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BHS Student:  …Boulder High is the only High School that helps plan and host panels for this Conference.  As students here at Boulder High, we try to create panels that will discuss topics and issues very present in the lives of students here today.  [indecipherable] and myself are the creators and producers for today’s panel, STDs, which stands for Sex, Teens, and Drugs.  We’d like to take a moment and please ask you to turn off all cell phones, and now devote your full attention to the panel we’ve organized.  And now we would like to introduce our moderator, Miss Laura [indecipherable].  (applause from audience)

Moderator:  I thank you for coming.   Our four panelists: are Joel Becker. He is a clinical professor at the Department of Psychology and at the Department of Psychiatry at the Department of Behavioral Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.  Our second panelist is Andee Gerhardt.  She is a community engagement leader with Ernst & Young’s International Accounting Firm in the Americas.  Our next panelist is Antonio Sacre.  He is an internationally touring, award-winning storyteller and performing artist based in Los Angeles.  And finally we have Sanho Tree.  He is a fellow and the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for Drug Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.  So, the way this works, they are each going to have about five minutes to make a statement on the topic, and then after that, the audience will be free to come to these two microphones to ask questions. We ask that any community members in the audience please wait until the students have had opportunities to ask questions before you come up to ask questions, Also while you’re waiting to ask a question, if you could please sit in the aisle so that not a bunch of people are standing and blocking the view.  Next, make sure that your questions are appropriate and polite, and that they’re not questions that have already been asked that we just heard the answer to.  And finally, make sure that they are questions.  Usually beginning with a question word, like what or how or who or when.  (laughter from audience).   For those are questions, which is what we’re asking.  We’re not making our own policy statements. Okay.  Thank you, and let me please remind you again to please turn your cell phones on, off, not on.  This is not a great time to be text messaging or answering calls.  Thank you very much.  (applause and cheering from audience)

Sanho Tree:  Hi.  Good afternoon.  My name is Sanho Tree.  This is my privilege to be my second time back at Boulder High.  I first spoke here about 3 or 4 years ago with the Conference on World Affairs and the topic that you all picked at that time was  Sex, Drugs, and International Relations.  Now, far be it from to suggest that you have a one-track mind, but I seem to be noticing a recurring theme here.  I’m going to be the designated drug person on this panel.  That’s what I work on and I believe, first of all, that the drug war has failed.  It hasn’t worked, it isn’t going to work and we need to find alternative solutions that minimize the harms caused by these drugs as well as the harms caused by the war on drugs which, in my opinion, now exceed the harms caused by the drugs themselves in many respects, and that’s a pretty staggering statement because the drugs do actually cause a lot of harm in our society. 

But I want to talk about why some of these policies backfire, particularly with regard to students.  The drug czar’s office is on a push to have federal funding to have local schools drug test their students.  Random drug testing.  Now, the Supreme Court has already approved drug testing for after school activities for—not just for sports, but also for chess club, (laughter from audience) for band, for all these other things, as though somehow it might impair your performance.  I’m sure that doesn’t happen here really, but its up to the local school districts to decide, but the federal government wants to make that money available.  But I think it’s going to have some unintended consequences. 

Number one, in terms of after-school activities, the best way to keep kids off of drugs, if that’s the objective, is to get them involved in after-school activities, in structured activities.  Between the hours of three and six typically, when kids are left on their own, that they have time on their hands, and drug use, especially marijuana use, becomes a very tempting default activity, if you don’t have something else to do, and so by having random drug test for students who participate in after-school activities, you may scare off the student who perhaps was at a party, perhaps a joint was passed around, perhaps had a puff two weeks ago or something, but now they’re going to be terrified that they’re going to turn up positive on a drug test, and so it scares people away from participating in after-school activities.  That’s exactly the part of the population you don’t want to chase away.  Right? 

