Will Donald Trump and RFK Jr. Psychedelicize America?

A teetotaling president and former addict just might end the War on Some Drugs.

I asked Grok to illustrate RFK Jr. and Donald Trump in ‘Peter Max style.’

Last week, I recorded a special post-election episode of

Zach Haigney

’s podcast, The Trip Report by Beckley Waves; it went live at Substack and elsewhere a day ago (scroll down to start listening and read a rush transcript). Zach wanted to pick my brain about what a Trump win meant not just for drug policy in general but especially about psychedelics. Trump had said that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was going to be deeply involved in his administration but had not yet announced him as his pick for secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). (Whether RFKjr can or should get confirmed is a different question.)

As you might imagine, most people in the broad drug legalization and psychedelic movements saw Trump’s victory as cause for something close to existential despair, on the order of a second coming of Voldemort, for reasons that nothing to do with drug policy per se. While I understand that feeling, I don’t really share it. To me, the decision between Trump and Harris was not one between darkness and light, but between two bad options, for different reasons that I won’t bother getting into right here and now.

When it comes to drug policy, Trump 2.0 has the potential to really open things up (at least if he cools it on the insane and unconstitutional plans to bomb Mexican drug cartels). The Biden admin has kinda-maybe already rescheduled cannabis, but recall that he supported Florida’s legalization initiative and promised back in 2016 that he’d sign legislation turning complete regulation of it back to the states (Bernie Sanders was also for this, while eventual Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton was a strong no on ending federal prohibition). Trump famously doesn’t drink or use what the feds still insist are ‘illicit’ drugs, but he also is very motivated to help veterans and others who might benefit from non-conventional therapies.

That is even more true of Robert Kennedy, Jr. whom I interviewed a little more than than a year ago, when he was running for president as an independent candidate (full q&a here). Despite his jesuitical protestations, RFKjr is indeed a longtime anti-vaxxer (including polio and MMR vaccines) and he believes virtually every conspiracy he hears. He’s also a former addict who comes from a family famous for substance abuse. He hates Big Pharma and to that end embraces virtually anything that he thinks would weaken its powers. That doesn’t always add up to anything coherent and he spends an insane amount of time shitting on seed oils and food additives, but he represents a massive departure from a status quo that lots of people understand is broken or at least in need of massive reform.

When it comes to drug policy, RFKjr doesn’t miss a beat saying he’d legalize or decriminalize virtually all drugs at the federal level. Here’s a snippet from my Reason interview (conducted with my colleague Zach Weissmueller):

And that’s really the starting point of my conversation with Zach Haigney on The Trip Report. Consider a possibility so crazy it seems like something you’d only come up with tripping balls: That Donald Trump of all people just might help end the drug war as we know it!

Take a listen and read through the rush transcript below, generated by OtterAI. Check all quotes against the audio. And do subscribe to The Trip Report.

Here is an uncorrected rush transcript. Check all quotes against audio!

