Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 309: Emanuel Sferios

Episode Date: October 20, 2018

Emanuel Sferios, founder of [DanceSafe](https://dancesafe.org/), joins the DTFH! Emanuel & Duncan discuss anti-drug policy & changing perceptions. Then Duncan uncovers a long-forgotten LP by one of America's most-treasured troubadours. This episode is brought to you by [Squarespace](https://www.squarespace.com/duncan) (offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site). Friday, November 16th - Come see "[Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism](https://www.samarasacenter.com/cutting-through-spiritual-materialism-lots-of-icing-not-much-cake/)" with Duncan & David Nichtern at the Samarasa Center in Echo Park, LA!

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Greetings to you, sweet friends and family. It is I, Dee Trussell, and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. I would first like to start off by with a very quick, non-sponsored ad for an incredible new service that they say is going to, in some way or another, potentially compete with Twitter. It's called Kleenex.com, you can go check it out.

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in keeping us healthy and free of colds. Also, I would be remiss if I did not congratulate my dear listeners who are living in the great country of Canada. Congratulations, you are now in the peculiar situation of being able to freely carry plant matter around in your pockets or keep it at your house without fear of someone with a gun,

potentially arresting you, shooting you, separating you from your family, or in some way, shape or form taking away. Some of your rights, it's crazy. You guys are really on the cutting edge of things. And that brings me to a really exciting announcement. I've already kind of mentioned this before, but the more I listen to this tape,

the more kind of, how do I say, I'm just intrigued by it. If you didn't hear in an earlier episode, I found this old tape that has got one of my favorite sad clown slash, you know, railroad hobo style singer, Fergus Blanders, and it's got tracks on it that I've never heard before that are impossible to find on the internet,

that I played for one of my friends at a record store and he couldn't believe it. These are deep Blanders cuts that seem to be completely, I don't know, they're just nowhere to be found. And I tried to contact the Blanders camp, but he and his manager have gone off radar, which happens sometimes with him. The last I heard, he was actually going to a monastery

in Bhutan to do some kind of performance out there, which seems absolutely bizarre to me because he's a hard drinking, self-indulgent, if you ask me, I still have his music kind of dude, but that's neither here nor there. My hope is that I don't get in trouble for playing this track. And I'm just gonna include some of the like weird shit

that also got taped over as a kind of, I mean, I don't wanna be correctional here, but if you find a tape, don't tape over it before you listen to what's on it because you never know what you could be taping over. And in this case, somebody with completely good intentions or maybe a group of people, I don't know, a few different people taped over

like really, really rare tracks that maybe even have the potential for being made into an album or something. I mean, this is like finding like some old Jerry Garcia songs or something that no one's ever heard before. And wow, man, that would be, for a lot of people, that would be pretty exciting.

So I'm not pissed, I get it, I've taped over shit that I regret taping over, but I'm just gonna include some of the stuff that got taped over, this completely rare and as far as I know, never before heard Fergus Blander's song and I'm playing it because it has a little bit of a connection to Canada. So congrats, Canada, you did it.

You can now have plants in your pocket and way to go. And also don't forget cleanox.com, it's cold season and you're gonna be able to make so many great, incredible sprays of mucus and share those sprays of mucus with your friends and maybe even make new friends or getting the polite kind of mucus competitions

with people from all over the world. That's cleanox.com and again, they haven't sponsored me. I'm just very excited about the service. So here we go. Here's a never before heard Fergus Blander's song followed by a little bit of business and then a wonderful conversation with the creator of Dance Safe, Emmanuel Safarios.

And if you're from the Blanders camp, my apologies, if you want me to take this down, I will. Okay, I think it's the plant. Hi. What? What's the plant? What is it? It's an egg in the marijuana.

Okay, thank you. Don't want to be surprised. Just smoking marijuana within a two-year period who were intelligent at first and after two years of marijuana they just came around and they go, hey, hey, how are you doing? I'm going to be the one of the first to say

that marijuana is very ultimately destructive. And then finally there'll be government studies to prove that it's totally harmful, much more harmful than it's ever been exposed to has been. Because I've seen it through people. I just end up, hey, hey. I don't like that. I like drunkards, man.

Because drunkards, they come out of it and they're sick and they spring back and forth. At the bottom of the glass is the college level class teaching you everything that you need to know. Hear the eyes go tingle, tingle as your coins go jingle, jingle down upon the bottom you enroll. Whiskey's my professor's philosophy she shares. Her alma mater consists of a billionaires.

Some take a class for wisdom, others take a class to hide. From airing her past the chastain through blasted countryside. Kings and grounds which places before they graduate. Some write love on their diploma, and assign their name in hate. For me, whiskey has been a lover and a friend which is why I smile when I'm held back and take her class again. I love whiskey, I love whiskey, I love whiskey, I love whiskey.

And for tomorrow, to go in early, medical claims file. Whiskey is my mother, because whiskey fucked my dad. Whiskey's the best parent that this kid never had. I guess it's a little bit like discovering a Mona Lisa in your basement and realizing that somebody was in a hurry and they wrote a grocery list on top of it. And my friend was telling me that in a weird way there's some parallels between writing a grocery list on top of the Mona Lisa

and karma that pretty much every single person is a grocery list written on top of the Mona Lisa and that meditation is not so much to make better lists but to become who we really are. Well, my friend said that, I just kind of changed the subject because to me it's like, here is this beautiful thing, you know, blanders. And then here is this symbol to me of the whole world which is like you've got noise and you got static.

And then with a tape like this, you think to yourself, which is which? But to me, I'll tell you one thing I know for sure. Blanders is the noise and everything else is static. And I'm thinking about even having the tape sent to one of those tape reconstruction laboratories in Beijing to see if there's some way that they can maybe pull what's underneath the stuff that's been recorded over blanders out so we can get an entire Fergus Blanders album out of this thing. And if so, then that's going to be great for the entire world.

If not, then I guess I'm just going to have to do what my friend said after he babbled on and on for a long time about this stuff and just accept the fact that even a Mona Lisa that's got grocery lists written all over it is still the Mona Lisa. So we'll see. I'll keep you guys posted. I know you're dying to hear more of Blanders beautiful voice and incredible genius poetic lyrics.

And the more I'm able to recover stuff from this tape, the more I'll try to share it with you. OK, guys, we got a wonderful podcast for you today. We're going to jump right into it. But first, some quick business. This episode of the DTFH has been made possible by the radiant rainbow beings of light over at Squarespace.com. They have specifically requested that I not reveal the fact that Squarespace is, in fact, a quadrahedron located in a different dimension and that they are undulating beings of light

who are attempting to create a very simple yet profoundly powerful service through which websites can be created, not only so that people can promote their weddings, send out invitations. I don't know why you'd want to promote your wedding, send out invitations. Well, I guess you'd want to promote it. I guess an invitation is a promotion. I have to read this is actually on the script. But one thing that they they don't want me to say is that their their mission here is to create a very simple

and inexpensive way that people can make their dreams come true. Because when people make their dreams come true, they manifest some ultimate reality and the ultimate reality ends up up shifting consciousness and the upshift consciousness naturally results in a reduction of violence and the reduction in violence and aggression. Inevitably improves the conditions of the planet. And this creates a kind of positive feedback loop which results in them being able to teleport from their dimension into this dimension because these beings of light breathe love in the way that we breathe oxygen. So I'm not supposed to tell you that. Sorry, Squarespace.

I just felt like if I don't let people know who you guys over there actually are, then I'm kind of being a little unethical. That being said, Squarespace gives you everything you need to create a beautiful website. They have award winning templates that you can mix and match to in a matter of minutes. If you want to, if you wanted to, you can create a really incredible site. They've got everything you need to sell stuff. They've got full shopping cart functionality and not only that, but they've got amazing customer support. So if you run into any kind of confusion, they'll get back to your right away. They size to any device and it's probably inappropriate to say this in the midst of a commercial and I'm not trying to spread fear

and I'm certainly not trying to bash the great web designers out there who do such a wonderful job making wonderful websites for all of us to enjoy. But they're not all great gang and some of them go deeply and permanently insane from being hunched over their keyboards coding so much. It's called code possession or the manifestation of the vaporous darkness. I'm sure you already know this and I'm not going to go into all the gory details of it, but in Indiana, in one of their cemeteries, right outside of a seminary, they found one of these web designers who had lost his mind, had gotten the fifth round of notes from somebody and had found the graveyard that their great grandmother was buried in and gone into the tomb where their great grandmother was buried and I'm not going to go into the details, but I'll just say they defiled the corpse and spray painted on the wall, some kind of HTML code that I guess if you were to put it into a computer would just say fuck you man. So that sucks.

And again, this is not the bash all web designers, but if you ask me, I like doing stuff myself and Squarespace.com is it's got everything you need so you can you can do it yourself make a beautiful website. It's Squarespace and then if you decide that you want to hire a web designer just make sure that you don't reveal what cemetery. Any of your relatives happen to be in chances are everything's going to be fine but man it's some pretty heavy stuff. Right now you can head to Squarespace.com forward slash Duncan and when you're ready to launch use offer code Duncan to get 10% of your first order of a website or a domain. That's Squarespace.com forward slash Duncan use offer code Duncan when you're ready to launch and not just launch a beautiful website but launch what could potentially be the great shift in consciousness that is going to completely and radically transform this planet not by adding flashy new stuff like spaceships and teleportation and monkeys that can drive but by connecting us to a kind of primordial pre existing technology which is the fundamental ground of goodness that makes up all things. And the glowing beings of light over at Squarespace.com want to be part of that process and you can too by creating an amazing website that shines that sweet rainbow light through every pixel on the screen of whoever happens to be looking at it. That's Squarespace.com also a deep heartfelt thank you to my Patreon subscribers.