Another problem with mandatory drug testing is that you all learn.  You learn from mistakes, you learn from, you engage from applied learning, and unfortunately some drugs show up on drug tests much easier than others.  If you want to really create a really dangerous world, there are all these new drugs available now.  It’s an alphabet soup of letters and things, are all these chemicals that can be cooked up.  You know with a graduate degree in Chemistry, you can manufacture all these drugs that are really much, much more dangerous than the stuff that’s already out there, and those are the ones that are hard to test for.  And so, the danger is that kids will say,  well, you know, if you smoke pot, that will show up on a drug test for three weeks or a month, but if you do this new drug here, that won’t show up  and that will have a profoundly unintended consequence of ushering in a dangerous new world of truly dangerous drugs, where we have no track record, we don’t know the long-term consequences of these very powerful synthetic drugs.

Also, drug testing violates in so many ways the things that are so sacred to our society in terms of teaching good citizenship, engaging in trust. Trust is very important when it comes to talking about drugs and drug prevention, and this is a place where we teach people to respect things, like the Constitution, and it bothers me greatly when we have all these exceptions to the Constitution.  President Bush wants all sorts of War on Terror exceptions, he gets to do whatever he wants regardless of the Constitution, so he would argue.  And, you know, this is where we teach people about the Fourth Amendment, your right to be free from search and seizure, and privacy.  This is not a good way to teach good citizenship by abusing people’s Constitutional rights, regardless of whether you’re a minor or an adult. 

Another problem with the drug war is that the way we teach kids about drugs has backfired.  The DARE program, I don’t know if it’s in this school or not, it’s been kicked out of many high schools around the country, and elementary schools and junior highs as well, because the data has been so disappointing.  Even the DARE program itself, which stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education, when Officer Friendly comes into the school and tells your kids,  if you smoke a joint, you’ll be shooting heroin in a month.  (laughter from audience)  All these incredible exaggerations, and the fear-based education produces an, again, unintended result, in terms of backfiring.  So that many kids know that their older siblings perhaps may have experimented with marijuana and didn’t end up shooting heroin, it happens very, very rarely, but they think,  what other lies are grown ups telling us?   And so they throw the baby out with the bath water.  That, you know, you don’t hear the important messages about heroin, about methamphetamines, and really far more dangerous drugs.  The assumption is that the adults are exaggerating or lying to you.  It’s also the way we teach kids about alcohol, for instance.  You can’t have honest education with a series of exaggerations because it backfires.  You know, the message is,  Kids, alcohol is bad for you, it will make you feel sick, you’ll throw up, you’ll die in a car wreck, and you’ll get pregnant, in that order.  (laughter from audience)  And, you know, but, until, until, the day you turn twenty-one, and then boy, look at all the commercials on TV for Budweiser, you’re going to go to parties, you are going to look cool, you going to get laid, (laughter from audience) you know all these.  What happens between the age of twenty and twenty-one that one-day, miraculously this evil substance turns into something that’s marketed toward young people, young adults, and it’s a wonderful thing according to the ads.  And we have to move away from these kinds of exaggerations both in terms of the hysteria about warning kids about alcohol but also the ads by the beer industry that make you think that you’re going to be glamorous or you’re going to look sophisticated.  If you think alcohol is glamorous, go stand in front of a frat house on a Friday night, (laughter from audience) and watch these people stagger out of there.  And I’ve been in that position myself.  And they think, yeah, I’m really cool, but when you’re puking in your shoes and making an ass of yourself it’s really not. 

And so, and finally, I think that we need to educate kids about drugs in terms of the relative harms caused by these drugs.  And so when adults say kids, don’t take drugs, drugs make you feel bad.  No they don’t.  They make you feel good.  That’s why people take drugs.  They have bad consequences, and that’s what we have to be honest about.  So you can’t have a series of lies and then try to insert some truths in afterwards because then you’ll throw the baby out with the bath water and come up with far worse situations.  So, thank you very much. 

(applause and cheering from audience)

Andee Gerhardt:  Hi.  Sorry about the confusion.  I’m second.  Sort of to play off of what Sanho just said, I wanted to talk a little about—not, you know, I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t know about why you shouldn’t do drugs, or why you shouldn’t have sex or get pregnant and drop out of high school.  I mean, you guys have heard it all a million times before.  So I just wanted to try to give you some context as to why it’s sort of really important to stay in school and minimize those things happening as much as possible.

