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The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie

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Feb 14, 2024 • 1h 6min

Shoshana Weissmann: Online Age Verification Rules Are Unconstitutional and Ineffective

In January, the Senate Judiciary Committee dragged the heads of Meta, TikTok, and X, formally known as Twitter, to Washington to charge them with exploiting children by allegedly addicting them to social media that sexually harms them, drives them to eating disorders, and even kills them. The Spanish Inquisition vibe of the proceedings reached a crescendo when Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) demanded that Mark Zuckerberg apologize to the families of children for the "harms" supposedly caused by Facebook and pay compensation out of his personal fortune. But is social media really that bad for kids? And is the solution being pushed by Democrats and Republicans alike—universal age verification for all users of the internet—even technically feasible without shredding the First Amendment, destroying privacy, and creating major security issues? The answer is a resounding no, according to Shoshana Weissmann, director of digital media at R Street, a free market think tank, and author of "The Fundamental Problems with Social Media Age-Verification Legislation." Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed Weissmann in Washington, D.C., in early February. Today's sponsor: Better Help. When you're at your best, you can do great things. But sometimes life gets you bogged down, and you may feel overwhelmed or like you're not showing up in the way that you want to. Working with a therapist can help you get closer to the best version of you—because when you feel empowered, you're more prepared to take on everything life throws at you. If you're thinking of giving therapy a try, Better Help is a great option. It's convenient, flexible, affordable, and entirely online. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists anytime for no additional charge. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/TRI today to get 10 percent off your first month. Nick Gillespie: So we're talking right at the start of February. And two interesting things related to this question of social media, its effects on kids, and the need to verify the ages of who's using social media, etc., just happened.  One is that the state of Utah, which had passed a law mandating age verification, pulled it after being threatened with lawsuits from a couple of groups. And the other was a spectacular Senate hearing about trying to protect kids from online exploitation and things like that that ended up at one point in a series of shouting matches, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg arguing with Sen. Josh Hawley [R–Mo.]. What was your sense of that Senate hearing? And does it encapsulate something important about the way this general debate happens? Shoshana Weissmann: For people who watch a lot of Senate hearings in general, you'll know that they're getting a little bit less professional. They'll ask them yes-or-no questions that are impossible to answer. If you understand that nuance is a part of law, it's really disappointing. And I've watched a lot, but this was the worst I've seen. It was just so wildly unprofessional and about a serious issue, so it should have been professional.  I don't blame the audience for cheering, but I blame the senators and Senate staff for not stopping that from happening. Hawley is often unprofessional, and he was extremely unprofessional demanding that Zuckerberg pay for the people who have faced harm here. It was just so bizarre. It was just weird, really. And that doesn't solve anything. He's not solving any problems. He's not approaching the issue with any seriousness. People say a lot that it's all about sound bites, but you could really, really see that's all this was. Gillespie: Zuckerberg did not come off well in that either, did he? Weissmann: No, I didn't care for how he came off. I think he could have done better in the hearing at a lot of points. I mean, I don't think that companies are perfect by any means. But Zuckerberg, I think, came off kind of strange at some points. Gillespie: What about the Utah law? This is not a right or left issue. Both Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals and progressives are talking about stopping the internet from exploiting children in all sorts of ways. Utah was applauded for this law. But then it was going to be challenged. And they yanked the age-verification law. Weissmann: It's really, really bad. Everyone warned them—the senators, the governor. I love the governor. I adore Spencer Cox. But it's crazy to me that he's getting behind this stuff because it's so unconstitutional. I mean, you can have your policy disagreements, but this is objectively very, very unconstitutional. Gillespie: How was it unconstitutional? Weissmann: Oh, man, so many ways. So, the First Amendment [includes the] right to anonymous speech. If you have age verification, you have face scans, you have to show your government ID. I actually just submitted seven pages of comments on the new proposed rules to accompany the law before I found out that it was going to be pulled. So I'm like, "Oh, well, I have this already, I'll submit it. It'll be useful." [The law] said you can use the last four digits of your social. You can require people to scan their faces and get their government IDs. Just really invasive stuff. I mean, America's in a really bad cybersecurity position. Everyone is hacked all the time. But even if it wasn't, if you're submitting that stuff online, you have reason to believe your speech is no longer anonymous, because that's the government enforcing that. That harms our right to anonymous free speech, which has been upheld many, many times at the Supreme Court. Also, there's a compelled speech issue that's a little bit smaller. But if you're going to go online and say, "Hey, I'm not happy in my marriage. I want to see what people know about divorce, marriage counseling." And then you think your spouse might realize who you are, posting about that, you're not going to want to do that. Or if you think you have a rare disease or HIV or something, you might not want to have your name tied to that. Gillespie: That is part of the larger question; in trying to childproof the internet, we end up shutting down all kinds of speech. Very few people would challenge that. But again, to go back to the '90s, The Simpsons had a running gag. In almost every conversation, somebody would shout, "Will someone please think of the children?" It's kind of come back to that in internet discussions because people are sour about social media. Everybody's down on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. These are hellscapes that are killing kids, exploiting kids, and making the rest of us miserable. So, it seems like the scope for regulating them—the speech, the content, and the business models—has really changed. And this is really where the social media age-verification push is coming from. And people like Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii, have joined it and a bunch of other people in the Democratic Party or even the progressive left have joined with Republican conservatives to say this is a good thing.  Before we go into your work on it, Schatz is a big fan of the Protecting Kids on Social Media Act. And this is kind of similar to all of this stuff going on. It would set a minimum age of 13 to use social media apps and would require parental consent for 13- through 17-year-olds. It would also prevent social media companies from feeding content using algorithms to users under the age of 18. So that's kind of the legal landscape that's playing out at the federal level and at the local level.  You have written a series of pieces over the past year that are grouped at RStreet's website: "The Fundamental Problems with Social Media Age Verification Legislation." I want to ask you as a starting point—a lot of this legislation is premised on the idea that people under 18 are suffering vast, obvious, measurable harms from being online. Is that really incontrovertible? Or is that a question? Weissmann:  It's definitely a question. Especially because the evidence is mixed. And kids are individuals. Some kids use tools. Some kids don't. And it depends on the tool too. You always have to work with your kid to figure out what's healthy for them and what's not. Some kids are doing unhealthy things on social media, and that's parenting. The government can't solve that. Someone using social media for five hours might be building a business or showing local businesses how to put themselves out on social media. Or they might just be depressed and something else might be going on. But so much of the stuff going on right now resembles the video game debates, the TV debates. Kids should be probably behind screens less, but that comes down to parenting and getting them engaged in other things. But there's definitely a mix.  As a kid, I used social media to find out I had fibromyalgia. I only know that because I found an online forum where someone said, "Hey, you're getting sick all the time and you have endometriosis. You might have fibromyalgia." And I also started my career online, by adding elected officials on Facebook, which sounds funny now, but that's actually how I started my career. And I'm terrified of closing the door behind me, of saying to the next generation, "You can't make what you want out of life because elected officials want to treat you all the same." That's really wrong to me. Gillespie: A number of major psychological groups have said that it is not clear that being on social media is harmful to young people. But let's pretend that it is for the remainder of our conversation because you have written pretty powerfully about the fundamental problems with social media age-verification legislation. And let's just start with part one of your series. The headline of the article is, "The Technology To Verify Your Age Without Violating Your Privacy Does Not Exist." What do you mean? How do you know that? What are the implications of that? Weissmann: So I looked through it. I even had age verifiers reach out to me because they didn't like what I was saying. So I'm like, "OK, tell me about your software. Tell me how it's different." They're like, "Oh, we'll just scan your face." Uh, what? So every time you want to post free speech online, you have to have your face scanned. Gillespie: This kind of reminds me of when people say, "Well, you know what? If immigrants just carried their work papers with them, then we wouldn't have to worry about illegal immigration." But when you require anybody to carry papers, everybody has to carry papers. Weissmann: Right. The way they find out if you're underage is by checking your age and your