PT 661 - Kenneth Tupper, PhD: Harm Reduction, Drug Education, Canadian Ayahuasca, and Psychedelic Public Health
Kenneth Tupper has spent decades working at the intersection of drug policy, public health, harm reduction, education, and psychedelics. In this episode, Joe Moore talks with Tupper about his early work with DanceSafe and drug checking, British Columbia's overdose crisis and experiment with decriminalization, and what the psychedelic field can learn from decades of harm reduction work and research. They also dig into Tupper's academic work on psychedelics and education, the idea of entheogens as "plant teachers," ayahuasca policy in Canada, problems with conventional drug education, and the limits of treating psychedelics exclusively as medicines. The conversation eventually widens into a bigger question: What does it actually mean to educate people well about drugs, altered states, and consciousness? Enjoy the show. Disclaimer: Intro and promotional audio in this episode were generated using synthetic voice technology. The interview itself is unaltered. Show Notes (Machine Generated) Kenneth Tupper's career has followed two parallel tracks: psychedelic scholarship and public health. Long before the current psychedelic resurgence, he was studying the idea of entheogens as tools for learning and examining how Indigenous traditions understand plants such as ayahuasca, peyote, and psilocybin as teachers. At the same time, work with DanceSafe and early pill testing drew him into harm reduction and eventually into more than two decades of public-health and drug-policy work in British Columbia. Tupper and Joe revisit the early history of drug checking and the logic behind harm reduction: if people are going to use drugs, providing accurate information and reducing preventable risks can save lives. That discussion leads into supervised consumption sites, pharmaceutical alternatives to illicit opioids, fentanyl, the toxic drug supply, naloxone, and the difficult reality of people surviving overdoses while sustaining hypoxic or anoxic brain injuries. They also examine British Columbia's experiment with drug decriminalization. Tupper describes the limits of decriminalizing possession without simultaneously addressing housing, healthcare, treatment options, the illicit supply, and other social conditions. The conversation contrasts British Columbia with Portugal and explores why drug policy interventions cannot easily be transplanted from one social and historical context into another. From there, the discussion turns directly toward psychedelics. Tupper argues that psychedelic public health should involve more than clinical treatment. Psychedelics may have roles in health promotion, community building, education, rites of passage, and helping people who are not necessarily diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. At the same time, wider access creates a need for better harm-reduction information, screening, preparation, and attention to set, setting, and the larger social environment in which psychedelic experiences occur. Drug education becomes one of the central themes of the episode. Tupper compares the history of drug education with sex education and argues that drug education has remained unusually tied to prescribed behavioral outcomes—particularly abstinence. Rather than simply telling young people what not to do, he asks what genuine education about drugs might look like when curiosity, experimentation, risk, pleasure, and real-world access are acknowledged. That question connects back to Tupper's longstanding work on what he calls entheogenic education. Drawing on educational thinkers including John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky, he discusses psychedelics as potential "cognitive tools" and considers how experiential education might offer models beyond conventional schooling. Joe and Tupper also discuss how AI may force an even deeper reconsideration of education when reading, writing, calculation, and information retrieval can increasingly be outsourced to machines. The final part of the conversation focuses heavily on ayahuasca. Tupper discusses his doctoral research into the Canadian government's handling of a Santo Daime religious exemption, the difficulty of fitting ceremonial entheogen use into modern drug-control frameworks, and tensions between religious, biomedical, Indigenous, and public-health ways of understanding ayahuasca. Joe and Tupper also examine consent and safety around ayahuasca admixtures. Traditional brews can vary significantly in composition, raising difficult questions about informed consent, standardization, cultural autonomy, and how Western participants can make informed decisions when entering practices developed in very different cultural contexts. The episode closes with a broader discussion of knowledge itself. Tupper argues for taking scientific methods seriously without assuming that Western science represents the only legitimate way of knowing. As psychedelics, Indigenous knowledge, AI, ecological crisis, and modern medicine increasingly intersect, he sees questions of epistemology—how we know what we know—as becoming increasingly important. In This Episode Kenneth Tupper's path from psychedelic scholarship into harm reduction and public health Why he adopted the term entheogen in his early academic work Jonathan Ott and the politics of psychedelic language The early days of DanceSafe and pill testing Why drug checking became a public-health intervention Supervised consumption sites and their limitations Fentanyl and British Columbia's toxic drug crisis Naloxone, overdose survival, and hypoxic brain injury Why addiction cannot be reduced to a simple pharmacological model British Columbia's experiment with drug decriminalization Why the Portuguese model cannot simply be copied elsewhere Psychedelics as one tool within a larger public-health system Psychedelic access in Canada compared with Colorado and Oregon The risks of over-medicalizing psychedelics Psychedelics for health promotion rather than only diagnosed illness Why traditional drug education has struggled Drug education versus sex education Abstinence, harm reduction, and genuine education John Dewey, experiential learning, and progressive education Lev Vygotsky and the idea of cognitive tools What AI may do to conventional schooling Psychedelics as educational tools and rites of passage Dennis McKenna's influence on Tupper's ayahuasca research Santo Daime and religious exemptions for ayahuasca in Canada Why ayahuasca does not fit neatly into conventional drug policy Consent and transparency around ayahuasca admixtures Safety, lineage, power, and sexual misconduct in ceremonial settings Indigenous and biomedical models of healing Science, epistemology, and multiple ways of knowing Tupper's experience with ibogaine Why he coined the term "intonicated" Links Kenneth Tupper Kenneth Tupper's website Kenneth Tupper – Research & Publications Publications Intonicated Podcast — Tupper's podcast on altered states, healing, learning, and wellbeing. Apple Podcasts Listen to Intonicated on Apple Podcasts DanceSafe DanceSafe Transcript Joe Moore (00:11): Everybody, welcome back to Psychedelics Today. Joe Moore here, joined by Kenneth Tupper. How are you doing today? Kenneth Tupper (00:17): Great. Nice to be here. Thanks, Joe. Joe Moore (00:19): Absolutely. So you're joining us today from the glorious Vancouver Island, is that right? Kenneth Tupper (00:25): Correct. Victoria, British Columbia, traditional territories of the Songhees, Esquimalt, and Songhees First Nations. Joe Moore (00:33): Gorgeous. Thank you. And I'm... I'm going to try to introduce you a little bit here, but we'll have you kind of tee yourself up a bit. But we met at the Psychedelic Safety Institute Summit at UC Berkeley. Stacey Wallen helped put that together with a few others. It was a pretty big event. And maybe we can chat about this later, but it was the first ever event I went to that felt like AI was a backbone component to the event, which was fascinating. I don't, you know, at times uncomfortable, but also like, you know, I was respecting just how skillfully it was employed. But let's talk about you. You've got a long career in harm reduction. You've been able to volunteer not only with DanceSafe, but many other harm reduction groups. And then you spent some time in the British Columbian government doing harm reduction work. Is that right? Kenneth Tupper (01:28): Over twenty years, yep. Joe Moore (01:31): That's a bit. So thanks for all that hard work. How do you like to describe your career, your position in the ecosystem here? Kenneth Tupper (01:42): So predating my public health career was an academic interest in psychedelics, or the term that I used originally was entheogen. And not in the health or healing space, but education. I was interested in advancing some understanding of the metaphor of plant teachers in traditional indigenous uses of plants like ayahuasca, peyote, or psilocybin mushrooms. And then from that got into accidentally harm reduction. I didn't even know the term at the time, but, uh, working with dance safe, running a dance safe chapter, uh, and getting involved in pill testing. And then through that, through connections, got into public health, um, and continued to sort of advance the academic work that I was doing on the side, but it was sort of two parallel trajectories, but both in the area of sort of drug policy. So my PhD, uh, ended up being on ayahuasca and the sort of public policy implications of its emergence of the Amazon. But my work in government was