Zach Haigney  00:00

Nick, welcome to the special dispatch of the trip report podcast production of Bentley waves. Today, I'm joined by Nick Gillespie, editor at large reason magazine, to discuss the results of the US election and specifically what it might mean for psychedelic policy research and drug development, as a veteran observer of the intersection between politics, regulation and civil liberties, Nick offers a unique lens through which to examine the evolving dynamics of psychedelics, the regulatory state, and how the incoming Trump administration might approach the matter. Our conversation focuses on the curious coalition between former presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, and President Elect Donald Trump, who has said that he will let Kennedy, quote, unquote, go wild on health through a yet to be announced position in his administration. This partnership raises critical questions about the potential for sweeping changes to policy in the United States, particularly as it relates to psychedelics, alternative therapies and broader health reforms. We explored the paradoxical nature of this political moment in which historical stigmas are shifting and new coalitions are forming with drug policy historically defined by prohibition. Could we now be on the verge of a psychedelic Renaissance fueled by executive power and bipartisan pragmatism. We unpack the complexities of descheduling psychedelics, the implications of potential federal support for therapeutic use, and how the cultural, medical and regulatory terrain could evolve in typical fashion, Nick brings clarity and insight to a conversation that touches on the FDA is recent rejection of mbma assisted therapy, the mixed outcomes of state level psychedelic ballot initiatives, and the broader cultural shifts that frame America's approach to mental health, addiction and drug legalization. This is a moment where history, politics and the psychedelic Renaissance converge, an era brimming with opportunity and risk with the potential for substantive change at hand. Now, without further ado, I bring you my conversation with Nick Gillespie. So I don't intend for this to take a very long time. I really just need to, like, I don't know, I our conversation last time, I don't know if you recall, was right after the FDA decision on, yeah, and this strikes me as similar, related. And I say that because the thing that is interesting here, and we're recording this on, what is this, Thursday, November 7, yeah, two days after the election, right? Obviously, Trump won. I don't know if you would call it a landslide, a soft land side, yeah. I mean, it was convincing, yeah, convincing victory. And interesting and important for the topic of this podcast and my publication, is the fact that he has partnered with, or aligned forces with, Robert Kennedy, Jr, right, who is notable for the extent of power that he is allegedly going to be, yeah, granted in a Trump administration, right? And I just want to bring up this tweet from october 25 from Robert F Kennedy Jr, that says FDA is war on public health is about to end, right? This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, yada yada yada. What's notable there is that the first thing he mentions is psychedelics and yeah, elsewhere I've seen that he is, is this? Is this a health czar? Is this? Yeah, what am I getting at? What I want to understand and what I need help understanding is we saw MDMA assisted therapy get rejected by the FDA in August, right? We just saw Massachusetts voters shoot down a ballot initiative that would have created a similar program that we have in in Oregon, Colorado. These are interesting compounds because they have a long history, right? A long history in our culture. Yep, they have a history of being stigmatized and made illegal 50 years ago by another Republican president. There's a lot of different routes. Yeah, right, that that that psychedelics are coming through to the mainstream. Yeah, all of the money has gone into medicine as as FDA approved, kind of, hopefully FDA approved drugs. There's a lot of money that's gone into policy and ballot initiatives. There is a right to try bill that has kind of been put on hold for a bit, and then obviously scheduling and decriminalization. I've said a lot there, but that's kind of just how I wanted to tee this up, right sure, a health czar or somebody with seemingly going to get a lot of influence. In a Trump administration that just had a big win, big win. Yeah,

Nick Gillespie  05:05

and this is an area where the president or the executive branch can exert a lot of influence quickly on various so

Zach Haigney  05:15

this is what I want to get into, and this is exactly why I wanted to talk to you, because reason and your work has focused on this sort of the regulatory apparatus, and it's not sort of belabored by kind of old partisan antics and stuff. And so I want to understand what is at play, or what is potentially at play. Yeah,

