Ep12 Mitchell Gomez - The Hidden Cost of Outdated Safety Policies

Mitchell Gomez  0:00  
And that moment of realization that there were drugs that could alter your perception of reality was the first time that I understood that my perception of reality wasn't reality. Welcome

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  0:12  
to psychedelic source where wisdom meets practice in the evolving landscape of psychedelic medicine. I'm your host, Dr Sandra Dreisbach, and I'm here to help you navigate the complex intersection of ethics, business and personal growth in a psychedelic space, whether you're a practitioner, therapist, entrepreneur, or simply curious about this transformative field, you found your source for authentic dialog, practical resources and community connection in each episode, we'll dive deep into the stories, strategies and ethical considerations that matter most to our growing ecosystem. Let's tap in to our inner source of wisdom and explore what it means to build a sustainable and ethical psychedelic future together.

VO  1:05  
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Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  1:36  
In this episode of psychedelic source, we meet with Mitchell Gomez, who is currently executive director of dance safe. He is a graduate of new College of Florida. Has his master's from CU Denver. Mitchell joined dance safe as the national outreach director in 2014 and he was promoted to executive director in March of 2017 he has served on the Advisory Council of both psych Sams and symposia, and is a harm reduction consultant for maps, the multi disciplinary association for Psychedelic Studies. And Mitchell is also volunteered with the Burning Man organization SSDP, which is Students for Sensible Drug Policy and other small harm reduction projects for many years, and is a passionate advocate for reality based drug policy and harm reduction. And I'm really excited that we get to have the opportunity to look at what does it mean to do psychedelic use in a western, global North sense, responsibly in these recreational settings. We have a lot of association in our western lens with psychedelics as being recreational from from the 60s onward, and you'll hear us talk a little bit about that. But the fact is, is that therapeutic use can be in many contexts and settings, and also has a deep history in traditional settings, outside of recreation, but also within recreational settings. And I hope that we get to see ways that you can source responsibly, removing harm, reducing risk, and hear a little bit of Mitchell's journey in how and why he's so passionate about this work. I'm so grateful to have Mitchell here with us from Dance safe and as someone who deeply cares about ethics and safety, to have dance safe represented, and have you in particular as the founder and and still very much.

Mitchell Gomez  3:48  
Oh, in current Executive Director, not founder. Oh, kind of, current

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  3:51  
Executive Director, my apologies, current Executive Director, which I also appreciate too, because I think that's part of the story sometimes people miss, is how, how things get started. But before we go too far, do you want to give, like, a brief description of, like, you and what you're doing now,

Mitchell Gomez  4:07  
yeah, like, my, how I ended up here is the is the question, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  4:12  
How did you, how did you start like, I mean, I mean, people kind of get the idea of what it means to dance safe, but they don't necessarily, it might not necessarily understand, like, what, what brought you to try and be and create this more safe environment for people in in psychedelic recreational spaces, primarily, but all spaces, yeah,

Mitchell Gomez  4:33  
I mean, so I think there's two parts to that answer. One is, you know how dance they've got there. And then one is how I ended up here as you,

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  4:39  
let's start with you, because I want to always like to start with the person. The personal. Yeah.

Mitchell Gomez  4:45  
So when I was growing up, my parents had this really permissive attitude towards reading, like, anything that I was like, capable of reading, they would like, let me read. And that resulted in a few things that, like, there are definitely books. Read that, I feel like, in retrospect, maybe were not appropriate. But on the upside of that, when I was, I want to say like 11 or 12, I came across a copy of Leary and Metz nurse, psychedelic book that was based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the psychedelic manual. And yeah, I was 11 or 12, I was capable of reading it. I read it. My parents never said anything about it being on my on my shelf. And I was immediately fascinated by the idea of psychedelics. At that age, my understanding of drugs, there were drugs that made you go faster and drugs that made you go slower is sort of how I thought of of drugs, right? I was a kid. I grew up in rural Weld County in Colorado. There was not a lot of exposure. And so that's what I thought of as drugs. And I remember reading one section of that book where I believe it's Leary, talking about, you know, watching this plant in his office melt. I remember reading this paragraph over and over and over again, because I just, like, couldn't understand, like, what he was saying. I was I was I was having a really hard time understanding, like, what he was saying, and that moment of realization that there were drugs that could alter your perception of reality was the first time that I understood that my perception of reality wasn't reality, right, that Those were separate things. I never had had that realization. And I think that people never have that realization. So having it

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  6:28  
as a card carrying philosopher,

Mitchell Gomez  6:34  
yeah, that moment of realization. But I was really under the impression that LSD was a thing that had existed in the 1960s 1970s but it had been, like, effectively wiped out by the government, right? Like, the book ends with, like, the story of criminalization, and like, you know, them getting kicked out of Harvard, you know, there was an afterward. It wasn't a, you know, first edition, obviously. And so, yeah, that was my, my understanding. And then I ended up in a dare class.

