DEAN BECKER: Our goal for this program is to expose the fraud misdirection and the liars who support for drug war empowers our terrorist enemies and enriches Barbara's cartels and gives reason for existence to tens of thousands of violent, new as games who profit by selling contaminated drugs to our children. This is cultural baggage.

Hi, there I am Dean Becker, and this is cultural baggage. The following is taken from a video production seeking the moral high ground. Well, it's been my pleasure over many years now to run into Maya salvage at various conferences and get togethers. If you will. Uh, she's a reporter, a great author. She has several books. I would recommend you read if you want to understand the nature of, uh, Oh, I don't know, drug treatment and, uh, uh, addiction and, and hell life in America these days. Uh, I want to welcome Maya Maya. Hi, thanks so much for having me. Oh, thank you for being here. I it's, uh, you know, this zoom thing has really taken off. I think a lot of folks are doing it. We're trying to outdo CNN with our Becker's buds productions and, uh, I appreciate you being one of the Becker's buds.

I really do. We have in America kind of a wake up call, it started to really rattle the cage. I think once, uh, uh, everybody witnessed the murder of George Floyd, that racism is, is evil. Racism is obvious, and it, it has grown from our, uh, uh, drug policy. It has made it for lack of a better word appropriate, uh, to treat people with, uh, less than proper dignity, because they might be druggies and druggies, or just bad. Your, your thought there, Maya.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: Well, absolutely. I mean, it's no coincidence that the horrible racist stereotype is almost identical to the horrible drug user stereotype, right? That's because our drug laws originate in racist stereotypes and drug laws have been used for Reese's purposes. Now, not everybody who was in favor of the drug war or supporting these laws, realize that that is how they're being used. But in reality, the fact that we lock up a huge proportion of people, of color compared to white people for drug crimes is not an accident. And the fact that as soon as we have a white overdose problem, we want to do harm reduction, kinder, gentler treatment, instead of sending people to prison, kind of us a clue that There is something else going on here.

DEAN BECKER (03:02)
Right? Well, and, and right there, you'll see in, um, I'm not gonna say every courtroom, but in many courtrooms that a black defendant gets a heinous sentence, whereas a white, uh, defendant might get a probation or a, at least a second chance in some facts.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (03:17)
Well, I can speak to that personally because in the late eighties I got arrested for cocaine and my lawyer being, you know, lawyers always want to drag things out because that works. And so oftentimes I would go for these court appearances and I would literally be the only white defendant. And I would see these people get sent away for really long periods of time. And I didn't. And part of the reason that I've always been so passionate about fighting the drug war has been that that's just outrageous to me, that should not happen. That is not the way justice should be, and it is not fair

DEAN BECKER (03:56)
Well, and that plays out every day, all day and courtrooms all across this country. Many States are much worse than others. You know, I, I, I think there are those few that were as maybe more balanced, but, uh, there are those States where Texas and Alabama and others come to mind where it plays out the more severely Louisiana. Um, well even maybe more so, uh, that, uh, they, well, they're not called plantations anymore, but they put those blacks out there working in the fields, uh, making money for the prisons.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (04:28)
No, it's really, I mean, you know, Michelle Alexander really got it across well by calling us the new Jim Crow, because that is how our drug was acting. And once we see this, we have to do something about it because it's just not right,

DEAN BECKER (04:45)
Right. It, it doesn't, uh, it doesn't fit the bill of equal rights in any fashion. No, it doesn't

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (04:51)
No will. And also the, you know, if we actually want to solve addiction, if we actually want to reduce harm related to drugs, locking people up is a really stupid way of doing it. It doesn't work. In fact, addiction is defined by compulsive use that continues in the face of negative consequences. So negative consequences if they were going to work, uh, the problem itself would not exist in the first place. So this is just ridiculous. We know that this doesn't work. We know that it does harm. We know that it's extraordinarily expensive and racist. So,

DEAN BECKER (05:27)
You know, I, I find myself, you know, on Facebook, uh, just really agitated sometimes, you know, I make a meme, you know what I'm saying? Just to post a sign, so to speak out there and just express my opinion to them. One that I think we really need to all think about. And that is the major harms of the drug war are caused by the drug war. And it's, it's like the politicians, I think most of them know this now, but they just, they don't seem to grasp the handle. They don't seem to know how to turn this thing around. It'll your thought there, Maya?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (06:04)
Well, I mean, it's really interesting as somebody who has followed this for a really long time, like in the late eighties and nineties, basically saying anything against the drug war was seen as treason, we were seeing pro-drug evil and you were a bad person. And even suggesting that, you know, we might try doing things differently. Oh, that was too soft. You are going to, you know, cause some kind of disaster. And you know, I looked at the presidential debates for the Democrats this summer or was it last summer at this point? I can't even remember it was last summer. But anyway, the contrast between that and that time when everybody was like, I want to give them 10 years, no, let's give them 20 years. No, let's like execute them. Like it was like a bidding war to make it like even worse. And now we had literally all of the democratic candidates except for Biden saying they want to legalize marijuana outright and that we can't arrest our way out of this and that the drug war is a failure. And so to see them sort of trying to outbid it, I support safe injection sites. You know, you saw like these kinds of things that like in my wildest dreams back then, I wouldn't have imagined democratic candidates saying because they would be so timid and so afraid to be seen as soft on drugs. They didn't care if it wasn't working. It was working for them because what worked for politician is what will get them reelected.

DEAN BECKER (07:33)
Yeah. And then, you know, and you mentioned the, all of them are adhering to the thought of, you know, legalizing or controlling marijuana in a better fashion, at least except for Biden. And he wants another study. And I want to share this with you. I interviewed my district attorney Kim Augur, uh, and she said, I mentioned her. I said, yeah, it seems like every time a new, uh, a city or locale wants to legal or consider, uh, changing their marijuana laws, they want another study as if the first 10,000 just weren't enough. And that's that kind of is the conundrum or the problem. Isn't it?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (08:07)
What I think is ridiculous here is that like marijuana, in terms of safety, we have a federal Institute, the national Institute on drug abuse, which has literally spent many millions of dollars looking for marijuana related harm. And it hasn't found the stuff that is looking for it doesn't turn people crazy. It does not turn people into, um, people who are addicted to heroin or other drugs. It does not, you know, make you, um, unproductive or unable to live a productive life. Like all of these things. It doesn't cause lung cancer, all of these things that they looked for, they have not found. And it doesn't mean it's, it's completely harmless. Nothing is completely harmless, but compared to other substances is much less harmful. And so when you think about every single FDA approved drug, nobody spends 20, 30, 40 years looking for harms before it gets approved. Like we spend, we do like maybe three clinical trials. And if there's no harm that turns up in those trials and there's no harm that turns up post-marketing we allow them. Um, so to say that we need another study is just to hold it to a standard that is ridiculous. Um, we have had 50% of the population trying it for the last 50 years.

DEAN BECKER (09:31)
Well, and I'm real proud of my da Kemo when I told her, well, you know, we've already had the 10,000 studies. She said, yeah, we've already had enough studies to choke a horse. So she at least gets it. And you know, I'm proud of that here, here in Texas,

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (09:46)
I was actually happy to see that, um, Guidon was saying that like, he doesn't, he does want to reschedule marijuana. Now everybody would prefer if it was D scheduled, but rescheduling is a major step forward because that would really pretty much allow the States to deal with it. Like legitimately instead of just like, Oh, well we'll overlook it the way it is now.

DEAN BECKER (10:07)
Right now, a little while ago, you mentioned that you had a little balance with cocaine back. When was I right. And I have my Dallin's with a speed, a hell of a lot of LSD back in the sixties and seventies. Um, and, and I guess what I like to point out is, you know, I, I probably, and some folks probably think I'm crazy. I did about 400 hits of acid or payoti or psilocybin or what. I love that stuff back when, uh, I went on to have a great career as a inspector, uh, you know, quality control manager, finally, as a project analyst analyst for, uh, Exxon with, uh, a major project in Nigeria. And I was responsible for $120 million of expenditures. I did a great job. I was much beloved within the company. And I guess what I'm saying is these drugs, they made debilitate you while you're taking them some, you know, and you don't want people out driving on alcohol, certainly. And you know, maybe if you're doing speed for a week, well, you probably shouldn't be driving either flip. The point is it does not ruin your potential in life. It does not. No, you can, you can Odie on some of these drugs, if you're not careful, but in general, taking them is that should not be considered a, a ruin.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (11:27)
I mean, the thing is that we make it into that because if you have, certainly there are drug related harms, you can become addicted and you can overdose in the context of addiction. Even if you have absolutely pure known drugs, as we've seen with the opioids, but the reality is making possession illegal. Doesn't protect you from those harms and making people move from prescription opiates, where at least you have the chance to know the dose and the purity to street drugs, where now it's all contaminated with fentanyls pretty much. And you have no way of knowing if this is going to be a shot that like gets you high or kills you, or does some bizarre thing that you were completely not expecting. So if we, I feel like, and I'm currently writing a history of harm reduction, and I feel like this is how our policy should be made.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (12:26)
The idea should be to reduce harm. The idea should not to be, we must not have people getting high. That is immoral because if that were our goal, we would have to illegalize cigarettes and caffeine and alcohol as well. And we already know that would be a disaster. No, the reason that the drugs that are illegal are illegal has to do with racism and historical contingency, not to do with what's more dangerous. So if we want to save our kids, make sure that they have a chance of surviving their adolescents when they are going to do dumb things, no matter what parents want. We need to make sure that we reduce the harm that they are exposed to. And we don't do this by the current drug policy. It doesn't work. What it does is expose them to more harm. So the way we look at this, we have to take a look at, you know, what are the actual dangers associated with the pharmacology of certain drugs? What are the dangers associated with taking them in certain settings? I eat driving, which is bad and, you know, work at it from there, like look at it as a practical problem. Not a problem of, I disagree with people having honored pleasure.

