Under the 1971 Convention on Psychotropic Substances, 184 participating countries have to regulate medical and scientific access to drugs by a scheduling system, and although some countries (Jamaica) have sidestepped these regulations by their interpretation of the convention, these provisions have generally made attempts at academic research and clinical trials very time-consuming, overly complicated, and expensive – especially for psilocybin, which clearly should not be a Schedule I drug. Koddermann helped create ITPRI to assist countries in pursuing and securing the rescheduling of psilocybin, first by initiating reviews of its status. He talks about what steps need to be taken to enable easier access to psilocybin, which countries are part of ITPRI and why, and why the US is not a likely candidate.
He discusses patents, IP, and “Psychedelics 2.0,” where companies are patenting new molecules, using IP to create investment interest, and patent-hopping: What should companies be allowed to patent? What is truly novel? He also talks about market exclusivity and patents; ketamine, esketamine, and the case of China attempting to schedule ketamine; Ken Kesey; consumer preferences around natural products vs. synthetic; the early investment hype in psychedelics; and the entourage effect and baeocystin, a compound present in many mushrooms.
Notable Quotes
“It just gets very complicated to do research, and in some cases, the research just doesn’t happen because you have researchers who may be minded to undertake research and look at the requirements and say, ‘Forget it. I don’t have the time or the expertise to deal with the administrative burden. I don’t have the financing to deal with the costs.’ So they go and do something else. …It really gums up the system and slows down the research, and obviously; when you’re slowing down the research, you’re ultimately slowing down the development of therapies for patients.” “I think the patent system isn’t perfect and probably needs to be looked at in terms of what is really novel and nonobvious and useful (which are the three criteria for awarding patents), because [in] some cases, patents are stifling as opposed to promoting innovation, which is the purpose of the patent system.” “The science is so early on and when it comes to these analogs, so little is known. Some of these have only been discovered in the last five years, so we’re really at [the] foundation when it comes to understanding what these analogs are doing, and what else is in the mushrooms – there may be other compounds that simply have not been discovered, especially when considering that dry weight is, in best case, 2% of the mass.”
In this episode, David interviews Kevin Balktick: Founder and Director of Horizons; one of the world’s longest-running psychedelic media, education, and communities – who we all know for their yearly Horizons conference in New York City.
Fifteen years in, Horizons is making its way West with their first conference outside of NYC; September 15-18 at the Portland Art Museum in Oregon. Balktick talks about what led to the creation of Horizons in 2007, why he seeks out old buildings with history, and why it’s become necessary to have a second conference in Oregon now that the state is about to forever be changed by the Oregon Psilocybin Services Act (aka Measure 109). Onlookers may think it’s about expansion and combating the government, but to him, it’s really about responsibility towards making sure that the community works together (and addresses what needs addressing) to get this pivotal moment right.
He also talks about Horizons New York (October 12-13 at The New York Academy of Medicine and The Great Hall at The Cooper Union); The Oregon Health Authority; why psilocybin is making the biggest waves in psychedelics; David Nutt’s paper on “Equasy”; Horizons’ scholarship system; how conferences don’t reflect the real demographic of their surrounding communities; and the importance (and life-changing possibilities) of gathering together in three dimensions. And reminder that we are able to offer discounts on Horizons to ether event! For Horizons Northwest, use code PSYCHEDELICSTODAY-NW-17 at checkout for 17% off, and for Horizons New York, use PSYCHEDELICSTODAY-NY-15 at checkout for 15% off. Joe and Kyle will be at Horizons Northwest and hope to see you!
Notable Quotes
“The venue is kind of part of the message that you can’t necessarily escape, so the selection of venues and the messages they communicate are a big part of the set and setting. Although it would be a lot easier in many ways, I’ve just never desired to have Horizons be at a hotel with the carpet and acoustic tile ceilings and so on and so forth. I’ve always wanted to be in somewhere that has history and has its own kind of character and dignity.”
“I have heard this again and again from people who were not sure whether they really wanted to risk their career by becoming publicly associated with psychedelics and then they went to Horizons or another similar conference and they could suddenly feel the strength and the confidence to do so. …All of those were people who had read journal articles, magazine articles, [and] watched videos galore. It is doing the fundamental human thing and being in a place with other human beings – that’s what really created change in people’s lives, and it was important that those things happened publicly and not at some private event with only a handful of people who are allowed to be there.” “When someone wants to bring someone to Horizons that is not already a part of this community and may harbor some skepticism; that’s a real relationship of trust, especially when it’s a family member, and someone is kind of implicitly saying, ‘I believe in this and the way you present it so well that I trust my family relationships with this community and with this event and with what’s being said on stage’ – that is the compliment I really, really am deeply honored and humbled to receive.”
In this episode, Kyle returns with another edition of Vital Psychedelic Conversations – this time with past guest Steve Thayer: clinical psychologist, Clinical Director of Education & Training at Novamind, and co-host (with Dr. Reid Robison) of the Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers podcast.
He talks a lot about integration and what psychedelic-assisted therapy really means, pointing out that much of integration work is just general good mental hygiene. He talks about how clients need to be open to where the experience takes them, but remember why they sought it out in the first place: What change are they looking for? He gives advice for people looking to enter the field, and points out the difficulties in comparing the efficacy of different types of therapy (as most studies focus on the drug itself).
He also discusses the main pillars of therapy and the essential domains of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy; his theoretical orientations (parts work, emotion-focused therapy, and acceptance and commitment therapy); the importance of trusting the inner healer (but with some structure); the unique communal aspects of group work; integration challenges he’s run into; mindful awareness; cognitive fusion; the importance of helpers getting help; and how psychedelics make us comfortable with not knowing.
Notable Quotes
“Everyone gets really excited, in my experience, about the medicine: ‘Can psilocybin cure my depression?’ ‘Can ketamine cure my trauma?’ ‘Can MDMA make me whole again?’ …People come to the doctor for the cure, and they just sort of expect the medicine to do the work. The medicine does a lot of work, but it doesn’t do all the work.”
“We don’t really know what’s going on when you’re in a psychedelic experience. We’ve got our predecessors who worked with this medicine a lot, and we’ve got the ancient traditions that have been using plant medicines and altered states for thousands of years that we can learn from, and then we have a little bit of empirical research here in the modern era; but to say that that gives us the authority to say, ‘Well, we know exactly what’s going on when you take this much of psilocybin or this much of LSD, and this is exactly what you should do to navigate that experience’ would be unbridled hubris.”
“If you know you want to become a psychedelic-assisted therapist, become a good therapist first. You can get training on the psychedelic medicine later. For me, I’m biased because I am a psychotherapist, [but] I think becoming a really skilled, competent therapist is really going to be the harder thing to do than it is to learn how to work with these medicines.”
“I’m also well aware that just because I’ve been trained in a Western modern psychotherapeutic approach, that I don’t have any kind of monopoly on the wisdom it takes to heal. …There are plenty of guides who work outside this paradigm that I’ve been licensed within who I would be more than happy to send a loved one to – that I would go to myself because I want to learn from their wisdom. We haven’t cornered the market on that.”
In this episode, David interviews Susan Beaulieu: Anishinaabe citizen of the Red Lake Nation, Ph.D. student, podcaster, and Extension Educator at the University of Minnesota Extension. She works with Indigenous communities primarily around intergenerational trauma and strengthening community resilience.
She gives some history of the Red Lake Nation, discussing the impact of boarding schools on their community and how the government attempted to assimilate children to a Western way of life, and how an ayahuasca session made her realize the power (and prevalence) of intergenerational trauma. She talks about how language shapes reality and the risk of losing Indigenous language, how psychedelics could help her community remember its traditions, and the need to insert important aspects of their culture into the healing process and integration work. She wonders: How do they create pathways beyond what is being explored in our current Western model that tribal leaders would be on board with? Does tribal sovereignty mean they have a legal right to try these new medicines? And how do they best keep tradition alive while embracing a whole new paradigm?
She also discusses mind-body medicine and soft belly breathing; the interconnectedness of all of our parts; the importance of truly feeling your “bad” emotions and embracing the flow of energy; how feeling someone else’s healing can be invigorating; and how culture is not just what you do, but how (and why) you do it.
Notable Quotes
“When we think about epigenetics, it’s not just the trauma that gets passed on. Epigenetics is about survival, so it’s also the resilience and the knowledge of our ancestors that gets passed on. So how do we, as Indigenous people, really tap into that again? I think the more that we’re able to heal, the more we’re going to be able to.”
“It’s one thing if a trauma befalls a family within a community that has all of those supports, because the rest of the community is able to come around and help support that family or individual. But when the attack is happening across the entire community and those practices are made illegal and the children are taken, who holds the space?” “To me, culture isn’t just the activities you do, but it’s how you do the activities that you do.”
“As sovereign nations, we should have the ability to choose how we heal, when we heal, all of those pieces. And that should not be determined by anybody outside of our community, especially the governments that inflicted the harm in the first place. That really should be up to our communities to decide when and how and all of that, and, resources should be coming to our communities to help us do that. As many resources as went into our communities to try and dismantle and tear our communities apart; just as many resources should go back into helping our communities to be able to access healing in the ways that we see appropriate.”
In this episode, Joe interviews Soren Shade: passionate anti-prohibitionist, producer of the third season of “Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia” and his new podcast, and Co-Founder of Top Tree Herbs, a kratom tea company dedicated to educating people about kratom, normalizing its use, and defeating the prohibitionists who want to ban it.
He tells his story of learning from Dr. Carl Hart at Columbia, discovering kratom, and meeting Hamilton Morris, and tells us all about kratom: how to pronounce it; its legal history (which is also summed up nicely in a blog he wrote for us); its ties to opium overuse and why it’s still political; how people typically use it today vs. how it was consumed traditionally; why people use it; caffeine and kratom as a coffee substitute; and what he and Joe like most about it.
And he talks about the lessons we can learn from kratom’s path to legality, which came into play recently when the DEA attempted to schedule 4-HO-DiPT, 5-MeO-aMT, 5-MeO-MiPT, DOI, and DOC. This episode was recorded as a lot of attention was being paid to this attempt, after Hamilton Morris had previously sounded the alarm and people were beginning to prepare for a fight. But after only a few months of public comments, the DEA backed down last week, proving that what happened with kratom may not have been a fluke, and we should all be taking notes and applying the lessons learned to future DEA battles.
Notable Quotes
“That’s kind of the bat signal for: ‘Whoa, maybe there’s something interesting here; maybe there’s something that’s not being said’ – when something is getting (without debate) solely bad attention through the typical media-sphere, through news outlets. It’s just: ‘Alright, here’s a plant, everyone’s hating on it. Hmmm… seen that before…’”
“Kratom has the roadmap for how to stop prohibition of a substance that’s announced, and I think that it should have more attention – that people should take more lessons from the one successful instance of overturning a ban and apply it to the bans that are currently ongoing now in regards to psychedelics.”
“I think normalizing drug use and use of traditional plant compounds and trying things in curiosity and talking about something despite there being a possible social stigma are all hard, but things that have to be done in order to get us into a post-prohibitionist paradigm.”
“Many millions of others count on this plant every day, and we’re just trying to keep it out there, keep it available for people and have people not afraid to use it; not lose their job, not lose their kids, not lose their freedom for using it. That’s our mission. And as soon as kratom seems like it’s in a safe position from that, it’s on to the next one until prohibition is just a reprehensible chapter in our history that we look back on and go, ‘Wow, glad we’re not dealing with that anymore.’”
In this episode, we introduce a new voice at Psychedelics Today: Director of Corporate Communications, Victoria Dekker, in her first PT podcast; breaking some big news with Spencer Hawkswell, CEO of TheraPsil.
Nearly two years ago, TheraPsil helped four Canadians suffering from end-of-life distress access legal psilocybin under a Section 56 exemption. But due to these exemptions expiring and the new Co-Ministers of Health (Jean-Yves Duclos and Carolyn Bennett) having other priorities, these patients and other hopeful patients have lost access to their medicine. So just this week, TheraPsil has backed a charter challenge effectively suing the Canadian government, stating that closing these exemptions violates Canadians’ Section 7 charter rights to “life, liberty and security of person,” and launched a fundraiser to help with this upcoming battle. You can read more and donate at Therapsil.ca.
Hawkswell discusses the creation of TheraPsil and how they help patients through this process; the current (and complicated) ways patients access psilocybin; how Canada’s Special Access Program works; how mirroring cannabis legislation is the best place to start with psilocybin; and TheraPsil’s just-launched Project Solace, where people who have received SAP (or Section 56) access can report back on their experience with both the medicine and the process.
And he tells the story of Thomas Hartle, the first patient to be granted legal access to psilocybin through TheraPsil’s efforts, and how he has once again begun the battle to gain access to the medicine that changed his life. Hawkswell believes that through this charter challenge (of which Hartle is the main plaintiff), politicians are going to show their true colors. Will they waste millions in taxpayer dollars fighting against the citizens they’re supposed to represent, or will they do the right thing?
Notable Quotes
“I’ve been trying to get a doctor for the last probably six months here in Vancouver. So now we’ve got end-of-life patients looking for a new doctor who’s trained with psilocybin and/or willing to support those exemptions. It becomes an absolute nightmare. And the unfortunate truth is that for many patients, they will die before they find a doctor who’s able to support them.”
“It is a right in Canada to have that access, whether patients are going to grow it [on] their own or whether we’re going to make regulations so that companies can produce it. …The only people in the way of that medicine getting into the hands of the patients who need it are our policymakers and the bureaucrats in Health Canada. So they can do the right thing, or they can be told to do the right thing by the courts.”
“The CAMH; that is an amazing grant [and] I’m so happy It’s been approved by the government, but it’s to see whether or not we can remove the psychedelic effects of psilocybin. It’s to see whether or not there’s something in psilocybin that is just this miracle kind of fix-the-depression [compound]. And to me, as a psychonaut, someone who’s spoken with (at this point) hundreds of patients who have been through therapy legally with psilocybin; the journey is the good part. It is the journey. It is the mind-altering psychedelic experience which makes you do the work that you need to do in order to heal. It is the fear; it is the bad trip; it is the dragon you encounter; it’s the deep, dark basement that you don’t want to go into; it’s the tears that you have to experience. It is the journey, and it just feels so right in my soul that that should be the case.”
“Thomas is someone who was given psilocybin in 2020. The exemption is only good for a year, and the Minister took that away from him. And it’s why he is going to be the lead plaintiff on the charter challenge. This is a person in Canada – a Canadian hero – who legalized psilocybin for himself and other Canadians, who is now being told: ‘You do not have the right to your medicine. You do not get it again.’ …It’s amazing to see that side of him come out again – the fighter wanting to change the laws in Canada, because he’s back on the case. He’s still fighting his cancer, and he’s now fighting the Minister of Health, and he’s going to legalize psilocybin for everybody in Canada and change so many lives. It’s a beautiful thing.”
In this episode, David interviews Monnica Williams, Ph.D.: licensed clinical psychologist, Associate Professor at the School of Psychology at the University of Ottawa, Clinical Director of the Behavioral Wellness Clinic in Connecticut, and fairly regular conference speaker.
In this in-person conversation recorded at the From Research to Reality conference (which she co-founded), she discusses her primary focus: the mental health impact communities of color face as a result of racism (both active and intergenerational); and what therapists, clinicians, and especially researchers need to do to make mental healthcare more accessible and more attractive to them. Between triggering language in informed consent paperwork, the fact that the tools for measuring trauma weren’t developed with racism in mind, and the personal biases of therapists (and defensive walls they often erect around racial issues), there is a lot of work to be done – and it all starts with education and open conversation.
Williams talks about why she moved to Canada; the differences in race relations she’s noticed between Canada and the US; why therapists need to be extra careful when dealing with race and psychedelics; internalized racism; the drug war and its intentions; and courses and readings she recommends for learning about anti-racism and for building up the stamina necessary for dealing with the inevitable backlash that comes from trying to help people. She is currently working towards a study on microsoding and racial trauma, a study on MDMA for PTSD due to traumatic immigration experiences, and she’s seeking expanded access to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for people dealing with racial trauma.
Notable Quotes
“For some strange reason, when it comes to racism, it’s almost like this automatic defense system comes up and it’s almost like the weapons come out and the therapists are like, ‘Well, how do you know that was racism?’ and “Well, could they have meant something else?’ Or they’re like, ‘Well, what does this really mean about you?’ This is not the direction the conversation should be going if you want the person to feel understood and if you want the person to feel safe, but it’s almost like an automatic reaction that people have that’s counter-therapeutic.”
“You can’t do good therapy with Black and Brown people in America if you don’t have some rudimentary understanding and appreciation of the traumatic history that we’ve experienced. And that’s doubly so, doing psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.”
“I think that the fact that so many people of color feel a little reluctant to get mental healthcare is because most of us kind of know that most therapists don’t really understand [us] and the process may be counter-therapeutic. And I think oftentimes, people of color are often looked down upon, and there may be this idea that ‘Well, they just don’t really understand.’ Well, no, I think they do understand, and that’s why they don’t want to come for therapy, because they’ve already had bad experiences in other aspects of healthcare and they don’t see any reason why it would be any different in mental health.”
He discusses the use of psychedelics in consciousness research; his concerns over psychedelic infrastructure scaling too quickly and people not being adequately trained; drug policy in the Netherlands, coffee shops, and the interesting loophole with psychedelic truffles; how harm reduction approaches actually work; and finding the proper balance between hype and hope. And he asks some interesting questions: How is research influenced by researchers consulting for psychedelic companies? Are there potential business models outside shareholder-profit models? Are there better ways to design psychedelic studies?
And of course, he talks a lot about this year’s ICPR conference, which is taking place at the Philharmonie Haarlem (just outside Amsterdam) from September 22nd to the 24th. Two big parts of this year’s conference are discussing how science, ethics, and business interact with highly scientific academic research, and looking at clinical perspectives in comparison to patient perspectives (as patients are not represented anywhere near enough). This year, they added an extra day before the conference (the 21st) dedicated more to business-oriented matters, as well as having workshops on music, breathwork, and psychotherapy and psychedelics. Joe, Kyle, and Johanna will be there, and after recording this podcast, it sure sounds like David will be too.
When signing up, use code TODAY150 at checkout for 150€ off!
Notable Quotes
“One of the areas that [is] most intriguing about psychedelic treatments is that they confront people with their own existence, with their place in the universe, with how they relate to themselves and to others; and that’s something, I think, as you said beautifully; it’s something that distinguishes psychedelic treatments from basically all conventional treatments.” “Since the 70s in the Netherlands, we’ve pioneered harm reduction approaches. This has worked really well for people consuming more addictive substances [like] heroin, cocaine, [and] crack cocaine. We’ve always had a very pragmatic, public health-oriented view. We’ve never criminalized drug use or drug users, and as a result, we have, I think, probably the lowest prevalence of heroin users in all of Europe.”
“I think one of the key reasons for decriminalizing drug use is that it would de-marginalize people. This is the foundation of our drug policy for over 40 years. This was one of the key insights that they had when they formulated our drug policy, is that it’s not drug use per se that leads to more harmful drug use; it’s being marginalized and being criminalized that puts people quite literally to the margins.” “I am personally convinced that in order to be an effective therapist, you need to have experience with the substance that you’re prescribing. You need to understand the terrain that patients are navigating through. …[But] if you’re a novice in psychedelic therapy, is having one experience enough? And if not, how many is enough? And do you need to have a difficult experience as well? If you have three positive experiences that go in a specific direction, do you run the risk of imposing your own experience on how you interpret patient experiences? And if that’s not the case, then how do you make sure that you stay open-minded and you don’t impose your own value system or your own way of understanding the world on patients?”
In this episode, Joe interviews Kim Dudine: Chief of Staff at OpenNest Labs and Director of Membership and Strategy at Trailblazers Presents, a curated community of cannabis and psychedelics leaders working together to shape the future of these industries and their surrounding culture.
If you’re someone who doesn’t view cannabis as a tool as useful and powerful as classic psychedelics, Dudine may change your perspective. She sees cannabis as an accessible, playful energy that meets you where you are, provides a pattern interruption, tells you what to work on (from the anxiety many people feel when smoking cannabis), and reminds us of our interconnectedness through the frequency of unity consciousness. When you smoke with someone, your energetic fields merge, and no matter how society and life has programmed you, cannabis has the capacity to easily unify the conversation – something Dudine feels is extremely important in a culture so heavily focused on individualism.
She talks about the importance of embodying the spirit of cannabis; the power of infusing it with gratitude and a “show me” attitude before a smoke; the frequencies she feels from psilocybin; breathwork and the inner healer; how we place so much importance on productivity and intellect but not on humility and heart intelligence; and asks the question: Are mushrooms more advanced and intelligent than we are?
Trailblazers Presents’ next event is an all-day gathering next week, July 27th, at Tribeca 360 in New York City. If you’d like to attend, use code TBFRIENDS at checkout for 25% off!
Notable Quotes
“I’m in no ‘rush’ to heal, but I am in this very expedited path to be of service, and I know that in order to be of service, we have to be able to serve ourselves first. And that’s really what psychedelics has supported me on the past couple of years, is just helping to illuminate so many shadows in my psyche, helping me to understand that my brain is a beautiful computer, but a computer nonetheless, and can be programmed for good or bad. So psychedelics has really helped me rewire a lot of things towards love and towards trust and towards surrender and towards really connecting to the true benevolence of life.”
“A lot of people just associate cannabis with enhancing a movie or enhancing a meal or just bringing in some more playfulness or laughter (which is medicine all in of itself and is all well and good). And like all other plant medicines, cannabis is kind of this really intelligent plant that will work with you and meet you where you are. And it’s, for me, truly just as powerful as psychedelics – if you have that intention of using that way.”
“A massive download that I’ve got is that the next phase of our evolution is realizing the heart intelligence. We’ve focused so much on the logical, linear mind, but we don’t even pay homage to the fact that there’s neurons in our heart and that our hearts have these massive electromagnetic fields that can change the energy of a room. So just by walking into a room and feeling gratitude and kindness in your heart, you can be the tide that rises all boats – if you’re willing to embody this beautiful gift that we’ve been given from these plants.”
“It’s so important to realize that the external projections of violence and suffering we’re seeing is because we haven’t looked at the violence and suffering in our inner dialogue. …Truly, the biggest gift we can give to this planet is to heal ourselves, because then we’re not contributing to this massive cloud of projecting our shit onto the world.”
Kim Dudine is Chief of Staff at OpenNest Labs, a venture capital studio that incubates and accelerates cannabis brands. She is also Director of Membership and Strategy at Trailblazers Presents, a curated community of cannabis and psychedelics leaders united by a shared ethos to advance both industries with thought leadership and the power of community. Kim was an International Business Development professional specializing in clean energy and natural resources management prior to joining OpenNest/Trailblazers. She is also a writer and an energy healer, at Thefrequencyevolution.com.
In this episode, Joe interviews Melissa Lavasani, Founder and Executive Director of the Psychedelic Medicine Coalition (of which Joe is a board member).
She begins by detailing her dark path to looking for an answer and how microdosing homegrown mushrooms and eventually trying ayahuasca changed her life. While she was blown away at how much better she felt, she really struggled with coming out of the psychedelic closet and becoming a public figure after she was asked to essentially be the figurehead for DC’s Initiative 81 campaign. She thankfully decided that her story as a working mom would change hearts and minds, and once people were actually listening with an open mind, the science was much more easily accepted – proving the power of good storytelling (Initiative 81 was the largest ballot initiative victory in history).
She talks about the birth of the Psychedelic Medicine Coalition and the group’s goals; her concerns with psychedelics following the same route as the cannabis gold rush; the frustrations of so many people still having a moral opposition to drugs; and the problems with peyote, of which she feels nobody other than Indigenous communities should be using.
Lavasani (along with many others who have been on the podcast) is featured in Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind” docuseries on Netflix, which just dropped last week. She discusses why she thinks she was in the mescaline episode, her feelings on being lumped in with groups that don’t agree with her on peyote use, and how the Decriminalize Nature battles have brought all of the conflicts with Indigenous communities and the booming psychedelic renaissance to light. While so many people are in such need, she asks: How do we proceed with psychedelic reform without causing any more damage?
Notable Quotes
“Whenever I have a meeting with somebody, if you start with a story, it kind of breaks down those barriers and then you hit them with the science, and once they’re open to this topic, the science – it’s just the facts. This is not my opinion. These are what the studies are saying. And that has become a really effective method in getting people to understand what psychedelics are about and what the potential is here.”
“There’s so many problems with society and it’s almost overwhelming at times to see everything that’s going wrong. But this is the one thing I think that is going in the right direction and can really change how we interact with each other and how we live our lives day to day.”
“The whole point of all the work that we’re doing is to try to make things better for society and better for humanity, and I think this peyote issue is just so touchy and so complex that if we continue without being in lockstep with Indigenous groups, that this is just going to cause more harm than necessary.”
“People tried to poke holes in our campaign and they weren’t successful. You can’t just say, ‘Oh she was just a burnout that wants to take drugs freely.’ I’m not. I’m a mother, I have two little children that demand so much of my time, I’m a professional, I’ve got two graduate degrees, I’m well-educated, and I’m fully aware and in control of myself. I did drugs to get myself out of a bad situation. I did drugs to save my life. That’s a very powerful statement for people. So the more people (the ‘normal’ people, everyday average Americans) that come out and share their stories, the bigger impact this has.”
Melissa Lavasani is Founder and Executive Director of Washington, DC-based Psychedelic Medicine Coalition, the first and only member association focusing on advocating for psychedelics at the Federal, State, and local levels of government. Prior to founding Psychedelic Medicine Coalition, Melissa was the proposer of Washington DC’s successful 2020 ballot measure Initiative 81, the Entheogenic Plant and Fungus Policy Act. Inspired by her own experience of using psychedelics to heal her severe postpartum depression, Melissa led the Decriminalize Nature DC campaign to the largest ballot initiative victory in the history of our nation’s capital (76% voted yes). Through Psychedelic Medicine Coalition, Melissa advocates for policies that support research and access to psychedelics at the Federal and State level. Melissa is also a Founding Board Member of the Psychedelics and Healing Initiative at the Global Wellness Institute and on the Advisory Board of Drugs over Dinner.
In this episode, David interviews Lauren Katalinich and Anya Oleksiuk of the Psychedelic Society; a London-based website and educational platform that runs events and focuses on building the community so many people need after having a psychedelic experience.
They discuss their work with the Psychedelic Society UK and how people often come to them after going through a clinical trial, not knowing what to do with what they’ve experienced; and how sharing circles, integration techniques, the support of an understanding and knowledgeable community, and non-psychedelic practices like meditation, gong baths, and ecstatic dance have helped people to continue their “inside-out journey.” They talk about the power of connection, how part of integration work is simply being around people who get you, and the amazing conversations that can come about in a room full of people who share similar values and the common thread of having done psychedelics before.
Oleksiuk reflects on what keeps her pushing forward and what they’ve all learned in the last five years, which is shown in her in-progress documentary, “The Psychedelic Renaissance” – a film that began as a campaign to remove stigma and help legalize and mainstream psychedelics, but has turned into a project more focused on harm reduction, the dangers of over-hype, and the worries so many of us have about psychedelics becoming a luxury product only for the rich. Perhaps one of the ways we can help this renaissance play out the way we want it to is to model our work lives the way the Psychedelic Society does, as a Teal organization (which David had never heard of, but sounds wonderful!).
Notable Quotes
“The challenge of integration is: when you are in the spiritual realm, there’s quite a big gap between the harshness of reality and the elevated state that you’re in, and you’re trying to bring some of that into your personality, into your actions, so that it can guide you in the right direction and so that you can have a sense of alignment. …What we’re trying to help people with is manifesting this beauty and perfection, really, that they’ve experienced, because it can be really harsh to come back, having seen and felt the potential.” -Lauren
“You see with talks that are being organized, more events, and even not completely psychedelic science-related stuff – the amount of gong baths and ecstatic dances multiplied so much in the last five years. It was so hard to find anything five years ago, and now they’re all over the internet and stuff. They’re everywhere. So there’s a massive change and shift in how people perceive psychedelics and psychedelic culture.” -Anya
“We live in a really distracted society, and I think the barriers to getting to that space of real openness and connectedness are high. So one thing that psychedelics can be great for is opening the door so that you know what that space feels like. …When I dance now, it’s familiar space because it was opened to me through psychedelics.” -Lauren
“I’m just asking: Where is the accessibility? …Where are the scholarships? This is kind of what we’re asking here. We’re encouraging the big boys to come with their money, but we encourage them to also remember about patients and integration and grassroots organizations and supporting people who were in this space for a long time.” -Anya
Lauren Katalinich oversees all things membership and marketing at the Psychedelic Society. She believes in the power of psychedelics and the practices they inspire to help people reconnect deeply with themselves, their communities, and the natural world. She recognizes the critical role of our relationships in the process of self-awareness and growth and is energized by developing the Psychedelic Society community. Her work at the Psychedelic Society is centered around both changing the public narrative of psychedelic substances and creating a space of support and connection for people who are seeking a new way of living their lives.
Anya Oleksiuk is a documentary filmmaker, host, and educator. She is a Co-Director of the Psychedelic Society UK, leading on video production, harm reduction, and education about psychedelics. She is also associated with the Psychedelic Society of the Netherlands and is a consultant for the Polish Psychedelic Society (Polskie Towarzystwo Psychodeliczne). Anya is a founder and director of Triptika Studios, which is a collective of independent filmmakers with interests in health, science, innovative solutions, mental health, drug advocacy, social and racial justice, and environment-friendly lifestyles. She is also the creator, director, and producer of The Psychedelic Renaissance – a not-for-profit documentary film about the worldwide re-emergence of the psychedelic movement and the crucial role of psychedelic substances, plants, and mushrooms in human culture.
Porta Sophia, which means “doorway to wisdom,” is a non-profit online library collecting relevant prior art in the world of psychedelics for patent reviewers and innovators around the world – the intention being to protect the public domain, stimulate innovation, and support good patents, all in support of greater accessibility to psychedelics and psychedelic-assisted therapy at a mass scale.
Li discusses what she does at Porta Sophia; what determines if something counts as prior art or not; the difficulties in collecting pre-prohibition, underground, and Indigenous community data; patent families, what can be patented, and the complexities of international patents; and COMPASS Pathways and their ongoing patent battle.
She also dives into epigenetics and intergenerational trauma; the differences between brain, mind, and consciousness; and what exactly a polymorph is. And lastly, she talks about her Women in Biohealth (WiB) mentoring program and how much women in the biohealth industry (and really, anyone) can benefit from the mentor-mentee relationship.
Notable Quotes
“It is, I would say, a hopeful thing that if the environment can change our gene expression for the worse, …it could also change it for the better. …There [have] been studies in terms of intergenerational trauma where these epigenetic markers are heritable; so if your parents or your parent’s parents experienced really intense stress, that could change their epigenetics and that could actually affect the offspring’s. And that’s kind of a wild thing to think about.”
“Porta Sophia is not directly involved in the …legalization//decriminalization efforts in Oregon, but I think we do share common interests in terms of our mission. …And I think what Porta Sophia is doing by supporting the patents and making these compounds accessible, especially in terms of the use aspect, could be beneficial to the Oregon efforts.”
“I have personally benefited from mentoring throughout my career and my life, and I saw with the pandemic and people feeling more isolated and networking being harder, that it really could be a good opportunity for more connection among the women in the community – especially in this space.”
Sisi Li, Ph.D. is a Data Architect and leads the data archival team at Porta Sophia, a non-profit online library for innovators and patent reviewers to find relevant prior art in the field of psychedelics. Sisi immigrated to the United States from China when she was 10 years old. She received a B.S. in molecular and cellular biology and psychology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, then received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where her research focused on better understanding the epigenetic and molecular mechanisms underlying depression and anxiety disorders. She previously worked for three years as a Research Scientist at Gregor Diagnostics, a prostate cancer diagnostics startup. She co-founded the BioForward Woman in Biohealth (WiB) mentoring program and is on the WiB steering committee. She is passionate about creating more connections among women in the biohealth community.
In this episode, Joe interviews Christopher Dawson & Andrew Galloway: Co-Founders and CEO and COO, respectively, of Dimensions; a Canadian-based company creating retreats that blend traditional plant ceremonies with neuroscience and a luxurious, five-star environment.
Dawson realized what so many people were starting to learn about psychedelics after attending a 2015 conference in Peru that mixed neuroscientists with traditional healers, but for Galloway, it was direct experience, as he gives credit to plant medicines for helping him to heal from a 6-year addiction to crack cocaine. They each tell their story and how it led to the beginnings of Dimensions, where they worked for a year with a “Dreamlab” team of MDs, psychiatrists, practitioners from different fields, and even a design agency to create different programs for different substances – all with a focus on true set and setting and integrating perfectly with nature. They’re in the middle of a soft launch right now, offering cannabis in a ceremonial, group setting context to friends and families at their Algonquin Highlands location; perfecting everything before opening up to the general public. And once the law catches up with them, they hope to offer psilocybin and other psychedelic-assisted therapy across several new retreat locations.
They talk about Health Canada and the country’s trajectory towards legal psychedelics; critiques of traditional addiction treatment and the efficacy of 12-step programs; the tension between the psychedelic space and traditional healing space; investing in biotech; the polyvagal theory; how animals deal with trauma (and how we don’t); and the concept of integration: If you’re just taking a pill and not doing the work, are you missing the point entirely?
Notable Quotes
“We’re biased (we’re in the retreat business), but I don’t think that psilocybin, as an example, should be reduced to a pill that you take with your juice in the morning and you no longer take your SSRI because this is your new pill. For us, it’s the psychedelic-assisted therapy that actually maximizes the potential of the psychedelic experience, and that’s the mechanisms through which fundamental, behavioral change can take place. I think the idea that a pill can replace all of that means that you’re kind of missing the point about the whole experience.” -Chris “I don’t want to slam traditional treatment because it actually did work for me to some degree. …I had a crack-cocaine addiction for six-seven years and ended up in rehab for six months and came back and participated in 12-step programs and remained abstinent. That part worked. The difference for me when I got involved with plant medicine was something else: I got healed. Instead of just abstaining and not using to cope or to manage with whatever I was dealing with, I actually healed through plant medicine.” -Andrew “Is it a pill or is it the therapeutic process? If you don’t engage in integration, then you’re just taking a pill.” -Chris
“We talked about stigma earlier; it’s changing, and [for] the general public, the stigma around the war on drugs is changing too. I think people have finally figured out that it doesn’t work. No war works. We only declare war on things that we can make money from.” -Andrew
Christopher Dawson is the Co-Founder and CEO of Dimensions, a growing collection of retreat destinations combining neuroscientific research with plant ceremony in immersive natural environments. Prior to co-founding Dimensions, Christopher was the founder and CEO of Edgewood Health Network, where he oversaw the largest private network of residential/outpatient treatment providers in Canada and led the merger and acquisition of Canada’s top three treatment centers to create that network.
About Andrew Galloway
Andrew Galloway is the Co-Founder and COO of Dimensions, a new paradigm for healing, combining ancient ceremonial plant medicines with modern science in safe, legal, and nurturing natural environments. He leads the organization’s clinical teams and operations for Dimensions Retreats, a new collection of immersive, transformational healing retreats combining neuroscientific research with plant ceremony and luxurious hospitality. Prior to co-founding Dimensions, he was a National Director of Edgewood Health Network; leading 10 outpatient centers. Andrew was the former VP at GreeneStone Muskoka, an international certified alcohol and drug counsellor, and has 14 years of experience working directly for the NHL/NHLPA substance abuse program.
In this episode, recorded in-person at the recent From Research to Reality summit, David interviews one of the more well-known figures in the psychedelic space (who somehow hasn’t been on the show yet), David Nutt: Psychiatrist, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Drug Science, Chief Research Officer at Awakn Life Sciences, and Edmund J. Safra Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology in the Division of Brain Science, Dept of Medicine, Imperial College London.
At Awakn Life Sciences, amongst other projects, Nutt is working to set up clinics for legal psychedelic therapy (so just ketamine for now), and, after a successful study on MDMA in the treatment of alcohol use disorder, he’s doing something nobody has really done before in seeing if improvements can be made to MDMA. He tells the story of when he was fired as chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs due to telling the truth about the differences in harm between alcohol, tobacco, and “bad” drugs like LSD and cocaine, which led to the birth of Drug Science (and embracing the truth about drugs even more).