in the harm reduction space, prevention writ large, but prevention of what? This is one of the questions I asked, you know, preventing harms or preventing use or preventing quote abuse, a term that I find problematic for a number of reasons. And yeah, and then also got into some clinical related work like opiate agonist treatment, methadone, which back in the day was kind of debated whether it's more of a treatment or a harm reduction intervention. Some people fell on one side or the other. In some ways it's both. Yeah, so that kind of defines, and then the last ten years working primarily on the toxic drug crisis or opioid overdose crisis here in British Columbia, which is one of the hardest hit provinces in Canada. And then still sort of keeping my toe in the world of psychedelics in and out, more out for the past number of years for a variety of more personal reasons, but coming back in and that Psychedelic Safety Institute Summit was part of that. And yeah, that's me in a nutshell. Joe Moore (03:50): So I have a confession i'll make on this show for the first time ever i am just now for the first time reading jonathan ott's pharmacotheon and i'm a bit embarrassed um that i'm just getting around to it now because his analysis uh commentary is just writing is so helpful and good and he he uh was one of the team that helped push this word and theogen And I'm just, right before this, I was working through his description of, you know, why entheogen as a term. I find it interesting. And I don't know, I just, anything that smells a little religious, I push back from, as if psyche doesn't have those religious connotations anyway. But, you know, in our strange times, I kind of use the psychedelic term as kind of like, in a way, to just be loud and proud about it, kind of leveraging gay rights movement kind of logic a bit. But I don't know, and sorry to go down something so banal as defining why you might wanna use a term like entheogen, but could you talk about that a little bit? Kenneth Tupper (05:07): Absolutely. And, you know, I could talk all afternoon about this. Language is sort of the world in which I swam academically. Critical discourse analysis was my sort of methodology for looking at public policy and the sort of way that language is invested with power overtly in public policy and law. of course there's micro powers and sort of everyday everyday language and discourse but for me personally the term entheogen was more sort of politically convenient in advancing an interest in this topic in through university structures in the late nineties early two thousands when the word psychedelic i mean being in the closet was the safe place to be at the time uh being more out was was sort of risky uh endeavor in terms of you know getting academic respectability um and i i found the term entheogen very helpful. So I'd come across it and reading Jonathan Ott's work and others at the time. I found it really helpful for framing traditional indigenous uses of plants versus the more sort of white powder application of a biomedical paradigm or psychotherapeutic paradigm. And I still actually find it a helpful heuristic of distinguishing entheogenic healing from psychedelic medicine with those sort of broad separations. Of course, there's lots of intersections and hybridities across them as well. And in some ways, you know, it's resonant of the failure of modern Western medicine to recognize the spiritual dimension in healing and health, something that I would argue in many most traditional indigenous cultures is seen to be, you know, synonymous, that those two concepts are completely intertwined, that the shaman functions both as a priest and And they've got the power of healing medicine man, as well as that spiritual intersection. So for me personally, that was why I ran with it. And there's a nice assonance with entheogenic education. Joe Moore (07:13): Well, at a later date, I'd have to dig in more on this. But I want to focus on this interesting harm reduction thread. it's cool it's really important to me as well um i jokingly almost renamed the show drug war today a few times like i just it's all i really wanted to talk about um for a lot of reasons uh so back in the day you called it pill checking like it wasn't drug testing testing pill testing that's interesting and it was just like ravers or was it all sorts of people that you were supporting Kenneth Tupper (07:51): The places we were doing it was at raves as they were called you know big electronic dance parties and my understanding is that's kind of the well there was deeper origin i think back in the early seventies there was some what we'd call drug checking happening in places like uh hate ashbury um free clinic and so there's some very sort of early moves towards it but it really kind of got lost in the shuffle for for many years and sort of the reagan era war on drugs but then With the rise of MDMA use or ecstasy use in the nineties and the illicit market that had no quality control or safety built into it, pill testing was obviously a way to discern whether or not you had actual MDMA in the so-called ecstasy pill that you bought. And for me, it was just a kind of no-brainer thing to do. Because in British Columbia, at least at that time, there was fake pills circulating, PMMA, paramethoxy methamphetamine, and others, sometimes just methamphetamine, things that were either cut in or completely sold as replacements for. But the idea that Offering people a way to learn what they think they've got was just an obvious good thing to do. But I found myself on the wrong side of law enforcement's perspective on that. They threatened to shut us down regularly and got into media battles about And I didn't even know what the term harm reduction was at the time. But it was through that work that I got introduced to people who were doing HIV prevention and trying to open Vancouver's first supervised injection site back in the early two thousands. And that was sort of my pathway into the world of public health. Joe Moore (09:32): So were you involved with any of the American DanceSafe folks at that point? Kenneth Tupper (09:37): Yeah, we were kind of an affiliate. So Emmanuel Sverios, I think was leading things and sort of we're in touch sort of regularly, but in order that the cards, the information cards that were given out and sort of loosely followed the protocols and procedures that were set out by an American, the OG DanceSafe. But we were somewhat autonomous as well and obviously worked in our local ecosystem. Joe Moore (10:01): That's super interesting. Never really thought about that would have operated in the early days and then um this supervised injection site thing i find fascinating i think dr carl hart did a really good job in his books kind of popularizing the concept and somewhat normalizing the concept where i recall some of the swiss cases where people were able to maintain a habit for effectively many decades without any real health consequences and or their family noticing And that's because they had clean supplies. They were able to do that. Kenneth Tupper (10:40): Well, actually, the critique I have of supervised injection sites is they actually don't touch the supply side of things. Joe Moore (10:47): I think this one does, but I think in Canadian markets. But you might know better. Kenneth Tupper (10:53): Yeah, so as it was set up, the people who used it had to procure illicitly off-site on the street market and then come in and use under medical supervision. So they could get sterile syringes, have an overdose responded to, have other wound care. I mean, there's a fully sort of wraparound healthcare and social service connection built into the site, which was part of the argument for putting it in place, was giving people a point of access instead of puddle water in the back alley. They're using sterile syringes under nurses' supervision with lots of connections and a lot of effectiveness in terms of what it was set out to do. But in terms of still relying on the illicit supply, it didn't do as much as it could have done if they had offered people a pure pharmaceutical product of a known quantity, which is what was missing from that. But you're right, I think some of the European models provided heroin prescription or diacetylmorphine Joe Moore (11:49): Right. And I, you just kind of rattled my world puddle water. I never really kind of went that far, but I totally understand. It's probably factual. Kenneth Tupper (12:00): No, that's exactly what was happening. Joe Moore (12:02): My God. So yeah, this is, this is the not quite far part, far enough part that I think we all kind of want to address in psychedelia because it's, you know, it's complicated if you're, being sold what you think is LSD and you're buying something like two five I n bomb that can just harm you, kill you. And, you know, the experience might be fine the first ten times. But there's, yeah, there's just really difficult math and data behind this. Kenneth Tupper (12:35): Well, let me sort of jump on that tangent for a second. So one of the realizations that I came to over the last decade with the toxic drug crisis, the opioid overdose crisis, was the sort of failure, the blind spot in the history of public health to recognize one of the most important interventions that was advanced over the last two hundred years, which is really all modern public health has been going since the mid-nineteenth century. And you know, we can count on one hand the number of big top five global interventions, immunization and vaccinations, clean drinking water, hand washing. But