Nick Gillespie  05:34

I mean, like, let's start with the figure of RFK Jr to begin with, because he has said, and Trump at his big Madison Square Garden rally, just a couple a week before the election, or less than a week before the election, said he was going to give RFK Jr a ton of power to do all sorts of health stuff. And then RFK Jr has been talking, he's saying, I'm going to get a big job in the Trump administration. That he told I think it was NBC. He said, I was, I'm going to be charged with cleaning up corruption in kind of the FDA and the pharma approval system that He is charged with bringing gold standard science, he said, back to drugs and food things. And then he's been charged with making America healthy again, particularly for kids, and dialing in on chronic diseases, etc, and to have results within two years. So that is what RFK Jr is saying. Trump has echoed some of that. The short version of it is that we don't know what any of that means until, right until next January, because we don't know it's it's almost certain that RFK Jr is not going to be given a role in which he needs to go to a Senate confirmation here, because there's no way he'll get through he he is kind of a nut. He's crazy. He believes in virtually every conspiracy theory you can think about, particularly if it involves chemicals or vaccines or drugs and the transition. The head of Trump's transition has said that he is not going to be heading up Health and Human Services, which was one of the things. So is it going to be a new health czar? Whatever? It's also worth thinking about RFK Jr being the health czar because he contracted hepatitis C from being a heroin addict. He claims that he had a in his divorce proceedings. He said he had a brain, a worm in his brain, that died and was messing up his cognitive abilities in the air. I mean, like he's, he's a nut job. He's a he's a hardcore anti Vaxxer. He dislikes pharmaceutical companies. He all kinds of weird stuff. The one thing that you have to say about RFK Jr, when I interviewed him about 18 months ago, and he despite his his history with drugs, despite his family's history with alcoholism and other drug problems, he doesn't miss a beat when he says, I will legalize psychedelics and all other drugs. Like he understands that this is whatever negative outcomes from drug use or substance abuse issues come you don't fix it by prohibition. So like that is huge, and it's also worth thinking about Donald Trump in this context, where Trump had an older brother who died of alcoholism or problems related to alcoholism, and he is a teetotaler and all of that kind of stuff. But like he has been, he said in 2016 when Hillary Clinton wouldn't go this far, he said that if Congress put a law on his desk legalizing weed, he would sign it. He and Bernie Sanders said that Hillary Clinton, when he he signed off and pushed right to try legislation when we yeah for end of life drugs and things like that. So you have this odd thing where it's like, okay, so maybe Trump is a conservative, whatever that means. Maybe he's a reactionary. Maybe he's a Nazi, but, like the Nazis used a lot of drugs. So it is not inconceivable, and we should take it seriously that this could be the most drug friendly and certainly the most psychedelic friendly administration that we have seen since the CIA was running MK Ultra and buying up the world's LSD supply in the early 50s. So that's out there. What is interesting to think about in a lot of these contexts is that this is also happening. And you mentioned how the psychedelic initiative really kind of flopped in Massachusetts. Beyond that California, California passed Prop 36 I believe it was called, which restored felony charges to various kinds of low level drug possession cases and drug dealing things. And not long, earlier this year, Oregon repealed its drug decriminalization law, which was really setting a trend. So we have this weird thing going on, and basically all of the marijuana initiatives that were on the ballot this year lost as well. Yeah. So. You have this odd thing where, like among the Vox Populi, it seems like there's a retreat from drug legalization. There is also Gallup, I think was in August, they released survey about how do people feel about marijuana use, not necessarily legalization, and across the board, in almost every category, including people who used weed, Democrats, Republicans, independents, age groups, you name it, people were saying that they had they were more suspicious of the harms caused by regular marijuana use than they had been two years ago or previously. I mean, we're still looking like a super majority wants to legalize weed. So that is good, but it's this bizarre moment where drug legalization may be happening at the executive level, exactly at a time when people are starting to kind of go backwards. And yeah, I think it's worth kind of thinking about that, because my colleague at reason, Jacob Solem, wrote a very good piece where he talked about how when Trump was first elected in 2016 just in that year, in that election, California, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada voted in recreational weed. Arkansas, Florida, Montana, North Dakota approved medical use in 2018 Michigan went for recreational use. Missouri, Oklahoma, Utah. I mean, these are three Bible Belt states, they all went for medical marijuana. And then in 2020 Arizona, Montana and New Jersey went with recreational. Mississippi moved into medical weed use. South Dakota legalized stuff. And then it got hung up because of various kind of procedural, kind of flim flamery on the part of the governor the Republic or governor. But like we've had this incredible decade, really, or dozen years, of almost unimpeded forward momentum on drug legalization when it comes to weed, and in various points, the District of Columbia made enforcement of psychedelics the lowest priority police Oregon legalized psilocybin centers and things like that. So it's an interesting moment to think about. And like the good news is that RFK Jr, if he is the health czar and the food czar and the drug czar, he's got a very positive approach towards psychedelics, and what we now call, I guess still, the government so calls illicit drugs, more generally, he's got a terrible view, like a very cynical and hostile view towards the pharmaceutical industry and things like that, you know. And obviously they are merging a little bit when you think about how Lycos, coming out of maps as big is a pharma company, and they brought in a Johnson and Johnson executive like the psychedelic world is trying to become more legit, and so this is an interesting moment, for sure.

This an uncorrected rush transcript. Check all quotes against audio!

Zach Haigney  12:49

It's very interesting. And you're you're right. I didn't follow cannabis and marijuana policy in the industry as much as I've I'm obviously following the psychedelics, but I did read that like every ballot that was up, this was shot down.

