Episode 104

hello and welcome to another great episode of Finding Peaks I am your host today Brandon Burns chief executive officer for Peaks recovery centers here in Colorado Springs and for those of you familiar to the show you know we’ve been tracking the natural medicine Health act which was passed this last election uh here in the state of Colorado also known as proposition 122 that moves the state of Colorado away from prohibited drug laws concerning the use of plant-based psychedelic medicines by first decriminalizing personal possession increasing access to supervised Professional Services and prohibiting local governments from Banning licensed facilities like Peaks recovery centers and services as permitted by the measure if you’re not familiar to the topic you can check out past episodes like episode 74 where we first sat down with the Coalition director for proposition 122 Kevin Matthews and discuss that length the Law’s intent and direction we further sat with other industry thought leaders such as Dr Scott beanenfeld and Dr Dana lehrmann on episode 70 78 to talk through their perspective and the value proposition within the measure at least the in the way that they see it we’ve even looked under the hood of treatment programs like Beyond dot Us in Mexico founded by energetic and passionate Tom fiegel on episode 88 where we discussed how ibogaine treatment in particular Works within inpatient settings plant-based medicine serve as an Innovative tool for the behavioral healthcare industry that as an industry and as we’ve talked about on these episodes has lacked some type of innovation for quite some time while running thin on its capacity to for example shift the direction of the overdose epidemic we Face here locally in Colorado but certainly across the country not to mention the ongoing toll of distress perpetuated by Society social media and day-to-day hardships that continue to weigh heavily on Colorado’s family systems our military members and Veterans and culturally across America at Peaks recovery centers we take great responsibility in the future delivery of these medicines and see this opportunity as a profound Innovative intervention that can among many other things support individuals better navigate their personal hardships such as trauma in a more effective manner than the historical delivery of monotherapeutic approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy or medications such as ssris snris and the treatment of depression for example and today we continue this discussion with attorney Ishmael Ali the director of policy and advocacy at Maps or the multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic studies as Maps director of policy and advocacy Ishmael Advocates to eliminate barriers to psychedelic therapy and research develops and implements legal and policy strategy and supports Maps governance non-profit and ethics work Ishmael earned his JD at the University of California Berkeley School of Law in 2016 after receiving his bachelor’s in Philosophy from California State University Fresno Ishmael has also previously worked for the ACLU of Northern California’s criminal justice and drug policy project and Berkeley’s law international human rights law clinic Ishmael is licensed to practice law in the state of California and is a founding board member of the Psychedelic Bar Association he also currently serves on the board of the sage Institute contributes to the chakruna institute’s council for the protection of sacred plants and participates on the advisory Council for the Ayahuasca defense fund he has also previously served as chair of the students of sensible drug policy board of directors Ishmael is further passionate about studying sustainable groundwork for a just Equitable and generative post-prohibition world so I’m very excited to divide him onto the episode today so let’s Dive Right In and learn more about this Innovative movement ahead of us uh you know at the end of the day I thought oh that’s in Colorado
and I couldn’t be more dead wrong about that now and I’m aware but if you could explain for the viewers what the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies or as we’ve been utilizing the acronym Maps is and uh what are some of the major successes you’ve been witnessed to during your time at Maps uh you know for example that can be a positive shift in political momentum within communities you know Etc yeah absolutely so Maps is a 501c3 nonprofit that was founded in 1986 which puts us I think at our 37th anniversary this year um and it was founded uh shortly after the criminalization of MDMA in part to um bring both education awareness research and create safe legal access through medical cultural and other context to MDMA and other psychedelics so it started really as an educational research organization um has operated that way for some time and I would say the kind of policy advocacy angle has been sort of baked in from the beginning because of the idea of it coming out in response to and in reaction to um a a movement that was within the kind of traditional War on Drugs as we understand it the kind of move toward criminalization of MDMA um the in 2013-2014 Maps founded a public benefit Corporation a wholly owned subsidiary called the maps public benefit Corporation and that entity for the last decade now or so has been doing a lot of the clinical research and Other Drug development work needed to take MDMA through the FDA approval process and so for the last you know the studies actually started quite a bit before that but for the last you know 20 or so years one of maps’s Flagship projects have been who work with mpbc to take MDMA through the FDA process with the hopes of having it approved as a treatment for PTSD um one and that’s what a lot of the media that people have seen about Maps is for um and just very briefly I can say that we recently completed our second phase three study awesome which is to say that the research phase of it um has closed and now we’re in the process of preparing the application to submit to FDA in the hopes of you know potential future approval so that’s some exciting step that I’m happy to go go more down that rabbit hole and what I’ll say in the meantime is that while all that’s been happening a lot of the work that I get to do because I work on the on the map side the 501c3 side as director of policy a lot of what I get to do is uh keep abreast of track and be navigating and Advising on some of the other things that are happening in parallel to that medicalization process so there’s one process that describe seeing us with other psychedokes too including psilocybin and some others where there’s a process of attempting to take it through the FDA process and the FDA process is really meant for you know it’s best served for single easily replicable molecules that are you know in the kind of traditional pharmaceutical framework and that’s something that I think the second assisted therapy modality somewhat challenges or at least expands where you have this kind of interaction between both a drug the substance and then a modality a human driven modality so that’s the medicalization side what I’ve been very lucky to do over the last bunch of years is work a little bit more outside of that realm so looking also at state level and federal efforts and also International efforts toward decriminalization regulated adult use religious use all the stuff that falls kind of outside of the medicalization sphere so those things obviously interact a lot from a policy perspective and we can go down that rabbit hole for sure especially as we talk about 122 which is a great example of like where you see some of those clashes um but the core idea there is that Maps has both a focus on this kind of medicalization process as well as other formats of engaging with um legalization and progress in that sense the other maybe big area in addition to education and policy that I’d like to note that Maps is really focused on is also harm reduction some people are familiar with the zendo project which is an on-site crisis response program that has worked with festivals the last decade or so um which I think just over a decade now and was recently spent out into its own nonprofit so it’s now becoming an independent entity for the first time and we work very closely with them as well as with others to both create trainings and basically kind of acknowledge that um even with whatever potential psychedelics may have for mental health