Drugs

This episode of Ephemeral is on drugs. Featuring Ethan Nadelmann, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance and host of the podcast Psychoactive.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Ephemeral is production of iHeart three D audio. For full exposure,
listen with that phones. This episode of Ephemeral talks frankly
about drug history, policy, study, and use. These views do
not necessarily represent those of iHeartMedia, Protozoa Pictures, or their
executives and employees, and should not be construed as medical

(00:24):
advice or encouragement to use any type of psychoactive substance.
Flow whooa always late, local tests, fired, phone calls, a
formal morning rund line rund run und doing drugs right

(00:45):
at your mind? Answer the question, brandom, you're doing drugs?
This exploration has led into a new and dangerous career.
Smoking rash, popping Manny's, shooting speed or dropping acid is
running one out there who still isn't clear about what
doing drugs does. Okay, last time, this is your brain,

(01:07):
This is drugs. This is your brain on drugs and
questions drugs, drugs, drugs. From pot to cot, alcohol to
adderall crack, cocaine to caffeinated coffee, almost all of us
use one form of drug or another. And even though

(01:30):
there's a constant flow of drug commentary coursing through our
news media and entertainment. It can be an uncomfortable subject
to talk about, amplified by the fact that rhetoric on
drugs can be difficult to trust. And that's a shame.
Oh man, they are so fascinating. Almost every department at

(01:51):
a university could have an entire course about drugs. If
you look in the social sciences, you could have of
course all about drugs, anthropology, in criminology, of political science,
and in sociology, and in history and in economics, all six.
In the arts, you could have it in music, you
could have it in literature, you could have it in

(02:13):
the visual arts. So you were talking about one of
the great interdisciplinary subjects that exist out there. Hi, I'm
Ethan Nadelman. I've devoted most of my adult life to
working to end the war on drugs. Started off doing
that as a professor at Princeton and started an organization
called the Drug Policy Alliance, and gentleman looked up to

(02:35):
Ethan Nadelman, which became the leading organization of the world
advocating for an end to the war on drugs. And
then about four years ago I stopped doing that and
took a little time off, and now I've started my
own podcast called Psychoactive. How much do you know about drugs? Well,

(02:55):
I'll tell you, Alex, I'm no expert on the sort
of biochemistry farm a college aspects of it, but apart
from that, I know a lot about drugs. I've been
reading and studying and talking to people and using drugs
for most of my adult life. I sometimes joke that
growing up Jewish, my first taste of alcohol was when

(03:18):
I was seven days old at my brists. I remember
being nine ten years old and going to synagogue on Saturday,
and at the end of services, they would lay out
the little mona chevits wine and these little tiny plastic cups.
My friends and I we would have a few of these,
and we knew if we had four or five of
them we would feel a little tipsy and maybe fall

(03:39):
asleep at lunch. And then there was the whole bar
Mitzvah scene when I was thirteen, where we all started
getting drunk. We weren't supposed to, but you know, we'd
be drinking Vika tonics with screwdrivers. In the Jewish community
in a suburb of New York, basically most people drank,
but I don't remember anybody who would drink to excess

(03:59):
the most powerful drug education I remember getting. I must
have been in junior high school. It was actually an
anti smoking set. The Surgeon General has determined a cigarette
smoking is dangerous to your health. They brought in one
of those fake lungs is a machine, and they connected

(04:20):
a cigarette to it and showed what happened to the
stake long when it got all yellow and disgusting. One
thing about this machine, it will never get heart disease
or cancer from smoking. But when it came to the
other anti drug stuff, I gotta admit I don't have
any recollection if they even did it back in the
late sixties early seventies. They must have, but I don't recall.