Unknown Speaker  7:04  
Oh, my goodness. Dare officer

Mitchell Gomez  7:05  
was, yeah, he was talking about these, you know, dangerous pieces of paper that can have, you know, this drug, LSD, that can make you crazy, and all this stuff that I already knew was was nonsense. And the phrasing I love for this is that I had some follow up questions about the sort of people to avoid if I did not want to be exposed to this, this dangerous substance, right? And he mentioned raves, and it took me, like, three or four weekends. It was the weekend after my first 14th birthday, after my 14th birthday, that I ended up at my first rave with a group of older kids from my high school. And this was not like a club or a party that was being called a rave. This was a rave. This was mid 90s Tampa, you know, there was this really, you know, really robust underground break scene, you know, you had to go to a gas station, and the guy decided if you were cool enough to get the next way for, I mean, it was a rave. Shockingly. Nobody would sell 14 year old Mitchell and the acid. But I did find some MDMA on the ground. I found some press pills. Oh my goodness, some pressies and so, yeah, it was the weekend after my 14th birthday that I first tried MDMA, wow, which I really, really loved. I mean, I immediately really resonated with that substance, and it's still one that is really like meaningful to me, although I'm quite careful about my use, you know, in my fourth in a way that I wasn't at 14. But yeah, it took a couple years for me to get real. LSD, you know, psilocybin was in Florida. Was quite easy at the in those ages, I was 15, the first time I tried mushrooms. Older when I first tried LSD, but all of them have never really lost their fascination for me, because I do think the big question is, how our brains are able to generate a reasonable approximation of reality? That seems to work well enough, right? How a few pounds of gelatin becomes aware that's a few pounds of gelatin, I think is the big question. And I do still think that psychedelics are the main tool that we will have to answer that question from the inside. Right? There's other tools that we're developing to answer it from the outside, but meeting in the middle of those two sort of methodologies for understanding how consciousness arises is the thing that I think about more often than anything else. Like, how does my brain know it's my brain? And so, yeah, they've really never lost their fascination for me, and I really wanted to go into psychedelic research academically.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  9:38  
So before you go on more about the psychedelic research piece, like, I'm kind of curious, like going back to those, those origins, like first being introduced via a book, right, you know, right? Being in curious, being being young and curious, and then, and already having certain myths kind of revealed, and then, and then having the, sort of like, just. Say no to drugs, sort of campaign, dare campaign, and this and and you couldn't even argue, maybe even despite that.

Mitchell Gomez  10:07  
I mean, I mean, yeah, because of it. I mean, this is yeah,

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  10:12  
then, then pursuing it actively, because the curiosity continued. But how did you feel, like, in terms of, like, those first initial experiences, what was, what would you describe your relationship? You know, is more of it was really just the the fascination of how it could change your perception, or was it more about, like that, sort of continuing curiosity? Or, yeah,

Mitchell Gomez  10:33  
I mean, I think it's some of that. I mean, it's, I think some of it is that I just like having a big question without an answer is a thing that, like my ADHD brain, doesn't deal well with, and so when I don't understand something, I'm often really driven to understand it. So some of it was that just the curiosity, some of it was the sort of experiential things around the ability for them to just do really interesting things. And some of it was just that I found them to be really enjoyable. Like, you know, I do think that particularly on the sort of, like, you know, more spiritual side of this psychedelic movement, there's this tendency to dismiss the idea of like, fun as an intention. It was like, no, like, that was my intention was to, like, have a really good time with this rave, right? And I think that's a perfectly valid intention. Intentional use for psychedelics is to have an enjoyable experience, yeah.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  11:28  
And I love that you bring that up, because there's I mean as much as I appreciate the therapeutic aspect, having been sort of raised myself in the Silicon Valley where, like, where the recreational was more foregrounded than any sort of therapeutic for a long time, the fact that there's even a sense of even loss of that recreational aspect, because that's that scene is more bad then, then, then therapeutic use, like therapy, okay? A recreational bad, you know, but I'm not micro

Mitchell Gomez  12:03  
dosing to maximize capitalist output. Totally fine. Or

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  12:06  
micro dosing, right? Because that's an exceptional like you don't you don't affect your ability to produce, right? So I appreciate you bringing that up too, but, but how did, how did that end up translating into to dance? Safe?

Mitchell Gomez  12:20  
Yeah. Um, so I really was quite, quite interested in doing psychedelic research. Um, the only school I applied to for my undergrad was new College of Florida. That's where Rick Doblin started. Maps, it's worth and fire were students as well. You know, per year with lennae from Zendo as well. The she was actually in my in my year, like she was a Lenna and I were students at the same time, and, yeah, doing a year of organic chemistry with Paul Scudder is what convinced me I was not going to be doing original PhD work in this field. You know, I passed. I got through, but, but, you know, doing o Chem with the guy who wrote electron flow and organic chemistry, it was a great experience. And also, absolutely the hardest year of my life. I mean, graduate, none of my nothing I've done since then is compared to the amount of like time that I put into o Chem. But no, my, you know, at the same time, dance safe was a thing, right? I mean, this is, you know, when I first started winter Raiders, dance safe didn't exist. But by the time I left high school, dance safe and other small harm reduction projects were coming up. There was one in Florida that I actually did a few events with that had what I thought was a very clever name, but did not lend itself to people coming to the booth, which was a drug educated America. So, DEA, all you know, it's like, I get it. You're being funny, but like, you know,

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  13:37  
yeah, you're triggering people a little bit, yeah.

