Hello from southern Italy.I'm here in Pomigliano Amare, a little seaside town in Apulia in the southern region of Italy.And I'm very excited today to host the executive director of SSDP, Students for Sensible Drug Policy,
Cat Murty to talk about an incredibly important subject, and that is the proposed scheduling of two vitally important research chemicals by the DEA, the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.
And you might not have even heard of these two chemicals, but they are vitally important to ongoing psychedelic research, and they are DOI. and DOC.
The current status of these two chemicals is unscheduled and it's the collective hope of many in the research community that they remain that way.
And SSDP in fact is taking the DEA to court to ensure continued legal research access to these chemicals.
We're going to learn more about the importance of this case today from Kat, but first let's keep this in the wheelhouse of unscheduled substances by thanking our sponsors Healing Herbals, purveyors of ultra-premium legal entheogens.
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Also, huge shout out to MicroBoost, M-Y-C-R-O-B-O-O-S-T, purveyors of ultra premium functional mushroom products and advocates and supporters of psychedelic research who also hope to see DOC and DOI remain unscheduled.
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It is a vitally important component of my personal wellness routine and one that I cannot advocate for enough.Check out microboost.com. and tell them I sent you.
And since you're here, would you be so kind to consider leaving a review for the Micropreneur podcast wherever you're listening?It's a pleasure to host this show for you.
Without further ado, let's get the show on the road and hear what Kat Murty of Students for Sensible Drug Policy has to say about the proposed scheduling of DOC and DOI by the DEA. K-PASA, MUFASA, what's up everybody?
We've got Kat Murty, Executive Director of SSDP, Students for Sensible Drug Policy, one of my favorite organizations in drug policy and the psychedelic space, et cetera.How are things today, Kat?Welcome to the podcast.
Hey, thanks for having me.Doing great.Excited to be here talking to you.
Awesome.I have so much respect for the SSDP organization and all the many different people who work alongside it and within it, several of whom have been on the podcast, including Gina Giorgio, who made this connection for us right now.
So shout out Gina, big fan of hers. And let's get down to business right off the bat.
I understand that SSDP has been very active advocating against the proposed scheduling of two research chemicals that are critical to psychedelic research and drug research, and those are DOI and DOC.
and that you've actually been granted a 10-day hearing by the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA, in order to plead your case of why these research chemicals should not be scheduled.
Can you catch us up to speed on what's going on here, Kat?
Yeah, absolutely, Dennis.So you've got it all right there.We're taking the DEA to court to keep psychedelic research legal.So DOI and DOC are these two research chemicals.
I'm not even going to pretend to say that I can pronounce their actual scientific names. Because no one would know them anyway.They're used almost exclusively inside of labs, and they have been for decades, very safely.
Between the two of them, there's been over 900 articles published in medical journals, scientific journals, showing all sorts of potential for treating anxiety and depression and pain management, and opioid overdose reversal.
And this has all happened because they have not been scheduled whatsoever.They're actually not included in the Controlled Substances Act.
And a result of that, DOI is the de facto chemical that researchers are using to understand how serotonin reuptake works in our brains.
So it's not even just about psychedelics, it's about medical potential and how much we can really help people out there who are suffering.And so they've been used for decades.There's been no problems.We don't see arrests.
People aren't really using these recreationally.
And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere in 2022, the DEA suddenly announced that they were going to be making these chemicals schedule one substances, which for those of you who don't know, means that there's no known medical potential.
There's a high likelihood of abuse.And obviously this is just not true on both cases.And most importantly, doing so would essentially stop all of this research.Well,
I don't think that they were expecting much opposition, but SSDP's Science Policy Committee, which is made up of students and folks who are involved in the academic world, who are much smarter than me and doing all of this amazing research, saw this, immediately pushed back, and the DEA dropped it.
So, yay, we're done, right? No, right before Christmas this past year, right in the middle of the holiday season, maybe they thought that then no one would know about it.
They again announced that, the DA again announced that they were going to be making DOI and DOC Schedule 1 substances.So we started off our year in January, again requesting a hearing on these substances.
We have, just within our Science Policy Council, we had 22 people who had worked in labs or are currently working in labs using either DOI or DOC for their research.
And all of them were going to be imminently harmed by this, as well as, of course, all of the Americans who aren't going to get these great medical cures that we're seeing coming out of this.
And so we've been going back and forth, and we now have a, I believe it's 9 or 10 days.It's from the 12th through the 22nd of November, we have a public hearing scheduled on these substances, which is just incredible.
Usually public hearings are a day or so.That's what we were expecting.
And we're really getting the opportunity to get the scientists out there explaining why it is so critical that we don't block the research that's happening here and we keep DOI and DSE legal.So it's a really great opportunity, I think.
you know, if you've been following what's been happening with our legal system and with the Supreme Court decisions that happened this year, depending on how this case goes, there's actually a chance that we could potentially really defang the DEA's ability to make these kinds of decisions in the future as well.
So, yes, it's about DOI and DOC.It's also just about public health, about medicine, about following the science.
And it's about no longer allowing the government to, with no oversight whatsoever, shut down people's ability to research things that are going to make our lives better.