Nick Gillespie  13:03

And if I may, I think what is partly coming out of that, or partly what that reflects, and I think it's a broader thing about the election, not to get into partisan politics too much, but to the extent that illegal drugs, or illicit drugs are often identified as kind of subversive, or they erode order and control, and they bring in chaos. And certainly, even though psychedelics are overwhelmingly discussed in a mental health context, and that it's about helping soldiers and sexual assault victims overcome PTSD, that psychedelics are heavily, heavily identified in the public consciousness with hippies and with nicks and Timothy Leary and Burning Man and just crazy people. And part of what was happening, and part of the reason why I think Trump, and more broadly, the Republicans, won, was there is a sense of creeping chaos in everyday life. The border can't be controlled. The border between the US and Mexico, prices can't be controlled. They're going way up and down, et cetera. Cities can't be controlled. There's homeless people, there's problems, et cetera. And like, we could go through each of these and say, that's not really true, or we have to put this in context. But part of what this election, I think, was about, was less a even a positive embrace of Donald Trump but or the Republicans, but more rejection of what seems to be chaos that was unleashed with COVID and then lockdowns, and then all of the stuff that came after George Floyd And then inflation, and we have like weird major world events unfolding in the Middle East and in middle Europe, and so I think that helps explain why drug ballot initiatives, wherever they were, kind of flopped this time around our tank. But then we get to that interesting question about. Okay, but Trump, this is where he is. Whatever else you can say about him, he is not beholden to the way things have been. To use a common law phrase, he's not unburdened by what has been and that he did stuff that people don't expect, right? I mean, like the first step Act, which was the most significant federal sentencing reform and criminal justice reform, Prison Reform Act. And forever he signed that. He signed right to try. And I think he takes that seriously. And I think he also has people near him, RFK, Jr, but even other people who have been in politics who are saying these drugs, psychedelics, have real potential to help veterans, to help assault victims, etc, and like I'm thinking back to the to the maps psychedelic science conference in Denver a couple years ago, Rick Perry was the second or third person on the stage, and he said, Hey, I know I'm the heavy, the Bad guy here, but he made his pitch for why psychedelics, he's pushing that. And he was like, when you look at Congress, there's a bunch of Republicans, most of whom were vets, or represent like vet heavy districts or have ties to the Veterans Administration, who are all pushing this kind of stuff, people like Rand Paul, people like Thomas Massie, people like Dan Crenshaw. So this might be a great moment for the administrative kind of loosening up as regards psychedelics.

Zach Haigney  16:31

Yeah. What could that look like? I'm just going to kind of run through the things that are top of my mind right now, because psychedelics as therapeutics are unique in the sense that, if you think about a cancer drug or a new blood pressure drug or whatever, the first people to whoever ever tried them will have been the clinical trial participants, right? And in this context, there's a long history of culture social fervor, like they're revered, right? Like they change lives, and so the the cart and the horse are switched there. And why is that important? There's a few things that are holding back the scientific progress, namely, the ability to get federal funding. I mean, I remember when Roland Griffith presented at the NIH in like December of 2019 and he presented his data. And this is, like, a huge moment, right? It felt like, okay, boom, here we go. We're gonna unrock this federal research funding for psychedelics. And here we are, five years later, and, I mean, it's been trickles, and that's tied up in federal one stat, or, I'm sorry, schedule one status, right? So there's these interlocking constraints and dynamics that really impact the ability for this to roll out in both a conventional medical context, right where you're writing prescriptions, or in a state by state legalization context, because of the the requirements or the, let's call it the culture around set and setting and sort of container, right? These are not dispensaries. These are healing centers. If we were to imagine somebody with progressive and outside the box thinking, which it seems like there is, and a president that gives zero fucks, right? What could we be looking at? I mean, is this like a Can you roll back schedule one status? Can you,

