PT 661 - Kenneth Tupper, PhD: Harm Reduction, Drug Education, Canadian Ayahuasca, and Psychedelic Public Health

Kenneth Tupper has spent decades working at the intersection of drug policy, public health, harm reduction, education, and psychedelics.

In this episode, Joe Moore talks with Tupper about his early work with DanceSafe and drug checking, British Columbia's overdose crisis and experiment with decriminalization, and what the psychedelic field can learn from decades of harm reduction work and research.

They also dig into Tupper's academic work on psychedelics and education, the idea of entheogens as "plant teachers," ayahuasca policy in Canada, problems with conventional drug education, and the limits of treating psychedelics exclusively as medicines.

The conversation eventually widens into a bigger question: What does it actually mean to educate people well about drugs, altered states, and consciousness?

Enjoy the show.

Disclaimer: Intro and promotional audio in this episode were generated using synthetic voice technology. The interview itself is unaltered.

Show Notes (Machine Generated)

Kenneth Tupper's career has followed two parallel tracks: psychedelic scholarship and public health. Long before the current psychedelic resurgence, he was studying the idea of entheogens as tools for learning and examining how Indigenous traditions understand plants such as ayahuasca, peyote, and psilocybin as teachers. At the same time, work with DanceSafe and early pill testing drew him into harm reduction and eventually into more than two decades of public-health and drug-policy work in British Columbia.

Tupper and Joe revisit the early history of drug checking and the logic behind harm reduction: if people are going to use drugs, providing accurate information and reducing preventable risks can save lives. That discussion leads into supervised consumption sites, pharmaceutical alternatives to illicit opioids, fentanyl, the toxic drug supply, naloxone, and the difficult reality of people surviving overdoses while sustaining hypoxic or anoxic brain injuries.

They also examine British Columbia's experiment with drug decriminalization. Tupper describes the limits of decriminalizing possession without simultaneously addressing housing, healthcare, treatment options, the illicit supply, and other social conditions. The conversation contrasts British Columbia with Portugal and explores why drug policy interventions cannot easily be transplanted from one social and historical context into another.

From there, the discussion turns directly toward psychedelics. Tupper argues that psychedelic public health should involve more than clinical treatment. Psychedelics may have roles in health promotion, community building, education, rites of passage, and helping people who are not necessarily diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder. At the same time, wider access creates a need for better harm-reduction information, screening, preparation, and attention to set, setting, and the larger social environment in which psychedelic experiences occur.

Drug education becomes one of the central themes of the episode. Tupper compares the history of drug education with sex education and argues that drug education has remained unusually tied to prescribed behavioral outcomes—particularly abstinence. Rather than simply telling young people what not to do, he asks what genuine education about drugs might look like when curiosity, experimentation, risk, pleasure, and real-world access are acknowledged.

That question connects back to Tupper's longstanding work on what he calls entheogenic education. Drawing on educational thinkers including John Dewey and Lev Vygotsky, he discusses psychedelics as potential "cognitive tools" and considers how experiential education might offer models beyond conventional schooling. Joe and Tupper also discuss how AI may force an even deeper reconsideration of education when reading, writing, calculation, and information retrieval can increasingly be outsourced to machines.

The final part of the conversation focuses heavily on ayahuasca. Tupper discusses his doctoral research into the Canadian government's handling of a Santo Daime religious exemption, the difficulty of fitting ceremonial entheogen use into modern drug-control frameworks, and tensions between religious, biomedical, Indigenous, and public-health ways of understanding ayahuasca.

Joe and Tupper also examine consent and safety around ayahuasca admixtures. Traditional brews can vary significantly in composition, raising difficult questions about informed consent, standardization, cultural autonomy, and how Western participants can make informed decisions when entering practices developed in very different cultural contexts.

The episode closes with a broader discussion of knowledge itself. Tupper argues for taking scientific methods seriously without assuming that Western science represents the only legitimate way of knowing. As psychedelics, Indigenous knowledge, AI, ecological crisis, and modern medicine increasingly intersect, he sees questions of epistemology—how we know what we know—as becoming increasingly important.

In This Episode

• Kenneth Tupper's path from psychedelic scholarship into harm reduction and public health
• Why he adopted the term entheogen in his early academic work
• Jonathan Ott and the politics of psychedelic language
• The early days of DanceSafe and pill testing
• Why drug checking became a public-health intervention
• Supervised consumption sites and their limitations
• Fentanyl and British Columbia's toxic drug crisis
• Naloxone, overdose survival, and hypoxic brain injury
• Why addiction cannot be reduced to a simple pharmacological model
• British Columbia's experiment with drug decriminalization
• Why the Portuguese model cannot simply be copied elsewhere
• Psychedelics as one tool within a larger public-health system
• Psychedelic access in Canada compared with Colorado and Oregon
• The risks of over-medicalizing psychedelics
• Psychedelics for health promotion rather than only diagnosed illness
• Why traditional drug education has struggled
• Drug education versus sex education
• Abstinence, harm reduction, and genuine education
• John Dewey, experiential learning, and progressive education
• Lev Vygotsky and the idea of cognitive tools
• What AI may do to conventional schooling
• Psychedelics as educational tools and rites of passage
• Dennis McKenna's influence on Tupper's ayahuasca research
• Santo Daime and religious exemptions for ayahuasca in Canada
• Why ayahuasca does not fit neatly into conventional drug policy
• Consent and transparency around ayahuasca admixtures
• Safety, lineage, power, and sexual misconduct in ceremonial settings
• Indigenous and biomedical models of healing
• Science, epistemology, and multiple ways of knowing
• Tupper's experience with ibogaine
• Why he coined the term "intonicated"

