Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
How to Fight Prohibition in 2025 w/ Soren Shade
Recorded: Oct. 1, 2025 Duration: 1:08:21Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, advocates for drug legalization emphasized the importance of collective action against prohibition, highlighting trends in self-regulation through blockchain technology and the need for open dialogue about drug use. The conversation also pointed out how each act of prohibition sets a precedent for future bans, urging the community to unite in their fight for drug rights.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. What's up?
Hello, testing.
Can everyone hear me?
We hear you.
Hey, wonderful.
Awesome, excited to be here.
Nice to have you.
Is that Riley?
That's Riley.
Nice. And this is That's Riley. Nice.
And this is I, Tyler.
Hello, Tyler and Riley.
Two of my favorite CyDial members.
Aw, yes, thank you.
So nice to see you, too, virtually.
There isn't the video component of this, right?
It's just audio
yeah just audio okay cool were you ever on a way to do video i did it one time but i think maybe
you have to be on your phone to do it huh well i am not on my phone anyways yeah i'm quite happy
with this everyone else's seems like a lot of people are hopping in, so that's exciting.
Yeah, let me put it in our Discord and our Telegram.
Meanwhile, tell us how you're doing and just, yeah, what's going on?
Well, I'm coming up on my second cup of coffee right now.
So part of my, one of my favorite parts of the morning.
It's, you know, a free, societally accepted opportunity to catch a little buzz.
And everyone else has got it going on at the same time.
So it feels like a nice collective drug experience I have every
morning with the capitalist drones around me. Nice and nice and enjoyable caffeine.
I've been reading the and actually I see that Taylor's in the chat. So I have to give him
credits for that. But in preparation for this call, I saw that it was going to be sort of focused on drug liberation and fighting the drug war writ large. on his uh account a few uh maybe yesterday or the day or two before but um always a good
reminder of how present and uh on the nose shulgan always has been um his writing from
was his 94 96 is still so uh applicable to the issues we have today. And even more so, I mean, his commentary that the war on drugs is a means of maintaining inflated military budgets in times of peace and commentary on how any nation that declares war on its
own citizen should not be classified as a civilization, but rather more barbaric and
draconian than a nation state that anyone should ever want to live in.
And that is, of course, so much more applicable to today, given that we have not only the war of drugs being declared on our citizens and civilians of the United States, but also a war on anyone that can even be vaguely associated with the, but not with the administration right now, anyone, you know, arbitrarily labeled Antifa, et cetera, et
cetera.
And, you know, I feel while most people in the United States or most people in the world
are on occasion drug users and therefore able to be subjected to police violence through
the rules of the drug war, everyone also probably has some sympathies at some level with Antifa ideology
and could therefore then be arbitrarily prosecuted by authorized police and state violence.
So, you know, we're just seeing sort of an expansion of the authoritarian and tyrannical
controls on what we can and can't do.
And it all sort of, you know, this is why I love drugs so much
is they intersect with damn near everything important in life.
And you can kind of just go back to first principles of drug war critiques
to get a better understanding of what's going on in the world
and how we got here today.
It's also relevant,
also interconnected. And yeah, if you're going to be concerned with military deployment in LA
and Portland, you should be concerned with militarized police deployment and the haulers
of West Virginia for heroin users and the inner cities of Chicago for the sale of other illicit drugs.
It's uh it's all sort of part of the- Taylor I invited you to speak I believe if you want to
jump in. Love to hear from you. Father McKenna. Yeah I called him out.
That was an excellent answer. He's also open to speak.
Yeah we sent invites out. I don't know if they're going through I got mine
cool
hello Jesse
hi hey Jesse
hey dude awesome
sorry
alright let me set the stage
it's great to see everybody in here. Really appreciate
all the attention. Good to see Soren here. Taylor, Jesse, Tyler's here, Brittany, Andrew.
Really lovely to see some of the side out people. And we're really here to talk about some of Soren's
work in the anti-prohibitionist space, in the media world, Kratom space,
also called Kratom or Kratom, pick your poison, and also precipitated by this beautiful article
that Soren wrote for our recent psychedelic science substack called the TAB, where he talked
about how it's important to work to decriminalize or legalize
all drugs, not just psychedelics. This is an important thing, according to him and according
to many of us. And so we wanted to bring him on to talk about his experience, his thoughts.
And so, Soren, I know this is something you're super passionate about, and you have been for a long time.
And if you want to just tell us like why you got, yeah, just tell us like, what's the seed of it for you?
Where did that first like wake up for you?
This, this passion?
I really first became aware of the phenomenon of using drugs well before I ever started using drugs.
I was raised in a cafe, pub, hybrid restaurant.
So all of my life, I remember people getting high around me and paying my parents for the privilege of
getting high in their establishment and my home. So drug use has been around me my entire life.
Now, those, of course, are drugs that are often excluded from drugs in many people's minds because of this strange, perverted, warped, and irrational
definition of what is and isn't a drug, but, you know, for, you know, background on understanding
how I speak. When I call something a drug, I mean, really, anything that you take into your body and it alters your psychology or physiology.
