Debate: Should Society Legalize Psychedelics?

[Music] hello and welcome to the intelligent square debate should society legalize psychedelics hosted like i said by intelligence squared intelligence for squares now i'm actually a huge huge fan of this debate series so if i know the intelligence squared audience you guys were debating between watching this and 60 minutes reruns on cbs so thank you for choosing us on to tonight's debate topic should society legalize psychedelics now i'm not trying to say i have a bias but i am a psychedelic comedian which means i'm only funny when you're on psychedelics you know i'm not an academic i'm not a professional expert but if there were a doctorate in how not to take psychedelics i would have that and i do want to say i actually oppose drug deals or more specifically that they're called deals because drugs are expensive and there aren't usually any deals you know i actually feel like people do cocaine on mirrors to feel like they have twice as much cocaine i'm just kidding of course i just get high on life and ketamine so i get why people are skeptical about psychedelics it could be another medical fad and there have been a lot of those like 150 years ago doctors would say things like i'm sorry you're dizzy sir you have ghosts um you should take two tinctures of arsenic and one dram of cocaine then you go to like a hundred years ago and doctors are saying things like hmm your wife wants to vote she has lady hysteria you should try giving her day heroine then you go to the 1950s and doctors are saying things like hmm your wife doesn't want to clean the house she needs pep try meth then you can calm down afterwards with a nice refreshing smoke and a ham salad you know medical fads they're not all winners and you know in the war on drugs it seems today the drugs are winning a lot of studies allege that psychedelics can cure anything from anxiety to depression ocd to ptsd and worst of all nbh not being high it's a very serious condition but whether you're pro-psychedelics or you want to keep them illegal i would like to focus on the things that we can agree on like not using the metric system you know whether you're a psychedelic prohibitionist or an exhibitionist like me i think there are things we share in common like being embarrassed about timothy leary or loving the show narcos so even though this is a debate i hope we keep it civil because the most powerful drug of all is love and love is what i call ketamine so with that i'd like to throw it to our debate host the most immoderately moderate moderator i've ever met and the dad i wish i had john donovan john thank you very much sarah and very nice that you get to do the funny which leaves for me today only the serious which i'm i'm good with because we do want to take on this topic in a serious manner and the topic is psychedelics and what do we mean by psychedelics well in medical terms these are a rather inexact category of drugs but they're generally known to affect perception and cognition in unique ways and we also know that they have been gaining broader acceptance across the culture in recent years now proponents of the broader use of psychedelics point to their potential uses in the field of neuroscience and also for a range of therapies opponents of their broader use point to the dangers and a lack of data about what the broader effects may be of greatly increasing access to the population either way as with cannabis the movement for wider use of psychedelics is growing it's an issue that seems ripe for debate so here it is should society legalize psychedelics i'm john donvan and this is intelligence squared so now it's time to cast your first vote you're going to do that by going to iq2us.org that's iq the number two us.org i'll give you just a second to pull that up in a new tab or you can do it from any browser on your cell phone iq2us.org and when you're there you'll be able to cast your first vote on the resolution legalize psychedelics you can vote for the motion against the motion or declare yourself undecided all entirely respectable points of view we're going to have this happen again after you've heard the debate and again it's the side that sways the most minds from the first to the second vote that will be declared our winner so if you haven't already voted go to iq2us.org i'll give you one more second to get that first vote in okay now let's meet the debaters arguing for the motion legalized psychedelics is rick doblin founder and executive director of the multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic studies his partner bia la bache an anthropologist and drug policy expert and executive director of the chakruna institute for psychedelic plant medicines opposing them jeffrey lieberman former president of the american psychiatric association and chair of columbia university's department of psychiatry and kevin cebet a three-time white house drug policy advisor and author of the upcoming book smoke screen all right so here we all are our four debaters i want to welcome rick and jeffrey and bia and kevin thanks so much for joining us on intelligence squared yeah our players are having us excited to be with you john talking about this interesting subject it's great to have you all you're spread all around the country and uh it's wonderful that we can all come together in this way to take on this really really interesting topic and the way we're going to do this we're going to go in three rounds the first round will be composed of opening statements from each debater in turn those statements will be four minutes each our resolution our motion is legalize psychedelics and first up to be speaking in support of that motion will be rick doblin rick the screen is all yours thank you jen um so the proposition that we're debating today is about legalizing psychedelics and i'd first like to speak to the areas i think where we're going to agree so i think that kevin and jeffrey will agree that if the fda approves psychedelic assisted therapy on the basis of evidence and makes that into a prescription medication that they would be supportive of that i think that they will also agree with the united states supreme court that certain religious uses of psychedelics like the use of peyote by the native american church and the use of ayahuasca by a church called dunya de vegetal that they would agree with that that those aspects of legalization for medical use and for religious use i think are going to be