 basically a new narcotic or psychotropic drug that in its pure form of preparation that is not yet controlled by United Nations drug conventions but that may pose a public health threat comparable to those substances that are already listed. Basically something new that hasn't been scheduled, that hasn't been focused on by either law enforcement or public health organizations. And just to kind of put these things in context literally the weekend before I planned on coming out here a music festival in Florida in the United States had a bad batch of one of these novel psychoactive substances that are as yet undetermined of an identity that resulted in the death of two in the hospitalization of 57. That is a substance that we still have no idea what it is and it was flagged as some type of molly or amphetamine type stimulant. This is the this is the standard ladies and gentlemen people don't know what the stuff is but the news is going to flag it as something such as MDMA or a psychedelic because they don't know and until they don't know whatever kind of previous and pre-existing bias that exists about drugs is going to be slapped onto it. And to give you a sense of the scope of the problem this is from the EMC-DDA last year. That's the number of novel substances that have been picked up by the organization just in Europe alone. And I do want to emphasize that the bottom half that's 60 new substances the red and green bars that's entirely taken up by those and the amphetamine type stimulants that have potentially psychedelic effects or synthetic cannabis like K2 and spice those fake pots that have been showing up all over. And these substances are not just different brands these are unique chemicals that are being synthesized and sold in gray markets all over the world. This is a chemical structure comparison between some of the more classic substances like THC and amphetamine and the other drugs that are now showing up such as UR-144 and MDPV like you saw earlier. This is some data from the National Health Services report from Scotland basically talking about drugs and drug effects every year. And I don't really know how to make this any more stark. I am not familiar with Etizelam which is designer benzodiazepines. I am not familiar with ethylphenidate which is a chemical iteration on Ritalin. But these are substances that did not exist on the radar of medical practitioners in 2012 and are now killing more people than all classic psychedelics and MDMA combined. This is a study from a music festival out in the United States basically an organization stood outside of the booth and told people hey listen we'll give you 20 bucks if you tell us what you took what you're planning on taking and you know if you give us a blood or urine sample so we can confirm. And a lot of people had a very specific understanding of what they were taking. They you know largely believe they were taking marijuana, alcohol, cocaine and MDMA. But out of the 104 participants even though 30% had said they were taking MDMA many many individuals who had said they were taking it also tested positive for a bath salt called alpha PVP. Additionally they were also testing positive for methylone, ethylone or butylone which are three amphetamine type stimulants that are considered novel psychoactive substances. And this means that straight up many many individuals that are consuming these drugs are not consuming them on purpose. They're purchasing something underground from either a dealer or a friend and they are literally getting something completely different. You know this is a very very different situation than when you would purchase LSD and you would get a piece of paper. You know there's a very big difference between getting simply nothing and getting a totally different substance that approximates the effects you were looking for. This is some research that's actually still in press by Dr. Joseph Palomar at NYU. And I would like to kind of emphasize the findings so I'm just going to read the table results. Racial minorities were more likely to report no lifetime bath salt use but have a positive hair sample for bath salts. And additionally those who reported no use of bath salts but tested positive for an NPS were more likely to report having earned less than a bachelor's degree. This starts to paint a very very disturbing picture of the idea that the individuals that are not getting the psychedelic that they want are generally lower income, maybe less educated, maybe a minority individual. And that is a trend that is deeply concerning for me. The idea that your class, your race, your ethnicity or your education would in fact determine whether you are able to have the psychedelic experience of your choosing. I think that is something that is only now developing as a problem and we need to start taking it seriously because it affects not only are you know the perception of psychedelics but the actual experience that people en masse are having. This is a study from 2013 in published in drug testing and analysis that showed just you know look for the data for yourself. I know that some of us may be familiar with 2CI and 2CE but I do not recommend consuming 25I, PMMA or you know 4FMA unless you have very very specific understandings of what these drugs are and these are total notifications by member states to the monitoring organization so that these are the number of times these drugs managed to hit an ER that were totally novel and the systems didn't know how to handle them. And when I do mean there are a lot of drugs I mean there are a lot of new