Tonya Mosley never expected to become a darling of public radio and podcasting; in fact, she had her heart set on becoming a print reporter. Now she’s the host of her own podcast, “Truth Be Told,” and the newest co-host of the iconic NPR interview show, “Fresh Air.” On this episode of Our Body Politic, host and creator Farai Chideya speaks with Tonya about her life growing up in Detroit, how she developed an interest in the news, and how her career unfolded on multiple media. Plus, we hear some clips from the latest season of “Truth Be Told,” which is centered on psychedelics and the Black community.
Farai Chideya [00:00:03] Hi, folks. We are so glad that you're listening to Our Body Politic. If you haven't yet, remember to follow this podcast on your podcast, your of choice like Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you have time, please leave us a review. It helps other listeners find us and we read them for your feedback. You can also reach out to us on Instagram and Twitter @OurBodyPolitic. We are here for you with you and because of you, so keep letting us know what's on your mind. We'd also love for you to join in financially supporting the show if you are able. You can find out more at OurBodyPolitic.com/donate.Thanks for listening.
Welcome to Our Body Politic. I'm creator and host Farai Chideya. Tonya Mosley is one of the most celebrated voices on public radio and podcasting today. She's host of the award winning podcast, Truth Be Told, which wrapped up its fifth season in May. And this year she was named co-host of the long running legendary interview show Fresh Air.
Terry Gross[00:01:06] I'm so grateful that you agreed to co-host our show. I'm so happy to be working with you and to hear your work on our show.
Tonya Mosley [00:01:11] Terry, thank you. And thank you for being so generous and spirit and generous and sharing the mic. And it's truly an honor and a pleasure to be co-hosting the show with you.
Farai Chideya [00:01:25] She's also a former correspondent and co-host of the midday public radio show Here & Now. To learn more about her path towards journalism royalty, I'm joined today by Tonya Mosley herself. Just so you know, we'll be talking about psychedelics in this show. Welcome, Tonya.
Tonya Mosley [00:01:41] Oh, my gosh. Thank you for having me, Farai.
Farai Chideya [00:01:44] You know, we have walked some parallel paths in terms of creating our own things. But you are so much bigger than any one thing. You are all the things as we like to say. And I have to say that you are my absolute favorite voice in radio. Before we get into what you actually talk about, were you just like some little kid who talk like this or did you develop a radio voice?
Tonya Mosley [00:02:07] Okay. Two things I want to say first, maybe yes? Apparently, that's what folks around me told me is that I've always had a voice for radio for broadcast in some way. Also, Farai, I just want to say we have to take a moment to say hearing you say that I'm one of your favorite voices is meaningful to me…
Farai Chideya [00:02:27] THE Favorite. The favorite.
Tonya Mosley [00:02:29] THE Favorite. I'll get back to my favorite. Yes. Because what you have meant to me in my career, I can't even really articulate it. I first discovered you working overnight when I was working overnights for a local television station in Michigan, and you were a television correspondent and I would see you and you were like a beacon. I thought, okay, I see myself in this woman and I aspire to be what she is. You're part of a legacy of laying the foundation.
Farai Chideya [00:02:57] Ah well, thank you. And I will reference folks back to the interview we had on Truth Be Told, which was so much fun, where we chopped it up about some of this stuff. But I feel I used to be someone who couldn't take in affirmation because I felt like I always had to have my forcefield up and to take in affirmation. You have to drop your forcefield. How do you feel about being someone who people listen to and how do you take it in or do you take it in?
Tonya Mosley [00:03:23] Well, you heard me just say when you said I am your favorite voice and I had to crouch that and say, Oh, I'm one of your favorite voices.
Farai Chideya [00:03:30] Right, Right, Right.
Tonya Mosley [00:03:30] And have someone say that to me. I still have that force field just like you have it. I still feel that this is isolated work that I'm doing. And honestly, everything that I do, I know… Well, I shouldn't say I know because, you know, we're trying to break through this, but I feel like it is always like, what have you done for me lately? Yes, I've done a great interview or yes, I've done something that people really resonate with. But tomorrow will come and I will feel like a beginner again. So that's part of me, you know, not necessarily receiving those accolades, but I take them and I'm growing.
Farai Chideya [00:04:06] We mentioned so many different roles that you have in your professional life, but I want to go back to where it started: Detroit, Michigan. Tell me about growing up in Detroit and how did you become interested in the news?
Tonya Mosley [00:04:19] So I grew up in Detroit. I'm a third generation Detroiter. My grandparents moved there during the Great Migration and the early forties. The one thing that my mother says is folks are learning more about my work as just say good things about Detroit. And that's because Detroiters often have this feeling of being the underdog because of what has happened there politically and socially over the last few decades. I'm such a proud Detroiter because it is a Black city through and through. So that's what my childhood was made up of. It was always us and them. The city, which was primarily Black, and then the suburbs that were primarily white. And so that was my framing growing up. But along with that framing, there was this sense of what we don't have and what other people have and what we have the right to. And so I grew up with kind of that as my compass. Like I'm fighting for something greater. Even in the work of journalism, there's always that sense for me that I have to be able to show people the humanity of people who are from places like Detroit.