(04:44):
With marijuana, I remember being about seventeen and seeing a
bunch of my friends who were getting high and just
noticing they all kind of fell asleep. So that was
not that appealing, So it wasn't really I started college,
and I distinctly remember the first off getting high there.
I was moving from one apartment to another. The marijuana

(05:04):
is coming on and we're moving a refrigerator, and you know,
the whole thing starts to become eighteen year olds laughing
and almost dropping a refrigerator down a flight of stairs.
So that was the start, and then I became a
regular marijuana consumer, but never a daily user. Had a
kind of almost anti addictive personality where you hear a

(05:26):
lot in the context of drugs, And indeed, the title
of Ethan's podcast is psychoactive basically means mind altering. You
think there's a whole host of drugs. The drug I
take every day I deal with my cholesterol that's not psychoactive.
Psychoactive suggests that and somehow it's altering consciousness. Now, that

(05:47):
could be in obvious ways, like psychedelics or like with cannabis,
but it could even be true of things like coffee
and tobacco, where when we consume them we're somewhat aware
of their subtle psychoactive effects, but we don't really notice
them until we stopped doing that. The single most common
one is caffeine. Something like the world consumes caffeine, either

(06:13):
in the form of coffee or tea or some other
plant products that contain it. Probably the second most universalist alcohol. Obviously,
there are prohibitions on it in the Islamic world, but
generally speaking, it's a fairly universal thing. And if you
go back historically, you have indigenous groups all around the

(06:36):
world having no contact with outer societies that somehow figured
out that that piece of food or that thing, if
left to ferment and then consumed, would have quite a
bank Marijuana has a history going back ten thousand years,
but it's not been as universally used. And then, of

(06:58):
course tobacco one came out of the Americas and made
its way to Europe and then to the rest of
the world, and because it was so remarkably addictive, really
got a kind of global use. So I would probably
say caffeine's first alcohol, second tobacco products, third cannabis for

(07:19):
oi and that heroin morphine other pharmaceutical opioids that are
made from it would probably be in fifth place. Then
you work your way down and a whole lot of
other things that may be used by tens or hundreds
of millions of people, like cot or cava from South Pacific,
or beetle nut used in South Asia, so there are

(07:41):
more localized ones that haven't sort of spread around the world.
One of the most traditional, if sometimes over exaggerated, applications
of psychoactive substances is to stimulate one's creative mind. I
know people who are artists and find the Meryl want
it really does help them on the creative side. On

(08:04):
the end they hand. I'll tell you when it comes
to the intellectual stuff, I'll beginning all these great ideas,
they don't seem as such value the next day when
looked at in the light of day when I'm straight interesting. Though,
with psychedelics, there are insights that I've had on doing
those the psychedelics that were almost life transformative for me,
and I'm more likely to remember it coherently in a

(08:26):
way as well. You think about some of the famous people,
I mean the Nobel Prize winners, the jobs and others
who say that but for psychedelics, they never would have
invented with the invented or discovered what they discovered. And
you don't hear that as often with marijuana or any
other drug. You know, there have been indigenous people's using
these drugs throughout history. Ayahuasca, mushrooms, payot or mescaline, the toura,

(08:54):
the plant which can be actually deadly poisonous, but in
minimal doses can be a very high at least psychedelic
type of drug l s D where the key ingredient
or good comes from a mold. There are histories in
Europe of these outbreaks of the town going crazy, and
it appears to be when this mold took off in

(09:16):
the local wheat or rye fields. Albert Hoffman sort of
accidentally invents ls be protectively and then that thing has
its kind of heyday in the fifties and sixties, first
among the sort of elite strata, and then Timothy Learry

(09:37):
turn on tune and drop out, drop out of becomes
the thing used by millions, drop out of junior executive.
Many people benefit enormously, other people just do it for yucks,
and some minority of people get really hurt by this.
And then you go into the kind of quiet age
of psychedelics, and I say, now we are in this period,

(10:02):
an extraordinary period in the history of human beings and drugs,
where we're having this sort of psychedelic renaissance. Part of
it is because of the work of organizations like MAPS,
the Multidiscipinary Association of Psychedelic Studies created by Mike Buddy
Rick Doblin back in the eighties. Psychedelics, when used wisely,
have the potential to help heal us help inspire us