another key one that we've forgotten is the passage of pure food and rugs legislation. So prior to the eighteen eighties to nineteen twenties, that was a period of a couple of decades where that form of legislation got put in place around you know developed world prior to that there was no quality control or consumer safety standards you took your life in your hands when you bought a sandwich on the street or a drink at the bar and there was a public health sort of progressivist movement at that time to ensure that people who are selling things foods beverages and patent medicines that was before a pharmaceutical industry got sort of standardized were selling what they said they were selling. And prior to that, there was a lot of risk involved in just taking, buying anything and consuming it. So these Pure Food and Drugs Acts came in place. I think in the U.S. it was like—[captioning error in source]. That's a whole separate, let's put that in a pin for a second. But the sort of consumer safety logic got applied across the entire consumer marketplace throughout the twentieth century. So children's toys, automobiles, hang gliding equipment, snowboarding helmets, all of these things allow you to engage in sometimes very risky activities. But insofar as you're a consumer in the marketplace, you're protected by these quality control measures. There's one area that we've left completely out of that logic. And it was the psychoactive substances used for non-medical purposes. And I describe it as a fascist logic of we are going to allow people to die preventable deaths to serve as a lesson to others not to engage in morally objectionable behavior. And it's just it's unconscionable when you think about it from that perspective. So we learned the lesson with alcohol. There was an attempt, obviously, federally, most famously in the US. But here in Canada, we had prohibition of alcohol in every province. It was never done federally except Quebec. But it was quickly realized to be a colossal failure. So here in British Columbia, we had prohibition for four years from nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty one. and then repealed it. And actually, a lot of British Columbians made a lot of money selling alcohol to the US before you guys repealed. But we didn't learn the lesson and apply it to opium. And there's a direct connection between opium to carfentanil and whatever's coming next, the novel opioids that are being cooked up in research chemist labs. So the cat and mouse game in the illicit market is always going to be, one by the mouse, right? They're innovative, and especially now with AI and combinatorial chemistry, the kinds of proliferation of new psychoactive substances on the horizon is frightening. So the idea that we're going to prohibit and criminalize our way out of these public health issues is, I think, deeply mistaken. Joe Moore (16:02): Yeah, I remember Leonard Picard telling me about predicting, in a way, in a paper, the fentanyl crisis. We chatted about it again a couple years ago in the show, and he talked about this kind of proliferation of technology and this wave of molecules that's coming. It's nothing to trifle with. In BC, when you were part of the government, were you all kind of looking forward to this at all, in a way predicting it or planning? Kenneth Tupper (16:41): No, certainly wasn't sort of on my radar. I think law enforcement folks were onto it sooner because they were picking up, you know, precursors and that sort of thing in large quantities. I remember fentanyl kind of coming on my radar in about twenty twelve when it started showing up in the postmortem toxicology reports by our coroner service. And again, it had been reported in small scale by police and seizures, but the fact that it was sort of emerging in sort of street level use and that people were dying from it was how it really first emerged in consciousness. And there was a kind of uptick in overdose deaths, again, at the time attributed to heroin, heroin overdose deaths. we realized over not too long was that heroin was being supplanted by fentanyl. And so when there was a public health emergency declared in twenty sixteen here in B.C. by our chief medical health officer, and that's when a lot of resources were mobilized to try to deal with it. But by that time, it was already kind of proliferating across North America. I think it was on the radar in the United States by that time. Part of it attributable to overprescribing of opioids, certainly there was a concern that there was a lot of people who'd gotten a taste of opioids through pain management offerings that were probably not now in retrospect considered to be best practice in how to help people who are navigating chronic low back pain or something like that. Because there's a phenomenon called hyperalgesia where people actually get exacerbated pain from regular use of opioids but the fact that fentanyl was now emerging into the illicit heroin supply was tragically only discerned by people's deaths and that's where i was able to kind of resurrect the idea of pill testing or it wasn't called again pill testing was the idea i first called it drug testing but Lots of folks pointed out that that also refers to hair samples being pulled to detect illicit drug use by parents and their teens or something. So we called it drug checking. That's the preferred term. Joe Moore (18:42): Cool. Well, that's really, really helpful and interesting. I wonder what organizations are going to start looking at that. It is a grave, I think... moral issue and national security issue honestly um leonard's point was what if some of these new drugs just transcend people's ability to fight addiction you know just kind of like doing the sci-fi thing with addiction um to to a degree and i like a kind of pleasure machine function of like so so incapacitating and hard-hitting that you just can't there's no effective treatments Kenneth Tupper (19:26): Right. Joe Moore (19:26): Like why we think that about methamphetamines. But what if we were able to do like twenty X Kenneth Tupper (19:33): I have no doubt it's coming and I share Leonard's concern that that's probably on the not too distant horizon. Although, you know, the idea of addiction itself is complicated in terms of, you know, what leads to chronic dependent patterns of use of any substance or not even just substances, behaviors as well. It's a sort of complex mix of bio, psycho, social, spiritual, environmental, milieu of things that really sort of defies some of the simplistic attempts to medicalize, which is why I would argue modern medicine hasn't been that effective at treating addiction. In fact, some of the best treatments are simple substitutions, right? So nicotine replacement therapy for tobacco or methadone for opioids, although I think we found methadone isn't quite as effective as it used to be now that fentanyl and other novel opioid analogs are sort of stronger than good old-fashioned heroin or diacetylmorphine Joe Moore (20:31): So for a psychedelic audience that's not really sure how this is related to psychedelics can you can you give us um a sort of rundown from your perspective on how it is Kenneth Tupper (20:43): So coming from a broad public, and that's sort of my angle in my interest in psychedelics is in that kind of public health intersection, or at least it's kind of these two parallel paths are emergent now on my horizon. One is the basic harm reduction of people who are using as, you know, information ecosystems continue to kind of democratize people learn about these things through non sort of non-standardized channels of mainstream media, there's a lot of excitement and rightly so. People start sharing stories of healing, of benefit. But it leads to a lot of use that might be risky or ways that people could harness these tools, and I'll use that metaphor sort of advisedly, with greater respect if they're aware that there's risks associated with it, not just in the supply side, but also in the sort of way that setting matrix, an important addition to that. I think Betty Eisner came up with that additional term. So again, the broader environment in which one's situated. So that's one side of it. And then the other is, I would argue, a health promotion side of looking at being... I don't think we need to necessarily reserve these substances just to people who have a diagnosed illness, that there's ways to be better than well or to get ahead of trajectories of things like metabolic disease or incipient mental health issues like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, where earlier upstream intervention is probably warranted. And again, there's lots of opportunity that these can be studied and hopefully deployed for not letting things get to the point of crisis in someone's life, but then they need to seek help for. Joe Moore (22:28): Right. Kenneth Tupper (22:34): That's the psychedelic safety summit was i think primarily focused on that harm reduction side of the first part um but there was some discussion also yeah the ways to look at how these and one of my interests has always been looking at traditional indigenous uses because we don't need to reinvent the wheel you know these tools again have been used for thousands of years there's ways to you know use them for community integration intergenerational education knowledge sharing, community bonding, social cohesion. It's such a thing that's so needed today, could be really, really helpful for dealing with some of the malaises of modernity that we're all experiencing. Joe Moore (23:18): Yeah. So let's see, because