Mitchell Gomez  13:42  
And so I Yeah. I mean, my motivation around harm reduction, around being involved in harm art reduction, is just the tremendous number of friends that I lost over the years. Yeah, you know, it's like, substantially more than half of my high school rave crew is not alive anymore, yeah. And it was a big crew. I mean, we're not talking about one or two deaths. I had a moment where I was like, in my mid 20s, maybe 2526 and I was at a wedding, and I had this realization that I'd been to twice as many funerals as weddings. Oh, my goodness, right, yeah. I mean, and so, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a real thing. I mean, the, the reason I'm alive is that the drug markets weren't as screwed up when I was, like, finding pills on the ground, right? And so this is, like, a constant source of motivation for me, is that I wasn't making, like, rational risk analysis. I was a 15 year old who wanted ecstasy, and nobody wanted to sell it to me. So if I found some at a rave, I was very likely going to take it. And at that age, there were, there weren't even test kits. You know, 9697 98 years going to raves, there was no way to test your substances. It was literally just put it in your mouth and and hope. And so, yeah, that's. My personal motivation, but there was a job opening for dance safe 11 years ago as outreach director. I'd been volunteering with maps for a while. You know, I've known, you know, Rick since college, easily, one of the, you know, three or four biggest influences in my life. And I was actually hesitant to apply. I had had some not great experiences with dance a volunteers like in the late you know, early 2000s late 90s, maybe, I think early 2000s sort of trying to piece together fuzzy memories for several decades ago that were fuzzy when I made them. But, you know, early 2000s you know, some volunteers who'd said some things that I knew weren't true. You know, some behavior that I was a little hesitant to be involved with an organization that I had seen from some of these, these folks. You know, it was the norm within harm reduction. It is the norm within rave spaces, but just personal hesitations. And so I did what I always do when I don't know what to do, which is I called Rick. Is that

Speaker 1  15:58  
what you do? Is that how you make decisions. Yeah, we know.

Mitchell Gomez  16:01  
I call someone I whose opinion I respect. I tried to tell

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  16:04  
is because you trusted him. And, yeah,

Mitchell Gomez  16:09  
you know, and still, still very much do, but I have a much bigger group of humans I can call now. That's great. I don't have to always bother Rick. He's got a lot going on. And he asked me two questions. The first was, if I thought that the mission was important, which obviously I do, right? I mean, I've lost so so many friends, and even even before I was involved with Dan safe, I was already publicly speaking out around the idea of harm reduction, not just as the things we do to make drug use safer, but as the alternative model to prohibition for how society can integrate and deal with drug use, right? It's not just the thing we do under prohibition, although there's plenty of things that are just created by prohibition that are dealt with by harm reduction, but harm reduction is the alternative philosophy for drug use, and so I think it's really important to like build it out, and

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  16:59  
let's take a pause and talk about that. So what is harm reduction for you? How do you define it? Personally? It doesn't have to be what dance safe identifies like. Well, how do you define

Mitchell Gomez  17:10  
it? Yeah, I mean, I think that really does sum it up is that harm reduction is a way of thinking about drug use that accepts that drug use is going to happen. It accepts that use is going to happen in ways that I personally would not use, or personally don't necessarily agree with, even if I but that we as a society can then choose how to deal with that use and how to deal with that use that we don't necessarily would personally engage with. And harm reduction is just accepting that people are going to make those choices and providing them the tools and knowledge they need to be as safe as they would like to be while making those decisions. And that's all it really takes. Like most users of most drugs don't develop any of the things that historically would be called addiction. You know, most people who do develop unhealthy behavior patterns, if you can keep them safe, they will often choose to change those patterns. And so just treating drug use as a public health issue that you address from a harm reduction standpoint is really all we have to do around drugs. Like that's that's it like there's no need to put anyone in cages. There's no need to spend these billions of dollars, you know, trying to stop George from entering the country like none of it is necessary. Yeah. So that was the first question. And then the second question was, do you think you have a better chance of getting the organization where you think it should be as an employee of the organization, or bitching from the outside. And so I hung up with someone, and I applied to be outreach director. And so, yeah, that was 11 years ago, so, and then a few years later, the executive director at the time was no longer involved in the organization. There was this really exhaustive job hunt. It was not like, you know, she stepped down and suddenly I was Ed. In fact, one of the board members phrased it to me as Mitchell. This isn't fucking Game of Thrones.

Unknown Speaker  19:10  
So there's this. Why do they say that?

Mitchell Gomez  19:13  
Mostly a joke. But he was basically saying, like, just because you're the next in line, that's not how this works. You don't get to, like, step into the into the role just because you're the next employee, it's

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  19:23  
not automatic, it's not automatic, it's not automatic. And ultimately, they

Mitchell Gomez  19:27  
actually found two people they really liked. It was me and another person and said, We would like you to be co executive directors. I thought that was a terrible idea at the time. I was like, You know what? Shift doesn't have two captains. I think was the phrase that I that I used. But they brought her on as a deputy director and promoted me to Executive Director. That was eight years ago. She is no longer involved in the in the organization. She now does a psychedelic Bar Association and a bunch of other really awesome stuff. Life. But interestingly, we have actually landed with a three member executive staff, so there's three people whose authority is equal. Our pay is linked within our spheres of responsibility. We're a ship with three captains, and we actually make it work really, really well. This distributed power system not to agree to agree to do that with a person I had never met. I do still think that was the absolute right call,

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  20:26  
as someone who really cares about collaborative models myself, you know, like, I think it's, it's really cool to hear about ones that are successful. Then, whether you're trying to share, you know, leadership roles and different aspects of the organization,

Mitchell Gomez  20:38  
you know, it's not, it's not a teal organization, but teal ish,

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  20:43  
teal ish, yeah, yeah, no, I think we're gonna have different I mean, I think there's also depending upon the org, what fits for what they do, right? You know, sure, and