Farai Chideya [00:05:22] What does it mean to you to be from Detroit in terms of like how you think of family relation and neighborhood, you know, roots level?
Tonya Mosley [00:05:31] Yeah. When I'm in Detroit, I don't ever meet a stranger. I'm in a grocery store, I'm having a 10, 20 minute conversation with someone. And so that might be surprising for people because some of the stories that you hear out of Detroit is always about the violence and that is also an element of the truth, too, because when people are desperate, because of economic divestment, that's just the natural progression of things. This is like a really horrible story, but also kind of funny, like you laugh to keep from crying. But I think I was in middle school and my mother and I were driving up to our house and this guy came to carjack us. And my mother was like, Hold on, you are not taking my car. Who are you? Do you live in this neighborhood? And the guy actually stopped and was like, I'm sorry, ma'am.
Farai Chideya [00:06:18] Oh, I love it.
Tonya Mosley [00:06:20] He said, I'm sorry, ma'am. And he went on and ran, ran away. And we actually saw him a few weeks later. He was of the community. That kind of stuff happens.
Farai Chideya [00:06:28] Yep.
Tonya Mosley [00:06:29] It's a natural thing that happens. There's a correction that happens within communities, but it also speaks to the community and the way that people move through in order to survive.
Farai Chideya [00:06:39] And in your fifth season of Truth Be Told, you do get into the pain of the violence and you have a line in that series. Growing up in Detroit in the eighties and nineties felt like death knocking at your door. And you talk about some of the people who passed. Who were your age. What does it mean to you to have been one of the people who not only made it in the career sense, but who literally made it to be alive right now?
Tonya Mosley [00:07:07] I hold a lot of survivor's guilt, even still. I feel more deserving now because I believe all people deserve, of course, to live and to be able to take care of themselves and experience love and joy. I will say yeah, I feel… because growing up I never felt like I was the smartest among my classmates. I never felt like I was the most talented. And that's because it was the truth. I wasn't. I was around so many other brilliant people, too, who, because of circumstance, were never able to get out.
Farai Chideya [00:07:39] Let me pivot a little bit into how you interacted with Detroit and the Detroit Free Press to, you know, have this proto-identity as a journalist. So I read that you used to write letters to the staffers at the Detroit Free Press, including Mitch Albom, who many people know is the author of Tuesdays with Morrie and The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Yeah, he was a sports columnist for the Free Press. So. So here you are, this bright, precocious and no doubt adorable, though I have not seen pictures of young Tonya Mosley, what possessed you to write to him and to them? And what did you hear in response?
Tonya Mosley [00:08:21] The Detroit Free Press was a lifeline because it was a lens into the world. My grandfather loved the news. He would listen to the radio, he would watch the local news, and he would also read both papers The Detroit Free Press in the morning and the Detroit News in the afternoon. And so it was because of him and our connection that I was always consuming news. Then I started to use it as a practice of my own. Like I was just always so curious. I would take the bus to the main library and just do research as fun. But the Detroit Free Press, I started doing this nerdy thing after my grandfather brought me a Brother word processor. This is we going way back, Farai, because word processors. You know, before there was even a computer that hybrid between typewriter and computer. And I would write these letters to people that I thought wrote really well. And Mitch Albom was one of them. He would make sports into beautiful narratives, and I just loved it. I would write him and he'd write back and he'd write back just saying, Thank you so much for reading. Best of luck as you move through your life in your career. And I held on to those letters and they were kind of like a beacon for me, too.
Farai Chideya [00:09:29] Oh, that is absolutely beautiful. And so what do you think made you into the kind of person who really, as a journalist, enters into the lives of people with such piercing intimacy?
Tonya Mosley [00:09:44] You know, I think that also goes back to maybe just who I am, but also that experience with the Detroit Free Press, because it was my senior year of high school that I experienced a school shooting where a classmate of mine, Frank Miles, was shot and killed in front of our school by a person just on a bus passing by. And I saw the aftermath of that. I felt the change happening in my school and at that time I had already been an apprentice with the Detroit Free Press, and I had a mentor by the name of Rachel Jones. And I was telling her about this horrible thing that had happened in my school. And she said, Write about it. She helped me write about it and it was on the front page of the Detroit Free Press. And that was my first step into using journalism not only as a vehicle to inform, but also as a mode of healing for people who can see themselves and see their pain on the page. I don't think that people really realize the importance of people being able to see their joys and their pains on the page because it legitimizes us. It really provides a sense of I am human and we are all part of the shared humanity of understanding what has happened. So I think that has always kind of been my guiding star as I've moved through this field.