you've been inside public health, I'm curious about this kind of somewhat clinical rollout right now of psychedelics in places like colorado and oregon um i know there's some interesting proliferation of businesses in british columbia though i think they're moving to mexico in real time for probably assorted reasons but what um what kind of public health things um do are folks trying to be mindful of um when looking at this kind of a rollout. Kenneth Tupper (24:04): So the clinical rollout of psychedelics in Canada is actually, I would say, behind what's happening in places like Colorado, Oregon. I understand New Mexico is coming online. There's, I think, advancements that have happened in terms of broader public offerings that aren't quite in place here in Canada. We have, in terms of legal access, primarily ketamine because it's an off-label use of an already approved medication. There's clinical trials happening in a number of internationally, a number of the big players are funding clinical trials. So there's some of that access. There's quite a bit of underground use, but again, that's sort of outside the mainstream medical system. There's also online dispensaries or actually some even in-store dispensaries that are offering things like mushrooms and five MEO DMT vape pens and other things that are to varying degrees, offering harm reduction advice and information for their clients. So it's a real kind of plethora of ways to access. And again, a lot of interest, I think, both on the clinician side and on the potential patient side. But the legitimate avenues are still relatively few and far between, which is why there's such a thing as medical tourism or psychedelic tourism, people heading to South America, Central America for ceremonies of various sorts. Ibogaine clinics, of course, are a big thing. in Mexico, and including one I personally was able to visit last year that was co-founded by a couple of Canadians, Ambio Life Sciences. Shout out to Jonathan and Trevor, who've done some amazing work on building, I think, somewhat respectable and safe in terms of the medical oversight offering. But I know there's a number of other clinics that are trying to do that, and probably lots more that... aren't quite holding up to the sort of degrees of standard that you'd want to have in place. So for that public health question, I think that's, you know, it's incumbent on all of us to think about a sort of health system stewardship lens, or at least that's the phrase that I use set up by the World Health Organization. But what are all the sort of pieces that need to be covered off in terms of planning and delivering for this to reach a broad scale? There's a big lag time between when something becomes an evidence-based treatment, and this is true for all kinds of medical interventions, a big lag time between when it is recognized as best practice and probably the best treatment available and when it actually reaches mainstream penetration of the health system. It's decades. I think the average I've heard is seventeen years. So there's ways to expedite that and see how to advance rollout with safety and efficacy always a primary consideration, but also recognizing there's things like health equity issues, who's got access, who doesn't have access, and for what reasons. And of course, that's, again, true of the broader medical system. So I know you've talked a lot to folks about these kinds of issues on psychedelics today. Joe Moore (27:07): Yeah, it's... endlessly complicated sometimes it feels really simple but like the actual execution is really difficult so let's see are you anticipating any sort of pushback in Canada around psychedelics perhaps Kenneth Tupper (27:36): I think we're probably slow walking at this pace relative to the fast tracking that we're seeing in the US and might partly be in reaction to the fast tracking that's happening in the US. I think the associations of the administration in Washington pushing forward in a whole bunch of different directions might actually cause our... folks in Ottawa to double-cross every T, triple-dot every I, just to ensure that they're not caught up in the hype and excitement of what might be fast and furious. So it's hard to say. I'm not privy to any particular discussions or decisions that are happening at that level right now. It wouldn't surprise me if there's going to be a sort of, let's go slowly and cautiously. But it seems to all be moving forward. I think there's a sort of tipping point that was crossed probably a few years ago in terms of recognition that these, we threw the baby out with the bathwater back in the late sixties, early seventies. And just a reminder to Canadian listeners and anyone else is that psychedelics were pioneered in Canada. Psychedelic medicine, the offering of LSD as treatment for alcoholism was pioneered in Saskatchewan. In fact, the word psychedelic itself was coined in Saskatchewan by Humphrey Osmond, a British psychiatrist who was recruited there in the nineteen fifties. So we've got this kind of long patriotic history of doing this kind of work, but it got caught up in the, you know, nineteen sixties counterculture. uh non-medical use scared a lot of folks north and south of the border as well as the you know imposition of randomized control trials and there were some methodological challenges in the history of science that led to uh restrictions on psychedelic research or folks who are trying to push that forward really resisted the rct design because of the you know challenges with placebo that are still sort of a confounder today but we don't talk about as much um Joe Moore (29:36): Yeah, I find that funny that we're still dealing with the same issue. I wonder. I hope some people have some good ideas. Kenneth Tupper (29:45): I think there's some bright minds who are at work trying to navigate those complexities in terms of research design. And ultimately, if they can persuade the regulatory authorities that they've managed to show efficacy in a way that allows it to be brought forward, then we can see at least begin to scale and do some sort of phase four pharmacovigilance. pharmacovigilance research. Once something's approved, you can continue to do more research and see where things can be tweaked or refined. So I'm hopeful that that's moving forward. Also, trepidatious of the kind of large pharmaceutical industry tentacles that are obviously looking not necessarily to maximize health and wellness for the population, but to maximize benefits for shareholders. So there's also a difficult circle to square in that regard. But I'm confident there's a big need and a big playing field. Lots of folks can be involved and hopefully see all sort of ships moving forward. That's not too many metaphors mixed. Joe Moore (30:51): So British Columbia famously had really great decriminalization laws, which allowed for, I think, harm reduction work to be done at a level I hadn't really seen elsewhere in the world. And can you talk about that decriminalization and how perhaps it helped and if there has been a shift to that decriminalization legal status in British Columbia? Kenneth Tupper (31:18): Yeah, I can't get into the details as part of the decriminalization core planning table when it got implemented. So I won't go into the details other than to say as part of the toxic drug crisis response, there was a willingness to try new things. And it was and that was one that was certainly being called for its implementation, I think, was challenging in the milieu of COVID-Nineteen emerging. We had two public health crises simultaneously. We had the pre-existing opioid overdose epidemic and then COVID-Nineteen came on top. So there was a lot of challenges with respect to the most vulnerable and marginalized people who use drugs and social distancing and all those kinds of things. And also there was, I think, an under-recognized element of almost a double edged sword of harm reduction in terms of getting naloxone out there broadly, supervised consumption sites, et cetera, did a great job of keeping people alive, but not necessarily resuscitation in this sort of vital few minutes post overdose that would prevent an anoxic or hypoxic brain injury. So that's when somebody goes down from an opioid overdose, they've stopped breathing for seconds or minutes or longer than that, that is death, right? That's what the ultimate death is. People dying from anoxia. But if you get naloxone and are revived, you may be suffering long-term cognitive impairment from an anoxic or hypoxic brain injury. And that's irreversible damage. I mean, I'm not aware of any sort of interventions that can help when it's a significant or severe injury like that. And sometimes it's multiple survived overdoses that stack on top of each other. Of course, on top of potentially pre-existing mental health issues, maybe pre-existing congenital brain injuries like FASD, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or other traumatic brain injuries. People might have had concussions and often ongoing active addiction. So you've got this kind of clinical mix of presentation that when an anoxic brain injury gets added, it becomes really, really challenging. So coming back to your question about decriminalization, what we saw in the rollout of decriminalization simultaneously was a sort of increase in public disorder, public nuisance. And I know you guys see it in the streets of places like San Francisco, LA. The same kind of thing appeared here. And it led to a sort of backlash of a political shift. So decrim, it was a sort of federally exempted research