SAFE DRUG USE, COLLEGE EXPERIMENTATION AND KRYSTLE COLE

College Student Experiences Firsthand The Pros And Cons Of Contraband,
Offers Her Take On Drug Laws And What She Wished She Knew About Tripping

Krystle Cole has tried more psychedelic drugs than all of the Beatles
combined, personally knew the operators of the biggest LSD laboratory
in history and lived through some of the most profound and darkest
experiences a human being can have, such as run-ins with the law and
bad trips. A native of Kansas and former Tucson dweller, Cole is a
pursuing a master's degree in psychology from Capella University.
Through her experience, she became an expert in psychedelics and safe
drug use, penned a book called "Lysergic" and founded Neurosoup.com, a
website that focuses on trying to educate people on responsible drug
use.

Daily Wildcat: Could you tell me a little about your education? You
dropped out of high school at 15?

Cole: It just wasn't working out for me, so I went for the first
semester of high school, and that was it. So after that, I went to
college and I got my associate's degree by the time I was 18. And
then I kind of started making some bad decisions aE& big decisions
that greatly impacted my life.

I met some people (William Leonard Pickard and Gordon Todd Skinner)
who were chemists. They had the largest LSD lab in the world, and they
got busted about six months after I met them. During that six months I
was with them -- and a couple of years after -- I did a lot of
different psychedelics and entheogens which taught me a lot of things.

Where do you see the drug laws going these days? Is it getting better
or worse?

I think it's getting a lot worse. For instance, substances like LSD
and MDMA, they might not be 100 percent safe, but compared to a lot of
the research chemicals out there, they're very safe. The research
chemicals that are on the market, like MDPV aE& (the government) will
find a drug out there, like the research chemicals, they'll schedule
it, and then the people out there -- the drug dealers -- will just
find more research chemicals to sell. And these research chemicals,
some of them can be highly damaging to people.

So I think that is one major problem with our drug laws, that our
government shouldn't be making people say, "OK, do I want to break the
law and cause myself to go to jail, if I get a felony conviction, I
won't be able to get my student loans to go to college." So people are
thinking about that, and it's like, "OK, well, illegal drugs could
cause me major legal problems. I don't want that." And then they're
like, "OK, what can I get legally? I can buy this stuff that's a
research chemical on the Internet and it's legal, so I'm gonna do
that!" And that's what the user's thinking.

The government's trying to act like they're doing something good for
people's health by making all of these substances like LSD and
psilocybin mushrooms illegal, but those things have some proven safety
profiles. You can have bad trips on them, true, and you can get
(hallucinogen persisting perceptual disorder) and flashbacks in a very
small percentage of the population primarily with LSD. But
comparatively, with research chemicals -- there are numerous ones, I
could list them off for you -- we don't know if they're going to be
addictive or if they're going to cause brain damage or if they're
carcinogenic.

They have no idea, but that's what the people are doing now to get
around the drug laws. aE& I mean, of course I think we should have our
personal freedom to do what we want. If we want to use entheogens for
spiritual purposes, we should be allowed to. I think the worst thing
right now is that (drug laws) are damaging people's health because
people are dodging around them by using research chemicals.

So when it comes to drug laws, what exactly is your
ideal?

When you look at something like heroin, it's really bad for
you.

It's addictive, it'll ruin your life, it'll ruin your family members'
lives, it's going to make it so you can't go to work, you'll steal,
try to do anything you can to get heroin. It's highly addictive. There
are substances out there that aren't doing that kind of damage that
are also in the schedule one category. I think that's what needs to
happen to drug (policy) reform: The government needs to look at and
ask, "Are these drugs really that damaging?"

I believe that some drugs should be illegal, like cocaine, crack,
heroin, meth. Those things should probably stay illegal. I don't think
they're helping the public in any way. In fact, they're probably
damaging the public. Things like LSD and psilocybin, I think they are
helping people, and they can help people when used in the right set
and setting. Also, I guess with medical marijuana, a lot of places are
doing medical marijuana now. Isn't Arizona one of the new medical
marijuana states?

Yeah, they voted it in last year, but Gov. Jan Brewer is against
it.

Yeah, medical marijuana is one good thing that's happened with drug
law reform. Some people are seeing that cannabis is not a(s) damaging
as what people have made it out to be. And I think entheogens --
psilocybin and LSD -- are in that same category. They're just not as
damaging as people think.

Some have said they can actually cure addictions, right?

Exactly. They've done lots of studies on LSD before it was made
illegal. Using LSD to cure people with alcoholism, they had good
results. As well as substances like ibogaine, which are being used all
over the world to treat substance abuse and addictions. But not here
in the U.S.

Our government just won't accept that they're so stuck in the social
stigma of what entheogens are.

I think also, at some level, the powers that be might not want the
social destabilization that happened in the 60s with the hippies,
everyone taking LSD. I don't think that they really want that to
happen again because people may wake up and say, "Hey, I don't want to
wake up and go to work every day to buy what the TV tells me to buy
and to take all the prescription medications to make me happy. I don't
want to buy into the system, I want to realize that happiness is
created by something far deeper and far more fundamental to being
human than having a good job and paying my taxes."

I think it'll be destabilizing, so I think that's part of why they
don't want entheogens to be legal.

What advice would you have for us entheogen-hungry college
students?

If it were me, and I could go back to being 18, before I made some
poor decisions, I would be more careful in choosing who I decided to
trip with and who I decided to trust at that level. Because, that's
been the biggest mistake for me: the people I chose to hang out with
while I was using entheogens. And (I wish) I would've had the
resources back then to look things up on the Internet and educate myself.