drugs. I'm not familiar with most of these. I don't think anyone in this building is actually familiar with most of these you know and that is hugely worrying because if all of a sudden you have a forensic psychologist I had an NYPD forensic examiner call me and ask me about one of these sedatives. I have no idea. I mean these drugs didn't exist two to three years ago and now they're starting to show up in autopsy reports. My biggest concern is that one of these is going to be deeply problematic. Speaking about those synthetic cannabinoids just in the United States the stars mean that they're schedule one and the other drugs are not. When you buy K2 or spice they don't tell you what the active ingredient is they don't tell you which one of these chemicals you're actually getting. So one brand may be 100% legal for human you know for having not been scheduled yet and the other one could be a class one felony. So just because of how crazy this is I wanted to take professor David Knutts words directly. You know one of the dangers of this approach is that has been taken if we ban every new drug without a balanced view then people will keep making more new drugs to replace them and eventually they will make something that's extremely toxic which when the kids take it they will die. That I don't want to be a fearmonger I don't want to try and be aggressive about this but I think that the amount of new substances that have hit the market in the last five years that mimic classic psychedelics or have similar symptoms is tremendously problematic and even though we may not interact with them on a day-to-day basis some people are. So some of the more problematic ones that we have evidence for firstly 25 I I don't know if anyone in the room is aware of this substance but it's something that can be used safely. There are definitely people that I know that have preferences for it under certain environments under certain conditions but it also has been associated with 17 deaths in the United States in the last six years. We have had individuals be medically transported from festivals because they've had seizures at half an hour after dosing. You know one of the biggest problems with it is that it's active at a microgram level just like LSD but because of the fact that most people are usually only getting it from either street dealers or festival dealers they're not getting exact dosages. You know the biggest problem with that is that LSD is a relatively harmless substance. You may not have a the best day if you take five tabs accidentally but you'll be fine. You know you'll you'll you'll wake up the next day. This is not the case with n-bomb. There are reports of seizures happening to cardiovascular events, agitation and aggressive behavior and renal failure. You know this is this is being scheduled. It's schedule one in the United States. It's going to be scheduled in Canada as well and it's definitely not something I'd like to be caught with in the European Union. One substance that got very very big and then was quashed thankfully is a second generation bath salt commonly known as alpha PVP. The street names for it include flocka and gravel just in case you wanted to get a sense of how awesome this substance is. This is I think a pretty stark illustration of the problem where this is just the number of crime lab reports submitted between MDMA and synthetic cathenones. This basically means that around 2011 MDMA purity essentially evaporated in the United States and synthetic cathenones rushed in to fill the void. Basically in 16 months you had 63 deaths in one city in one state alone. That's not including all 50 states because those numbers are still kind of hard to generate but when you're getting 20 ER visits a day from a substance that didn't exist five years beforehand there's kind of a huge pressure on law enforcement public health and governmental authorities to do something. One of the biggest steps forward they were able to make was they were able to push and pressure China to stop manufacturing the substance so with that combined with an extensive law enforcement effort across the United States cases of alpha PVP intoxication dropped to almost nothing which in my opinion is a very very good thing. It shows that targeted interventions for a lot of these substances can actually work. However that also means we have to see them and we have to do something about it. You know just to give you a scope of the problem again that's the number of different brands that were found in just Gainesville Florida of synthetic cannabinoids and synthetic cathenones and the list of side effects that go from anywhere from self mutilation, tachycardia, transient ischemic attacks, nausea and serotonin syndrome. These are drugs that have risk profiles and side effects that classical hallucinogens and psychedelics have never had and because of that fact I think they're deeply problematic for the continued push to mainstream and normalize actually non-harmful psychedelics. You know just to give you a little bit more information about synthetic cannabinoids they're actually the proper term is synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonists because they're not actually cannabinoids. They're chemicals that were used to explore the cannabinoid receptor system and there are three classes of them but at the same time they are all full agonists of CB1 and CB2 even though THC and CBD aren't. You know these aren't drugs that were created to get high from. These were drugs created to explore the animal model of the cannabinoid receptor