 I'm Anna Ross. My background is from as a as a clubber so in the late 1990s I sort of found ecstasy and the club scene and had a wonderful time and got really heavily involved in harm reduction but peer-led harm reduction so particularly with psychoactive substances so we weren't really focused on opiates we were focused on club club drugs and going out to free parties and providing a safe space for chill out and things like that and that really so I was it I was sort of a clubber and I was you know working in catering and doing all of that kind of stuff and then from that that really kind of inspired a a sort of passion because what I was seeing because I started to go into support work and in support work you work with people who are homeless and with problematic substance use and I was seeing this dichotomy between the people that I was using substances with for pleasure versus the people who are supporting who are allegedly using substances for problematically and sort of just really that was the beginnings of my understanding of this sort of structural impact of drugs policy on the way that you use drugs and so I became really passionate about that and I went into Crew 2000 which is the drug policy reform and then I went and did a law degree because I wanted to become a criminal defense lawyer and defend against the awful drug laws and but I didn't get traineeship and went into academia and from that so I started my PhD on drug policy participation or the the role of drug users in the participate in the in the development of policy in Scotland and in doing that and the idea behind that one of my supervisors was an expert in deliberative democracy and part and participation methods and so I set up this group called the Scottish drug policy conversations and the idea behind that was to bring in multiple stakeholders so traditionally when you're talking about drugs you have the government you have your police you have your medical professions and then very rarely you'd have your token with people in recovery and generally speaking it's like people who've been off drugs for 20 years and are drug-free and you know are there to tell their story and I found that really problematic because for me my experience of drugs was always very positive not always but you know like I've seen a lot of positives so with the drug policy conversations it was to try and bring all of these stakeholders together to actually shift the narrative and go you know loads of people use drugs loads of people enjoy using drugs there's a small section of society that have major issues with a certain kind of substance namely opiates and pain relievers and we all know why that happens you know because it's deprivation it's trauma it's all this kind of stuff so we need to widen the conversation out because if we accept that drug use is normal within society we can then focus on this smaller group and go well actually that's not the drugs that's that's what's causing that is something else that's the policies that's the capitalism that's the lack of investment that's the lack of connection all of that kind of stuff so we so we created that group and it was really powerful and that's when I'm around about that time I met Fiona and and and then we sort of Fiona and I sort of started working together quite closely I continued my PhD and I as a result of my PhD I became quite heavily involved in the Scottish government and I became a representative on their lived and living experience groups I became a real pain in their arse our thorn in their sighs should I say and constantly going you got to think about us you got to think about us and and and yeah just developed connections I've you know as a result of my engagement with all of this I also did the I was a special adviser to the UK select committee on problem substance use in Scotland and that was interesting and what was interesting about that was we still had to focus on problematic substance use but initially it was like inquiry into drug use in Scotland and you know this is I guess this is just an example of this tiny narrative shift which is like no it's not an investigation to just drug use in Scotland because then you would be investigating all the people that took ecstasy or smoked cannabis or you know enjoyed a bit of cocaine at the weekend no you're looking at people who have habitual dependent opiate use so we were able to change the focus from drug use to problematic substance use and that was quite important for us and to create that narrative I'd worked in a lot of sex worker charities sex worker rights charities and I had been part really blessed to be part of our honour to be part of the HIV community which we didn't realize how incredible that was as a movement when it was when we were there do you know act up and all the rest of it and then I'd taken a seat back I'd been doing all different things with my life and I was part of the recovery community at the time and I watched a film called the house I live in and it the fire that it created in me the rage that I felt when I watched that film because I'd never thought about I had always thought about drug use in my life and friend my friend's lives as I thought we were exceptional and then I realized actually this was a designed policy this was a designed policy created to criminalize certain drug users of certain class certain types of drug use and I look back and I thought about all the people who died all the unnecessary deaths that we'd put down as drug deaths when they were actually created by state violence by state stigma you know we all talked about oh you know I feel really ashamed and it's like you were stigmatized and that's a deliberate state policy so I started speaking to my friend who had survived and we started reframing our stories not about I was a problematic substance user but you know I might have had issues and I might have overused certain substances but you know let's talk about the time that the police beat us or women subjected to violence you know where do you go when it's the police that have actually say