Mitchell Gomez  20:51  
there's definitely challenges. I mean, there are things that are made much harder by the fact that I can't just say, like, Hey, I'm executive director, this is how we're doing it, right? Like, but I think that it definitely cuts into that sort of problem inherent with power, right where you begin to believe that your decisions are always correct, even if you know that that's what power does, you tend to get a little loosey goosey on ethics, even if you know you shouldn't. Like this is just how power operates. And so by distributing the power, particularly, you know, as a straight cis man, having two women be the other members of the executive staff, those problems seem to be mitigated to a to a pretty large degree. I can't just make a decision and run with it, right? Like, that's not how the organization operates, and that can be a weakness, but, boy, it is also really a strength. You know, the fact that I'm forced to think about impacts on the larger system. I'm, you know, required to get buy in from other people within the system is a really, really powerful, I don't want to say like stop gap, but it works as an opposing force to that creates

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  22:12  
a built in sort of accountability too, you know. But, but I want to shift a little bit back to like, where harm reduction and, and I actually also usually like to say risk reduction, but, but we don't have to talk about that, Paula, that whole issue, right? But a lot of that has to do with, like, trying to shift our mindset around harm and

Mitchell Gomez  22:36  
risk. I mean, we think we're starting to use benefit maximization, right? No,

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  22:40  
I've heard that too, right? Like, because a lot of times people throw around the word, like harm reduction, not, not in your case, but I've noticed like that, like, it's automatically going to be a harm, right? You know that there isn't necessarily going to be a harm, but you need to be aware of the harms and reducing risks. But also, like benefit maximization as another way of thinking it, but not to the point of where we feel like we're bypassing the harms. But I would be curious to hear, what do you feel are the challenges now? Versus, versus, like, let's say, in the early 90s, because that's like, I was part of the rave culture too, and I would agree with you, like, there there weren't testing, like there wasn't, and I and I've lost people as well, and that definitely motivates a lot of my work. But how would you say it the landscape has changed, like, because there are harm reduction tools, there is information out there. People can Google stuff. They got the social media things. What would you say are the biggest things people should be aware of? Yeah, now compared to then, yeah.

Mitchell Gomez  23:43  
I mean, I think, I think maybe the biggest one is just the speed at which new substances can enter markets, right? It used to be that if you wanted to develop and test a brand new drug. You had to be a Sasha Shogun, right? Like you had to have the knowledge, the lab, the care, to develop a substance that the safety profile made sense. And it was, you know, an enjoyable experience. It was a, I mean, realistically, if Sasha had been working in any other field of chemistry other than psychedelic drugs, he would have a Nobel Prize, right? Like it took that level of intellect to be the type of person who could develop and bring a new drug to market, whatever that term means. Now, there are labs in Asia where you can just send them a drawing of a theoretically psychoactive substance, right? You just draw mescaline, erase a line over here and add an oxygen and put something over here with a hydrogen. You've made a brand new drug. It's not illegal, because the nature of a free society is that anything that's not banned is legal, right? This thing doesn't exist anywhere except on that piece of paper where you just drew it. You send. A picture to the lab. And I've never tried this, but there are labs that say that they can deliver a gram in 30 days.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  25:07  
Wow, wow. And even more so, like, especially, like, I want to use, like, maybe a case example, like, I know, like, for example, the diamond shrooms product. And I'm not trying to say anything against the brand, per se. But, like, it's one of those cases where you can see that there were negative results, and part of it where a lot of these products weren't, weren't, like, even the combination of products weren't being tested, let alone whether or not it was some sort of, you know, some of the parts were synthetic pieces. Yeah,

Mitchell Gomez  25:37  
you see products in head shops that just say, like, proprietary blend of tryptamines, right? Like, like, okay, cool. Like, what does that mean? And so, yeah, it's, it's, we're really seeing a really rapid escalation of new drugs entering market, you know, obviously exemplified. I think, best by the increase in synthetic opioids as border enforcement steps up, right every time you make it harder to smuggle substances from point A to point B, the natural reaction from those markets is to switch to more potent synthetic analogs. This is a dynamic that was written about as early as the 1940s after alcohol prohibition, right? The primary alcohols in the United States that were consumed before Prohibition were beer and wine. The switch to hard liquor happened in response to prohibition. It didn't make sense to smuggle wine, right? This is why cocktails exist as a social phenomenon, is that the drug sellers, the illegal drug sellers at speakeasies, had to create a way to cut the drugs that had become too strong because of prohibition, to make them palatable to an end user, like drug purchaser, yeah. And

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  27:00  
I think that's a fascinating case to like, look at. Now, for those who don't understand what a synthetic alkaloid is,

Mitchell Gomez  27:06  
Oh, yeah. So I'm talking about things like fentanyl replacing heroin, right? So now we have a situation where they've they made it so difficult to smuggle heroin that most of the, no, not most, but a large number of, you know, people who are smuggling these substances have switched to fentanyl, you know, car fentanyl. There's a whole galaxy of these, these opioids that, you know, were often developed for medical use, but the synthesis on them is very, very easy, you know, comparatively and cheap, yep, and so, and yeah. I mean, a person who's making, like, a fake hydrocodone pill using fentanyl, there's a real possibility that, like, they spent more money on the binding agents and like the pill press dies than they did on the fentanyl that's being bound like than they did on the active drug. Like they actually spent more to manufacture this thing on the other parts of the component than they did on the active component. It's that cheap to manufacture, right? We're talking about fractions of a penny per dose, but it's really the smuggling advantage, you know? And, yeah, the iron law of prohibition is the term that was coined after alcohol prohibition, which can broadly be summarized as, the harder the drug laws, the harder the drugs. I think

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  28:24  
that's a moment to just even reflect on, that the harder the drug logs, the harder the drugs. So, like, so, so it makes me want to ask, like, I mean, there's multiple solutions and ways of approaching it, but, but just that alone, like, so what would be, and there's a lot of press about the fentanyl and opioid crisis. I obviously, personally deeply care about, you know, fentanyl contamination and people having Naloxone and and and kits and things like that. What? What are? What's your sort of personal you know, if you were to magically have a wand to fix the opioid and Fentanyl crisis. Right now, what would be the three things you would do?

