Plants of Power, a six-part video series of mind-altering drugs in nature and culture.
Written and presented by Nick Rankin.
Plants of Power, Program 5, The Power to Choose.
One of the things that you must remember is that plants are powerful because they produce powerful chemicals.
Psychopharmacologist Dr. Ron Siegel.
All of our major drugs are chemical substances known as secondary substances or alkaloids.
Plants have no known use for alkaloids.
They do not need them for their metabolism or for their growth.
They produce them as a byproduct of plant synthesis.
And they produce them for one reason only.
Because they are chemical defensive agents.
Intended to keep animals away.
Plants taste bitter.
They cause numbing sensations.
If you eat too much of it, you'll throw it up.
If you manage to keep it down long enough, you'll cause physiological disturbances, liver damage.
And if you manage to keep it down long enough for it to be absorbed, you might get intoxicated.
You might get dizzy.
You might not survive.
So it makes real good sense for the plant to produce this as a wonderful chemical warfare agent.
And it makes really good sense for animals to evolve mechanisms to taste the bitterness, to detoxify the alkaloids, to develop good livers and good enzymes, and to develop good brains.
What we have done, being the clever primates that we think we are, we have picked apart these plants.
We've concentrated down the chemical or the drug that's in them, devised mechanisms for injecting it directly into our bloodstream or smoking it into our lungs.
Animals don't smoke in nature.
And then we ask, why do we have drug problems?
We have drug problems because we're screwing around with Mother Nature.
We're taking relatively benign medicines, relatively safe medicinal plants, and we're turning them into poisons.
And I submit to you that all of the drug problems that we have as a species on our planet today are due to dosages and patterns of use gone haywire.
Well, I'll tell you what, I used for 30 years heroin and cocaine, I was on methadone for years, very, very sick.
I was the kind of mother that shot dope with my older son, and we used to deal drugs together.
And I brought my younger son, Solo, into the world of drugs, and it was a nightmare.
Dr. Randolph Nessie, you're Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan, and co-author with George Williams of Evolution and Healing, The New Science of Darwinian Medicine.
Now, human beings have always taken psychoactive plants that have changed their consciousness.
That is true, isn't it?
And not only humans, chimpanzees quite clearly seem to use drugs from plants, perhaps both to heal themselves and for pleasure.
For pleasure. How much does our feelings come to this?
Most of the drugs of abuse, obviously, make people feel better. That's the simple, simple explanation.
Why do you take drugs? Because it makes me feel good.
The emotions are useful, and there's got to be brain mechanisms in there that make those emotions work.
There's got to be dopamine and serotonin and nerves and all the rest.
Once you have a mechanism that regulates behavior based on chemicals,
then if an individual has access to outside chemicals instead of the natural ways of stimulating them,
those chemicals are going to change those emotions, either for better or for worse.
It looks quite clear that most drugs that cause pleasure or cause behaviors to be repeated
cause the release of dopamine in certain areas of the middle of the brain,
which tend to both cause pleasure and to make that behavior repeated.
Amphetamine does that, cocaine does that, and marijuana does as well.
And thus, organisms, when they get a chance, take chemicals.
But there's something very different happening now than over the past several thousand years of people taking chemicals.
What's happening now is that we have new chemicals, we have them more pure, we have them more available,
and especially we have different routes of administration than we ever had before.
People have always used opium. People have used alcohol.
In fact, some of my anthropologist friends suggested the very origins of civilization
were in making grain so they could ferment it, so they could have a reliable source of alcohol.
But they never got distilled alcohol.
They were never able to buy as much as they wanted so they could drink every single day to intoxication.
The modern environment challenges individuals with chemicals of a purity and degree of availability
that's completely novel in our evolutionary history.
So, how is our brave new world coping with the chemical crisis?
Heavy-handedly and wrong-headedly say some.
American drug policy is heavily dominated by a criminal justice approach
that relies very heavily on a moralistic rhetoric on a demonization of anybody involved with illicit drugs.
Ethan Nadelman, head of the Lindesmith Center, the Urban Society Institute's drug policy think tank in New York City.
If I'm asked what do I think is really driving American drug policy,
it probably boils down to a combination of fear, prejudice, ignorance, and profit.
I mean, ignorance in the sense that people are dreadfully unaware of what drugs are about.
If one were to give the ordinary congressman in the U.S. Congress a multiple-choice test on simple questions about drugs,
they would probably do worse on it than a chimpanzee guessing randomly.
Now, in terms of prejudice, I mean, look at the origins of American drug laws.
I mean, the first anti-opium laws in this country were the 1870s and 1880s in California and Nevada,
and they were directed at Chinese immigrants who was feared would take their opium
and seduce white women and turn them into addicts.
The first anti-cocaine laws were directed at the blacks in the first decade of this century,
who once again was feared would take cocaine and be impervious to the bullets of sheriff's rifles,
as well as seduce white women.
The first anti-marijuana laws were directed at Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans in the Midwest in the 1920s and 30s.