Farai Chideya [00:11:03] And you've done kind of everything. You talked about being someone who saw yourself as a print person and then, you know, you ended up working in television and even won an Emmy for your 2016 piece, Beyond Ferguson. So what took you to radio?
Tonya Mosley [00:11:19] You know, part of it is I suffer from wanderlust, but I also am so innately curious and I love to use different modes and different mediums to be able to capture a story. So sometimes, you know, a story is a visual story, and it requires you to see the images. And other times it is the intimacy of the voice. And radio for me had always been something aspirational, in particular in PR. I had been a television reporter for many, many years, and some of my colleagues would even call me the public radio of television, because when we go out to live shots or to do news reports, I would always have NPR on in the news car because I loved the way that public radio captured the intimacy and was able to tell stories through narrative in this way. So that was kind of what led me to my interest in it. But it wasn't until I had a little bit of space many years in my career when I decided to take a break that I actually said, okay, maybe radio is something that I could explore.
Farai Chideya [00:12:25] Well, I'm going to get to this incredible season five of Truth Be Told, in just a moment. But I do want to ask, what do you think of this moment in history in terms of radio, where for many years people of color in public radio often were in shows for other people of color? You know, I hosted NPR's News & Notes. Michel Martin hosted Tell Me More. But now you have Michel Martin and Leila Fadel at NPR's Morning Edition. You have you going into this juggernaut of Fresh Air. Do you think that there's a turn of the wheel with these moves in public radio?
Tonya Mosley [00:13:04] I'll be honest, Farai, I'm not sure. I think it's an attempt to get to a place that allows public radio to be a real reflection of our society. And I applaud these legacy news organizations for taking these steps to do that. I am glad to be a part of it. I never thought that in my lifetime I would actually have the opportunity to co-host a show like Fresh Air at the same time. There are a lot of headwinds there. You're pulling along with it a change of identity because you can't really have hosts of color come in and a show not change. And I think that is the challenge that many of these legacy news organizations have because of our definition of what diversity means. For so long, we saw it as almost like tokenism, like we will have a Black host, will have an Asian host, we'll have a Hispanic host. And now we've done our jobs. But these people will be interchangeable and they also will not change the way these shows are.
Farai Chideya [00:14:11] Yeah.
Tonya Mosley [00:14:11] You can't really have both of those. You have to truly, in order to get to that place that you want to be to reflect the audience, you have to also allow for that change to happen.
Farai Chideya [00:14:23] In order for that to happen, then there has to be a shift in the narrative voice, not just the color of the person who has a voice.
Tonya Mosley [00:14:32] You know, this work is long work. I mean it… You know, you can't say, okay, we've ignored huge swaths of the population for decades and now we are paying attention and now we're hiring more people of color. Okay. We want you to come along. You have to give time for them to trust, to say this is an organization. And I mean, for all media. I'm not talking about just public radio. You have to invest that work. And so it is so disheartening – It's heartbreaking – when you see cuts and layoffs that are really part of that progression because it really means that we're starting over. We're starting from scratch every few years.
Farai Chideya [00:15:07] Yeah, well, I mean, I certainly hope for the best. I mean, I grew up listening to public radio and I get to be on public radio. And even though I critique public radio, I love public radio.
Tonya Mosley [00:15:17] It's why you critique it, right? Because you love it.
Farai Chideya [00:15:19] Yeah. So let's talk about Truth Be Told. You know, you had already established a prime career in public radio when you decided that you wanted to do something of your own. What has it been like? We talked about it a little bit, but to run something of your own.
Tonya Mosley [00:15:41] Hmm. It's tremendously gratifying. Scary. Scary as hell. I don't know…we can say “hell” on public radio. And also a lot of work. I mean, almost. You know, there are moments where I have said to myself, What am I doing? What is this for? Should I just hang up the towel and. And work for someone else and just call it a day? There are those moments, and I think anyone who is an entrepreneur probably experiences a range of emotions, but it is really been also one of the most gratifying few years of my career in my life, because having ownership over my craft and having folks work with me, alongside me and for me. To be able to hire people is, wow, it's a powerful tool to have to be in the position to do. And I don't take it lightly.
Farai Chideya [00:16:34] Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And I have to say that this season five and I want to really dig into this, is such an incredible piece of audio. You don't skimp on the journey. You have so much storytelling, so much reporting, and it's about psychedelics, which is a topic which has increasingly entered the public discourse but remains controversial. So why did you want to do the season on that?