system. You know the biggest problem is they have no quality assurance or quality of control policies when these are being created so not only do you have cross contamination between brands of these synthetic cannabinoids you have what are known as hot spots. Hot spots are basically what happens when someone's making drugs in their basement where you take a pile of plant matter and you spray the synthetic cannabinoid receptor agonist on it but the coverage is uneven so that means you have differential quality and purity within the same bag of drug which is insane if you think about it for any you know for more than five seconds but there's nothing to be done about this because they exist in this gray market universe where if you stay one step ahead of a regulator you can buy this stuff at a gas station. You know there's this this writer that I know he has this blog called the dose makes the poison where he talks about different substances and their problematic you know their problematic issues from a toxicology perspective and I think he said it the best. You know the vast majority of people using these substances and products are consuming substances of unknown identity with unknown pharmacological and toxicological profiles and unknown combinations unknown dosages. This is probably the craziest thing that I've ever heard like the fact that it's not just a hallucinated fantasy but the reality of thousands if not tens of thousands of drug users all across the world is deeply kind of troubling to me. I'm going to talk very quickly about two substances that have been showing up in other drugs such as fentanyl. Basically U18 is a novel opioid or is considered a novel opioid that has started showing up in benzodiazepines and designer benzodiazepine mixtures and it's an opioid that has no activity at any of the opioid receptors even though it's seen as approximately 10,000 times as powerful as heroin. We have no evidence of opioid receptor activity but it's being considered an opioid. This is madness you know the the the narrative is completely different than what's actually going on in the science you know and in the United States and Canada we have additional problems when it comes to high potency high strength opioids infecting non-opioid medications where you have because I can tell you right now I can't tell the difference between those two benzodiazepines. One of them is actually made of venopioid that could probably kill you. The other one is Xanax. I mean Xanax is not a great drug but at the same time it's certainly not lethal. You know that's the problem because once you combine something a painkiller like fentanyl and a novel sedative such as one of these you know that giant stack that I showed you earlier you end up with people in a very very dangerous place. So now I want to talk about kind of why it's different this time around you know this is how we report those issues you know we don't really say what the drug is we just slap the term rave onto the party and molly onto the drug and we say this person was hospitalized because they overdosed on molly just as a show of hands or you know call out. What color is molly? Okay does the fact that I heard five different answers bother anyone else? Like if your daily painkiller was three different colors would you take it? You know and obviously that's kind of you know a push out but at the same time ecstasy and molly are a very very loaded term lsd means lsd psilocybin means psilocybin but now we have these catchall phrases that include almost anything if I take molly that has mda in it it's going to be a little bit more psychedelic if I take molly that has mdma and a stimulant in it I'm going to be running around for three hours but at the end of the night I'm still going to have the term molly associated with an array of behavioral symptoms in my head so when we talk about it we're going to have two completely different definitions but we're not going to confirm that I'm not going to go hey was your molly speedy like I'm just going to think that it is because that's what my experience was you know and more importantly nps is most of them can't be detected by drug tests yet I mean this is one of the reasons why people do them you know you work in security you have work in you have a you know parole officer you have all of these kind of concerns and you can't be caught with a drug test you can't be testing positive for cannabis or cocaine or you know anything so you have one of these other options which you know you maybe won't get arrested but you might die and also like specific details and this is where I think it affects the psychedelic research renaissance can slip through the cracks you know there was this very famous story a couple of years back of this bath salts causing this person to like eat this other person's face and it was terrifying except there were no bath salts in a system it there were no there wasn't even any cannabis in a system he was just mentally ill but the story was run and pushed past and got super famous in the same way that every time there's a molly overdose what the drug actually is is kind of completely ancillary to the story chasing you know there was there was a case in a university in the northeast of the united states where somebody had taken a bunch of what seemed to be mdma but it was actually a synthetic cannabinoid and that's a psychedelic but at the same time the story had already kind of come and gone and a certain drug had been demonized that's where we are now you know the psychoactive substances act in the UK passed recently