credentials. Basically, the way that age verifiers seem to want to do this is some sort of government ID plus face scans. And it can't be a static picture, it has to be a live picture. So, every time you want to post free speech criticizing the government, asking about marital problems, asking about disease, whatever it is, you're going to have to have your government ID, and the internet's going to have to scan your face, which is really, really, really invasive. Because obviously, everyone lies with a checkbox. With government IDs or credit cards alone, you could just fake your parents. There's a great Simpsons line where Bart's like, "Hey, Lisa, is this dad's credit card number?" And she's like, "You know it is." Kids memorize that stuff. And they would with government IDs if that was all that's required, [like] social security numbers, which are also not secure. They're leaked everywhere. So it just creates massive cyber risk. None of these are safe. None of these protect your privacy. And this massive, massive risk is all to verify the age of children where parents could just not give them phones or give them phones with very, very limited access or block stuff on their computer. There are ways around this that put the parents in charge. Gillespie: In a different section of your series, you write that if you are requiring this type of data to be put together, then it's going to be in a database somewhere that foreign governments or enemies of America can get it. Because we're in a panic over TikTok, right? Every new dance craze goes directly to the Beijing basement of the Communist Party in China. So this obviously presents a massive risk because you're pulling data, which then is hackable. There's a related concept that you've written about called data minimization. How does that factor into this? Weissmann: I love data minimization. This is the kind of person I am now where this excites me. Just less of your stuff online. The less stuff you share, the safer it is. So I don't always like that platforms require as much information as they do, but sometimes they're doing it in pursuit of something like giving you a better product or whatever it is, but forcing them to require this is nuts. And like you were saying with TikTok, in Utah, Gov. Cox had said that he thought TikTok was a real security threat, but his law would have required them to collect face scans and IDs and Social Security numbers. And whether you think other governments are an issue or our own is an issue, you should be like, "Hey, maybe we don't create this massive risk for other people to get our data." And that's part of data minimization. The less that you put out there, that you share around, the less worry you have to have. It's a simple principle, but it's a really important one when everyone is hacked constantly. I've been in so many data breaches. We all have. Gillespie: What does it mean that we're being hacked all the time, but it doesn't really seem to change what we do? Weissmann: It's kind of bad. I think we as a society need to figure it out a little bit more. But basically people can log into your stuff, so you should have two-factor authentication. It's not perfect, but if you have one of those code generators, that's the best method. And it stops people from logging into stuff. I know that people keep trying to log into my Instagram, and then [Instagram] will email me saying, "Hey, if you want to change your password, here's the link." And they don't have access to my email. So that's good. So I can handle it there. World cyber security isn't in a great place. And all this stuff puts it in a worse place. But you want to try to make things safer in the environment we live in. Put less of your information out there, especially sensitive stuff about your location. IDs are super sensitive. Social Security numbers, you really don't want to share those with everyone.  Gillespie: Although, social security numbers, it's kind of amazing. If you go back to the '50s and '60s, people mostly on the right—paranoid people who turned out to be kind of correct—believed the Social Security number was going to become effectively a national ID; it's required everywhere. And you can buy them by the boatload, right? Weissmann: Oh, yeah. I think mine was leaked in the D.C. health breach. So, I'm screwed there. Like, that's not nothing for me. And you can find databases of them online, unfortunately, pretty easily. Gillespie: Some of the articles that you've written talk about how age-verification methods in their current forms threaten our First Amendment right to anonymity. I think on some level, those of us who remember our history classes from grammar school or read something about The Federalist Papers, we understand that in a profound way, America was founded on anonymous speech. But nobody likes anonymous speech now, right? Anonymous speech is bad, right? So why should we care about our right to anonymity? Weissmann: It terrifies me that there are so many lawmakers saying—even Nikki Haley has said this—"Oh, you know, every user should have to verify their identity online." OK, so we don't get whistleblowers anymore. No more whistleblowers. We're opposed to that. The Federalist Papers, like you're saying, are anonymous. The NAACP, their members were anonymous, back when everyone hated black people. And that was a really, really dark part of history. But thankfully, the First Amendment protected them. And they had a right to anonymous association.  And it's important for the same reason today: The government doesn't like when people disagree with it. And sometimes you have to do so anonymously in order to avoid certain levels of scrutiny there. Not to say you shouldn't be held accountable for your opinions or whatever, but anonymous speech has always been an important part of American history. And there are centuries of precedent saying that, yes, we have the right to anonymous speech under the First Amendment. So if you infringe upon it—it's not saying you can never infringe upon it—but you have to have a really, really good reason. It has to be narrowly tailored. And these means just aren't. Gillespie: It's fascinating to me, again, thinking back to the '90s, because the parallels are ominous and disturbing and ubiquitous, but AOL was popular. America Online, when it was on its move to becoming the largest ISP, its whole selling point was that you could come up with a handle that was kind of your name or you could make something up. And they really pushed back against attempts to crack the anonymity of their users. AOL was great because it was anonymous. Weissmann: The history there is so interesting. I love Jeff Kosseff's book on anonymity. I learned so much through that. I did not realize the extent to which we have precedent here. And also the way it worked with AOL trying to not unmask users and trying to protect users—I don't want to get too nerdy—but the internet history around this stuff is really, really fascinating about how big a deal it was back then. We shirk a bit about anonymous speech, but it is really important. Sure, some people use it wrong, but there are studies that show that some people actually use it better, and they're using anonymity in actually really healthy ways. So our gut assumptions on it aren't always right.  Gillespie: I wrote a piece for Reason about this in the late '90s called "Child Proofing the World." And one of the metaphors I use—and I had young kids at the time—was, just because I have to childproof my house doesn't mean the world has to change everything because I have kids. And that may sound callous, but it really isn't. You also have talked about how the age-verification methods threaten our First Amendment rights beyond anonymity. So how do they cut down on our free expression rights? Weissmann: So a big thing is chilling speech, because you have the pure anonymity issue where you're actually not anonymous. They took my ID, they took my face scan. Let's say their cybersecurity is immaculate. If you don't believe that, you're still not going to want to post the stuff that you would otherwise anonymously. So there's a chilling speech issue. Kids have First Amendment rights, and most content on social media is First Amendment–protected in a way that would apply to kids too. It's not narrowly tailored just for the stuff that we say kids maybe can't look at. It's really, really, really broadly tailored.  There's also the First Amendment right for content to be seen by users. People might think it's silly. "Oh, Twitter doesn't have a right to be seen by people who want to access it." OK, well, what about someone criticizing the government? The government could just say, "Oh, well, they don't have the First Amendment right to be seen by people." And then you can kind of see why that's a dangerous perspective and why it's not supported by First Amendment jurisprudence. There's a First Amendment right of parents who don't care about what their kids are doing online, or are OK with what their kids are doing online, to not have to deal with those barriers to speech. So it's just up and down. It violates the First Amendment. Gillespie: One of the most powerful parts of your work in this series is simply the headline "Age Verification Legislation Doesn't Do What Legislators Say It Will." Summarize that article. Weissmann: So when I talk to people about age-verification law, there's a lot of different issues they bring up. One is exploitation. They're worried about predators reaching out to children, and that's very reasonable. Gillespie: But is the internet mostly a child exploitation racket? Weissmann: Definitely not, but it's there. There are definitely people who want to try to do that stuff. It's not to say the government doesn't have a role there, but parents really do need to work with kids to make sure they understand the risk and what to say, what not to say. It's silly, but when I was on Neopets and chatting with people, my dad was like, "Never tell them where you live." And I was like, "Haha, I'm saying I'm in Texas. They'll never know where I am." But maybe that wasn't the most ingenious thing, but it was still a good perspective to have, to just be a little bit more careful about that stuff. Gillespie: We hear a lot about sex trafficking and about child sex trafficking, and it obviously happens, and that is horrible. And we need to figure out ways to minimize that or get rid of it completely. But is there a reason to believe that child exploitation, however you define it, is large and growing on the internet? Weissmann: I'm not sure, exactly. The reports are up, but I know that a lot of it is duplicative. Which is good, that there are more reports of the same thing. That's not an issue. It's just hard to measure with a lot of unlawful content in general. I'm not sure about how sexting for kids rose or where it's at, but I think that that did make it harder, especially when online girlfriends became a thing. Then you really didn't know who was behind the screen. So I think it is something to combat, and I'm not sure exactly how it's growing, but there does seem to be somewhat of an increase of it especially from kids who don't know what to predict, who never lived through the Nigerian prince era, that kind of stuff. Gillespie: But you say age-verification legislation won't do what legislators say it will. What do legislators say it will do, and how does it fall short? Weissmann: So what I was saying was that the big reason that legislators and other people just want to stop kids from using social media is exploitation. Another issue is that they just don't want kids posting, that they think that they'll become addicted. The last piece is they don't want them to access content that they don't want them to, whether it's liberal content or too conservative content.  