Transcript: ISMAIL LOURIDO ALI, J.D. on Post-Prohibition Realities /309
Ayana Young Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I'm Ayana Young. Today we're speaking with Ismail Ali.
Ismail Ali The drug war has not actually reduced the number of drugs, the volume, the frequency of use, the geographic spread of use, like on any of those metrics the drug war has failed. More people are using today than ever before, more people using more dangerous drugs, drugs continue to get more dangerous and in an unregulated context.
Ayana Young As MAPS’ Director of Policy and Advocacy, Ismail advocates to eliminate barriers to psychedelic therapy and research, develops and implements legal and policy strategy, and supports MAPS’ governance, non-profit, and ethics work. Ismail earned his J.D. at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law in 2016, after receiving his bachelor’s in philosophy from California State University, Fresno. Ismail has previously worked for the ACLU of Northern California’s Criminal Justice & Drug Policy Project, and Berkeley Law’s International Human Rights Law Clinic. Ismail is licensed to practice law in the state of California, and is a founding board member of the Psychedelic Bar Association. He also currently serves on the board of the Sage Institute, contributes to Chacruna Institute’s Council for the Protection of Sacred Plants, and participates on the advisory council for the Ayahuasca Defense Fund. He has also previously served as Chair of the Students for Sensible Drug Policy Board of Directors. Ismail is passionate about setting sustainable groundwork for a just, equitable, and generative post-prohibition world.
Well, Ismail, thank you so much for being on the show and joining us in the conversation today.
Ismail Ali Absolutely, thank you so much for the invitation. I'm super excited to have this conversation.
Ayana Young Me too. I was going over my notes and there's so many ways we could start this, but I was really drawn to this quote particularly, in an article called “Colonization Laid the Groundwork for the Drug War '' and that's on thefix.com. And the quote is “decolonizing drug use on a personal level means returning to intentional relationships with these substances that are grounded in respect, reciprocity, and reverence. It means contextualizing one's relationship to drug use within the paradigms of colonialism, patriarchy, and violence, and becoming aware of the spectrum of intentions behind self dosing, from healing, to worship, to personal growth.” I know this is a really big quote to start with, but it really spoke to me because I think it's getting to a deep root that I want to explore with you and if there's anything in that quote that you want to pull out to begin with, I'd love to just hear what is coming up for you in this moment.
Ismail Ali Yeah, thanks so much for bringing that in. We wrote that a few years ago and it's really nice to hear it reflected in that way. You’re right, there's a lot in there, both kind of on a logistical, cultural level, like what does that even mean? How do we even do that? And then there's also like, the deep personal kind of implication of it. So I'll just share a couple of things about that quote and concept that might be a helpful starting point. I love that we're going just deep right away. This is truly like some of the most important aspects, I think, of this whole bigger picture conversation around drugs and drug use and drug policy, and what do we shift? And how do we shift? And going back to the quote, one thing that really, I would say, has influenced me, and I wrote that with a colleague, Justice Rivera, and we also had another good friend Paola Khan, who contributed a lot to that conversation, and one thing that, like, was really coming up at the time that we wrote that article, and that it came together was this sense that, you know, in the West, in America, in the Global North, you know, there's a lot of ways to characterize it, there's this kind of entitlement toward consumption. And you know, Gabor Mate calls it kind of like the hungry ghost, pulling from the kind of Buddhist concept of this hungry ghost, this spirit inside of us that it's impossible to satiate it. It can just consume and kind of loses the relationship with what it's consuming. It's kind of an endless void, if you will. And I think that you know, we have started to wake up to that kind of hyper consumerism within the context of, you know, our use of gasoline and fossil fuels, or the way we navigate food, or the way that we think about just consumption of resources in general, but what I found is that there's less of an awareness around that, or at least less of a connection that I had seen between that kind of entitlement toward consumption, and how we think about drugs and drug use, and trying to layer those things together. So that's to say not to recreate kind of an abstinence only prohibitionist framework around drug use, but one that actually incorporates the reality of it happening, while also holding the critique around, and the concern around kind of entitlement.
Dissociated consumption is a hard needle to thread, because I think that there's the sense that, you know, people who use drugs, especially illicit drugs, are highly marginalized and tend to be ignored. Unless, you know, they can be used to bring in some sort of political point or cultural point, I think that from a social safety net perspective, we have really failed people in our communities who have problematic or chaotic relationships with drugs. And I think that thinking about how to relate to our consumption of these substances, and you know, maybe we can double click on the use of the word drugs in the first place, there's a lot of ways to think about that, which we can go into maybe later, but just thinking about the kind of desire in the actual act of consuming substances for a variety of reasons and trying to understand well, what, what are the things that motivate that use on an individual level, on a social level, on a cultural level? And then how do we bring some sort of balance back, so we're not just hungry ghosts consuming all of the everything all at once, just to just to feel something or whatever it is, you know, whatever it is that we're seeking. And I say that, with the very important caveat that I'm myself a person who uses drugs, I've been part of underground and above ground drug using communities for more than half of my life. So I see this as someone who's totally embedded in this conversation, but also curious, how do we, how do we expand beyond the current kind of assumptions and norms that have really permeated this conversation of drugs and substance use and treatment and recovery and healing and all of those important things? So I'll stop there for now.