You know, after college you start thinking about what you want to do with your life, and, you know, I don’t know, over a 40 year working career, if you have a B.A. you actually get to earn, which is a Bachelor of Arts degree, a four year degree, you get to earn minimum, 1.1 million dollars more than somebody who doesn’t have a Bachelor of Arts degree, and I think that that actually comes out to have huge consequences for the lifestyle you want to have after you grow up and become more independent.  This isn’t about being a downer, but it is about thinking about the choices you are making today, and how they effect you over the long haul.  I personally spent ninth grade high and failed a couple of classes.  This was after being a straight A student.  And that had consequences for me when I was applying for school because my grade point average was much lower than it probably could have been, and I had more limited choices about where I could go to school, and more limited choices influences where you end up working, or getting into grad school, and I don’t think when I was in ninth grade I was thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.  I was having fun with my friends getting high after school.  So I think you just try to, I guess my point is, my goal today, is sort of to just let you know that while the immediate fun is fun, the long-term effects actually have ramifications. 

By 2010, and I just pulled off all these statistics from the internet so you can get them as well, two-thirds of all jobs in the US will require a college degree.  So that’s your graduating classes.  That’s very different than 20 years ago, 22 years ago, when I graduated from high school, and I think that’s something you guys have to keep in mind.  Because you’re not just competing for jobs any more with folks from your town, or your city, or your state.  You’re competing with folks all over the world.  And this is a serious topic, and we do tend to make light of it, in a lot of ways because its sex and drugs and your guys’ lives, but it is your guys’ lives. 

It turns out that only 18 percent of freshman in high school wind up graduating from college.  That’s as of last year.  The numbers are not doing so well.  Colorado, you should be happy to know, has one of the highest graduation rates, high school graduation rates, in the country.  You are up to 89 percent.  You guys are doing really well.  So, your school systems are working for you.  And the cost ends up being pretty heavy.  So, I guess I wanted to open up the discussion as to, when you are making the choices you’re making today, what are the long term consequences that those have on your overall lifestyle.  I’m probably not doing it very eloquently and I apologize for that.  I think that a lot of times we say, as adults we say, don’t do drugs and don’t drink and don’t have sex before you’re married or before you know what you’re doing, and use birth control so that you don’t get STDs and AIDS.  I grew up in a world in high school there was no such thing as AIDS when I was in high school, so that wasn’t so much an issue, it was more about getting pregnant.  But we don’t really ever talk to you about what happens 10 years down the line, 20 years down the line, and how that effects your life.  So I just wanted to bring some awareness to you about how that does effect you economically, socially, your education, where your opportunities will be in terms of your career.  It does, it does.  There are opportunities to correct.  I have an amazing job.  I am pretty successful.  But I have to say, it made it much more a struggle to be sort of screwing up and touring with the Dead through high school later in life, which is what I was doing.  So I guess I just want to impart, you know, this: find some balance with the, you know, having the fun and experimenting and enjoying what you’re doing, whether it’s learning, or sexually, or with drugs and alcohol and hanging out with your friends, but keep focused because it is your life, and eventually your parents don't bail you out, and eventually you’re going to have to do it on your own.  That’s all really I wanted to talk about.

(applause from audience)

Joel Becker:  Hi.  My name is Joel Becker, and I’m a clinical psychologist.  I’m going to ducktail off a little bit of what Andee said, but I think I’m going to go in a little bit of a different direction, because I’m going to encourage you to have sex, and I’m going to encourage you to use drugs appropriately.  (applause and cheering from audience)  And why I’m going to take that position is because you’re going to do it anyway.  So, my, my approach to this is to be realistic, and I think as a psychologist and a health educator, it’s more important to educate you in a direction that you might actually stick to.  So I want to, I’m going to stay mostly today talking about the sex side, because that’s the area I know more about. 