DEAN BECKER: (13:45)
That is the heart of the other side. If I can sum it up that way, they have this fear that, that drugs are just bad as Nancy Reagan said. And then if you take them harm will come. The nation will crumble. Morals will dissolve. And, and that is where I'm trying to bring focus to bear on our special we're producing that, you know, seeking the moral high ground. All right, this is Dean Becker. And I interrupt to say, you are listening to cultural baggage on Pacifica radio and the drug truth network. I'm interviewing Maya salvage, uh, author of the unbroken brain. We're talking drug war, uh, um, morals, if you will, as part of my forthcoming, a series of videos seeking the moral high ground, which will feature the likes of, uh, uh, mr. Roger Goodman, a Washington state rep, as well as Ethan Nadelmann, former director of the drug policy Alliance and dr. Kristoff Berkey, the pioneer of the Swiss heroin program and the drugs are of Portugal, dr. JL Gullo gonna toss in a name that drug by it's side effects. And then we'll go back to our interview with Maya salivate. It's time to play name

Speaker 5: (15:05)
Side effects. Does your idea of a fun night consist of playing German board games and going to bed at 10, looking at the news because, you know, make you sad, do you get angry? Just knowing that there are teenagers on vine who have made more money in the past two years and you will in your entire life, do you enjoy drinking a beer right after getting home from work? Just a little too much? Huh? If you answered, yes. Even one of those questions, chances are you might have adulthood, a serious condition that affects 7 billion people, 18 and older worldwide. And there's no cure.

DEAN BECKER: (15:38)
Again. This is Dean Becker interviewing author Maya salads. We've waged this drug war for a hundred years, more or less. Now it's just gotten worse and we're empowering terrorist, cartels, gangs, overdose deaths are increasing. Children have easier access than ever before. What is the,

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (15:59)
What makes it more

DEAN BECKER: (16:00)
In a year, your response to their Maya salvage?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (16:03)
Sure. So I think that, you know, people have this fear that other people, if given access to things that give them honor, and pleasure will never work, will be lazy, will be unproductive, will not fit themselves into the capital's wheel. Now that's actually generally not true because the vast majority of people want to participate and be productive. And in fact, most people don't end up being addicted because even if they have the most euphoric experience in the world, they're like, I don't want to give up my kid. I don't want to give up my job. I don't want to just spend my whole day and my whole life chasing this thing. However, if your life kind of really sucks, then that thing's going to become overwhelmingly powerful for you and you are more likely to become addicted. So our fears that like all those people can't handle stuff.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (17:00)
I mean, there's some very interesting polling. I think this is from the nineties where they asked people, Oh, if cocaine was legal, would you do it? And most people were like, Oh no, I wouldn't touch that stuff. And then other people were like, then they ask them, well, what do you think about your neighbor? Oh, my neighbor, we told him. And so it's kind of like, we have this idea that like, we have, you know, freewill and responsibility and we are moral, but you can't trust those other people. And until we realize that that kind of moralizing actually doesn't help. Like, I think one of the things that is amazing about harm reduction as an idea is that it flips the moral calculus on its head. It basically says the most important moral value is saving lives. Nothing is more important than doing that. It's not more important to prevent people from maybe becoming lazy than it is to save their lives.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (17:56)
We need to save lives first. And so once you sort of see that and the immorality is not in the, Oh my God, they're going to take this substance and have some fun or do something that's going to make them, you know, not work or not take care of their kids or all these things that we want them to be doing. Um, if instead we're like, well, you know, they can't recover if they're dead. Um, we get that, you know, life comes first. And so understanding that, you know, sure, we really don't want kids like smoking pot in high school when they should be in class. Like, that's really not a good thing, but putting them in jail is not going to increase their educational opportunities, right. Need to figure out why are they doing that? Are they just kids being kids? In which case we need to come up with ways to deal with that creatively.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (18:51)
Do they have some kind of emotional or psychological problem in which case we need to teach them coping skills around that, but we need to realize vast majority of human beings throughout history have taken some kind of drugs, whether it's alcohol or caffeine or mushrooms, or, um, you know, bring your PE in Southern like human beings. Like we have always, you know, we get high in music, we get high on all kinds of things, and that's a good part of human culture. There's nothing wrong with wanting to experience joy. The problem is if our lives are so empty, that the only way we can experience joy is through chemicals. And we have no social connection and no, you know, et cetera. So what we need to be asking when we want to consider problems related to drugs is first of all, is this drug making your life better or worse? If it's making your life better, we shouldn't care if it's making your life worse, we need to figure out what the alternatives are and how do we deal with that instead of being like, Oh my God, you're a bad person because you're taking a drug.

DEAN BECKER (20:05)
Sure. And, and then, you know, I want to circle back to the one thing you, you mentioned that, you know, we want to prevent these people from killing themselves. And then there's the flip side of that coin. That is, well, at least now they're better off dead. I mean, I don't know that that comes up too often, but you know, the fact that they're no longer suffering with their,

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (20:25)
I mean, I think like, you know, the, um, a lot of that comes down to dehumanizing people who use drugs because a lot of people feel as though people use drugs are just worthless and that we can't be good parents and we can't be good at our jobs and we can't contribute anything to society. And, you know, you just think about some of the amazingly famous people who have suffered from addiction. Most people, if you're like, well, Oh, would you want to kill Janis Joplin? Uh, you know, do you want to kill like, um, yeah, I mean, right. Um, you know, should we, um, get rid of F if we got rid of every actor or musician or intellectual that had taken drugs and that had some kind of substance misuse problem, our culture would be very, very, um, much poorer for that. And when you think about people on, you know, I often have this experience when I'm interviewing people who are like homeless and on the street and actively using, and they're really smart and they have stuff to say, and they are talented in various ways. And it's like, what a waste? Like, why are we just throwing away this human talent that we could be using? If we were recognizing that stopping people from taking substances is not a sensible goal just by itself, sensible to try to help people be healthy and to have less harm, but it is not sensible to hurt people in order to help them.

DEAN BECKER (22:06)
No, my, I know that, um, before we began our discussion, you, you were doing some writing, uh, you, you have written several books. Uh, the one that's caught most people's attention on broken brain, uh, um, cutting, um, extrapolates on too much on what we've been talking about, that, that, uh, taking drugs does not make you a bad person or ineffective or incapable, or, Oh, I have a shirt I like to wear that says, uh, nice people take drugs because it's so true. We were just talking about Robert Downey or whoever, and we just need to walk away from those racial fears and propaganda, the hysteria that was put forward. And that, that seems to percolate up through the halls of Congress every five or 10 years, or at least it did up until about the last 20, but they had to increase the penalties in the, you know, the outreach and the, you know, the, the long, longer terms and, uh, mandatory minimums and three strikes, you know, just on and on just we're going to teach those druggies. And they haven't taught us a damn thing. I don't know. You either thought they're my

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (23:18)
Well, yeah. I mean, just like, again, you know, if you're trying to fight addiction, addiction is resistant to negative consequences, so that's a really stupid way of doing it. If you're just trying to fight drug use, you might be reducing people's drug use if you're really horrible to them, but if you're reducing something that isn't harmful, why is this a good idea? You know, I mean, like we might want to eliminate telephone use or something. Um, but, um, you know, it helps people communicate, like why would you really want to do that necessarily? So I think, you know, what's important to realize is that human beings are going to do lots of stuff that other human beings, disapprove of the only place in which the government should be involved is if that is harming someone, if it's not harming someone, just leave it alone and work. We have plenty of problems that are causing real harms to lots of people. And we have plenty of money that we should be going to those things that we are wasting on the drug war.

DEAN BECKER (24:21)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and that's the heck of it. Most people just don't stop and think about it. We're empowering terrorists. If they're brave enough to grow flowers on a mountainside somewhere we're enriching. These Barbara's cartels that are driving these caravans northward because well, hell they take over those small villages. They, they run the police out of the building and, and become the police, uh, extorting the whole village and little wonder those folks want to come northward. And of course, Chicago is once again, like the prohibition, you know, uh, um, uh, shootout capital of the world, uh, and, and little wonder because this prohibition creates so much incentive, um, to, to control the market, to, to make the profits. And, and I don't know, I'm not going to preach to you, but it just is freaking crazy. Isn't it?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (25:15)
Well, I mean, the thing is that, like, what we really don't recognize is that drugs serve multiple purposes. Um, and so in a situation where people have no jobs and no hope, and a lot of chaos drugs can either anesthetize that for you or they can serve as a job and a source of income. And we are not going to solve this problem by putting people in jail. When the demand, when that's going to traumatize people and increase the demand, the only way to solve this is to provide people meaningful alternatives, and to help people find ways that are healthier of dealing with whatever their issues may be. And also in some cases, they may have no issues and just be having fun. In which case, why do we care? We should not care if people are just enjoying themselves. Like, you know, why should I care if somebody is having fun doing something I really don't like to do. Like, it's like, okay, that's nice for them. Like, I don't want to stop them as long as they're not bothering me. Like please.

DEAN BECKER (26:18)
Yeah, no one of those means I put up on Facebook when, when you Foria is a crime, the whole world suffers and that's, that's just what we have going on. That's what the agitation of the drug war is all about. Um, well, myself, it's, I want to thank you for taking time to visit with us here on Becker's buds and, and to be part of the seeking the moral high ground. Uh, we hope to have a 90 minute

DEAN BECKER: (26:44)
Special. We're going to release on September 11 with a lot of great names and a lot of great reasons why we should end this madness, but also with an invitation to a Donald Trump, as well as to mr. Joe Biden to come on the drug truth network, tell us why we need to do this forever. Uh, what would you say to those two candidates if you could?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (27:08)
Well, I would just say that our policy should be to reduce harm if we want to not spend money on things that are a waste of time. And if we want to have happier, healthier, more productive people, and we want to have money to spend on things that we all recognize we need to spend money on, then we should stop the drug war. If we want to fight addiction, if we want to help people feel safer, happier, more productive, we need to focus on reducing harm, not on stopping people, getting high, and the best way to make the world safer for people in general is not to prohibit things for which there is a massive and infant thing.