Ayana Young Thank you, there's so much to that response. I'm wanting to follow up on something around I think you said dissociated, dissociative consumption and also just what is a drug? That those two things really stood out for me amongst others. Maybe we could go into the definition of drugs and drug use, and then go deeper from there. Because I do think that that is an interesting question that I don't think that I necessarily ask myself often, is what is considered a drug? And why and by whom?
Ismail Ali Right. Yeah, this is a question that could be its own very, very long conversation. So I'll give you just some thoughts about my answer and see how we can go from there, but basically, it's helpful to throw out a few different words. I think that the word drug is kind of easy, because it's usually used in kind of the legal regulatory system. There's the association, which is both kind of the drugs “of abuse” or the drugs people are scared of, you could say, the ones that are illegal and that people kind of use to stigmatize people. And then there's the drugs that are good, like the ones where when you're going down the street, and you see a drugstore, like oh, these are pharmaceuticals, these are these are healing drugs. So it's good that we're asking this question because even the use of the word does not itself provide so much clarity about what exactly we're talking about.
Usually, when I'm describing what people call drugs, I usually just stick to a more technical term like substances, which is maybe technically accurate, but it doesn't really have the weight of the implication or the baggage. But I think that it's helpful because when speaking with a lot of different kinds of audiences, which in my work as an advocate, I tend to do, it's usually helpful to start somewhere kind of plain and technical and then emerge into a cosmology as it reveals itself, you know, in a conversation with someone, but the other word I want to name here is medicine. And, you know, sometimes you have it described as plant medicine or sacred medicine, and that's also a powerful word that also has, you know, kind of like “drug,” its own significant implications. If the implication toward the word drug, you know, as used in popular culture is, well, it's probably bad for you, or can be harmful, I think that the implication for the word medicine is the opposite. It's like, well, it's probably good for you, and it can be helpful. Of course, neither of those definitions are as clear as I think any of us would like them to be.
But I recognize that especially within the world of the psychedelic ecosystem as it emerges, and maybe this is true of drug policy a little bit more generally, the use of the word drug or medicine are sometimes interchangeable. Although that's not universally true from like a cultural competency perspective, you could say, because there's certain situations in which using the word drug, like you're describing something like Ayahuasca in the Amazon, or the use of peyote, you know, in the northern, central and South America and northern hemisphere, you really shouldn't be calling those drugs, they're not really drugs and never really conceived that way. They're really treated like medicine or sacred tools, but people use drugs to describe them because they contain presently illicit scheduled substances. So the government might call them a drug, even though literally nobody who uses them calls them that.
And on the flip side, you've got this word medicine, which, on one hand, I think it's, of course, really exciting. It's the field that I work in, around, you know, bringing awareness to the positive potential impacts of some of these substances that are currently considered drugs, and their, you know, medical or healing or therapeutic value. But I also see the shadow side of that, where people think that oh, just because you can call them medicine means you can do with them whenever you want, or as much as you want, or however you want. And I think that the word medicine doesn't always actually include within it, the kind of element of respect or reverence or really relationship that one might want to have with these substances, which goes far beyond just “Is this a thing that I'm using to treat, you know, an issue that I have?”
So that's a very long winded way of saying, I think it's hard to draw the lines between drug and substance in medicine, but for the purposes of this conversation, I tend to focus on presently illicit substances. So drugs that are in schedule one or another drug schedules, and that tend to have an element of criminalization, either at the International or at the domestic level. And I think, again, for the sake of this conversation, the element of criminalization is quite important. Because so much of the conversation about how we utilize drugs or substances or medicines in society, how do we change that relationship? Has to do with where are things at now? And what that looks like, is a scheme of prohibition and criminalization that has been built over the last 500 years, depending on who you ask and how you ask it. So maybe that's helpful. Maybe that's more complicated, I'm not sure.
Ayana Young I think it's both. I think it's helpful and more complicated. And I really appreciate understanding, or at least beginning to think about the difference between substances, medicine, and drugs. And maybe you could lay out some groundwork for us right now on prohibition, and where we're at now. And we can start to get into criminalization and all of the issues and suffering and disconnection that comes from that.
Ismail Ali Totally. The abridged version, or the rapid fire version of everything that's happened in history about drugs, goes something like this. People have used various substances of all kinds over the course of history for a ton of different reasons. You know, connection with divinity, connection with community, political, physical, spiritual, emotional healing of all kinds. Also, you know, all kinds of ceremonial and ritual use that I think, cuts in a lot of different directions, people have used substances to make them better at fighting, or hunting, or war, they've used substances to make them more fertile or better at sex. They've used substances to escape and dissociate. So there's a huge, huge, huge kind of universe of like, why people have altered their states over the course of history that may be outside of the scope of this conversation, but I think it's important to people to know that this is just-it's not new of a concept, that this has been happening and I think that said that our relationship kind of culturally and politically with drugs and these substances has changed significantly over time, even if the reasons for us have stayed somewhat consistent across the world, albeit in different contexts.
So the short version is that, you know, when we learn about the kind of conquering of the new world, like the beginning of European Western European expansion, and what we kind of know as the colonial era, and what happens in that context, what's happened in that context, a lot of that history includes, rightfully, the story and the narrative of the attempt by mostly European kind of economic, religious, political forces, on anything from coercing, to forcing, to genociding and to enslaving people of the “New World” as well as of the African continent, for the purposes of creating this kind of industrialized world that we now live in, although I'm not sure how much of that was predicted, you know, that early on. But the important thing that's less known in that process, or maybe as fleshed out in many cases, is exactly how that cultural genocide that led to the possibility of such a radical cultural and social shift occurred. And so much of that had to do with the kind of eradication, the demonization of the spiritual practices at the center of a number of communities. And while it's not true that every single Indigenous person, or tribe, or community, that existed in North and South America at the time of early conquest used psychedelics, or used plant medicines to alter their states, there are quite a few that did. And there's good evidence that in the early days, that the Catholic Church, the kind of royalty, the political forces, and so on, actively demonized and undermined and attempted to destroy these kind of cultural containers, which often did include the use of these plants and many substances or to converse or convene, kind of engage with community.
