Hamilton’s Pharma Cope, Part 4: “The Face of Psychedelic Journalistic Ethics” Transcript

Transcript created using Descript and may be subject to misspellings.

Russell: This is the final part of our conversation about Hamilton Morris’s interview on Andrew Callahan’s forecast. We left off discussing Hamilton’s spreading of misinformation about our team members and we’ll jump right back in there. He thinks people are out to assassinate his character. He’s very paranoid about that clearly.

And these next couple of clips are how he describes people, specifically us, our work. And his own sort of attempts at character assassination is. Uh, sort of the theme of these next few clips. So what we’re gonna see first here is him describing us and we can discuss who we think is who here when he, when we finish.

Like, guess

Pace: who,

Russell: because, uh, I, I’m not entirely clear, but this is him describing us at the end of the, uh, channel five interview.

Hamilton Morris: So one of the people is pretending to be indigenous and was outed for lying to the FDA and beating her boyfriend with a broom. Uh, the other one distributed, uh, underage revenge pornography and stalked, uh, ex-girlfriend the other.

Is living with his wife, who is a coworker, which I think is ethically questionable. Um, and having his mother sue journalists that criticize him and the other dedicated her life to trying to destroy an indigenous man who she had consensual sex with, but could only get New York magazine to publish it because every other magazine wanted to speak with.

The person who’s being accused. New York Magazine was the only publication that lacks enough standards to allow this to be published. And one of them, I don’t know, he’s probably just gonna be like a freelance psycho harassing people on Twitter.

Andrew Callaghan: And those are the core symposium members?

Hamilton Morris: Yeah,

Andrew Callaghan: those are the people that stopped MDMA from being legal for use for PTSD therapy.

Hamilton Morris: It’s almost inspiring if it weren’t so horrible.

Pace: I think we’re gonna have to like, update our bio, uh, on, on websites to conform with Hamilton’s characterizations, you know?

Russell: Yeah. And I think there’s a few things to discuss here. I do wanna say regarding the person he says was distributing pornography.

That’s gonna come up in a, in a few clips later, so we don’t have to dwell on that one. We can tackle that in a moment, just to be clear. Not someone involved with our organization off the top here. But he starts that clip saying one of us is pretending to be indigenous. Do you wanna speak to that one Che?

Because he takes that one around a lot

Neşe: so that that’s in reference to me. It’s as if he’s making me out to be what’s referred to as like a pretending or someone who kind of fakes indigenous Native American identity in order to gain. Credibility or access to scholarships or whatever it is. Um, but that does not apply at all to my situation and actually shows a lot of ignorance on his part, if not just fully bad faith, but likely ignorance is involved as well.

Um, so I am half Kurdish, which the Kurds in Turkey. Are an indigenous group that has been treated comparably in that country to Native Americans in the United States. There have been boarding schools and other long, long history of, of cultural and other kinds of genocide going on with the Kurds in, in that region.

And even when I was, the year that I was born. Kurdish was illegal to speak. People could get arrested for having Kurdish language music. Music cassettes, and I have written and published on. Internationalizing the conception of indigeneity in order to think more globally about the problem of colonialism and the groups that are controlled and subjected to the dominant culture.

So, and I’ve been very clear and explicit about exactly what I mean and why I am saying, but that does not figure at all into the way that Hamilton’s talking about this.

Pace: You’re doing identity politics by talking about who you are.

Russell: And then I think the, this series of clips is gonna end on, uh, discussions around the broom thing that he brings up.

So I think we can hit that at the end. I, I can’t speak too much for Dave and Lily who left the group prior to all the FDA stuff, like I said, but they are. A husband and wife, whether that’s an unethical thing that they live and work together is contestable. But I do want to emphasize the way he describes Lily’s experience, which is documented in cover story power trip where he says that she made it her life’s work to discredit an indigenous man she had consensual sex with.

That is well documented in that podcast series as. A very coercive relationship and his comments about New York Magazine are also notable because they have published a piece about one of his former employees dying by suicide, and it doesn’t make him out to look very good. So it’s notable that he has this sort of chip on his shoulder about New York Magazine as well here, and then takes it upon himself to contextualize Lily’s experience.

That’s that’s very well documented.

Pace: Hamilton’s pretty consistent about, um, and, and Callahan, actually, Callahan and Hamilton look utterly like a bunch of, um, callous bros. Every single time. You can go, go back and take a look every single time. Something, uh, related to sexual abuse or sexual assault or sexual misconduct comes up in this interview.

They mock it. They dismiss it. They don’t take it seriously. It’s, it’s a very consistent pattern here that shows, um, well, who they are and what they care about.

Russell: They did this whole like country club smoking cigars, like laughing about all of it too as they discussed.

Normie: It’s very, it’s very daily wire smoking cigar that the, the, the setup that they have.

Russell: Yeah. And I’m curious who the freelance Psycho was. I feel like that could have been, uh, me, you normy, who do you think the Freelance Psycho was? Uh, I think we

Pace: should just all get business cards printed out, you know.

Russell: Um, another thing that was unclear was when they released. Like a super cut of some of these clips through Channel Five’s.

Instagram, they recut a lot of clips and the point where they’re talking about a husband and wife living together. They cut Yeah. My image.

Pace: Yeah.

Russell: Next to Shay. While they were saying really weird. Um, I’ll pop it up on screen here, but just so viewers can see it.

