Sustainability, Reciprocity, Extractivism
Psymposia discusses the tensions of decriminalization, bioprospecting, and the complex interconnections between industrial and Indigenous populations with relationships to drugs in response to a question posed during the January "Castalia" Livestream.
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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] Heather h had some questions that are you know relevant to what we think about a lot which is you know concerns about when psychedelics are decriminalized particularly sort of natural d decriminalized nature category psychedelics the ones that grow from the ground ibogaine dmt containing plants and you know mushrooms obviously and peyote I think is the one that is you know most disputed but heather h mentioned several such compounds and sort of the encroachment of demand you know on on endangered plants so I mean so I teach psychedelic studies and I actually gave a lecture on peyote today so you know peyote is the slowest growing
[01:02] Slowest growing cactus and the only people who have federal license to use and harvest it to grow it to partake in it are members of the native american church in the united states and there's what I'll say first of all is that like there's an ongoing conversation about this that's not really settled there's quite a lot of back and forth about it but you know the question of like unsustainable extractivist harvest you know in particularly slow growing plants like peyote and ibogaine where global markets have turned their sights I've heard that in certain regions there is a depletion of wild banisteriopsis copy but this isn't very different than any other problem that we have in capitalism when there's global demand for something yeah it will be
[02:05] It will be harvested unsustainably and I think that's it oh no go on no you finish up and then well like basically you know I'm a plant biologist and my response to that is just like people home growing mushrooms nobody worries about mushrooms becoming endangered because they're so prolific their life cycle is very short but peyote can be grafted to san pedro and its life cycle can be you know vastly accelerated in that way and decriminalization that included cultivation which I think it should could certainly mitigate the unsustainable wild harvesting you know I mean I think that the people should have control over their sort of lands and that kind of thing but you know if people are allowed to grow it that that is a potential route the other thing is is that when things are decriminalized rather than
[03:06] Outright legalized it's the outright legalization that creates an international market it's just going to hasten that extractivism this is one of the reasons why we're kind of like can we just decriminalize everything until we figure out what the hell is going on here yeah and I think that there's a lot to so so about when it comes to peyote I mean there's also discussion and there has been for many years in forum communities about grafting peyote on economics I believe which you can then grow hydroponically there's discussion about potency loss some people claim there is no potency loss other people claim there is if we're talking about this purely from the sense of propagating the plant though potency shouldn't really matter and you could ostensibly get you know sort of grandfather size plants that you could then get into the ground and produce buttons and offspring and rest from there's also I think
[04:09] The importance of recognizing that we currently live within industrial capitalism and that there have been quite a few ongoing extractivist endeavors and so there are these interesting tensions between I think commodified approaches verse like communal efforts to grow for maintaining genetic lineage and accessibility more generally right so like if we look at the absolute devastation of a boga in gabon and we you know recognize that people's attempt to treat opiate dependence in the u.s has contributed majorly to that right as people sort of emphasize their right to detox using a boga but then we look and we see in places in south east asia I believe as well as certain you know in australia there are iboga plants that are growing you can actually order pods I know people in california and florida and elsewhere who are growing
[05:10] And propagating and selling ebola pods so that other people can also grow and continue to you know propagate these plants right we get into this these really difficult terrains of you know at the point where we've seen this decimation at the point where there is ongoing biopiracy but then we have you know cultivator communities that are looking to grow these plants where they live so that one they're not continuing to deplete the native populations but two you get into these questions of reciprocity you get into questions of you know how do you give back you get into questions of to what extent is working towards self-sufficiency among communities that don't have connections to some of these endemic populations of plants you know how do they engage with that both with the cultures that have stewarded some of these plants for long times as well as the cultural realities of
[06:10] Where they live I mean there are I think myriad questions around that and when we look too at say peyote right like I know that there are plant propagation forums that have done multi member buy-ins right where you now have people across the forum that are each chipping in a couple bucks to buy ungodly amounts of peyote seed and with the hope of again propagating and increasing access in ways that don't necessarily get into the issues around indigenous propagation questions of folks raiding lands or abusively and extractively harvesting cacti I mean it's not so simple like when we talk about reciprocity it's not as simple as give these people xyz dollars and that addresses the harms if we want to talk about this like we need to get into issues of land back we need to get into issues of like if we're going to talk about say 5meo right and the notion of toad