non-controversial although we'll find out about that i think the areas where we're going to be disagreeing are whether individuals should have a right to explore psychedelics for spiritual purposes without being part of a group or a religion whether that extends to individuals and i think we'll also disagree potentially on whether people who don't have a medical diagnosis could access psychedelics in a legal way for a whole range of things for personal growth for celebration for couples therapy for a whole range of things and i think we may also disagree on what are the appropriate um punishments you could say for uh if people are going to be supporting criminalization uh or not legalization what kind of punishments should there be for people who who break these rules but but first now that we've established that i want to explain the vision that we have for legalization and actually i think that alcohol is regulated too lightly i think marijuana is regulated too lightly and the form of legalization that i'm talking about is called licensed legalization where you have a license to do these drugs and if you misbehave you get punished for your misbehavior for your behavior but not for the state of consciousness that you were in or the drugs that were that you had taken and that you could lose the license for a period of time as well and then you would have to go to class as education so for example we all know that drunk drivers often lose their driver's license for driving under the influence but then they can go and buy alcohol they get back in their car and they kill people so i think we should make it harder for people who misbehave to get access to these drugs now with this kind of licensed legalization there's a series of policies that should go along with it and the first of these policies is honest drug education um you know my kids have gone through the dare program i didn't want them to not go through that but they got education that was twisted and not very honest i think we need honest drug education we also need access to pure drugs we know that a lot of drugs are adulterated through the black market so legalization will permit these drugs to be available in a pure way we also need harm reduction techniques which for example we're a fiscal sponsor for a 800 number for people to call if they have difficult trips on the phone we do psychedelic peer support training we need to embed in the culture the knowledge of how to help people who have difficult experiences and then in addition to all these policies we need to have treatment on demand and i think that that's really important and that will be paid for by the taxes from people that are buying these drugs and for minors it should be um for forbidden except if they get permission from their parents and 23 states are like that for alcohol that parents can override the laws against minors so for that i hope you will vote for the legalization of psychedelics licensed legalization in the way i just described thank you thanks very much rick doblin our next speaker will be arguing against the motion legalized psychedelics here is jeffrey lieberman jeffrey the screen is all yours thank you john well uh i want to make clear that i'm really a proponent and an advocate for the exploration of psychedelic substances to the extent that they can be useful for human kind and in legal terms what that means is that i advocate strongly that they'd be allowed to be studied for medical research to see what their therapeutic indications are and how they can help us to understand the brain and the mind i also think they should be decriminalized but in terms of legalization i'm against that now rick has introduced a nuance here about licensed legalization which we can get into during the discussion but i'm against legalization for the following reasons now first let me in full disclosure indicate that i'm a pointy-headed scientist and a practicing physician but i have lived experience i'm a child of the 60s and although i didn't inhale like bill clinton i did imbibe various amounts of blotter or ously or other types of mescaline psilocybin so i've had actual experience i also want to say that during the 35 to 40 years that these substances were banned for further research and potential use i commend the advocates and particularly rick and maps for keeping the faith and staying the course however now that they've been rehabilitated to some extent i'm concerned about the process that's been instigated and that we don't screw this up a second time and have these banned and you know have to forgo what would there be their potential benefits and if you look at the mission statement on the maps website it says some things which i have problems with one it says to develop psychedelics and marijuana into prescription medicines well maybe there are therapeutic uses that can be eventually found in these substances for treatment of various specific medical conditions but to be clear this is really a ruse this is a way to get around their prohibition by saying well maybe they're useful for some medical reasons and therefore should be available so it's trying to get a foot in the policy door a second point of their mission is to train therapists and establish treatment centers what's the methodology i mean there's no established methodology which shows how they should be used or what they should be used for or what patient population for whom they would be indicated or contraindicated this is something that's all potentially feasible but it doesn't exist at this point the third point on their website is that they support scientific research into neuroscience which i fully concur with but also spirituality and creativity well maybe these drugs are gateways to a creative muse or spiritual plane but they also could be illusions i mean virtual reality is an illusion and maybe these drugs give you an inner state of mind which makes you think you're connected to the godhead or to the universal fundamental plane of existence or that you're creative um and then finally they say they envision a world where psychedelics and marijuana are safe and legally available for beneficial uses where research is governed by rigorous scientific evaluation of risks and benefits well that's not what's happening now it's not being done in a rigorous way in the way that the kind of usual important topics governing research into cancer cardiovascular disease infectious disease and brain disorders is usually done now