DEAN BECKER: (27:54)
Very true. Well, is there a website or where maybe some of your next writings will be next book you're gonna publish?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (28:01)
Uh, sure. So, um, Maya xe.com has most of my stuff. Um, and I am, yeah, the book is not going to be out for another year or so, but I am just desperately trying to use the darn thing done

DEAN BECKER: (28:14)
Well. Well, thank thank you for your time. My, I hope to see, I hope someday there is a conference we can meet.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (28:20)
Yes, I do too.

DEAN BECKER: (28:23)
Thank you. All right. Once again, I want to thank Maya salivate. So I want to thank you for listening to cultural baggage. And I want to remind you once again, that because of prohibition, you don't know what's in that bag. Please be careful to the drug truth network listeners around the world. This is Dean Becker for cultural baggage and the unvarnished truth drug truth network archives are stored at the James A. Baker, the third Institute for policy studies,

Cultural Baggage 08/12/20

DEAN BECKER: Our goal for this program is to expose the fraud misdirection and the liars who support for drug war empowers our terrorist enemies and enriches Barbara's cartels and gives reason for existence to tens of thousands of violent, new as games who profit by selling contaminated drugs to our children. This is cultural baggage.

Hi, there I am Dean Becker, and this is cultural baggage. The following is taken from a video production seeking the moral high ground. Well, it's been my pleasure over many years now to run into Maya salvage at various conferences and get togethers. If you will. Uh, she's a reporter, a great author. She has several books. I would recommend you read if you want to understand the nature of, uh, Oh, I don't know, drug treatment and, uh, uh, addiction and, and hell life in America these days. Uh, I want to welcome Maya Maya. Hi, thanks so much for having me. Oh, thank you for being here. I it's, uh, you know, this zoom thing has really taken off. I think a lot of folks are doing it. We're trying to outdo CNN with our Becker's buds productions and, uh, I appreciate you being one of the Becker's buds.

I really do. We have in America kind of a wake up call, it started to really rattle the cage. I think once, uh, uh, everybody witnessed the murder of George Floyd, that racism is, is evil. Racism is obvious, and it, it has grown from our, uh, uh, drug policy. It has made it for lack of a better word appropriate, uh, to treat people with, uh, less than proper dignity, because they might be druggies and druggies, or just bad. Your, your thought there, Maya.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: Well, absolutely. I mean, it's no coincidence that the horrible racist stereotype is almost identical to the horrible drug user stereotype, right? That's because our drug laws originate in racist stereotypes and drug laws have been used for Reese's purposes. Now, not everybody who was in favor of the drug war or supporting these laws, realize that that is how they're being used. But in reality, the fact that we lock up a huge proportion of people, of color compared to white people for drug crimes is not an accident. And the fact that as soon as we have a white overdose problem, we want to do harm reduction, kinder, gentler treatment, instead of sending people to prison, kind of us a clue that There is something else going on here.

DEAN BECKER (03:02)
Right? Well, and, and right there, you'll see in, um, I'm not gonna say every courtroom, but in many courtrooms that a black defendant gets a heinous sentence, whereas a white, uh, defendant might get a probation or a, at least a second chance in some facts.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (03:17)
Well, I can speak to that personally because in the late eighties I got arrested for cocaine and my lawyer being, you know, lawyers always want to drag things out because that works. And so oftentimes I would go for these court appearances and I would literally be the only white defendant. And I would see these people get sent away for really long periods of time. And I didn't. And part of the reason that I've always been so passionate about fighting the drug war has been that that's just outrageous to me, that should not happen. That is not the way justice should be, and it is not fair

DEAN BECKER (03:56)
Well, and that plays out every day, all day and courtrooms all across this country. Many States are much worse than others. You know, I, I, I think there are those few that were as maybe more balanced, but, uh, there are those States where Texas and Alabama and others come to mind where it plays out the more severely Louisiana. Um, well even maybe more so, uh, that, uh, they, well, they're not called plantations anymore, but they put those blacks out there working in the fields, uh, making money for the prisons.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (04:28)
No, it's really, I mean, you know, Michelle Alexander really got it across well by calling us the new Jim Crow, because that is how our drug was acting. And once we see this, we have to do something about it because it's just not right,

DEAN BECKER (04:45)
Right. It, it doesn't, uh, it doesn't fit the bill of equal rights in any fashion. No, it doesn't

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (04:51)
No will. And also the, you know, if we actually want to solve addiction, if we actually want to reduce harm related to drugs, locking people up is a really stupid way of doing it. It doesn't work. In fact, addiction is defined by compulsive use that continues in the face of negative consequences. So negative consequences if they were going to work, uh, the problem itself would not exist in the first place. So this is just ridiculous. We know that this doesn't work. We know that it does harm. We know that it's extraordinarily expensive and racist. So,

DEAN BECKER (05:27)
You know, I, I find myself, you know, on Facebook, uh, just really agitated sometimes, you know, I make a meme, you know what I'm saying? Just to post a sign, so to speak out there and just express my opinion to them. One that I think we really need to all think about. And that is the major harms of the drug war are caused by the drug war. And it's, it's like the politicians, I think most of them know this now, but they just, they don't seem to grasp the handle. They don't seem to know how to turn this thing around. It'll your thought there, Maya?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (06:04)
Well, I mean, it's really interesting as somebody who has followed this for a really long time, like in the late eighties and nineties, basically saying anything against the drug war was seen as treason, we were seeing pro-drug evil and you were a bad person. And even suggesting that, you know, we might try doing things differently. Oh, that was too soft. You are going to, you know, cause some kind of disaster. And you know, I looked at the presidential debates for the Democrats this summer or was it last summer at this point? I can't even remember it was last summer. But anyway, the contrast between that and that time when everybody was like, I want to give them 10 years, no, let's give them 20 years. No, let's like execute them. Like it was like a bidding war to make it like even worse. And now we had literally all of the democratic candidates except for Biden saying they want to legalize marijuana outright and that we can't arrest our way out of this and that the drug war is a failure. And so to see them sort of trying to outbid it, I support safe injection sites. You know, you saw like these kinds of things that like in my wildest dreams back then, I wouldn't have imagined democratic candidates saying because they would be so timid and so afraid to be seen as soft on drugs. They didn't care if it wasn't working. It was working for them because what worked for politician is what will get them reelected.

DEAN BECKER (07:33)
Yeah. And then, you know, and you mentioned the, all of them are adhering to the thought of, you know, legalizing or controlling marijuana in a better fashion, at least except for Biden. And he wants another study. And I want to share this with you. I interviewed my district attorney Kim Augur, uh, and she said, I mentioned her. I said, yeah, it seems like every time a new, uh, a city or locale wants to legal or consider, uh, changing their marijuana laws, they want another study as if the first 10,000 just weren't enough. And that's that kind of is the conundrum or the problem. Isn't it?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (08:07)
What I think is ridiculous here is that like marijuana, in terms of safety, we have a federal Institute, the national Institute on drug abuse, which has literally spent many millions of dollars looking for marijuana related harm. And it hasn't found the stuff that is looking for it doesn't turn people crazy. It does not turn people into, um, people who are addicted to heroin or other drugs. It does not, you know, make you, um, unproductive or unable to live a productive life. Like all of these things. It doesn't cause lung cancer, all of these things that they looked for, they have not found. And it doesn't mean it's, it's completely harmless. Nothing is completely harmless, but compared to other substances is much less harmful. And so when you think about every single FDA approved drug, nobody spends 20, 30, 40 years looking for harms before it gets approved. Like we spend, we do like maybe three clinical trials. And if there's no harm that turns up in those trials and there's no harm that turns up post-marketing we allow them. Um, so to say that we need another study is just to hold it to a standard that is ridiculous. Um, we have had 50% of the population trying it for the last 50 years.

DEAN BECKER (09:31)
Well, and I'm real proud of my da Kemo when I told her, well, you know, we've already had the 10,000 studies. She said, yeah, we've already had enough studies to choke a horse. So she at least gets it. And you know, I'm proud of that here, here in Texas,

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (09:46)
I was actually happy to see that, um, Guidon was saying that like, he doesn't, he does want to reschedule marijuana. Now everybody would prefer if it was D scheduled, but rescheduling is a major step forward because that would really pretty much allow the States to deal with it. Like legitimately instead of just like, Oh, well we'll overlook it the way it is now.

DEAN BECKER (10:07)
Right now, a little while ago, you mentioned that you had a little balance with cocaine back. When was I right. And I have my Dallin's with a speed, a hell of a lot of LSD back in the sixties and seventies. Um, and, and I guess what I like to point out is, you know, I, I probably, and some folks probably think I'm crazy. I did about 400 hits of acid or payoti or psilocybin or what. I love that stuff back when, uh, I went on to have a great career as a inspector, uh, you know, quality control manager, finally, as a project analyst analyst for, uh, Exxon with, uh, a major project in Nigeria. And I was responsible for $120 million of expenditures. I did a great job. I was much beloved within the company. And I guess what I'm saying is these drugs, they made debilitate you while you're taking them some, you know, and you don't want people out driving on alcohol, certainly. And you know, maybe if you're doing speed for a week, well, you probably shouldn't be driving either flip. The point is it does not ruin your potential in life. It does not. No, you can, you can Odie on some of these drugs, if you're not careful, but in general, taking them is that should not be considered a, a ruin.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (11:27)
I mean, the thing is that we make it into that because if you have, certainly there are drug related harms, you can become addicted and you can overdose in the context of addiction. Even if you have absolutely pure known drugs, as we've seen with the opioids, but the reality is making possession illegal. Doesn't protect you from those harms and making people move from prescription opiates, where at least you have the chance to know the dose and the purity to street drugs, where now it's all contaminated with fentanyls pretty much. And you have no way of knowing if this is going to be a shot that like gets you high or kills you, or does some bizarre thing that you were completely not expecting. So if we, I feel like, and I'm currently writing a history of harm reduction, and I feel like this is how our policy should be made.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (12:26)
The idea should be to reduce harm. The idea should not to be, we must not have people getting high. That is immoral because if that were our goal, we would have to illegalize cigarettes and caffeine and alcohol as well. And we already know that would be a disaster. No, the reason that the drugs that are illegal are illegal has to do with racism and historical contingency, not to do with what's more dangerous. So if we want to save our kids, make sure that they have a chance of surviving their adolescents when they are going to do dumb things, no matter what parents want. We need to make sure that we reduce the harm that they are exposed to. And we don't do this by the current drug policy. It doesn't work. What it does is expose them to more harm. So the way we look at this, we have to take a look at, you know, what are the actual dangers associated with the pharmacology of certain drugs? What are the dangers associated with taking them in certain settings? I eat driving, which is bad and, you know, work at it from there, like look at it as a practical problem. Not a problem of, I disagree with people having honored pleasure.

