Ephemeral - Drugs

This episode of Ephemeral talks frankly about drug history, policy, study and use. These views do not necessarily represent those of iHeartMedia, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees, and should not be construed as medical advice or encouragement to use any type of psychoactive substance. Slow Show, whoa what always late, lugging tests, tyre phone calls a formal morning brand brund Drund doing drugs right, how you're hitting your

answer the question brendon you're doing drugs? This exploration has led into a new and dangerous area smoking grass, popping, many's shooting speed or dropping at it is there anyone 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. Are and drugs? Any 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, and anthropology, in criminology and 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 gentlemen 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, pharmacology 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 Chevit's wine, 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 it was the whole bar mits the scene when

I was thirteen, when we all started getting drunk. We weren't supposed to, but you know, we'd be drinking by ka tonics and screwdrivers. In a Jewish community in a suburb of New York. Basically most people dragged, 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. This is a smoking machine, and they connected a cigarette to it and showed what happened to this fake 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 top getting high. There. I was moving from one apartment to another. The marijuana is coming on, We're moving a refrigerator, and you know, the whole thing starts to become eighteen year olds laughing and almost dropping

and refrigerator down a flight of stairs. So that was the start, and then I became a regular marijuana consumer, but never a daily user. I 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 psycho active basically means mind altering. You think there's a whole host of drugs the drug I take every day of 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 stop 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 to historic clay, 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 bang. Marijuana has a history going back ten thousand years, but

it's not been as universally used. And then, of course tobacco, once it 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 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 beetlenut 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 merril wanda really does help them on

the creative side. On the other 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 Interestingly, 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, Steve Jobs and 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 peoples using these drugs throughout history. Ayahuasca, mushrooms, paoti, or mescaline, the toura, the plant which can be actually deadly poisonous, but in minimal doses can be a very highly psychedelic type of drug LSD 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 field. Albert Hoffman sort of accidentally invents LST protectively and then that thing has its kind of heyday in the fifties and s extees first among us sort of elite strata, and then Timothy Learry drop out of turn on Tune, and drop out drop 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 my 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 Pollen 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 for 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 except into 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 oxycoda. 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 through a racking withdrawal of it. But the fact that matters if you have a reliable dose. The worst side effect, oftentimes it's constipation. 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 of 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 Prograham. 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 high 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 marijuana, 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 did 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 den 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 to 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 demon eyes. 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. That's when heroin gets invented, actually by Bear Pharmaceutical as a copt for president. What happened was you had as 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 aroma, 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. And a lot of people say that. Then under the first George Bush took off like crazy. All of us agree that the gravest 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 dirt. It's matri 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 repeal 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 extra judicial 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, or 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. Mexico, for example, at one point Nixon closed the border. It's become a big issue with cocaine coming out of Bolivia, Peru,

ofttimes 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 narcos takeover government. It was a complicated issue in Afghanistan. So there's always been that international dimensioned where to appeal to the rent, we've gotta stop drugs from coming to

this country. When it comes to keeping drugs away from kids, people were 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 of high school kids, we're saying marijuana was 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 tripping, 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's 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 producing fentanyl and d e A and Mexican police succeeded in shutting it down and that cut off the flow of ventinyl briefly. But apart from a couple of rare examples, There are thousands of cases of trying to reproduce that success and failing simply because where there is a demand, there's going to be spot. 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 popped out of this drug traffic that you network, that's gonna pop in another drug trafficking network. You make it harder to expert the stuff to the US, and Americans are gonna start producing and stuff you cracked down on meth labs in the US Mexico, that's gonna step up. And of course it's ludicrits because our borders are so open that if there were a market for her in this country of ten times what's currently coming in and 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 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 a 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 in 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 broader 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 nine seven 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 in three articles in eighty nine, and as a result I got catapulted into like these two bursts of fifteen minutes of fame, 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 Naman, Ethan Nathan specialist today, Ethan Naemanthanman, 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 in a major events. This feels like a serious altered state of consciousness right now. 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 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's 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 and how are you to accomplish our common objectives. George's instincts on the issue are right eid and educated about harm reduction and needle exchange and medical neural want and

all that 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 war on drugs 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

who've 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. The time to vote on recreational marijuana is here, So we began to get much more political, beginning in the late nineties, 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, were 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 for medical and then more broadly. The second third focused on rolling back the role of the War on drugs in 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 have people coming from every perspective. I could look at the audience and seeing one row there was a guy who had hemp leaves in his hair, something that's for your couples. Next to them was somebody who was anti marijuana but anti incarceration. I think a man working out to or she feels more like a man

if you're gonna 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 come the dads. We can see that's no duck walk anymore. Sitting next to them was a guy who'd been a law enforcement officer for twenty five years and realized the drug wars futile. 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 a sho You're gonna give it giving 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. We have on this strike we wanted the minute we started across this railroad yard. Sitting next to them 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. So next to them would be somebody who was going from the Coca Growers Union 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 the Drug 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 believed that the war on drugs is the wrong way to go. And then 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 acquire. 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 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 about 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 going to 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 that's ampheta means not that we would make them legally 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 of both academic and popular publications, but at some point my most creative writing goes and interact thing 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 d p I. 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 blah blahla la la la, you know, the 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 in 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 science 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

met 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 you be an audience where the common link is it's me as a host, psychoed 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 feel like I need to, Like, I mean, what is the upshot of it look like? 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, anthetam and 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 government'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 ely 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 as 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 learned 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 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 calling 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 and 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 Blind, with producers Trevor Young and Matt Frederick.

Ethan Needelman'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 a femeral dot show. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio Apple Podcasts wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Next week, we'll be hearing from Maya Salivitz, one of the most brilliant journalists in the world covering drug issues, who's got a new book out on the pioneers of

harm reduction. A man named Nico Adrian's, who was himself a heroin injector, founded the first needle exchange he gave people clean needles and he took the used ones off the street. This meant that when HIV did show up in the next three or four years, Rotterdam had a much lower rate of infection amongst its IVY drug users. And so when the HIV virus was discovered, Amsterdam and the rest of the Netherlands was like, oh wow, we have something here in Rotterdam that can work for this.

So they just expanded needle exchange very broadly.