Tonya Mosley [00:17:03] Yeah, so just a little bit of context. I own the show, Truth Be Told, it's a podcast and with that I am able to take on any topic that I want. The show is about Black liberation, so within that theme we can take on lots of different topics. The idea to take on psychedelics came from a piece of reporting that I did a few years ago looking at a study that found that war veterans who were in this research study looking at MDMA as a form of treatment for PTSD really worked for them. And I thought, Oh, wow, this is amazing. And that researcher in our same conversation said, And, you know, we've also found that subgroups like those who suffer from racial trauma have also benefited from MDMA therapy and other forms of psychedelic therapy. And that's where my interest came in. And so with that, I decided that I would take the step as a personal journey to go to Jamaica, where psilocybin mushroom use is legal, and try it along with trained medical professionals. And after that experience, I knew I had to just do an entire season on it. Before I went I thought maybe I'll do a show on it. After that experience, I knew I wanted to devote an entire season to it.
Farai Chideya [00:18:18] What was it like for you?
Tonya Mosley [00:18:20] Well, first off, I want to tell you that I was scared the entire time. Mostly because I am a child of the drug war. I've seen the ravages of drug use. And I was told as a kid that, you know, psychedelics could make me go crazy. My mother actually told me stories of people that she saw back in the seventies that would take different forms of psychedelics. I didn't even know what they were at the time, but, you know, fall out of windows or jump from windows. And so I did not want to have an experience like that. I had done tons of research, though, before I went there. So I did know that some of those stories were myths. Even still, just to get you right to the experience. I was the last one of the group that I was a part of. It was a group of people from all over the world who had come for this session. I was the last one to actually feel the mushrooms, and I took the most because it took me 2 hours to fall into the high. And part of that that I learned later is because I have so many control issues that, like I was. Holding on for dear life. I will say, Farai, it was one of the best experiences of my life because, you know, the beauty of psilocybin mushroom therapy is that it allows you to face your traumas without being retraumatized. And I didn't know what would come up for me. But my entire journey, which was 6 hours, was devoted really to me and interacting with family members. And I did not expect for that to happen for me, but it was what I needed to return to the self through my family. When I came up from it, the first thing I thought was, Can my mother do this? Can other people that I love do this because it would free them in so many ways?
Farai Chideya [00:20:03] You talk about the ways in which for Black communities, drugs are trauma and plant medicine can be healing. Psychedelic medicine can be healing. But there is a kind of umbrella trauma around what drugs have done to the Black community. So you talk to Nicholas Powers, and his mother used to tell him stories about the soldiers coming back from Vietnam with track marks on their arms and then crack flooded the streets. So here he is on, Truth Be Told.
Nicholas Powers [00:20:37] So growing up, there was this kind of contract they had to sign. And that contract is you have to work twice as hard and be squeaky clean to get half as far as where a white person can get with a deeply tarnished track record. So I remember growing up and there was this divide. You know, some of my generation, you know, they were just like, What? I'm not going to sign that contract and that. And they were like, This is this is I was like, I'm going to live my life and I want to make money the way I can make money. And then there were other of us who was like, No, we have to do this because drugs destroyed the last generation and we have to be squeaky clean to to get to carry on the tradition, to keep integrating. And I think that John Henry-ism, that kind of psychological condition of burning ourselves out with too much work is in part a working class and middle class and upper class form of trauma that is in itself a kind of loyalty to the generations before.
Farai Chideya [00:21:44] So Powers later used psychedelics in his own healing. But what did his story both about the trauma of drugs in the Black community and the healing that he experienced from psychedelic medicine teach you about the complexity?
Tonya Mosley [00:22:00] Mmm. Well, I tell you, every time I hear him speak, especially about this John Henry-ism, I get teary because I feel it 100%. I felt that way, and he articulated it so well. You know, it's very complex because, as he said, we often take two tracks. Either you're going to try to be perfect, you're going to work your way out of your circumstance. But that comes at a cost. It comes at a mental cost and it comes at a physical cost. And then there are those who say, you know, I'm just not going to try at all. You know, that complexity I thought, was important to be able to articulate in this podcast, because above all, the purpose of this podcast is to really give people a lens into something that is coming. Psychedelic therapy is going to be mainstream in the next 5 to 10 years, with the FDA already near approving the use of MDMA assisted therapy, making that something that can be regulated. And, you know, you participate at a therapist's office. We're going to see these little pop ups all around the country and neighborhoods just like we see these cannabis shops. And so I want Black people to understand a bit of it and say to themselves, okay, I listened to Truth Be Told, I listened to this podcast. Now I'm going to do my own research to find out more or now, because I listen to Truth Be Told, I understand that this is what I'm seeing in my communities.
Farai Chideya [00:23:21] Yeah. In another episode, you speak with Adrienne Maree Brown, who works in pleasure activism and transformative justice, and she talked to you about how she became severely depressed and suicidal in her early twenties. And MDMA, known as Ecstasy, was something she used for healing. And here's Adrienne Maree talking to you about that experience.
