Dan Savage on Sex, Drugs and Freedom

Dan Savage is the famed podcaster and columnist on sex and relationships. We talked all about drugs and sex – what works, what doesn’t, how our brains are wired for risk, and how there’s no clear line between use and abuse when it comes to sex or drugs. We got personal, with Dan describing how MDMA (“Ecstasy”) saved his marriage. And we compared perspectives on the struggles for gay rights and for drug policy reform. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi. I'm Ethan Natalman and this is Psychoactive, a production
of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
views expressed here do not represent those of I Heeart Media,
Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed, Heed, as

(00:23):
an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may not
even represent my own and nothing contained in this show
should be used as medical advice or encouragement to use
any type of drug. In this episode will also be
talking about sex and sexual assault. I have a feeling

(00:44):
that today's podcast is going to be particularly interesting and
maybe pushing boundaries and and maybe pushing buttons. Uh. My
guest today is Dan Savage. Thirty years ago, Dan started
writing a column my sex and relationships for the alternative
newspaper in Seattle called The Stranger and that thing or

(01:05):
less thirty years has become syndicated all around the United States.
And then since then he's also started his own podcast,
which is called Savage Love Cast. So, Dan, thanks so
much for joining me. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to have this
conversation too. Yeah, So listen, let me first ask you.
I mean, I think you and I are going to
land up agreeing on a lot of stuff, So I'm

(01:28):
going to try to probably tie some issues as well
and see what we can mudge out some disagreements here.
But tell me, I mean, basically, what's your frame of
mind when you're thinking about drugs and sex? If I
just put those two words together, you know, I'm not
opposed to mixing them. There's a lot of people out there,
particularly with the conversation we've been having about consent and
informed consent and meaningful consent, who are arguing that any

(01:50):
impairment at all means to consent wasn't real, authentic, genuine,
freely given. And I disagree you. Sex makes us all nervous.
There's a reason why a lot of people need to
have a little bit of social lubricant of whatever form
before they head out in search of sex. Some people
need to medicate a bit with alcohol or other drugs

(02:14):
to find the courage to ask for what they want.
It's a slippery slope, though, because you can wind up
in a place where you're not thinking straight, you're not
reading another person's cues correctly. Uh, you're so nervous and
and repressed that you have to not just lubricate yourself
a bit socially, but flood the zone to such an

(02:35):
extent that you go a little crazy or aren't advocating
for yourself in the moment an effective way, and you
could end up being traumatized or harmed or traumatized or
harms someone else. So it's a it's a weird place,
you know. They're these two pressures um insects with with
mixing sex and drug sex and alcohol where it can

(02:56):
make sex and that kind of connection possible can help
believe be at our anxiety or on going order asking
for it, but too much can magnify the harm potentially
that non consensual sex are just sex. It leads you
feeling violated, even if you know the person who violated
you was you when it's over, and so you have

(03:18):
to approach it cautiously and carefully, which is not how
everyone does it. Okay, So I told you I might
dredge up some stuff from things you've written or said
in the past. Okay, So okay, Well, I gotta say
something first. I've been writing for thirty years. Like, sometimes
you write something, you think some more, you write some more,
you think differently, and then people will bring something up,
especially in the Internet age, because everything you've ever written

(03:40):
is on websites that you know have ads for movies
that came out this week. So everything you've ever written
with like you published it yesterday. Man, I can relate.
I started writing this stuff in eighties seven, and I
look at some of the framing, the language I used
back in the eighties. But let me tell you, let
me let me see how you respond to the dance
Savage of two thousand and three. Okay, you've got it
on your Savage log column. Somebody wrote to you about

(04:02):
uh female college sophomore's boyfriend. She was in a relationship,
but then she found out that he had also been
screwing some other women and using cocaine, and you right
back to where he goes. First, of all, coke is
not a date rape drug. Date rate drugs has commonly
understood her substances that render a girl helpless. Practically, comment
tose obliterator will in any ability to resist. If anything,

(04:23):
Cocaine would have to be considered the opposite of a
date rate drug, being pressured into having sex that you
regret the next morning does not mean that you were raped.
Being seduced does not mean that you were raped. Nor
does consenting to sex when you were drunk or high.
So what do you think we just stand viol those
words or pull back from some of them in this
new context. I would pull back from some of them

(04:43):
in this new context. Yet I wouldn't pull back as
far as others might. Certainly, now there's this awareness that
I have this awareness. I've thought through this about coercion,
but also about the way men are socialized and the
way women are socialized, and that women will often go
along with what a man seems to want in the
moment for fear of violence, to to de escalate the situation.

(05:07):
A lot of women will consent to sex, whether they're
drunk or high or not, because they fear that the
guy that they're with may do something worse than have
sex with them that they don't want or aren't enjoying
if they say no. And men, I think have to
be hyper conscious of that going into any sexual interactions
with women. Thank God, I'm gay, sometimes they think not
that this cad play out in same sex relationships as well.

(05:28):
Men have to control for that and in some ways
overcompensate for that. You may get the yes that you
hope to get, you need to verify that that was
an authentic yes, and that that wasn't yes because you
scare me. And what you don't want to do is
get into situation where you get unenthusiastic consent or inauthentic

(05:49):
consent or panicked consent, or consent that was granted reluctantly
because the woman felt coerced by the circumstances into having sex.
And I don't think most men want to have that
kind of sex. I don't think most men want to
have sex where you know, technically it seemed to be consensual,
but the woman felt violated afterwards. Uh, most men aren't monsters.

(06:10):
Other men who are monsters at least have some sort
of self preservation instinct these days around not wanting to
get into a ME two situation like that, And we'll
go to greater lengths. So I think that two thousand
three column was a little, which is almost twenty years old,
a little too glib with those distinctions. I was being
a little too technical in a way that gave men

(06:34):
advantage or license that men don't deserve and shouldn't take.
So there's you know, this phrase kem sex right, you know,
And I came across some of the fellow named David
Stewart who said he coined the term, and it refers
specifically to gay men in the use of particular drugs
crystal math, g H, b gb L, casinoe, things like that,

(06:55):
UM and other people to find it more broadly. But
here's the question I want to ask you, right, So,
so when people are entering, especially younger people, entering a
situation where drugs and sex, like, we're gonna talk a
lot on this show about drugs, set and setting, right,
the basic idea that how drugs impact you have as
much to do with the set in the setting as
they do with the drugs themselves. And obviously the same

(07:16):
it is going to be true with issues around sex
and possibly issues around consent. So somebody's going to a party,
a club, whatever, it's one where sexual contact is understood
to be part of what's the scene. Somebody's taking drugs
because they want to release some of those inhibitions, they
want to explore some aspects of their sexuality or whatever

(07:37):
in that context, and in that context, they are way
out there and doing all sorts of ship that they
may love in the moment but feel bad about the
next day, and that's on them, okay, And that's I
think a real risk of this actually repressive culture is
that some people the only way they can give themselves
permission to do what they want to do is to

(08:00):
put themselves in a situation where they don't feel there
in control. You know, they basically self medicate the shame
and inhibition away, and then when the drugs wear off,
when the shame and inhibition come rolling back in like
the tide, you can end up feeling awful about yourself
about what you did, about the people that you did
those things with, or did those things to you, Which