He covers a lot of ground in this episode: how serotonin seems to affect the default mode network; glutamate, cortexes, and the flexibility in the human brain; Robin Carhart-Harris’ “Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression” study and the realization that psychedelics were doing something different in the brain; Measure 109 and the importance of how Oregon establishes a new paradigm around legal mushrooms; drug hysteria in the US and UK and how drastically that differs from Portugal’s incredibly successful approach to drugs; why real world evidence is the core of science; and why psychedelics seem best at disrupting internalizing disorders.
Notable Quotes
“The reality is that the psychedelic impact on depression has been so powerful, it’s changed the whole narrative about how we think about depression. Our one study in [treatment]-resistant depression spawned 40 companies now [that] are working on psilocybin for depression, which is amazing. …It’s been a spark to this amazing expansion. Why? Because for the last 40 years, there’s not been any innovation in terms of mechanisms in treating depression, ever. All the drugs we have today are essentially safer derivatives of the drugs we invented in the 1950s. So this is a new approach, and that’s really, really exciting.” “We’ve got to get our politicians, our policymakers to admit that these drugs should never, ever have been put in Schedule I. They were put in Schedule I [because] we said they were ‘very harmful’ (which they’re not), and they have no medical value (which they do), and it’s actually immoral now, reprehensible that politicians could not see that.”
“They just said, ‘Let’s try a different approach. Let’s try decriminalization and let’s treat drug addicts as human beings and help them get off the addiction rather than put them in prison.’ And that’s been one of the greatest success stories in the history of drug interventions. In the 15 years we have data since the Portuguese experiment was instigated, the Portuguese have reduced opiate deaths to one third of what they were before. In the same 15 years in Britain, using prohibitionist policies, we’ve doubled our deaths from opiates. And that, frankly, is an insult to humanity that we’ve pursued policies which we know are actually killing people.” “Real world evidence is the core of medicine.”
David Nutt is a psychiatrist and the Edmund J. Safra Professor of Neuropsychopharmacology in the Division of Brain Science, Dept of Medicine, Imperial College London. There, he uses a range of brain imaging techniques to explore the causes of addiction and other psychiatric disorders and to search for new treatments. He has published over 400 original research papers, a similar number of reviews and books chapters, eight government reports on drugs, and 36 books, including one for the general public, Drugs: Without The Hot Air, that won the Transmission Prize in 2014.
In this episode, Joe interviews Miriam Volat, MS and T. Cody Swift, MFT; Co-Directors of The Riverstyx Foundation: a charitable organization focused on funding psychedelic research and ensuring integrity and reciprocity in the psychedelic space.
Volat and Swift cover a ton of ground in this conversation; from philanthropy, research, and the hurdles of funding in the psychedelic space, to the unintended consequences of the quest for holistic healing (e.g.: iboga & peyote over-harvesting), to plant medicine biocultures and the Good Friday Experiment, to changing our relationship with waste with green funerals. They discuss psilocybin’s ability to ease distress related to cancer and death, toad conservation efforts by the Yaqui; the true sacredness of peyote amongst Native Americans, and Indigenous-led structures for future biotechnology companies.
They talk about the ever-present reality (and ripple effect) of the decimation of the Native American way of life, and break down the critical considerations for the survival of Indigenous culture; looking at the Nagoya Protocol and how sustainable harvesting structures, better relationships with the land and surrounding communities, benefit-sharing, and, most importantly, partnerships with Indigenous leaders can help to ensure a culturally respectful and informed future for the psychedelic field.
Notable Quotes
“Sometimes in the psychedelic space, people are just focused on this organism or brew or something, and that’s the focus. But really, for thousands of years, those things aren’t separated from a way of life or a cultural container that guides many things through a territory, through language. So that’s why we’re really using that term, ‘bioculture,’ so as not to dissect these things into little parts that are actually very interconnected.” -Miriam
“If we arrive in a psychedelic future 20, 30, 50 years from now and we haven’t done our work to empower those communities to survive and stay strong and stay rooted in their own traditions, we’ll be at the same place of not knowing where we came from: What were the original ways of holding these medicines? What were the original songs? What were the original protocols? And once again, [that] will have been lost. And that’s not healing, that’s more disconnection.” -Cody
“White cultures, especially on the West coast; we’re blessed with …so many amazing medicines from MDMA and LSD and ayahuasca and 2C-B, and all the 2Cs, and 5-MeO, and just– it’s incredible. And the Native American communities have, at least in this country, they have peyote. They do not regard it [as] a psychedelic. This is a sacred, sacred plant medicine. And they have no interest (from all the leadership that we’ve talked to); absolutely no interest [in other drugs]. It would be a sacrilege to consider the other pathways. All they have is Peyote. We really need to keep that in mind.” -Cody
Miriam Volat, MS, serves as Co-Director with Cody Swift of the Riverstyx Foundation, Interim Executive Director of the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative, Director of the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund, and she is on the Board of Directors of MAPS Public Benefit Corporation. The RiverStyx team undertakes deeply engaged relational philanthropy supporting social justice; ethical and innovative integration of the psychedelic movement into broader society; addressing mental, spiritual, and ecological crises through biocultural responsibility; and respectful allyship with Indigenous traditional knowledge holders. Miriam Volat works personally and professionally to promote health in all systems. Her background is as a complex systems-facilitator, soil scientist, educator, and community organizer. Her work aims to increase broad-based community and ecological resilience through supporting high leverage initiatives at the intersection of biological, socio-cultural, and psycho-spiritual diversity.
About T. Cody Swift, MFT
T. Cody Swift, MFT is a philanthropist, qualitative researcher, and licensed psychotherapist. Through the Riverstyx Foundation, he has collaborated extensively on projects addressing healthy society through working with stigmatized populations and issues – those most likely to be overlooked for funding and support. Since 2007, he has helped to fund over 20 psychedelic research trials. He has served as a therapist-guide in the Johns Hopkins psilocybin and cancer-anxiety study, and has conducted dozens of qualitative interviews with study subjects into the subjective aspects of their experiences with psilocybin and MDMA. He has a passion for reinvigorating religious traditions through psychedelics, and has also worked for over 7 years supporting Indigenous communities in the conservation of their sacred plant medicines, such as the Native American Church in the preservation of Peyote and the Indigenous Medicine Conservation Fund.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews the CEO of Mindset Pharma, James Lanthier.
Mindset Pharma is a 3-year old biotechnology company built on discovering and developing new psychedelic compounds to be used as medicine for a variety of indications. While the efficacy of the psychedelics we know can’t be denied, the goal of science is to improve, and Lanthier believes optimizing these drugs will make them safer, more predictable, and more palatable for a far greater portion of the population. He envisions these new molecules leading to a future of highly personalized medicine, where people who would never eat a mushroom would likely take a related drug prescribed by their doctor.
Lanthier discusses what’s going on at Mindset Pharma; why patents alone will not be sufficient protection from competition; the long game of biotech, psychedelic stocks, and overreaction to slow growth; the Nagoya protocol; mescaline; the need for big pharma and capitalism; the art of formulation; and how microdosing could soon be revolutionized.
Notable Quotes
“I had some fairly well-known psychedelic investors say to me, ‘You’re just building a better mousetrap.’ And my reaction was: ‘Well, that’s the march of science. That’s what science is trying to do.’ Take the example of what the German scientist [Felix Hoffman] did in the nineteenth century to go from the bark of the willow tree, eventually going through a whole bunch of intermediate chemical steps to eventually get to Aspirin. Science hopefully tries to make things better, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
“Big pharma has skipped right past psilocybin. Why? In my view, it would be because of the lack of strong IP rights. They’ve gone right to second and third generation drugs because they’ve made the assessment that even if you own the strongest IP in the psilocybin space, you’re still quite exposed, ultimately, to competition.”
“I think if there’s a future where you have relatively low-priced classic drugs potentially available alongside more optimized, specific drugs that have the full support of the medical community, that would be a great place to get to, I think – really great place to get to. And I think we only really get there with the machinery of capitalism moving forward.”
James Lanthier is the CEO of Mindset Pharma, and is a seasoned technology executive with strong expertise in corporate finance, public markets and M&A. Most recently, Mr. Lanthier was a co-founder and CEO of Future Fertility, an innovative early stage developer of AI applications for human infertility. As a C-Suite executive, Mr. Lanthier has assisted in the growth and successful exit of numerous technology-enabled businesses through the public markets, including Mood Media, the world’s largest in-store media provider, and Fun Technologies, a pioneer in online casual games.
In this episode, Joe interviews Julie Zukof: Head of Strategic Partnerships for Nue Life and the creator of Psychedelic Women, and Michelle Weiner: a double board-certified Doctor specializing in integrative pain management, using cannabis, ketamine, and other holistic modalities to get to the root cause of chronic pain.
Weiner tells of how her pain-management methods changed as her patients told her about the healing power of cannabis and ketamine, and how she was even more inspired by learning how much chronic pain is a result of fight-or-flight trauma reactions and resulting learned behavior. She discusses the central sensitization of fibromyalgia; ketamine infusions and dose discovery; the differences between how therapists and coaches are viewed (and the need for both); session music and trusting the facilitator in their music choice; and the importance of preparing for a ketamine experience through meditation and/or breathwork.
And they talk about Psychedelic Women, which was just founded in January as a result of Zukof realizing how much women were a minority in the psychedelic space. She talks about why we need more women in psychedelia; women’s natural inclination to connect and support each other; and how medicine should mirror that – where people from all methodologies can work together for the betterment of the patient. Psychedelic Women is in the process of updating from a speaker series to a more community-based platform. If you want to become a part of the community, sign up at their waitlist today!
Notable Quotes
“Personally, the coaches and the therapists that I use (my nurse practitioners) are mainly women. And I don’t know if that’s because they gravitate towards this field or because patients gravitate towards them, but there’s that nurturing, innate property of being a woman that also is special and unique and we can use to our advantage in that sense.” -Michelle
“I think people are under the impression that psychedelics are always meant to be enjoyable. And while ketamine oftentimes is enjoyable, sometimes it’s meant to be part of a healing journey.” -Julie
“I credit Dustin [Robinson] for bringing us on and featuring the group at Soho House, and something he said was, ‘It’s not that I don’t want to feature women on the panel, I just need more women in the space to feature them.’ And I think that’s an excellent point. And if we can help do something about that, then I think we’re winning.” -Julie
“There’s so many other people that are involved in making this experience more effective for people. It’s not just the medicine and the doctor and the therapist and the coach. …It’s so nice to see because this is really how medicine should be. It shouldn’t be everybody in their own box like with other physicians. …This whole group is really bringing people together that have certain talents and passions and saying: ‘We can work together.’” -Michelle
Julie Zukof is the creator of Psychedelic Women, a speaker series and influential community. Over her eighteen year career in NYC, Julie has created, innovated, marketed, and grown wellness brands by working at prestigious innovation firms and then starting her own consultancy. Julie is now Head of Strategic Partnerships for Nue Life, the leading mental wellness company in at-home ketamine treatments.
Dr. Michelle Weiner is double board-certified in Interventional Pain Medicine and Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, and a partner in private practice at Spine and Wellness Centers of America. She is a member of Florida’s Medical Cannabis Advisory Committee, vice president of Mr. Psychedelic Law, a not-for-profit with the mission of responsible legal reform of psilocybin, and a clinical advisor for Iter Investments, a venture capital firm focused on supporting emerging companies within the psychedelic ecosystem of behavioral and mental health. Dr. Weiner’s research focuses on using cannabis as a substitute for opioids in chronic pain patients and cannabis’s effect on seniors with chronic pain, as well as comparing psychedelic v psycholytic doses of ketamine for chronic pain and depression. Her unique approach of personalized and preventative medicine focuses on empowering her patients to cultivate health using cannabis and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy as a catalyst to identify the root cause of one’s suffering, optimizing their quality of life.
In this episode, Joe interviews Co-Founder and CEO of Sensorium Therapeutics, Dick Simon.
Sensorium Therapeutics was created by professionals from Massachusetts General Hospital who started to wonder: With so many plants with rich, ethnobotanical history, what if we looked to those plants for answers instead of just analyzing the trendy psychedelics so many are focused on now? Why not fully research what already has established efficacy? Their goal is to have the largest collection of psychoactive plants (which they’re calling their Neuro-Natural Library), and use machine learning to figure out exactly which molecules are doing what, to then synthesize new drugs that are safe and effective; eventually bringing these new compounds through the FDA approval process.
Simon talks about how so much of what we know to be effective and beneficial is based on assumptions or best guesses, and while that doesn’t discredit very real benefits, it does beg the question: Is this all optimized as best as it could be?
He also discusses how recent advances in neuroscience and technology are catalyzing molecular research; how we can learn about other mental health indications from studying rumination; the benefits and challenges of nutraceuticals; geopolitical conflict resolution; organoids; the necessity of the FDA; why “them” can be a very dangerous word; the challenges of benzodiazepines; Burning Man; and the problem with people needing to be treatment-resistant or seriously ill to gain access to psychedelics. He hopes that what Sensorium Therapeutics learns over the coming years will help bring better medicines to more people.
Notable Quotes
“The goal here is to look at the 500+ plants and fungi and what their component elements are (what’s actually driving that efficacy, or signals of efficacy; signals that they make a difference in a high throughput way), to really assemble massive data. Then, we’re using machine learning to distill all that down to: ‘Alright, we have all this cool information; what does it mean? What does it tell us? And how do we convert that into a drug that helps people?’” “We operate under a lot of assumptions that are based on experience, but are not based on any controls on the experience. Even something basic like the assumption [that] music and playlists are really important – they’ve been used and they seem to work. We don’t really know if that’s true. …I’m not saying that music and a controlled playlist isn’t absolutely the best answer, but it seems like it’s something we really ought to know an answer to, rather than make assumptions.” “If I would have told someone ten years ago: “No, no, we’re going to have this company, Sensorium, and it is going to be able to, in a 384-well plate, take a look at groups of neurons growing, and we’ll have sophisticated microscopy to take a look at it, and we’ll be able to do it at a high throughput basis, and we can reliably do it and replicate,’ the question would have been: ‘Alright, what other drugs are you taking? That’s not going to [happen].’ [But] we’re there.”
“Even questions as to how important the psychedelic effect is to efficacy; the assumption tends to be that somehow or another, the intensity of the experience is related to the efficacy. …There are people now who are looking at: ‘What if you removed the psychedelic effect from psychedelics? Are you still getting the same neuroplasticity, neurogenesis, and much of the effect?’ I don’t know the answer, but I think those that are ideologues on either side of that [are] silly. Let’s figure it out. …Why don’t we find the answer rather than argue for whatever our position is?”
Dick Simon is a serial entrepreneur and leader in advancing psychedelic-assisted therapies. He is the Chairman of the Advisory Council of Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics at Massachusetts General Hospital, Co- Founder and Board Member of the Boston Psychedelic Research Group, and on the steering committee for the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative. He received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University and his MBA from Harvard Business School. After September 11, 2001, he co-founded and led the YPO Peace Action Network which leverages personal and business relationships, resources, and expertise for conflict resolution on local and global levels. Dick’s work has earned him YPO’s Global Humanitarian Award, Harvard Business School’s Making a Difference Award, inclusion in Real Leaders magazine’s “100 Visionary Leaders” and in the “100 Most Influential People in Psychedelics” list.
Shannon feels that the majority of people who are interested in (and could benefit from) psychedelics would prefer that their experience be as close to a conventional medical setting as possible. And especially with the risks of rogue practitioners, licensing boards want to see predictability, uniformity, regulation, and (perhaps most importantly) that we as a psychedelic culture are placing importance on being accountable and self-governing. He wants to establish a certification process that’s standard enough that which medicine the patient is using will become secondary.
He discusses what the certification process will likely look like; why uniformity is so important; the challenges of respecting and integrating Indigenous traditions into a medical model that’s drastically different; what people should look for in psychedelic education; and the importance of breaking from a siloed and hierarchical model into one that’s cross-disciplinary, where professionals of all types can work together for the betterment of the patient.
Notable Quotes
“The premise of the certification board is that we’re trying to certify a process …of medication-assisted, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy that looks at integration [and] prep, that looks at set and setting, that looks at the sacred container of this relationship; and that we build that, and that is the core of it, and the medications become a little bit secondary. We can bring ketamine in, we can bring DMT in, we can bring psilocybin [in], [and] we can bring MDMA in; because these medications, frankly, they’re not really chemically-related or that similar, but what’s similar is the process that patients go through with them.” “There’s always the question of: ‘How do I get training?’ …The Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative just did a survey of the field of education and found that there are now over 50 providers of psychedelic education, and four years ago, there might have been a handful. But someone coming [up]: What do they do? ‘How much do I need to study?’ These things are expensive. It’s confusing. So we want to create a clear, professional path [where] someone says: ‘I’m going to step into this and do this as a career. Here’s what I need to do? Good. I can do that.’”
Scott has been a student of consciousness since his honor’s thesis on that topic at the University of Arizona in the 1970s. Following medical school, MDMA-assisted psychotherapy became a facet of his practice before this medicine was scheduled in 1985. He then completed a Psychiatry residency at a Columbia program in New York. Scott studied cross-cultural psychiatry and completed a child/adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the University of New Mexico. Scott has published four books on holistic and integrative mental health including the first textbook for this field in 2001. He founded Wholeness Center in 2010 with a group of aligned professionals to create innovation in collaborative mental health care.
Scott is a past President of the American Holistic Medical Association and a past President of the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine. He serves as a site Principal Investigator and therapist for the Phase III trial of MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD sponsored by Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. He has also published numerous articles about his research on cannabidiol (CBD) in mental health. Scott founded the Psychedelic Research and Training Institute (PRATI) to train professionals in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and deliver clinically relevant studies. Scott co-founded the Board of Psychedelic Medicine and Therapies in 2021 and currently serves as the CEO for this non-profit public benefit corporation. He lectures all over the world to professional groups interested in a deeper look at mental health issues and a paradigm shifting perspective about transformative care.
In this episode, Joe interviews Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist and certified sex therapist, Courtney Watson. In just two years’ time, Watson grew from “Psychedelics are white people drugs” to opening a ketamine clinic to serve the marginalized communities she comes from. She shares the work she is doing through Access To Doorways; her Oakland-based non-profit whose mission is to bring psychedelic-assisted therapy to queer, trans, non-binary, gender non-conforming, Black, Indigenous, people of color, and two spirit communities.
This discussion is all over the map, from the platform of African traditional religion through the prospect of trauma healing for white supremacists, across BIPOC erasure in psychedelic research studies, and down into the realms of connecting to the spirit of entheogens from our pasts. Watson waxes on Black resilience; Hoodoo; how ALL plants are entheogenic; how conceptualization and talk in the psychedelic space often falls short of real action; ancestral veneration and ways to connect with one’s ancestral past; andthe concept of “spirit-devoid” synthesized compounds actually being the evolution of those plants’ spirits. She breaks down thoughtful considerations for queer and trans people in the psychedelic space, pointing out that while our society places too much emphasis on gender and sex, the acknowledgement of gender diversity and tearing down of the myths of hetero- and cisnormativity is hugely important. She believes that true access to these medicines can lead to true healing, which leads to love, justice, and actual equality. You can support Access to Doorways by making a donation here.
Notable Quotes
“Our people will talk to us. They will guide us. They will direct us. Especially for folks that don’t have ancestral practices in their day to day and haven’t had for generations; ancestors are starving for attention. They’re like, ‘Thank God you see us!’ Give them some light, give them some love, give them some attention, and they will open roads for you in all sorts of ways that you never knew were possible.“
“I think we also place way too much emphasis on gender and sex in this culture in this way that ends up stigmatizing the fact that there is gender diversity. …Holding all of this knowledge that heteronormativity is a thing and cisnormativity is a thing, and that these are not the default when we’re working with trans folks and folks that do not identify as heterosexual – that is really important.” “Healing could actually help shift what’s happening. It can help turn things in the ways that they need to be turned; in the ways towards love, towards justice, towards actual equality. It’s only when we are healed that we can actually do that; 1) because we have enough energy to be able to do that, but also because we have enough vision and foresight to be able to do that. The clarity of what it means to actually love only comes when we are healed.“
“There’s a lot of conversations, there’s a lot of talk, there’s a lot of conceptualizations, there’s a lot of dreams. But there’s not a lot of action. …So many people get stuck in the conceptualizing piece of it and the philosophizing piece of it that action gets missed. Access to Doorways is action. With $7000, we have given 4 subsidies. I know people that have raised ten times more than us and have not done that much. It is completely about doing what we say that we’re doing. It is completely about action towards healing.”
Courtney Watson is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and AASECT Certified Sex therapist. She is the owner of Doorway Therapeutic Services, a group therapy practice in Oakland, CA focused on addressing the mental health needs of Black, Indigenous & People of Color, Queer folks, Trans, Gender Non-conforming, Non binary and Two Spirit individuals. Courtney has followed the direction of her ancestors to incorporate psychedelic-assisted therapy into her offerings for folks with multiple marginalized identities and stresses the importance of BIPOC and Queer providers offering these services. Courtney has received training from the Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research at CIIS, MAPS, and Polaris Insight Center to provide psychedelic-assisted therapy with a variety of medicines. She is deeply interested in the impact of psychedelic medicines on folks with marginalized identities as well as how they can assist with the decolonization process for folks of the global majority. She believes this field is not yet ready to address the unique needs of Communities of Color and is prepared and enthusiastic about bridging the gap. She is currently blazing the trail as one of the only clinics of predominantly QTBIPOC providers offering ketamine -assisted therapy in 2021. She has founded a non-profit, Access to Doorways, to raise funds to subsidize the cost of ketamine/psychedelic-assisted therapy for QTBIPOC clients (now accepting donations!!!). When not in the office seeing clients or in meetings for the businesses she leads, she’s watching Nickelodeon with her kids, kinda working on her dissertation and more than likely taking a nap!
In this episode, David interviews one of the biggest names in psychedelics and someone we haven’t had on the show until now; Founder and Executive Director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), Rick Doblin, Ph.D.
MAPS has recently been at the center of media scrutiny, notably through the New York magazine‘s “Cover Story” podcast series, which chronicled instances of alleged sexual abuse within the MAPS clinical MDMA trials. Since reporting on this issue has largely called into question the design of MAPS’ clinical trials, data reporting, quality control, and claims around the efficacy of MDMA in the treatment of PTSD, we wanted to provide an opportunity for Doblin to respond to these very real concerns – and he does just that.
He discusses how MAPS reacted, what could have been done better, what it has all meant for the non-profit, and how it feels to now be considered the enemy by many in a space MAPS helped build. He addresses the concerns of sessions ending too soon (highlighting how that may suggest a desire for additional therapy) and asks anyone who has participated in a MAPS trial to complete a long-term follow-up survey so the organization can improve their process and ensure their data is as accurate and robust as possible.
He also discusses what the post-approval psychedelic landscape could look like; their goals for facilitator training and how they align with requirements in Oregon; their desire for a patient registry or “global trauma index”; and the importance of collecting and analyzing real-world evidence. And he talks about MAPS and their globalization goals: how exploring psychedelic therapy specifically in countries with little to no tradition of psychotherapy can lead to new therapeutic models. Rather than exploring areas where there is guaranteed revenue, they are seeking areas that are high in trauma instead – to bring these medicines where they are most needed.
Notable Quotes
“I think you can have solutions that go too far. The podcast people put out a solution, saying that there should be no touch in therapy. …They’ve also said that [our] studies should be shut down and that we need experts to think about this for years. I think that kind of thinking is out of balance with the amount of suffering that seems to actually be alleviated.”
“The more dangerous the drug, the more important it is that it be legal.”
“We’re really wanting to bring this to the police, [and] we’ve done a lot of work with veterans. The breakthrough that we’re still looking forward to one day would be to treat the first active duty soldier. So far, it’s only been veterans, but if we can treat active duty soldiers, I think that would be [great]. The closer you can treat people to the trauma, probably the better.”
“Even though we’re focused on MDMA and there’s all these other things for MDMA, really, what we’re doing is opening the door to psychedelic medicine. So what we want, ideally, is therapists to be cross-trained with MDMA, ketamine, psilocybin, ibogaine, 5-MeO-DMT, ayahuasca, whatever. And then the psychedelic clinics of the future will not be: ‘Here’s a ketamine clinic, here’s [an] MDMA clinic, here’s a psilocybin clinic.’ It will be psychedelic clinics, and the therapists will be cross-trained and they’ll customize a treatment program for each individual patient with any number of different kinds of psychedelics at different times in a sequence.”
Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). He received his doctorate in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his Master’s thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana vs. the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. His undergraduate thesis at New College of Florida was a 25-year follow-up to the classic Good Friday Experiment, which evaluated the potential of psychedelic drugs to catalyze religious experiences. He also conducted a 34-year follow-up study to Timothy Leary’s Concord Prison Experiment. Rick studied with Dr. Stanislav Grof and was among the first to be certified as a Holotropic Breathwork practitioner. His professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist. He founded MAPS in 1986, and currently resides in Boston with his wife, with three children who have all left the nest.
In this episode, David interviews Clinical Psychologist and Founder of the Psychedelic Society of Vermont, Dr. Rick Barnett, PsyD.
Barnett discusses the importance of building community in psychedelic spaces; psychedelic experiences as preventative medicine, and the differences between (and value within) the sanitized medical model and more ritualistic experiences. He talks about his own personal journey with addiction and recovery and looks at the interrelation between trauma, addiction, trust, and how psychedelics operate as disruptors – with a sense of meaning and purpose.
He discusses many of the current clinical trials happening around psychedelics and addiction; Alcoholics Anonymous and LSD; Vermont’s developing decriminalization bill (Measure H.644); the psychiatric workforce shortage and the potential solution of more prescribing psychologists; and, considering Oregon’s budding psilocybin therapy model, points out that one doesn’t need to be a licensed clinical practitioner with specific schooling to be a good psychedelic facilitator. Could we instead build models that are based largely on competency?
The Psychedelic Society of Vermont is putting on the Psychedelic Science & Spirituality Summit on the summer solstice (June 20-21) in Stowe, VT, with the goal of holding space for both the scientific and spiritual side of psychedelia. The conference is specifically for healthcare professionals, but all others are welcome to virtually attend or come to the summer solstice celebration after the conference. For more info, head to vermontpsychedelic.org.
Notable Quotes
“I had several profound experiences with LSD when I was a kid, and when I crashed and burned on alcohol and wound up in a 12-step rehab (the Hazelden Foundation), I quickly recognized that my experiences with LSD made me extremely receptive to the message that was being put forth to me in a 12-step-oriented rehab program. Concepts like surrender and a connection to spirituality, a connection to open-mindedness, willingness, being honest with oneself, taking one’s inventory – these kinds of concepts that are so common in 12-step programs – they resonated so strongly with me because of my experiences with LSD.”
“We have the ability to instill a sense of trust with our patients, and they can begin to trust themselves, and to trust the therapist, and to review some of these old hurts and really get into it over the course of therapy in a way that’s very healing. So it can happen with therapy, and I don’t think one is necessarily a substitute for the other. I think [psychedelics and therapy] work very well together. Psychedelics are yet another tool, just like therapy is a tool, just like AA is a tool, just like Suboxone and Methadone are tools. They’re all tools, and it’s really important to respect and honor that each one brings something positive, potentially, for an individual.”
“An AA program, a harm reduction program, a therapy program, a psychedelic program, [a] meditation retreat: All these things provide a nudge, and potentially a very transformative nudge in the direction of like, ‘Okay, and then what?’ What are you doing in your daily life? …That ‘assisted’ part is not just assisted by a therapist. It’s not just assisted by a drug. It’s not just assisted by a shaman or an integration coach. It’s assisted by everything.”
Dr. Rick Barnett, Psy.D., is the Co-Founder of the Psychedelic Society of Vermont, the Legislative Chair and Past-President of the Vermont Psychological Association, the founder of the non-profit organization, CARTER, Inc., and is a clinical psychologist and addiction specialist in private practice in Stowe, VT. Dr. Barnett has worked as a Clinical Psychologist in nursing homes, hospitals, and outpatient programs, and has trained hundreds of health professionals through workshops on addiction and mental health issues over the past 20 years. He is in long-term recovery of alcohol and substance abuse and is an active advocate for addiction treatment and recovery resources. Dr. Barnett holds a Bachelor’s degree in psychology from Columbia University, a Doctorate and Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology and a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychopharmacology. He is a Licensed Alcohol and Drug Counselor and holds certificate in Problematic Sexual Behavior (PSB-S) and Gambling Disorder.
In this episode of the podcast, recorded in-person in Joe’s living room, Joe interviews Philip Wolf: Founder of Cultivating Spirits, Co-Founder of the Cannabis Wedding Expo, past guest, and friend whose path in cannabis aligns nicely with that of Joe’s with Psychedelics Today.
Wolf’s work in cannabis has largely been in the form of “elevated dining,” where participants are treated to an experience similar to what wine aficionados seek out; with dispensary tours, cannabis tasting, and food-pairing. His current project is CashoM: a platform offering education to cannabis consumers, from beginners to connoisseurs, covering everything related to cannabis – from teaching a newbie how to pack a bowl to the science behind terpenes, and everything in between.
Wolf discusses the free-for-all, wild west early days of recreational cannabis in Breckenridge; similarities between those days and what’s happening in Oregon with psilocybin; cannabis as medicine and the reframing of what “medicine” is; his recent appointment to the Rolling Stone Culture Counsel; and the recent “deep dive into winter” he took by staying at a house alone in Wisconsin for 2 months.
And he talks about some higher concepts: The importance of sitting in a circle with a group, the need for integrity in all things, embracing uncertainty, and why we need challenging trips. There is no one tool, modality, or programmable set, setting, and dose that will work for everyone every time, but he believes the secret to making this all work is to find commonality between each other. Can we all grow enough to make that link a general love for one another?
Notable Quotes
“Right now, we’re really limiting the potential of cannabis, and limiting how it can actually affect someone’s experience, and how people are connecting with it. And this comes from people trying to create digestible marketing because they feel like that is the route in order to get new consumers on board. But actually, I think, through that, they’re actually doing a really big disservice, because people are just pigeonholing cannabis with sleep or anxiety relief or [to] energize. It’s just really limiting everything in my opinion. …Having a limited understanding of what cannabis can actually do for your life isn’t going to allow people to tap into the true potential of that particular medicine.”
“I think there is a wisdom to the medicine. Like, if you feel like you ate too many mushrooms, maybe you were supposed to eat too many mushrooms. …You get provided a lot of things in your life that can lead to a lot of other things, and we don’t always have the capability of seeing the importance of that.”
“Hopefully it’s a good reality check for a lot of people to understand how we’re going to come together to get this right. And it’s not my way, it’s not Joe’s way, it’s not your way, it’s not this person’s way, it’s not this company’s way, it’s not MAPS. It’s none of it. All of that together is the only way that this is going to happen.” “When we’re going through a bad experience, we grow from it. If we were happy all the time – if we have the happy pill, if we have the happy mushrooms all the time – then there’s no point to grow and advance. But if we can push the edge, as we spoke about, then there’s that opportunity for growth.”
Philip Wolf is grateful to do the work he was born to do: open the minds of the world to the benefits of cannabis, and showcase them in the form of celebration, ritual, and elevated dining. Since then, he’s founded Cultivating Spirits, co-founded the Cannabis Wedding Expo, co-founded Hispanola Health Partners (501-c3 non-profit) and is currently creating CashoM, a Cannabis Masterclass program for beginners and connoisseurs. His focus: to bridge the gap between mainstream America and cannabis through education, experience and lifestyle. Philip has been featured on CBS Nightly News, NBC, Business Insider, New York Post, Rolling Stone, Forbes, Time Magazine, Bloomberg, Vice, Entrepreneur, and many more. He’s appeared in viral Facebook documentary style videos with over 12 million views, and starred in an episode of the popular television show, “Bong Appetite” on Viceland. Philip was recently honored this year by the Rolling Stone Magazine Culture Council to join its ranks.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews cannabis expert and social ethnobotanist, Amanda Reiman, Ph.D., MSW. Reiman is the Founder of Personal Plants; an organization dedicated to promoting a deeper relationship between people and plants, and Co-Founder of Sacred Garden; a Web3 project which advocates for entheogenic plant conservation.
Reiman has over 25 years of experience growing cannabis and is intensely passionate about deepening the relationship between people and their source of healing, which she hopes is with plants they are growing. She talks about her early days of growing cannabis; the pros and cons of pharmaceutical vs. herbal plant models; the rules around cannabis regulation and taxes; the concept of retreat centers soon having liability insurance; how the different consumption patterns of cannabis and psychedelics could lead to vastly different pharmaceutical models; and what she’d like to do to promote a better connection to plants: guided tours of sacred gardens in virtual reality.
This episode swerves into territory often touched on but not fully dissected in the podcast, as they delve into the endless possibilities of cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and other Web3 projects. While the mining of cryptocurrency does present many environmental concerns, Reiman discusses how NFT groups like hers are mitigating these worries by focusing on conservation efforts, and how the benefits of being able to decentralize the internet and return control to the people may far outweigh most concerns. She sees the future bringing on the possibilities of legal defense funds and clinical trials being entirely crowd-funded, and therefore taken out of the hands of venture capitalists and the endlessly corruptible government.
Notable Quotes
“People who don’t even consume cannabis are finding joy in growing cannabis and giving it to their friends who do consume. So that’s really what Personal Plants is about: it’s taking a step back from that culture of high-level sophistication and bringing it back to the joys of gardening.”
“It becomes about profit margins and it becomes about revenue and I think that’s probably the biggest threat to plant medicine (the way we’ve seen it be a threat to healthcare). The fact that healthcare is a business means that what’s best for the people is never going to be number one, and so if we create a plant medicine system that also upholds those same values, I’m afraid the people will lose.”
“You can sit and listen to someone talk about something, [and] even if it’s freaking fascinating, it’s still not going to be the same as actually physically touching something, smelling something, [and] seeing something come alive in front of you. It just impacts the brain in a different way. So what I would love to do is have guided tours in the virtual reality space of a sacred garden.”
“I don’t think drugs are going back. I don’t think we’re going back. I think it’s too late. I was just looking at the latest Pew research figures yesterday and only 8% of the entire population thinks cannabis should be illegal. So we’re done. And I think now that we’re done with cannabis, it’s tugging on the thread of questioning about other drugs. And when I first started doing reform work, people would say, ‘Oh, you just want to legalize cannabis because you really just want to legalize all drugs.’ And you know what, Joe? I do. I do want to legalize all drugs. And I think we’re getting there.”
Amanda Reiman, Ph.D. , MSW, is a social ethnobotanist. She is the Founder of Personal Plants, a platform designed to deepen the relationship between people and flora, Co-Founder of Sacred Garden, a Web3 project focused on entheogenic plant conservation, and the VP of Public Policy Research for New Frontier Data, a cannabis-focused data analytics firm.
An internationally recognized cannabis expert and public health researcher, Dr. Reiman is a leader in the field of cannabis as a substitute for alcohol and other drugs, and has presented her research all over the world. She has written for/been quoted in The Huffington Post, New York Times, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, and Playboy, as well as numerous peer-reviewed academic journals and several textbooks.
In this episode of the podcast, Kyle interviews psychiatrist, Dr. Reid Robison, and clinical psychologist, Steve Thayer, Ph.D. Together, they host the Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers podcast and work at Novamind; Robinson as the Chief Medical Officer, and Thayer as the Clinical Director of Education & Training. They talk about their respective journeys from psychology into the field of psychedelic medicine, their current work with ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) at Novamind, and their combined efforts in educating and training future KAP therapists and clinicians – a need they feel is going to become increasingly urgent as ketamine becomes more mainstream. To meet the challenge of scaling accessibility of psychedelic therapies, Novamind recently combined forces with Numinus Wellness, creating a platform and standard of mental health care within psychedelic therapy.
Robison and Thayer discuss the different ketamine dosing modalities and purpose for each; the ketamine sessions Novamind provides for frontline healthcare workers (called ‘FrontlineKAP’ or FKAP); how difficulties in emotion-processing are often at the heart of mental health struggles; and how ketamine can help loosen emotional binding, allowing greater access to them. They also discuss current clinical trials on LSD for anxiety and alcoholism; how ketamine can be used for therapist burnout; the challenge of long LSD sessions and therapist stamina; the benefits of group ketamine sessions; the concept of combining ketamine with other therapeutic modalities (or substances); and the power of stepping aside and allowing the inner healer to take over.