What that means is that the original vision of the War on Drugs kind of goes to the name of the title of the article, like the original vision of the war on drugs, the kind of mass kind of the coercion into hegemonic cosmology, one that actually did not include the possibility that these sacred plants could connect a person to, you know, divine wisdom, or to some sort of collective cultural consciousness was just off the table. And that demonization and eradication of those practices means that the many people, myself included, who, you know, consider ourselves or were of like a diasporic identity where our ancestry comes from places that have been colonized, or from people that have been genocided, that means that this kind of understanding of how to engage with substances or medicines or sacred practices and these ways were pushed underground, and overwhelmingly, you know, in some cases, completely eradicated, but in many cases, pushed underground. And now as we start to see a few things happening, at the same time, both a resurgence of understanding of psychedelics and entheogens, and these plant practices and the possibility that comes from them in general, while we're also experiencing this really beautiful, kind of reunderstanding of the cultural contact between the kind of global north or the west or industrialized society and our families, our relations that are still part of the kind of tribal system. And I use that word intentionally in the sense that in the United States, the conversation about, and awareness around, Indigenous people, Native Americans and their tribal affiliations and the sovereignty of those tribes in the way that we navigate indigeneity as a whole, is also experiencing a simultaneous resurgence and awakening in popular culture in a way that I feel like hasn't happened for quite some time.
So when you put those two things together, we suddenly have this awareness that “Whoa, like this global drug control system that has been built out of the eradication of these practices, has now very successfully created a highly restrictive, highly criminalized framework that continues that process first, you know, affecting these these belief systems that I’ve described before and then flash forward to the 1800s, suddenly you have the U.S. criminalizing opium use because of its association with Chinese immigrants that are coming into the west coast to build the railroads flashforward 50 years later, you have the kind of criminalization of people at the border with Mexico, Mexicans who were suddenly associated, and of course, Black people who are suddenly associated with marijuana and cannabis. Flashforward, another 30-40 years, and you've got the 60s and the beginning of the association, of course, with heroin and jazz music and the white hippies and the anti war movement and that takes us to 1970, 1971, the passing of the Controlled Substances Act. And in those decades, the 60s and 70s, you also see kind of a simultaneous restriction occurring at the international level.
So even though some of these large companies, some of whom kind of got their foot in the door, you could say, before the U.S. was even a country, by the late 1800s, were, you know, making plenty of money, were financially gaining from this drug trade and then in the early 1900s, mid 1900s, you have a sudden restriction of that, and then kind of the international community following the US as lead and restricting, creating a prohibition based framework. And in the last, so now, so I say all that to say that, like, you know, people know about and they think about the war on drugs, you know, it's something that I think has really, and mass incarceration, these concepts have definitely entered for good reason. Like popular consciousness. But I think that those stories often started about 50 years ago. And I think it's, it's good to have the context of what it was like 500 or 150 years ago and how do these kinds of frameworks affect us today? And then, how does that bring us to where we are now, which is okay, we've looked back. And now there's, I think, a pretty wide sense, I've been using the word multi-partisan to describe it, because it feels like it's not just both sides of the political aisle, but it's a little bit beyond that, even with a multi partisan says the war on drugs as we know it has failed, but not too much clarity about where to go. So that's kind of a little bit of the groundwork, you could say for how we ended up here politically speaking.
Ayana Young What a history lesson nd yeah, I'm just letting that sink in a bit and thinking about this quote from ACLU’s “Against Drug Prohibition,’ and it’s “Drug law enforcement consumes more than half of all police resources nationwide, resources that could be better spent fighting violent crimes like rape, assault, and robbery. The steep climb in our incarceration rate has made the US the world's leading jailer, with a prison population that now exceeds 2 million people, compared to approximately 200,000 in 1970. Nonviolent drug offenders make up 58% of the federal prison population, while drug imprisonments are a leading cause of rising local tax burdens, they have neither stopped the sale and use of drugs nor enhanced public safety.”
I think that sometimes it's challenging for us as just, you know, people trying to go through life and in our everyday lives, to not understand all of the consequences of what these drug laws actually do and how they impact our culture, our communities. And just all of the different consequences that come from this, in this quote alone, really just sitting with the prison industrial complex, and how much money is made off of imprisoning people for nonviolent drug offenses and then you think of how many billions of dollars the prescription companies make on their legal drugs. But you know, clearly this is by design. Clearly there are people in power who are benefiting so much from controlling populations, drug use in a way that is neither healing, helpful, or creating safer communities. So, yeah, I just would like to hear your thoughts on the connection with the prison industrial complex and what other consequences you're seeing from this type of drug control?