Mitchell Gomez  29:06  
Yeah, so this is a Mitchell answer, not a damn safe answer. I'll give you my Mitchell answer. I want to be clear that when I talk about drug legalization, that there's a literal bible of like, regulatory models for drugs, right? I'm not necessarily saying sell all drugs at 711 to anyone of any age, right, but I do think that creating appropriate regulatory models so that every person can access the drugs that they desire to consume in some sort of regulated, legal way is the way out of this, and I'm not talking about decriminalization. Decriminalization often makes things worse, because it does leave control of access in the hands of people who, by definition of the system, are criminals, right? If you don't legalize sales, and I'm not making a value judgment on people who sell these up. Is, I'm just saying that like that is the definitional term when it's not legal, and those are the only people who can sell it. You have left it in the control of criminal enterprise. And so I'm talking about legalization. And there's a group in the UK, I believe it's called Transform drug policy, that has written an actual book. I mean, it is a thick book on different regulatory models that may be appropriate for different drugs, right? And we're all familiar with these within the US, because we have different regulatory models for different drugs, right? So the regulatory model for tobacco is different than the regulatory model for alcohol. The regulatory model for alcohol is different state by state. By state. There's some states that control the hours that can be sold. You know, I think most

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  30:47  
states are dry counties. I was Texas that that was the case, right, right? So you're meeting a card, right? And things like that.

Mitchell Gomez  30:54  
And I think we're all immediately aware that legalization of drugs does not legalize all behavior while you're on drugs, right? So the fact that alcohol is legally available in certain contexts to certain people of a certain age doesn't mean that just because you can legally consume alcohol, that you can consume as much as you want and then drive a vehicle or go to work or fly an airplane, right? And so when I say legalization, I think a lot of people hear me saying, like, oh, we should sell heroin at 711 Right? Like, if you're a 10 year old, you could walk into 711 you could buy heroin. That's what when people say, like, how do you what do you mean that all drugs should be legal? And what I mean is that we need to figure out ways that people can get the drugs they want without having to rely on criminal enterprise

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  31:39  
for but wouldn't you think like decrim would still be part of that model towards legalization, like, you know, in part and parcel? I mean, you can look at, you can look at what happened in in Oregon, for example, where there was both decriminalization and legalization that was happening at the same time, and then people, you know, push back and then, and then they recriminalized, right? And while having legal access only to certain people without a high price tag, right? So, like, you know, and only for one substance for what it's worth, because that's what you're saying, beyond one substance. Oh yeah,

Mitchell Gomez  32:12  
no, I'm saying that all people who want all substances. And part of the reason I'm so skeptical of the like molecule by molecule model for decrim, or legal access, is twofold. One is that actually threefold. One is that it often tends to just be an expression of privilege, right? These, you know, these decrim Nature campaigns have had some tremendous successes, but every time a decriminator campaign has reached out being like, Hey, would you like to write something about it. We're trying to legalize plant medicines in my city. I always offer to do it, if I can write it on cocaine, right? Cocaine is a naturally occurring alkaloid within the coca plant. It is not synthetic. It is not semi synthetic. There is cocaine in the coca plant. You can chew the leaves. That is oral administration of cocaine fulsome. Not one of them is, let me do that, right? Not one of them has taken me up on taken me up on this offer. And so what does decrim Nature mean when you're leaving out, arguably the most commonly used plant medicine in the United States, there

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  33:14  
are certainly tobacco or something like, right? Other than like, maybe

Mitchell Gomez  33:17  
tobacco, maybe marijuana, but like, in terms of like, ones that are currently still heavily stigmatized, heavily criminalized, cocaine is a plant medicine, any way you slice it, right, that is just a factually true statement. And so it leaves out it's an expression of privilege, where it's just like often relatively resourced white folks just legalizing the psychedelics that they like. So that's a criticism that I think is really valid. But another one is that it's we're never going to build a national coalition to decriminalize or legalize some of these really heavily stigmatized drugs, right? Like the idea that we're going to do it around heroin, the idea that we're going to do it around cocaine, the idea that we're going to do it around fentanyl, because there are people who prefer fentanyl to heroin, and those people also have the right to take whatever substance they want under whatever regulatory model makes sense for those substances. And the idea that you would build a national campaign to legalize fentanyl when we've had this like billions of dollars in government spending, propagandizing the public against these substances seems really, really

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  34:25  
unlikely. Well, what's your what's your position on sacred use? So like cocoa plant that you mentioned, right? Has a long, long history of sacred plant medicine use, and including even oracular readings, getting a cocoa leaf reading, for example, yeah, right. One reading that I received like the person was trained for over 30 years before they were allowed to do a reading with it. Yeah, right. What's your general position in terms of legalization and sacred use? Yeah.

