Ian Benouis | Drug War Stories
Drug War Stories, Catharsis on the Mall 2015
Filmed by Kenny Reff, Evan Roberts, Bryce Montgomery
Edited by J Warner
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.
[00:22] Thanks anyway for coming out tonight it's an honor to be here in the National Mall and thank you to catharsis or setting up all this great kak and putting all the time to bring us all out here together so Psymposia does drug lectures and conferences around the east coast but the thing that we've been doing lately it's been the most powerful is the storytelling it turns out that somebody living story from the heart for 10 minutes you can often get it more important lesson than you can from an hour-long slideshow and that's why we were so excited to be part of this to get these stories out to show part of the horrors that the war on drugs causes here amongst us and so I want to start with a really powerful speaker in Ben we and he was in the US Army he was a pilot of the of a Black Hawk helicopter and he was in Panama for operation just cause then later he went to be a rep for Pfizer and he was an intellectual properties attorney as well and then he became a casualty of the war on drugs for cannabis and for the last 20 years
[01:23] He's been healing himself through his own spiritual practice and involves plant medicines and now his hope is to keep continuing to heal his fellow veterans using such practices and so to Ian been we thank you so what I figured I do is just you know where this is storytelling is tell my story and I've added any time at the end open it up for questions so I grew up in hawaii and it was awesome it was in the 70s three years behind obama so cannabis was totally part of the culture it was decriminalized there was no drug trade because even though drugs came in there was all the homegrown cannabis and it was an island culture and it was totally integrated and I remember the day I had this aha moment my brothers and I were you know kicking a soccer ball or throwing a football around in our neighborhood and it went over into the neighbor's yard this
[02:24] Japanese couple and maybe in their 60s retired and they had two huge pot plants in their backyard and that was like everybody smokes pot and so but it was integrated and after I left Hawaii I missed all the dare education but after I left hawai they started green harvest right which was the first use of US military in drug operations on US soil which violates Posse Comitatus right you're not supposed to use US soldiers to conduct anything but you know military operations not drug operations and so what that delivered to Hawaii as they went around and did this eradication was the world's fur in the country country's first and worst meth epidemic and now Hawaii still in the grips of that and to me it's a pretty straight line between you know clapping down in canvas when you had no problems and then causing a whole new problem so
[03:24] Again an example right of prohibition in this case creating a problem that didn't even exist to begin with so I went to West Point like Lex said I was a Black Hawk pilot in the Army started deploying down to Panama in 1987 before operation just cause prepare adventure basically preparing for that and of course that was our big drug operation and yeah so I got out after that I had you know my had a bunch of things happened to me I was drowned body surfing off santa cruz and a house burned down and the guy burned my house sounds ex-military he robbed it burned it down and then he's got help for his mental health issues and his due to stand trial later he killed himself the night before he was supposed to you know go to trial of course we weren't you know there's nothing we were prosecuting in that but the state taking over and so I got out of the military but those things happening to me kind of started my
[04:25] Personal spiritual quest and I got out of the army moved to Austin Texas my first wife left me and that's when I I've been kind of sober at certain times in the RV just because I saw the dangers of alcohol on deployment and people medicating with that and so MDMA yeah MDMA was I mean back in high school you know grow up in Hawaii alcohol cannabis mushrooms they grew all around my high school and but MDMA was the thing that kind of opened me back up as I started on my spiritual path and then from there just you know it took off so I basically spent the first three years of law school in Houston in first three years of my new marriage to my wife I've admired 20 21 years of four kids and yeah so we kind of you know I got my basic work sorted out enough for I could be a husband and a dad and my wife and I gotta you know good set up to our marriage by basically you know
[05:26] Tripping every other weekend at least for about three years on on mushrooms so so so then I really you know my kids were really my medicine for the next you know 20 years or so and I taught my kids to get high in their own supply I taught them you know properly I was honest with them and upfront with them and we got in the backyard and our trampoline and just bounce for hours and play games and I would tell them this is you're making yourself feel good you're making yourself get high on your own supply and what that means then is that if you choose later to do something that's additive to it right you're not you know trying to cure some problem and then if you're trying to do that then that's your body trying to tell you something that something else is wrong and maybe that medicine is good for you or maybe there's some other medicine or other some other thing you can do so yeah I'll even tell you real quick how I had that conversation with my kids about drugs because I know that
