I interview friends, colleagues, and experts, on harm reduction and its implications in Canadian society, from the theory to the practice, to the practical. I am a Member-at-Large for Outreach for Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy and writer for Karmik, Fresh Start Recovery Centre, and the Marijuana Party of Canada. Here I interview Evan Loster, part 3.
*Audio interview edited for clarity and readability.*
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What events have success?
Evan Loster: In Europe, there are a lot of events. Zendo Project is a major one in the United States. They’ve been at Burning Man. There’s an organization called Dance Safe. That’s what I know. Other have contemplated it, but have stopped because of legal issues.
That’s the biggest issue. You have a festival run by boards. The problem is everyone on the board must agree. We need drug testing. Even in my own community, we have something called Folk Fest. I want to bring drug testing to it.
Even talking to the harm reduction community in Winnipeg, there’s this problem having accountability and responsibility in those events. They tried to bring Plan B. One, sexual assault is an ongoing and common issue at these events. Two, the need to have that protection for females is a good thing.
For example, an unsolicited sexual encounter and don’t want to have their baby. Plan B was over-the-counter. They didn’t want to take responsibility for giving that out to people. They will turn down the entire idea.
Since the festival turns down the idea, it doesn’t mean that won’t happen there. Same with the festival. They didn’t want naloxone at the festival without a trained professional. Naloxone is easy. You don’t need to be a trained professional to administer it.
It is as easy as taking saline mixtures up the nose. I hope, in spite of it, some will bring naloxone. It is not to promote drug use, but to help attendees to stay safe. Universities should have access to it.
It is a tough time. You are stressed and depressed in this major time of development. Many will experiment with substances. Opiates are a good substance to reduce pain. They calm you. They bring you down. The issue is this becoming a recurrent obsessive behavior.
Also, when you think a taken substance is one thing, and it’s not, it can be a big problem. Across the world, there are safe injection sites. Many countries have legalized heroine. Canada too now. Paraguay has decriminalized all drugs.
It is a perfect example. The statistics demonstrate drug related crime has gone down. Overdoses have gone down. HIV/AIDS rates have gone down. Drug use has gone slightly up. The statistics might be deceptive. Have rates gone up or have people admitted it – since the stigma is gone?
Maybe, people admit it. Maybe, people experiment without the dissolution of the stigma. If someone wants to try marijuana or a therapeutic amount of MDMA, that should not be stigmatized. It is awesome to explore yourself.
Jacobsen: There’s an inverted pyramid of drug abuse. An inverted pyramid of harm and legality, tobacco and alcohol are harmful to individuals, families, and societies. Cannabis is in the national discussion now.
It is illegal. Yet, it does not have major harms associated with it, especially compared to tobacco and alcohol. Tobacco and alcohol are legal and harmful. Marijuana or cannabis is virtually non-harmful and illegal. This is repeated across the spectrum.
What seems like the reason behind this?
Loster: I am unconventional. I use Terence McKenna and Bill Hicks for this perspective. Tobacco and alcohol promote productive workers. Same with caffeine. They are the most prized substances in society. You ingest nicotine and caffeine to make you productive. There’s no other reason for it.
It doesn’t bring you down at night. The whole basis is the promotion of cultural values of productivity. You drink alcohol to forget about the shitty work week. So, you have a coping mechanism.
When people stop using these substances, that’s when they stop being able to work at that level. You start depreciating yourself. Your true qualities are showing. Let’s use the opposite side of the spectrum, I like heroine as an example.
There are differences in the addictive qualities of heroin and tobacco. Heroin, you may want to stay home more than go to work. Same with psychedelics. They make you question the cultural patterns.
If everyone tried LSD or psilocybin, people wouldn’t contemplate work for tomorrow. They would look into other values, which the establishment doesn’t want now. I don’t believe in a massive conspiracy. Ideologies have created a giant illusion believed by us.
The ideologies began with a few people. It spread. If you look at a cult, a cult as it first comes out, it has a huge stigma. Everyone thinks it’s bad. If you attach the word to it, it is instantly demonized. Every major belief system started as a cult.
You had a small number of people believing something. It grew. Scientology is ridiculous now. In 1,000 years, if it’s still here, people will think it has some basis in reality because “Why has it been around for so long?”
It boils down to substances most promoted in society are promoting cultural values. Those most penalized are against those values. One of Nixon’s or Reagan’s political advisors targeted specific marginalized groups of people by penalizing the drugs used most by them.
The black community was crack and heroine. Even to today, Jay-Z put out a music video about the war on drugs. He talked about the media promoted crack as a black problem, even though more white people than black people used it.
Legally, blacks got worst charges and indictments for selling crack cocaine because the people using crack were in poverty and in minority neighborhoods based on the expense. Same with the Far Left movement. They penalized psychedelics because LSD and psilocybin created a counterculture movement.
It was associated with it. It mostly boils down to culture. There are classifications of legality and substances are not based on science, more on how we want people to act and behave. Even altered states of consciousness like schizophrenia is demonized in our society, if you’re a shaman, you are seen as a gift.
Our society doesn’t make schizophrenia mark the archetype of sanity. We demonize and attempt to medicate it.
—
Original publication on www.cssdp.org.
—
—
—
Photo Credit: Getty Images
The post Evan Loster, Successful Events and the Inverted Pyramid of Drug Abuse appeared first on The Good Men Project.