Ismail Ali Yeah, yeah, no, totally. I mean, first, I feel very grateful that the conversation about criminalization and the prison industrial complex has really hit the mainstream. Now, that's not to say that I'm so optimistic in the short term that so much will change. But it's true, like the kind of flip side and one of the clear benefits of operating the drug control system, as it currently does, is that it's highly lucrative from a revenue generation perspective for the actors that are involved in it. And when thinking about exactly how to respond to or solve this problem, it's quite important to touch on these points that you made, because there's the level of the problem and dilemma that exists purely by virtue of needing to understand how to transition away from a punishment based kind of punitive framework of establishing consequences for behavior, and that goes beyond drug consumption, but it's absolutely impacts that.
But it also forces us to confront this other question, which I think you have posed really well in your question, which is, or in your inquiry, which is, well, what happens when people really want to keep this system going, like, even if we know, the way that it's, it's failing, it's preventing from? Well, it's failing in so many ways, and I'll just enumerate them really, really, I mean, I, for one, the drug war has not actually reduced the number of drugs, the volume, the frequency of use, the geographic spread of use, like on any of those metrics, the drug war has failed. More people are using today than ever before, more people using more dangerous drugs, drugs continue to get more dangerous in unregulated contexts. You know, our overdose crisis is, I mean, we know it's at the highest it's ever been. So we know that those aspects are there. But of course, then, on another level, the war on drugs was an absolute success, because it did in fact, in so far as part of the reason, was to incarcerate and impact, you know, all of these different communities that I named earlier. In that sense, it's been quite successful in that it has extracted billions and billions of dollars from the government and from individuals through fines and revenue in the creation and maintenance of the prison system. It has, in fact, decimated entire communities for generations, which again, insofar as it was a goal of the original architects of the war on drugs, then it was a success, insofar as it consolidated power, wealth control, within, you know, certain highly regulated systems like the pharmaceutical industry, while also completely failing to eradicate, and in fact, it really created the modern paradigm of organized crime that we know of today, it was also, I guess, both a success and a failure, which is to say that like, as we think about where we're at, just taking an honest accounting of that reality, I think is helpful to think about where to go, and what to do next.
But there's no question that there's repair needed and I think that when we think about future paradigms, it's not just a question of, well, what's the regulatory or political framework that's better than the way we've been doing it? That's a significant part of the question, but I think one thing that's also real is that it's difficult and maybe even unethical to think about, where should we go from here? If we're not simultaneously and very seriously thinking about what have we done, and I say “we” very broadly here, I don't personally think that, you know, I or you are necessarily complicit in this system that I suspect that we, and so many people in our communities, have been fighting for a long time, but certainly as the US government and its influence on global policy, the U.S., you know, and other countries around the world that have really leaned into this kind of framework of criminalization have absolutely caused horrible, significant impact on individuals and communities that I think ought to be acknowledged, if not before at least part of, as part of thinking about, like, what happens from here.
So I guess bringing it full circle, like, again, even if people see oh, well, mass incarceration, has failed to prevent the problems that we identify, it's failed to “rehabilitate” people, so they're actually ready to reenter society, if anything, many stints with incarceration undermine that ability, and make it harder for people to re enter into society, and as like, you know “productive members”, and yet we are still needing to figure out what do we do? And what does it mean that, you know, we actually do have a responsibility to kind of figure that out, at least in some way or another.
Ayana Young I'm thinking about going back to the beginning of our conversation and this term dissociative use, or maybe that wasn't exactly it, but I'm thinking about that, and addiction and, gosh, I have so much compassion and forgiveness for us as humanity and for myself individually, when it comes to this topic, because so much of our lives we've been conditioned to consume, that was the word consume dissociatively and consume without thinking and fill that hungry ghost void in us. And, you know, that's very much by design, and so many of our childhoods from being born on have been shaped by this conditioning and it's also no surprise that we find ourselves so addicted to this type of consuming, whether it's drugs, substances, food, purchasing things on Amazon, social media, I mean, the list goes on and on of what we find ourselves addicted to. There is a question I have around addiction to medicine, but I want to get to that in a minute after we kind of start here. So yeah, I guess I'm just sitting in these questions, these kind of broad topic questions around dissociative consumption and addiction, and where you see us collectively, in this moment, and, of course, we could speak to drugs and substances, specifically, which I think we should, but also just wanting to leave room for the topic of addiction in general, because I think it's so much more than just addiction to drugs at this point.
Ismail Ali Right. Yeah, I mean, it's such a big topic and it's so sensitive, because it has so many layers to it and maybe the first thing I'll say is that in the same way that it's helpful to kind of flesh out our understanding of drug versus substance versus medicine, it's also useful, practically speaking, to kind of tease out the difference between addiction or dependency or habitual use and kind of different practices around drug consumption. We don't need to go totally down that rabbit hole, but I just say that to say that there's definitely a tenner of difference in different kinds of patterns of use. And because of just generally, I think the lack of nuance around the conversation on drug use and addiction in general, it's, you know, popular culture, kind of broader society, doesn't really necessarily have that level of detail in its schemas. So I do think it's good to differentiate those things because it's not necessarily true that someone who uses something every day, for example, is necessarily addicted according to a definition in which addiction is persistent use, despite negative consequences, just as one example and not saying that that's like the correct definition. But it's one one definition and I would say that that's very different from someone who's taking something on a maintenance level, because they have symptoms that they're trying to manage and that requires them to take something every day, which might look like a physical or psychological dependence, but may not be an addiction in the sense that they are utilizing this tool to function and that that functioning may not actually be harmful for them or their relationship to society. In fact, it could be the opposite, it could be beneficial. But I think what happens is that we have, because we haven't really fleshed these things out and because we're in this underlying default of that kind of dissociated, hungry ghost mentality that we were talking about earlier, it's very easy for those lines to blur. I think it can be challenging for people to maintain their own boundaries, just on a personal level, when that use and attempts to use or patterns of use are not as clear, and when everything around us is telling us just consume, keep going, you know, don't pause, then I can see how it's easy for otherwise, you know, benign or innocuous habits or dependencies that started out due to health needs, like become something that can start to have a negative impact.
