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Psychedelics Today

Emanuel Sferios - Dance Safe and MDMA The Movie

Psychedelics Today

Psychedelics Today, LLC

Life Sciences, Science, Medicine, Health & Fitness

4.6598 Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2017

⏱️ 73 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Download Emanuel Sferios joins us to talk about his upcoming film "MDMA The Movie" along with the founding story of Dance Safe. Emanuel has a fascinating story that includes.
  • Humble beginnings
  • Lots of media attention
  • Huge amounts of fundraising for harm reduction
  • A film that is going to be incredible. Check out the trailers below!
MDMA was one of the last drugs that the old guard anti drug US government worked to smear with disinformation and outright lies,  using outlets like Oprah and more to stain MDMA's reputation. While Ophra's media empire has now come around a bit, MDMA continues to hold parts of the social stigma that Oprah helped to give it. Emanuel tells the story here with on the ground details in ways that Kyle and Joe haven't heard before. We hope you love it!

If you enjoyed this episode you may love these other podcasts.

Confessions of an Underground MDMA Therapist Thomas Roberts Ph.D. – The Broad Future of Psychedelic Research
https://youtu.be/7ldu7qAdZ0Q

Show Notes/Links


Want to learn more about psychedelic harm reduction, safety, and integration? Sign up for our online course!


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About Emanuel Sferios

Emanuel Sferios is an activist, educator, public speaker and harm reduction advocate. Founding DanceSafe in 1998, Emanuel was an early pioneer of MDMA harm reduction. DanceSafe has volunteer chapters in over two dozen cities across the United States and provides non-judgmental, peer-based drug education and drug checking (a.k.a., "pill testing") services in the electronic dance music community. Emanuel also started the first public laboratory pill analysis program in 1999 which allowed ecstasy users for the first time to anonymously send tablets to a DEA-licensed laboratory for chromatography analysis. Originally publishing the results on the DanceSafe website, the program still exists today and is hosted at Ecstasydata.org. Today Emanuel speaks at colleges and universities about MDMA, harm reduction, and drug policy. He lives in Grass Valley, California with his wife and two stepchildren.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome back to Psychedelics today.

0:11.8

This is Joe with Kyle here.

0:14.0

And today on the show, we have Emmanuel Sperio, is the founder of DanceSafe.

0:18.9

He's also working on a movie called MDMA The Movie.

0:22.4

It's going to be a really cool documentary.

0:24.2

I think, did he say a timeline, Kyle?

0:26.4

I don't think so.

0:27.1

He's still raising money to finish it up.

0:29.9

But I don't know.

0:30.9

I thought it was kind of done because I know they screen it a bunch.

0:35.4

But yeah, they're probably just, they're still raising money for like, you know, extra production costs and whatnot. Right. It sounds like they're doing some fundraising right now so they can finish it up. I hope that they're able to, I think Emmanuel said they're going to try to get it into some film festivals next year. And that should be really cool. But yeah, a fantastic guest. He's brilliant, super well educated on harm reduction,

0:56.3

and he came into the subject in a really interesting way that we get into in the show.

1:01.1

Was there anything that really surprised you or excited you about the conversation?

1:04.9

I think one thing that stuck out was the history of Dan Safe and like how he came about founding the company and putting it

1:14.1

together. And also I thought it was really interesting that they were doing pill testing early on.

1:20.4

Yeah. Well, I think the technology has always been there, right? Like police have to use a similar

1:25.5

method. You'll see it on a, you know, TV shows like

1:28.9

special victim unit or whatever. They'll throw the drug in a bag and smash a little vial

1:33.4

inside the bag and it does the reaction inside a bag. So they've been, you know, this tech has been

1:38.1

around for a while, which is cool. Yeah, I guess I didn't really mean the tech. Just the fact that

1:43.1

MDMA was, became, probably like, what,

1:47.0

10 years before he founded the company. So I figure with the drug war and stuff, it'd be really

...

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