Adrienne Maree Brown [00:23:45] I knew that I was struggling to feel joy. And then I found something that was like, this is guaranteed. This will help me feel joy and connection and loosen my inhibitions. And I felt like my real self. Like when I was on ecstasy, I felt like that's. That's really me. Like I am a sex goddess. Pleasure, princess. Like, take me to the party and I will stay on the dance floor for 6 hours. And I will dance with everyone. And I will kiss all the beautiful humans. And I will just… I mean, I just felt so free in that space. And I was I felt like, oh, my God, life is good. It's good. Like, there's a lens through which it's all really unfolding exactly as it's meant to unfold. And I needed to dose myself with that because I did not have the ability to access that otherwise.
Farai Chideya [00:24:37] And so Adrienne Maree identifies that as a transformative experience in a period of time that helped her build what has become a big part of her body of work around pleasure activism and led to healing. But of course, MDMA, like any drug, can be abused. And specifically with MDMA, it can deplete the brain's ability to produce its own neurochemicals. So it's all very complex. What gave you the courage to step into these waters when this is just hot? I mean, you know, there's tons of bestselling books about psychedelic medicine. There are lots of businesses, but there's also a huge backlash against it.
Tonya Mosley [00:25:19] Yeah, I would say two things. Number one of all of the work that I've seen, there's I've just not seen a deep, complex look at the impacts of the changes in our thoughts and behaviors around psychedelics as it pertains to Black America. And so… and Black people more generally. So I wanted to take that on and I wanted to take it on as a journalistic endeavor simply because of what you said there, because there's a lot of conflicting information about it. I think the body of evidence around research is clear, though: plant medicine in general… I'm going to take away MDMA just for a moment, but plant medicine in general. We're talking about psilocybin, mushrooms, peyote and other forms of psychedelics that are naturally occurring. They've been lumped under bad drugs and we have certain drugs that are vilified and then certain drugs that are prescribed by doctors. And many of them have the same profile. When you take a look at them chemically and you take a look at their properties and the compounds there. And so why are we vilifying some forms of drugs and not others? So that was another thing that I was thinking about as I was delving deeper into this issue as a journalistic endeavor. Yeah, I will say when people listen, I want them to listen and then do their own research. This is not a podcast that is an advocacy podcast for psychedelics. It is showing you the true realities of people who have experienced healing from them. As you say, it is complicated. It also requires us to maybe rethink what we have been taught around drugs and drug use as a form of control to control our behaviors, some of it to save ourselves from ourselves, but in other ways to control the use of them. Because there are people who want to profit or big corporations who want to profit from that high. And so they don't want you as an individual to have your own autonomy to be able to do that.
Farai Chideya [00:27:14] Yeah, I certainly think about how plant based medicine has deep indigenous practices, but the people who are now packaging it are huge firms and that's just the arc of history.
Tonya Mosley [00:27:29] I want to say with that too, there is ritual that goes along with it. There are rules that go along with it when we talk about indigenous practices around plant medicines. So when you talk about MDMA and some of the ways, for instance, that MDMA, which is a chemical compound made in a lab, how it can deplete the brain… with any drug use, responsible drug use is an important component of it. And perhaps these type of experiences, it's why MDMA assisted therapy, if it's approved by the FDA and ultimately if it's legalized, it will be in a therapeutic setting. You are with people who are there to help you through their journey. We're not talking about a party drug where you're out in the world and you actually don't have those safeguards. Although, you know, there are those who believe that you should have that right, too. And that is another argument to take up.
Farai Chideya [00:28:18] Yeah. Well, before we let you go, what are your hopes for Fresh Air? You know, you've got Truth Be Told Tonya, you know, and who is Fresh Air Tonya going to be? Who are you making Fresh Air Tonya into?
Tonya Mosley [00:28:33] You know, I had a boss about 15 years ago who said to me one time, I want to see Tonya, I want to see Detroit Tonya, I want to see like who you are. And at the time, I was offended by it, Farai, because I thought he was saying something else like, I don't know. I didn't hear him saying actually, he wanted me to be myself, but it's taken me a few years to come to what he was truly saying. If you're a Black journalist or journalist of color in any medium, you have experienced people wanting to change you, wanting you to conform, wanting your sensibilities to be targeted towards the mainstream, which is another code for white. And in some cases it's white, middle class people of a certain ideology. It's taken me a few years to get there and Truth Be Told has been a big part of me getting to this point. But I now understand what that boss was telling me when he was saying, I want to see Tonya. I want to see the real Tonya.
Farai Chideya [00:29:31] Yeah.
Tonya Mosley [00:29:32] And so what I hope to bring to Fresh Air is my true sensibility.
Farai Chideya [00:29:37] Yeah.
Tonya Mosley [00:29:37] The gift that Terry has given the world over the last 30 plus years is her sensibility. Terry doesn’t it take on anything she doesn't want to take on? She takes on issues and topics that are important to the world and also important to her. And that's exactly what I want to bring to the show.
