PSYCHOACTIVE

Do you ever wonder about the actual lives of people who sell illicit drugs – their fears and aspirations, their family lives, their business models and moral codes, and their fates once their drug dealing days are behind them? Philippe Bourgois is a distinguished anthropologist, currently teaching and directing the Center for Social Medicine and Humanities at UCLA. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he befriended and gained the trust of street-level drugs dealers in East Harlem, New York and wrote an award winning book about it, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. Years later, from 2007 to 2018, he embarked on a similar project in Philadelphia. His ethnographies are unparalleled in the depth and intimacy of their analysis of inner city drug dealers and markets. This is the first episode of a two part interview, in which I was also curious to understand how Philippe managed the inter-personal and moral challenges of becoming so deeply involved in these worlds.

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Whom do you call when you’re having a “bad trip,” or just need to process a psychedelic experience that’s now behind you? The Fireside Project is a psychedelic peer support line, co-founded by Hanifa Nayo Washington and Joshua White, that has been well received in the rapidly growing psychedelic community. I was curious to learn how and why it emerged, how’s it going, why Hanifa thinks there are no “bad trips," and the role of psychedelics in the Black community.

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Almost every Democratic member of Congress has voted to legalize marijuana but Republican support has remained scarce. Nancy Mace, a first term member of Congress from South Carolina, wants to change that. She recently introduced a legalization bill that has attracted strong support from the marijuana industry and begun to re-shape the debate within Congress over how best the federal government should deal with marijuana. I was curious why she did this, how both Democrats and her fellow Republicans have responded, whether she thinks Congress will pass any significant marijuana reform legislation this year – and what she thinks of psychedelics.

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Mycologists study mushrooms, and very few mycologists are household names, let alone have a Star Trek character named after them. But Paul Stamets is a truly exceptional character who has played an extraordinary role in researching, discovering and popularizing the potentially revolutionary contributions of mushrooms and other fungi to medicine, environmental repair and human consciousness. We talked about all of this as well as his unique career, his discoveries and patents, and the “stoned ape” hypothesis.

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Among the eighteen states that have legalized marijuana to date, no state has faced greatest challenges in trying to suppress the illicit market and regulate the legal one than California – and nowhere within the state have the challenges been greater than Los Angeles. I met Cat Packer in 2016, when she moved from Ohio to California to work on the Drug Policy Alliance’s successful campaign to legalize marijuana statewide. One year later, at age 26, Cat was chosen as the founding director of Los Angeles’s new Department of Cannabis Regulation – a position she still holds. I had lots of questions for her – about making the transition from activist to government regulator as well as lessons learned, successes and failures, and the particular challenges of diversifying participation in the new legal industry.

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One of the outstanding figures in the current Psychedelic Renaissance is Matt Johnson, who recently became the first researcher to be appointed to an endowed chair in psychedelic studies. He is the Susan Hill Ward Professor in Psychedelics and Consciousness at Johns Hopkins University, a university which has played a pioneering role in renewing psychedelic research. Matt and I talked about the politics of psychedelic research, the relative merits of psilocybin versus other psychedelics, the significance of the mystical experience and what he calls the “dope slap effect,” why psychedelic therapy may represent a paradigm shift in psychiatric treatment, the in’s and out’s of conducting psychedelic experiments, and much more.

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George Soros' Open Society Foundations has been the outstanding funder of harm reduction initiatives around the world since the mid-1990s. The brilliant individual directing that work until just a few months ago is Daniel Wolfe. We discussed the challenges and frustrations of trying to advance harm reduction in often hostile environments from Central and East Asia to Mexico and Ohio and how a traditional public health approach can prove not just insufficient but even counter productive. Daniel also opened up about the fascinating personal journey that ultimately led him to this work.

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Hamilton Morris has been writing and making documentaries about drugs and the people who make them for over a decade, delving into the relationships between chemicals, people and society. We discussed his outstanding TV series - Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia - including his objectives and creative process, his efforts to challenge popular myths and misconceptions, and the chemists and filmmakers whom he most admires.

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Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy is growing rapidly in popularity in the United States and abroad, both because ketamine is the only psychedelic that can be legally prescribed and because its unique properties open up opportunities for profound insight and personal growth. Dr. Gita Vaid is among the outstanding practitioners and teachers in this area. She is a lead instructor at The Ketamine Training Center and recently co-founded the Center for Natural Intelligence, a multidisciplinary laboratory dedicated to psychedelic psychotherapy.

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