Episode 7: Psychedelics on the Ballot

(00:00:00) Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Welcome to Altered States, I’m Arielle Duhaime-Ross. This week, reporter Damiano Marchetti goes behind the scenes with one of the most influential players in the decades long fight to legalize recreational marijuana. A person who is now setting his sights on psychedelics. Damiano takes it from here. 

(00:00:19) Damiano Marchetti: In the first episode of this series, we cover this measure that legalized psilocybin therapy in Oregon.

(00:00:24) Damiano Marchetti: And from the outside, it seemed to be going pretty well, which was surprising to me. Because there was something else happening in Oregon that made me think it should not have had a snowball’s chance in hell at succeeding. It was this other experiment in drug reform that had started around the same time.

(00:00:41) Archival Clip: Oregon voters have cast their ballots in favor of measure 110. 

(00:00:44) Archival Clip (2): Now this is getting headlines around the country. That measure reclassifies possession charges and penalties for certain drugs. 

(00:00:51) 

(00:00:51) Damiano Marchetti: In 2020, there was a very public effort to decriminalize most drugs in Oregon. The idea was a classic one, but (00:01:00) something we’d never seen tested before in this country.

(00:01:02) Damiano Marchetti: Basically, proponents said, instead of treating drug use as a criminal issue, let’s treat it as a social and mental health problem. Instead of arresting users, let’s take that money and provide social and mental health resources. But just a few years in, things were not going as planned. 

(00:01:17) Archival Clip: Block after block, foil, syringes, and used Narcan canisters litter the streets.

(00:01:22) Archival Clip: The sight of open fentanyl use is inescapable. In one of the most progressive states in the country, some are getting cold feet. It didn’t create homelessness, it didn’t create crime, but I think by almost everyone’s accounts, it’s made all those things worse. 

(00:01:40) Damiano Marchetti: The measure was failing. There’s a lot of good reasons for this.

(00:01:43) Damiano Marchetti: The money, the social services, they weren’t in place in time. But regardless, it was too easy for people to point at what was happening and say, look, these liberals in Portland got to test this idea that instead of arresting people, we can help them. And it just doesn’t work. Actually, everyone is worse off.(00:02:00) 

(00:02:00) Damiano Marchetti: Quickly, the political tides turned against Measure 110. 

(00:02:03) Archival Clip: The governor of Oregon has declared an emergency for the city of Portland just a few years after it became the first state in the nation to largely decriminalize drug use. Very interesting story here. 

(00:02:13) Damiano Marchetti: A few months later, and just three years after it was passed, Measure 110 was rolled back and many drugs were re criminalized in the state.

(00:02:21) Damiano Marchetti: With all this very public fanfare about the issue, it was kind of strange to watch as at the very same time, this little psilocybin therapy measure 109 sort of quietly rolled out and went to work. And when I’d called around to find out, like, what was different? Like, why was that doing well when 110 had failed so spectacularly?

(00:02:41) Damiano Marchetti: Someone told me, well, you have to talk to this guy, Graham Boyd. He was one of the organizers of measure 109. He’s an attorney who works on drug reform. 

(00:02:50) Graham Boyd: I’m the co founder and executive director of the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative. 

(00:02:56) Damiano Marchetti: You have multiple roles, right? You have a lot going on. 

(00:02:59) Graham Boyd: (00:03:00) So my other roles are, I’m also the director of New Approach, which is a group that works on state policy around psychedelics and previously around cannabis.

(00:03:10) Damiano Marchetti: The person who had suggested I talk to Graham had told me that Graham is the mastermind behind a lot of the most important drug legalizations we’ve seen in recent history. This person actually used the word mastermind. I have it here in caps in my notes, though. I bet Graham wouldn’t really like it.

(00:03:25) Damiano Marchetti: He’s more of a behind the scenes kind of guy. The PAC he runs, New Approach, is behind a lot of drug ballot initiatives including ones aimed at legalizing psychedelics. But 110, that larger Oregon decriminalization measure, that actually wasn’t one of them. Instead, he was watching on the sidelines as they did this big experiment that tested a lot of the ideas he’d built his career on.

(00:03:47) Graham Boyd: This has really been, in a lot of ways, my life’s work to try to move in the direction of compassion and public health. And it’s really heartbreaking that it hasn’t worked. 

