How I Started DanceSafe | Emanuel Sferios | Drug War Stories
"DanceSafe really hasn't been providing harm reduction services for ecstasy or MDMA all these years. It's been providing harm reduction services for prohibition."
Drug War Stories, Catharsis on the Mall 2015
Filmed by Kenny Reff, Evan Roberts, Bryce Montgomery, Basil Glew-Galloway
Edited by J Warner
https://dancesafe.org
http://mdmathemovie.com
http://catharsisonthemall.com
http://psymposia.com
Sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
http://maps.org
Transcript
This transcript was generated automatically from YouTube's captions, then cleaned up by removing filler words, repeated words and background sounds. It may still contain errors.
[00:01] I'm very pleased to present Emanuel a friend who helped to found dance safe who does some incredible work for harm reduction at festivals and Raves and places like this for people who are using these medicines for maybe more dionan use and he's currently now working on a featurelength movie with the working title MDMA the movie and focused mostly on the therapeutic use of MDMA as well as harm reduction around the use of MDMA so please join me and thanking Emanuel for coming out whoa it is bright there's no body out there I'm Emanuel speros I founded
[01:04] Dance safe 18 years ago thank you and the first thing I want to say is we've come a long way in 18 years I mean really it might not seem that way but the young people who dance safe was serving back then are now starting to di positions of power in government and TV and public health and the media has been so much better around harm reduction now than it was back then so I see a lot of Hope how did I start dance sa I've never told this story before really many reporters have asked me that and I I'll start I first did MDMA when I was 16 years old for therapy reasons I was not a raver this was back in 1986 one year after it became illegal yeah I wasn't a raver although Raves I think had started back then there was some underground events I grew up in Florida I was actually a
[02:04] Punk and I hi there and I yeah bad rins so but I got into therapy there is abuse in my past I had run away from I wasn't living at home anymore I was living in a warehouse in downtown St P Florida playing in my punk SCA band and I got lucky to get hooked up with some adults some Quakers from the American friend service committee who yeah yeah really saved my life they channeled my anger into a positive direction and I became an activist at a very young age and I could have very easily gone down a road of self-destruction without them and one of the things they said is we have you considered therapy you know I what's therapy oh is when you talk about your problems and so I these two grown-ups the first grown-ups in my life who treated me with respect had a big
[03:04] Impact on me and I got involved in the co-counseling movement which if you don't haven't heard of that it's sometimes called reevaluation counseling I don't even know if it's still around but it's sort of Poor People's therapy if you can't afford a therapist you just you know these you learn therapy techniques and you take turns one person half hour plays the role of therapist for the other and then you switch sides so I started doing this a and then I saw an article in Newsweek in 1985 about MDMA and the first line of the article was this was the drug that LSD was supposed to be and is that Rick laughing Rick was in the article and it was you know maybe you don't know the first articles about MDMA even when they were when it was banned you know probably thanks to Rick were about its use over 10 years it was being used by therapists and they tried to keep it underground because they knew there would be a Crackdown that happened I went to search it out I was like okay you know I want to do this because I was on this path
[04:05] Now of healing and it took me six months to find it as a 16-year-old Punk kid you know the no punks were doing ecstasy at the time right but I ended up finding someone and I remember Tampa going out standing outside of this nightclub in eore city and he gave him my money and he went in and what seemed like a long time this goth chick came out of the club and you Manny I like yeah and I think she was more nervous to be selling drugs to a teenager than I was to be buying them but she was kind of goth and I felt comfortable because I was a punk and that was sort of my culture you know and she hands me these two pills and she says don't take more than one right and here's my card if you want more give me a call so I ended up taking with my best friend a couple of weeks later and
[05:06] Began profound path of healing allowing me to forgive my father and eventually when his brother died and I was 30 years old I took MDMA with my father and the first time I saw him cry and I can't say he changed completely at that time but up until that experience with him when we talk to each other you know twice a year or whatever we never would say I love you to each other but now after that every time we did speak we said to I love you to each other and he passed away in 2012 and I was with him holding his hand for his last breath and I know that would not have happened without the path that I went through healing through MDMA so I things I never told this story to the media right because I was working in harm reduction right and I was trying to just stick
[06:08] To message you now I'm a independent and I'm making a film and I want to tell the whole truth about MDMA so I'm feel free to tell this story now first time publicly but that's not really so so in some ways I started Dan safe to honor MDMA in some way but really what happened is that and I probably did it a dozen or so times in that year or two and then went on to you know I actually I dropped I had dropped out of high school but I went to college and graduated and I lived on some intentional communities for a few years and I end up in San Francisco now we're at 1998 and someone gives me MDMA again and oh sure I'll do it again right and I get online now we have the internet right before to research MDMA I had to go to the index of periodical literature who remembers that out there yeah like three stories high you know these big Green books every you could look up a topic and every magazine