Once again, these people would smoke marijuana and have a good time, and it all seemed awfully strange,
so we criminalized that as well.
So there's an enormous amount of prejudice underlying these laws.
Now, keep in mind also that at least in the United States, when somebody says junkie or dealer or something nasty,
the image that comes to mind in most people's eyes is a person with dark skin.
So to some extent, in American society, it's no longer possible to speak nastily in public
about women or minorities or blacks or Latinos or even homosexuals.
But if you're involved with drugs, it's carte blanche.
Anything can be said whatsoever.
And this becomes a way, I think, of demonizing inner-city black and Latino people in this country
by mixing them, assuming that they're involved with drugs.
Now, I talked about fear.
Well, fear because we're all afraid of dark-skinned people getting crazy on drugs
and forgetting their place in society, but fear also in a very understandable sense.
I mean, there also is this fear that every parent has,
that every parent wants to put their child in a bubble and to protect them.
And, you know, we now have seatbelt laws and helmet laws,
and we have all sorts of safety things that, you know, those of us who are in our 30s and 40s and 50s
did not grow up with.
We want to protect our kids.
And the great fear is that somehow drugs or even this dot log that we're having right here
will somehow pierce that bubble and make our kids more vulnerable to drugs.
So I think that's an area where tremendous empathy and compassion is required.
Yet at the same time, the United States now has a war on drugs
that's costing tens of billions of dollars a year.
We have increased from 50,000 in 1980 to 400,000 the number of people locked up in this country
for violating a drug law, an eight-fold increase in the last 16 years.
I mean, unparalleled.
Why are we doing all this?
Well, oftentimes it's justified as to protect the kids.
Why do we have to drug test everyone in the workplace?
It's to protect the kids.
Why can't we let a sick person smoke a marijuana if it keeps their nausea down?
Well, it's to protect the kids.
Why can't we allow a junkie to have a clean needle to reduce the spread of HIV and AIDS?
Well, we can't because it's to protect the kids.
I mean, to some extent, we've mounted this massive drug war.
It all is sort of being justified as one great big child protection act.
Now, the bottom line is we do need to protect our kids,
but it's not by a criminal justice war-like policy heavy on moralizing and rhetoric
and very low on truth and respect and human decency.
Right.
My name is Jenny Mez.
So I run a project called Drug Busters,
which is all about teaching children how to make informed choices about drugs,
helping them to be aware of the different types of drugs there are in their community.
How old are these children?
They're 11 years old.
Into 11 years old, so the children we target mostly,
because they're children that are going to be leaving school for next year and going on to secondary school,
where we feel that that's where drugs are normally introduced and they become more vulnerable.
You've got front of us here, there's a suitcase which you take around.
It's a black briefcase and you open it up and there's a display inside of drugs.
Now, they aren't real, they're models, but a very realistic display.
Can you take me through and how do you tell the children about these drugs and what they really are?
The idea of this drug suitcase is two things.
One, to explain and break down to them the different types of drugs there are,
but also another thing which is important to me is for them to discuss and identify whether these drugs are in the community
or whether they've actually seen any of these drugs on the market.
I think if you're the cannabis, I think the cannabis is one of the most popular drugs there is on the market.
There's a lot of debate about it.
Some people say it should be legalised, some people say it shouldn't.
That drug is one of the drugs that has a real confusing issue about it in the community,
but it's one of the most popular drugs used.
Apparently it has an effect on people in the fact that it causes brain damage and it keeps them dizzy and it makes you lazy,
and that's why I think the people think it's dangerous, but other people say it's not dangerous, so it's a difficult one.
Now, in the case, there's amphetamine powder, coffee and nicotine.
You've got a cigarette butt and do some coffee now.
Well, it's true, in this programme, we've been talking about coffee and tea, they are plant drugs.
I mean, they are stimulants and alcohol is one too, and you've got it done at the bottom here.
The point is there's a whole range of them.
Some of them are legal, some of them are prescribed by doctors.
You've got steroids there, which bodybuilders take.
You've got benzodiazepines, which is temazepam and sleeping tablets.
You've got cocaine and crack.
Yes, cocaine and crack is a drug that needs to be taught to children because it is so highly addictive.
Once you've taken it, you need to have more and more, in particular the crack drug.
You know, it's very highly addictive, and that's what causes burglary.
It can cause you to, you know, lose your job.
It can, you know, lose your family.
It has a terrible effect on you.
So, yes, I do teach them about that drug.
Oh, I don't know why it gets you so high.
Putting a buzz in your heart.
You do a marathon, you want to go on.
Kicking the steel apart, they call it wacky stuff.
When people are chewing coca and they're ingesting small amounts of cocaine
and it's absorbed very slowly through the mucous membranes in the mouth and the throat and the stomach,
they get some mood elevation, but they don't get euphoric.
But when you take this alkaloid, this chemical, from the plant and you inject it directly into your bloodstream
or you smoke it, and in six seconds, it goes from the lungs to the brain.