(00:03:58) Damiano Marchetti: Did you feel that (00:04:00) anxiety of like, Ugh, everyone’s going to think now that this is always going to be how it goes and we’ll never be able to do this work because people are always going to point to this as an example?

(00:04:10) Graham Boyd: Well, I mean, what you’re saying is in fact exactly the fear that I and many people have is that this first attempt to try something different, to stop arresting and to provide social services. It was partially rolled back in Oregon, and now it’s under attack in pretty much every other place that it’s being considered.

(00:04:32) Damiano Marchetti: He says California right now is debating whether to reinstate harsher penalties for low level possession of some drugs. 

(00:04:38) Graham Boyd: The trend line was going in what I would call the right direction for many years, sort of slow, incremental change towards moving away from incarceration. And at the moment, the pendulum is swinging in the other direction.

(00:04:52) Graham Boyd: I think the real question is, how far and how fast will it swing?

(00:04:59) Damiano Marchetti: (00:05:00) Graham is worried that this backlash could be coming for psychedelics too. And there’s good reason for that because this has all happened before. In the 1950s and 60s, the movement around psychedelics looked really similar to how things look now in a lot of ways. There was this long history of people using the drugs.

(00:05:17) Damiano Marchetti: There was some promising research on their therapeutic benefits. 

(00:05:21) Archival Clip: For the past seven years, we’ve been treating persons who suffer from alcohol abuse here at the Topeka VA Hospital with the drug LSD 25. I certainly don’t feel like now that I would want to drink it. Seems trivial. 

(00:05:34) Damiano Marchetti: But then, as Graham sees it, things grew too big, too fast.

(00:05:38) Damiano Marchetti: People were using psychedelics hedonistically, openly. 

(00:05:42) Archival Clip: Hippies are very interesting to the young. Their diversions might seem to be harmless enough, were it not for one thing. In a very aggressive and evangelical way, they praise the effect on the mind of hallucinatory drugs. The drug is what holds their subculture together, and the drug is extremely (00:06:00) dangerous.

(00:06:01) Damiano Marchetti: And it was easy to find examples of things going wrong. 

(00:06:04) Archival Clip: Right now we have over a dozen people hospitalized. Bizarre fatal accidents and suicides have also occurred in LSD’s users. People are seriously disturbed, some even dead. 

(00:06:16) Damiano Marchetti: There was a public backlash, and suddenly psychedelics were made illegal. 

(00:06:22) Graham Boyd: So we’re still at risk of that now, all of those forces still exist in our society and our politics and religion in a lot of different quarters.

(00:06:31) Graham Boyd: And so change that is gradual enough for society to digest it is actually quite important. 

(00:06:37) Damiano Marchetti: The fear of starting at square one again has turned Graham into a very specific kind of drug policy advocate. Graham moves extremely cautiously. He loves rules and regulations as long as it leads to what he sees as good public health.

(00:06:53) Damiano Marchetti: Somehow, so far, he’s figured out a way to reform psychedelics without awakening the beast of anti drug (00:07:00) sentiment. Not just in Oregon, but also in Colorado, and this November in Massachusetts. Graham developed his playbook a decade earlier, when he was working in a completely different world of drug reform.

(00:07:11) Damiano Marchetti: Recreational cannabis. I’d always had this idea that all the state by state weed legalizations we’ve seen in the last decade were like this slow groundswell of grassroots change. One state getting flipped, and then giving the others the confidence to do the same. That, I learned, was completely wrong. A number of groups had been working to pass medical marijuana legislation since the 90s, but then things escalated.

(00:07:36) Damiano Marchetti: They wanted to provide larger access, legalize it entirely. And that would become this incredibly orchestrated, well funded, step by step plan, in which Graham was a central player. What was your first cannabis ballot initiative campaign? 

(00:07:50) Graham Boyd: So, we’ll go, we’ll go way, way back. So, Peter Lewis was the, uh, CEO of Progressive Auto Insurance.

(00:07:58) Graham Boyd: He was a billionaire. (00:08:00) One of his legs had been amputated, and he had continuing, like, phantom limb pain, and doctors had asked him to use opiates to control the pain. He found it very debilitating, and he found his way to cannabis instead, and that really worked well for him. He then got arrested for cannabis possession.

(00:08:20) Damiano Marchetti: And this billionaire ended up spending a night in jail. 