(08:20):
is why I think. You know, I'm very opposed to
crystal math. I think it's a terrible drug. You know.
I'm gay, and I've certainly had my fund and my
crazy experiences. I've never participated in chem sex sessions where
chem sex parties I would experience them as to humanizing
in a way that I don't think that I would

(08:41):
have a good time. But I've had friends who enjoyed
that scene. I've had friends who were destroyed by that scene.
I've also had friends who were destroyed by just sex
without chems. So everything is a hammer. Basically, you can
build something or you can beat your brains out with it.
Chem sex. I think it's a particularly dangerous. Yeah, yeah,
I mean it was a time, must have been early
two thousands and meth amptheta mean was taken off in

(09:03):
the kind of gay club scene in New York and
there was a sort of split I think in the
gay community. And I remember being invited to give a
talk at Gay Men's Health Crisis where they were fighting
over the issue could there be such a thing as
safe sex with meth amptheta mean? Could there be such
a thing as harm reduction with meth amphetamine? Both of
us know a phone name. I think it was Peter
Staley who was like putting out, you know, ads on

(09:25):
New York City corners condemning meth and you know that,
really making a campaign, and it was weird. It was
obviously trying to discourage young gay men from doing this stuff,
but it was feeding into a stigmatization, demonization campaign as well.
So if you had a friend of yours, a younger
friend coming and saying Dan like, you know, I really
want to try this. I have a few friends who
have done it and hasn't been a problem so far. Yeah, No,

(09:48):
it's weird. I remember Peter Staley to do that ad
campaign about math. You know, Peter and I had kind
of a run in about um prep because I predicted
and I think I've been vindicated by the warding in
the data. Like just explained to our our listeners what
PREP pre exposure prophylaxics. It's a drug that gay men
and other men who have sex with men can take

(10:08):
so that basically prevents HIV infection. HIV negative men on
PREP and HIV positive men who have access to drugs
and care who have undetectable viral loads are not capable
of passing on HIV, which is why we've seen just
a rapid plummeting and HIV infections. But PREP doesn't protect
you from the other sexually transmitted infections, and so of

(10:28):
course it led to a huge spike and syphilis and
gnaria and chlamydia among gay men who stopped using condoms
because now they were on prep. Um. Anyway, you go
back to Peter and meth and there in the harm
reduction movement, which really started around HIV and condoms. That's
when that idea kind of got injected, uh into the

(10:50):
gay health discourse. There seemed to be a lot of
permission seeking flying under the banner of harm reduction or
being wandered through harm reduction, because people would argue that,
you know, gay men were shamed for being gay, therefore
you shouldn't shame gay men for using math and staying
up for four days and having sex with you know,

(11:10):
eighty people at a never ending party where nobody ever
stepped out to have food or a glass of water
and never slept, and you were participating in the shaming
of other gay men. If you said that sounds like
a bad idea. That sounds like an unsustainable sexual lifestyle,

(11:31):
if I could use that word, certainly an unsustainable sexual ecosystem,
and not an environment where people are going to be,
you know, exercising their best judgment. And you don't always
want to exercise your best judgment when you're having sex.
Sometimes you do want to take risks. We're wired for risk.
Risk is sexually arousing. Risk is exciting. Remember like Clinton
getting those blow jobs from Mirk Clominsky off the Oval

(11:51):
office and people are like, why would he do that,
it's so dangerous. Exactly why he did it because it
was so dangerous. The truth is, risk is arousing, and
we all want a certain amount of risk in our
sex lives. It's why I'm always in the position of
advising people have been together ten twenty years who say
there's no passion, the spark has gone. Sex is and
exciting to engineer risk, to take risks together as a couple,

(12:12):
because at the beginning of the relationship, you're the adventure.
There on their the adventure you're on. They're like taking
a chance on you. They don't know if you're an
X murder or Jeffrey Dahmer or not, and vice versa.
And so getting naked with somebody for the first couple
of dozen times is scary in this reptile brain way
that getting naked with somebody that you've been with for
ten years never can be We'll be talking more after

(12:37):
we hear this. Add It's funny, Well, you would say
to a long term couple, try out some danger and risk.
I would probably say try out some drugs. Oh, the

(12:59):
drugs are something I recommend to long term couples frequently,
And so which ones are you recommending? Uh, you know,
I think ecstasy saved my marriage. Terry and I were
at a real low point and we got a cabin
on the Pacific coast and took a weekend away and
did he on Saturday, and we're really able to reconnect
in what wasn't the drug talking. The drug was allowing

(13:22):
us to talk, uh, in an authentic way. And I
think ecstasy saved my marriage. I recommended m d m
A to couples. Well, Dan, let let me stop with
you with the m d m A thing, because I say,
in my marriage, m d m A did not save
our marriage, but I think it helped us come to
a softer landing where we then became very good friends
thereafter and continue to be so and co raised her
daughter and things like that. I could see m DA

(13:44):
doing that too. Yeah, but but I mean, you can't
take it every day, so obviously want is to bring
those lessons into your life going forward. How did you
and Terry take that experience and bring it forward in
a way that didn't just wear off after a few
weeks or months. It just surfaced a lot of love
that had and buried under a lot of resentment. And
score keeping, and our personal lives are very complicated. We're

(14:06):
polly amorous and have other boyfriends, and that requires a
lot of sort of tense negotiation and scheduling, as all
the Polly people will tell you, And we had sort
of lost sight of not just each other, but the
fact that being with him allowed me to have my
boyfriend too, and being with me allowed him to have
his boyfriend who and being with me men he didn't

(14:27):
have to choose, and being with him and I didn't
have to choose, and neither of us wanted to choose.
And we were able to talk about that in a
way that that became sort of a focal point of
our affection and regard for each other, that this thing
that we've been fighting about was actually a thing that
had value, and that was a demonstration of our love

(14:47):
for each other that we were in negotiation about these
things that we had managed for years to find a
way to not finesse but allow, you know, the conversation
we had on e really land in a place where
we said, we're gonna love and support and leave each other,
or we're gonna love and support and let each other.

(15:08):
And we weren't able to have that conversation in the
way that we did before we took E, and you know,
had this wave of the surfacing of the love that
was there. It wasn't like the E was creating feelings
of love. It was unleashing them and unburying them. And
I really, honestly, you know, we didn't do it in

(15:29):
a controlled clinical setting. We didn't have a couple's counselor
at our elbows. We weren't in a therapist office. We
were on the ocean on a beach, just the two
of us, um with some m d m A that
we acquired the traditional way or the you know, I
guess you could say getting it from a couple of
scounsel was the traditional way before it was criminalized, because

(15:50):
it had been used in couples counseling up until the seventies.
But we had to get it from you know, friends
who can access those things, and it really helped us.
Did you continue to use it to reconnect, to re
reprocess these issues thereafter? We haven't. And you know, we
had used you once when we first met each other
twenty six almost seven years ago, recreationally, and we have

(16:15):
it in the house and we've talked about it, but
we haven't done it again. But we keep saying to
each other like we're gonna get away for a weekend
and and do you again. It almost feels like a
tune up. But this was probably two years ago, year
and a half ago. Oh is that recently? Yeah? And
I've always said to when drugs come up in my
talks at colleges that I guess, except for work, I

(16:36):
don't have a very addictive personality. And whenever I found
a drug that I really enjoyed, my responses and oh,
I'm gonna do that every day. My response is I'm
going to put that on the shelf so that when
I do want to do that again, it has as
big an impact as it did today or last night.
And so you know that E worked for us so
well that weekend doesn't mean we've done the every weekend since.