If you go to patreon.com forward slash DTFH you'll be met with uncommercialized episodes of the DTFH you'll also get access to all kinds of stuff over there including sometimes our plus long rambling things as I try to help myself understand some of the things that I'm currently taught by my meditation teacher at least that's what the last Ramble is about and I try to do it in a way that doesn't make me seem like I know what I'm talking about or like like I'm some kind of expert or know it all which is Jesus Christ depending on how many Yerba Mates I've consumed is one of the. It's a danger it's a danger because I'll tell you is so much easier to talk about Buddhism and meditation than it is to meditate which I think is one of the big problems because really it's like every single Buddhist text I read in some way shape or form kindness as well you know maybe it's not even a thing that we talk about which is pretty peculiar and to me and a little paradoxical in the sense that I love watching YouTube videos right now the great teachers like Chogyam Trumpa Rinpoche or the Dalai Lama talking about this stuff and fantasizing that they're drawing not from some memorized. Stuff but from their connection to an ever refreshing kind of data stream called the Dharma could be completely wrong about that really mean I don't know but it's fun to think that anyway thank you. Patreon subscribers you want to subscribe go to patreon.com forward slash D T F H and sign up you will also get access to our discord server where folks who theoretically listen to the podcast though now I think about it maybe some of them don't. Hang out and sometimes I pop in there but these days because of my big secret project I've been in there less frequently but I do dive in there sometimes also thank you for those of you who have been using our Amazon link which is. Located at Dunkin Trussell dot com and we have a shop if you want to get some cool.

Dunkin Trussell family hour merch it's we got all brand new stuff over there and God what what would make your. Mom or dad happier than to get a wonderful Dunkin Trussell family hour T shirt or if your mom a mom or dad what would make your your your kids happier or the you don't even have to know the person you know you could just. You could just bring it to your local grocery store dinette and just say here you go I got you this gift man and they'll be like what is that and you just smile and. And walk out knowing that you have made somebody's year with some of these incredible shirts that you will find over at Dunkin Trussell dot com. Friday November 16th I'm going to be at the Sam Rasa Center in Echo Park and recording. I guess you could call it a podcast it's more of like a I don't know what you would call it. Why do we always have to call things stuff I'm going to be up there talking with David Nick turn my meditation teacher he teaches classes all over the world and he's coming into town. And he lets me sit up there and ask him questions about the particular branch of Buddhism that the lineage of Buddhism that he's in which he was a student of Chogum Trumpa Rinpoche and he's a really great teacher.

If you're woo woo adverse or if you kind of like think I want to go to some new age talk man or whatever it's not like that. It's what I love about him and the lineage that he teaches and I know lineage sounds like a fancy word but it's like that's what they call it. It's it's and I didn't mean that in a condescending way I mean it's like lineage. The sort of the school he's in is pretty basic and I used to hate that about it and now I love it about it because it's real simple. There's not a lot of bells and whistles attached to it and it's it's all kind of sort of centered around a very experiential way of practicing Buddhism which is pretty awesome because it's so easy to get caught in all the. I guess what we are calling right now icing is him he and I like as he teaches me you know it's easy to have a lot of icing and not much cake and icing is pretty awesome and I love icing and I also as a child if I'm going to get sick at a birthday party is because I've been eating way too much icing even though it looks good and it's delicious and sweet. You want some cake under there and so that's the topic is lots of icing not much cake cutting through spiritual materialism that sounds maybe really heavy and potentially boring but it's not. It's just a fun thing to think about sort of the difference between all the extra stuff that you might add on to this practice or that that is really cool and fun and awesome.

I don't know maybe like practice where you are capes and juggle magic wands and have like a some kind of like dance sessions and oil yourself down roll around in some kind of a ball pit only it's not balls it's like miniaturized globes that that make like the ohm sound and then and somebody on the side. It has a mister that sprays masculine infused mist on top of you and then when you're done you're sort of like laid out on a nice bear skin rug and spanked by a professional spanker who then rolls you up and some kind of velvet blanket and then. You sort of hang out in the velvet blanket while being massaged or something and all that stuff sounds really fun and now that I think about it I hope somebody creates that. Religion but it would be easy in all those steps to get kind of lost if there wasn't some underlying basic E equals MC squared to type thing to the. Religion itself you know and some I think maybe some things actually are just all icing and there isn't any cake but then is the icing actually considered the cake is there a difference between the icing and the cake who am I to say what's fucking icing and what cake isn't. Maybe some people want a nice big fat bowl of fucking icing dude back off man so that's that's what we're going to talk about and maybe we'll figure it out maybe we won't again that is the Friday November 16th at the Samarasah Center in Echo Park L. A it's from seven to nine p.m. and there's going to be refreshments and and and we'll hang out a little bit after so this is a cool thing if you are interested in this kind of stuff. Even if you're not interested in this kind of stuff why not just drop by and see if you see and just be bored with it will be bored.

I just can't be bored. You don't like it. Okay man I guess that's about it. Oh shit one last thing. My guest today's guest Emmanuel Safarios is the creator of dance safe and this sometimes happens that at the end of a podcast. The guests kind of forget something that they meant to mention and in this case dance safe is now making available fentanyl test strips. If you're somebody out there who likes to use white powders and if you're somebody out there right now who is using some kind of white powder particularly heroin or cocaine. Not not to make you paranoid or anything like that and you'll hear Emmanuel talk about this a little bit more you could research it.

I guess fentanyl is making its way into the white powders out there and fentanyl kills people and it's super powerful and there's a thing called the chocolate chip effect where a little grain of fentanyl might make its way into your. White powder and then and then and you can you can OD. So if you're somebody who is doing that right now you might as well order some of these fentanyl test strips by going to dance safe dot org why risk why risk. Killing yourself and who you know it sucks that the supply chain is being corrupted by some kind of weird super powerful synthetic drug but I really like Emmanuel's POV you know from my perspective. I've always loved psychedelics and I think I have more of a kind of like hierarchy of substances and are like a weird ethical hierarchy of substances that I project on to various psychoactives or mind altering chemicals whereas for Emmanuel. It's more of a look people are using substances out there and there's no sense in shaming them for that because that doesn't do anything and also there's no sense in pretending it isn't happening and then acting shocked every time somebody dies. Why not just accept the fact that part of being human for some people is engaging with substances that are sometimes dangerous and potentially deadly and then make available to people things that can sort of mitigate that risk. I love that I think it's a very very intelligent and rational POV when it comes to drugs but he's gonna articulate that a lot better than me and I really love chatting with him always found it to be very educational and also.

As somebody who from time to time really does enjoy using some psychedelic or mind altering substance it also I always feel a little more informed and a little sort of more grounded. In what's going on out there because folks like Emmanuel are they keep their ear to the railroad tracks so to speak and also they set up dance safe Emmanuel's organization actually sets up booths at events where they test drugs for people so we can avoid the thing that happens. And some of these events where somebody takes something that isn't what it is and then the entire event ends up. You know being transformed from a celebration to a tragedy and this all of course has its roots in the insane prohibition of drugs which absolutely does not work and the. Absolute insane rave act that Biden passed which just doesn't it doesn't work it doesn't work if it work great it doesn't work people are still dying and the reason they're dying is because they're they don't they're not being educated and they don't have access to. Tools that they could use to mitigate risk mitigate risk God I sound boring. Hey guys want to come over to my house and mitigate risk tonight Jesus Christ. Well anyway it doesn't have to be boring and I'll tell you this I'd rather have boring friends than dead friends.

I think today's guest is a wonderful human the founder of dance safe.org. This is his second appearance on the DTFH all the links you need to find Emmanuel and all the links you need to get fentanyl strips or any of the testing kits that they supply over at dance safe.org will be at dunkitrustle.com. Now without further ado please welcome to the DTFH Emmanuel Safarios. Welcome. It's the dunkitrustle. I mean you're welcome back to the DTFH what a wonderful thing to have you here with me thanks Duncan it's great it's great to be in your studio man I have so much respect for you and what you do because. As many people know I am a lover of psychedelics and I have since I was 16 or younger been infuriated by the prohibition and the stigmatization of psychedelics. And I consider you to be one of the people who is on the front lines of one of the very important social for lack of a better word there I don't like using it wars that are happening right now which is the.

Movement to shift the stigmatization the conditioning the. Complete superstition surrounding psychedelics into a more logical arena and also in that process to get a lot of people potentially out of prison and get a lot of people who might have gone to prison. To keep that from happening so thank you let me just qualify that all all drugs not just psychedelics all drugs we need to get rid of that stigma. Right yes that's the cool thing about you too is that you don't do what I do which is like I have created a hierarchy of good drugs and the bad drugs. This is so funny because like my my meditation teacher told me that this joke this joke which is like really cheesy but really funny to me which is because he's a musician and he's sorry David if you're listening I'm going to butcher your joke. What's the difference between a banjo and an accordion. I don't know a banjo burns longer. It's like a diss on the on one certain musical instruments.

So it's like there's literally a hierarchy of musical instruments. So the violin. Oh so sophisticated the banjo. What are you like a redneck. Well this affects the drug policy reform movement. It really does because the stigma has been put on all of us and one way that a drug user tries to relieve themselves of that shame is by saying oh well at least I'm not using crack or at least I'm not using that drug whatever happens to be right. Well it's I guess let's look at that. Let's deeply look at that which is certainly all drugs are not equal in the sense that there are certain drugs that have far more damaging effects on the human being than other drugs.

