Duncan Trussell Family Hour - Emanuel Sferios

Episode Date: April 8, 2015

Emanuel Sferios, founder of Dancesafe.org, joins the DTFH to talk about why the prohibition of MDMA is a million times more damaging than MDMA.   We also talk about his efforts to fund MDMA the movie.

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It is I, Duncan Trussell, and you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, and this is part two in a series of podcasts I'm doing about the folks who are making great efforts to get MDMA legalized. I actually am just calling it a series. It just coincidentally happens that I interviewed two people in a row who happened to be working really hard to change the draconian, archaic, monolithic, Machiavellian, and ridiculous drug laws that are keeping people locked up behind bars with murderers for doing nothing more than trying to expand their consciousness or trying to expand the consciousness of folks around them.

You guys know how I feel about this. I hope I'm not seeming to one note. If you just started listening to the podcast's last episode because of Rick Doblin, please don't think that the only thing we talk about on this podcast is the legalization of drugs, though I do find it an interesting topic, and though it is something I love talking about, it's not the only thing we talk about, and I hope that if you are bored with this subject matter, you will forgive me and trust me when I say we've got a lot of great podcasts coming up that don't have to do with the fact that alchemists and chemists and teachers and saints and people

who only wanted to love a little bit more or people who are hurting really bad and just using what they had at their disposal to try to escape the pain are currently festering in the dungeons of the Illuminani or whoever the fuck is behind the prison industrial complex. I have a feeling it isn't the Illuminani, it's probably just a bunch of grumpy, scared people and nothing as sinister as it seems if you think about it too hard. We got some great podcasts coming up. Pete Holmes is going to be on the show this Thursday. My friend Johnny Ross, who is one of the leaders in the virtual reality community,

is going to be on the podcast and then we can get right back into talking about the other strange stuff that's currently happening in the world, but I do think it's important since it is spring, we did just celebrate the resurrection of Jesus to spend a little bit of time talking with folks who understand that there are certain powerful medicinal psychoactive chemicals out there that need to be brought out of the dark of prohibition and see the light of day so that all the stigma currently attached to these substances can be lifted and people can begin to experience the benefits that come from these substances and when I say these substances generally what I'm talking about is psilocybin or magic mushrooms, MDMA, marijuana, dimethyltryptamine,

which is ayahuasca and any safe, time-honored substance that has very little negative repercussions and if used responsibly and moderately with good intention and surrounded by people you trust and love can have supremely powerful outcomes when it comes to your ability to connect with the people around you and to forgive people that perhaps desperately need your forgiveness. They also help with understanding myth. There are great lenses that you can revisit the religions that you may have been raised with. A lot of folks were raised in fundamentalist conservative households where whatever the story being told was for a lot of folks that's fundamentalist Christianity, for a lot of folks that's like Pentecostal Christianity, that story sometimes because

it's being told by scared people or people who have been taught to fear the Lord, it gets tainted and so you end up missing this incredible information packet that's encapsulated in all the symbols that make up the story of Jesus Christ or whatever your particular, whatever religion you were raised in. If you were given it the wrong way then you're going to have the same response to Christianity that I currently have whenever I smell absent. I can't drink absinthe anymore. I used to really enjoy absinthe not just because I'm a closet goth but because it's a really interesting tasting alcohol but ever since I did drunk history whenever I get around absinthe it just makes me want to puke in the same way because of my body's trying to protect me

and telling me oh shit man that's poison I almost killed us once. There's some metaphysical or perhaps neurological part of the human brain that after you have been exposed to fundamentalism and you revisit it you have a poison response your body contracts you clench your forehead down and whoever happens to be yapping about sweet baby Jesus you just want to tell him to go shove it where the fucking sun doesn't shine you proselytizing holier than thou piece of shit I am an adult and I don't have to eat these poison pellets that were fed to me every Sunday when I was a kid but if you take a psychedelic and revisit those stories quite often you will recognize that the stories weren't what was fucked up but the people who were telling them had

twisted agendas that didn't really have much to do with the myth that they were telling you. That's another reason psychedelics are great. Psychedelics are great if you're having the inevitable sort of stagnant period that can come in a long-term relationship. Lots of folks have that it's completely normal to have that if you're hanging out with somebody all the time that initial burst of firework like passion can diminish and suddenly it feels like you're eaten stale crackers and watching a black and white I love Lucy rerun instead of enjoying that incredible passionate love-filled fuckfest that your relationship used to be what happened to the showers you would take together where you'd scrub each other off and pretend you were in some

kind of 90s soft-core porn what happened to listening to enigma and rubbing coconut oil in each other's moobs it's gone it just vanishes and the next thing you know you're just like wafting farts on each other and praying for death it can happen but the responsible MDMA session done in the right way with the right intentions behind it the right prayers intoned the right sigils written down can bring you right back into that passionate sweet beautiful connective place that you experience when you first met whoever it is you've been with for a long time so that's another reason psychedelics are incredibly useful and all the research is out there you can see the research happening with giving psilocybin to folks who have late-stage

terminal illnesses who are more than likely about to exit the casino and are feeling the kind of anxiety that goes along with knowing you're going to die and somewhere in the process of taking a high dose of psilocybin you realize that this ego identity this human body this vortex of atoms and and memories and and essentially this bag of meat that you've gotten so fixated on is just one infinitesimal part of what you actually are because sometimes a good mushroom trip done in the right way can show you that what is waiting for you after the death of the body is very similar to somebody who's been living in Syria for their entire lives going to visit Hawaii it's almost like that and you realize that the uh what what what is waiting for you is so beautiful and profound