(16:58):
To tolerate each other, yea, well it when worked out.
I mean, you know, look from I think about the
role for me in my life, I mean, I'm sort
of your basic, you know, heterosexual serial monogamist, and for me,
N d m A has played a role beginning in
my thirties until maybe ten years ago when it stopped
really working for me. It's really in processing issues in
a relationship. You know. It is the way of kind

(17:19):
of clearing out talking basically what you're talking about. And
it wasn't obviously every week thing. It was a kind
of once a year sort of thing um to really
process those kinds of issues. And isn't it interesting how
people will take E and then say very loving things,
and then someone will dismiss them and say it's just
the drug talking. It's almost as if we're afraid of

(17:40):
the enormity of the affection and feelings of love that
he can surface that our response to them, and not
just individually, but I think culturally because you see this
in sort of writing about E or representations of taking
E in films, is this rush to dismiss whatever was
that are done us as a lot? Well, you know,

(18:03):
I think there has to be some element of consciousness
around it though, because people ask me about ecstasy E
and I'll say, I say, look, it's a drug. It's
not a sex drug. It's more a hug drug. Oh god, yeah, No,
it's not a sex drug. It's more of an No,
it doesn't it's you know, you may get aroused, but
it's not You're not gonna be orgasming in that way,
and that it's also I also say, it's a drug
that will make you feel warmly towards strangers, lovingly towards friends,

(18:26):
and profoundly in love with your lover. But what I
also know is at the times I did, I knew
right from the beginning that it could wear off and
that there could be a tendency even among people have
done it, and it felt these incredible feelings of love
for those things to fade and say it's just the drugs.
And so part of I remember the first time sort
of sitting looking at my life at the time while
we're on it and just looking at the eye and saying,

(18:47):
this is going to fade. Let's think about how we
come back, you know, during the week and the months ahead,
where we try to bring up this feeling again without
the drug, because we know that you know, all drugs
basically trigger alter states of consciousness. You know that can
be triggered without those drugs. The question is learning how
to teach yourself to trigger those things. So and I
think it's easier to trigger those things if you've experienced

(19:10):
them as intensely as he can help you experience him
like like I love my husband. Uh I certainly when
it's just you know, he and I in the couch
watching TV in a very similar physical position as we
were on that deck, and you know, on the coast
of Washington, like I'll feel that I love him. I
don't feel this like, oh my god, I'm turning inside out.

(19:30):
I love him, right, But that turning inside out feeling
from two years ago helps me identify that feeling even
when you know life and stress and family ship has
buried it. I think it's more easily surfaced. That's the
word I always come to that, like he helped us
surface a bunch of stuff that just the the accrual

(19:52):
of time and conflict. Life is a grind and and
one of the traps of people who are an open
relationships or polyamorous relationships can fall into is that you're
a spouse or your committed partner. Your primary partner is
the one you have to talk with about the rent
and putting a new roof on the house, and conflicts
about kids and deal with a family crisis, and the

(20:16):
boyfriend is who you turn to for fun, and you
have to make a really conscious effort not to just
have all the fun with the secondary partners and all
the grind with the primary partner. That makes sense. What
about psychedelics as they played a role in your life?
I took acid in college and it was uh okay

(20:38):
and not very strong. My then best friend and I
were like wandering around this huge performance arts center looking
at the woodwork and it was kind of like moving
and I saw like lizard patterns, very like an Escher
print in the floor. And then like twenty years later,
I was in a gay bar and somebody offered me
acid and I took it, expecting that sort of slightly

(20:59):
visually enhanced to experience. And then an hour later they
asked me if I was feeling anything, and I said no.
When they asked me if I wanted another hit, and
I took it and the first hit hadn't hit yet,
and then the first hit hit, and then the second
hit hit, and nobody told me that in the intervening
twenty years the power of acid had increased by some
exponential effect. And I saw that place that people don't

(21:20):
come back from. So I am afraid of acid and
kind of don't want to ever do it again. After
what about mushrooms or ayahuasca. Also, I was in a
gay bar on Halloween in drag judging a costume contest,
and then everybody in the bar found out I was
tripping my head off on acid and was fucking with
me all night. But I couldn't leave because I didn't

(21:42):
trust that the sidewalk was actually not the ocean. So
you basically violated harm reduction one O one principles in
terms of where and how you did that stuff. Yeah,
I was very uninformed about acid the second time I
did it and not prepared for that. I've done mushrooms
a couple of times. Um did mushrooms last pretty recently

(22:03):
with my husband's boyfriend. We had some mushroom tea together
and watched cats uh huh, which I think is the
only way to watch cats uh, but not the only
thing to do while on mushrooms. But for you and
mushrooms and sex has not been a thing. No, no,
And like a little bit of pot and sex, sometimes
a little bit of alcohol and sex. But I'm a

(22:24):
I'm grateful. I'm a sober sex kind of person. I'm
not like strictly always, but I've seen a lot of
gay men self medicate with alcohol and drugs so that
they can have sex without being paralyzed by shame, without
feeling guilty or conflicted, and it can create a really
powerful association. I think it can carve a deep groove
in someone. That's often what I see going on with

(22:48):
the people that I have known, And that's an important distinction.
I'm not gonna say my friends who got into keem sex,
because I have very few friends who got into keem sex,
because I didn't know anybody who got into kem sex
who came back from it in one piece. Some didn't
come back from it at all, some died, but nobody
emerged from a couple of years in kem sex whole

(23:12):
enough to have a friendship with. I think it's very
deeply damaging. There. There's some things I don't think harm
reduction applies to, Like the harm reduction doesn't apply to
Russian Roulette with five bullets in the gun, and that's
keem secks. Well, I mean, you're more of an expert
on these angles than I am. But I do know
people who would say, you know that anything can potentially

(23:34):
have a harm reduction approach to it, and that there's
understanding that there are ways to use some of these
substances which can enhance sexual intensity, etcetera um, and to
dabble in these things without going whole more into them.
And there's sometimes a bias in what we hear about
stories because the people who screw up on drugs are
the ones we always hear about, whereas the people who
use it with some responsibility control are the ones that

(23:55):
keep it quiet, don't talk about it is so stigmatized
in the eyes of everybody else they don't want to
be disapproved to even though they're used to doing it
in a you know, blah blah blah blah blah. It's
funny you should throw that at me, because I've always
said that about three ways and open relationships, particularly for
straight people. Straight people would always say, like, three ways
always mean the relationship collapses. It's always the end, and

(24:16):
open relationships always fail, and no, it's those are the
ones you heard about. If your parents had a three
way or your dad cheated and your parents got divorced,
you heard about it. If they didn't get divorced, you
didn't hear about it. So you knew lots of couples,
straight couples who were successfully open or successfully sexually adventurous
without the relationship following your part. You just didn't know
you knew them exactly. Maybe it's the same thing for