should we assaulted you or my friends who spent years and years in prison these beautiful sensitive people who spent years in prison were sitting in Edinburgh it was the AIDS Capital Europe it was created by that was a policy a deliberate policy that state agents the police talk about like they acted it out on people who were using drugs and we became the AIDS Capital Europe so that was all stuff that had been in the middle of and not realized was policy driven and so recovering justice was like how can we change the policies and what would the peaceful solutions be to that and at the time a lot of the rhetoric around problematic drug use was do you know I took drugs I became a really really bad person and now I don't take drugs and there was also this thing you know I smoked cannabis at 12 and then I was a heroin user at 18 we tried to change that narrative I think we were successful in some ways 10 years later I'm still a little disturbed that the rhetoric is and even in drug policy movements and in social justice movements the rhetoric is do you know I wasn't a bad person I was a really sad person I was a really traumatized person and I mean I have to say like and I know my colleagues feel the same way sometimes you sit in a conference and it's like fuck I'd just rather be bad do you know I might have had some agency then but we've done this thing where we've pathologized the lives of like so-called problematic substance users you know and it's like if we can just tell you how traumatized they were when they were five years old or this terrible event happened to them and now they're taking drugs and as Anna says what that does is it bypasses that we're now in late-stage capitalism if you're not traumatized you're not fucking paying attention you know if anybody's not traumatized like what's wrong with you you know what I mean and this idea that we'd now become responsible productive members of society and again if you're well adjusted in this society you know you shouldn't be we should all be out making trouble so I was starting to become a little disillusioned within the space and we were constantly getting asked do you know tell your story you know people did not want to hear me speak about drug policy reformed we're like talk about this talk about that would you talk about this because it's sensational and it creates an energy but often not an energy that gets us in the room to make the changes they just wanted our stories and Anna and I had huge like that's why I met with Anna and she was like yeah I absolutely get this how do we make a space where we are the change makers rather than just the sad stories that somebody's gonna put on a podium and also there's a thing around there's a couple of things pathologising drug users has become the norm nobody's question in it has been done over and over and over again and we often do that in spaces where there are police police who have done utterly horrific things to people horrific things they've ruined peoples they've like destroyed students lives they've arrested men in front of their children screaming and they've taken them off to prison for six years for cannabis and nobody says what happened to you and your childhood that you became part of this and you managed to stay in this and torture people for smoking smoking pot or what happened to you as a politician that made it okay to make benefit cuts to such an extent that people are dying and committing suicide you those are not the conversations that we ask other groups of people so why do we do it with people who use drugs so and I don't think we should I don't think you should ask anybody those questions I think they're personal deep questions that you probably should do in a psychiatrist so what we decided to do was like flip the narrative and instead of looking at what were our supposed weaknesses it was like water or strength and then also this idea that like drugs were bad it was like actually there are no good or bad drugs there are just good or bad policies so when we flipped at that then we started saying and actually there's some substances out there that could be part of the solution and that's when we formed recovering just as did come become part of that but then and I realized it wasn't the space and so we create the Scottish psychedelic research group but it was also this frustration at this and it's exactly that the pathologization of drug use it was this frustration that every time you walk into a room when you talk about drugs it's about the harm it's like about how do we prevent the harm of drug use how do we prevent that you say these poor drug users and even within the medical cannabis space as well and and the other spaces but the thing that really fired Fiona and I I think to move away from the narrative of harm and into the narrative of pleasure and the narrative of normalization was this frustration it's like you know this this is everyone's always talked about of poor drug users it's this lack of autonomy it's like well actually people are using these substances because they're working you know like they're working for whatever it is that they're doing and then I come from an environment where I've you know like I say I've used multiple substances I haven't had an opiate dependency but I've been in relationship with somebody and there is something you know which is like different to an opiate dependency than say for example a cannabis dependency so there are different there are differences but you know I also know people that have used opiates regularly at the weekend for most you know for their whole lives without a problem so it's really dependent on the individual so yeah we just wanted to flip the narrative really and I think like one of the big things that gave us the freedom to do that was the OSF funding so we got funded from the global drug policy program and that was just oh my god like that was like a sort of um you know when you when you I approached the OSF on my own because I was a mom with two children I was passionate about this subject and I was doing all of it but I was