Just speaking directly to it, I mean, we are in a period right now of the most overdose deaths in history and it's now one of the primary leading causes of death for multiple age groups. And there's a lot of reasons for that. There's just the sheer concentration and availability of extremely cheap drugs that are very hard to dose. But I don't like even calling fentanyl itself like a dangerous drug per se, because even though it's one of the leading causes of overdose, fentanyl, as a molecule, is only as dangerous as the person who's using it or their lack of education of the person that's using it. Fentanyl is used in medical situations literally every day all the time. And it's used safely. But you know, the average person does not have this kind of training or expertise to utilize in a safe way. And as a result, we've got both deaths from accidental overdose as well as what people are kind of calling drug poisonings, which is to say, when someone's looking for one drug, and they get something else, you know, adulteration and it's too simple, it'd be too easy to say, well, our fentanyl overdose crisis is because everyone's getting it mixed into their drugs. Like there's lots of people now that are using it intentionally because it's what they're looking for because it provides the relief from sickness or withdrawal or whatever it is that they need, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't think about, you know, what is the paradigm in which people are landing at having to so consistently, be in a dynamic and in a relationship with a drug that also puts them so close to death and so, so far away from help, at least when it comes to what's available in the social kind of system that exists.
So while in the backdrop of that kind of crisis, overdose, and which I think is, of course, is very tied to the crisis around suicide and mental health in general, I think about like, well, what are the ways in which we can bring more awareness and attention to our tendencies of use? But then how do we actually apply that in what I would say is a crisis response situation? You asked, and your question I like, where are we now with that? I think the answer is that we're in a crisis. Like I just, I don't think that there's a way to sugarcoat it and while I do think that setting up really strong social groundwork can help, I feel like the types of interventions needed are more significant than what are currently available for most people.
I have a friend who asked me recently about microdosing and they were describing a situation of a friend of theirs who is dealing with a pretty severe addiction and dependency. I thought about it for a second and to be clear, by the way, I'm not like a medical professional or don't consult in this way, but I was thinking about it and it just kind of brought up this feeling for me where I'm excited to see that people are talking about microdosing, I think that there's a lot of benefit that can come from it, especially when paired with other contemplative practices, but some people that are really suffering that are dealing, you know, with severe addiction or severe dependency or the type of interventions needed are more significant, dramatic, I don't know if that's the right word, but they definitely require a kind of a sharper, more direct, more specific response than what I think we want to do. I don't think that there's, I think there's an appetite to change the society like society and kind of like this consumption, dependency addiction dynamic, both with drugs, and in general, but I fear and feel like even with that motivation, there isn't a clear idea, like what does that intervention look like? Like we can bring in more crisis response and education and harm reduction, and so on, those are needed, but we're in a pretty tough spot. And people are highly desperate, highly in need and not getting the social help or the help that they need through their kind of social safety nets. So until I think we can do some of that groundwork and also have kind of a acute crisis response situation, I think we're going to we're going to stay in this loop for a while unfortunately, I know that's not very optimistic of a response, but it's kind of hard to do right now.
Ayana Young It's really complicated and fascinating, in a kind of twisted away, to begin to unravel all of the moving pieces of what it takes to get these drugs-and I'm still learning how to say drugs, substances, medicines, and really differentiate, regardless, they all are moving across the world at all times, and where their origin is, how they're created, how they get to people. I mean, it's really, gosh, so much movement, and so many people along the way are impacted and harmed. And I guess I'm thinking about this question around medicine use and, of course, I think that there can be so much beauty and healing with folks utilizing these medicines, so many of them being ancestral to Indigenous cultures, but I also see a very large movement that has these types of spiritual bypassing vibes. A lot of these medicines are sometimes being used as party drugs, or a type of way for the privileged people in the world to feel a certain way that isn't maybe shooting up heroin or doing something that kind of has like a classist negativity lens on it. You know, you could be going to a party or a gathering or whatever people want to call, they're coming up coming togetherness and so I'm just really sitting with the intensity of when folks use medicine in a spiritual bypassing type of way, and I'm sure many of them never consider the pain and the suffering, that it's causing to even get that medicine to them too. As a quote, like spiritual journey or something like just the implications on the earth, on resources, on humans. So I just want to kind of speak to the, I don't know if it's hypocrisy, but it's kind of like an icky feeling of how can we talk about this in a good way? Because I think, for a lot of folks listening, definitely for me myself, I have seen these types of circles and it's alluring and can be an invitation to certain people, but I think that we need to really be aware and not fall into the feel good aspect of taking medicine and not always in a way that is really accountable.
Ismail Ali Right. I actually think that that's the scientific term icky feeling. Yeah. I mean, no, I really agree with you. And, you know, it's interesting, because it's kind of cut both ways, in the sense that it's true that a lot of the conversation about psychedelics and plant medicines, in particular, has kind of like operated through the container of relatively more privileged people who have engaged with the work and some cases, a more ceremonial framework that has in this like weird post 2020 reality, this place where there is some level of like, respect insofar as there's like a ceremony, you know, the thing about ayahuasca that I think is so fascinating, one thing, is that it has traveled with the ceremony, it's quite difficult to drink, to find any ayahuasca really anywhere, certainly in the US, in most of the world, where you're not utilizing it in a ceremonial context, that's one thing I think is like really beautiful that most people are working with it, or working with it in some sort of ritual or ceremonial kind of context.
