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The Current Transcript for April 24, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Sirens]

VOICE 1: C’mon, get down! Get down! Get down!

VOICE 2: I have a gun in my pocket!

VOICE 1: I don’t care, get down!

VOICE 2: I have a gun in my pocket!

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VOICE 1: People were walking on sidewalk of Yonge Street at 13:26 and it's alleged that the accused drove on the sidewalk, it looks intentional and as a result now 10 people aren't with us.

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VOICE 1: All I seen is this guy just crumbling — he was going 70-80 clicks. He was just hitting people one by one going down. It was a gruesome scene, I can't believe what I seen out there ... oh man.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: The images and sounds are now seared into the memories of so many eyewitnesses. A stretch of road just over two kilometers long on one of Toronto's most iconic streets is now a crime scene and people merely out on a sunny afternoon are now victims being mourned. There is still much we do not know about what could have motivated a man in rented van to run down so many unsuspecting helpless pedestrians but we are learning more about the humanity of those who rushed to help the victims. In a moment, the questions still being asked about yesterday's devastating attack on pedestrians in Toronto. Also today, Sebastian Woodroffe had a plan for addiction counseling that involved working with the hallucinogen Ayahuasca.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Things could have gone sideways for me in my life, and they didn't. So I'd like to just thank the universe or the spirits or God or whoever is looking out for me. I'm going to pay you back, and I'm going to try to help people.

AMT: Instead he was beaten and murdered in Peru in a place where Indigenous land disputes and the Ayahuasca tourism industry overlap. We'll tell you more in half an hour. And then he's an ER doctor who feared he was losing empathy.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: When patients tell you that you're incompetent, there's a good chance that they could be wrong. But when they tell you that you're unkind, that hurts — because they know kindness. Everyone knows kindness.

AMT: Journalist, author, doctor, and host of White Coat Black Art, Dr. Brian Goldman travels the world in search of empathy and kindness. Hear what he learned and what he found in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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'There was no time for hysteria': Bystanders leap to aid Toronto van attack victims

Guests: Taras Kulish, Araf Reisiardekani, Nicole Ireland

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Normally I'd have my balcony closed when I'm on the phone because it's so loud here. But today it's like a ghost town.

AMT: Hours after a van raced along the sidewalks of Yonge Street in Toronto the people who live in the Willowdale neighbourhood were trying to come to terms with what happened. As the police investigation began last night the street was closed to traffic — leaving a normally busy thoroughfare unusually quiet. This man stood on the sidewalk outside his condominium still in shock about what took place earlier in the day outside his door.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Normally when I work from home, I go to Mel Lastman Square for the food trucks to get lunch. And that's where... where some of the stuff happened. Scary. It really hit home. Could have been me or my son or nephews or sister. It could have been any of us.

AMT: Hours earlier, the scene was chaotic and noisy. Our producer John Chipman spoke with some of the people who were there and a warning — some listeners may find their descriptions disturbing.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: We were at Yonge and Finch at a restaurant. Me and my friend were about to head out and I turned around and saw a van drive by — I went outside... he was on the sidewalk too, really close. There was a guy on the floor — he was on the ground. Then we saw another dead body on the ground — it was a lady, an older lady.

VOICE 2: This time, my school was on complete lockdown.

VOICE 1: Literally we went down and there were four people on the ground.

VOICE 3: Did the van stop?

VOICE 1: No it kept going. We walked further down. Saw there was a fire hydrant — meters from where it was originally. I was shocked at first, but now I'm fine. I'm better.

AMT: Taras Kulish also witnessed the attack. He was in a restaurant on Yonge Street yesterday afternoon. He's on the line. Hello.

TARAS KULISH: Hello.

AMT: When did you first see something and you realized something was happening?

TARAS KULISH: Well we were sitting at a picture window of the restaurant on 5376 Yonge, and so we were we were looking out over a Yonge Street, and then this white van sped by on the sidewalk in front of us and took out part of the wooden deck in front of the restaurant. So there was splintering going into the air. And so immediately we knew that something was extremely wrong with the situation and myself and my friend who I was having lunch with we rushed out into the street and we saw that there was you know a terrible situation going on and we saw that there was a man down about 25 meters from where we stood in front of the restaurant. So we went to his assistance.

AMT: Tell me a little bit more about that. What was happening with him? What did you do?

TARAS KULISH: Well he had been hit. He was alive. He was in distress of course and he was bleeding from the head. I ran back into the restaurant to ask the owner to bring out towels and water, thinking that would be one thing, and my friend was on his cell phone to dial 911 but the lines were jammed so he went back in the restaurant and used their landline and he was able to reach them — the police. And I told my friend that I would go to the police station which was actually around the corner from where we were. And so I went you know quickly down the sidewalk and went to check on the fellow again. There was there were people around. There was one lady who was speaking to him, talking to him, comforting him. But he was twisted. He had been dragged approximately 25 metres by the van and there was one lady who was asking us to turn him around or to untwist. We didn't want to do that because you don't know if you move somebody what that could trigger.

AMT: It could hurt him more.

TARAS KULISH: Well there could be a bone that you could pierce through his skin or something. This lady was wanted us to turn him over. I said "No. Don’t touch him, just comfort him." And then I went to the to the light, to the corner, and I was hearing sirens and saw that the fire truck was coming out of the station down the road and so I went into the middle of the intersection and basically flagged them down and directed them a little bit north to where the fellow was down. The firemen saw me and nodded to me and then turned their truck towards the individual because they were obviously responding to the calls. They didn't know exactly where to go and so I was able to get them to do this one fellow. The firemen came out, stabilized him, did what they had to do, straightened him out, and they know what to do. Then they proceeded north. North of us there was at least two other victims.

AMT: So Taras when did you realize there was more than one person? When did it hit you that this was all these people?

TARAS KULISH: We came out. My focus was more on the pedestrian, the crowd of people around this one individual. There were other cars chasing the van, it seems people wanted to stop him. And so my colleague seconds after said "He just hit somebody else." We could see that it was going down the street, so we knew immediately that this was a situation.