(00:08:23) Graham Boyd: And he realized that if he weren’t a billionaire, he would have spent. Many days, weeks, or months in jail, and he really dedicated himself to then trying to change the cannabis laws, and he funded different campaigns at a state level that had failed, and he was frustrated by that, and so he wanted to try something different, and he asked me to focus full time on legalizing cannabis.

(00:08:49) Damiano Marchetti: In the early 2000s, there was no winning playbook for how to run a campaign like this. At the time, the messaging was like, hey look, marijuana isn’t as bad as you think it is. In (00:09:00) fact, like, there are things that are already legal, like alcohol, that are way worse. They showed people statistics on overdose rates.

(00:09:07) Damiano Marchetti: That, it turns out, is not a winning strategy. Graham remembers one focus group participant in particular saying something to the effect of, I have an uncle who just sits on the couch all day. eating Doritos and watching TV and smoking pot. I don’t care what your research says. My uncle is useless and lazy.

(00:09:25) Damiano Marchetti: You’re not gonna get that person to think marijuana is actually great. Graham would need a new playbook. 

(00:09:32) Graham Boyd: So we did two years of research. Tons of polling, mocked up TV ads, all of these different things. 

(00:09:40) Damiano Marchetti: And what they found was that about a third of people hated weed, about a third of people loved it.

(00:09:45) Damiano Marchetti: But then, there was this other surprising group. 

(00:09:48) Graham Boyd: There’s a middle third that actually doesn’t like cannabis. That’s not their motivation. They don’t like it. Um, they’re not personally interested and they know someone who’s been harmed by it in their mind, right? (00:10:00) But they’re open to the idea that having the police run around and arrest as many people as possible is dumb.

(00:10:09) Damiano Marchetti: Reaching that group of voters did not leave them with a lot of room for error in their messaging. They had to light a fire under the feelings of frustration people had with the system, but at the same time, they couldn’t let a single stray spark ignite the disgust and fear that some had for cannabis.

(00:10:27) Damiano Marchetti: And what they came up with is, well, I gotta say, it’s pretty good. 

(00:10:31) Archival Clip: I don’t like it personally, but it’s time for a conversation about legalizing marijuana.

(00:10:35) Damiano Marchetti: This is one of the first ads that ran in Washington. It’s a white mom in a coffee shop. She doesn’t like marijuana, she says, but does what we’re doing now make sense?

(00:10:44) Damiano Marchetti: What if we decriminalized it, put a bunch of safeguards in place and tax it heavily? 

(00:10:49) Archival Clip: And we would control the money, not the gangs. Let’s talk about a new approach, legalizing and regulating marijuana. 

(00:10:56) Damiano Marchetti: Then there was the mom on the porch. 

(00:10:59) Archival Clip: We need a new approach (00:11:00) to marijuana. Young people have easy access since, of course, drug dealers don’t check IDs. Initiative 502. 

(00:11:06) Damiano Marchetti: Other ads followed suit. There was a mom unloading her kids out of an SUV. 

(00:11:10) Archival Clip: Did you have a good day? I love being a mom. I’m already obsessed with the safety. 

(00:11:16) Damiano Marchetti: You get the idea. There was also ads with cops, but these moms with their straightforward, pragmatic argument that we need a new approach to weed.

(00:11:24) Damiano Marchetti: They were convincing. 

(00:11:25) Graham Boyd: That has been a consistently winning argument. 

(00:11:28) Archival Clip: Major lines today. For the first time, you can buy marijuana legally in parts of Colorado, purely for recreational use.

(00:11:35) Damiano Marchetti: First, they won in Colorado in 2012. 

(00:11:37) Archival Clip: And we now turn to Washington state, which on Tuesday will become the second state to allow the legal sale of recreational marijuana.

(00:11:45) Damiano Marchetti: One recreational cannabis ballot measure after another passed, and some new medical ones too, in places like Mississippi, backed by more unexpected supporters. 

(00:11:55) Archival Clip: (00:12:00) and we’re so humbled i always wanna give glory to the lord he has provided and blessed the whole time 

(00:12:08) Damiano Marchetti: Graham worked about a dozen recreational cannabis campaigns that used that message. And after about a decade working on cannabis reform, almost half the states in the U. S. had passed some kind of recreational cannabis measure, even more if you include medical marijuana. He had started a domino effect, and the movement began to go on its own.