However, of course, it comes with the baggage that you just, I think very accurately described, which is well, okay, so who has the access, proximity, privilege, resources to actually participate in this globalization of ayahuasca or other other substances. And I think that point that you made is really great, which is like, are people thinking of the cost of getting something to them. And this is true with ayahuasca and the plant medicines. It's also true with heroin and cocaine, and it's a little bit edgy within the drug policy community kind of to talk about some of this stuff, because people see, I didn't say everyone, but some see the kind of identification of the cost of production or getting a drug to to a user, as a form of like shaming of use. And unfortunately, I understand where that comes from, but I think it's really important to see the whole story. Kind of to the point that you're just wanting to seek to understand the true cost or the to the true kind of accounting of the resources needed to get something from one place to another, by the way, like, I mean, going back to the very beginning this conversation, this question about where things come from is absolutely relevant to everything we consume, it's relevant to the food, to the gasoline, to the electronics, you know, like, this is a broadly relevant question. It's not just relevant to drugs, but I'm gonna stay focused on drugs, because that's what we're talking about, but I just want to acknowledge that this is, you know, this question of like, how do the things get to us? Like, why do we have such incredibly convenient lives? Like that is truly a question.
I think that's, you know, maybe an easier inquiry for those of us that live in dense urban areas that are surrounded by, like, every single resource we could ever possibly need. With very little reason to question well, why do we have access to all these things? Bringing it back to the drugs, I think your point about kind of privilege and access is absolutely true. And I think that it has to do with some very practical elements as in you know, people who are seeking like alternative or you know, I don't love the phrase alternative healing, but alternative health care, things that fall outside of the realm of kind of Western medicalized health systems, like those are not always available to everyone and I think as we look toward this kind of transition away from what we now know as the war on drugs and the current drug control scheme, whether that looks like any number of policy changes, medicalization of some psychedelic substances, decriminalization of personal use, legal regulated adult use, in certain cases, in any of these situations that were, you know, I think starting to contemplate this question about, you know, how do we repair the harms? And how do we ensure access, are too critical to actually figuring out like what that next step is, because if not, then, kind of, as you said, we end up in this dynamic where we're just consuming things because we have access to them, not questioning why we have access to them in the first place, and then by not questioning, and by kind of allowing the narrative to be, or preventing the narrative from deepening or not going deeper into like, what's going on there? Even if we don't want to become complicit, ultimately, in these oppressive systems in which, in order for you or your friends or whoever to have your like, fun night out, we have to participate in a literal bloody economy like that is the reality of the situation for some substances and some use.
So it's not that oh, suddenly, the users need to feel more shamed and stigmatized then they already are. It's really not that. And also, it's like, we should be tracking these things. So when we do seek solutions, how do we do that collectively? You know, there's a conversation that's now starting to hit the mainstream in Colombia about what would it what would it look like if the country of Colombia actually legally producing regulated cocaine instead of letting the entire economy exist entirely within the realm of organized crime, which, by the way, overlaps a lot with government, I mean, organized crime and the government unfortunately, tend to go hand in hand around the world, this is not just a Colombia problem, this is true. Corruption is a kind of a universal reality, but I bring that up to say that like, you know, the idea of like a country like Colombia seriously, considering the legal production, regulation and sale and you know, maybe even export of cocaine is quite a big deal. Because so far, the lack of doing so has put so much of that power in these extra judicial forces, that then are in this like, wild like dog-eat-dog kind of vicious cycle dynamic between law enforcement and these kind of underground economies, that ultimately, I think harm basically everyone involved, like, they're not good for any of these actors, except for maybe, maybe whoever's making all the money off of it. But that, you know, that's ultimately a huge minority of the people that are involved.
So the idea that we could be looking at like a global system that considers production and consumption gives us the possibility to your point earlier on, can there be a version where we are able to support access, education, and so on without having to succumb to these kinds of same dynamics? And how do we do so in a way that doesn't perpetuate the bypassing that happens, where it's like, oh, well, it's great that I can get my ayahuasca, it's great that I can get my sacred plant medicine and do my personal healing. But then like, to what extent is that person's seeking a personal healing, which, by the way, is a beautiful thing, like the individual seeking a kind of mental health equilibrium is truly something to be celebrated, but it needs to be seen in the context. And like, we can't just be like, well, those of us that have access to these tools, we get to do our individual healing, but good luck to everyone else. I think that there is an inherent connection there, which I think people ignore it for a while, but I think it comes around eventually, it's hard to not, you know, kind of try to see through this, what some people call psychedelic exceptionalism. And sometimes people are like, well, if we're not thinking about all of our, you know, all of the drug users in our community, then we're not really going to the root of the problem here. So yeah.