Notable Quotes
“Difficulties in emotion processing are often at the heart of many mental health struggles. And if we can support the clients in developing skills and confidence in moving towards their emotions, and leverage the power of the corrective experience, the healing power of caregivers, [and] supporting them with emotion coaching skills, then we’re wrapping the client in this really powerful therapeutic healing environment and leveraging ketamine as a catalyst.” -Reid
“People will tend toward self-actualization and transcendence if you give them the environment to do so. To be well is not something we have to teach people to do, it’s something that they can remember how to do. It’s in them. If we can help them peel away the negative programming and conditioning and trauma and all that stuff, they’ll find their way to health and healing.” -Steve
“To me, it makes complete sense to use something like LSD for anxiety because what we think perpetuates something like generalized anxiety is what Steve Hayes of ACT might call ‘experiential avoidance’; that we don’t want to feel these intense feelings of fear or embarrassment or rejection or whatever it is, so we worry chronically, we get addicted to worry itself, [and that] keeps us safe from having to do scary stuff. And the LSD experience is just (for a lot of people) going to crack that open and give you an opportunity to face your fears, so to speak. It’s like exposure therapy on psychedelic steroids.” -Steve
Dr. Reid Robison is a board-certified psychiatrist and Chief Medical Officer at Novamind. He is adjunct faculty at the University of Utah, founder of the Polizzi Free Clinic, co-founder of Cedar Psychiatry, the medical director for the Center for Change, and was voted Best Psychiatrist in Utah in 2020. Over the past decade, Dr. Robison has led over 200 clinical trials in neuropsychiatry. Notably, he served as Coordinating Investigator for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) MDMA-assisted psychotherapy study of eating disorders. As an early adopter and researcher of ketamine in psychiatry, Dr. Robison led a pivotal IV ketamine study for treatment-resistant depression by Janssen, leading to FDA approval of Spravato™. Dr. Robison is also the co-host of the Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers podcast.
Dr. Steve Thayer is a clinical psychologist and Clinical Director of Education & Training at Novamind. As a USAF military veteran, Dr. Thayer maintains his commitment to serving the veteran and first responder community through his position as the Executive Director of Therapeutic Operations for the World Voice Project. At Novamind, Dr. Thayer conducts and provides training in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. He serves as Lead Therapist on several clinical trial studies involving psychedelic medicine. Dr. Thayer is also the co-host of the Psychedelic Therapy Frontiers podcast.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews retired Nurse Practitioner, Midwife, and Air Force Captain, Kimberly Juroviesky.
Juroviesky was forced to retire from her career and aspirations in the Air Force after she fell during a training exercise and again on ice months later, eventually realizing she had developed Complex Regional Pain Syndrome; a little understood condition where essentially, nerves continue to tell one’s brain that a healed injury should still hurt. When she tried ketamine and it cut her pain in half, she wondered, “Why aren’t more people doing this?” and created the Ketamine Task Force to fight to get insurance to pay for ketamine (and eventually, other legalized psychedelics).
She discusses Complex Regional Pain Syndrome and her path to ketamine; the redefining of “treatment-resistant”; the lack of knowledge from so many physicians about drug interactions and proper dosing; the mental health benefits of primal activities like swimming or dancing; the utility, timing, and efficacy of each ketamine method (for others and what’s worked best for her); the arduous and frustrating process of applying for a new CPT code with the AMA; how chronic pain and suicidality are intertwined; and the relationship between the timing of ketamine sessions, improvements, and problems returning.
Juroviesky is currently practicing Nue Life‘s protocol, with at-home ketamine and participating in group integration sessions. She believes the future of ketamine will be similar to how many feel psychedelics like ayahuasca, psilocybin, or LSD should be used: using smaller (and lighter) doses as maintenance in between larger experiences (in this case, in-office IV or ketamine infusions) – with, of course, lots of integration.
Notable Quotes
“The biggest hurdle has been access for me [and] access for everyone, because unfortunately, the majority of insurances refuse to pay for ketamine. It’s very depressing, very upsetting that you have all these people who could benefit but they can’t get access because they can’t afford it, because most of the people who need this medicine, unfortunately, are on disability and no one has the money to pay thousands upon thousands of dollars for this treatment. So I founded an organization called the Ketamine Task Force in order to fight to get insurances to cover ketamine.”
“Unfortunately, there’s so many clinicians out there who are either not telling their patients things like which drugs prevent ketamine from working at its best, or they’re doing doses that are so ridiculously low that their patients get no response and then their patients think they’ve ‘failed ketamine.’ And I’m like, ‘You haven’t even tried ketamine! You think you’ve failed it, but really, you’ve only gotten .2 milligrams per kilogram. That’s like taking a baby aspirin for a brain tumor.’ Education is so important; not just education for patients, [but] education for clinicians.”
“There are people who go into their ketamine treatment completely suicidal, with a plan, ready to kill themselves, and they come out and they say, ‘I don’t want to kill myself anymore.’ It’s unbelievable, the changes. Even in one session, it can reduce that suicidality. It doesn’t [work right away] for everyone. Sometimes it takes three, four, six, ten [sessions], but almost everyone sees some improvement immediately, and that’s the amazing thing. …And if it’s not ketamine, then, like I said: try psilocybin, try MDMA. But there is hope. Don’t give up hope. There’s always hope. As long as you’re alive, there’s always hope for tomorrow.”
“We want to be the go-to who’s going to help with ground-breaking and changing laws and getting things done. …We want to be the ones to bring it to the world because we just feel like this is soimportant. We literally are changing the world right now.”
Kimberly Juroviesky is a retired Nurse Practitioner and Nurse Midwife who trained at Columbia University and The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. She was injured on active duty while in the USAF and developed Complex Regional Pain Syndrome which unfortunately, forced her to retire from her career early. Kimberly began getting ketamine infusions in 2015 as part of a research study. While they don’t make her pain levels disappear, they do bring them down to what she describes as “livable levels.” Kimberly has always been driven to help people so she started up a Facebook group to support patients in their ketamine journeys. Kimberly also started a second Facebook group to allow ketamine providers to connect with one another. Kimberly also wrote a book to help patients to know what to expect during their infusions called Ketamine Infusions: A Patient’s Guide. She also is the author of Ketamine Journeys: A Journal for Your Ketamine Experiences. Kimberly has found a new passion in being an advocate for the use of ketamine to treat both mental health and pain diagnoses. She advocates for and talks with both patients and providers around the globe on a daily basis.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Lyle Maxson: Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Entheo Digital, a “technodelic” company focusing on digital therapeutics and virtual reality – both as adjuncts to psychedelic-assisted therapy, and theoretically, as new forms of medicine.
Maxson began his career by creating immersive, psychedelic-like experiences at some of the world’s largest music festivals. It was mostly those world-building experiences and some time in sensory deprivation tanks that led to his interest in seeing just what was possible through altered states of consciousness and technology. He discusses using VR before and after psychedelic experiences as a priming and integration tool; VR’s potential to ease first-time trip anxiety; Entheo Digital’s SoundSelf system and the powerful influence of biofeedback; and the question of whether or not technology (on its own) could initiate a non-ordinary state of consciousness with the same benefits as one brought on by psychedelics.
This episode treads lots of new ground, with Maxson discussing the likelihood of using different tools to be able to naturally activate endogenous DMT; the idea of a Steam-like internet marketplace for digital medicine; the possibility for technology to trigger lucid dreaming; the concept of highly-personalized digital schooling, and the tough question of how to not become so reliant on technology in such a quickly-advancing technological world. The challenge, which Maxson is eager to take on, is to shift opinions on VR from fear and pessimism to inspiration about what’s truly possible: How can we use technology not for escapism, but instead, for good?
Notable Quotes
“If you’re trying to drive to a yoga class, you’re usually more stressed out by the time you get there than if you hadn’t of left your house at all. And I feel like that’s the case with a lot of therapy work in general, whether it’s psychedelics or not; you could have [an] onboarding call with somebody the day before, but you have no idea what’s happening to them [in] the 24 hours leading up to them actually coming into your clinic. So I think the big focus on the priming is: how do we have reliable, very consistent treatment processes with being able to drop people into a very deep surrender, meditative, introspective state prior to them actually going into a therapeutic process?”
“I think that eventually, you’ll start to combine light, frequency, vibration, [and] electromagnetics to the point where you could actually activate DMT inside of your brain without having to use it from an external source – so like, literally using technology to activate the psychedelics inside of your own body. I think we will get to that place and that will be very interesting.”
“What [we’re] doing with creating digital medicine is a holy grail type of project, but with that comes the reverse side; which is the addiction that we already have to computers is off the charts, but what happens when you could literally press play and get high at any moment? Would people ever get off of it? So that’s a philosophical question, but I think we’re actually going to butt up against that in the next few years as we continue to develop this technology.”
“What does it look like to get in on the ground floor? It’d be really hard to do that in movies or radio or the variety of mediums; TV shows, all of those things. Like, they’re already pretty much dominated by content that we don’t really want or doesn’t make us feel better when we watch it. But with VR, it’s early enough to get in on the ground floor and create compelling alternatives to the zombie shooter games and the porn that will inevitably fill the device, and get people thinking about how to be an embodied avatar inside of a virtual world and do it for good instead of for escapism.”
Lyle Maxson is the Co-Founder of GeniusX, an XR education platform reimagining online learning. He is also the Co-Founder of Andromeda Entertainment, a VR publishing company focused on bringing to market “games for good,” which developed and published the first-ever digital psychedelic, Soundself VR, as well as the breakout hit, Audio Trip (voted best dance game of 2019 by VR insider). His latest venture, Entheo Digital, seeks to provide digital therapeutics solutions for psychedelic therapy and the treatment of mental health disorders. Lyle has appeared on a variety of stages, speaking on benevolent technology and the positive impact immersive tech can play in our future. He runs a 50,000 person community of transformative entertainment enthusiasts and is a pioneer in the neurohacking movement.
In this episode of the podcast, David interviews Anne Philippi; Founder & CEO of The New Health Club. Prior to her work with TNHC, Anne was a journalist for VOGUE, GQ, and Vanity Fair.
Philippi takes us through the arc of her departure from the media world in 2018 and into the realm of psychedelia. She opens up about her first experiences with LSD and psilocybin; how those journeys helped her shake off her “old narrative” as a journalist and step into her “real narrative”; the podcast that was birthed out of that inner work and its transformation into a business; and the work TNHC now does with ketamine and psilocybin truffles. Along with her personal story, she talks about things like integration; how the meaning of symbols witnessed in journeys becomes clearer over time; generational trauma (especially as experienced by Germans); non-linear healing; and how modern data pertaining to psychedelics is outshining the hangover from the US’s drug war propaganda.
Using the current COVID era and Ukraine/Russia conflict as examples, Philippi shares how crises can inspire togetherness and the importance of making psychedelic therapy available to refugees. She takes a very optimistic stance on the incorporation of psychedelics into the workplace as a means to help it evolve, and she talks about the toxicity of hustle culture; how safe, supported psychedelic practices can prevent burnout in the workforce; the companies that are already offering psychedelic experiences and therapy for their staff; and the value in entertaining psychedelics as a preventative measure – not just a recuperative treatment.
Notable Quotes
“I really think that with a psychedelic experience, or a regular checking in with [yourself] based on that psychedelic experience (maybe even to go on a guided trip [once or twice] a year), it’s really easier to acknowledge your body, to have a conversation with your body. Because we don’t say, ‘I’m tired, I feel like I need to take a break’; we mostly overstep that moment because then you have another coffee or you go for a run – all these tools we have in our Western society to ignore our exhaustion limits.” “Let’s say you have an amazing psychedelic trip, and then you go back to your shitty life and you don’t change that, and you don’t go in nature, and you don’t have a community, and you’re in a toxic relationship – then the trip doesn’t actually matter in a weird way. I think that’s also something that is becoming now very clear; that the surrounding where you actually land after your trip also has to be transformed.” “I think in the next five years, there might be completely transformed companies coming out of a psychedelic leadership idea. And again, that doesn’t mean the crazy CEO who is going crazy on ayahuasca, it’s just really to have a very conscious use of these substances, to really look into a better understanding of a very productive and creative community that is not suffering from [a] toxic work environment anymore.”
“You can find this kind of truth with the help of psychedelics. The people who I have talked to who have experienced that, whatever substance it is …pretty much, that’s the bottom line [of] what people say. At the same time, we should not really forget to say those people who found that had also done a proper integration and keep doing it, even after months and months of experiencing what they have seen.”
Anne Philippi was a successful journalist with a strong background in established media, journalism, and communication. She published books, worked for Condé Nast, was a Vanity Fair reporter in Berlin and for GQ in Los Angeles, and she wrote for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about tech and California. In 2019, she founded The New Health Club podcast and newsletter, and created a space where CEOs, founders, investors, scientists, and therapists from the new psychedelic ecosystem and business world could talk abut the disruptive power of psychedelics, new markets, new compounds, and psychedelic medicine. In 2021, Anne made it onto Psychedelic Invest‘s list of the 100 most influential people in psychedelics. She is working on bringing The New Health Club to the next level soon.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Kole, who was famously arrested for growing and possessing mushrooms in Denver back in 2019 – shortly after psilocybin had been decriminalized there.
Kole has moved on from his past and has begun a new life far away from any drugs, but he shares his whole story here, in his only podcast appearance. He discusses why he decided to start growing mushrooms; how he became involved in the decriminalization movement; why he brought several journalists to personally see his grow; and how, even though those journalists may not have had bad intentions, that blind trust led to his downfall.
He describes how the arrest played out and why he was likely let go with probation instead of the possible 6-10 year sentence he had heard warnings of. And he digs into the sociology in a lot of this: the disconnect between people in terrifying, life-altering moments and joking police who do this every day; “man’s law” and how the law is not necessarily put in place for ethical reasons; and how breaking the law (and getting caught) doesn’t just affect you, but affects everyone you care about too.
In this psychedelic echo chamber many of us live in, it’s easy to feel so strongly that what we’re doing is right, and start acting reckless; trusting anyone in the space, and believing that “that could never happen to me” when seeing others get caught. This episode is an important reminder to be extremely careful in your actions and in who you trust.
Notable Quotes
“They actually took the handcuffs off me and the agent guy kind of made a joke, like, ‘You’re not going to start swinging if I take these off, are you?’ And I’m getting the impression that it’s just another day on the job for them. But it’s sort of a life-altering moment for me. Sort of a weird disconnect there.”
“I wasn’t really doing something that created victims or hurt people, but the whole idea to make it sound like I’m leaving this environment where I was doing this? I wasn’t hurting people. My efforts through activism and cultivating was to help people and myself. So it’s weird to say I’m in a prosocial environment when I already was in one. I was around good people and I was doing the right things and I was working a full-time job. Nothing about my life was criminal in the sense that there are victims from my actions. So it’s just very weird how it was all framed just because of what the law is.”
“Other people’s ignorance affects your freedom, and I think that’s completely true, whether it’s social, political, [or] legally. Ignorance definitely harms everyone.”
“The idea that it is illegal and that there are consequences is sort of separate from actually having consequences and having all that happen to you and thinking that you’re going to be going to prison. They’re two totally different animals. I suppose if you’re going to learn from other people’s experiences; learn from mine, and do not be public with your activism, because you never know. You never know what could happen. You might not be as lucky as me.”
In this episode of the podcast, recorded live from the Archipelago Attic space in Denver, CO, Joe sat down with Unlimited Sciences founder, Del Jolly; Former UFC champion and Hall of Famer, Rashad Evans; and 10-year NFL veteran quarterback, Jake Plummer, at the initial launch of their new functional mushrooms company, Umbo Mushrooms.
Plummer and Evans tell their story of how they met Jolly and transformed from professional athletes to long-haired mycophiles who are now running their own mushroom company; discussing how difficult transitioning back to normal everyday life after a sports career can be, and how CBD, following the Stamet’s stack protocol, and learning about all the anecdotal evidence of brain injury healing started to make them question what kind of long-term issues they may have coming to them (fellow athletes have asked Evans: “Do you feel it?”). Jolly believes that functional mushrooms have just as much, if not more potential to help humanity than the often higher-praised psilocybin.
The four of them talk about a lot more in this nearly 2-hour panel discussion (with audience questions): the power in language and how a diagnosis can be a wall people put up that blocks progress; how valuable it is to learn from each other in group preparation and integration sessions (Evans calls these ceremonies “share-emonies” for this reason); how the UFC and NFL feel about psychedelics; microdosing and competition; NFTs; the Telluride Mushroom Festival; and the problem with TBI often being misdiagnosed as PTSD. And they discuss what steps we can take to better align our communities to the set and setting we want; the importance of slowing down; how every person has a specific audience they can reach; how we can learn from Indigenous people about our lost connection to community; and the interesting question of if we actually feel better from eating mushrooms because as a society, we completely removed them from our diets and our bodies have been craving them ever since.
Umbo Mushrooms has just recently launched and they’re offering a 20% off discount for PT listeners (use code Unlimited20 at checkout). Additionally, if you are planning to use psilocybin outside a research laboratory before July 1st, Unlimited Sciences is running a study to learn more about the positive and/or negative outcomes of using psilocybin in more natural settings. You can participate here.
Notable Quotes
“As a big advocate for psilocybin in particular, functional mushrooms have just as much, if not more potential to help humanity than psilocybin. I really believe that. And it’s just a matter of time before some eight year old kid is going to come up and say, ‘Oh, that’s the key. Look what I found!’ Boom. ‘Now my Dad really isn’t going to age.’” -Del
“I think tapping into those Indigenous voices – those stories, the history – is very important for the movement because they understood community. And when you look at what are the biggest [ailments] in our society is the fact that we have a broken community. Our communities are broken for the larger part. And finding ways to tap back into that old knowledge of ways we used to be can get us to remember what we are [and] how to be towards each other. I think that we don’t get better as a world until we get better as a community, and I think tapping into those strong Indigenous community roots would help us to be what we could be.” -Rashad
“The world doesn’t need psychedelics. The world needs community and a meditation practice. But psychedelics is the 2×4 that brings you to that awareness.” -Del
“Don’t minimize what your impact is. If you’re Rashad Evans with a platform, [a] Hall of Famer, Jake Plummer, [whoever]… Either you’re that or this. Don’t minimize what it is, because whoever you’re speaking to might be the person who sets it off.” -Del
“I think once you get into the mushrooms, you can’t help but learn more kindness, compassion, and love. It will open your mind. That’s kind of why I said those three words; is if we can keep that in front of everything and also the sacred part of everything… Everything should be a lot more sacred than it is, everything we do. I find myself grabbing food and eating it and then going, ‘Damn, I didn’t even really thank this food for being here.’ We take a lot of things for granted, so I think just starting with that awareness can be a step in the right direction.” -Jake
“Suga” Rashad Evans (left) is a former UFC light heavy weight champion and Hall of Famer. He currently is an ESPN analyst for the UFC and Co-Founder of Umbo Mushrooms.
Jake Plummer (center) is a former NFL Pro-bowl quarter back who played 10 years in the league with the Arizona Cardinals and the Denver Broncos. He is now a mycophile who runs Umbo and Mycolove Farms.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Jason Grechanik; a tabaquero running plant dietas, an ayahuasca ceremony facilitator at The Temple of the Way of Light, and host of “The Universe Within” (@universewithinpodcast) podcast.
Grechanik tells his story and digs deep into the rich history of shamanism, herbalism, and Indigenous spiritual traditions that span the globe from Siberia and India to Peru. The unifying theme rests on bridging our cultural commonalities; recognizing the fundamental truths consistent across cultures and acknowledging how this seemingly lost knowledge has been kept, guarded, and passed down through epochs of change.
He unfolds the many layers of ayahuasca medicine work; examining plant intelligence, plant dietas, ways of seeing beyond yourself in the world of spirit, and how deep ayahuasca work can inspire gratitude and humility. And he discusses how group containers exemplify universal oneness; the value in both Western and Indigenous medicine; critiques for the current psychedelic renaissance; the power of breathwork; and the debate between traditional plant medicines and newer lab-derived substances – how everything has a spirit, even a mountain.
Notable Quotes
“I think it’s always really important when we’re talking about these experiences to also realize that they’re extremely personal; that there’s certainly archetypal experiences that these plants can invoke, but they’re very personal as well. And for some people, what they need is the opposite of that. They need to see beauty and love and their own self-worth and to have a very gentle experience. And then other people need to be thrown into the abyss to kind of shake themselves out of something. And I think that’s where that idea of plant intelligence comes in.”
“It’s not that far-fetched to think that these medicines were ancient, and that they were guarded even through apocalypses and catastrophic events and colonization. They kept these things, but why did they keep them? They kept them because they were seen as not only important, but actually something that was inseparable from humanity.”
“All of these things; there’s a time and a place for it. There’s benefits to certain things, there’s some drawbacks to certain ways of doing things, but ultimately it’s: what is going to be best for the patient? And that’s also something that’s fundamental to any holistic medicine, is realizing that there’s no panacea for everyone. We’re all different. We all have different body types, we have different stories, we have different physical ailments, [and] different mental stories. So how do we find the medicine that’s going to be best for us in this moment?”
Jason Grechanik’s journey has led him around the world in search of questions he has had about life. Early in his twenties, he began to develop a keen interest in plants: as food, nutrition, life, and medicine. He began learning holistic systems of medicine such as herbalism, Traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, and nutrition. That curiosity eventually led him to the Amazon where he began to work with plants to learn traditional ways of healing.
Jason came to work at the ayahuasca healing center Temple of the Way of Light in 2012. After having worked with ayahuasca quite extensively, he began the process of dieting plants in the Shipibo tradition. In 2013, he began working with maestro Ernesto Garcia Torres, delving deep into the world of dieting. Through a prolonged apprenticeship and training, involving prolonged isolation, fasting, and dieting of plants, he was given the blessing to begin working with plants.
He currently runs plant medicine retreats in Peru and travels abroad running dietas. He also works at the Temple of the Way of Light as a facilitator of ayahuasca ceremonies. In 2020, Jason created a podcast called “The Universe Within.”
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews philosopher, clinical psychologist, Grof-certified Holotropic Breathwork® facilitator, and long-time mentor to Joe and Kyle: Lenny Gibson, Ph.D.
They talk at length about shamanism, Greek mythology, tribal cultures, and the overlapping themes across them. They discuss how religion became but a shadow of the ancient wisdom these cultures held; the commonalities between physics and poetry; how Holotropic Breathwork is a shamanic technique appropriate to 20th century western culture; and the battle between attainable knowledge and the vice of ignorance.
Gibson discusses the “dying before dying” that took place at Eleusis; how practices like meditation and breathwork can help us in recovering what in Zen is called “original mind;” achieving mystical enlightenment by studying mathematics; and the philosophical parallels between Plato, Kurt Vonnegut, Alfred North Whitehead, and the ancient Greeks.
He also shares how LSD has reshaped shamanism along with a fun story from the first time he met Albert Hofmann. When considering the most vital conversations people should be having, Gibson encourages us to return to the origins; to study the lineages that embodied the mystical wisdom discovered through non-ordinary states – something he believes our modern culture is missing. In the words of Leon Russell, “May the sweet baby Jesus shut your mouth and open your mind!”
Notable Quotes
“Lao Tzu says, ‘The secret awaits the vision of eyes unclouded by longing.’ The secret is in plain sight. All one has to do is step back and pay attention.”
“Conformity and deep understanding don’t go together.”
“I try to discourage the focus on substances because one of the most important means in Greek culture was poetry. Homer may or may not have been a person identifiable, but his poetry survived as a body. …The Greeks gathered in large festivals and they would recite the poems of Homer, The Iliad, and The Odyssey, and get thousands of people together chanting the same poems – a huge rave!”
“The absolutely most impressive thing about Stan Grof’s discovery …that if you empower people in accessing their deepest Self, you will get more than you could get by having a psychoanalyst talk to them about themselves.”
Leonard (Lenny) Gibson, Ph.D., graduated from Williams College and earned doctorates from Claremont Graduate School in philosophy and The University of Texas at Austin in counseling psychology. He has taught at The University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Lesley College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He served a clinical psychology internship at The Veterans Administration Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and trained in Holotropic Breathwork with Stanislav Grof. Most recently, he has taught Transpersonal Psychology at Burlington College. Together with his wife Elizabeth, he conducts frequent experiential workshops. He is a founding Board member of the Community Health Centers of the Rutland Region. As a survivor of throat cancer, he has facilitated the Head and Neck Cancer Support Group at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. Lenny is President of Dreamshadow Group. He raises vegetables, fruit, and beef cattle on a homestead in Pawlet, Vermont, and plays clarinet in local bands.
Morisano was researching the small percentage of people who experience negative effects from cannabis dependence, but in 2013, her boss retired to pursue ayahuasca research around the same time she was reading Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, and she wondered: Is there a tangible future here? She discusses the emergence of psychedelic medicine and the importance of reciprocity and inclusivity, pointing out how we often lump very different traditions together under the umbrella of “Indigenous.”
Three years in the making and planned as a one-time event, she considers the “From Research to Reality” conference to be a state of the union of the field of psychedelic science, where people from all fields in psychedelia will meet and discuss what we know, what the future could look like, and how we can get there. Each presentation was submitted and reviewed by a committee of peers, and will largely feature new research. The conference takes place May 27th to May 29th in Toronto, and a virtual option is available, with a special “Saturday night special” featuring David Nutt, Rick Doblin, Monnica Williams, and others. Check out the website for more details!
Notable Quotes
“We can’t just pick and choose what we want to gain from Indigenous knowledge. It has to be gifted to us. It has to be given freely. And if people want to incorporate Indigenous practices into their modern Western clinical practice, I think it should be done in consultation with multiple folks across different groups of different nations, and done with reciprocity in mind.”
“One person can’t speak for everybody. Three people can’t speak for everybody. 10 people can’t speak for everybody. But the more we listen to different perspectives of people coming from different nations, the more we will learn. And we includes everybody. It’s not just like we’re in one group and they’re in another group, it’s like we’re all having conversation together, hopefully learning from each other.”
“This is a place where everybody’s going to come together – government, regulators, policymakers, traditional medicine providers, neuroscientists, clinical practitioners; they’re going to all come together for the conversation. It’s a single track event, so there’s not going to be: ‘The neuroscientists are going to that room, the clinical people are going to that room.’ It’s like: No, everybody’s in the same room at the same time, listening to all the same stuff, and they’re going to learn from each other. That’s the idea. We’re going to learn from each other so that when we’re making decisions moving forward about what works best for people and for us, we’re going to have a lot of different viewpoints in the conversation.”
This talk covers a lot but really hits home on a few very important topics: the clinical model’s limited perspective; the importance for psychedelic boards to self-organize before government agencies step in; and how cannabis can actually be as powerful a psychedelic as DMT. They mull over where the field of psychedelics is going and wonder: Who gets to do this work? And can psychedelics really fit within our current medical models?
McQueen digs into the non-licensed approach to facilitation; the difference between coaching, counseling, and psychotherapy; and describes valuable harm reduction strategies, vital self-care practices for facilitators, and ways to navigate the (not talked about enough) transformational process of being a guide for others. If you experience anxiety or paranoia from cannabis, you’ll learn how Nano CBD can shut it down almost instantaneously. Last but certainly not least, McQueen shares all about the transformative work and trainings he and his colleagues are doing at both the Center for Medicinal Mindfulness and Psychedelic Sitters School.
Notable Quotes
“We’ve got to have our boards, we’ve got to become members of those boards, and we’ve got to self-organize and regulate. Otherwise, the government agencies are going to do it for us. It’s going to become super clinical, super medical. It’s going to limit the scope to only people who are really suffering and I think that’s a trap.”
“I’m thinking [cannabis is] probably one of the best psychedelics for trauma resolution work and other things. So I’m way past ‘Is this psychedelic?’ I’m stepping into: ‘This might be one of the best medicines for psychedelic therapy and guiding that we have available.’”
“I just was intuitively drawn from the beginning to do blends – to blend multiple strains [of cannabis] together – and I started to experiment on my friends. …One of my friends …sat up and said, ‘Daniel, if I didn’t trust you, I would swear you put DMT in that.’ And I hadn’t, it was just pot. And that was the moment. I’m like, ‘Okay, maybe there’s something to this.’”
“Sometimes these stories that we hear are the hardest stories to hear from another human being. So there’s an emotional impact to process. I’ve had to really evaluate my existential understanding of reality because of this job, so there’s that whole thing too. It’s not the same as psychotherapy, it’s just not. Professionally speaking, I tell people it’s more like being an emergency medicine doctor. You’ve got to take time off. Self-care is vital.”
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor and Holotropic Breathwork® facilitator, Christine Calvert.
At age 19, Calvert left Los Angeles and found her way to breathwork, spending four years in Grof Transpersonal Training. She quickly discovered that the technique served as a gateway back home to herself – her sacred self. Together, Christine and Joe cut through the many layers of the holotropic paradigm and transpersonal experiences, discussing how willingness for accountability & repair in facilitation are more important than perfection; the role of touch in breathwork sessions and the potential harm in not providing it; how amplification over suppression of symptoms in breathwork can heal; and how doing less as a facilitator can actually do more.
She also talks about the inner healing intelligence we all possess; how celestial nostalgia leads to mystical yearning; the ethics of spaceholding; the excitement and terror in expanded states of consciousness; saying yes to the entire archetypal pool; how Grof was (and still is) decades ahead of psychology; and what it means to die to ourselves.
Notable Quotes
“There [were], I don’t know, 175 people there. So that was my first big group breathwork. I was sitting first and I remember just looking out at the room which was just absolute pandemonium. It was like the display of the full human experience. I remember just crying because I was both totally intrigued and excited – like ‘Finally, I’ve arrived’ – and then I was also just incredibly terrified. I feel like that’s an interesting and kind of truthful reflection of how expanded state work is for a lot of people. There’s this part of me that feels home and also maybe a little healthy resistance to knowing what that also means for me.”
“One of the greatest gifts we can do for someone is to trust that what is happening for them is exactly what is needing to come through for their healing and that there’s nothing that we necessarily need to do in order to manage that.”
“I can’t imagine that continuing to just treat symptoms and see everything through a pathological lens is really all that fulfilling. Also we’re just the doers in that world. And as much as I think our ego wants that, behind that is always the desire to be a part of something that’s actually truly healing, and to know that we’ve empowered somebody to heal themselves. This is one of the things I love so much about the holotropic paradigm; is that it is about radical self-empowerment.”
“I think we have to stop being afraid to just be vulnerable. We have to stop being afraid of our humanity. As facilitators, as practitioners, as spaceholders, as participants in medicine and breathwork – this is what we have to really be willing to share. …When we’re willing to sort of knock ourselves off the saint pedestal as facilitators and spaceholders, I think then we might be able to hold this.”
Christine Calvert is a teacher and module facilitator for Grof Transpersonal Training and a Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor. In addition to bringing Holotropic Breathwork® and other experiential workshops to mental health and addiction facilities, she is passionate about the ethics and integrity needed in facilitating expanded-state work; supporting the integration of Holotropic and psychedelic sessions through somatic resourcing; and creative expression, personal ritual, and group support. Her own personal healing journey was greatly influenced by the Holotropic perspective and she feels deeply dedicated to sharing this work with those seeking healing. She enjoys finding ways to weave her personal and professional experience of different therapeutic and spiritual systems such as Shamanism, Somatic Experiencing, Jungian psychology, attachment theory, and mindfulness practices into her work with others. Christine is currently studying to become a Naturopathic Doctor and maintains a private counseling and consulting practice in addition to facilitating Holotropic Breathwork® nationally.
For our first ever Earth Day episode, Joe interviews publisher, ecologist, and planetary steward, Deborah Snyder. Snyder is the co-owner of Synergetic Press and its associated organic farm, orchard, and retreat center, Synergia Ranch.
Snyder worked with the team that designed and built Biosphere 2, and she unpacks the many ways in which understanding the planet as a biosphere – a collection of cooperative living systems – can shift our perspectives and help us to heal our precious home. She discusses how monitoring the earth from space can teach us how best to care for it; the technosphere’s disharmonious relationship with the biosphere; the anthropocene epoch;Synergia Ranch and Synergetic Press; the importance of recognizing ourselves as an integral part of nature; and the ways psychedelic and ecological spaces overlap. While both agree that the environment is in trouble, they have an air of optimism and action that we all desperately need in order to secure the future of the planet and our species. This episode also features a brief chat between Joe and Kyle, with Joe calling in from Bicycle Day San Francisco. With Vital officially launching the same week we hit 3 million downloads of the podcast (!!!), they felt it was worth doing a rundown of the top 8 most downloaded episodes, as well as highlighting some of their favorites. Thank you to everyone who has been listening and sharing your favorite episodes with friends. To 3 million more!
Notable Quotes
“I would describe the psychedelic world as tools to be able to enhance a person’s ability to explore and to understand what connections and interrelationships are. Many people that have had grand epiphanies that have led to whole new revolutionary technologies attest to this phenomenon. So Biosphere 2 was definitely an example of the creativity that came out of people that were able to do that.”
“We are very much nature and I think that we need to really work on our value of what that brings us and carefully consider before utilizing those resources for something that is perhaps just a one-way street.”
“I have never met anybody that has undergone or gone through any kind of transformative experience for themselves or looking for insight that hasn’t come out with a greater appreciation for the nature of which we are a part.”
Deborah Snyder, co-owner and publisher of Synergetic Press, Ltd., has published over 40 books in ethnobotany, psychedelics, biospherics, consciousness, and cultures since establishing it in 1984. In 1986, she was on the team that designed and built Biosphere 2. There, she met Richard Evans Schultes, publishing his two classic books on ethnobotany of the Colombian Amazonia. In 1990, she started The Biosphere Press, an imprint of Space Biospheres Ventures, producing a dozen books for children on biospheres and biomes; developed a K-12 curriculum; and helped launch the first peer-reviewed journal in closed ecological systems, Life Support and Biosphere Science. In 1999, she moved to Synergia Ranch, in Santa Fe, NM, which was established in 1969 as an intentional community and site where the Institute of Ecotechnics formed. Deborah is currently a director and VP of the U.S. non-profit. Synergia Ranch is home to a 4 acre organic orchard, a half acre market garden, and small retreat center. From 1982 to 2019, Deborah spent time volunteering most years on the Institute’s pastoral regeneration project in the northwest Kimberley of West Australia. Starting as an apprentice in savannah system management, by 1990, she became a co-owner and chairwoman of the 5000 acre freehold property). A recent documentary, “Spaceship Earth,” features the work of the Institute and its landmark ecological project, Biosphere 2. Click here for a short video on how Deborah got into publishing and her relationship with Ecotechnics on City Lights Bookstore’s Youtube channel.
In this Bicycle Day edition of the podcast, Joe had the honor to sit down in-person with chemist and researcher, William Leonard Pickard. In 2004, Pickard was famously convicted for the alleged manufacture of 90% of the world’s LSD – the largest case in history – scoring him two life sentences in a maximum security prison. Prior to his conviction, Pickard was a drug policy researcher at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and deputy director of the Drug Policy Research Program at UCLA.
Pickard discusses his prediction of the current fentanyl crisis (warnings which fell on deaf ears) and watching it all unfold and desecrate lives across the globe from behind bars on the televisions of the Tucson, Arizona Penitentiary he found himself in. With new and dangerously addictive substances like fentanyl being produced carelessly at staggering rates, he believes that it’s incredibly important that we be stronger than any substance, while cautiously asking: will there soon be a drug that is stronger than the will of man?
He talks about the unfair and ongoing sentence of Ross Ulbricht; the alchemy in drug manufacturing; the Fireside Project; what made LSD special; substance overuse and what he saw when volunteering in an ER; the inhumanity of prison and the coping mechanisms of prisoners (like making pets out of ants); 2C-B; NBOMe; LF-1; LSD (of course); and perhaps the most sultry devil of them all, caffeine. And he shares his stance on why it’s okay to be drug-free: how the natural and unaltered mind is the greatest gift of all, and how it’s actually a sign of great respect to the sacraments to finally put them down after you’ve received the message you needed to hear.
Happy Bicycle Day from Psychedelics Today! If you’re celebrating, please be safe and respectful.
Notable Quotes
“I do think that it’s important to remember that these powerful drug experiences that people have had (psychedelics or otherwise) are not the end-all and be-all – not a religion in themselves but simply a place that points to a greater realization; a greater purity of life and practice. And in the end, you don’t need the drug. That’s one of the beauties of psychedelics, I think, is that they tend to be not only non-lethal (at least the classical hallucinogens: mescaline, LSD, largely psilocybin), but they also are self-extinguishing; that is to say, after a number of long nights of the soul, one may realize that one has learned everything that this particular sacrament can teach and it’s time to put it down. It’s not necessary to go chasing after analog after analog, after different drug experiences with hundreds, soon to be thousands of things available on the net. It’s not necessary to be continually stoned on a different analog every weekend. …It would be respectful for these particular sacraments to put them down and, in honor, say farewell, and simply go about a healthful life of caring, loving one’s friends and families, [and] doing good work in the world. It’s okay to be drug-free. And that’s one of the beautiful things that these particular compounds teach us.”