and incredible and uh familiar uh that the the fear that you're experiencing or a lot of the fear that you're experiencing in relation to that inevitable event that every single person on the planet living today will more than likely experience unless you believe or occurs well in which case we're all going to get broken apart by nanobots and go drifting into space and turn the moon into a Commodore 64 or something I hope that happens but it may be that we're all going to die and in that and so psychedelics can alleviate a lot of the anxiety and tension that all of us are probably secretly feeling at least in some small way so that's another excellent use for psychedelics um there's a lot of other great uses for psychedelics too and I could probably go on

for about 700 hours listing all of them but I'm not going to do that just know that this is the second part of a two-part series on the legalization of MDMA and uh we've got a lot of other top groups that are going to come up we don't just talk about drugs on the Duncan Trussell family our podcast much thanks to the AV club for giving me a review on the Rick Doblin episode reviews are interesting sometimes it feels like they gotta throw in a tiny little jab and the critique that I got in the review from the AV club was that uh uh I was I'm not I'm gonna misquote it you can google search it but it seems like they thought that I was ascribing a little too much benefit to these substances uh and that uh you know maybe they're they're not the

they're not gonna fix every problem in your life I will concede that point I don't think that they're gonna fix every problem in your life but I do think that they're going to help you as you address all the problems in your life with a brand new uh uh with a brand new set of goggles on they're gonna help you look at the problems in your life uh in a brand new way and they're gonna help you deal with some of the difficulty that you've been experiencing in creative ways that you might otherwise not have thought of uh to sum it up they're gonna help you forgive everybody who's ever done any shitty thing to you and uh in the process you're gonna forgive yourself and so in that way I think they are a wonderful tool that can be used uh that should be used responsibly

and should be used along with perhaps therapy or meditation or just a general desire to evolve yourself so that you can be a more giving gentle compassionate and empathetic member of whatever community you happen to have incarnated into okay my friends okay so we're gonna dive right into this podcast now listen I've got to I've got to call somebody out here my dear friend and teacher Raghu Marcus was at the Whole Foods in Asheville North Carolina and encountered a grocery clerk who was working there who recommended uh for him to listen to the Rick Doblin episode so thank you my friend for doing that and then complained about my commercials that I do on this podcast and uh he said he doesn't want to fucking hear about somebody yapping about web design so look

I understand friend uh I get it you know what I don't necessarily want to hear commercials either they annoy me uh when I'm watching The Walking Dead and they and they're there in the in the middle of the fucking action a god damn car commercial comes on I'm getting ripped apart by zombies I might I'm I'm afraid my sweet dear sheriff Rick uh might be getting about to get murdered my sweet sweet man who I wish could protect me and everything that I do in the real world I wish Sheriff Rick lived with me and guided every guided me every step of the way uh and anytime him or his friends get into danger I don't want to see some bullshit about a goddamn antidepressant or car commercial but uh you gotta get you I have to go through that they interrupt it that's what I'm saying they

interrupt the show several times with these goddamn commercials I sweet friend at Whole Foods in Asheville North Carolina put the commercials in the very fucking beginning of this goddamn podcast which means that if you take the slightest amount of time and maybe I'm wrong about this maybe whatever system you're using doesn't have a keyboard or a mouse and you can't just jump forward but I think you can just jump forward that's all just jump forward are you really not willing to expend that amount of energy to it's probably four calories is my guess it's half a cracker's worth of calories to jump ahead in my rambling commercials and I will admit sometimes they're too long and I will admit that sometimes I go on and on about them and I shouldn't but the reason

I do that is because something about just reading off the paper makes me feel like some kind of robotic shill and um I don't know I I just don't want to like do the whole like news real thing or you just read the copy and then move on so that's why I do it maybe I'll figure out the time codes or something and for those of you who don't want to listen and obviously I'm the opposite of offended that you wouldn't wouldn't want want to listen to a commercial but for those of you don't want to listen you could just dive ahead move into the next phase jump right into the interview you don't have to listen to me ramble about uh some crap you're not interested just jump ahead do that for me would you all that being said I'm not going to do a commercial uh for this particular podcast

at least uh I'm not going to do any of the Casper Squarespace or any of those but I am going to do my uh I am going to talk about the Amazon portal for a second you could have already jumped ahead are you still listening you could have already jumped ahead is it that hard I want you to be happy I want you a Whole Foods clerk to be happy in fact at this moment I'm thinking of the unified consciousness of all things the love field that we are all a part of and I'm imagining that all sentient beings at this very moment in the universe are pumping your life filled with the most incredible blessings synchronicities coincidence joys I'm you're seeing fucking I'm monarch butterflies that's what I'm imagining I'm imagining you're waking up in the morning your window is flying

open and just a a a a a bustle is that what you call a swarm of monarch butterflies a bustle of monarchs kids come soaring into your room and their beautiful orange wings are flapping and they're flapping it's synchronistically so that the the drone of their flap starts making the oom sound over your bed and any dying flowers that you have around your room or any dying things that you have around your room are coming back to life and even and you are getting younger because of this magical butterfly event that's what I want for you I want you to be happy and to enjoy this podcast but I got to do commercials because that's what pays the bill so I'm sorry you don't enjoy them and and I thank you for recommending the podcast to Ragu

but for god's sakes man just jump ahead okay all right uh this episode of the dunga trustle family hour podcast is brought to you by amazon.com thank you all of you have been going through the amazon portal it's a great way for you to support this podcast if you go to any episode of the dunga trustle family hour podcast and uh click through the amazon portal uh the next time you're going to buy something on amazon they give us a very small percentage of what you buy and it doesn't cost you anything so it's a way for you to support this podcast and you really are supporting the podcast when you do it uh it really adds up uh so it's a way for you to support the podcast without having to to do anything more than to buy some delectable delightful wonderful thing