Ayana Young I want to talk a bit about the dark side of legalization and regulation, as I've seen it, at least in the cannabis industry. I have been living in Northern California for the past decade, and what some may call the Emerald Triangle and have, you know, my neighbors and people that I know have been growing illegally and have been able to support their families and their homesteads and are growing the cannabis outside and try to use regenerative practices. Now, of course, that is in no way saying that everybody has been doing that in the illegal context for the last you know, however many decades. There's also rat poison and death and abuse and all sorts of strange things happening growing illegally too. But what I saw happen with the legalization of cannabis, and let's just say in California, is it went from something that was underground, that was more expensive per pound-so the farmers made more money, the trimmers made more money, everybody along the supply chain seemed to make more money, so people didn't have to grow as much to make the same amount as what's happening now with legalization, which is, with the legalization and the regulation, it's really expensive to grow legally now. So a lot of the small farmers have been cut out, and who gets to now pay for the permitting, who gets to grow marijuana, it's corporations, it's people that have money to invest in the legal process, where it's also because it's so expensive to now set up a grow. And because it's also legalized, the middleman is making more money, the growers making less money, so then the grower feels pressure to have to grow more and more and more and more. And then that puts pressure on the earth because then it's like, well, if it's outside, you have to pump them with fertilizers to make sure you get the same amount. If it's inside, you're using so much electricity and soil, you know, from bags and or not soil, you know, so there's just watching just with cannabis alone, how much has shifted, I think negatively of legalization and regulation, I want to talk about that. And I think a second point to this, which is that I don't want to lose the first one because I really want to hear what you have to say, but I think for those of us who want to use plant medicines specifically and we want to feel elevated or connected, we have to consider how are these plants being grown? It's like when a plant never even sees the sun and it's being sprayed with all these pesticides and and who knows what else and just all of the inputs in the soil or not. And then we're trying to ingest that in a good way. It just seems like whoa, we have to pause, like yeah, it's cool to go into a dispensary, but how is this even being grown? And if we're trying to have some type of spiritual moment with it. It's like this plant itself has been really, I think abused just in the way that it's even being grown. So I know that's kind of a, those are two very big questions, but they kind of all just came out at once. So please take it however you want to.
Ismail Ali Yeah, no, thanks. I appreciate and there's totally a link between those two things, for sure. I mean, well, first of all, I'll start from your last point. I mean, the growing of cannabis indoors requires so much more resources on so many levels, the electricity, the space, the coverage and so on. But I think my understanding, and I wonder if I'm wrong about this, but my understanding is that the mass production of cannabis indoors was also partially a result of prohibition in the sense that when you can't grow it outside, you have to hide it. So I think that there's probably a win-win there where it's like, okay, yeah, you can control it more but also that means you can hide it. So I do suspect that there's some sort of connection between what you're describing like this, like cannabis just being a good example of a plant that can be grown from tip to tail without seeing the sign at all. Which now that you say that it's kind of freaky to think about. Yeah, it's a little bit strange and sci-fi and like, not a good way. But so there's that on like the growing level. So that's absolutely true.
I think that kind of tying your questions together around like legalization or regulated access and regulated use and what the cost of that is, I think this is a challenging question for me because, on one hand, I really understand the instinct that you know, early cannabis advocates have had around the issues we were talking about earlier, like there was a sense that if we could just change the laws that would prevent the government from continuing to criminalize people in the same way, the starting to undermine and maybe even eventually transform the kind of the way that our society deals with, in this case, cannabis, or really any drug going forward. So I do feel like I understand and I really support it and support the kind of instinct to, I mean, really just like find a way to transition away from prohibition, which, on one level means no longer arresting people. I mean, one thing that happened in California with Prop 64, when it was passed in 2016, that I think was quite a huge deal was that the smell of cannabis can no longer be used as probable cause. That is huge, it's a small change that makes a huge impact, because so many kinds of secondary searches or other issues have come up out of this question of like, why is it? You know, is there probable cause for a search? If there's probable cause for a search and you can't find it, then suddenly a person who may just have a broken taillight or whatever, is suddenly, you know, it's so much more dangerous than it should be? And I think that that, to me, is a net positive from the question of legalization. But it comes at that major cost that I think you've very accurately identified, which is “Wait a minute, like, suddenly, legalization means permission to commodify?” And commodification means that it is subject to these market influences that have really corrupted so many other kinds of resources and brings us back to the very beginning of this conversation and kind of just turns it into another product to be consumed by the hungry ghosts, you know, that are buying it. And I think that that is, that's very scary. And I agree that that's something that I think is a major cost of legalization to me, it makes me wonder about like, what's the trade? The trade was okay, we're not going to have any more people arrested for possession of marijuana or cannabis in the US, and there'll be more leniency and flexibility around how we do that. And the trade off for that to make it palatable to voters or to, you know, the legislature, depending on the state and California was the voters, but how much does it have to look like every other industry? And it's every other industry that's doing all the things that we don't want to see with these beautiful plants? And I think that that is a big question that I still don't know the answer.
I think that's the question here, that is what I wonder like probably literally every day actually, like, what is the trade off that we're doing here? And is it worth it? Is it better for something to be criminalized? For people to be taking risks to have their families torn apart because they want to engage with something? Or is it better for this to be part of the kind of traditional commercial market industry logic that, unfortunately, rules so much? Now, I also want to recognize that that's a little bit of a false dichotomy. I don't think it's true that we just have two options. In fact, I think a big part of my personal work, I should say, my professional work, although personal too, does, in many ways, boil down to how do we actually go beyond these paradigms? And I'm not, I certainly don't have the answer. But I do feel grateful that I think the kind of leading edge of the drug policy reform conversation is incorporating all of these questions, you know, like this question about the commercialization of cannabis is a huge question that is, as far as I can see, being thought being thought through by basically everyone that I that I know and associated with in the psychedelic and drug product, drug policy world, which I appreciate because, you know, we're asking the same questions that you just said, which is like, “Okay, well, yeah, legalization has some of these benefits, but like, what about the things that have happened? Like, what about these multi state operators? What about monopolization? What about this like, weird industrial cannabis manufacturing world that we've been, where you can buy cartridges, you know, in most cities in California, THC cartridges, but what you're buying is like a Frankenstein of like oil and terpenes THC and it’s like oh is that really what we want here? Is that we're going forward? Do we want these like weird Frankenstein products that are just, you know, seeking the lowest common denominator? And I don't I don't think so.