(24:38):
me and people who can have one weekend a year
where they do a bunch of math. And I draw
a distinction between ketamine math and what's the other one?
Uh h b HB Yeah, yeah, although you know there's
an argument for low do sam fetamine that's also is
different between KIM six oftentimes evolves very high dose stuff

(24:58):
and you know, a lot of times with drugs, it's
all about the yeah, no, you're not going there, Okay,
you know, I don't want to push in it. You know,
I'm not. I'm not going to push drugs on you
or tell you to give it a try. Um, but
I did math ones well, I'm talking also not about
meth amphetamine in the you know, heavy form, you know
the way, the way same which ways in which you know,
millions of young adolescent boys are prescribed you know riddle

(25:21):
in which is basically an amphetamine type drug, and if
you were to snort or inject that, it would be
like meth amphetamine. And conversely, if you were to take
mess amphetamine in a small pill form, it would be
more like the riddle and the kids are taking And
there may well be an argument that, um, you know,
taking in a very low dose, perhaps combined with cannabis,
might actually be a positive thing. Only one of your
teeth will fall out. Well, speaking from personal experience, no

(25:45):
teeth fell out, and it's got its benefits, you know. Um,
I actually did do math one time, and this is
like I think this was literally a plot line on
Girls on HBO. I had done a little bit of
cocaine in college. I just moved to Seattle. I was
twenty five or went four years old, and I was
offered a white powdery substance to snort by somebody that

(26:06):
I was having a three way with and I did
it and then he told me it was math. Because
I was like, wow, that is some shitty tasting cocaine.
Because I had done a bunch of coking college A
bunch relative for me, a bunch. I've done it like
probably a dozen times. Uh, And I was not happy
about it, and I was up for two days and

(26:27):
I felt like ship and I didn't do that much.
Uh huh. You know that's a data point. That's not
a trend, and that's an anecdote, not data. But it
just confirmed for me that math wasn't for me, and
and I had a deep and I had better understanding
about the guys. I'd seem destroyed by it because I
couldn't imagine putting that in my body on a regular basis. No, right,

(26:50):
But it actually the truth is day and it really
does come down to the dose and with the way
you consume it and consuming it orally is opposed to
storting or injecting it and the dose level being substantially different.
And that's true. We really all drugs in a way.
I was just gonna say, like one cocktail versus thirty
exactly exactly. Alcohol poisoning can kill you. But like you
brought it up in the context of these chem sex parties,

(27:12):
Now that's true. That yeah, I don't think there's a
lot of moderation at chem sex parties. Okay, well let's
shift over. So for me, when I think about sex
and drugs, the psychedelics actually do have their upsides. I mean,
there was Timothy Leary. He used to write about, you know,
being with women who are having hundreds of orgasms, and
and there's a whole sort of it's it's not just him.

(27:32):
There's a whole kind of world in which and then
even in my own personal experience, there's been ways in
which not in the thick of the experience, but maybe
it's the very beginning or the end where it does
have his positive size. But the real one, I think
is marijuana. I mean marijuana in the same way to
enhance his music taste, other things can enhance um, you know,
sexual and I think as much as it does for men,

(27:53):
probably even more so for women generally speaking, I think
so too, And that's come up on my show a lot,
and I've recommended it to women in place of a
couple of glasses of chardonnay that a lot of females
sex advice Calum Mr Writers have recommended to women. And
I've gotten tons of, you know, anecdotes, not data, feedback
from my listeners who have experimented with pot. They found

(28:16):
it disinhibiting. And you know, I don't want to make
when you start making generalizations about men and women, you're
making generalizations about three point five billion people, and four
billion people and four billion other people will be hundreds
of millions of exceptions. Women have more shame and inhibition
heaped up on them, and it's so constant that it
can be a lot harder for a woman to know

(28:37):
whether what she's doing is what she wants to be doing.
The example I always cite is that Fifty Shades of
Gray phenomenon. It wasn't a bunch of sixteen year old
girls buying that book and suddenly getting into S and
M or realizing that power play turned them on. It
was a bunch of middle aged housewives who were suddenly
getting into that book and realizing because they finally had
permission to fantasize about that from an external force, which

(29:00):
was the best seller list. Pot can be that permission
for some women to really tap into what turns them on.
And it does seem to have UH when applied topically,
an effect UH in the genitals for some women. There
are like some THHC lubes out there that I've gotten
a lot of positive feedback on. I hate to like

(29:21):
sound like a wellness industry crank or hack, but the
studies aren't done until there's some anecdotal screaming and yelling
about the d I Y effects that people are creating,
right because there's actually there's very little and certainly on
topicals and like CBD, th HC, things like that. Yeah,
maybe it's just the feeling of being naughty that you're

(29:42):
like applying this, like previously bidden the legal sub constitute
genitaly in a form of a loube and just the
act of it is exciting enough that it's a placebo
that I've had to say, a cultural placebo test right here.
But I think there's another variable two which is related
to what you're saying, which is I think that in
a way, marijuana can help the chatter in the brain

(30:02):
that can stand between um, a woman and attaining or
achieving a better orgasm. Right, it's that kind of in
the same way that you can focus more intensely on
music or on touch or things like that. It enables,
I think, both for men and women, but maybe even
more so for women to just quiet that stuff so
that you're fully focused in the moment on the experience.

(30:22):
In Macbeth, talking about alcoholic character says, you know, booze
basically inspires the desire and pieas the performance. I'm paraphrasing,
perhaps badly. Uh So we know that, least in men,
we've like acknowledged for hundreds of years that alcohol can
have a deflating effect. Well, the clitterists is an erectile
tissue two with two erectile chambers and a glands, just

(30:44):
like a penis. And it stands to reason that alcohol
that can like make it hard for a guy to
get it up, can make it hard for a woman
to become fully aroused, whereas pot doesn't interfere with that
ability for most men. So it stands to reason, you know,
women and basically have everything that men have, just the
packages assembled in a very different way. A penis is

(31:05):
a giant clint actually in some sex differentiation, although a
fewer nerve innings. Unfortunately, Well that's why you have to
prostate and other conversations. Let's take a break here and
go to an ad M. I'll tell you a funny story.

(31:33):
You know, must have been early two thousands, and you know,
as part of our my organization's efforts to kind of
change public opinion around marijuana, marijuana legalization, and one of
the things we saw was a significant gender gap. The
numbers were like men and of women favored legalizing marijuana.
And so I was trying to figure out what to
do about that, and so I began to bounce the

(31:56):
idea about the benefits of marijuana use among older people,
especially women, right, And I bounced this afo my board
members and other friends, and all the women I were
talking to are most of them were saying, ethan great idea, fantastic,
And it was all about you know, we knew that
the public would would whereas they we get freaked out
about marijuana kids. You talk about drugs and older people,
and people are a lot more tolerant. Right. The notion

(32:18):
that hey, viagra worked from my husband, but marijuana is
the real magic for me by people is focused on
people in long term relationships. You know, it seems like
a whole way to appreciate these kind of health and wellness,
sexual benefits of these things. And so I was getting
all excited about doing this campaign. And then I ran
into a couple of problems. Where is the older people
I talked to oftentimes loved the idea. My younger staff,

(32:41):
my communication staff, they were totally opposed. And the reason was,
I think, because the thought about sex and older people
hit the yuck factor and they just didn't want to
run with it. And I just basically hadn't let go
of the thing. They didn't want to think about their
parents fucking exactly exactly who wants to go there? So
I think that stuff is really evolved. I mean, now