“I believe that the nobility of ourselves, the dignity of ourselves, is that we are stronger than any substance. We are stronger than heroin. We are stronger than cocaine. We are stronger than methamphetamine. We are stronger than fentanyl and carfentanil or sufentanil or any of its analogs. We are stronger than alcohol or nicotine. And that must always be true or the world will be enslaved to a substance.“
“The problem children of the future are not developed by rogue underground chemists. There are few of those and most are not well-trained. The problem children of the future, drug-wise, comes from Big Pharma [and] their relentless tweaking of molecules.“
“When I first was released, … the first thing that happened when the government van drove away and suddenly, for the first time in twenty years, I’m standing alone with no inmates or officials or anything around – I’m alone for the first time in twenty years – the first thing I did was I saw a flower on a growing tree and went to stare at the flower for about twenty minutes. It was quite beautiful.“
Alleged by United States federal agencies to have produced “90% of the world’s LSD,” William Leonard Pickard is a former drug policy fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, a research associate in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, and deputy director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As a researcher at Harvard in the 1990s, Pickard warned of the dangers of a fentanyl epidemic, anticipating its deadly proliferation in the illicit drug trade decades before the current opioid crisis. Pickard’s predictions and recommendations for prevention have been acknowledged as prescient by organizations like the RAND Corporation. In 2000, Pickard was convicted of conspiring to manufacture and distribute a massive amount of LSD, and served 20 years of two life sentences, during which time he wrote his debut book, The Rose of Paracelsus: On Secrets and Sacraments, using pencil and paper. Pickard was granted compassionate release in 2020. Presently, he is a senior advisor for the biotechnology investment firm, JLS Fund, and the Fireside Project.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Omar Thomas: Founder of Jamaica’s Diaspora Psychedelic Society, CEO of Jamaican Organics, Psychedelics Today Advisory Board member, organic farmer, and certified death doula.
Thomas discusses how we define home, the importance of having open dialogue with our children about psychedelics, how the psychedelic experience relates to permaculture, our cultural absence of a rite of passage, the joy in psychedelics, and the value in allowing change to become a natural evolution we experience once we take the mindful seat of the observer.
Thomas breaks down all the ways in which Jamaica is shaping its framework as a psychedelic-informed health & wellness destination and the country’s cultural roadblocks that could potentially impede its development. And he talks a lot about his work as a death doula: the importance of taking a more sacred and preparatory approach to death, how helping someone through the transition is the ultimate holding of space, and how each psychedelic trip can be a practice session for death.
A theme that is consistent throughout this conversation is self-directed growth via The Warrior’s Way – an exercise in discovery, surrender, and developing daily practices toward change. Thomas posits that it’s when we hold space and shed the many layers of our identity that we can begin to foster real change – by “staying on” and becoming an observer rather than directly trying to change things, change will happen naturally.
Notable Quotes
“The things you need for a psychedelic trip are the same things you need for life. You need courage when you’re afraid and you need to prepare yourself for the things you’re going to undertake, and to do them seriously and with appreciation for the moment.” “The idea of holding space is so much about us not being in the way of hearing what others have to say, and allowing them to come to realizations that they would come to naturally if they would but take the time to sit for a while and contemplate the idea without distraction.”
“I found that Jamaica itself is healing. The island is healing. And I don’t want to get too esoteric about it, but there’s something about even just being outside for me in the early morning hours before the sun rises in a climate that can allow me to do so comfortably, and to be able to start to appreciate still connection, just on its own – I’m finding that this place seems to be tuned to some sort of frequency. It just makes it easier to slip into a feeling of wholeness, or at least of wanting to be.”
“We have our lifetimes only to begin to affect the change in the things that move us. If we are upset about the climate, let’s use the life we have. Let’s use the life we have to connect so that when death comes, we have lived a life worth living, that’s so satisfying that it’s okay to let go. For me, the psychedelic trip and journey is about letting go in a micro sort of way. Each trip is a practice session.”
“I’ve seen people laugh and chuckle now at the idea of not being, because during the trip, they learned that there’s no way to not be, because matter cannot be created or destroyed. …We’re afraid of smoke and mirrors and shadowboxing – things that we don’t need to fear.”
Omar Thomas is the founding advisor of Diaspora Psychedelic Society (DPS) and a member of the Jamaican Diaspora Task Force on Behavioral Health. His Afro-Caribbean upbringing led him to seek out non-traditional answers to his own PTSD and trauma issues in the early 90s. His search eventually took him to Mexico where he underwent 30 days of fasting, isolation, and intensive sacred mushroom work under curandero guidance. He’s lived as a permanent resident of Mexico for a number of years developing a deeper connection to the medicine in the context of community. He brings his years of experience in Mexico to bear in guiding the vision for DPS.
Through Diaspora Psychedelic Society, Omar collaborates with a number of organizations to promote more equitable access, Jamaican inclusion, and innovative approaches to psilocybin-supported therapies. In addition to overseeing day-to-day DPS activities, he is the CEO of Jamaican Organics, and sits on the strategic advisory board of Psychedelics Today.
Omar now resides on his ancestral island home in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica.
In this episode of the podcast, David interviews lawyer, activist, and co-host of our Eyes on Oregon web series, Jon Dennis, Esq.
Dennis has been heavily involved in Oregon’s Measure 109: creating the Entheogenic Practitioners Council of Oregon, writing a proposed regulatory framework for religious practice under Measure 109, and presenting to the psilocybin board subcommittees all in an effort to protect religious psilocybin use and ensure paywalls don’t ruin the unique and historic opportunity Oregon has opened up here.
If you weren’t as knowledgeable about Measure 109 as you’d like to be, this podcast serves as a great summary of how we got here and what’s next. Dennis discusses how Measure 109 came about; how it’s gone through a reputational makeover of sorts (and is more about supervised adult-use than therapy); the role of each subcommittee; Measure 110; who defines what counts as religious practice; the complications of requiring specific psilocybin testing; community support models as harm reduction; how it will become harder and harder to make good legal change in an emerging “psychedelic industrial complex,” and how he’s using the travails of María Sabina as an inspiration to make sure people aren’t left behind as Oregon moves forward.
If you agree with us that religious use should be protected under Measure 109 (and especially if you live in Oregon), please sign his petition by April 20th, send an email by April 21st, or speak up during the comment periods during one of the upcoming subcommittee meetings on April 18th (5-7 PST) or April 21st (10m-noon PST). The board has 9 hours left of meeting time to make decisions on the recommendations of the subcommittees, so the time is now to make sure this is done right.
Notable Quotes
“I think at this point, we all will agree it’s inevitable that psychedelics are about to enter the mainstream, but how they enter the mainstream is important so that they not be delivered directly into the hands of capitalists behind paywalls that keep out millions and millions of people.”
“The depth of human suffering right now is immense. And if we only wait until Compass Pathways and other companies that are pursuing legalized medical applications of psychedelic compounds [complete their research]; not only is that a long time to wait when people are suffering now [and] hospice patients are dying now, [but] to say that they have to wait through even the three or four or five-year expedited ‘breakthrough therapy’-designation type of process through the FDA – we don’t have time to wait. People are suffering now and we have enough information to not need to be really afraid of psilocybin and other psychedelics.”
“I think over 37 million Americans live in poverty and almost 600,000 Oregonians live in poverty. And to think that we’re just going to leave those people out because of an elevated safety concern; it’s just really hard to kind of square that all together in light of what the actual risks of psilocybin in particular are. …If Oregon decides to create a program – the world’s first regulated psychedelic services program – that prioritizes business interests to the detriment of marginalized people, I think the historical record will bear the stain of scandal and corruption on this.”
Jon Dennis, Esq. is a lawyer and activist in the psychedelics ecosystem and a consultant at the firm, Psychedelics Now. He is the co-host of “Eyes on Oregon,” a podcast by Psychedelics Today exploring the latest developments in Oregon’s legal psilocybin landscape. He serves on the Executive Committee of the Oregon State Bar Practice Section on Cannabis and Psychedelics and is a co-chair of its Psychedelics Subcommittee. He is a member of the Psychedelics Bar Association and sits on its Religious Use Committee.
Jon is the chief architect of the proposed regulatory framework for protecting religious and spiritual communities who operate under Oregon’s new psilocybin program. He has presented to multiple subcommittees of the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board in support of religious and spiritual freedoms and a community model for psychedelic services. He is a founding member of the Entheogenic Practitioners Council of Oregon. Jon has taken the North Star Ethics Pledge and is drawn to this work by the conviction that psychedelics possess the potential to accelerate our individual and collective shifts away from self-destructive paradigms. Prior to joining Psychedelics Go, Jon worked as a civil litigator and managed a nonprofit law office giving free legal assistance to people living in poverty. Jon has a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Kansas and a law degree from Lewis & Clark Law school. He lives in Ontario, Oregon.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Kyle interviews clinical psychologist and integration facilitator (and now 3-time guest), Dr. Ido Cohen.
The topic of integration sits center stage for this discussion, as the two peel back all the nitty gritty and nuance of this psychedelic cornerstone, breaking down why integration is so important, where it stands currently, and where it needs to go as psychedelic-assisted therapy grows. They discuss the importance of taking it slow when it comes to exploration of these non-ordinary states – something that can be so difficult for us in our fast-tracked, clock-watching, Western culture, where it’s quite common for people to get blasted into inner-space on a Saturday, be shaken and perplexed by the experience on Sunday, and then have to go back to work and act like it never happened by Monday.
He discusses the value that both individual and group integration holds; what happens when you sit in groups of the same people over time; why Carl Jung never tried psychedelics; and the importance of tolerance, trust, and critical thinking when processing peak experiences.
And he raises some important questions like: What does long-term care in psychedelic-assisted therapy look like? What frameworks can be experimented with and implemented now to offer real movement from peak experiences to sustainable change? What is that bridge between peak experience and long-lasting change which allows us to become the insight? Is every insight true? Where does trauma work fit into this treatment? And what is the difference between symptom reduction and real healing?
Notable Quotes
“My mission has been: what does that bridge [look like] between experience and the steps that we have to take to really integrate in a deep embodied way to move from, ‘Oh, I can become this thing’ or ‘I have this insight’ to becoming the insight or becoming the thing?”
“I always use this catchphrase because I don’t like it, but it sells the psychedelic science:ten years of therapy in one session. I always say if you get ten years of therapy in one psychedelic session, then you had really bad therapy.”
“The psyche has an organic life. It opens up in the way it opens up. You can bathe yourself in ayahuasca and eat fifty grams of mushrooms per week [but] there are certain processes you can’t rush.”
“It’s funny how when we slow down, things become clearer faster.”
Dr. Ido Cohen, Psy.D, serves individuals, couples, and groups in San Francisco. As part of his practice, Ido works with a diverse range of challenges – childhood trauma, inner critic, relational issues, as well as integration and preparation sessions with individuals and groups. His doctoral dissertation was a 6-year study of the integration process of Ayahuasca ceremonies, while applying Jungian psychology to better understand how to support individuals in their process of change and transformation. He is also the founder of The Integration Circle and facilitates workshops on the different dimensions of integration and the intersection of mental health, spiritual health, and the entheogenic experience. Ido is passionate in supporting individuals to create longterm, sustainable change leading to vibrant, authentic, expressive, and love-filled lives.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Kathryn L. Tucker, JD: Special Counsel at Emerge Law Group, where she Co-Chairs the Psychedelic Practice Group.
Tucker has had a 35-year career in advocacy and protecting rights of terminally ill patients, serving as lead counsel in three landmark federal cases around constitutional rights and dying. Most recently, she was part of the team responsible for enacting Oregon’s groundbreaking Measure 109.
She discusses the mechanics of how access to psychedelic medicine works under the Right to Try act; how she feels about decriminalization vs. legalization and how it all relates to what she’s seen in the field of death and dying; what she’s excited about in Oregon; and how measures in Colorado could take things even further.
While synthetic psilocybin is the only “investigational drug” offered under Right to Try, naturally-derived psilocybin and MDMA could be an option sooner than we think – but based on the DEA’s behavior so far, that will only happen if more people join the fight, as it’s been over a year with no answer on how the DEA would be enabling psilocybin access to patients under the Right to Try act. To help push this along, Tucker welcomes donations, but more importantly, she invites activists everywhere to “shine the bright light of public scrutiny” on the insulting inaction of perhaps the government’s most ineffective agency. There’s a clear path here where everyone wins, so please, call your state’s elected officials and demand that they actually do their job.
Notable Quotes
“Part of what’s been so frustrating, of course, is when we satisfied ourselves as attorneys, that the state and federal right to try laws did in fact apply to psilocybin and that it should be accessible for therapeutic use with patients with advanced illness; when we approached the DEA to inquire how it would enable that access, that inquiry was in January of last year, 2021, so we’re now more than a year later and the DEA is still obstructing access.”
“To absolutely prohibit access, when state and federal law are intended to allow access; that is impermissible. …These dying patients could have immediate, substantial, and sustained relief from debilitating anxiety and depression. That’s what all the studies show, and I’ll say those words again because they’re the words that really caught my attention: immediate, substantial, and sustained relief. And why anyone would obstruct access to that kind of relief for a dying patient is impossible to comprehend.”
“I would just as soon not need to return to court, although I think our merits arguments are incredibly strong. I’d much rather see the DEA just adopt an attitude of: ‘Everyone can win here. Our interest in diversion protection can be addressed, the patient’s need for relief can be permitted and everyone can declare victory and go home.’”
Kathryn L. Tucker, JD is Special Counsel at Emerge Law Group, where she Co-Chairs the Psychedelic Practice Group. Tucker is a founding member of the Psychedelic Bar Association and serves as Liaison to the Psychedelic Lawyering Task Force within the American Bar Association. Across her 30 year career, Tucker’s work has focused on advocacy to protect and expand the rights of the terminally ill. She served as Executive Director of the End of Life Liberty Project (ELLP), which she founded during her tenure as Executive Director of the Disability Rights Legal Center (DRLC), the nation’s oldest disability rights advocacy organization. Tucker served two decades as Director of Advocacy and Legal Affairs for Compassion & Choices. Prior to that, she practiced law with Perkins Coie. Professor Tucker has held faculty appointments at Loyola/Los Angeles, the University of Washington, Seattle University and Lewis & Clark, Schools of Law, teaching in the area of law, medicine and ethics at the end of life. Tucker served as lead counsel representing patients and physicians in two landmark federal cases decided by the United States Supreme Court, Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill, asserting that mentally competent terminally ill patients have a constitutional right to choose aid in dying. These cases are widely acknowledged to have prompted nationwide attention to improving care of the dying, and to have established a federal constitutional right to aggressive pain management. Tucker played a key role in successfully defending the Oregon Death with Dignity Act from attack by the United States Department of Justice, resulting in the landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court, Oregon v. Gonzales, representing the patient plaintiffs. Tucker was part of the team that succeeded in enacting the nation’s first state law permitting psilocybin therapy (Oregon Measure 109, 2020). She serves as lead counsel representing a palliative care physician and an oncology clinic in the first effort to apply Right to Try laws to psilocybin therapy, AIMS et al v DEA.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Kyle interviews Dr. Devon Christie: Senior Lead of Psychedelic Programs with Numinus Wellness, clinical instructor, counselor, and Co-Investigator and study therapist for a Canadian MAPS-sponsored trial investigating MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.
Christie talks about the importance of biomedical ethics and the unique considerations of psychedelic-assisted therapy: how psychedelics enhance the vulnerability and suggestibility in a well-established power dynamic, and how being aware of your power and biases is of the utmost importance towards not influencing your patient’s experience. They discuss just how much that experience is affected by every detail of preparation, and how it’s a very thin line between scaring someone off, setting impossible expectations, or even giving away too much of the experience (and with limitless possibilities, is that even possible?).
And she talks about the complications of touch and establishing (and honoring) informed consent; how true mindfulness can cultivate a greater capacity for self-regulation; how to handle situations where the client wants to know if a memory is real or not; the idea of psychedelics as a placebo; and many other complicated therapeutic concepts like harm of neglect, undue influence, making pleasure a virtue, cultivating agency, combating physician burnout, and the expectation effect.
Notable Quotes
“We don’t really know, but there may be aspects of psychedelics and their impacts that may make them ultimately like super placebos.”
“From my training as a relational somatic therapist, it’s actually not about the facts or details of what happened that matter. In fact, we can resolve trauma without even recollection of facts or details because we’re working with how it shows up in the body and how it’s showing up emotionally. …We can assist that process through working with what’s actually emergent in the felt experience and not needing to stay adherent to the narrative around it.”
“I think the yardstick on how far we’re going with this psychedelic work is that, either personally in our own journeys or even in the folks we’re supporting, we’re getting to a place where we don’t need the psychedelics – where the psychedelics have given us a reference, they’ve opened up new vistas of possibility, they’ve helped us to approach our lives differently, such that we are now cultivating the quality of presence and the quality of investigation and curiosity and flexibility and all those things that psychedelics can bring us – in our ordinary lives. …We’ve got these tools and they can help us learn and they can help us connect, and then hopefully we can come full circle and we can drop the tools and just be able to live meaningful lives that are sustaining for ourselves and for each other.”
Dr. Devon Christie is a medical doctor and registered counselor with a focused practice in chronic pain and trauma. She is trained to deliver both MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, and she serves as Senior Lead of Psychedelic Programs with Numinus Wellness. Devon is also a certified Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction teacher, Functional Medicine practitioner, and clinical instructor with UBC Family Medicine. She is currently Co-Investigator and study therapist for a Canadian MAPS-sponsored trial investigating MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, and co-investigator on a pilot study investigating MDMA-assisted therapy for fibromyalgia.
After traveling the world and seeking knowledge for 15 years, a conversation with the spirit of iboga helped her realize that the highest teachings were all there in her own culture, and she could have healing relationships with plants in her own environment – that while it’s beneficial to learn other cultures’ traditions and have reverence for the spirit of other cultures’ medicine plants, you can achieve the same result at home, with plants you can be more connected to, and through a lens you may understand better.
She discusses her process and the importance of plant dietas; the idea of the “ethical warrior”; the types of energies she sees in different plants; how we’ve forgotten our connection to nature; what can help strengthen connections to plant energies; why she recommends starting a plant exploration with mugwort; the concept of ayahuasca helping you to die consciously; the power of energy fields; how we are the most amazing technology; and how, for many reasons, people are often carrying around attachments they’re not aware of.
Notable Quotes
“What I found was that if you approach our native plants and trees like the oak, alder, elder, etc. with reverence and in a sacred way – as you would with, say, a sacred ceremony with a psychedelic plant – if you approach them in this kind of reverential way, then they can be just as psychedelic.” “[You] just have to have this patience that the plant spirit knows exactly what you need when you need it and it’s working in the background even if you’re not conscious of it. But then you become conscious of it.” “I wouldn’t say we’re disconnected [from nature] because we are nature. It’s just that we’ve forgotten our deep connection. And so whenever we’re working with plants and trees (or any plants), it’s just a remembering – remembering who we are.” “These plants show you what you need to resolve within yourself. The plants don’t fix you. Ayahuasca doesn’t fix you, but she gives you a lot of homework.”
Emma Farrell is a plant spirit healer, geomancer, and author. Emma has held plant diet retreats and ceremonies in England and Wales since 2016. She holds a Master’s Degree in “The Preservation & Development Of Wisdom Culture & The Art Of Liberation” in the Tibetan Buddhist Mahayana Tradition, writing her thesis on “Understanding The Nature Of The Self Through Lucid Dreaming.” Emma spent 2 years at the Lama Tsongkhapa Institute in Tuscany studying under lamas and geshes including her refuge lama, Dagri Rinpoche. Emma has been initiated into Indigenous healing and magical lineages of the British Isles and the Ecuadorian Amazon, has trained in Geomancy, Pranic Healing, and Psychic Surgery. She lives in Somerset, UK, where she runs the Plant Consciousness Apothecary, a remote healing practice and WisdomHub.tv. Emma’s healing practice is grounded in quantum plant technology, which she believes is the healthcare of the future. Emma is the co-founder of Plant Consciousness, the ground-breaking London event about the conscious intelligent world of plants and trees.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Kyle interviews professor of anthropology, author, and historian, Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D.
Together with his wife, Julie M. Brown, MA, he co-authored the book, The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, where they present compelling anthropological arguments through early Christian frescoes and iconography of the major religion’s long-forgotten entheogenic history.
Brown discusses the historical and cultural use of entheogens, the major universities currently conducting clinical research, the importance of ethics in this space, the question of ‘will psychedelics survive success (in business)?’, the future of these substances in the fields of medicine and mental health, and rides on the back of giant bengal tigers up volcanoes during LSD journeys. He breaks down why it’s important to understand the role of psychedelics in religion and how they can play a large role in the returning of faiths to their mystical roots, and he highlights two important areas professionals ought to be well-versed in: the establishment of trust between the therapist and client, and the technique of guided imagery – evoking mental images and symbols to facilitate deep healing.
Brown teaches our CE-approved six-part course entitled “Psychedelics: Past, Present and Future,” and is one of the teachers of Vital, which begins on Bicycle Day, April 19th. Applications for Vital close on March 27th, so if you’re considering joining in, now is the time to act!
Notable Quotes
“The magic …is that it is the spiritual experience – the intensity of the mystical experience – that seems to be the kind of magical key that opens the door to healing, to what Grof calls the activation of that inner self-healing intelligence that psychedelics bring to the surface.”
“To borrow an American Civil Liberties Union phrase, ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’. And I think that eternal vigilance within the psychedelic community against all kinds of abuse by egomaniacal leaders or ‘phony holies,’ as Julie and I call them (people who want to put themselves out as a spiritual leader and they have no credentials for that); that’s going to happen. And we have to be vigilant for that so it doesn’t derail the good things that are happening.”
“Guided imagery along with psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy could help heal even cancer, not just alleviate the psychological anxiety and depression.”
Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D., is an anthropologist, author, and ethnomycologist. He is a Founding Professor of Anthropology at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, where he teaches an online course on “Psychedelics and Culture.” He also co-created the “Psychedelics: Past, Present, and Future” course for us. Professor Brown teaches and writes on psychedelics and religion as well as on psychedelic therapy. He is coauthor (with Julie Brown, LMHC, an integrative psychotherapist and also his wife) of The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, 2016.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Adam Bramlage: Founder and CEO of Flow State Micro, a functional mushroom company and microdosing educational platform.
Bramlage talks about his journey to psychedelics and discovery of microdosing, and how he worries that the troubling issues he saw in the legal cannabis industry are already finding their way into the psychedelic space. He discusses what he experienced when he started microdosing; how he connected with James Fadiman; how he defines microdosing; the concepts of neurogenesis and a gut-brain axis; how more and more professional athletes are using psychedelics to heal brain injuries as well as optimize performance (and how leagues may handle this going forward); concerns over chronic microdosing; and why the goal is always to microdose less over time.
While we expected to hear about the benefits of microdosing, their conversation also goes deep into its history and our ancestral connection to psychedelics (particularly psilocybin), touching on Hernán Cortés; R. Gordan Wasson banking for the vatican; Christianity, Jesus, and mushrooms; repeated examples of control through the erasure of history; Tim Leary; Al Hubbard; MKUltra; the Tarahumara Indians’ peyote-influenced ultra-running; cave paintings; Whitey Bulger, and more.
Bramlage is a speaker on May 27th’s Microdosing Summit (along with Joe), and just released a new “Microdosing Movement Masterclass” in collaboration with the San Francisco Psychedelic Society, which focuses on our ancestral connection to psychedelics and the potential evolutionary use of microdosing. Use code psychedelicstoday at checkout for 10% off!
Notable Quotes
“I’m a single dad to two kids, and both of those kids, at periods of time in their life, were raised on a cannabis farm. And what I’ll tell you is this: when you normalize these plants and these tools and it’s just like a flower or a squash that my kid sees farmed like the farmer next to me, my kids want nothing to do with cannabis. It is so uncool. It’s the last thing they want to be around. I don’t have any worries about my son or daughter smoking pot. And why? Because we normalized it. And if you look at Portugal and what they’ve done with drugs and the success they’ve had with decrim legalization, supporting substance abuse issues with therapists and programs; this is the future. This is the answer.” “We have an ancestral and evolutionary connection to these plants and it’s only in the last couple hundred years that they’ve been made illegal and bastardized. …We’re putting five or six year old kids on Adderall (which is methamphetamine), but we’re pointing fingers at a parent who gives their kid 10 milligrams of a mushroom.”
“Psychedelics have an afterglow, or a 48-hour effect, so you don’t need to microdose seven days a week. You can take it on a Monday, take Tuesday off, and you’re still getting benefits. So what I see over time with microdosing is the more people use it, the less they need it. This isn’t a Western medical model of: you’re going to take microdoses five days a week because it regulates your blood pressure and your heart condition. It’s not like that. This is more like: the more people are microdosing over time, the less they need it. …When I’m coaching people or working with clients, the goal is to eventually not microdose.”
Adam Bramlage is Founder/CEO of Flow State Micro, a functional mushroom company and microdosing educational platform focusing on harm reduction and best practices. Bramlage works one-on-one with clients to optimize their microdosing experience. He’s helped hundreds of people, from professional athletes to people suffering from addiction and depression, achieve incredible results through microdosing. Bramlage works closely with psychedelic researcher, pioneer and father of modern microdosing, Dr. James Fadiman. In collaboration with Doubleblind Magazine, Bramlage launched his 14 episode online course “How to Microdose,” which was recently featured in Forbes Magazine as one of the masterclasses of psychedelics, and received an award from Gear Report for Top Ten Wellness Products of 2021. In collaboration with the SF Psychedelic Society, he has recently released his online Microdosing Movement Masterclass, looking at our ancestral and potential evolutionary use of microdosing. He is co-founder of the Microdosing Support Network, the first free online monthly microdosing support group. Prior to his work with mushrooms, he spent more than a decade in the Prop 215 and Prop 64 California cannabis space as a farmer, distributor, and manufacturer. He hopes psychedelics does NOT go the same route as legal cannabis.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Kyle interviews clinical psychologist, author, and researcher, Dr. Adele Lafrance.
Lafrance developed Emotion-Focused Family Therapy, which focuses on the role of the family in psychedelic work. Realizing that the healing process disrupts systems and that dealing with a loved one who is going through a massive shift can be quite challenging for their loved ones, the idea behind EFFT is teaching family and significant others emotion-processing and behavioral support skills, how to make therapeutic apologies, how to recognize defensiveness and not react in a knee-jerk way, and how to find problematic caregiving problems where families accommodate for mental health issues (and therefore perpetuate them). While not typical for adults to involve significant others or family in therapeutic processes, she has found that if done correctly, it can be extremely helpful.
She talks about anger: how we struggle with expressions of anger, the idea of healthy anger, and the ways psychedelics can help us move from rejecting anger to assertion. And she discusses the Hoffman Process; emotion coaching; the power of validation; similarities between EFFT and IFS; rolling with resistance; tips to incorporate family into therapy more; the concept of a shame hangover and checking in on “tomorrow you”; and that even with all the preparation in the world, there’s no way to adequately prepare someone for the vast array of possibilities within (and after) a psychedelic experience.
In addition to being one of the faculty of Vital (reminder that applications close on March 27th), Dr. Lafrance has a 4-Part, CE-approved EFFT Core Clinician Training course that begins April 4th. Click here for details.
Notable Quotes
“As a culture, we really, really struggle with healthy expressions of anger, both in delivering them and in receiving them, so we end up having these unconscious contracts with our loved ones where there’s this unspoken rule that we don’t …speak up for ourselves when we feel like things aren’t going okay, and both parties can be ‘okay’ with that. And one thing that psychedelics does …is that they help us connect to our healthy assertion, as a byproduct of the cultivation of self-love.”
“The paradox of rolling with resistance is that that’s exactly the most efficient route to releasing resistance.” “There’s actually no way to adequately prepare for what might come. And so I’ve incorporated that – this idea [that] there could be major shifts that are highly disruptive, you might reconnect to old memories that you completely lost connection to that are not pleasant and that will shake your world, or, you can have an experience of self-love that helps clarify your path forward in your career, and anything in between. …We don’t know what can happen. We don’t know. It can be a smooth re-entry, or it can feel like your life blows up, and you need to be prepared for that. What I do know, though, is that it is way more likely that anything that happens will be in the service of creating a more aligned life for you. That, I do feel comfortable saying.”
“Integrity is about doing your ultimate best, being supported, asking for help, and then when you fall down, you pick yourself back up, you learn from your mistakes, and then you teach others.”
Dr. Adele Lafrance is a clinical psychologist, research scientist, author, and co-developer of emotion-focused treatment modalities, including Emotion-Focused Family Therapy. A frequent keynote speaker at professional conferences, Adele has published extensively in the field of emotion and health, including a clinical manual on EFFT published by the American Psychological Association. She is passionate about helping parents to support their kids in a way that is informed by the latest developments in neuroscience. The knowledge and tips in her book, What to Say to Kids When Nothing Seems to Work is an effort to do just that. With colleagues, she also makes a wealth of caregiving resources available at no cost at Mental Health Foundations. Adele is also leader in the research and practice of psychedelic medicine, with a focus on ayahuasca, MDMA, psilocybin and ketamine. Currently, she is the clinical investigator and strategy lead for the MAPS-sponsored MDMA-assisted psychotherapy study for eating disorders and a collaborator/clinical support on the Imperial College study for psilocybin and anorexia nervosa. She is a founding member of the Love Project.
In this episode of the podcast, David interviews Chief of Staff, Head of Operations, and “Chief Cheerleader Officer” atNue Life, Kabir Ali.
Ali speaks about the power of ketamine-assisted therapy and how his first ketamine treatment made him overcome 10 years of addiction and depression (and realize what caused it). He talks about addiction: his struggles, how people can have these relationships with anything, concerns over the addictive properties of ketamine, and the importance of having the right people in your corner – especially when using a substance to overcome another. And he talks about the lack of education in mental health he’s seen in his travels, how our current society seems to be driving us to escape, and how self-love (and the authenticity and freedom that comes from it) is one of the most overlooked and wonderful gifts of psychedelic-assisted therapy.
And he discusses Nue Life: how the clinicians he works with are magical people, the benefits he’s seen from integration work in group settings, the health coaching they’ve made a large part of their program, what he’s most excited about, and why he views Nue Life as a next-gen mental health company rather than a ketamine clinic.
Notable Quotes
“We’re certainly living in a space today where our environment is pushing us to escape. It doesn’t necessarily feel safe. There’s a lack of certainty in our social landscape over here today. And whenever I come by someone who is struggling with addiction, whether it’s someone that I am mentoring or personally coaching, it’s quite apparent that we cannot underestimate the value or the impact of our environment.” “That self-compassion, that self-love: it’s one of the most, I think, overlooked gifts of these treatments.”
“The biggest gift, again, is that self-compassion, that self-care, that self-love. But the authenticity and the freedom that comes through these discoveries or through these experiences that we share with psychedelics; that’s one thing that I think we, at times, look over, which is: what is it that you are actually walking away with when you embark on a journey with plant medicines or with ketamine? And that’s just really the authenticity that you just touched upon right now, and that is that liberating feeling where we can actually go ahead and pursue and live the lives that we once had, or perhaps, lead a life that we never knew that we could lead.”
Kabir Ali is an advocate for accessible and innovative mental health care. As an operations executive in the wellness industry, his passion is to create collaborative teams that provide effective treatment at the highest standards of compliance. Kabir grew up in West Africa and Bombay and began his career as an actor and filmmaker in Bollywood. The pressures of the entertainment industry and the incarceration of a close family member ultimately led to struggles with addiction. While in treatment, he began working in healthcare communications, where he found satisfaction using his storytelling skills to help others heal. Today, Kabir serves as COO of Mind Body Medicine and My Ketamine Home and as Head of Operations for Nue Life, a recently-launched startup that provides at-home psychedelic therapy. In his spare time, Kabir studies the intersection of addiction and family systems and looks forward to developing additional programs that bring affordable mental health treatment to underserved communities.
If you aren’t familiar with the Internal Family Systems model, this podcast serves as a great introduction, as Schwartz discusses how it came about and what it entails; how he views the Self; how IFS relates to the body; exiles, managers, and firefighters; the 8 Cs of self-leadership qualities; how to address the actions of one’s different parts; and how often people in psychedelic-assisted therapy sessions find themselves naturally thinking within the IFC framework. He believes that the different parts of the mind each have valuable qualities and resources, and psychedelics (and other non-ordinary states of consciousness) can help to re-harmonize the damaged parts, therefore allowing the Self to do its job as the inner healer.
He also talks about the importance of preparation and facilitators knowing their own parts; his psychedelic history and why he’s no longer afraid of death; what he strives for in integration work; the 5 Ps facilitators need; Sandra Watanabe’s concept of a “cast of characters”; soul retrieval; starling murmuration; and the Pixar movie, “Inside Out.”
Notable Quotes
“[Michael Mithoefer) kept track of how often, spontaneously, the subjects would start doing IFS without any coaching from the facilitators, and in the high-dose MDMA [studies], 80% would start working with parts spontaneously. And that felt very validating to me, like I had just stumbled onto a process that people naturally do once they access enough Self.”
“There are times where you just can’t convince these protective parts to let us get to an exile and heal it. And a psychedelic session can expedite that pretty easily, it seems.”
“For me, there is a big SELF, with all capitals, that’s kind of like the ocean, and then we’re a drop of that ocean – there’s a piece of that that’s in each of us that I’m calling the Self with a capital S. And when we take ketamine and we leave [our bodies], we’re actually going back into that ocean. And there’s a lot of bliss, at least for me. I mean, there [were] a few moments that weren’t so blissful, but much of it was just– I came back, and I say this and people find it hard to believe, but I have no fear of death now. I just know that it’s a transition into that ocean.” “I think the psychedelic world has been conditioned by a kind of passivity approach to being present with people and just trusting their own process. And that can do a certain amount of good, but you’re also missing the opportunities [for] doing some really deep healing.”
Dr. Richard C. Schwartz began his career as a family therapist and an academic at the University of Illinois at Chicago. There, he discovered that family therapy alone did not achieve full symptom relief, and in asking patients why, he learned that they were plagued by what they called “parts.” These patients became his teachers as they described how their parts formed networks of inner relationship that resembled the families he had been working with. He also found that as they focused on, and thereby, separated from their parts, they would shift into a state characterized by qualities like curiosity, calm, confidence, and compassion. He called that inner essence the Self and was amazed to find it even in severely-diagnosed and traumatized patients. From these explorations, the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model was born in the early 1980s. IFS is now evidence-based and has become a widely-used form of psychotherapy, particularly with trauma. It provides a non-pathologizing, optimistic, and empowering perspective, and a practical and effective set of techniques for working with individuals, couples, families, and more recently, corporations and classrooms. In 2013, Schwartz left the Chicago area and now lives in Brookline, MA, where he is on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Ed Prideaux: UK-based writer and journalist working to raise awareness around Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) in affiliation with the Perception Restoration Foundation.
While HPPD is known in the psychedelic community (Kyle has unfortunately had experience with it), it’s not talked about or researched enough, and often considered by many as fake or a trauma reactivation. Prideaux likes to call HPPD “post-drug perceptual changes,” and talks all about it: how it came about in his life and how it affects him; what visual snow syndrome and other common HPPD visuals look like; big names in the field and current research; neurodiversity and looking at things from a “critical psychiatry” lens; how he thinks HPPD relates to anxiety and distress from depersonalization effects and isolation (did you know that visual changes are reported in people with generalized anxiety disorders?); and how so much of the lack of knowledge and progress around HPPD is a direct result of the drug war.
Is there a higher chance of HPPD happening when the experience happens in youth? Are there dormancy effects? Is cannabis a larger trigger than people think? Is the biggest trigger being overwhelmed by a larger-than-expected dose? Is LSD the most commonly reported culprit due to how long the trip is? Is one unintentionally training their brain to get used to a trip during these long experiences? Could entering into more non-ordinary states of consciousness actually be the solution?
The Perception Restoration Foundation is working on a study in Macquarie University in Australia looking at neuroimaging of people with HPPD, they just released an HPPD information guide in collaboration with MAPS, and they are working to finalize and release a documentary called “HPPD: Stuck in an Altered World” that features someone at least Joe and this show notes writer are huge fans of: Andrew Callaghan of Channel 5 News (previously of “All Gas No Breaks”). We will have a companion piece about HPPD from Prideaux in the blog this week as well.