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honey that you can spray into your breads and and the mouths of your lovers and pets go to go through our portal won't you it's at dunkintrustle.com in the comment section of any episode and we are also going on tour friends oh yeah and I've got a really big announcement I am so excited about this man uh so first I'll go through the dates some of these are already sold out uh the show in Cambridge Massachusetts on April 23rd is sold out Brooklyn is sold out uh so there's basically two there's three shows left on the tour that have not sold out yet Philadelphia Arlington and the improv on the 18th of April at the improv on the 18th of April in Hollywood we've got Danielli Bollelli Abbey Martin's gonna be in Arlington Virginia uh in Philadelphia uh we've

got Johnny uh I'm sorry in Cambridge rather we've got Johnny Pemberton and Lou Barlow uh at the Sinclair but that's sold out sorry and Philadelphia it's Johnny Pemberton at the Trocadero here's my big announcement on the 26th in Brooklyn if you weren't able to get tickets to those shows we've added a third show uh this third show is not a live podcast this third show is an end of tour party we're gonna have amazing DJs and Alex and Allison Gray are going to be painting if you don't know who Alex and Allison Gray are check out the Alex and Allison Gray episode this is gonna be super super fun I'm gonna be hanging out Emil's gonna be hanging out it's just gonna be a way for all of us to unwind after this tour and hang out together

and watch Alex and Allison Gray paint uh while some incredible DJs play some insanely good music so um I will have that link up on the website uh very soon the proceeds 100 of the proceeds from this party will uh go to Cosm uh they're gonna go to Alex and Allison Gray's foundation to help those sweet incredible artists continue to be conduits for uh the the art that flows through them into this dimension and certainly brings me a shit ton of happiness uh so please come out to that show it's gonna be a blast come to any of these shows I really hope that I will see you there today's guest is Emmanuel Sferios you might know him as the founder of DanceSafe.org which is an organization that uh used to test MDMA at raves to make sure that it was actually

ecstasy and not some deadly poison some Jim Jones shit being sold by an unscrupulous greedy drug dealer he is currently uh working on a movie called MDMAthemovie.com there's an Indiegogo fundraising account for that if you're interested in pitching in a little bit to get this movie made I'll have links to that at DuncanTrussell.com he's an activist and he's working really hard to get the ridiculous drug policies related to MDMA reformed and was super cool to have a chat with him so I hope you will all connect your psychic microtubules and squeeze your pineal gland tight so that all that sweet love goo goes shooting down the transcendent conduits that connect all human beings to each other and lands right in the sweetest spot of Emmanuel Sferios's spine so that he

experiences a temporary blast of pure nirvanic love bliss everybody now please welcome to the DuncanTrussell family hour podcast Emmanuel Sferios Emmanuel Sferios welcome to the DuncanTrussell family hour you are the founder of DanceSafe.org can you tell me a little bit about what DanceSafe.org is? Sure DanceSafe is more than a website it's actually a harm reduction organization has chapters now in 12 cities throughout the U.S. harm reduction provides an alternative to the just say no model of drug education operating under the philosophy that there will always be people who choose to use drugs and if they do they should do so as safely as possible until they decide to quit and so DanceSafe provides

truthful non-judgmental drug education and services to young people in the electronic dance music community where ecstasy or Molly now as the younger generation calls it is widely used so you guys and I've you know I've seen I remember seeing documentaries about it and and stuff popping up about it and just being kind of amazed that somehow you could legally test people's ecstasy at raves I didn't understand how come you didn't get arrested for doing that well you know Duncan I fully planned to be arrested it just never happened I found a needle exchange attorney in the San Francisco Bay Area where I lived and I was like this is going to save lives and perhaps it's technically against the law because we're touching controlled substances

but I'm going to do it anyway and I was sort of you know expecting it to happen but it actually didn't we ended up working cooperatively with local health departments and even local police and a number of cities around the country that was back in the early days the politics have changed a little bit since then ironically it's kind of gotten worse and that was when the federal government came in and passed a piece of legislation called the rave act senator biden passed it now vice president back then and it basically expanded the crack house laws to commercial venues right which could prosecute promoters or club owners if they were quote unquote maintaining a drug involved premises this real vague language you know what does it actually mean but it sent a chill

through the industry and when that happened the promoters were more reluctant to welcome dance safe in to do this harm reduction work it just seems to me it seems like such an easy thing if I was a cop and I was going to a rave and I wanted to bust people it seems like all I'd have to do is stand near the dance safe table and wait for people to come up and reveal that they had drugs and then arrest them how come cops didn't do that well a lot of the events back then Duncan were sort of underground events they did hire private security but you know everyone you know sort of knew that there were drugs there and the strategy and these underground events at the time was let's try to keep people safe because we're not going to be able to stop people from getting

drugs in and that's been demonstrated today where a lot of these major festivals like electric zoo in New York implement draconian search policies with you know dogs that supposedly can sniff out drugs etc and they can't stop people from getting their drugs in or or even worse young people will see the dogs get scared and then they'll take all their drugs at once before they come in which can more easily cause problems overdose etc so so it's your philosophy and the philosophy of dance safe seems pretty logical which is that the making drugs illegal is not stopping anyone from doing drugs it never has that's correct and and so harm reduction is and is you know it can it coexist with a law enforcement model as it does in many countries somewhat successfully the