AMT: I want to bring someone else into this conversation who like you rushed out to see what he could to help. Araf Reisiardekani is also on the line with us. Hello.

ARAF REISIARDEKANI: Good morning, Anna Maria.

AMT: You rushed out as well, how did you hear about this?

ARAF REISIARDEKANI: Well a family member mentioned to me, "Look, somebody just got hit." We could see from the window and granted that I first aid and rescue operation training, my instinct was just run out of the door. And I also actually always carry a latex glove in my pocket. First impression was: hit and run, oh my God, panic, hit the second person. But as I offered my Good Samaritan act of assistance to individual there was another lovely person, another lovely lady, who had also had gloves, started to realize she knows what she is doing. I said I have this man stabilized and you look at there ... By the time I point in that direction I said wait a second there are 12 people on my north and then next thing I know on my south I see there are two other people. Very short distance around me there were five individuals seriously injured.

AMT: You live near Finch and Yonge, right? So right where this would have started and you could see that many people already hit.

ARAF REISIARDEKANI: Starting from Finch all the way to Sheppard, that area. Pretty much every few hundred metres, one individual has been injured. Yes.

AMT: How did you react to that, Araf?

ARAF REISIARDEKANI: The training kicked in. The training kicked in. And there was no time for emotional, it's their time to help and save someone's life. So I was very calm and I have to say actually people around me were very calm and together. There was no hysteria. There was no panic. And people were generally interested to offer assistance and help. The community came together to their capability to what they could do; those of us who were trained I think were a little bit more. I want to thank the first responders and men and women in uniform that came here very promptly. Due the sheer volume of the number of people injured, it was just a matter of [unintelligible]. It is a matter of “This one… OK this one is stable, move onto the next one."

AMT: So you stayed with one man, did you not?

ARAF REISIARDEKANI: Yes, absolutely.

AMT: And how badly injured were he? Could you tell?

ARAF REISIARDEKANI: Thank goodness, I am very optimistic that he will recover from his injuries.

AMT: Did you talk to him? Did he have anything to say?

ARAF REISIARDEKANI: If you don't mind I rather to keep privacy... A lot of people were taking pictures of us and I've been talking to different media. I prefer not to mention his health. But I can assure, thank goodness he was much more stable compared to other people. I must confess that at this moment I'm very worried about him. I don't know about him... I really want to figure how he is doing right now.

AMT: The two of you, your first response was to get out there and help, and I'm just wondering how you're processing this and what you saw this morning? Taras, what are you thinking of what you saw and all that's happened?

TARAS KULISH: I was lucky I suppose last night because I had a friend of mine call me and with concern. He suggested you know that I speak with somebody because of potential PTSD repercussions, and also that perhaps I arm myself better in the future by taking first aid courses. It's been a while since I've taken anything going back to Cub Scouts or when my sister and mother were doing Canadian Ski Patrol. And I actually think that was something that assisted me in my response — their training and having witnessed that when I was a teenager. But I think right now I have to get in touch with the police and give my witness statement and follow up with our office. Everyone is safe but to make sure that we have you know first aid training because accidents can happen, it could be a hit and run, there could be something, and you don't want to feel powerless, you want to be or to do and to respond in the best way that you can. So at this point in time is how I am dealing and processing. But I do think that there's a kilometre stretch of road and thousands of people who were affected in different ways and there’s people who may be in much more degrees of shock than I might be or my friend on the line. I think one of the things that as the media that you can do is getting the word out to the importance for people who've witnessed this to seek assistance.

AMT: Yes and the police are asking for witnesses to come forward as well. We have to leave it there. Gentlemen, thank you both for sharing your story and for your humanity. Thank you.

ARAF REISIARDEKANI: Thank you.

TARAS KULISH: Thank you very much.

AMT: That is Taras Kulish. He was at a restaurant on Yonge Street when the attack began. Araf Reisiardekani lives in a condo overlooking the Toronto street that was the scene of so much carnage yesterday. You are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. We know 10 people died in this attack, one of them later in hospital, another 15 people have injuries. As you’ve been hearing on the news, Alek Minassian, a 25-year-old from Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto, was arrested at the scene. He appeared in court a little while ago and he was charged. CBC reporter Nicole Ireland was there and she is with us now. Hi Nicole.

NICOLE IRELAND: Hi Anne Maria.

AMT: What are the charges?

NICOLE IRELAND: The charges — 10 counts of first degree murder and 13 of attempted murder. Now as you mentioned before there were 15 people injured so it wasn't mentioned in court why exactly there are 13 counts of attempted murder. We wonder if it may be because we don't know the nature of perhaps two of those injuries, perhaps there weren't charges for the other two of the 15 or perhaps there's even still an attempt to identify who those people are. So 10 counts of first degree murder, 13 of attempted murder.

AMT: Was the accused Alek Minassian in court?

NICOLE IRELAND: He was in court. He appeared within the traditional white coveralls, handcuffed behind his back, standing in the prisoner's dock. He did have a brief conversation before he addressed the court with duty counsel. He did not have his own defense lawyer so duty counsel was representing him in the courtroom. Spoke briefly in sort of whispered tones with her before the proceedings began. He spoke out loud twice. Once was when he was asked to confirm his name. He spoke loudly and clearly. The next time was when he was asked if he understood a no contact order meaning that he is not allowed to have contact with any of the people who he injured. He responded again loudly and clearly: yes.

AMT: And so did he look around? Did you get any sense of him or was it pretty straight forward?

NICOLE IRELAND: He didn't really have much of an expression. He just sort of looked grim. He had a shaved head, sort of rugged moustache and beard growing in. He sort of looked straight forward, remained quiet, except for the two times that he was addressed. Where we did see some emotion was that there was an older man in court in the front row weeping. We've been trying to confirm who that is. We don't know what the connection was. We don't know if that was a relative of Minassian. But we do know that he has some connection to this case because he was escorted by police here out of the courthouse and to his car. But that gentleman did not provide any comment. We also believe that Alek Minassian himself has left the courthouse. There was the court services van that's normally used to transport the accused back and forth that just left a few minutes ago.