Notable Quotes
“I remember lots of experiences where I’d be in my living room with my parents (who had no idea what I was going through) and I’d look at my Dad, I’d look away, and a complete afterimage of his silhouette would linger in the air for several seconds. Walls would morph, I’d see faint geometric patterns on the floor and on surfaces at school; surfaces, walls, carpets – they would melt and move waxly, like I was in a kind of semi-psychedelic state. There’d be times when I’d glance over at the carpet and there would be faint mandalas and kaleidoscopes on it. …The worst effect of these visual changes; it wasn’t so much anxiety about what I’d done, it was just the sheer sense of isolation, as if I was stuck in my own essentially mini broken perceptual world that I was just too freaked out to tell any of my friends or family about.”
“I don’t want to be a savior guy here, but these severe HPPD cases have, for the longest time, been essentially left voiceless. And I hope that this film will be the voice and mouthpiece for them.”
“I think part of the HPPD problem is our culture’s entire warped relationship with drugs, in particular, in creating the conditions for the sense of isolation and self-shame that can come with HPPD. …With drugs, it seems to be that there’s limited room for empathy. It’s just like, ‘Yeah, you’re a druggie and this is what you did to yourself. You fried your brain.’ The brain-frying thing; it’s a huge source of self-stigma for people with HPPD. I definitely experienced it myself in the first year after I developed the condition, like, ‘Yeah, I’m a basket case. I’m an acid casualty.’ And I think that all of these really needlessly self-shaming, incredibly negative and unpleasant narratives people tell themselves are allowed to fester in a culture where we can’t have open conversations about the risks and benefits of drugs.”
“In the current environment we’re in with the psychedelic renaissance, we’re in a delicate pivotal time for psychedelics. And obviously, this is psychologizing for other people and projection is playing a role here, but I think people can feel self-conscious about coming out and saying, ‘Hey, yeah, I have actually been having some difficulty from my trips,’ because they don’t want to spoil the fun. They don’t want to derail the train.”
Ed Prideaux is a UK-based writer and journalist who’s written about psychedelics for the BBC, VICE, The Independent, and Unherd, and other topics for The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Spectator, and The Quietus. Ed is working to advocate and raise awareness around Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD) in affiliation with the Perception Restoration Foundation, a new 501 (c) (3) nonprofit that has secured the launch of HPPD’s first breakout studies in decades.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Kyle interviews Michael Sapiro, PsyD: clinical psychologist, writer, meditation researcher, integrative coach, former Buddhist monk, Vital teacher, and now 3-time podcast guest.
They begin with what he feels is the most vital conversation we should be having now, then he discusses the idea of bringing psychedelics to prisons; his mental time travel work with The Institute for Love and Time (TILT); building an ecosystem where those with means pay full price to enable those with less money a discount; rebuilding trust in the medical community; and the difference between a diploma and real-world experience and proper training.
And he talks about the mystical experience, working with clients, and education: how so much more training is necessary than people realize, and how so much of the true education is learning how to vocalize an internal experience (and then integrating the positive aspects into everyday life). He talks about the complicated dynamics involved in what many see as a fantasy career; how he knows when to intervene; how he views “doing your own work”; whether or not the work can be gentle or joyous; the idea of joking during a session; his work with combat veterans and the intensity of 5-MeO-DMT; mainstreaming mysticism; and trusting that the universe has our backs.
Notable Quotes
“We want people to have real, internal experiences that they’re aware of and they can vocalize, and that is the actual education; not just the knowledge I’m giving them about what this drug does to the brain or how you identify something. It’s really: What is alive in you, how do you identify what’s alive in you, how do you use it in real time, and then how do you navigate those circumstances and change and grow? That’s the real learning process.”
“The mystical experience is a present moment experience where the universe unfolds in front, within, and around you, and then we integrate that into our human self. So Mike gets this amazing introduction to the universe through an experience and then it comes in and becomes insight and knowledge, and then hopefully practical application. So that’s where I think, in the end, we actually transform; is when that knowledge becomes integrated into the fabric of our own being [and] into our personality, and now Mike and the universe are more melded.”
“Zen is serious until you learn the universe is playful, and then you get to be kind of playful with it.”
“My hope is that all of us touch on the unconditional love that’s here for us, within us. And once you touch that, you can’t not offer it. You can’t not take care of other things. …This work gives us access to what’s already fundamentally true, and helps us bridge that with everything else.”
Michael Sapiro, PsyD, is a clinical psychologist, writer, meditation researcher, and former Buddhist monk. He is on faculty at Esalen Institute, is a Fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and is completing a study on time travel, hope, and love with Dr. Julia Mossbridge of The Institute for Love and Time. Dr. Sapiro teaches nationally on the art and science of transformation, expanded human capabilities, and futuremaking. He is the integrative psychologist at the Boise Ketamine Clinic where he offers Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP and KAT) sessions, and is an integrative coach with VETS, helping former Navy Seals and other special operations team members recover from combat exposure with psychedelic-assisted therapy. He hosts a syndicated radio program called Radio Awakened out of KRBX. His work is dedicated to personal awakening for the sake of collective and planetary transformation. He can be found at Michaelsapiro.com.
In this episode of the podcast, Kyle interviews Laura Mae Northrup, LMFT: author, educator, somatic psychotherapist, and host of Inside Eyes, a podcast focusing on the use of psychedelics for healing sexual trauma.
Northrup is the author of the just-released Radical Healership: How to Build a Values-Driven Healing Practice in a Profit-Driven World, which, although not focused on psychedelic work specifically, was largely written on or inspired by psychedelics, and is beneficial for people entering the field as psychedelic practitioners (she calls it “a self-help book for healers”). She talks about the book and ways to make a sustainable path towards a healthy practice, with the most important factors being to build in time for joy and inspiration, and to continuously do your own work.
She discusses what “doing your own work” really means; what people struggle with when entering the field; the idea of ”action movie therapy”; the ways gained power, unconscious motivations, or issues you haven’t worked on can influence the ways you work with others; why preparation is maybe more important than integration; capitalism and why practitioners shouldn’t feel bad about charging money for their services; the importance of trauma training; the need for community and developing relationships with colleagues; and why, while society usually feels differently, you don’t actually have to be perfect to become a healing practitioner.
If you’re interested in Radical Healership, we have a discount code for you thanks to North Atlantic Books! Go here and use code psychedelicstoday for 30% off and free shipping!
Notable Quotes
“What you’re doing, especially if you’re working in a psychological or spiritual realm, is that you’re using your own being as your instrument. And so, just like somebody who is a surgeon that is using a surgical knife; you would want that person to be cleaning that surgical knife and replacing it when it’s dull and really tending to this surgical knife. This isn’t the same as just trying to cut up a tomato for dinner and it’s okay if the knife gets a little dull over the years. You want to make sure your instrument is well cared for, and that is you. It’s your being.”
“We’re so obsessed with the pinnacle moment or the peak experience that we don’t value appropriately all of the more mundane experiences that actually allow that peak experience to happen safely. Absolutely, the people I see doing the most profound healing work for themselves [and] getting a lot out of psychedelic medicine; they did a lot of prep. We talk a lot about integration, I think, in the community, but we don’t talk as much about preparation, and I actually think integration flows a lot more easily if you’ve done a lot of preparation.”
“There’s kind of this fantasy healing practitioners can get into where they’re like, ‘I’m not going to charge anything’ or ‘I’m going to charge really little.’ And I would say one individual person driving themselves into lifelong debt and not charging enough money is not actually changing the system. I think it’s masochistic. I think a lot of healing practitioners do it, and to all the healing practitioners listening right now that struggle with this, I want to speak to you and I want to say: I want you to be a okay, because we fucking need you so that you can actually help people heal, and when you’re driving yourself into the ground and stressed out and you can barely support yourself, you’re not taking care of yourself enough to support other people. So please charge enough to be okay.”
“Finding our way through capitalism involves connecting ourselves to a deep, deep, deep sense of love.”
Laura Mae Northrup, LMFT is an author, educator, somatic psychotherapist, and podcaster. Her book Radical Healership (Feb 2022) is a spiritually-informed and anticapitalist guide for healing practitioners who seek to build a values-driven healing practice. She is the host and creator of the podcast Inside Eyes, an audio series about people using entheogens and psychedelics to heal from sexual trauma. Her work focuses on defining sexual violence through a spiritual and politicized lens, mentoring healing practitioners in creating a meaningful path, and supporting the spiritual integrity of our collective humanity. You can learn more about her work here: www.lauramaenorthrup.com.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Kyle interviews researcher, author, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich, and Co-Founder and Director of the Breaking Convention conference: Dr. David Luke.
Luke talks about the importance of understanding the full range of psychedelic experiences; the difficulty in defining and measuring the transpersonal, how science has pathologized (and religion has demonized) the weird; the need for counselors to be open minded to the reality (and after effects) of their clients’ experiences; the problem of trying to apply science to something science can’t define; and how the most important thing we need is community.
And he talks about DMT and entity encounters: What could these encounters represent, or what could these entities be? And why do people who have these experiences have such massive shifts in belief afterward? While he can’t answer these questions, he shares a few stories of his own that led to prolonged, incremental ontological shock in his own life, including elves taking light from the sky and putting it into his chest, and meeting a being with “multiple snake body tentacles all morphing in a kind of fibonacci spiral covered in thousands of eyeballs.”
Reminder that each of the guests on Vital Psychedelic Conversations is a part of the teaching team for our 12-month Certificate course, Vital. We’re taking applications until March 27th, and classes begin April 19th!
Notable Quotes
“I would have these extraordinary experiences which I couldn’t quite explain, which begged me to kind of reconsider my worldview about the nature of reality. And just as I maybe started to incorporate that and go, ‘Okay, I feel comfortable with that now, that isn’t really so mind-blowing to me any more,’ …I’d have another experience which would be even more mind-blowing than that, and I’d have to try and get my head around it. And then on and on it went. …It’s a series of just shattering your beliefs and then just staring at them on the floor and wondering how to reconstruct them.”
“When your ‘boggle-threshold’ just gets exceeded, it finally finds some new equilibrium in a more expanded kind of worldview. But then that can be exceeded again. [There] doesn’t appear to be any apparent limit on how far out we can go with our beliefs. But just a word of caution: Keep an open mind, but not so much that your brains fall out.”
“Experiences are real. It’s a real experience, no matter what. If you are somewhere in another dimension encountering with impossible entities, then it’s still a real experience. It doesn’t mean the phenomena are real or the entities exist, but it’s a real experience. …And that has a profound effect. We see these profound effects and how [they shift] people’s beliefs, so they should be treated with that respect and seriousness.” “The very fact that the mystical experiences even are in the scientific parlance; [are] in the research agendas; [are] in some of the clinical research (not all of it); and being talked about is a massive shift. Basically, up until very recently, what we might consider a mystical experience was either demonized or pathologized. Now it’s completely done a 180, and it seems to be part of the solution for mental health problems instead.”
Dr. David Luke is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Greenwich. His research focuses on transpersonal experiences, anomalous phenomena and altered states of consciousness, especially via psychedelics, having published more than 100 academic papers in this area, including ten books, most recently DMT Entity Encounters. When he is not running clinical drug trials with LSD, conducting DMT field experiments or observing apparent weather control with Mexican shamans, he directs the Ecology, Cosmos and Consciousness salon and is a cofounder and director of Breaking Convention: International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Professor of Neuroscience, author, and Founder and Vice Director of the Brain Institute at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil: Sidarta Ribeiro.
Ribeiro tells his story, discusses some of his work with dreams, and talks about what he’s seeing happen in psychiatry: that we’re realizing how little traditional psychiatry paid attention to set and setting, how much the creation and spread of antidepressants was influenced by conflicts of interest, and how the future of psychiatry and psychotherapy will mean more talking and less use of drugs (and not the other way around).
He also discusses research where MDMA was given to octopuses; how we’re arriving at many “new” conclusions that are actually old; why he’s primarily researching LSD; how all descriptions of the world are metaphors; the ayahuasca-like drink, jurema; how we need to look at things outside the realm of logical positivism; microdosing; and why we aren’t more tolerant of each other. And he talks a lot about biopiracy: how we need to honor the sacredness of these plants, learn from the knowledge that came before Western science, and respect the dream-state journey that many psychedelic companies are trying to figure out how to remove from the experience. We’re giving away 5 copies of Riberio’s newest book, The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams. Click here to enter!
Notable Quotes
“People need to be listened to. People need to dialogue. People need to have access to sophisticated techniques of care that can be aided by substances, but they cannot be replaced by substances.” “What I don’t like and I think it’s either naive or disingenuous or even quite misleading (and I see it [with] lots of people; scientists, journalists, and capitalists going in that direction) is to say that the non-psychoactive psychedelics are the good ones, the preferred ones – that this is the right way of doing the therapy. I think this would be similar to saying that sex without orgasm is better than sex with orgasm.”
“Because of the propaganda, because of the war on drugs, because of Nixon, because of Reagan, because of people that said that cannabis kills brain cells, because of people that said that psychedelics would make everybody psychotic. That really worked. People really believed those myths and it really took very sustained research work over many decades to overcome this. Now, I think the genie is out of the bottle. It’s very hard to portray psychedelics as something tremendously harmful and dangerous. This moral panic; it doesn’t stick anymore.”
“We are really close to a very big positive change. And the reason I believe it is because it’s obvious that we have accumulated in the past three million years such a wide and rich wealth of knowledge from many different sources, that if we were able to gather the best of all that we have and apply it, we would reach world balance and harmony quite quickly. If we think of the financial capital that has accumulated now, the technological capital, the human capital: we have it all. But we’re still confused about something that is quite basic, which is that we need to share.”
Sidarta Ribeiro is Full Professor of Neuroscience and Vice-Director of the Brain Institute at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biology from the Universidade de Brasília, a Master’s degree in Biophysics from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, and a Ph.D. in Animal Behavior from the Rockefeller University, with post-doctoral studies in Neurophysiology at Duke University. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Latin American School for Education, Cognitive and Neural Sciences (LA School), and he is a senior research associate of the FAPESP Research Centre for Innovation and Diffusion in Neuromathematics and Scientific Coordinator and Member of the Advisory Board of the Brazilian Platform for Drug Policy and the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. His most recent book, The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams, was released by Pantheon in 2021.
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, David interviews Andrew Tatarsky, Ph.D.; author and developer of Integrative Harm Reduction Psychotherapy, and Juliana Mulligan; writer and head of Inner Vision Ibogaine, which supports people in their preparation for and integration of ibogaine treatment. Both are involved with our Vital program, and both are part of The Center for Optimal Living in NYC (CFOL); Tatarsky as the Founder and Director, and Mulligan as the Psychedelic Program Coordinator.
Mulligan tells her story of overcoming opioid dependence through an almost deadly ibogaine treatment, and how later, she began to see two major issues quickly becoming a problem: the continued labeling of psychedelic interventions as “miracle cures,” and the alarming lack of knowledge so many people seemed to have about preparation and integration. Tatarsky discusses his realization that traditional 12-step or abstinence-only programs were contributing to what he calls “treatment trauma,” and how breaking the rules in how he treated people led to a newfound interest in harm reduction and the creation of the CFOL.
They talk about reframing addiction, the ways society divides us by accepted behaviors, how being taught to doubt ourselves as children creates trauma, the idea of the “disease narrative” and self-demonization, how research studies support the idea of the quick fix, and harm reduction as a pathway to a better self.
The CFOL is currently running an 8-week virtual training series with a focus on intersectionality and social justice called “Working with Psychedelics to Treat Substance Use Issues,” featuring names like Gabor Maté, Laura Mae Northrup, Courtney Watson, and Dr. Carl Hart. Mulligan developed the curriculum by asking her favorite people in the psychedelic space what they were most passionate about. Check out the event page here.
Notable Quotes
“The harm reduction framework is about not imposing barriers, expectations, our values [and] our agendas on the people that we’re trying to be helpful to. It’s about radical acceptance and respect and empowerment, and therefore we can truly meet people where they are as unique humans in unique social and relational environments and create a safe space to support people in discovering their truth and their goals and what approach to positive change makes sense to them. So it’s non-ideological, it’s non-prescriptive, and I think it really is a very powerful way of engaging folks. And it works!” -Andrew
“I had to go through homelessness and getting beaten up and going to jail and all of this, but the most traumatizing thing for me was being told repeatedly that I had a disease for life that had no cure and I had to admit that I was powerless and say that I was an addict for the rest of my life, and if I stopped going to these meetings, then I would end up in a jail, institution, or I would die.” -Juliana “In the psychedelic world in general, we need to get away from this kind of ‘miracle’ language or even ‘10 years of therapy in one night.’ That kind of thing, I think, is playing into the notions that we’ve been taught in capitalism that you can buy your way into getting what you want or there’s some kind of magical overnight fix for things. There’s not.” -Juliana “We’re losing hundreds of thousands of people a year from lethal overdose or drug poisoning because of prohibition. Our American gulag is filled with mostly people of color and folks in marginalized communities because of the simple use or possession of a substance. I mean, these are catastrophic outcomes of prohibition. If anybody ever believed that prohibition was supposed to be helpful to vulnerable people, I think that’s been glaringly exposed as a terrible lie.” -Andrew
Andrew Tatarsky, Ph.D. has worked with people who struggle with drugs and their families for over 40 years. He developed Integrative Harm Reduction Psychotherapy (IHRP) for treating the spectrum of risky and addictive behavior as an alternative to traditional abstinence-only substance use treatment. IHRP brings relational psychoanalysis, CBT and mindfulness together in a harm reduction frame and meets people wherever they are on their positive change journeys, working collaboratively to support people in discovering their truth and what goals and approach to positive change best suit them. The therapy has been described in a series of papers and his book, Harm Reduction Psychotherapy: A New Treatment for Drug and Alcohol Problems, which has been translated into Polish and Spanish and is currently being translated into Russian. He holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from the City University of New York and is a graduate of New York University’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is Founder and Director of the Center for Optimal Living in NYC, a treatment, education and professional training center based on IHRP. He is a member of the Medical and Clinical Advisory Panels of the New York State Office of Addiction Services and Support. He has trained individuals and organizations in 19 countries. His writing, teaching, clinical work and leadership aim to promote a re-humanized view of problematic substance use and a harm reduction continuum of care that will extend help to everyone who needs and wants it wherever they are ready to begin their positive change journeys.
Juliana Mulligan has been an active member of the Ibogaine community for nine years and is currently working on her MSW at NYU. She runs Inner Vision Ibogaine, supporting people in preparation for, and in integration after treatment. She is also the Psychedelic Program Coordinator at the Center for Optimal Living. Previously Juliana was an opioid dependent person, and in 2011, with the help of Ibogaine treatment, she left opioids behind and set off on a path to transform the way drug users and their treatment are approached. She has been featured in DoubleBlind magazine, Chacruna, Woman’s Day magazine, and Psymposia.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe and Kyle finally sit down with one of their all-time heroes: Stanislav Grof, MD, Ph.D., who joins them with his wife and collaborator (and co-creator of Grof® Legacy Training), Brigitte Grof, MA.
If you’re a fan of Psychedelics Today, you know that one of the major reasons Joe and Kyle met and decided to start this whole thing up was due to a mutual admiration for Grof’s work and a strong desire to spread it through the world of psychedelia. Due to Stan’s stroke a few years ago, we haven’t been able to have him on, but he has recovered enough to grace us with an appearance.
Stan and Brigitte talk about his stroke and recovery; developments in his concept of birth perinatal matrices; how they see breathwork evolving; how we get to the psychology of the future; the inner healing intelligence; and the need for more practitioners to have more training in non-ordinary states of consciousness. Stan also tells stories of how he discovered the power of breathwork and bodywork, and a funny story about missing a huge event at Harvard to instead relearn how to say “monkeys eat bananas.”
While the stroke set Stan back a bit in terms of speech, “the problem is in the cables, not the content,” as Brigitte says, and that is evident – as is Stan’s refreshing and humbling self-awareness and ability to laugh at his struggles. And what’s even more evident is the love between the two of them and how much Brigitte has helped him through this difficult time, and continues to help keep his knowledge in the forefront of this psychedelic renaissance (as we’re trying to do).
Notable Quotes
“This was the only situation where I could see what LSD is actually about, because once you get beyond the matrices, there is no real material substrate for the images. It’s basically just consciousness, and the question is how far the consciousness goes further back.” -Stan
“I believe that if psychiatry goes in the right direction (not where it is going now) that it ultimately should be done with non-ordinary states of consciousness (not necessarily just psychedelics; it could be breathwork or it could be working with people who have spontaneous experiences, spiritual emergency and so-on), …because some of the deeper sources; they are not reached with verbal talking and just suppressing symptoms. It’s very bad psychiatry. So I believe, if it [goes] in the right direction, that it’s going to be [working] with non-ordinary states of consciousness.” -Stan “I find something that is absolutely essential for breathwork …is that the psyche has the intelligence.” -Stan
“The processes are similar. …Certainly with psychedelics, it’s more visual and it’s longer, but what you could see is anything you can see in breathwork. So if you learn how to deal with this by breathwork training, …it’s an easy step to be a psychedelic sitter or starting to do psychedelics yourself. …When you know how to deal with breathwork and bodywork and everything, then you can deal with psychedelic sessions. It’s a very short, small step to move over to that area.” -Brigitte
“People can become artists who haven’t been before. It can awaken these abilities, or healing qualities, or people can maybe get some psychic experiences, or just become yourself more, whoever you are or whoever you’re supposed to be. I think that’s what it’s about.” -Brigitte
Stanislav Grof, MD, Ph.D., is a psychiatrist with more than sixty years of experience in research of non-ordinary states of consciousness. In the past, he was Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and Scholar-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. Currently, he is Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco, CA. In August 2019, his life’s work encyclopedia, The Way of the Psychonaut, was published, and the documentary film about his life and work was published as well: “The Way of the Psychonaut- Stan Grof and the journey of consciousness.”
About Brigitte Grof, MA
Brigitte Grof, MA, is a psychologist, licensed psychotherapist, and artist with 35 years of experience in holotropic breathwork. She was certified in the first Grof training groups in USA and Switzerland. She has led breathwork workshops and taught training modules in the US and in Germany. Currently she works in her private practice in Wiesbaden, Germany, and leads workshops and retreats.
Since April 2016, Stan and Brigitte Grof are happily married, live in Germany and California, and conduct seminars, trainings and holotropic breathwork workshops worldwide. In May 2020, they launched their new training in working with Holotropic States of Consciousness, the international Grof® Legacy Training (www.grof-legacy-training.com).
In this episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations, Kyle interviews Sam Gandy: researcher, science writer, Ph.D. ecologist, and collaborator with the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London.
Gandy is most interested in the capacity of psychedelics to amplify or ignite our relationship with nature. He talks about our skewed relationship with nature; David Luke’s study on nature interconnectedness after psychedelic experiences; and ways to add nature into the integration and prep stages, from VR to planting seeds to even just looking at pictures or videos.
He talks about the challenge of maximizing the benefits of the psychedelic experience and the need for more knowledge on how to integrate, asking how we can use psychedelics intentionally as creativity-enhancing agents. And they discuss James Fadiman and Willis Harman’s 1966 “Selective Enhancement of Specific Capacities Through Psychedelic Training” study and how the directive priming that was used in it is similar to intention-setting today.
They also discuss the communal aspect of the music festival psychedelic experience, dream states and creativity, how more research is needed on the context around the chemicals (not just the chemicals), and the complications of trying to step into a newly-discovered life purpose while living in a capitalist society.
Notable Quotes
“People are maybe slightly focusing too much on the chemical substances themselves when the context around the usage of those chemicals is probably much more important and in need of much more attention, I think. And I feel like more exploration there could enhance the potential benefits of psychedelics in a variety of different ways.”
“Some scientists have argued, as I do in this paper, that perhaps we’ve become a little bit over-reliant on analytical thinking. Like, I’m in no way shooting down the importance of analytical thinking. It’s absolutely essential. But perhaps [these] more slightly dynamic, free-flowing, unconstrained states of consciousness that you can access through these altered states – perhaps they’ve got a place.”
“There’s not that much known, really, at this stage, about how to maximize the benefits in terms of people bringing those insights back and integrating them into their life and acting on them. That’s something that I feel needs more attention.”
“Prior to people going into an experience, you could maybe tend a bit of soil, like you’re preparing your psychic soil before going into [the] experience. And then plant a seed that you then take away and you nurture this young plant as you’re hopefully nurturing and grounding the insights in yourself.”
Sam Gandy is a lifelong nature lover and has been fortunate enough to conduct ecological field research in various parts of the world. He is a Ph.D. ecologist, researcher, and science writer, and has experience of working within the psychedelic field as a past scientific assistant to the director of the Beckley Foundation, and as a research assistant with the Synthesis Institute and a senior science writer with Wavepaths. He is a Project Manager with Norfolk Rivers Ecology and a collaborator with the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, with a research interest in the capacity of psychedelics to influence our connection to nature.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews two authors and professors at the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco: Rick Tarnas and Sean Kelly, Ph.D.
While this is the first PT appearance for Tarnas – a huge name in the archetypal astrology field (and referenced often in our monthly Cosmic Weather Report series) – this episode is not focused on his work, but instead on the new book he and Kelly co-edited: Psyche Unbound: Essays in Honor of Stanislav Grof, which is a collection of 22 essays from the last 50 years about Grof and the impact of his work (a festschrift of sorts). The book features pieces from legends of the past like Joseph Campbell and Huston Smith, and big names in the field today like Michael Mithoefer and Fritjof Capra. It’s quite a beautiful book, and thanks to Synergetic Press, we’re actually giving away five copies signed by Stan Grof himself (click here!).
Tarnas and Kelly discuss what led to this project happening; why Grof’s work is so important; how Grof connected classic ideas with previously unthinkable concepts and realities; what the over-simplified term, “ego death” really means; and talk about their concern that standardized research is often leaving out the very integral spiritual dimension. They also discuss a different way of viewing the concept of “hanging up the phone,” and Kelly tells the story of a very powerful early psychedelic experience.
Notable Quotes
“What [Stan] found was that it was often the challenging experiences – the really difficult ones, the ones where one is encountering not only problematic or traumatic psychological issues, complexes, traumas from early life, etc. – it was bringing these up from the deep unconscious where they’re lodged in our body and in our psyche, and bringing them to consciousness and working them through, releasing them, releasing the emotions and the physical responses that have been bottled up in the psychophysical organism for decades. And that that was the very means by which a psychospiritual transformation could open up, and that one could thereby have both a healing experience and a deeper mystical experience of life.” -Rick
“She brought me outside and sat beside me as I lay in the snow for about three hours and was just with me. And that transformed what had been a kind of Hellscape where I was trapped in this world of mirrors (a ‘no exit’ situation) into one of just floating on this sea – a nourishing, milk-white snow ocean. But it wouldn’t have happened unless this compassionate being was willing just to sit with me and hold my hand.” -Sean “Stan’s attitude has been one of trusting whatever is coming up, whether it’s a difficult experience or a positive one. The positive ones can often serve as a kind of grounding and awareness that you can keep in the back of your mind, that when a difficult experience starts coming up, this higher unity is still waiting for you in some way. You can trust that the hard experience is not the only game in town.” -Rick
“If the humanities are colonized entirely by the methodological imperatives and constraints of the natural sciences, we’re essentially blocking out much of what it is to be a human being.” -Rick
Richard Tarnas is a professor of psychology and cultural history at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he founded the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He teaches courses in the history of ideas, archetypal cosmology, depth psychology, and religious evolution. He frequently lectures on archetypal studies and depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Santa Barbara, and was formerly the director of programs and education at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. He is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern that is widely used in universities. His second book, Cosmos and Psyche, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network, and is the basis for the documentary series, “The Changing of the Gods.” He is a past president of the International Transpersonal Association and served on the Board of Governors for the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.
In this episode of the podcast (and episode 3 of Vital Psychedelic Conversations), Kyle interviews Kylea Taylor: M.S.; LMFT; Grof-certified Holotropic Breathwork® practitioner; Vital teacher; and author of several books, including her newest, The Ethics of Caring: Finding Right Relationship with Clients (which you can win a signed copy of here).
She discusses her past and what she’s doing now, from learning breathwork from the Grofs at Esalen; to working through (and with) her 5-year spiritual emergency; to her work bringing breathwork to a residential substance abuse recovery program; to her InnerEthics® program, which she developed after realizing how traditional ethics education didn’t come close to covering the intricacies of working with non-ordinary states of consciousness.
They talk about how much the psychedelic community undervalues the reciprocity and knowledge one can gain from sitting for someone else; how a facilitator’s simplest question to ask when looking to intervene is, “Who’s this for?”; the need for therapists to have their own experiences and learn the territory of the medicines they’re using, how our multiple selves complicate already-complicated relationships, and three tools likely not yet mentioned in this podcast: Angie Arrien’s naming ceremony, SoulCollage®, and Brainspotting.
Plus, they talk about having dreams about taking psychedelics (have you ever had one?), and Kyle tells the story of his psychic dream – or as this show notes writer believes, his “making-prank-calls-while-sleeping” incident (sleep-pranking?).
Notable Quotes
“Informed consent is completely different, because how do you describe what a person is going to go into if they’ve never been into it? They’ve never had an extraordinary state of consciousness, let alone experience with that particular medicine. So you can describe it, but do they understand it? And can they really make an informed consent?” “There’s exponential kinds of connections between the multiple selves, and it gets really confusing to sort out, so it’s another reason to know ourselves as well as we can, and to have experience in these states, and also to trust – when in doubt, go back to trusting the inner healing intelligence.” “Therapists, with psychedelic-assisted therapy, need to be properly prepared and experienced, and know their scope of practice, and know themselves. I think trainings are doing a good job and we’ll get better as we go, but I think experience is the part that it seems like people are going to have to take care of themselves. If they really want to do the best they can for their clients, then they need to do it. We need to do it. We all do.”
Kylea Taylor, M.S., LMFT developed and teaches InnerEthics®, a self-reflective, self-compassionate, approach to ethical relationship with clients that she is now teaching in psychedelic psychotherapy trainings. Kylea started studying with Stanislav Grof, M.D. and Christina Grof in 1984 and was certified by them as a Holotropic Breathwork® practitioner in 1990. She worked with Stan Grof and Tav Sparks as a Senior Trainer in the Grof Transpersonal Training throughout the 1990s, and worked for nine years in a residential substance abuse recovery program. She is the author of The Ethics of Caring: Finding Right Relationship with Clients, The Breathwork Experience, Considering Holotropic Breathwork® and is the editor of Exploring Holotropic Breathwork®.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe sits down with Co-Founder and CEO of Numinus, Payton Nyquvest, this time for a full episode (you may remember that he had a brief segment in Solidarity Friday #86).
Nyquvest tells the story of how ayahuasca became the cure for his chronic pain, and discusses pain in general and how we deal with it: how people so often fall into a box where their diagnosis becomes their identity, and how so much of healthcare is about alleviating the symptoms but never getting to the root cause.
He talks about how Numinus came about; how Health Canada’s Special Access Program could be huge towards more legalization; his concerns with the rush to ketamine and virtual therapy; patents and Compass Pathways; the importance of a safe container and community; and the need for a shift in how we view psychedelics and self work, from something we view as a last ditch resort to something we treat more as regular preventative tune-ups or check-ins.
Numinus is working with MAPS in their Phase 3 MDMA for PTSD study, and due to a license amendment by Health Canada that now allows them to produce a product from natural fungi, they have just produced what may be the first legal psilocybin mushroom since the 1970s.
Notable Quotes
“[I] saw this possibility [that] someone, through shifting their mental health and mental state, could greatly become a better version of themselves. And so, in my mid-to-late teens, became very, very passionate about mental health and my own mental health, and the intersection of mental health [and] physical health, and the recognition that you can’t compartmentalize the two. They’re all part of the same thing.”
“If you look at AA for example, there’s not a city on the planet I think that you could go to where you don’t find an AA community. And while certainly all these communities have their strengths and weaknesses, it really shows that with a really, really strong community, you can really help facilitate a lot of healing. …While the psychedelic experience is important, the integration and ongoing support and community is, I would argue, as important or more so.” “I encourage everybody to read the results from the MAPS Phase 3 work, which is probably, I would argue, the most astounding clinical data we have on psychedelics for treatment-resistant PTSD, which, for anybody who doesn’t know; treatment-resistant PTSD is– this is a population of people who have tried every other treatment and have failed. Over 80% of people who went through the MDMA protocol saw a significant reduction in their symptoms and 67% actually no longer met the PTSD criteria after three treatments. That’s a cure for treatment-resistant PTSD, which is just an astounding thing to be able to say.”
Payton Nyquvest is the Founder, Chair & Chief Executive Officer of Numinus, a company that empowers people to heal and be well through the development and delivery of innovative mental health care and access to safe, evidence-based psychedelic-assisted therapies. He has a deep understanding of the psychedelic industry from its infancy, driven by life-saving personal experiences with multiple therapy modalities. Additionally, Payton has deep business leadership experience, particularly in the finance sector, and is a recognized innovator and visionary in mental health care. At Numinus, he guides teams leading strategy, innovation, research and clinic network expansion, and supports the marketing and capital markets functions. He is responsible for raising more than $70 million for Numinus in the past year, and is quoted widely in media such as CTV, Forbes and the New York Times. In addition, he brings more than 15 years working in finance, investment and retail banking with some of Canada’s leading independent investment firms, including Jordan Capital Markets, Canaccord Financial and Mackie Research Capital. In these and other roles, he has raised more than $100 million for a variety of small cap companies.
In this episode of the podcast, fresh off the heels of the announcement of (and opening of applications for) our new 12-month certificate program, Vital, Kyle sits down for episode 2 of Vital Psychedelic Conversations; this week with two figureheads lending their knowledge to the course: Annie & Michael Mithoefer.
While also supervising and training therapists for MAPS-sponsored trials, the Mithoefers are probably best known for groundbreaking trials they’ve been involved in, including two MAPS-sponsored Phase II trials studying MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, a study providing MDMA-assisted sessions to therapists completing the MAPS therapist training, and a pilot study treating couples with MDMA-assisted therapy combined with Cognitive Behavioral Conjoint Therapy. They are also both Grof-certified holotropic breathwork practitioners, and huge proponents of breathwork in general.
They talk about why they connected so much with breathwork and how it cured Annie’s panic attacks; how they’ve used breathwork in their practice in conjunction with therapy; what trusting or following the process means (for the patient and facilitator); the concept of the inner healer (or “inner healing capacity”); touch and bodywork in therapy; how the communal, group process aspect of breathwork is inspiring ideas for group MDMA sessions; how we can best scale therapy; updates on new trials for 2022; and their best advice and biggest takeaways they’ve learned from decades in the field.
Notable Quotes
“It’s not that you never offer any direction or engage and help people if they’re stuck, it’s that that only happens in service of what’s already trying to arise spontaneously; that the point is to give plenty of time and encouragement for that process to just take its own path and unfold in its own way. …You may be offering quite a bit sometimes in terms of support and direction, but it’s only in service of what’s already happening.” -Michael
“Stan learned it by working directly with thousands of people with LSD in the beginning. And of course, other cultures (in some cases, for hundreds of thousands of years) have developed knowledge about wise use of these kinds of states. So it sounds a little new-agey or woo woo (‘Trust the process’ and the inner healing intelligence, you know), but it’s based on reality that people have observed for a very long time. And we see it. We just get it reaffirmed again and again.” -Michael
“People do get better with love and care. Sometimes it’s just that extra fifteen or twenty minutes at the end of a breathwork session when somebody is still kind of shaky, or sitting with them and having a meal after breathwork, or the extra times that you take with people. Supporting people: it really makes a difference.” -Annie “There’s something great about breathwork, to know that you can have these experiences without taking anything – just having that experience of: ‘Wow. These places are not as far away as I thought they were.’” -Michael
Annie Mithoefer, B.S.N., is a Registered Nurse living in Asheville, North Carolina, where she is now focused primarily on training and supervising therapists conducting MAPS-sponsored clinical trials, as well as continuing to conduct some MAPS research sessions in Charleston, South Carolina. Between 2004 and 2018, she and her husband, Michael Mithoefer, M.D., completed two of the six MAPS-sponsored Phase II clinical trials testing MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, as well a study providing MDMA-assisted sessions for therapists who have completed the MAPS Therapist Training, and a pilot study treating couples with MDMA-assisted therapy combined with Cognitive Behavioral Conjoint Therapy. Annie is a Grof-certified holotropic breathwork practitioner, is trained in Hakomi Therapy, and has 25 years experience working with trauma patients, with an emphasis on experiential approaches to therapy.
About Michael Mithoefer, M.D.