All drugs have risks and benefits and some drugs have a greater risk profile in certain areas addiction potential things like that. But what we have to understand and most important point that needs to get across is the vast majority of all drug use no matter what drug you're talking about the vast majority of people who use that drug use it non problematically and in fact obtain benefits from it. And that's true with stimulants that's true with opiates as well we just see in the media and in our own lives the worst case scenarios we notice when people are having problematic drug use. I'm going to give you an example of something that William Burrow there's something William Burrow said that I remember when I heard it I thought my God this is just awful that he would say this and it's terrible and he's just rationalizing a really horrific thing. And then in retrospect as I've thought of it just from a rational perspective I guess it's kind of right and he was saying that heroin injecting heroin into your body physiologically is not really that damaging. No it's not damaging at all in fact the early addicts were doctors who at the turn of the last century who had access to it. They lived long healthy lives surgeons operating on you while they were on their heroin. I mean no thanks though like you know what I mean like if I went to my doctor and he's like we're doing a surgery next week I'm going to be so fucking high on heroin.

Well wait let me blow another myth for you then so they have heroin maintenance programs in Switzerland and Germany even some in Canada. We're talking instead of methadone or suboxone if you're an addict you can enter the program and they just give you your heroin as much as you want. You can go in three times a day helps these people get back get their lives back put food in the fridge for their kids. The thing we don't understand is that when you're using high dose opiates the high or the inebriation effect only lasts a couple weeks after that you're just feeling normal. You're not getting high. The notion that heroin addicts are let's call them just daily heroin users are chasing a euphoria that simply isn't true. And when we look at the phenomenon of addiction where people can go to prison for a month or two and not have access to well you can get access to drugs in prison but let's say some people can't. You know so the withdrawal symptoms also only last a couple weeks so you've gone through the withdrawal symptoms you come back out you start right up again.

You could call that a substance use disorder and for some people it may be but it also may be the case that opiates are the best medication that we have for severe childhood trauma severe anxiety things that SSRIs won't touch. We have thousands and thousands of people who make the choice to use high dose opiates and live functional lives and what's really killing them today is the fact that there's fentanyl contaminating the drug market they don't know what dose they're getting they can't take it regularly. Prohibition has created the addict and our narrative and store in our minds of what the heroin user is prohibition has created that. Okay let's talk about that the. I want to get to the root of the problem here which is that. People are taking substances. Because they want to reduce the suffering they're experiencing in their own lives usually in some way shape or form that's a one main reason people use drugs well let's what are some of the other reasons insight therapy self exploration. Fun maybe you could say wanting to have fun you know with your friends is about reducing suffering because it's the opposite of suffering fun rate something like that but I just want to make sure you're not.

I don't think most people use drugs to. Relieve themselves of pain maybe largely with opiates yes but that's not why people trip not pain suffering. Okay sure let's dive into this so and I think you're right let me refine what I was saying. Because it was like very like monolithic in the sense that when the implication what I said is that when a person does anything there's one motivation behind it you know usually there's like a. Variety of different motivations within any action but there's some overt motivation that has underneath it a bunch of more subtle motivations behind it so. When people use drugs there's generally some combination of things like for example if I would be very suspicious if I met someone who told me I am taking this substance or that substance for knowledge that's my dog. Is that going to come through a little come through okay that's my dog we're trying to reduce my dog's suffering that's Piper itching. To reduce her suffering it's creating a reverberation through the ceiling which is then going to make its way into the podcast which is then going to make its way into the years of so many people listening right.

And so this brings me to kind of what I want to talk about which is there is an inevitable. Karmic repercussion for the way we reduce our own suffering which is not limited to the individual and the impacts of a substance or method on an individual but these waves radiate out into society and so. This is where the legislation I think comes into is that there is an acknowledgement or recognition that we are dealing with these waves of karmic repercussion from people who are doing anything in an attempt to reduce their suffering but to clarify the point of reducing suffering. Entertainment. Even some most forms of exploration of knowledge have attached to them an element of distracting distraction a sense of being sort of enamored or caught up in some thing whatever it may be and in that enamored moment and being caught up in like seeing the thing. Are suffering this thing that we were feeling which made us want to go to a movie which made us want to reach for the pie which made us want to like get a massage which made us want to like get a blow job or. Or continue our work. Yeah that we justify we're doing good for the world or you know what all of it is an attempt to relieve suffering everything anyone does.

There you go. That's right that's that perhaps maybe meditation but that's the ultimate. Well I mean obviously people consciously engage in meditation to relieve suffering but that that's then that may be an activity that doesn't produce the karmic results that you were speaking of. Well I mean you know with my God with meditation. It's so easy to like it to get caught in the very same trap you get caught in with with a Netflix movie with meditation where you start like sitting down and like like looking taking on some sort of form that you've seen somewhere or another and imagining in your mind that somewhere in here is like a thing you're doing and which is fine by the way but what really is the difference and I think you could name some differences but I want to get to the issue at hand which is that humans on this planet are suffering and we want that suffering to not happen anymore and so we're doing anything we can to try to reduce that suffering. Some of us are shooting heroin some of us are shooting people and some of us are meditating and yet we still are dealing with like one central fundamental problem which is like fuck we don't feel so good sometimes.

So that's what I wanted to talk with you about is. It's the ultimate topic. Yeah it's the ultimate topic. So if my methodology for reducing suffering is to inject myself or eat a drug that is going to create some physiological change in me that makes me dependent on that drug. In the short term I have succeeded in reducing my suffering but in the long term I might have added more complication to a situation and in a paradoxically in the long term amplified my suffering happens all the time. Absolutely I mean you're kind of defining substance use disorders right there people who use drugs to escape to relieve themselves of their pain their suffering can get trapped in a cycle. Right that's the thing right there and I think that like when we look at like regulation and again I'm I'm I guess you could say playing devil's advocate here so that but let's be clear that is nothing to do with why drugs were made. Illegal historically and has nothing to do with why they are remain illegal today.

It's not because of the risk of addiction that drugs are illegal that that's maybe an excuse but drugs were banned because of racism. Every single step of the way you know the the anti Asian American laws back in when they built the railroads was late 1800s. You know the first ever drug laws were laws that were combined with other anti Asian culture laws so they banned smoking opium at the same time that they banned carrying your laundry on a stick over your shoulder because I destroyed my mother's life. It was a joke. She became hooked dude. First it just started off on the weekend. She's carrying her laundry all day. And then it was a really bad right.

It was a downward spiral. Yeah we allowed them to come over build the railroads for us once the railroads were done. We didn't like them around our communities so we started passing laws aimed at their culture and one of them was opium as a first drug laws in this country. Right. Yeah well OK so in the past and I like I've heard the same thing with Nixon and like that he like wanted to figure out a way that he could essentially like the idea is let's concoct a way that we can control people by arresting them. And so what we do is we make something that is a completely natural normal facet of human experience the reduction of suffering through this chemical or that chemical illegal. And so what we've done here is by stigmatizing and legislating this thing or that thing. Now what I have is an avenue to arrest people.

Right. And that produces this kind of eerie horrific power that's been moralized. So it's kind of like of course we must do this. Of course we must because if not then we're going to experience this rampant. Terrible fucking ripple pouring through society and it's going and all of the world will collapse because of it. Well you know Portugal is a perfect example of why that's false. Portugal decriminalized all drugs in 2001 so that that's 17 years ago now personal possession possession for personal use is no longer a crime in Portugal for all drugs. They reduced their overdose rate by 53 percent just by doing that.

And they have one of the lowest rates of drug use of all of Europe. Wow that's so amazing. Yeah you know what's so funny is when they legalized marijuana recreationally in California my interest in it diminished. Oh yeah prohibition creates this forbidden fruit effect which not only attracts young people to the drug. Don't do that that's bad. But also causes misuse and abuse because when you prohibit something you say there's no benefits there's only risks if you do this you're bad. And so the consciousness of using it responsibly to obtain the proper benefits which of course includes not using it too much and don't take too high of a dose. That doesn't even enter the consciousness of a lot of young people.

This is why I founded DanceSafe was to create a positive drug culture one that recognizes the benefits because that's the best way of reducing the harms. And it's why I named my new podcast Drug Positive for the same reason. Very quickly can you we already talked about it on the podcast that you're here but maybe for some new listeners. Can you can you talk a little bit about what DanceSafe. I should have this and I should have this elevator pitch perfected by now. DanceSafe is a peer based harm and risk reduction nonprofit with chapters in I think now about 20 cities across the United States where we provide harm and risk reduction information and services basically. Drug checking services will test your ecstasy pills or any drug you want for you so you know what you're taking. We have literature that we bring to events on the safer use of substances and peer based drug education from a non-judgmental perspective.

And but I I'm a bit out of the loop here. I thought that because of Biden's law that that doesn't happen anymore. Oh so the the rave act has sent a chill through many through much of the festival community and some festivals don't allow us to do pill testing on site. Some don't allow us there at all because they're too afraid but we still are able to do a lot of festivals around the country. So how does that work. And I think we talked about in the last podcast if like you're running a tent where someone is bringing in a schedule one drug to be tested or whatever schedule drug. Can a cop just position themselves somewhere outside the tent and when people walk out arrest them. They could but you know the exact opposite has happened. We've had cops who have confiscated drugs on people come to our tent and say hey can you test this for me.