Netherlands being a good example where the government actually funds harm reduction services including drug checking pill testing services that I started doing with dance safe where we actually would test people's ecstasy to help them avoid ingesting the pills that contained PMA paramethoxam phetamine and many other drugs that are being sold as ecstasy or molly now that are far more dangerous the Dutch government actually does this themselves that's where I I modeled dance safe off of the Netherlands program so you know ecstasy is still illegal in the Netherlands but the the government takes a public health approach towards the illicit use what's the difference between you and everybody else who's taken ecstasy realized it's great and then it hasn't done nothing

for the community what got you what what made you to decide it to take steps to create this organization well first of all there are a lot of people who've done a lot of great things in for the rave community and ironically I actually had wasn't a part of the rave community when I started uh dance safe I had I had used ecstasy back when I was a teenager I was 16 but I didn't get it at rave I actually read an article in news week about the drug being used in therapy right and said hey I you know I wanted to try this to gain the insights and I was dealing with a lot of issues for my own child and child child to search it out and found it and did it and and it was very very helpful to me and it's a very powerful medicine and I probably I can't say every

time I did it was strictly therapeutic back when I was a teenager you know I had some house parties and I turned some friends on to it and probably there's a couple year period there where I took the drug a dozen times or so and then I forgot about it you know went to college and you know traveled around and now here I am living in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1998 and a friend of mine gives me some ecstasy again and now we have the internet now I wow I can really learn what did we know in the last 10 years right what have we learned and I was blown away by what had happened to the illicit market it was incredible because back in 86 when I did it there was no fear when you bought ecstasy that you were going to get some deadly drug it was pretty much all MDMA back

and now it was the most it had become even back in 1998 the most highly adulterated illicit drug market in the world and I discovered the Dutch program to help users and just said hey I'm going to do that here I had been an activist for many years and had done needle exchange volunteer work and also worked in downtown Oakland with inner city families who's you know mostly African American families who had you know male relatives in prison for 10 years or life for you know a handful of you know rocks of crack cocaine and so I had a already an understanding of how the drug war was not just failing but it was actually causing most of the problems well that's what I'm really curious about and I know that I hope that you don't think I'm getting too far away from ecstasy

but I'm really curious about that moment in a person's life where they go from being a consumer to being an activist like what what what's that first move that you made in the direction of starting dance safe I what got you well when were you like okay I'm gonna do something to help these are great questions I hadn't and no one's ever asked me this before you know and so so the the truth is I was an activist on other issues before that as I just explained one of them being a homeless rights I worked for you may have heard of this international organization food not bombs yes yeah so I was a food not bombs activist in Berkeley for four years and one of the things that we did we weren't just advocates for homeless rights we were also

a direct service for homeless people we cooked and served vegetarian meals five days a week in Berkeley and served in in People's Park not just for homeless it was anyone can eat right yeah students ate with us it was um you know picnic atmosphere and that's kind of you know and then on top of it we did advocacy too and through that I learned that the best way to affect social change is to combine your political advocacy work with direct action let's do this ourselves so when I discovered that there were these testing kits these chemical reagents that again the government of the Netherlands was using they would set booths up at these events where people use ecstasy and you'd scrape a tiny bit of the pill onto a white ceramic plate and you'd put

a drop of this chemical on and you could tell whether there was actually MDMA in the pill or not right I realized what a magical thing this was because I could go out to events and try to organize people to change drug laws you know young people and say look drug war is not working you know we need to you know change these laws but you know you hand out literature but you know really you're not gonna galvanize people that way but if you're actually helping them right just to be safe then they're gonna like you know be impressed right yeah and and other people are going to help you and they're you know and so it sort of grew this this what began as sort of this like you know let's um you know more of a politically oriented activist um sensibility

in me kind of grew into a a community that took care of itself right dance safe is a peer-based drug education nonprofit and young people across the country are educating themselves and taking care of themselves really a beautiful thing it is it's beautiful and uh it's it's um uh it's to me it is and I'm sorry I keep going back here but I'm thinking about myself selfish Duncan and I'm thinking about perhaps many of the people listening they're not like you they want to help we want to help we want to do things to help the world we think it would be beautiful to help the world but we don't help the world there seems to be this impenetrable magnetic barrier between us and going out there and becoming activists and organizing and doing these beautiful things and

I'm just curious about what the first moment you passed through that membrane you well in my life I passed through that membrane when I was a teenager and I went to an anti-death penalty protest just sort of off the cuff wasn't an activist at the time I just said to myself gosh you know I think I was 14 right and I said how could the government kill people when they tell us we can't kill people it was this hypocrisy thing right I didn't really have a social justice consciousness but I took a bunch three city buses to get there because I grew up in Florida and public transit was horrible and it took like three hours to get to this protest and there was just two people there and they were with the american friend service committee the political

wing of the quakers and they were also the first two gay adults a man and a woman they were both gay who treated me with respect like I was this 14 year old kid with a mohawk and they asked me what I thought about things and and they offered me a ride home and took me by their office and I introduced me to all their social justice literature and everything and at that point I sort of you know became an activist they channeled my anger from this bad childhood you know into a productive capacity and I'll never forget those two people because I think if I hadn't stumbled upon them I could have easily gone down a more uh destruct self-destructive road in my life but you know my anger over you know what was happening in my childhood and whatnot some sort of took on

you know was channeled into this political activism I don't know if that answers your question no it does it does it's go ahead I didn't mean to cut you off I'm sorry there also might be something in me right that some of us are just a little more brazen a little more courageous to take risks you know people told me I was crazy when I was going to test ecstasy tablets like you're going to get arrested I was like I know I want to get arrested I saw this happen to me the the courageous needle exchange pioneers some of them spent time in jail but now look even in states where it's needle exchange is not explicitly legal the cops leave them alone because everybody knows this is saving lives right so someone's got to do it someone has to have the courage well yes no I I mean we need

you uh and and there's more of us than there are you and I think though obviously it's a cliche thing to say but the world would be an absolute paradise if the majority of people became like you and that's something that's always uh well frustrated you know well it's true you know it is true if everyone just uh it's an interesting thing isn't it you have some event that happens in your life uh for a lot of people it's a a rough childhood for sure for some people it's other things but you have this event that creates a kind of energy uh a radioactive energy tablet inside of you that if you don't channel that energy in the direction of helping the world then you can only channel it in the direction of self-destruction and you it starts eating you from the inside