But here's the thing: None of these laws prevent kids from viewing anything. They just prevent kids from posting. So [for platforms that don't allow] kids under 13 or that have age verification, it doesn't stop them from viewing the content. So if you think they're addicted to scrolling, that's not going to solve anything. And if you think that they shouldn't be viewing the content there, it also doesn't solve anything. So they'll say it's kicking kids offline. But really, you don't have to log into a lot of these platforms to see stuff. I don't ever log in to Reddit, and I read constantly on Reddit. TikTok, you don't need to log in. It makes it a little easier for you. Gillespie: And, if we may—the cameramen are the ones who gave me this information—on Pornhub, you don't have to log in to view it.  Weissmann: That's a good point. It's true. You don't have to login, and they're not blocking you from accessing these sites in the homepage way or in the clicking-through way. Tons of these sites you don't have to log into, and you're still viewing the content from any sites you'd like. So they're saying it's going to stop kids from using social media without parental approval, but it really doesn't.  Gillespie: A lot of regulation is supposed to be about content, but then it ends up moving into business models. And this was certainly true of proponents of net neutrality. Ultimately, we're trying to say that phone companies and ISPs had to do business in a particular way. So it's really kind of a business issue.  A lot of this legislation says, "Kids under 13 can't use social media. We're going to ban them somehow." But then it will say for kids under 18, sites can't serve up content to them using algorithms. And algorithms have kind of replaced Satan as the vague, sinister, ubiquitous spirit that is threatening our world. Why is it wrong to tell websites or service providers that you can't use algorithms in general? And then why is it misguided that you can't use algorithms for kids under 18? Weissmann: So there have been a few less popular proposals that completely banned algorithms. You can't do that. Time order is an algorithm. [Those proposals assert that] the only way to keep people safe is raw data. Even an RSS is ordered.  Gillespie: I mean, that would just turn us all schizophrenic. We would be like in A Beautiful Mind, where it would just be a display of data flowing around us. Weissmann: That's scary. That's going to be harmful. They don't understand how algorithms work. And then it's like, well maybe time ordered is OK. And then you have to remind them, what about reverse time order? Oh, I guess that's OK too. And it gets really, really silly. They even don't want to target kids through algorithms with their interests—so if a kid likes soccer, you can't show him soccer stuff? That's stupid. If a kid wants to learn more about math, you can't target based on their interest in math. It's just ridiculous.  I think people overestimate the issues with algorithms. I know one issue is that if you're into unlawful stuff or bad stuff, that it'll show you more of that too. And I think it's good that platforms are working on mitigating that because even, oddly enough, on Tosh.0, there's a segment about that, about a series of videos that were basically showing young girls doing cutesy things. And then you realize it wasn't made for other young girls. So, of course, YouTube should not show people those kinds of content when they realize what it's really about, even just from a normative standpoint. But in most cases, the algorithm just knows I like marmots. So hey, here are marmots, Shoshana. Gillespie: And there was an earlier fear—this is going back maybe a decade—that "I started out watching puppy videos and then 15 minutes later, I signed up for ISIS." And most studies that looked into that did not actually bear out the idea that there's a quick or even long-term radicalization algorithm that is being widely applied or used or people are falling into.  Weissmann: People seek out the stuff they want to seek out, and the algorithm just helps them seek it out more. Algorithms are math. When you're mad at it, you're mad at math. And it's silly to me.  Gillespie: You also write that regimes that run age verification through the government would allow prosecutors to make children federal criminals if they lie about their age. Weissmann: Oh, this was fun. That was the Schatz bill, the [Protecting Kids on Social Media Act]. And I do respect Schatz a lot. I think he's trying to do the right thing. I don't think he's doing it right, but I think he's trying. And a lot of what I've seen that he's saying, I kind of respect more than I do from other elected officials, but it's really bad. I mean, when you lie to the government, like that can be a federal crime. He thought, maybe as a better way to protect data, it would be better for the government to handle age verification. But that means if kids lie to that entity, whether it's run through a government contractor or an agency, you can be a federal criminal because you're lying to the government. And sure, we don't prosecute kids a lot, but government sometimes starts enforcing stuff that it didn't used to enforce. And you don't want to add a new law to the books that makes it possible for kids to become federal criminals for trying to login to YouTube. That's not wise policy. Gillespie: At the same time, services should be free to demand whatever they want from people, right? Weissmann: Sure. I don't like when they want a lot of my information, but if that's what they want, they can suffer the business consequences. Gillespie: For people watching this on video, they may have seen I was drinking out of a 7-Eleven cup. I went to 7-Eleven to get coffee this morning, and they asked for my phone number. I was like, "No, I don't want to give you my phone number." And I was going to walk away, but they were eventually like "OK." I understand why they're doing that. And I also understand the power of getting more personal information. One of the things that sites can do more than regular businesses is tailor more stuff directly to you. But that's a negotiation. Weissmann: You have some say there, and it's not mandatory. And some companies realize that users don't want that. So they try to step away.  Gillespie: With age-verification systems, you mentioned Neopets. My younger son was really big into Club Penguin. It no longer exists. But it was kind of a social media, a very walled garden for kids to use to do stuff and interact and have online adventures. Were there services that did a really good job that are directed toward kids that protect that? And are there examples to be learned there from how we might change the way kids interact with the internet? Weissmann: Yeah, I liked Neopets a lot. I actually made a few internet friends, and my friends were into it. I forget the names of [my pets] and they're dead now. They're all dead. I haven't fed them in so long. I haven't even dug their graves. I like the way Neopets operated. I always felt pretty safe there. I'm sure they could have actually done some more nudges like, "Hey, remember not to give up personal information to strangers," but overall they did good. Club Penguin is a really good example because I remember the big trend of trying to get banned from Club Penguin, but they did a good job of banning people being inappropriate, and then it became a meme. So it was a bit of a Barbara Streisand effect. I know Instagram wanted to do Instagram kids, and then everyone flipped out over it so they couldn't. But I actually think that's a good idea. Some safer areas where you still warn kids about stuff, but maybe there's a little bit less risk for them. Gillespie: What's the role of the companies here? Broadly, people who are offering goods and services, have they fallen down on their job to kind of proactively preempt this type of legislation? What do they need to be doing better? Weissmann: I think the big thing is that they should be coordinating to make parental controls easier. Genuinely, I think that's the big lesson here. I'm not sure it would have stopped the legislation, even. I know that parents are sometimes overwhelmed by all the choices, but it would be nice if parents had one set of controls that made it a little bit easier, because you can't have device-level filters, platform-level filters, app store filters. But it would be nice to give something to parents that's a little bit easier here just to manage, just to show them how stuff works. Because just like with any technology, it gets complex. I'm online way too much, so I know how all this stuff works, but make it easier for parents. I'm not sure that companies have exactly failed, but they really could be doing better.  Gillespie: And a clear part of this is kind of a public relations war. Again, going back to the '90s, cable TV didn't really become a fully national phenomenon until the late '80s and the early '90s. And then, under Bill Clinton, Janet Reno, the attorney general, went on a jihad against cable TV because it was showing too much sex and violence. And it obviously wasn't, but out of these sets of concerns came things like the VHS, which was a technology mandated into every new TV. And then the idea was that we're going to rate TV programs and then parents will set their TVs to a certain level so the kids can't block it. Nobody used it.  But it seems like companies now could do a better job of combating the negativity. But they're part of the problem, aren't they? Both in terms of not seeming to care, (maybe, maybe not), but also colluding with the government. One of the things that is very different now from the '90s is in the wake of revelations about Twitter and Facebook and other companies not just relying on the government or rolling over for the government but asking the government to say, "Hey, would you moderate our content?" Weissmann: It's disgusting. It's regulatory capture. And they know what they're doing violates the First Amendment, but it benefits their business. I do understand on a level: You're a business, your job isn't always to fight for freedom. But at the very least, you shouldn't be proactively fighting against freedom. I get if government pressures you too much, you might have to roll over a bit. But rolling over is different than what a lot of these companies are doing.  