I want to encourage you to all have healthy sexual behavior.  Now what is healthy sexual behavior?  Well, I don’t care if it’s with men and men, women and women, men and women, however, whatever combination you would like to put together.  But I think that we know enough about what constitutes healthy sexual behavior to think about it along two lines.  One is, the issue of health and disease.  So all the information that you can get about the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, you should have.  And then we should be realistic about what you are actually going to stick to, and what you are not.  We were handed this survey that was done here at the high school, and one very shocking statistic that came to me was, and actually the people that compiled it missed something here, there was a question ‘have you had sex?’ and 33 percent of the respondents, and I guess this goes all the way from the ninth grade to the twelfth grade so we’d expect it to be lower in the ninth grade, higher in the twelfth grade, 33 percent, so a third of you copped to having sex.  How many were under the influence of drugs or alcohol when you had sex? Eight. That would be 8 of the 15, which is actually more than 50 percent, because they saw it was what percent of the total, its over 50 percent of you who are having sex are having sex under the influence of alcohol and drugs.  If you look at the AIDS transmission literature, this is a major route of transmission.  People having sex under the influence because you get careless, and you get sloppy.  (laughter from audience)  So that’s very important to look at that relationship between those two variables. 

So, what else do I mean by having healthy sexual behavior?  I think that we also want to have a definition of healthy sexual behavior as sexual behavior that is appropriate to your level of emotional development.  Now what does that mouthful mean?  Well, I’m not sure that ninth graders, tenth graders, eleventh graders, and twelfth graders are all exactly equal, in fact I’m fairly sure you’re not, in your level of emotional development in terms of what you can handle.  And if you think that having sex doesn’t come with feelings, that’s where you’re mistaken.  Sex does come with having feelings, and that’s what you have to have to be prepared for.  I’m going to come back to that in a second, but I also just want to just comment on, you know, I’ve been told that this is a very liberal high school, and I’m probably speaking to the choir by encouraging you to have healthy sexual behavior because most of your parents probably have given you similar views, but you know, when you are 13, 12, 13, 14, certainly one of the most appropriate sexual behaviors would be masturbation.  (laughter from audience)  Masturbate.  Please masturbate. 

Now, if any of you have been told, and one of the problems that we have right now is that religious communities are trying to give us information and sometimes that information isn’t correct.  So I went to a very interesting panel this morning, and I just reference the story of Onan.  You know that the sin of masturbation is the sin of onanism?   Does anyone know what that Bible story was?  Well, where it came from I found out today, was that you know these people were all Jewish because this was the Old Testament, and in the Jewish law, when a man dies, his brother automatically becomes the woman’s husband, so the brother inherits his brother’s wife and becomes father to that brother’s children.  Well there was this one very wicked man named Onan, and Onan was evil in the following way: he had sex with his brother’s wife but he refused to make her pregnant because he was evil and it was a woman’s right to get pregnant, and instead, he spilled his seed on the ground.  How they got from there to there, that that meant that masturbation is not okay, no one seems to be able to figure out, but that’s where it came from.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, and it doesn’t even address the issue of masturbation in women.  So, it’s not a sin to masturbate in my world.