AMT: And of course there's the stretch of Yonge Street basically two kilometres long is still a crime scene. What has the police chief said about the investigation now?

NICOLE IRELAND: Right. Well Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders spoke last night about the fact it would be a long investigation as you say it is a long stretch of road, lots of security footage to go over, lots of street to cover, lots of eyewitness accounts. They are asking for help and asking for people to come forward with their witness accounts. We also know that the Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said that there was no reason to think that there is a national security threat at this time in terms of motive. Saunders wouldn't speculate about motive at all. He said he wasn't ruling anything out and that the Toronto Police are working with both provincial and federal law enforcement to determine sort of motive and to investigate what exactly happened here.

AMT: And before I let you go Nicole I know that Toronto Mayor John Tory has called on his fellow councillors who are sitting in session today to adjourn today's planned session as a sign of respect to the victims and the witnesses. A lot of people in Toronto are still very shaken by what they saw yesterday.

NICOLE IRELAND: Absolutely. And we're starting to learn to I think that's going to increase more unfortunately as we learn more about the victims. At this point we only have one person confirmed, one identity. Anne Marie D'Amico was...

AMT: She worked in the area, at Invesco.

NICOLE IRELAND: She did. She did, at an investment firm. So as those identities come in and as people are able to put faces and names to these victims they've been paying tribute to.

AMT: It gets worse. Nicole we have to leave it there, we're out of time. But thank you for your help today.

NICOLE IRELAND: Thank you.

AMT: Nicole Ireland CBC reporter in Toronto. We’ll have more on this right after the news. Stay with us. This is The Current.

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Officer's cool head may have helped rule out terrorism in Toronto van attack

Guests: Mike McCormack, Christian Leuprecht, Dan Collyns, Peter Gorman

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, there's still a shroud of mystery surrounding the murder of a Peruvian Indigenous healer and activist and the killing of a Canadian man in Peru. Their deaths are raising questions about the country's ayahuasca tourism industry. We’re going to hear more about that later. But first, the aftermath of Toronto's deadly attack.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: This is a tragic, tragic situation and our first thoughts are with the victims and their families.

VOICE 2: This kind of tragic incident is not representative of how we live or who we are or anything to do with life in this city on a day to day basis.

VOICE 3: We need every single piece of this puzzle that we can so we can have a fulsome picture and account just to exactly what took place here.

AMT: The voices of Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders and before that, Toronto Mayor John Tory and Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne — speaking last night at the scene of so much carnage and as you heard, the investigation into this incident is only just beginning. Here's what we know so far, police have arrested the alleged driver in the deadly van attack, and identified him as Alek Minassian, a 25-year-old from Richmond Hill, Ontario, just north of where this took place. CBC News has confirmed that the officer who faced down the driver of the van was Constable Ken Lam. Ten people have died, one of them died later in hospital, and 15 more injured when a white rental van jumped the curb and ran over pedestrians along Toronto's busy Yonge Street. Yesterday's attack has security experts watching the unfolding investigation very closely. Toronto Police of course in the middle of this investigation and Mike McCormack is the president of the Toronto Police Association. He's on the line with us. Hello.

MIKE MCCORMACK: Good morning.

AMT: We have all seen that footage of the take down of the suspect. Not a shot fired. What were you thinking as you saw that?

MIKE MCCORMACK: Well I think that officer showed amazing restraint, training, and being an officer out on the street that's what we do in Toronto. You know the vast majority, 99.9 per cent of our confrontations with people who are either armed or have an alleged weapon result in this type of peaceful sort of resolve. But yesterday was quite different given the circumstances. But I was with the officer yesterday, I was at the scene with that officer yesterday afternoon, and I talked to him. He's a great guy and he was saying “Mike, look you know I was responding to what I was seeing. I was dealing with the situation.” And he goes “Yeah I made the arrest, but what's going on with all of the people out on the street? What's happening? How many people have died? What's going on? Can I get back out there? Is there something I can do? Because he had to go to the station with the guy.

AMT: And he wanted to be back helping.

MIKE MCCORMACK: Yeah. Yeah.

AMT: So tell me a little bit more about him, Mike.

MIKE MCCORMACK: He’s got seven years on the job. Again I know him personally, he's a really great officer. And he's just saying like “Mike you know like I just wanted to do what I need to do.” But after being in that situation where not only are you confronted with somebody who wants you to kill them in a very stressful, critical situation, but then you compound that with what happened yesterday, and again like the mayor and everybody else, our hearts and our prayers go out to the families of the victims. It was an absolutely horrible scene like walking up and down Yonge Street and seeing that scene was something that I've never seen. Most hardened officers have never seen anything like that. It was absolutely terrible. But once that adrenaline leaves your body the magnitude of what happened yesterday it's pretty overwhelming for that officer.

AMT: And you know we have come to you when things have not gone well and in the video we can all see the suspect saying he has a gun actually urging the officer to shoot him and the officer actually saying you know when he says “I have a gun,” “I don't care. Get down.” The officer just stayed right on message with him and kept moving closer. Tell me a little bit more of what you saw when you saw that and what that says about the way he reacted.

MIKE MCCORMACK: Yeah the way he reacted again what we do and what he was exactly telling me and what I saw in that video. He was reacting to what he was seeing. He was watching the person's hand, seeing what was in their hands, watching the way they did the drawing motion, constantly assessing, constantly giving commands, in control of the situation and doing exactly; like he said it's what he was trained and what his experience had taught him. And that's what we do and that's why Toronto Police are the best as far as I'm concerned the best trained officers in North America dealing with this type of stuff. And he was reacting. And again the video shows you a different perspective. But what he's doing is watching and he's looking firsthand and he's looking at the person's hands, seeing if he can see what's in his hands, and watching the hand movement and constantly making a threat assessment. If that threat would have changed at any point there could have been a different outcome and he would have been totally justified in using the force that would have been necessary which would have been his firearm.

AMT: We will now have more information perhaps about the motivation because a suspect was taken without a shot fired.