I was very grossed out by how Snapchat and Facebook were just like, "Oh, please regulate us" and put it sort of on other people. And it's just silly. Snapchat, I also personally have never had a lot of respect for. They used to tell politicians to go on Snapchat, that's where the kids are. But [Snapchat] knew that's not where you're going to reach people for politics. That was just not ethical business. Gillespie: You're a woman. Instagram has gotten a lot of heat, partly because of reports that were leaked from within Facebook saying it has a problem with certain types of adolescent female image issues. Do you buy that? Is that a serious threat to the idea that free speech should dominate the internet?  Weissmann: So what's wild to me is people flip out over this. As a kid, all my friends had eating disorders. Every friend. And it wasn't because of Instagram. It was because of models and magazines and TV. We were all always worried about being thin enough, and social media didn't exist then. It was all because of the images we were shown. Whereas now there's a lot of heavier women on Instagram who look great, and they're showing, "Hey, you don't have to be perfect." It's not about weight and cellulite. It's actually really nice to see that there are girls showing, "Hey, if you look like I do, here's how to dress, here's how to feel good about yourself." Gillespie: One of the great celebratory points of the '90s was the end of the mainstream. And particularly there was a lot of discussion about ideals of female beauty. You know, ideals of male beauty don't get the same kind of attention. But in both cases they expanded vastly. So instead of saying, "OK, you can be Raquel Welch or Twiggy," there's an infinite gradient of beauty and of being comfortable with yourself. And we seem to be occupying that world in reality now. And people are like, "We've got to shut this down. Something's gone terribly wrong." Weissmann: Yeah. Instagram's tried to get rid of a lot of the eating disorders stuff, but there's a lot of really good, healthy content. There's unhealthy content too. But the mix is way better than it was when I was a kid. If there was a heavy woman on TV, everyone noted that she was heavy, and that was the end of it. Everyone had the same body shape, they didn't have many curves. And when they did, it had to be Britney Spears or nothing. You couldn't have too much of a waist and you couldn't have too much of a butt. But now, online, it's really proliferated. All different kinds of women showing, "Look how I'm beautiful." I think that's really nice.  Gillespie: Do you think perhaps that's the problem? Not that certain new forms of hegemonic body types are shown, but that actually anybody can do anything and that's what's freaking people out? Weissmann: Oh, I'm sure that there's a level of that, of, "It's not like when I was a kid." I think there's a real aspect of that in here. But in general, it just baffles me that everyone's worried about body positivity online when that wasn't a thing when I was growing up. Every young girl was worried about being thin enough from the time we were like 8 years old. All our friends talked about being thin, and I'm sure that there are still issues like that, but the people they have to look up to are a lot broader. I just have to think that a piece of this is people not understanding that, or people thinking this is different from when I was a kid. Gillespie: One of the other things you write about is how age-verification laws don't exempt VPN traffic. But that traffic can't always be detected. Explain what a VPN is and why these are important. Weissmann: So people can use VPNs to make it seem like they're in a different place. So me in D.C., I could be like, I'm in Iceland or I'm in Utah. Gillespie: One of the things that everybody talked about when VPNs happened, it meant that if you're a political person in China or in Iran or whatever, you can use VPNs in order to actually kind of access the internet and speak freely.  Weissmann: Totally. There are a lot of great use cases, like to evade bad government and oppressive government. The case isn't anonymity that the normal person uses it for. It's for Netflix. It's definitely Netflix. Or to just try to avoid a little bit of extra tracking. You're not trying to be anonymous. You're just trying to have less stuff acquired. Gillespie: And I've noticed too VPNs are something that went from being kind of celebrated because this is how we're going to help people in authoritarian countries find freedom in the internet and speak to evade what used to be called the great firewall of China and stuff like that. Then it became, "OK, this is kind of cool because I can watch Netflix anywhere around the world from the U.S. feed." And now it's that the only reason to use a VPN is to engage in some kind of criminal or sexually perverse behavior. Weissmann: Exactly. Meanwhile, my friend's fiancé is a normal guy; he doesn't do politics. He's a trainer, and he likes VPNs because he's just like, "I don't want stuff tracking me." And so that's the normie use of it in America.  Gillespie: So these age-verification laws don't exempt VPNs. Why is that a problem? Weissmann: So this is a really fun rabbit hole because it makes these laws impossible. So, VPNs can convincingly make it seem like I'm in Iceland or Utah or wherever. You can detect a lot of VPNs. Not all, but you can detect a chunk of VPNs and realize, OK, this is a VPN. So in those cases, if you're in Utah and you're a social media company that operates there, what you would have to do to comply with the law is say, "You're using a VPN. We need to verify your age. I know this is just a Utah law, but to be on the safe side, in case you're in Utah trying to get around the law, we have to verify your age." That would violate California law because in California, if you treat VPN traffic differently, you're in violation of the law. So there's impossible compliance at that level. Let's say you really can't detect it, like you're using acceptable methods. And I talked to different VPN blockers and VPN providers, and they basically said you're not going to be able to detect all VPN traffic. So let's say I'm in Utah. They're supposed to verify my age. And they think I'm in Arkansas or maybe someplace without one of these laws. Maybe I'm in Maine. So it appears that I'm in Maine. I'm really in Utah. I get around the law. They don't verify my age, and I'm a child. In that case, the social media company that failed to verify my age would be liable. That's nuts. It's impossible to comply with that. And there's just this sense of, "Oh, sure, you can figure it out," but no. Even worse, the law applies to Utah residents. How the heck do you know if someone's a Utah resident? You literally have to verify everyone's age. Because if a child in Utah is in D.C. now and logging on, well, the IP address is D.C., or the D.C.-area because IPs aren't exact either. So they don't verify the age, and now they're liable. You create just absolutely impossible compliance.  And to drive the point home too, with Netflix, they fail to detect a lot of VPNs. Netflix has massive incentive because of its licensing agreements with various companies and various shows. Basically, it's really bad for them if people can get around these. So that's why they block VPNs to make sure that they're upholding their licensing agreements. So if even those guys can't do it, then how the heck are all these social media companies going to be able to do it when the incentive is even higher to use VPNs to get around these laws? Gillespie: Let's talk a little bit about R Street, the place where you work, and your journey to what you do and how you think. What is R Street? Weissmann: So R Street is a free market think tank. We were founded on insurance policy, which is fun. I actually really enjoy talking flood insurance now, but we do everything from energy to cyber security, tech policy, obviously, licensing reform, a lot of justice reform. I love my job. It's a lot of fun. Gillespie: When you say free market, what does that mean?  Weissmann: So, a lot of people think libertarian, but we're not always libertarian, and we don't mind government if it solves a problem narrowly tailored. Or if the government's already involved with something, we're not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. We're fine with incremental reforms, and we're fine with turning a bad system into a better one.  Gillespie: What's a place where government is working well, where the government regulations or structures in place are delivering a good product or service? Weissmann: That's a very good question. I think that government really does have a role in things. I just don't think it often executes well, like with cyber security. I think there are legitimate roles for government. I just don't know that it's doing well. There are different standards across different agencies. It doesn't help businesses know what they should be doing. It even sometimes creates adverse incentives not to report breaches. So we want to fix that. We want to make sure that people feel comfortable reporting breaches and that even if they're penalized, that we're not harming them for telling the truth there.  In justice reform, I mean, we need police but there are ways it could be working better. So we like justice reform. We like bail reform. And, there are a lot of places experimenting with different models to figure out what works better. But we have important rights that are often violated by police. We want to try to stop that and give police the tools they need.  Gillespie: When you think about the whole suite of what R Street and other free market groups are talking about, in many ways there are issues that were not being talked about 20 years ago en masse or 30 years ago, things like occupational licensing reform, zoning reform, things like that. This seems to be a kind of golden age. These are being seen as useless, or whatever good they might have provided, they're now really choking down the economy as we live today. Do you think that's accurate, that there are reasons to be very optimistic about a certain type of policy reform change?  