I want to see what it is really. Really. There's a very strange relationship between law enforcement and harm reduction. You know they might be arresting people at the festival but yet they allow harm reduction to do its thing. Now that's not all cops. Obviously there are some counties and these are usually the events where the promoters won't allow us to do the testing that would be totally against that. But in the counties that understand harm reduction there's usually a lot of cooperation. Well I mean yeah because you know the thing is like you created like many there are many police officers I've met are people who are doing it because they actually want to help people. You know what I mean it's not like these we were running. I think most go into the profession thinking they will be helping people.

And they're like taking on the shittiest job. It's like the shittiest job. It's like being a bouncer for society. And it's like you've got to like you. I just when I wake up in the morning like this morning for example you know one of my anxieties. I think man I hope I give you a good interview today. You know what I mean I get a little flutter inside of me and I'm like man I hope that like I don't over talk or whatever. Well if you're a police officer you wake up in the morning and you think man I sure hope that I don't end up in a situation where somebody fires a gun at me. And I don't know exactly how I would I would never do that job right. So somewhere within that stress I think there's a lot of probably opportunity for somebody to start exhibiting some pretty like symptoms of PTSD and anger and who knows what else.

But anyway the point is they're not all bad man. And if certainly when it comes to this issue they don't want to be arresting people for some bullshit that they know is like on the on the on the on the hierarchy of harm. Yep you know but I think they realize that I think local police local city councils get it way more than the federal government gets it right. That's right. And that's how change is happening in this country. It's not happening at the federal level. Congress is gridlocked and you're never going to get a law passed through Congress but we've decriminalized or legalized cannabis in over half the states in the United States through initiatives state by state initiatives. And what I tell people now one of my podcasts I promote every episode is the next step we need to do is state by state initiatives to decriminalize all drugs because the polling has already happened.

And across the entire country Republicans and Democrats alike by a sizable majority favor the decriminalization of all drugs that possession for personal use should no longer be a crime. Really? That should be the next thing that the movement takes on. I keep trying to promote that. What polls are you citing there? It was a private opinion poll conducted by a reputable opinion polling group. There's some movement happening in California with a group that I'm in contact with. It's probably going to do the first one they're thinking either Oregon, Colorado or California.

It's going to happen maybe next year the first one. I know in one of the debates between Ted Cruz and Beto O'Rourke Ted Cruz brought up that Beto O'Rourke at some point in his political career was for exactly what you're saying. And Cruz brought that up as a political bludgeon to make him seem like he was a monster. Yeah, well it's not even, fuck those feds. Who cares about what Congress thinks? You do it on a state by state level, right? Let the feds come in and try to fight us. For a while they were raiding a lot of California pop clubs.

Now they've given up. Now they've kind of said, okay, even sessions is not greatly turning the clock back on cannabis. That's right. No, I mentioned that not, but I mentioned that because there are obviously people at all levels of government who agree with you, but know that if they come out publicly and say that and cite the statistics and the data related to what happens when you do that as far as harm reduction goes, they're still going to get crucified. They can't say it because these days and all days, it seems like unfortunately people are magnetized not towards logic. They seem to be more magnetized towards passion. They seem to, right? Go figure.

Well, you know, the great thing about propositions and is that you don't need any politicians on board. You collect enough signatures. You put it to the voters directly. Wow. I do want to get into like something a little bit more philosophical, but only because you are such an expert on this and you've made it your life's work. Why don't we just do it right now? What are the steps that anybody listening to this who feels drawn towards the notion that we should decriminalize all drugs? What are some steps they could start taking to help this reality happen?

And also, if you don't mind, if you could just add some data sets that they could go to so that they could educate themselves on it. You know what I mean? If someone listening right now, if you're like rolling your eyes and like, what the fuck are you talking about? That's the most insane, psychotic, lunatic, shitty, satanic idea I ever heard in my fucking life. This guy is out of his goddamn mind. I don't want my kid to be able to go down to the 7-Eleven and buy some fucking methamphetamine and smoke meth behind the fucking 7-Eleven. What are you doing? Why are you letting this man on your podcast? He's going to destroy society. Tell them the data sets and then give us some step-by-step moves.

So the first thing people need to know is that decriminalization is not legalization. Decriminalization just means that a personal possession is no longer a crime, but manufacturing and selling still remains a crime. Now, I'm an advocate for full-on legalization. Every drug needs to be regulated after it's legalized. But that's for another show when you have me back on in a year or whatever. But decriminalization is what they did in Portugal, a couple other countries have it too, where if you are using drugs and you have them on your person, on your body, that's not a crime. Not even a misdemeanor. California has made personal possession just a misdemeanor, so it's close to decriminalization.

If you just have drugs on you in California because of Prop 47 a few years ago and you get busted and they can't show that you intended to sell them, that's just a misdemeanor. Oregon has a kind of decriminalization law similar where it's a misdemeanor if you don't have any prior felonies. Don't ask me why. But anyway, we're moving to that direction. So what happens when you decriminalize drugs? And if you take the Portugal example, the most important thing that happens is you open up the public space for conversations and services to take place. Most people are dying today. The people who are dying from drugs today, they're dying because they're hiding their drug use.

They're not talking about their drug use with the people they need to be talking to about them. Doctors, teachers, public health providers. They're not going and obtaining the services that even the ones that are available for them. And safe injection facilities and DanceSafe and the RAVAC preventing us from doing harm reduction work. Once drugs are legal to possess, all of those of us who are trying to get these services out to people, it instantly becomes widespread and available. And that opens up the conversation, changes the culture, now everything changes. It's not that they diverted money from enforcement into treatment, and that's what reduced the overdose rate. We know treatment doesn't work.

Medication-assisted treatment for opioid addiction works pretty well, but 12-step works for a tiny percentage of people that enter it. It's not treatment. It's just the fact that... Stop the presses, Satan! Hold on! Okay. Now, I am not in a 12-step program, but I have many, many friends who are. And these people have certainly relapsed multiple times. So if the quantification mechanism we're looking for here is not relapsing as being an indication that the program is successful, then yes, perhaps you're right.

People do relapse when they go into 12-step programs. But the 12-step programs themselves are producing for some people a structure within which they can explore themselves and maybe get to the root of why they've been making some of the decisions they've been making, which have caused their life so many problems. And any addict will tell you that it's not the substance that is causing the problems. The substance abuse is a flower growing off of a much deeper... The roots go much deeper in this tree of sorrows and that we get to the root. And from that, we might find that the addiction or the addictive behavior diminishes. So I don't agree with you in the sense that I do think they're effective in at least illuminating the interior universe of some people and showing that there might be a connection between that universe and the external universe in which they're experiencing so much chaos. You ready to unpack this?

Yeah, let's do it. Well, like I said, 12-step programs work for a small percentage of people, but the data shows that they are not helpful for the vast majority. And in fact, whatever treatment program you can name helps approximately the same percentage. Can you define what you mean by work? Let's just do it this way, that the individual feels that they are no longer suffering from their problematic drug-taking behaviors. Because we're not going to call total abstinence the end result, even though that's what 12-step considers to be the only successful result in the end. Oh, okay, so wait, hold on. Right, so if we use the criteria of the program itself as in like working means that you are not using, if that is the criteria, which I'm not sure if it is, then you could say it's not working.

Well, even that criteria, absolutely, it's not working. But to be able to help a drug user stay alive and no longer have the negative consequences of their behaviors happening, that would be what we would call successful. And that could be moderation, no longer feeling the compulsion to use too much too often. Anthony Bourdain committed suicide, right? They remember him? Yes, of course. And he had a problem in his 20s with heroin and he kills himself whatever 30 years, 40 years later. And because people knew about his problem in the 20s, they immediately jump on this notion, oh, well, maybe he was using drugs and the toxicology reports came back.

No, he wasn't using drugs, right? And he would drink alcohol on his show socially. It didn't seem like he had a problem with alcohol, but there was a lot of the 12-steppers that would come out and criticize him and even see things in his drinking on his show that weren't there, right? Because they are steeped in the abstinence-only model. But the fact is, the vast majority of people that recover from addiction do not become totally abstinent. They are able to partake in the substances that at one point in their past, they had a problem with. The vast majority. Wow, okay, I got you, I got you.

Okay, cool, that makes a lot of sense. That's cool, that's cool, man. But again, it's like, man, I have met people, alcoholics in particular, who, like, they can't. Alcohol is very interesting and I think our entire addiction treatment kind of paradigm began with alcohol. Certainly 12-step grew out of alcohol, right? Alcohol is different in a lot of ways than other drug addictions because I think there is, particularly there is a certain type of alcoholic and I believe it's a genetic profile where they have the tiniest amount of alcohol. Boom, their personality changes completely. I used to live with one of them and they become helpless and dependent and like, it's like, you know, whether they've had half a beer because suddenly they're a different person.

And for people like that, for that particular type of alcoholism, I think maybe total abstinence really is the only way to go. But that is, you don't see that kind of thing with most of the other drugs that people can get themselves addicted to. Yeah, okay, I got you. So it's like, you're talking about a more nuanced approach to this. It's like, let's not lump every single addict into the exact same category. There's genetic profiles connected to all these various addictions and because of that, there clearly are different treatment methods based individual to individual. I'll just tell you something about myself. In my 20s, I had a meth habit last nine months and I actually went to NA afterwards and I loved NA.

I loved it. I didn't do the 12 steps because I didn't really need to, but I understood what narcotics anonymous was all about and I became a big proponent of it. Because I think it does help a lot of people. Very, very pure organization. No bullshit in that organization, at least if people are going voluntarily because court appointed 12 step just fucks with the entire 12 step. You're being forced to go there. Yeah, so I just say it only works for a small percentage of people and we need to include harm reduction based treatment protocols as well. Or maybe revise our definition of working.