(10:26):
and perhaps even to help save us. Part of it
because of a range of academics that have just kept
pushing to get this going. Part of it because Michael
pollan sort of breakthrough book, Changing Your Mind. What happened
to psychedelics in the sixties that they became so stigmatized
that research stopped. Now you have all these companies trying
to create new psychedelic products. So you have this sort

(10:49):
of psychedelic renaissance where the media is mostly focused on
the upside layout the case for legalization of psychedelics and
and why this is an opportunity of investors. We're used
numbers of people are having positive experiences where people understand
the significance of setting like using these drugs in the
right type of environment. So I think we're probably in

(11:12):
a period in history where more people are using these
things than ever before. And I also expect that there's
gonna be some tragedies. There are going to be some
people who get hurt. The media is gonna jump on that,
We're gonna start to see the pendulum swing backward. But
I think there's a level of consciousness and awareness and
acceptance and normalization happening both with cannabis and with psychedelics. Now,

(11:36):
unlike anything we've seen before, medical use of psychoactive drugs
can be rife with complications. Take for example, the array
of pharmaceuticals derived from the opium plant. In the United States,
our medical system prescribes opioids, so most people have had

(11:57):
some form of opioid in their life. We come out
of getting our wisdom, teeth removes, we come out of
some minor surgery, so the doctor may prescribe like an oxycodon.
Go to place like Japan, I think, where it's very low.
You go to parts of the developing world where it's
under prescribed and many people die in pain. Opioids one

(12:20):
of these things where interestingly, if you have access even
to heroin, to pharmaceutical grade heroine, and you know the
dose and you're using the same dose, you can basically
consume heroin every day of your adult life and live
to be years old. You can have a job, you

(12:40):
can have sex with your partner, you can drive a car.
You can do it all because your body develops a
certain tolerance. If you stop using it, you'll feel sick
and feverish or even worse. While your body goes to
a racking withdrawal of it. But the fact that there is,
if you have a reliable dose, the worst side effect
oftentimes it's instipatient. When you combine heroin with alcohol or

(13:07):
with a benzodiazepine type drug, in modest amounts, it can
be a really great high. But the problem is if
you double or triple that dose, you stop breathing. We
think about people dying give an alcohol overdose, but the
deadly thing is that alcohol is oftentimes the hidden thing
that's causing an overdose with another drug where the media

(13:29):
headline says heroin, but it was actually heroin plus booze.
And it was only with the recent emergence of ventonyl
taking the opioid epidemic to a new level of urgency.
This synthetic opioid that's fifty times more powerful than heroin,
Graham prograam. That's the first opioid where people just take
it all by itself and they can just stop breathing.

(13:56):
You know, with marijuana, you can have fifty times the
amount you need to get a hundred times and it's
not going to kill you. It appears that if you're
on an opioid prescription and you combine it with Marriwana,
you can cut your prescribed dose in half just by
having a little bit of marijuana with it, because the
marijuana potentiates it. There's a bunch of research studies out

(14:19):
there that showed that in states that are approved medical marijuana,
they appear to have lower overdose rates than did other
places because people were either substituting the marijuana for the
opioids for pain relief, or they were combining it with
the opioid and therefore taking less of the opioid because
they didn't need as much. I know, I get totally

(14:41):
lost on it, but I didn't want to ask about
opium classic you know, smokable opium, you know, like I
feel like I see most of like media with like
opium then and I imagine it was a scene in
the US at some point, and it's not really anymore. Well,
I'll tell you. I mean, I feel I've been a
bit professionally negligent and never having actually smoked opium. I mean,
it's on my two do list, my bucket list. You know,

(15:01):
I got to do this if I'm really going to
be a serious, you know person talking about drugs. But
by and large. The opium dent was a common thing
in Asia, and then it came to America when people
came from China in the middle of late nineteenth century.
They then became incredibly demonizes. The first opium prohibition laws
were in the eighteen seventies and eighties in the Data

(15:22):
and in California, very racist laws, and the fear that
the Chinese were basically addicting and seducing and turning white
women into sex slaves. Works wonders. When heroin gets invented,
actually by Bear Pharmaceutical as a cost sur president, what
happened was you had a some of the switch going
on from opium to heroin, and then people begin to

(15:45):
realize that if you want to smuggle this stuff, it's
a lot safer to smuggle a white powder like heroin
than it is to smuggle opium. And if you want
to consume it, opium gives off a distinct a roma,
whereas heroin, especially if you're injecting and not smoking, it
no aroma, so it's easier to hide from the cops.