first thing that i would ask in terms of clarification is that when psychedelics first became known to the popular culture after lsd was synthesized by albert hoffman and sir humphrey osmond coined the term psychedelics mind manifesting it applied to a specific set of substances that had a similar pharmacologic activity by targeting a specific serotonin receptor and produced a certain subjective state of mind the definition has been broadened and to include dissociative drugs like ketamine and phencyclidine in pathogens like mdma or ecstasy and deliriants and there's no basis for this so i think it's irresp it's going to be reckless to legalize them and i encourage you to vote no thanks very much jeff lieberman okay so everybody you've heard the first two opening remarks and now we move on to the third and next on screen with her opening statement in support of the motion here is bia labachi hello everybody it's an honor to be here and we're discussing whether psychedelics should be legalized and i say yes psychedelics should be legalized and i'm going to explain very briefly why first historical and cultural foundations 2 the absolute failure of the drug war three some examples that we can look at so history and culture drugs have been used by all kinds of populations through all historical periods there's nearly none human group that hasn't experimented with altered states of consciousness more than that psychedelics have been central to several indigenous groups of the americas and elsewhere as a matter of fact psychedelics have been a main way through indigenous people their sacred plants have helped them uh guide their culture teach the younger generations create socialization celebration identity territory to explain the very myths of why man is on human planet and so but this is you don't have to go to indigenous people only you can go to the ancient greeks and find information with the old elysian uh mysteries are early christianity there's a whole speculation on whether early christians use psychedelics we have evidence for uh the presence of cannabis since 10 000 years among the chinese we have archaeological evidence of the use of peyote for 5 000 years my main career i have studied ayahuasca sacred plants from the indigenous people of the americas it's said to be used and known since immemorial times so i just want to say that we're not inventing the wheel here we're talking about things that have deep roots in our nations and countries and consciousness and in terms of the drug war it's a it's first of all let's just remind that the current scheduling of drugs is absolutely non-scientific and has a lot of historical cultural and social reasons to why the substances are divided in such categories and the drug war we all know it's a moral and cultural war it's a word that lends itself uh with with the language of religious dogma you heard a little bit about this the idea of artificiality of things that are unreal that are fake mixed with pathology so the drug war has always been a war that is a moral war a war on consciousness a war on minorities and a war on people more than that the drug war is a racist war it's a way to persecute certain minorities and we have associated the chinese with opium we have associated mexicans to cannabis we have associated uh african-americans to cocaine we have associated the irish with alcohol and we have persecuted their habits because we can't persecute them as people so we all know for a fact that for similar quantities black and brown folks are incarcerated about three times more than the white peers for use of drugs the drug war is a failure the drug wars has innumerous costs and drugs have been used to scapegoat us to attribute all kinds of problems when we should be talking about other things such as education housing and uh health conditions the drug war is a problematic enterprise that has not proven to to work it has failed and i want to know what people propose instead of prohibition and criminalization i'm curious to learn we are in favor of legalization and i want to say that we have already a few examples that are working fine and i want to mention the case of brazil which we do consider ourselves part of the west in case you're wondering but brazil has used ayahuasca since immemorial times and the brazilian ayahuasca religions are plant incorporated into our societies hey the sky did not fall we don't have a tragedy going over there children go to rituals together with their parents it's beautiful the netherlands legalized truffles and psilocybin mushrooms the scot the sky didn't fall either thought yes to legalizing psychedelics thank you billaboche our final opening statement will be against the resolution here is kevin subbett kevin the screen is yours thanks so much again it's a pleasure to be here um you know i think we need to remember what we're debating here and what we're discussing it's not the war on drugs which i think most of us can agree has a lot of challenges and there are a lot of issues there we'd like to discuss but that's not what we're talking about and we're not talking about the specific limited medical use or research or even the decriminalization of hallucinogens which would i think go a long way in addressing some of those arrest disparities although i will note those arrest disparities are not having are not happening because of drugs like lsd and mdma they're happening because of other drugs actually alcohol being the first among them and alcohol is legal um i i think we need to remember also that we're not talking about ancient plant ceremonies in uh cultures from 10 000 years ago i wish we were i think that'd be a lot more interesting we're talking about legalization of hallucinogens in the united states of america and that is not limited plant ceremonies in the amazon that is unfortunately super bowl commercials uh that is major lobbyists who pay are being paid millions of dollars to promote an agenda that enriches them uh that is allowing companies and industries like big tobacco and big alcohol uh to do what they're doing with cannabis now which is take over the entire industry while those who may have been persecuted under previous laws are left with crumbs they're left with nothing um just in case you didn't notice uh the the corner boy from the bronx is not making money for marijuana legalization right now uh but altria philip morris is making a lot in fact they just invested four billion dollars with a b in that market