DEAN BECKER: (13:45)
That is the heart of the other side. If I can sum it up that way, they have this fear that, that drugs are just bad as Nancy Reagan said. And then if you take them harm will come. The nation will crumble. Morals will dissolve. And, and that is where I'm trying to bring focus to bear on our special we're producing that, you know, seeking the moral high ground. All right, this is Dean Becker. And I interrupt to say, you are listening to cultural baggage on Pacifica radio and the drug truth network. I'm interviewing Maya salvage, uh, author of the unbroken brain. We're talking drug war, uh, um, morals, if you will, as part of my forthcoming, a series of videos seeking the moral high ground, which will feature the likes of, uh, uh, mr. Roger Goodman, a Washington state rep, as well as Ethan Nadelmann, former director of the drug policy Alliance and dr. Kristoff Berkey, the pioneer of the Swiss heroin program and the drugs are of Portugal, dr. JL Gullo gonna toss in a name that drug by it's side effects. And then we'll go back to our interview with Maya salivate. It's time to play name

Speaker 5: (15:05)
Side effects. Does your idea of a fun night consist of playing German board games and going to bed at 10, looking at the news because, you know, make you sad, do you get angry? Just knowing that there are teenagers on vine who have made more money in the past two years and you will in your entire life, do you enjoy drinking a beer right after getting home from work? Just a little too much? Huh? If you answered, yes. Even one of those questions, chances are you might have adulthood, a serious condition that affects 7 billion people, 18 and older worldwide. And there's no cure.

DEAN BECKER: (15:38)
Again. This is Dean Becker interviewing author Maya salads. We've waged this drug war for a hundred years, more or less. Now it's just gotten worse and we're empowering terrorist, cartels, gangs, overdose deaths are increasing. Children have easier access than ever before. What is the,

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (15:59)
What makes it more

DEAN BECKER: (16:00)
In a year, your response to their Maya salvage?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (16:03)
Sure. So I think that, you know, people have this fear that other people, if given access to things that give them honor, and pleasure will never work, will be lazy, will be unproductive, will not fit themselves into the capital's wheel. Now that's actually generally not true because the vast majority of people want to participate and be productive. And in fact, most people don't end up being addicted because even if they have the most euphoric experience in the world, they're like, I don't want to give up my kid. I don't want to give up my job. I don't want to just spend my whole day and my whole life chasing this thing. However, if your life kind of really sucks, then that thing's going to become overwhelmingly powerful for you and you are more likely to become addicted. So our fears that like all those people can't handle stuff.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (17:00)
I mean, there's some very interesting polling. I think this is from the nineties where they asked people, Oh, if cocaine was legal, would you do it? And most people were like, Oh no, I wouldn't touch that stuff. And then other people were like, then they ask them, well, what do you think about your neighbor? Oh, my neighbor, we told him. And so it's kind of like, we have this idea that like, we have, you know, freewill and responsibility and we are moral, but you can't trust those other people. And until we realize that that kind of moralizing actually doesn't help. Like, I think one of the things that is amazing about harm reduction as an idea is that it flips the moral calculus on its head. It basically says the most important moral value is saving lives. Nothing is more important than doing that. It's not more important to prevent people from maybe becoming lazy than it is to save their lives.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (17:56)
We need to save lives first. And so once you sort of see that and the immorality is not in the, Oh my God, they're going to take this substance and have some fun or do something that's going to make them, you know, not work or not take care of their kids or all these things that we want them to be doing. Um, if instead we're like, well, you know, they can't recover if they're dead. Um, we get that, you know, life comes first. And so understanding that, you know, sure, we really don't want kids like smoking pot in high school when they should be in class. Like, that's really not a good thing, but putting them in jail is not going to increase their educational opportunities, right. Need to figure out why are they doing that? Are they just kids being kids? In which case we need to come up with ways to deal with that creatively.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (18:51)
Do they have some kind of emotional or psychological problem in which case we need to teach them coping skills around that, but we need to realize vast majority of human beings throughout history have taken some kind of drugs, whether it's alcohol or caffeine or mushrooms, or, um, you know, bring your PE in Southern like human beings. Like we have always, you know, we get high in music, we get high on all kinds of things, and that's a good part of human culture. There's nothing wrong with wanting to experience joy. The problem is if our lives are so empty, that the only way we can experience joy is through chemicals. And we have no social connection and no, you know, et cetera. So what we need to be asking when we want to consider problems related to drugs is first of all, is this drug making your life better or worse? If it's making your life better, we shouldn't care if it's making your life worse, we need to figure out what the alternatives are and how do we deal with that instead of being like, Oh my God, you're a bad person because you're taking a drug.

DEAN BECKER (20:05)
Sure. And, and then, you know, I want to circle back to the one thing you, you mentioned that, you know, we want to prevent these people from killing themselves. And then there's the flip side of that coin. That is, well, at least now they're better off dead. I mean, I don't know that that comes up too often, but you know, the fact that they're no longer suffering with their,

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (20:25)
I mean, I think like, you know, the, um, a lot of that comes down to dehumanizing people who use drugs because a lot of people feel as though people use drugs are just worthless and that we can't be good parents and we can't be good at our jobs and we can't contribute anything to society. And, you know, you just think about some of the amazingly famous people who have suffered from addiction. Most people, if you're like, well, Oh, would you want to kill Janis Joplin? Uh, you know, do you want to kill like, um, yeah, I mean, right. Um, you know, should we, um, get rid of F if we got rid of every actor or musician or intellectual that had taken drugs and that had some kind of substance misuse problem, our culture would be very, very, um, much poorer for that. And when you think about people on, you know, I often have this experience when I'm interviewing people who are like homeless and on the street and actively using, and they're really smart and they have stuff to say, and they are talented in various ways. And it's like, what a waste? Like, why are we just throwing away this human talent that we could be using? If we were recognizing that stopping people from taking substances is not a sensible goal just by itself, sensible to try to help people be healthy and to have less harm, but it is not sensible to hurt people in order to help them.

DEAN BECKER (22:06)
No, my, I know that, um, before we began our discussion, you, you were doing some writing, uh, you, you have written several books. Uh, the one that's caught most people's attention on broken brain, uh, um, cutting, um, extrapolates on too much on what we've been talking about, that, that, uh, taking drugs does not make you a bad person or ineffective or incapable, or, Oh, I have a shirt I like to wear that says, uh, nice people take drugs because it's so true. We were just talking about Robert Downey or whoever, and we just need to walk away from those racial fears and propaganda, the hysteria that was put forward. And that, that seems to percolate up through the halls of Congress every five or 10 years, or at least it did up until about the last 20, but they had to increase the penalties in the, you know, the outreach and the, you know, the, the long, longer terms and, uh, mandatory minimums and three strikes, you know, just on and on just we're going to teach those druggies. And they haven't taught us a damn thing. I don't know. You either thought they're my

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (23:18)
Well, yeah. I mean, just like, again, you know, if you're trying to fight addiction, addiction is resistant to negative consequences, so that's a really stupid way of doing it. If you're just trying to fight drug use, you might be reducing people's drug use if you're really horrible to them, but if you're reducing something that isn't harmful, why is this a good idea? You know, I mean, like we might want to eliminate telephone use or something. Um, but, um, you know, it helps people communicate, like why would you really want to do that necessarily? So I think, you know, what's important to realize is that human beings are going to do lots of stuff that other human beings, disapprove of the only place in which the government should be involved is if that is harming someone, if it's not harming someone, just leave it alone and work. We have plenty of problems that are causing real harms to lots of people. And we have plenty of money that we should be going to those things that we are wasting on the drug war.

DEAN BECKER (24:21)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and that's the heck of it. Most people just don't stop and think about it. We're empowering terrorists. If they're brave enough to grow flowers on a mountainside somewhere we're enriching. These Barbara's cartels that are driving these caravans northward because well, hell they take over those small villages. They, they run the police out of the building and, and become the police, uh, extorting the whole village and little wonder those folks want to come northward. And of course, Chicago is once again, like the prohibition, you know, uh, um, uh, shootout capital of the world, uh, and, and little wonder because this prohibition creates so much incentive, um, to, to control the market, to, to make the profits. And, and I don't know, I'm not going to preach to you, but it just is freaking crazy. Isn't it?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (25:15)
Well, I mean, the thing is that, like, what we really don't recognize is that drugs serve multiple purposes. Um, and so in a situation where people have no jobs and no hope, and a lot of chaos drugs can either anesthetize that for you or they can serve as a job and a source of income. And we are not going to solve this problem by putting people in jail. When the demand, when that's going to traumatize people and increase the demand, the only way to solve this is to provide people meaningful alternatives, and to help people find ways that are healthier of dealing with whatever their issues may be. And also in some cases, they may have no issues and just be having fun. In which case, why do we care? We should not care if people are just enjoying themselves. Like, you know, why should I care if somebody is having fun doing something I really don't like to do. Like, it's like, okay, that's nice for them. Like, I don't want to stop them as long as they're not bothering me. Like please.