or individual growth for Spiritual practice so on um that there are risks and that whole idea about having like a robust harm reduction program is to acknowledge that those risks exist and to do our best to incorporate safety crisis response mechanisms into that and I think we don’t talk about this so so much in the Psychedelic world but you know bringing it back around to Peaks like I do feel like that there’s an under understood risk profile of psychedelics you have the the kind of Hysteria machine that are like they’re gonna take Scoops out of your brain and you’re never gonna be the same again and then you’ve got the other side where people are way too excited about this the Silver Bullet effect as I like to say like right like it’s everything they’re going to pick Society they’re gonna fix you they’re going to fix your mom like everyone’s better so I feel like that the truth obviously is somewhere in the middle there are a lot of amazing potential benefits for psychedules and there’s real risks and I think that part of the idea for maps is like how do we hold this whole story we’re not part of the hype machine we’re not part of the Hate Machine we want to be able to say education research um harm reduction policy reform all together all needed yeah yeah absolutely Amen to all of that you know and it’s so true you know as you get into the sort of Pandora’s box here of of the movement and the history of all of this it is a it is a massive discussion and one of the things that you know I I think that we could just you know go into here as well too this is one of the things that I was talking about in front of the Senate finance committee um uh and while I was advocating for natural medicine Health act and you know basically just encouraging don’t make amendments don’t ruin the beauty of its original language that type of thing was it had me thinking about how the addiction treatment industry going back to the 70s when insurance companies um are you know Managed Care Systems started paying for these services and there was this original debate about well whether or not the Western sort of medicalized approach to this you have to have the Master’s Degree the PHD the lpcs all the licensures all those things right and that that person was better suited to treat the individual suffering versus what is no longer language thank goodness they call them paraprofessionals or individuals who had experiences with use and recovery and so the debate became is the paraprofessional better suited or the actual professional in the western medicine sense of thing better suited to treat the individual and I think that debate still kind of rages on today oh yeah and uh and and so one of the things in the uh Senate finance committee that was kind of of an issue is this um fear about the non-western medicalized person delivering these psychedelic medicines to the individual but for me it makes a profound amount of sense that the history and the path and the experiences matter greatly here I think we have an incredible amount to learn from our indigenous communities especially around the concept of reverence and how we deliver these medicines at the end of the day and um I didn’t intend to go down this path but uh you were talking about it all roads all roads are you know available to us here and uh so just curious uh before we maybe dive into some of the the questions that we originally you know talked about kind of what your view is and how we might open because one of my strategies has been let’s let’s open the hearts and minds of individuals out there around this potential without making it seem like you stated a silver bullet it is complex and how we deliver this and how we manage the systems and so forth but I do think it’s really important to highlight that this these medicines have been used for a really long time and with great reverence and with great um professionalism even without that sort of Western lens and just curious for the viewers out there how you might bring them closer to that as a really important part of this project yeah this is um like the other example you gave this is totally something that the debate is going to rage on probably long after we’re both gone because it’s a big question that we’re constantly navigating which is like you know play another way as if I understood you correctly is like how do we reconcile the fact that there’s this highly professionalized approach to health care and how Healthcare delivery often occurs in the United States at least and then with the other side of it which is a and you didn’t say this explicitly but that well there’s there’s the kind of traditional indigenous practice angle which you just mentioned and I would say also um in between those two is kind of a peer support angle where there’s something that’s been happening for years around peers just supporting each other outside of professionalized context and as far as how we hold all those realities that I’m a little a little bit of a broken record about this so sorry if you’ve heard it already but one of the things that I’ve been thinking a lot about in this last year or so a couple years is the possibility of harmonizing different policy approaches and acknowledging that different people have different needs which means different contexts um different kind of safety requirements of course there’s some consistent things that we’d like to see across all of those examples like it would be nice to see something like quality control for products like one day it would be you know maybe even you’ve talked about this like you know the erratic nature of um underground drugs and what’s being sold is is a problem it’s a risk factor it’s a significant risk factor for people so it would be nice to see something like that one one question that goes a little bit more to the edge of what you were bringing up is well what about training what does it mean for someone to be trained to offer these Services that’s an edgy one because on one hand you’ve got the hyper professionalized approach that you were describing we’re like oh you have a license you have a certain level of training your board says you can do this and if you get you know if you get sued for malpractice then you have a defense because you have insurance that will cover you that’s like you know like maybe Peak protection you could say and then you’ve got like a whole bunch of gray areas below that point or kind of on the Spectrum there where people have different levels of protection and different levels of training different levels of expertise and I guess like I mean this is its own very Niche or kind of nuanced conversation but I guess what I would say is I would like to see different points of entry for different types of access so I think that for example if someone has a number of comorbidities a number of diagnoses and they’ve tried a lot of different kinds of medications that haven’t worked so as an example then maybe that person should have more professionalized Specialized Care if they’re trying to do something like detox or wean off of some sort of drug that the dependent on or so on like maybe more comorbidities more complexities higher professionalization maybe maybe on the other side of the spectrum I think that you know for the average 20 something year old who has an average you know average to normal trauma history like they should probably be able to just rent a cabin and go eat mushrooms with their friends like that should probably be fine you know so I feel like that should also be on the table and as far as like the other kinds of use you know one of the things about bringing in traditional indigenous practice into the equation is that I think that there’s been a conflation with um traditional practice and traditional healing what I mean by that is that not all traditional or indigenous use is healing use we’ve kind of pigeonholed psychedelics a little bit in the western conversation in the west because of how excited we are about therapy and about therapeutic applications and there’s a lot of potential there but what that means is that the healing the healing Lobby has sort of monopolized where it’s like we’re talking about something else we got to be talking about healing that’s that’s where we’re at and that’s great because honestly I think it’s maybe from a social perspective healthier for us you know for the average teenager 20 something or whoever who’s stumbling upon informational psychopath it’s probably good at the first thing