So, lets go back again to the issue of developmental, emotional development, and what you can handle.  I’m going to reference right now a famous article by a guy I don’t reference much, whose name was Sigmund Freud.  Ever hear of him?  Okay.  Well, Sigmund Freud, for which we’ve actually proven most of what he said was untrue, so you’ll know that, but he happened to write this paper in 1923 that had the following title, “The Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinctions Between the Sexes.”  Let’s interpret that.  In other words, how is your reaction to intimacy or sex different based on the layout of your sexual organs?  Where’s a woman’s sexual organs?  Inside her body.  Where’s a boy’s sexual organs?  Outside his body.  (laughter from audience)  We’ve got a set-up here, if you take a look at this.  In order for a girl to have sex, she makes herself vulnerable, she “opens herself up to the male” and inevitably, feelings follow that.  So girls, this is really tough for you.  Boys don’t have that reaction.  Their sex organs are outside their body, we older people make jokes and say teenage boys will stick their you-know-what in a melon, (laughter from audience)  I mean, that’s about as much feeling as they need to have for the object.  (laughter from audience)  And after it’s over, it can be as meaningless as you could imagine.  So you have to all be prepared for those differences between the two of you.  In today’s world, I’m understanding also that girls have become the aggressor.  So I’ve had patients who have had 13 or 14 year old boys in high school, and they’ve been very worried about the girls, the girls who want another notch in their belt for how many boys they’ve performed oral sex on.  I think that’s having sexual, I mean emotional, consequences for the boys also.  So what I’m saying here, and then I’ll wrap up, I encourage you to have a healthy sex life that is both responsible and appropriate for what you can handle emotionally.

Thank you.

(applause and cheering from audience)

Antonio Sacre:  Hello.  It’s an honor to be back here.  I’ve been here the past couple years.  I wrote something this morning, and I’d like to read it.  All the names have been changed, and like my storytelling teacher told me, all of this is true, and some of it actually happened. 

I gotta say something to you students right now, but how?  If I was in the audience, at my high school back in the 1980s, right now, listening to someone like me, talk about anything, I’d be doing anything but listening.  I’d be flicking John Whitwell so hard on his ear, tears would come to his eyes.  I’d be reading the next installment of the Incredible Hulk.  We had comics when I was a kid.  Gheez.  I’d be figuring out a way to play Mattel Electronic Football, and you have no idea what that handheld game was.  It had a little red dot on it, that you had move past other little red dots, and if you got to the end, you did it again ten times and then you got a touchdown.  I’d be asking Jay Murphy to pull my finger and he would act all smart and say, “No way, because I know what happens when I do it.” And I’d whisper, “Come on man, my finger is all cramped up from playing Mattel Electronic Football and it really hurts man, I can’t straighten it out.  Can’t you please, please just pull my finger?” And like Lucy convincing Charlie Brown to kick the football again, he’d fall for it again and a whole row would bust out laughing even if it smelled bad, and one of us would get sent to the office.  And I’d snake my headphones from my Walkman through my shirt to my ears.  A Walkman is kind of like an iPod (laughter from audience) except that it plays a cassette, a cassette is like a little box that plays music, and if you had a really expensive Walkman it would play actually play the other side [indecipherable phrase].  And I’d walk out into the hallway singing, “Whoa, here she comes, watch out boy, she’ll chew you up, whoa here she comes, she’s a man-eater.”  I was super cool in high school.  Damn. 

Well, anyway, I’m the last person to listen to someone like me talk about anything, especially sex.  But there are some things I wish I could say to my teenage self now at my age.  I wish I could somehow go back in time and speak to me now at my age back when I was 15, but if (singing:) “I could turn back time, (laughter from audience) if I could find a way,” I’d talk to me as a young man and I’d say (rapid “storytelling” voice:), “Yo, Antonio, when Carla damn Rosio tells you she wants to kiss you, don’t ask her if you’re going to get stuck to her because you got braces, (laughter from audience) because first of all, it’s impossible, and second of all, she didn’t have no braces, and third of all, you’re going to feel and sound stupid, and she’s going to kiss you anyway, and you’re going to like it, a lot.  And when your dad from Cuba comes into your room with a box of condoms and a Playboy magazine and says ‘Mijo, you make me proud,’ (laughter and cheering from audience) don’t bring those condoms on the bus, because Joey Fray will look at you and say, ‘You don’t even know how to use them,’ and even though its true, and you’re gonna say, ‘Yeah-huh,’ he’s going to say, ‘Uh-uhh.’ And you’ll say ‘Yeah-huh.’ ‘Uh-uhh.’ ‘Yeah-huh.’ ‘Uh-uhh.’ ‘Yeah-huh.’ He’s going to say ‘Yeah, well, prove it,’ and you won’t even know how to open the package. (laughter from audience)  And when Matt Hammers dares Danny Hammerback at a boy-girl truth or dare party to put his, how should I say this, [indecipherable] hunka hunka burning love at that remote controlled race car track (laughter from audience) and tells you to put the car on the track, don’t pull that trigger.  Because when you send that car crashing into his one-eyed [indecipherable] what you’re doing is sending 20 volts of electricity into a place where you don’t want to get electricity, and all of the girls [indecipherable] electrified Danny candy.”  (laughter from audience)