Nick Gillespie  18:24

I mean, the Biden administration had rescheduled marijuana, if I'm if I'm correct, I'm pretty sure. I don't think it has taken effect yet, but they were talking about moving it from schedule one to schedule three, and that's going to happen one way or the other, because it's it doesn't make sense. And this is also something that RFK Jr has talked about about when it comes to marijuana, changing whatever federal prohibitions are on, allowing banks to handle money from dispensaries and things like that, which is, yeah, also important when there's been legislation towards that end and things like that. But so if you have a White House and you have a drug regulation apparatus that is saying, Okay, we're going to start shifting these Out Of Schedule One, and we're going to put them lower, or we're going to take them off, and we're going to allow, either openly or covertly, we're going to allow people to start using these things all over the place. I mean, that's kind of happening already, but I think it could be transformative, because it would loosen up, but make research easier for everybody who's involved, and that's very important, but it would also, I think what's been happening, particularly the way that things, these things are getting used, it is like it's already happening, and it's more A question of like, when is the federal government going to realize, like, what? Like, we're not controlling this stuff anyway? I mean, no, no, law enforcement agency at any level in any jurisdiction is like, what we've really got to do is we've got to find out who is growing mushrooms and bust them, like, or even LSD. And even MDMA, to a large degree, it's like it's, it's kind of over for that. And it's a question of, when does the federal government start to just kind of admit the war on drugs is over, and we lost? And I think this could happen. And again, this is where psychedelics, you wouldn't have thought this, I don't know, maybe 10 years ago or something like that, but where they are seen as relatively safe, because we do have this long history of people using them for fun and for kind of deep work on themselves, and for getting over PTSD, and we have developed all of these harm reduction strategies in the underground. I mean, whether it's dance safe or other groups, the Zendo project like this, is a community that is kind of taking care of itself all of this, and a certain familiarity with where this is not fentanyl, like, right, okay? And not only is this not fentanyl, but this is not something that Johnson and Johnson is going to be selling, and it's not even ozempic, where you got to take it every couple of weeks, or something like that. These are, and this is an oversimplification, but these are, like, one and done drugs like these are not maintenance drugs that you have to really be on top of. So it from a regulatory standpoint, so weirdly and ironically and kind of in a way that fits with psychedelic experiences. I think, like you, you go through a door and it's pitch black, and then suddenly you're in the most beautiful park you've ever seen, and then, and then, like you, you have a soft landing. I mean, it's, kind of amazing. And, I mean, I think the other things to keep in mind is that, I guess I'll say two things. One is that there is an erratic nature to everybody that's involved in this from in the Trump administration. Trump himself, he has a short attention span. He has ADD, well,

Zach Haigney  21:57

I have thought to myself, like, what's the probability of I wish there was a prediction market for, like, yeah, probability of, of RFK actually becoming the rights are, they're

Nick Gillespie  22:06

probably, I guess they're probably, yeah,

Zach Haigney  22:08

I looked, I don't, I didn't, I couldn't find them. But it's a substantive probability. Yeah, yeah. I

