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, wh
