 Really the big breakthrough came for me with a very powerful mushroom journey on October 20th, 2018, which pretty much launched me. And it's been quite a journey since then. Yeah, it's been amazing. And six months later, we passed the Criminature. Now we're in 100 cities, 30 states, five countries in terms of members of this movement. We have about another half dozen cities passing the resolution. It's been one hell of a roller coaster that really, for me, germinated in that one mushroom journey because of the level of clarity it gave me about my own childhood trauma and really how to heal from that. After that mushroom journey, it was very challenging for me to understand what happened to my brain and I could suddenly see the world from so many different perspectives that I could suddenly be having these conversations with myself that were far more enlightened than I was able to have before the mushrooms. The resolution is beautiful. It's so simple. It simply says in multiple warehouses and therefore be it resolves that our relationship to entheogenic plants and fungi should be the same as our relationship to tomatoes, the same as our relationship to an orange tree, to herbs we want to grow in our garden, that there is nothing fundamentally different between our... There's not being anything fundamentally different between our relationship to entheogenic plants and fungi, consciousness healing plants and an orange that is decriminalized. There's no controls on how much you grow. I can share it with friends. Our goal at the end of the day would be to get all plants and fungi removed from schedule one. I know someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? Five, four, three, two, one. What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sokian. We are on site at the beautiful New West Summit The Cannabis Tech Conference. We are now going to be talking with Carlos Plazola. Hi, Carlos. Hi. Thanks so much for coming on our show. Really appreciate it. Thank you for inviting me. So pumped for this conversation. Carlos is the co-founder of Decriminalized Nature Oakland. Carlos, let's start things off by talking about your journey, who are you, how you even got interested in this space? Yeah, actually it's been quite a journey. I started somewhere around the age of 10, but I'll leave out some minor details. The journey starts with me trying to find my clarity about what this world is and what it means and try to heal from some childhood trauma. It takes me through my going to college and getting my degree in environmental science, living amongst the Oshawa community and the rainforest at the age of 23 in pursuit of the sacred. Then comes life and family. I get beautiful life, children. I'm living the day-to-day life of making money and all of that. Then I have this particular severe trauma hit with my mother passing and the extended family begins to disintegrate with all of that and relationships disintegrate. So I went through this healing process and found my way to meditation, yoga, but really the big breakthrough came for me with a very powerful mushroom journey on October 20th, 2018, which pretty much launched me. It's been quite a journey since then. Yeah, it's been amazing. Six months later we passed Decrim Nature. Now we're in 100 cities, 30 states, 5 countries in terms of members of this movement. We have about another half dozen cities passing the resolution. So it's been one hell of a roller coaster that really, for me, germinated in that one mushroom journey because of the level of clarity it gave me about my own childhood trauma and really how to heal from that. So that's it in that shell. Whoa, let's also go to the... If we could go all the way back to childhood, what was going on for you growing up that was making it difficult? Sure, yeah. I'm the child of immigrant parents. My father himself was left when he was very young, didn't know how to really be a father, so very soon after I was born he kind of bailed, and so mom was left to raise her kids by herself. And here in the U.S., three kids, she had about 20 bucks in her pocket. We took a midnight train literally out of Mexico and landed in the U.S. with some family. We struggled in terms of... She struggled in terms of working long hours to make money, so I was in many ways sort of raising myself. And then soon thereafter she met a man who was an alcoholic, and that came into the family. We had the physical abuse, there was alcoholism, there was yelling, there was a very unsettled moment. And so as a being that really loved peace and loved beauty, to be immersed in this really hectic and violent world, sent me searching, what's it all mean, right? So that was sort of me up until the age of 16 and 17. This is three Oshawa. Oh yeah, Oshawa was in... Oshawa. 20, 24 years old, 23 years old, I lived with the Oshawa. Wow, okay. This was like in my early 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 years old. You were searching for the purpose of Oshawa. Yeah, why was I searching for Oshawa? Wow. Yeah, so the way that came about was someone told me that someone in my family... This is kind of the genesis. This is the seed, if you will, of my own searching in the world. At the age of around 8 or 9, someone told me that someone in my family died. And so then I said, well, what happens when they die? Where did they go? And they said, well, they go to heaven, where they live forever. So then they say, I was like, okay. And then I went to bed and I'm like, okay, forever. Try to imagine what that is. I'm like 8 years old, right? So then I started obsessing with what forever meant. And it really became from the age of 8 until 23. I obsessed about it and couldn't figure it