Hear, hear.I'm so here for it.This is such a critical juncture in modern history, it feels like, with drug policy reform, because it really feels like we've reached a critical mass of people who recognize
the current scheduling system for controlled substances as being woefully inadequate at large and egregiously overdue for sensible reform.And I like that you've got that baked right into the name of the organization, Sensible Drug Policy.
It's not asking that much.Now, I very much like yourself, Kat,
I'm unfamiliar with the more scientific depth of what DOC and DOI are, but I have been following quite a few journalists and organizations in the space that are advocating to prevent them from being scheduled, much like SSDP.
So I'm familiar with the fact that this is an important landmark case that you're very much at the vanguard of.
How can the public support, how can regular people and people like myself support SSDP and the broader push to challenge the DEA on the proposed scheduling of DOI and DOC?
Yeah, so definitely us having this conversation here is the biggest part of that.
I think that the DEA has really been taking advantage of the fact that the average person doesn't know what DOI or DOC is, even within the psychedelics community, which you would think are the people who are most likely to know about this.
No one else really knew about these substances.They didn't necessarily know that they were getting scheduled.
I can't tell you that I would have known about it if it weren't for the fact that we had so many amazing scientists who are SSDP members and alerted us to this being a huge issue, right?
And so the number one thing is just getting the word out there about the potential, about all of the things that DOI and DOC could do, and the fact that if they are scheduled, we're going to be shutting down
research that could be saving lives, that could be changing lives, but also saving lives for the better.So that's number one.Definitely anything that we can do for that.
And then we're going to be looking into other options for folks to really come out and support, perhaps when it gets closer to the hearing as well.It is a public hearing.The media is going to be able to attend as well.
But there's going to be other options depending on how things happen.So if you check us out at ssdp.org slash don't block psychedelic research or just go to ssdp.org and you should be able to find it pretty simply on our website.
You can sign up there and we will keep you up to date with different ways that you can make sure that we keep DUI and DOC legal.
Wonderful.There's the call to action folks, ssdp.org.Let's talk a little bit about the organizational culture at SSDP.It's my understanding that you've been involved since 2009. You've been named Executive Director as of October 2023.
And in that time, we've seen a lot more public advocacy and awareness around psychedelics, this whole psychedelic renaissance, as some have framed it, and just this incredible mainstreaming of psychedelics, which also serves as a catalyst for a broader conversation about drug policy reform.
That's one of my favorite things about psychedelics is that they've actually opened the door to a lot of people recognizing that
we need to change the system at large for how we schedule or preferably don't schedule drugs for how and who we allow to regulate these substances and for these broader conversations that are ongoing.
So what is the organizational culture like at SSDP these days?How many chapters are there and what is the end goal of SSDP?
Absolutely.So I'm going to start at the end and work back, right?So we are the largest national network of young people working to end the war on drugs.That's the end goal.
We want to replace destructive, failed war on drugs policies with ones that are rooted in science and compassion and human rights. Young people have always been at the front lines of the war on drugs, and they continue to be.
They're most targeted, they're most likely to be in harmful positions, and this is a war that is fought in our name over and over and over again.
We're told that the war on drugs is here because we want to protect our children from drugs, and we know the prohibition is not the way that you do that.It leads to
higher arrest rates, higher death rates, and just generally ripping apart our communities, stopping students and young people from being able to attend university, from being able to get different types of jobs, from being able to rent apartments, buy homes, all sorts of different things like that.
We're really focused on doing everything that we can at the policy level to end the war on drugs and start addressing the harms caused by decades of war on drugs policies.Now, we are a chapter-based organization.We have members across the US.
We started in 1998 and we've had tens of thousands of folks go through our program since then. They've been involved in changing everything from a lot of the marijuana legalizations that you've seen across the country.
Every single one of them have had SSDPers involved.A lot of the plant medicine bills, syringe access work.We've done a lot of stuff around harm reduction, the Good Samaritan laws.
You know, when I was in college, folks wouldn't call if there was an overdose because a lot of times they would send the police before they would send an ambulance.
Your friend was still dying and you were all going to prison now, thanks to peers and a lot of folks in this community.That's no longer the case.You can call for help.You have these medical amnesty laws in place.
Those are all things that peers have worked on our students.Now, students and young people who might belong to campus chapters that are on. High schools, colleges, universities, or who might belong to community chapters.
Those are folks who are not currently enrolled in a. A school, but are still interested in his mission and want to work with us or ambassadors who are not part of a chapter, but are working actively with in various ways, whether through things like our science policy committee or.
Just in their community through other work that they're doing that furthers SSTP's mission.We have right now a little bit under 100 different chapters or ambassadors across the country.All over the place.
We really are just a national organization with a local feel.So what that means is folks are really picking for themselves.What are the places that make the most sense in their community for them to be addressing at the grassroots level?
Uh, although we do also at the national level, we try to encourage folks to work on certain projects, certain opportunities that we see coming out and, uh, working together as a network when, when it makes sense to do so.
So, um, there's a lot of different ways to get involved.Um, I actually first joined in 2009, as you mentioned, as a college student, I was at the university of California at Berkeley.Um, and I went to Berkeley because, you know, I'd read.
all of this stuff for a long time about the free speech movement and the civil rights movement and about all of this incredible work towards human liberty that had happened in Berkeley and had really sprung out of there.