Farai Chideya [00:29:55] Well, Tonya, I will continue to listen to you and enjoy every minute and enjoy this beautiful set of gifts that you're giving the world through all of your media. Thanks so much.
Tonya Mosley [00:30:07] And thank you for the gift of you, Farai.
Farai Chideya [00:30:09] Oh, that's too kind.
That was Tonya Mosley, co-host of Fresh Air and host of the podcast, Truth Be Told.
BREAK
Farai Chideya [00:30:29] Welcome back to Our Body Politic. I'm Farai Chideya. We've heard so much about the latest season of Tonya Mosley's podcast, Truth Be Told. And now I'm excited to share with you two of our favorite moments from the show. Our first excerpt comes from the season's third episode titled Self-Made. Mary Pryor is the co-founder of Cannaclusive. She talks about how her childhood illnesses and trauma led her to discover and eventually work in the cannabis industry. Let's listen.
Tonya Mosley [00:31:07] By the time I was eight, I knew what heroin, crack and cocaine could do to the body. My mother held no secrets. She would share in great detail the regrets of her youth. Cautionary tales. We lost so many people, she'd say. And I knew that didn't always mean the people she spoke of were dead. Like my godmother, Amelia, who for many years I imagined had wings. I’d never met her. But I knew from my mother's stories that when I was born, the two loved and trusted each other so much that my mom named Amelia, my godmother. It never bothered me that I'd never met her. A godmother I thought, as someone who will be your mom when your real mother isn't around. Maybe Amelia would fly down like a fairy from the sky when I needed her most. It was a muggy afternoon. The first and only time I saw Amelia's face. All four windows of our blue Chevette hatchback were down… the thick hot wind offering moments of relief from the summer heat. I saw her before my mom did. Actually, it was her coat. I noticed. It was a winter down with the fur collar that she had zipped up tight. She stood along the side of the street the way I'd seen hitchhikers in the movies do. But she wasn't interested in anything happening around her. She was laughing and talking to herself. Amelia, my mother yelled through the passenger window, slamming on the brakes. I watched and waited for the moment when my mother would turn back to me and say something like, Look, it's your goddaughter. Maybe Amelia would rush over, open the door, swoop me up and say something like, Look how big you've gotten. That never happened. As quickly as we stopped, we pulled off again. For half a second Ameila and I locked eyes. Or should I say I locked eyes with her. She looked right through me.
Mary Pryor [00:33:19] I was impacted by the war on drugs due to the fact that my father was and battled addiction most of his adult life.
Tonya Mosley [00:33:31] Mary Pryor also saw up close how drugs could wreak havoc. Her father came home from Vietnam, a different man. He died on Mary's 27th birthday.
Mary Pryor [00:33:41] I wrote a story called My Dad would have been an awesome father if he wasn't a crack addict. And, you know, I grew up. Seeing, like, the tools of what it is to even prepare to smoke crack. You know, I. I saw that I am definitely a daughter of the drug war because I had to live with it and see it and pretend I didn't see it and have people say it to my face and use it against me and weaponize me against since I was a child.
Tonya Mosley [00:34:09] But Mary still excelled. She graduated from the University of Michigan, traveled the world and built a successful career. But none of it could take away the deep pit of fear that lived in her gut.
Mary Pryor [00:34:21] There are things that have been instilled in me because of lack, because of how I've grown up. This thousand dollar sweater I got on sale, I got like… I'm there's still some things I'm not doing. There's still… I still hold on to plastic bags. I don't know when I don't need. I'm so glad You just I don't know. Self-defense. I don't know. Right?
Tonya Mosley [00:34:48] Mary started smoking weed in high school to be cool, but as she got older, she could see its healing potential. It helped with her Crohn's, an inflammatory disease that causes pain, fatigue and weight loss. Marijuana helped her get food down. She also felt less anxious, less afraid.
Mary Pryor [00:35:07] I wouldn't be here if I didn't develop a relationship with cannabis that I needed to tap into for my ability to one: live. It's trauma, but like everybody has trauma. The thing is, is that I don't have equal access to therapy as a part of the melinated community. I have equal access to even knowing that therapy is okay. You know, I'm being told that all I got to do is just pray and not do therapy. You can do both. You can do it all. You know, our relationship to how we create these dependencies is all based on escaping trauma.
Tonya Mosley [00:35:47] A few years ago, as states began decriminalizing cannabis, Mary watched with dismay as wealthy white people set up shop and capitalized off of Black communities. She was working in marketing and knew that less than 3% of cannabis businesses were Black owned. So she quit working for big brands and founded a collective focused on advocacy for Black and brown people in the cannabis industry. And as she got deeper into it, she explored other plant medicines to heal.