Nick Gillespie  22:14

mean, it's definitely, it's better than zero, yeah, well, it's

Zach Haigney  22:17

better than zero. So, but, but

Nick Gillespie  22:19

there is an erratic nature, and it, there's a question too, because the way that RFK talks about this stuff, it's, it's very close to the top of his his list, like you were saying when he talks about stuff, it's, it isn't like when the second footnote on the third page or anything. Yeah. So that's good, and if he goes away, which is possible. I mean, I was talking to on election night. I was talking to people who are kind of real political watchers and kind of kremlinologists of Trump world, and they were saying one of the things is that Trump, he promises people and holds them close, and then, like when he doesn't need them, he just never talks to them again, and he doesn't need anybody anymore because he's got his second term, but things are looking pretty good. I mean, his transition head did say that RFK is not going to be head of Health and Human Services. I can't imagine he's going to be the head of the FDA, or it's going to be any kind of traditional existing role. So there's that. One thing is to keep in mind, is that this all might disappear, and it's just like, we wake up and somebody's been spraying political Narcan, and it's like, holy shit, we're just this was not what we thought it was. The other thing, though, and I think this is particularly coming on the wake of the FDA bumming out on MDMA, is that within the psychedelic movement, getting out of the boxes of like, okay, well, there are Democrats and Republicans, there's progressive and conservatives, there's partisans, like, and we know what tribe we're on, and we're going to work with the people in our tribe. Because, like, we all know there's no fucking way that Donald Trump, like, he doesn't know how to trip, he doesn't want to trip, he, you know, and like that kind of parochialism. This is a good time to kind of rethink that for a lot of different reasons, and that when you think about the way that psychedelics are being mainstreamed, and I'm not saying this is purely instrumental, but it's like it is through a medicalized version, a therapeutic version, and it leans heavily on helping veterans and sexual assault victims. It's a very medicalized version, and that is important for those people. Like, when you look at groups like symposia, they were like, kind of talking down MDMA therapy and stuff. Part of it was like, We don't care about the people who might benefit in the next three weeks from this happening because we have a bigger we've got bigger fish to fry. No like, let's think about those people. But also, this is a good time to think about psychedelic mainstreaming. Psychedelic legitimacy is going to come from a network. Work and a political coalition that doesn't look like stuff that's out there. It's got to be, it's got to be beyond partisan politics, and it's getting there. I mean, it's, it's kind of amazing. This, the other thing I'll add to this, which is also, I think puts a little bit more weight on the scale of this moving forward, is that the kind of Silicon Valley bros who really helped Trump, and I'm thinking of people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and some of the all in podcast guys, the tech VCs, they're committed to psychedelics as a technology that helps them optimize their lives. And many of them also acknowledge and are behind, kind of helping vets and stuff like that, but, but the Silicon Valley money, which is new in Republican politics, and as was very helpful for Trump, these guys. They may not be zealots in the way that RFK talks about it, but this, this is something that they want, and they see as of a piece with getting to Mars and having kind of like the regulatory freedom that will allow them to build businesses and to build houses and to create their version of an abundance economy. So that's pretty good, if your cause is, how do we get good psychedelic drugs in the right kind of set and setting in the right container, with a lot of information, where people don't have to scurry around for this kind of stuff, and where researchers and doctors and therapists and shamans and individuals can all use this stuff with more free and clear and above board information, where you can argue about the discovery process you need at every level, there's a lot of people to play with. Now,

Zach Haigney  26:49

I was just thinking that, you know, if you were to rewind the tape, like, what role RFK joining Trump had on the outcome of the election, but this is another sort of instance where it's really bizarre for me. I'll date myself. I'm 40. I'm going to be 42 years old. I graduated from college in 2005 the prospect of a presidential candidate, sort of running on, like, organic food and right? Not Trump, but like this being a, yeah, yeah, anything felt like it became an actual, like, substantive part, along with foreign policy and inflation and the border, like this Maha movement is like, it's bizarre to me. It's just fucking crazy Trump

Nick Gillespie  27:37

who drinks like Diet Coke or regular Coke today, but it's like, and he eats McDonald's and Chick fil A, and it's like, he seems to be like, a fat fuck. He's not only like Grover Cleveland, not only the only president to have two non consecutive terms, but he seems to be a fat load like Grover Cleveland. And it's like, but, yeah, it's beautiful and it's weird, and it's kind of like, this is the world we live in where,

Zach Haigney  28:02

you know, it's very bizarre to see, but also it feels like the MaHA movement is actually like a bipartisan thing, and people who, and there'll be a certain amount of preference falsification right, from people who are not going to be willing to admit that, yeah, that the factory farming and the pesticides and the super processed foods are, I mean, we're a fat fucking society and we're sick. And it is shocking. I mean, Obama did Obamacare right, and that was sort of like a revision of healthcare, right? But this is, like, a fundamentally, yeah, this is better Elon Musk term, like a first principles approach to and then I have to imagine there are people at the New York Times and The Washington Post and MSNBC who are pulling their fucking hair out totally because they seeded this ground, yeah, to this fucking guy,