out. So it sort of became this fascination with zero and the infinite zero being the end and nothingness. And the infinite, of course, is where does forever go? But that, while it was traumatic, it also helped push me through a lot of the trauma. Because from that state of realizing there's something far more esoteric than us, being punched in the head is a pretty minor thing, right? So it allowed me to sort of rise above the trauma. So when I was ready to leave home at 17, 18, I got into biology and anthropology, which were natural for me because I wanted to understand this planet, life, humans, what all this was. So that was my first sort of venture into what I really began a pursuit of beauty and sacred. Wow. All right. So I really appreciated how you were walking us through this divine search that you embarked on as just a young little lad. And also just having something that could be like an anchor for you like this forever throughout that process. And then what was the, you know, when you're 23, Ashwad, you said? Ashwad. Ashwad. Ashwad. They're the original headhunters in the rainforest that we read about, that we see in movies. They're also known as the Hebatul. And they live in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador, in Columbia, northern Columbia. So the way that came about is I'm a biology major at UCLA. My professor, Dr. Robert Bailey, tells a story about how he left Wall Street after 10, 15 years of success feeling empty. And so he went to live in the rainforest with a tribe in the Brazilian rainforest. And that was just fascinating. So I said, I have to do that. So how do I do that? And he said, well, there's this husband and wife team out of Santa Barbara that are going down their PhD students that are finishing up some research. And I said, OK, I need to go. So he said, well, let me put you in contact with them. I called them. They told me, well, if you really want to go, learn how to do health studies, particularly using calipers so we could do health studies based on the indigenous folks becoming sedentary because of oil companies using their labor for a search of oil. And so I did that. I showed up. And next thing you know, I'm on a dual plane, dual engine plane heading into the rainforest. It was an hour in off the nearest city, which is Puyo, and we're flying in. And an hour later, we're coming on this little landing strip right in the middle of the rainforest. And I'm thinking, what the hell did I just do? Right. And it's not just any group. These are the famous headhunters, the hibato, right? But it was absolutely a tremendous experience. They were welcoming. They were loving. But because they were sedentary, typically they were nomadic, they didn't particularly share food because their meat resources were being depleted. That was one of the effects. That was why we went to study it. And so the effect of all of that was they didn't share their meat much. So I ended up losing 30 pounds because I wasn't a very good hunter-gatherer, it turns out. Little kid from East San Jose wasn't a very good hunter-gatherer, it turns out. But I survived. I made it. It was beautiful. And I had an opportunity to do ayahuasca there in a true shamanistic, Gudandero experience, and in a circle with the villagers. So it was a very beautiful experience. I found the sacred there, by the way. Tell us more about that finding. Tell you more about... That finding. Oh, well, they live connected to the land. They live connected to each other. Everything is sacred. They know the plants for their medicine. They know the plants for their food. They see their ancestors in the plants. They see their ancestors in each other, in the actions that they do. Everything has meaning. And that's the sacred. So one of the most challenging things was coming back into western civilization at the time, because now I had found the sacred, and now I'm going back to the land that had not been particularly kind to me. So I experienced the emptiness that we experience sometimes in the west that leads us to the use of opiates and depressions and all those things. But really at that point, I engaged in trying to figure out how to create social change for preservation of the planet, social justice. So about a month later, I found myself at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. And so now from the rainforest, I'm walking the halls of Yale. So it was a pretty trippy experience. Life is nothing if not trippy. From losing 30 pounds is a poor inability to hunt and gather your own food to back in the halls of the cafeteria, Ivy League. And that was the extreme. See, Ivy League, we're talking about people with tremendous privilege to people who are struggling just to survive and preserve their ways. So it was a pretty big dichotomy of worldviews. So I absorbed it all just to try to expand my own worldview. That's very awakening to get those stark dichotomies. Very awakening. And so from there, a lot of my peers, we had a decision to make my peers and I about what we would do with our future. So for me, I chose to follow the path of love, which was really how do I step forward into the world in a way where I'm coming at it from the heart. And so I did organizing with a pastor there who was working with formerly incarcerated. And then I, from there I went into community organizing, worked with Acorn, I did social justice organizing, environmental justice organizing. And from there I went into political organizing, running campaigns, working in government. All the while just learning the tools of creating change. And then I went into business because if you can't figure out the capitalist model then you really can't function in this world. So for the last 