Mitchell Gomez  34:53  
I mean, I think that when you know sacred and spiritual use is sincere, and I often think that it is not. Universally, we've definitely seen examples of people using that, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely, yeah. I think that in addition to all of the human rights violations that are intrinsic to the drug war, then we're certainly running into the fact that the government is regulating which Religions can or can't be practiced within the United States. But I think that ultimately, from a legalization standpoint, the core issue is either we own our minds and bodies or the government owns our minds and bodies. And I don't see any fundamental, I don't want to say difference, but a person who's using a highly stigmatized drug for fun, and a person who is using a less stigmatized drug for a spiritual reason, both of those being illegal are both a violation of those individuals human rights, and so I don't think it's necessary, when we're talking about these movements to necessarily use that to move the conversation. I do think that from a tactical, immediate access standpoint, right? These psilocybin churches are great. You know, when they're sincere, when they're done ethically, I think they're great. They destigmatize use in general. They increase access. I do believe that more people using psychedelics is a generally good thing for society, particularly when it's used in a structured context of, like, spiritual use. But we

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  36:24  
certainly have seen insincere, I mean in the sense of, like, people using it, at least in theory, to protect, in theory to protect themselves, legally from, from, from, for use, right? That, yeah, and I'm not a lawyer, I can't say that they're gonna be legally

Mitchell Gomez  36:42  
safe. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't I do think that it's theory, not practice, and I think we might see that tested pretty heavily, but maybe not. I mean, maybe this is just not a thing that anyone cares about, and that would be great. And no, look, I think that I certainly know people personally who have been accused of doing that, right? Of like, Oh, this is performative. This is and it's like, no, like, there's some of these people who've been accused of that, who I know for damn sure are serious, are sincere, right? And so it's easy sometimes to misread the situation from the outside as well. And I don't know of any way of judging a person's religious beliefs on sincerity. Like, forget psychedelics.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  37:21  
No, believe me, yeah, you know, right?

Mitchell Gomez  37:23  
Look, there's plenty of people who claim to follow a guy who spoke repeatedly against wealth and yet have private jets that belong to their churches, right? So, like, I don't know how to judge sincere, real defense

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  37:35  
here. Like, you know, it's not an uncommon psychedelic experience to be able to say, like, I saw that I was God, you know, right? And then have the, you know, I don't mean to say, like, everyone has a delusion of grandeur experience just because they've had that, you know, insight, yeah.

Mitchell Gomez  37:50  
One of my favorite lines from tea fairy is, uh, anyone who thinks that psychedelic kills egos never spent time with a former acid cook and like, boy that lands. Like, uh, yeah, it's psychedelics do a lot of interesting things. Generally, reduction in ego does not, in fact, seem to be one of them, you know, and also this idea that it universally makes you more connected to, like all people, also seems to be pretty patently false.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  38:18  
Well, I mean, don't I mean, just to give it a little bit of argument, right? Wouldn't you say that, like, it's substance dependent, perhaps like, or and, or relationship dependent, or sentence setting, like, there's a lot of other factors that I think

Mitchell Gomez  38:28  
it's more set and setting than anything. I think that there's a really amazing academic article that I can't remember the title of, but it was written up as a popular article called Lucy in the Sky with Nazis. This is by Brian pace from symposia.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  38:46  
Oh yes, I

Mitchell Gomez  38:48  
that is a article about a group of self described neo Nazi assets, right? These are people who successfully integrated a psychedelic into their culture as self described Neo Nazis, right? The in group bonding, the us versus them, the you know, the thing that psychedelics seem to do pretty universally is increase creativity. That does seem to happen pretty universally. It makes you a more creative thinker, I think, because it destabilizes your like connections, and then they're trying to reconnect, and they connect in new ways. Other than that, it seems to mostly be set and setting, right? I think that's where the bulk of the experience really happens.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  39:28  
Well, speaking of set and setting, I can't help but mention the setting that you find yourself in in this conversation, could you talk a little bit about the lovely sculptures and artifacts that you have behind you.

Mitchell Gomez  39:42  
Yeah. So I was raised pretty disconnected from my father's ethnic background. My father's family is a combination of Sephardic Jews who were running from the Inquisition for several 100 years. The earliest Inquisition trial record I have of a family. Member of mine to the latest is 280 year time span. So 300 years, basically, they were running from the Inquisition and then also substantial Native American ancestry from everything from the sort of mid 1800s genesero slaves. So these were Native American slaves that were often sold into Spanish families in New Mexico and Colorado. So I have a lot of Genero ancestry, all the way back to a pretty substantial amount of Nahua ancestry, what would now be called the Aztec empire. I have a theory about this, and my theory is that if you were a secret Jew hiding from the Inquisition, that it was safer to marry native people than it was to marry a Catholic, right? And so that they would often, if there weren't enough Jews that you weren't related to, they would often marry Native American ancestor people. You do your religion. I do my religion. We go to church once a year. We don't rock the boat. And this was a way of, like, keeping your practices going that wasn't exposing it to the Catholic Church.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  41:04  
And how does that connect to what's behind you? Yeah.