(33:02):
that you see that his marijuana is becoming increasingly legalized,
there's very little increase in adolescent use, but there's a
tripling or quadrupling of use among elderly people. And I
think some fair bit of it has to do with
long term married couples invigorating and keeping alive their relationship.
I've seen that too, and I think that's really positive.
And pot, as you know from your years of advocacy,

(33:24):
is so much less harmful than alcohol. Pot doesn't make
you aggressive or impair your judgment in the same way
that alcohol does, or in any way comparable to what
alcohol does people, and that's a terrible combo impaired judgment
and aggression, you know. I remember when I was a
little kid, my dad, who was a Chicago cop, would
talk about having to arrest the hippies who were stund

(33:47):
for pod and the attitude among the police him and
all of his partners, even though they cracked heads at
the six eight Democratic Convention in Grant Park, was that
it wasn't the pod heads that were problems, that they'd
rather arrest potheads because they were easier to arrest, because
they weren't a gro they weren't out of control crazy.

(34:07):
Even though the pot propaganda, particularly at that time in
the late sixties early seventies, was all that pot made
people crazy. Read again, pot makes you impotent, and the
opposite was true. It's alcohol that makes you fucking piece
of ship in big doses, in big doses. But too
much alcohol you want to get in a fight. Too

(34:28):
much pot you want to get in a seven eleven
candy ale and give me the stone or over the
boozer any day. You know, let's shift gears. I mean,
in my advocacy around UH drug policy reform, you know,
there were tremendous analogies um to the fights around gay rights.
And I often times, especially on the marijuana piece of

(34:49):
drug policy reform, that the gay rights movement really felt
like something of an elder sibling, somebody who was paving
the way. And for all sorts of reasons, all these
powerful and oologies between that struggle, um, ranging from the
stigmatization on the one hand, two elements of personal autonomy
on the others, And I wonder how much that's been

(35:09):
part of your thinking around these issues. I certainly think
there's a parallel there. And remember, the gay rights movement
was the offspring of the women's rights movement, which was
the offspring of the civil rights movement. Each inspired the other.
And I do remember years ago when normal adopted coming
out as a metaphor, what they were importuning people who

(35:31):
smoked pot recreationally to start doing because the public image
of the pothead and the reality of the pot user
were in such conflict, and so many more people used
pot responsibly um and recreationally than anybody who made policy
was aware. Era most voters were aware, and so the
pot community borrowed the coming out metaphor. Some gay people

(35:55):
were offended. Some gay people lived to be offended. I'm
not one of those gay people. I was defended at all.
Lots of different people have borrowed the coming out metaphor.
I'm offended when the ex gay is borrowed the coming
out metaphor and then come out as X gay and
argue that no one should be gay and the gay
people shouldn't have rights because they're not sucking picks anymore
fun those guys. That's an abuse of the coming out metaphor.

(36:15):
But I think the pot folks adopting it was an
affirmation of of our of the you know, the secret
weapon of like the gays, you know, we were randomly
distributed throughout the population and embedded in every family. It's
not a perfect analogy, but if race worked the same way,
we would live in a very different world. If you
found out you're going to meet your kid was black

(36:37):
when your kid turned fifteen or thirteen, George Zimmerman would
be on death row. Yeah, well, let me ask, because
let me push you a bit, because I've seen some
things where maybe we can find some room to disagree
on something here, which is that I also think there's
an element of identity, right So for me and trying
to build a drug policy reform movement, it was I

(36:57):
saw myself in following the footsteps and standing on the
show holders of civil rights and women's rights and gay
rights and other fights against discriminating minority groups that were
discriminated against. And it raised questions about to what extent
one's use of illicit drugs created a sense of identity
in a way. And there's even a phrase I would
sometimes use that I didn't I don't like the sound

(37:19):
of it, So I never used it a lot. But
it was druggism, just not unlike racism. Right that people
have negative they stigmatized, they demonized, they have negative views
of people who use people because of the drugs they use, right,
um and often and and and that that's and then
in some respects, that prejudice almost became the one acceptable prejudice,

(37:40):
not just among conservatives, but even among liberals, where we
would accept a criminalization of people based upon the substance
they were putting in their body when we were when
when liberals were abandoning this on all other fronts. Are
you with me on this? I'm with you. This is
not an area of disagreement necessarily. Uh and and Druggism
of course, that kind of describe military attitude grew out

(38:01):
of the drug War and a hundred years of propaganda
stigmatizing drug use and people who use drugs, even as
the whole country swelled alcohol and smoked cigarettes. I think
cigarette is the worst and most destructive drug. You know
that that that that's always for me a big hang up.
Like the point of smoking a joint isn't to smoke,

(38:22):
it's to stop smoking. The joint and get onto the freedoms. Right.
But I saw you say someplace like, you know, listen
to the difference here though, is that if you're gay,
lesbian or whatever, you know, even if you stop fucking,
you're still gay or lesbian. It is it is a
core identity. Where is if you're a drug user and
you stop using, you're no longer a drug user. I mean,
put aside the whole twelve step always an addicting and

(38:43):
put that on the side. But I don't think. I
don't think drug user is a analogous to a sexual orientation,
is it. Well, let let me press you on this,
right because and it also raises the issue of how
much stigmatization plays a role. Right. So for me, if
I think out in my own evolution from being a
kid who was totally you know, stupid on issues about

(39:05):
about homosexuality and what have you, and then my evolution was, well,
what this fight is basically about is getting to the
point where one sexuality is you know, no different thing
about that. Then we think about left handedness versus right handedness.
I mean, roughly the same percent of the population are
probably gay or left handed, but we don't even think
about left handedness. There's no negative thing a touched to

(39:25):
it at all anymore anymore exactly. And the question is, is
is I you know now in terms of as as
being gay or lesbian or even other parts of l
g B t Q become more normalized hopefully, does that
sense of identity connection to that identity become increasingly diminished. Well,

(39:46):
some people argue are arguing that it already has. Um.
The world is some parts of the world are less
hostile place. We've seen other parts of the world become
more hostile to queer people in reaction to the parts
of the world where there's less hostility. Um, you have
countries like Russia trying to assert its moral superiority over
the decadent West by killing gay people and queer people

(40:09):
and trans people and persecuting them in ways that they
weren't persecuting them twenty years ago. So individual results may
very check your geolocation before you make statements about like
how you know much better everything is for queers. The difference,
I think though, is the overwhelming majority of people are
straight like and all queer people are going to face

(40:35):
the heterosexual and cis gender assumption. And it's not an
irrational assumption when something's correct at the time. That's an
assumption that human beings are gonna make. Even gay human
beings are going to make those kinds of assumptions when
they're correct ninety seven percent of the time. So all
gay people, all queer people going forward, are still going
to have to come out, are still going to have
to push away the assumption that was made about their

(40:58):
sexual orientation or gender identity and assert themselves as gay, lesbian, buyer,
trans in a way that a straight person doesn't have
to assert themselves is straight because the default identity that
the presumed identity assumption fit And wasn't you know, a
hair shirt like it was for us. And when it