It takes 14 seconds, by the way, when you inject a drug to go from the site of injection to the brain.
That feels real good.
But when you smoke a drug, it only takes six seconds.
And that's so fast that we have had male subjects in the laboratory smoking cocaine and having orgasms.
And it's testimony to how nice this alkaloid feels in the brain.
The brain is wired to do this.
And this is why we have such an attraction to this particular plant drug.
I think one should separate drugs that are used therapeutically from drugs that tend to be abused.
But one should think in both cases about how they influence the normal adaptation of normal folks.
Most drugs that are abused stimulate brain systems regulating positive emotions.
They don't keep doing that for very long.
Now, the history of an individual's drug use very often is that desire for the drug starts growing and growing,
even as the pleasure produced by the drug begins to fade.
Kent Berridge, who's a psychologist and a colleague of mine at Michigan,
he and I have just finished a paper about this exact issue.
And he has wonderful evidence, even from rats,
that even as the behavior to go get the drug increases and increases,
the pleasure shuts off in the brain, thus leaving people trapped,
spending their lives craving after and spending all their money and time trying to get drugs
that no longer bring them pleasure.
And this is the drug prisoner's dilemma.
More effort for less pleasure.
An expensive spirit in a waste of shame, as Shakespeare described lust in action.
Gloria Scott of Venice Beach, California, whom we heard earlier,
knows about the hard work of beating addiction.
Her method is cool and tough.
She doesn't like psychical and says if you've got an inner child,
you should take it out and shoot it,
and then try to grow up and learn the painful home truths with your peers.
The approach is based on the 12-step program,
which means alcoholics anonymous, narcotics anonymous, and cocaine anonymous.
That's what our program is based on.
And I've got, I used it for 30 years and I've got almost 18 years clean.
And without the AA program or the 12-step program, I wouldn't be clean today.
No, no way.
And part of that is because of the fellowship.
You know, a lot of the programs, you go in there and you stay clean for nine months,
you learn about the disease, and you learn what to do,
and then you clean and you go outside and you're on the street all by yourself.
Now what do I do?
You know, and you get all the anxiety.
And when the anxiety comes up, you go back to your old neighborhood.
But this is based on fellowship.
So by the time you're in a program for six months, three months, nine months,
you know a lot of people on the program.
Because AA means one alcoholic and one alcoholic helping another one.
So the only way you stay clean, the only way I can stay clean is by helping another addict.
Well, it keeps me busy, for one thing.
You know, alcoholics and addicts are very self-centered people.
You know, the world revolves around us.
We are the center of the universe.
And, you know, that's one of the main things of the disease.
We're always looking in.
We never look out.
In fact, we don't give a shit about anybody but ourselves.
Getting the drug, the da-da-da-da-da-da.
Alcoholics and Anonymous and Cocaine and Anonymous and Alcoholics and Anonymous teach us
to turn our eyes out.
That there's other people here and we need to work with those other people.
We stay clean to help an addict or alcoholic.
Well, it works.
We're so self-centered that when I'm working with somebody,
like if I'm taking them to an AA meeting or I'm picking them up at jail and helping them
or I'm working the steps with them, whatever I'm doing, I'm not thinking about myself.
When I take them home and it's back to glory again,
oh, poor Gloria, she's too old, she's too fast, I want to use, da-da-da-da-da-da.
That's the way we are.
We're horrible.
It's typical American, you know,
because America, I think, is very self-centered and very selfish.
We're a very selfish nation, you know, and we're victims.
You know, it's Vietnam's fault.
It's, you know, Renata's fault.
It's everybody's fault but ours.
We never take responsibility.
Neither do addicts.
We blame everybody.
Our mothers, the courts, the police.
It's not our fault, you know, that kind of thing.
And most addicts don't work.
Alcoholics don't work.
They have all this time on their hands.
They do nothing.
That gets you in trouble.
Jenny Mayers, now you mentioned crack being addicted, alcohol being addicted.
You've got heroin up there, you know, and chasing the dragon, smoking heroin,
heated on tinfoil or injecting it or whatever.
Addiction.
How do the children react to this idea that it can start off as fun but then you can't stop?
Do they grasp this concept?
We hope they do.
I mean, within our plays, we have a play called Brain Drain, and we don't actually strath in the play.
We use computer games because that's another addiction.
We ask children to identify what addiction is.
Television watching is addiction.
You know, computers.
Playing football, some of them say is addiction.
Sweets.
Yeah, eating sweets.
There's lots of things that are addictive.
And the way we approach them, our drug education program, to try and get them to learn what addiction is.
How, what makes them get hooked, what makes them keep going, what controls their body,
what controls their pattern of life.
And in this game, Brain Drain, what actually happens in play?
It goes way over the top.
It's not real.
It's about three people.
One person's addicted to computer games, and her friend's wanting her to go out.
And she doesn't want to go out because she loves these computer games.
And then there's a brain monster that comes and asks her, can he have some of her brains?