Weissmann: Oh, yeah. It's been crazy to me to see the broad interest in licensing reform from everyone across the political spectrum. And they're excited about it. Like when I go to Congress to talk about it, they're like, "Yeah, let's talk licensing reform." That's crazy, I love it. Or even energy permitting reform. It's really exciting that that's a thing. And they might be messing it up a little bit in Congress. Gillespie: With occupational licensing, one of the things is that, say, in Ohio, you have to do 2,400 hours of barber college. But you only have to get six hours of training to be a cop. Nobody responds to that by saying we should make the cops do 2,400 hours. It's more like we just need to rethink how we license and certify people and whether or not, in many cases, that's a role for the state or for private organizations. Weissmann: I just love that there are so many elected officials interested in this. I mean, [former] Gov. Doug Ducey and I, in Arizona, we became friends because of this, because he was really big into licensing reform. And we hit it off. And we've been friends for like seven years because of it, which is just such a funny thought to have that there's elected officials like really, really interested in narrow regulatory reforms. Gillespie: Is there a generational component to the conversations that R Street is involved in like tech policy and online policy? And at that tech hearing or the child exploitation hearing we heard, there are always these moments when people like Lindsey Graham, who clearly has never dialed a telephone or used a cellphone or been online or driven his own car for decades, is railing about technology. And it's just kind of like "OK, boomer" moment. But it's not that easy, right? It's not just, old people are the problem and they have to get out of the way for young people. How do these issues of regulatory control of common use media play out?  Weissmann: So it's actually really varied across issues. One interesting thing is that with licensing reform, it's very Gen X and younger more interested in it. And even older than that, not that they're not interested, it's just not their thing. But with tech policy, the lines are all over. Like, [Sen.] Ron Wyden [D–Ore.] is one of the best people on this, and I adore Ron.  Gillespie: Ron Wyden, the Oregon senator, is one of the authors of Section 230. You mentioned Jeff Kosseff. His work we respect in common. He wrote a book about Section 230 as well as anonymous speech and then, most recently, defending misinformation. I'm just very curious to see where he goes next. Weissmann: Oh, I know. He keeps ruining things though, because when he writes about it, it becomes a thing. And I'm like, just stop writing. He's older, but he's really smart and he knows what he's doing, and he's thoughtful. And I don't always agree with him, but I get where he's coming from. But then you have younger members like Hawley, who is atrocious. I mean, he's not even trying. There are other younger members who just don't know what they're doing. I actually once had a meeting with a staffer for [former Rep.] Madison Cawthorn [R–N.C.] on licensing, and he's like, "We want to force the states to do what we want on licensing." And I was like, "Hey, there are a lot of constitutional issues here, a lot of functional issues." He's like, "Yeah, but we just want to force this." And I'm like, "OK, this isn't going to work." But it's not a young or old thing. It's how deep are you going to get into the issue. There are members who are more serious and less serious on this stuff, and it's really just not an age thing. Gillespie: At Reason, in the '90s and beyond, we used to talk about the real axis being control and choice. I guess that still exists. Somewhat related to that is the sense that we've gotten to a point where the Republican Party or the Democratic Party win an election because the other party had just been in control. People are like, "I don't want that. We'll try this."  There's a real breakdown of consensus it seems in many aspects. You see that in presidential elections that tend to be very close. You see that in control of different parts of Congress going back and forth. Is that what is really being expressed in these debates over how we control social media? Is that really what is being talked about without being acknowledged, that my side can't control the conversation so we want to figure out ways to do that? Weissmann: I know what you mean. But I'll push back on the control vs. choice thing, because some of the best regulatory reformers in general are some of the worst people on social media regulation, which I don't fully understand. But I think it gets to this point where I think the bigger dynamic is just moral panic, that people are freaking out and then they lose their principles and their sense on certain things. Which is why some of the people I adore the most—I love Gov. Spencer Cox in Utah. He's done great, great things, but he's really, really wrong here. Gillespie: What is he good on? When you say he's done great, great things, what are those things? Weissmann: Just every little thing. He's a very good governance guy. He pushed for a lot of Utah state government people to be able to work from home to save money and to make it easier on families. And that's some nice common sense stuff. And he does a lot like that. He's great on licensing reform. His first executive order was licensing reform. And now the Utah Department of Commerce has a guy whose whole job is figuring out the best way to make licensing work, where it's working, where it's not, if we need more licensing, but it's very objective and very thorough and very thoughtful. And it's incredible. This isn't due to Cox, but there's a Utah regulatory sandbox for lawyer licensing reform. And Cox is in on all this stuff. He's really, really good at what he does. But man, when it comes to social media regulation, I don't know where his brain is going on this. I don't understand, except if it's moral panic. And he thinks that the freakout and what he's feeling and what he's thinking here is just more important than all the other principles. Gillespie: I'm thinking of somebody like Taylor Lorenz, who's now at The Washington Post. She's been at The Atlantic, The New York Times, etc. She recently wrote a book that's really interesting. And generally she's very pro–social media or new forms of media that allow younger people to express what they're thinking. I interviewed her for Reason years ago, and it was great.  But she and other people have been talking—this is something on the right and the left—about how the problem is that big corporations or big internet companies are able to manipulate your feeds, are able to make you want certain things or to see certain things, that they have become this vast reality distortion machine, so that when you're online—and we're increasingly online—you're not seeing the real world.  Again, this goes back to certain debates in the '90s and even in the '50s where there was a critique, broadly speaking, of unregulated capitalism, that it allowed Madison Avenue and the hidden persuaders, the mad men. The mad men of Madison Avenue who were using psychology and science to make you buy appliances every year, even though you didn't need them, and to buy this car rather than that car. That seems to be kind of flourishing again. How does one engage that or combat that idea that we are not in control of our social media feeds? Weissmann: It's funny. I just think it's one of the most toxic ideas out there. I think understanding and empowering autonomy is probably the most important thing in life. If you don't believe you're in control of your own destiny, then what do morals matter? If everyone else is controlling you, then nothing you do matters and you have full license to be as awful a person and do as bad things as you want. I have like almost 70,000 followers, and they love regulatory reform. They love slobs and marmots and regulatory reform. How do we even live in an age where that's possible? I spend so much time on all trails and so much time offline hiking, and it's only possible because of our current age. Because, one, I have enough treatments for all my diseases, and I'm up to 11, which is fantastic. With hiking, even women traveling alone is kind of a recent thing in a lot of ways. Not a century ago, that wasn't much of a thing. Knowing where the trails are, having people review and tell you, "Oh, there's a bear here. There's a wolf here," stuff like that. Being able to create community with the people I meet—I meet people on trails. Then we follow each other on Instagram and meet up next time we're in the same place. The stuff that's possible, the levels of autonomy that are possible, and the power to choose your own life that are possible are often because of social media.  Like I said before, finding out I had fibromyalgia, not through the almost 30 doctors I had seen by that time but by one internet forum after Googling, that's incredible. I just think it's the most empowering thing. All these different mediums we have, all this information. Sure, some of it's wrong, but you can research. I went to a doctor to figure out if I had fibromyalgia. I've been led down rabbit holes that solve problems that I didn't even realize I had. And I just think that's the proper way to see this. Sure, there are problems, and sure, you can just kind of get lazy. But I know people who are lazy and just play video games all day. We're not railing against that screen time. For some reason, it's the dumb dances on TikTok that freak everyone out.  Gillespie: So, what you're saying is that the world that we live in is a mix of online and off. We have much more information now, and that doesn't alleviate our need to be critical thinkers and critical learners and things like that. But it gives us many more opportunities to find out what we are, who we are, and how we want to live? Weissmann: It empowers autonomy in just incredible ways. Not everyone will embrace it. My close group of friends, almost everyone is insane about exercise. We love exercising. They want to run. I'm not much of a runner yet, but I want to hike farther than everyone. They want to run faster than they ever have before, and I don't think that was as big a thing. People went to the gym. But the competition, the excitement, the empowerment for each other online, the level of community you can find, even the people I stay in touch with all over the world because we have hobbies in common. I know that I can be a little bit more extroverted than a lot of people, but there's really this way to find community that's never existed before, so people can get together and come up with ideas and, like you said, find out who they are and what they are. But it's about finding out who you are and what you are, not letting things shape you and everything shapes you to a degree. But now way more positive things can than could before. Photo Credits: CNP/AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom/ Rod Lamkey - CNP/picture alliance / Consolidated News Photos/Newscom/ CNP/AdMedia/SIPA/Newscom. Video Editor: Adam CzarneckiAudio Production: Ian KeyserThe post Shoshana Weissmann: Online Age Verification Rules Are Unconstitutional and Ineffective appeared first on Reason.com.