like I need to get paid I need some money for this you know I can't do it anymore so I approached them and I had several sort of like meetings with them and stuff and it was just it was so empowering because they just went we see you we see what you're doing you know I'm not this big organization we're not this like massive kind of like you know government-run organization or anything it's just two people you know who want to make a difference who are having these little conversations and they went yeah we'll find you just go and do it and so we've had two parts from them and it's really kind of actually enabled us to do this what we call soft diplomacy work so we've had the three events that have taken place over the last three days and the reason why they're so important is Fiona and I have spent the last five years setting up the networks so it's things like being a thorn in the government side by constantly emailing that they know our names they listen to us when we talk but that's taken like five years of always being on the scene always been the ones that are just going to give that different voice which means we're now listen to and the big push that we've had for these past three days is to try and get the community because it's been quite difficult to galvanize the community in the sense that it's it's disparate there's a lot of different people like I say there's like the harm there's the drugs harm community and that's all quite set up the Scottish government have been very good I'd like to say that Fiona and I feel we can get a little bit of I mean it was on its way anyway with the Scottish Recovery Consortium so they were really focused on lived experience really wanted lived experience voice within policy and like I say I joined one of the groups and was really champion for like not just opiate use but all use and not just 20 years in recovery but you know recovery is whatever you want it to look like and you know that voice was kind of heard but I like to think you know we we've been on the outside skirts of it just shaking the narrative I mean like Fiona for example was instrumental in getting the daily record and on board to to call for decriminalization of drugs I mean that's unheard of the daily record is what the the most well-read newspaper in Scotland well and we did that on the back of we kept lobbying politicians would go in the speak to them and they'd say look I completely agree with what you say but the daily record and at first you went the first time you hear that you think oh that's a bit weak and then when you kept hearing it you realized actually this is they work for constant their work for their constituents who read these papers so that's when we went to the day you said that you would like to take this discourse out from the harm context but it's quite difficult right when when the media is full of reports of people dying of overdoses and as far as I know there is this surge of overdose deaths in Scotland so there is but this is why we've focused on cannabis and psychedelics which and psychedelics includes MDMA because there's focus on harm is all around opiate use and you know you can't really get away from it it's very difficult to what I've learned from the policymakers and from all of this is you need to create a story you need to create a narrative and like you say the narrative in Scotland is very much you know we have this exceptional drug deaths you know there's all these people dying from opiate use and all this where our narrative comes from that is like well that's as you say late-stage capitalism so you can sit there and you can come up with all these different ideas but the reality is that it's an intergenerational problem that's not going to go away where we come in where we want to do it is that actually you know well psychedelic assisted medicine for example is probably showing one of the most powerful evidence of how to address that the trauma which is not just the childhood trauma because actually a lot of the trauma comes from adulthood of having to engage in drug-using communities that are criminalized and therefore have these really violent structures you know and within them so there's a lot of trauma that's created through that and you and I had a lot of conversation around it when we first started this work the space wasn't created and now there is there's a drug policy task force and what we realized is okay so we held the space till the people turned up they turned up and then what we're good at is creating new spaces rather than we do know the experts are all there I am not the expert in that and neither are you and we don't want to be hopefully that issue will get dealt with appropriately and so now what we did want to say was but this space is not getting talked about the solution one of these solutions could be psychedelic assisted therapy and cannabis I mean yesterday at the event and several people who were really really forceful about nobody's talking about cannabis for addiction we've got I've met there are several people at the cannabis event yesterday who have cured or you know I've stopped their alcohol addiction by using cannabis so it's just you know like yesterday it's a Monday Tuesday and Wednesday the three events that we're having but Monday and Tuesday in particular we're about community building and about going right okay we've been on this tip for you the last few years and we've been funded to to create this space you know we've done a lot of the back work I've got agreement from the Scottish government that they will engage on anything to do with cannabis we've had meetings with the Scottish government about psychedelic assisted therapy there you know we've had meetings with the chief scientists office like that all of the kind of networks are in place but what we don't have is the coherent community so we know we set up the Scottish psychedelic research group a year and a half ago and that's definitely coming along I mean like we we have a board of four people now but this event just showed us that we've got a real team of folk that