Mitchell Gomez  41:07  
So I, when I discovered all of this ancestry, I started collecting pre Columbian pieces, being very, very careful about provenance. I want to make sure I'm never supporting modern looting, but also focusing on cultural groups that I have ancestry in. So I have a lot of like Ancestral Puebloan and a lot of you know Maya and mishtech and Aztec pieces, including all of these lovely pre Columbian mushroom pieces. Wow. So this is all Mayan mushroom stones, a lot of Aztec pieces that also deal with psychedelics, a lovely Colima peyote bowl. You can see, these are actually peyote buttons on the on the bowls, and then up here wrong side, the Flip camera confused me. This piece, right in the corner here is an Aztec incense burner of xochipilli, the god of psychedelics. So this is a deity that his statue in Mexico City is quite famous. If you search so chipili, you can find it he's covered in they're often described as tattoos. They actually look to me like scarification, like they're raised, not inset, right? So it'd be really easy to inset tattoo imagery. And you see that in in like, not why sculpture. You'll see cut in lines. This almost looks like scarification of sacred plants. So there's mushroom symbolism. Actually, that is the mushroom symbolism on xochipilli. So it's three mushrooms cut down the side and then a cap from the top right. So mushroom one, mushroom two, mushroom three, and then the cap from the top. So this is a symbol that is shown both on the base that he sits on and also scarred into his knees and elbows. Wow.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  42:58  
So, so for for you, coming from looking at a book to as a young as a young boy, to now having these statues and relationship with your own ancestry, what would you say is your relationship now with with psychedelics and plant medicines? Yeah, um,

Mitchell Gomez  43:20  
you know, the weird dynamic is that I'm so busy right now, in this exact moment that I don't actually use psychedelics all that often. Dance tape has been going through some tremendous growth, tremendous periods of change. And, yeah, it's a strange dynamic, well,

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  43:37  
and I mean it not in terms of use, I mean it in terms of relationships, yeah, I started

Mitchell Gomez  43:42  
collecting these things because I really liked the idea of having them. That was sort of the thing. They've definitely become something else for me now, which is this, like, powerful concrete, right? Stone, we say concrete, but an issue personally, using the same metaphor would have sent a stone reminder, right? Instead of reminder, right? Instead of a concrete reminder, they are stone reminders that our relationship with these substances is ancient and the laws criminalizing them are really new, right? The majority of particularly these lower pieces, like these lower stone pieces. So this would have been a mushroom figural piece that was probably smashed by the Catholic Church, right? So he would have had a body, but he was smashed. And so I just have his head. The majority of these things were older than the United States is now when Jesus was born, right? So we're talking about 2300 2400 year olds, reminders that our relationship with these substances for the vast majority of human history was one of reverence, respect, connection to community, and that we've been criminalizing these things for. For at most, you know, a few 100 years, and that's really stretching the drug laws to be, to be to really go as far back as we can. As part of a book that I'm working on, I was looking for the first drug law I could find that was a true prohibition of the drug Right? Right? So there were lots of laws that controlled who could use drugs, when and where, but that's actually just regulatory models. That's what I want, right? So, like the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greece was clearly a psychoactive sacrament. Like, there's no real debate about that anymore, but it could only be used at eleusius, we actually have a trial of a Roman official who was tried with using the mysteries at home, we have the criminal trial that I've ever found that was a true prohibition of the drug. Was an idiot from the Spanish Inquisition banning what they called payo. It's not clear if they're talking about peyote or mushrooms. That was a term that was used to refer to both, but banning the use of some psychedelic sacrament for the Aztec empire that they just conquered, right the it's a literally inquisitional process for a government to say no one can use this substance under any circumstances. That comes from the Inquisition, as far as I can tell, that was the first group that ever tried to pass a law like that. And so that's part of why I keep these things right, these smashed ancient artifacts that show our relationship with psychedelics that were smashed by a church so threatened by a tool that allowed people to directly experience the divine that they were willing to burn books, burn people, take over jungles, erase knowledge, to cut off our access to this experience. Yeah, and so, yeah, that is and the other reason is that I want to make sure they end up in the right hands. A lot of these things are already promised to various museums, and a lot of my collection is already at cause, the Chapel of sacred mirrors, Allison Gray's church in upstate New York, some on loan, some that I've given them. And so, yeah, they're making sure that these things have public exposure. For a time, I owned the only known Aztec bone carving of xochili. It was found in the 1940s I had the original drawing from the archeologist who had excavated it. And the minute I got that thing into my collection, it felt so utterly inappropriate to be sitting on a bookshelf of mine. I mean, it felt absurd, yeah, right.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  47:49  
I mean literally, in a private collection versus in a place or with the people of origin or right,

Mitchell Gomez  47:54  
right, right, no. And some of it, you know, you know, I've often thought about repatriating things back, and there's a reason that I haven't and part of that reason is that I was told off the record because there is no public database of all of the things not on display in the national anthropology museum in Mexico City. But I was told off the record that there are 280 mushroom stones in storage and zero on display, because there's so much that's been excavated there, right? That, like, they just physically it would be physically impossible to create a museum that showed everything that's been excavated.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  48:35  
And you're making me think, like, you know, I know there's a well, this kid would get into a conversation. I know there's a museum being set up and to help preserve the traditions of, you know, in the of the Mazatec, right? And, but, but I want to come back to to you and dance safe and just, you know, giving one thing I like to help advise people in this podcast is to help direct them towards like, what kind of sources, what kind of things can actually be of help to them to have a safer, more supported experience or a better relationship. So, so what? What advice would you give someone who might be listening to this and hearing all the stories that you've been telling today?