15 years I've been learning financial modeling and the world of capitalism. So when that day came, October 20th, 2018, and I had that kind of big moment of clarity about my own path and where I was, it was a pretty natural next step to take all those tools and then put them to work to push for the decriminalization of the very thing that sort of liberated my own consciousness. It was a way of saying thank you to the plants. Okay, so we have this process that you've had of working on social justice and environmental causes and just causes for further catalyzing awakening in other people over time and you're picking up strategies along the way and you wanted to implement that for specifically decrim nature. So yeah, how did the idea seed for decrim nature and walk us through? Well, I'll give you my path. Of course everyone who was at the table had their own path to the table. But after that mushroom journey it was very challenging for me to understand what happened to my brain that I could suddenly see the world from so many different perspectives that I could suddenly be having these conversations with myself that were far more enlightened than I was able to have before the mushrooms and it confused me in many ways. So I went in search of community. This is now where Ayahuasca experience with Correndero was 23, 24 years old. And then the mushroom experience was just a year ago. Yeah, less than a year ago. And between that was not, what was that? Not too much? Well, Ayahuasca experience didn't really do much because it was very light. It was very light. So all it did was give me a deeper sensory experience, height and vision and hearing. That's all it did. You also had an understanding of the interconnectedness of the tribal, indigenous lifestyle. So I understood the sacred from the intellectual perspective, from the cerebral cortex perspective, so to speak. The mind, the brain. I understood it intellectually, right? People say you understand God intellectually. Yeah, intellectually, yeah. Yeah, versus the feeling. Yeah, the very deep knowing. So that was in between 23 to 50. Wow. And so there was still a struggle, and it would manifest in if I was under high duress, if I felt as if I was being attacked, I would go into self-protection or even counter-attack mode, which is something we see in PTSD, something we see in people who have been abused where it's about self-protection. There's an immediate place of assuming you're being attacked. And so I recognize that. I've known that about myself, at least for the last five years, I've seen a lot of deep meditation. Okay, so your meditation was a big connecting thread over those 20-plus years? Yeah, yeah, sorry. When I was 24, 45, my mother passed. So about six years ago, my mother passed away. And that sort of reawakened a lot of the childhood trauma because my sister brother and I were not prepared to know how to deal with that level of complexity of trauma. We didn't have the tools, because we weren't given those tools when we were young, on how do you work through these challenges in a way that isn't yelling or screaming or fighting, because that's what you were taught. So now I'm seeing all of this disintegrate around me, relationships breaking down, people getting into deep, deep depression around me, not knowing how to function in the world. And I'm looking around thinking, what do I do with all this? So I started with myself and said, why am I healing the self first? And as I did that, I went into yoga, then I found Shavasana. When I found Shavasana, I said, what is this thing, consciousness? I'm suddenly recognizing there's this other state of being where you're aware of your own awareness. And so from there, I went deeply into meditation, meditating almost daily, well, daily for about two years. And as I went through that process, I sort of let go of all of the trauma, everything that was binding me. But I still had the reaction. I still was reacting from a place of self-protection, anxiety when I felt under duress. So I realized that there was something in my brain that wasn't under my control, even with meditation. And I figured that I could not break this cycle, that I was forever going to be trapped in this self-defense mode when under duress. And that's when I was ready to give up. I read Michael Pollan's book and I said, I got to try these mushrooms, because apparently they do a pretty good job. So that's where I went into the ceremony with a friend. I had my five gram journey. I closed the door behind me, I locked it, and I said, I'm coming out when I'm done with processing these five grams. And it was a pretty tremendous journey. I felt that default mode network, now I've come to understand what happened. And what happened was that I was trapped in this cycle of neuron firing that reacted, just reacted. And I couldn't overcome it, because it was just too built into my network system, neural network system. So then that's when I started searching for community and found this very, very strong community of a psychedelic community in the Bay Area that included doctors, nurses, therapists, scientists, and I said, wow, what the hell is this, and where have you been all my life, right? And so then we had a meeting. We all sat down at a table and started just introducing ourselves. As I introduced myself, I said I used to work in government. I worked in the Oakland City Council. My job was to get legislation passed. So if you all want to pass something, I'm happy to help. And at the very end, Dr. Gary Kono, who was there with us said, I think we should pass a resolution. And everyone else agreed. And so that's sort of what started it on rolling. So from there, that was December of 2018. And