want to do it and I'm really excited about it because they want to run with it you know so our event and on Monday was about bringing the community together and we made a call for more participants for the SPRG because we don't want this kind of like right we're on a board and then we're gonna get everyone to do that no their voices are the ones that need to be heard and similarly I mean yesterday with cannabis one was probably the most powerful because cannabis is there's a real danger with cannabis that it gets implemented from top-down luckily as a result of being the secretary to the cross party on medicinal cannabis I'm a bit of a gatekeeper towards pharmaceuticals but what we've discovered now so we got approached by the various large pharmaceutical companies to engage with the Scottish government and we said well you can be members of the cross party but we're not giving you special treatment haven't really heard anything much back from them but what we have found out is that now approaching individuals within health boards to use their synthetic cannabis drugs for trials so they're bypassing the Scottish government and getting into the medical community so there's a real sense of urgency within the community at the moment of we've got a voice we want this voice to be heard you know yesterday in the room we had some people that it was fascinating and I hope we've caught this back in the feedback but you know I had some people there who've been involved in all the medical cannabis kind of startups you know around the world and he was just a bit blown away and flabbergasted because he was like I've never actually been to an event like this I don't actually know what was different about it because Fiona and I are used to doing these kind of events and these and what I think what was different about it was we leveled the playing field you know so there wasn't any experts and stuff you know everyone in the room there was experts whether you're a cannabis user a patient somebody who was growing you know we had like the bunch of guys there who have the first ever cannabis cultivation legal cultivation there you know we had like top and you know Mike Barnes who's like the top newer neuroscientist and all this kind of stuff so we had we had a range of all these so-called you know elite positions all the way down to sort of folk that would consider themselves just a bit of a cannabis user but they were all sitting in tables together and telling their story about why they were passionate about cannabis and oh man I mean like the buzz in the room was just it was just beautiful absolutely beautiful but the other thing that we're really really wanting to do and this is where I get excited and it gets a bit weird is within the cannabis in the psychedelic community there is a growing understanding that you know the concept of health and well-being isn't just about a Cartesian model of you know Dr. Knows Best and you know this that kind of thing and so what we've been doing in our events is also bringing in an element of the sacred so not bombarding it with like yeah we're all gonna sit here and you know do justics and kind of like sing kumbaya but just recognize that we're dealing with a different we're dealing with a different way of thinking we're dealing with a different way of being and we're trying to connect that the kind of mask faceless institutional personas that most people put across when they engage in these spaces and bring everyone down to the human level and that seems to have worked it seems to have worked and um and one of the things sorry the one of the things that I love is as a Scotch psychedelic research group we're all open about the fact that we take psychedelics we've used them and we've used them for healing we've used them for pleasure but we're out about that and so many organizations will skirt round it yeah most of our events people we try and create events and not everybody obviously can safely talk about that but when Carol Hart put that book out and talked about it I think we're in the next phase I really hope we're in the next phase of drug policy because I've got most of my best drugs from harm reduction conferences from being in the harm reduction movement you know I mean I was 20 years in abstinence based recovery and then I meet all these incredible people who don't talk about the fact that certain substances have transformed I'm assuming and hopefully with Scotland with this organization we will be able to safely talk about that and not be the lunatic fringe and I got I did a Winston Churchill fellowship and then they gave me more money and Winston Churchill are a really well it's Churchill fellowship now they're really you would think a very conservative and I said I want to create some space in Scotland where we can create an equitable cannabis market and bring psychedelic assisted therapy to Scotland and not in the way that it's been done in other countries not where you have big pharma and big capitalism and I put the application in and I thought they're gonna just like not even get back to me and they got back to me and they gave me some money to do that so that's some of the funding that I get so I feel that there is a cultural change and hopefully hopefully we do not end up with this psychedelic industrial complex because we know where some of the funding is coming from and it's really dark funding we're a really small country and hopefully hopefully we're small enough that those big beasts will stay away and we might be able to create our own hemp farms our own not we will we will yeah that's our dream and the people who are already the people who were in the room yesterday some of them are creating the most beautiful thoughtful medicines they are working underground taking huge huge risks to heal people they're running their people who've had a whole lot of experiences themselves who are now saying people can't afford to do a £5,000 psychedelic retreat and even if they could they don't want to be sitting with a bunch of hedge fund managers they want to be sitting with their own