(00:12:27) Damiano Marchetti: Graham left to do other things. At that time, Graham didn’t think he could do for psychedelics what he’d done for cannabis. But soon, he’d change his mind. That’s after the break.

(00:12:53) Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Welcome back to Altered States. I’m Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Before the break, we heard how this lawyer, Graham Boyd, helped (00:13:00) strategize political campaigns to legalize recreational cannabis in more than a dozen states. But what could he do for psychedelics? Here’s Damiano Marchetti with the rest of the story.

(00:13:11) Damiano Marchetti: Through all his experience in drug reform, Graham has landed on this sort of veteran playbook for getting these initiatives passed by voters. The more I talked to him, the more I came to understand that strategy. Graham calls it gradualism. Slow, incremental drug reform. I would say that Graham goes about legalizing drugs like a parent goes about unloading a dishwasher while trying not to wake up a sleeping baby in the room over.

(00:13:35) Damiano Marchetti: He likes things quiet, safe, and controlled. It was for that reason that when Graham first learned that some people in Oregon were trying to do psychedelic drug reform, he was skeptical. 

(00:13:46) Graham Boyd: I actually thought it was a terrible idea. I also heard there were some people in California who were doing, you know, hoping to do a ballot initiative that you could buy magic mushrooms at the convenience store on the corner.

(00:13:59) Graham Boyd: I mean, it’d be (00:14:00) wide open for that, and I thought, and still think, not a good idea for that. I thought it was dangerous, it would um, create a backlash. 

(00:14:09) Damiano Marchetti: He assumed that the Oregon folks wanted the same kind of access as they had been proposing in California. Graham thinks it’s too easy for things to go wrong if you let companies go wild promoting psychedelics to people who might not have much experience with them.

(00:14:22) Damiano Marchetti: But it turned out that Graham was completely wrong about what the people behind the Oregon psilocybin measure actually wanted. 

(00:14:29) Graham Boyd: I was pleasantly surprised to learn that they were a husband and wife, um, Tom and Cherie Eckert, who were both psychotherapists. You know, they had worked their adult lives as, as healers, and really were pragmatic.

(00:14:46) Graham Boyd: They weren’t trying to make some big grand statement about psychedelics, but they wanted to open up a route through which therapists could help people and have another tool. 

(00:14:56) Damiano Marchetti: Graham was excited about the therapeutic use of psychedelics. (00:15:00) He talked to the Eckerts and they ended up working together. The Eckerts had hired a lawyer, had a draft of the measure, but they quickly got a crash course in Graham’s gradual don’t wake the baby approach to ballot measures.

(00:15:11) Damiano Marchetti: First and foremost, Graham wanted to take things slow. That, he thought, was the biggest failure of the Oregon Decriminalization Measure 110. The very same day that measure passed, everyone in Oregon woke up and most drugs were legal. You could walk out of your house and use fentanyl openly. Which he thought hadn’t given organizers enough time to put the money and social services in place.

(00:15:34) Damiano Marchetti: When Graham talked to the Eckert’s, the therapist couple, he insisted on a two year planning period to make rules and regulations before psilocybin was made available to the public. Together they wrote the measure, but now they actually needed to get it on the ballot. 

(00:15:51) Graham Boyd: It is really Essentially never the case that someone has a good idea or even a great idea and basically says, okay, I’m doing a ballot (00:16:00) initiative and then it just happens.

(00:16:01) Graham Boyd: Uh, you have to collect signatures. Tens of thousands of signatures, and you have to pay people to do that because it happens in a very compressed time period. So the price tag for actually doing a ballot initiative is usually in the millions of dollars. 

(00:16:16) Damiano Marchetti: David Bronner of Dr. Bronner Soaps ended up being the major funder.

(00:16:20) Damiano Marchetti: Graham had actually worked with him on recreational cannabis measures too. But even with all that money, they still had to convince people that a state legalizing a psychedelic was even a good idea. With cannabis, they’d only consider trying to pass a ballot initiative if they already had over 50 percent support.

(00:16:37) Graham Boyd: The dynamic in Oregon around psychedelics, totally different. We started at 42 percent favorable. 

(00:16:44) Damiano Marchetti: Oh, wow. Okay. 

