I had the pleasure of interviewing James Davis recently on TSC Talks. As you’ll hear in the podcast, we connected a little over a year ago when he was just getting started with Bay Staters for Natural Medicine and looking for volunteers. At that time, I’d been experimenting with microdosing natural medicine for mental health reasons, it was helping, and I thought I’d jump in. Life pulled me away from that volunteer work, but James made a profound impression on me, and I had the notion that he’d be successful in whatever he endeavored, particularly his advocacy around decriminalization of plant entheogens, as his passion, kindness, and honesty just stands out. When we connected to do the podcast, I was not surprised, but also surprised by the progress he and the growing team of volunteers he leads has made over the past year. He hits it home on so many topics within this pod, I thought it best just to include the full transcript. Thanks, James, for showing up, being such a divine-human and inspiring, and leading many to make a difference. Enjoy the pod!
Links: https://www.baystatersnm.org/
https://www.instagram.com/baystaters/
https://www.facebook.com/BayStaters
https://twitter.com/baystaters
“James Davis is a leader of Bay Staters for Natural Medicine. They have mobilized over a thousand Massachusetts volunteers to decriminalize Somerville, Cambridge, Northampton, and Easthampton and have pending resolutions in Boston, Burlington (VT), Amherst, Worcester, Needham, Salem, and Medford. These resolutions decriminalize growing and selling plants like magic mushrooms, which reduce the risk of opioid addiction 55% after a single experience and have been proven to have statistically significant benefits for PTSD and depression. Their resolutions also end all controlled substance possession arrests, referring people for addiction treatment and committing our cities to invest in these services. In this episode, you will also learn about the other types of entheogenic plants and the power they hold to help us heal”
Here’s an excerpt from the transcript, the full transcript is available here~https://tsctalks.com/tsc-talks-james-davis-transcript/
James D: Thanks, James, thank you so much for having me, Jill. I’m really excited to chat and I am really [00:02:00] grateful for the support you showed for bay Staters.
When we were just a 10 follower Instagram group. We only started about a year and some months ago. And at that stage, We were just weirdos, emailing our city councils, sharing our stories with plant medicine. We took the philosophy that we didn’t need to fundraise a lot of money. We didn’t need to even have a website active to just start doing this advocacy work and start speaking from the heart.
And you know, what this has snowballed into is really, really awesome and beautiful and all the lessons we’ve learned along the way and advocacy. About the medicines themselves just from meeting so many people whose lives have been changed with this psilocybin experience or an MDMA experiment experience or an LSD experience.
So just really honored to be here and really glad that we met too. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. To tell you a little bit more about who I [00:03:00] am. I know you mentioned all those credentials Yeah, they really don’t define who I am. I would say. So I, I grew up in Kansas in a trailer park that was on the wrong side of the railroad tracks.
So all the middle-class kids lived on one side a Walmart supercenter. And then I lived on the side that was mostly liquor stores and churches and run down streets. So. I was raised by my mom my biggest inspiration in life and she Growing up was always working multiple jobs to make ends me really inspire me to work hard as well.
And then she was dealing with a lot of intergenerational trauma herself. Her father’s had served in the Pacific theater, the Korean war and Vietnam. And. There was just a lot of, a lot of trauma that she had picked up from childhood and then relationships stemming from, from being a young woman and just growing [00:04:00] alongside her.
It really shaped me into the person I am today and made me really compassionate to help people who are struggling in poverty who have that intergenerational trauma. So that’s why I think fundamentally this line of work emerged from.
Jill W: That’s really beautiful. I know I’m sure that was not, it was a tough upbringing in a lot of ways, but I, yeah, just to have your mom, just to have that connection with your mom.
I, I remember when I first met you and I should say, I don’t know how our paths crossed specifically. Maybe through social media, but I ended up doing a little bit of advocacy work with James and I’ve had my own plant medicine experiences that have been transformational. Really. I don’t want to say saved my life, but really gave me the insight I needed to.
To kind of take charge and not to be, not be a victim and be a participant in my, my life. So I, you know, [00:05:00] I’m so supportive of this, I think it’s, I think it’s great. I want to say everybody, but if it might not be right for everybody, but for as many people as possible. And I do want to say as a special needs mom we’re, we’re kind of trapped in a lot of situations that can’t, that don’t necessarily resolve.
And I think that having a tool like this can give you an ability to get above. The, the trauma that you’re actually you’re experiencing trauma. Either whether you’re witnessing it or you’re impacted by something that’s happening with your kids or the follow-up from relationship problems. And you know, this tool has been tremendous as well as I’d say cannabis as well, but the plant medicines, the plants, thank God for the plants.
Yeah. So how’s the, you know, you guys have done amazing since I last was even involved. So I don’t know if you want to talk further about that or move into a more personal discussion and talk about like what your life’s been like you gave a little bit, or [00:06:00] any particular lived experience that has moved you into, you know, further understanding why you’re here and what you’re doing.
Kind of thing.
James D: So I’m going to try to actually combine those questions, a segue into the ladder. So where we kind of left off in early 2020 is we had finally heard back from Somerville city councilors mantra. The old mantra goes, you know first, they ignore you. Then they laugh at you, then they debate you, and then you went and that’s the exact formula we have seen across the state with plant medicine is you’re not taken seriously at first, but then when they’re receiving an email a day, From people who are very credentialed and very serious about how this has changed their life, they start to pay attention because the city counselors see a lot of human suffering in their own communities and their own families.
See link above for continuation of transcript!