community so we were wanting to create a space where that becomes something that you will not risk stay agents bursting in and breaking up and putting people in prison for and removing children for and I and I do think I have a real hope that Scotland could achieve that and it's just how do we shape that narrative and how do we change it so that the government see and they are the first time I spoke to somebody who was running one of the biggest drug organizations when I said to him about psychedelics he just laughed and he was like oh my god you're just on it again and now he understands the power of these medicines to help in all sorts of different issues so the massive danger yeah we're in a very very interesting period where we're starting to get noticed as people that are creating change and that is a dangerous thing almost because it's like this is all being kind of behind the scenes you know with the underground with just creating networks and stuff but the moment that you start becoming people like oh this is interesting what they're doing and like I said we had somebody there yesterday you could almost seems like like flabbergasted didn't know I mean am I allowed to say it like spare prick at a party you know they didn't know where he sat because within these industries there is a whole bunch of middlemen generally speaking men white men sorry no nothing but who are who are have made a business of trying to connect governments with these industries but what we're trying to do or what we are doing is not about connecting industries with the government but connecting the voices of the people who use and what was once again beautiful about yesterday with the cannabis stuff was like everyone in that room had a relationship with cannabis of some sort that doesn't mean that they used it but they used it in the past but it was a passionate relationship with cannabis it wasn't there about money maybe there were a couple people that you know obviously want to make a buck but it was really about we're in Scotland man we have the talent to do this we have everyone behind us you know and and we can do this I mean I just wanted to go back actually to something you'd said earlier just about yeah about the narrative like I had when I started my PhD one of the first articles that I wrote was called the role of experiential drug use in drug policy research and it ties in right into what Fiona was saying and because I went and presented this at the Australian IDI international drug policy conference anyway big one it was made a lot of waves and it created a lot of conversation because so many people within the drugs policy arena use drugs but don't admit to it because they feel that it was somehow discredit them you know so for example yesterday like one of the people were saying oh you know you should think about using the term cannabinoids instead of cannabis because there's a negative link to cannabis I'm like no that no what that's playing the game that's like buying into the narrative that they want you to create which is you can't talk about this but you can talk about that you know cannabis I love cannabis in its beautiful beautiful substance and it's been around for hundreds of thousands of years why would I shift that term in order to make it more appealing to policymakers I mean I do understand that concept but this is the kind of thing that fired me and Fiona up because it's like no we're just we're just pussy-fitting around we're playing you know the concept of recovery having to be drug-free well so many of them aren't drug-free because they're taking prescribed drugs so what does that mean or they're smoking count you know like all of these kind of languages that are kind of masking the reality of what's going on and then and yeah so that so that was that but I got recommended by my supervisor at the time to not come out as a drug user because they said that they would it would impact my chances but I could not in good conscience write about drug users as if they were somehow other you know and so I took the risk and I added my own experiences and and all of my publications have me coming out and I still got a job and I've now got permanent lectureship I've got feeling that they've not actually read any of my publications but I acknowledge the fact it's incredibly brave that you do it not just as an academic but as a mother as a mother yeah I mean Jesus you know like it's kind of yeah it's scary but I feel supported because I feel that well a yeah I feel that I don't feel too scared but anymore but I do wonder you know at times if I become more public about it because at the moment like I say Fiona and I have been skirting around the edges not skirting around the edges in the underground you know we've been we've been the background going you go forward we've been trying to put people forward so this film in fact is probably one of the first times that we've decided that we're going to actually put ourselves at the front and go okay we're here but I don't want to be at the front I mean it's not about us being at the front I mean the whole point of this is to create a collective voice and that collective voice doesn't need to be saying the same thing but it fundamentally needs to be based on this concept of social justice humanity human rights and equity you know and that's a core energy that we're going for the core energy and and I really think it'll work and it can be really scary I mean as somebody who didn't use drugs for a very very long time and I had lost my fear of the police and now as somebody I am vulnerable yeah and I don't like them and I'm frightened of them so I'm very very cautious and we want to create safe spaces so that people are safe from those people because they're dangerous people yeah and they're violent and I mean and they're self-confessed I mean our metropolitan police have just had to say we're misogynistic and violent and we're not safe for women so it was a really big shift for me and it the shift was really bizarre because my friends would say to me are you worried that you'll become