MIKE MCCORMACK: To that point – this is more than just an arrest when we’re arresting somebody with a weapon; this is somebody who committed this heinous act. The intelligence community… get the intelligence, get the information, figure out what happened here. And if he would have shot that person and the person would have died then we would have lost that. So this officer, he's a great guy, he's a hero. He is a hero.

AMT: Mike McCormack, thank you very much.

MIKE MCCORMACK: Thank you.

AMT: Bye bye. That's Mike McCormack. He's the president of the Toronto Police Association. Christian Leuprecht is a security expert watching this unfold. He is a professor with the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario. He is also the Matthew Flinders Fellow in the Centre for Crime Policy and Research at Flinders University of South Australia. He is in Brisbane, Australia today. Hi Christian.

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: Good morning.

AMT: I know you're out of pocket geographically but you've been watching all of this and I'm wondering what's stood out for you in what you're seeing and hearing.

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: I think what's been the most impressive here is the actions by the uniform member about whom you just talked. So if you put yourself in his shoes all you know is that there's a mass casualty event and someone ramming a car down the street running people over. He arrives. He has no immediate back of in his vicinity. And yet relatively quickly getting out of the car he ascertains that the suspect doesn't have a firearm. You can tell that because he doesn't perceive an immediate threat. He would have cower behind the engine block if he had. He stands up straight. He takes his eyes off the subject, turns off the siren to make sure the subject can hear him, tries to escalate the situation also by turning off that siren. But I think what's really impressive if you look at that camera angle from above where he takes his firearm puts the firearm back in his holster pulls out his baton goes over to the individual and puts the handcuffs on him and let's remember at that moment the individual could have had a knife, the individual could have been wearing a suicide vest, so I think he went over and above the call of duty. He could have simply contained the individual and waited until the emergency response team would have shown up which would have been a couple of minutes behind. But he felt it in the best interest of the suspect, of the public, and his own personal safety to be able to do this. And I think it shows this as an experienced member where the training that he's received both in identifying firearms and dealing with people who might be mentally on the edge and unstable is clearly that combination is paying off and I think it shows that Canadians can have full confidence in the professionalism of their police services.

AMT: Now we know that the police have said they have not ruled out the word terrorism but they are not actually calling this an attack of terror — terrorism. What kinds of things might be going on behind the scenes on different police levels as this investigation goes forward?

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: Right, these are the complex events to respond to because essentially of a mass casualty first responder event. But at the same time in parallel you're running a criminal investigation. And so trying to do this in a coordinated fashion and in a federal country where we have multiple levels of police services is complex and I think we saw a very well-rehearsed response here. There are two investigations possibly going on in parallel. There is certainly a murder investigation which would be run by Toronto Police. If this does turn out to be a national security event that would then be a parallel investigation by the RCMP which is in charge of all national security files. We saw the RCMP on site at that event although not identified by badges, but you can identify them by the best that they were wearing. So certainly the national security, the integrated national security enforcement team, is shadowing this investigation and is assessing the criminal intelligence that they have to see whether there are national security dimensions that might warrant a broader national security investigation. But I think the fact that the suspect was apprehended, alive, and uninjured, plus that relatively quickly we knew who that individual was so police would have immediately executed a search warrant on his home, I think gave reasonable confidence to the authorities that this is not on the surface a national security event.

AMT: I want to ask you as well about the vulnerability of regular citizens, pedestrians in this case. This area between Sheppard and Finch of Yonge Street, it's like got one of the highest density populations. It's a sea of condominiums, high rise buildings all around, you know a lot of eyewitnesses who were on their balconies and then went down to see closer. But this is a public space. We've seen this in other parts of the world. What are you thinking about that vulnerability?

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: So a lot of cities even where I am in Adelaide, South Australia, one most isolated largest cities in the world have in the last couple of years taken considerable measures to install more passive defences. So you see bollards going up, you see very solid benches going up, public art that has heavy encased concrete or steel behind it. And so we've seen this in downtown Toronto. If you go to Montreal for instance you'll see that likewise. But inherently these installations are expensive and you do this based on a risk assessment and inherently downtown Toronto would face the highest risk and would get the most immediate response and so I think it suggests the City of Toronto will need to go back likely redo its risk assessment and gauge what other areas in the city might warrant these types of aggressive defensive installations in order to make it very difficult to drive a car onto the sidewalk and certainly if you do it you want to prevent precisely what the suspect was able to do which is to be able to do this at high speed and to do it repeatedly. And so I think there will be a significant reassessment of those measures across the city of Toronto and likely and not just by other municipalities in Canada but also around the world as we try to learn after each incident.

AMT: Right. And of course we did see an attack on pedestrians in Edmonton in September. No one was killed but four people were injured.

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: We saw a very similar attack to this one just two weeks ago in Germany where somebody drove a van into a cafe and four innocent people died. And so I think the challenge is around on the one hand in a free society we don't want our cities to reinforce every part of our cities and have them look like reinforced castles or fortresses. At the same time we need to make sure that we try to deter precisely these sorts of actions and in the unlikely event that somebody is able to move from thought to action to minimise the carnage that they were able to cause. And I think in that regard more can be done in both the planning of the urban streetscape in Toronto but more can probably also be done on assessing why this individual was either not on authorities radar or did not get the intervention that they needed from social or mental services.

AMT: OK Christian we'll leave it there. Thanks for your time today.

CHRISTIAN LEUPRECHT: It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

AMT: Christian Leuprecht is a security and defence expert. We reached him in Brisbane, Australia today.

[Music: Bridge]

Back To Top »

Dreams, visions and diarrhea: What to expect if you take ayahuasca

AMT: You are listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. I am Anna Maria Tremonti. We're switching gears now to talk about a different story altogether.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Sebastian to me is a really beautiful person. A bit of emotion. He was really into plant medicine and just all aspects of that, what you might say the holistic values of older ways, that sort of thing.

