one week to hear about the latest and psychedelics research, the next week about the overdose problem, the next week about Afghanistan, the next week about the latest book by Michael Pollan, And that's what we're gonna see. Will it be an audience where the common link is it's me as a host PSYCHOEDDI drugs the subject, But that's going to cover incredibly wide spectrum of issues. I got one more question.

I know You've been asked this before, but I said, feel like I need to, Like, I mean, what is the upshot of it look like? Like? What's a better world look like? What's a better America? Is that all drugs being legal? I mean, I think, first of all, simple possession of any substance for your own use should not be a crime, even if it's messa amphetamine, heroin,

some synthetic drugs. If you're only using it for your own use, it's a matter of personal freedom, human rights, sovereignty, civilibrities, you name it. None of the governor's business, none of my employer's business. That's that when it comes to how we make it available and whether we make it legally available over the counter, we need to come up with the balanced, sensible taxation policies, regulatory policies. But I think ultimately it boils down to accepting that there's almost never

been a drug free society in human history. There's certainly not going to be one in the future. And that's the challenge is not how to get rid of drugs. It's not how to build a moat between drugs and ourselves, or even between drugs and our children, because that's impossible. It's really how to learn how to live with these drugs,

these plants and chemicals. So they call us the least possible harm and in many cases the greatest possible benefit, where we can turn what's been this kind of big crisis, ugly problem involving people dying of overdose and vast numbers of people getting arrested incarcerated into a small problem, whereas people still get hurt, but not as severely or as frequently as they do now, and where people still go to jail because they're not obeying the rules around legally

regulated markets, but if they do, it's a much smaller number and not for so long. Where we have honest drug education, where young people learn that there's no such thing as a good or bad drugs, they're only good or bad relationships with drugs, and more responsible or less responsible ways to use that say that, you know, the great blessing in life is to find a way to get paid for something you're passionate about and then you

enjoy doing. Not many people get that, but I looked into that by finding my only in an early age and effectively getting paid to do what I wanted to do with my life, whether it was my appreciation of marijuana or my anger at seeing people getting busted, or

my mushroom trip or what have you. No regrets. This episode of Ephemeral was written an assembled by Max and Alex Williams, with producers Trevor Young and Matt Frederick Ethan Nadelman's weekly podcast is Psychoactive, a co production of iHeart Radio and Darren Aronofsky's Protozoa Pictures. Find out wherever you listen to podcasts and find us at e Fhemeral Dot Show. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio Act Apple Podcasts. Wherever you listen to your favorite ships wo