[06:27] It is a big challenge when this is so illegal to how do you have that conversation they were about 14 to I want to say nine or something around in that range and three of them with me went to a soccer tournament in Houston at a hotel there were they just mulch the ground with all this you know cow manure mulch and it had just had a big rain so I remember driving in the parking lot and my a mushroom sense was all tingling and like what's something going on around here yeah oh my god dad's gonna go downstairs and walk around the hotel for a little while and come back you know and so I came back with probably what end up being about you know 60 or 70 grams eventually of dried mushroom says it was a pretty good haul just right there in the hotel parking lot and so you know my kids definitely were going to talk about that right there was no way that we're not going to talk about that and so like so the mushrooms what's the deal with that and I said okay knives good or bad you know throw it out to the
[07:28] Audience and they're like good you know because you can cut your food with it or bad because you can you know hurt somebody with it I said well there you go mushrooms are there knife is technology mushrooms or technology treat them appropriately respect them they'll do good things for you but I also have that kind of crazy DPS or Child Protective Services you know conversation where I said look we have to be able to keep secrets in our family and I'm not the kind of Secrets like dad's sexually abusing you know not that kind of secret this kind of secret like you didn't get what you want so you're mad at dads you decide to call 911 and say my dad's got all sorts of stuff in here you know that's not going to do anybody any good but being honest with my kids I believes really helped and you know and I've been growing these plants for 20 years as well so when they see you know you growing these plants growing and taking these plants vs. you know going to the pharmacy and a prescription they can kind of on their own figure out right what drugs are and you know not
[08:29] Fall into this whole predefined you know system that the government's trying to you know propagate to everyone and so let's see so I got out of the army started that spiritual path I was a pharmaceutical rep for Pfizer really at the height of we launched zoloft that was the height of the synthetic opioids which were all marketed right as and they've always been marketed this way same with heroin compared to morphine right he'll this new excuse me this newer version of this thing newer you know is less addictive than the old one so actually this you know this thing will cure the addiction to the lower level right that let the less complex opioid and so yeah I saw some of the good that the pharmaceutical industry could do but I also saw that they're really just looking for customers they're not they want magazine subscriptions they're not trying to cure things they're just trying to get people on maintenance drugs and have them beyond than the rest of their lives and so I that so I said I was in went to law
[09:35] School studied intellectual property was in law school hanging out with a new friend that I'd met down at barton springs in austin if anyone's been there kind of the soul of austin yeah hanging out in the overflow the free part where all the freaks hang out and you know he's like a mat you want to smoke some herb I'm sure but violated the number one rule in my opinion right is don't take any more or any form that you can't immediately disposed of if law enforcement shows up so law enforcement hide down the bushes sauce came up you know you guys were smoking pot and he's like do you have any still and he like me to pulls out his bag of a quarter how sound like oh my god and fortunately for me is austin texas they have a real official program now called cite and release but I gotta basically early version of that so that's a year and a half through law school I think or maybe the first year camera the year and I was in the second year and so I had they brought it down
[10:36] To drug paraphernalia so I wasn't arrested but I was giving it you know a Class C misdemeanor ticket right there I had to go to drug classes I paid if anybody knows from Texas Jamie belleza you know the 420 dude he was my attorney it cost me three thousand bucks to get it expunged to get it out of my record so that I could you know be able to take the bar and become an attorney and so I used some of the mushroom money my mushroom scholarship from picking mushrooms I did deliver about 10,000 one gram doses to austin between 94 297 saying the name of God over every one of them and that was my some of my early political activism but keeping Austin weird so statute limitations it's all good right so pass but so yes I mean I you know for me thank God that I was able to the right that I had that money that I had that privilege and you know to be able to get that my record
[11:37] Expunged so I could do the thing that I wanted to do and since I've been an attorney kind of working in the corporate world and like I said raising my kids and you know maybe with my wife taking MDMA a couple times a year is a great marriage to land you know to do our work with each other and psychedelics more occasionally and then about a year and a half ago I went to the first veterans normal conference in Texas and just connected with veterans that was kind of the beginning for me of a healing two point oh you know I'm like I've done enough work so I could you know like I said be a good human being be a good father and a husband and a wife and all that and but I still had a lot of work to do I found out when I met veterans and I would first certainly say to that my PTSD is not caused by combat anyway maybe flying in the army which is really dangerous and sexual trauma and car accidents and other stuff but I'll I want to show you how real and deep this drug war goes my