So, you know, and Shulgin and the Nature of Drugs, Volume 1, which is a three part series of lectures that he gave UC Berkeley in 1986,
which I highly recommend to anyone who hasn't read it yet. He has a whole
chapter on sort of just like what is and isn't a drug. And he even expands his definition so far
as to include water when one's very thirsty and things of that nature. And all really just sort
of this Socratic process of, do we really understand what we're talking about? Not really, sort of a thing,
and sort of going from there as a means of demonstrating how far from sanity and logic
we've come, and even just classifying these compounds. So I've been around drugs my whole
life and started using drugs once I
got the, I drank a little bit in high school, but started using drugs seriously in college.
And there in college, you know, I was met with sort of the classic existentialist questions of
our teenage years, like, who am I? What do I want to do? What
do I find important? And I was torn in so many directions by things that impacted me empathetically,
you know, wanting to, you know, make the world a better place and operate through the means of love, not greed or hatred. And that,
you know, tore me in a lot of directions. Do I, am I concerned with economic issues,
political issues, immigration issues, global issues, national issues, state issues? And
as I began to explore these things deeply, I came to realize that they all, at some point or another,
intersected with drugs. And I don't know if that's simply the nature of, you know,
humans liking to do drugs, and therefore drugs can weave themselves into every endeavor of the
human condition, or just the fact that we like to think that we operate with a degree of freedom. And one of the most
obvious and blatant abridgments of our freedoms in the United States stems through the war on drugs.
And so it's really through the recognition of the intersectionality of how the war on drugs and
really just how the war on drugs impacts so many things I was interested in and passionate about just allowed me to focus on drugs as the means of not ever saying I give up on an issue I care about.
So that's sort of the high level overview of what got me into it.
And so it started as sort of this intellectual or this maybe more heart-centered
like emotional reason for doing it. Here's what justice is. Here's a way to like impact society
or work for the betterment of all human beings. And now there's still that for you. But there's
also this personal thing now because you run this Kratom company, a Kratom, and now they're trying to ban a certain
one of the, what do you call it? Isolates? Alkaloids. They're trying to ban one of the
alkaloids right now called 7-hydroxymetraginine. And this is going to, is this going to affect you personally if they
do this? Or is this more of it's not right and you just care because you just can't stand
seeing injustice? Well, yeah. So, I mean, personally, yes, all acts of prohibition
impact me personally. But with regards to 7-hydroxymetragyene and its impact on me financially it's a
complicated question so the for just some background what's going on is that in late july
um four of the government uh organizations which are um crucial in and play a very large role in making drugs illegal,
got together in a very rare and sort of first of its kind event to announce that they would be
scheduling 7-hydroxymetragynine and putting it on the controlled substance list as a scheduled one
compound, meaning that it has high potential for abuse and a liability for addiction and no medical value, et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera. And they carved out a really unique exemption for
drugs that contain 7-hydroxymetraginine outside of 7-hydroxymetragynine in and of itself.
And so what I mean by that is they have, they're going to make 7-hydroxymetragynine illegal unless
it occurs in combination with some other creatum alkaloids and it is below a certain percentage,
which is something that has never occurred in the history of prohibition before.
This is it's it's sort of like saying you can it's it's as. But any coca or any product that contains
cocaine greater than 2% in relation to other certain compounds that are found in coca leaves,
then it is illegal. So this really weird exemption that permits... Sorry, if you want
clarification, please feel free to interrupt me at any time.
Isn't that how it works with hemp, though?
So hemp is, I mean, an even more convoluted carve-out.
It is probably one of the most accurate parallels, but it isn't enforced through the Controlled Substance Act.
The Controlled Substance Act is a de facto ban on cannabis and Delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinoil.
And then in 2018, the Farm Bill, which is a many thousand page document that determines how federal budget is applied to things related to farms generally in the United States, made an exemption for the exact same plant, cannabis sativa or indica.
Um, and it had less than 0.3% Delta nine THC in it, everything else in it is illegal.
So this was this, it was an exemption made outside of the controlled substance act that,
um, judicially we've decided to prioritize over, um, the law in the controlled substance
act.
I mean, so this is another element of drug law and the drug war
that is important to me is that if you're going to create an operating system for a nation state,
it should probably be consistent. It should probably be rational or else no one's going
to know how to apply it equally and honestly to the things that you do in their life. They're not going to know how to behave because which part of the law do you follow? And then if it seems irrational,
your trust for the whole institution is going to be eroded. So, you know, that's just another
aspect of how the war on drugs has eroded what was a noble experiment at the beginning and has
since made it very hard to follow and hard to justify institution of governance.
But back to this is true.
Well, it is kind of true with Kratom, too, where it's hard to follow.
It's hard to understand what is an isolate?
What is the whole plant? What is the difference between the things?
Yes. Yeah. And so, so going back to the question of like, how am I financially impacted by this?
You know, the short answer is I don't sell any 7-hydroxymetrazinine isolate products.
Therefore, this act of prohibition doesn't affect me immediately. And honestly, in the short term,
a year or two, it will probably benefit me to have some of my competitors forcibly removed
from the state. I mean, this is an act of government interference in the market to create
monopolies for companies like myself, which is, you know, not really in the spirit of free market capitalism, which
we supposedly worship like a god in this country.
So I don't know, that would be, you know, a blasphemous act for like a Keynesian or
someone like that.