And this goes to what Joel was saying, (reverts to “storytelling persona”) when you rub yourself one time alone in your bed, and something comes out of you, and you get so scared because you have no idea what it is, and you freak out, don’t freak out, man.  Don’t go to your mom.  (laughter from audience)  Because, even though she’s a nurse, and doesn’t even bat an eye when you show her, she says, “Well, honey, you were masturbating, and what you have there is semen.  Its perfectly natural, but you usually don’t want to do that and show people.” (laughter from audience)  And don’t ask anyone at school about masturbation except John Whitwell because when you tell John, he tells you that 98 percent of the boys at school are masturbating and the other 2 percent that say they aren’t are lying.  And that makes you feel better.  But don’t tell Jay-pull-my-finger-Murphy, because even though he can’t figure out the pull-my-finger-game, he knows a million different ways to say masturbation, and to get back at you for the pull-my-finger-game, he starts calling you Captain Jack, and Antonio Chicken, and Choker Stackery, Antonio Wackery, and 50 more.  (laughter from audience) 

And wet dreams are fun, and rare, so enjoy them when you get them.  (laughter from audience)  And don’t worry if you dream something truly weird, like that dream you had about play-doh and your neighbor’s trampoline, and you wake up all sticky and sweaty, just take a shower and don’t even think a moment about it.  It’s just your sub-conscious working something out, although in this case I don’t know what the hell I was working out.  (laughter from audience)

And know this, most of your classmates, when they brag about sex, are lying.  Those people that brag about having sex, if you need to talk about it with someone, don’t talk to someone who’s bragging, talk with one of your friends in a quiet time. 

And I know me when I was 15, and I know now at 38 deep in my heart that there are some things that me at 15 should have never done.  There should have been a law not allowing me to have the ability to drive until I was at least 23 because I was stupid as hell behind the wheel, risking my life every time I drove and, worse, risking others’ lives.  (reverts to storytelling voice)  Like that time you almost killed little Jane on her tricycle because you were trying to drive like the Dukes of Hazard (laughter from audience)—the TV show, not the movie—when I was a kid.  And you at 15, little Antonio, should have waited to have sex.  Because I know now, and I know you weren’t ready for what you felt.  And when you got older and you were ready, it was transcending, and beautiful, and amazing, and like God, but you didn’t wait, and you should have at least known that when Carla, super hot junior, invited you over to her house for the first time for you to have sex, when you were a sophomore, and she tells you, “It’s okay, you’ll like it,” she’s telling you the truth.  But when she tells you don’t worry, her mom never comes home this early, she’s lying.  (laughter from audience)  Because by the time she tells you that, when you’re naked on her bed with her, her mom is already in the house, coming up the stairs.  And when you hide, don’t hide in her mom’s shower, because for some reason, that’s the first place she looks.  (laughter from audience)  And you’ll be there with your clothes in your hands with the shower dripping on your head, and when she asks you, prepare something better for her question, “Who are you?” “I don’t know.” “What are you doing here?” “I don’t know.” “What’s your name?” “I don’t know.” And you run down the street, buck-naked.  (laughter from audience) And when you finally stop behind a tree and put on your clothes, you realize you lost your virginity to someone you didn’t even like.  And you feel dirty, and bad, and you want it back.  But you can’t think of anything else.  And when she invites you back to her house, you say yes.  And she says, “Don’t worry, my mom won’t be back,” that’s true.  And you say something about a condom and she says, “Don’t worry, I’m clean, and I can’t get pregnant,” and I swear to God she said, “because the moon is full.” (laughter from audience)  And when she says that, don’t believe her.  Because a few weeks later she says she’s late getting her period, and those four days waiting until she finally gets her period are the longest of your short life.  (laughter from audience)  And from that day on, you swear you will always use condoms.