The computer keeps breaking down, and she has to keep buying these games from the brain monster,
who wants to take some of her brain cells in exchange for a game.
And it goes on and on, and eventually he eats all the brain cells, you know.
It's a ludicrous play, but the kids love it.
And they can identify with the two things.
I want more games, and in exchange for more games, you have to give me brain cells.
And brain cells are what destroys your brain, because once they've taken the brain cells,
you can't think anymore.
It was a true fantasy, but they do understand what addiction is through that approach.
I'm Timothy Leary, and I'm 75 years old.
I did act as a PR person for the brain, and the possibility of changing the brain.
Who in greats doesn't understand the brain at all.
We needed that work for 50 million years to produce a brain low-recepticite,
which has a government wrong, said they're illegal.
We can change that, and they think services to the brain.
The various brains that we haven't even solved yet, we can have today.
People use drugs as medications to change the way in which they feel.
And if we still have to think about drugs as medicines, as treatments for the human condition,
then we should begin to start thinking about making them safe.
Dr. Timothy Leary, the late LSD guru, who believed we should be activating more chemical receptor sites in the brain,
is having the last laugh.
And millions of people begin to turn on, or rather, turn off the feelings that they don't like.
This chemical control of the mind by blocking negative emotions is something that disturbs Randolph Nessie.
Well, as a psychiatrist, I've lived through the period from when we thought it was probably a mistake
to treat emotional disorders with drugs, to a period now where many patients with very serious life problems
in the midst of a terrible marriage or problems with children or the like come in and say,
I'm feeling bad. Please give me a drug to relieve it.
A huge sea change, and really medical ideology about how to deal with the emotions,
it's taken place just in a period of 20 or 30 years.
And I think we're just getting going.
My prediction is that the drug age, in terms of really novel pharmacologic,
psychopharmacologic age, is just getting going.
There are over 15 different serotonin subtype receptors, for instance,
and different drugs are being developed right now to stimulate each of those, to block each of those.
And we're looking to see what effects those drugs will have on the emotions.
And we're just starting to look at other kinds of neurotransmitters and receptors,
and all of the drugs that will influence them.
There's every reason to believe that over just the next 20 years,
we are going to invent dozens or hundreds of new medications that will influence people's emotions.
Drugs that block negative emotions.
Negative emotions like anxiety and sadness and jealousy and boredom and all kinds of things.
My belief is that we're very ill-prepared to make wise decisions about how to use those agents.
When I have to step back and ask,
what is the function of those emotions,
and when is it wise to block them,
and when is it wise not to?
Now, in the case of negative emotions,
how do you make the judgment?
I mean, if you're bereaved, for example,
you're going to feel sad.
Now, it seems to me,
I mean, it may be begging the question,
but it seems natural to grieve, to mourn for the loss of a loved one.
It is natural,
but do we know what use it does?
I mean, what good is it?
One can speculate all over the place,
but there's no agreement among scientists
as to exactly what the benefit is to our genes of grieving the loss of a loved one.
We need to know that, though.
One very small study,
and its astoundings has not been done more carefully,
suggests that drugs like Pro-Sac are really moderately effective
in relieving the discomfort caused by grief.
One could therefore recommend using that drug more widely,
or shouldn't we?
These are the kind of questions that we should be asking ourselves,
and a whole lot of work is needed.
Is there a point that the negative emotions may be useful in an evolutionary term,
a sense of unease or discomfort?
These may be helpful to one.
It seems to me also that sadness could lead to things like empathy and sympathy,
which are very important.
The ability to understand other people's sadness is important in human societies.
But what's happening if we're moving into a drug age now,
where people are not going to face these,
are going to take drugs to make them happy?
This surely is going to change things.
We're going to find out, I think.
It will change things,
and history has shown that when people have access to drugs,
they will take them.
Will it be just terrible?
Will this change human nature in a way
that makes us all behave maladaptively all the time?
Well, when anesthesia first came in for surgery,
many people thought one shouldn't use anesthesia for surgery
because it was unnatural.
Now, the very idea of undergoing surgery without anesthesia is ridiculous.
And I can anticipate a time in the future
when people might look back at our time
and wonder how we possibly could have endured
some of the emotional pains that we now experience
because we don't have drugs to block them.
On the other hand,
I can imagine people looking back at our time
and saying that was the time
when people lived normal, real, full human lives
with positive, negative, intense emotions
instead of having them all blocked like we do nowadays,
speaking some hundred years in the future.
I think this is happening,
and the only way that we're going to be able to offer
really the world advice on this
is to learn a great deal more
about the functions of the emotions
and how different drugs influence
the brain mechanisms that influence emotions.
I see this as very urgent work
because of the growth of new psychoactive drugs.
The future of the human species
is to learn how to use our brain.
A six-part video series
about mind-altering drugs
in nature and culture.
Written and presented by Nick Rankin.
Plants. Power.
Program 6.
Power and Control.
Richard Evans Schultes
arguably is the greatest Amazonian explorer,
certainly of this century,
and perhaps even of all time.