Hamilton Morris: The other is living with his wife, who is a coworker, which I think is ethically questionable,

Russell: but, uh, I just thought that was notable to point out that the quality control around.

The accuracy of their imagery versus what’s actually being said is at odds with one another.

Normie: Just one point on the husband and wife kind of concept here, um, that’s kind of core to maps is therapeutic model is husband and teams where there is actually tons of conflicts of interest and tons of like unethical lapses that have in fact happened.

Um, but yet he chooses to, again, like the more important thing. Is to focus on husband and wife team who were involved in nonprofit work and it’s bizarre stuff like that. Not actually in the. Not actually like in in the therapeutic relationship or in clinical trials. Don’t, don’t worry about that. That’s not important.

Neşe: Yeah. So just just to emphasize, normy is talking about husband, wife, co-therapist teams in psychedelic assisted therapy where there have been abuses. Associated with those conflicts of interest

Russell: in the clinical trials that Hamilton goes to bat for.

Pace: Right, right. And, and you know, just very briefly, like the idea of a co-therapy, uh, model, a dyad in the first place has roots in that there are two people that are both supporting each other and the patient, but also watching out for.

Bad behavior in their, you know, partner and that’s not gonna be happening with a married couple.

Neşe: It was popularized as a supposed stop GA gap against a known problem of abuse occurring during a psychedelic therapy. However, it has been completely a failure at protecting against abuses.

Russell: And so getting back to kind of this clip reel here on his sort of attempts at character assassination of people, I think this kind of relates to the previous clips we had just looked at of.

Hamilton’s description of being confronted or confronted in quotes by Amanda at the psychedelic conference versus what actually happened and and how your understanding changes when you see the context of what’s being discussed. So this next clip was a quick cut in the Channel five interview. Showing pace, asking Hamilton a question.

Pace: Oh, I thought he forgot all about me while he was naming all the, uh, you know, symposium members and their, their bios. Do you remember that?

Russell: Yeah, no, he definitely knows who you are as is evidenced by this clip. And what’s notable here is that Channel five cuts to this. Quickly cuts away before any context is given, and then basically calls you a crazy person.

So we’ll watch that clip first, and then we have the actual full clip in context that I think is worth looking at.

Hamilton Morris: I’ve known a lot of these people for years because they were always part of the psychedelic world. They were kind of like the feckless dumb people who didn’t really have anything to contribute, and then they came together and became immensely destructive.

Pace: Hi Hamilton. Uh, we know each other, but um. My name’s Brian Pace. Oh my God. I’m with the, uh,

Neşe: oh, my, you give the microphone to him of all the people in the audience.

Pace: So I’m, I’m with the, I’m with the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education at, uh, the Ohio State University. I’m also. The politics and ecology editor at Symposia.

Hamilton Morris: I think like one moral of the story is just how much damage a group of psychos can do. Like they really scared everyone because part of it is that people are doing shit, like people that have stuff to do are busy. They don’t want to be in a Twitter war with crazy people.

Russell: So I think we can quickly hop to the next bit, but I just wanna point out how condescending he is here, like the condescension from the stage when Pace identifies himself and the clip following that, he calls us psychos and crazy in like the same breath.

Like this is how you talk about your enemies. It’s just. An interesting dynamic

Neşe: we’re we are not even his enemies, we’re just people who have a different perspective than him. It’s not even like this is a battle outside of his own mind.

Russell: Yeah. And a perspective he doesn’t actually claim to disagree with when confronted about it.

Uh, as we’ll see in the next clip,

Pace: last year’s circumstances prevented me from seeing your talk. Um, but I was surprised to find my work, uh, featured in it, uh, with a couple of slides. But then of course, the.

Russell: As a just quick point, we were banned from the conference in which he talked about Nasha and Pace’s work on Rightwing Psychia and none of us, this is him discussing it.

Neşe: None of us were actually going to that conference. No, it’s important to note. So this became a big point of discourse when. On, on Twitter, there was a picture, Western Pinup most wanted style of us, along with other people that we, you know, do not work with saying, you know, protection. They

Pace: banned from all events.

Neşe: Banned from all events. Yeah. So we were not. You know, there heard about this and so yeah. Just to emphasize ’cause it’s like, it wasn’t like we were thrown out or anything.

Pace: No, I was, I was taking a nap when this, uh, came out on, on Twitter as I like

Normie: to, and this was, this is a conference that he, like a lot of the insiders and researchers understood to be kind of a grifter conference, Wonderland Miami.

Uh, who, like after they realized that the psychedelic bubble had popped, like immediately pivoted to longevity, predictably,

Pace: and I actually clarify because, um, I’m actually, um, asking the question, uh, to Hamilton at the following year, uh, Wonderland. And, um, and by that time it had pivoted to a, um.

Psychedelics and longevity. Confidence. Yeah. You know,

Russell: ever present threat. So this is right

wing

Hamilton Morris: people using,

Russell: yeah. This is Hamilton. The first year when we were banned, and then it’ll cut back to Jesus’s question,

Hamilton Morris: psychedelics, uh, uhoh. How, what are we gonna do? Right? Wing people use the same drugs as left wing people.

I had no idea. And we all know that, uh, Jordan Peterson used a psychedelic blah, blah, blah, blah. So. Peter Thiel something, something, something, something. So we, we’ve all. Gotta be really careful.

Pace: So I actually do have a question. I was wondering first, uh, I was wondering if perhaps my new paper might show up, uh, in your, your talk today.