And then I went to college there and I liked it, but I was really disheartened that I wasn't finding that community.
I'd been involved in my normal chapter in Texas when I was in high school and had otherwise just been really passionate about this work. I looked around, I didn't see that kind of organization.
But, you know, I was a freshman trying to get stuff figured out.And so I just kind of went and started doing other work on campus.And then I took a class called Drugs in the Brain.
It is the class that I got the worst grade in because it was mostly pre-med students. And that is I'm a political scientist.I'm not a scientist.
So definitely was a little above my level when it started breaking down into the actual chemical models and things like that.But fascinating stuff about really how drugs interact with. your brain and your body.
And so I took it out of interest and someone had come in and said, hey, I'm starting this organization.It's called Students for a Sensible Drug Policy.If anyone's interested, come join.I went to a meeting and I got hooked.
And so I, yeah, so that was back in 2009.I became a campus chapter president.I ended up interning for SSDP. I served as our Amplify co-coordinator.
This is a project that we used to have where we'd connect with touring bands and we'd promote their shows and they would wear SSDP shirts on stage and allow us to have booths at their conferences.I mean, sorry, at their shows.
you know, we kind of worked together.
That's kind of fed into a lot of the work that a lot of our current chapter members do now, going to festivals and doing harm reduction trainings and work like that at conferences and festivals that are happening now.
And then I joined our board of directors and I chaired all of our diversity initiatives for eight and a half years.And just like, it's just always been a center of
focus and just the amazing people that I meet who are always doing cool things and changing their community.And it's just more and more and more cool people just kept me around.
And so when we needed a new executive director, our old executive director, who, again, was someone who I had known since I first joined SSDP, and he was at a chapter at UConn.And of course, I was at Berkeley.
We met at our first SSDP conference in San Francisco. And he was stepping down.He was moving on to a different organization.And so I was on the board.I was thinking about, oh, OK, so we need to hire another executive director.
I've been involved in hiring the last three.It's a lot of work.I was going into my maternity leave.I was just about to have my second child, my daughter.And so my mind was kind of wrapped around, OK, So I got to wrap this up.
I got to start thinking about this.It also feels like this time in my life when I want to do something new.I want to do something that I want to feel like something I'm really passionate about, that I'm really changing the world.
I've been in my prior role also kind of in the human liberty oriented world, but at a different organization for a little over a decade at that point doing communication stuff.And so it's kind of pondering on these two.And I was like, oh, wait.
I know what I'm passionate about.What's the thing that I spend all my free time working on anyway?And so brought it up to the board and, you know, thought and they agreed with me.
So it's been just a massively exciting ride to get to explore SSDP in this different way.And God, it's just like, it's so inspirational.Every single day I get to talk to young people who are just doing really cool things and building a better world.
And it feels like I'm really making a change.So I love doing it.
That's such a great feeling to have such a sense of purpose and drive.A lot of times I come back to my own life and where I want to go and having a sense of purpose, kind of everything else orients around that.
That's your North Star when you find that purpose and then you're, galvanized in your action towards achieving that purpose, whatever it is.So we were actually in the Bay Area in college at the same time.
I arrived at the University of San Francisco in 2007 in the fall semester, stayed through 2011.And as you can attest to, it's quite a liberal atmosphere, which as part and parcel to that is there was a lot of unfettered drug use.
There was a lot of psychedelic experimentation, a lot of dabbling in other substances. And it was pretty integrated into the culture, woven into the social fabric in the Bay Area.
And I always noticed that missing piece, that there wasn't a lot of education happening, at least not where I was, around best practices.I had never heard the word set and setting.I had never heard the term harm reduction.
You just had a lot of people with quite a bit of money with a lot of substances.And while that makes for a great party, it also made for a lot of growing pains for a lot of people and a lot of trying to figure it out.
So I'm a huge advocate and proponent of education and recognizing that a lot of these substances, maybe not DOC and DOI, but a lot of other substances are already being widely used.
But what we're missing is that educational component that is not so judgmental, right?I went through the D.A.R.E.program, as many of our generation did, and it's so punitive and prohibitive.It's punishment based.It's just say no.
And something you mentioned earlier.
It's ineffective.Ineffective.You know, I did D.A.R.E.too, and they gave us this fat, this fat book of all of these different drugs and everything that they did and told you never go near any of these.And of course,
I think the average student looks at that and says, oh, it's a bucket list of things to try, right?
In fact, it is.Yeah, I've heard a lot of firsthand testimonies from people saying that they had zero interest in LSD until the DARE officer came in and started telling them about how you can see Bugs Bunny and you can laugh hysterically.
And everybody said, that actually sounds pretty interesting.And I can say that high school seeing, it wasn't a DARE program, but we had a health class the teacher was an old rock and roller.
And I don't know if he subversively tried to get us interested in psychedelics, but the drug education program actually opened up my mind to a lot of possibilities and kind of led me to Arrowwood, you know, Arrowwood.org was the only reliable drug education website that I knew of that had a lot of firsthand experiences.
That was like the only way that you could learn about a lot of these things in a more like realistic manner at that point.