and now we have this forensic strategy where we're going to be illegalizing drugs based on the receptor that it acts on which one it only acts the law only stated that receptor activity at cb1 GABA 5ht2a nmda mu opioid or a monamine transporter would be affected so if you can create a drug that gets you messed up on uses a different receptor you're good which i think that's the problem we're just going to keep pushing innovation that pivots around these laws because we're using a very very poor fat you know measure of psychoactivity and this leads to unfortunately my nightmare you know what happens when an exceptionally damaging synthetic cathenone or novel psychedelic is created and then pushed into a recreational drug supply and then consumed by someone important i.e. Donald Trump's daughter you know what happens when say for example at fashion week or you know a very important party in washington dc or something like that in europe where something goes horribly wrong because a drug that is novel is introduced as a replacement or a cut into a classical chemical if that happens we're going to see a lot of this environmental like friendliness get very very cold very quickly a lot of the research and a lot of the funding that people in this room in this building are relying on is going to dry up because i guarantee you they won't know the difference you know we barely know the difference between a lot of the more novel and nuanced substances i can tell you that Donald Trump will simply not care you know so kind of bringing it back to us you know what can we do i think we need to check our drugs like people need to test their substances if you're going to go out you need to stay hydrated you need to understand that if you're taking a novel substance that you shouldn't be redosing that you shouldn't take one and then take two more an hour later you know there are great harm reduction services such as zendo and the harm reduction services at the boom festival in portugal these are all organizational structures that need to be supported because really they're the only ones that are preventing this from happening and more specifically especially for my advanced psychonauts out there we need to accept that trip reports on arrow wood and blue light are not research this is one person's story in one environment about the psychedelic that maybe has no bearing on whether it's going to be safe for you to consume so please please be cautious you know what one of the other things that i would love to see this came out of switzerland where they were documenting all of the psychosactive substance environmental cases that they had seen there was no bias they said here's all the stuff that we saw we tested everything and here were the new novel substances that we are not really familiar with that that kind of conversation in gender safety and also one last thing is we need to stop treating psychedelics users like children you know messages that recognize drug user subjects as events incompetence responsibility and a desire to reduce harm while simultaneously pursuing pleasure maybe experience is empowering by young users you know don't tell them that it's going to kill them because they kind of have already done the research a lot of stuff isn't going to kill you but if you tell everyone that pot's going to kill you acid's going to kill you ecstasy is going to kill you they're not going to listen to you when they get to n bomb they're not going to listen to you when they get to bath salts so in closing you know like where do we actually go as a you know collective from here you know it's very specifically realizing that we cannot schedule our way to safety we just can't there's too many drugs and the iteration cycle of drug development is getting faster faster and faster you know we're seeing third and fourth generation bath salts we're seeing substances that have already overtaken 25 i and a number of others and that's just going to keep happening as these companies pivot around scheduling systems i think we need to we need to start exploring the facets of the psychedelic drug experience as an array of symptoms not as a preference for a certain substance because we're now in a place where it's not just about i prefer lsd to psilocybin it's i prefer this kind of visual space this kind of mental space this kind of activity level because we have choice and we have choice now like we've never had before but that also means there are probably ones that are safer there are probably ones that are better for certain types of activities there are probably ones that no one should be doing you know more specifically we need to actually understand how certain substances are affected by dose setting and privilege but of course the easiest way to actually make this better would be to just end the war on psychedelics so people could get the drugs that they wanted thank you very much fantastic dog thank you so since most people don't have the access to a mass spectrometer my more sophisticated festival goers are using test kits yes and so the the issue with these is that their color change and so if you get an admixture which most of these things are yep and say something is 60 mdma and 40 pma how is that gonna how does that test out in the color changes and how likely is it one to get a false a false positive so one of the one of the best case practices when it comes to those color change tests is you say for example if you have something to test positive for mdma there's a secondary test that can test for you know a bath salt pma something like