Links

Kenneth Tupper Kenneth Tupper's website

Kenneth Tupper – Research & Publications Publications

Intonicated Podcast — Tupper's podcast on altered states, healing, learning, and wellbeing. Apple Podcasts Listen to Intonicated on Apple Podcasts

DanceSafe DanceSafe

Transcript

Joe Moore (00:11): Everybody, welcome back to Psychedelics Today. Joe Moore here, joined by Kenneth Tupper. How are you doing today?

Kenneth Tupper (00:17): Great. Nice to be here. Thanks, Joe.

Joe Moore (00:19): Absolutely. So you're joining us today from the glorious Vancouver Island, is that right?

Kenneth Tupper (00:25): Correct. Victoria, British Columbia, traditional territories of the Songhees, Esquimalt, and Songhees First Nations.

Joe Moore (00:33): Gorgeous. Thank you. And I'm... I'm going to try to introduce you a little bit here, but we'll have you kind of tee yourself up a bit. But we met at the Psychedelic Safety Institute Summit at UC Berkeley. Stacey Wallen helped put that together with a few others. It was a pretty big event. And maybe we can chat about this later, but it was the first ever event I went to that felt like AI was a backbone component to the event, which was fascinating. I don't, you know, at times uncomfortable, but also like, you know, I was respecting just how skillfully it was employed. But let's talk about you. You've got a long career in harm reduction. You've been able to volunteer not only with DanceSafe, but many other harm reduction groups. And then you spent some time in the British Columbian government doing harm reduction work. Is that right?

Kenneth Tupper (01:28): Over twenty years, yep.

Joe Moore (01:31): That's a bit. So thanks for all that hard work. How do you like to describe your career, your position in the ecosystem here?

Kenneth Tupper (01:42): So predating my public health career was an academic interest in psychedelics, or the term that I used originally was entheogen. And not in the health or healing space, but education. I was interested in advancing some understanding of the metaphor of plant teachers in traditional indigenous uses of plants like ayahuasca, peyote, or psilocybin mushrooms. And then from that got into accidentally harm reduction. I didn't even know the term at the time, but, uh, working with dance safe, running a dance safe chapter, uh, and getting involved in pill testing. And then through that, through connections, got into public health, um, and continued to sort of advance the academic work that I was doing on the side, but it was sort of two parallel trajectories, but both in the area of sort of drug policy. So my PhD, uh, ended up being on ayahuasca and the sort of public policy implications of its emergence of the Amazon. But my work in government was in the harm reduction space, prevention writ large, but prevention of what? This is one of the questions I asked, you know, preventing harms or preventing use or preventing quote abuse, a term that I find problematic for a number of reasons. And yeah, and then also got into some clinical related work like opiate agonist treatment, methadone, which back in the day was kind of debated whether it's more of a treatment or a harm reduction intervention. Some people fell on one side or the other. In some ways it's both. Yeah, so that kind of defines, and then the last ten years working primarily on the toxic drug crisis or opioid overdose crisis here in British Columbia, which is one of the hardest hit provinces in Canada. And then still sort of keeping my toe in the world of psychedelics in and out, more out for the past number of years for a variety of more personal reasons, but coming back in and that Psychedelic Safety Institute Summit was part of that. And yeah, that's me in a nutshell.

Joe Moore (03:50): So I have a confession i'll make on this show for the first time ever i am just now for the first time reading jonathan ott's pharmacotheon and i'm a bit embarrassed um that i'm just getting around to it now because his analysis uh commentary is just writing is so helpful and good and he he uh was one of the team that helped push this word and theogen And I'm just, right before this, I was working through his description of, you know, why entheogen as a term. I find it interesting. And I don't know, I just, anything that smells a little religious, I push back from, as if psyche doesn't have those religious connotations anyway. But, you know, in our strange times, I kind of use the psychedelic term as kind of like, in a way, to just be loud and proud about it, kind of leveraging gay rights movement kind of logic a bit. But I don't know, and sorry to go down something so banal as defining why you might wanna use a term like entheogen, but could you talk about that a little bit?