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Feb 7, 2024 • 44min

Rachel Nuwer: MDMA Is On the Cusp of Legalization

Reason's Nick Gillespie interviews Rachel Nuwer, author of I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World. The book is a history of the drug known as molly and ecstasy that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently evaluating as an aid in fighting PTSD. Today's sponsors: ZBiotics. ZBiotics Pre-Alcohol Probiotic Drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by Ph.D. scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Make ZBiotics your first drink of the night, drink responsibly, and you'll feel your best tomorrow. Get 15 percent off by going to ZBiotics/TRI and using the code TRI at checkout. The Reason Speakeasy.  The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy. Go here for an online archive and go here to sign up for information about upcoming events. Watch the full video here and find a condensed transcript below. Nick Gillespie: Why did you write I Feel Love?  Rachel Nuwer: There are really two answers to that. The first is a sort of common good answer, which is, there wasn't a book about MDMA. It's this huge cultural phenomenon. We're probably going to see it—well, hopefully see it—approved by the [Food and Drug Administration] for PTSD treatment within the next year. Yet, there wasn't a resource that brought all the information about this complex, nuanced drug together in one place. People needed to have that touchstone. There are just so many misconceptions about MDMA that I wanted to dispel those, not just for readers but also for myself.  The other part of that answer is a more personal one. It was the height of the pandemic. Like many people, I was kind of having a crisis. What am I doing with my life? Am I going in the right direction? And for me, that was really manifesting in worries over my career. I'd spent about a decade reporting about illegal wildlife trade, which is not a cheery topic. We're talking slaughtered rhinos and elephants. And there just weren't many hopeful stories there. And I really realized that I was looking for a change of pace, for a new intellectual and personal challenge, and MDMA turned out to be the answer.  Gillespie: And that helps explain the subtitle of the book, right? Which is?  Nuwer: "MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World."  Gillespie: So this is like your pandemic baby? Nuwer: This is exactly that. It's kept me very occupied in the pandemic. And my last book, I went to 12 countries to report it, but this one I could very easily do from the phone, right here in the good ol' U.S.A.—and a quick hop over the pond to the U.K.  Gillespie: We talk about the psychedelic renaissance at Reason and obviously other people do, but that might be one thing the pandemic really helped because you couldn't travel out. So travel in.  Nuwer: Exactly, yeah. And I say this in the beginning of the book, so it's not a surprise. But the idea for the book came to me while I was on MDMA, but not in a club, which is my preferred environment for this. I was just sitting on my couch at home at 7 p.m. on a Friday night.  Gillespie: Before we get into the conversation about the history of MDMA, I'm struck by you saying, "This came to me while I was on MDMA." As a broad cultural background, how old are you?  Nuwer: I am—let's see, what am I now? 38. Keeps changing.  Gillespie: Have you always felt comfortable saying, "I use drugs that are technically or still openly illegal." Have you always felt comfortable doing that? Or is there a shift going on in our society?  Nuwer: I was definitely not always the person who was like, "I use drugs. I like drugs." I was a D.A.R.E. kid from the '80s.  I completely swallowed that message. I internalized it. If I heard of friends doing drugs, whether it was weed or ecstasy, I looked down on them. I judged them. I thought people who do drugs are looking for an escape, or they're burnouts, or they're going to frazzle their brains. Wasn't for me. That began to change in college. I had a friend who introduced me to mushrooms, but I didn't really know anything about them. It didn't have the stigma attached to it like ecstasy did. So I was like, "Sure, I'll try a new thing." I love new experiences. And that was great. I really enjoyed it, but it didn't open my eyes to MDMA at all. I still had this negative connotation.  Gillespie: Is it because MDMA is engineered? MDMA is a pharmaceutical of some sort. It's a pill. It's not a naturally occurring thing.  Nuwer: I think for a lot of people that is absolutely the case. For me, I had a personal negative connotation. In my freshman year of college, a friend's brother committed suicide. And this is in my small town in Mississippi, and everyone blamed his use of ecstasy. They specifically said, "Chris, he was taking all this ecstasy. It made him so depressed, and he killed himself." So instead of looking at the underlying drivers of what led him to make that decision, everyone just pointed out the drug. My D.A.R.E. kid self said, "It must be this awful ecstasy thing. I'm never going to touch that."  Gillespie: Let's talk about the rediscovery of MDMA in the late '60s, early '70s. Lay out the history of MDMA. And for the people out there—you might know it as molly or ecstasy. But what is MDMA, and where did it come from?  Nuwer: That's a great disclaimer for everyone out there. Molly and ecstasy are the same thing. And they refer to what is supposed to be MDMA. Whether your street-bought molly or ecstasy is MDMA is another question. But they refer to the same thing. It's just a branding tactic. So, the history part of the book, surprisingly, was one of my favorite parts to write. My mom's a historian, but I'm not a history person myself, and I just really got into it cause there were so many unexpected twists and turns.  So, first of all, MDMA is a lot older than most people think. It was first patented, let's say, on Christmas Eve 1912 by the German pharmaceutical company Merck—a respected group. And they weren't looking for something to change people's brains. They were looking for a blood clotting agent, and MDMA was just a chemical intermediary on the steps they needed to get there. Whether or not anyone at Merck actually tried it, we don't know. They've been really cagey about letting people into their archives. It seems like maybe they did. There are little hints here and there of chemists being like, "Hey, this is pretty interesting. Let's take a closer look." Fast forward to the 1950s. MDMA pops up in the U.S. for the first time. This is during the U.S. government's search for a chemical truth serum. So, let's figure out how we can control the minds of our enemies by conducting experiments on U.S. citizens to see how this goes.  Gillespie: So this is part of MKUltra, and it's the epiphenomenon of that? Nuwer: It wasn't MKUltra itself, but yeah, it was the army's version of the CIA trials. Again, we don't have the sort of smoking gun evidence that MDMA was ever given to anyone under this experiment. But there's a lot of circumstantial evidence. People who have had more time than I have to pursue the Freedom of Information Act process have gotten really close to revealing that, indeed, the U.S. Army did do this.  A student named Nicholas Dunham—I think he's gotten his Ph.D. now, so, Dr. Nicholas Dunham—tracked down a document that pointed to Tulane University in New Orleans as having contracted with the army, and MDMA was on their list of drugs. But when Nick asked for the specific document from the U.S. government that would show whether or not it was actually given to anyone, they said, "Oh, we lost it". So MDMA pops up again in police records of seizures in around 1970–1971, which probably just points to the fact that the Controlled Substances Act had just come out and had criminalized MDA—which is a closely related molecule—and entrepreneurial chemists were probably just looking for a way to get around the law by sticking an extra methyl group. Poof:  MDMA. So, the police even thought that they were seizing MDA. But we don't know anything about those chemists. We don't know who their customers were. We don't know who was using it for what. What we do know is that MDMA comes up again in 1975 when a Ph.D. student at Berkeley named Carl Resnikoff got with his mentor there, a guy named Alexander Shulgin. Everyone calls him Sasha, a famous psychedelic chemist. And they were working on a summer project together.  Gillespie: And Shulgin is kind of the Thomas Edison of psychedelics.  Nuwer: That's the correct way of putting it. Incredible chemist. Invented, like, 20 molecules. He would test them on himself and his wife if they were interesting and share them with friends. Young Carl was really enamored with Shulgin and his work, because Carl had tried LSD when he was in eighth grade. He was all about it. And Shulgin said, "OK, you need to do a summer project. What do you want to do?" And Carl was a big fan of MDA—as we were talking about earlier—and thought, "OK, methamphetamine is more euphoric than plain amphetamine. The difference is this methyl group. Why don't I just stick the same methyl group onto MDA and see what happens?" It's pretty logical and Shulgin's like, "That's a great idea. Let's do it." So they hole up in the summer of 1975 at U.C. Berkeley and synthesized MDMA together, and Shulgin took most of it home. But he gave Carl a little baggie, measured out just perfectly. I think it was like 125 mg. Two doses. And Carl and his girlfriend Judith wound up taking it on a beautiful September day on a boat ride across the San Francisco Bay to Sausalito.  Gillespie: Sometimes MDMA is that drug you do by yourself or with a loved one or somebody you want to connect with. And when I say intimate, not necessarily sexual, but like a deep bond. And then, it becomes the ultimate rave. Well, actually, club drug first. And then rave drug. How does it start shifting out from that?  Nuwer: Well, back up just a step before that. So Shulgin did try MDMA after Carl reported back with very positive experiences in '76, and he realized this molecule's potential for therapy. He introduced it to a therapist friend of his who became sort of this—I guess people say the Johnny Appleseed of MDMA in the therapeutic community. So, it quietly started spreading among first Bay Area therapists and then broader around the U.S. and even internationally. But people were keeping really quiet about it, because a lot of these therapists had either worked with LSD in the preceding decades or knew exactly what had happened with LSD being criminalized. So, they knew that if word got out about this new psychoactive drug, it would absolutely be criminalized, just like LSD. And they didn't want that to happen because they were seeing such powerful results.  