(00:16:45) Graham Boyd: So, we had to convince people to change their minds. But their opinions weren’t strongly held. The 58 percent who were not in favor of the ballot initiative initially when they first heard about it were mostly (00:17:00) like, I guess I’m against it, but I don’t really know much about it.

(00:17:03) Graham Boyd: In fact, I don’t even know what psilocybin is. I’m against it, but I don’t know what it is. It was a starting position for a lot of people. 

(00:17:09) Damiano Marchetti: So, they had work to do. Now remember, before doing anything else, they had to collect enough signatures to even get this on the ballot. So just imagine this for a second.

(00:17:22) Damiano Marchetti: You have to stand outside of a Trader Joe’s, in a neon vest, and get people to stop and sign something, none of which they want to do. You already look hella suspicious, but not only that, you have to stop them to quickly say, hey hey, forget everything you know about psychedelics, and oh, let’s also legalize it, too.

(00:17:40) Damiano Marchetti: Great idea, right? That seemed very hard to me. But Graham said, no, no, no, no. You have it all wrong. 

(00:17:48) Graham Boyd: You don’t even start the conversation about psychedelics. The starting point is, do you believe we have a mental health crisis? A hundred percent of people say yes to that. Do you think what we’re doing (00:18:00) right now is working?

(00:18:01) Graham Boyd: No one thinks it’s working. Have you heard about the promising research that psychedelics could help with this? And people are like, Hmm, maybe I haven’t heard about it, but that’s interesting, right? Tell me more about that. If we can give access to these substances with safeguards around them, would you favor that?

(00:18:19) Graham Boyd: And people, the majority of people do favor that. 

(00:18:23) Damiano Marchetti: Focusing on mental health was the framing for the whole campaign. And then 

(00:18:27) Archival Clip: I was a Navy SEAL, 18 years. 

(00:18:30) Damiano Marchetti: The ads. 

(00:18:31) Archival Clip: I couldn’t live life outside. Dark thoughts. I tried talk therapy. Doctors threw pills at me. Nothing worked. Psilocybin therapy. I don’t have the words.

(00:18:41) Archival Clip: It breaks patterns of negative thoughts. 

(00:18:43) Damiano Marchetti: He worked this angle, not just in Oregon, where they won in 2020, but then also in Colorado and it’s on the ballot this fall in Massachusetts. Now Graham and his team, they’re beginning to look ahead. They want to run an ambitious nationwide state by state psychedelics campaign cast in the mold of the (00:19:00) cannabis campaign Graham ran years earlier.

(00:19:03) Damiano Marchetti: But that’s going to cost upwards of a hundred million dollars. They’re going to need more than Dr. Bronner’s soap money to get psychedelics across the line. I wondered, though. The work Graham and others did on recreational cannabis made way for the birth of a multi billion dollar cannabis industry. Now, wealthy cannabis companies spend millions lobbying the government to protect and create cannabis laws.

(00:19:25) Damiano Marchetti: Would the same happen with psychedelics? Would psychedelics companies jump in and foot the bill for these ballot measures? 

(00:19:32) Graham Boyd: The intersection with capitalism is really interesting here. So we’re going back and forth with cannabis and psychedelics. Cannabis is essentially a consumer product. Consumers who like cannabis are going to buy it regularly for years on end.

(00:19:44) Graham Boyd: And so that’s how the money’s to be made. And there’s a lot of money being made in it. 

(00:19:49) Damiano Marchetti: Graham thinks psychedelics are different. Just think about how they’re used. You can come home, drink a beer, smoke some weed every night. Plenty of people do. But that’s not really how the majority of people use (00:20:00) psychedelics.

(00:20:00) Damiano Marchetti: And in the therapeutic version, the idea is you go for one session or a handful of sessions. That means a few doses at most. That’s a lot harder to make money on. 

(00:20:09) Graham Boyd: With psychedelics, the money is not in the psychedelics. It’s in the therapy. And so when you think about Big Pharma or Big Alcohol or Big Tobacco, these are all instances of a company that is selling a product over and over and over for you to take again and again and again, but you’ve never heard of Big Therapy.

(00:20:29) Graham Boyd: Therapy mostly exists in the hands of solo practitioners or small groups, and most of the money is spent on therapy. The money that’s actually paid to the therapist. So I don’t think that the, you know, next ballot initiatives are going to be funded by venture capital. 