I also wonder, like, you know, how much of this is the adjustment period? Like, is there a version of reality where a drug policy reform scheme allows us to create like, the paradigm of our dreams which to me, it looks like, I don't know, fairtrade, plant based, organic, MDMA and like community gardens where people can teach each other to grow mushrooms and do ceremony and do ritual together and regenerate the land and probably also billions of dollars from the federal government for reparations and restoration of rights after the war on drugs, you know, there's a list, there's a laundry list of things that I'd like to see and I think we'd like to see as we transition into the future, but I think you're right for now, we kind of got to see all the ugly parts, as we as we build out this other infrastructure, because, unfortunately, there's just like an adjustment period, I guess, you could say, between the paradigm that we're currently in which we're trying to fit these new ideas into. And then like, the infrastructure that we're trying to create, which I think will take a little bit more time, but it will be worth it. It'll be worth doing in the end, even if it'll take, I think generations truly, to really get it done. I don't know if that answers your question. That was just a kind of response to the metaphor there. Yeah.
Ayana Young What I'm honestly feeling is we need a part two, because there's so much to talk about. But yeah, I would like to, to open the floor to you to speak to anything that's still on your mind that we haven't gotten to in this conversation, knowing that we're going to need a second conversation, I hope that you'll be available at some point because yeah, we're just I feel like just scratching the surface. So yeah, I just want you to close us out in whatever way feels the best for this conversation this beginning.
Ismail Ali Totally, I thank you for the space to have this conversation. We touched on so much. And yet we really scratched the surface. And I think that that's kind of what you're saying. I'd be happy to come back and have more conversations with you, because there's just so much in it. But I guess I'll just close here by saying or kind of, you know, pause here, you could say by saying that, we're in this, you know, I've been working in the drug policy reform world for I mean, professionally for about seven or eight years, and personally for way twice that long. As you know, just being a street harm reductionist, you could say or going to community harm reductionist and learning as I went with my own experiences, my own kind of like personal growth processes from a very young age. And what I've noticed is that we're in a paradigm in which the worlds of our past are the ways that we think things have to be done. And the worlds of our future, the kind of what we're emerging into. Our clashes are kind of suddenly coming together, and are overlapping, maybe that's really the word that I'm looking for overlapping. And people look back, and they look at this war on drugs, they look at this global drug control scheme, and they're like, “Wow, that really isn't working. You know, that's not cool. But then they look forward. And it's not really clear where we go from here. So I feel like this conversation that we had today, all of these kinds of all of this really like this whole inquiry is really around, what are the ways that we want to do it differently in the future, and I just want to encourage listeners or people who are, have their own relationship with drugs, or close to people that they love, who have, you know, contents complicated, or maybe even really positive relationship with these substances to start to imagine, like, what do we want this to look like? I think that we're in a period of great growth and transformation, and can in fact, make these changes if we're wanting to and if we're ready to. And I think that that puts us in a position of great power in some ways, like as a community and as a group of people who are thinking about this. But I just like, I really want to encourage people to be really visionary, because now is really the time to do that, even as we can navigate all the harms and pain and suffering and oppression that we're all kind of simultaneously navigating. So I think just thinking of it in that way, like a long game framework, multigenerational framework is really helpful. And then I think, finally saying that there is an emerging care infrastructure that's being built out within the psychedelic field, you know, with therapists and practitioners and people who are really thinking kind of to the very beginning of our conversation I like, how do we engage with these substances outside of the hyper consumerist kind of cycle that so many people feel stuck in. And I think that, you know, bringing it back to that is like, there is a way to be in really respectful reverence to these incredibly powerful tools in a way that, you know, promotes like a generative outcome for us all instead of one that kind of pushes us further down this very scary vortex that we that I feel like you know, some people feel like we're slipping into so not to end on such an exit or anything, but maybe we'll get more into the fun stuff next time too.
Ayana Young Absolutely no, I mean, I'm with you, and I think ending on that note feels real, and it feels honest. And I think we need that from each other because if we don't start from a place of honesty, it's really going to be hard to have fun authentically. And like, truly have fun because we are consenting to what we're doing in a respectful way. I mean, gosh, there's just so much that was spoken to in this time together. And I also just want to close out by saying I'm appreciative that the conversation felt so destigmatized around usage. I think that shaming each other or ourselves only makes our relationships more challenging with whether it's the substances or with ourselves or with each other. And definitely with the system at large. So gosh, yeah, there's so much more to speak to, but I really appreciate your work and your research and your diligence, and your willingness to sit in the trouble of all of this and continue to try to envision another way even when it's not clear or it's not easy to find ways out. But staying with it is I think, really what we all need. It is a long game. All of this stuff is a long game. And I'm just happy that we have each other in it.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Harrison Foster, Book of Colors, and Autumn Hawk Percival. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Julia Jackson.