Yeah.So huge shout out to Arrowwood and it's great to see that there's so many other organizations now that are latching onto this.So yeah, just a couple of thoughts there.
And I'm curious when you want to apply political pressure against the DEA or some of these other entrenched actors and organizations, where do you start?Do you start with an open letter from an attorney?Do you start with a protest on campus?
What are some best practices for actually getting the attention of these agencies?
I think it really depends on what it is.It's important that you always look out and see what the opportunities are and what our abilities are.And we also try to think of it as what is for SSTP, like we are young people.
That's the whole appeal, we're young people and that's our approach.And that brings this type of energy and excitement and promise for the future to it, right?But that also means that there are certain things that we're gonna be better at
other things.And so there's lots of different things that we've done, you know, around 420 this past year, we've done a lot of work.One of our other big things that we've been working on since I became executive director and before, but
has been really pushing for the rescheduling and then full de-scheduling of cannabis.You know, for us, that's been a whole mix of different things.We've met with the White House.We've met with the Office of the Vice President.
We've done petitions and organizational sign-on letters.
We've done, we did a, we helped put together a massive lobby day of 30 different organizations, 30 plus from right, left in the cannabis industry who all went up and lobbied together asking for explicitly three goals to
Deschedule cannabis, release all federal cannabis prisoners and clear their charges from their records.
And really with the idea that like, look, you can't come in and tell us that your friends from the left or your friends from the right or your friends from the industry are saying this other thing because we brought them all together in this 1 room and we're all asking you for the exact same things.
We also had a big vigil that we held about 300 people in front of the White House, reminding President Biden of his campaign promises to decriminalize marijuana, let everyone out of prison and clear their records, which of course,
Hasn't happened yet.We've held expungement clinics, working with attorneys and trying to really lower the barrier as well by making these accessible for folks who don't have an attorney.
to start clearing records for folks who do have charges that are holding them back.We've done trainings, we've done, you know, we've worked, our folks have worked to do a lot of decrim work on marijuana in Texas, like all of these different things.
It's really about finding what the opportunity is and moving forward on it.And I think that we've gotten a lot of wins on it in that way.
If you'd asked me before 2022, would we be sending a legal letter to the DEA telling them that we want to schedule an administrative court hearing to talk about scientific research chemicals, I would have been like, what are you talking about?
But it was just that that's what aligned and that's what made the most sense for us to do.We might soon be in court again on cannabis.We filed the letter Uh, on that as well for descheduling, um, with the DOJ.
So it really depends where the opportunity is.We're willing to take it.Uh, the way I see it is any.Any single thing that moves us closer to decriminalizing drugs, ending the war on drugs, getting people's charges removed, making sure that.
We're having a safer environment for people who do choose to use drugs, where they're less likely to be mixed with other substances that they don't know about, where they're less likely to be in unsafe sets or settings, where they are more likely to be in the right headspace, to be supported by a community, to be able to use
drugs in a way that they're not going to cause undue harm to themselves and others to be able to get help when they need it.All of those kinds of things.Anywhere we see the opportunity and we're able to do it, we move forward.
And I really think that's what everyone has to do.You wait, you look, you find your opportunity, and then you get the work done.
And seeing the level of Connection between the different organizations and stakeholders that you've mentioned really speaks volumes when you have strategic alliances and a well executed plan, because it is a war on drugs.
So, ergo, it requires a sort of battle like mentality.
I mean, it is a battle like mentality.Think about it.We've all seen the SWAT coming in, bursting down people's doors, throwing smoke bombs at babies because they heard that someone might have a marijuana plant growing in their bathroom.
What is this, right?It is a war.It's a war that we've all been unfairly drafted into.None of us really want to be a part of, and it's making our communities a lot less safe.
It's preventing people from being able to pursue a better life for themselves.It's breaking apart families.It's killing people.It's killing so many people.
We talk about the opioid overdose rate in this country, and that is a direct result of prohibition.And every single time we see another law cracking down on opioid prescriptions, which are often scapegoated as the reason for the opioid crisis,
You make the drugs less legally available, we see a higher rate of overdoses.And this happens with every single drug, right?And so what's really important is that it is a war and it's a war against us.
It's being fought in our name, but it's really against us.And to the extent that we're able to make people see that and realize that it is in the best interest of every single one of us.
It doesn't matter whether you use drugs or not, whether you like the idea of other people using drugs or not, whether you belong to a different racial or ethnic or religious group, whether you're right wing or left wing, it doesn't matter.
The war on drugs is harming you and our ability to really get together and unite around that message and end this is really what's moving us all forward.And I think that we've seen so much progress in that arena.
It used to be when I first started this work in 2007, that's when I first started trying to legalize cannabis specifically.And
you know, we get together and we kind of talk about, oh, you know, maybe, maybe one day I do think that marijuana is going to be legal, but I'll probably be in my 80s, you know, and nowadays on every single corner, uh, just about it's, um, 80 something percent of Americans across the country live, uh, some live within driving distance of a marijuana dispensary.
And that's everywhere in the whole country.The vast majority of Americans do. You know, this is just a whole different world.
Now, it's worth mentioning, there are also close to 3,000 people who are in the federal penitentiary for long sentences, some of them life sentences, for marijuana still, oftentimes within a mile of one of those legal dispensaries.