[07:12] Extractivism like the harm to the animal like what sort of if somebody were to set up a synthetic lab and to be clear this there's all sorts of issues of neo-colonialism around this but like if there was to be a synthetic lab that was offering you know some sort of payments to people in the sonoran desert region right like and again like it's a mess it's an absolute mess but part of the reason it's a mess is because we have these much greater issues of industrial capitalism that if we're going to talk about this within a psychedelic context we need to get into the politics that undergird this and it deals more deals with more than just psychedelic cultures it deals with the broader cultural questions and social relations that we currently power relations absolutely yeah so I mean there's we could we can and probably will at some point given both dave and I specifically
[08:14] Like interest in some of the you know the cultivation of these plants and compounds but yeah without sort of spending too much time on it that's a sort of a taste that basically those issues are unfolding right now there's a lot of people who are stakeholders in those communities when I went to the global ibogaine conference way back in 2016 some of these same issues of sustainability were being raised and people were trying to solve the issue with cultivation but then you know questions of well what gives you the right you know in canada to cultivate these plants and make a profit off of this and so something something's got to give yeah and real quick two things because I wanted to lead with you brought up the questions of banisteriop's copy and I just want to throw this down on the record so that it's there bia labate and chris killum and other people raised objections when the ethno-botanical stewardship council started raising questions about
[09:14] Long-term banisteriopsis copy sustainability and they said there's no problem with this we don't know why you're raising this as an issue you're just trying to center yourself and yes there are all sorts of issues with the esc I'm not here saying that was a great organization that should be lauded and this that and the other ways like again when we're talking about these things there's a whole bunch of complexity but if we're talking about extractivist processes under capitalism we could see the demand rising around copy puffing up your chest and saying there's no issue here which I would say there's no issue here yet right at the time the notion of just like shunting that under the rug is as something that didn't need to be dealt with at the time like we could see the trends rising we knew that there were going to be pressure pressures on native populations and there's also this question about contaminants which rather different than the banisteropsis copy but again we've seen how things work under prohibition so like I've been part of check-in which is a drug testing team at the boom
[10:15] Festival in portugal thanks to their decrim laws it's pretty straightforward to do drug testing there all things considered and actually the last year I did that was in 2016 and there was a death at the festival and the cops actually brought the drugs to check-in because check-in was able to do a quicker analysis than the cops would have been able now granted we were just doing thin layer chromatography combined with reagent testing it wasn't the most accurate you know detailed rundown of what was there but it could within a to a pretty reasonable degree of certainty establish a wide variety of different compounds being present now when I look at the existence of things like check in when I look at the spanish organization called energy control which has a mandate from the spanish government to do harm reduction testing at festivals and rapes and whatnot when I look at the sort of projects that have sprung up under prohibitionist frameworks and I would say and some of these are
[11:15] Rather anarchic projects and in like people saw a need people with the awareness and intention when I look at the loop in australia when you see the sort of pill testing measures that have gotten up off the ground when you look at dan safe pulling in you know gcms and or lcms I think it's gcms that there's tir at this point oh right I forgot about that yeah when you look at the stuff that they're using in the field I mean yes they're pricey but even in this context the fact that organizations have gotten their hands on it and have made this happen if we could imagine a decrim context I imagine you would see almost collectives or like chemist guilds of drug nerds who are interested in making this happen and whether it's run as a cooperative or an llc or what have you like there's all sorts of ways where I think there's enough desire to make it happen and people with the knowledge that that we would see something to that effect so so yeah that so I think we
[12:17] Do have to move back into the material but we mentioned we do a giveaway called that power it's just rapid fire machine gun information it's true it's why we love him we did mention though that we were gonna do we were gonna do a giveaway does does anybody want to you know do that sorry heather h supplied a question that that we spent some time on so heather send us if you want yeah if you want it stuff well send an email to hyattsymposia.com you