that they get nowadays A lot of the first information they get is like this is a thing that can be used for treatment like this is the thing that should be cared about if you should be careful with like that’s probably a good thing the flip side to that is when it’s too relied on and suddenly people are like this is like we were just saying this is the Silver Bullet that has to fix me then you have a consumer protection problem because suddenly people are getting information and they think that this is the thing that’s going to fix them but what if it doesn’t right and that I think has its own kind of negative effects so to me there’s like kind of a balance of what are we talking about the use for what claims are people allowed to make what do they like to promote or advertise I have a I know there’s a little bit of a Meandering answer but I’m very very skeptical about advertising for really any drugs any substances whatsoever but psyched oxen especially I’m a little worried about the um like combination of the fact that all these Doom scroll apps that I use have like a whole psychological profile on me and they might know that I’m depressed and they might know that I have what XYZ disposable income and they know that I live in this particular the whatever it is like you know the combination of that kind of uh data slanging that we’ve got in the current kind of Digital World Plus um psychedelic advertising that part kind of freaks me out so I do feel like when we’re going back to your original question how do we reconcile all these different Frameworks like I actually think that we need to look at these macro things which is like consumer protection safety training and then say okay these circumstances are all going to be different based on the what what what claims people can make what things what expectations we’re setting and then just iterate like see what happens when we have a medical system and an adult use system in the same state you know maybe we’ll get into that in a second but what happens when we have multiple approaches operating simultaneously I think that there’s a there’s been kind of a lack of policy imagination which is like we have to choose one you have to either just decriminalize or you have to just medicalize or you have to do this and I don’t really buy that I believe that it’s possible that all these things can coexist the reason I don’t have a nice packaged answer for you for that question is because like I don’t know how yet but I’m here to like figure it out you know with you and all of our many colleagues that are also trying to solve this problem absolutely the thing that I would highlight after everything you stated there just for the viewers out there you know whether it was the Coalition director we had on whether it’s the doctors psychiatrists people involved in this movement that every time we ask these questions or we dive into them there’s clearly a lot of thought being put into this there is a lot of potential there are also a lot of concerns there are also a lot of things to address you know within this uh kind of prohibition era if I can use such language uh yet in society and uh there is I think General concern across the board for doing this correctly and figuring out a path forward that reduces as much risk and harm as possible but also highlighting that risk and harm is going to be a part of this process as is the case with I think anything else we’ve tried from a treatment standpoint from a medicine standpoint and so forth and differently into your point about advertising instead of stating you can’t sleep here’s a psychedelic you can’t you know as these monotherapeutic interventions We’re actually inviting in a conversation for this might work here it might work better up over here and it might not work at all over here and the only way to really get involved with that is to be curious about it and to learn from our mistakes and heal from those mistakes forward-looking and I think one of the things that’s challenging about this movement and its current state is there’s so much fear baked in so we want all of this guaranteed certainty out in front of us as a protection and I think that’s the thing that got us caught in Prohibition in the first place right we were too fearful first we put in all these laws and then after an incredible failure of drug policy over the past you know especially post kind of nixonian era have discovered that is completely ineffective and it’s had an incredible amount of consequences not just you know socioeconomically for the individuals um uh for this process but I think all across America and certainly the world it’s created kind of a nightmare for how to confront um the best possible reality and how to move forward um I don’t know if I want to add anything to that but that was just kind of top of mind that yeah no I I love that and what I guess what I’ll say is two things one and this is not a correction but just an additional layer like I like to say that the War on Drugs failed on some levels and succeeded on some levels right because I do think that insofar as it was meant to be also a form of kind of social political control that has been wildly successful but has led to a serious backlash and I think what’s happening now is that the increasingly bipartisan push across the country to look at drug policy reform is showing that you can only operate kind of mask off I guess you could say for so long like once it became clear once we got the numbers and once it became really clear to the public I think this was probably clear to the makers of the policy in the beginning but I think when it became clear to the public that the War on Drugs was um a failure according to its stated metrics and a success according to these like Shadow metrics of racism and oppression people were like wait a minute we got to figure out how to do this a little bit we got to figure out how to do this differently and you know no one no one is saying addiction isn’t real or drug harms aren’t real like we’re all like I think that there’s kind of a reconciling happening between okay yeah drugs have risks but the way to respond to those risks is not incarceration and so on it’s trying to find some alternative option and going back to the first thing you were saying also I would just add that you know I think that there is a very valuable framing when talking about psychedelics especially for people who are looking at them for personal growth for healing for so on um to think of it as um to think of them as as kind of tools to clear the trail heads like so you’re like aware that there’s ways to the top of a mountain the psychotics are not gonna like slingshot you up there they’re not gonna put you on a tushy helicopter and take you to the top but they will you know help clear the brush and be like okay here’s a Trailhead you can choose whether or not you go down and I’m sure that you’ve talked about this and think about this but like that’s where kind of the conversation for me goes beyond the Psychedelic itself it’s not even about the substance or the experience like those are key threshold points key um milestones in a person’s Journey for those people that are interested in exploring that but we all know and um I think many of us in the field are tracking this that you know this I bet a lot of people you work with know this and about a list a lot of listeners as well but like at the end of the day like they’re a lot of the work that you have to do to do the healing you got to do sober in your day-to-day routine in your day-to-day life like that is and that’s what I feel like is so interesting about this whole conversation that it’s actually psychedelics is so much more about giving people the inspiration and direction to do things themselves which is part of why I think when they are effective for let’s say you know dealing with substance use disorders or other kinds of treatments when they when they do have those benefits often it’s not because the thing like the drug itself kind of by itself like changes a significant thing what it does it opens people up so they can do this inner work suddenly they’ve like kind of you know I mean this in a good way trick themselves into figuring out there’s hope you know and I’m like yo we’ll take it where we can get it people it’s it’s we’re really lacking that nowadays so I’m happy to to have that opportunity you know to have that option for some people yeah absolutely and what resonates with me is certainly the kind of