But, they’re tricky.  And even through in your teens, even when your 16 and 17, you could have thousands of erections, sometimes 50 in a day, and you know because you counted (laughter from audience), [indecipherable phrase] the act of putting on a condom, for me at least, makes me lose my erection almost every time.  That’s the thing they don’t tell you about condoms. If you’re lucky enough to get them on, and you still stay hard, it’s hard to stay hard. (laughter from audience)  And it doesn’t feel as good.  And sometimes you hurt the woman because you can’t feel her, because you didn’t know, when you were 16, that lubrication like KY helps you stay hard and makes her feel better.  And I know how hard it is to talk like that to a girl.  It’s even hard now for me as an adult.  So I don’t know how it is for you to be able to say so. 

So its no surprise that me at 15 stopped using condoms when she said she was going on the pill, and the next thing you know, something is leaking out of your penis, and it hurts when you pee.  So then you find yourself in a clinic across town, hands around your ankles.  Dr. Walters pulls out a huge q-tip meant for a horse or something, (laughter from audience) and sticks it right there and says, “This might hurt for a moment.” (laughter from audience)  And he puts it in where things should only come out, and you say “Doc, that kind of hurts,” and he says, “Yeah?  Well, you should have thought about that if you weren’t using condoms.” (laughter and applause from audience)

And even that experience won’t teach you about condoms.  And when you finally fall in love, when you’re a senior and old enough to know, with that beautiful, amazing, angelic girl that makes you laugh, and you trust her with your heart, with all of these stories, and more, and making love with her is literally that, an act of creation, that creates more love in the world, and fills you full of light and hope and joy, and you hold her and she holds you and it is as close to heaven as you can get.  And you would move mountains for her if you could.  And she goes on the pill and she is clean, and you believe her.  And you should, because she really loves you, little Antonio, 16 years old.  And she forgets to take her pill one day because she’s 17, and amazing, but she’s not perfect.  I know women in their 30s who forget to take their pill.  And a little while later, you both make a decision that you’ll regret for the rest of your lives—every year, marking how old it would have been.  And how it would have been to have been a 17 year-old father.  And you’re glad that you’ve had that choice, and it makes sense, but why do you have a whole in your heart, all these years later?  And you can’t go back in time and tell myself that.

(applause and cheering from the audience)

Moderator:  Okay, so if you guys have questions, now is the time.

BHS Student:  Is it working? Okay.  I just wanted to ask because I’ve seen a huge increase in, like, people in general having sex earlier, just from, like, my observations of people that I know, and I was wondering if you had any idea why people that arem like, 11 or 12 are having sex?

Moderator:  Who wants to take that one?  Is this directed for a specific person?

BHS Student: Joel, I guess.

Becker:  That’s a really good question.  I don’t think there is an easy answer.  I think it’s probably a combination of what you’re exposed to in the media, probably it comes also from a lack of good parenting in some situations, absent parents, and probably from a lack of ability to attend educational panels like this. 

BHS Student:  Well, first I want to give you guys all props, because I figured you guys would come and, like, lecture us about sex, and, like, we shouldn’t do drugs and whatever, so it’s a relief.  I actually have a question for Mr. Tree, and I was going to ask you about the fact that, like, drugs like LSD and stuff, I heard that were originally like worked in labs by the US army, I don’t know. And my question is about how, why when some drugs get shut down and stuff, if you think that, like, the way we dealt with all the drugs people were doing, you know, without LSD, without all these other drugs in the 60s we wouldn’t have had this, like, cultural revolution, and what I’m saying is if stopping one thing makes things more serious, and if things get more serious, do you worry about the whole creation and the way these drugs do effect their community changes. I also want to say, like, the Greeks, before Catholicism—

Moderator:  Ask a question.