so we need to separate these issues of prohibition which is a separate policy decriminalization which would remove criminal penalties and not uh charge people for low-level use or possession for private purposes uh the medicalization which happens to do with research uh and happens to do with fda approved medications scientifically validated medications i'm a proponent of that i i we need as much as we have much as we can get to relief pain to deal with difficult trauma ptsd experiences i will note by the way the largest study looking at that just found that uh placebo worked better than the actual hallucinogens in other words when people thought they were micro dosing that worked as well or better than when they were actually given the drug but again i'm interested in looking at that more we need to do more research on that and i think what rick is doing has the potential to be very good even though i disagree with him on this on this debate uh about legalization because legalization is that fourth separate box from prohibition decriminalization and medicalization and legalization we know very clearly what that is here it's not what is happening in the netherlands it's not what is happening in brazil which not many people know about it is the mass commercialization and promotion of a drug for profit that is the american way when you legalize a drug we don't have to guess what happens we have legalized drugs they're called opioid uh pharmaceutical drugs they're called alcohol and they're called tobacco they kill more people than all illegal drugs combined partly because they're used more and why they are used more is because they are promoted and commercialized in this system so let's pursue the research let's be careful about that make sure people aren't hurt but this idea that we should turn this over to the legal market uh which would again is basically the purview of wall street and silicon valley it's not their purview of of medical laboratories and of careful experimentation or even what rick is presenting which is interesting a licensing scheme it's not that and it's not what the best intentioned academics want it is what the market wants currently in the united states and the market for these drugs is about addiction for profit it's about pushing the most number of people to use your substance irresponsibly and heavily because that is how you make money think about alcohol 10 of americans consume 80 percent of the alcohol volume in this country that means the alcohol industry relies on alcoholics for its profit we do not need to create another industry like that thanks kevin sabeth and that concludes the first round of this intelligence squared us debate where our resolution is legalize psychedelics and now we move on to round two and round two is a much more loosely framed uh round of the debate it's much more like a conversation which will be led off by questions from me and perhaps some comments for me based on what i heard you say in your opening statements but also it's your chance to challenge one another and to question one another as well i want to go first to you rick rick doblin and there really is a significant amount of common ground here in that all of you uh seem to recognize that the the government's reaction uh from the 1960s through about 15 years ago was an overreaction during that period that i think we can call prohibition you all agree that that was not productive i think you all agree that the drug war has been not productive and actually harmful i think you all agree that more research on psychedelics is a good thing nobody is disagreeing with that it seems to me what we're talking about and where that where this divide comes is on the the presumption that any individual has a pathway to access these uh psychedelics without having it to be characterized or religious part of a religious ceremony or uh part of a medical uh a medical requirement to some sort of diagnosis and it occurred to me that perhaps just the the a model an analogy would be being able to drive an automobile it's presumed in society that driving an automobile can be a very dangerous thing enormous amount of research and experience has been built up over the over time in regard to that and we all have a path to learn to get licensed for driving an automobile therefore it's a sort of i would say mass access to the experience i want to ask you rick am i capturing the degree of access that you're talking about the the principle of access the spirit of the kind of access you're talking about yes definitely i think that there should be free access for adults um with a license to these drugs not everybody's going to want to do it but i think a substantial number of people will i would uh take issue with kevin saying this is all about addiction for profit uh jeffrey lieberman jeffrey has talked about how psychedelics the classic psychedelics meaning lsd psilocybin mescaline are not really addictive drugs but i do believe that there should be access and i think one of the problems of decrement is that you still don't have pure drugs and we have a lot of problems with people getting adulterated drugs well let me let me i i just now that i i wanted to to get you on the record just establishing the degree of access you're talking about i put out there the analogy of being able to drive a car um jeff lieberman why is why is why is using psychedelic drugs not the same thing as driving a car from your point of view why what what's different about the conditions the parameters that would cause you that do cause you to have to raise flags about that level of access psychedelic drugs are a unique class of substances on the good side it has nothing to do with the drug wars because they're not addictive drugs in the same way because they're not euphorians and they're not hedonistic drugs and they offer this subjective altered state of consciousness that is potentially revealing about people themselves or about the world or about life in general and we don't know the extent to which that can be put to useful purposes both for human potential as well as therapeutic uses the problem is and we agree on 90 percent i think it's really just terminology definitely medical uses definitely decriminalization i'm not sure quite what licensed use means but the thing is is that the knowledge base the scientific knowledge base the knowledge base about the pharmacology of these substances how it can be optimized and then applied for human use has barely