project that basically didn't get continued. So it's kind of gone back to status quo with varying degrees of discretion by individual law enforcement officers as to whether they decide to intervene. And it was always just sort of simple possession charges that were decriminalized. So it didn't do anything to deal with the supply chain itself. It was personal possession. And it was only certain drugs and up to a certain amount. So cocaine, methamphetamine, opioids, up to I think two and a half grams. It was an inclusive experiment, I would say. It was difficult to know whether the right mix of other interventions that could have helped people navigate trajectories of health and wellness might have been simultaneously in place. A lot of people point to Portugal and the Portuguese model of decrim that I think rightly so say wasn't put in place fully here in British Columbia. The kinds of other elements of what was done in Portugal didn't get implemented in terms of a real strong housing first, a lot of medical and other health supports that were kind of absent in what we did. Joe Moore (35:07): Can you talk about why perhaps Portugal was successful? Kenneth Tupper (35:12): I mean, I'm not an expert on this. I'm sure you've got lots of other folks who could tell you much more. But my understanding is it was just a different time and place. Street opioid use was a relatively small. Heroin or diacetylmorphine was the opioid of choice, or maybe diverted methadone, but not a huge kind of issue that we saw here in terms of fentanyl use and the proliferation of fentanyl in the heroin supply. That really sort of was a different beast, what we were dealing with. And again, just some of the social services, health services that were available and put in place in the Portuguese sort of, I think there was a really whole of government approach that took it very seriously. And they had, was it called dissuasion panels, other kind of alternative justice approaches that we kind of tried to replicate. We have drug courts here in BC that are obviously copied from the US. I think many things and broadly the addiction or drug use field help some people some of the time. Some people benefit from AA, twelve step models and all power to them, that's great. I would never want to say don't try that if it's a path for somebody, but we know that it doesn't help a lot of people a lot of the time and we need lots of different modalities. I would say the same thing is true with methadone or opioid agonist treatments. Some people respond really well. They're life-saving and vital and that's great, but there's other people who don't respond. And so it's always looking for the non-responders or for people for whom that path isn't necessarily working, what can we offer them instead? This is where I see psychedelics as another tool in the toolbox that maybe is really going to be helpful. And I particularly think of Ibogaine as something that could potentially deal with both an opioid addiction and a brain injury simultaneously, given the research that we've seen on TBI or traumatic brain injury, as well as what we know about opioid addiction treatment with ibuprofen. It's a very promising medicine with some risks, obviously, that need to be managed and studied better. Joe Moore (37:24): So let's see. Have we missed anything on the kind of BC government side yet that might be important to cover? Kenneth Tupper (37:36): Well, another area that it's not so much BC government, it's actually another area of my academic research. When I started my PhD, it wasn't actually to do ayahuasca research originally. It was to do drug education research. I was sort of fascinated by the question of what do we teach kids in schools about drugs? uh a question that i don't think has really been adequately answered yet you know and when i started uh doing this this sort of subject in terms of my academic research it was knowing that the just say no approach their program were kind of discredited in terms of the outcomes that were claimed certainly weren't realized in academic research and studies. In fact, some critiques saying that it might actually do more harm than good. But what to do instead, is it just say yes, just say maybe, just say safely, just say with harm reduction, is not a clear-cut, you know, to me, it's not a clear-cut path forward. And, you know, one of the questions I still have is, and I've got... girls, step-daughters, they're thirteen and a half and it's becoming real in terms of what they're exposed to in the school environment. But I think there's a lot to learn from sex education and I wrote a paper looking at the history of sex education and drug education in parallel over the last hundred and fifty years since public schooling became an institution both in the US and Canada going back to the nineteenth century and how drug education, the blueprint for it really emerged in the eighteen eighties with Women's Christian Temperance Union delivering what they called scientific temperance instruction, and they very craftily used the word scientific to appeal to parents and administrators. But it really was the blueprint for what's still done today. All use is abuse. There's no such thing as responsible use. Use inevitably leads on the slippery slope to either prison or death, scare tactic type approaches. They were focused primarily on alcohol, but they also applied it to opium. And there really wasn't much innovation. There has been a bit, I think. But when you look at sex education, It actually started later. It was very difficult to get sex education in schools. It was only after World War I with soldiers returning from Europe and venereal disease and the sexually transmitted infections in the roaring twenties became a concern was when sex education really got sort of embraced. Although at the time it was really focused on anti-premarital sex, heterosexual sex and anti-masturbation. And that was a huge, huge sort of push for early sex education. And again, we forget how big of an issue masturbation was just a hundred years ago or a hundred and fifty years ago. Believed to be a major cause of both mental and physical illness. So that was a big impetus for moving it forward. But then, you know, post-birth control and the swinging sixties, there was a real shift, not everywhere, there's still conservative religious communities that push back on it, but a shift in sex education to a much more progressive approach. And then with HIV coming in the nineteen eighties, I think that's really locked in an understanding that there's ways to do sex education that are really vital for protecting people. But we haven't seen that shift with drug education. It's been much more challenging. But I describe them both as moral purity issues in the classroom. You know, there are two topics that just don't really fit into school curricula in the way that... And sorry, I'm just going to go on another tangent. If you look at the history of education and pedagogy as a sort of philosophy of education in the nineteenth century, it was a Victorian era sort of rote memorization. Again, the beginnings of public schooling, desks in rows regimented by bells. regurgitate facts that are learned out of textbooks. And there was a big push against that in the early twentieth century with people like John Dewey and other progressive education reformers who talked about, we need experiential education, we need to stimulate natural curiosity. Instead of reading about a tree and a leaf in a book, we need to get kids out in the field and touching real trees and leaves and then build on that to scaffold their education from there on. And that works great across the entire curriculum, arts, sciences, humanities. The two topics it doesn't work so well for where we don't really want to stimulate natural curiosity and get hands dirty and feet wet is sex and drugs. In fact, it's just the opposite. What we ascribe for success in those two topics is abstinence, prescribed behavioral outcomes that really isn't education anymore. It's frankly indoctrination. And so it's been a challenge. And parents expect schools to do something. you know, challenged teachers, often uncomfortable delivering those topics, so they'll outsource to a nurse or a police officer to come in and, you know, do the talk. But, you know, kids, and especially now, it was challenging, you know, fifty years ago, but, you know, in the post-Internet age, and now with AI, who knows where it's all going, but, you know, you can download hardcore porn or learn how to cook crystal meth with the click of a mouse. It's a challenge. Joe Moore (43:01): Right. And yeah, what is to be done in the face of that? I was on stage recently in Aspen at the Aspen Psychedelic Symposium with a professor from Stanford who focuses on drug education research. And I'll pull her name up in just a moment here. But it was really impressive that she had data. Rana Hashemi? That could be it. I think she's at Stanford. She's one of the leading young voices in drug education and harm reduction. That could be her. Pull up her photo here. I like how the CV comes up first. But I think this is probably her. No, she's a PhD candidate. No, this is like a full professor at Stanford, like a very impressive researcher. I'll have the name in a moment. It's on the end. aspen uh the aspen public radio website but it was it was just really cool to hear how developed the um data has become on drug education and from a reputable source who's kind of on this um uh educate first over abstinence like let's actually get you really knowledgeable so you can make