But so in the short term, it's not beneficial to me.
It is it would potentially be beneficial for me.
But in the long term, it's going to make it much easier for Kratom and really any other drug to be made illegal.
I mean, every act of prohibition is sort of my thesis of the tab piece I wrote.
piece I wrote, every act of prohibition ultimately makes it easier for other drugs to be made
illegal because it's going through the exercise over and over again until it becomes something
that we just accept without any sort of critical analysis or complaint or criticism. This is just
the way the world works. Drugs are made illegal and there's nothing we can say about it. In this particular relation to 7-hydroxymetraginine, we're already seeing how this is eroding
this ability of the Kratom market because the media class is misrepresenting the nuances
of the government's announcements.
They don't see 7-hydroxymetraginine as a semi-synthetic
kratom alkaloid isolate. They just say kratom or a part of kratom. And then there comes these
fear-mongering, sensationalized stories about how 7-hydroxymetraginine has hurt people, which
probably not entirely true. This is just classic drug war misinformation and media
sensationalism that drives clicks and scares people in suburbia. But they're misrepresented.
What you've said in your article that we just published was kind of a slippery slope argument,
which is every new criminalization attempt reinforces the precedent that the
government has the final say in which forms of consciousness are acceptable. The prisons,
police forces, and political interests that target 70H are the same ones that criminalize
LSD and psilocybin. And which drug they choose to focus on next depends on which drug scare is in style. And as long as prohibition
exists, psychedelics, which is the thing that a lot of us on this call are most passionate about,
but as long as prohibition exists, psychedelics will always be one bad headline or political
swing away from recriminalization. I also wanted to jump in real quick and just say that there's a lot of people
who are not prohibitionists or didn't used to be prohibitionists, you know, Kratom advocates
who are now turning around and saying that 70H should be prohibited because of it hasn't gone
through drug trials, it hasn't been tested, etc., etc. That argument would make sense if it wasn't
already on the market and it didn't already
have a massive user base.
It's one thing to say this shouldn't be introduced to the market.
It's an entirely different thing to say this should be prohibited.
And so I get really frustrated with supposed Kratom advocates who are turning against 7OH
because it's just going to hurt them in the long run.
Kratom gets bad headlines.
You can't separate that from 7OH.
100%, Sky.
Yeah, so I mean, it's exactly that.
I mean, and there's a nuance that I could really get into regarding path to market approval.
What processes supposedly exist in the United States for taking something that was never sold,
that's meant for human consumption, and then selling it for human consumption.
But that is something that is just rarely enforced until people start dying.
It's the sad fact of the matter.
And yeah, this guy's totally right. The current attitude of the Kratom advocacy community is, by and large, get rid of 7-hydroxymetragynine. And that is something that is fueled by fear, not by rational adherence to one's first principles and beliefs. It is Kratom helps me a lot. I don't know how I would go on without it.
I've been told that the existence of 7-hydroxymetragynine on the market somehow
undermines the security of Kratom to continue to be sold legally. Therefore, out of fear of
preserving the thing that benefits me, get rid of the thing that I was told could potentially damage that ability to
secure Kratom. Can you say about a little bit on the human level about 7-hydroxymetragynine?
Why is this important to people? How does it help them? Who have you seen this? How has it
affected some lives that you've seen? Yeah. So, you know, I'm going to focus on the
positives here, not to say that there are not negatives, you know, the same way that,
you know, while sugar makes a lot of meals better, and I really enjoy it, it also has damaged
people. You know, there's just a flip side for everything, but I care to focus on the positive.
Whenever I attend virtual meetings, 7-hydroxymetragynine advocates how that they
can best utilize their stories, how can they best leverage their letter writing, email writing
abilities to solicit their representatives to oppose this ban. It feels like being in LA in 1994 at some of these
underground medical marijuana distribution networks. It is patient advocates all around.
It is people who have the toughest lots in life. I mean, it is spiritually draining to be on these calls of people who are in pain,
who are scared and angry and frustrated, asking questions like, yes, I know I didn't get a right
to my representative, but if they make this illegal, what do I do? Where do I go? What do I
do? I hurt, I'm in pain, and this helps. And it is, I mean, it's, it's emotionally like very difficult to be in these calls with people and try to strategize and like
this weird neoliberal, like, what is the best way to lobby the government to take us seriously
way? Because it's so clear that the government isn't concerned with the well-being of these people um it's concerned with um you know ultimately maintaining the steady drip of
lobbying that came in to uh make this illegal in the first place i mean which is ultimately the
the root of this like there was lobbying by people who did not like 7-hydroxymetragynine,
a lot of them in the big kratom industry already, the legacy kratom industry that pushed for this
prohibition because they thought it would ultimately benefit them in the long run, which,
as I was saying earlier, it will not benefit legacy kratom in the long run. In the short term,
yes. In the long run, no, it will erode public trust for kratom in the long run in the short term yes in the long run no it will erode public trust
for kratom the plant generally because the media can understand the nuances the differences
between these things um yeah hey soren if i could jump in real quick i'm curious if you could
explain the uh pharmacological differences between seven hydroxy by itself versus the full kratom
alkaloid profile.
And this is a two-parter.