been touched the drugs that are currently been tested both mdma well let's forget about him about psilocybin that is a naturally occurring substance that was selected opportunistically there's no comparative pharmacology between the various types of psychedelic drugs to see which would be optimal and then how to refine those and administer them it's being done in a very well intended but uh amateurish and potentially uh reckless way so bia we heard from jeffrey uh he's quite skeptical of um sort of drawing comparisons and this is your this is your life's work it's drawing comparisons between the united states and and also kevin was bringing some of this in where the the they're envisioning the provision of psychedelic drugs would be this massive corporate undertaking and that your your depiction of the uh both the safety and the cultural integrity of the use of psychedelics being demonstrated by ancient cultures and also indigenous cultures having used them it's just not relevant to what psychedelic use would be like in a fully legalized united states production of psychedelics by presumably the pharmaceutical companies what's what's your response to that well first of all let me once again thank you all beautiful gentlemen it's an honor to be the only woman here and i might respectfully disagree with my fellow presenters so uh kevin yes i i strongly disagree that the use of uh sacred plants by indigenous people is not relevant to what happens in the united states i think maybe you're not really aware of what happens in the united states but i am because i hang out on these atmospheres so first of all there's a lot of ayahuasca use on the underground in the u.s both religious and clinical or semi-clinical or whatever you want to call new age spiritual for personal self growth there's tons and tons of circles i think that as we speak i would bet that there is one circle in each iowa in each city in this country it's really grown strong and the use of psilocybin you also have such a strong culture of psilocybin used in the united states the other day i went to the academy of science which is one of my favorite spots here in san francisco they had a whole day about mushrooms and it's not just mushrooms gourmet it's also mushroom psychoactive they have zines they have a whole cultural movement they have transformational festivals all over the united states and you also have a large culture of use of peyote and you have traveling shamans and i do think that rituals that uh happen outside south america are important and i think americans like to idealize mystify fetishize what happens in south america and think that there is no culture here and that everything but they're but they're projecting a future where that would not be the situation the situation would be but would be uh well i'll let uh kevin respond and then go back yeah when he says about big ball and i think there's a fundamental confusion here so one thing is to say i'm against regulation and the other thing is to say regulation will be big pharma we can create mechanisms to mitigate to to avoid exploitation to create systems where people that have suffered previous drug offenses are not taking their licenses out we can uh limit government control we can limit taxes there yeah so look um i i wish it would happen i guess i'm just more cynical having you know been in three different white house administrations and in every state capital looking and talking about uh specifically cannabis policy but also alcohol a bit in tobacco and other drugs like opioids we've never really gotten it right um the the perfect balance has not happened and it you know and again actually what i'm saying is perhaps they have gotten it right in other places around the world on this including brazil and other places but in the united states it does become about big business and what i meant by you know addiction for profit and what rick was talking about it's not necessarily uh it's always going to be the addictiveness but also just the harmfulness that that the people that are going to be investing and making money in this unfortunately are no nobody in this debate right now i can tell you that um they're the people who are operate behind the shadows on this you know 37th floor of an office building uh in san francisco or new york or la or london uh who uh you know run multiple companies that see this as another part of their portfolio but why is that why does that need to be inevitable and first of all because why is it inevitable it's not inevitable does that change your position well i think it's happened in every single situation uh where we've had legalized drugs so we've never had an ex a counter example of that so i i think it's risky to think that that's not going to happen i also have an issue with this idea that if it were legalized it would be purer and better and i think that we can look at uh the tobacco example is a very good example you know tobacco killed very few people before the advent of big tobacco tobacco had been has been around for thousands of years but about a hundred years ago when big tobacco came on board and invented the modern day cigarette invented the addition of nicotine and other harmful products even though tobacco was apparently regulated this happened under our watch and started a much more harmful drug i want to let rick respond to some of this rick made some references to cannabis and has come up a few times in the conversation now uh there you know there really is a sense that that attitudes and certainly access changed and are changing still dramatically when it comes to cannabis psychedelics different class of drugs but what what does the cannabis journey tell us about the psychedelic journey that could come are is it red flags is it smooth sailing uh what is it what what are the lessons from that all right so you know jeffrey talked about um the medical research that we're doing as a ruse as amateurish you know we are working at the highest standards of the fda we're in phase three we've had successful phase three study that's about to be published in nature medicine we are working at the same level that big pharma works and the same standards that fda applies to us so we do interest uh are interested in medicalization but we are also interested in access for people without it being a medical condition so it's not a ruse it's not amateurish it's it's the highest standards of science what i do think though is that this boogeyman of big