then by January and February, we wrote the resolution. By March, we're meeting with council members. By April, we have a sponsor. By May, we're at public safety. And by June, we pass it unanimously. And now the rest is six months. Yeah, six months. Wow. So the resolution teaches us about the resolution. So the resolution, I think, is a beautiful resolution. It's one year ago passed. So one year on the 20th of October. It will be one year. So the resolution is beautiful. It's so simple. It simply says in multiple warehouses and therefore be it resolves that our relationship to entheogenic plants and fungi should be the same as our relationship to tomatoes, the same as our relationship to an orange tree, to herbs we want to grow in our garden, that there is nothing fundamentally different between our relationship, there should not be anything fundamentally different between our relationship to entheogenic plants and fungi, consciousness healing plants, and an orange, that it's decriminalized. There's no controls on how much you grow. I can share it with friends. And if I choose to create a factory to take my oranges and make orange juice, now I plug into pre-existing regulatory systems that are already in place. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. So our resolution doesn't go that far. It simply says if you're going to grow it for personal use, to share, and to enjoy without the process of commodification, that it's for sale or commercial sales or commercial cultivation, that there's no constraints, no controls, no government interference between that relationship. And we think that's the way it should be on planet Earth. Wow. What a progressive bill. So simple, though, isn't it? It is. Well, yeah, I love the analogy to our relationship with tomatoes or an orange tree. I love that. That was really eloquently written, that with entheogens and with fungi shall be similarly treated. And that's very elegant. The only reason not to do it is fear. And that's the only argument we've ever heard against this from people is, what if somebody does this? What if a child gets ahold of it? What if? But then you go to the next step. What if a child eats these? What if a child decides to cross the street with a bus coming? There's certain things that we as parents, as adults, are supposed to help guide children through, including, don't give them powerful mushrooms. Nevertheless, poisonous, poisonous deadly mushrooms are not illegal. So we're going to say, what if a child eats these? What if a child eats those? But we don't seem to have the impetus to make those illegal. So then, what does... I liked how you guys said, at the next level it would be a plugging into the existing regulatory framework if someone was to go beyond just going for their own consciousness healing using entheogens and fungi. But how about then for purposes in the last year, what have you seen happen from that? What has come up? What have people been doing? Just having entheogens be decrement, what is that like? Well currently, we still have the state and federal laws in place, which we're working on hopefully changing soon. And it's a city of Oakland. So then if you're in just the city... Yeah, it's only the local police and local prosecutors that will not take any action or prosecute against anyone with those plant materials. But a federal official seeing somebody using them, yes, it's still federally illegal. It's still illegal at the state level. So that is our next kind of ground and really our goal at the end of the day would be to get all plants and fungi removed from Schedule 1. Because if you think about it, there's no way to get them removed by testing, because you test compounds, individual compounds, you might test psilocybin, but a mushroom is not psilocybin, a mushroom is many different compounds. So plants and fungi never should have been put on Schedule 1 because you can't test them off Schedule 1. So I think we may consider broader action towards a federal government that seeks to remove all plants and fungi from Schedule 1 as well as looking at how folks might engage in a relationship with plants and fungi in a sacred, ceremonial, sacramental way that is protected under church freedom of religion. Interesting. So my inalienable rights for my spiritual attention technologies of plants and fungi. Yes, if you approach it as a sacrament for personal religious healing purposes it should not be infringed upon by the government. It's such a beautiful expression of consciousness right now because it's like indigenous people have for the longest time just been living with the land and with each other and with these plants, fungi. Government has helped, of course, people organize themselves into states and countries and... May I opine on that for a moment? Yes, there are beautiful things that come from government. There are beautiful things that come from capitalism. They are technologies and we embrace these technologies because they help us to do wonderful things. But we should also be open and aware that as we're evolving as human societies there are costs to these as well that we have to now clean up. We're seeing that with climate change so we have to recognize that while capitalism is good it also has impacts. So how do we begin to transform that? We don't have to throw it away, we just transform it. To version 2, version 3. The code updates. We got it. There are some archaic codes with plant and fungi. That's really serious because those have a lot to do with consciousness ascension and healing which are paramount to having a well functioning self-family civilization at large. One might speculate that when these plants were being co-evolved with humans and