I'm also wondering if there's anything to be learned from the 2018 ban on kratom that
was prevented.
Yeah, so pharmacology and then past kratom ban.
So pharmacology of kratom is really deeply interesting because it is a real and true example of the entourage effect, which may or may not exist in cannabis, but most people are familiar with it.
case of Kratom, there are likely six or seven alkaloids that are occurring at quantities that
are high enough to have psychological and physiological impact if they were administered
in and of themselves without anything else. And then you're taking them all at once. And really,
your exposure is like 50 plus alkaloids, but so many of them occur at such a minor level that they're really only
visible under scrutiny of advanced scientific instruments. But there are at least a half
dozen alkaloids that all have different pharmacology that are all acting in your CNS at the same time. So the main one is mitragynine, which is not a like selective
drug. It acts on various different receptors of the body at the same time.
So it has opiodergic effect, pretty mild opiodergic effect. It binds with new opioid receptor and can cause mild pain relief and yeah, just classic
opioid effects, but it's very, very minor in its effect there. It also has serotonin activity. It
can stimulate the release of dopamine and it also has alpha adrenergic effects as well, which are sort of stimulant effects.
Then there's a number of others like speciogynene, speciostelatin, pananthine, isorhynchophyllene,
rynchophyllene.
Like pananthine, for example, is a mu opioid antagonist.
So it's acting actually more like naloxone than it is like Percocet or a classic
opioid. So it has like the blocking effect. And so you're taking this at the same time as you're
taking, you know, classic opioids as well. And, you know, isormycophylene, very interestingly
enough, has NMDA, antigenous activity. So similar activity as how ketamine works. I mean, it's really, truly one of
the most fascinating plant drugs on earth in that it has so much activity. Like there are alkaloids
in it that have 5-HT2A agonist activity, which is the marker of a classical psychedelic. Like it's
all over the place. And so metragenine, whenever it enters the body and after it goes through first pass metabolism, a not insignificant percentage of it is converted into 7-hydroxymetragenine, which occurs at trace amounts in the kratom leaf, but likely not enough to have a direct impact on your CNS.
You only start having an impact of 7-hydroxymetragenine in the effects of crotone after you begin to
metabolize metragenine. And 7-hydroxymetragenine is unique among the kratom alkaloids, not only
in that it is a metabolite, but that it is pretty selective for one receptor in the body, which is
the mu opioid receptor. And on a milligram per milligram basis, on the
barbaric and frankly, like, inethical rat models, whenever they put a rat on a hot piece of metal
and measure the time it takes for it to flick its tail or get desperate and try to escape,
tail or get desperate and try to escape it has about a 20x greater analgesic effect than morphine
does so it's a very strong uh opioid agonist has very potent analgesic nociceptive effects and
uniquely among selective strong opioid receptor agonists, it is very difficult to get respiratory depressant effects
from it. So the reason why there's widespread opiophobia in the United States outside of
propaganda to make us not like it is the fact that if you take enough opioids,
especially in combination with other depressants that are GABAergic,
it can shut down your breathing to such a level that you suffocate and you die.
And that's why a lot of lay people fear opioids, because they have a relatively achievable
dose that shuts down your breathing. 7-hydroxymetragenine takes orders of magnitude more to shut down your breathing than
classical opioids to the extent that I find it hard to believe that anyone would ever get to
the level that would kill them without a high tolerance for it because like you would get
nauseous and it would be unpleasant. You'd fall asleep before you could get to this dangerous
level and one of the benefits of tolerance, why tolerance is often a good thing, is that tolerance to a drug doesn't occur just in
the good parts of it, but also to like the dangerous things of it. So if you're tolerant to
7-hydroxymetragyny and you take more and more of it, your ability to withstand more of it without
slowing down your breathing also increases as well.
So basic pharmacology of CRTOM and 7-hydroxymetraginine there. And then in relation to
the 2016 prohibition attempt of CRTOM, which is not the only act of prohibition that CRTOM has
weathered, it's also weathered a number of state bans and also an attempt at the international
level in 2021 through the UN and WHO. In all of these instances, some government agency or
international organization has attempted to prohibit CRTOM. In all of those instances, there is sort of a three-front defense that
has proven to be effective, which is one, the scientific community has mobilized to present
evidence that Kirtom does not cause the harm that was attached to it whenever either the FDA or the DEA
suggested that it be made illegal.
They sort of, you know,
demonstrated that those were untruths.
Then there is the grassroot organizational component
where many people who are passionate about Kratom
organize to reach out to people in positions of power,
legislators, presidents, government
officials, et cetera, stage protests, all sorts of things to protest this action and demonstrate
that people would not take this lying down.
And then on the third front, we have the industry component, which funneled millions of dollars
every time that they try to make this illegal to fund lobbyists to go and essentially, you know, grease the wheel a little bit to convince the people in 2016, the DEA less than a month later announced
that they were actually going to be revoking their decision to schedule it until further
review. And this action of late July 2025 shows that they are coming back with a little bit more
surgical precision. And instead of targeting metragenine and 7-hydroxymetragenin,
they're simply targeting 7-hydroxymetragenin in certain formulations.
I remember that 2016 attempted ban.
I went into one of the Kratom dispensaries here in Denver,
like right after the ban was announced or the proposed ban.