out and you become sunken in and cruel and awful and Machiavellian and so I want to when I get to talk to people like you I want to I want to figure out how to why have I not crossed that membrane uh in in such a I mean I have a podcast and I talk to people like you but that are you cruel and Machiavellian I have you know I have been uh and and I I'm not right now uh and I think a reason that I am not like cruel and Machiavellian is a lot of that has to do with my interaction with MDMA and psilocybin and psychedelics and I think that maybe those things didn't push me in the direction that they pushed you in or that they pushed Rick Doblin in or that they pushed some other activists in but they certainly have made me hesitate when I could be an asshole in times

that I wouldn't have hesitated yeah no no they've had a profound effect on me too these substances can be extremely therapeutic and that's good to see that's becoming more widely recognized now the last three four years especially there's this huge cultural um you know rebirth of of psychedelics that the younger generation I think is more um courageous in coming out and and advocating that hey yes these things have helped me um so I have a lot of hope you know we all we have marijuana legalization I think psychedelics ought to be next and a slow you know followed by all drugs eventually and and and I should really clarify this too because this is very important for people to know when when most of the people in the drug policy reform movement

when you say you want to legalize drugs you're not saying that because you want drugs to be accessible to you're more accessible to children uh you're you're saying let's legalize drugs precisely for the opposite reason because legalization actually means regulation prohibited drugs when you prohibition is the application of regulation it turns the manufacture and distribution of drugs over to criminals and so when we say when I say I think we need to legalize MDMA it's because providing adults with safe legal access to the drug will eliminate the criminal market and make drugs and MDMA less available to minors and I think that's a good thing I actually have a teenage stepdaughter and she tells me that she can buy molly from half a dozen kids in her

school molly whatever it it you know might contain but to get alcohol she at least has to find an adult to buy it for when illicit drugs are more available to teenagers than than legal drugs something's wrong that's that that's right and and I it's it's a it's one of those obvious truths that is so obvious the fact that it's being suppressed that obvious truth uh just gives me chills because uh I contemplate quite often why are these substances prohibited and uh I was wondering if you could help me answer that question what is the rationalization uh from the federal government for keeping MDMA illegal well I think this goes back to LSD in the 60s and sort of an accident of history um but interestingly it involves PTSD right when LSD became popular in

the 60s the Vietnam War was happening and the young adults who were being drafted to go to Vietnam witnessed the effects of war on their parents because World War II was a horrendous war probably there hasn't been an experience in this country where we had more people with post traumatic stress disorder than we did after World War II of course they called it shell shock back then they didn't call it PTSD but and the way that we as a society tried to deal with PTSD back then after World War II was to repress it right if you look at 50s culture we kind of everyone loves to make fun of it now you see you know father knows best and this show tunes now is the best time of our life and yeah it's all like you know but but the kids growing up

with fathers who had PTSD and came back they saw the suicides they saw the domestic violence they were beaten and it was such a contradiction to what they were seeing on TV their society was telling them look everything's great that's why you had folks like Timothy Leary and others whose message was anti-establishment right tune it turn on dropout so LSD became a rebellious thing that with that was not only about you know screw this war you're not going to put me through the same shit you put my parents through right it was you know screw the establishment right that scared the crap out of Nixon it really did and the elite at the time and they thought that LSD itself was like somehow built into the drug and anti-establishment kind of drug and that led to this crackdown

which we call the second wave of the drug war because really the drug war began you know back in 1914 with heroin and an alcohol prohibition at the same time and but this was sort of the second wave of it well interestingly you know I don't think today there's many people that see psychedelic drugs as anti-establishment anymore MDMA in the when it you know sort of became popular in the mid 80s certainly did not wasn't wedded to any kind of anti-war or political movement you know people in fact can take MDMA and LSD and become more integrated into their society so I think that fear is no longer driving the drug war today that's an interesting point you're making there and I don't know if I wonder I don't know if I agree with that 100% because when I think of

because I don't look at integration is necessarily a great thing and and when I think of not you know MDMA by itself is to me one of the most potent powerful therapeutic relationship enhancing drugs I've ever encountered I've never seen anything so miraculous and profound chemically as that substance when it comes to bonding with someone else amazing but it's not just amazing in that way it's also has an incredible synergy with some other substances for example have you ever taken MDMA and psilocybin before I've never hippie flipped no okay well the combination of those two substances is so incredible and the experience that I think people have on it is so profound that because you don't just get the sort of bonding beautiful love-filled

nirvanic bliss that can come from a great MDMA trip but you also get that kind of DMT level I mean depending on the dosage of mushrooms you know the DMT level visuals that sort of bring you out of your existence and in you enter into Terence McKenna land where you're no longer you realize that you are a super consciousness that seems to have become entangled with your body and that you know death suddenly is not this awful thing to be afraid of but more like a Hawaiian vacation that's waiting for everybody at the end of their lives and that leads you to a feeling of disattachment in the best way possible from the things that society seems to want you to be so attached to so is that and that doesn't seem to really integrate

you so much with a hyper materialistic society it seems that it that that the perhaps they're still afraid yeah you that's absolutely right and even the pure MDMA experience which doesn't have those kinds of fireworks you know that's more about love and empathy that certainly also kind of goes against the old competitive cutthroat corporate culture that we're all raised in you know and some of the folks I interviewed for my film which we haven't talked about yet have mentioned you know some of the experts have said that there could be a very deep way in which MDMA has changed culture making the younger generation a little less competitive a little more cooperative more into you know helping each other helping the environment etc yes and and and this is the thing

that I don't I don't want to believe one thing that you know what I don't want to believe I don't want to believe that there's a cartel of powerful people who are aware of the fact that psychedelics are opening windows to this truth that is letting us peer out of the conditioning and the the sort it's like being in solitary confinement and a symbolic solitary confinement created by the interweaving of all the non-truths that you've been told since you were a baby and for a second you're sitting in this solitary confinement this objective solitary confinement cell where that where you know you don't maybe you don't know anything and then all of a sudden this window pops open you look through the window you realize that you're in this incredibly beautiful