(41:19):
comes to drug use, don't we all use drugs? When
I go to the pot shop, it is literally three
blocks away from my house in the city, where I
used to smoke a little weed on my back porch
and worry about a neighbor calling the cops and the
cops coming, which was in a rational worry. I'm a
white guy in a white neighborhood predominantly, and the cops
are not going to come arrest me in my porch.
But it's still played in the back of my mind

(41:41):
because I have worst case scenario disorder. And now I
walked to the pot shop. I don't see twenty one
year olds in there. I see people my age in there.
You know, I mean your your state. Washington State was
the first state to legalize marijuana. Now a third of
the states that a little more had done so. But
you know, we're basically talking about two countries out of
two hundred, and we're talking about the Russias and others
of the world, which demonizes not just gays and lesbians,

(42:04):
but also demonizes users of other drugs. And there are
ways in which alcohol is to other drugs, the way
being straight is to other types of sexuality or sexual identity. Yeah, yeah,
that's true. I think that's true. And the other thing
I remember because there was this period in the early
two thousands when all of a sudden, basically the anti
retroviral drugs that come along, and the people have been
leaders in the HIV AIDS struggle, they were all looking

(42:26):
for something new, and many of them ended up working
for me on drug policy reform. They it was another
social justice issue. It was where there were these ongoing issues,
and so I would push this analogy between gay rights
and drug post reform, between issues of personal autonomy on
these things identity, And I know it made some of
my gay colleagues uncomfortable, right that that this was something

(42:47):
that somehow identity as a drug consumer was not of
the same level. And then I would kind of point out,
I'd say, you know, think about it this way. If
you're gay, to get criminalized, your moralists have to be
caught in the act. Right legally speaking, twenty years ago,
with drugs, you didn't need to be caught in the
act of consuming. You just needed to be caught in possession.

(43:08):
With drugs, you could be drug tested for what you
did two days ago, four days of six days ago,
but you cannot be gay tested in the workplace, right, Yeah.
You know, we keep getting to my brother and I
call it when we're in violent agreement instead of violent disagreement.
We keep landing in a place of violent agreement. Gay
people who can't see the parallel, you know, it's not
it's never exact, but the parallel between being you know,

(43:29):
we used to get thrown in jail for what we
put in our mouths. That there are people in jail
for what for a substance they wanted to consume for you,
you know, for some guy, poor motherfucker arrested in a
park in l A thirty years ago it was semen.
And if some buddies getting arrested and thrown in jail
right now because they want to put a joint between
their lips, there's a parallel. I don't think it's around identity.

(43:50):
I think it's around behavior, desire, you know, the desired effect, right,
but also the ecstasy maybe like the ecstasy of sucking
something dude on in the park X to see like
that human desire for that kind of transcendence and sexuality
and sexual acts are one way to transcend death, transcend
the moment. Drugs are another way. You know. It reminds

(44:11):
me of gay people who can't see that anti choice
laws that criminalize women's control of their own reproductive systems
are in the same basket with laws that criminalized our
expression of sexual desire. To telling people what they can
and can't do with their body, it's the state taking
control of your body. Uh. And some years ago, one

(44:35):
of our first allies in Congress, who is Barney Frank, right,
the first openly gay member of Congress, and we're talking
about marijuana reform or talking a little bitout gay rights.
And as I'm leaving, I say, you know, Barney, I
mean gay rights, drug reform. I mean, it really boils
down the same principle that nobody deserves to be punished
what they put in their body, whether it's a cock

(44:55):
or a joint. And how did he react. He smiled,
He got it, you know, because I mean, you know,
he's a smart guy, and it was it was obvious.
You can always find the tiny percentage of gay land
that's offended by anything. There's been some writing comparing the
COVID nineteen pandemic to the HIV AIDS pandemic, and there

(45:15):
are eerie parallels. I lived through the HIV AIDS pandemic
I came out, or the crisis. You know, it's still
with a million people died of AIDS last year. I
came out in eighty and then AIDS came out in
and you know, people talking about you know, antibodies and
whether they're negative or positive, and risk and harm reduction

(45:36):
and how to have sex in a pandemic, like, all
of these things have been terribly triggering for me in
a not in a trauma sense, just like throwing me
back into moments of well, I guess in a trauma sense,
fear and panic around HIV and yet some gay people.
And I've noticed that when I like see gay people

(45:57):
being very angry about these comparisons, I'll go and look
at their social media profiles and their thirty mm and
then you see gay guys like me. You see Andrew Sullivan,
who's very controversial, has written some very moving things about
his experiences as an HIV positive man in the pandemic
then compared to the pandemic now and drawing those parallels.

(46:18):
And he's also reading some very good stuff about drugs
actually as well. Yeah, do you see older gay men
and gay people who lived through it get it, and
the gay people taking offense that anyone would compare. You know,
the whole government kicked into action about this pandemic in
a way they didn't about HV. Yeah, that's absolutely true.
The response was very different. A lot of these echoes

(46:39):
are there, though, and they're very evocative for those of
us who lived through the AIDS crisis. You know, it's funny,
I feel little bit like we're talking like to you know,
the Yiddish expression is all the cocker's, you know, old farts,
you know, but I mean, I mean the senses. There
is this thing. It's like I look at my I
would look at my younger staff, and they were in

(47:00):
first grade when marijuana was getting legalized. It maybe not
even born when marian's getting legalized for medical purposes, and
they were in middle school or something when marijuana was
getting legalized in Washington, Colorado, and they have no idea
of the struggles that went on before that, right, And
the same thing on harm reduction type stuff. And obviously
you must feel the same thing about gay rights, where younger,
you know, LGBT people have no idea what the stigmatization

(47:22):
demonization was like before. And it's the same way in
which older civil rights leaders sometimes go, oh, young people
don't get what it was like before or what happened.
You know what I've said to some of my younger
gay friends. You know, at the Pride parade, the P
flag will come down the street, parents and friends of
lesbians and gays. I don't think it'd stands for that anymore,
because it's not just lesbians and gays anymore. And I'll

(47:42):
point out to them that P flag comes down the
street now, and nobody cries when p flag came down
the street. When I was twenty and at your eighteen
and at my first Pride parade, people bald because it
was the exception to have parents that loved you. It
was the exception to have parents that hadn't rejected you.
And to see parents marching with their gay kids, to

(48:03):
see parents who loved their gay kids was just gutting
because for most people in the crowd, they didn't have that.
And I point that out to young, my young gay friends,
like when I've been to Pride pards with them, You're
not crying. Please be aware of what that means, because
I can't even talk about people like I'm crying right now.
I can't even talk about people like without getting weepy,

(48:25):
because you know, when I came out to my mom,
who I loved and who loved me, I had a
friend waiting on my porch because there was no cell phones,
there was no texting people in an emergency. I had
a friend waiting on my porch whose apartment I could
go live in with him on his couch if I
got thrown out that night. And now people come out
to their parents and it's just it's exceptional when the

(48:48):
parents reject them. It's shocking, like news stories get written
about that. No, it isn't that great that they take
it for granted because now they're fighting too. Like it
means we won, It means that we've been this our
generation has been the toorious. It means we won. And
when you win movements, what do they do? They move
on to what hasn't been one yet. That's what they're
supposed to do. You know, during the marriage equality fight