the way that we approach treatment you know within our own program and curriculum is the spiderweb concept monotherapeutic values have this high end density in the beginning of the research the founders of them cognitive behavioral therapy ssris whatever it is you know come from showcase like this is it this is the thing that’s going to fix this and I think we’ve been we’ve become so attuned at least in my experience within certainly American culture to there’s a fix and a solution to your problem it’s right here and you know you’re getting blasted with advertisements and that sort of thing and we’ve lost our genuine and general capacity uh as with this inner body healing framework to succeed on that journey within ourselves and to your point I think that’s the beauty for us here at least from a treatment center kind of standpoint about what these medicines can bring about they’re not going to fix anything in this sense of you know changing something in your maybe it does you know maybe for some people it’ll be so eye-opening and moving that it resolves other issues in that kind of moment but I think for most people it’s it’s to your point the trailhead it’s it’s showcasing the journey in front of you but more beautifully than the Western medicine sense of things I think historically you come into a treatment center we kind of you know create awareness and then we kind of tell what to do in that regard versus allowing the person to explore their own opportunity from our own lens uh and so I think there’s a lot of power uh coming down the shoots here and and I know we’re going to dive into this here shortly uh but uh just to uh keep it going uh before we we get into this uh more uh poignant part of the conversation um so much you stated a lot um at least in the way that I’m not familiar to hearing when it comes to the war on drugs and this type of thing and I think that it’s such a broad stroke of language that for a lot of people out there on the political Spectrum it can mean one thing or the other or it just means you know one side of history and the other side of History but in kind of uh you’ve talked about uh this in the past but uh and I’m curious about it because I’ve never heard of it in context but it’s striking me as something that’s important and missing at least in my historical context uh about but but how did colonization lay the groundwork for the War on Drugs uh in this regard I’d never heard that language used until I I heard you and another podcaster uh surveying it out there um but if you could just invite in the viewers a little bit into your uh understanding of what kind of led to this through that lens of colonization absolutely yeah I mean there’s a short version there’s a long version I’ll stick with the short version because they have a limited time but I think it’ll get the main point across so the core idea behind this language colonization that the groundwork for the War on Drugs is that if we look at the um kind of original intention of the War on Drugs capital W capital the the thing that started during you know the Nixon and Reagan administrations then what we see is kind of two primary goals um one is ostensibly to reduce the risk and the scourge of drugs on society and that’s where we’re like how do we you know the goals there were reduced drug use reduce addiction all that good stuff um reduce Reliance on the cartels which were less of a factor than our increasing effector increasing have been increasingly effective over the last 50 years um and if you look at just those metrics like lots of failure drug uses up drug use is more concentrated it’s more dangerous all that good stuff um if you look at the other side of the equation which is what I was kind of just touching on you see a social political um incentives to uh pass policy that would lead to the War on Drugs the control Substances Act and so on the CSA does not exist in a vacuum this control Substances Act passed in 1971 is the culmination of really like itself 50 years of bills that were passed across the country to start to criminalize um various drugs starting in the 1930s with cannabis and that itself 1930s that itself is a legacy of a process started in the late 1800s of going from we’re going to control we’re going to sell drugs this is what a lot of large companies were doing the British East India Company the Dutch East into company like you see these large Colonial Powers the Dutch the British and so on selling drugs they’re selling opium they’re selling tea and coffee caffeine they’re selling alcohol like that’s a major part of their trade system and it wasn’t until the United States itself brought in kind of momentum to criminalize these substances in the late 1800s that we even were having a global conversation about criminalizing drugs before that it was just how do we make money off of it the reason I start with this conversation around colonization laying the groundwork for the War on Drugs is because the logic that ended up permeating the Modern War on Drugs that there are social cultural political Norms that we want to establish in society and we can do that by restricting human access to certain substances that concept started during the colonization of the quote-unquote new world there are reports in the late 1500s early 1600s of the Catholic Church the Spanish and the Portuguese and other governments seeing the ritual use of plants by native people who are living in Central South America North America and identifying that as a essential aspect of the culture where like this relationship to plants this relationship to these to the ceremony to the altered state that actually being a core component of society in that time and then the intentional eradication of those links to those Traditions as a way to exert power so some people would go so far as to calling that a cultural genocide because you actually have a robust cultural tradition and practice that exists within a people settlers arrive they see the importance of those practices and they’re like if we want to disrupt this culture we can’t just kill people we also have to separate them from their culture this has happened across the world in colonial situations everywhere on the globe and that happened in Central and South America so to me there is a thread between the desire to separate people from their cultural identity by Banning by calling peyote and mushrooms demonic by saying that the ceremony is demonic by disassociating it from the kind of virtuous practice of Christianity and in the process of I’m sure you know people have seen the photos of like native people who had their hair cut or who had they had to go to boarding school there’s like all these of course including including and not limited to the genocide the active kind of perpetuation of violence there’s all of these levels where that’s all happening and the the whole conversation about how that was actually also happening to substances substance use and cultural use a lot of that has disappeared because it happened so early it was one of the earliest things to happen was the separation of those cultures from their plan practices so to me colonization leading the groundwork for the one on drugs means colonization is the first time where we see of the again quote unquote you know so-called new world like colonization is where you start to see an intentional separation an intentional kind of wedge being placed between people and these practices that are part of their cultural tradition to me that is not so different from the desire in the 60s and 70s to say oh black people who are you know people African-American people who are listening to Jazz and doing this and that like let’s let what are they using you know the Mexican Amer the Mexican people who are using cannabis who are associated with marijuana in the 30s like the Chinese people who are associated with opium in the 80s and 1980s or sorry 1880s it’s the same story different cultures different drugs but it’s just been happening for 500 years so I’m just saying this whole conversation didn’t start 50 years ago or 3500 years ago and we’re seeing kind of that Legacy play out over and over and over and over again fascinating and thank you so much for the short answer I can only imagine yeah totally what the longer version is like but I think that’s imperative I mean for me and you know naively in the western you know traditional sense of things I I kind of just see Nixon and then to Reagan and then here we are today and uh