expansive super intelligent matrix of life and it is terrifying to me to imagine that there are people who are going around the world right now at this moment slamming those windows shut whenever they can oh shut that down shut that window don't look out that window no that that window is you've gone nuts shut it down shut it down shut it down that's fucking scary to me man I think they don't understand it Duncan I think that more it's just there's a lot of people that operate from fear and they're afraid of you know the terrorists the communists etc they tend to be religious conservatives uh because studies have shown if you look at some of the research with them arise into conservative and liberal attitudes that conservatives are more motivated by negatives

right when they things that could go wrong it really motivates them whereas liberals are more motivated by hope right that things potential positives are more motivated right so so I think it's just that psychedelics scare people and they particularly scare people because of their therapeutic potential because a lot of people are repressing a lot inside them especially things like you know pleasure they think to themselves look I I've sacrificed I'm not indulging you know and and they see drugs in general as these hedonistic things you know especially if you look at pictures of hippies in the 60s as all free love and sex and yeah this idea that it's about hedonism and I think that scares people who are or haven't really come to terms with their own desires

you know the stereotypical republican who's anti gay but really he's gay himself so he's right and so psychedelics will bring it up you know especially MDMA it has this ability to kind of force you to confront things that you were pressing and and that scares people yes it does I mean it scares the shit out of people and it it um it it seems that the way that these people are reacting to fear is violence and you know I just I was actually uh just at the comedy store and I was talking to somebody who had who had met at this Alex Gray rave and she was telling me about one of her friends just went to jail for 12 years for uh LSD and ecstasy at LSD and ecstasy I think he had a vial of acid or something and ecstasy in his pocket and now he is in jail for 12 years 12 years

and that kind of thing uh man that kind of cognitive dissonance I could walk around my house just squealing 12 years 12 years 12 years because to me if what you're saying is that this these drug policies are in place because of the opinions of frightened repressed conservatives who have a religious agenda then that makes me think that the servants of satan are in control that sounds like what the devil would do it doesn't it sounds like if there was satanist and I'm just using this symbolically I don't think there's some dark luciferian entity that exists in the universe necessarily I'm not positive about that but I don't want to believe that but if there were what would his servants do his servants would actively violently try to divert people from the

truth at all costs yeah there's some sinister stuff out there Duncan for sure you know I there they're you know the that banning lsd has only created 25 i n bomb which maybe never heard of but this is the first drug that is active on a microgram level that can kill you if it's just slightly too much and you know there was that a big bust in the missile silo where the the dea but busted a Leonard Picard one of the big because I think that his name something Picard I think so yeah I yeah I think so and and really it really did dramatically reduce the amount of lsd in this country it was hard to find and I'm sure a lot of the dea that participated in that are patting themselves on the back saying look what a good job we've done we protected the children but

all it really did was cause the proliferation of other new synthetic imposter drugs like 25 i n bomb that are much more dangerous and they're killing about one person a month so we ban the safer psychedelics that have a track record and all we're doing because you can't stop the desire to alter what your consciousness there is always going to be a huge percent of the population that want to do that and people to fulfill the demand and now it's being filled with drugs that are much more dangerous it's crazy but it's going back to the evil here there are people out there who think well that's a good thing if people die when they take what they think is lsd yeah you're right it sends the message to others that it's dangerous oh god you're right you're right because they're

not trying they're not public health oriented they're not trying to save lives as much as they're trying to save souls and if you already are gonna sin and take an illicit drug then you're gone in their minds then you know you're not worth living anyway but your death it will set an example for other young people who haven't yet decided to cross that line into sin yet this is how they think holy shit it's 2015 it's 2015 and there are cultists in the world who have organized a system of repressing chemicals that contain within them keys that unlock doors in the human mind to great vast archives of information that can only benefit our species and they are they're they they they want people to die for going into those libraries it's 2015 this is no

different to me than burning books this is no different to me than any other time tyrannical forces have tried to place their heel on the flow of information and for whatever reason we are still stuck in a period of human history where we only think of information as the data encoded in books and the data encoded in recorded conversations or movies we don't understand that there's data encoded in chemicals compounds we don't understand that yet but there is isn't there there is sure sure you know though i don't want to scare people away we should talk about some of the positive things we'll get into the positive i'm sorry you gotta let me howl at the moon for a second i swear to god i'll turn it away and you guys always do this you know the

graze did it too like i start like i will i at a moment's notice i will definitely become chicken little and start freaking out over the stuff and i'm just giving voice to the frustration inside of me but yeah i know that i know that i have to i know that there are good things happening and it's when i say that there's people like that out there i'm not saying those are the people controlling the drug war i don't believe they are you know i think most of them those you know the nixon cabinet folks are gone well i guess rumsfeld is still around right yeah but but uh these days i think it's mostly that people just they don't understand drugs because so few people use them relatively speaking right it's probably five percent ten percent max of the population has

used any psychedelic drug you know within well at period right so so people don't understand them and then they don't believe uh those of us when we say these drugs are therapeutic these drugs benefits yes they might think oh those are those are just those hedonistic they just love feeling pleasure and justifies their drug use you know this is one of the reasons why mdma i think was uh made schedule one in 1985 by the dea despite a coalition of therapists suing the dea when they placed it on emergency schedule one and they went to court in front of a administrative law judge and they had hundreds of hours of testimony from doctors and therapists who had been using it for almost 10 years with great results and the dea law judge francis young

actually ruled in favor of the therapist and said mdma should be schedule three wow clearly it has a medical value but the dea just chose to ignore their own judge's ruling because it was only an advisory hearing and they kept it on schedule one and i think the reason is because they were used to hearing people in the 60s saying that you know hippies and what is a lsd is therapeutic etc and and they just didn't believe it because they were still in this mindset that we discussed earlier with you know this anti-establishment hippies that want to drop out and they hate america and all this kind of stuff right well you know it it is a uh like i understand that the getting too shrill about it doesn't really help anything and sometimes can hurt things and and more than