(16:07):
It's what we call the perverse consequences of prohibition, where
when you prohibit a drug like opium or coca or
some other things like that. People tend to say, Okay,
let's synthesize it, let's make it easier to smuggle, easier
to consume discreetly, and we push people away from the
less dangerous, more natural plant product towards a much more

(16:28):
compact and potent version. And that brings us to one
of the most controversial polemics about mind altering substances. That
for decades, the US and by extension, the world, has
been waging a war on drugs. America's public enemy Number

(16:55):
one in the United States is drug abuse. Nixon declared
a war on drugs fifty years ago. In order to
fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage
a new all out offensive. That rhetoric, those ideas, the
huge growth in the enforcement agencies, and then it kind

(17:17):
of quieted down during the Jimmy Carter days when you
actually had a fairly progressive mindset for a few years.
Then Reagan and that Reagan generation pushed it to the max,
making a final commitment not to tolerate drugs by anyone, anytime,
any place. And unfortunately it was very much of a

(17:39):
bipartisan effort. I mean, Tip O'Neill the very famous influential
Democratic Speaker of the House, Liberal Democrat Massachusetts. He was
totally on board the war on drugs too. You know,
you look a little like Tip O'Neill. Mhm. A lot
of people say that then under the first George Bush
took off like crazy. All of us agree that the

(18:00):
this domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs. The
first drugs are was a guy named William Bennett say
the War on drugs was a failure. It was not.
It was not, It was not who really was masterful
at advancing a right wing, reactionary political agenda in America
by playing on the fears around drugs among middle class

(18:21):
American parents. Talk to your kids about Office of Drugs.
Help your children to just say no. But you know,
the truth is you can go back to the refor
madness days of the third mat Juana, the burning weed,
with its roots in Hell. In this film you will
see the ease with which this vicious plan can be

(18:41):
grown in your neighbor's yard, ruled into harmless looking cigarettes
hidden in an innocent shoe. Some people say that what
brought us alcohol prohibition was the War on drugs, but
it was focused on alcohol Americans praise passing of the
dry law and then promptly perceived by every possible means
to repeat eighteenth Amendment. You can go back even further

(19:03):
in history and see other war on drugs happening in
other parts of the world. There were times in Europe
when there were efforts to crack down tobacco. China launched
its own warrn opium in the nationalist phase in only
twentieth century. If you look at what's going on the
Philippines right now, in some other Asian countries, they have
sometimes vicious wars on drugs. They don't exceed ours in

(19:26):
terms of mass incarceration, but in terms of the brutality
and authorizing police to conduct extrajudicial killings the President of
the Philippines do to day. He gave his cops a
green light to just go and shoot people. So wars
on drugs are not uniquely American phenomenon, but the United
States took it the furthest in terms of mass incarceration.

(19:49):
We also had our kind of prohibitionists abstinence only mentality,
and we became the chief proselytizer and promoter of global
drug prohibition from the early twentieth century until the early
years of the Obama administration. Substance abuse generally legal and illegal.
There's a problem locking somebody up for twenty years. It

(20:10):
is probably not the best strategy. Domestically, the issue has
oftentimes been tied up with race. If you ask why
are some drugs legal and other drugs illegal, it has
relatively little to do with the relative dangers of drugs
and almost everything to do with who use it and
who is perceived to use particular drugs. So that connection