But, um, if you’d like to talk a little bit about this is, is really my, my question because I, I think that you. You don’t understand the analysis that we put forth and that, um, either that or perhaps you misrepresented it. So I was wondering if you would be open, um, to a conversation, um, about this work in our more recent work.

Uh, I would’ve asked you, but, um, we’ve never interacted on Twitter, but I found that I was actually blocked before I could send you a message. So it was just a church of style. That’s my my question. My question is, would you, like, would you be open to a discussion about these, uh, these things that you’re clearly interested in?

Thank you.

Hamilton Morris: Yeah. No, no, no, no, no. I’ll, no, I’ll answer that. This a fun one. It was a fine, it was a fine question. It’s a fun one. Yes. I would love, I would love to talk about it. And to be clear, I don’t, I don’t disagree with the entirety of that paper that you published. I agree actually, with the majority of it.

I mean, a lot of it is objectively true if you’re describing the fact that. Psychedelic drug use has been associated with all sorts of bad behavior and right wing behavior. I agree completely. That’s objectively true. The, the, uh, argument that I had is with any type of pharmacological determinism in both directions, whether you’re saying that psychedelic drug use.

Goodness, and liberal values and ecological consciousness or conservatism, authoritarianism, fascism, whatever. I think both directions of deterministic thinking are misguided. And that was what I was trying to cr to critique.

Pace: Embarrassing.

Russell: So, so as, as a, as a quick question, why did you guys write that paper?

Pace: Hmm, I, it was a very weird, uh, moment to have a sort of a badly phrased, but still mostly cogent like version of, uh, our thesis quoted back at me in person as somehow representative. Hamilton’s critique of that work. Um, frankly, I was flabbergasted. I did not expect that answer from Hamilton. And also you can kind of hear I was being shouted down at the moment for, you know, being a.

Uh, so impertinent, I thought it was actually pretty polite. You

Normie: almost get A-U-S-A-U-S-A chant going on there.

Pace: Right, right, right. No, I mean, and it was, yeah, it was kind of a weird vibe in the entire conference, but regardless, yeah, I didn’t get a chance to like really rebut him in real time ’cause it was just bizarre.

However, and I, I wanna, I wanna just point this out as like. An an extension of like, well, the sentiment of my question in the first place, Hey, I don’t think you understand our paper or you misrepresented it. Are you willing to talk at this, to talk about this at greater lengths? To unpack, you know, the real perspective and how that perspective’s evolved.

I, uh, had been somebody. Passed me Hamilton’s personal phone number, uh, knowing that I was going to the conference and I followed up a in person with Hamilton, not in a harassing way. I just printed out a copy of, of the latest paper and I said, Hey, you know, here, here you go. And followed up on the, on the question.

Um, I sent him a text, said, here’s my contact info if you’d like to, you know, talk about this, uh, because that’s what he said. So, I mean, that’s the spirit of the way that we sort of interact with people who at that. Point, I wanna just hasten to, uh, remind the viewer had trashed my work that I’d written with, uh, NHE here.

That was a, you know, otherwise well reviewed and regarded paper on stage from a conference that we were banned from. He responds in a very weird way, and then I never heard from him again, uh, directly. He is never reached out despite having, you know, my email, my, my information. That’s

Normie: it. It seems like there’s a pattern of him talking publicly about us and not reaching out.

Pace: So strange.

Normie: Some real alpha energy I get.

Pace: Yeah, I mean, look, I understand that he is got big feelings about things, but I, I, the offer still stands. If you ever wanna unpack some things, we can, we can do that.

Normie: Do you get, do you guys wanna just briefly touch on what inspired you to write that paper? Which I still find?

Yeah, go for it. Like, one of the, please. I, I find it to be one of the most interesting papers that has come out. I, it’s fascinating.

Pace: Why don’t you start Nashay

Neşe: Yeah. I mean, it, it, it has. Fundamentally shift, like had a big, big impact in shifting the discourse in the academic field in which we work. In the sense that before this paper came out, there was a lot of just very uncritical assertions that we just have to kind of get psychedelic medicine out to the world as quickly as possible, and it’s gonna turn people pro-social, pro-environmental, and more democratic and it’ll have this great

Normie: authoritarian,

Neşe: yeah, it’ll have, have this great net effect.

And it was, that argument was being used. Used to silence people with real concerns about the, the way that the field was being developed and rolled out, because people who would say. Hey, I don’t know if this is really safe or ethical to do. People would respond and say, you must just be opposed to global healing.

Mm-hmm. And not want that to move forward. And so we put this out there in order to emphasize that the way that psychedelics are used has a huge effect on how they’re the, the consequences of those experiences are. In, integrated into, into people’s lives, and you can’t just assume the pharmacological determinist perspective that people are just going to be better people after taking these substances.

Pace: And if I can pick up after that, I mean, the, the thing is, is that this work came out of a, a lot of sort of earlier writings and other, uh, sort of observations along these lines, but I think the thing that was most concerning. In, in terms of the need for an intervention in this discourse is you had sort of the authority of like n neuroscience outfits coming out of Imperial College of London, putting together a few small questionnaires and tossing it into their psilocybin studies, and then saying big declarative statements within n equals, you know, 14, uh.

Study set that, like Psilocybins going to cure fascism, or maybe they weren’t saying that themselves directly, but, uh, interacting with the press where that discourse is out there and in their own writing saying, you know, this is particularly important, you know, uh, for, for now, which was in the sort of, uh, Trump, uh, part one era.