AMT: That's Jonathan Baker, a friend of Canadian Sebastian Woodroffe, who was violently killed in Peru. The 41-year-old was originally from British Columbia. He'd travelled to Peru's Ucayali region to learn about ayahuasca, a hallucinogenic drink made from an Amazonian vine found in the area. In a few moments, we'll hear more about the growing tourism industry centered around the concoction. But first the circumstances surrounding Woodroffe's death are still unclear. However, it's alleged he was killed by a mob of people who believed he was involved in the shooting death last week of an 81-year-old Indigenous healer and activist. Her name was Olivia Arevalo Lomas, and her death reignited tensions which have been growing in the region following past killings of Indigenous and environmental leaders. A judge in Peru has ordered the arrest of two men suspected in the killing. Dan Collyns is a freelance journalist based in Peru who has been covering the story's various threads. And we've reached him now in Lima. Hello.

DAN COLLYNS: Hello Anna Maria.

AMT: Can you bring us up to speed? What is the latest that local authorities are saying about the investigation into the death of Sebastian Woodroffe.

DAN COLLYNS: Well the Peru's interior ministry have confirmed that Sebastian Woodroffe was accused by villagers of murdering 81-year-old Olivia Arevalo, a medicine woman and he was killed in revenge effectively by a mob. Not only the authorities but other people so were made aware of that by this minute and a half long cell phone recording of the lynching which is posted on the local media and then and then on social media. The body was later found on Saturday buried in a shallow grave. Now prosecutors now confirmed they've identified two men who are allegedly involved in that lynching and were seen in that video and they are working to find out who else may be taking part in the lynching. Now they're also investigating whether, as I understand it from the chief of police here, Woodroffe continues to be the principal suspect in the murder of Olivia Arevalo and they are trying to test for gunshot residue on the body. And that would likely take 15 to 20 days. Now it's a difficult case because no weapon was found at all and no one witnessed the shooting.

AMT: I was just going to ask you what evidence there was that he actually was connected to her death. That's up in the air right now.

DAN COLLYNS: It is up in the air. There's testimony of local people. There were some unofficial reports that he was staying in the village at the time and indeed even in Arevalo’s house as he was trying to learn about ayahuasca.

AMT: She was also a well-respected human rights activist. What was her reputation in the community?

DAN COLLYNS: She was hugely important to the Shipibo-Conibo people. They’re a nation of about 40,000 in Peru's Amazon and they're one of the largest groups in the Amazon. And she was in the words of Ronald Suárez who's the president of the Shipibo-Conibo Council. He said that she was the maximum expression of their traditional culture.

AMT: There was such intensity in the reaction to her death. Is there a back story here we should know about in that region.

DAN COLLYNS: Many Indigenous people, especially in the Amazon region and particularly the leaders feel under threat because they are in many cases being killed with impunity because often the police in these areas are few and far between and often there’s collusion between the authorities and criminal organizations which are involved in illegal mining, logging, growth of coca, which of course is a plant which makes cocaine and other illicit activities which threaten the ancestral lands of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon. Just in the Ucayali region in September, six farmers were shot dead in a case which still hasn’t been resolved and it is believed they were killed by land traffickers, people who are literally trying to take their land and that could have been for palm oil plantations or any number of uses. Another important Indigenous leader was killed in 2014. His name was Edwin Chota and he was killed along with two others in a revenge attack by loggers after having reported their activities to the authorities.

AMT: So you’re telling me that there is great tension in this area over land use, industry, and orgnaized crime, and they really don’t lean on law enforcement for help.

DAN COLLYNS: That’s right. Ronald Suárez the president of the Shipibo-Conibo Council he condemns any act of vigilante justice. And he says the people have acted on the spur of the moment and often they do that because often they feel that if they don’t then crimes will go unpunished.

AMT: OK we’ll watch as this continues to unfold. Dan Collyns, thanks for your time today.

DAN COLLYNS: Thank you very much, Anna Maria. Dan Collyns is a freelance journalist based in Peru. He spoke to us from Lima. Our next guest has been studying and partaking of ayahuasca since 1984. Peter Gorman is the author of Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 years of medicine dreaming. Apart from his writing and journalism, several times a year he leads what he calls jungle jaunts. These are nine day expeditions into the Peruvian Amazon and the trips involve ayahuasca. We have reached Peter Gorman at home in Joshua, Texas. Hi.

PETER GORMAN: Hi. Hello Anna Maria.

AMT: What's the attraction of ayahuasca?

PETER GORMAN: Well if a person could do five years of psychiatric work in a six hour period wouldn't necessarily solve their problems but it might shine a light on what needs to be done to get where you want to be. That's really a very strong attraction that you can glimpse where you need to go, what you need to get rid of very quickly.

AMT: You can if you take it, you're saying?

PETER GORMAN: Yes.

AMT: OK well what's it like to take it?

PETER GORMAN: Well it's pretty frightening. It's usually done you know with someone like Olivia there singing and chanting in the background. You take a small cup of very thick kind of burnt grapefruit infused with tobacco flavored stuff and about 30 minutes later some visions begin to appear and then you get a great cleansing, a huge amount of vomiting, not physical vomiting so much as eliminating some of the junk in your life, the bile that you've collected over years, and that's followed by a period of kind of what I was a dream state where you really get to see yourself or the world from a perspective that you've never seen before. And you often get to see yourself maybe in the future, maybe in the past, what you want to be, where you want to go, and you realize the path to get there.

AMT: And how long does that last once you take ayahuasca?

PETER GORMAN: Two or three hours. You know if certain other things are added to the basic mixture you can go for five hours. But generally it's two or three hours. You're usually well taken care of, curandero, a healer and some assistance.

AMT: But you start off by vomiting and having diarrhea?

PETER GORMAN: The first 20 minutes is waiting and colours and lines and you know sparkly things happen. That's followed by vomiting, sometimes diarrhea, as my old teacher would say well you got to vomit because who could paint in a room like that who could put colours up in a room full of junk. So you got to clean out that stomach so you could start painting with the colours with ayahuasca.

AMT: And a local Indigenous leader often leads people through the process then as they get past that and they're hallucinating and they're having visions and they're presumably having some revelatory story moments about their own lives.