hooked on drugs again and I was like no I'm actually really worried that I could have some really big violent men come into my house and I would lose my autonomy yeah it's a real to be fair I just need to feel like I need to say to be fair like in Scotland police Scotland yeah I live in England yeah I live in England yeah they've been I mean I'm sure there's loads of incidents where you could say they've been awful like so for example the cannabis possession like we have de facto decriminalization where cannabis is dealt with a minor police warning so the police just give a slip of paper and if they're not caught again within thinks three to six months then it's let off but despite that over 50% of all possession charges are with young men between the ages of 18 and 24 and on top of that and it's in houses and it's all well known you know that's the police know who they're going for and you know I've spoken to police some of the guys the police about this and they feel their hands are tied you know but we have got better dialogue with police Scotland I mean I think this is why Scotland is quite exciting to be in at the moment because in regards to our engagement we have good engagement with police Scotland we have good engagement with the Scottish government the Crown Office we don't have such great engagement but they won't engage with anyone because they want to be independent and but you know there are there are avenues of dialogue that don't exist a UK level and you know like for excitingly I just found out this morning that Northern Ireland are going to be or is it Ireland are going to be holding a citizens assembly on drugs policy and that's something that we can really really help with you know so now that they're doing that in Ireland it could be something that we do in Scotland although to be honest a citizen assembly yeah yeah yeah I actually was thinking about I'm not sure it's like I'm more interested in the voices of the drug users and the people who have the experience of this and I know it sounds like the exceptionalist but you know you said earlier you know everyone involved in the psychedelic community has tried psychedelics and then there could be an argument against that saying well you know what it's exclusionary it's not it's not including people that don't have that experience and therefore all voices should be involved but I have no problem excluding the voices of those who have not used substances in this conversation because the reality is it's not about those voices because it's not about what they think or care or feel about it it's about us it's about how we experience the substances and how we experience that community and and there's dialogue to be had but it's just interesting because in doing that you know the model with opiate and the harm thing is like you've got the GP you've got the medical professions you got the treatment providers you've got all these people and in a million years you'd never expect them to take methadone or any of the treatments that they're prescribing and they will always see their clients as the drug user and me as the professional or as the policymaker but within the cannabis and psychedelics movement level playing field or at least that's what we're creating is we're creating a level playing field and that's really getting felt and we've got a series of events coming up as well I mean we've got in June we're hoping to be collaborating with David Nutt he doesn't actually know this yet but his publisher knows on an ethics around psychedelic medicine in Scotland we've got a three-day exhibition in the Scottish Parliament at the end of September in which is culminating in an event but the idea behind that is to bring the art so the other thing as well which is really fascinating about this is there's a lot of creatives involved in psychedelics and cannabis and it's people who have used those medicines and it's done them good and they want they've been creating art out of it so we're like well how do we include those voices in the policy discussion you know and how do we make sure that they're included another thing I'm absolutely passionate about is getting the people who are already growing and dealing you know involved we haven't I haven't really worked out ways to do that confidentiality but there are people engaged who do engage in that they just not able to talk about it but as we move towards actually policy development proper we need to bring those people in you know they've tried to do it I mean I understand they tried to do it in New York but they didn't really get it together but you can see around the world that like focus trying to create legislation that does have this social justice element to it and and and retribution restorative element to it and we can learn from those but they can create our own specific score because the other thing we're tapping into as well is this energy of old medicine so the narrative is always like oh look at this new medicine you know psychedelics new medicine cannabis new medicine no no in Scotland cannabis was grown for hundreds of years if not thousands I mean they found seeds it was a staple of all of the monasteries you know particularly with the Christian Celtic Christianity which was deeply spiritual and we have oral history we don't necessarily have physical evidence yet of the use of liberty caps but I mean come on like you know they grow all over Scotland and our Celtic shamanism is very similar to many of the Siberian shamanistic things it is without a doubt we use psychedelics so what we're trying to talk about is not bringing in a new form of substance use but reclaiming and we don't know what that looks like because we don't have the lineage or at least we don't have the physical obvious lineage because they were all killed and burnt in the witch trials and but the intelligence of the plants will tell us the intelligence of the plants and the earth and the community I mean the people that were meeting you know everyone has this you know slightly special link to Scotland and there's just this buzz about