decisions it's kind of like respecting miners as like a real thinking people, as opposed to trying to lead with lying. Kenneth Tupper (44:36): Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's being, you know, respecting autonomy, respecting, but again, you know, information is critical, but not necessarily sufficient in terms of what we know, again, about harms and addiction and other things is it's often to do with trauma, environment, ones raised in things that are extraneous, completely outside of school systems control, which is, again, one of the challenges for doing drug addiction. How do you do something universal for all kids when, you know, what works well in like the D.A.R.E. program, it works great for the kids who come to the front of the class and brought the apple for the teacher that day, you know, all squeaky clean, but the kids at the back of the class or didn't come to class that day, didn't have breakfast, you know, we need something different. Joe Moore (45:18): Yeah, so I'm going to share my screen here, but it's Bonnie Halpern Felsher. Oh, cool. Okay. And definitely somebody worth following, and you can actually catch her recording. We had a person who grew up in Aspen, is still quite young, on stage with us, Ronan. A person who I think lost their child, Trina, here. and I was able to moderate this one. And I find it interesting that I was included being childless, but I do drug education. So perhaps that was enough. But it was a really great. Kenneth Tupper (45:59): We all have an interest in the future generations, whether we have offspring directly or not. We're all going to be looking to young people to be leaders of tomorrow. So hopefully educating well is something we get passionate about. Joe Moore (46:16): Yeah, and it was great to be involved in that. I was heartened by the audience's response. Ronan, who was on stage, a younger guy with us, he said some really, really great stuff about how he navigated being in such a drug-rich environment like Aspen. And not just drug-rich, but everything's available. You could be doing plenty of LSD if that was your thing. But, you know, I think he had a good encounter early enough that kind of, I don't want to say scared straight because that's kind of a stupid term, but, you know, you can get rattled with psychedelics and you might want to change your behavior, right? Kenneth Tupper (47:03): Again, this is where I look to, you know, indigenous traditions as, you know, a form of intergenerational education and where elders model responsible youth lead ceremonial type practices that allow for rites of passage that frankly our societies are mostly lacking in terms of that kind of liminal experience in older adolescents, young adults. One of the jokes I make is that kids come into kindergarten full of wonder and awe and curiosity about the world. And if they have any of that left by twelfth grade, it's usually despite their schooling, not because of it. And that's where I think, again, a sort of circumspect, carefully moderated, led opportunity for psychedelics could, for many people, be really helpful in terms of rekindling that sense of meaning, purpose, wonder, awe. elements of what's important for for human flourishing Joe Moore (48:01): Yeah um it's perhaps out of out of your scope but i'm sure you've thought about like what what would need to shift in the contemporary education paradigm in order to like help people stay a little bit more creative or interested Kenneth Tupper (48:20): I distinguish between education and schooling. Those are two different concepts. So education is a much broader, more philosophical type of how do we raise young people into adults in a whole variety of different ways. Schooling is a much more narrow, again, construct that was part of the broader apparatus of things like hospitals, mental institutions, et cetera, put in place in the nineteenth century. So I don't see psychedelics necessarily fitting into the school system as we've currently got it. But as a broader understanding of education, I was challenged with this question when I was actually working on my master's thesis, where I was first developing these ideas around entheogenic education. One of my professors was Dr. Bruce Alexander. Shout out. He was a psychology professor who is most famous for the Rat Park studies that he did in the So he was on my master's committee and he was, I'd say, the most enthusiastic or he was keen to, as he said, okay, you've persuaded me on the idea. How do you do it? What's the implementation pathway here? And that was a challenge because I hadn't really thought, I was more sort of trying to frame a theoretical foundation for even discussing the topic. But sort of came to the idea and conversation with a friend of the idea of, and he coined this phrase, instead of outward bound, something like inward bound, which would be, an experiential education program like Outward Bound, where maybe it's, you know, a cohort of young people with some caring adults that do something, you know, a few days in nature, but it culminates with, you know, a peyote ceremony, ayahuasca ceremony, or psilocybin, you know, some sort of structured psychedelic experience that could, again, you probably, you would need careful screening and selection. It's maybe not forever. And just this Outward Bound, is not for everybody. Some people for whom maybe that's not an appropriate program. And there's risk involved. I wouldn't deny it. Same thing with Outward Bound. There's been deaths of both leaders and participants in Outward Bound programs, but seen overall to be a broadly really sort of helpful way of conceptualizing your alternative approach to education that for many people, schools don't just kind of fit the bill. Joe Moore (50:27): Yeah, that would be really interesting. And just more enrichment and it's hard, you know, we're stretched thin everywhere with budgets, but is developing this next level of genius or next generation of genius creatives. Kenneth Tupper (50:44): Well, I think it's the biggest challenge is actually the advent of AI. And like, you know, when I was young, learning long division seemed kind of pointless when you had pocket calculators. But now it's the entire, you know, reading, writing, and arithmetic is all outsourced to AI. What do we do with education? K through PhD, like the entire elementary, secondary, post-secondary ways of doing things are... dissolving in front of our eyes. And I know people that I talk to in universities and in school, like the mainstream public school systems are struggling. And I don't have the answer other than I think it's going to be a lot about social emotional development, socialization, just getting kids off screens for several hours a day is probably going to be an important piece of what it means to be educated in the future. Joe Moore (51:30): Right. Kenneth Tupper (51:33): I used as a foundation for my academic work a Soviet psychologist who is mostly not known about in the twentieth century. He was working in the nineteen tens, nineteen twenties in the Soviet Union named Lev Vygotsky. I think his work only got translated into English in the nineteen sixties but he kind of became big in education circles in the seventies and eighties and I picked up on his ideas and he developed a kind of alternative understanding of childhood development different from Piaget and Skinner and some of these other behavioral psychologists and child development experts that were dominant throughout the twentieth century in the West. He argued that becoming educated and developing is becoming versatile with cognitive tools. And that's the term that I found really, really helpful. And he talked about literacy, reading, writing, numeracy, skill, those types of things as becoming performative with cognitive tools, that learning to read and write is learning how to use a cognitive tool. And literacy is not a natural thing to learn learning a language is a natural thing to learn spoken and you know we've spoken languages for hundreds nobody knows how long a hundred thousand years plus but literacy has only been around for like five thousand years there's lots of ways that it can go wrong in terms of education and So that idea of cognitive tool I found really helpful to think about how to frame psychedelics or entheogens as ways to harness a particular kind of tool that has been respected and understood in other cultural traditions but lost from our own. and think about how to integrate those for potentially educational purposes as well as obviously healing purposes and see that obviously is a important component as well but to catalyze you know again creativity wonder awe sense of connectedness and it's partly the not just the experience but the stories that are told about the experience so again in many indigenous traditions you're taught you're told stories about meeting your ancestor spirits and connecting with the you know animistic forest spirits that will happen for you when you have the opportunity to use uh you know the medicine of one's community at the appropriate time and age and so the growing up with that kind of respect and anticipation is a kind of placebo enhancer for when the opportunity finally comes to have those experiences and you're already well set and prepared for it. In contrast, you know, I think about my own introduction to these substances as a teenager, it's almost the reverse. And in fact, it's surprising how few people are harmed given the nocebo, the opposite of placebo is the nocebo effect of like, you know, anticipating something negative is going to