that so there's generally you can run up to four tests on a certain substance to give you four yes or no questions because you know we have to treat drugs like we're asking a genie things um i think the biggest thing is to also understand that a lot of people are also probably not going to take those steps because you have to use a piece of the drug you know i i i spent all my money on the mdma i'm not gonna then take the mdma and waste it um i think what you're getting at is exactly the clinical limitations of harm reduction in this environment you know absolutely test it tested at home test it not under low light or black light or you know something like that but also you know this is the difference between the privilege of an individual who has a regular dealer and someone who's buying something at you know Glasgow or Ibiza or something like that and you know we we we i want to tell you you know don't buy drugs from strangers but at the same time it's that's something that people simply won't do you know they're going to and they're going to be in that environment so we can only say listen test it if it looks wacky don't do it you know what i i do harm reduction drug checking for events in New York City and some other places and thankfully when we have tested and someone's stuff had come back as completely ridiculous i've i've never seen them take it i've never seen them go okay this is not what i thought it was i'm still going to put it in you know i i've found that most people once they realize that they've gotten something that they aren't prepared for are generally willing to back away which is hopeful hope inducing for me oh absolutely um ecstasy data pill reports blue light you know that the biggest issue the biggest limitation with those is that batch to batch batch to batch differentials you know and also copycats where just because one's pill has you know large purity etc you develop a lot of copycat presses that people want to cash in on you know and the thing is europe is actually kind of having an opposite problem because after a specific drop in purity which gave rise to bath salts in 2011 2012 we're now seeing this giant spike in purity where we're having where there are pills that are showing up in certain countries that are potent enough to be two or three doses and and i i think if you look at the data there you're going to find that bath salts kind of don't stack up people aren't doing them anymore because i think there's a very clear preference for classical psychedelics that you only get into this other stuff when you can't get what you want i'm kind of tailing on that what are your thoughts on any possibility of centralized distribution in the near future at least possibly of gray markets possibly like decriminalization so i mean that's that's definitely a much more policy discussion that you may want to talk to rick doblin and the you know the individuals that spoke pretty you know long about i think it strengthens the case and you see a lot of policy public policy makers stating that they hope that this helps push the conversation along because the only way to really fix this stuff is to get that decriminalization or centralized distribution created i was mostly curious that you were saying that it seems to you that traditional empathogens traditional psychedelics are taking the blame in the press most often for new psychoactive substances in the uk we've seen the complete opposite so when methadone was still legal almost every death that occurred due to any drug was blamed on methadone and in actual fact david nut has pointed out quite almost ironically i'd say that when methadone was legal we saw a drastic decrease in drug related deaths from cocaine and emphatamine because in actual fact it's much less toxic and once methadone was made illegal then those deaths spiked back up again so i would ask you like do you not think that the issue is not necessarily to do with these being novel substances but more to do with prohibition in general i mean you've advocated intervention against them but i feel that all of the problems you've mentioned haven't been due to prohibition what needs to happen is we need to have a serious discussion about what these the damage that these drugs do and when they're useful there are definitely people that i know in new york miami la that prefer methadone to cocaine or mdma depending on the situation but right now the biggest issue when say in the united states is that i can't trust methadone's purity you may be able to in the uk and exact that speaks to exactly the point exactly and and that that is exactly until because of the fact that prohibition is a binary issue that has a significant amount of resistance that is going to be a very very long uphill battle i think in the interim we kind of not only do we obviously need more research in what these drugs do but we also need more funding such that the research when it comes to human trials actual like you know basic understanding of what happens with these things independent of just blue light trip reports etc such that we can actually turn these into legal above ground medicines and consume you know consume around that stuff you know one of the biggest things that i've seen is that independent of all of the stimulants that were made illegal in the united states in the 90s a lot of methamphetamine had come in to replace that and if they could get something like methadone ephedrine something like that they would be able to satisfy a need without necessarily going for a drug that's tremendously harmful of course