Michael Mithoefer, M.D., is a psychiatrist living in Asheville, NC, with a research office in Charleston, SC. He is now a Senior Medical Director at MAPS Public Benefit Corporation (MPBC). He is a Grof-certified holotropic breathwork facilitator, is trained in EMDR and Internal Family Systems Therapy, and has nearly 30 years of experience treating trauma patients. Before going into psychiatry in 1991, he practiced emergency medicine for ten years. He has been board certified in Psychiatry, Emergency Medicine, and Internal Medicine, and is a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and Affiliate Assistant Professor Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences Medical University of South Carolina.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Josh Hardman, the Founder and Editor of Psilocybin Alpha, a news website and weekly newsletter covering the psychedelic space with a focus on emerging companies and drug development.
Hardman discusses how the juxtaposition of the studies coming out of Imperial College London and the way hippie culture intersected with various political movements made him want to create Psilocybin Alpha. He talks about his early anonymous days and how the 2020 US election jumpstarted the site, especially due to the passing of Oregon’s Measure 109 and people suddenly showing a lot of interest in psychedelic stocks.
And they talk about a lot more, as this podcast is very topic-to-topic conversational in the way you’d imagine a podcast between two people neck deep in psychedelic happenings may be: why the UK is so conservative when it comes to drug policy; Brexit; cryptocurrency, decentralized finance (DeFi), and decentralized health (“De-health”?); overuse of Sonoran desert toads and over-harvesting of iboga (why aren’t LSD and psilocybin good enough?); data collection and data privacy; patent thicketing; integration as a new recurring-revenue model; psychedelics and VR; investor obsession with derivatives and analogs; and 2022 seeing the likely consolidation of many for-profit companies in the psychedelic space.
Notable Quotes
“The point at which it went from just being kind of a side project to me to being ‘I should work on this full time’ was the November 2020 elections in the US. I remember I sat here up to like 5am in the UK, watching the results to see measure 109 in Oregon (obviously) and the DC ballot initiative to decriminalize. I think that was the point, to me, where I saw not just traffic to the website go up thousands of percent overnight, but also the types of people that were reading Psilocybin Alpha went from weed investors and crypto investors to therapists and people who were seeking therapy, emailing me. Hundreds of emails the next day saying, ‘I want to get involved in this. I’ve been working in psychiatry or psychotherapy for 30 years and I want to understand this new modality.’”
“Why are people depressed? I think a lot of people are depressed because something acute happened to them or because maybe they do need to go inside and work some stuff out internally, but, me being a student of sociology and political economy, I’m more inclined to think a lot of people are depressed because of their material situation: their job or their home life, economic realities in America, lack of health insurance. These things are all external. So I have some concern with how much we can really solve whilst in a system that makes people so upset and miserable.”
“The reason psychedelic companies are so disruptive to the healthcare system is because something like Prozac is chronically dosed. It’s like almost a recurring revenue model. It’s a subscription model. And obviously psychedelics can potentially not cure someone but put them into remission (at least clinically) in two or three sessions. So you could say that if a company is able to capture the integration part of the treatment arc as well, that’s where they start getting their recurring revenue.”
“I think people are concerned about investing in another psilocybin company. So if you can take a derivative, an analog, or a new chemical entity entirely (even if it’s very similar to psilocybin); to the investor or to the untrained eye, it’s new. It’s novel, and it’s going to get a patent, so therefore it must have some value. I think that might be a big story in 2022, when we start realizing that a lot of these supposedly new chemical entities either start failing in preclinical work or in Phase 1 work or they’re just not that remarkably different.”
Founder and Editor of Psilocybin Alpha, an online resource and weekly newsletter covering the psychedelics space with a focus on drug development efforts.
In this episode of the podcast, Kyle sits down with Joe Tafur, MD, for the first episode in our new weekly series, “Vital Psychedelic Conversations.”
Vital is the name of our new 12-month certificate program launching in April, and each episode of Vital Psychedelic Conversations will feature one of the teachers we’ve been honored to be able to include in the program. While the official announcement with all the important details is coming next week, we’re pretty pumped about Vital and wanted to start this new series today!
Joe Tafur, MD, is a family physician and author who was trained in ayahuasca curanderismo at the Nihue Rao Centro Espiritual in Peru. He also is a co-founder of the Church of the Eagle and the Condor, which is currently pursuing legal protection for ceremonial ayahuasca use.
He discusses the frustrating application process for the church; the idea of the substance only being a part of the experience; how a truly transpersonal moment seems to make people start asking about the sacred; the scientific community’s struggles with the transpersonal; soul retrieval; the interconnectedness of all things; and he makes an argument for allowing religious tokens in therapeutic containers. And he talks about what we can learn from Indigenous tradition and their holistic and health-focused mindset, connection to nature, relationship with substances, and embrace of spirituality.
Through the Church of the Eagle and the Condor, Tafur is running a webinar series to speak to and learn from Indigenous elders called “Wisdom of the Elders.” The first is next week, January 27th, and features Diné Elder Josie Begay-James.
Notable Quotes
“People are with this kind of direction: they’re partying, they’re having a great experience, maybe making some big memories, maybe they are shifting, some people are growing, maybe not. But then, on this other side, you have this high percentage of people really turning around decades-old mental health issues. So that’s a big, big difference. So what’s going on in those sessions? And what’s going on around those sessions? The focus has been the substance, the substance, the substance, the substance. They think they can sell it, whatever they want to do with it. But that other meat of what’s happening with people – there’s a lot of mysterious elements in that space.”
“The ones who are doing the psychotherapy with ketamine, I find, over and over again, that they become very curious about the sacred. …Those people want to know about people that have experience with this, from that perspective (from a spiritual perspective), because you can tell them: ‘These molecules did this and these neural patterns did that,’ but they’re not satisfied. It doesn’t answer the questions that they’re seeking, about: ‘What do I do with that?’” “Why does it have to be separate? Why would it be separate? It’s not separate, I don’t think, in sports. I don’t think they try to get people to dissociate from their intuition and their feeling. I think they encourage it strongly. …They’ll say, ‘He’s possessed!’ They’ll say a person is ‘inspired.’ Similarly with music; you wouldn’t have that ‘I’m not going to try to feel into my soul while I’m on stage.’ It’s actually the opposite, is the discussion quite often. Isn’t that true? Isn’t that what sells tickets all over the world? Isn’t that what distinguishes the big ticket sellers in general, that they’re able to tap into something that is transpersonal?”
“We have to deal with the transpersonal, not only for the sake of expanding ourselves and to be better people or to grow, but it’s a matter of health. That’s the reason.”
Joe Tafur, MD, is a Colombian-American family physician originally from Phoenix, Arizona. After completing his family medicine training at UCLA, Dr. Tafur spent two years in academic research at the UCSD Department of Psychiatry in a lab focused on mind-body medicine. After his research fellowship, over a period of six years, he lived and worked in the Peruvian Amazon at the traditional healing center Nihue Rao Centro Espiritual. There he worked closely with master Shipibo healer Ricardo Amaringo and trained in ayahuasca curanderismo. In his book, The Fellowship of the River: A Medical Doctor’s Exploration into Traditional Amazonian Plant Medicine, through a series of stories, Dr. Tafur shares his unique experience and integrative medical theories. After the release of his book in 2017, Dr. Tafur has been spending more time in the U.S. and with his spiritual community in Arizona, has co-founded the Church of the Eagle and the Condor (CEC). This spiritual community is dedicated to promoting the spiritual unity of all people with the Creator through the practice of traditional Indigenous spirituality and sacred ceremonies. The CEC is currently pursuing legal protection for their practice of sacred Ayahuasca ceremony. Dr. Tafur is also a co-founder of Modern Spirit, a nonprofit dedicated to demonstrating the value of spiritual healing in modern healthcare. Among their projects is the Modern Spirit Epigenetics Project, an epigenetic analysis of the impact of MAPS MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. Their first results have now been submitted for publication. He is currently a fellow at the University of Arizona’s Center for Integrative Medicine. Additionally, he is involved the Ocotillo Center for Integrative Medicine in Phoenix, Arizona. To learn more about his work you can also visit Drjoetafur.com.
In this episode of the podcast, Kyle and David interview Andrew Penn: nurse practitioner, Co-chair for Sana Symposium, Associate Clinical Professor at the University of California–San Francisco School of Nursing, and Co-founder of OPENurses; a professional organization for nurses interested in psychedelic research.
Penn discusses how he came into the world of psychedelics and how in his early days, the only way to talk about psychedelics for therapeutic use was in a sidebar to speeches on drug abuse. He talks about reframing that conversation, the progress he’s seen, why psychedelics and SSRIs may actually work together, microdosing and the placebo effect, how the placebo effect may play into other aspects of healthcare you might not have thought about, why psychedelics needs more skeptics, and the importance of care in healthcare.
He talks about OPENurses (The Organization of Psychedelic and Entheogenic Nurses), which he co-founded to make sure more nurses are involved (and front-facing) in the psychedelic space. He feels that nurses are more prepared for psychedelic treatment than other professions, but the biggest hurdle they’ll face will be learning when to not intervene and just let something play out (something that’s very common in psychedelic therapy but not at all in traditional medicine).
And lastly, he talks about how we need to stop romanticizing the idea that you need to have a huge experience with re-lived trauma in order to heal, and that we should have an appreciation for the subtle – that change is gradual, and often it’s more about creating a better relationship with the thing we can’t change than eliminating it.
Notable Quotes
“Back in those early days, the only way I could talk about psychedelics was, essentially, embedded in a talk about drug abuse. In fact, the very first time I talked about MDMA as a therapeutic agent was in a talk about bath salts.”
“I think it’s interesting that as a community of people who really are not necessarily rational materialists – you know, we’re not necessarily mechanistic in our way of thinking – that people get really mechanistic about microdosing; that it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s this tiny little dose of LSD or whatever that is making this change.’ And I’m a little puzzled why people want to essentially take a regular dose of a psychedelic. I mean, how is that any different than taking a regular dose of Fluoxetine or Lexapro or something like that? I just don’t see it as being that radical, quite honestly. …LSD is not a naturally-occurring compound. It has to be synthesized. So does Fluoxetine. I mean, maybe psilocybin, but I’m just a little puzzled by the phenomenon.”
“I think psychedelics needs more skeptics, honestly. I think we either have to bring the skepticism ourselves, or other people and other forces who are not as convinced as people in the psychedelics community will do it for us. I used to have a therapist years ago who liked to say, ‘Do you want to be uncomfortable on your terms or on somebody else’s?’. And I think that’s a great question that the psychedelics field could ask themselves, because if we don’t bring this level of scrutiny and skepticism to our work, then other agencies like the FDA will.” “When you’re trained in healthcare, we’re often explicitly taught (or implicitly taught) that we need to dosomething; you know, what’s the intervention? What’s the thing you’re going to do? And often in psychedelics, the thing to do is to hold still. …I think the drive to intervene is well-intended but often, ultimately can be incorrect. What we all need to learn (not just nurses, but just all of us in this profession) is that sometimes the right answer is to watch this unfold. Choosing not to intervene is actually an active process.”
Andrew Penn, NP was trained as an adult nurse practitioner and psychiatric clinical nurse specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. He is board certified as an adult nurse practitioner and psychiatric nurse practitioner by the American Nurses Credentialing Center. He has completed extensive training in Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy at the California Institute for Integral Studies and recently published a book chapter on this modality. A leading voice for nurses in psychedelic therapy, he is a cofounder of OPENurses, a professional organization for nurses interested in psychedelic research and practice and was a study therapist in the MAPS-sponsored Phase 3 study of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD and is a Co-I in the Phase 2 Usona sponsored study of psilocybin-facilitated therapy for major depression. Additionally, he is a co-author in a recent article in the American Journal of Nursing on psychedelic assisted therapies, the first in 57 years. He is the Co-chair for Sana Symposium, a leading national CME meeting on psychedelic therapies.
Currently, he serves as an Associate Clinical Professor at the University of California-San Francisco School of Nursing and is an Attending Nurse Practitioner at the San Francisco Veterans Administration. He has expertise in psychopharmacological treatment for adult patients and specializes in the treatment of affective disorders and PTSD. As a steering committee member for Psych Congress, he has been invited to present internationally on improving medication adherence, cannabis pharmacology, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, grief psychotherapy, treatment-resistant depression, diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder, and the art and science of psychopharmacologic practice. He also keeps regular blogs on all things psychiatric and has been interviewed in Forbes, the Los Angeles Times, and on the BBC World Service.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews co-founder and CEO of Journey Clinical, Jonathan Sabbagh.
Journey Clinical is a telehealth platform specializing in remote and in-person ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, but what makes them a bit unique is their larger focus on the needs of the psychotherapist, by helping approved psychotherapists integrate KAP into their practices, and by building out a platform to facilitate the delivery of customized treatments of all modalities to their patients under the same umbrella – the idea being that more specialized treatments can lead to more patient progress and less therapist burnout, which is a bigger problem than many people realize.
Sabbagh tells the story of his own burnout after 20 years in finance, which led to ayahuasca and a career change, and discusses data privacy; why ketamine is just an adjunct; how Journey’s process works; the importance of building a safe container (in therapy and digitally); wearables and the future of combined tools; what he’s most excited about; what it meant to see his company’s banner hanging at Horizons; and why it’s important to have a growing industry be led by true believers.
Notable Quotes
“I think people don’t talk about this enough – about the impact of being with patients who are stuck and who are not progressing in their therapy for years – and that’s really a big driver of therapist burnout. And we’ve had people work with patients who were stuck, really stagnant in their progress, have a few ketamine sessions and have major breakthroughs at a reasonably low dose, and say, ‘Wow, this person has never been so open, this has changed the psychotherapy.’ And that really re-energizes them and I think that is just really wonderful.”
“People are looking for ways to feel better, mental health isn’t taboo anymore. And so I think that as we progress, we’ve got technology, psychedelics, there’s a lot of work being pushed forward, openness to mindfulness-based practices; and I think they’re all going to support each other.”
“I think one of the beauties of the stage where we’re at in our industry (and also the nature of our industry) is that it’s still believers that are building it out. And so we’re all figuring ourselves out a little bit but we care about doing this. We’ve got a personal stake and personal experience into it and I think that’s true for the majority of people involved.”
Jonathan Sabbagh the co-founder and CEO of Journey Clinical. He spent the first 20 years of his professional career working in finance, where he occupied a variety of roles including building two businesses from the ground up. While building one of them, he suffered a burnout that was the result of undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder. After being heavily medicated, suffering from substance abuse issues, and undergoing a lot of psychotherapy, Jonathan finally found relief in a series of traditional ayahuasca ceremonies and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy; experiences where he discovered he needed to lead a more integrated life and to be in service to others. He quit finance and went back to school to study clinical psychology. While he was on his path to becoming a clinician, he felt the need to integrate his background as an entrepreneur with his long-term goal of becoming a psychedelic therapist in order to expand access to psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. This is the genesis of how Journey Clinical was born.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Tryp Therapeutics, Greg McKee.
Tryp Therapeutics, a fairly young, early-stage biotech company, is focusing on nociplastic pain (the hard-to-explain pain where nothing seems physiologically wrong, but a nerve signal related to pain seems to be stuck in the “on” position) and how it could be alleviated through the rewiring often possible in the psychedelic experience. They are first looking at psychedelics for chronic pain and eating disorders, and when this podcast was recorded, had just received FDA clearance to begin a fibromyalgia study at the University of Michigan (with studies on phantom limb pain, complex regional pain syndrome, binge eating disorder, and hypothalamic obesity likely coming after). They are also working on a psilocybin derivative-based novel compound and novel route of administration/protocol, possibly with the ability to stop a difficult trip when necessary.
McKee discusses the origins of Tryp, the benefits of using synthetics, 5-MeO-DMT, how the Nixon administration killed research progress, the positives to take away from Compass Pathways’ preliminary psilocybin Phase 2B trial results, MAPS and possible insurance models, Robin Carhart-Harris, why a lot of early psychedelic investors may be mistakenly panicking, and the idea of insurance covering the treatment of a patient for a period of time rather than number of visits.
Notable Quotes
“We think that there’s a huge opportunity to unleash the full potential of psychedelics, well beyond traditional mood disorders.” “It’s a fascinating field, no doubt. There’s a lot to be learned and there’s still a lot more questions, frankly, than answers. That’s the thing that’s really quite surprising. I mean, I’ve been on a learning curve [and] I got right to the edge fast, because I realized, ‘Oh shit, nobody has the answers to these questions.’”
“The thing about synthetic is that it just allows you not only to have consistency and all that that we just [talked] about, but it allows you to scale so you can impact so many other people’s lives. So it is a little bit of a pain in the backside to go through this process, and I can totally get why certain people are saying, ‘Hey, why do we need the pharma industry to do this?’, but on the other hand, if life science investors and biotech and pharma companies do get involved and push this through to market; boy, you’re going to be able to treat so many more patients.”
Greg McKee serves as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Tryp Therapeutics. Greg has served in executive management positions for more than 20 years. He started his career in life sciences with Genzyme before serving as Chairman and CEO of publicly traded Nventa Biopharmaceuticals. Greg also served as CEO of CONNECT, a startup accelerator, and as Co-founder and Managing Director of Torrent Ventures. Greg earned a BA in economics from the University of Washington, an MA in international studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from the Wharton School. He has worked in Tokyo for seven years and has been a member of YPO since 2006.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe revisits the topic of religion and psychedelics touched on last week in PT280, but this time, much more in depth, with two guests of different religions: Rabbi Zac Kamenetz and The Rev. Hunt Priest.
Kamenetz and Priest both had catalyzing psychedelic experiences as participants in research studies, and after gaining interest, noticed that their religions weren’t referenced much in psychedelic literature. They’re each working to build a broad network of leaders and academics who are Jewish (through Zac’s website, Shefa) or Christian (through Hunt’s site, Ligare) to act as psychedelic societies and encourage more people to buy in, be more open, and embrace the renaissance. Do these communities know enough to properly frame and integrate their experiences when they add psilocybin to Seder? What are the best protocols in which to authentically blend in religious tradition and lessons? Is their true purpose to help others use religion to explain mystical and psychedelic experiences? Or use mystical and psychedelic experiences to explain religion?
They also discuss the differences between how Christianity and Judaism talks about psychedelics; the Jewish Psychedelic Summit; why Christianity seems to be so far behind; the minimization of mystical experiences; the concepts of spiritual harm reduction and spiritual literacy; the need for accountability and “bumpers” in religion; Rick Strassman, DMT, and prophecy; how religious tokens and symbols in psychedelic-assisted therapy can traumatize or influence an intended experience; what religions can do in situations of spiritual emergency; and why serving others should be part of the integration experience.
Notable Quotes
“There is a very vibrant Christian conversation. It’s just quiet. It’s too quiet, really.” -Hunt
“When more people are having transpersonal experiences – ‘The All! The Nothing!’, them existing beyond their body and their consciousness – people are going to be looking for answers to their questions, more questions to their questions, and then these traditions that sadly, people are walking away from for all sorts of reasons (maybe good reasons, even), that we’re going to have to then present meaningful models, responsive models to their quandaries. That, really, I feel, is the heart of the work.” -Zac “It would probably have taken 10 more years of Vipassana meditation to get to where I was six hours into my psilocybin experience. And people will say, ‘Well that’s a spiritual shortcut.’ And I mean, at least in Christianity, we say none of this comes because we work hard for it; it comes as a grace and a gift, and take it. Take it and go with it, and then change your life because of it.” -Hunt
“This is multi-prong, multi-experience, multi-community [thing]. It’s not going to just be the psychological community, it’s not just going to be the hospice/end-of-life community, it’s not just going to be the party community, it’s not going to just be the religious community. It’s going to be all of us, I hope, moving forward together for the healing of the world.” -Hunt
“It’s interesting to figure out the ways in which you integrate these plants and fungi and substance/compounds into Jewish ritual, but I think there’s also, then, the opportunity to think about, like: Okay, what’s the role of preparation here? Like, if I steep myself in Jewish wisdom, is a ‘Jewish experience’ going to emerge? …The idea of set and setting then becomes a really interesting one. What is a Jewish mindset and are we actually interested in trying to fill people with content in order that they have an experience come out? …We don’t want, necessarily, to fill people with Hebrew music or words or ideas. We want the medicine and the inner healing intelligence to do that work. And then, really, what is the role of clergy there? Just to witness, just to support? ‘What are we doing and whose experience is being had?’ I think, is a really important question.” -Zac
Zac Kamenetz is a rabbi, community leader, and aspiring psychedelic-assisted chaplain based in Berkeley, CA. He holds an MA in Biblical literature and languages from UC Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union and received rabbinic ordination in 2012. As the founder and CEO of Shefa, Zac is pioneering a movement to integrate safe and supported psychedelic use into the Jewish spiritual tradition, advocate for individuals and communities to heal individual and inherited trauma, and inspire a Jewish religious and creative renaissance in the 21st century.
About Hunt Priest
Hunt Priest is an Episcopal priest and the founding Executive Director of Ligare: A Christian Psychedelic Society, a non-profit network of Christian leaders educating themselves and those they lead about the intersection of open-hearted Christianity and the Psychedelic Renaissance. A participant in a psilocybin study in early 2016, he had two life-changing mystical experiences under the care of a research team. His encounters with psilocybin opened him to the healing and consciousness-raising power of psychedelic medicines and changed the landscape of his work. Hunt believes the healing power of psychedelics should be in the toolkits of all who are healers of bodies, minds, and souls, and can’t wait to provide access for legal, safe, and guided experiences in a Christian setting. This past April, Hunt took an extended break from full-time parish ministry to expand his priesthood out into the emerging psychedelic landscape.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews Clinical Professor at the University of Florida, College of Pharmacy: Oliver Grundmann, Ph.D.
While Grundmann’s focus is the neuropharmacology of natural products in general (especially those with potential for dependence), this episode is entirely about a substance that has been mentioned on the podcast, but never fully dissected: Mitragyna speciosa – otherwise known as kratom.
And they cover it all: What to look for when purchasing kratom; possible risk factors and drug interactions; the contaminants most often seen; its history with the FDA; its safety profile; what the veins mean when people describe kratom as “red vein;” what is being researched today; what an alkaloid is; how to safely explore kratom and monitor dosing; what the future could hold; and of course, the science behind how it works. Get ready for mitragynine, 7-hydroxymitragynine, and the μ-opioid receptor to be part of your vernacular!
Grundmann is currently analyzing Top Tree Herbs‘ products to see how they differ from others, specifically looking at how much mitragynine people are actually getting when drinking a tea dissolved in water (vs. levels from the whole plant dissolved in methanol, which most current research shows). He believes more real world evidence could help push kratom in the direction of being considered a dietary supplement. If you use kratom and want to add to the conversation, you can fill out his questionnaire here.
Notable Quotes
“You tell the FDA something acts on the opioid receptor and they see, immediately: Oh my gosh, we’ve got something else that might contribute to the opioid epidemic. I think that was kind of the concern of the FDA, which is a legitimate concern, but I think, as you pointed out; there is more to the story. You need to look at the whole picture.”
“If somebody who has used alcohol for years in advance is then using kratom and shows signs of liver injury or failing liver, then contributing that to relatively recent kratom use appears to be a stretch. But yet, it is being done in the literature.”
“It doesn’t necessarily always have to be an illicit use of the drug. It can be that somebody was completely, legitimately prescribed an opioid (a benzodiazepine) and then they did not feel adequate symptom relief and they added kratom to it. And the self-treatment of kratom then resulted in a potential drug interaction that led to a fatality. Does that mean that kratom was the causative agent? That is the problem, since we do not know exactly what the effects of kratom are.”
Dr. Oliver Grundmann is a clinical professor at the University of Florida, College of Pharmacy. He serves as the Director of the graduate programs in Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Clinical Toxicology, is a fellow of the American College of Clinical Pharmacology, and his primary research interest is centered on the neuropharmacology of natural products, especially substances with potential for tolerance and dependence development. He has authored over 75 publications, 5 book chapters, and given over 40 presentations at national and international conferences. Dr. Grundmann obtained his BS in Pharmacy from the Westfälische-Wilhelms-Universität Münster in Germany, and his Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences, MS in Forensic Toxicology, and MEd from the University of Florida. He has been teaching on the subject of natural products, drug abuse, forensic & clinical toxicology, and pharmaceutical sciences for the past 13 years.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe interviews D.C.-based attorney, Executive Director of the Association of Entheogenic Practitioners (AEP), and Guardian of the Temple of Mother Earth, Danny Peterson.
He discusses the work of the AEP, which he describes as similar to a bar association for practitioners in this space (facilitators, shamans, guides, sitters, etc.), with a code of ethics, best practices guide for facilitation, and efforts to continually improve the psychedelic-assisted therapy experience through what he calls “community building practicums.”
They talk about psychedelics, religion, and freedom in the United States; where we are in the “forming, storming, norming, performing” process; how much culture has changed in the last year due to Covid and a blossoming virtual world; Phish; the iron law of prohibition; the need for 10,000 entheogenic churches; and the classic questions we ask ourselves when analyzing our most powerful experiences and the communities we experience them in: Is this religious? Is this spiritual?
This is a bit of a hybrid Solidarity Fridays episode as well, with Joe and Kyle having a brief chat first. As one should in an episode coming out on New Year’s Eve (Happy New Years, everyone!), they reflect back a bit on the year and look to the future, with two brief, but huge announcements: 1) They just recorded a podcast with Stan and Brigitte Grof (!!!); and 2) In March, Psychedelics Today is launching a 12-month certification program called Vital. You’re going to hear a lot more about it, but learn more and join the waitlist now at vitalpsychedelictraining.com.
Notable Quotes
“[I] learned about the UDV and Santo Daime cases that had gone through the federal courts and came to be of the opinion that while the people who are clearly protected by religious freedom in the United States is a pretty small group, the people who should be protected is much bigger than that. And that is the community that I’ve been seeking to serve.”
“I might be wrong in this – I don’t know the Consciousness Medicine community. But merely watching this situation from a distance, something that’s interesting to me about this moment in time is that it doesn’t seem that any part of the conversation is about whether anyone is likely to be arrested for being involved in psychedelic work. That is the unusual thing here. We’re talking about this openly and it’s not about whether the DEA is going to come knocking.”
“The initiative (81) didn’t so much change the law in D.C., as it recognized what’s already happening. It was already the lowest law enforcement priority to deal with entheogenic plants and fungi. Now we’re saying that it is and it should be. That’s what we’ve said as a city. And in a way, I guess that’s the analogy that I’m going for here: This is already religious, now we’re just saying so.”
“Music, psychedelics, [and] community at the same time: How can we see that as not a religious or spiritual activity? …I’m not trying to get Phish a religious exemption or anything, but there’s something there that’s under-discussed and under-investigated.” -Joe
Danny Peterson is a founding member and the Executive Director of the Association of Entheogenic Practitioners (aep.community), a religious professional organization and mutual aid society that promotes safe access to entheogenic experiences. In 2014, Dan began participating in entheogenic ceremonies to address lifelong struggles with depression. He has since completed over 200 hours of training in entheogenic practice and currently serves as a Guardian of the Temple of Mother Earth in Washington, DC. Dan is also licensed to practice law in Maryland and the District of Columbia, and has served as an outside general counsel to emerging organizations for more than ten years.
In this episode of the podcast, Joe finally sits down with two of the three hosts of another fellow long-running psychedelics podcast, Entheogen: Joe Zap and Kevin W.
They discuss the early days of smoking cannabis, Joe’s Ismokeweed.org t-shirts, and seeing people realize cannabis and other drugs may be ok if done responsibly; the problems with dosing due to Nixon and the drug war; Hulu’s “Nine Perfect Strangers” and their mention of “psilocybin withdrawal”; the early stages of podcasting; Timothy Leary; Alex Grey and leadership by example; Burning Man; gurus and cults; social media, QAnon, and conspiratorial thinking; why recreational drug use should be talked about more; ego dissolution vs. ego amplification; competition vs. cooperation; and what it was like being quoted in a Playboy article about toxic masculinity (written by PT friend Michelle Janikian).
After a self-imposed year and a half break from the podcast, they are back at it, with a new episode just released today, featuring David Bronner, CEO of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps. Check it out at Entheogenshow.com or watch the video on YouTube here.
Notable Quotes
“One of the first times I ever ate a pot cookie, I was wearing one of Joe’s t-shirts (so [it said] Ismokeweed.org – you know, this is the worst thing you could be wearing in public) and I remember running into your Dad. And I’m just off my face on a cookie with an Ismokeweed.org shirt on. I’m just like, ‘I think I just became the person I was warned about.’” -Kevin
“The drug war, for like 50 years: one of the worst side effects of it is you don’t know what you’re getting or how much you’re taking. It’s horrendous. That’s the opposite of what you want with any kind of strong medicine.” -Joe “For me, there’s absolutely no situation in which LSD is not appropriate. It just depends how much of it you take.” -Kevin “There’s this whole ‘in’ group/’out’ group thing, and, ‘Do your own research.’ Like, the more obscure the website is [and] the more of a weird corner of the internet you can find; somehow, ironically, paradoxically, the more you believe that, somehow. I get questioning authority (speaking of Timothy Leary – you know, ‘Think for yourself, question authority’). Good advice. Question authority. It doesn’t mean reject authority. Skepticism is not the same thing as contrarianism.” -Joe
“Why are we doing this? We’re trying to help society, we’re trying to help ourselves have a more durable society. We’re on the cusp of falling apart – I think it’s kind of clear at this point to almost anyone paying attention. Let’s not let it fall apart. Let’s work together, put all the resources in, all the money. That’s great you can profit. That’s great, but let’s do it so that we can continue to have an enduring society and human civilization as we know it.” -Joe
Joe Zap spent over two years living nomadically, traveling the Western U.S. and working remotely in a camper van with his wife, Ashleigh, before relocating to Boulder, Colorado in the middle of 2020. His full-time livelihood is Apple technology consulting, having owned and run a technology consultancy since 2004 while being an Advisory Council Member of the Apple Consultants Network. In 2013, Joe founded Command Control Power, an Apple consulting podcast with over 400 weekly episodes and counting. After his first Burning Man in 2014, Joe co-founded another podcast, called Entheogen, with two good friends, Kevin and Brad. Joe has been a lifelong supporter of the psychedelic renaissance, having volunteered for and supported organizations including: CoSM, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors; MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies; MPP, Marijuana Policy Project, and others.
About Kevin W
Kevin W is a Co- host of Entheogen show, avid Burner and devout believer in the science of Psychedelics.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, we tried to have a 2-parter, but like many things in 2021, that just didn’t quite go as planned. Hopefully, the Compass Pathways patent analysis (with patent attorney Stefan J. Kirchanski) can be re-recorded for a future episode. Stay tuned…
In the part that was successfully recorded, Joe and Kyle highlight some recent news: most notably the emergence of the Natural Medicine Healing Act, which will allow Colorado voters to decide whether or not to legalize possession and personal cultivation of ibogaine, DMT, non-peyote-derived mescaline, psilocybin, and psilocyn up to 4 grams (of the actual drug, meaning 4 grams of psilocybin, not 4 grams of mushrooms containing psilocybin), as well as establish “healing centers,” where adults could receive treatment from trained facilitators.
They then cover the University of Texas’ Dell Medical School opening a center to study psychedelics, YouTube user Psyched Substance’s recent admission that his drug use had gotten out of hand and he has quit everything, and Colorado health leaders working to establish specific guidelines around how police, paramedics, and EMTs handle ketamine – which obviously needs to happen after Elijah McClain’s 2019 death from being forcibly given entirely too much.
Also discussed: drug exceptionalism, Carl Hart, Run Ronnie Run!, and how much having family involved in ketamine-assisted therapy could help with the process (even if they have absolutely no understanding of it).
Notable Quotes
“Yes, decriminalizing psychedelic compounds is a step in the right direction. To me, it’s not a holistic step, because we’re still putting people in jail.” -Joe “We do need situations like this with really weird drugs like ketamine. …Are the authorities using it properly? And I think this is a good sign that, in some cases, even though it’s years late, we can improve drug policy.” -Joe
“You have this massive transcendent experience. Who’s to say your friends, family, and people you’re around are going to have any way to relate to that, especially a way that’s positive for you?” -Joe
In this episode of the podcast, Joe sits down for the very rare multi-guest podcast, this time with four: teacher and author, Ayize Jama-Everett; LMFT, certified sex therapist, owner and operator of Doorway Therapeutic Services, Courtney Watson; LMFT at Doorway Therapeutic Services, Leticia Brown; and activist and facilitator, Kufikiri Imara.
The group has come together to create A Table of our Own: a for-Black-people by-Black-people psychedelic conference and corresponding documentary. While noticing how often it seemed members of the BIPOC community were being used to check off a diversity box for grant money, they decided that before they were another guest at someone else’s table, it was time for them to gather at their own table and figure out exactly what they want out of this “so-called psychedelic renaissance” first.
They talk about why a Black conference is needed and what it could look like; how affinity groups create safety; the ease in communication and connection when having shared experience; the problems with modern, performative-based psychiatry; and why it’s true that when Black people win, everyone wins. And reflecting on some of the recent abuse allegations, they also discuss abuse in the psychedelic space: how abusers always learn from abusers, how communities learn from the behavior of elders, how guidelines for facilitators and therapists are drastically oversimplified, and how we all need to recognize our own ability to cause harm.
A Table of our Own is happy to take donations, but only if you’re in it for the right reasons (i.e. you aren’t filling a quota or need your company’s banner hanging at the event). And if you’re someone who understands affinity groups but the idea of a Black-only event feels like segregation (like many felt when Nicholas Powers talked about a Black Burning Man), definitely check this one out.
Notable Quotes
“There’s a lot of ‘We want you at our table, we want you at our table,’ but as people of color, we’re not a freaking monolith. We haven’t sat at our table. We haven’t shared our stories, the positive and the negative. We haven’t collaborated on what’s going to do best for our communities. We haven’t had those conversations. And so the conference is about: Let’s just sit together and talk. Where are we at? How are you feeling? What’s going on? What do you need? Do you need a hug? Can you get fed? Can you be comforted? Can I hear your knowledge? Are you willing to share yours? Can we get that back-and-forth going? And then once we have that; well, let’s document that, because not everybody’s going to be able to come to this. What we need to show is: Hey, this is how we do.” -Ayize
“For survival purposes, because of the nature of historical precedents, we have to adjust who we are for the environment that we’re in for survival, understanding that there are those in the same society that expect the environment to change to them because that is the way things have been set up. So when we’re in an environment of a Black experience of people of the African diaspora, understanding that that’s not something we have to do in that space (like the others said, around being policed and thus having to police themselves); there’s a uniqueness around that.” -Kufikiri
“The harm comes in in ways of presenting itself as some authoritative model around good and bad, right and wrong; yet misses so much of the harms that exist in society that are navigated by those in marginalized communities (especially those in Black bodies and Western colonial spaces) that don’t account for that aspect of someone’s identity, but yet is looking to work with someone around what their identity is. So that harm is a very real one. …How do you know your worth and your value in a space if you’re always being compared to someone that does not look like you or does not have your experience?” -Kufikiri
“Black folks, when we’re in spaces together; we’re not all sitting around talking about our trauma. We are often just connecting with each other and laughing with each other and holding each other. So this conference is also a space where we can heal through play and joy and movement and dance and everything about how we navigate the world that brings so much flavor, including the joy. Black joy is a whole other kind of medicine that is always present when we gather.” -Leticia
Ayize Jama-Everett (b. NYC 1974) has been in various relationships with plants, substances, and communities since his birth. Born into the Black Power movement’s conflicts, Ayize comes from the lineage of the Lincoln Detox project, a community organization in Harlem, New York, that taught the formerly incarcerated to use acupuncture to help with heroin withdrawal. At sixteen, he traveled to Morocco and was taken in by the Gnawa and was privileged to join their rituals. Ayize served as the director of Outpatient services for Thunder Road Adolescent Treatment center for three years before joining Catholic Charities of Treasure Island as the substance use and mental health services manager. He’s worked in both abstinence and harm reduction modalities. He also served as a high school therapist for over a decade.
Ayize Graduated from the Graduate Theological Union in 2001 with a Master’s of Divinity. His thesis was on the spiritual use of substances among the homeless youth of Morocco, London, and the Bay Area. Soon after, he began teaching the Course “The Sacred and the Substance,” one of the first survey courses of sacred plant use at the Graduate Theological Union. In 2003, Ayize received a Masters degree in Clinical psychology from New College of California. In 2019, he received a Masters in Fine Arts, Creative Writing, from The University of California, Riverside. He is the author of four books, and his shorter works can be found in The L.A. Review of Books, The Wakanda Dream labs, The Believer, and Racebaitr. As an African-American male, Ayize’s focus has been consistently on underrepresented communities in the sacred plant community.
