Neil’s Biography & LEAP website
What is your position on decriminalizing entheogens?
I don’t think about it as decriminalizing the drugs. I think about it as decriminalizing the people who use them. I think it’s good. But it can’t be where it stops. We have to move to legal access. I think that we’ve finally reached a place in this country where the vast majority of folks do not think we should arrest people for using drugs no matter what the drug is.
But we can’t stop there for two main reasons:
- For the people who are using drugs, we have to create the safest possible environment for using the drugs. An environment in which these drugs are being manufactured, how they are taken care of, and making sure they aren’t adulterated. Especially the psychedelics that are chemically-based: MDMA, LSD. Being done as safely as possible with the right ingredients in the right conditions.So people are getting the safest product.
- When it comes to psychedelics, from my experience in policing, there generally is not an association of the market with violence like you would see with cocaine, heroin or even cannabis. However, you still want to move it out of the illicit market to a regulated market.
What would be your message to Seattle PD?
You have to seek the right information. Educate yourselves on this issue. In the policing community, we were given such bad information about psychedelics. In the 1960s and 1970s psychedelics were demonized, especially LSD. We were told people would have flashbacks, and kill their family members — even eat peoples’ faces off. This is what we in the policing community were told about these drugs. It was around 1970 when LSD was placed in Schedule I and they wanted us to enforce these laws. They ramped up enforcement on illicit drugs all around. We weren’t given any info about their therapeutic potential. Never in the conversation or in our training. It was always about how bad these drugs were in our communities. My message to the police: get good information. Multiple, credible resources. Corroborate information regarding studies about therapeutic use. I didn’t start getting this info until I started working for LEAD, getting info from LEAD. I find myself interacting with the Drug Policy Alliance, folks involved in the research, others involved in MDMA research. I met one of my donors in California and he was telling me about the ayushyachya experience and what that was about from a perspective of therapeutic use. We had another LEAP speaker who is Native American and he was talking about ceremonial use of peyote and mushrooms. I’m getting information I never heard of when I was an officer. Started to hear the same thing over and over again from different people. I heard different perspectives. My advice — again, do the research, educate yourself, and then decide what your perspective is regarding psychedelics. As an educated police officer, you have the ability to educate and influence elected officials.
How did you get involved in this?
I started to get involved in drug policy reform all the way back in 2001, 2002. I started asking questions in a formal way. I was the head of training with the Baltimore Police Department in the year 2000. A good friend of mine was working undercover, he was killed in a bad drug buy working with the FBI in DC. The guy who killed him didn’t know he was a cop, he thought he was a drug dealer. It was a violent act that began my questioning of our drug policies, policing, prohibition and how we were going about this work. I saw the violence, and I saw other police officers killed. A family of 7 in 2003 were killed in one night because the mother was working with the police to try to get the drug dealer’s crew arrested. In a short period of time, seeing the violence I began to question. I stumbled across LEAP. I connected with them. I officially started speaking for the org in 2008. It’s been 20 years, but I’m still on a journey of education. It went from violence to my eyes being open to incarceration issues. Every turn I was learning new things about the failed war on drugs. I am someone who has been a police officer for 30 years, the vast majority of which was in drug enforcement — if I can make the shift because of education, because of knowledge, anyone can. Anyone in law enforcement, judges, whoever. Any citizen as long as you’re given the right information. Then anyone can. It began with violence for me, but then I started seeing all the other horrific connections and results. Drug enforcement is morality policing . It’s not drug prohibition; it’s about morality policing. Prohibiting consensual adult behavior. Legally punishing adults for entering into contracts with each other. To do something, to buy something or sell something other people don’t agree with because of their morality. The problem is whose morality? Whether we are talking drug prohibition, prositituion, gambling — morality policing is a big problem. We shouldn’t try to legislate morality.
Do you think the war on drugs has destroyed trust in the police?
I agree 100% that the drug war destroys trust in the police. I would say 80% of negative interactions between police and citizens is due to the war on drugs. You don’t have to go any further than YouTube or Facebook, you see these interactions where people are getting stopped, very soon in the encounter they are asking, “Do you have illegal drugs?” They’re looking for a way to search the person or their belongings and it’s all about drugs. Even someone being stopped for jay-walking — that encounter turns into them asking, patting the person down, trying to search the person for drugs. Eager to find some shake, still looking for weed even though cannabis is becoming legal. Anything they can find, any powder they are quick to question. If we were to eliminate that possibility, that scenario of the police being able to search or trying to search — what’s left? What is left is police looking for crimes of violence. Rape, robbery, murder, burgarly. If we were to move this into a place of regulation, legality, as far as ending the war on drugs, I think 75-80% of negative police interactions would go away.
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