In other words, like it's like, again, it gets back. I have a spiritual belief that allows me to say I don't have control. I don't think I have control over anything in my life. And in fact, my meth addiction really drove that home for me when I was unable to stop using meth. I had to leave the city I was living in order to quit. Thank goodness it wasn't for very long. It was only nine months, right? But that made me realize I'm just a sock puppet with the universe's tentacles inside me moving me around.

Even the activism I do, everything that I think I take credit for, that's just nature doing its thing. And so I was able to accept the admit that you're powerless kind of thing because it didn't make me feel more shame. But for a lot of people that surrender to a higher power, the admit that you're powerless over your addiction, etc. That it's a permanent thing that's going to be with you the rest of your life and therefore total absence is the only way to go. A lot of people, most people, the vast majority can't accept that and it actually locks them into a low self-esteem and addictive drug taking behaviors. Whereas if you let them feel that they're more powerful and they can manage it, even if on a spiritual level you and I will think, well, you know, you really don't have power. That actually helps other people. Yeah, yeah.

And maybe if we begin, maybe another problem of this viewpoint on addiction is that people who are deeply and profoundly addicted to things that aren't chemicals are completely in denial. And so people who aren't, who are just stone cold sober people who find their attention grabbed inexorably by a relationship, by a career, by a fixation on their thought patterns, by any number of things. What's the number one leading cause of death in teenagers from driving? Do you know? The cause of car accidents? Yeah. Drinking? I don't know. Texting, yeah, texting, yeah. Yeah, so there you have an example of another addiction, which is that people are, their attention has been grabbed by their phones and their attention has been grabbed by the desire to constantly communicate with people.

Right. They're driving and this is causing deaths all over the fucking place. So those many, many people who are fixated on their phones don't consider themselves to be addicts. They just think of themselves as living a normal life and doing what's necessary to efficiently run their business. They don't realize that, and many people who are working all day long don't realize that they're addicted to that. And many people who are completely grabbed by the universe's sticky and hypnotic aspect of being able to numb and nullify ourselves by ignoring something within us don't know it. And so you watch TV like, man, I'm glad I'm not addicted to math. And you've just been watching fucking Sean Hannity.

You've, you know what I mean? You've just been watching, you've been like sitting in front of your TV. Well, so you've touched on a really important point here because I think, you know, what drives the drug war other than the money and the corruption of politicians, intelligence agencies, corporations, you know, we got to understand this little tangent here. There is no commodity that is traded in such a high value amount in the world more than drugs, except for one. And that's oil. It goes oil, drugs. And by drugs, I mean just cocaine and heroin, right? Just those two.

And then armaments. And you realize how much money, illegal tax-free money is being made, that it's second only to oil. And it's being laundered through major banks, major multinationals. That corruption is really the elephant in the living room. I just wanted to put that out there. But the justification, the reason that the general public has such a hard time letting go of the drug warrior inside themselves is because it serves as the perfect scapegoat that we realize about ourselves but don't want to recognize. And that is we all over consume.

We live in a society that tells us to gratify our desires instantly all the time. And the greatest motivator of human behavior is shame. And so to offload our shame, to feel better about ourselves, we take what we don't like about ourselves and we project it onto what we consider the extreme version of that. The addict or the drug user. We say, at least I'm not them. Yeah, sure. Why do we over consume? We're trying to relieve our suffering in the wrong ways.

Yeah. But do you think you could go a little deeper into that? Why does a person feel drawn to this thing or that thing? Well, so, you know, I don't know if you got the last email I sent you before I arrived here today, but I said, hey, remind me to tell you why I think artificial intelligence, generalized AI, sentient AI is never going to happen. Will you tell me why sentient AI is never going to happen? Yeah, I will. And I think it speaks to this conversation we're having right now because, you know, current artificial intelligence is really just pattern recognition. The kind of machine learning and neural networks that we have, we've been able to program that can, you know, win the game of go.

I'm a go player, right? Google's DeepMind AlphaGo is incredible, right? So we've made great strides in artificial intelligence, but it's not sentient. And the reason is because in order to learn, you have to have desire. Intelligence emerges from desire and desire is primary. The baby is born and if it didn't have any desires, it would never learn. But it learns when it cries, mom feeds it and it starts to develop an intelligence that it knows how to manipulate its world. It all begins because it had a desire.

Desire is fundamental to the universe, this avoidance of pain moving towards pleasure or contentment or happiness and avoiding what we don't like. It's integral into the universe. We are all, we are born from it. And I think, does that answer your question? You asked why do we seek to pleasure and to avoid? You can't answer that except to me, except to say that that's the nature of the universe. And the spiritual teachings are about how we can get out of that trap, right? Yeah, but to get out of the trap, I think we need to understand the nature of the trap.

So though I do in some way agree with you, the answer is that is the nature of the universe. I think then the next step would be, well, let's start looking at what is the nature of the universe. And then maybe from that, we can start understanding what kind of trap we're in here. And so let's look at that. You know, a baby has some desire as hungry cries gets milk and that satiates temporarily the baby's hunger. So the baby gets to survive now because the baby's gotten milk, right? But most people I know who are experiencing the incessant sobbing of an internal baby living inside their head. They're not looking for anything that's causing them to necessarily survive as much as a way to like do something in the moment.

So it's like a book, a movie, you name it, a cigarette, whatever it may be. Well, boredom is really the perfect illustration that we live in suffering. We can't even sit still with ourselves. We suffer just sitting still. Yes. Yeah. And that right there. So to me, like I think a thing worthy of exploration would be to ask yourself if the milk that you're giving the baby in your brain is actually making the baby stop crying. Or have you done what I've heard really rotten parents do, which is when the baby starts crying, they just turn the stereo up louder than the fucking baby crying. The baby's still crying.

You just can't hear it because now you're listening to Led Zeppelin 4 at 10 on your fucking volume or 11 if your spinal tap. And so in this, you know what I mean? Big babies. Yeah, right, right. So here, let's get into that, man, which is that it's like if the problem in the world is addiction, which I think it is. I mean, if you were to like look at the United States as an individual and realize that for 93% of this individual's life, it had been engaging in the use of a really, really, really, really dangerous drug war. And you were to say, man, you were to sit down and do an intervention with the United States. And you'd be like, listen, I know you think this is working, but people really don't like you right now.

It's causing a lot of problems in your social circles. And it's really, really getting in the way of you experiencing what you were born for. Then you would find, oh my God, this is this thing we call war is in fact another flower off of the very same tree. And what is, what are the roots of this? And potentially if we can discover the roots of that, then maybe we could start reducing these massive fucking horrific flowers that look like flowers. They look like people being blown up, people being thrown in jail, fathers and mothers ignoring their children. Well, what's interesting to me is that I think one of the best tools that we have to enlighten us about all this happens to be a drug. What's that?

MDMA. MDMA is in its phase three trials through the FDA right now as a treatment for PTSD. It has this very mysterious ability to heal unresolved trauma in conjunction with psychotherapy. You have to use it with intention. And to the degree that war and certainly the drug war, as I just explained, the scapegoating process is largely from our unresolved trauma. What we don't like about ourselves, the shame that we feel that we project on others, the greed that we want more, the jealousy that we have all these things come largely from unresolved trauma. We don't have to get into the psychopath conversation, whether they're born that way or not, because maybe even that trauma is inherited, right? Because like you, I think, I believe in the transmigration of the soul.

So maybe it won't work for psychopaths, but for most of us, going deep with the help of a substance like MDMA can help us heal. And then, you know, I had one of my podcast episodes is called Is the Military Trying to Weaponize MDMA? Because a lot of people are really skeptical about MDMA therapy for veterans. They think, oh, you're going to heal these veterans and then they're going to just put them back into wars. It's going to become a tool of oppression and empire building. And my position is, no, it doesn't work that way because part of the trauma that veterans suffer is the knowledge that they went over there and killed innocent people based on a lie. And they can't, because PTSD is largely a moral crisis. It's an identity crisis where you've interpreted your trauma in a way that you blame yourselves.

And then when, so when you heal that, there's no way they're going to go back there and engage in the same evil destructive behaviors that they did previously. Because the healing process itself is about acknowledging and recognizing that you're a good person and you wouldn't do something like that. So that the healing process is about recognizing that you're a good person. And I think that that right there, I think that's one of the keys, which is that right now we recognize ourselves. And the way we recognize ourselves is as a person, right, good or bad. We just recognize ourselves like we, one of the products of being a human being is that you recognize yourself. When you look in the mirror, you see you. When my dog looks in the mirror, I'm not so sure, you know, but when we look in the mirror, we see an eye.

Oh, there's Emmanuel. Oh, there's Duncan. There's me, right? So we recognize ourselves. And when we recognize ourselves, it doesn't stop there. Does it? When we recognize ourselves, it's generally followed by a lot of other shit. Oh my God, you look old as fuck. Oh my God, you look tired. Oh my God, you're getting fat.

Oh my God, you're getting fat. Oh my God, look at that fucking zit. Oh my God. Or if we're not looking in the mirror and we're looking in the fun house mirror of our own minds, then we think, oh Jesus Christ, I can't fucking believe I said that to that girl last. What the fuck was I thinking? Oh my God, why did I send that text? Why did I send that fucking email?

Why did that person do that to me? Right. And if you recognize yourself, if there's a moment where somehow in the recognition of the self, you go, that's okay. Right there. A lot of the shit that you've been doing that's been causing all kinds of harm in the world and harm to yourself. It's probably going to, it's probably going to change a little bit. Right, right.