(00:20:46) Damiano Marchetti: So Graham is going to have to keep looking for big soap money.

(00:20:50) Damiano Marchetti: And actually he’s happy about that. 

(00:20:52) Graham Boyd: The thing about cannabis that I really regret is that with the profit motivation of a consumer product, (00:21:00) you know, the classic business model for, for Alcohol and it’s looking this way for cannabis too, is that the vast majority of your profits come from the consumption of a very small number of people who misuse the product.

(00:21:13) Graham Boyd: Alcoholics are the best customers for an alcohol company. Somebody who drinks one beer a week is almost irrelevant. The person who really matters as your consumer is the one who drinks 12 beers a week or 20 beers a week. And so, with cannabis, The high THC products, the marketing towards people who are already using a lot of cannabis makes economic sense, but it’s terrible public health.

(00:21:38) Graham Boyd: So I’m happy that in psychedelics, that same kind of incentive structure doesn’t seem to exist. There’s not really a business to be made of selling people psychedelics and more psychedelics, you know, take more and more every single day. That’s just not the business model because that’s not how that drug actually appeals to people.

(00:21:58) Graham Boyd: Yeah. 

(00:21:59) Damiano Marchetti: I think (00:22:00) part of Graham’s excitement here explains something else to me too. His gradual, don’t wake the baby approach to drug reform, I wonder if it’s also a kind of correction. As the architect of a lot of the recreational cannabis measures, it’s a hedge against what he sees as having gone wrong there, unleashing this drug without a lot of scaffolding, rules and regulations, and then letting capitalism run amok.

(00:22:24) Damiano Marchetti: Whatever the lessons he took from cannabis, with psychedelics, he’s just getting started. 

(00:22:29) Graham Boyd: I feel completely optimistic about the ability to make progress around psychedelics in the context that exists right now. I mean, I really wish that we had the resources to do 20 ballot initiatives next year, because the public is with us right now.

(00:22:48) Graham Boyd: They really are. We’re in this Overton window that has opened to the place that we really do have public support for access with safeguards to psychedelics. (00:23:00) My fear is that that could shift. My fear is that the sort of moment of acceptance and hope and optimism that exists in the American public for psychedelics right now could shift for reasons that we don’t know right now, and that we might look back and regret that we didn’t move more quickly towards having more states sooner.

(00:23:20) Damiano Marchetti: Graham wishes he could put psychedelic initiatives on the ballot in 20 states next year. He wants to reach a critical mass, that point where there’s just no turning back, like what happened with cannabis. This year, the Department of Justice proposed reclassifying cannabis as a less dangerous Schedule 3 drug, after Dozens of states passed recreational and medical cannabis measures.

(00:23:40) Damiano Marchetti: Graham wants to create that same pressure around psychedelics. 

(00:23:44) Graham Boyd: You know, if there were a hundred, a hundred and fifty million dollars available right now, I think that we could, in the next three to four years, create nationwide access to psychedelics. 

(00:23:54) Damiano Marchetti: Nationwide. 

(00:23:55) Graham Boyd: Yeah, I think that we would probably need to do 15 or (00:24:00) maybe 18 states in short order.

(00:24:02) Graham Boyd: And that would be, in terms of population, the majority of the United States. And I think that would then create the situation at a federal level that the change would happen there too.

(00:24:17) Arielle Duhaime-Ross: This episode was reported and produced by Damiano Marchetti. Altered States is a production of the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and PRX. Adizah Eghan is our senior editor. Jennie Cataldo is our senior producer. Our associate producer is Cassidy Rosenblum. Our audio engineers are Tommy Bazarian and Terence Bernardo.

(00:24:39) Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Fact checking by Graham Heysha. Rotating BCSP script readers are Michael Pollan, Michael Silver, and Bob Jesse. Our executive producers are Jocelyn Gonzales and Malia Wollan. And our project manager is Edwin Ochoa. I’m your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross. Be sure to subscribe, rate, and review Altered States wherever you get your podcasts.(00:25:00) 

(00:25:00) Arielle Duhaime-Ross: Most well known psychedelics remain illegal around the world, including the United States, where it is a criminal offense to manufacture, possess, dispense, or supply most psychedelics with few exceptions. Altered States does not recommend or encourage the use of psychedelics or offer instructions in their use.

(00:25:19) Arielle Duhaime-Ross: We’ll be back next week.