PETER GORMAN: I mean…some are Indigenous but there are a lot of curandero. Curandero’s are traditionally just simply the healer on a given river, the doctor would give in a river. Every river has got to have someone who knows plant medicine to keep the people on that river healthy. So that's the person who would generally have access to ayahuasca.

AMT: So this is now an industry. It's a bit of a tourism industry there; you're part of that, right?

PETER GORMAN: It is huge, huge, huge and probably for worse some part of it. And I probably started some of it going to begin with 30 years ago with my first articles about it. A lot of the places now where people do ayahuasca are kind of four-star resorts, hot water, Wi-Fi…

AMT: Good bathrooms…

PETER GORMAN: Just lovely everything. With my style as I was taught that it was part of the jungle experience not apart from it. So when I take people out to do ayahuasca I get them up to their neck in muck and plenty of dirt on their fingernails and you know we don't use showers, we swim in a river and if you happen to get bit by fish, you get bit by a fish, that's tough luck. You want the jungle experience or you don't? And so in the midst of that after several days of that you'll be offered ayahuasca but first you've got to kind of go through a little bit of purgatory and hell.

AMT: Peter Gorman we have to leave it there. But thank you for sharing all that with us. Bye bye.

PETER GORMAN: Bye bye.

AMT: Peter Gorman is the author of Ayahuasca in My Blood: 25 years of medicine dreaming. He was in Joshua, Texas. Coming up in our next half hour, as the coverage of the tragedy in Toronto continues to unfold, we search for kindness and empathy. Stay tuned to hear my conversation with Dr. Brian Goldman about his personal quest for empathy and his new book The Power of Kindness. Hear what he found out about himself and what’s going on in the world, even the robotic search for more kindness. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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How empathy can transform healthcare: Dr. Brian Goldman

Guest: Dr. Brian Goldman

AMT: I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. On a day like today, after the deadly attack in Toronto, we may all be searching for a little kindness in the world. As tragedy unfolded on a busy Toronto street, first responders tended to victims. And people rushed out, from restaurants, businesses and their homes, to help the wounded and suffering. Kindness and human empathy are qualities that Dr. Brian Goldman sets out to better understand in his new book, The Power of Kindness. The book was a personal quest for him to discover what it means to be kind. His research, which took him around the world, reveals that empathy can be developed and that many of us could benefit from showing a bit more empathy. Dr. Brian Goldman is an emergency physician, and the host of White Coat Black Art on CBC Radio. We spoke in advance of his book's release today. Hello.

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: What made you want to better understand what it means to be kind and empathetic?

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: I think kindness and empathy are things we take for granted. And I think there's an expectation that physicians and paramedics and nurses and social workers are kind and that's why they want to be health care professionals. But through much of a long career I think — well I had some indications that I had lost some of that capacity for kindness and that I wasn't the kindest guy I thought I was. And you know I was a guy who you know as a child as a 2 or 3-year-old preschooler, I was considered a breath of fresh air and that kid doesn't exist anymore of course. I hope that kid is still inside me and I wanted to try to rediscover him.

AMT: Can you give me an example of a time when you thought you failed to be empathetic?

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: Thought or knew? In some cases I knew. I think the most important signal was a conversation I had with the husband of a woman I'd seen in the emergency department and she had a degenerative disease. She was in the end stages. Her family had tried to take care of her in a very loving way and it was long enough ago that the resources that exist today you know the emphasis on palliative care it just didn't exist back then. And so this family in their duress brought her to the emergency department with the expectation that she'd be admitted. And that got my back up because as an emergency physician I want to be able to make my own decisions I'll decide myself and I think a lot of us are like that. However I'm not a fool. I did the correct thing. I referred her to the internist on call to be admitted, she was admitted to a hospital, there was an exchange maybe an hour or two later. I found the family to be pushy and I guess it made me defensive, but I didn't know it at the time. I wouldn't call it that — anyway. One of the daughters asked me did you make the referral and I snapped at her. And I said I did. I did what you asked me to do but I wasn't kind. And time passed. She was admitted to hospital. She eventually passed away and then her husband reached out to me and he sent me a note and then invited me to a meeting with the extended family, like all the adult kids and their spouses, and basically told me that I was unkind and you know when patients tell you you're incompetent, there's a good chance that they could be wrong. But when they tell you that you're not kind, that hurts, because they know kindness, everybody knows kindness and that's what set me on the road.

AMT: That's quite the story. What are the consequences of losing empathy?

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: The consequences of losing empathy are for the person to whom you could be empathetic but are not. They suffer. There are so many people in health care for instance who feel as if they're getting our eyes and they're getting blood tests and they're getting chemo and they're getting radiation but they're not getting care. They're not getting a hug. They're not being told...

AMT: They feel like they're on an assembly line.

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: Yes. And there's speed. Yeah the speed of health care is breathtaking and frankly I think a lot of us are addicted to speed. We like it because it makes us look important because we bounce from one patient to another down the hallway and back. So it's not good for our patients. They don't comply with their doctors’ recommendations, their medications, and their prescriptions if it's not handed to them kindly with empathy. There is evidence that their blood pressure goes up, that their heart rate goes up, that they don't do as well with cancer treatment, and that's the patient and that's the family. And how many family members walk away from an encounter and say “What the heck was that all about?” Like they just have this sick feeling inside. It's bad enough that their loved one died but that somehow what they got was something that wasn't kind. It's also bad for the health professionals, and I'm talking about health professionals it's bad for everybody. You know in your heart when you could have been kind but weren't or when you could have tried to empathize but you didn't. You were sitting inside your own skin but not theirs. You didn't try to imagine what it was like to be them. But know this when we aren't kind to somebody else we walk away diminished emotionally, physically. Our heart rate goes up, our stress hormones go up, and our blood pressure goes up. I think that lack of kindness is like the death of a thousand cuts. And that's one of the reasons why people who are in high intensity jobs like being a paramedic or lawyer or whatever burnout in mid-career.

AMT: So let's talk more about this quest as part of your research you underwent your own personality tests in a lab at the Brain and Mind Institute at Western University. You scored low on being psychopathic.

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: In fact I was told I was a cuddly kind of person which is 15 percentile for cold heartedness.