happen, given all the kind of scare stories about LSD and, you know, in the seventies and eighties, people jumping out of windows or going blind from staring at the sun. The fact that people had primarily positive experiences is almost surprising given the stories that we were told as kids. And that's sort of in retrospect how I look at my own sort of introduction to these things as playing with really powerful tools like they were toys because I had no cultural context for understanding them as tools. You know, it was really just, you know, let's drop acid and look at the pretty colors and laugh. But sort of for me, it was like sensing this kind of cosmological awareness of something deeper that was... catalyzed in a way that was unexpected, but tremendously rewarding and valuable. Joe Moore (55:27): So I'm seeing here in my notes that you were able to work with Dennis McKenna a little bit. Kenneth Tupper (55:32): So I read, well, Part of my PhD topic came from Terence's book, Food of the Gods. I remember in the mid-nineties reading that book and then Wade Davis's book, One River. And in both of them, they talked about ayahuasca, something I'd never heard of. And the idea that indigenous peoples of the Amazon talked about learning from ayahuasca as a plant teacher. And I was struck that was where that kind of education metaphor hooked. Also, actually, Aldous Huxley's book, Island. I'll give a big shout out. That was another big influence. But Terrence McKay, I didn't know anything about a brother of Terrence until in the early two thousands. Dennis published a paper called Ayahuasca and Human Destiny that I read. And it really resonated with what I was experiencing in my own encounters at that point with Ayahuasca. and found out that he actually had gone to the University of British Columbia for his PhD. It was his alma mater. He was an alumnus of UBC and had moved back to British Columbia at that point. So got an introduction and he signed on to be on my PhD dissertation committee, which I was tremendously grateful for. He's a world's expert on ethnobotany and ayahuasca specifically. Joe Moore (56:44): That must've been really fun. Kenneth Tupper (56:45): Yeah. He's, he's, he's always fun to talk to. Very creative. Joe Moore (56:50): That's great. And, um, did you work on any ayahuasca issues in Canada? Kenneth Tupper (56:57): So my PhD dissertation was looking at the Canadian government's response to a application from a Brazilian church called the Santo Daime that had set up a chapter in Montreal as an offshoot of Brazilian mother churches and was seeking, we have in Canadian drug law, we have a controlled drugs and substance act. There's something called a section fifty six exemption, which allows the minister to give an exemption to the drug law. It's actually what allows supervised injection sites to operate. an exemption that allows them to operate legally. But there was this church application had been put forward for, and if you read the act, it says the minister may grant an exemption for medical, scientific, or purposes otherwise in the public interest. And it's that third clause that's actually really you know, broadly interpretable phrase. And the church put forward a religious freedom exemption, just basically said, we want to use our sacrament and import it, not just use, but we want to import our sacrament from Brazil and, you know, perform ceremonies for our congregation. And so I had the good fortune of encountering the applicant, Dr. Jessica Rochester in Montreal, and learning about her endeavor and ended up doing an access to information request, an FOI or Freedom of Information request that generated three hundred and eighty pages of internal Health Canada documents on their decision making from the sort of initial, what the hell is ayahuasca, because of course they'd never heard of it. to what I described as kind of a smoking gun document, which was a twenty-page issue analysis summary going through the evidence to date at that point of potential risks and harms. It was mostly unredacted, but there was a few key redactions, so I can't make a conclusive determination, but it ultimately led to a recommendation for the exemption to be given. However, it took ten years from that point before they actually got the exemption because there was a change in political shift in Ottawa. That was when our previous prime minister, Stephen Harper, got elected. So the recommendation came forward just as he took office. And for the next ten years, there was a conservative government that did not look favorably on anything drug policy related. So it kind of got held up. There was also import-export conundrums, a catch-twenty-two between the government of Canada and the government of Brazil around who was going to authorize import versus export first. But ultimately, in the Santé d'Aimé in Montreal got their exemption and legally operate to this day. I think the Canadian government was looking at the U.S. Supreme Court decision around the Unio de Vegetal. A preliminary injunction that was held up or held to be in favor of the church and religious freedom down there. So it was an interesting topic to be working on in terms of, as I described it, looking at sort of how liberal democratic states, it was focused on Canada, but also broadly looking at like the Netherlands, the United States, Spain. There was other countries that were dealing with these same issues. trying to uphold competing principles of civil liberties, religious freedom, criminal justice, public health, economics, all these things kind of pulling in different directions with respect to ayahuasca, which is really kind of an outlier with respect to mainstream drug policy or drug laws, the architecture set up through the United Nations International Drug Control System, the three international treaties. And when you look at that whole apparatus, it's really difficult to fold in ceremonial entheogen. And here I would use the word entheogen very sort of specifically for the Santo Daime practices because it is overtly spiritual. And ultimately Health Canada's decision was very narrowly circumscribed for only ceremonial and religious uses. In fact, one of their key things was no health claims shall be made. This is not a medicine. There's no medicinal opportunities here. It's purely a sacramental use that has to be under the umbrella of religious practice. Joe Moore (1:01:01): That's interesting. Did the church object to that framing at all? Kenneth Tupper (1:01:07): No, they were okay with it. I mean, they recognized that if they tried to fight it, it would be a... Health Canada would push back and say, well, if you're making medical claims, then you've got to go and do a... Phase one, phase two, phase three clinical trials and a hundred million dollars. And, you know, so they were happy to stick with them, I think, in that sort of religious framing. And, you know, they were following the Santo Daime traditions of what was legally permissible in Brazil. And that was another advantage for them is that they kind of fit nicely into the box of what, Canada and the bureaucrats in Ottawa understood as religious practice. A shamanic type of use involving ayahuasca with a much more kind of diffuse history. The brew that is served in the Santo Daime is very sort of narrow and involves just two plants. Whereas in many indigenous traditions like Shipibo or Shuar, so many different words even for what is prepared as an ayahuasca brew. And the word ayahuasca, somebody said it's kind of like the word casserole. There's lots of things that you can put into it and still call it ayahuasca. There's a few key things, but lots of other, you know, toy, tobacco, coca. There's all kinds of plants that get mixed in. Joe Moore (1:02:21): I've never heard the casserole analogy. It's amazing. I have a paper I'd like to write, or at least I wanted to write an article on this concept of, it's a tricky one. consent in ayahuasca spaces around admixtures and we just don't know what's in things and if it's safe for me or is it even the thing that I signed up for? Have you bumped into any of those discussions? Kenneth Tupper (1:02:54): Yeah, I mean, it's obviously, and I've been in ceremonies where the brew has been very powerful in ways that, you know, weren't necessarily sort of reminiscent of previous experiences that made me think, and, you know, whether or not the person pouring, leading the ceremony knows themselves what has gone into it often is questionable. So for sure there's, but then the question comes up is okay well then how would one begin to standardize or regulate something like a traditional indigenous practice that defies that because the proprietary sort of recipe that is followed by a shaman cooking up in the jungle The idea you're going to come in and impose, okay, you're going to have this many, you know, chacruna, psychotria leaves and, you know, this amount of the ayahuasca vine and that's it. Nothing else. It's like anathema to their whole way of understanding what's needed. Joe Moore (1:03:47): Like sharing the recipe is super scary for them too, or just not appropriate. Kenneth Tupper (1:03:52): Yeah. Yeah. Joe Moore (1:03:54): It's interesting. I thought about this from like a, okay, we're selling to Westerners. Westerners can choose to go that way. but how do we make safer more kind of well-documented options available I remember ages ago people saying like yeah I don't don't really like the toe a blend but if I had something really bad happening I would go for that which is wild because that's a pretty high dose scopolamine situation