Anthropologist Wade Davis,
whose biography of the Harvard ethnobotanist
Richard Evans Schultes
is called One River.
Schultes was a very enigmatic character.
He was raised in a very poor family in Boston,
became the first of his family
ever to go to university,
and he expected to become a physician.
And while he was an undergraduate at Harvard,
he stumbled upon the first monograph
ever written in English
that described the stunning pharmacological effects
of peyote.
And he became fascinated by that magical plant,
and he studied it for his undergraduate thesis.
And that launched him on a long and varied career
that took him from the mountains of Oaxaca,
where he discovered the so-called magic mushrooms,
the events that probably more than any other
sparked the psychedelic era.
And later carried him, of course,
into the forests of the Northwest Amazon,
where he truly made his mark.
And Schultes' expeditions took him
thousands of miles down unknown rivers,
often through areas totally unexplored,
living amongst uncontacted societies,
all the time he was pursuing
the mysteries of the rainforest.
He would collect over 27,000 botanical specimens,
describe the use of 2,000 medicinal plants,
find over 300 botanical species new to science,
and really, you know,
celebrate the poetics of that land
and its people
in a way that no other botanist ever has.
I believe that all of us
who have ever done anything significant
in ethnobotany
were students of Richard Evans Schultes.
William M. Bowden
author of the classic narcotic plant, considers Richard Evans Schultes as the master.
He has always, through his writings, through his speaking, been the pivotal figure in this entire
endeavor of trying to understand these plants in relationship to civilizations of mankind.
And I think all of us must say we owe a great debt to Richard Evans Schultes, as
the people of South America have given him honors, but his greatest honor, he said,
was when they set aside several million acres of rainforest in his name.
He would take this as the greatest tribute, of course, because this is his great love. He has spent
over 27 years exploring these rainforests of the Americas and has given us so much original
information, so many new ideas, new ways of thinking, changing our ideas.
Among the plants of power that most attracted Schultes were the hallucinogens.
This fascination with the most sacred mind-altering plants began with a college library book.
There he read about the mescaline-rich peyote cactus, Lophophora williamsii.
Schultes has taken a course at Harvard called Plants and Human Affairs, a course that has been
taught at the university longer than any other in the undergraduate curriculum. And in the lab
dedicated to these curious plants that were then known as Fantastica, they had to do a book report.
And it was racing to get the thinnest book possible in the shelf that led Schultes to that monogram.
And I read it through the night. He read stories and accounts of visions of orb-like brilliance,
where colored patterns felt like rain upon the skin of all those who took the magic plant.
And he became enchanted, and since he fell away into trance, and his professor, who was another
conservative Bostonian, said that if you want to study the plant, it was one thing to read about it,
which you would have to do. But mostly he had to live it.
This is a peyote opening song. The next song is the night water song.
In the summer of 1936, Richard Evans Schultes and the anthropologist Weston Labar went to live
with the Kiowa Indians in Oklahoma Territory. They took part in peyote ceremonies at night
and at the sacred visionary plant.
In some sense was a pharmacological shortcut to distant metaphysical realms traditionally reached
by the pain of ordeal, the vision quest, the order of battle. And the Kiowa were the very conduit
through which that cult came onto the plains and then became disseminated at a remarkable rate of
diffusion, reaching by the 1960s, even the Cree in northern Canada. And Schultes was the last
generation of scholars actually to know the elders of the Kiowa who had been raised in a way of life
that had withered and died within a century of its birth. We forget that the Great Plains culture was
not something that had gone on for centuries. It developed with the horse, which only reached the
plains in the 17th century. So Schultes had this remarkable initiation into the wonder of the Ameri-Indian
civilization. And I think at the earliest age possible really as a young academic, he realized
that this world doesn't exist in some absolute sense, but is just really a model of reality and
that the lesson in ethnography is that there are other visions, other ways of being and thinking on
the earth. And it was to pursue those visions and understand them that Schultes dedicated his career.
The life work of Richard Evans Schultes has centered on the relationship of natural plant
materials to the religious and cultural life of native peoples. But William Amboden deplores the
way that modern civilization has profaned the plants of power. The people who use these use them in the
context of the sacred. We abuse, they use, there's an enormous difference. The persons today will snort
a line of cocaine, whereas the cocairo would chew leaves over a long period of time and get a small amount
of cocaine in their system and traverse paths through the Andes. The person who smoked tobacco would
blow smoke upon a sick colleague or would use smoke in a sacred context and not walk about with a
cigarette bobbing in his mouth all day. Among the users of peyote, peyote was used only in sacred
contexts and only on specific occasions after fasting and abstaining from use of salt, abstaining from sex.
It was a very sacred thing and used in a very specific context for a very specific purpose of understanding.
We don't understand a context for the use of any of the things that are powerful and sacred and have
the power to enslave us as well. We have turned them into a monetary thing instead of a sacred thing.
How traditional people use these plants of power without problems is vital knowledge for us today.