it helps i guess so i know it there needs to be a kind of moderate uh viewpoint when it comes to the gears that have to turn to make these things uh legal but man i really you know when i really contemplate it's one of those things when i contemplate it and and look at all the good that it's done for me and look at all the good that it's done for so many other people both you know entrepreneurs and famous people and just regular people and and soldiers and uh when i look at all that and then and hear that someone's gone to jail for for 12 years it's a tough thing to swallow which is why we need folks like you getting the the good information out there and which is why it's cool that you have actually made a movie you've made the movie right and you've

shot it or you're still in the process of making the movie i know i'm still in the process i've had four film shoots and out of those i put together a nine minute short film on MDMA therapy where i interviewed some veterans who participated in FDA approved studies using the drug to treat post-traumatic stress disorder as well as a rape survivor and some others but this is a film short film i produced just sort of to show people uh that i can make a quality film um it's only on MDMA therapy the full documentary is going to also cover harm reduction as an appropriate public health alternative to failed efforts of prohibition i plan to fly to europe uh we're not just the netherlands but many countries in europe now are offering services to uh ecstasy users that far

surpass what we're able to do legally here in the united states and i want to juxtapose the successes that they've had in reducing medical emergencies and fatalities with the failures of us drug policy as well as the uk and canada and australia the english speaking world um where through their zero tolerance drug war approach um we've seen well the latest statistics we have we're back from 2012 where we had over 12 000 emergency room visits related to ecstasy or molly the vast majority of those were from fake or adulterated pills and even the ones that came from pure MDMA or the and they're you know here and we have to say uh it's important to know there have been fatalities after individual is taken pure MDMA uh MDMA is not completely safe

right and but i but i think that actually puts it in uh a category that makes it very appropriate to focus on for the next phase of the drug policy reform movement because it shares a lot of qualities with marijuana which is completely safe and we have seen some progress a lot of progress now on legalization uh shares those qualities along with some of the qualities of the harder drugs that um are more problematic to deal with and um because i'm an activist for drug policy reform across the board um i uh i want to you know give an argument and help this movement uh move forward so that we have rational drug policy and keep everyone out of jail addicts don't deserve to be in jail anymore than ecstasy users even if their drug of choice isn't as

therapeutic as ecstasy or the psychedelic exactly man that's exactly right well no one deserves to be in jail because they wanted to experience pleasure and they took their own biochemistry into their own hands that is not a crime that is not illegal there is nothing it's illegal but it's not a crime it's not a sin it's just an exploratory person who may be a self-destructive deciding that they want to you know man i i just watched this documentary last night it's pretty good documentary it's on it's on uh netflix and uh it's about these guys who want to climb k2 you know k2 that deadly mountain that's uh it's in i guess it's in what napal hold on i'll look it up i don't know where look i'm sure i'll get fat no matter what i say i'll

fuck it up so i'm sorry all the mountain experts out there prepare for me to mess something up about k2 but well i won't even go into details about it aside to say that it is a mountain that is somehow deadlier than everist it's like this is the this is the one of the most insurmountable horrible cruel monstrous beasts and you know it draws mountain climbers to it man anyone that wants to climb that needs to go to rehab immediately yeah put them in jail put them in jail it kills you it's kills like 20 of the people who try to climb it that's a really dangerous fucking mountain let's get a fucking giant iron wall around that mountain and shoot anybody trying to go in and then if someone does manage to get into that mountain let's fucking take their money away from

them let's take their home away from them let's take their family away from that let's call climbing equipment paraphernalia and ban things like harnesses and carabiners yes exactly man it's like they're so what they're trying to do is they're trying to activate a biochemical change in their brain which is the what must just be the most stupendous release of dopamine and serotonin anyone can experience once you finally clamber to the top of that awful peak it just must be like the touching god it must be like your brain turns into a clitoris it must be so fucking incredible it's so amazing but they're doing it by climbing instead of by injecting snorting eating or getting it into their bloodstream so it's okay but the moment that you decide i'm going to actually put

some some information into my bloodstream and experience a heightened state of consciousness why because i want to because i exist in a dimension where i'm going to die i have about 60 70 if life extension therapy happens 150 years to live in this temporary trance like state what do we call human incarnation and i'm gonna play around with uh the colors that i can experience in the spectrum of experience and the fact that there are sons of bitches out there who think that we aren't allowed to do that is something that uh really obviously i'm sorry i keep going on these rants but it really gets me puffed up like one of those puffer fish in the ocean when i think about it too much just because it seems so absolutely absurd yeah more well let's talk

strategy for a minute okay how are we going to affect rational drug policy in this shrill ranting my friend shrill ranting that changes everything oh you have to do this right high-pitched shrill ranting with with i guess that's i don't know man help us to provide everyone who thinks like us with the language to articulate a winning argument and here is that winning argument i i i i have to i can't stress this enough uh marijuana has made its gains largely based on a civil rights argument leave us alone this is a good drug it helps me it's medicinal etc yet not everyone likes it but it nobody's ever died from it you know look at how dangerous alcohol is it makes no sense to its marijuana that's great but marijuana has something very

very unique that most other drugs don't have a quality of it and that is it is the safest recreational drug in existence right nobody's died from i don't think anyone's died from mushrooms or peyote or lsd either but those drugs are so unknown so few people have used them it's hard to win with that argument right and then with mdma and any other drug you want to talk about there have been deaths and so the argument the winning argument needs to be legalization and regulation to strip the control and distribution of drugs from criminals right allowing adults legal safe access and thus reducing access to children can't stress that enough that's what's going to win reform because i have a you know a stepdaughter and i care i