And, and it was like, well. Neuroscientists, uh, in their work don’t necessarily engage much with the, the historical record. And there’s just not a lot of acknowledgement of, of the sort of underground and the, the way that the public itself interacts with and experiences, uh, psychedelics. Like, there’s just, you know, they’re talking about a, uh, a few studies and writing them up and then making these big declarative statements.

And so, you know, the, the paper that we wrote together was an intervention in the sense that it was, uh, large in scope and, you know, cross-cutting and, and sort of the, the bodies of literature that it drew from to essentially erode the foundation of somebody making such a, a silly claim with such thin evidence.

And because we. We took both the claims of the people, um, that were promoting the idea that psilocybin is gonna make you more liberal or more environmentalists, you know, seriously enough to, to unpack and cite them. It became a very complete work that is, is impactful today.

Normie: I mean, the subtitle of the piece was Case Studies and Cultural Plasticity in Political.

Pluripotency. It’s like it was the a, it was the opposite of what he was claiming That, that you were claiming. He was saying, I need to push back on them because Nache and Pace, they were saying that, oh, if you do psychedelics, you’re gonna be right wing something, something, blah, blah, blah. But when confronted publicly, oh no, I actually really agreed.

I, I was pushing back on the notion that you guys were saying that you take psychedelics, you’re gonna become. Right wing. Mm-hmm. It’s like entirely not the case. Again, of just a fundamental like lack of literacy, lack of understanding, or just dishonest interpretation.

Pace: That, and that’s the thing I was, I was actually fairly upset, um, with the, the way that Hamilton originally framed our, our work at the Wonder Land that we had been banned from because it was so cynical because he could only say the things.

That he was saying on stage about something we put a lot of work into just sort of counting on the fact that his audience wasn’t going to actually read it and

Neşe: then, which is a friend. Then this is piece of a pattern.

Pace: Right? And then when confronted by the author of that paper, like I thought. Fairly politely.

He does it again, you know, just utterly misrepresents the, the thesis of the work as his critique. Like how cynical, what a, what a, a person who has no respect for the people who come to hear him speak.

Russell: Yeah. And I think that’s a perfect segue into this next series of clips we have, which is him discussing.

Independent researcher named Sasha Cisco, and this has been a consistent refrain in his descriptions of our team since the FDA stuff. His claim has been that Sasha, Cisco, this independent researcher, was a member of symposia and. That they had distributed some kind of pornography and harassed clinical trial participants and consistently conflates this independent researcher who has never been a part of symposia with us.

Normie: This isn’t a conflation. This is an intentional way to smear. And this is what the PSFC crowd and like the operatives and whatnot that are on that side have strategically done since the FDA Advisory Committee Committee, they were digging around for this stuff under the radar. It had come to my attention, like well before the New York Times and Rachel New was doing that.

They were digging around Sasha. They wanted to use that as ammunition to associate Sasha. With us as a, you know, as part of their political agenda. This is very intentional that this was, yeah. That this was done. And, and in the same way that they twisted that symposia are against veterans, it’s the same bullshit nonsense.

The the thing, the thing is this is all they got. This is all they got. So they just have to throw shit at the wall. And for people who are not educated or up to date on this, Hamilton appears to be a trusted source. He says it, so it must be true. There’s no critique, there’s no like looking into the facts of the matter.

And then that just becomes the narrative. And, and they’re so it’s an echo chamber on that side. They all believe that they’re doing God’s work or they’re doing something like really transcendental. So. They all like, kind of just stick to that talking point and it becomes a truth to them. I, I think it, it’s kind of like how JS six is being rewritten now.

There’s just these, these things that they just accept that are reality and then they, they, it’s just, it, it’s a fart, huffing like, uh, exercise for them.

Russell: Yeah. And I think the egregiousness of these claims will be very clear watching these, these clips in context that this person was never a part of symposia in the at at all.

Transfer here.

Hamilton Morris: And the really crazy thing is that one of the main symposia people who had tried to have Rick Dolin canceled

Russell: main symposia people, I just wanna.

Hamilton Morris: So ridiculous. So it turns out this guy who had spent his life attacking people, had distributed underage pornography and had stalked people, broken down their doors, slashed their tires, and was a complete psycho, like I had been harassed by this person as well.

They’d harassed everyone and they had been, actually, I think it’s actually more interesting. Symposia had always been. Careful not to say that they were officially a member of symposia, just an ally of the group, which makes you wonder how much did they know all along? I think it’s almost more suspicious that they arbitrarily made a firewall between themselves and this one ultra psycho person,

Pace: you mean?

All right, so we acknowledged that this person who was frequently tried, others tried to associate us with them, was not a member of our group because they were not a member of our group.

Neşe: Well, that, that is very classic conspiracy logic that, um, absence of evidence is proof of the conspiracy. It’s so sinister that there’s nothing to support it.

I mean that the, the reason why we have emphasized that Sasha is not part of our group and not connected to us is because that is the truth of the situation.

Russell: What I find interesting about this clip is that he starts it describing Sasha as a main symposia person, and by the end. Clarifies that Sasha was not, but problematizes, the fact that we never assimilated them into our group.

And what’s interesting is he says, we only ever described Sasha as an ally, but that’s not our language. That is language that appeared in the New York Times article about us describing Sasha Cisco as an ally of symposia. That is not

Normie: by his friend Rachel Newer, who he fed information to, right? Mm-hmm.