About Courtney Watson, LMFT
Courtney Watson is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and AASECT Certified Sex therapist. She is the owner of Doorway Therapeutic Services, a group therapy practice in Oakland, CA focused on addressing the mental health needs of Black, Indigenous & People of Color, Queer folks, Trans, Gender Non-conforming, Non binary and Two Spirit individuals. Courtney has followed the direction of her ancestors to incorporate psychedelic assisted therapy into her offerings for folks with multiple marginalized identities and stresses the importance of BIPOC and Queer providers offering these services. Courtney has received training from the Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research at CIIS, MAPS and Polaris Insight Center to provide psychedelic-assisted therapy with a variety of medicines.
She is deeply interested in the impact of psychedelic medicines on folks with marginalized identities as well as how they can assist with the decolonization process for folx of the global majority. She believes this field is not yet ready to address the unique needs of Communities of Color and is prepared and enthusiastic about bridging the gap. She is currently blazing the trail as one of the only clinics of predominantly QTBIPOC providers offering Ketamine Assisted Therapy in 2021. She has founded a non-profit, Access to Doorways, to raise funds to subsidize the cost of ketamine/psychedelic-assisted therapy for QTBIPOC clients (now accepting donations for our first 100 recipients!!).
About Leticia Brown, LMFT
Leticia Brown (she/her/hers) is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Black queer femme whose practice engages various healing modalities at the intersections of harm reduction, sexuality and social justice. She prioritizes work with BIPOC & QTNBIPOC communities through a liberatory lens that values communual interdependence and affirms the inner healer we all hold within. Constantly exploring ways to decolonize her relationship to healing, she incorporates intergenerational exploration, spirituality, ritual, the use of the body, and reconnection to intuition in her practice, and sees her role as co-creator with those she walks beside on their healing journeys.
Leticia has been trained in a variety of Psychedelic-assisted Therapy modalities, including Ketamine-assisted Psychotherapy trainings with Sage Institute, Polaris Insight Center, Healing Realms and Doorway Therapeutic Services, where she maintains a small private practice. Leticia was also a trainee of MAPS’ first-ever MDMA-Assisted Psychotherapy Therapy Training for Communities of Color, in August of 2019. Additionally, she is a therapist with the MAPS expanded access program, using MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for treating severe PTSD. In her harm reduction consulting and training, Leticia encourages both self-introspection and challenging discourse. In her work supporting therapists with engagement of anti-racist and decolonizing practices, she aims to offer a sense of groundedness and purpose to the work. In her work with clients and therapists around issues of sexuality and (other) altered states of consciousness, she holds a sociopolitical lens, and aims to cultivate a safe relationship to the body. In all of this work, Leticia aims to be guided by Fannie Lou Hamer’s mantra that “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free”, particularly in her work with QTBIPOC folx.
About Kufikiri Imara
Kufikiri Imarawas born and raised on Huichin territory of the Ohlone people (Oakland, California). With parents that were involved in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s, he grew up in a family and community that strongly emphasized cultural awareness and social responsibility. He volunteered with Green Earth Poets Society in NYC, bringing poetry to incarcerated African-American youth. He was an early member of the Entheogen Integration Circle in NYC, supporting marginalized communities. He is a friend of Sacred Garden Community as a facilitator. A former member of the Decriminalize Nature Oakland grassroots collective, he went on to head the DNO committee on Outreach, Education, Access, & Integration. He lent his voice to the Horizons Media documentary film “Covid-19, Black Lives, & Psychedelics.” He also facilitates a BIPOC Entheogen Integration Circle with the San Francisco Psychedelic Society. Kufikiri Imara is a voice championing the important issues of access, education, and inclusion within the larger psychedelic community.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down for an old fashioned freestyle session, taking a macro dive into microdosing.
Inspired by their conversation with James Fadiman from a few weeks ago, they discuss all things microdosing: Why people are doing it, what they’re using, possible negative effects, how it could work with pain (pain management and/or neurogenesis), what other indications it could help, how research studies are pretty limited (yet very polarizing), how other life variables are likely at play when microdosing, and how the classic self-blinding study that many deemed the death knell for microdosing should actually be seen as the beginning of a long road of research.
Joe then shares an Instagram post from author Kelly Starrett that sarcastically showcases the problems with physical therapy in a careless healthcare system, which leads to a conversation about how one decides what a good outcome is in mental health therapy: What are the patient’s goals and how do they differ from those of the therapist (or insurer)? How do you measure progress? Can we avoid a model of “therapy forever”? And they discuss the problems with self-scoring, high cocaine use being linked to strokes, the coaching industry, chronic pain, Star Trek, and reconsidering the use of the word, “overdose.”
Notable Quotes
“This thing needs to be a long conversation. This isn’t one study and done because [Balázs Szigeti and David Erritzoe] did that self-blinded, self-reported study with a lot of samples. That’s not the end of the story. That’s the beginning of the story.” -Joe
“It would be interesting to get some data around somebody’s day. How are they actually creating their day? Are they starting off with an intention that this is going to help them? [Are] they putting a lot of value on it? Are they doing any meditation once they take their microdose? Are they engaging in any sort of ritual? Anything to enhance that? …What type of role do those other extracurricular activities play in enhancing wellbeing? …Is it the microdosing or is it actually the whole day and the activities that you’re engaging in and your mindset around: ‘This is going to be helpful for me’?” -Kyle
“I think we have to thank microdosing quite a bit for where we are in psychedelics today (no pun intended).” -Joe “Don’t just shut the door on microdosing. Understand [this] thing is really complex and we don’t know much yet. But some people? It’s fucking saving their lives.” -Joe
In this episode of the podcast (recorded in-person at Horizons NYC), Kyle sits down with Founder and Managing Director of Vine Ventures, Ryan Zurrer.
After witnessing the work at his wife’s ayahuasca retreat center in Peru and seeing the emergence of psychedelics for healing as a new paradigm, Zurrer noticed a strong aversion to for-profit companies and venture capital in general, so part of the mission of Vine Ventures (an early-stage venture fund focused on psychedelics) is to change that. He talks about their Vine Reciprocity Pledge (where 50% of GP Carry is donated to nonprofits specializing in what they refer to as “conscious health and wellness”), their Knowledge Preservation Project (which aims to catalog Indigenous knowledge through interviews and recordings), and their most recent news: the announcement that they have created a SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle (essentially a subsidiary company)) with MAPS to infuse $70 million into patient access infrastructure and research for MDMA-assisted therapy.
He explains the ins and outs of this agreement and how it will benefit MAPS and the future of psychedelic medicine, as well as their upcoming projects with NFTs. He also discusses how any capital coming into psychedelics is beneficial, how the future of psychedelics is in community and figuring out how to expand the use of naturals without affecting the environment, and how the new spiritual-but-not-religious, “California sober” way of life could (and maybe should) be considered a religion.
Notable Quotes
“Putting MAPS out in front first will allow a thousand entrepreneurial flowers to bloom over the next decade in the long shadow of a drug patent. And I think that that’s really inspiring for investors who want to continue to support this space [and] I think it’s really inspiring for entrepreneurs who now have an avenue to carve out value in the space for their in-city clinic in a city that is not New York or LA or try something new that they couldn’t. Now there will be more value available because a pharmaceutical company isn’t hoovering up all the value in the space.” “What platforms were to the 2000s and networks were to the 2010s, communities will be to the 2020s in venture. So the most valuable organizations that will emerge in the 2020s will be ones that are the most valuable communities.”
“I generally believe that when venture capital is applied correctly, it seeks to create great value from solving the world’s biggest problems. I can think of no other problem on planet Earth than the mental health crisis that we’ve unleashed onto our society. And I come at that knowing the global warming problem very intuitively. I spent a decade in renewables, and spoiler alert: we’ve actually solved global warming, it’s just a matter of deploying the technologies. Mental health, we have not solved. Very far from it.”
“All the things that religion historically provided – a sense of community, a sense of belonging, a sort of social safety net, a sense of something greater than yourself – all these things we seem to really want as a society and as individuals right now, but then have this great aversion to whatever would be classified as religion.”
Ryan Zurrer, a venture investor and entrepreneur for 16 years, is the Founder and Managing Director of Vine Ventures, an early-stage venture fund focused on psychedelics. He is also the Co-Founder and Director of Dialectic, a family office with a focus on alternative asset management. Ryan has consistently delivered extraordinary returns through a decade in venture. Previously, he held senior roles deploying utility-scale renewables globally.
He is an avid biohacker and was an early contributing member to the Quantified Self Movement in the early 2000s. Ryan was a seed investor in some of the best performing venture investments of the 2010s including MakerDAO, Ethereum, Polychain Capital, and a host of other companies. He launched Polychain’s private investment activities and is considered the creator of the SAFT. He led Polychain Capital’s investment team and was instrumental in delivering Polychain’s 2017 returns (in excess of 28X net of fees to LPs).
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, we’re featuring another split podcast of recordings from Wonderland (we really recorded a lot there, huh?).
In part 1, David interviews psychiatrist, researcher, drug policy reform advocate, and Co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Awakn Life Sciences, Dr. Ben Sessa. They discuss their frustration with the current maintenance-medication state of psychiatry and addiction treatment, how much we (and doctors!) have all been brainwashed by decades of drug war propaganda, and drug policy in the UK (with a quote that rivals any rant Joe has ever gone on!). And they discuss the impressive results from the world’s first MDMA-assisted psychotherapy study to treat alcohol-use disorder, ibogaine, and what they’re looking to research next: behavioral disorders like addictions to gambling, sex, and pornography.
In part 2, Kyle and David speak with cannabis industry entrepreneur and now Director, CEO, and Chairman of Mydecine Innovations Group, Josh Bartch. Mydecine is a biopharmaceutical company developing new compounds, the most notable being MYCO-001, which will be used in the first NIDA-funded study in nearly 50 years: a smoking cessation study being conducted across 3 Universities and headed up by Dr. Matthew Johnson. Bartch talks about their app, Mindleap Health, an educational media platform featuring hundreds of hours of interviews, guided meditations, and other patient-focused ancillary services, which also has 155 specialists of various types (with plans to add A.I.-informed technology to match users to specialists). He discusses the amazing efficacy of psilocybin (with therapy) on smoking cessation, how structural changes in molecules can affect half-life, microdosing (on which they’re also running an exploratory study), and the importance he places on reframing how psychedelics are viewed to inspire greater public adoption.
Notable Quotes
“I can’t think of any other branch of medicine that would accept the kind of outcomes that we do in psychiatry. I often talk about this; how psychiatry is this fairly desperate, lonely place to work. We don’t cure our patients. We don’t use that word, ‘cure.’ We get alongside them in a palliative care way and just patch them up with daily maintenance drugs. And the truth is, if you’re going in to see a psychiatrist in your early twenties with a severe anxiety-based disorder like PTSD or any addiction or depression or anxiety, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll be talking to that psychiatrist in your 60s or 70s. That is not good enough after a hundred years of modern psychiatry. And the reason being is that we’ve been trapped in this top-down, biological model for the last 40 or 50 years, giving people daily maintenance drugs, papering over the cracks, but never getting to the core.” -Ben Sessa
“Psychedelics are the most effective, innovative, creative form of psychopharmacology we’ve had for a hundred years in psychiatry. They really do now offer us a chance to change, completely, the paradigm by which we manage mental illness.” -Ben Sessa “I remember 15 years ago, 20 years ago, when I was a junior doctor, telling my tutors that I wanted to work in psychedelics, and they said, ‘You’re crazy. This is career suicide. This is just a bunch of crazy fringe hippies. Why are you getting involved in this?’ Well, I can tell you now: This is not crazy, fringe hippies. This is cutting edge neuroscience. This is cutting edge clinical psychiatry. Every single major clinical research institution in the world now has psychedelic programs running. This is not the fringe. This is where it’s at. Get involved.” -Ben Sessa
__________________
“When do you see success? For us, success in this industry is when this is offered in already-existing traditional medical and therapy settings and offered as a frontline treatment, not in a secondary psychedelic center or this unique infrastructure that’s being built. When it’s integrated into the actual, already-existing frontline medical community, that’s when we really think that’s a win for all of us.” -Josh Bartch
“If people’s goal, collectively, is to really bring these different molecules (which is what they are) and treatment modalities to the public and to treat large suffering populations, we need to change the context of how they’re portrayed publicly. So the whole ‘magic mushrooms’ [term] or anything that has a recreational context that has been negatively portrayed over years needs to be eliminated, and we need to kind of reboot that public perception and really take it from a recreational context that has tons of negative press and publicity and makes people scared and nervous to use it as a real treatment, and change that messaging to: ‘These are really safe, effective molecules that are showing tons of promise to really change the paradigm.’” -Josh Bartch
Dr. Ben Sessa’s joint interests in psychotherapy, pharmacology, and trauma have led him towards researching the subject of drug-assisted psychotherapy using psychedelic adjuncts. In the last 15 years, he has been part of scientific and clinical studies administering LSD, psilocybin, ketamine, MDMA and DMT to patients and volunteers. He is the author of psychedelic medical exploration books; The Psychedelic Renaissance (2012 and 2017) and To Fathom Hell or Soar Angelic (2015). He has recently completed research with Imperial College London exploring the world’s first MDMA-assisted therapy trial for the treatment of Alcohol Dependence Syndrome. Alongside Prof. David Nutt, Ben has also been a long term advocate of drug policy reform in the UK, believing that current laws hamper research and increase, rather than reduce, the burden of problematic drug use on individuals and society. Ben also has specialist training as a child and adolescent psychiatrist and is interested in the developmental trajectory from child maltreatment to adult mental health disorders, including adult addictions.
About Josh Bartch
Josh Bartch is Director, Chief Executive Officer, and Chairman of Mydecine Innovations Group (MIG). Mr. Bartch’s entrepreneurial career took off in 2009 when he co-founded AudioTranscriptionist.com and founded the Denver-based dispensary, Doctors Orders. Following these ventures, Mr. Bartch founded a boutique investment firm that operated throughout the U.S. and Canadian markets. In 2014, Bartch co-founded Cannabase.io, the U.S.’s most significant legal and sophisticated cannabis wholesale platform. Mr. Bartch took successful exits from AudioTranscriptionist.com, Doctor’s Orders, and Cannabase.io.
In this episode, Joe interviews seventeen year veteran of federal policy, past Navigating Psychedelics student, and founder of Healing Equity and Liberation (HEAL) Organization, Micah Haskell-Hoehl.
Haskell-Hoehl talks about growing up in Pittsburg and seeing disparities in how the school system treated him in comparison with people of color, discovering psychedelics and their healing potential, his path to federal policy and creating HEAL Organization, and his realization that psychedelics can not only help heal deep wounds, but also do something less talked about when considering race relations: help white people deal with how they fit into a culture founded in colonialism and white supremacy. He also discusses the nuance in patenting and IP; how private companies have financially benefited from taxpayer dollars; and how, while he’s excited for the future, he’s worried that mental health disparities will get even worse in the coming corporate wave if these medicines are only available to the rich and connected (or if policymakers aren’t thinking of everyone).
Through HEAL Organization, he’s working to gather evidence that proves to providers that it makes financial sense to cover all types of psychedelic therapy, get public funds allocated to give everyone access, and fix barriers so people have the time and resources necessary to work with these medicines. He has worked with the Plant Medicine Coalition to create the National Council on Federal Psychedelics Priorities to collect like-minded individuals and organizations, figure out exactly what psychedelic policy should look like, and take the first steps to get this (unfortunately slow-moving) process going.
Notable Quotes
“From as early as I can remember, [I] can recall thinking there’s not that big of a difference between these kids and [me]. We’re all human. We’re all very much the same. So there’s something going on here that is warping our experiences and our life trajectories, and that’s external to who we are as individual people.” “As a white guy, I know my experience, and I just want to say that I think that there’s really tremendous possibilities out there for white people to deal with our racial shit through psychedelic healing as well. So you know, there’s the whole concept of white fragility and the shirking away of confronting issues of race and systemic oppression; that is a common experience for white people. The way that we, I think, as white people, have internalized trauma that is premised on white supremacy as well. …Psychedelic healing is a real amazing opportunity for us to dig at those issues in ourselves, because the systems of oppression operate external to us, but also through us, and exist inside of us too.”
“I just don’t believe that psychedelic healing can reach its full potential inside of this broken social container where these systems of oppression are just running roughshod over entire communities of people. I just fail to see how that’s possible. So I think as a movement, I would challenge folks to think about why it’s psychedelic to promote a full end, hard stop to the war on drugs.”
Micah is the founder of Healing Equity and Liberation–or HEAL–Organization. It is working to create a justice framework for psychedelic decriminalization, regulation, and healing, using federal policy. He’s worked in federal policy for nearly two decades, including at Vera Institute of Justice and the American Psychological Association. Micah’s both found healing from depression through the use of psychedelics and struggled with substance use, for which he’s been in long-term recovery for over eight years.
This week’s Solidarity Fridays episode is another 2-parter: A Joe and Kyle discussion followed by the recording of Joe’s interview from Meet Delic with CEO of MINDCURE, Kelsey Ramsden.
In part 1, Joe and Kyle address a recent issue with the Facebook group and a rather accusatory tweet, then discuss something most people who are excited about the prospect of ketamine as medicine aren’t talking about: whether or not ketamine is addictive and therefore a concern for people with substance-abuse issues. And they talk about a Vice article showing some of the shortcomings of Mindbloom and how they highlight the various issues with at-home ketamine therapy and what really counts as ketamine therapy vs. just simply using ketamine. And lastly, inspired by PT writer Zeus Tipado‘s tweet, they wonder if “mystical” is the word we should be using to describe the psychedelic experience – and is the mystical what we should always be striving for?
And in part 2, recorded in a White Castle parking lot in Las Vegas, Joe briefly speaks with Kelsey Ramsden, CEO of MINDCURE. She discusses iSTRYM, their app designed to use A.I. to examine real-time data from users and provide drug-agnostic insights and recommendations, as well as collect and update different protocols for physicians to use with clients. And she talks about MINDCURE’s other big piece, the Desire Project, which is researching MDMA (and possibly other drugs) to help with Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD), an affliction that leaves women unable to feel sexual desire (and is much more common than you may think). MINDCURE will also be manufacturing synthetic ibogaine for research studies.
Notable Quotes
“It is interesting when I hear people talk about psychedelics and always wanting to talk or be oriented towards the mystical. …Is it always mystical? Is that something that we always need to point towards for these experiences?” -Kyle “When my undergrad was going on, I was kind of obsessed with this idea of enlightenment, opening up the chakra system, kundalini experience, etc., because I was positive that once I had that, everything else in my life was going to be solved. …I found an intellectual runaround to the suicide thing. It was a spiritual, intellectual solution to my deep dissatisfaction to how my day-to-day was looking. So I was really obsessed with transcendence and mysticism and all this other stuff as a way to avoid my life – classical spiritual bypass. And people may wonder why I have a little bit of snark around this topic. It’s because I lived it. I was there, I was in it. I was not doing very healthy stuff on the regular and also having this kind of interesting transcendent thing I was looking for that would ‘solve everything.’ And that’s what people are looking for, is a single thing to solve their lives and then everything’s good from there. Well, no. You’re not going to get that.” -Joe
From Kelsey Ramsden’s segment:
“I think the sleeper (the secret sauce, if you will) is the protocol catalogue: this idea that a therapist can unlock a variety of protocols in there for different patients and get personalized care at that level, as well as it lets all of us who are developing protocols and drugs get a new revenue line. …We have the content and we distribute it and so that allows us to pick up value at every segment of the value chain, and create an amazing product that can unify mental health care globally. That’s a big statement, but there’s no reason we can’t.”
“I think data’s going to move the science. We know that and that’s what we’re all working on. But story is going to move the culture. I was on a panel the other day and someone was smacking down one of the people who has enrolled a celebrity spokesperson. But for a segment of the population, we’re still in an echo chamber. We’re still in our small world. [Celebrities can move the needle] if it’s the right person with the right message at the right time, for the right audience. …If the right people can put their hand up and say ‘I did this, it helped me, it changed my life,’ and that makes someone explore it and make their own opinions? Amazing. There was someone like that for me.”
With Over 15 years founding, scaling, and operating innovative businesses across several industries, Kelsey Ramsden has built multiple eight-figure companies from the ground up. She is an experienced leader and acclaimed entrepreneur, twice recognized as Canada’s Top Female Entrepreneur of the Year. After serving as MINDCURE‘s COO, Mrs. Ramsden steps into the President and CEO role as of December 1, 2020. She possesses a thorough understanding of the mental health industry and a clear vision of where it is going.
In this episode, Joe and Kyle finally interview legendary author and microdosing popularizer, James Fadiman, Ph.D.
He talks about Tony Sutich, Abe Maslow, and the emergence of transpersonal psychology in an era when psychology was especially uncomfortable with spiritual experience; the early days of the Transpersonal Association and their relationship with Ram Dass; how easy it was to get LSD from Sandoz Pharmaceuticals and the vastly different ways people started experimenting with it; and how society dealt with him, his ideas, and these new substances as they started to become more mainstream.
He discusses microdosing: how it emerged, dosing amounts, how you’re supposed to feel, and how researchers are finally starting to look at brain waves of microdosers. And they discuss the recent self-blinding microdose study and how he thinks the “not statistically significant” difference was actually notable; the strictness of clinical trials and how researchers often stack the deck to get the results they want, and how real world evidence (which psychedelics has a ton of) is seen as the defining factor of a successful trial.
And he talks about his newest book, Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who We Are, which he sums up quite well with: “Have you ever argued with yourself? Who is the other person arguing?” He believes (and psychology believed, before Freud) that we are made up of several different shifting selves and the key to a happy and healthy life is to embody the right self at the right time.
Notable Quotes
“I’m still not acceptable. I have no University affiliation, no hospital affiliation, no clinic affiliation, and I talk about the correct use of psychedelics in ways that the people who are doing the fundamental research either don’t know or can’t talk about.”
“The level of oversight from the federal government – you cannot imagine it, knowing anything about the federal government today. You wrote Sandoz and Sandoz said, ‘I don’t know who you are. Here’s a whole bunch of LSD.’ Literally, the instructions you would get is: ‘Tell us what you’re doing.’ Because Sandoz had this wonderful problem: they had this substance that was the most powerful substance per molecule that they’d ever found and they didn’t know how to make any money out of it.” “The secret of microdosing is if you’re noticing it, that’s a little too high a dose. …The perfect definition of a microdose is: You have a really good day, you get things done that you’ve been putting off, you’re nice to someone at work who doesn’t deserve it, after work you do one more set of reps at the gym than you usually do, you really enjoy your kids, and at the end of the day you say, ‘Oh, I forgot I had a microdose.’” “The last step is always real world evidence, which is why drugs get recalled. …The funny thing with psychedelics is we have all the real world evidence pretty well stacked up to start. So I’m not waiting for the clinical evidence, because it comes in last.
“The image of the healthy self is more like a choir, where everyone is singing their correct note, but not the same note. And also they’re singing at the right pitch, at the right tempo, at the right volume, so that it works. And a beautifully organized choir doesn’t need a leader because they’re hearing each other.”
James Fadiman, PhD., has been researching psychedelics since 1961 and the effect of microdosing since 2010. His most recent books are The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys and Your Symphony of Selves: Discover and Understand More of Who We Are (with Jordan Gruber). He is working on a new book about microdosing and wants to hear remarkable microdosing stories: jfadiman@gmail.com.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, we have another split podcast, with side A bringing you a short PTSF check-in from Joe and Kyle, and side B featuring an in-person interview recorded at Wonderland withNuminus Co-founder and CEO, Payton Nyquvest.
Joe and Kyle first talk aboutupcoming courses (and possibly an in-person pop-up in Breckenridge?), Wonderland, Covid, and whether or not psychedelics are in an “ivory tower,” as Dr. Alex Belser, Chief Clinical Officer of Cybin, suggests they are. And they discuss Mike Tyson: his insistence on saying “toad,” his relationship to Gerry Sandoval, and the dangers of celebrities promoting the further endangerment of such highly threatened species.
Then we go back to Miami where Joe and David speak with Payton Nyquvest of Numinus, a company with two major pieces: ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and a clinical platform offered through Numinus Health, and Numinus Biosciences; which recently produced the first legal psilocybin product derived from natural psilocybin-producing mushrooms. He discusses how his mother’s substance abuse recovery and a trip to an ayahuasca retreat center taught him how to reimagine his chronic pain as a gift, the need for reciprocity, and what the recentCompass Pathways results show us about integration. And he asks an important question we don’t often ponder: Why do healthcare providers only offer psychedelics after they’ve tried everything else? Why not first?
Notable Quotes
“I was in the trauma ward at Lion’s Gate Hospital, I booked my flights while I was in the hospital, went home, packed my bags, and got on the plane. I’m hesitant to create an expectation of a panacea or anything like that, but one week with ayahuasca and I never had any chronic pain issues ever again.”
“We keep talking about treatment-resistant depression, treatment-resistant anxiety or treatment-resistant PTSD, and the reason why the psychedelic space has seen this re-emergence is there’s a huge burden on the healthcare system at the moment, and there’s this recognition that psychedelics could take some of that burden off of the healthcare system. So why are we putting psychedelic treatments at the end of a patient’s life-cycle? Why should they have to go through this prolonged period of suffering? …Why is it not a standard of care, with curative intent? Put it at the beginning. …If they’re safe and effective, why are they not prioritized?”
“When I speak with institutions and stuff like that, they say, ‘Wow, you guys really seem to be approaching this from a 3-5 year standpoint, and intentional.’ And my response is: ‘Who’s not?’ …Let’s not be short-sighted, and recognize [that] a paradigm shift in healthcare is so significant. We haven’t seen significant innovation in mental health in 35-40 years. So that’s a big shift. …Let’s not try and squeeze psychedelics into old paradigms of the pharmaceutical space or something like that. Let’s recognize that these are interventions, and where do they fit within the healthcare system?”
Payton Nyquvest is the Co-founder, Chair & Chief Executive Officer of Numinus, a company that empowers people to heal and be well through the development and delivery of innovative mental health care and access to safe, evidence-based psychedelic-assisted therapies. He has a deep understanding of the psychedelic industry from its infancy, driven by life-saving personal experiences with multiple therapy modalities. At Numinus, he guides teams leading strategy, innovation, research and clinic network expansion, and supports the marketing and capital markets functions. He is responsible for raising more than $70 million for Numinus in the past year, and is quoted widely in media such as CTV, Forbes and the New York Times. In addition, he brings more than 15 years working in finance, investment and retail banking with some of Canada’s leading independent investment firms, including Jordan Capital Markets, Canaccord Financial and Mackie Research Capital. In these and other roles, he has raised more than $100 million for a variety of small cap companies.
In this episode, Joe and Kyle interview CEO & Co-founder of Nue Life, Juan Pablo Cappello, from his home in Miami during the Wonderland conference.
Cappello first talks about growing up in Chile and provides some history; covering how peyote became religious and how Catholicism spread through the Americas like a franchise system. And he talks about his family’s relationship with San Pedro, his entrepreneurial past (starting the first online bank in Latin America), and how selling that company for $700 million felt like an abject failure.
He discusses how the idea of depression and PTSD being symptoms of an unaddressed root cause led to the creation of Nue Life, and what he wants to do with what he considers a primarily data-based company: use the massive amounts of data connected devices are already harvesting from us (digital phenotyping) for our benefit rather than our detriment. He believes most medical models focus primarily on the continued income from maintenance medications like antidepressants, and instead, A.I. could use this data to recognize patterns in behavior and make recommendations based on each user’s specific data points – a sort of health ecosystem attuned to what works best for each person.
While he’s very excited about the progress so far (data from 2k people, Nue Life being licensed in five states with five more coming soon), he also talks about his concerns with the current psychedelic gold rush: how Big Pharma is pushing pioneers in the space into restrictive models, and why we will soon see a flame-out of many of these emerging highly-appraised companies.
Notable Quotes
“At the height of the drug war under Clinton, we had 2.2 million people going to jail for drug crimes. This year, it’ll be 2.1 million. So we still have huge, huge numbers of people being incarcerated and going to jail, and for me, that’s because of the way we’ve managed the cannabis industry. And I really, especially at a conference like this where it becomes about the money (not about the impact); I’m very, very concerned that we’re going to find ourselves missing this once-in-a-generation opportunity to make real progress. And real progress really begins with decriminalizing these amazing substances.”
“We’re not a psychedelics-focused company. We’re a mental wellness-focused company that’s going to use whatever technologies are available to drive these extraordinary patient outcomes.”
“How can we, rather than having our phones be a source of body dysmorphia and negativity and a place I feel compelled to go to but it ultimately is bringing me down – how can we turn that technology around and have it be something that helps elevate our patients? …We’re constantly giving out [data] but that data can be used, like a lot of tools, for good as well as for bad, and we’re in a position where we’re really saying: let us be one of the first companies that’s going to use this data for good.”
Juan Pablo Cappello is a passionate entrepreneur who believes in the power of technology and innovation to address humanity’s biggest challenges — mental wellness being one of them. In his home country of Chile, Juan Pablo has seen both the trauma caused by years of a military dictatorship and the power of psychedelic therapies to heal that trauma. As Nue Life‘s CEO & Co-founder, Juan Pablo measures the company’s success by how many lives Nue Life positively impacts.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, we’re doing something a little different and featuring two shorter interviews, recorded in a media room at theWonderland Miami conference last week. First, Joe andDavid interview Ahmad Doroudian, Ph.D., the CEO & Director of BetterLife Pharma, and then David speaks with Dr. Abid Nazeer, Chief Medical Officer at Wesana Health.
After a brief Joe rant that touches on Wonderland, biopiracy, rising sea levels, and psychedelics for problem solving, we jump into Ahmad Doroudian’s recording, where they mostly talk about the non-hallucinogenic compound, 2-Bromo-LSD. While LSD has shown great signs at being effective for the treatment of cluster headaches, many people (including Doroudian) do not want to experience the hallucinatory part of this medicine, so BetterLife Pharma has been researching using this LSD-relative to address this very need (and it may be even safer than LSD too). They also touch on another compound, TD-010, which could be a safe and non-addictive alternative to benzodiazepines.
Part 2 of this split podcast features David sitting down with Chief Medical Officer at Wesana Health, Abid Nazeer. He talks about opening the first ketamine clinic in the midwest;Daniel Carcillo; the need for integrative wellness; and traumatic brain injuries, which they’re researching alongside MAPS. He talks about what he wants to do with Wesana Health, which is essentially creating a “center of excellence” hub where a patient can be referred to different departments (spokes) specializing in any number of possible healing modalities, all under the same network.
Notable Quotes
“Can we put this together in a way that is patient-friendly, cost-effective, all the things that are more or less a big pharma approach, to something that could really make a difference? It’s not specialized, you don’t need to have a high net worth to get this treatment, and you don’t need to worry about side effects.” -Ahmad Doroudian
__________________
“I told my wife that I want to open up a private practice ketamine/psychiatry clinic a couple of days after we found out she was pregnant with twins. She’s like, ‘Now? Is this the right time?’ There’s never a right time, but if you feel it, you should go for it.” -Abid Nazeer
“We’re complex beings and the brain is super complex, so that whole hypothesis that it’s all about up-regulation of serotonin or dopamine or norepinephrine receptors; I don’t think it’s going to hold weight in the long run. There’s too many other factors involved, and psychedelics are teaching us that you can approach this in a whole different way.” -Abid Nazeer
“It’s almost like some programs focus on therapy, some focus on biology, and the needle should be right in the middle for the best effect. And I think psychedelics are the first thing to actually bring it back to that.” -Abid Nazeer
Ahmad Doroudian, Ph.D. is the Chief Executive Officer & Director BetterLife Pharma. He has more than 20 years of experience as a Pharma CEO in finance, including M&A, and multiple IPOs, Integration of pharmaceutical operations (Whitehall Robbins, Rhone Polenc, Boehringer, Aventis). He is the Founder of Merus Labs (NASDAQ: MSLI), which sold for $300 M+ in 2017. He specializes in acquisition, integration, tech transfer and management of branded pharmaceutical products Enablex®/Emselex®, Entrophen®, Sandomigran®, Sintrom®, Vancocin®, Zaditen®.
About Dr. Abid Nazeer
Dr. Abid Nazeer is the Chief Medical Officer for Wesana Health and is a leader in the fields of addiction, ketamine therapy, and pharmacogenetics, currently spearheading research into ketamine and cognition. He was previously Chief Medical Officer for a national network of addiction focused clinics, pioneered the first dedicated outpatient psychiatric based ketamine clinic in the Midwest, and lead the PTSD clinic at Overton Brooks VA Medical Center.
In this episode, Joe interviews Erica Rex: writer and participant in one of the first ever clinical trials using psilocybin to treat cancer-related depression.
She talks about her complicated path to becoming part of the study; the study itself; her frustrations with the clinical and dehumanizing aspects of research; and how integral communication, community, and integration were toward her healing. They discuss the importance of self-analysis and doing self-work under the right circumstances: Are you too close to your everyday environment? Who or what is causing you to feel this way? Are you in a place in life where you can be ok with being destabilized for weeks or months?
And she tells three different stories of spontaneous mystical experiences; tears in the fabric of her universe where the lines between reality and dreams were blurred, including one where a friend’s deceased mother (who she had never met) spoke to her in a dream about her own family. And this leads to a discussion about the DSM, psychiatry, and how we don’t know anywhere near enough about schizophrenia or these strange brushes with the mystical.
Notable Quotes
“I just assumed, for no reason other than people encouraging me to take psychedelics, that I don’t need to take that stuff because I see horrible things when I’ve got a migraine anyway — why would I want to go there? Of course, ironically, I learned once I got to Hopkins, that in fact, that probably would have helped me.”
“[In Europe,] doctors cannot get their minds around the idea that an American (where ‘everybody has money’) has to leave the country to get treatment and care for a medical condition. This has to be gone around and around and around, both in England and in France, more times than you could possibly imagine. They cannot get their heads around it.” “I can’t stress enough that the integration part, ideally, is done where there is community involved. …This is about community and coming away from that horrible isolation of depression back into contact with the rest of the world in a constructive and more advanced and more clear-thinking and more elevated (if you want) way. …In some ways, it’s more important than taking the drug. The drug is an accelerant. The drug does its job, but the drug is not the point. The process is the point.”
Erica Rex writes about science, environment, mental health, climate, and the forces shaping all of them. She’s written for The New York Times, Scientific American, The Times (UK), and is the recipient of a National Magazine Award. She was a subject in one of the first clinical trials using psilocybin to treat cancer related depression in 2012. Her book-in-progress traces the story of psychedelics through the lens of her quest to heal from childhood trauma. Ms Rex’s unique perspective shows how psychedelic medicine provides a pathway out of trauma, a light at the end of a very long tunnel.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle recorded together from a hotel in Biscayne Bay, looking out over Miami Beach and reflecting over the Wonderland Miami conference they just attended. And that’s what this abbreviated podcast is: a quick check-in to discuss Wonderland (and Meet Delic, which Joe attended) while it’s all still fresh in their minds.
Beyond the reviews and comparisons, they talk about how it felt to attend a big conference again; Joe’s panel about what the world of psychedelics will look like in ten years; Compass Pathways’ just-released research outcomes and why Joe is reconsidering his critiques of their patent issues; and how a few of the people they met at Wonderland are already motivating them and making them consider just how much they can really do with Psychedelics Today.
Notable Quotes
“Overall, I think people are slowly coming out of their shells around Covid, which is nice. Still be careful out there, folks, but we’re seeing people lower their guard, and it seems really healthy to be with people again.” -Joe “I think you and I had some really interesting conversations walking home from the party last night, back to our hotel. And I was like, subtly in-crisis, going, ‘I need to really re-vision where Psychedelics Today lives in this space.’ I think you and I are going to do a lot of thinking over the next couple of weeks about what we actually want to do, and see what the right move is. It’s fascinating times.” -Joe
In this episode, Joe was in Las Vegas for the Meet Delic conference, and, inspired by the presentation by Jesse Gould and Roger Sparks, decided to record an episode with three veteran friends for a special Veterans Day release.
While the three vets chose to keep their names and personal details anonymous, they share a lot about the military and the difficulties of transitioning back into civilian life. They talk about how there’s actually a lot of drug use in the military (and how essential nonstop stimulants or painkillers are to some); how little there is in the way of a transition process; and how the normal mind state for most soldiers is a combination of tucking all emotions and anxiety away, assuming they’re going to die, and powering through until there’s time to work through it all (which of course never comes).