But how do we get to that point is the question. How do not just through MDMA or therapy, what is the question would be this? Is there something that is not connected to transitory phenomena in the world? Yeah, well, I think ultimately there is no self, right? You know, MDMA and having even better than that, having good parents that raise you well can produce a healthy ego. A healthy ego. And the West is very good at producing. Western psychology is based upon trying to produce healthy egos.

And I think this is one of the reasons why MDMA is becoming legalized because here in the United States, right, the Westernist country, the pinnacle of Western progressivism, right? Despite Trump now, because everyone is recognizing its value in that way. But the East then takes the healthy ego a bit farther into the transpersonal realms. And there is a whole field of transpersonal psychology. But to get there and then the more classic psychedelics tend to take us there, right? MDMA can raise us up and give us a healthy ego. And then we've got LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT that can produce, not always,

but can produce these transcendental experiences where we realize, well, one of the classic ones is, we're all one. Wow, we're all one. What does that mean for you as a person to think we're all one, right? Like the deepest part inside of me is the same as the deepest part inside of you. That recognition should entail simultaneously a recognition that everything you think you are that separate from everyone else is just transitory, including your mind, your body, your pimple, et cetera, and your thoughts, everything that I can claim credit for. Like I said earlier, it's just nature doing its thing. I am really just this pure consciousness that's the same in everyone else.

That's scary for some people because to believe that because we are attached to our unique sense of separateness, uniqueness from others, et cetera. Also, you're going to like, when you hear a thing like that, it's easy to get really confused by hearing a thing like that, because when you hear a thing like that and you haven't necessarily experienced a thing like that, or if you have experienced a thing like that, it's been in the midst of like a hardcore psychedelic moment that has then caught, like, you know, I can think of many, many, many, many of these experiences with psychedelics. Were they difficult? What? Were they difficult for you?

Oh, no, absolutely not. The difficult part is the transitory period in between the merging with the universe. It's the place where the ego tries very, very tries a million different tricks to not be, to not become what we are. And so somewhere in there, there can be like something very similar to a yoga stretch that is maybe that is challenging you and it hurts. And it can be really scary. And if you get stuck right in front of that place, then you can have a very challenging psychedelic experience. But the moment you pop past that into that, this place, then suddenly you have, that's where people have these very healing experiences, I would, I think. And I think MDMA is a really wonderful route to talk about this, because I have a personal experience with healing trauma through MDMA, which is that,

and this was way before any of this research was publicly available. And I can remember being on MDMA and getting lucky enough to begin thinking about how much I hated myself. You know, I got lucky enough to be able to summon up to recognize myself, so to speak, as an ego and to look at the ego from the lens of MDMA, rather than from the lens that I had been looking at myself in the entire world through, which is a lens constructed through a combination of genetics, experience. The amygdala. The amygdala, but not just the amygdala, the language system, the story system, the story we tell ourselves. And so in that moment, from this incredible rush of love and deep empathy for everything, I was able to experience myself within that field. And within that, I was able to love myself for the first time, maybe since I was a kid.

That's what all of the Phase 2 participants told me when I interviewed them for my documentary. There's this classic mechanism of action for MDMA that you hear a scientist talk about where it shuts down the amygdala, where the fear center of our brain is, and increases activity in the forebrain where we can make new thoughts, put things in context, and you hold that space for five, six hours with a therapist and talk about your traumatic experience. It creates new neural pathways. And then even when you're not on the drug now, when you remember the traumatic incident, it doesn't activate the amygdala anymore because you've spent so much time developing these neural pathways. That's the classic mechanism of action. But when you speak to all of the subjects who went through the study, what they will tell you is exactly what you said. I forgave myself.

I realized I like myself because PTSD is a moral crisis, like I said. It only happens when it affects your sense of self. That's right. And MDMA has this amazing, beautiful, miraculous, nobody understands why ability to produce self-appreciation and self-love. And then, of course, that includes empathy and love for others because we all are only one self. I disagree with the idea that nobody understands why. I think maybe from a scientific materialist perspective, there's some questions regarding the functioning of the sensory apparatus in general just because we don't have the technology yet to fully map what's going on in there. But it gets back to this idea, which is, is there a state that is not affected by phenomena?

And where we run into some problems, not just with MDMA, LSD, alcohol, TV, movies, relationships, orgasm, is that this thing happens sometimes in a person's life where suddenly they experience that MDMA sense of universal love. This feeling of, oh my God, I'm okay with all the flaws and all I've done. I was just doing my best. And then maybe in that moment I'm MDMA, you have this flash where you realize, wait, if I'm okay and I was just doing my best, then the people that were hurting me theoretically at some level are okay too. And then you start thinking, wait a minute, I think everything is perfect. Right. And it's a flash. Yeah.

And then cut to next Wednesday. You look back and refer to that and you still feel way better than you did because you at least have been given a very temporary, how would you say, vacation from the gravity well of your own self loathing. Right. Then cut to the week after or the week after or maybe even not so long after the event. You so loved that experience that you're going to try to get it again. And this is where we run into addiction. And so now what I'm doing is I'm telling myself that this experience that I've had is based on external phenomena. Yep.

What I think is the root of the problem that leads to war is because people are always going to this thing or that thing to try to get to a place that they already are. And through this sort of never ending furious attempt to get to that point, we end up completely not being in that point. And in that point, I think is what we actually are. I fully agree. Fortunately, you can't take MDMA every day. It just won't work. So it's got kind of a built in anti addiction mechanism in that regard. But I think if you could feel that every day, people would get addicted to it, obviously.

But I also think most people actually learn the lesson that you're talking about, right? The euphoria and the inner peace that MDMA and other substances can produce for people. They recognize that's a temporary phenomenon. And everyone thinks, wow, how can I cultivate that more in my own life? Because they don't go immediately. Most people don't become addicted to any drug. They just don't. There's a moderation effect that's just normal and we get it.

But it stimulates people's thought process like it did you. And perhaps psychedelics in your life have led you to become a spiritual thinker like they have for me. And that's a good thing. The answer, or I'm never going to pretend to know the answer. But one way of exploring it is that that state is always among us, even as emotions and activity. It's like the white screen that the movies project on. It's always there. And drugs can kind of snap our brain out of the habitual thoughts and emotions and feelings that allow us to see,

oh, there's a purity behind this. That purity, that peace exists even in a battlefield of war. It's always there. And is there something that's the same about us that's not transitory? I've always thought of it this way from the teachings of spiritual masters that I've read. When you reach that state in meditation, first thing you stop identifying with your body, right? Feeling a little itch is one of the first things I remember when I say, God, that itch is over there. I'm not going to focus on that.

Then it's like your thoughts, okay, I don't want to focus on my thoughts. I just want to kind of be present and feel my real self. All these thoughts keep coming up. Where do those thoughts keep coming from? It's not me. I realize that's not me because I don't want that thought. I'm trying to get rid of them, but it keeps on coming. That's not me.

And you get to this state where I've been able to do for a minute at a time where it feels like, wow, no thoughts coming through my mind at all. Like, oh, I'm really meditating well now, right? Stensibly, you get to this place where you've totally disidentified with your body, with your mind, even with your emotions, but you still feel that you're there. You're still there. You're feeling your pure consciousness. If at that moment someone came behind you and put a bullet through your head,

you wouldn't even notice. You would just stay right there feeling yourself. Because that pure, real thing that you are is not connected with your body or your mind. It's the entire universe. What is? Yeah. You like that one, huh? Yeah.

Yeah, me too. That was good. And that is, I think, where some confusion happens so that people think, oh, well, to get there, I need to meditate. And now we're in the same predicament, aren't we? Getting addicted to meditation. No, we're getting addicted to the idea that that state is not a fundamental state, that that is actually what we are. And so now we're like, okay, by meditating, I'll get to this place. By meditating, I'll get to this place.

And so now, even though, and that's great, by the way, that's okay. Whatever reason you have for sitting still, or more importantly, whatever reason you have for remembering who you actually are, it's a great reason, if you ask me. If the reason is because you want to radiate some love, if the reason is because you want to, like, become a rock star. If the reason is because you want to potentially levitate or teleport or read people's minds. Whatever the thing is to me, the many, many, many complex and very interesting intentionalities that lead to a person relieving themselves of the amnesia that comes from having a highly complex nervous system that has manufactured an identity and a past, present, and future, and has manufactured a sense that we are separate, I'm all for it. It seems like as we go down these winding paths, the paths get a little wider. We end up meeting people from other paths, like, oh, hey, where were you? Oh, man, I was on the LSD path.

And then you run into, like, hey, where were you? I was on the path of sorcery. I was studying magic. And you run into somebody else and you're like, where the hell were you? And they're like, oh, I was trying to be powerful. I was trying to be a powerful boss. I was trying to get myself into a flow state so that I could make more money. And you're like, oh, cool.

All right, well, let's all walk together for a little while. And then as you walk down that path, it begins to widen a little bit more. And you look over and it's like, whoa, there's a monk here. And then you look over and you're like, whoa, there's a shaman here. And you look over and then those people, they begin to like kind of help you refine. And then suddenly you end up at a moment where you're all the same person walking down the very same path, except it wasn't a path. You've become what you actually are.

And you realize this isn't dependent anymore on some shift in this thing or that. And that, to me, whatever way you have to get there, it's great. And one of the things I love about your perspective on substances in particular is it has that taste to me, which is like shit, man, it's all the same thing here, man. This is all the same. Oh, yeah, right. You know, that brings up something interesting, you know, this debate of whether or not drug experiences are real, right?