(49:09):
that I was very involved in, you know, people would say, oh,
the gay rights movement was supposed to be about liberation
and sexual freedom and not marriage. And I would say
to them, Okay, well we have secured the right to
suck a million decks and wear an appalling outfit to
the bride bread without getting arrested. Yeah, yeah, job done.
But the movement has moved on to what we don't

(49:29):
have yet, which is marriage. Yeah, exactly. And you know
it's it's I mean, I look at it with the
marijuana legalization victories. I mean, you know, until almost yes year,
there's still seven hundred thousand people in America being arrested
for marijuana, mostly possession and disproportionate young men of color
and all that. Now that we're legalizing, the stories that
bring me to the same tears that you had when

(49:50):
that flag was waving was when I hear about people
who are being suddenly lead out of jail or dismissed
from court or having the records expunged because now they're free.
And my own personal experience that literally, I mean, we're
having this conversation now in early May. Literally just a
few days ago, I went with an old buddy, right,
and we were taking a walk in Central Park and
New York has just changed the law so that you

(50:10):
can smoke a joint openly anywhere you can smoke a cigarette.
First day in the country to do that. Right now,
you're not allowed to smoke a cigarette in Central Park,
which means you can't smoke a joint. So we walked
outside Central Park. We're sitting on a bench on Fifth Avenue, right,
and I said, let's light up, and there's a cop
sitting across the street in his car. And my friend
goes Ethan, there's a cop there. We can't I said, Howard,

(50:32):
this is the meaning of freedom. We can light up
this joint with a police officer sitting in the car
across the street and we are totally legal. And that
feeling that, you know, what we were fundamentally fighting for
was freedom right is something that I hope people just
keep hanging on to. That. There was a citizen initiative
in Seattle to make marijuana crimes the lowest law enforcement priority.

(50:57):
So if the police were arresting more people for pot
than for jaywalking, the police were breaking the law. And
it got onto the ballot and every city council member,
the mayor, the governor was a Democrat. I think at
the time, the entire political stalishment said vote no. It
passed by. It was really the trial balloon for decriminalization
in Washington State. That's really true. Well, remember who was

(51:20):
It was a young guy named Dominic Holden, right, who
was your colleague at the newspaper The Stranger and my
ally and the policy reform movement, and he pioneered this idea.
We were already moving forward a medical marri Wanna that
was changing one element of it. The racial justice piece
had not yet really emerged. And here out of Seattle
comes as beautiful measures basically saying to the cops, we
can't force you but we're telling you this should now

(51:40):
be the lowest priority of enforcement. It was a big breakthrough.
And then when it was on the ballot statewide to decriminalize,
to to legalize relates, almost every I think political elected
official in Blue Washington said vote now, and overwhelmingly people
voted yes. And I was just thinking about that when

(52:01):
I was sixty two passed and came into effect, because
you know that I've mentioned earlier, like having into my
backyard and worried, like what if a neighbor smells this
and calls the cops and their board and they want
to like make it seem like marijuana enforcement isn't just
something that they do to black kids, and so they
make a point of driving into my neighbor restue me.
And I would have those anxieties. And it was the

(52:23):
feeling of like smoking pot in public after that past
and just feeling free was tremendous. I gotta say that
I think one of the missing and I've argued this,
I've written things about this. I get so angry at
elected officials when they say it's no longer a crime,
it's not not a crime to possess pot. Now, therefore,

(52:45):
these people with records for possession. These records should be cleared.
It's not a crime to sell it anymore either, And
yet there are people in jail for selling it still
who sold it when it was a crime, just like
there are people in jailford possessing it when it was
a on. And we need to the movement and you know,
you hear more about this now and I think they're
doing this. New York needs to argue for expunging the

(53:07):
records of people who had dealing convictions. I mean, Dan,
you know, the fact of the matter is when that initiative,
I mean, my organization was not involved in drafting the
initiative in Washington State that year. But the fact of
the matter is the first generation typically are the first
generation of these new laws are typically more restrictive because
public opinion is not advanced as far. So we could
not put those expungement provisions because that might have been

(53:28):
a no go for people who otherwise vote for it.
There were provisions about continuing to allow drug testing, which
were now able to really restrict. In the later laws,
there were issues about where the tax revenue went. So
I think it's it's the issue where the old, older
generation of these laws are the pioneering ones, but they
only can go so far because the public has only
gone so far. Now, in two thirds of the public,

(53:48):
um is in favor. Um, you can push it a
lot further. So listen, last day, so I'll talk to
you about So. I mean you you and your husband
have a kid who's went now in his early twenties. Yeah,
and you've had to talk not just about sex, but
about drugs with him growing up. So how did that
conversation evolve? Um? Uh, if I can ask, uh, you know,

(54:10):
this is something I can't talk about. My son doesn't
like me to talk about him. Yeah, ten years ago
he told us he was off the record, and I
I have to respect that. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. My daughter
is saying the same thing about a bunch of things.
But she does understand the basic ideas that that essentially
harm reduction visa v. Drug education really models on sex education, right.
It's accepting the fact that people are going to do something,

(54:31):
engage in sex, engage in drug use, and that one
way or another you have to keep them safe. And
the other point I'd make is that you know, young
people typically lose their quote unquote drug virginity before they
use their sexual virginity right, they get drunk, they get high,
they do this, they use their friends real and oftentimes
before they ever get laid, you know, And so that
we better have that same sort of pragmatic advice going forward.

(54:52):
We certainly had conversations with him, they didn't always have
the impact that we hoped that they would have. Um,
there's a lot of addiction in my biological family and
my you know, bio grandparents. Our son has adopted. There's
a lot of addiction issues in his biological family, UM
that he's had to be careful about and I've had
to be careful about because of the hereditary component for addiction,

(55:17):
the propensity for addiction. And so those weren't always easy conversations. Yeah,
I mean have you had I mean I think we
also didn't talk about is a issue of drug addiction
and sex addiction and uh, I mean you obviously have
had to give a lot of advice on your columns
about sex addiction. And yeah, I don't. I don't think
sex addiction is real. I think there's compulsive sexuality is

(55:38):
sort of like overlaps d behavior and sexualities also sells
destructiveness around sexuality that can attach to it very easily
because we live in a sex negative, kink shaming, homophobic culture,
and some people are so packed with self loathing about
their desires that they will then punish themselves with those
desires how they act on those desires. They believe that

(56:01):
they deserve destruction for you know, who they are sexually,
and they will throw themselves on those rocks, which is possible,
particularly if you're gay. You know, you can fund yourself
to death of your game. Um, you know everything that
the excesses of gay male culture that sometimes straight people
assume is something we all do that that's not about

(56:22):
being gay, that's about being a man. If there was
a you know, a bath house in every city in
the country where women showed up wanting to have anonymous
sexual intercourse with heterosexual men that they would never see again,
straight men would go there in droves. A bath house
is a whorehouse staff by volunteers, as I've frequently parously said,

(56:43):
And there's no parallel in in gay land or in
straight land. And we can't we can't discount the zap
that can be placed on people's heads about who they
are sexually and not just gay people, like there's a
lot of straight people struggle with shame as well, postically
people from religious backgrounds, but almost everyone who is head
link the sex addiction models sex addiction therapy. It's a

