TSC Talks! Points of Light, James Davis of Bay Staters for Natural Medicine-"Advocacy from the Heart"

TSC Talks!

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 psilocybin 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://linktr.ee/baystaters 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 on the website. Here's an excerpt from the transcript, the full transcript is available here~https://tsctalks.com/tsc-talks-james-davis-transcript/
Jill W: [00:00:00] Hello, welcome to TSC talks. Your host, Jill Woodworth. Here. I am so glad to be with James Davis. He is a, he is a volunteer among other things, but my basis of meeting him was a volunteer and the leader of bay Staters for natural medicine. Just to give you a little background here before we get started, I'm going to read this, but. He's done tremendous work. I'm really excited to have him here. And I'll tell you how our paths crossed in a minute, but he's the leader for Bay Staters for natural medicine. They've mobilized over a thousand Massachusetts volunteers to decriminalize Somerville, Cambridge, North Hampton. East Hampton pending resolutions in Boston, Burlington, Vermont Amhurst, Worcester, Needham, Salem, and Medford.
These resolutions… 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 [00:01:00] statistically significant benefits for PTSD and depression. The resolutions also end all controlled substance possession arrests, referring people for addiction treatment and committing our cities to invest in these services. Let's see. And your day job, you're a legislative director to, Massachusetts state rep the chairs, the legislator’s cannabis committee, and formally did legislative work for the city council of Berkeley. You have a master's degree in public administration from USC and a BA in economics and history from Columbia and your views do not necessarily represent your employer. One thing that I read in what I was researching you a little bit, was your personal connection?
Actually, no, I'll let you go into it. So yeah. Why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself and about the advocacy work that you're doing and we will roll from.
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 of 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 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.
Full transcript available at https://tsctalks.com
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/tsc-talks--1666046/support.