yeah um you know and people have been harmed from the nicotine in there from nicotine or rustica go ahead Kenneth Tupper (1:04:23): There's also, you know, the whole question of commensurability of Western biomedical understandings of what's going on in an ayahuasca ceremony versus traditional indigenous understandings, which are, again, very diverse. Different indigenous groups have their own understandings of illness and disease, but mostly, I would say, incommensurable and diverse. There's a naivety that I certainly experienced or became aware of in my youthful endeavor to get into research in this space that my hippie ideals of pink elephants and fluffy bunnies was fundamentally at odds with the deep, rich history of how ayahuasca has been used in the Amazon, which is one as much of assault sorcery, black magic, as it is for healing. An analogy I use is it's like nuclear energy. It can be used for healing and helping nuclear medicine, but it can also be used for potential harm. Going down as a Wessner to the Amazon, as some people have described it, going into a war zone with magic darts flying all over the place shamans with you know intergenerational enmity that uh you know casting black magic and hexes on one another um and i know more than one westerner who's gone down and felt they came back worse for the experience because of what's been attributed to black magic so it's again what sense to make of that i don't know it's a it's a challenging challenging piece but uh certainly fascinating as well Joe Moore (1:05:59): The final one is this fermenting of ayahuasca. And I've chatted with some experts on this and this idea of like, the more it ferments, the more wise it is in some traditions. And then like to kind of clean it up and get it ready for serving, it would be like a skim of the malt on the top and then boiling it and then serving it. And I think in some cultural containers, it's totally cool. People have the gut biome for it. You bring somebody from Toronto and drop them in there, they are toast for potentially a while. And why Toronto? We'll get into that on another episode. But I think it's wild to think that people don't... Consumers don't know what they don't know. And they don't know to ask questions. And I think that's a big deal. Kenneth Tupper (1:06:56): Absolutely. And that's why when I give public talks and this kind of thing, I always emphasize a harm reduction perspective and educating oneself, learning as much as you can before you know, entering and find out the lineage of the person you're working with, who are they trained by. And especially for women, there's also an awareness of sexual assault and, you know, predators, sort of shamans who claim to be something that they're not and power dynamics. Shout out to the Women's Visionary Congress who have a great website page on, it's meant for women. I think it's good advice for men as well. on how to protect yourself if you're going into some kind of plant ceremony practice and a bunch of things that you need to consider and either ask questions of or take precautions on when you're thinking about it and ultimately doing it if you go that way. Joe Moore (1:07:51): Cool. And I think in terms of a closing thought around this philosophy of education background that you have and what might we take from that field of philosophy of education at this interesting juncture of psychedelic history? Kenneth Tupper (1:08:14): Ooh, that's a big question. Joe Moore (1:08:16): Yeah. Kenneth Tupper (1:08:17): Just that there's more ways of knowing than... You know, it's interesting. We live in a time of kind of the evaporation of truth and authority. Partly, I think, when you think about the idea of authority and authorship coming along with the printing press... the emergence of science as part of a function of the dissemination of knowledge through the printing press we're now in a similar moment with with first you know the internet and social media and now ai is like this compressed time frame of reconceptualizing epistemology which is kind of the philosophy of knowledge what does it mean what does it mean to know something and how do we make claims of knowledge um and my part of my sort of enterprise was to broaden that idea of knowledge to be not just limited to Western scientific approaches. Although I still value, I was raised myself personally to be a scientist in my patrilineal tradition and still tremendously value that method for, for discerning ways of understanding the universe, but it's not exclusive to what I think is valuable. And, you know, coming into deeper into the twenty-first century, thinking about the predicament of humans, you know, the, the reconciling ecology and economy, I would say is one of the crises of our times. It's not global warming per se, it's more how do we manage an infinite growth paradigm of economy with the finite limitations of planetary systems. I don't personally think it's going to be going to the moon or to Mars. I think it's more figuring out how to live sustainably on the planet we've got and you know maybe that's a hippie idealistic thing but i feel like these kinds of experiences these kinds of cognitive tools or plant teachers are our ways to help us uh navigate that path forward uh or at least was maybe fifty years ago maybe we're past a point for no return now i don't know right this is like big questions that we need to ask ourselves Joe Moore (1:10:14): Absolutely yeah um anything you want to leave folks with or Kenneth Tupper (1:10:19): If you're interested in reading the academic thoughts I've put into all of this, you can find it on my website. Oh, I've got a podcast that I started as well. I'll just maybe close with the title is Intonicated, a word that came to me in my Ibogaine experience last year where I was reflecting on the state of consciousness that I was in, understanding that if I was assessed by a medical professional, I would be deemed intoxicated for sure. I was unable to stand up, let alone drive a car. But I didn't feel anything toxic happening. In fact, I felt the exact opposite. I felt there was this healing going through my body at a subcellular mitochondrial level, working spiritually, psychologically, physically, simultaneously. And I felt like there was a tonic happening. And I felt like I don't feel intoxicated. I feel intonicated. and came to realize that after I came down and looked it up, no such word existed, but I felt like it was a good title for a podcast. So I started putting some interviews with friends and colleagues out there. Joe Moore (1:11:22): I love this. And I think you have a level up on Jonathan Ott's argument around shifting from toxicology or, sorry, intoxication to inebriation. I feel like Intonicated could be even better because it has less of those kind of baggage notes around opioids or anything. Kenneth Tupper (1:11:41): Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I'd love to. Unfortunately, Jonathan Knott's passed away, but I'm sure we would have had a good dialogue about the merits of that term. Joe Moore (1:11:51): Right. All right. Ken, I thank you so much for doing this with me. I hope we can do more. I remember when we met, you were still working for the government and I wasn't sure how to get you on the show. Kenneth Tupper (1:12:06): Yeah, no, I've left government and a bit more if you're free to speak and share. So I'm happy to be doing it here with you and psychedelics today audience. Joe Moore (1:12:15): All right. Until next time. Thank you everybody for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Frequently Asked Questions Who is Kenneth Tupper? Kenneth Tupper, PhD, is a Canadian public health researcher, drug-policy expert, educator, and psychedelic scholar. His work has included harm reduction, drug checking, the opioid overdose crisis, psychedelic policy, ayahuasca research, and the relationship between psychedelics and education. What does Kenneth Tupper mean by "entheogenic education"? Entheogenic education is Tupper's framework for considering psychedelics and traditional psychoactive plants as potential tools for learning rather than viewing them exclusively as recreational drugs or medical treatments. His work draws partly on Indigenous traditions in which substances such as ayahuasca, peyote, and psilocybin mushrooms may be understood as teachers. Why does Tupper criticize traditional drug education? Tupper argues that much drug education has historically focused on achieving a predetermined behavioral outcome—usually abstinence—rather than genuinely educating young people about drugs. He contrasts this with more experiential approaches to education that encourage curiosity, critical thinking, and informed decision-making. What does the episode say about British Columbia's drug decriminalization experiment? Tupper describes decriminalization as only one component of a much larger system. Removing criminal penalties for possession does not by itself address an unpredictable illicit drug supply, housing, healthcare, addiction treatment, mental health, or social services. The episode examines why policy outcomes depend heavily on what other supports are implemented at the same time. What are the safety concerns around ayahuasca admixtures? Ayahuasca preparations can vary significantly between traditions and practitioners. Joe and Tupper discuss questions around informed consent, additional plants in a brew, pharmacological interactions, practitioner transparency, cultural differences, and the difficulty of applying Western standardization requirements to traditional ceremonial practices.