[12:40] Mother has been a opioid attic for 40 to 50 years the degenerative disc disease my youngest brother has been a opioid attic his entire adult life and then my other brother Tyler Sibley know is a third time through rehab and so far you know successfully but I've seen the choices that other people my family making a really tried to make better ones and so for me meeting with veterans was really the beginning of my like I said rehe lling process and connecting with veterans and for me then starting my own healing process again which you know his involved mainly personally I ayahuasca and yeah I've been really then since then just trying to share that healing with other veterans and what I want to do then is just share sort of two things I accomplished with the sacred plants as far as my traumas
[13:41] Just to really also share with you the power and in this whole time I've had a spiritual practice and you know Indian yoga for five years learn to do open-eyed meditation and so all these techniques right they're all supportive of this kind of work so back in May I did a three-day ayahuasca ceremony outside of Austin with the healer from the Santo dyami tradition but it really wasn't a santo dimee ceremony and three days so the first day was really just you know getting my body all sorted out just kind of clearing all the negative energy kind of getting that you know DNA scrub down to the you know subatomic level and then in the next day it was really a bunch of heart polishing you know so clearly negative energy polished the heart break it apart put it back together blow it up rinse wash repeat you know as many times as necessary and when I was finally kind of mother ayahuasca taking me through that process and I'm like okay cool let's take this new heart out for a ride and
[14:41] See how he can go and it immediately went to this sexual trauma that I had when I was in first or second grade where I was sodomized by a older neighborhood boy in the bathroom of my own house and so when I went to that place under the medicine it would and I really saw the young me and I saw this person and it you know your default thing and that scenario your ego right it's to go towards yourself I'm like you know the young me but instead I my heart in my attention shifted towards this person and I'm like you know what happened to you what why did this happen to you why are you doing this not in a you know questioning threatened but like an in a caring compassionate empathetic perspective and what I did that the whole emotional content of that memory just completely evaporated and it was gone so that was some amazing healing and then a couple weeks later
[15:42] I'd planned to do this conscious cannabis ceremony in Colorado with this healer is a transpersonal counselor and done you know work in native traditions and it was with cannabis because we he wanted to test the proposition for vets especially but it would be true for everyone but prove it first and that's that you could use cannabis actually not just sort of as a maintenance for trauma but also to deal with the trauma and so we did a ceremony and like in his house with a little altar and I've lined down on a kind of like a yoga mat and the rug of his you know the front room in his house and he was a guided meditation with music that he had all cued up and you know he was talking to me but not really I wasn't talking to him he's just sort of guiding me and I took three puffs I'm sorry seven puffs of this you know only cannabis I hadn't smoked any that day that was it and I went to that psychedelic space it was amazing and I basically went to my first trauma which was
[16:43] My sister died when I was nine months old and she was a little bit less than two in a car with my parents and my grandfather and some other relatives and I went there and you know the short version is I got okay with everything and totally let go of it and it was Austin the same kind of thing like with ayahuasca where the whole emotional you know trauma just literally evaporated and just to throw a fun wrench and all this mother ayahuasca came along is that an attending physician for the whole process to make sure that it all worked out so yeah Here I am today and so I'm a veteran working to share this kind of healing with other people and I'm really honored and blessed to be you know working with the rest of you and this movement to get these plants recycle eyes and I'll just say the last thing is that and I experienced this under ayahuasca is that
[17:43] I came to the understanding that veterans of the moral conscience for this country because we go and exercise the politicians will and are the instruments delivers and witnesses of these horrible things that you know no human being should experience and then we have to come back and reintegrate and there's no real plan or you know way that's currently set up to do that and so I've seen that veterans are going to be the ones that get to prove this model to show how we can turn ourselves from warriors killed that are killing machines into warriors that are loving machines that can you know actually beat our own swords into plowshares and so that's what I see for veterans and that's what I'm committed to so thank you