Think Anthony Henman, author of Mama Coca and Big Deal, the politics of the illicit drugs business.
The example of traditional coca chewing in the Andes has three great lessons.
One lesson is of a sort of green pharmacological nature that a substance is much more difficult to
abuse when it's in a sort of crude vegetable form. There are certain inbuilt filters that prevent
you know overdoses and lots of the types of medical problems that are associated with refined substances.
The second aspect is that a society like that has a proper ritualized context for the use of these
substances. And I don't think that our society lacks that. I mean we can see that similar types of rituals
exist in our society around tea drinking or beer drinking or in these days even you know ecstasy use.
You know I mean it's it's not yet become a totally formalized ritual but nevertheless there are
certain types of informal cultural controls which seem to merge in any society and you know if we
understood these at a more theoretical level I think we could design policies which are more
adapted to to the realities of these substances. And the third aspect I think is is properly let's say
ethical. The way to prevent substances becoming negative and damaging and evil and poisonous and
so on is actually to say that they're good for something and you know they exist in the universe.
There was a Jesuit who was sent out to Peru in the 16th century largely to justify the Jesuits
participation in cocoa plantations at that time. But he uses a basic theological argument which was
if God created this plant you know in this part of the world he must have done it with a reason because
we know that God did nothing for no reason and for no purpose. So I would say that what we need to
understand is that these substances do exist they're not going to disappear that the idea of forcing them
to disappear of eliminating from the face of the globe which is what the United Nations and the United States
are trying to put on us are unrealizable goals and you know it would be better to to say well these
substances are useful for something you know I mean coca is useful as a stimulant the opiates are
useful for killing pain cannabis has a wide range of uses and so on and so forth and and and try and
build on on the positive uses of these substances rather than you know constantly drawing attention to
the undoubted negative side effects that can occur. There's a lot of money in the illicit drug trade
today and as the Colombian economist Oscar Rodriguez Aguilar explains capitalism has little to teach
the Colombian drug cartels. This is a business with investment with labor with transport costs
with sales costs with marketing costs with dealership costs and with profits and the reason for its
success has been not only that it's the legal business which therefore generates enormous amounts of
profits but secondly because it has been managed as a business. Now I know these are only estimates
because it's illegal there aren't official accounts but can we calculate how much money is being made?
What are the figures? There is a figure which estimates that for example in 1978 in just Colombia
when the cocaine boom began the value of the drug trade the value was estimated at 200 billion dollars but
the most recent figures were mentioned at the beginning of this year 1997 at a very specialized conference
in Prague in Czechoslovakia and there is a firm called Interaccess Risk Management in fact which put
forward this figure which is the so-called gross criminal product of drug trafficking in the world
calculated estimated at a thousand billion dollars. Now that figure is roughly just below the United
Kingdom's GDP. Now just in the United States drug trafficking was valued at 400 billion dollars for last
year and that is roughly more than the GDP for Russia and just under the GDP for Spain certainly more than the
GDP of Mexico and South Korea. That money can buy a lot of power. Last year police in Europe seized 11 tons of
heroin, 30 tons of cocaine and 630 tons of cannabis. How much got through to consumers no one knows.
These figures come from Interpol, the international criminal police organization that's an information clearinghouse for police from 170,000 countries around the world.
60% of Interpol's time and resources is spent on drugs and organized crime. He won't admit he's losing the war on drugs but the secretary general, the top cop in Interpol, thinks it's time for a change in tactics.
From a police family, he's been a policeman himself for 50 years and his name is Raymond Kendall.
I think we need to get a different approach at political level because unless there is a political will to do something it won't happen.
I mean however much we would like as policemen to be able to provoke action here, there and everywhere, the most we can do and I think it's our job is to deal with the distribution network and so on.
But if we want to be successful we've got to do it against the background of some sort of strategy.
What happens at the moment is that we find that of the total resources that are being spent on dealing with this problem, about 75% of the resources are being spent on law enforcement activity and only 25% are on dealing with the question of demand.
Now it's very clear that if there's that sort of imbalance in the use of resources that you are never really going to, in a coherent way, come up with a policy that's going to really serve a useful purpose.
So what do you think? You say we've got to change it politically. What do you think the politicians should be facing up to?
It's very nice to put money into law enforcement because if you increase the size of your drug squad you will seize more drugs, you will arrest more drug traffickers, but at the end of the day you're not doing anything to deal with the basic problem.
And the answer to that I think is the fact that if you start dealing with social action and social policies which require enormous investment, the probability of you seeing a valid result is going to wait maybe one generation or ten years, shall we say.
And most politicians don't think that far ahead and wouldn't have the courage to propose that sort of investment.
So what sort of social policy do you think they should be invested in for the long term?
It's a very complex issue because it concerns so many aspects of our societies, not only obviously police but the judicial system and the social services system as well.
For example, in some countries I know there are legal provisions to deal with drug addicts by way of alternative procedure.
In other words, instead of putting them in prison or whatever, obliging them to go into treatment centres and things like that.