And there was like a frenzy in the dispensary of people trying to buy as much Kratom as they could, these big bags. And I think it like sold out the
dispensary because these people had been using Kratom for relaxation or pain relief or socializing.
And then all of a sudden it was going to go away. And it created this frenzy.
And it's like you've said in your piece about how when you start to make things illegal, it creates all these behaviors that are not necessarily good for people. Whether that's
moving to a more dangerous drug or something that's not, that they don't know what's in it.
drug or something that's not, that they don't know what's in it. It's just this effect where
it like kind of messes with human behavior and people change how they act and change the medicines
that they take. And you've seen how that's dangerous throughout history. Yeah. One of the most,
one of the, you bring up two wonderful examples in your piece about how after LSD was made illegal
in California in 1966, people didn't shrug their shoulders and quit using psychedelics. They
searched for alternatives. One was DOM, which is a Shulgin compound. And DOM is in many ways is less
safe than LSD because it lasts 24 hours and the come up takes like three
hours. And so people would wait for an hour, think that it wasn't working. Then they take more
than they're tripping for 24 hours. And this led to a lot of bad trips and hospitalizations.
And you've seen this when they outlawed heroin or when they cracked down more on heroin,
people moved to fentanyl, which is a more deadly and less predictable drug.
And so you're just creating this suffering in people that may not have been there.
Like it's this perverse thing where you're trying to help people, allegedly, perhaps, by outlawing a drug that you think is dangerous,
and you just drive them to a more dangerous drug.
And that leads to deaths and harm and suffering.
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's a hard point to convince people at this point that there were ever good intentions behind the war on drugs.
I mean, you look through the history of America's drug legislation.
And it's hard to find a single instance
that wasn't clouded with external interests
aside from public health.
I mean, we can go back to,
I mean, we can go back to like 1906 with the creation of the Pure Food and Drug Act by the head of the USDA Department of Agriculture, Harvey Wiley. hardcore Christian scientists who believed that in a way that the,
the body was a temple of God and one shouldn't,
one shouldn't adulterate it.
One shouldn't put non-natural, non-good things into it, which is, you know,
like how do you even demarcate between good and bad things to put in it from
like a Christian mentality? Because did not God, you know, like, how do you even demarcate between good and bad things to put in it from like a
Christian mentality, because did not God, you know, allegedly create all of this. So, you know,
this whole unsanitary temple, like belief system that underlies so much of America's drug wars,
is something that even for me, it's hard to but it was 100 used as justification in the early
period of the drug war and yeah i mean so we along with all these racist and classist things
oh where they didn't just crack they didn't crack down on heroin in the you know in the 20s among
people who were upper class and using it recreationally,
they went after jazz singers. They went after Billie Holiday because she was black.
And this is well documented in a lot of places.
They have the receipts for this.
And, you know, they're not going against Wall Street bankers
who are using cocaine on the weekends.
They're going against people that are unhoused, in the gutter using some fentanyl to try to smooth out their day.
And it's just tough to watch.
I want to remind everybody we're on with Soren Shade.
He's a former producer of Hamilton's Pharmacopia and a Kratom expert.
Soren, why should I and a Kratom expert.
So why should I care about Kratom? I don't do Kratom.
I like mushrooms and ayahuasca.
And so I don't care.
So let him outlaw it.
I guess you've given some good reasons for it,
but still I'm a busy person. I don't have time to write letters. I don't have time to go down to the courthouse.
Yeah.
I'm working on mushrooms.
time so there there are several arguments uh to be made so i'll go with a different one but
you know is you know when when one enjoys tripping um is your preferred place to trip
an area that is filled with you know like nature and art and friendly people smiling at you or would you prefer to trip um with a lot of
police around you with the full knowledge that um if you are confronted by the police you could
be put into a cage you know it's even's, even if, you know, all the good fortune of the
psychedelic, like Renaissance part three, or part four, whatever we're in right now, like,
comes true, and we are able to legalize these things, not only for medical use, but for
recreational use. If there is, continues to be widespread crackdowns on
non-psychedelic drugs, that means that there's going to be a continued increase and escalation
of the amount of militarized police on our streets in order to enforce those drug laws.
So you are just going to be tripping in an environment that is a de facto police state.
And is that an enjoyable thing to do?
Or would you prefer there to be more of a feeling of freedom and goodwill around you?
So that's like sort of my aesthetic argument for prohibition should be fought uniformly.
prohibition should be you know fought uniformly and then there's the slippery slope argument where
if you continue to allow prohibition um on things that benefit some people but don't benefit other
people who is to say that eventually the time will come whenever the thing that benefits you
but not other people will be next on the docket i mean it's you know not to like i don't mean this in bad taste because i truly
believe that these follow like the very same thread of of concern with authoritarian government
practices but like first they came for the socialists right then they came for the labor
unions then they came for the jews and i did not speak out on any of these because i was not any of
these but then they came for me right and who's left to speak out on any of these because I was not any of these. But then they came for me, right? And who's left to speak for it? It's very much the same thing with the drug war. And we're seeing that escalate now. First, they came for the opium users. Then they came for the reefer smokers. Then they came for the cocaine users. Then they came for the heroin users. Then they came for the fentanyl users, the carfentanil users, the methamphetamine users, on and on and on.