So this war on drugs is not over.We're seeing new inroads, whether it comes
whether it comes to opioids or attempts to schedule things like fentanyl or xylosine as a result of the opioid crisis, or whether it's attempts to do things like block research using chemicals like DOI and DOC that literally there haven't been any arrests for in years and yet is somehow an urgent emergency for
the DEA to completely block access to.There's new pathways every day.So it is an ongoing fight.But I think that as people have learned, increasingly as this message has passed, and as people have started to band together, I worked on the
Uh, California campaign to legalize as the field director for the prop 19 campaign back in 2010, we narrowly lost.It was very frustrating, but just a couple percentage points almost exclusively because of organization by.
folks who were benefiting from the quasi-legal medical system at the time, growers who would tell you very openly that they didn't want marijuana to be legalized because they didn't want competition.
And then we just narrowly lost the next major election cycle, Colorado passed legal. And then ever since then, people looked around and they realized, oh, actually, the world didn't end.It's actually better.Kids use less drugs.
Youth use less drugs when it's legalized.Every state that has legalized has lower use rates for young people. It's just all of these amazing things they're looking around and they're saying, hey, maybe those war on drugs policies didn't work.
Maybe everything we learned in D.A.R.E.wasn't really true.And so, you know, Republicans, Democrats, they agree.
It's just about getting the politicians to realize that this is the world that we live in and it's time to start ending those prohibitionist policies and putting in place things that actually do help heal our communities and build better, stronger ones as well.
Indeed, and it really feels like there's been a sea change in public opinion towards cannabis and psychedelics and increasingly so towards drug use at large.
you know, rewind 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there were still the commercials about the scrambled egg, this is your brain on drugs.And now we have messaging talking about hyper-connectivity and microdosing for mental health.
And in a way, this has completely moved the pendulum from this just say no, Nixon era, Reagan era, war on drugs that everybody was in favor of to an unpopular war on drugs.
I would say that public opinion is very much on the side at large of legalizing cannabis or at least taking it off schedule one, which is a great first move towards de-scheduling.
Now, I'm curious, this is such a noble battle to fight against the war on drugs, but have you given much consideration to what a post-prohibition future might look like?
Yeah, actually, I have.SSDP has as well.And of course, this is one of those places where it starts to break down a little bit.We've seen this happen with cannabis, for example.
It was a lot easier to organize when folks were saying like, okay, we don't want it to be illegal.But what do we want it to look like?That's where you start to have a lot of conversation.The same, I know, with
a lot of the psychedelics, it becomes an issue of, okay, well, we know we don't like this, but what do we want the model to look like?That's when you don't have as much agreement.
Now, I will say, personally, I think that anything that decriminalizes everything, nobody should be in jail because of something that's nonviolent that they choose to do consensually by themselves.That would be my number one guiding star, North Star.
That's what I'm moving towards.Full legalization, decriminalization of all drugs.SSTP actually co-published a
Something last December alongside the reason foundation, the National Coalition for drug legalization and law enforcement action partnership, which is a handbook for what drug what the world could look like in a post drug war world.
And the idea is very much that. You know, we always talk about the harms caused by the war on drugs, but we don't talk about how much better our world could be if we didn't have prohibition and what that could look like.
And so it's definitely something that we're exploring and thinking about.And I think that it's something that all of us really are still kind of trying to figure out what we want that world to look like.
I think that the key thing to remember always is that we want to prevent criminalization. As ssdp as we're picking the policies and the campaigns that we want to work on.It's always very much.Okay.But will this create new crimes?
And if it does, that's a concern for us.But otherwise, if it moves us closer to. a freer world in which people can choose for themselves what is the right pathway for them when it comes to drugs and drug use.
One in which we can have safer access to drugs for those who choose to use them.One in which we can have a better, less stigmatized approach to addiction resources and treatment for those who need them.
and one in which we can really fully harness all of this amazing information that's really been shut off from us in this dark ages type prohibition for decades and decades, where we can really understand better how we can improve all of our lives, whether it comes to mental health, physical health,
or any number of other things, human connectivity.There's just so many amazing possibilities out there, and I think we're just starting to see the cusp of that.
Sure.Let's talk about psychedelic exceptionalism for a little bit, right?
It's something that as psychedelics have gained mainstream acceptance or at least interest from a lot of different demographics that we've seen psychedelics unite the both sides of the political aisle, which is one of the rare issues these days that left and right seem to be in agreement on and
yet there's still a broad swath of the community or the population in the United States who other certain drugs.And they say, well, my drugs are good, like mushrooms, microdosing, LSD.These are cool.These are smart.There's research.
But the cocaine and the crack and the heroin, these are bad, bad, bad.And these are criminals.And to kind of frame that, I was having a conversation with an elder woman that I know, elderly woman.
And I had mentioned one of my talking points I've heard is how various compounds like opiates and Ritalin, et cetera, are not that chemically different from crack or from methamphetamine, from heroin, et cetera.
And she said, well, you don't see Ritalin and opiates getting people out on the street in the homeless camp.And that was kind of her framing of it.
It's problematic and it kind of ignores the socio-political factors and the climate, but to me that line of thinking is representative of this broader public that still says that some drugs are bad, some drugs are good.