Come up with that story. It’s, it’s a circle jerk, the whole thing.

Pace: Right, and I would just include for completeness sake that Sasha, Cisco actually did attempt to attend the Wonderland that we were banned from. And the band list that that conference had put together had not only everyone from symposia, but also some, you know, some business people that we have no relationship with either.

And so, you know, when that all happens. Sasha being literally the only person on that list, including the business people who were banned, who tried to attend, had been removed like by the police or something. And yes, we, we interviewed them about their experience, identified them as the independent, um, I guess Twitter journalists or journalists on, on these topics that they, you can accurately, that’s, that’s what they were doing at the time.

That’s it.

Normie: One of the reasons that there is so much contempt in the Maps Network, uh, against Sasha is because they were successful with the Journal of Psychopharmacology in getting maps’, three published papers retracted, which came right after the, was that right after Adcom that, that happened? I,

Neşe: it was right after the, the rejection actually of the NDA in August.

Normie: Yeah. And so it was kind of an avalanche

Russell: and, and what they’re discussing are a series of complaints that were filed against Sasha that were never taken through court. And having read them, they don’t sound great. And I would not endorse Sasha’s character based on them. However, the idea that we should have some response to these claims.

That came up in a complaint filed against Sasha. This person who has nothing to do with our group is just bogus to me.

Pace: Yeah. I mean, I don’t know. I, I have read through that, that complaint. Uh, that’s, uh, this sounds like terrible behavior. There you go. I, I, I don’t know what else to say, but you know, the idea that this is somebody who, uh, we are responsible for, we collaborated with, like, that’s a absolute falsehood, and it’s slanderous, frankly.

So

Russell: what Hamilton consistently goes on in interviews to describe related to Sasha and Conflates to us is that they harassed clinical trial participants somehow on our behalf. Uh, so these next couple of clips are Hamilton describing that, which has come up in numerous interviews.

Hamilton Morris: And I know one of the women who underwent this kind of like post therapy abuse from symposia where they were trying to convert her to being one of them and saying that she was a victim and it completely fucked with her head.

Andrew Callaghan: Becca is not just a phase

Hamilton Morris: three participant. She’s somebody who has a very interesting experience. Of having been unsuccessfully approached by symposia with the hope that she could be turned against maps. Sasha Cisco sent Becca a series of very creepy voice memos and dms telling her that she was a victim of wackadoodle nonsense therapy.

And forcefully trying to convince her that she had not been helped by this trial. It should go without saying that that is shockingly unethical behavior and should also call into question the conduct that Symposia has had with other maps trial participants.

Normie: It’s hard to even address something when it.

En entirely just made up.

Pace: I mean big if true, but it’s not like it’s not true at all. At all. Again, it’s just not true. So next, let’s move on. Like, this is I all he

Normie: has.

Neşe: I should also say, ’cause I do think, you know, Sasha is ultimately a fan. Of us and our work. I would not want someone who’s following my work to be causing any distress to other people in relation to my work.

After I heard claims that, you know, there was some distressing communications going on. Regardless of the facts of whether that, you know, was actually I, I I, I, I don’t believe that Hamilton’s characterizations of those communications are probably a neutral way of, of looking at the situation. But nonetheless, I did send Sasha a message and identified that, that there were trial participants that were describing unwanted communications and encourage them to.

Stop communicating with trial trial participants as a result. And I don’t see what beyond that I could have done about the situation. ’cause I, I ultimately don’t have any control over Sasha

Russell: and as is kind of here on the screen. I had it blown up a minute ago. I’ll just pull it back up to read really quick.

But this is. An archive post from Sasha saying, announcement. I am not, nor have I ever been a member of symposia. I’ve never held a financial relationship with symposia or its members. This is notable because that’s been out there for a long time. It’s something we’ve published. It’s something we’ve made very clear and so has Sasha, but these people decide to just run with this story again.

Normie: Sasha

Russell: does symposia.

Normie: Yeah, they know that. They know Rachel knew her from the New York Times, Hamilton Morris, our detractors and whatnot. They know that Sasha has never been involved with symposia. This is a propaganda, PR talking point. Yeah. Find someone that’s in their orbit and push them, find trash on them.

This is a talking point, and he is more, I don’t know if he knows this, I, I, I, if I’m charitable, he’s ignorant, but he, this is just a talking point and, and, and. I won’t be charitable. ’cause to say that Sasha is a main member of symposia,

Pace: completely false

Normie: is a lie.

Pace: It’s a lie.

Normie: It’s

Pace: an

Normie: lie, and he knows

Pace: that there’s no evidence for it.

There’s no, it’s not true. Like, uh, one, one thing I just want mention here is, is that, um, you know, ham Hamilton has invented, you know, members of symposia, uh, actually, uh, also in this, in. You know, in this video he was talking about somebody we presume was Travis Kitchens, somebody who wrote for us at one point in time.

Um, even in a case with somebody who, who did contribute to symposia in one way or another, and still was not, uh, this is just an example, you know, but if there was a, a hypothetical. Where, you know, Travis Kitchens did something, you know, punched somebody in the nose. Um, the idea that somehow we’re responsible for that or that that is, you know, reflective of the core doings of this organization is absurd.

Normie: Yeah. I don’t know why I have to explain that to adults. That’s, this is like,

Neşe: well, the other, the other thing that I think people who don’t care about our work or respect our work. Don’t want to discuss here is that like our work, when we are talking about abuses and when we’re talking about patterns of harm, we are talking about, we are analyzing such, uh, dynamics that are systemic and that need to be addressed before problems are scaled.