Oh, that was just a drug experience. A lot of people poo poo psychedelics because like you're hallucinating. Like whatever's happening to you is not, is not real. You know, well, in the West, we have a very different definition of real than what they have in the East. In the West, real means occupying a location in space and time. Right? This teddy bear that Teddy bear I brought is real because there it is important to

blah, blah, blah. And like say, you know, if you have hallucinations when you think something is occupying a space and time and place and it's not really there, right? And that's a little strange. In the East, real is that which has always existed, that which never had a beginning nor an end. If something came into existence and then left, how can it be real? And of course, that's all phenomena.

Everything has a beginning and end that we can see. Yeah. And so to them, the only thing that's real is consciousness. It's the one consciousness. And so, you know, when I say to people, you know, hey, you know, I smoked DMT and I met these beings. Oh, that's not real. That's just hallucination.

I'm like, it's as real as what I'm experiencing right now. I've learned from them. I talked to them. They talked to me. You know, am I saying they existed on a planet over there? I have no idea where they are, but the experience, all experiences as real as anything else, which isn't real, but it's all part of phenomena. That's one of the funniest things when someone does that trick, because when you report something

and a person comes back to you with no, no, no, that was an illusion. And the thing telling you it was an illusion is an illusion. It's like going to the DMT realm and one of these beings and you're like, hey, you know, there's a whole other universe out there. And that being was like, yeah, that's a bunch of shit over there. That's not real. This is where it's really at. Right.

But then it's just two sides of the very same Mandala and saying that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's why I'm not into this whole, the universe is a simulation, right? That we are actually a simulation of another higher beings that have created us. I think this is like the way that in our modern world, we were trying to come up with an explanation for these psychedelic experiences that we have that doesn't seem woo-woo to us, right? Because we're developing artificial intelligence now.

We have this idea that we're going to, you know, we have computers. We have little worlds that we can create and maybe wear that world. And maybe like when you smoke DMT, these beings are from the world that has created us. And we're just, you know, computer avatars in their world, right? And the problem with that theory is that it can easily, logically lead to an infinite regress. Well, those beings may be a simulation of beings higher than them and then it can go on forever and ever and ever.

It's much simpler to say that there's an infinite amount of beings everywhere on every level. We're all just consciousness playing itself out. And the only thing that's real is consciousness. It's not that those beings are real and that we're not real, right? Like, well, what if they're not real too, right? Well, this is a ridiculous question for you, but it's just a fun question to ask. What if I told you, and again, this isn't like I'm alluding to something or I believe it, it's just a fun like thought experiment, but let's imagine that I told you, you are

in a simulator, you're in a simulator, you're in a universe simulating machine and beings in this universe simulating machine are really adverse to that idea for some reason or another, but you are in one. Well, how would your life change after that? How would you start behaving differently? Well, you know, if I didn't have a perspective that everything is just an illusion anyway, I might start thinking along the lines of the matrix. Oh, I got to take that red pill.

I got to escape. I got to get to the place that is real, right? And that's where I think the trick is. There's no place that's real, but yet there's an element of truth in the movie, The Matrix, that this is all an illusion, but we still cling. We still want to think that there's something real that we have a self in the pod that we can escape from and go on an adventure and kill the aliens. Then that's finally real.

None of it's real. Okay. That's funny. Right. You're right. It's like, yeah, okay, sure. Yeah. It's like a never ending.

Again, we're back in the exact same thing, aren't we? Which is that we're trying to get from one point to another with this idea that it's going to help as an antidote to this problem. When the problem itself is the problem that we've identified as being real, permanent, continuous, and that is causing all of the suffering. So yeah, that's to me is like something that's really amazing to think about is that what, just a fun question would be, what if you didn't need, and I don't mean in a boring party pooper way, that as I used to interpret it when you'd hear people say this, what is

what if you didn't need anything? What if right now, even if you don't believe it, even if you're not feeling it or thinking it, you are that place. What if that was true and true and if that, and what if that was the only true thing? Wow, man. That there's some something within that. I think that would as far as like I'm concerned, if that, if that was what I thought, I imagine that it would probably reduce a lot of the bullshit that I was doing in the world.

Well, what they say is then you would be free, right? But they also say we all are free. That the process is just to realize that it's sort of moving the veil that we're actually not free. Our bondage is only an illusion also. But what we want to do is be and feel and know that we're free. How do you do that? Yeah.

Well, there's many, many ways that there's prescriptions have been given to us from the ancient days through various forms of yoga, meditation. Ambient. Right. MDMA, LSD. Right. You know, I tend to think that meditation is the way to go in the end, right? We can get peak experiences in the PEEK through drugs, right?

Well, you get a little peak. It's like, look at that. Oh, wow. Yeah. Then we're right back in our body. And you know, maybe there's some healing and we change solely over time through the use of psychedelics. Obviously, that's true.

But I don't think most of us are going to become fully free, self-realized simply through the use of psychedelics. And although it can happen instantly for unknown reasons to anyone, I think. But I think that the recipes we've been given over the ages by people who at least claim they've gotten there tend to all point towards meditation and not acting selfishly, right? Going against the current of what our body and mind wants to do. There is a great phrase that one spiritual master said that I read is, every day, do one thing your mind doesn't want to do and don't do one thing your mind does want to

do. And that's just a great way to start the process of becoming free. You know, realize that you don't have to do what your inclinations and your body and your feelings and sit, in other words, sit with your suffering and accept your suffering because suffering is love. Yes. But what a high level thing that is, you know, to that point that you so beautifully just made there is for a lot of people when they hear suffering, they have different ideas

of it. They think of it like the feeling when you burn your hand or something like that. They don't they don't realize it's not the feeling when you burn your hand. It's all the feeling feelings following when you burn, all the thoughts falling, the recursive thoughts falling when you burnt your hand. And but to get to this idea of suffering, one thing that I heard that used to drive me up the fucking wall about suffering is that many of these teachers would say, you're not going to fix it.

Give up that idea, this idea that like give up the idea that this thing that you think is fixable is fixable in the way you think it is. It's not. It's a fundamental state. Right. And then, then suddenly, if you just for a second, and this is what I love about what you're saying in particular in a relation to chemicals, like imagine if just for a second, no matter what activity you may happen to be engaged in at this very moment, whatever

it may be, that's perfect. That's perfect right there, including the grief, including the suffering. So when, so in other words, when I'm like, so for me, if I'm like, Oh God, I feel so bad. And this has now happened with my teachers. After my dad died in particular, I had this wonderful moment with one of my teachers on the phone where I'm like, I'm crying on the phone and I say, I feel so terrible. I feel so sad.

I feel so bad. I am so unhappy. And he said, you're going to feel that way. And that's it. There wasn't a, and then, right now do this, now do that, it was, this is where you're at. And in that, I stopped trying to evade it. I stopped trying to escape it.

I stopped trying to get out of it. And maybe you felt bad with a little less suffering. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's it. But listen, in the same way my trainer, when I was going to the gym a long time ago, before

I hurt my back, I'd like to return it in the same way my trainer taught me how to do pull-ups by like applying all these embarrassing straps to my body so I could do pull-ups. Psychedelics can function in a similar way, which is that or drugs or whatever it may be, for me it's psychedelics. These can be at least kind of like intermediary tools and like, you know, when you go do yoga, well at least if you're me, and you go do yoga and the yoga teacher will come and give you like 17 embarrassing like odd cushions and shit so that you can get into the poses and you're like humiliated because like you're looking at people who are as like bendy as

a fucking rubber band who are like in their 80s and they're having to use like carpets and shit to like prop your body up to do downward dog. But over time, the props kind of naturally, you're like, I don't need it anymore. I'm already limber, you know, I could already do that. The props start naturally falling away, you know. So to me, this is like what the psychedelic pathway, one part of it is. And that's not to say that it's something you can really trick yourself because at some point you can either start thinking that you can start thinking one thing or the other

regarding psychedelics. You can start thinking, man, I've been doing this too long. I don't need this anymore. And now you're shaming yourself and you're all like, you know, you're all or you could start thinking like, I'm not going to do this anymore because it's bad. And then you stop and you're shaming yourself in a different way. Whereas I think potentially maybe what might happen is these things you just naturally stop thinking about them.

You stop wanting to go for your phone. You stop wanting to go on Reddit. You stop wanting to go on Drudge Report. Because why? Because why? Because the reason is you were going there in the hopes of experiencing this flickering state and now you've found it everywhere. I think that would be my theory.

Yeah. That's, you know, how that resonates with me most is in terms of activism and making the world a better place because that's been my path, right? I've always, you know, since I was a teenager, been an activist, right? I was anti-nuclear activist when I was 16 and just, you know, now I'm trying to change drug policy, et cetera, right? And you know, it all really comes from my relationship with my father. I was just in this workshop.

My stepdaughter has been doing it for years and that's why I'm carrying this teddy bear around by the way. I went through level one. It's called Global Harmony in Sacramento and it's very interesting. I got closer to my stepdaughter and I have to carry this around until level two. That's, you know, so. You have to carry a multicolored bear around with you? Yeah.

I have to carry it around for the next couple of weeks until I go to level two. But if you check to see if there's any bugs in there. Well, I got to choose it out of a whole big room full of teddy bears and, you know, I picked the one that looks. But I mean, if you look to see if there's a recording device in there. Oh, and I feel something right there. Why do you have to carry that around? Tell me why.