Can you frame a little bit this idea of psychedelic exceptionalism?
Yeah, I am so glad you brought that up and all of those points you made because they are crucial for us really understanding what's happening in these war on drugs dynamics because
Humans have a tendency to say, whatever I do is OK, whatever someone else over there is doing is not OK.And I think that that can be a real problem.
That's also why we've seen, as I said, as the pendulum has swung in a more positive direction on prohibition on some things, we've actually seen increased prohibitionism on other things.
And so that is always a dangerous tendency and one that we need to watch out for.Psychedelic exceptionalism is, I think, a really huge problem.
That's this idea that psychedelics, as you put it, are the exception and that we should legalize psychedelics, that that should be okay.
But all those other drugs and those people who use those other drugs, those are dirty, terrible people who should be punished and continue to be locked away.And that's not okay.And those laws are not great.
And that can actually cause a lot of problems, especially when we're looking at the legal system and the way in which that some of the psychedelic decrim initiatives have moved forward in the past.But as you mentioned, drugs are drugs are drugs.
We all do drugs in some way, just about everyone out there.Caffeine is an extremely addictive drug that the vast majority of Americans consume every day. People are really truly addicted to caffeine.
They get huge physical withdrawals when they don't consume caffeine.They have difficulty concentrating.They have difficulty getting their work done.They get in a negative mood.They have headaches.Some people will even shake.
They have difficulty sleeping properly at night.That is a physical addiction to caffeine.And yet, How many people do you know who have lost their homes, lost their jobs, lost their families because of their caffeine addiction?
It's not because of the drug.It's because the drug is completely legal.It's safe. You can access it in safe formats on every single corner, basically 24-7.
And it's that setting that completely changes what caffeine means as a drug for us in our everyday lives.So there is an experiment that if folks have not heard about it, I highly recommend that they read up on it.It's called Rat Park.
And it has a lot to do with addiction.And it really helps explain what are the negative impacts of prohibition and drug use and what's really at play here.
So what scientists did is they took a number of rats and got them addicted, physically addicted, to various types of drugs.And then they locked them into cages with zero stimulation, nothing else to do.They were uncomfortable.
There was nothing else going on.They had no stimulation, no social engagement, nothing.And they gave them a bar that they could press on to administer themselves more of whatever drug it was.
And they would keep pressing that bar because they had literally nothing else to do. Then they tried giving them the option of, okay, you can choose food or you can push the bar.They would choose the drug over the bar, over and over and over again.
Then... They tried a second iteration of this experiment where they caused a physical addiction in all of these different rats.
And some of them went to that original control model where they're in a cage with no stimulation, no social engagement, nothing to do, no real hope for anything else that they could get out of life other than pressing this bar.
And then other of them, others of these rats were put in rat park, which is essentially a fun place for rats to play where there was food options.There was a lot of different things, activities for the rats to do.
There were other rats there for them to engage with and interact with.And these rats would choose to engage with others.They would choose to do these activities rather than press that bar, right?So sometimes maybe they would
go use some of those drugs.But for the most part, they were able to engage much more.And they didn't have all of these problems of eschewing everything else in order for the drugs.And this is the same thing with humans.
With prohibition and with stigmas around drug use, what we end up doing is we push people into these hopeless into this type of human hopelessness.They see no pathway forward.They can't get a job.They can't go to school.
They don't have they don't have human connections.They don't feel like there's anything else for them to do in life.And that is what causes the problems.Right.
So if we remove the stigma and we're able to put people in a situation where they can thrive. it completely changes it.And then, of course, there's also, you know, when you are getting drugs in an illegal setting, you don't know what's in it.
You don't necessarily know the dosage.There's no consistency from one time to another.You don't know who's selling it to you.You might be getting it from a fairly criminal element.You might have to
both attain it and use it in pretty unsafe places that not only are associated with higher rates of violent crime, but also are going to now put you in a situation where you're in a bad headspace going into it. You feel bad about yourself.
Your self-esteem is lower.You're more likely to engage in chaotic drug use.All of those kinds of things are major factors here.You know, you talked about Ritalin versus cocaine versus crack.They're essentially the same drug.
They're used in very different settings, and yet we treat them completely differently.Ritalin is something that people use, that students use to get the best grades.That's the A student valedictorian drug, right?
And then crack is something that, you know, houses people that we don't like that are dirty and we don't want them around us are using.And cocaine, you know, maybe that's kind of like the politicians drug.It's the same drug.
They're using it in the same way.Now, some of those might be less safe. Because again, it's obtained in a way that it's not as consistent.You don't know the dosage.You don't know if something's been mixed into it, etc.But it's the same drug.
And yet it has such different stigma associated to it.It has such different impacts.We have such a different mental picture associated with it.And it's entirely because of the law surrounding it.
To the point where one of the big issues that SSTP worked on several years ago, it used to be 100 to 1. crack cocaine sentencing disparity.What this meant was the same amount of crack cocaine, that's the name, it's just a different form.
The exact same drug, it looks a little bit different.That's like having a rock sugar versus powdered sugar.They're both sugar.You can use them the same, they're just slightly different.There was a hundred times
the criminal sentence that you got for the same amount for crack versus cocaine.And of course, this has had massive disparities when it comes to race and poverty in terms of who's getting locked up for these long sentences.