Nick Gillespie  29:04

right? And it is like, this is where you got to be able to laugh at yourself prior. Because, like, and I'll tell you, I'm 20 years old, or almost 20 years older than you, and I still think about, like the great, one of the greatest things. My grandparents were all immigrants from Ireland, in Italy, and like, one of the greatest parts of the American dream is that they grew to see their children, who were born and raised in America, become fat fucks. Like, I don't have a problem, like, I think we oversell this. I'm not worried about pesticides, I'm not worried about industrial food. I'm not saying it's good for you, but these are not things that moved me, but I agree with you completely that we are entering a moment now of Make America healthy again, where people for a wide variety of reasons, and most of this is kind of symbolic processing and the way that I think about it, but it's that we don't want super processed foods anymore. We. Organic, however we understand that term we want, we want to be healthy and clean, and we can do that. We can afford it. And this is a way that we find meaning in our lives. And it is what happens when these big shifts come. And it is not a partisan thing. It advances across a wide swath of society, a majority of society, and I think you're absolutely right to say that we're at the beginning of that. And if people stay in these artificial kind of groups of okay, well, this is what a Democrat means, and this is what a Republican means. And these things change all the time. And with this, this election was fascinating, because I was, like, a full third of the electorate said they were independent, and everybody votes for a Republican or Democrat. But it was up the last election. It was, it was 34% this time, it was 26% in 2020 so like, the old ways are loosening, and this for me, and I realize different people's mileage will vary. But like, if we look at this election as closing out a kind of failed model of politics where it's a lot of control and it's a lot of finger pointing and lecturing people on what is right and wrong, and like, what really matters that's been shut down a little bit, and I'm not saying that means we got nothing to worry about. I'm terrified of Trump's, particularly his views on tariffs and immigration and culture mass deportations. But there's a moment here where something new is starting to emerge. And I think in a broader sense, along the lines you were thinking about, there's a an anthropologist named Grant McCracken, who, a couple years ago, wrote a book called The Return of the artisan, how America. And the subtitle is something like how America went from factory made to handmade. And he tracks. He tracks how after World War Two, all of the energy in America went away from like making your own food and making your own clothes to buying pre made stuff, because that was symbolically, that's what people wanted. That's how you knew you were American, and you had made it by buying canned goods and TV dinners and everything was metallic and jet age and everything. And he's like, starting in the 60s, that started changing, and we're back to we've been in a prolonged period of a return to artisanal everything. And people want, they want the handmade they want the thumbprint on everything that they're consuming and buying. And then we live in a maker economy, and this Make America healthy stuff, I think is part of that. I think the psychedelic Renaissance is part of that, because what are people doing with this stuff? A lot of it is, we're seeking a more individualized form of communing with God than our mass produced religions allowed us, etc, so that this is good. When you're tripping, people say, Don't resist. Don't resist and take like, if more is offered, take it. It's like, maybe we should think about that in the context of what could happen over the next, yeah, few months.

This an uncorrected rush transcript. Check all quotes against audio!

Zach Haigney  33:09

I want to be mindful of time here. It's pretty late again. Thank you for for joining me in the last minute here. Let's transport you into the shoes of RFK Jr. Yeah, and you're given this go wild on health. How do you starting with psychedelics? Like, what? What makes sense to you? Nick Gillespie for for sort of action along the lines that we've been talking about. I mean, I How would you use that? Yeah. I

Nick Gillespie  33:37

mean, I think among the first things to do is because there is a robust world in place, like, figure out what are the main barriers to kind of open research engagement and use of what is already happening. So like, how do you, how do you, how do you dial back the controls on research, on money, on on on any kind of legal sanctions against people who are using stuff allow what's happening to come fully up, to be to visible level, because that is you want the people at NYU and Johns Hopkins and UCLA to be able to do what they're doing, and more of it, and other groups and things like that. You want the police to spend their time actually going after dangerous substances and whatnot. And so

Zach Haigney  34:25

are you talking about, like, rescheduling, yeah.

Nick Gillespie  34:28

I mean, all of that, yeah. I mean, and I think that, I think that that's a huge part of it. I think a big part of it is, like figuring out financing and, and, and convening. I mean, this is, I guess it's maybe, maybe I can't believe I'm going to say this, but it's kind of like, how do you do the reverse of a just say no, type campaign where you start to do not in grammar schools, but in other places, where you start to talk to the people you know, you, you, you, you loosen the culture up a little bit. So we can start finding out. But the other thing is, there are so many trials that are moving along. There are so many protocols that are in place. It's like, how do you how do you speed that up? How do you make it easier for them to do what they're already doing? Because, in another sense, like the psychedelic renaissance and at the end of the drug war, is happening not because of government action, but in spite of it. And so, like, if we have less government action, that's just in the way, I think we'll start, we'll start moving forward.