(20:33):
in the American consciousness of drugs with black people, brown people,
especially with Chinese people in the late nineteenth century, that's
always been a very prominent element. And that same racism
and discrimination based on ethnicity has played out not just
in the US but many other countries around the world
as well. Because most of these drugs were being imported

(20:55):
from abroad, you saw that become a big issue in
foreign policy met to cult for example, at one point
Nixon closed the border. It's become a big issue with
cocaine coming out of Olivia, Peru, oft times via Colombia
and in Mexico. So it became a number one issue
in our relationships with some of those countries. Sometimes there
were countries like Paraguay where you basically had the narclas

(21:17):
takeover government. It was a complicated issue in Afghanistan. So
there's always been that international dimension where to appeal to
the renter if we've gotta stop drugs from coming into
this country. When it comes to keeping drugs away from kids,
people worry about, oh, we legalized marijuana for adults, more
kids are gonna be using it. But that was bullshit.
Throughout the last fifty years, if you ask who's had

(21:39):
the best access to marijuana in America, it's always been
the kids, the adolescent. Even as marijuana he's went up
and down, up and down, up and down, always eighty
percent of high school kids. We're saying marijuana is easy
to get. And in fact, since we started legalizing marijuana,
you know, beginning with Colorado Washington in twelve, there's been
almost no increase in analysts and marijuana use. The big
increase has been among people in their forties, fifties, sixties, seventies,

(22:02):
and eighties. The ones who did have access to it,
the ones who because it was illegal, didn't want to
use it. We're the ones where that you see a
double trippling quadrupling abuse. All of this begs the question
how effective is the war on drugs or has it
been effective at all? I mean, it's very hard to

(22:24):
find any examples of success. Fifty years ago when most
heroin was coming from Turkey through what was called the
French Connection into the US, and there was a period
when we were able to crack down on Turkey and
crack down the French connection, and there was a brief
shortage of heroin in the US. Or there was another
moment when there was a laboratory in Mexico brucing FENTONYL

(22:48):
and d e A, and Mexican police succeeded in shutting
it down and that cut off the flow of ventinel briefly.
But apart from a couple of rare examples, there are
thousands of cases of trying to reproduce their success and
failing simply because where there is a demand, there's going
to be suppot and you crack down in one place,
it's gonna pop up somewhere else. You knock out disproduction area,

(23:12):
it's gonna pop in another production area. You pop out
of this drug traffic and you network that's gonna pop
in another drug trafficking network. You make it harder to
expert the stuff to us, and Americans are gonna start
producing and stuff you cracked down on nest labs in
the US Mexico, that's gonna step up. And of course
it's ludicrous because our borders are so open that if
there were a market for heroin in this country of

(23:33):
ten times what's currently coming in, it would come in.
There's no way to stop it. Not when you have
endless numbers of shipping containers and boats and planes and
you name it, and people coming in. There's no way
to keep drugs out of the country. But it always
appealed to politicians sense of playing on people's fears around
what was coming in from abroad. I just think the

(23:54):
evidence of the drug war in terms of reducing the
use of drugs or making them less of available, they've
made them less available than if they were fully legal.
But the negative consequences in terms of incarcerations, in terms
of now maybe one to one and a half trillion
dollars wasted on the War on drugs over the last
fifty years, in terms of people using drugs that are

(24:16):
more dangerous because they come from the black market, in
terms of violations of civil liberties and human rights in
terms of empowering gangsters. Never Mind the millions and millions
and millions of people, disproportionately young men of color, who
have been locked up and arrested and have their lives derailed.
Never Mind the hundreds of thousands of people who have
been fired from their jobs for testing positive for marijuana use,

(24:36):
even though it was having no impact on their job
performance at all. America was profoundly irrational around drugs, and
much the same way we were with alcohol prohibition. We
understood that these drugs could be problematic and dangerous. We
then made this silly assumption that if we banned them,
the problem would go away, maybe reducing the number of consumers,