And it has a lot to do with who gets associated with who uses cocaine, usually wealthy white people, who uses crack in the mental image is poor black people a lot of times.And so they got locked away.And so this law has now been changed.
It was a sort of win, I will say, but there is still a major disparity.It's an 18 to one disparity.So there's still 18 times the sentence for crack cocaine versus powder cocaine. And so stuff like that continues and it is a huge part of it.
And, you know, we talk about stuff like, OK, you serve your time, then what?Well, now you've got this drug conviction.What job are you going to get?Can you go to school?
Well, up until 2023, literally last year, no, there was a lot of bars on your ability to get an education after this, on your ability to access an education.There's still bars on your ability to get any number of jobs.
on your number to rent apartments, to get a mortgage, to do all sorts of things.We've had members of SSDP who were teaching, one in particular who worked with us a lot on cannabis this past year.
She was an elementary school teacher and she got arrested in Utah hiking with a small amount of cannabis on her, well, she was no longer allowed to be a teacher.
She did actually, she's one of the very few people who benefited from the much-bellyhood pardons from President Biden.She got a letter, she has a letter in the mail that says that now 10 years later, she's been pardoned for this.
Of course, it doesn't impact her because over the 10 years that she wasn't allowed to be a teacher, she started a whole different career.
But think about all of those students that she would have taught over the course of 10 years who missed out on having this passionate elementary school teacher because she went hiking with a joint.
You know, those kinds of impacts are not going to go away, and that's something that we're going to have to continue to address.
Yeah, I just learned recently that at the first Emerald Cup Cannabis Cup in California during the first few years, there was a strict no hash and no concentrates policy because of this sentencing disparity where simple possession of concentrated cannabis products would net you 15 years just like that.
Well, a few years later now and they're sold in all these neighborhood dispensaries and In my suburban neighborhood where I grew up in Southern San Diego in the town of Chula Vista, it was a very suburban, white collar, traditional neighborhood.
And just in the last five to 10 years, there have been three cannabis dispensaries move into the area immediately surrounding my folks' house where I grew up.
And I feel a little bit vindicated in a sense because I was always a cannabis user and an outlaw.And it was so secretive as you described, right?It was like,
I believe it was Bill Murray who said, I find it ironic that the most dangerous thing about cannabis is getting caught with it.Yeah, true.It's still true.It's still very true.And unfortunately, in some states, way too true, right?
And I saw another tweet a while ago that really resonated with me that said, when cannabis dispensaries start looking like Apple stores, it's time to let a lot of people out of jail right now.
There are people who are serving life sentences for cannabis crimes
crimes just miles, a mile or two away from a place, from a dispensary that looks like an Apple store that your average soccer mom isn't going to on a weekly basis that deals with more cannabis on a daily basis than that person has locked up for for the rest of their life.
Yeah, huge disparities and all too often a blind spot still, right?
Even with all this ongoing education, I find sometimes like a lot of us and quote the psychedelic community or in drug policy advocacy sometimes live in echo chambers or are surrounded by like-minded thinkers.
And then I've been fortunate to travel a lot and within the United States and also abroad. you do encounter people with very antiquated mentalities that have been rooted in a lot of this drug war propaganda that was very effective.
Ultimately, it achieved exactly what it was designed to achieve.And that was to disrupt communities, primarily BIPOC communities, create a privatized prison system and a steady stream of people being incarcerated.
And I know I'm preaching to the choir here.
That was the goal.That was the goal of the drug war.If you go back and you actually study history, the very 1st.Drug law in the United States was.
targeted against the Chinese community in California that was helping build the railroads, and they specifically outlawed only the form of opium that they consumed, and didn't outlaw laudanum, which was widely used by wealthy white women across the country, right?
Because it was actually their way of being able to crack down on these Chinese people.The next time we see the Harris Tax Act, 1914, that's when cannabis was criminalized.
And that specifically was meant to target Hispanic migrant workers that were coming up.And then they started calling them jazz cigarettes in the 20s and used them to go after black people.
Specifically, they wanted to go after any black men who were talking to white women.And this was another way to criminalize that.We see this happen over and over and over again.And so these are just these like
reared roundabout ways to control the population when I'm not going to quote him on it because it's really disturbing.
But when Nixon, President Nixon, first pushed forward the war on drugs, as we know it today, his specific goals were to find a policy that would help crack down on both the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement.
And this was the best way to do it, was to use these drugs to track to crack down on black people mostly, and then white people who were pushing back on the laws that were oppressing black people.
So these are big concerns, and there are still a lot of blind spots when it comes to policy.We talked a little bit about the crack versus powder keg and sentencing disparities.
There's a lot of things like this, like drugs that are more white coded that white wealthy people use, like certain types of psychedelics are viewed as more okay, versus drugs that are more likely to be used by other communities are not okay.
in the average culture, how they're viewed.There's higher rates of drug use amongst wealthy white people than most other communities of color, and yet the arrest rates are much higher amongst communities of color.