And now they're just coming for you if you're Antifa or you post things that express a disdain for genocide on Twitter.
They're coming for you now because you didn't speak up whenever they came for, you know, the drug users 100 years ago.
And I also need prohibition to end because I like 2CB and I don't see any like path for 2CB to be legal.
Not enough people are trying to get it through the FDA.
Even if they did, I would have to take it probably with a therapist or a doctor.
not to mention all the 6APB and ILAD and all of these other things that it's just like,
I need there to be an environment in which I'm not going to go to prison for any of these things.
Totally. And think about the pathways that we're utilizing to legitimize these substances.
You know, MDMA costs probably about a billion dollars of Lycos and MAPS money at this point for it to not be approved.
Now they've got like another 120 to spend to reduce stage three clinical trials.
Compass is spending close to a billion dollars to get psilocybin legalized for certain medical conditions.
Just look at T-call and P-call.
You've got 400 plus compounds there.
That's 400 billion dollars that
would be wasted on on on the apparatus of a pharmaceutical like the pharmaceutical industrial
complex you know the the labs that have to go through all the the rodent models in stage one
and then the recruitment processes of stage two and the observers and the HR and stage three.
These are billions and billions of dollars being spent on useless things, just meant to check off
legal these boxes. And then you look at everything that's on the controlled substance list. It's
well over 400 compounds at this point. It's more than everything at PCOL and TECOL.
Do we have to spend a billion dollars on every single one of
those to make it available for some people with certain medical conditions and it's just not it's
just not an efficient way to uh get the phone call probably um sorry yes maybe now's uh well Yes. Maybe now. Well, I just want to say we got about 15 minutes left left. And I want to open it up to questions, thoughts. Anyone else wants to jump in?
It is my personal belief, and I don't know if there's a better way to do this, but at this point, I think this is the most surgical and precise way of doing it, is that we need a constitutional amendment that guarantees the right of all citizens in the United States, the ability to alter their consciousness as they see police, so long as it does not harm anyone else, and have the ability to treat themselves medically in the manner that they see fit without any sort of police or government or state guidance or interference,
so long as it does not impact the health of other people.
And that is, I think, the only way to unwind the Controlled Substance Act and start at ground zero and then build regulations based on public health and our civil rights from there. But until we get rid of the Controlled Substance Act,
there's going to be no way to band-aid ourselves
out of this problem of prohibition.
And is there anybody working on this constitutional amendment?
Well, you see, I don't want to spoil my pitch
for some of that sweet, sweet psi money,
but no, no one's working on it right now,
but hey, side dial.
Nod, wink, wink, nod, nod.
No problem.
We'll get on it.
I love it.
I think it's a wonderful possibility, and I wonder if we're in a place to do it, but it would be so sweet.
I wonder if we're in a place to do it, but it would be so sweet.
I feel like drug legalization kind of hit a high watermark in about 2021.
And the tide has been turning against it ever since in public opinion, where you saw the decriminalization in Oregon roll back.
It's just not a good time.
It seems like the tide is shifting.
As an Oregonian
that voted for the original
decriminalization, it's been very
disappointing to have a ballot
initiative by the people,
repealed by the people,
by our state Congress, essentially.
Yeah. I mean, that occurs everywhere
with drugs. When Ohio legalized cannabis through a
boater initiative there was like a slurry of activity in the legislature in the 72 hours
following that where they like they they docked like 90 of the plants that you're allowed to grow
at home they um made carve outs for certain cannabis formulation types. They put caps on purchase limits and potency.
All of these things that were not things that people voted for that were just ad hoc piled on there.
It's I mean, it's we don't live in a democracy, people.
You know, I hope that's not a shock for anyone.
Do you think that tokens can help you fight prohibition in 2025 of 7-OH?
For example, if you use the science capital markets of the internet,
of the internet that I think include advocacy capital markets because so much of the memetics
that I think include advocacy capital markets,
are tied to tokens is based on bag holder advocacy. You could generate a pretty interesting
economic force to support your political will. Do you think that there's an opportunity there for
a 7-OH token economy to serve as the shelling point for the anti-prohibition effort you described?
It's a really interesting idea. I hadn't thought of it um and honestly you would be the person i
would want to talk to about that among other people on this call i'm sure um you know like
so my first principles on this are you know the american empire is entrenched because of the
global reliance on the u.s dollar as the global reserve like currency.
If you want to purchase oil, you know, you kind of have to use the US dollar.
Well, up until maybe a year or two ago with the with bricks and all of that.
But anyways, still by and large, you have to operate the US dollar to
participate in the global economy.
And that's where America's hegemony is founded. And if you can in any way erode that hegemony through alternative financial systems, I think you go a long way in combating the ideology that predicates prohibition, this urge for power and control.
And that's where America's hegemony is founded.
So I love the alternative financial and economic systems that are emerging in the Web3 space,
but I can't pretend to know a whole lot about it other than sympathy with the first principle
arguments that there needs to be some sort of competitive vector against the USD.
I would submit to you that actually USD hegemony is perpetuated by cryptocurrency because of the
proliferation of stable coins. However, I get your point, right? You're saying that alternative currencies
can help to foster independent autonomous communities that aren't subject to what you
feel like is an overwhelming level of policing of this compound of 7OH.