and so much of History can get buried or lost in these energized discussions in political indifferences and I’m appreciative of you bringing that close to the viewers so they can hopefully on the other side of these screens you know explore you know what you’ve been talking about and really the incredible history that’s led us to this moment uh that we’re living in today so very much appreciate that you showcasing that right great as far as and you know time is always of the essence in this busy moving world that we’re in but you know I do want to dive into yeah one of the things that uh uh the issue around consumption and dive a little bit into the fears and have a discussion about you know kind of what I’m seeing kind of on the boots on the ground level and I talked about in my advocacy in the Senate finance committee um uh the the those who are resistance not the right where those uh opposed to it or who have a lot of curiosity about how this might get done better through the fears of the um you know past legislation one of the unfortunate experiences right before I advocated for our side of this bill and measure with these two mothers who came on and talked about how their loved ones went on you know the internet and got this God dose you know delivered to their doorstep and got an incredible amount of these medicines in their system that ultimately led to their untimely death jumping off of a balcony and dying in mom’s arms and you know really tragic instances uh that one I think we just want to be transparent and talk about because this is the reality of misinformation and um you know uh educational opportunities that are missed and consumption-driven mindsets that frame uh drug use uh in general especially here in uh well certainly here in America right you know everything daily intoxication I’d be curious to hear your perspective on marijuana legislation compared to psychedelic legislation and uh to be clear both are Monumental achievements in the post kind of prohibition era uh but I think one of the things we got wrong on the side of marijuana legislation via the consumption uh driven mindset was to State something like marijuana daily for depression and uh for me that was wrong because I think that marijuana as a medicine or a drug if we’re going to call it that it really elicits an experience of at times I feel anxious I feel paranoid I feel you know whatever the case might be and for me I think this is often lost on society but in my light reading of Bob Marley and his history he utilized those experiences as like oh I’m anxious for something you know marijuana is supposed to be sort of the cherry on top of the ice cream at the end and now he’s going through the process and experiencing anxiety he didn’t smoke more weed to deal with the anxiety in my understanding of of the literature he stepped away from marijuana to explore that further so the marijuana created the awareness and then outside of that yeah yeah and in the you know advertising sense of things it’s like well I need to take this daily and yeah I think that’s incorrect um and we can dive into it together but also with the psychedelics in plant-based medicine we are kind of Shifting that perspective quite a bit and just curious about your thoughts in reference to the marijuana legislation and we’re out of psychedelics because so much of the fear that I heard within the Senate Finance Community here in Colorado was this is just like marijuana everybody’s going to have access everybody’s going to be doing this all the time you know kind of slippery slope you know uh type logic there and uh so yeah just curious for the viewers out there what your insights are into kind of that Collision yeah there’s a couple of threads that I’ll go down real quick so the first around um maybe I’ll talk about the differences between psychedelics and marijuana broadly and then a little bit more about the policy differences um and which touches on both of the things that you that you brought on so first off I would say that unlike cannabis psychedelics resist being used daily and not to say you can’t do it because people do but I think that they resist it and I think that that is to say that they also resist um kind of being treated like a um daily consumable commodity again it happens but uh anecdotally you know I’ve spent more than half of my life around people who use drugs of all kinds and I have I probably know you know literally 50 times more daily cannabis consumers than I know daily or even near Daily Mushroom or any other psychedelic consumers and that’s partially because a very practical bio biophysiological reasons including tolerance jumps and how all that stuff happens with different substances um but that doesn’t just mean that like it shifts the dynamic around what you know problematic or substance use disorders might look like with those substances it also means that the way that we think about um the harms is a little bit different so whereas you might say you know one of the potential risks of cannabis use is Habitual use that that then goes beyond what is actually good for a person and you know they might know that it’s more it’s not helping them but they keep doing it that’s kind of a classic symptom as I know you know of a substance use disorder um but you can keep smoking weed and it’ll keep working it working meaning like it’ll keep having an effect on your body like you know eventually you can smoke yourself sober but I say that to say that like or some people experience that where they’re like okay they’re they’re tolerance is so high that they’re not able to kind of alter their Stadium as a result of it but the reason I bring that aspect up is because with psychedelics it’s a little bit different most psychedelics have such a big tolerance jump but if you try to use it daily or near daily it just literally stops working like what your body doesn’t that doesn’t have an effect and um there are other kind of secondary effects that come up now and that we all know that negative effects of substance use does not deter all people so that’s like only a limited consolation and um the other kind of big practical difference I would say are two of the other big practical differences are one the way that we’ve talked about psychedules as a tool to help people you know medically or kind of therapeutically so often has with it this key element of some sort of guiding facilitation peer support aspect and that means that from an economic perspective it’s a very different dynamic because you’re not just buying a drug store kind but you’re actually buying a service direct to paying for is taking a service in addition to access to the thing so that is a major kind of economic shift or like how I think you know the drug will be bought and sold and so on and then the other kind of key difference I would say is that um the like the conversation and this kind of just what you’re saying around like what the public perception the conversation that’s like you know is much less I should say there’s much less support for the idea that this is a thing you should do every day like with cannabis you can really see how like I’ve seen people who are dealing with um cancer in particular for whom daily cannabis use is absolutely the best thing for them because of the appetite because of the other aspects appetite sleep support so on um that Tempo may not be the same for someone who even who’s using cannabis for a mental health issue maybe for a mental health issue actually when you use it with a with a lower frequency and you can still get the benefits or you only need to use it in acute situations and still get the benefits or I love the anecdote you gave because to me that sounds like treating cannabis like a psychedelic it’s like oh it shows you something so go figure out what that is spend some time on that before you come back to it in some ways it’s a form of integration I love that um so I think you really see that conflation of being like Oh daily use oh it’s okay for these people so it must be okay for these people so I could see that happening with psychedelics where we’re like oh like you know thankfully there’s and I’m not going to even mention it here but there are very few not zero but very few conversations that daily psychedelic use and all of the experts that I know can’t take that stuff seriously like I have yet to hear a person who’s like yeah you should be taking literally any psychedelic every day like even if it’s even if you’re talking