And even with cannabis, what we've seen in the studies is that when, and this is something that concerns me a lot, and I think really impacts a lot of our members at SSDP as well,
Is that when adult use laws have been passed, so that is the recreational candidates is legal for folks who are 21 plus, which I think is generally a positive.I'm certainly not arguing against that by any means.I think that that's a win.
But when you have adult use without full decriminalization of cannabis, that means that you remove all cannabis related crimes.It actually results in not higher use rates, the same use rates, but higher arrest rates for young people.
So teenagers mostly, but young people and also poor people and black people and particularly black teenagers who live in public housing are the number one most likely to get arrested.
Their arrest rates go way up when you have these adult use laws passed without full marijuana decriminalization.And that's essentially because marijuana prohibition has been a cash cow for
For prohibitionists and for many different law enforcement agencies for a long time.You're taking that away from them.
Um, but you've left them this little legal loophole where they're allowed to go after these folks and you're putting a target on their back where all of a sudden.
They're being pursued, even though that they're not using cannabis at any higher rates that they were previously and generally speaking, are using it at lower rates than the people who are now now allowed to use it legally.
Um, so that's very concerning and. In the places that have fully decriminalized as well, I do want to note this, youth use rates drop.
Youth use rates stay the same, they don't go up, but they stay the same when you have only adult use without full decriminalization.When you have full decriminalization, youth rates drop and arrests drop for everyone.
Adult use without decriminalization, youth rates stay the same, but arrest rates spike.
And that is just such a concerning statistic that we need to be shouting from the rooftops and making sure that every, you know, I'm a mom, I care about these things.
And I think that other mothers and other parents out there need to understand this as well.It's not about, hey, we want your kid to do drugs.That's not what we're saying here.We're saying, hey, we don't want your kid to get arrested and
have a criminal record that's going to prevent them from being able to do all of the amazing things that they otherwise had in their futures that have now been taken away from them.
We want to make sure that they're safe and that they're able to move forward in their lives and get into that university and complete that program and
get married and be able to get a mortgage and build their wonderful career and do all of these things that you want for them, that prohibition is taking away.
And so even when we are changing these laws, and we have been legalizing cannabis, and that's incredible,
Young people oftentimes are being left out of it and a lot of times more specifically are being harmed by it because we've set this level at 21 plus and we haven't looked at what happens and what the incentives are for law enforcement when that happens.
This is amazing to learn because I've been involved in a lot of advocacy and tangential to a number of these organizations and stakeholders and this is new information for me.
So imagine the general public and it really speaks to the fact that so many of these. motivations for the war on drugs are deliberately hidden in the design of the war on drugs.
And that it's, of course, people don't know about it because what the end user, average person just sees is whatever is getting, you know, sent from the top down a lot of times, right?
And now I think with new electronic media and social media and, you know, makes grassroots organizing a little bit easier, arguably.Obviously, there's other challenges that this introduces, but
For me, you know, I'm a big fan of Rana Hashemi, who has been an SSTP alum, who is actually a version of our drug education program, Just Say No, KN, not the one that we learned in school, in the school system in California.Yeah, Rana's amazing.
Big fan, and just learning about the exposure to youth of different substances via social media, how many different layered complexities that introduces.
Like, you know, just when you start to publicly pressure towards the end of one war, there's a whole new level of education that's needed.That's where I see the next step for a lot of what we're talking about now is accessible public education that's
data-driven, it's trauma-informed, and it has the harm reduction lens.So I couldn't be happier to be in support of SSDP and No Drugs, KNOW Drugs, and other advocates and organizations like that.
So as we start to bring the discourse full circle today, Kat, let's go back to the DOC and the DOI and this ongoing issue.What is the next step there?What's the call to action for the public?
And anything else you wanna share with the Micropreneur audience today?
Yeah, absolutely.So we have a public hearing.It's going to be November 12th through 22nd here in Arlington, Virginia, just out of Washington, D.C.SSTP is going to be. fighting for DOI and DOC not to be scheduled.
And so that's definitely the next thing.The call to action, we need folks to be talking about this.
The DEA is just really banking on the fact that no one knows anything about DOI or DOC, doesn't know that they're essentially trying to cut off all this incredible medical research that we've seen happening.
And they're just trying to sneak it under our noses. People need to be talking about this.If you have that in with your member of Congress or something like that, please do bring it up.
We're going to have a lot more asks for you, more specific around that as they arise.So if you go to our website, ssdp.org, sign up, join our mailing list.We'll be telling you as opportunities come up around that.
But I think it's just really huge that we make sure that people understand that DOI and DOC are are just, they've shown incredible potential.They could
do all sorts of things for helping people with anxiety and depression and pain management and opioid overdose reversal and probably so much more.DOI is the de facto chemical used for understanding serotonin reuptake in the brain.
And there's just a world of scientific discovery out there that is going to be completely shut down if they get added to Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act.And people really need to understand what's at risk here.
Wonderful.Thank you for framing that for us.And thanks so much, Kat Murty of SSDP, Students for Sensible Drug Policy, for joining us on the MycoPreneur podcast today.
Thank you so much for having me.This has been a fun conversation.
Yeah, I loved it.Cheers.And that is a wrap.Thank you for sticking around to the bitter end.It's very sweet of you to commit so thoroughly.Don't be a stranger.
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