Zach Haigney  35:34

There's, like, I think it's Chinese, a Chinese proverb that says, May you live in interesting times, right, right, yeah. And I feel like I've been using that for the last six years, but, oh God, at least right. Very, very Yeah, apropos, yeah. And

Nick Gillespie  35:48

I do this within the kind of broad psychedelic movement, I mean, almost at every level. I really do think it is all of us, to various degrees, pride ourselves on. We're not, we're not rigid thinkers. We're not, we're not the clowns who are stuck in these constricted, repressed identities. And it's like, yeah, yeah, okay, let's, let's act that way for a while and see what happened. And I mean, hopefully, if it's RFK, and he's true to the to the stuff that he has said about psychedelics and about health stuff, and if he's gonna have a big influence, that's really good for the psychedelic movement. Yeah, it's really good. And you gotta like, I know when I see him, like, I respond negatively, because I'm like, Oh, he keeps talking about how tap water, chemicals and tap water are either turning kids gay, it's pushing back puberty or it's speeding it up, depending on when you talk to like, all of that. Like, that doesn't matter when we're talking about psychedelics. Like, he's on point. Trump doesn't use drugs. Does not he has in this campaign, has called for the death penalty for drug dealers. I don't know what that means he clearly isn't talking about people using mushrooms, or, I don't think he's talking about people using LSD or MDMA, yeah. So we, you work with what you got and, like, we've actually got a real moment here where the egg is cracking open, yeah.

Zach Haigney  37:15

That, to me, feels like the thing that's important here is, like, I mean, to to draw a sort of obvious and beaten narrative metaphor, but like the the neuro plastic window, yeah? For ossified institutional circuitry, it feels like it's it has a chance to be beat. Yeah? This

Nick Gillespie  37:36

is like we're getting a new layer of snow on the cultural brain. So let's see different trails. Let's throw in all of the possible metaphors that we can use about that. But it's but it's true, and it's like, yeah, I'll tell you just in terms of kind of political or ideological and cultural movement. I don't know it was, like, 15 years ago, maybe, or something I interviewed. You know, I'm a small l libertarian, and I take that seriously. And at one point I got to interview Ralph Nader, who, particularly in the 70s, had a lot of libertarian kind of impulses and policies. Why not? But he had written a book about how, like, if libertarians and progressives got together on these, like, 10 or 20 topics, like, where we basically agreed, like, we had a super majority, and we could, like, have substantive change. And I was so I wanted to interview him about that, and I knew him a little bit, and then I immediately started talking to him about first principles. And he was like, Nick, like, why that? Why should we? Why should we argue with each over, over stuff we know we disagree on when, like, the the topic here is like, what do we agree on, and how do we get that passed? And I think in the psychedelic movement, I've noticed, and this is a weird thing, a development, I think I've been sensing, and maybe, maybe it has more to do with me as a viewer than what's going on, but that, as you get closer to full acceptance and normalization and legalization stuff like that, people start getting kind of uptight. And I feel like more and more people are saying, like, don't, like, no, it's got to be done the way I want, as opposed to, like, No man. Like, words so close to victory. Don't, don't start pulling your trip on me. Like, let's just, yeah, let's clear the woods, and then we can, I'll build my village over here. You build your village over there, and, well, it'll be beautiful, but, yeah. But I think a lot of people are seeing psychedelics as a means to an end, like to a single end, and it might be healing society, healing the planet, etc, all, things that are good and interesting and everything but like the point is none of that happens if we don't finish the project in front of us, which is getting more of these substances recognized and legalized and open and into the cultural Slipstream, if not mainstream, so we have more. Tools to live by or to live by, yeah,

Zach Haigney  40:02

well said. All right, Nick, I want to let you go. I know it's late. I appreciate it. This has been substantive and helpful, and similar to the last time we talked, I have an essay that I have to write tonight, and this is helping me good moment those things so. All right, thank you. You. Thanks for listening to the trip report. We hope you enjoyed it. You can sign up to receive our free newsletter and get the podcast sent directly to your inbox by going to the trip report.com This podcast is a production from Beckley waves, a psychedelic venture studio. If you are interested in learning more about building companies in the psychedelic space, head over to Beckley waves.com to get in touch. If you liked this episode, please give us a five star rating on Apple podcast and share it with your friends. I'm Zach hegny. The trip report is produced by a cooler production company with coordination from Caitlin Jabari. See you next time.

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