about micro dosing like no one even says micro dose mushrooms every day at least not responsible people I haven’t I mean not that it doesn’t happen people say that but as far as anything reminded regarding the evidence anecdotes like that’s just not there that’s one aspect which we can go down more and then the other thing I want to touch on is the difference between cannabis and psychedelic policy which kind of goes to what the regulators and the legislators are worried about that like we don’t want this to be another you know high volume production storefront situation we have to deal with additional licenses and all of the drama of dealing with who gets what kind of regulatory permissions and like it’s a whole thing and I guess the big you know people compare psychedelics and cannabis a lot and I think that there’s some places where you see similarity notably in like you know the government is trying to figure out how to incorporate a drug or a substance that they’ve mostly just demonized and avoided having any serious conversations about now we’re like okay we’re just gonna put it on the market and I kind of blame the kind of history of the way the government has navigated this question um there’s a reason we don’t have good information and it’s not because the people who have been smoking it haven’t been asking questions just because there hasn’t been the opportunity for cannabis to actually like get good research on now we’re trying to do it but we’re doing it racing against like state regulatory or state um legislative and policy changes and now we’re like at the cusp maybe maybe a federal federal changes there with can with psychedelics because the kind of serious policy conversation started later and it started after more clinical research had been done um we have a little bit more of a scientific evidence base the problem I think that comes up there is that a good scientific evidence base from clinical double-blind trials or whatever does not always extrapolate well to a state or federal level policy conversation you know there’s some overlap but not always so I guess what I see now is this um move toward figuring out how do we bridge that gap between what we know scientifically research-wise and what we know we don’t know from a policy perspective those are you know those are some distance apart and we can start to fill in the gaps bit by bit with some of the things we talked about earlier training advertising consumer protection like that kind of stuff that we’re like well regardless of the beneficial effects or risk regardless of where it comes from like we all know at the very least if someone’s buying something you should be able to get an accurate ingredient list everyone agrees with that one you know so I do think that we’re kind of in this stage sort of of being like where do we pull the thing that we know we know but plug that stuff in how do I identify what we know we don’t know hold those questions open and then like iterate as we go so going just to kind of succinctly get back to your main question like I think that one of the big differences with cannabis and psychedelics is that there was a desire or kind of this fantasy maybe among the movement with with cannabis that it wouldn’t be around among some I should say lots of people predicted this so I don’t mean to undermine that but that it would just be just another product that as soon as it got into the market we could just sell like another product like you were just saying could be part of the consumerification of everything we can all just become more consumers of more things great another product to sell no big deal nothing special I think people are rightfully freaked out about that with cannabis I don’t think that cannabis which is a beautiful powerful sacred plant necessarily wants to be treated like a thing where you can just put into any gummy with all the sugar and all the things and just sell it storefront like I don’t know and I think that if the trade-off is we gotta in order to reduce criminalization we must have some sort of Market solution then I see that as like this kind of bigger meta problem of how we deal with stuff in society which is like oh so the only way we can have a responsible conversation about this is if we’re talking about whether or not we sell it in a market okay so that just brings all the baggage of the market dealing with late stage capitalism all this stuff all of that is going to be true with psychedelics the Dynamics going to be different it might not be storefront because there’s guides it might not be just a sold product because you can’t do it every day like you do with other stuff but I think that the concerns about corporatization the like lower quality control standards the weird sketchy advertisement all that stuff that’s come with canvas yeah we have to deal with all that yeah beautifully stated and you know to me it I I guess the to recapitulate it sounds like with the Psychedelic movement the research is a little bit ahead of the policy and that’s positive to think about right because we have a little bit more to Anchor into and our understanding of the delivery of the medicines and with cannabis we put in policy first and it raised the head of the research that’s now kind of trailing it and to the notion of kind of responsible use in that regard in a perfect world if it’s Izzy’s world right now I don’t know if there’s a clear answer for it but how would you on the side of cannabis get that much closer to where the Psychedelic movement is at from policy and research and in this kind of perfect world scenario for the viewers out there uh how would you bring those to considerations closer together in a way that uh at least at the level of the State uh participants that I’ve been around fear that the market is going to continued outpace cannabis to which there is no ability to bring that research close to it yeah I mean I think this is a big conversation a big question that you just asked but I’ll say that one I don’t think I’m as worried about it as some people are not because I am so excited about the possibility of the corporatization of psychedelia um I’m not to be clear but because I feel about like in some ways in some ways the attempt to control the market of these substances and the kind of cultivation and the distribution of some of these substances in particular the plants you know even though I’m like really committed to this mission of making it figuring out how to make it as you know properly designed as possible for this post-prohibition area that we’re hoping to you know step into um I think it’s kind of futile and I said I say that not to undermine my own work but to say that like we’re talking about plants like at the end of the day a lot of the especially you know going back with the Colorado example in particular like talking about plants that grow in a lot of places like as long as home grow was present for all of the Cannabis regulatory changes and all the Cannabis legal changes you know we can be really upset about and probably should be skeptical about the multi-state operators all of the corporatization and the monopolization of the Cannabis industry and at the end of the day most people could grow it themselves and it’s a little bit you know it’s expensive requires some skill not everyone can do it but we can do that we don’t have to rely on these large companies to get it and I think I feel the same way about psychedelics like I think that this is going to be different with synthetics it’s its own whole conversation for sure but for mushrooms for San Pedro for other things like we will there will always be people who grow who grow them and as long as the policy shifts ensure protection for the cultivators and for the people who are giving that to their Community sharing that with their Community then I think we’re going to be okay like there will be a need for some people for a super pharmaceuticalized super dialed product you know I saw this a lot with medical cannabis when recreational or adult use cannabis swept the country one of the losses that happened although it did increase access to most people was what one might call it medical grade that’s kind of a euphemism but medical like tested products and for people who have cancer or compromised immune system they actually can’t just go to the open market and get a gummy they actually need something that has a higher quality control standard so I see that similarly here like I don’t want to lose the possibility