psychedelics trying to push psychedelics on everybody and somehow or other like tobacco developing more addictive forms of this i don't see that happening i don't quite understand how that was and i'd say one of the things we've learned from marijuana and this maybe speaks jeffrey's point is that medicalization is necessary as a step to educate people who have been miseducated and lied to and research has been suppressed so medicalization changes people's attitudes about the risks and benefits of these drugs and then it leads people to think more about legalization so what we have seen what's the lie that people have been told about psychedelics well uh when i grew up in the 60s i was told if you took lsd six times in a row you were certifiably insane we were told that lsd caused chromosome damage and you would have deformed babies we're told that it will promote well i i don't know i i we've been told by oprah that mdma causes holes in your brain i still come across people who say that they've watched this oprah show and they believe that mdma causes holes in the brain we've been told that mdma one dose serious brain damage major functional consequences that should never be researched these were things that we had to overcome rick believe me we are we are aligned but let me ask you the key question apart from proving medical uses which you know you've done a good job with ecstasy and with ptsd treatment on getting to the fda what non-medicinal purpose do you think it should be made available through whatever means to the general population what is the what is the purpose of that well i think first off for individual spiritual purposes for personal growth for couples therapy for working with relationships building relationships for a vision quest you know apart from your experience with it which i've had too you know we should compare numbers of trips but um what is the evidence for that what is the evidence for what is the evidence for personal growth apart from steve jobs saying that uh taking acid changed his life um what is the evidence for personal growth or couples relationships or anything else well we okay so we've done a study with some va affiliated researchers into cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy which is where conjoint means couples where one has ptsd the other has um it affects the person in the relationship and we worked blended that with mdma both people got mdma there were all sorts of measures of their relationship their relationship was increased but because of the fda only dealing with medicalized conditions couples therapy is not going to be something that could be medicalized who's going to be spending all the money to try to do this research to prove to you that a million anecdotal reports don't count you know that you need if you had a mod if you had a modicum of evidence to support that it could be marketed as a nutraceutical or as a supplement you don't have to go through the rigorous fda approval not as a controlled supplement the problem is is that practice is leaping ahead of research no i would say that's not can i say something wait wait let me say that that we have a situation where um you know where are the resources going to come from for this kind of research that you're speaking about looking at benefits it's not coming from the nationalists on drug abuse it's not even coming from the nationalist and mental health it's coming from companies like maps that are trying to medicalize so i don't know that we will have this vast scientific but there are so many the absence of the absence of support for research is not a reason to jump ahead and assume that you're that your beliefs are true no i you know i want to say to uh jeffrey that i understand you're a medical doctor and that you have published many articles and you are you know science oriented but i think i've also taken psychedelics recreationally good good for you i i think there's a fundamental mistake that is like confusing reality with research and taking research as the only measure for reality so research is this reality is much bigger than this that for example you have thousands and thousands of years of peyote use ayahuasca use psilocybin use and that's not documented in fda clinical trials you must remember that clinical trials is something that emerged in the 40s mainly to treat to to deal with new drugs yeah i don't want to keep the psychedelics locked down to only fda approved medical uses i i agree with decriminalization and the underground that has existed which has administered it under control conditions by well-intended people even if they weren't thoroughly knowledgeable has been uh relatively safe the problem is is that saying it's been used for thousands of years ritualistically by the elusivian mysteries by the greeks if it was the original sacrament of the christians that was replaced by a placebo wafer that's fine but people worshipped idols for millions of years too people thought the earth was flat for millions of years too and those things didn't prove to be true the whole arc of civilization has been guarded by science which has verified the assumptions that humans have made and i'm just saying before we screw this up again let's make sure we know what we're doing what happened what was the first screw up that you're referring to please if you can do it in 35 seconds because it's not a debate point this is just an elucidation point well naturally occurring psychedelic substances had been used as being pointed out for thousands of years but when uh albert hoffman synthesized lsd and it was marketed as delcid in the 1950s it sort of sprang into the popular culture and lsd plus the naturally occurring psychedelics began to be used and people like timothy leary and ken kesey spread the tune in turn on drop out and this is the pathway to spiritual uh enlightenment and happiness and it got out of control kevin sabet yeah on on that point i i wanted to ask really two two things actually one is then why isn't decriminalization enough i mean even if we may have some arguments about whether or not there's medical value and whether anecdote is evidence and whether the you know um experience of people thousands of years ago would mean the experience of people living in the 21st century and beyond which i think there are a lot of questions there putting all of that aside why isn't decriminalization enough and i would love to hear from bia or rick to tell me how many people are actually serving