But the problem is that in most of our countries that provision may exist in the legal sense, but it doesn't exist in reality simply because institutions are not there to put people in.
Now, Raymond Kennel, forgive me for pushing you on this, but you say there are different ways the law has for dealing with people.
Are you suggesting that the users, the people who might be addicted to these things, should not be treated as criminals?
Is that partly what you're saying?
No, it's totally what I'm saying because I think there must be a certain amount of frustration on the part of many policemen
who are confronted on a daily basis with having to deal with issues which are social issues as opposed to purely police criminal issues.
The police obviously has a social role.
You're in the front line there.
In the streets you're going to come across the problems that are of a social nature,
but you should not be called upon to deal with that social side.
I think the police role, the law enforcement role, is to deal with the distribution networks,
distribution networks right down to street level.
What I feel is a waste of time in a way, a waste of resources, is simply arresting the addicted people,
putting them through the legal system as if that is somewhere or another was going to solve the problem.
Now, we have to be careful here because where I've got into trouble in the past is there are terms which are used,
like decriminalization, depenalization, liberalization and so on.
What I'd like to express in the way that you did is to say that I certainly don't think it's of any value to treat drug addicts like criminals.
On the other hand, I don't believe in total liberalization.
I don't think any kind of drug, be it cannabis or any other, should be legalized.
I think that if you want people to go into treatment, you need some coercive possibility,
simply because human nature being what it is means that unless there is some coercive,
perhaps many people would not voluntarily go into treatment.
On the other hand, we can say that I'm sure there's not a single serious drug user
that would not want to get off the habit if he could.
Ethan Nadelman is the head of the Linda Smith Center, the Open Society Institute drug policy think tank in New York City.
How would he change the drug policy in America?
What's the rational way to deal with this problem?
I think one has to look at the underlying assumptions.
First, let's change the underlying assumption.
The assumption so far has been that we should seek to create a drug-free society.
Let's forget that. Let's stop saying it.
Let's accept instead that there has never been a drug-free society in civilized human history.
That the challenge is not how to get rid of drugs or even how to keep them at bay.
The challenge is how do we learn how to live with drugs in such a way that they cause the least possible harm.
That seems to me the more sensible objective.
Now, what does that mean in practice?
Well, I don't think it means that you legalize all drugs tomorrow, but it certainly doesn't mean that you keep the drug war going the way it's been going.
What it means is you start to fight for a more humane and decent and sensible version of drug prohibition
that begins to look for public health priorities, that begins to decriminalize aspects, institute better regulations.
That means that if you're dealing with junkies who can't quit, you adopt a harm reduction policy.
You make clean needles available.
You teach them how to shoot safe rather than landing up in a hospital emergency room.
When it comes to drug treatment, whatever works.
That's different strokes for different folks.
You want to do whatever works.
If it's oral methadone, do that.
If it's what you do in England with injectable methadone, do that.
If it's a drug-free program or a 12-step program, do that.
If it's prescribing heroin to a hardcore drug addict as you do in England and now they're doing in Switzerland, you do that.
Whatever works to reduce the death, disease, crime, and suffering associated with drugs.
Do we need to be sending drug dealers to prison for 30 to 40 to 50 years as we do in this country?
No. Drug dealers, if we're going to punish drug dealers, should not be punished the same way as rapists and murderers.
They're not engaged in the same sort of activity.
If somebody is a simple drug possessor, drug user, there's no way that they belong in prison.
That's not the place for them.
If they're a drug user, don't have a drug problem, then leave them alone.
If they're a drug user and they do have a problem, then allow them access to treatment.
With respect to marijuana, I cannot understand why marijuana should continue to be treated as an ill-fiddle substance.
I don't know about broad-based legalization, but when it comes to marijuana per se, it seems to me we need a sensible, tax-regulated policy with respect to the sale of marijuana to adults.
It would earn revenue for the government.
It would avoid the loss of revenue that we now spend on the drug war.
It would avoid many other problems that we have with the current illegal market.
It seems to me it's a simple case.
At the same time, alcohol, tobacco, I'd get tougher on that.
Just stop short of prohibition.
Tax it more, regulate it more, but stop short of prohibition.
It's when you go to prohibition that you start to create our current disasters.
This next one is the closing song, the wonderfully untied a drum.
I think the title Plants of Power, I think we have to recognize that these plants do have powers.
They have particular capacities to change one's awareness, consciousness, whatever you want to call it, in a particular way.
And that power has got to be recognized, that power has got to be harnessed, that power has got to be understood, you know, and that power has got to be turned by advantage.
As long as we view this power as being something inherently malefic, it will be malefic, it will turn malefic.
It will go on producing gang wars in Colombia and destabilizing states and undermining economies and boosting prison populations
and generally creating havoc socially and politically, you know, across the planet.
It's only when we come to a serious, you know, awareness of the powers that these plants have and understand the way in which we can use that for the benefit of society
that I think there will be any way to kind of, you know, move forward on this.