of having a very very precise formulated product I think that that’s really good I just think that we can’t only have that we also need to be able to grow mushrooms at home you know so I think that like to me that’s the balance as long as we can have those things at the same time then like the rest is going to happen at the pace that happens it’s a little bit of a delusion to think that we should and I’m saying you’re saying this at all but it’s a little bit of a delusion to think that like we have to wait for the right amount of research because once we have that then we can know it’s safe I’m like we can do that and we should do that from a regulatory perspective like I don’t expect the government to be making moves on things that they don’t feel pretty secure about totally understandable medical institutions same like healthcare go through the processes for sure but like literally millions and millions and millions of people have used all these things and we have a we’re not coming from nothing with the risk this isn’t a new molecule that was invented yesterday we have like pretty good naturalistic evidence about what kinds of risks to be concerned about as long as they’re being compiled as long as they’re being shared like let’s do that the one caveat I would say to that is I do think that with better data capture we do get better information so post legalization of cannabis I think we have better information now about the risks of cannabis because there isn’t the same stigma to studying it so I do think that we might not they’re like new things may not emerge but we may learn more about the kinds of risks and benefits that exist with psychedelics because we’re actually able to get good information and don’t have to be operating under the kind of shadow of stigma all the time so I do think that you you know to your question like moving toward a balance between naturalistic observational evidence which to me is enough to say well we probably shouldn’t criminalize the behavior we can probably say that right now I don’t need more evidence to say we shouldn’t be criminalizing people growing around mushrooms you’re not going to get into me otherwise but if you’re talking about should you be able to make claims about treating something should people be able to use it if they’re medical providers with expectations does insurance cover you for malpractice like yeah let’s get some evidence for that those are good things we want to have more details for so I kind of feel to just multi-tier like to me these things are not mutually exclusive those things can occur at the same time it’s complicated like it kind of breaks your brain to think how do we have a license framework and also an unlicensed framework you know thinking about 122 in Colorado it’s like The Regulators are going to have a fun and complex time over the next two years figuring out how do you have a regulated and unregulated system at the same time I personally love that question like we should have both they’re going to be different expectations and norms for the providers like but let’s solve that problem like why would we have to limit our imagination to say you only get one option which we know doesn’t cover all the bases
and this is truly wonderful the vote that I would put on that too as well again for the viewers is like people like you as a deep deeply immersed in the movement and uh you know for the past few decades are thoughtfully considering this and I think the public has such a reference point of you know maybe hippie culture maybe you know the LSD slipping over the gates of research into the public sphere and you know tune in and shut out and all that you know type of language that exists that this is the core of the movement but actually the core of the movement is is quite considerate of all of its possibilities and all of the potential consequences uh that come with this and as diligently and as thoughtfully as as we can be within this movement trying to answer really challenging questions and bring forward something positive um but it’s not going to be without no negotiation without its consequences and and for the sake of time here I uh we’re we’re gonna have to have some coffee or something in the future is he at some point because um I just want to continue to pick your brain uh about all of this and certainly and just want to know you more as a person as well too um you’re you are a fascinating and inviting person to have a conversation with and so I’m grateful for this experience but to take us out here maybe for a last question I know I gave you like 100 questions or whatever on a word spreadsheet but you know time is what it is I’m very excited about where we’re at I see as possibilities I see the opportunity for negotiation in a way that we’ve not had in the public sphere certainly at the level of the federal government you know State local municipalities so this is very exciting times but around you know kind of where we’re at and you being more immersed in it in a way than I could possibly be at this point what are you feeling that this movement in the direction and where we’re at is sustainable and uh if it is what would you caution those who are speaking to the public uh in the future about so we don’t disrupt and sustainability inform them as a movement yeah there’s like a nice art of forward momentum a balancing forward momentum with like the you know getting your chin out in front of your knees kind of situation where we’re like a little too excited yeah no I mean uh I think that it’s sustainable because it’s self-regulating and what I mean by that is like and I don’t wanna you know I don’t wish ill Amma upon anyone and also I think without naming names they’ll kind of large economic shifts that are happening within the industry right now the kind of what we’re seeing around different companies shifting services or getting closed or merging or acquired like you kind of see this kind of self-correcting mechanism where there’s only a limited carrying capacity that exists within the industry like there’s only so much money to go around there’s only so much there’s only so much expertise and people and time so so it’s not always sustainable but it like the system kind of forces it to be sustainable by limiting when things were moving too fast um so I do believe in kind of an inner oh God I can’t believe I’m saying this but kind of an inner healing intelligence I guess you could say even of that kind of larger ecosystem to say like oh well when things go beyond what they’re actually able to carry like there will be an adjustment um and I do think that there is a certain level of um like so so what I mean by that is like acutely I would say yeah like I would say the hype is a bit unsustainable right now like the story about how cool and beneficial and potentially helpful psychedelics may or may not be like all of that stuff like it’s probably a little bit ahead of what the science actually says and what we really know and what’s really great to say but if I zoom out I’m like oh that will be adjusted though like there will come a time like that line can’t sustain itself that partial truth can’t sustain itself so in that sense I see it as sustainable and to kind of more directly answer your question I do think that there would be a lot of benefit to um really holding both the potential benefit and these like risks and concerns and probably a more kind of nuanced detailed conversation about what we do about those things I think that what I see is concerns about a lot of simultaneous concerns that need to be reconciled people want increased access to people who are marginalized people also want the research to slow down and be better because of ethical concerns because it concerns of violations or abuse or boundary or boundary issues and so on um we can do both of those things but we need to be aware that there’s tensions that like reducing the cost for the patient means May mean reducing the capacity of this modality to be something that a provider can get a lived income off of do we get the money from the government do we so there’s all of these kind of questions that come up when we’re dealing with the tension the tensions and values that I think a lot of us are holding and I don’t think that means we shouldn’t hold it be with attention I think it just means that we need to be aware that like everything is a series of trade-offs and to me sustainability within the within the movement would just be that acknowledging