DEAN BECKER (26:18)
Yeah, no one of those means I put up on Facebook when, when you Foria is a crime, the whole world suffers and that's, that's just what we have going on. That's what the agitation of the drug war is all about. Um, well, myself, it's, I want to thank you for taking time to visit with us here on Becker's buds and, and to be part of the seeking the moral high ground. Uh, we hope to have a 90 minute

DEAN BECKER: (26:44)
Special. We're going to release on September 11 with a lot of great names and a lot of great reasons why we should end this madness, but also with an invitation to a Donald Trump, as well as to mr. Joe Biden to come on the drug truth network, tell us why we need to do this forever. Uh, what would you say to those two candidates if you could?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (27:08)
Well, I would just say that our policy should be to reduce harm if we want to not spend money on things that are a waste of time. And if we want to have happier, healthier, more productive people, and we want to have money to spend on things that we all recognize we need to spend money on, then we should stop the drug war. If we want to fight addiction, if we want to help people feel safer, happier, more productive, we need to focus on reducing harm, not on stopping people, getting high, and the best way to make the world safer for people in general is not to prohibit things for which there is a massive and infant thing.

DEAN BECKER: (27:54)
Very true. Well, is there a website or where maybe some of your next writings will be next book you're gonna publish?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (28:01)
Uh, sure. So, um, Maya xe.com has most of my stuff. Um, and I am, yeah, the book is not going to be out for another year or so, but I am just desperately trying to use the darn thing done

DEAN BECKER: (28:14)
Well. Well, thank thank you for your time. My, I hope to see, I hope someday there is a conference we can meet.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: (28:20)
Yes, I do too.

DEAN BECKER: (28:23)
Thank you. All right. Once again, I want to thank Maya salivate. So I want to thank you for listening to cultural baggage. And I want to remind you once again, that because of prohibition, you don't know what's in that bag. Please be careful to the drug truth network listeners around the world. This is Dean Becker for cultural baggage and the unvarnished truth drug truth network archives are stored at the James A. Baker, the third Institute for policy studies, Japanese dancing,

TRANSCRIPT

CENTURY OF LIES

NOVEMBER 4, 2018

DEAN BECKER: The failure of drug war is glaringly obvious to judges, cops, wardens, prosecutors, and millions more now calling for decriminalization, legalization, the end of prohibition. Let us investigate the Century Of Lies.

DOUG MCVAY: Hello, and welcome to Century of Lies. I'm your host Doug McVay, editor of DrugWarFacts.org.

Later in the show we're going to hear from Maia Szalavitz, the award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author discussing effective treatment for opioid use disorder. First, though, in October, the Commission on Narcotic Drugs held another set of intersessional meetings in preparation for their next annual session, coming up in March of 2019.

One of the topics under discussion was new psychoactive substances, and ways in which to respond. One of the speakers that they heard from was Anton Luf from the Medical University of Vienna, with the Check It! service. Here's Anton to explain more.

ANTON LUF: Thank you very much. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's an honor to be here and to speak about integrated drug checking, or nowadays as we call it analysis based interventions at Check It! in Vienna.

Check It! is a scientific collaboration of the Vienna Addiction Services and the Medical University of Vienna, and is funded by the city of Vienna and the Federal Ministry of Labor, Social Affairs, Health, and Consumer Protection.

It was founded in the year 1997, so more than 20 years ago, to provide consumers of psychoactive substances on electronic musical festivals with addiction prevention and early interventions.

So, basically, Check It! offers substance analysis and individual risk categorization of so-called recreational drugs to users of those substances, like amphetamine, ecstasy, or cocaine, and so on, and many more, actually, and the service users, this is all on-site, we have a mobile laboratory, and users can hand in their substances and get them analyzed before they are consumed. And this is key.

But, those analytical and toxicological measures are never placed alone. They're never offered alone. They're always combined together with psychosocial interventions, such as information, advice, and support, and it's -- that's what we call analysis based interventions.

So, as this graph shows, the substance analysis never comes alone, but it provides the basis for a bunch of other services, and interventions, like information, advice, and support, ongoing support, and in a wider scope, the monitoring of the drug market. And it increases the value of all of those interventions, but it is not -- it's not the center.

From an analytical point of view, there are a few requirements for comprehensive addiction prevention early interventions in that sense, and first of all, the substance analysis has to provide the identity of all pharmacologically active substances in a drug sample that is handed in.

Then, the second, this is getting more and more important, the quantitative composition of the drug has to be determined. And fast analysis and communication of the results at the venue has to be -- is a key requirement, because there's evidence that service users are not likely to wait longer than 15 minutes to an hour to get a screening result, and it is very important that the results are communicated before the substance is consumed.

And I like to use the phrase "potential consumers," because we will see later not everyone who uses the service is a drug consumer.

So, there are current developments and challenges that we're facing in the drug market in, and this is especially for Austria and Vienna. We have an increasing number of different new psychoactive substances on the market. We have a high complexity of samples, which means that the substances are not pure, they're often mixed with other ingredients, which are also very often pharmacologically active.

We have a high variability of dosage, and also increased dosages, especially MDMA and cocaine. And, the most recent and the most severe consequence, or development, is the appearance of highly potent psychoactive substances in this field, in this specific field, which we also refer to sometimes as the party setting, which is not a good term, actually, but it's used like that.

And it is -- it is very surprising that highly potent substances are appearing in this field. So, you can see the development of the analytical equipment that we're using, that Check It! has been using from 1997 on, and it also had to be developed, according to the market, and nowadays, Check It! uses a combination of three approaches, which includes UHPLC DDMS [ultra-high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry digital direct mass spectrometer] and multi DMS, direct mass spectrometric approach, I don't want to go into detail, and I will explain why this is necessary.

And now with the focus on the appearance of highly potent psychoactive substances, here we see in this graph the new and reoccurring new psychoactive substances in Vienna, sorted by year and substance group. We see new psychoactive substances appeared on the market in Vienna in 2005, with piperazines, and the fentanyl -- the phenethylamines entered the market, and it was taken over by cathinones, which peaked in the year 2011 and 2012. And a very interesting development that we see is that in 2017, synthetic opioids entered the market.

So, I brought a few examples just to explain our work, and what is happening. Here we see a white powder, bought as 4HMF, a tryptamine derivative. It actually did contain the substance 4HMF, but also methoxyacetylfentanyl, a highly potent synthetic opioid, and in cases like this, we issue a warning, which is indicated by this red piece of paper, and as you can see, it's also anonymous.

Another sample the same night was submitted as fentanyl. It did not contain fentanyl, but as you can see in the MS trace chromatagram, it contained carfentanyl. Carfentanyl, as many of you know, is a highly potent synthetic opioid many times more potent than morphine, ten-thousand fold, it depends on which literature you consult. And as indicated by the picture next to it, very small amounts, micrograms, can lead to severe intoxications.

And this is a summary of what happened at the same night. This was quite representative for this night, but not for the whole setting. There were several unknown research chemicals handed in, so people -- that indicates that the people who handed in the substances had no idea what the substance was, and we found in three cases U-47700, cyclopentyl fentanyl, furanylfentanyl, which are all powerful and very potent synthetic opioids, and some other cathinones and other derivatives, all at the same night.

So, from an analytical point of view, it is extremely important to know the [unintelligible] substances, because it would create a false sense of safety, so we, in addition to our UHPLC-MS, we use now direct mass spectrometry on site with this very fast and easy approach, and this, our DMS has a very high sensitivity, and it is, as I said, easy to use.

So, at last, it is very important to analyze how the clients, the service users, react towards those warnings, and we, this is preliminary data of our ongoing survey, and one of the questions in this ecstasy survey was, how do you react if the analysis of your tablet yields a warning because of a harmful substance?

And 71 percent stated that they won't -- that they don't consume, 20 percent said that they would at least take less than usual, and only seven percent would consume as usual.

So, in the end, it -- this indicates that consumers or service users have -- show great risk awareness when they are presented with the right information, but without the information, they don't have the risk awareness, so it also indicates, this data, that the analysis based interventions can avoid -- can avoid -- sorry, I got stuck there now -- can avoid severe intoxications and in some cases maybe death cases. Thank you.

CND CHAIR: Thank you very much, Mister Luf, and, for a very interesting presentation. I want to see whether there will be any comments from the floor, any questions from the panelists as well. The UK, you have the floor.

DELEGATE FROM THE UK: Thank you very much, and thank you to the presenter for this very insightful presentation.

I have two quite specific questions, if I may. So, the first is in regards to the demographics of those who use this service. Do you have anything to show the age ranges?

And the second is about the preliminary data that you have, and whether you were able to find what you meant by harmful in the questionnaire. Did that mean that it was a substance that they didn't -- they weren't aware of, or does it mean that it was a highly potent, for example, more MDMA in a tablet of ecstasy, for instance? Thank you.

CND CHAIR: Thank you. Canada?

DELEGATE FROM CANADA: Thank you. I've been wanting to ask, there's a few questions, maybe, that just, a little bit maybe more description around the other parts of the service. So, if you could speak to anything like what percentage of people you think that are aware of the service would choose to use it. Do you give, are you able to identify all of the substances that you find, or is there an unidentifiable? And then what would you do with that?

And, I can't remember. There was supposed to be a third one. But if you could give a little more description around the rest of the service.

CND CHAIR: Angela, you wanted to make a comment?

ANGELA ME, UNODC: I just want to make a comment, if I may, because I think it's interesting what, particularly the last panel, that not everyone actually would not use the drug knowing that it is harmful, and then, it goes back to the issue of fentanyl in the US, and what I heard that some have researched, and I don't know if, you know, if it's true, that it shows that some users indeed, you know, want to avoid fentanyl, but actually what is happening also in the US and Canada have actually created some users who are actually, some want fentanyl.

They are very, maybe, not, you know, the great majority, but in a way, all of this potent substances are also creating niche markets, and I think it's important to understand, because, you know, of course, services to prevent the negative impact of drugs are very useful, but they need also to be targeted by those who really want to avoid the negative impact.

And the other question is, how do you manage with users that actually want to have very potent substances, and very dangerous substances?

CND CHAIR: Any other delegation? The Netherlands, and Slovenia.