worry like every parent does about kids getting in trouble with drugs right just like we don't let our kids eat sugar because their brains haven't evolved enough to be able to delay gratification and all they would do is eat candy and ice cream all day parent knows that so you don't want your kids taking pleasure drugs to that can uh if you use them to much kill you or cause addiction etc we we want to wait until young people are old enough now maybe we disagree on that age and teenage years it's different for every child but there's got to be some arbitrary age that we just say look as a society this is what we're saying i think it should be 18 i think it'd be 18 with alcohol you know right it's 21 whatever the whatever it is we we have to put out an argument

that's reasonable to protect children from substances including sugar that's going to be potentially uh dangerous right it's why we got to get sugar out of schools that's why that movie that documentary fed up is such an important documentary you know right yeah it's it's the idea is like come on are you seriously thinking that your kids aren't taking drugs because they're illegal that's ridiculous you know what my drug dealer was like when i was in high school man holy shit he had like porn magazines scattered all over the floor of his trailer unidentifiable animal bones scattered everywhere it looked like straight out of the texas chains on massacre that house i'm not even joking like like bone wind chimes and like you know he was freely just

selling drugs to high school kids he didn't care he was just like whatever he's making fucking money and and we would go there and and buy the drugs and we would go off and do them feeling like the most vile criminals on earth so every single trip slightly tainted by the uh dishonesty now that's another yeah this is another aspect of it there's the the way the way that these prohibition is hurting families is uh not only are kids having to sneak around to get drugs but they're having to be dishonest with their parents when they do drugs so right they take these drugs they have these spectacular experiences they gain all this information they get all this wisdom they probably have shit tons of questions to ask their parents because suddenly they just

got this huge download of truth into their brains and they can't mention it because if they mention it their parents are going to take them to a drug rehab they're going to start giving them piss tests they're going to kick them out of the house potentially they're going to call the cops and it's going to be awful so you know that's the other side of it it's not just these kids are because of the prohibition being exposed to toxic uh chemicals that aren't what they say they are they're also being taught to lie to the people they love the most uh in in their lying in their pursuit of truth it's fucked up man it's fucked up it's even worse than that Duncan and it's a point that i try to make all the time because uh i didn't really know this until i started working

with dance safe and i've spoken to and counseled you know thousands thousands of young people over the years and i firmly believe that prohibition and the culture created by the drug war not only causes young people a lot of their parents but actually manifests it actually creates the very drug misuse and abuse that the the prohibitionists claim they're trying to prevent because when you ban a drug and you send this message that drugs are bad drugs are evil if you do them there must be something wrong with you etc it creates a relationship with the drug where the young person isn't even open to the idea of using it responsibly they don't see it as something to gain insight from to learn from to be moderate in to respect that's why we see this

language among teenagers let's get fucked up dude and and bragging about how many pills you've taken pushing your limits and things like that well you know there's always going to be some crazy people like that but this cult this is part of a culture of prohibition and if we you know recognize these drugs as medicines we would reduce that greatly just like teen drug use decreased after prop 215 in california and and the best theory as to why is because it's all these young people thought well it's just a medicine that my parents do now it's not this cool thing you know exactly because that's that that's exactly right man you your teenagers they want to go skittering off into the dark and the moment this if this substance if any of these if mdma

suddenly became associated with education that it's a form of psychological education or a therapeutic experience what's that a therapeutic drug a therapeutic drug teenagers like fuck that man i'm not going to do that goddamn sappy shit i think oh it's going to make me not hate my parents no thanks i don't want to do that because i really i mean here let me just say some true blasphemy here so this is blasphemy right now in the era that we're living in but can you imagine what would happen if some parents and some kids and their kids who are estranged from them sat down for an evening with some therapists and took mdma together can you imagine what that would do for a family no you can't i mean no one knows what it would do and you can imagine but we don't

know because that if that came out oh shit a family took ecstasy or their kids they're having problems with they would all get hauled away to the kid they lose the kid i wish i could remember her name but there is a life coach this woman gosh i talked to her on the phone but you should google her because she did that and she came out every year for like five ten years in a row her entire family her kids all got together and did mdma once a year on like christmas eve or something like that and she's got a website and she's got a a ted talk or at least a video on youtube about it i can't remember her name but yeah no she did it and there are a lot of other people that have too i took mdma with my father before he died wow wow what was that like it was it was great you know i don't want

can't reveal too much personal stuff about it but i can tell you this um after i was an adult right but i was 30 years old at the time and he lived a long time after that and we only did it once but after that every time we talked to each other on the phone uh we would say i love you to each other and that never happened before that may session god that was so beautiful he didn't change but uh our relationship changed so that was good well you know man this is good work that you're doing and uh i think a lot of people are going to want want to get involved in somewhere another i hope i i hope that people if you wanted to do something that can help right now you can go to my crowdfunding campaign and donate some money there's 10 days left i've raised $46,000

so far i chose $100,000 as my goal i'm still a little hopeful because i've been talking with some funders who might kick down some big amounts but you can help right now the easiest way to get there is just go to my website mdma the movie dot com and you'll see the link right there to go to the crowdfund the indagogo site um to uh and there's a video of me explaining what the movie's about you can watch my first short film on mdma therapy and there is about 12 to 15 other short videos that i've put together out of the footage from my first four film shoots you can watch um and learn a lot about um this unique drug thank you so much for coming on the show it's great chatting with you and uh let's do it again soon thanks duncan i appreciate it it was fun thanks for listening

guys that was a manual spherios you can donate to getting mdma the movie made links are going to be at duncan trustle dot com thank you guys for bookmarking the amazon portal if you like the podcast give us a nice rating on itunes and thank you guys so much for continuing to listen to this show harai krishna see you later on in the week meet the bedroom suite by thuma the foundation for the perfect staycation time spent at home is the ultimate luxury and thuma makes it easy to stay in with lifestyle enhancing pieces like the bed the dresser and the nightstand to get 25 towards the bed go to thuma.co that's thuma.co to receive 25 off your purchase of the bed shop the bed at thuma.co