time in prison for using something like lsd or ios i mean this is obviously happening without people criminalist rick why is not decriminalization enough why go all the way to legalization well first off decrim is often associated with fines it's not legal there are penalties but well okay let's talk about that but the other part of it is one of the biggest dangers of the black market is adulterated drugs and as long as you don't have legalized commercial sales you will not have regulation to make sure that the drugs are pure and as long as you have this kind of decrements quasi you know you will still have penalties and fines and things like that you're not going to have necessarily honest drug education harm reduction treatment on demand well i'm glad that you would like that but we see that legalization really is lifts the barrier we have a lot of negative education for honest drug education and that concludes round two of this intelligence squared us debate where our resolution is legalize psychedelics and now we move on to round three and round three will be closing statements by each of the debaters in turn they will be two minutes each this is their last chance to change their minds remember after this round you will be asked to vote for a second time and it's your votes that will decide who was the most persuasive and therefore the winning side in this debate so first making uh his final statement in support of the resolution to legalize psychedelics here is rick dublin thank you um so i have been married only once in my life and i've been married for roughly 27 years and my wife and i have tried to take mdma together around once a year and we have found that to be tremendously helpful for our relationship it helps us to be better listeners it helps us to be more empathic more sympathetic we can hear critical information that we're giving to each other and i think that that has been a very important part of strengthening our relationship however couples therapy or just couples work is not something that we would call religious it's not treating a disease and it is something that should be um available in illegal access with pure drugs it shouldn't be something that's quote decriminalized and what we really haven't gotten here is this sense of what does decrim really mean decrim is usually associated with penalties with some sorts of fines with it's left in the black market to distribute uh jeffrey was concerned about who sells these drugs it would be so by companies you could say big psychedelic but it would be regulated it would be pure there would be potentially concern limits on advertising but that there are a whole host of other uses than just couples therapy that you know people will have benefited from psychedelics we have enormous number of reports from people who've talked about their lives were changed because of psychedelic experiences that are outside of religion and outside of strict medicine and so i think with proper support and training and understanding of how we can educate people honestly where they'll believe it that we could have a much better situation and that these drugs should be legally available and i hope that you will vote yes to say that psychedelics should be legalized thank you rick doblin next we'll be having a closing statement against the resolution and that comes from jeffrey lieberman jeffrey the screen is yours um psychedelics have been used for centuries ritualistically in a certain fashion it was only really in the mid 20th century that they became more widespread and got into popular culture outside of ritualistic use or the nascent medical research that was being done and that's when all hell broke loose sociologically and some people got hurt and due to the overreaction of the government they were prohibited from further study until recently my position is is that they should be available for medical research they should be decriminalized but rick and beta are sort of arguing for what would be a very dangerous social experiment in social engineering and if you want to see the good side of that if they're right reads read brave new world by aldous huxley where soma was given to everybody ritualistically so they turn into good people my concern is that it's more akin to prometheus the legend of prometheus who defied the gods by stealing fire and giving it to humans now prometheus became a figure representing human striving particularly for knowledge and the risk of overreaching and its unintended consequences and he's regarded as embodying the lone genius the true believer who thinks they know by their true experience or their intuition what's good to improve human existence now parenthetically mary shelley who authored the book frankenstein written in 1818 used the subtitle frankenstein the modern prometheus so as george w bush tried to say and mangled the quote fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me we don't want to be fooled again and or as the rock group says in terms of who the who we won't get fooled again if we allow this to be let out too quickly without adequate proof we're risking losing the possibility of their benefits for a long period of time so please vote no for legalization thank you jeffrey lieberman and our next speaker will be speaking in support of the resolution to legalize psychedelics here is bia la bache okay i have shared here my passion for ayahuasca we named our non-profit the chukruna institute for psychedelic plant medicines after ayahuasca i have participated in hundreds of rituals and i sincerely believe that ayahuasca has helped me become a better person a better daughter a better spouse a better member of my community a better worker and the use of ayahuasca has spread significantly to the united states and except two very specific contexts all the other use of ayahuasca continues to be illegal i think that is unfair i don't think that people should be kept you know without being able to access ayahuasca legally without knowing where it comes from without having the chance to to acquire this with dignity i've i think a lot of what has been said here is based on fear and it's based on uh you know attempts of science to control everything and this credit make a kind of narrative that the counterculture was a disaster there were a few excesses but the counter culture was really also wonderful and created big revolutions that make us stand here i am a foreigner i immigrated to the united states because to me i've