(57:03):
way of secularizing a religious argument about sex and sexuality.
And most of the people pushing it are religious, and
most of the organizations pushing it are religious, and they
want people to feel conflict about their desires. And you know,
you see guys who are like looking at a little
porn and the only way that they can get out
of trouble with the wife and the congregation is to
claim that they're addicted to porn. The evils of porn,

(57:26):
And now we have a movement to ban porn and
declare porn of public health menace because it's so addictive
and destructive and it's just not There's some people who
will spend twelve hours in front of a computer masturbating
until their bloody. That person has a problem. Porn is
what they're punishing themselves with. But porn is a neutral
actor because millions of other people at the same time

(57:49):
can like enjoy a little porn and push away from
the computer. The problem isn't the porn, Well, you know,
I like, well, so where you started in this by
saying that you essentially reject the term sex addiction, and
you know, there's a whole way of thinking about drugs
which also rejects the term drug addiction. I mean, first
of all, because so many people use it to mean
so many different things. But beyond that that, when we're

(58:11):
talking about whether it's sex, or whether we're talking about
drugs or all host of things, is the quality and
nature of that relationship, the difference between healthy relationships and
unhealthy relationships, the difference between use and abuse. And we
have to be very clear about that. There's difference between
use and abuse. And when it comes to the sex
addiction model, like, very often what people mean by sex
addiction is someone is having more sex than I think

(58:32):
that they should have or should want to have, or
a different kind of sex than I think anybody should
want to have. And it's about a moral judgment and
shame and not about harm necessarily. It's possible to have
tons of gay sex. It's possible to have multiple partners.
It's possible to you know, be straight and swingers or
you know, a serial monogamist or whatever and be healthy.

(58:56):
It's not one woman, one man marriage, heterosexual missionary in
the dark for life to be healthy, although anybody that
deviates in the lightest way from that standard is in
danger of being labeled a sex addict. Well, and there's
also an analogy they already drug use, which is that
one can use some drugs every single day, but if
it's not causing a problem in your life, it's not
really an addiction. One can use a multiplicity of different

(59:18):
drugs for long periods of time for different reasons, and
once again, it's not an addiction unless it's really causing problems.
But can you acknowledge that there's a potential health consequence
there to the to to do that kind of habitual
regular use. I can acknowledge. I have written, very controversially
for like the gays, that it is possible to suck
too much dick, that the more men that you're having

(59:40):
sex with, the more risk you're running, not just for
s t I S, but for like Jeffrey Dahmer's and
John Wayne Gacy's and Andrew Cananon's like the more people
that you have sex with who don't care about you,
they just care about the sex, the likely you're out
to wind up in bed with someone who is going
to harm you, right, not maybe not murder your neat you.
But and the same thing is true in that relationship

(01:00:00):
with a drug, I mean nicotine itself. You can be
taking it every day all your life in a relatively
safe way. It's not really gonna harm you. You're smoking
a pack of cigarettes every day, there's a very good
chance it's going to kill you. Right. Alcohol you can
have the occasional drink, and there might be slight risk
associated with that, especially with older women and such, but
by and large, if you're drinking a pint a day
or a cord a day, that could destroy your liver

(01:00:22):
and kill you. With cocaine, you can play with it,
but in the wrong amounts that can kill you. With opioids,
it can become a lifelong medication for some people and
actually enhance the quality of your life, especially if you're
using it in a control of responsible way. But if
you're injecting ship of unknown potency and purity, you know
that's going to be a problem. Um psychedelics, you know
where the benefits so much exceed the downside for so

(01:00:42):
many people, But you do it in a stupid context.
You know, to go back to where you start off,
you know, not such a good idea. You can land
up in trouble there. So it's just, I mean, the
aggravating thing is there's no clear line that we can't draw,
like a definite line. There are guys out there who

(01:01:03):
can like drink or use a little bit of drugs,
or drink more or use more drugs than someone else
can drink or use drugs and still be healthy and functional,
and they're fine. But there's a point at which we
all recognize, like twelve drinks in a night, every night,
do you have a problem? Six? Maybe you have a
problem too, you don't have a problem. Then it's our

(01:01:25):
inability to draw a clear line because individual results may vary.
That make these conversations so not unproductive or unsatisfying, just
we can never resolve them. We can never come up
with recommended daily dose of anything. You kept breaking up
dosage because an individual's body, their tolerance levels, what works
for them. But but you know, at a certain point,

(01:01:52):
we can, you know, we we reckon. We can't see
where the line is, but we can see when someone's
gone so far past it that it's definitely a problem. Yeah,
when it comes to sex, when it comes to food,
when it comes to drugs, when it comes to twitter,
when it comes to almost everything. We can see when
it's a problem, but we can't see quite the point
of tips over into the problem. That's true. I mean,
now you see as the COVID restrictions are lifting, Uh,

(01:02:16):
do you think we're going to have this explosion of
reckless sex and drug use coming up ahead and next
year or two. Well, I was talking about Nicholas Kostoka's
book last week where he's predicting that there will be
uh an explosion of hedonism I labeled at the horring twenties.
We'll see we're also in the midst. Other social scientists
have documented a kind of a sex recession where more

(01:02:37):
and more people are making their sexual debuts, as they're called.
We are all debutantes. It's guys think about later in life.
There's a lot of people who have had no sex
partner in the last year on average, and that's the
pre COVID years, uh than ever before. And so we'll see.
I know people are desperate to get out there and
drink strangers spit. But we'll see where the intersection of

(01:03:00):
this excer session and this, this pent up demand comes.
On that note, I just want to thank you. I
love talking with you, man. This is so much fun.
And hopefully we meet in person one of these days.
You're welcome, and I'm glad I didn't have too many
more quotes from my old columns thrown at me. I'm
sure you have more. I did have a few more,
but I said I'll leave him there, you know. Psychoactive

(01:03:23):
is a production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures.
It's hosted by me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by Katcha
Kumkova and Ben Cabrick. The executive producers are Dylan Golden,
Ari Handel, Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronovski for Protozoa Pictures,
Alice Williams and Matt Frederick for I Heart Radio and
me Ethan Nadelman. Our music is by Ari Belusian and

(01:03:47):
especial thanks to Abiv Brio, Sef Bianca Grimshaw and Robert Beatty.
If you'd like to share your own stories, comments, or ideas,
please leave us a message at eight three three seven
of the nine sixty. That's one eight three three Psycho zero.

(01:04:08):
You can also email us as psychoactive at protozoa dot
com or find me on Twitter at ethan Natalman. And
if you couldn't keep track of all this, find the
information in the show notes. Tune in next time. From
my conversation with Melissa Moore, my former colleague at Drug

(01:04:28):
Policy Alliance, who led the successful effort to legalize marijuana
in New York State, all the evidence showed that if
you would randomly stop a hundred black kids under brown
kids that are white kids in almost any city in America,
virtually the same percent of them would have marijuana in
their pocket, but the black kids were two to ten
times more likely to get busted than the white kids.

(01:04:50):
That's right. And you know, the data that we have
from the Department of Health in New York City in particular,
shows that young white people in New York City actually
use cannabis at eificantly higher rates than black and Latin
X young people in the city. And yet what we
see is the enforcement is pretty much the exact inverse
of that. Subscribe to cycoactive now see it, an't miss it.