[07:10] Article that was printed about it would tell you where to find it you know in the library and online I discovered that the market was highly adulterated and people were dying from fake ecstasy and the Dutch government had a program where they would go out to Rave set up booths and test pills for users to help them avoid the fake pills and a light bulb went off in my head and I said I'm going to do this here I knew that it was going to be successful I've had a lot of ideas in my life and I've started a lot of organizations actually and some I thought oh this might work and some I go oh this is going to work and Dan safe was one of them my movie is one of them going to be successful I just knew it and one reason why is because the testing kits were a tool to organize I had been volunteering for many years with food
[08:11] Not bombs anyone know them yeah four years cooked in the serve free vegetarian meals in Berkeley California four days a week was doing that and we d food knot bombs did more than just homeless advocacy they also provided a Serv but providing that service was so powerful I realized if you want to organize against the drug war if you want to start a peer-based drug education program where young people can educate themselves on how to more safely use drugs and you just go out with literature it's going to be really hard to kind of get this off the ground but if you had a tool that you can actually help somebody or if you're actually feeding homeless people right then you know you instantly win the trust and so well so I did it I have to say though I really thought at the time that I was just
[09:12] Helping people test their ecstasy be you know so they couldn't get the bunk stuff how do I say this I had no idea just how much misuse and abuse was going on in these scenes I never been to a rave before my first event behind a dance safe booth and I remember seeing a young woman maybe a teenager walking around with a little spoon saying bump of K bump a k and other young people leaning over and snorting a mystery white powder off of a spoon from a total stranger and I was shocked because I would never do something like that and I didn't know what to make of this and I like realized dance safe needs to be more than just about testing drugs and it had to become about education also I
[10:13] Realized in talking to young people about ecstasy they didn't even know ecstasy was its own drug its own molecule MDMA I was like what do you think ecstasy is oh it's these little pills that you buy at Raves some of which make you feel good and some of which make you feel bad the ones that make you feel so so why does some make you feel good oh they have a better combination of drugs in them what drugs oh oh heroin cocain they listed off whatever drugs they knew the ones that made you feel bad were the ones that had the bad combination of drugs that's what a lot of people thought now these are a lot of them were all ages events a lot of young people but I realized oh my God we have to start from the very beginning so I wrote this ecstasy health and safety manual and we trained our chapters to start from the beginning MDMA is its own molecule and you're not getting you know good MDMA or bad MDMA you're getting real or sorry ecstasy as its own
[11:15] Good ecstasy or bad ecstasy you're getting real ecstasy or fake ecstasy what's so interesting and you know unfortunate but telling is that you know now the young people call it Molly right they still ecstasy is still now and now the kids are right ecstasy are those pills right like it's not MDMA anymore right ecstasy is not MDMA right but the myth of course today is that Molly is pure MDM made the powder form if you find a little bag of white powder and someone says it's Molly oh that's pure M and that word Molly came from Molly molecule from the work that Dan safe was doing back in the late 90s saying you know MDMA has its own molecule so you can't win without well this when I say what I
[12:16] Realized too and you got to remember today death the fatalities have quadrupled there's about 20 young people a year dying after they take MDM or Molly some of it is bath salts methylone but increasing amount of it is actually MDMA it was about three five a year back in the late 90s and so things have just gotten worse I can explain why maybe I I'm talking a while so you can come up to me if you want to know why MDMA deaths are increasing MDMA related deaths come and talk to me because I've spent the last two years really figuring it out and it has a lot to do with loose powder rather than pressed tablets and the flood of bath salts on them but maybe in an ironic way let me know but what I realized things have only gotten worse after the since I've started Dan saafe and I just realized Dan safe really hasn't been providing harm reduction services for ecstasy or MDMA all these
[13:19] Years it's been providing harm reduction services for prohibition and what we really need is to end Prohibition in order to save lives and th this is very very important we need to go on the offensive right now and start advocating for the legal regula regulation of MDMA the legalization or legal regulation of MDMA not so much for the Civil Rights argument but that's true too right but because if we provided adults with safe legal access to MDMA in limited quantities we would eliminate the criminal Market not just the fake pills that are on that market but also reducing access to Miners and that's kind of hard for a lot of us to you know out and proud say
[14:20] Because most of us come from a psychedelic using paths like myself and you know but we need to be able to hold simultaneously in our minds truthfully the Civil Right to use these substances to change our Consciousness with the imperative that we protect the weak and vulnerable and particularly children it's right it's true it's not just strategic because that's what's going to pass but if you're a strategic-minded person think of it that way that's what we need because I actually have a 15-year-old now who is interested in psychedelics and I have the same fears that other parents have you know it's easy if you have a very risk averse child and they're just not going to you know be interested in experimenting with drugs but at least you know half of us are novelty Seekers and that's just going to happen and that's kind of scary but it's more scary when you know that she could be taking
[15:21] Anything that she won't have any idea how much she's taking that her peers are telling her that oh Molly is pure or you know we could dance safe could fight for another 20 years trying to educate people on safer use but it's going to continue to fail and it's only going to get worse if we don't end prohibition so I guess I'll stop there thank you everyone awesome a round of applause both for Emanuel in the work of dance safe cuz it's always activists on the ground working their asses off to get stuff done