how we're going to bring back the indigenous use of these medicines I mean they are many to there are many to mushroom I'm any to miscaria grows all over Scotland all over the north and it's one of the ones that we've not had a discussion about we hope to have a really really in-depth discussion around how many I have do you know I mean they've been used for years and years but they're there they hit the GABA receptors one of the biggest factors in drug deaths in Scotland is GABA painting and yeah I didn't know that even myself so doctors are prescribing the substance which is actually highly toxic and we don't really know what's doing when in it occurs naturally in these mushrooms we know people who are now relearning that medicine it can be used as a tonic on the skin and have the same impact as these highly toxic highly dangerous drugs yeah you can pick this thing from your sacred ground and make this ointment I mean and so these are the stories that were not that we want to bring forward yeah we just want you know and every because otherwise yeah and they've been stolen and I mean obviously like them the medicines were taken Roman times I suppose like we've lost as as healers we've lost a lot yeah but there and it does sound kind of woo-woo but the plants tell you yeah that there's an intelligence in those plants you take them and they tell you what they need us to do so my understanding is that you are very skeptical about the mainstream medicalized model it has to be part of it obviously it has to be part of it but what what kind of system do you envision do you have any ideas how how the government should regulate all this field if it should regulate how can we make sure that for example not this is not Charlotte answering as we are abusing the substances abusing the naivety of people you know but this is so this is yes so this is so we have so this is this document that John so John Anderson one of our board members has written this whoo incredibly hefty ethics document and but this is the next stage for us so so there's two things in your question there and one is what we can do now currently within the framework so in regards to cannabis and you know you'll have seen from the presentation last last night and I guess you can probably just show elements of that because with cannabis there's some quite clear roots that we can go down we can get a team together which we're going to get together to get the Scottish guidance rather than the English guidance that is currently being used but the Scottish guidance and prescribing so that's fairly easy to do as long as we've got the people and we're also looking to get a team together to get a Lord Advocate's reference so in Scotland Police Scotland are governed by the Lord Advocate the Lord Advocate can make a reference to so for example the Lord Advocate made a reference which reduced all of the basically de facto decriminalization so all possession of drugs now is dealt with a minor police warning so and then that was from a Lord Advocate's reference where they basically made a statement going we believe it's not in the public interest to to do this and so we could get them to do a statement you know if we had the team to develop the evidence saying it is not in the public interest for the Scottish Police of Police Scotland to be policing actively policing the cultivation and possession of cannabis so that's possible but in regards to I mean I think it's interesting you use the term charlatans because yes there is all this fear around the misuse of psychedelics because it can be problematic but I think that is more around lack of engagement of people that are using psychedelics and I mean when we're in the community there like on Monday that was the community of like healers and psychedelics and they are not charlatans you know they're people that are doing the work I think what you'll fight like in Scotland I don't I haven't yet come across any like oral evidence around the probe like the really bad use not in the same way that I've come across from England and where there's been quite a massive surgeons particularly in London in place like that but in regards to how do we see envisage coming into Scotland well we've had a meeting with the Scottish Government Drug Policy Division I mean they're really interested and keen to see and psychedelic assisted therapy as some form of treatment for addiction there are already a couple of trials going on in the Kennedy Tower around treatment resistant depression I think if we create a community yeah hopefully it becomes self-regulating yeah and the community then how it held to hold each other accountable yeah and I have heard there was conversations yesterday I know a lot of men that just will now work with men women that just work with women we've not made an official connection with the Chikruna Institute but they wrote an incredibly beautiful book called psychedelic justice which I've now listened about six times it's just fabulous it covers all of this and we'll get in touch with them and yeah hopefully the next one will do some work with them because they're fabulous but I think the main thing is is it has to come from the community so it's not like how well what would we like it's like well the community will guide our role is to hold space for the community you know like I'm not a therapist I'm not like a psychedelic practitioner my expertise is creating an anaphylone to our expertise it appears because I think we've only really just had evidence of this properly this week like we were over we've been overwhelmed like we were not expecting these these events to to turn out this way we always get good attendance but not in the same way as this there's something shifted either with us or with the community I don't know but the the point is that and we're here to create that space to hold that space so the community can then create what it needs in order to regulate itself so going forward we've got monthly meetings with SPRG and what we really see is this yeah this building of a momentum empowering people so many