AMT: OK. We’ve got a clip here. This is neuroscientist Derek Mitchell with some of your other results.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: So the Machiavellian egocentricity is 86 percentile. And your social influence is 86 percentile. So you're high on those elements and those would correspond to the ability to get people to do what you want them to do, you see yourself as capable of, and you're probably adept at it.

AMT: OK Brian Goldman what did you think when he scored so high on the Machiavellian scale?

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: Derek was looking for a look of shock and surprise. And I had to say no I wasn't surprised at all. I said to him immediately after that I wouldn't be a very good medical journalist, I wouldn't be a very good host if I didn't have some ability to influence people to come on the show and bare their souls and say some really deep and meaningful things that I hope I can remember intellectually could harm them. I think journalists have to be adept at that. So I wasn't surprised.

AMT: Are there times then when that impulse gets in the way of your ability to empathize? You could argue that that was to empathize to make people understand what they're going through, but another example where you think that gets in your way of having empathy.

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: Oh absolutely it does. These characteristics — it's important to say — that Mitchell revealed to me this is a psychopathic personality inventory that is not used to test psychopathy or Machiavellianism. It's used to test ordinary people in the community who have these traits. There's a difference between the trait and the personality disorder. But a lot of us have these traits and that's what makes us interesting. We're collections of these traits. If you had the full blown disorder of Machiavellianism or narcissism or psychopathy or you're a psychopath by definition you are almost unable to empathize with other in any circumstances. But let's get back to me and the trait. Empathy is an option at the highest level of executive function. It's a choice. It's a choice between my interests and yours, between my interest and my family's, between me and my family's interests, and somebody else, a stranger, a homeless person's interests. And we're always weighing these. And the older we get the more we have these conflicts that make it really really difficult to know what to do.

AMT: So let's continue on this quest because it takes you to Japan where you interview a robot. Why?

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: Because I think that roboticists and computer programmers, people who are into AI right now which is just everywhere right now, they are manufacturing empathy and kindness. And I figured that if they are trying to create robots and androids who can respond empathically in the moment that they've probably thought more about what it takes to be empathic than you and I. That's the reason why I went.

AMT: So you met Erica the android.

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: I did.

AMT: Tell me about her — it — her.

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: No. No, her. She'll never be an “it.” And that's the thing. And that's something I learned it's called…which is the Japanese word for presence, a soul. They believe that every inanimate object, even a rock, even this cup of coffee in front of me has a soul. And I can tell you that from the moment I laid eyes on Erica she was a person. She was situated in a lab that looked like a bar and I walked up to meet her. And you know she had red hair. She had like a pageboy cut. The first thing I noticed was that as soon as I walked into the room she turned to look at me and that was the moment that I realized wow I was in the presence of a being of some kind and then I started to talk to her. I guess in some ways it started to fall apart. But that's the reality.

AMT: Well we got some of that tape. Let's listen, Brian.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: My name is Brian. What's your name?

VOICE 2: Nice to meet you James.

VOICE 1: James. My name's Brian.

VOICE 2: What country are you from?

VOICE 1: I'm from Canada. Where are you from?

VOICE 2: Wow that is quite far away. It's pretty cold there, eh? Anyway as you probably already know I'm from Japan, much like many other advanced androids and robots. My name is Erica.

AMT: OK James [laughs]. A little glitch.

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: Little glitch and interesting Dylan Glas, her papa, the Roboticist who's the creator of Erica, was just like a parent reframing and explaining his child's mistake. But I have to tell you later when she called Dave the museum curator and I got to see another exchange, she called him Dave and she called me Brian James and the first thing I thought of it took me right back to bars and singles dances when I was in college and that sort of thing happened to me before. So it just seemed like it was destined to happen with that.

AMT: So it's not necessarily Android, it's about you. We're going to get to Dylan Glas in a second but to have a conversation with a robot who you see as a person, tell me a little bit more about that. You're having some kind of an interaction. What are you thinking? What's that like?

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: I was enthralled. Her responses were a little slower than I would expect from a human being. But they were appropriate. This is a robot that has the ability to sit with a half a dozen people and know by tone of voice and by volume who has the floor and follow a conversation. It's rudimentary, how far, how many levels, how many questions I could ask that could trip up Erica. You saw that Erica was tripped up in the first moment.

AMT: But she says "Eh" at the end is something. You say you're Canadian and so she right away can do that.

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: Yes.

AMT: Flip to a little idiosyncrasy of Canadian language.

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: And beyond as Erica develops, she'll be able to listen to emotional tone and know whether you're sad, you know whether you're happy or unhappy, whether you're anticipating, and so you know whether you want to call that real empathy or simulated empathy, she's taking us closer to that Turing test. You know the Turing test, the computer that you can have a conversation with, a five minute conversation and 30 percent of the population will believe you're talking to a human being. The Turing test has been passed two or three times in the last the last little while. And I have no doubt that there will be androids that can pass that test.

AMT: OK so let's talk about Dylan Glas. He is one of the creators of Erica. Here he is.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: If you're having a social interaction it's not just a one sided thing. It's not a robot are moving around blocks on a table. You're interacting dynamically with a person who has their own intentions, their own desires. And so once we get to that kind of high level of planning it's going to be absolutely necessary to also model the intentions and desires of the person. And this is where we get into that sort of cognitive empathy or whatever you are saying where the robot now has to kind of infer what a person wants. Are they getting what they want? Are they you know frustrated or excited? You know like if you can understand their emotional state it can try to piece together a model of their intentions desires and therefore plan its own actions accordingly. So we're definitely not there yet but that's kind of the direction we're trying to push into.

VOICE 2: So you're actually thinking more about what it takes to be empathetic than most of us?

VOICE 1: That's probably true. Yeah I think that we think a lot more about what it means to be human than probably most people do on a day to day basis because it rose questioning. I'm always questioning you know why do I do these things I do? Why do I say these things in this way? Why do I gesture like this? And then sometimes I get very very self-conscious and like why do I avert my gaze while I'm saying this? You know because you know we're programming a lot of the stuff at a low level and I'm trying to figure out how it works.