So identifying systemic harms is not the same as. Holding every single person up to a mirror and evaluating their flaws like that is not what we we do as an organization at at all. There’s a, a big difference, a gulf there between those two things.

Russell: And, uh, I think the, the last clip in this section of clips regarding these kind of attempted character assassinations of symposia.

Relates back to that initial one where Hamilton’s describing one of our members, hitting someone with a broom, um, along those lines. So we’ll see him discuss that with Andrew here, and then I think we’ll have a bit to talk about there.

Andrew Callaghan: So, is it safe to say that symposia kind of really destroyed the fight for legal MDMA?

Hamilton Morris: Well, so it was a kamikaze mission after they had this. Disastrous campaign to destroy MDMA. It came out that the lead woman, uh, was accused of beating her lover with a broom in a very, uh, Tom and Jerry style, domestic abuse Yeah. Um, type situation. So she’d, she’d beaten a man with a brew.

Normie: This is really fucking gross behavior.

Russell: In the more recent publication of this interview, they also blast a Facebook post on screen of where this accusation is coming from. Desha, do you wanna speak to where this is coming from?

Neşe: Yeah, well there is a, you know, the way that Hamilton describes the situation, it’s like, oh, you know, saying that someone was outed, it implies that there was this, uh, you know, some kind of a serious.

Investigation or something, or with evidence or like, you know, that went on in involving that. The what he’s referring to. But in actuality, there was a Facebook post from a former partner of mine who is very un unwell.

Russell: So Hamilton had discovered this post. I don’t know if he was the first person to discover it, but what was really gross about it was there was a screenshot from someone who was clearly in some kind of crisis that was posted on Facebook, and then someone took that.

And posted it on a psychedelic Reddit page about Nasha and completely out of context. And what I did was I went and found this post on the Facebook page to put it in context of what this person was saying as alongside all of this. And so I’m just gonna pull it up here. This is me scrolling through his Facebook page and you can see these large.

Posts of conspiracy theories of, I’m not gonna keep these up on the screen for too long. People can pause and read if they really want to, but there’s a number of things. There’s a number of him talking about the, uh, artist Grimes. The actual post in question is around the 52nd mark, so I’m just gonna scroll up to that so we can kind of read what Hamilton is referring to here.

But this is the post that he found, and it starts with CIA enemy numero uno, an international villain, LMAO. The values are fucked and reversed. LOL The worst thing I ever did in my life was punch my ex-girlfriend in the face one time, amidst years of abuse by women and Nshe Deano beat my ass into a concussion with a broom and hit me multiplicitous times to be frank.

So stop looking for help from leaders who don’t understand re karma. Re Karma alignment with the best possible future for all sentient beings. All beings and forms of life on planet Sophia are sentient and aware in some way. So I just wanted to read that in full context because this is the post that Hamilton is using to claim that Nhe was outed for beating someone with a broom.

Neşe: And it was very clear to even people that saw that, uh, Reddit post, that this individual was in some kind of psychosis. Um, and Russ, you mentioned Grimes. They have a lot of other posts where they clearly kind of believe that they are in a relationship with Grimes. They’ve also posted about, um, other friends and family doing horrific torture to them in ways that are very recognizable as.

Um, things that sometimes people say when they’re in psychosis and so, you know, that context could have been an opportunity for a serious journalist to reach out and get more context about it. And if they had reached out to me to get more context about it, I would’ve been able to explain. That relationship was an extremely abusive relationship to me that involved a tremendous, uh, amount of coercive control, um, that is documented and that other people are, are very aware of.

Russell: And notably, in the first version, they had this Tom and Jerry clip spliced in after they discuss it. Um, in the republished version, Andrew has a screenshot of that Facebook post. That pops up on screen instead of the Tom and Jerry clip. So he was perfectly aware of how disturbed the context of this Facebook post was.

Pace: Yeah. Both Andrew and Hamilton. Had all the information that reasonable per a reasonable person, uh, if they had it would say This is a deeply unwell person, but that’s not what Andrew or Hamilton were interested in spending any time with. That’s not what they were doing. This is not journalism.

Russell: This next clip comes with a huge trigger warning as far as abusive language.

It is a recording that Nhe took after the ex-partner, who Hamilton is using as a source, stole money from their bank account. We are including in discussing this specifically to provide an example of the character of the sources that Hamilton is using to make claims about us and to illustrate exactly the kind of evidence we could have provided had Andrew or Hamilton ever reached out to us about any of the claims that they were making.

Neşe: So why? Why did you say, I should be scared of you?

Neşe’s ex-partner: Because you don’t understand what I am and how important I am in things and how disposable you are,

Neşe: I’m disposable.

Neşe’s ex-partner: Yeah, because you still won’t help. You choose your own selfish desires. You don’t understand things. You fucked with the wrong person.

Neşe: In what sense

Neşe’s ex-partner: of all people You could.

It’s the wrong person

Neşe: in. In what sense?

Neşe’s ex-partner: Because you don’t understand that I have given up my personal desire completely to be with the heart of this thing, the harmony, and I feel it everywhere, and I feel you even now. So if you really wanna fuck with something that’s surrounding you, even now as you speak, watch what happens.

Neşe: So you think that you’re allowed to just help yourself to my money?

Neşe’s ex-partner: I don’t think it matters. Nasha. I think you should get the fuck over it and get over yourself too.