people turned up to the events and we're like what should we do and then by the end of it it's like they're feeling oh it's not about you telling us it's like we're here we can do this you know like what can I do you know people are you know saying and I'm gonna send out emails and get spread lists and oh god because in the end of the day is just me and Fiona still doing all of this and so the next stage for us is to go okay we've just galvanized galvanized the community now we need to get some structures in place to make sure that community doesn't become fragmented again so and it's I've put I mean you and I have put on an awful lot of community events and I always used to identify you know I'm an activist and my activism's driven by rage and sometimes desperation and what took me to psychedelics was I was burned out by it yeah like absolutely fundamentally burned out with it and I realized that rage is not an energy that creates sustainable healthy change so when I mixed that with the mysticism and the magic of the medicine the two it was like these there's two energies created and into something that's like sacred activism and it's a secret like like I am now a sacred activist activism and the energy was different yes people were angry but they also had hope yeah and I've not seen that so much before Fiona you mentioned that it is still very expensive to to attend a psychedelic retreat yeah what can we do to make psychedelic healing more accessible for people who live in poverty at the most marginalized people who really need it but now it's still a kind of upper middle class team at the moment we're all underground yes I've done some training you know I've got a therapy background I've done some training but it all amounts to nothing you know because of the legalities unless I go and do it in a different country and and for all sorts of different reasons people a lot of my friends can't travel because if they're you know so we're working underground we're working underground and a lot of those underground practitioners as we get together I would hope that we can have some kind of permission to and you're going to have to be the person that works out how we do that here but we still have a class war yeah I was really delighted to hear some really really working class oh yeah since both of those events and at this event who are actually giving medicine to their communities in their communities because there's something around and I hear it the idea that you know you have to be kind of you know you have to have a nice house and a nice job and a certain income to be able to handle psychedelics yeah because you know and it's like if what we're saying is that you know if you don't have that and you may never have that you shouldn't be allowed access to the divine or joy or ecstasy like how dare you yeah this is something that everyone should be allowed to experience but also in Scotland this is like part of our cultural heritage I mean I grew up in Scotland from the age of 14 years onwards it was a routine on in all in the autumn you know and it's just right the the the heart is just like set it's like that mist you got you know it's a routine and a ritual that many Scottish adolescents go through and then it's forgotten about or you know they move on to the harder drugs whatever you want to call it but there is a I mean you know like we were up north and in all in the autumn last year and we were looking for mushrooms and it was hilarious because like all the locals were like oh I getting a wee getting a wee footage and then I was like aye aye so you know so it's part of our culture you know our underground culture and that you know so really it's about yes how do we empower people from you know the sort of the class working class environment but actually they're all doing it anyway so I mean so it's actually not about empowering them to do it right or anything like that it's about getting those voices in to say we've been doing this already and you know this is what we're doing and it's it's fantastic so you're right you know and I had a conversation with a woman who was like really well mean and you know and she said you know Fiona it's like no actually it was a guy and he'd said you know how do you send how do you give people this incredible experience where they're open to the beauty of the universe and then you send them back to our blog and I said to him how do you have this incredible experience that the universe is one and then you go back to your white male misogyny and work for a capitalist organization you know is raping the planet yeah you know I mean what absolute nonsense that we would say this to people yeah one thing I want to finish up on though was just to say that when Fiona and I did events before and we always felt really drained at the end but yesterday we were like oh my god I don't feel drained I feel really energized and really like going going going but um yeah we're gonna have we've got our final event today so we better get our skates on so we were talking about media and how you want to work with the media and that's why we use quite a big bit of our budget to bring you guys over because actually media's toxic and you're not you know so we wanted you yeah yeah and that was part of it it wasn't like by accident or because we think I mean we do think you're fabulous but but no we had conversations about trying to get like the Herald and the independent and everything but they were like no actually because it's the two kind of like organizations that are about the user voice and then we can send those to the politicians and the ministers and everything like that but we don't need the events have shown us that we don't need the media behind us because actually media might even complicate matters what we need is the user voice because we have the links to the government we have all of that so we just need recording sheets about how many people turned up and what they said you know and there's enough knowledge about psychedelics around there already that we don't need to get that advertisement out