Gillespie: How did they use it in a therapeutic context?  Nuwer: There are some early studies from [George Greer and his wife Requa Tolbert] out of New Mexico. And at first, it's kind of funny, they were following the LSD model, but they were kind of just experimenting themselves with what worked and what didn't work. And, in those original trials, they would actually take MDMA with their clients, but they realized, "OK, we need to not be high on MDMA because we need to focus on you and not make this about us." So that stopped. But they would—kind of like the trials today—bring people to their house, give them a low or whatever dose they thought would be appropriate, and just let them work through whatever issue they were trying to work through.  Gillespie The idea is that it opens people up. It allows them to be in touch with their feelings and feel connected. Nuwer: Exactly. Shulgin used the word "window." So it opens this window on yourself where you can find answers to questions you're asking your own self or partners, without fear, without anxiety, without the typical neuroses or clutter of our brain that gets in the way.  So yeah, people used it for all kinds of things, from couples counseling to just "I'm having this trouble at work. I want to work through that" to "I want to know myself deeper" to more serious things like trauma. So that was all going on through the '70s. But, as you said earlier, MDMA did make this jump from the therapist's couch to the dance floor. And, the Greers said to me at one point of the interview that it was inevitable that this was going to happen. It's a drug that makes you feel good. People want to take drugs that make you feel good. And there was a lot of tension between the recreational and the therapeutic community, just as there was with LSD years before.  Gillespie: We should point out that LSD, particularly during the '50s and early '60s to some degree, was being used widely by therapists, just to help treat things like alcoholism. Yesterday—while we're taping this—was Cary Grant's birthday. And Cary Grant is probably the best-known kind of celebrity who took LSD and publicly extolled its virtues, saying it made him feel alive again, etc. So MDMA is kind of an echo of that.  Nuwer: Exactly. It was really the LSD therapists that paved the way for MDMA to then just slot right into this empty pool that had been left by LSD being criminalized. And the thing is, at this time, MDMA is completely legal. The government isn't aware of it. So the therapeutic community, many of them wanted to keep it a secret, only a thing that friends tell friends. You can't, like, just spread it around a club. But there's also a different contingent of people who wanted to just release it on the world and also make a nice profit in doing so.  So the sort of figurehead of the recreational scene at this time was a guy named Michael Clegg. He ran a group that came to be known as the Texas Group because a lot of them were operating out of Dallas. And Michael Clegg just wanted to churn out as much MDMA as possible, as quickly as possible, making a lot of money. But he wasn't the typical drug lord that you think of, like, "I'm just going to get everyone hooked and make money." He had these ideas of himself as enlightened, wanting to serve a bigger purpose in the world and wanting to help people be saved, whatever that means to them. So that was Michael Clegg. He really spread MDMA across Texas, California, and the United States. And that is what attracted the attention of the U.S. government.  Gillespie: Right. So then what happened?  Nuwer: Well, the [Drug Enforcement Administration] moved to schedule MDMA. In the summer of '85—which is when I was born, coincidentally—MDMA was put on the emergency Schedule I list, and that meant that it was illegal. Well, the DEA, what they did not see coming—they thought this would just be a normal scheduling—is that there were all these therapists, professors at Harvard, who believed in MDMA and thought it was worthy of study and worthy of use. So this group of therapists, including Sasha Shulgin, put together a case to bring the DEA to court and say, "Hey, this is a drug with medical purpose, so it can't be Schedule I because Schedule I is defined as no medical purpose. It should be Schedule III. Allow us to work with it, allow us to study it, control it, but, you know, come on." And the really fascinating thing is they actually won that trial. The administrative law judge sided with them and said, "Yeah, you guys have shown that MDMA does indeed have value as a medicinal tool. It's being used by therapists. It should be Schedule III." But because of whatever bureaucracy—I don't understand the federal system—MDMA was put on Schedule I because that judge's determination was only a suggestion. So the DEA just did what they wanted to do the whole time.  Gillespie: I am old enough to have taken MDMA before it was illegal and after. I have a strong memory of it being—in the early '80s, before it was illegal—more of a reflective, introspective drug.  Post-prohibition, the biggest thing that was a problem about it was that it made you dangerously social, where you would go out and dance all night and kill yourself. Like you couldn't stop, you were part of a hive mind, which is just kind of bizarre.  So, talk about MAPS—the nonprofit that's been working since the '80s to bring MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. How did they get involved and what role did they play in this world where MDMA has been banned?  Nuwer: So I'll say that we would not be where we are today in terms of MDMA-assisted therapy being on the cusp of potential federal approval if it were not for MAPS—the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. MAPS was founded in 1986 by a guy named Rick Doblin. Rick was this kid who grew up outside Chicago, raised on stories around the family dinner table of the Holocaust. So Rick was this kid who was afraid that at any moment, all the people around him could just break out in like a maniacal genocide mode. And Rick really made it his mission in life—he's a strange kid, apparently—to find a solution for that. Just a strange guy, a very interesting and unique character. Rick wound up at New College in Florida, where he was introduced to drugs, and he thought that doing mind-melting doses of LSD was the way to enlightenment. He did not find the answers that route. But through those connections, he found his way to MDMA. And at first he thought it was like, "How profound could this drug be if you can still talk on it?" But he quickly realized for himself the utility of just being able to communicate with people in the open way we were talking about earlier, and he thought, "Huh, maybe this drug is the answer for getting people to set aside their differences and seeing that we're all just human. We all want love. We all want the same thing. We have more in common than we have different." Rick got involved in that DEA trial. He was one of the three younger people that was sort of spearheading the organizational effort: getting the money, getting a lawyer, and getting everyone to write letters.  After the trial, everyone gave up. Most people stopped using MDMA in their practice because they didn't want to lose their license. Rick was the one person who did not give up, and everybody thought, "You're an idiot. You're wasting your time. You're wasting your money. It's just a matter of time until you too see the writing on the wall. This is not coming back." But Rick just is very hardheaded, I guess, like the most tenacious person ever. And there was something that Rick actually learned at the trial. He was talking with one of the DEA agents who was representing the government and this guy, Frank Sapienza, told Rick, "Look, kid, there might be something to this MDMA thing, but you are never going to get anywhere with it unless you go through the federal route. You need to get approval. You need to do FDA trials, clinical trials, that's the way you have got to do it." And Rick really took that to heart. So he founded MAPS to see that through. And, you know, it's taken like 38-plus years Gillespie: Where are they now for FDA approval of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy? Nuwer: So, clinical trials have to have three phases. Phase one is just to show like, OK, this isn't going to kill like a bunch of rats and people. Phase two is more about efficacy and safety. And then phase three is the more rigorous, like, OK, does this work and is it safe? They have just completed the end of the phase three section. And again, this has taken literally 20-plus years. Rick was doing this all on fundraising, and it costs millions literally to do clinical trials. And also just jumping through all the paperwork and permission hoops of the government.  So the last phase three trial is done, and MAPS' Public Benefit Corporation, which has now become a pharmaceutical company, just submitted an application to the FDA at the end of December asking for a new drug approval for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. So the FDA has a certain amount of time to respond. But long story short, hopefully there'll be some sort of answer by mid-2024. That's the year we are in now.  Gillespie: Parallel to MAPS trying to get MDMA in certain circumstances approved—what happened in the '80s and '90s and the aughts with MDMA? Timothy Leary once famously talked about how LSD escaped the CIA labs and went into the mainstream. MDMA certainly escaped any kind of lockdown on it. What was going on there? Nuwer: A lot was going on. So in the late '80s, MDMA made its way to the U.K., which basically created raves because people wanted to keep partying after clubs closed, and hence raves. And raves in turn led to the multibillion-dollar electronic dance music industry that we have today. MDMA through that rave pathway became a global phenomenon. So like tons of people doing MDMA, mostly youngsters [at] warehouses, clubs, potentially dangerous environments. And we started to see our first MDMA deaths. Nothing like the number of alcohol deaths we see or [deaths we see from] other drugs, but a few deaths that would be overly covered in the news. Gillespie: And this is from people taking too much and having cardiac events or dehydrating and kind of dancing themselves to death.  