we were using them to bring peace into our own villages there were other times perhaps we used them to understand our enemy better but certainly we used them to help advance our own consciousness to live as a community also to raise our awareness to see trends, to understand patterns in the ecosystems. We were elevating our consciousness with these plants. It's very interesting that here we are now as a species trying to figure out how we survive ourselves and these plants are theirs gifts to help guide us. Let's talk on what has happened in terms of business. When a city does make these incremental steps like you listed and then is able to do something like decriminalize psilocybin or fungi and endiogens what is able to transpire afterward for people this more maybe freedom with the feeling they are more free to engage with those endiogens which is really beautiful in the sense of fungi but also does it seem like in the last year there have been businesses that have emerged and what do those look like? Not so much yet because of the state and federal restrictions they can't even incorporate as you can't just say because they plug into the same regulatory framework again. What we're looking at in terms of the evolution at the local level which is actually where we'd really like to put our energy as decrim nature is throughout various communities around the US and around the world if it grows to that is how do we support the local emergence of their own relationship with these plants and fungi growing, gather, gift grow, gather, gift helping people grow their own helping people gather and gift to friends Interesting the gather it's a naturally growing phenomena so you can gather rather than even have to grow specifically in your a safely gather Really all that's saying is in East Oakland we have a beautiful nursery that is run by formerly incarcerated individuals who do the work and then they sell the plants What a beautiful thing if they could grow mushrooms or grow beneseriopsis, capi and chakruna for ayahuasca and they could share this in a responsible way share this in with other people in their own community and help each other heal that way so it's a healing relationship you establish now that will happen at the local level and we're pretty sophisticated enough to know that on top of that there will be many once especially once this becomes state and federally legal there's going to be a whole lot of commodification that happens so that's not our agenda if you want to do that that's up to them to help build community around these plants and fungi by having a direct relationship with them and they can these communities that are interested in the antigen and fungi process of bringing them into the communities the decriminalization of them do you have a protocols, frameworks that they just download or how do they do so we actually do have we actually have what's called the Oakland framework for antigenic use antigenic plant and fungi use and it's a seven, eight page document we created at the request of city council they said one of the council members Lauren Taylor actually asked us to create some protocols to ensure the protection of people in his community because it's largely African American community they don't have a lot of experience in that community with antigenic plant and fungi use and so he wanted us to bring the information that we could gather forward to make available to not only his community but communities throughout the US who will be new to this arena so we consulted with doctors, therapists, nurses, psychiatrists long time facilitators without initials next to their names and we created a seven page Oakland framework for antigenic plant and fungi use and it goes everywhere from preparation to micro dosing as a good way to start all the way to reciprocity when you've gone through the entire process of self healing the last piece of that is reciprocity yeah that's so cool okay so then now able to be downloaded and use this framework and hopefully to like you said each community has will have its own unique relationship with antigen and fungi and they'll get to decide how to properly decriminalize and what to do so then it seems like it could then maybe not yet businesses but you can maybe set up a meet up and all go hang out in the park and go through conscious healing and ascension together it has enabled facilitators to be facilitators for those who don't know is just people who are well trained in helping people go through the journey so it enables the entheogenic psychotherapy sessions so healers and psychotherapists can then work with these entheogens and fungi well if they have a certification as a therapist with a capital T then they're still not allowed because that is I believe a certification granted to them by a government body that is not local I believe it's state but then non-capital T government certified yeah yeah that's right so people who have been doing this for a long time can feel safer in providing ceremony in their community and help them facilitate that experience provide ceremony in the community and then also maybe making it based on gift base like you said your last GRO gather gift yeah yeah very cool how do we ensure that people like the indigenous that you were with in Ecuador is that right that they and other people that may not be reaping the great fruits of such emerging markets how do we ensure that these fruits become democratized and distributed well so the fruits by the fruits do you mean the actual materials or do you mean the fruits of their labor in providing knowledge right because intellectual property these Cudandedos have some very deep historical intellectual property that they're