Neşe: Well, unless I can come get my things from you, like I’m gonna need to go to the police and file a police report,

Neşe’s ex-partner: nja, stop trying to fuck with me because you’re lying and I’m not.

I am not fucking around. I’m not going to jail. Okay. Don’t fuck with me. I told you that last time. I don’t give a shit about you after this.

Neşe: You stole over a thousand dollars from me,

Neşe’s ex-partner: Nisha. It is fucking money. You get plenty of money. You fucking idiot. You fucking bitch. You get plenty of money. You’re not in distress, you’re not in scarcity.

Get the fuck over yourself.

Neşe: So I should just give all my money to you.

Neşe’s ex-partner: You should get over yourself. You’re fucking prideful piece of shit. All you can do is stroke your own ego. You never can admit that you are prideful and a piece of shit.

You have a huge fucking pride, huge fucking ego. You shouldn’t be teaching psychedelics. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

Neşe: Is it? Why should you be able to control what I can do with my life?

Neşe’s ex-partner: Nhe, get over it.

Neşe: I told you that you should go. See, you’re lying

Neşe’s ex-partner: to me. So stop.

Neşe: You feel like it’s justified?

Neşe’s ex-partner: Yeah. Nhe. I do. ’cause I have more important of a role than you right now. I don’t care about myself in the same way you do. You’re completely self-involved.

Neşe: But you were taking my money for yourself.

Neşe’s ex-partner: No, it wasn’t for myself. That’s where you don’t understand

Neşe: ’cause you wanted, it

Neşe’s ex-partner: was also for, it was also for you because the reality wants you to see your fucking insanity. You’re fucking insane. Over money.

Neşe: You emptied my bank account.

Neşe’s ex-partner: Nhe. Nhe. You’ll work debt. More money. You know that’s true. Get off your fucking ass and called a bank bitch.

Neşe: And, um, I, I should mention too, that during that timeframe when this recording happened, I have messages to people talking about how he was blackmailing me to try to not get me to report the money as stolen.

And he said, quote, you want to play this game? Don’t fucking play the fear game with me. I am not afraid you will lose everything. And then he told me that people like me de deserve to be shot. Um, I think it’s horrific that Hamilton and Andrew were laughing in the way that they were about. Accounts for my abuser who became very, very unwell and um, I have ultimately.

I mean, I, I don’t even, uh, know if we should include this, but it’s like I feel like I’ve just spent so much of my life just trying to like exist and being told that I don’t deserve anything and that I’m not good enough and I’m terrible and people like hound me and just like won’t stop fixating on all the reasons why I am terrible.

And this, this situation with Hamilton has been. Yet another extension of that where it’s like I have been showing up, applying all of my academic training to try to make the world safer for other people because I understand deeply how destabilizing abuse involving psychedelics can be, and to have been treated the way that I have been for doing this work is profoundly.

Disturbing to me. It is, it is a sign of something deeply, deeply sick with this field that the, the way that we have been treated has been condoned and normalized.

Russell: It’s literally stomach turning to listen to that audio and know the way that he’s using claims by, by that person. I,

Normie: I don’t know what there is to say.

The fact that Hamilton and Andrew go on a major. Have a major platform and they choose to exploit your abuse for their own points to satisfy some, especially for Hamilton, to satisfy some deep insecurity that he has about what I, I have no idea is, is really disgusting in. The fact that people listen to that guy, I don’t, it’s really a shame.

I, I don’t, I’m kind of at a loss for words about what kind of man would go, go and do that. For I, I, it’s like hard to, it’s hard to even articulate why you would do that.

Pace: I can make, uh, articulate, it’s malicious, it’s a

Normie: Sure call.

Pace: I,

Normie: I get that

Pace: aggressive thing. It, it, uh, it speaks to a desire to, you know, bully and, you know, malign the, uh, reputation of a person in public.

But it’s

Normie: pretty clear. There’s a reason why Hamilton’s reputation in this space is beyond toxic. I’ve spoken to lots of people that had used to work with him. Used to associate with him and it’s universal. He’s a toxic guy. He’s a

Pace: toxic. Maybe people should read the New York magazine, uh, article about, uh, some of the people who worked close closely with him.

Uh, I think we mentioned that in the last video, but I think it’s worth people reading about, um, some of those things.

Russell: And to the clip at hand, I just wanna say you show up in this audio in personal situation, like you’ve shown up to the people coming at you so aggressively at like professionally as well, which is calm matter of fact.

And you are clearly the one in the right there. Like, I, I just, I just can’t stress enough that. I don’t know. You appear resilient in these, like personal and professional situations in which people are, are coming at you and it’s

Normie: Yeah. And, and Andrew using a Tom and Jerry cartoon clip to do that, he can go fuck himself.

Russell: Mm-hmm.

Neşe: But, and the la the laughter is genuinely chilling to me at that point, whereas I just find it so. Yeah, just, I don’t even have, I honestly don’t even have words for it. It’s, it’s very, there’s

Russell: no words. It’s, it’s so dis and they’re gonna, of course, somebody is gonna share this with them, and they’re gonna say, well, how would I have known that?

And it’s like, well, dude,

Pace: you didn’t ask,

Russell: did

Pace: you,

Russell: you didn’t ask, you didn’t look into this at all. You just took the Facebook post of this clearly unwell person and blasted it to the entire, to

Normie: score some points for himself.