And so having an alternative currency for that 7OH advocacy community
could help to foster its independence and autonomy.
Yeah, I get your point.
Yeah, I get your point. that is attached to appropriate and valid safety data for specific 7-hydroxy syntheses, formulation, preparation, and distribution
that people can look for whenever they are trying to purchase 7-hydroxymetragynine products. So some sort of auditor that attaches an NFT of sorts to certain products to act as a stamp
of approval that this product is not adulterated and there is evidence of safety for the dosing
regimen that is recommended on the instructions for use portion of the label.
You know, there is allegedly something like that right now with the FDA's path to market process and filing a new dietary ingredient notification or new drug application.
But the FDA hasn't enforced anything on that for a very long time.
The synthetic cannabinoid market has been able to avoid it and still sell products. The
croton market, the legacy croton market going to leaf cratum has managed to avoid this FDA
path to market regulatory processes that are supposedly entrenched in law. So there is allegedly something in place like this that's supposed to give consumers a sense
of security that what they're consuming is safe, but it's unenforced. And so we're sort of back to
the era of patent medicines where you just need to take the risk into your own hands, do your own
research before you consume these things, because there isn't a regulatory authority that is policing these things to make sure
that it is safe before you consume it.
So yeah, some sort of...
It's really the crux of it.
Yeah.
That's the crux of it, Soren.
I think it's the capacity for self-regulation that emerges from token-based community organization.
I would submit to you that because a token is just a few lines of code, nothing more,
all those things that you mentioned, they get attached to it by the token holders, the
community that forms around it, as the network of holders or the network around this thing grows,
the nature of it will change and gain those functions
that you're looking for.
And so, you know, it's very important to consider
this cryptography and the cryptographic currency movement, not
as like an alternative web, but rather the web that is emerging, right?
Because the internet is still quite young, right?
You like myself have probably seen it emerge from nothing to what it is today.
And I think this currency layer of the internet that we operate on as CIDAO and many of the people on this call operate on,
and I think Twitter or X now will ultimately operate on too,
it'll be an inherent part of the internet.
It already is in many cases.
And the token 7OH, let's say for this hypothetical,
would serve as a shelling point for that.
Speaking from experience of the tokens
that have been deployed already on pump science
in the psychedelic ecosystem by Pumpsy, LSD and Silo.
You deploy the token in order to get data from the scientific experiments that
you can then ultimately you know use in this effort to support fair treatment regulatorily
speaking of the drug and also ideally in what you're describing like a self-regulation of the drug economy, right? You're saying kind of there's nobody regulating the 70H economy.
It's in your article in the tab, you mentioned how it's exploded from zero
essentially to a billion dollar industry within a few years all around this
molecule and its derivatives.
And there's no regulation within the industry, self-regulation.
And so the outside regulator of the government is coming in and saying,
we need to step in and regulate this because it's growing a billion dollar industry, right?
And out of nowhere, it's not self-regulating.
Do you think that there's a way to fight this drug war through the new internet?
I hope so.
Yeah, I just, I simply can't pretend to know enough about Web3, I think,
to give a productive answer to that.
If there is a means of self-regulation that can be deployed through the tokenization of drug-containing
products, then let's give it a try. I mean, hell, that could be one of the really incredible things
that come out of the Kene launch. That could be a really cool thing to explore is how can consumers reviews be embedded on the blockchain
so that there is no hiding cutting corners or or adverse events right a blockchain it's a perfect
panopticon right it's totally transparent financial network all this data publicly available, open source, perfect for open science,
perfect for open community formation, and also perfect for this kind of regulatory transparency.
We have already done some cool things inside out in figuring out how to work sort of within the existing structures in interesting ways. Like
we are working, we are finding ways and places where psychedelic research and advocacy can happen
sort of unexpectedly. Like we're researching a dissociative in the Netherlands because the
Netherlands have these unique drug laws. And we are working with the shipibo people in peru to bring up this very interesting botanical
and characterizing it and figuring out exactly what's in it and then working it to to get to
people in ways that you know we're and we're organizing all this on ethereum and working together with all these disparate you know tokenomics lawyers
experts in drugs experts in all in measuring and then the shapivo people in their distinct
botanical knowledge it's definitely not perfect and it's not quite to the point where we can
totally dismantle the drug war create a constitutional amendment to you know
dismantle the drug war, create a constitutional amendment to, you know, legalize consciousness,
but it's interesting. For now, Soren, what can those of us who believe in prohibition,
I mean, anti-prohibition do at this point? You know, I like to go back to the first step to the first, first step be an open drug user, just come out of the closet. We, I mean, it is it is a fundamental part of the human condition to alter our consciousness like, like, as kids, we like to get dizzy because it's different. And it's not something to be ashamed of.
And so if you use drugs, be open about it. Maybe, you know, given our current,
you know, administrative landscape, that doesn't necessarily mean taking a selfie of yourself about to smoke 5-MeO-DMT in a state where it's illegal, but, you know, talk to your family,
talk to your friends, let them know that you are a drug user. Whenever they generally speak bad upon drug users, let them know that they're talking about you as well.