Mary Pryor [00:36:16] When I tried ayahuasca, I hate to disappoint you, but I was able to consume the vine and I did not throw up.
Tonya Mosley [00:36:25] Wow. How common is that?
Mary Pryor [00:36:27] And the other times I've done it, I did not throw up.
Tonya Mosley [00:36:32] Ayahuasca, known as the grandmother of psychedelics is a psychoactive brew made from tropical plants that indigenous communities of the Amazon have been consuming for spiritual purposes for more than a thousand years. It's also pretty gross. Most people vomit violently after taking it. It's thought that the purging allows for a deeper opening of one's consciousness. And Mary didn't vomit.
Mary Pryor [00:36:56] So what I've been told is that the medicine went into my intestines and my did like it was working on, say, a return and healing me Like I needed to have that in me versus out of me.
Tonya Mosley [00:37:10] But the psychedelic experiences that stick with her the most are the ones where she felt no fear. Like the time psilocybin mushrooms opened up a portal for her to feel love. All of her senses were on fire. Love and sensuality on a level she'd never experienced before.
Mary Pryor [00:37:30] Oh, wow. This story. Oh, boy. Here we go. First time I had mushrooms. Was a couple of years ago. I was on a trip with someone I no longer speak with, and we were in Mexico and it was amazing. The feeling that we had in terms of like just being very, very energetic towards each other. The touching, the feeling, the pure joy of just like being in each other's arms and like being all over each other, which is amplified even more by like sensory and touch. And it just made orgasms very, very powerful. It was amazing.
Farai Chideya - Before we go, I want to share one more moment from Truth Be Told, latest season. What you'll hear next comes from the sixth episode titled A New World. Tonya speaks with neuroscientist and chair of the Department of Psychology and Dirk Ziff Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, Dr. Carl Hart, on how his research led him to reimagine how we study, understand and use psychedelics. Here's more.
Tonya Mosley [00:38:43] The year was 2000, and Dr. Carl Hart was on top of the world. A young, brilliant Black neuroscientist, one of the best in his field, researching the impacts of drugs on the brain.
Dr. Carl Hart [00:38:55] Learning about the neurobiology, pharmacology, publishing dozens and dozens of scientific papers, participating in all kinds of scientific committees, conferences and just learning what I could about drugs.
Tonya Mosley [00:39:11] Carl grew up in Carrol City, a working class suburb of Miami, and was now in the top echelons of drug research and policy. The National Institutes on Drug Abuse even gave him millions of dollars for his research. Carl had made it.
Dr. Carl Hart [00:39:26] So when I said I was going to do was study drugs to try to figure out how they produce addiction study of the brain and figure out how I can best serve my community. I felt like if I could solve or cure drug addiction, then I could solve some of the problems that I thought were as a result of crack in my community.
Tonya Mosley [00:39:56] Miami in the eighties is where the making, selling and distribution of crack cocaine became a bona fide business. Cartels imported cocaine from South America to the Florida coast. And Miami dealers perfected the technique of converting powdered cocaine into crack. Violence, crime and chaos came with it. And Carl watched his community fight to hold on to its identity.
Dr. Carl Hart [00:40:21] We were resource poor, but we were poor. You know what I'm saying? We are too rich in culture, rich in love, rich in sort of transmitting those skills that one needs to be independent in a world that was not designed for you. And I think about all the cats who grew up in the neighborhood. If the criminal justice system didn't get them, maybe some early disease got them.
Tonya Mosley [00:40:53] 2000 was a breakout year because it's when Dr. Hart produced a study that looked at how marijuana impacts our ability to process information and perform tasks. He studied people who smoked weed recreationally and went into the research with an open mind. But he also admits he expected the results to confirm conventional thinking that drugs ultimately made people cognitively worse off.
Dr. Carl Hart [00:41:19] And so I studied these folks and I wasn't seeing the cognitive decline or impairments that I thought I should see in response to cannabis. So I went to a conference to present some of the preliminary findings, and basically the findings were limited, and I gave all kinds of explanations why I wasn't really finding anything. And then one guy, Jack Bergman, who was a friend of the scientists at Harvard, and he said, is it possible that they're just not there? And that just never crossed my mind. I just thought, like, drugs are bad, so therefore they're there and I just haven't found them.
Tonya Mosley [00:42:07] It wasn't immediate, but Dr. Hart's thoughts about drugs began to change. A slow unwinding of what he'd been taught.
Dr. Carl Hart [00:42:15] That helped me to get out of those bias, at least somewhat, and which trapped my thinking because I didn't even realize that I was imprisoned by this “drugs are bad” bias.
Tonya Mosley [00:42:29] What if his ideas about them were all wrong? What if the very research he was conducting was that looking for a way to cure addiction but instead reinforcing existing policy? He started to rethink his work and the dominant attitude towards drugs.