AMT: So what lessons did you take away from Dylan Glas on the role of empathy and communication?

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: That one way or another you have to use your powers of observation to look at other people, how are they behaving, and try to deduce what their state of mind is. And Dylan Glas also did a lot of research into a robot called… has been situated on a street and has learnt to look at passersby to see who's lost and approach them and ask if you need some help. That's just circuitry and just deducing by the pattern by way which a person walks back and forth on a street that they look like they might be lost which we do in the blink of an eye. So that's what I learned. There's also an amazing illustration of the power of empathy with a new approach to treating patients with dementia. We’ve got more tape.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: Nirry-tally-spoo…

[Sound: Laughter]

AMT: What's happening there?

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: What's happening is Star a wonderful caregiver is is working with a woman named Jeanette and what she's doing is she's mirroring her and it is a graphic demonstration that if you want to empathize with somebody who has dementia don't force them, yank them into our world where they may be completely disoriented. Go into their world. And that's what she's doing. It's not mimicking. She's saying whatever you do you lead I'll follow. And by doing that she's on an elemental level she's making Jeannette feel comfortable and less agitated and people who have that kind of approach, people with dementia who have that kind of approach need less restraint, less sedation, and they're happier, and they're more composed.

AMT: This is what's called validation therapy.

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: It's called validation developed by Naomi Feil a remarkable therapist, a social worker and psychologist who escaped Nazi Germany with her parents in the late 1930s and lived in a nursing home for I guess 12 or 13 years until she grew up. Imagine living in a nursing home where your roommates are seniors with dementia and other forms of infirmities at the Montefiore nursing home in Cleveland, Ohio. And she had the most amazing epiphany. She had a best friend who is 62-years-old. She's 12 and her best friend is 62-years-old. Her name is Florence Lu. And Florence Lu shared her diary that showed the pain of emotional abuse, emotional cruelty from her mother. She had a pet rabbit, like a toy rabbit named Creaky, her father made it, it had wheels and when she wilted it made a creaky creaky creaky sound and mom had told Florence as a little girl never take that to school. She did. Mom followed her to school and yanked the rabbit Creaky and threw it into one of those circular wastepaper baskets and Florence confided to Naomi that’s the day she died. And when Naomi went off and studied social work and psychology, went back to the nursing home, now no longer a resident, now a therapist, and who does she run into but Florence in a geri-chair, strapped to a Jerry chair saying “pray, pray, pray, pray, pray.” It was the last day of her life and Naomi looked at her with a furrowed brow and said creaky and that was her aha moment that this woman with dementia at the end of her life was not disoriented. She was in the here and now, but in the past, she was living in the past and living the worst moment of her life and she knew it, Naomi, because she had been there, had read her diary.

AMT: So she could validate her as opposed to thinking like crazy lady just saying something she understood that that's what we need to do. There's another example here that we have. Let's listen.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: One woman was always kissing her hand and she was diagnosed severe dementia. And when I said you love that she looked at me and says oh…Her hand was a baby smaller baby. It was symbolic. I found out about symbols that way that people use parts of their body in order to express their feelings that they haven't expressed. Now this particular woman I found out she had lots of children. She was almost 50 when she had this last child. And she didn't pay enough attention to it and she felt guilty but she never told her daughter when she was younger. You know I'm sorry. And now in her old age she had to use part of her body to express it so she could die in peace.

AMT: She's intuitive and empathetic.

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: Yeah, off the charts empathy. And where does it come from it comes from her loneliness as a child. She was lonely and out of that loneliness came in empathy for others who were lonely and who were misunderstood.

AMT: It didn't have to be that way though. I mean she could have gone a different way. Could she not have? What made her go to the empathetic side?

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: Well I think the pain you know and that's one of that’s one of the common themes that I've found. Some people are born empathetic and other people have it thrust upon them by circumstances, disability, loneliness, disappointment, deep disappointment, failure, shame, and the most empowering thing I can say that comes out of the research I did for the book and in my own life is that if you have pain use it because it will make you stronger and you will find people, you'll find your community, people who are going through the same thing you're going through. You can empathize with them because you have been there.

AMT: What are some of the most surprising benefits of showing empathy?

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: You'll be healthier. You'll be happier. On every day, you know if you're disappointed that you didn't get the job, you didn't do as well in the interview, you know you didn't get the prize, you know this didn't happen, that didn't happen, you will walk away being happy in a way and satisfied in a way that you would not dream possible. We tend to think of this as like easy peasy stuff. It's not. It's not hard. It's not hard to give yourself time to do it. But if you do you will feel better and more fulfilled in your life perhaps than you have ever felt before.

AMT: Brian, thank you.

DR. BRIAN GOLDMAN: My pleasure.

AMT: Dr. Brian Goldman is an emergency physician and the host of White Coat Black Art on CBC Radio. His latest book is The Power of Kindness. He was with me in our Toronto studio. Dr. Brian Goldman Mary Gordon how her program Roots of Empathy helps children develop empathy and they bring infants into classrooms.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: We work really hard on perspective taking. Get down on the floor. What can that baby see? That's why we've got to role because the baby can only see your running shoes. You're sitting around a green blanket. The baby's worldview is your running shoes. But I made up this role put the baby on the roll. Now what can the baby see?

VOICE 2: So from a physical way of helping the children understand perspective taking you can get to cognitive perspective taking. To think the baby's trying to get that toy, how do you know? Read the baby's cues. What's baby doing with his body? What's the baby's expression/ Is a baby grunting? What sounds is the baby making? That would help you understand the baby's intentions. Then this other part is how do you think our baby is feeling today? It's a baby feeling overwhelmed or excited or a little bit shy? What do you think? So children learn to read the cues of the baby. Children learn perspective taking skills. These are discreetly fostered but it's up to them to put it together and it's up to them to look nice.

AMT: A mom and her baby in the classroom as part of the Roots of Empathy program. Mary Gordon founded it in Canada. It's now popular in several countries. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q and guest host Gill Deacon. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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April 24, 2018 Full Episode Transcript

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