Someone that they love, someone that they have compassion to.
And I think that's one of the most important first leaps that takes a lot of courage is to be an open drug user.
And then from there, I think things will sort of progress naturally.
You know, if you are someone who is of an oppressed class and you admit it and you stop
deluding yourself that you're not of the oppressed class, you're going to start being concerned with
fighting against that oppression. So yeah, that's my first step. Be, come out of the closet.
It's great.
It worked.
It's worked in a lot of historically, you know, people fighting for their own rights.
It was hard to come out of the closet for gay people in the 1990s.
It's hard to come out of the closet for drugs now, but it is important.
Hey, before we end, I want to invite up.
We have another speaker here who hasn't had a chance to speak.
Dr. Ponzi, do you have anything you want to ask or add or bring up in the conversation?
Yeah, interesting to listen to.
I will say, you know, I think what's preventing a lot of this is the lobbyists, big pharma lobbies,
big food lobbies, because these are the people who are ultimately going to, you know, control.
I mean, we could even even the FDA, right? I mean, the FDA is I mean, look, look, who's high up in
positions at the FDA. And maybe it's getting a little better now. But I mean, these are people coming from big pharma.
And when you have institutions controlling and making the calls and thinking,
okay, I'm going to make decisions that's going to make my company and make us more money, right?
Because they have obligations to the shareholders.
Institutions don't have morals. So if that means keeping and advocating for policies that are
going to make psychedelic drugs illegal, I mean, like think of all the stuff with,
what's it called? Like Ibogaine, right? I mean, there's tons and tons of research out there that,
you know, people with PTSD who, um, have Ibogaine
treatment, MDMA treatment, LSD treatment, like this stuff should have been legal 10 years ago,
but it's not. Um, and it's because you have people lobbying against it. I mean, you could
say it's the FDA controlling it and whatever, but it's, it's really, we know who it is. It's the,
it's the people who are lobbying against it, who want their treatments to do. It's the people who are lobbying against it who want their treatments to do. It's the people who are making these SSRIs, which I think is, I'm not going to go down this road.
I think it's one of the most horrible, horrible medications out there.
But those are the people who are going to prevent the policies, you know.
So it could be interesting to see what happens in 10, 20 years.
to see what happens in 10-20 years but it will always be um far far behind what what you can do
and the opportunities you have you know just exploring on your own or even going to some
other countries and stuff but yeah interesting to hear yeah the one of the most enlightening
parts of being involved in the the kratom space over the past few years is getting a first-hand account of and watching and even participating in
lobbying and how it affects government decisions. I mean, it is a very real thing. I mean, it's
you, for example, you are working at the natural product department of the FDA and you you are immediately hired by either a trade organization
that represents dietary supplements or a specific company that's a dietary supplement. And they pay
you a premium so that you can exploit the loopholes that you wrote into the law that regulates the
business that you are now working for. And that is common practice. I mean, it is, it is so insane.
And I, there's some lawyers that I really like in the Kratom space, like on a personal level
that used to be in the FDA, uh, dietary supplement regulatory position. And now they,
uh, consult for Kratom companies and make like several thousand dollars an hour. Um that's just permitted in our, it's permitted in America to do that. Like,
write the laws with loopholes in it, and then sell yourself in order to exploit the loopholes
that you wrote. That's the name of the game. That's business.
Yeah, the issue is now, right? It's the big institutions that have a lot more money,
right? So they're going to get the better lawyers.
They're going to have more people lobbying.
You know, they're going to have
favorable policies. So yeah,
I think crypto, you know,
we have a chance. We have a fighting chance.
It's going to be an uphill
battle. It's not going to be easy, but
there is a chance.
Hell yeah.
Yeah, I want to thank everybody for tuning in.
It's inevitable.
I mean, crypto seems inevitable.
Organizing on the blockchain seems inevitable.
And where exactly that goes, what exact path that takes is being decided every day.
I mean, people voting on Discord is changing the way the world
works. And by the way, that's how we organize the Earthside House. So come visit us in the Discord.
I want to thank Soren so much for being here, everyone else for being here. Thank you so,
so much. We are trying to have these spaces twice a week to try to create awareness for what we're doing to try to bring psychedelics to the people.
And then, Soren, thanks for helping to open our minds to remember that just being narrow about what we are fighting for can actually damage our own cause.
And opening ourselves to more ideas can actually damage our own cause and opening ourselves to more ideas
can actually help ourselves for the things that we care about.
Yeah. And thank you all so much for, for making the space and for coming and listening to this.
I really appreciate that people care about this and will spend your valuable time hearing me give my argument and
point of view. So thank you all so much for being here. Thank you. Thank you, Soren. I want to
redirect to also to Soren's article in the tab. And you can find that at psychedelicscience.substacks.com.
I'm going to finish with some words from Soren,
which were really beautiful. Psychedelic insights of universal interconnectedness
also apply to psychedelic advocacy. To carve out a privileged space for psychedelics while
abandoning other substances is to accept prohibition as permanent. If you want to see a
world where everyone fights for psychedelics, don't fight just for psychedelics. Thank you everyone for coming and love to see you in the
next one. Thanks for coming. Thanks for coming. All right. Cheers, y'all. Bye. Thank you.