(24:58):
but dramatically increasing the broad or set of problems that resulted. So,
if you can't stop drugs from being made, bought, shipped,
or consumed, and the battle for those efforts is just
as costly as any war with no end in sight,
what should we be doing instead? Re Educating people on

(25:28):
issues of drug regulation by separating political rhetoric from actual
data was to become the subject of Ethan's life's work.
In I finished my PhD, I got a job teaching
at Princeton Politics and Public Affairs, and interestingly, the dean
invited me to teach a class on drug policy there,

(25:49):
and then I wrote it three articles and as a
result I got catapulted into like these two bursts of
fifteen minutes of faith and tonight's great debate is the
war on drugs of failure. We have eight hundred thousand
Americans arrested last year simply for possessing a joint where
I was all over the national media, all over television

(26:09):
on the other side of this. Ethan Nathan, specialist today,
Ethan Nathan, thanks so much for joining us this morning.
Ethan Nadelman, Thanks very much for being here. Ethan Aedeman,
Welcome to Democracy Now. Ethan, it's a pleasure. Welcome to
Freedom Watch. Ethan Nadelman, Welcome to our show. That was
only in my young thirties and I was speaking around
the world and a major events. This feels like a

(26:32):
serious altered state of consciousness around But there was a
single moment that cemented it all for Ethan, a clarity
about where he fit in this world of drug discourse.
And it just so happened to come while he was
tripping I did mushrooms in nine for the first time
in seven years. It wasn't really an epiphany. It was

(26:54):
more a kind of realization that this was my calling
in life to teach people about drugs, and that it
did not matter if I was going to stay in
academia or go into journalism or writing or politics or
run an advocacy organization. And out of the blue I
got a phone call from a guy named George Soros,

(27:16):
prominent financier who was not yet well known it He
was interested in this issue, and we hit it off
and he said to me, well, look, I'm a busy man,
but as substantial resources. So let's assume I want to
empower you to accomplish our common objectives. George's instincts on
the issue are right. I then educated about harm reduction

(27:38):
and needle exchange and medical neural want and all the issues,
and we have formed an effective partnership which resulted in
my setting up this organization, first within this foundation and
then independently in what became the Drug Policy Alliance. I
support the Drug Policy Alliance because it fosters debate on
drug policy. Because the world were under represents an extraordinary

(28:01):
violation of human rights, because whether you use drugs or not,
you deserve to be treated with respect, kindness, and dignity.
The Drug Policy Alliance or d p A is a
New York based nonprofit that is still in existence today.
Ethan would serve as the organization's executive director. Initially, it

(28:22):
was just about putting out the ideas, but beginning around
we realized that there were a few issues were a
majority of Americans thought that the war on drugs had
gone too far. One of those was that a majority
of Americans had come to believe that people who use
marijuana as a medicine with a doctor's recommendation should not
be treated as criminals. And the other was that most

(28:43):
Americans believed that if somebody got arrested for possessing any drug,
even heroin and meth amphetamine, and they had a drug
problem and they weren't violent, they should be given at
least a few opportunities for drug treatment before they got
put away. And that gave us a foot in the
door to pass other ballot initiatives. Time to vote on
recreational marijuana is here, so we began to get much

(29:05):
more political, beginning in late es to see how do
we pass these reforms through the ballot initiative process, through
state legislation, through Congress, and then of course the public
education side, and bit by bit I built up the organization.
So when I stepped down that we're about seventy five
people working at Drug Policy Alliance. We had a budget
of or fifteen million, offices and about half a dozen

(29:27):
states around the country, some doing some work internationally as well.
Really saw myself as building not just an organization, but
really a political movement to end the war on drugs
and to promote alternatives that were grounded in science, compassion, health,
and human rights. Because issues around drugs are so complex.
Part of making the Drug Policy Alliance an effective resource

(29:50):
was keeping its objectives clear. I'd say one third of
our work focused on ending marijuana prohibition, first from article
and then more broadly. The second third focused on rolling
back the role of the War on drugs and mass incarceration,
and the last third focused on treating drug use and

(30:10):
addiction truly as a health issue, not a criminal issue.
It was basically those three things and seeing myself engaged
in sort of the first generation of a multi generational struggle.
The d p A also drew a diverse crowd of supporters,
each with their own agendas. I relished when I was
building drug policy alliance did have people coming from every perspective.