Pace: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, you know, how, how would I, you know, know such a thing? Well, you know, the.

The story that they wanted to tell, they, they already knew, um, what story they wanted to tell. These, these are all just interchangeable pieces, but like, what I would like to say is that, you know, these are a lot of absurd claims. Um, some of them are, are, you know, silly others. Quite a bit more serious and mean-spirited.

Um, this is definitely one of them. I, it should go without saying that no one should have to provide, and many people don’t have receipts like you have just done. It’s just not, this isn’t the way civilized people behave, but the kinds of. Behavior that Hamilton has displayed over months to his own, you know, audience and admission across many platforms, many hours spent, um, in these efforts.

Like there has to be some reply. You should not be expected to provide this kind of reply. Um, but this is our attempt to address in a broad way the many. Garbage claims and you know, at a certain point, you, you stop listening as a person has been, you know, discredited as a reliable source of information.

And in this case as, uh, two people. Have been discredited through their deeds and the quality of their work and the lack thereof. They’re no longer credible sources and they have not been credible sources for a long time. Those people have other people out there criticizing their work. It’s the way these things play out all too often is that somebody turns the lights on and pulls the curtain back to see the, the small man behind the, behind there in front of the, the, the controls and, and then suddenly it was always shoddy.

It was always mean-spirited because people can see no. Thanks for your bravery, NHE. You shouldn’t have to be like this.

Neşe: Yeah. Well thanks, thanks for listening to it with me. Um, and ultimately, yeah, like I, I don’t want people going after him, you know, like my ex for example. He, he genuinely is I think very unwell.

But the reason I shared it was to be instructive about the nature of these narratives and what they’re leaving out.

Russell: That’s kind of a, a good place to wrap this on. It’s, this has been a demonstration in poor journalism, in my opinion, the conversation between Andrew and Hamilton. Two people who consider themselves journalists, who the public generally considers journalists.

Doing the worst possible job at, at relaying facts and correct narratives about these things. I do have some clips we can end on of Hamilton discussing his journalistic education if we’re interested, or his lack thereof. So this is kind of just a super cut of him discussing it.

Hamilton Morris: I never studied

Normie: journalism or anything like that.

I’ve never taken a journalism

Russell: class. I’m completely untrained as a journalist. Uh.

Hamilton Morris: I’ve never studied journalism in any way. Yeah. My sense of journalistic ethics is entirely self-constructed. I don’t even really know what is, like, I know that I have to tell the truth, but I don’t know what is taught to a, a student.

I, I know that a lot of the people that I see that do have like, uh, graduate degrees in journalism and things like that tend to be some of the worst. Uh,

Russell: and yeah, he, I mean, he’s just demonstrated the issue of having no journalistic,

Normie: it’s all, it’s, it’s like, dude, it’s obvious to anyone. We, we believe you.

Yeah.

Neşe: Like, after having watched all of the clips that we showed today, it just seems like he’s like extremely manipulative. You know? It’s like that, that clip with pace, uh, with that, you know. Telling pace from stage, the argument from our own own paper as his rebuttal. I mean, he knew that that like, it’s like to, to me, it comes across as like he’s performing respectability to the audience with a known lie that’s designed to maintain his own narrative, you know?

And so it’s like for someone who does that to also emphasize how honest they are and how they correct mistakes. At a certain point, it seems very intentional and very malicious, and the fact that those patterns are so transparent on the record should be a sign about who this person is and where they’re coming from.

Normie: I feel just feel bad for the young guys that listen, that sign up, listen to him, and just thinking, thinks he knows what he’s talking about.

Pace: It’s often been sort of a point of wisdom to, um. You know, not as scribe, uh, malevolence to simple ignorance. That’s usually a, a good place to start. But you do have to recognize that there are people with mal-intent.

There are people out in the world who take pleasure in hurting other people or who have self-interested reasons to try to harm and destroy others. And once you gather enough data, you may be dealing with. That sort of person, if, if that pattern continues long enough.

Russell: Mm-hmm.

Normie: Yeah. I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me just saying like, what, why is he doing this?

Like, I don’t understand why, why is he going, like, why is he doing this? Is what is wrong with him? People speculate, is he being paid? Like, because they just don’t understand. It’s so obvious to everybody like that he’s unhinged. That he’s unwell, like this is an unwell person. And I, I don’t have an answer.

I don’t, I don’t have an exact answer. It’s, it’s, it’s, um, it’s a fixation. Yeah. I don’t know.

Russell: This response to these claims I think was a long time coming and I’m glad we did it, but. I will be excited to not have to engage with some of this stuff, uh, for a little while now that it’s all out on the table.

Neşe: To return to something that we started with, he has been very open about the fact that he wanted to prevent us from reporting acknowledged crimes to federal agencies, and just to emphasize. The issues that we were in communication with those agencies about, we’re about people being harmed. There was harm.

We are not talking about, we’re not reporting people’s drug use to get people in trouble the way that he is representing it. And so the fact that that is the case, I think I just wanted to end with that, to emphasize it, that that’s very in line with everything else we have seen.

Russell: Hugely important point.

And for those who have stuck around through all of this, we appreciate it. If there’s any fans of Hamilton’s or Andrews watching this, we genuinely appreciate it. Um, we don’t think less of you for being a fan of theirs. There’s a huge community that lifts these people up as legitimate sources of information.

Hopefully, after seeing our engagement with this misinformation, you might think differently, and we appreciate that you’ve stuck around. More than either of them have ever done.