Mitchell Gomez  49:19  
Yeah, you know, I think the most important one is that drug markets right now are incredibly adulterated. You know, we're seeing things like fentanyl in ketamine. There have been cases of it in MDMA. That's not common, but it has happened, you know, certainly, you know, in cocaine, we see fentanyl, you know, pretty regularly. You know, we've seen a galaxy of different research chemicals laid on blotter paper and called LSD, right? And so, you know, individually, getting a reagent from Dance safe, getting the fentanyl test strips from Dance safe and testing substances is really. The only way to know what you're putting in your body if it's not a natural product, there's never been a case where we've seen, you know, like that type of adulteration within like mushrooms. That doesn't mean it couldn't happen, but it's never happened so far. It's not as common, yeah, yeah, although, certainly, a lot of these manufactured mushroom products aren't mushrooms right there. You know, they're for ACO, therefore ACO, they're whatever other, you know, random tryptamine is being pumped out of

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  50:27  
labs, whatever laboratory that was made in, wherever, whatever was

Mitchell Gomez  50:32  
made in, to whatever quality it was made to. And so these, these manufactured products, I tend to be a little skeptical around, and often, because they're very difficult to test outside of a laboratory, right? You're going to have far more chocolate than drug, and so detecting the drug becomes really, really difficult well,

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  50:50  
and makes me want to talk about the the chocolate chip cookie problem, but like a bit of it with a synthetic testing, actually, we could talk about that, but I would just want to, like, you know, definitely would recommend people checking out. Dance safe checking out. You know, the you have lots of education and materials available for people. And I just, you know, thank you so much for taking this time with me and and with the community. Share a bit more about you and about your work. Yeah. And the other thing

Mitchell Gomez  51:19  
I would suggest is, even if you're not interested in volunteering, interested in volunteering with dance safe, doing our online training, doing the Zendo training, like building the skills so that you can be a person in your community, right? Dance safe is really predicated on peer education. Our job is to teach people who can then act as peers in their community, to educate others. And so even if you have no interest in volunteering with dance safe, but you should, because it's a lot of should, because it's a lot of fun. We go to festivals. We test drugs. It's great. Still doing that training so that you can build out the skill set to support your community is really worth doing.

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  51:51  
I totally agree with you. Like, I see it like, kind of like taking standard first aid and CPR, like, you should have some basic skills as a responsible member of the community. You don't have to support any sort of use, whether it be recreational, therapeutic, having Naloxone, like I have mine, you know, and knowing how to use it, you know, it won't harm people if they get it, and it's not useful, but it'll save someone's life.

Mitchell Gomez  52:12  
Yeah, the thing I've been promoting lately is beyond first aid, a wilderness first responder. Course, wilderness, because first aid is often built on this idea of, like, you just need to wait for the ambulance to get there, right? Yeah, festival that is sometimes kind of a

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  52:27  
wait, no. You're more of a wilderness environment,

Mitchell Gomez  52:31  
wilderness first aid and stop the bleed. Like, yeah. I mean, I have a stop the bleed kit, like, in my festival backpack that goes everywhere with me at events. Like, I have a tourniquet at festivals every Yeah, no,

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  52:42  
I have, like, a real tourniquet. Like, you know, oh, I'm gonna just use my shirt. Like, no, no, a real tourniquet where they have

Mitchell Gomez  52:47  
shirts, great if an ambulance is five minutes

Dr. Sandra Dreisbach  52:50  
away, nothing. People like, you know, get advice on medical or health or whatever, you know, professional, all the good things, but, um, but I appreciate you bringing that up too. Because I think you know, even if you just know someone who, who does have those skills, you know, and when you're in a group and in the wilderness, you know, setting, but, but thank you again. And you grabbed me on truly, yeah, I was, I had such a good time. I want to, I want to do this again at some time in every episode, I hope we're giving you the source in terms of responsible community use practices, research ideas. But in this case, we could maybe be more directly talking about source of product, psychedelic source as a phrase, is often used as a way to talk about, who's your source, who's your source of product, right? Very material focused, and I think it's really important to emphasize and make sure people are who are focusing on just having an experience, right? That you're doing so responsibly, and that means having the knowledge and testing product and empowering yourself with resources. But you know, sometimes you'll even hear people say, know your source, right? And it's very challenging in at this time where most use is criminalized, that you make sure that if you are making those choices that you're doing so with safe product, or at least safer product, there is real contamination of product. Dance safe happens to offer some testing products, including for fentanyl test strips, as well as testing for different aspects, there's also now available potency testing for things like psilocybin and LSD, which many people aren't as aware of. But. There's a lot of product that's on the shelves even, quote, unquote, legally, or at least, seems like it's a legal product that actually isn't safe. And I cannot emphasize enough, whether you find it in the nutritional shelf of your store or a local smoke shop or from a friend, the safety and responsibility is is very important. It is life changing, and don't risk your your life in exchange for just a good experience. And yes, I also feel it's important, even if you don't feel that, it's that you feel like you you want anyone to use psychedelics, it's important for all of us to have some good basic knowledge and awareness and safety. I personally don't use opioids, and have never used opioids other than through medical use, but I still have a way to give people Naloxone, right, not only for you know that potential accidental consumption, but also for you know you never know when Someone may need that support and minutes, every minute counts. So I just wanted to take this time to encourage everyone, given that our name is indeed psychedelic source, that the safety of your products, the safety of your friends, of your your family, really does depend on you being a responsible citizen and taking care of your own awareness and education, regardless of your stance on psychedelics and plant medicines. Thank you for joining me on psychedelic source. If you found value in today's episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and share with others in our community. And if you're a psychedelic practitioner, therapist or coach looking to identify blind spots in your practice or determine next steps for moving it forward, take the first step by visiting psychedelic Source podcast.com Until next time, remember, start low, go slow and stay connected to your source. You.