(30:34):
I could look at the audience and see in one
row there was a guy who had hemp leaves in
his hair. It was something for your couple. Next to
them was somebody who was anti marijuana, but anti incarceration.
I think a man working outdoors. She feels more like
a man. You can have a bottle of suns. Sitting
next to them was a guy who had been incarcerated
for fifteen years on a minor cocaine charge and now

(30:57):
comate dads. We can see that's not duck walk anymore.
Sitting next to them was a guy who's been a
law enforcement officer for twenty five years and realized the
drug war resute tile. I hate this job. I hate
this job, and I don't need it. Sitting next to
them would be a young woman from Vietnam who was
doing needle exchange programs and pushing in city. You're gonna
give it, You're gonna give the shot. Sitting next to

(31:19):
them would be a person working for a labor union
trying to persuade the labor unions to embrace marijuana legalization.
MR we have on this strike we wanted the minute
we started across this railroad car. Sitting next to them
would be somebody who's a leading psychedelics researcher. Like knocking
at the door with a brick. When the door is opened,
you don't carry the brick inside. Sitting next to them

(31:40):
would be somebody who was going from the coca growers
union in Latin America? Where did you get this stuff?
And for me, the challenge is how do you take
all of those people and understand that they are in
a common struggle. The line I used to use is
who are we did of Policy Alliance? Who are we

(32:01):
the drug policy reform movement? We're the people who love drugs,
we're the people who hate drugs, and we're the people
who don't give it damn about drugs. But every one
of us believe that the war on drugs is the
wrong way to go, and that therefore what matters is
not your relationship to drugs, which might be fantastic or horrific.
It's about understanding that a punitive, criminalized, moralistic approach is

(32:26):
inevitably going to result in more harm than good, and
what we need is rationality, compassion, respect for human rights,
respect for science. Even though the vantage points on this
issue are innumerable, there's no point in preaching to the choir.
The really interesting conversations for me are sometimes with people

(32:49):
who may not fully share my set of values, who
are more instinctually conservative or don't agree with some of
the human rights elements, but they're open, and for me,
it's like, how do I get past their instinctive defenses
to try to open them up to seeing things in
a new way. You know, there's twenty percent of the

(33:09):
country which is just ideologically on the other side. They
move in, they're invested in it, But then there's a
big part of the country which is just part of
the conventional anti drug discourse. And the challenge therefore is
how do you bring him to a new way of thinking.
How do you get a parent whose kid died of
an overdose and whose first instinct is to just go

(33:32):
out and execute all the drug dealers, how do you
get them to understand that that's not going to solve
anything and there's another way to deal with this. How
do you get cops to understand why legalizing is actually
gonna be good not just for the broader society, but
from where they sit. One of my challenges is talking

(33:52):
to people in the marijuana psychedelics world and getting them
to understand that the same principles they bring to marijuana
psychedelics also have to apply in some way to the
drugs like opioids and no antheta means not that we
would make them letally available in the same way, but
that the principles around sovereignty of your own mind and
body have to extend even to those growing The Drug

(34:14):
Policy Alliance didn't leave a lot of time for much else.
A lot of my time was consumed with basically building
an organization. I used to write a lot in both
academic and popular publications, but at some point my most
creative writing goes and interacting with billionaires. So I'm trying
to raise money from the amount of time I was

(34:35):
spend interacting with media I had to balance with running organization.
I could also only accept so many public speaking engagements,
so there were the things that I decided to pull
back from in order to build an organization and to
empower young people so that they could becoming the next
generation of leaders in this area. In January, after more

