Civil Disobedience, City Council & Psychedelics || Daniel Carlino
Artem SmirnovCivil Disobedience, City Council & Psychedelics || Daniel Carlino
Daniel Carlino is a council member in Missoula, Montana. He is dedicated to decriminalizing plant medicines and he’s the youngest council member in Missoula history.
Daniel Carlino is a council member in Missoula, Montana. He is dedicated to decriminalizing plant medicines and he is the youngest council member in Missoula history. We were fortunate that he joined us for an interview just outside of the capital building.
“If every politician had a psychedelic experience, I think we would be getting way better outcomes in this world”
-Daniel Carlino
Daniel Carlino’s history with psychedelics
Daniel: I’ve had a lot of life-changing experiences through psychedelic experiences with psilocybin or DMT, and others. Psychedelics helped me just think about the way the world works and realign my worldview with just trying to be the best person I can be.
It’s helped me with times where I’ve been depressed or sad for a long period of time and it helped me break that by knowing that there’s a lot of new things I can learn in the world and a lot of stuff that’s worth being happy for.
I am somebody who I would never expect to be in a politician. I started studying environmental studies here in Missoula, and at that time I realized how bad it is with the climate crisis and the way that human relationship is with nature and just the harm that we’ve done.
I’ve been on beautiful hikes around Montana where I’ve been having a mushroom experience and just thinking about what I can do to try and change this.
“And part of the reason that I got into politics is just believing in myself through psychedelic experiences and thinking ‘Hey, I can change the world and step up to the plate to be in politics and be an activist.'”
What is a city council?
Daniel: So in the city council we were supposed to represent everybody in town and best we can and we work to pass local laws and local policies. So, for example, if the city Council agreed that we want to decriminalize nature, the police department and health department and everyone else who works for the city would have to go along with that and adapt to it.
In Missoula, there’s 12 of us on the city council, and we work to make local laws. We work on our zoning, which decides what can be built where and we also work on the city budget. So we decide how much money goes to the police or to the fire department or to our parks and trails and things like that.
What can the city council do about decriminalizing psychedelics?
Daniel: So part of what we were asking for was for police to not use any more time or funds on trying to arrest people for psychedelic use, possession, or growing. We were asking our county attorney here to throw out any cases that they’ve gotten around this too, but the city council, he said, wasn’t ready for this. So we ended up tabling the Decriminalize Nature resolution.
We didn’t have all the votes together, so we ended up tabling it for the meantime to give council members more months to learn more from our constituents and people about why we want to decriminalize nature and give them some more time to just soak in the facts and data around why this is a good idea.
There were more people that spoke out in favor of decriminalize nature than anything else this year- over 100 or so Missoula people came out to speak out! We had multiple addiction counselors and veterans and other people who had suffered from PTSD. That helped. We had a pretty wide coalition of people in town that were speaking in favor of this.
Why is it important that we decriminalize before we legalize?
Daniel: I think it’s really important that we decriminalize nature first because we want to make sure that there can be an abundance of naturally grown psychedelics around. We want to make sure that there’s not too much regulation that gets to decide who can grow what and who can have what.
We want to make sure that everybody has access to growing these medicines and is able to provide for themselves and not have too many governmental laws in place that would restrict that in the first place.
On civil disobedience and psychedelics
Daniel: Civil disobedience has definitely changed the United States and changed politics. Some civil disobedience that I’ve been involved in is just like standing in front of a train full of oil and coal. But I think civil disobedience to help decriminalize nature is a good method.
The rule of social movements is that every time 3.5% or more of the population has gotten involved in sustained social movements, every single social movement has been successful. With civil rights movement or women’s suffrage movement and other movements across the entire world, this has always been true.
The social movement to decriminalize nature is inevitably going to be successful. But I think it’s a great idea to lean on our neighbors and friends in the meantime to find access to these naturally growing psychedelics.
So essentially, getting more people involved can mean educating somebody about it or helping your friend to find psychedelics or going out to your city council and being like ‘Hey, I’m somebody who wants to see this be decriminalized.’
If the police come to arrest the people that are running illegal distribution of psychedelics, that the civil disobedience would be gathering a big crowd of people and physically blocking the police them from arresting them.
Civil disobedience would be to try and stop the government from enforcing these unethical laws with the mass numbers.
Watch the full interview with Daniel Carlino
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