been here for four years i immigrated to join the psychedelic renaissance the bay area is the birthplace and you know it's where the psychedelic renaissance is is blooming and we are super enthusiastic and positive about this future to come and i think we're gonna look back to this historical period that we're now and we're just going to be ashamed of ourselves like like if it was you know during the times that we did slavery or women couldn't vote a time where you shamed people you stigmatized their practices you throw black and brown bodies into jail and you you told people that their habits were wrong so i i think the united states is the land of freedoms the land of hope i ask you to please join rick and i in the force and power and beauty of the psychedelic revolution with all its love and with its renewed hope for a better humanity please vote yes with us thank you bia la bache and finally with our argument against the resolution and our last speaker in this round the resolution again legalized cadence he is against here is kevin sabette i wish i could be more proud of what we created but i'm not the outcome of legalization is shameful hurts people and we are not safer what i've changed my mind on applying current reality i was too naive to anticipate years ago is the wisdom of a commercialized for-profit elitist government-protected privileged monopolistic industry that perpetuates itself and its obscene profits to the detriment of the public good those were the words of the introduction of a stunning op-ed in admission by the writer of marijuana legalization in colorado now fast forward to almost 10 years later seeing what the effects have been this is somebody who defended the plan of marijuana for his whole career and still does and and uses it but understands that legalization actually was a lot worse when it came to the rights of users but definitely the rights of of non-users uh the drugs that kill the most in our society are legal ones and it's not because they're necessarily more harmful alcohol is not more harmful than than heroin but it's because they are commercialized and normalized in society it's one thing to advocate for decriminalization ending the war on drugs it's another thing to advocate for the commercialization and normalization which is exactly what would happen if we legalize psychedelics it's very hard to put the genie back in the bottle uh despite all of the efforts that are going on they're still 420 000 deaths a year from cigarettes even though the use is declining but we still have lung cancer and other detrimental effects and that was the goal of this industry is to make money and that's what happened with big tobacco and i don't see why we would want to do that again it does not mean we necessarily want to criminalize people but the idea that we think we can finally get it right i haven't seen evidence that shows that that's true that's why i'm in line with the national academy of sciences with all of the major medical associations with parents who care about their kids i think you know the old adage hope not dope i think makes a lot of sense um there might be some limited uses in some special situations with a you know physician supervising a low dosage within therapy that's not what we're talking about with american style commercialization when we're talking about that we're talking about venture capitalists and banks and that's why you should vote no on legalizing hallucinogens thank you kevin thank you everybody and that concludes the final round of this intelligence squared us debate where our resolution is legalize psychedelics and now it's time for our second and final vote remember it's the side that changes the most minds from the first to the second vote that will be declared our winner we're going to ask you again to cast your vote by going back to iq2us.org do exactly what you did the first time maybe you even still have the tab open same url iq2us you can do it from any browser or on your cell phone again you'll be given the choice to vote for against or undecided after you've heard the arguments this is you are making your second vote based on what you heard i'll give you just one more second to get that final vote in also unlike in past debates we're going to be leaving this vote open for seven days for the broader public to really get from them a sense of what the nation is thinking and how swayed they were by the arguments presented here and at the end of those seven days we will be announcing the winner on our website iq2us.org i want to thank our audience for for joining us as well um you know the goal in intelligence squared is to encourage people to talk with one another honestly and forthrightly but with respect something that we don't see happening a lot in our political discourse and it can be a real challenge to find substantive reasoned competition of ideas from people who have opposing views but also know what they're talking about and also have the same commitment to intelligence and mutual respect and that's what we do it's what we bring you and millions of listeners around the world real debate through podcasts and television and public radio and we do it all for free it's something we care about a lot here at intelligence squared we're a non-profit and if you want to learn more about what we do or watch one of the more than 200 debates we've produced debate you can do that by going to our website iq2us.org i'm john donven i want to thank you so much for joining us

Channel: Open to Debate

Views: 6,950

Keywords: Intelligence Squared, IQ2, IQ2US, Intelligence Squared U.S., debate, live debate, I2, nyc, politics, conservative, liberal

Id: sKfwNZeMZG0

Length: 55min 30sec (3330 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/askdix]

Who are you debating? The government?

[u/Mind_Wizard]

People Who are against...

Have they tried it?

[u/[deleted]]

every single person who spells psychedelic like this on this sub needs a permaban

[u/galifanasana]

Knew I'd see Rick Doblin here. I saw him speak at Horizons a few years back. Love that dude.

[u/flarn2006]

What an individual decides to put in their body has nothing to do with society.

[u/deepswandive]

Decriminalization is the way to go

[u/Tiglath-PileserIII]

Online debate by IntelligenceSquared on the thesis: "Should Society Legalize Psychadelics?"

[u/AeonDisc]

This is excellent, and be sure to cast your votes!

[u/dapp96ii]

Kebin Sabbet, the fourth speaker, actually has a good point...