(34:58):
than two decades at the Helm, Ethan stepped down from
the dp AM. When I stopped bringing drug policy alliance,
I was just happy not to talk about drugs for
a while, because I was talking about drugs around the
clock forever and ever. I go on a vacation, start
chatting with some people you meet and they say, oh,
what do you do? Instantly I'd be bla, la la

(35:18):
la la lah, you know, same thing over and over again.
So it was nice to just kind of shut up
for a while, and so retired. Ethan took a turn
living the quiet life until one day he got a
call from a filmmaker friend of his. When Darren Aronovski
first reached out to me, he asked me if I

(35:39):
want to do a podcast at psychedelics, and my response
was nope, I want to do it on all drugs. Psychoactive,
which debuted in July, features one on one interviews with
leading minds from across the ideological spectrum and frank discussions
about drugs, from signs to policy, and even stories of

(36:02):
personal drug use. The thing about the podcast was it
gave me a reason to re engage with the whole
issue of drugs and drug policy. So it's given me
a reason to touch base again with people who I missed,
and I like, you know, I can talk with the
former president of Columbia. President Santo's welcome. Thank you so
much for joining me. Thank you, and I'm very very

(36:23):
glad to be here with you. But I've known him
since two thousand and twelve and not with him when
he was president. One of the challenges is are they
gonna peet the people who want to tune in one
week to hear about the latest and psychedelics research, the
next week about the overdose problem, the next week about Afghanistan,
the next week about the latest book by Michael Pollan,

(36:44):
And that's what we're gonna see. Will it be an
audience where the common link is it's me as a
host PSYCHOEDDI drugs the subject, But that's going to cover
incredibly wide spectrum of issues. I got one more question.
I know You've been asked this before, but I said,
feel like I need to, Like, I mean, what is
the upshot of it look like? Like? What's a better
world look like? What's a better America? Is that all

(37:06):
drugs being legal? I mean, I think, first of all,
simple possession of any substance for your own use should
not be a crime, even if it's messa amphetamine, heroin,
some synthetic drugs. If you're only using it for your
own use, it's a matter of personal freedom, human rights, sovereignty, civilibrities,
you name it. None of the governor's business, none of

(37:26):
my employer's business. That's that when it comes to how
we make it available and whether we make it legally
available over the counter, we need to come up with
the balanced, sensible taxation policies, regulatory policies. But I think
ultimately it boils down to accepting that there's almost never
been a drug free society in human history. There's certainly

(37:46):
not going to be one in the future. And that's
the challenge is not how to get rid of drugs.
It's not how to build a moat between drugs and ourselves,
or even between drugs and our children, because that's impossible.
It's really how to learn how to live with these drugs,
these plants and chemicals. So they call us the least
possible harm and in many cases the greatest possible benefit,

(38:08):
where we can turn what's been this kind of big crisis,
ugly problem involving people dying of overdose and vast numbers
of people getting arrested incarcerated into a small problem, whereas
people still get hurt, but not as severely or as
frequently as they do now, and where people still go
to jail because they're not obeying the rules around legally

(38:28):
regulated markets, but if they do, it's a much smaller
number and not for so long. Where we have honest
drug education, where young people learn that there's no such
thing as a good or bad drugs, they're only good
or bad relationships with drugs, and more responsible or less
responsible ways to use that say that, you know, the

(38:49):
great blessing in life is to find a way to
get paid for something you're passionate about and then you
enjoy doing. Not many people get that, but I looked
into that by finding my only in an early age
and effectively getting paid to do what I wanted to
do with my life, whether it was my appreciation of
marijuana or my anger at seeing people getting busted, or

(39:10):
my mushroom trip or what have you. No regrets. This
episode of Ephemeral was written an assembled by Max and

(39:31):
Alex Williams, with producers Trevor Young and Matt Frederick Ethan
Nadelman's weekly podcast is Psychoactive, a co production of iHeart
Radio and Darren Aronofsky's Protozoa Pictures. Find out wherever you
listen to podcasts and find us at e Fhemeral Dot Show.

(39:52):
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio
Act Apple Podcasts. Wherever you listen to your favorite ships
wo