Dr. Carl Hart [00:42:46] It increased the budgets for like the war on drugs, even for me as a scientist. It increased our budgets. Meanwhile, the people who I care about continue to suffer. It basically reinforces our views of drugs in the larger society. It helps to maintain our views or our beliefs about people who use certain drugs. Then we don't have to think about them anymore. And so policy just follows that. But drugs and our views about drugs plays such a central role in who we are as a culture.
Tonya Mosley [00:43:25] Instead of criminalizing drug use, Dr. Carl thought, Why aren't we focusing on the environmental reasons People choose them in the first place.
Dr. Carl Hart [00:43:34] And when people are struggling in life, they may have co-occurring psychiatric illnesses, they may have lost jobs recently. They may be chronically stressed or or chronically subjected to unrealistic expectations. All of these things increase the likelihood of someone going to meet criteria for addiction. No matter what the substance. And so it's more important to try to figure out what's going on in that person's life, in that person's environment. Far more important than looking at the drug per say, as we've done in this society. That's a sort of politician trick. Because what that allows you to do is to say, we're going to go after that drug and take that drug off the streets. We own it. That means we're going to put more cops on the streets and go after that drug. That's a trick. It's a trick that the American public follows for every time.
Tonya Mosley [00:44:30] As of now, Oregon and Colorado are the only two states that have legalized psilocybin mushrooms for medical or recreational use. Some cities have decriminalized psychedelics, but that doesn't always protect people from facing arrest. For Black people who have always been overpoliced and discriminated against, the threat is serious.
Dr. Carl Hart [00:44:54] If you want to get to the heart of the dope problem, legalize it. Prohibition is a law in operation that can only be used against the poor, James Baldwin.
Tonya Mosley [00:45:05] Dr. Carl Hart references that quote from James Baldwin in his book, Drug Use for Grown Ups, where he makes the case that to stop the harm of the drug war, we need to legalize and regulate all drugs, including psychedelics. Decriminalizing them, Dr. Hart believes, just isn't enough.
Dr. Carl Hart [00:45:26] Street level police still have tremendous amount of discretion in determining who gets arrested, let's say. Well, you were selling, I know you were selling. That wasn't just possessing. It's like in Baltimore, for example, when they decriminalized cannabis in 2015, between 2015 and 2017, they had more than 1500 people arrested for cannabis, even though it was decriminalized. And something like 96% of the people who were arrested were Black. And so this is that discretion that street level police have… still have with decriminalization. So that's why I am a proponent of legal regulation, because of this police discretion and because of this lack of quality control.
Tonya Mosley [00:46:14] As a person who studies drugs on a molecular level. Dr. Carl Hart stopped short of calling any substance a miracle drug, but he is amazed by what he's seeing in the MDMA assisted therapy trials.
Dr. Carl Hart [00:46:27] I think MDMA should be used as a treatment for PTSD. I think the data is overwhelming. And so I will be excited to make sure that it's available for people who are suffering. I mean, it's probably one of the best things that we have for that.
Tonya Mosley [00:46:43] Dr. Hart became a neuroscientist to help solve addiction who discovered that drugs weren't the problem. And I'm inclined to agree. The research data and thousands of years of indigenous wisdom offer a compelling argument. But I still can't wrap my head around the idea of legalizing all drugs in the United States, at least not yet. On the one hand, it's a no-brainer. I think about all of the Black and brown people who disproportionately suffered, who were stripped away from the ability to have a life enduring long prison sentences for drug possession. But we have a lot of work to do in our society to get to a place where we are invested in understanding the reasons why people choose drugs… to feel, to escape, to cope. I just wish our country's history with race and drugs didn't make that possibility seem so daunting.
Farai Chideya [00:47:50] That was episodes Self-Made and A New World from Tonya Moseley's award winning podcast Truth Be Told from TMI Productions and its latest season, How to Get Free: The Psychedelic Renaissance for Black America.
Thanks for listening to Our Body Politic. We're on the air each week and everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can also find us on social @OurBodyPolitic. Our Body Politic is produced by Diaspora farms and Rococo Punch.
I'm host and executive producer Farai Chideya. Nina Spensley and Shanta Covington are also executive producers. Emily J. Daly is our senior producer. Bridget McAllister is our booking producer. Monica Morales Garcia is our producer. Natyna Bean and Emily Ho are our associate producers. Nicole Pasulka is our fact checker. This episode was produced by Andrea Asuaje and Natyna Bean. It was engineered by Mike Garth and Mike Gaylor. Special thanks to Tonya Mosley and the team at Truth Be Told from TMI Productions.
This program is produced with support from the Luce Foundation, Open Society Foundation, Ford Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, Democracy Fund, The Harnisch Foundation, Compton Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the BMe Community, Katie McGrath & JJ Abrams Family Foundation, The Pop Culture Collaborative, and from generous contributions from listeners like you.