I think probably the most problematic is not actually cocaine in that respect, but it's heroin, you know, because the opiates do produce a proper physical addiction, which is difficult to treat.
What needs to be understood better is the way in which people sort of, you know, just shift from very occasional, largely unproblematic use of heroin into properly dependent, addictive use of heroin.
That is a shift which is, you know, something which has got to be addressed as a form of individual pathology, but it's got to be addressed culturally, it's got to be addressed socially.
The only example I know of where that worked was a group of Hmong hill tribe people that I lived with, not for very long, but for a couple of weeks on the border of Thailand and Laos.
And there, although the young men smoked opium on occasion, like once a week or once a month or once a year or even two or three nights in a row,
they nevertheless were strongly discouraged by the older men from smoking every day because they knew that would produce addiction and dependence.
And some of the older men, however, were already addicts because, you know, they were suffering from serious aches and pains and so on and therefore they needed their opium every day.
But it seemed to work well as a sort of form of generational control.
You know, young men were not prohibited from using opium, but they were encouraged just to use it on occasion.
And there seemed to be a kind of like a form of social learning there that was going on between the old junkies and the sort of, you know, the young experimenters
that served to seriously communicate the risks to people who were just beginning to use the substance.
And I think one would have to sort of, you know, think along those lines.
Andrew Weil, Dr. Andrew Weil, a botanist and a physician.
Ultimately, with drug plans, some are allowed alcohol, tobacco, some are not allowed opium and marijuana.
The problem seems to me control, social control, personal control.
I agree. I agree.
Where do you stand on this?
I think this is an issue that society needs to come to terms with.
These substances have potential for harm.
I have always written and said that there really are no good and bad drugs.
There are just good and bad uses of drugs.
I think any drug can be put to constructive uses and any drug can be put to destructive uses.
I think that society should be concerned about drug abuse.
It should work to try to reduce it.
But I feel that the use of the criminal law is completely inappropriate and ineffective.
So, here's what I'd like to see happen.
I would like to see us back away from the commitment to use the criminal law as the vehicle through which we try to influence people's drug-taking behavior.
I don't think that means we can undo the drug laws all at once overnight.
But I'd like to see them dismantled in a gradual stepwise fashion while allowing society to adjust to the changes.
You know, an easy place to begin would be with the decriminalization of cannabis, for example, since that's the most popular of the illegal recreational drugs.
But I think that has to be accompanied by real drug education because I think education is our best hope.
And that means teaching people, and by the way, it's everyone.
It's doctors or as in much native drug education as kids are, about what are really the benefits and risks of these substances.
And I think we have to look at it all.
It does have to be from chocolate to morphine.
You know, it's got to be at all of the mind-altering substances, including the ones that we now profit from.
You know, alcohol, tobacco, the various forms of caffeine.
And I'd also like to see gradual restrictions placed against the commercialization and glamorization of all substances, including the legal ones.
I think if we began moving in those three areas, that is, beginning to dismantle the criminal laws,
really working to develop real drug education and restricting the promotion of all substances,
we would see the problems associated with drugs begin to recede instead of continuing to get worse if they have, you know, for all this century as we've been using the same old methods.
I also feel that our best hope is really with social controls rather than legal controls.
Even if you look at what's happened, you know, the change with tobacco is quite interesting because, as I said, here is the most addictive substance known.
And yet, in America, there has been an enormous change in smoking behavior.
And at the root of this is that smoking is going out of fashion.
You know, so this is a social change.
And even dealing with such an addictive, difficult drug, this kind of new social consensus is enormously influencing people's behavior for the better.
I think that's our best hope. It's not through legal controls.
One of the observations that I presented to the natural mind that I have seen again and again is that in these Indian cultures in South America,
where there were no criminal laws, there were very effective social controls.
For example, I lived with a tribe in the Amazon called Cubayos who used coca leaf.
And coca was prepared every day and made available to everyone in the tribe, but kids didn't use it.
And I asked every kid in the tribe that I could find questions like, don't you want to try coca?
They would say, no. Aren't you interested in how it makes you feel? No.
Don't you want to know how it makes your dad feel? No, I'll wait until I grow up.
I never hear kids in our culture say things like that.
You know, when this was in a culture where there were no external controls, it was not illegal, this was a social consensus that everybody bought into.
So, I think that is a really effective way of dealing with all this.
Andrew Weil.
Plants of power can harm or heal, kill or cure, as they are used or abused.
They hold the keys to the locks of our minds.
They can open the gates of heaven to sacred ecstasy, or open the gates of hell to addiction, degradation and death.
In the doors of perception, his 1954 account of taking mescaline derived from peyote, the author Aldous Huxley was astonished by the sacramental vision of reality that he was granted.
And in all the horror and hysteria around the word drugs today, we should not forget that ancient transcendental instant at the core of the experience.
For a shared moment, creatures of biology, like this woman invoking an Amazonian plant of power, Mother Ayahuasca, reconnect to the universe and to the source of all our life, the sun.
Mother Ayahuasca