carrying around with them and do deserve to be compensated for their service and so how do we do that we pay for their services directly so if they fly up to the U.S. to give a training they should be compensated for their time and we should appreciate what they bring to the table the materials themselves we're a little cautious about moving too fast to commodify the actual materials at this point in time at least from our perspective we'd rather compensate the individuals who bring the service forward in terms of how we democratize the materials themselves this is one of our big concerns as decriminalized nature we saw what happened in cannabis I was directly involved in the cannabis industry involved in a business in the cannabis industry and the extent of greed that sort of prevailed in post prop 64 and I saw it directly where people were speculating once big capital came in that it just became about assembling as many different dispensaries as you could it became less about the medicinal and healing value of cannabis it became more about how we can commodify that whole thing and then there were a lot of people who were pushed out of it a lot of African American people who were involved in the industry were suddenly pushed out because they couldn't afford to go through the regulatory process or to get a permit and build out for a million dollars plus their manufacturing or their cultivation facility a lot of people got pushed out through that process and the additional downside is they were restricted on how many plants they could grow so what we're saying is do whatever you want to do with commodification with corporatization with clinical studies just don't set any limit on what people can grow because then you're allowing people to have a relationship the same kind of relationship I can have with tomatoes, with lemons, with oranges and if people would prefer to go to the store and buy something off the shelf that's produced then let them but if they want to grow their own mushrooms or create their own ayahuasca or their own DMT then they should have that right and so that's how we democratize it is we allow people to retain that direct just like tomatoes direct access distribution of then there's different frameworks that have to be well no forever forever they should have it's like tomatoes we can still go get tomato sauce or buy canned tomatoes but I can also grow my own but then if you grow for a million people then there needs to be some sort of check what we're suggesting is that people get taught how to grow their own if they so choose in every community people get taught how to grow their own mushrooms for example if they want to if they want to learn how to grow their own there's people there to teach them and then they can give to their neighbor because then it's safe they can that's right and then it doesn't need to go through a regulatory check because they already learned how to grow and they're gifting it it's like you with tomatoes as long as they're grown right or that the eggs are well you can grow tomatoes or you can put your pesticide all over it so there's that too but we don't regulate you from doing that there's a certain level of trust put the same rules onto mushrooms with that same level of trust because humans aren't as stupid sometimes as we make them out to be it's a nice fiction so that we can have greater control at the higher levels of government and I'm not a libertarian so this is not coming from a libertarian speak and Michael Pullman had a mushroom journey that he spoke about in the book and by the way I enjoyed it very much and then he had several other journeys and then when they asked him are you okay with the way decriminalization is rolling out he said I'm concerned about safety so he's concerned about other's safety but he's confident in his own abilities to have safety protocols so there's a certain otherness to that so what we're saying is be okay that everybody can make the same decision that you can that's right everybody's just as smart smart we know how to survive as human beings generally speaking so we don't need to have the fear interesting that's such a cool way to put it yeah I wonder where else that can be applied with all of the oversight top down oversight that's happening that's a good question although generally we don't have the same level of fear and anxiety that we do over things like drugs or things like cannabis or things that impact our consciousness where the government seems to have drawn a line in 1970 with Nixon was on things that impact our consciousness even things like deadly mushrooms poisonous mushrooms we seem to be okay with those it's just things that impact our consciousness that we seem to have anxiety about as a government of the people I have one last question that we like asking on the show what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world life this the alternative is pretty bleak kind of lonely Carl's your journey has been fascinating thank you for all your incredible work appreciate you having me on thanks everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate it love to hear your thoughts on the comments below so let us know what you're thinking check out the links to Carl's work also check out the links to Decrim Nature check that out as well I'll support the artists, the entrepreneurs, the organizations around the world that you believe in, support New West Summit where we're at right now, support simulation our show you can find all our links in the bio below and go and build the future everyone manifest your dreams into the world we love you very much, thank you for tuning in and we'll see you soon gosh that was so great thank you you