Nuwer: I mean, hyperthermia was the main one. Overheating. So MDMA became this hysterical news story. "Ecstasy is killing our children." It was seen as this threat to sort of puritanical American and likewise British values. So there were tons of just really severe laws that came down banning it. Gillespie: Joe Biden was involved in the Rave Act. Nuwer: Oh, yeah. Trying to criminalize pacifiers and glow sticks as drug paraphernalia, for example. But what that did is it really tarnished MDMA's reputation. Almost in the same way as LSD's reputation was tarnished by being attached to the counterculture. It was like a political strategy to try to take this drug down. And, at the same time, the U.S. government especially was pumping money into studies to prove that MDMA was neurotoxic, that it impacted the brain in a detrimental way. Millions of dollars of federal funding went into labs literally trying to prove this. And in the end, they didn't approve it because MDMA really isn't neurotoxic. It, of course, can be dangerous if you take too much. But, the lasting effect of that, from the late '80s and through the '90s and even early aughts, was that MDMA's reputation was really tainted. Any public understanding or awareness of its therapeutic value was completely paved over by this negative connotation. And it's that kind of connotation that I grew up with in the '80s.  Gillespie: It's kind of flipped, right? Because there was that story, but then people were like, you know what? I feel really good on this or I've had good experiences. When did things seem to start tipping away? Nuwer: Yeah, I absolutely agree. Well, I can tell you my personal experience of when I flipped. So I wrote this book proposal during the pandemic, like I told you, and my agent sent it out to a bunch of editors, and we got all no's. People were saying Michael Pollan already wrote this book, because they just don't understand the difference between a mushroom and MDMA or whatever. Other people were saying this book looks too positive about ecstasy. Why isn't this about the negative effects of ecstasy? And others were saying there's just not enough there to say anything about ecstasy; this isn't a book project. Then the first MAPS phase three study came out. I wrote about it for The New York Times. Suddenly, the conversation just shifted in this really significant way. I started getting interest in the book proposal. I really think that that trial kind of legitimized MDMA and put it out there in the broader public understanding in a way that wasn't present before. Gillespie: What are the benefits of the MAPS approach, of going through FDA approval and showing that this is a medicine? Nuwer: I have heard people who are more part of the underground scene, and they're afraid that, oh, this is going to make MDMA less cool if it's suddenly this medicine or, oh, we're sterilizing the industry. I'm just remembering a comment from Ben Sessa, who is a psychiatrist in the U.K. and also works with MDMA and other drugs like this. He's like, "You know, I can put on my white coat and then I can go to a rave, you know, whatever. It doesn't make MDMA less cool, but this is what we have to do to legitimize it, to eventually move toward hopefully legality, not just for therapeutic uses but also for recreational uses or whatever people want to do." And that's going to make these things safer in the end, because then we're going to know where we're getting our drugs. We're going to know how to take them. We're going to have education about how to use them properly.  Gillespie: This is almost always the case with what the government calls illicit drugs—not even illegal, they're immoral—not knowing what's in them, which is hard to do in black markets because dealers don't spend a lot of time putting labels on stuff.  What's the role of the rave culture in kind of popularizing ecstasy? Nuwer: I think hearing your friends or people you trust say, "Hey, I tried this thing and not only was it the most fun night I've ever had, it also was a profoundly beautiful experience." That's actually how I found my way to this drug. My now husband was a '90s raver kid in Colorado going out to warehouses. And when I met him, I still had these negative connotations about ecstasy. And then hearing his stories—and he was by no means trying to push me into this, he was done with MDMA—I was finally just like, I want to try this too. It sounds really fun. And I think that we really look over or we don't give the rave scene its due credit. Millions and millions of people around the world have tried MDMA. Millions of them have had profound, beautiful, wonderful experiences on it. Yet there's very little rigorous attention paid to them by the scientific community. There's just no funding or interest to study them. Because the government is providing them most of the funding. And people aren't dying en masse like they are with meth or some other drug. So I think there's just so many interesting questions to be mined there and stories to be heard.  Gillespie: And then you have kind of underground movements that come above ground. Burning Man is not certainly exclusively about MDMA, but that's part of the culture and the rave element of that or the Electric Daisy Carnival. Nuwer: Definitely. I mean, I think it really serves the purpose of these gatherings in the past that we could rely on from religion or mystical gatherings or whatever that we're really missing today. And people are seeking that out. I know that's why I like to go to raves. In terms of what it's actually doing, I mean, massive dumps of serotonin. It not only blocks your receptors in your brain from taking up serotonin, which is the sort of jack-of-all-trades neurotransmitter, it does all kinds of things. But, your neurons actually dump out their stores of serotonin. Something like 80 percent of your serotonin floods your brain on a night of MDMA, or a day. Oxytocin gets triggered as well. So there's just this whole chemical formula that's going on in your brain to produce that feeling.  Gillespie: How do you think MDMA specifically fits into the larger kind of resurgence of psychedelics? Nuwer: Well, I do think that MDMA is paving the way through this potential FDA approval. I think all things look good for MDMA to be the first psychedelic over that finish line. So that is absolutely major. You know, returning to that stigma and that taint we talked about in the '90s and 2000s, I think that was a really big obstacle to overcome, in a way that mushrooms didn't have to overcome because they just didn't have that same negative connotation that MDMA or LSD had. I mean, you never hear anything about LSD. Hardly at all. MDMA I hear less about than I hear mushrooms. I was reading U.C. Berkeley's newsletter today, The Microdose. It's like, oh, Indiana's moving to invest dollars in psilocybin research on PTSD and this and that. But the states aren't as eager to do MDMA—I think it is the connotations, the stigma from earlier decades. And also referring back to that synthetic issue that you mentioned, for some reason people are more comfortable with a natural substance than one that was made. Gillespie: Legalizing nature, there are a lot of movements to just save plant-based entheogens or certain types of psychedelics. Maybe it's that they're harder to regulate because they could grow anywhere. I think it's an artificial distinction between nature and artifice. Nuwer: Yeah, I 100 percent agree with that. But, at the same time, I think MDMA is just such a useful and powerful tool for therapy just because it's such an easier medicine to work with.  Gillespie: Why does there seem to be so much interest in this? I mean, it's definitely changing. The laws seem to be changing, and there's a cultural moment where a lot of serious people are talking about this.  Nuwer: I think it's a complex mix. So I think people are just fed up with the war on drugs. They're beginning to realize just how idiotic it was, that there's no way to win this war, just what a waste of money and lives and environment, the list goes on.  I think people also have come to realize that the quick chemical fix that we were hoping would come through psychiatric drugs isn't working. There are more and more people suffering from things like depression, anxiety, trauma. So we're looking for other answers. And then a little bit more cynically, I think people like the idea of this magic wand cure-all. And they're just like, "Psychedelics are going to rid me of all my problems." Gillespie: They're going to do what Prozac failed to do. Nuwer: Exactly. And people want to believe in these magic cures. And it's not going to be that for most people.  Gillespie: A parallel with MAPS, they're a bit behind, but Compass Pathways, a pharmaceutical company, is pushing psilocybin trials for depression and anxiety with the FDA. Is that a good sign or a bad sign that the big pharmaceutical companies are kind of starting to circle around this? Nuwer: I think, unfortunately, it was just inevitable. It's great that they're pushing trials through to get these medications to people. The monetization of it isn't great, but this is the system we live in. And I don't think that psychedelics were ever going to be able to reform the system. Rick Doblin was hoping that he could get MDMA over the finish line with charity alone. And I mean, incredibly, he raised $140 million in donations. And then he even says himself that he was sort of a victim of his own success because by helping bring the psychedelic renaissance about through MAPS, suddenly we have these companies like Compass popping up that are for-profit. And then donors are like, why would I give you free money that I'm not going to see a return on when I can make an investment over here? So MAPS isn't going to make it over the finish line with MDMA as a philanthropy-funded product. They just spun out a pharmaceutical arm that is for-profit. They have a board. They have investors. They tried really hard not to. But this is just the system that we live in. Gillespie: Do you see any big obstacles in the next couple of years to the medicalization or legalization of these substances? Nuwer: I'm sure there's going to be some kind of bureaucratic whatever. I mean, there's a lot of positive signs from the federal government that they're into this. Biden released a memo about it. There's language in a new bill about veterans for investigating this. But the government is very, very conservative. So I can see there being all kinds of hitches that delay this, like, years. This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. Audio Production: Ian KeyserVideo Editor: Adam CzarneckiThe post Rachel Nuwer: MDMA Is On the Cusp of Legalization appeared first on Reason.com.
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