Kenneth Tupper (05:07): Absolutely. And, you know, I could talk all afternoon about this. Language is sort of the world in which I swam academically. Critical discourse analysis was my sort of methodology for looking at public policy and the sort of way that language is invested with power overtly in public policy and law. of course there's micro powers and sort of everyday everyday language and discourse but for me personally the term entheogen was more sort of politically convenient in advancing an interest in this topic in through university structures in the late nineties early two thousands when the word psychedelic i mean being in the closet was the safe place to be at the time uh being more out was was sort of risky uh endeavor in terms of you know getting academic respectability um and i i found the term entheogen very helpful. So I'd come across it and reading Jonathan Ott's work and others at the time. I found it really helpful for framing traditional indigenous uses of plants versus the more sort of white powder application of a biomedical paradigm or psychotherapeutic paradigm. And I still actually find it a helpful heuristic of distinguishing entheogenic healing from psychedelic medicine with those sort of broad separations. Of course, there's lots of intersections and hybridities across them as well. And in some ways, you know, it's resonant of the failure of modern Western medicine to recognize the spiritual dimension in healing and health, something that I would argue in many most traditional indigenous cultures is seen to be, you know, synonymous, that those two concepts are completely intertwined, that the shaman functions both as a priest and And they've got the power of healing medicine man, as well as that spiritual intersection. So for me personally, that was why I ran with it. And there's a nice assonance with entheogenic education.

Joe Moore (07:13): Well, at a later date, I'd have to dig in more on this. But I want to focus on this interesting harm reduction thread. it's cool it's really important to me as well um i jokingly almost renamed the show drug war today a few times like i just it's all i really wanted to talk about um for a lot of reasons uh so back in the day you called it pill checking like it wasn't drug testing testing pill testing that's interesting and it was just like ravers or was it all sorts of people that you were supporting

Kenneth Tupper (07:51): The places we were doing it was at raves as they were called you know big electronic dance parties and my understanding is that's kind of the well there was deeper origin i think back in the early seventies there was some what we'd call drug checking happening in places like uh hate ashbury um free clinic and so there's some very sort of early moves towards it but it really kind of got lost in the shuffle for for many years and sort of the reagan era war on drugs but then With the rise of MDMA use or ecstasy use in the nineties and the illicit market that had no quality control or safety built into it, pill testing was obviously a way to discern whether or not you had actual MDMA in the so-called ecstasy pill that you bought. And for me, it was just a kind of no-brainer thing to do. Because in British Columbia, at least at that time, there was fake pills circulating, PMMA, paramethoxy methamphetamine, and others, sometimes just methamphetamine, things that were either cut in or completely sold as replacements for. But the idea that Offering people a way to learn what they think they've got was just an obvious good thing to do. But I found myself on the wrong side of law enforcement's perspective on that. They threatened to shut us down regularly and got into media battles about And I didn't even know what the term harm reduction was at the time. But it was through that work that I got introduced to people who were doing HIV prevention and trying to open Vancouver's first supervised injection site back in the early two thousands. And that was sort of my pathway into the world of public health.

Joe Moore (09:32): So were you involved with any of the American DanceSafe folks at that point?

Kenneth Tupper (09:37): Yeah, we were kind of an affiliate. So Emmanuel Sverios, I think was leading things and sort of we're in touch sort of regularly, but in order that the cards, the information cards that were given out and sort of loosely followed the protocols and procedures that were set out by an American, the OG DanceSafe. But we were somewhat autonomous as well and obviously worked in our local ecosystem.

Joe Moore (10:01): That's super interesting. Never really thought about that would have operated in the early days and then um this supervised injection site thing i find fascinating i think dr carl hart did a really good job in his books kind of popularizing the concept and somewhat normalizing the concept where i recall some of the swiss cases where people were able to maintain a habit for effectively many decades without any real health consequences and or their family noticing And that's because they had clean supplies. They were able to do that.

Kenneth Tupper (10:40): Well, actually, the critique I have of supervised injection sites is they actually don't touch the supply side of things.

Joe Moore (10:47): I think this one does, but I think in Canadian markets. But you might know better.

Kenneth Tupper (10:53): Yeah, so as it was set up, the people who used it had to procure illicitly off-site on the street market and then come in and use under medical supervision. So they could get sterile syringes, have an overdose responded to, have other wound care. I mean, there's a fully sort of wraparound healthcare and social service connection built into the site, which was part of the argument for putting it in place, was giving people a point of access instead of puddle water in the back alley. They're using sterile syringes under nurses' supervision with lots of connections and a lot of effectiveness in terms of what it was set out to do. But in terms of still relying on the illicit supply, it didn't do as much as it could have done if they had offered people a pure pharmaceutical product of a known quantity, which is what was missing from that. But you're right, I think some of the European models provided heroin prescription or diacetylmorphine

Joe Moore (11:49): Right. And I, you just kind of rattled my world puddle water. I never really kind of went that far, but I totally understand. It's probably factual.

Kenneth Tupper (12:00): No, that's exactly what was happening.

Joe Moore (12:02): My God. So yeah, this is, this is the not quite far part, far enough part that I think we all kind of want to address in psychedelia because it's, you know, it's complicated if you're, being sold what you think is LSD and you're buying something like two five I n bomb that can just harm you, kill you. And, you know, the experience might be fine the first ten times. But there's, yeah, there's just really difficult math and data behind this.

Kenneth Tupper (12:35): Well, let me sort of jump on that tangent for a second. So one of the realizations that I came to over the last decade with the toxic drug crisis, the opioid overdose crisis, was the sort of failure, the blind spot in the history of public health to recognize one