that everything is a trade-off there is no there is no like untainted option like every single direction we can take is going to have risks and it’s going to have potential benefits and you know going to something you were saying earlier and maybe as a way to kind of close this phase of the conversation is like yes there are absolutely risks to Bringing these things into society decriminalizing especially without good education harm reduction crisis response we didn’t even touch on that but there should be massive government investment into education harm reduction and crisis response like to me that’s very obvious that that shouldn’t be done by civil society that Scrappy philanthropy-backed nonprofits should not be holding that public health burden that should be something that the government should be involved in paying for same with Recovery Services like there should be so many more research to allocated to this if it doesn’t have to come from private dollars of philanthry that’s just my opinion but I say that to say that like while we are moving towards decriminalization I can say yes there’s risks yes we should have better services and a safety units is worth it and the risk of us maintaining illegality is still greater than those things like I can hold both of those truths like just that there’s risk does not mean that it’s not less worth it and you know you see we’re not going to go down this rival right now because it’s a dumb conversation but you see there’s a lot come up with ibogaine with ebola and I begin an addiction and substance use assertive treatment where it’s like there’s very real health risks with ibogain and Ebola there’s very real cardio risks there’s a very real trauma risks like people do get re-triggered and get all kinds of stuff happen when they have you know an improperly held the ibogain or Ebola experience but is the risk of having that come online lower or greater than the risk of having right now no really effective funded solutions for substance abuse disorders and then you know just having record and increasing records you know record numbers of people dying of Overdose I don’t know that is a trade-off you know so anyway that’s a bit of a morbid place to end but that’s it’s real everything you just stated I think is so valuable and I have always advocated for transparency within treatment culture right never over promising and under delivering this is what we can do this is the delicacy in it here are the outcomes and the challenges associated with your loved ones Journey moving forward uh in this regard and being transparent about this and open-minded open-heart open mind towards its possibilities but also towards its risks I think invites in a discussion rather than pushing people away from the discussion um into their own perspective or what they thought was going to be the reality of all of this and so you know I I very much appreciate the transparency and holding space for the delicacy of our situation uh globally and certainly as a society here in America and how to balance this discussion it cannot just be a uh I think you would share this and correct me if I’m wrong it can’t be like completely illegal to everything is legal now all of a sudden a balance in here in a discussion to arrive at the least amount of harm with the greatest positive societal benefit at the end of the day and it’s going to be a discussion for I would imagine decades if not centuries to come in front of us and um so very excited and very pleased with your view of this your approach to this and your insights into it as well we will have to do coffee or this again sometime in the future I certainly hope to cross your path again Izzy this has been really uh empowering hopefully for the viewers and their understanding but certainly as somebody who’s getting closer to the movement with a lot less history than you it’s just exciting to continue to meet professionals out there thinking about these things on behalf of society and trying to nurture and balance uh a challenging discussion at times and and with that I’m hopeful you know maybe you can kind of take us out what exciting projects you’re working on where maybe uh would you you know like to point the viewers as to resources or anything of that that you would like to take us out out with that you feel passionate about at this time yeah no thank you so much this has been a great conversation maybe I’ll just close by plugging our conference so um we’ll be having a conference in Denver actually you know at the end of June which I’m really excited about psychedelic science 2023 so that’s happening um and there will be just way more to do than you can possibly imagine lots of stages it’ll be like a festival where you have to make really bad choices between the two artists that you really want to see but with kind of like a nerdy version of that so um that that’s happening in June which I’m really excited about and then I think the other thing that I’d like to give a shout out to is you know there’s a whole kind of ecosystem out there of people who are working on all these different aspects of the field and I’d really you know especially for people who are interested in the law or legal work um I’d invite them to check out the Psychedelic bar associations just the psychedelicbar.org um it’s an organization that I co-founded with some colleagues of mine that is really around like kind of um cultural onboarding you could say uh people in the legal field of how to think about some of these like very big very complex questions that we’re all navigating all the time so give them a shout out um and yeah besides that like I think that this year a lot of this year is going to be okay now that we’re a couple years away from the beginning of this state level projects it’s going to be what what have we learned in the last couple years and I think Colorado as a state you know with the regulatory agency or the regulatory board and so on is going to be sorting through a lot of those questions like what have we learned over the last couple years and um what do we want to be the ones to learn you know as we as the state kind of moves toward whatever this next phase of the Paradigm is so um yeah thanks again I hope to see you in person at some point I would love to cross paths again or I’m happy to join this again and we can spend an hour and a half on any of the things that we talked about today so I’m happy to go all the way into the details yeah well you I was I was debating because there’s so much proximity for me and I’m and uh you know I don’t want to sound like too privileged here but I’ve I’ve been so blessed to be in front of so many individuals here in the state kind of pushing forward this movement that I feel like oh I don’t have to go to that psychedelic conference in Denver whatever but right absolutely if uh Maps is throwing it and you’re going to be there as part of that uh I I’m gonna stand my ticket today and hopefully see you around there at that time I think I think it’ll be I don’t think you’ll regret it there will be a lot there’s literally like nine stages simultaneously every day like it’s gonna be overwhelming but the in the in the good way I hope and we’ll have some really good conversations about some of these policy questions too that’ll be happening on the policy stage we have an amazing Society stage where we’ll have like a whole half day just about different forms of harm reduction so yeah yeah I hope to see you there I’ll say that wonderful well thank you so much Lindsay for your time continued success in all that you do grateful for your representation out there in the world and uh yeah looking forward to next time until then thank you so much until next time then all right everybody that’s a wrap for this special episode of Finding Peaks thank you so much for joining us today and my sincere hope at the end of the day as I reiterated throughout the episode is that you can hear that this movement is thoughtful it’s considerate it’s concerned and it’s thinking about how to deliver this in the most positive beneficial way to society and so you know to Ismail and Izzy as we were referring to him throughout the episode again thank you so much for being here for all the people out there uh hopefully we can find extended clips on all the social medias the Facebook the twitters the tick tocks all the things and as I always State I believe our social media assets are going to be far more positive than the general Spectrum so check us out