BHS Student:  Yeah, that was my question, but, you know, before that, before all these rules you know, expression [indecipherable] were, like, totally different.

Sanho Tree:  Well, your first point about LSD, its true.  The Army did experiment with LSD, and so did the CIA, in terms of trying to find a truth serum or some way to interrogate prisoners.  It was also used in psychotherapy experimentally to treat alcoholism and other things like that.  It was originally discovered by a Swiss chemist, I believe—Albert Hoffman, I think in the 1940s, perhaps, or 30s.  But anyway, it’s been around a very long time, and it certainly did contribute a lot to the culture of the 60s.  But what, you know, in terms of how do we deal with this problem, it goes all the way back to the Greeks as you said.  I believe in a doctrine, a philosophy, called harm reduction, which is different from zero tolerance or the drug war.  What that means is that drugs have been with us, mind-altering substances have been with our society, as far as recorded history and will always be with us to some extent or another.  The question is can we minimize the harm caused by these things, as well as the harm caused by the war on drugs?  And what history teaches us is that as soon as human beings learned to domesticate grain, fermentation came right afterwards.  We’ve always had some ways to alter our consciousness, and in many ways, it’s a natural desire.  Some people get it through religion, through meditation, some people get it through the arts, or some people get it through drugs.  And sometimes it’s used by traditional cultures, indigenous cultures—in the Amazon and all over the world, actually, there are psychedelic substances.  But they were controlled; it’s never abused.  Historically, thousands of years, they weren’t abused, and yet they had some of the most powerful psychedelic substances known to humanity.  But it was a method, a regime of sacred control as opposed to criminal control.  It was the shaman that guided you through the experiment, through the experience, and interpreted the visions you would see, and it was part of their culture, part of their religious practice.  And so I would like to see ultimately a form, different types of regulation of drugs, for adults, that involve different types of control rather than criminal control, because ultimately in a nation of 300 million people, in a so-called free society, its very difficult to police what people are going to do in the privacy of their own homes.  So I think we should hold people accountable for their conduct, much like the way we do with alcohol, rather than the substances that happen to be in their urine or their body at any given time.  Does that answer your question?

Joel Becker:  I would add onto what Sanho said in terms of that same thing I was talking about, in terms of your emotional development.  I mean, I agree with Sanho that the human animal has seemed to want to change its consciousness to some other consciousness since the beginning of time, and I think that people are going to continue to do that.  But, I think we have to find a way for people to do that in the safest way possible—harm reduction.  And there’s no question that people’s worlds are changed after their consciousness is changed.  Well, you have to really sort of think, am I ready to have my world changed?  I’m 14 years old.  Maybe I’m not ready to see what one sees on LSD.  Maybe I’m not ready to have the feelings that mescaline provides in my body, or ecstasy, because a lot of those feelings have to do with feelings of being out of control, and they can be very scary to a person who doesn’t have a strong enough sense of themselves, and that’s why people end up having bad trips at young ages.  They’re just not ready.  As a psychologist, I know the history of the use of psychedelics. There’s a very famous man named Timothy Leary at Harvard who did therapy with LSD.  Even today, there are psychiatrists who will do sessions under the influence of ecstasy.  If I had some, maybe I’d do it with somebody, but I don’t, (laughter from audience) you know.  I haven’t tried it but there are people that do it. 

Sanho Tree:  And also, I want to add quickly, you know, I’m 42 years old, and if I could talk to myself, as Antonio said, if I could to myself back then I would say, I would tell myself, some of you in this audience aren’t going to make it to this age.  Some of you are going to die from overdose, some of you are going to die in car accidents, under the influence perhaps, some of you are going to contract HIV or hepatitis C, and it will be a slow, painful illness, and some of you may commit suicide because you try to self-medicate yourself with illicit drugs rather than seeking help from people who would know what they’re doing.  So I don’t want to make light of this.  But, on the other hand, I know that it’s not going to go away, and we should approach these things responsibly and try to minimize the harms caused by these things.