DELEGATE FROM THE NETHERLANDS: Thank you, Madame Chair. I thank the presenter for his presentation, and I have a question about drug testing. We have it in the Netherlands as well, and the main purpose of it, of course, is harm reduction, but it has something counterintuitive about it, because people would think that it might stimulate the use of drugs instead of only reducing the harms.

So, can you elaborate a little bit on that issue, and explain to us whether it stimulates the use of drugs, and maybe lure non-users into the use of drugs. Thank you.

CND CHAIR: Let's take the one also Slovenia, please.

DELEGATE FROM SLOVENIA: Thank you very much. When somebody pays money for the drugs, normally you want to use it. It's, and if you will use it, even if it will be tested or not. If we're offering the testing, that is much better.

In Slovenia, we have such network of eleven focus centers in which everybody can bring the drugs on the test, and in a few days, he receives the answer from the laboratory. It is some kind of agreement between the police, medical institute, and the network of these centers. Is it exist also in Austria in such network or not?

CND CHAIR: Yes, please, go ahead.

ANTON LUF: Thank you for the questions. I'd like to start with Canada, and explain some of the other parts of the service.

As I said, the substance analysis is always placed in the center of attention because it is very interesting, and it happens in the public, but all the other services, there's a drop-in shop, for example, that has opening hours two times per week for psychosocial counseling. There are psychologists, there are groups, there are reduction groups, consumption reduction groups. There's referral.

We are very well connected with the whole addiction and prevention services in all of Vienna, and if a client turns into a patient, then we refer him to a good institution to solve that issue.

Also, there's online counseling, there's legal counseling, there's the whole, Addiction Services of Vienna also have needle exchange programs. There is, also is a big institution for IV drug use, so, and also we're well connected with the European monitoring system, the EWS, the Early Warning System, that we provide all of our data to those services, which contributes to the early warning system, and it's very interesting because some substances are not even detected by the police before we actually identify them first.

And so we get first hand information also, and also how a specific tablet or a specific substance is -- how dangerous it was. Also, if we find fentanyl in heroin, which was also the case, it was not only those party drugs. So, that's what we -- that's what I referred to.

And, about the identification of the substances, we have -- we put a lot of effort into identifying the substances as fast as possible. At the moment, at the venue, if we don't -- if we don't, can't identify it completely, we have an idea what it is, we announce a warning that this is an unknown substance.

We screen for approximately 500 substances, five hundred psychoactive substances, and if it is not one of those, the counselors of course tell the person or the client who is using the service that if it's not one of those substances, why would you ever consume it? Please don't, in that case, and we go back to the stationary laboratory, measure it with high resolution mass spectrometry and everything that we have. We identify it and then we train our systems again to recognize that substance.

The question about, in our survey, what the word harmful refers to. There were several more questions, and one of them also was how would you react if you get a warning because of high dosage. So that was very well distinguished between those two terms.

The word 'harmful' in that sense meant it was something like, we gave some examples, like PMA, like fentanyls, something that really -- that really is, like, a imminent health risk, and not just like an overdose, which I don't want to -- it's, that's maybe the bigger problem with the ecstasy tablets at the moment, but we have a different warning system for those, and we also have a threshold that is based on pharmacological data that we put a lot of research in, and this is very well communicated by the psychologists and the counselors.

DOUG MCVAY: That was Anton Luf from the Medical University of Vienna talking to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs in its October intersessional meetings. They were discussing new psychoactive substances and drug safety testing.

You’re listening to Century of Lies. I’m your host Doug McVay.

NGAIO BEALUM: While marijuana's legal on the west coast and Alaska and a lot of different places, it is still illegal in most of the country. Right? So while these cats are out here making millions of dollars and everybody's got a cannabis business and we're all smoking weed in the streets, there are people in other states who are still in jail over a joint, who got fifteen years on two grams, who got arrested for a gram and a half of weed. It's not over. We still need activists. We still need radicals. We still need to be in the streets.

Like, I've updated one of my new jokes about how what we need to do is just roll out from the west coast to all these other states, and just start going door to door like Weedhovah's Witnesses and getting everybody involved. I have some good news about weed, can I share it with you?

DOUG MCVAY: Now, let's talk about opioid use disorder treatment. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in their Health and Medicine Division held a public workshop of the Committee on Medication Assisted Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder at the end of October.

One of the people they heard from was my friend, the journalist and New York Times best-selling author Maia Szalavitz. Let's hear what Maia had to tell them.

KATHLEEN CARROLL, PHD: And finally, to bring us home, we're going to hear from Maia Szalavitz, who's an American reporter and author of the New York Times bestseller The Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way Of Understanding Addiction, to which I recommend you all highly. Thank you, Maia.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: Thank you so much for having me. I'm delighted and rather terrified, but, I just want to start by saying, we should not be calling this MAT. With any other treatment for any other disease or disorder, we don't say I'm on Prozac-assisted treatment for my depression, or I'm on insulin-assisted treatment for my diabetes.

We recognize that medication is appropriate treatment for a disease or a disorder, and so I think we've got to, like, look, starting right there, from the stigma that lives right there in that name. I would propose counseling-assisted treatment for those, because, you know, according to the data, what actually saves lives and cuts the death rate in half is the medication, even if there's no counseling. Plus, I like the acronym CAT.

Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the barriers that patients experience. Now, I am not currently a patient. I was a patient in the '80s, and that was a nightmare. Basically, it is an -- you know, the reason they call it orange handcuffs, for being on methadone, is because the experience is a carceral one. It is one of being controlled and being humiliated.

You know, I could have told them I was still using coke, but no, I had to sit there and, you know, try to eke out some pee in front of somebody, because I was so dehydrated from shooting the coke. But that would not have been acceptable, I would have not had the urine.

So, the humiliating and literally ghettoized nature of methadone clinics is deeply problematic, and we really need to -- we can prescribe Oxycontin to as many patients we want to do, so why can't we prescribe methadone or suboxone to however many patients we want to do?

If we are actually considering addiction to be a medical disease, we should not be treating these patients as somehow different, and as somehow requiring of more surveillance because we are somehow evil, bad, scummy people that are going to lie to you.

The stigma of addiction is often spread by people talking about how people with addiction, oh, when do they lie? When their lips are moving. Now, if you actually look at self-report data from people with addiction compared to people without addiction, if they don't have a reason to lie, like any other human being, they won't lie.

So, it's really, again, we really need to stop, you know, having these barriers, and so I just talked to a bunch of people who are actively patients about what kind of barriers they are currently experiencing. So, this is from a woman, she's on buprenorphine. "My symptoms are dismissed as simply pill-seeking behavior, leading doctors to miss a giant tumor in my ovary that almost left me infertile."

Our courts don't recognize suboxone as being clean, their stigmatizing word. It's holding up the visitation of my children, in this person, this is the mom of the patient, so, she can't see her grandchildren because the mom can't see her children, because suboxone isn't "clean."

We get people, I have tons of stories of people thrown off of methadone or suboxone for positive marijuana tests. Now, let me just say, a study came out a couple of weeks ago showing that daily marijuana use was actually associated with better outcomes in medication assisted treatment, oops, I didn't mean to use that phrase, but, yes, there -- but also, do we throw people who have diabetes off of their insulin because they smoke pot? No, we do not, we recognize that a life saving medication is a life saving medication and people should be on it.

I know that one of the federal agencies has warned that we shouldn't be throwing people off of opioids for benzodiazepines, either. The main thing that we do in our system of providing methadone or buprenorphine is to create these barriers.

So, we don't require counseling for anything else. I have a lot of stories here about people, I want to do my job, I want to go to work, but I have to go to counseling three times a week and it's in the middle of the day, and otherwise they're going to cut me off my medication.

I have heard from a woman whose husband suffers from psychosis. He was on I think 120 milligrams of methadone. He went into the hospital. They took him down to 20 just because. And we also probably know that actually opioids are kind of good at reducing psychosis, so that was completely -- there was no reason to do that to this person, other than to make him suffer.

We also have a problem with drug courts, that two thirds of drug courts say that you're not allowed to use methadone or suboxone, and that this does not count as treatment.

So, that -- they're basically, I reported a case a few years ago where a young man was doing well on methadone. He, some old warrant came back to haunt him, and the judge insisted that he come off methadone, and he was dead of an overdose a few days later.

He can't sue, because you can't sue the justice system, but the -- that kind of malpractice, and that kind of practicing medicine by judges, should not be happening.

I've heard stories from women who, oh, you gave birth? No more methadone for you. I've heard stories, oh, you miscarried? We're going to cut your Subutex down. There is also just the ongoing intense stigma that people experience when they seek any kind of other medical care. As soon as they hear that you are a person with addiction, you get, oh, you're just here to fool me kind of thing, and that's the nicer version of it.

There are also detoxes that have killed people because they couldn't pay for treatment anymore, and I haven't even gotten into the financial barriers.

I know I'm towards the end of my time but there's one more thing I want to say, which is, one of the key things that we do in the medication treatment world is we require people to attend twelve step programs. Narcotics Anonymous, which is the primary twelve step program for people with opioid addiction, does not consider being on medication to be being clean or in recovery.

So basically this means that we're sending people to a place that will stigmatize them. We're sending people to a place that will tell them to stop those evil meds, they're bad for you, you don't need them. If we really want to provide social support for people on medication, we should not be requiring them to attend programs that tell them that medication is bad, and I will be happy to take questions later. Thank you.

DOUG MCVAY: That was Maia Szalavitz, award-winning journalist and New York Times bestselling author, speaking to the Committee on Medication Assisted Treatment for Opioid Use Disorder at the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, on October Thirtieth.

And for now, that's it. I want to thank you for joining us. You have been listening to Century of Lies. We're a production of the Drug Truth Network for the Pacifica Foundation Radio Network, on the web at DrugTruth.net. I’m your host Doug McVay, editor of DrugWarFacts.org.

The executive producer of the Drug Truth Network is Dean Becker. Drug Truth Network programs are available by podcast, the URLs to subscribe are on the network home page at DrugTruth.net.