You know, I don't know. I think the part of this was like getting in touch with your inner child. And I think they also want you to come back to level two. But and so this is a reminder. If you carry around with you, you're not going to forget to come back to the next level. I'm not going to forget because I'm going with my stepdaughter who, you know, really wants to. What's it called? Global Harmony.

Yeah, it's a local. It's in Sacramento. But in any case, in this, we're talking about like the go into your relationship with your father and my father was abusive. And that's why I feel lucky that I was introduced to MDMA as a teenager because it helped me to heal from that. You know, but I also realized that my activism began sort of as this rebellious state, I happened to meet these Quakers who got me into anti-war activism.

And I was able to channel my anger against my father into something more productive. Right. And so then, you know, it's been like, I want to change the world. I want to make the world a better place. And through my lifelong process of, you know, healing, and I have come to realize that the abuse that I suffered as a child from my father was the greatest gift I could have ever had because I have more empathy now for the suffering in the world. People who have had great childhoods and never experienced suffering, your proverbial wealthy people who are insensitive, you know, they may lack something.

They may be more spiritually challenged. And I was able to fully forgive my father. And it was horrific. I don't want to go into all the details. But I was with him at his bedside when he passed away. I took care of him for the last year of his life. I always protected myself from him. You needed to because he was that kind of person.

But I ended up fully forgiving and fully loving him precisely because of what I feel that he gave me. And when I translate that to the real world, and this activist hate hearing this, you know, this whole notion of like, everything's perfect. Right. The war in Iraq is perfect. Terrorism is perfect. Donald Trump is perfect. Right. The evil in the world is there to get our souls on the path towards love. You can't even imagine a perfect world.

Why try? If it was a perfect world, there was no there'd be no love. Also, because you can only understand things in relation to their opposites. Yeah. So everything that's happening is perfect. It's all here for a reason. It doesn't mean I've stopped being an activist. You still do it. You still try to relieve suffering, even though you realize that suffering is a necessity to help people approach and realize love.

I think that theoretically, that if you wanted to be an activist and make things better, then my guess would be that you're going to do a better job if you have found a way to love yourself and to forgive your parents. And when I throw my mind into the big picture events, it can be a little confusing and my mind can get grabbed into a kind of state of hopelessness. So and what I've been taught is that though, certainly we don't want to stick our heads in the sand and ignore the truth of the horrific tragedies that are happening all over the world and use something called spiritual bypass

to avoid confrontation with this. But because these big, big, big problems are going to require, as in the climate change report that just came out, an unprecedented shift. And the way humans are living, then that means that we have to start with ourselves first and then as we're working on ourselves, continue a thing that was initially fueled by anger. Because in the same way, when I was talking about that weird thing where there's all these kinds of paths that lead to broader paths, I think it's

similar with activism. So many people start off fucking pissed off. So many people start off just wanting to seem cool. Yeah, wanting to seem like good people. So many people have all these crazy reasons at the beginning of it. And then as they progress, they begin to realize, oh, wait, we're all here for the same reason. And then the fights that happen between activists, when you're kind of far

out in this strange mandala, they stop happening. Because now we're getting closer and closer to the real truth, which is that we want to connect or to remember who we really are, what we really are. Because what we really are is fundamentally good. I have never in my fucking life heard anybody criticize a rose. Yeah, I've never heard anybody be like, I tell you, roses suck roses. Oh my God. Who does that rose think he is?

Look at that rose. Look at that rose. Clearly that rose is putting on a show of being that colorful. It's not really that colorful. Look how wilted that rose is. My God. How is that rose wilting in such great environments? Have you ever seen such a shitty fucking rose?

Did you hear about the rose? That rose is never. And yet humans are identical. We are nature. We're part of nature. And yet we criticize and hate ourselves. So to me, it's a beautiful thing that you're saying, which is like, man, on one level, everything's perfect.

On another level, somebody's house is on fire. Fucking house is on fire. I'm not going to be like, hey, that's perfect, dude. Someone's in prison because they smoke cannabis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think that there's some weird synchronicity between the two forms of activism. I think you could almost say that self-remembering is a form of activism. That sure, the ultimate, the ultimate form of activism.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you know what happens if you keep engaging in activism and you don't bring in that spiritual perspective? What Stalin, the Khmer Rouge, you know, these horrifying, you know, put your enemy against the wall and shoot them all. And the most, the dictatorial dictatorships on the planet have all come from the best of intentions originally, but not the ultimate one that you're talking about,

the cultivation of humility and the remembering who you are, right? We need to learn to see our perceived enemies as potential allies always. That's not to say there isn't going to come a time where we have to fight. You know, we will. And it's unfortunately seeming to be more likely the case that we're going to have to fight in this country, too. I, you know, pray it's not going to have any time soon. But even as we do that, we can come at it from a different perspective.

This is the whole point of the Bhagavad Gita, by the way, the great Hindu spiritual text, Arjuna, is on the battlefield about to go to war with the other clan. And there are relatives of his on the other side and he gets dejected. And then Krishna gives this speech to him, which is called the Bhagavad Gita about how you should go to war anyway, but do it from a place of detachment and remembrance. You can't control the situation. You need to participate. It was a just war. It was a just war.

It's not saying that, you know, so I'm not saying therefore I'm that, you know, say Iraq or Afghanistan that should stay and fight, right? You know, the war that we're fighting is the war to end the wars in Afghanistan. So we keep doing that. We keep keep on fighting, but just, you know, be an activist, but do it from a place of detachment where you aren't desperate for the results. That's great. Yeah. Well, that is something in the Bhagavad Gita.

You have a right to your action. You do not have a right to the fruits of your action. Right. And, but I think, and I think, man, that the this is one of the things that pops up is popped up in my head. And it's a legitimate, valid point, which is like, you know, how do we deal with confrontation while simultaneously being compassionate? And it's a big, big question. And I think that the

and it's a it's a good thing to have and think about. But let's, while thinking about this, keep getting back to this question, which is, what are we really? What are we? And if what we are is fundamentally good and we keep reconnecting with that memory that gets obscured or by their flickering, non-continuous self, then maybe the thing is we, the thing you're talking about, some potential conflict always there, not just in the United States, but in a personal level,

always some potential conflict, always something that could be looming in the future, whatever it may be, always, always there. And then some would say inevitable in some form or fashion. And I think this is one of the reasons why people call meditation a practice. We're practicing so that when that thing comes, we can respond to it in a way that is nonviolent and loving because we've been practicing.

And then when that happens, if you're somebody like me, who's been a big portion of our lives, reacting to confrontation with aggression in some form, even if the aggression was veiled as something as simple as an eye roll or a sarcastic remark or some very, very subtle form of aggression, high-roading, which I'm quite guilty of, or like producing an idea that my POV must be better than another's POV, or all the very, it gets very subtle.

In fact, I imagine in some form or fashion, I'm doing it right now and I apologize. But it will, because it's, this is just like, it gets very refined, right? But if in the big, like, sort of overt mechanisms, we respond to confrontation from a place of being grounded in some fundamental good, you'll find that the way your fights happen is completely fucking different than the way they used to happen. I mean, on an interpersonal level.

Right, right. You know, and that, and when you get into one of those kinds of fights, arguments, or whatever you want to call it, and you watch the way those fights go down, it's almost a game, it's playful, there's something in it that's like. And you know who I think is a testament to the success of this method on, you know, a larger macro scale? You know him?

Who? Rick Doblin. Rick Doblin has been able to work with our perceived enemies to such a degree that they have come around now and are behind MDMA legalization in a way that nobody ever would have dreamed of. Even 20 years ago when I first met Rick, you know. I mean, I dreamed of it because I, you know, I was like, I hopeless positive belief systems.

We're going to do it, you know. But you know, he, there's so many people out there right now who just think, you know, they don't want to work with the Trump administration. They don't want, you know, but they're never going to do it. You know, the way it was in my career as a harm reduction activist, I started reaching out to parents of kids who died at raves after they've taken fake ecstasy. Oh, and people told me at the time, you know, you're crazy.

Those are going to be the most anti-drug people ever. They're going to like, you know, never going to work with you. And I found that to be not the case at all. I was nervous the first time, but all the parents that I've contacted, ended up becoming allies in harm reduction. Wow. Yeah. You know, so, so we, we need to perceive our,

we need to realize our perceived enemies, our potential allies, and approach them as if they already are. Wow, man. Thank you so much for this conversation. I've learned so much from it. Will you please tell my listeners where they can find you and how they can help you and become your allies? Yeah. Well, you know, the thing I'm trying to point right now is my podcast called Drug

Positive, and you know, it's on iTunes and everywhere else. We've got nine episodes. My wife is my co-host. It's really great because it's the first time we're really working so closely together on a project. And that's, that's awesome. And, you know, I don't bring too much of this spirituality discussion into it. It's mostly a harm reduction and activist or it's a drug policy reform podcast.

We need it. But it's, it's entertaining. We're approaching a thousand listeners per episode now. So, man, I'm so lucky to get to hang out with you. And I'm so grateful for the work that you've been doing for so long out there. And I'm obviously exceedingly grateful to Rick Doblin. And, but I hope somewhere in the midst of your tireless effort to create a more rational relationship with substances that you give yourself a pat on the back here.

You deserve it. And more, many of us are very grateful for your work. Thank you very much. Hare Krishna. Thank you so much for listening, everybody. A big thank you to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. Much thanks to my Patreon subscribers and much thanks to all of my sweet listeners. May every single one of you be free from suffering and be happy.

Have a nice full belly and lots of wonderful orgasms if that's what you're looking for. I will see you soon. Hare Krishna. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JC Penney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with.

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