The Drug Truth Network has a Facebook page, please give it a like. Drug War Facts is on Facebook too, give its page a like and share it with friends. Remember: Knowledge is power.

You can follow me on Twitter, I'm @DougMcVay and of course also @DrugPolicyFacts.

We'll be back in a week with thirty more minutes of news and information about drug policy reform and the failed war on drugs. For now, for the Drug Truth Network, this is Doug McVay saying so long. So long!

For the Drug Truth Network, this is Doug McVay asking you to examine our policy of drug prohibition: the century of lies. Drug Truth Network programs archived at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy.

CULTURAL BAGGAGE

JULY 12, 2018

TRANSCRIPT

DEAN BECKER: I am Dean Becker, your host. Our goal for this program is to expose the fraud, misdirection, and the liars whose support for drug war empowers our terrorist enemies, enriches barbarous cartels, and gives reason for existence to tens of thousands of violent US gangs who profit by selling contaminated drugs to our children. This is Cultural Baggage.

Hi folks, I am the Reverend Dean Becker. Thank you for being with us on this edition of Cultural Baggage. Today we're going to hear from Paul Armentano, who will describe why the state is burning tons of legal marijuana out there in California. We'll hear from Brad Burge from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. But first up:

MAIA SZALAVITZ: I'm Maia Szalavitz, and I'm the author of Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way Of Understanding Addiction, and I've written about drugs and addiction for about three decades now for publications ranging from High Times to the New York Times.

DEAN BECKER: Now, Maia, the heck of it is, we're getting a lot more allies these days. I mean, folks like me have come along and worked in support of what you have presented over those decades, but, more newspapers, magazines, and even politicians are starting to align with what you determined all these years ago. Your thought there, please.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: Yeah, it's kind of amazing to see. I mean, it was obvious to me very early on that our drug policy was senseless, and was harmful. But at the time I started writing about this, the whole government and media was caught up in this war on drugs idea, and they really weren't thinking it through. It was just like, oh, if we, like, you know, cut the supply of this stuff then nobody will ever want to alter their consciousness, and nothing will replace the thing we cut down, and putting people in jail will help them.

You know, it all -- it's all really insane, but, at the time, a lot of people really didn't realize that our drug laws were not made based on science and rationality, they were made based on racism.

DEAN BECKER: Right. And that's the whole point, I mean, a lot of folks think that the doctors jumped up, and demanded this. It wasn't the doctors at all, it was law enforcement types, it was moralists. Charlatans, from my perspective. Your thought there, please.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: Yeah, I mean, there has just been a sort of series of people who gained status and power and money from demonizing various forms of drug use and associating them with various racist tropes about particular people.

I mean, marijuana was made illegal because of fears related to Mexicans and blacks, and particularly jazz musicians weirdly enough. Opium was made illegal because of fears about Chinese railroad workers taking American jobs, and seducing white women. You know, cocaine was made illegal because it was seen as literally making black people impervious to bullets, and also better marksmen.

So, yeah, I mean, and so when you look at this stuff, it just like seems laughable, but it was -- it was used to panic people and people did believe it, and that's how these laws got passed, you know, and I mean, we have this idea that we have this like scientific regulatory apparatus, which is largely true of the FDA, but it is not true of our prohibition system for recreational drugs.

DEAN BECKER: Well, and it brings to mind that over the decades, certainly I've been aware of what happened in the '80s, where they kind of had another brainstorm, if you will, and they thought mandatory minimums will get it done, and locales thought stop and search would, you know, get it done, that, I use the phrase, that the drug war is a quasi-religion. It's a belief system that people just adopt as if it were something holy.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: It has been basically a religion. The idea that certain substances offer unearned pleasure, and that's sort of the devil's playground, is really what underlies, like, our attempts to ban these substances.

I mean, we have this idea that, you know, I mean, alcohol prohibition occurred during great fear about immigration, and the idea was that, you know, alcohol was what caused domestic violence, it caused poverty, it just made people, you know, act in all the bad ways that people can act, and if you just took the alcohol away, then all of those things would go away.

Now, it is certainly true that alcohol can enhance violence, but, the prohibition actually made violence worse. If you sort of settle on one complicit cause of all your problems, or one specific group of people that are the cause of all your problems, it makes a nice, neat political message, but it's not true, so you're solution is going to end up causing problems.

And, when you realize that, you know, people take drugs for a multitude of reasons, and sometimes people, you know, actually drink alcohol in order to like hype themselves up to be violent, so they were planning to be violent in the first place.

In other instances, you know, people take drugs to calm themselves down. Anything that has consciousness likes to alter it, whether it's a cat taking catnip, or, you know, birds drinking fermented fruit.

DEAN BECKER: I think it's kind of a sticky subject. I'm a pothead, I've been smoking pot for over fifty years. I want to legalize it. And, in America, the majority, the vast majority of those working for drug reform are working for that same goal, marijuana legalization, but my thought is that we're kind of wasting our efforts, that it isn't just marijuana that's the problem, it's the prohibition itself, the belief system I was just talking about, that is the problem, because it empowers terrorists, cartels, gangs, it ensures more overdose deaths, children's access.

Prohibition is the real problem, is it not?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, it's certainly not the case that we want to have, like, Philip Morris crack or Philip Morris fentanyl, right? Like, that would not be a good idea.

DEAN BECKER: Well, --

MAIA SZALAVITZ: By letting gangsters sell it, it's not a good idea, either. The reality is that what we would like to do is have a system of regulation for highs that are so-called recreational, similar to the way we regulate medical drugs, although better, because we don't -- I mean, it's insane to me that it was and still is legal for drug companies to push doctors to, like, have people have quotas on like how many sales you must make in order to like, you know, get a commission for pushing a doctor to, like, you know, prescribe more Oxycontin.

Like, that's a problem, too. So, while prohibition just gives all this stuff over to the gangsters, and means that there's zero control over it. If you go too far the other direction, and, you know, have no rules about advertising and marketing and promotion, then you could have a system that's almost as bad.

Now, marijuana, that's not such an issue because if you, given that we have, you know, alcohol and tobacco legal, and both of those are more harmful, you kind of want the marijuana industry to not be, you know, pushed back by those two forces, in a sense. Ideally though, you would not have people making profits from addictive substances.

And you would have, you know, really good control over the way that supplies are, you know, regulated, and this doesn't mean that some things might not be, you know, illegal to sell. I think, you know, most people don't want fentanyl. They are usually seeking heroin when they end up with fentanyl, and if you gave them reasonable alternatives that were safer when they were not ready to stop, you could save a lot of lives.

So I think, like, in order to develop a good way of regulating recreational substances, you need to l look at the quality of the individual substance, the context in which the demand for that substance exists, the things that substitute for it, the things that complement it, and then work from there.

I mean, I think that it is very clear that one step, you know, the next step we need to take after marijuana legalization is to decriminalize possession of everything. There is absolutely zero support for throwing somebody in a cage for using a substance.

DEAN BECKER: Yeah. We shouldn't throw people in a cage if we're mad at them, for their habit, it just seems preposterous.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: Exactly. Yeah, I mean, that makes no sense. I mean, you could have a better argument against like, oh, let's sell cocaine to everybody, because that is a truly quite dangerous drug. But you need to figure out, like, when is the prohibition more harmful than the drug? How do you deal with, you know, sales, and terrorism, and cartels, and all these kinds of things, and balance out the harms so that they are minimized?

DEAN BECKER: You know, last week I had an editorial on my show, I talked about when will the harms of prohibition be examined, be recognized, and, you know, we've been pointing out some of the failures, the futilities of it, but one of the bonuses, I think, the benefits of legalization that I included last week was the fact that once it's legal, law enforcement will have millions of new allies, instead of people hiding from them. Your thought there, please.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the tragedies of prohibition is that it undermines trust between communities and law enforcement. And when people can be open about, you know, things like their immigration status, or their drug use status, or any of these things we've tried to, like, push underground, you will do a lot better at solving crimes that are actually predatory and actually harming people, because people will not fear for their own future. You know what I mean?

This is one of the things that's so damaging about trying to prosecute people for so-called drug induced homicide, when they -- when somebody overdoses on fentanyl. You know, usually in that instance, what happens is the person who's charged could just have easily have been the person who died. It's like, you know, a couple of users are together, they, you know, one of them goes out and gets the drug for everybody, and then another of them dies.

Like, it could have just been the next day that the other person would have been the one buying the drug. It's not, you know, it's not -- these are not kingpins. And if you prosecute them for overdose deaths, people are not going to seek help when they need medical help when somebody's dying.

And that is just wrong. The whole thing about understanding harm reduction is basically that the most important thing is saving people's lives.

DEAN BECKER: Exactly.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: It's more important that we save your life than we prevent you from getting high. I don't think the government has any business, like, determining whether or not you experience unearned pleasure or not. You know, that's between you and your own spirituality or morality, or whatever you want to call it.

What we should be worried about is, are you doing something that is harmful to yourself or others? And how can we reduce that harm? Well, we're not going to reduce the harm of marijuana by putting somebody in jail, because putting somebody in jail is more harmful than marijuana could ever be.

DEAN BECKER: Yep. So true. Well friends, once again we've been speaking with Maia Szalavitz, she's an author, mentor to many of us, an expert in the field of drugs and drug war. Maia, thank you for being with us. Is there some closing thoughts, a website you might want to recommend?

MAIA SZALAVITZ: Well, if you want to read my writing, you can look at Vice, I am in the Crime section, and also in the Health section, which is called Tonic, and you can also check me out on my own website, which is MaiaSz.com, that is MAIASZ.com, and you will find more than you possibly want to read.

DEAN BECKER: All right, thank you, Maia.

MAIA SZALAVITZ: Thank you very much.

DEAN BECKER: It's time to play Name That Drug By Its Side Effects! Permanent damage to the liver, eyes, bone marrow, heart, and blood vessels, convulsions, impaired mental function, neurological damage, kidney damage, irregular heartbeats, unbearable stress, sudden sniffing, death. Time's up! The answer: Lucy. Gasoline. There's a vending machine in your neighborhood.

BRAD BURGE: I'm Brad Burge. I'm the director of strategic communications at the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, otherwise known as MAPS. We're a nonprofit research and educational organization that focuses on the beneficial uses and the risks of psychedelics and cannabis.

My role is generally just educating the public.

DEAN BECKER: Well, Brad, thank you for being with us. You know, I'm aware that, you know, politicians and newspaper editors and, you know, many people with stature around the country, heck around the world, are beginning to reexamine and, I don't know, just reformulate their perceptions of these drugs, and how they might work to our benefit. Am I correct?

BRAD BURGE: We're seeing more psychedelic research now than has really ever taken place in history. Even back in the 1950s and 1960s, when the first research started into mescaline and LSD and psilocybin, there were only a few trials, and they were happening at more and more universities, but then they were criminalized, LSD and psilocybin in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and MDMA in the early 1980s, and so now, we're seeing clinical drug development drug trials, that is research that could make these drugs into legally approved medicines for specific conditions, taking place all over the world.

MAPS is going into phase three clinical trials of MDMA, assisted psychotherapy for treating PTSD, this fall. That's the last phase of research required before the FDA decides whether to approve MDMA as a prescription drug.

Psilocybin is also going into phase three trials. In Europe, we're going to be starting phase three trials there with MDMA probably next year. Yeah, there's all sorts of stuff happening now and it's really exciting.

DEAN BECKER: I like to think some of that progress was made possible by new perceptions, if you will, people realizing that marijuana wasn't the devil's drug and that portended horrors did not occur, and that it's actually working out pretty good, maybe we should reconsider our stance insofar as these other drugs. Would you respond to that please?

BRAD BURGE: Yeah, Dean, yeah, I think we are reconsidering our stance to those drugs. Now we're seeing, you know, a few people in Congress, elected representatives and a few appointed officials, you know, still digging in their heels, and saying no, marijuana has no medical benefit, and ignoring the thousands, or tens of thousands of reports [sic: Americans for Safe Access estimates there are more than two million legal medical cannabis patients in the US] we've had of people who've gained benefit from medical marijuana, despite state legislatures all over the country plus national governments all over the world starting to legalize the adult recreational use of cannabis.

And still, we get a few people digging in their heels. But, regardless, we're seeing this sea change, this huge change, towards more acceptance of marijuana, and I think also of, to a lesser degree, psychedelics. But, that's happening in a somewhat distributed sense, so we have medical universities, academic research institutions, state governments, and so on, all -- and also for-profit pharmaceutical companies now, who are doing research with medical marijuana, though all of that research is either limited to isolated cannabinoids, individual parts of the cannabis plant, or to synthetic parts of the plant [sic], so synthesized THC, artificial CBD, and so on, or non-smoking delivery systems.

Or they're doing research that can't be ultimately accepted by the FDA, that the FDA can't then use to approve whole plant marijuana as a prescription drug. So MAPS now is just -- is doing that very first study. It's a study of smoked marijuana in veterans with PTSD, and it's the first study that's ever taken place that could ultimately get federal approval for the marijuana plant, even if we get all fifty states and the District of Columbia saying, you know, we want to allow medical marijuana, we could still get to a point without federal approval where physicians won't be able to prescribe the plant.

DEAN BECKER: I show my age when I say this, but I kind of quit psychedelics, mostly, back about 1979, 1980. I really don't know a heck of a lot about this MDMA stuff. I think maybe it was showing up about the time I quit. What kind of benefit does it provide, sir?

BRAD BURGE: Yeah, I really love that story, Dean, because MDMA is really surging forward in public knowledge, as far as being a psychedelic drug with a medical use, it's kind of leading the way in a sense, and MAPS has been behind a lot of that, or really most of that MDMA research.

And, it's very different from the classical psychedelics, from -- it's very different from LSD, it's very different from psilocybin mushrooms. Of course, psychedelics often have very little in common with each other, and MDMA is no exception to that. Especially, it's just worth noting that MDMA is not a hallucinogen.

So, MDMA came about in sort of the late 1970s and early 1980s, is when it first sort of emerged into popularity, originally as a therapeutic drug and then later as a recreational drug, in a club environment.

These trials are moving, as I mentioned, into phase three this fall, and that's the last phase of research needed before the FDA will determine whether it's going to be a prescription treatment. So MDMA assisted psychotherapy is what we're talking about. It's not just administering MDMA to people and hoping that they feel better. Rather, it's just a few sessions, usually just two or three sessions, using MDMA combined with an eight hour psychotherapy session, where people can go through and relive their trauma from the standpoint of a lot of trust and confidence, which the MDMA brings to the therapy.

So in our phase two trials, which we completed last year, we had 107 participants overall, and we saw that after just two or three sessions, 56 percent no longer qualified for PTSD. So they didn't have PTSD anymore, after just two to three sessions.

And then twelve months later, that number actually went up, so people kind of kept getting better over that time, to the point where 68 percent, a year following just a few treatments, they didn't have PTSD anymore.

So, all of these people had chronic and treatment resistant PTSD, that means they'd had other treatments and they hadn't worked for them, and they'd had PTSD for an average of about 18 years. So these are some of the toughest cases of PTSD and after just two or three sessions, using MDMA to assist psychotherapy, 68 percent no longer had PTSD.

Those are just super impressive results, and if we can replicate those, or come anywhere close to those, really, in the phase three trials, the FDA should approve it, we're hoping by the year 2021. So just a few years from now.

DEAN BECKER: Well, Brad, that's wonderful news, and, you know, there are lots of military, former military, who have PTSD, first responders, and many others, whose lives have been handicapped. Well Brad, I promise I'm going to keep up with you guys more often, certainly. I do appreciate this information. I hope it's -- raises the curiosity of some of the listeners to the potential for maybe themselves or members of their family. You can learn more about the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies on their website, it's real easy, MAPS.org.

Brad, I want to thank you, sir, and let's do this again soon.

BRAD BURGE: Dean, I look forward to it. It's great catching up, as always. Thanks so much.

DEAN BECKER: What will it take to motivate? Please visit DrugTruth.net.

Things out on the west coast got a little weird from my perspective here in Texas. They apparently destroyed a couple hundred thousand pounds of marijuana and extracts and so forth. And, I don't quite understand why that happened, or the need for it to happen, and I'm hoping that the deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws can help us understand what happened there and maybe how it's going to go forward. Mister Paul Armentano, are you there sir?

PAUL ARMENTANO: I am. Good to speak with you, Dean.

DEAN BECKER: Paul, it is kind of puzzling, here in Texas, what just went on. Describe to me the situation, what happened.

PAUL ARMENTANO: Sure. California's medical market is in a state of transition. It is transitioning from an unregulated quasi-gray market to an above ground regulated legal market. And as part of that transition, there was a period of time where there was a grace period and dispensaries after January First were allowed to sell products to consumers that had not necessarily gone through state licensed testing.

But that grace period ended on July First. So after the first of July, any state registered dispensary that's selling cannabis based products to consumers must be selling regulated products that have been subjected to state licensed testing. Products that had not been subjected to testing could not be sold to consumers after the first, and that's why those products were destroyed, and not available to consumers.

DEAN BECKER: Okeh, and, was I right in the number, a couple of hundred thousand pounds?

PAUL ARMENTANO: I have no idea what the total number was, but certainly in the weeks leading up to July First, dispensaries significantly marked down such products and I don't think it is believable to think they were able to sell all of their inventory, so at the end of the day, yes indeed, some inventory that could not be sold after July First most likely was destroyed.

DEAN BECKER: Now, I hear reports out of Oregon and maybe Colorado as well, but, that the price is falling, that growers have over produced, that there's an abundance, if you will, if not a surplus on the market. Is that true?

PAUL ARMENTANO: Well, I don't live in either one of those states, but certainly I have heard those same reports. Certainly this is an economic market, and there are laws of supply and demand, just like there are in any other market, and when demand outstrips supply, prices go up, but when supply outstrips demand, prices go down. And we are going to see that level of market volatility and price fluctuation in the marijuana market, just like we see it in other markets, whether we're talking about gasoline, whether we're talking about iPhones, or whether we're talking about marijuana.

DEAN BECKER: Okeh. Now, it's been six, well, going on seven months that it's been legal in California. How is it working out? Is there, the black market still interfering greatly, or what's going on out there?

PAUL ARMENTANO: Well, let's be clear. The adult use and possession and personal cultivation of marijuana has been legal since midnight on election day 2016. The change that took place on January First of this year was that the above ground adult use retail market of marijuana became licensed and regulated.

And again, like with any roll out, with any new transition, it's had its bumps along the road. When, in January, there were very few licensed retailers that were available to sell marijuana to adults. In the past few months, that total number of retailers along with the total number of state licensed labs and manufacturers is growing to slowly meet market demands.

And I have confidence within the next six months to a year we will see a robust legal market in California. But it's going to take some time. California is a massive state that has a massive public demand for marijuana, and it is going to take time for the legal market to be robust enough to adequately meet that demand.

DEAN BECKER: All right. Yeah, and as I understand it, California recently became, is it the fifth largest economy on planet earth?

PAUL ARMENTANO: It is, it is the fifth largest economy in the world. Obviously marijuana and the marijuana industry is a small part of that economic engine, but it is certainly a notable part of that engine. And it is certainly critical to establish an entire bureaucratic and regulatory system overnight to meet the demands of that market.

DEAN BECKER: All right, friends, once again we've been speaking with Mister Paul Armentano. He's the deputy director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Of course, they're out there on the web at NORML.org. Thank you, Paul.

PAUL ARMENTANO: Thank you, Dean. Pleasure speaking with you.

DEAN BECKER: And so quickly we are done. Once again I remind you, because of prohibition, you don't know what's in that bag. Please, be careful.

To the Drug Truth Network listeners around the world, this is Dean Becker for Cultural Baggage and the unvarnished truth. Cultural Baggage is a production of the Pacifica Radio Network. Archives are permanently stored at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. And we are all still tap dancing on the edge of an abyss.