They also talk about a lot of issues the rest of us don’t necessarily think about, like how hard the demanding schedule of deployment is on one’s personal life, how much families are affected by the mental health of someone on deployment, how tough it is to become like family with fellow soldiers only to have them go away, and how challenging it is for someone who has good mental health practices in play to be able to continue them once in the service.
But it’s not all dark, as they also talk about how psychedelics, meditation, breathwork, wilderness therapy, and long hikes have helped them reevaluate their lives, see themselves (and others) from different perspectives, and get to places of happiness (but with continued work). This is a glimpse into the camaraderie of vets, and their laughter and support of one another really drives home one of their main points: the importance of finding a community of people who support you, understand you, and don’t judge you.
Notable Quotes
“I did more drugs on deployment than I’ve ever done in my life. That’s a fact.” “You get in this habit of pushing things off, pushing it away, pushing it away. And that shit just builds up and then, now the lid doesn’t stay on and you just fucking pop. …You’re told to just shove it down, push through, whatever. ‘You’ll get through it, you’ll figure it out later.’ But you don’t ever have that time to figure it out.” “You’ve got to be willing to put yourself in these uncomfortable situations that oftentimes accompany doing a psychedelic drug, and accepting the thoughts and emotions that are going to arise, and working through those with the knowledge that: ‘Hey, I’m doing this to better myself.’”
“[My friend] finally said ‘This is fucking bullshit, I need to help myself’ and took a trip to Costa Rica, did ayahuasca, and completely changed his life. He still struggles — it’s not an end all be all, you’ve still got to work on yourself — but he was able to enjoy life after that and spend time with his kids and appreciate what he has and build and grow from that. …[He had] a decision-making turning point in his brain where [he said], ‘I’m not going to rely on the army medical system [or] the VA to fix this mental issue, this mental battle that I’m having; I need to do this for myself.’ And I really hope that, if anything, any veterans out there listening, if they get anything from that, it’s: You can be helped, but you’ve got to want to help yourself first, and that’s ok. It’s ok.”
“No two struggles are going to be the same. No two traumas are going to be the same. No two solutions are going to be the same. …It took a psychedelic trip for me to realize all the things that we’re talking about. It doesn’t have to be that way for everybody, but you won’t know what your solution is until you start trying things.” “If you’re a veteran that’s thinking about suicide or that nothing else is working for you, you’re not alone. There are a lot of us out there that have had a lot of issues that we’re trying to work through and you can work through it. Even though it seems like it’s not going to happen, there is a way. …Ask for help. Talk to others. And don’t bottle it up, don’t be ashamed. Nobody’s going to shame you. If they do? Fuck ‘em. Whatever. They shouldn’t be in your life.”
In this episode, Joe and Kyle sit down with famed anthropologist and author (most notably of The Cosmic Serpent), Jeremy Narby. He is also the Amazonian projects director for Nouvelle Planète, a nonprofit organization that works to empower Indigenous peoples through demarcation of land.
Narby talks about how he was pushed to psychedelics through a combination of long talks with Humphry Osmond and political anthropology, focusing on the conflict between the World Bank and Indigenous people over their land. He tells how his first ayahuasca and datura experiences made him feel reconciled with nature, and how he realized people in the states had started speaking highly of the ecological knowledge of Indigenous people of the Amazon without ever talking about the hallucinogenic way they attained that knowledge (and how he felt it was his place to start talking about it).
He also discusses anthropology and subjectivity; Richard Evans Schultes; the problem with trying to verify or substantiate hallucinations; the West’s focus on “the active ingredient” and how ayahuasca is much more than drinkable DMT; the overuse and microdosing of ayahuasca; the entourage effect and how it’s excluded by the “DMT explains everything” hypothesis; why vine-only ayahuasca needs to be researched more; and the differences in how people react to LSD vs. ayahuasca or psilocybin (do the plant substances have a trickster spirit in them which doesn’t like some people?).
To win a copy of Narby’s most recent book, Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge (co-authored by Rafael Chanchari Pizuri), click here!
Notable Quotes
“When I first started hearing this at the age of 25 (in 1985), I thought it was a bit of a joke because I didn’t think that one could take psychedelics and learn about plant properties. I thought one could take LSD and have an interesting time in the woods with one’s friends, but if you really started thinking that the trees were talking to you, there was a bit of a problem. That was my point of view at the time. But here were these rainforest Indians living in the most biodiverse place on earth saying: Yes, we learn about plant properties by drinking this hallucinogenic vine mixture.” “I went to the Rio summit in 1992, and suddenly there are all these governments talking about the knowledge of Indigenous people about biodiversity, talking about the knowledge of Amazonian Indians and how we have to recognize it and take it into consideration. Everybody talking about the knowledge of Indigenous Amazonians, [but] nobody talking about the hallucinogenic origin of this knowledge as they themselves discuss it.”
“If you’re an average Westerner; without really even realizing it, you kind of subscribe to this idea of The Active Ingredient. So you know what is the active ingredient of ayahuasca? Ah, it’s DMT. This is the scientific opinion that has been turned into a kind of orthodoxy, but just talk to the Indigenous Amazonian people. They’ll tell you that the vine itself, which doesn’t contain DMT, is the main ingredient.” “Just the ayahuasca vine itself; if you make an extract from it, you already have a complex cocktail. And then that mixture is used to study all the other plants. And so, it’s a cocktail to which you can add tobacco and nicotine, datura and scopolamine, coca and cocaine — you can add any plant you want to study the effect of the plant. That’s what ayahuasca also is. So, it’s, at its base, a cocktail, and then it can be turned into a psychoactive cocktail with many different plants, including DMT. …It’s Cocktail City, basically.”
Jeremy Narby, PhD, is co-author of Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge with indigenous elder Rafael Chanchari Pizuri. He became an early pioneer of ayahuasca research while living with the Asháninka people of the Peruvian Amazon in the 1980s. He studied anthropology at Stanford University and now lives in Switzerland and works as Amazonian Projects Director for Nouvelle Planète, a nonprofit organization that promotes the economic and cultural empowerment of Indigenous peoples.
In this episode, travel and preparing for Wonderland Miami made recording a fresh Solidarity Friday episode impossible, so instead, we bumped up Tuesday’s episode, where Joe speaks with accomplished neuroscientist, researcher, Professor and Vice Chair of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Director of Mental Health at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center, Dr. Rachel Yehuda.
She talks about the importance and complications of research trials: the difficulty researchers have in remaining neutral; how protocols have an arbitrary beginning and end that may not make sense to the participant; how the process of getting funding for one’s own clinical trial begins with creating a simple and specific protocol; and how, while it can often feel like therapy to participants, the purpose of these trials is often more for researchers to learn from participants how to better run the trials themselves.
And she discusses much more: her background and path to psychedelic research; the current trial focusing on using ayahuasca for relational processes between Palestinians and Israelis; why knowing the pharmacology of a compound doesn’t explain enough; what she thinks the next few years of psychedelic neuroscience looks like; how to work with big corporations who may seem like they’re only in it for the money; and how we need a science to analyze what she’s most interested in: trying to predict who will or won’t respond to a particular treatment (and why).
Notable Quotes
“We don’t need everybody around the table to be gung-ho psychedelic aficionados. We want the medicine to speak for itself in clinical trials and we want to pay very careful attention to people that don’t respond the way the zeitgeist is telling us that everybody will, because we want to learn from everybody.”
“If you treat it like any other study and just go through the steps, what you’ll find about psychedelic research is there are just a lot more steps. …Start with a protocol. Start in a very concrete way, and let’s have a discussion around this particular protocol and not a theory.”
“I think we need deep humility here that we are not going to know or understand how psychedelics work in the brain for a long time, mostly because I think the tools that we need haven’t necessarily been developed. …What we do know so far, is that just understanding the pharmacology of a compound isn’t going to get us where we need to go.” “I think the more sober and conservative we are at this stage, the higher the yield we will have in the future in terms of a very big footprint for these approaches; not just as [a] last-ditch ‘I’ve tried everything so now let me try this’ approach, but as the tools that I think that people have known for years and decades (and millennia even in some societies) that they could be if used correctly at the right time, in the right place, in the right way, in the right setting, [and] with the the right people.”
Rachel Yehuda is an Endowed Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience of PTSD and Vice Chair for Veteran Affairs in the Department of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she directs the Center for Psychedelic Psychotherapy and Trauma Research and the Traumatic Stress Studies Division. She is also Director of Mental Health at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx. She is the recipient of numerous federal grants and awards, has authored several hundred peer-reviewed scientific papers, and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine. Dr. Yehuda’s work has focused primarily on the neuroscience and treatment of trauma and PTSD.
In this episode, Joe interviews New York-based writer, comedian, and performer, Adam Strauss.
Strauss tells his story of growing up with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder; struggling with decisions, control, and anger, and how a small 2006 study on psychedelics and OCD mixed with meeting someone who had had a life-changing ego death at age 16 led him to try to fix his OCD with psilocybin. The subsequent trips (especially the bad ones) became a template for how to work with his OCD, as they taught him to accept, feel, and breathe through the emotions his OCD was trying to protect him from. He tells the full story through his one-man show, “The Mushroom Cure,” which he’s hoping to turn into a special.
He also talks about comedy in the era of Covid and why he doesn’t do much stand-up anymore; the creation of his YouTube show, “The Trip Report” (which originally was co-hosted by last week’s guest, Hamilton Morris); Terence McKenna and the concept of humans coevolving with psychedelics; drug urban legends and the misinformation of the drug war (Oprah and MDMA causing holes in the brain); and why psychedelics may be the best tool towards saving the planet.
Notable Quotes
“OCD is entirely a disease of thinking. If you don’t have thinking, you don’t have OCD. It’s this trying to figure out and get things perfect in your mind, but the roots of OCD, I believe (and I believe this is true of all what we would call mental illness): …it’s always in the body. There’s always an emotion, which is basically a physical sensation that we don’t want to experience. And so with OCD, there is a fear or a loss, and the idea is that if I can figure everything out in my head or if I can arrange things perfectly in the world, then that feeling in my body will change. …And so if you’re able to accept that anxiety, to really feel the fear in the body, that takes the wind out of the OCD’s sails.”
“I don’t think psychedelics are necessarily going to save humanity, but I think our odds of survival without psychedelics are vanishingly slim.” “If you’re talking about OCD, you’re really talking about this absolute inability or unwillingness to trust anything. You don’t trust yourself (that’s why I have to check the stove 47 times), but you also just don’t trust the universe. You don’t trust that things will be okay. And on psychedelics, I’ve had these spiritual, religious, ‘plus four’ experiences where there is a deep sense of a profound intelligence …at work- an intelligence that transcends my own consciousness and probably transcends human consciousness. And I think so much of why we’ve gone off the rails (at least in Western society) is this real loss of religious and spiritual experience.”
“Having people who should know better believe drug war propaganda is not top of the list, but it is significant. It is significant, and I think it tells you how effective this propaganda has been. We laugh about “Reefer Madness,” but a lot of these same people who laugh about “Reefer Madness” do believe that LSD can give you a flashback because it still stays in your spinal fluid.” “I think one thing psychedelics reliably do at high doses is they can be humbling, and I think humility; it doesn’t always lead to compassion and empathy, but I think it often can.”
Adam Strauss is a writer and performer based in New York. His monologue, “The Mushroom Cure,” is the true story of how he treated his debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder with psychedelics. The New York Times said it “mines a great deal of laughter from disabling pain,” The Chicago Tribune called it “arrestingly honest and howlingly funny”, and Michael Pollan called it “brilliant, hilarious and moving.” Adam is also the creator of The Trip Report, a psychedelic news show streaming now. Adam also speaks about OCD and psychedelics in articles, on podcasts, and at conferences.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle have a serious discussion about abuse in psychedelics, talk about upcoming conferences, and even cover some news.
They’re both attending Wonderland this November 8-9th in Miami (and now both on panels too?), so they start the show by excitedly talking about that (use our affiliate link here to buy tickets to attend or stream at home).
But then things turn more serious, with discussion of the recent accusations of abuse against two prominent figures in this space by friend of the show, Will Hall – something you may have been wondering when we’d address (and which Joe wrote about in yesterday’s blog). They talk about the frustrations of not knowing what to do with stories people have confided in them, the complications of sexual energies coming out in psychedelic sessions, the cult-like mentality of protecting abusive facilitators, the politics of becoming a narc, the financial dangers of defamation, and how the best way to tremendously improve safety in psychedelic work would be to end the drug war.
And they cover some news: Bank of America canceling the account of the Scottsdale Research Institute likely due to their research of psychedelics; Prime Minister Boris Johnson considering legalizing psilocybin (which is actually pretty newsworthy); and legalization progress in Luxembourg, Switzerland, and East Hampton, Massachusetts.
Notable Quotes
“Going to bed at night knowing that I’m keeping my mouth quiet; is that complicity?” -Joe “At a certain point, you will become that elder that you were seeking for guidance, given diligent effort and careful attention to detail and a lot of integrity. Those things can really add up to you becoming the elder that you were seeking in somebody else.” -Joe “By doing this stuff, often, you are breaking the law and you expose yourself to a lot of legal risk. And by people inviting you into their world, they’re exposing themselves to tremendous amounts of legal risk. So there has to be this trust, and as soon as the trust is gone, what the fuck is left?” -Joe “To feel good about yourself years later; the trick is to have integrity now, so you know you handled that situation to the best of your ability.” -Joe “Don’t touch people without consent. If you’re going to do something where you’re touching people, make sure you have a lot of conversations (pre-dosing) about it. Maybe you need to totally re-vision how you’re doing underground intake. Maybe it needs to be a lot longer and you need to charge a little bit more to be able to allow for that kind of informed consent. …Be very careful, please. Very, very careful — over the line with consent. Overboard with consent.” -Joe
In this episode, Joe travels to the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia for a rare in-person interview with chemist, filmmaker, science journalist, and go-to media consultant, Hamilton Morris.
They cover a lot: Hamilton’s early realizations of how ill-informed the media was about psychedelics; his time at Vice and how being a journalist gave him a license for curiosity; why he was most interested in covering the substances people were comfortable hating; respectability politics and how only showing what helps the movement is propaganda; how we can learn from watching people do salvia on YouTube; drug elitism; PCP advocate and Process Church alum, Timothy Wyllie; how people attribute more to chemical makeup than their own psychology; how we all need to be more open about our psychedelic use; and why it’s unnecessary (and potentially dangerous) to embrace the narrative that you need to suffer (and do so with a shaman) to truly heal.
They talk a lot about his two 5-MeO episodes of “Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia,” with Hamilton laying out what he wanted to do with the episodes, detailing what led Ken Nelson to first milk a Sonoran Desert Toad, and explaining how small of a chemical difference there is between toad-derived and plant-derived 5-MeO-DMT. And they touch on the hot topic of his relationship with Compass Pathways- how it’s not that different from what several historical psychedelic figures did, and how it’s leading to the creation of many new drugs.
Notable Quotes
“As an outsider, you might think, ‘Well who’s going to object to this? It’s going to be Christian mothers and middle America- those are going to be the people that object to it.’ But that’s actually not the case at all. I’ve received no objection from law enforcement or conservatives. 100% of the opposition comes from within the psychedelic community. That’s where all the in-fighting and the discord tends to be localized.”
“Yes, there are very serious differences between [psychedelics and other drugs], but if we fall into the same moral binary, then we’re ultimately no better than people that think that the distinction between licit and illicit drugs is a pharmacologically or medically meaningful distinction.” “It’s actually kind of interesting how within this neovitalist/animist concept of the activity of plants, …people are dismissing their own psychology entirely and attaching all value to the molecular identity of the drug. And this is coming from someone who is a staunch materialist who spends all of their time thinking about the molecular identity of drugs, and I can tell you, this is crazy. The human mind is a huge contributor. If you take the exact same dose of LSD every year, I would be amazed if it’s the same. I would bet against any resemblance between these experiences because you will be different. You will be in a different mood, you will be thinking about different things. You change all the time, much more than the drug.”
“In the last three months, we’ve synthesized more psychedelics than in the preceding three years. …I understand, and I actually am happy about the vigilance of the psychedelic community and I think it is important to keep an eye on these things and make sure that everyone behaves in an ethical manner, but at the same time, there’s something a little bit surreal about waking up each morning to invent new psychedelics and people thinking that’s a bad thing.”
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe sits down with photographer, entrepreneur, veteran of the cannabis industry, and current CEO at Microdose; Patrick Moher.
Moher talks about his path through the cannabis world and to Microdose; entrepreneurship, his business ethics, and how to build a team; the openness of psychedelic companies; Tim Ferris; the bravado in cannabis; the war on drugs; and everything Microdose is working on, including CME-accredited training, a magazine, and a documentary. But they mostly talk about Moher’s biggest project right now, the massive psychedelic expo happening November 8-9 in Miami: Wonderland.
We’re psyched to announce that we’re Silver Sponsors of the event, and Joe, Kyle, and David will all be attending. Featuring an insane lineup of speakers (Robin Carhart-Harris, Rick Doblin, David Nutt, Mike Tyson, Matthew Johnson, Ben Sessa, and many more), projection mapping, VR applications, an art exhibit, wild decorations (giant mushrooms), and sure-to-be memorable afterparties, Moher’s goal was to create a business-minded event that people would actually have fun at.
We’ll surely be talking more about Wonderland as we get closer to the already-very-close first day, but if you want to act now and save some serious cash,use our affiliate link here to buy tickets! Oh, and we’re nominated for a fewMicrodose awards as well, so vote for us and vote often! (you can vote once a day)
Notable Quotes
“As an entrepreneur, the way I want to do my business is ‘win-win or no deal.’ If everyone’s not benefitting and we’re not contributing to the future that we want to see, then I’m not really interested in engaging.” “A lot of people give a lot of grief to a lot of things. But it’s like, is that benefitting your life at all to just be hating on what somebody else is doing? They’re clearly following a passion, doing what they feel is important, doing their life’s work. Why don’t you go and do yours?”
“If it’s not your cup of tea, there’s 20 other teabags sitting on the shelf. Go find it.” “Mike Tyson and Lamar Odom: I know they’ve had their troubles in the past, Mike being a particularly controversial figure. [But] do you believe in second chances? Do you believe that these things can help people become better and do you believe that we can heal together? [That’s] the unifying story there.”
“When people talk about ‘what is the psychedelic industry really going to change?’, I’m trying to think way further. What happens when you have a society of people that aren’t in jail, they’re happier, they’re healthier, [and] they’re not dealing with mental health implications? You’ve got less people in jail, less people in the medical health care system, more people [being] creative, innovative, [and] open to building things for good rather than having this inner narrative of shame and regret and fear. To me, this is one of the only things that I’m an absolutist on. I believe that absolutism is generally what’s causing a lot of our world’s chaos and negativity right now, but if you don’t think that psychedelics or drugs in general are a fundamental human right, and if you don’t think they’re actually going to benefit humanity; I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. They are, and they’re doing it in real time, and we will continue to see that change.”
Patrick Moher is an industrious entrepreneur working in psychedelics and cannabis, currently the CEO at Microdose Psychedelic Insights. As a passionate and unapologetic environmentalist, his relentless work ethic has directly translated to previous success in his photography career, as well as founding Ethical Image, co-finding Alan Aldous Communications, Goodwood Accessories, UCannAcademy & and becoming a partner at ADCANN. Patrick is focused on helping combine creativity, CSR, and sustainable profitability for companies. He has a dynamic ability to unite individuals across social and corporate spectrums to create unique business solutions. His dedication to community service has seen him actively collaborate with many volunteer organizations, photograph hundreds of events/portraits/weddings, & sponsor the planting of over 20,000 trees (and counting).
In this episode, Joe interviews Rebecca Kronman, LCSW: Brooklyn-based therapist offering ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, writer, and founder of Plant Parenthood; a digital platform investigating (and de-stigmatizing) the relationship between family and psychedelics.
She dives into the very controversial topics of psychedelics and parenthood and psychedelics and pregnancy, discussing the safety concerns (medical, emotional, spiritual, and legal); the difficulties of drawing conclusions from inadequate data; the many confounding factors in analyzing children born of psychedelic-using parents; the near impossibility of ethically researching the outcomes of pregnancy and psychedelic use; and why, when you consider the multitude of prescription drugs and unnatural foods so many of us consume, does the idea of a mother taking a psychedelic during pregnancy feel so wrong to so many?
And they talk about much more: the need for affinity groups and how the safety they can provide can lead to better decisions; the concept of considering psychedelics as life-saving medicine (or at least a factor towards the happiness (and therefore health) of the parent); the societal scrutiny mothers face; harm reduction; the idea of addiction being a complication of PTSD; drug exceptionalism; and how disclosing drug use to your children is a great opportunity to move the conversation into one of both compassion and injustice.
“When we look at doing an environmental study (where people are already doing this and then we’re looking at the outcomes), then we have another issue, which is the confounding factors. I can’t put you in a bubble and feed you the food that I want to feed you or [not] expose you to environmental toxins …and not expose you to stress in your personal circumstances and your sociocultural circumstances- that’s not a thing. There’s a lot of different substances that birthing parents are exposed to during their pregnancy, and to parse that out and say, ‘Does this one create a birth defect?’ for example; it’s very, very difficult. And maybe not even possible.”
“We need to really take a look at how the criminal justice and child protective system is intervening in cases where yes, [the] birthing parent is using drugs, but does that necessarily mean that they are not parenting adequately? We’ve made the leap that it must be true that if you’re a drug-using parent, you must be an inadequate parent. But that’s bullshit.” “We’re moving into this phase of psychedelics where people are using these as life-saving treatments. Literally. You don’t take away a life-saving treatment during pregnancy. We don’t have a framework for doing that with SSRIS, for example. We don’t have a framework for doing that with heart medication. So why are we thinking about this so differently?”
Rebecca Kronman, LCSW, is a licensed therapist, mother of two and founder of Plant Parenthood, a digital and in-person community of parents who use psychedelics. She is a psychotherapist with a private practice in Brooklyn, New York, where she offers ketamine-assisted psychotherapy and works with clients to prepare for and integrate after psychedelic experiences. She is also a writer, and wrote “Psychedelics and Pregnancy: A Look Into the Safety, Research and Legality” for us.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle speaks with integration specialist, past Navigating Psychedelics student, and Netherlands-based legal psychedelic guide, Liam Farquhar.
Farquhar talks a lot about trauma and how it needs a rebranding: how it’s a far more common part of life than psychiatry has led us to believe, and how it’s much more wide-ranging, in that whatever is overwhelming the body and causing its fight or flight response could really be anything. They talk about Covid-related burnout and the struggle for healthcare workers to show up for patients; how working through trauma is not a rational, “talk it out” process; how the body can’t differentiate between what’s causing it pain; the concept of the body keeping score while the mind hides it; and how the best way to work through trauma might be by physically shaking for long periods of time- an exorcism of energy.
He also talks about his “7 Lens” approach, Internal Family Systems as modern-day shamanism, Peter Levine, the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm (are we stuck in it?), Bernardo Kastrup and idealism, how the brain is a receiver (not creator) of consciousness, how our Self is our best healer, and the idea that even by defining “soma,” we’re separating the mind and the body. This one will definitely get you thinking, folks.
Notable Quotes
“Overcoming [trauma] is primarily a physiological process. Traumas in the body and overcoming it isn’t a rational process. It’s not a thinking process. It’s a much deeper process than that, and in fact, the more you can tune your rational mind down, I’ve found, the more an instinctual healing process can happen; a healing process that our bodies have evolved over millions of years to instinctively know how to do. Often the thinking mind gets in the way of that.”
“I think to say that you don’t work with trauma is to say that you don’t understand trauma.”
“All I do is provide a process using the model where the client interacts with their own parts [and] the parts then tell the client what they need. But the most important relationship to establish in Internal Family Systems is that between the client and their self, because it’s the self that’s always with them, and it’s the self that heals. The self does all the healing. So I simply just support that process. I don’t actually need to be too clever about it. All the answers, all the potential, all the wisdom is within the client.” “Just because we can’t make something falsifiable doesn’t mean it’s not true. We’re reaching the limits of what we can measure. We won’t be able to prove multiverse theory (if that’s true), but it’s not to say that it might not be true. And something like consciousness: How are we going to prove that, really?”
Liam Farquhar is a legal psychedelic guide and integration specialist, working between London and Amsterdam. He also does men’s group work and therapeutic work. He uses a ‘7 Lens’ approach that he developed as the foundation for all his services, combining: Internal Family Systems; Grofian (based on the work of Stanislav Grof); Jungian (based on the work of Carl Jung); Mindfulness; Scientific; Shamanic; and Trauma/Somatic. He is also a past Navigating Psychedelics graduate.
In this episode, Kyle interviews anthropologist, author, ethnomycologist, and now co-designer of a new Psychedelics Today course, Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D.
Like this episode, the course he worked on with Kyle is called “Psychedelics: Past, Present, and Future,” and this podcast serves as a brief overview of what the course goes much further into, from the landmark psychedelic events that brought us here, to the current models of psychedelic-assisted therapy, to the many career avenues that have opened up (and will continue to open up) as a result of this renaissance.
Brown discusses Albert Hofmann’s synthesis of LSD, Stan Grof’s first psilocybin experience, the Nixon administration and the beginnings of the drug war, Roland Griffiths and Walter Pahnke (and Rick Doblin’s follow-up research), the early end-of-life cancer and psilocybin study, the creation of the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, and how Gordon Watson’s betrayal of María Sabina mirrors a lot of what’s going on today between Indigenous tradition and the Western money grab.
He talks about the concerns over Compass Pathways and patent law, how legalization often follows medicalization, how Portugal has handled the drug war, why we need to know our history, and the importance of recognizing the different ways of knowing. And he gives a very detailed description of his life-changing psilocybin journey many years ago that led to the discovery of his soul’s code.
“There’s a difference between standing on the shoulders of giants and crushing the people who have gone before us.” “I was completely blown away by this Jungian synchronicity; this meaningful coincidence of a mental, psychedelic experience and something physical that happened in the world. How could they possibly be connected? But they were obviously connected. And this is the way I found what James Hillman (the psychologist) called my soul’s code.”
“That magic and that resacralization of life’s experience that people talk about; this is a real deal. I mean, if you think about it, many of the founders of the field had transformative, transformational psychedelic experiences that took them from where they were in one part of their life and brought them into working on psychedelics.”
“In both trials, the intensity of the mystical experience described by patients correlated to the degree to which their depression and anxiety decreased. I mean, let’s just think about what this means: We have white-coated shamans in a clinical laboratory administering a synthetic psychedelic to predictably occasion a mystical experience, which turns out to be the key to healing. This is amazing and brings psychedelics back to its shamanic roots.”
Jerry B. Brown, Ph.D., is an anthropologist, author, and ethnomycologist. He is a Founding Professor of Anthropology at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami, where he teaches an online course on “Psychedelics and Culture.” He also co-created the “Psychedelics: Past, Present, and Future” course for us. Professor Brown teaches and writes on psychedelics and religion as well as on psychedelic therapy. He is coauthor (with Julie Brown, LMHC, an integrative psychotherapist and also his wife) of The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, 2016.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe is in Pennsylvania, fresh from seeing Kyle in person for the first time in years, and they talk decriminalization, peyote, San Pedro, and the dark web.
They first discuss Seattle’s recent unanimous vote to decriminalize the cultivation and sharing of psilocybin, ayahuasca, and non-peyote-derived mescaline, and then look at the flip side of this win: Santa Cruz removing all mescaline-containing cacti from their decriminalization law put into place two years ago. And they wonder: Is San Pedro actually what could keep many people from eating the more endangered peyote? Is there enough research comparing peyote and San Pedro? And they look at the various opinions on the best way to move forward with this conundrum- could it be massive greenhouses growing as much peyote as possible?
They then talk about the news of dark web marketplace, White House Market, shutting down (or “exit scamming”) and the dark web in general: How it democratizes access to drugs; how huge it is for harm-reduction with its very open, Ebay-esque review system; how crazy it is that something so huge can exist with so few people knowing anything about it; and how these things will never truly go away due to the innovation that comes from prohibition.
They also discuss Joe recently recording with Hamilton Morris, South African quaaludes, Will Smith coming out of the psychedelic closet, the “Operation: Fast and Furious” blunder and the many ways our tax dollars are making cartels richer, Delta-8, and what “legal” really means. And after talking about our newlive course offering with Jerry Brown (starting October 26th), Joe attempts to freestyle a commercial forNavigating Psychedelics.
Notable Quotes
“Black markets are never going away. Prohibition never really works. People are creative enough to always work around it, and prohibition seems to incentivize people so that the stricter the rules, the higher-valued the thing is going to be. So there’s always going to be people breaking laws to smuggle and traffic and create when those things are prohibited.” -Joe “We [could] disempower large distribution networks by making it more democratic. If we care about cartel violence, if we care about American drug habits, [and] fueling violence and death in Mexico via potentiated cartels with lots of cash, then anything we can do to take power away from them (like publish secrets [and] publish methods) is good. …What do we have, over 100,000 deaths in Mexico related to the drug war in recent past? Is that worth your son not smoking pot or not ever trying cocaine? 100,000 deaths?” -Joe
“Even if we get to legalize-and-regulate, which is where I want it to be, we’re still going to have a fight ahead of us of like, do these laws make sense? Are they optimal for the culture we’re collectively designing? Or do we need to design our own alternate cultures? Perhaps that’s the solution.” -Joe
In this episode, Joe interviews Jessica Cadoch, MA: Medical Anthropologist, former Executive Director of the Montreal Psychedelic Society, and current Research Manager working at Maya Public Benefit Corporation.
She talks about her psychedelic path and two most important pieces of research: First, how the rites of passage one experiences at a psytrance festival emulates the traditional ritual structure (and how the reintegration back into society is the most important part), and second; the concerns for people in long-term recovery and 12-step programs using substances therapeutically, for getting off their problematic substances, and even recreationally (when those substances have been labelled “dangerous drugs” their whole lives).
She discusses Maya, a platform where psychedelic therapists can gain better insights into their practices by learning from one another’s reports, developing better, more consistent protocols, and creating better qualitative questions and measures for patients. She’s now seeing her main role as bridging the gap between nonprofits and for-profits.
And as this was the rare time Joe was able to record in-person, this episode feels a bit more conversational and far-ranging than some. They also discuss how people view different substances based on if they’re man-made or not, spiritual bypassing, Carl Hart and the dangers of drug exceptionalism, the need to decriminalize all drugs, the Nacirema people, 12-step programs and the risks of 13th steppers, how our culture views medicine as gospel, and how we all need to stop the in-fighting and division within our psychedelic communities and learn to work with the big corporations many are scared of.
Notable Quotes
“What is the real definition of ‘recreational’? It’s to recreate and to reconnect and maybe to fix things. So we have these really strange conceptions around recreational use being almost like an antithesis to therapeutic use.”
“I do not enjoy psychedelic exceptionalism, particularly because I did that. I did that with my best friend who died of heroin. I said, ‘My drugs are better than your drugs. You should come do LSD with me instead.’ And what did that do? It made her feel judged, it pushed me away further, and I almost didn’t get to speak with her before she died to say sorry. And that’s what psychedelic exceptionalism can do, is it puts people who are using other substances into a category lower and lesser.” “In thinking about where [we’re] going with this movement, it’s up to us. We get to write this script, and we get to be a part of it, which is why it’s really important to be in the conversations with the big companies rather than to run away from them.”
“The way that we believe in science is so cultural. We’ll believe it in the same way that another culture might have this faith in a sacrament or might have faith in a certain crystal or a rock. …We idolize the research paper.”
Jessica is a Medical Anthropologist working at Maya Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) as a Research Manager. As the former Executive Director of the Montreal Psychedelic Society, Jessica is passionate about bridging the non-for-profit and for profit world of psychedelic initiatives. With a particular interest in the intermingling of 12-step methods of managing addiction and psychedelic-assisted therapy, Jessica is concerned with ensuring that psychedelic practices are carefully and ethically integrated into modern Western society and culture. Email her at: jessica@mayahealth.com
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle discusses Hulu’s show, “Nine Perfect Strangers“ with previous guest, Dr. Ido Cohen.
If you haven’t watched “Nine Perfect Strangers” yet, it’s a show that takes place at a boutique wellness resort, promising healing to nine stressed city dwellers as they begin a 10-day retreat. This episode (which does contain spoilers!) focuses on the themes portrayed in the show and how they relate to the psychedelic space, looking at the role of community and accountability when abuse is happening within healing containers (whether at a retreat or in the larger community). They also look at the negative aspects of the show such as poor protocol, lack of consent, and the facilitator, Masha, having her own agenda and providing trauma treatment without being trauma-informed.
For those of us doing our own healing, how do we develop boundaries on saying no when something doesn’t feel right, but let those boundaries down when they take away something meaningful or helpful? How do we learn to discern when the space isn’t more important than the abuse within it? How do we distinguish between a desire for healing and a desperation for it?
Hopefully, shows like “Nine Perfect Strangers” open space for us to think together as a community and create more integrity, support, and honesty around facilitators and psychedelic retreats. And hopefully they also encourage us to become more empowered to acknowledge in ourselves when to draw the line when we don’t feel safe.
Notable Quotes
“When you open yourself up with plants or psychedelics, you really give the other person a non-verbal permission to look deeply at yourself. You’re really putting yourself in someone else’s hands in a very, very vulnerable way, even if you’re an experienced psychonaut.” -Ido
“I think when it comes to abuse, the lines should be very clear. If someone is touching someone inappropriately, that’s what it means. There is no working around it. If you feel repetitively shamed or you don’t feel safe in your body or you feel confused around someone repetitively, that’s a sign. “ -Ido
“Needing that element of death, a real threatening of our safety, does produce something within us at times. It gets us to some sort of experience that goes, ‘Holy shit, this is real.’” -Kyle
Dr. Ido Cohen is based in San Francisco, working with individuals, couples, and groups, and the Founder of The Integration Circle. Ido has been working with individuals and groups in the context of preparing, understanding, integrating, and implementing experiences from altered states of consciousness for the last 7 years. He also has supervised doctoral interns at the California Institute of Integral Studies for the last 4 years. Using Jungian, relational, and holistic psychologies, as well as eastern/shamanic and kabbalistic cosmologies, Ido believes in the ability to work psycho-spiritually and turn the lived experience into knowledge and a meaningful, embodied, and whole life.
In this episode, Joe interviews Boston-based teacher, coach, facilitator, and podcaster, Gibrán Rivera.
Rivera talks about the importance and benefits of group process: How we’re in a crisis of meaning and connection, and group work creates the structure of belonging so many people need. And they dig into the spectrum of healing itself: How so much Western psychedelic work is hyper-individualized, but over time, with spiritual maturation and self-sovereignty, the act of helping others can become a necessary part of one’s own healing journey.
He talks about affinity groups, how different groups can have their own distinct energy, and his “What Should White People Do?” project, which aims to add a mythos to the act of learning history and trying to improve on past mistakes. And he talks a lot about masculinity: How the recent focus on toxic masculinity, to many, has felt like a demonization of any masculinity, and how The Better Men Project aims to rethink masculinity as not only a good thing that’s needed in this world, but also as the perfect compliment to femininity; and how, to truly grow, it’s best to learn how to embody the best aspects of both and not repress the direction you’re most drawn to.
They also discuss Puerto Rico, how trauma can be weaponized, decentralization, the idea of saying ‘congratulations’ to news of divorce, how social movements often give people a license to hate, the concept of emergent consciousness dialogue, the commodification of experience, the dangers of focusing too much on the abstractions in psychedelic trips, rites of passage, Holotropic Breathwork, and the importance of shaking your hips.
Notable Quotes
“We live in a culture that yields anxiety, that yields depression, that yields loneliness. That is a crisis of meaning and a crisis of connection. And so, we can use these medicines to adapt ourselves to a culture that is unhealthy, or we can work with these medicines to actually shift the culture. But we don’t shift the culture just by improving our mental health and spiritual health. That helps, but it is about what we’re doing together that matters.”
“There’s something good in masculinity, something that the world needs. And we are here to try to remember what that is, to make it a conscious thing, to embody conscious masculinity rather than toxic masculinity. We have a well-developed discourse on toxic masculinity, but a very undeveloped discourse on what conscious masculinity is.”
“To the male psychonauts in this space: …this can be such a place where you discover so much of yourself, but if you’re doing it alone, if you’re tripping hard and only going towards abstraction, if you are not learning to come into your body, if your heart is not opening, if you’re not making yourself more vulnerable to others; all of that understanding, all of that awe, all of that seeing- you’re only getting halfway there. I just know so many psychonauts that are in that trip, in that super heady trip, and I’m just saying: Let the energy move down into your body, not just in your head, not just [being] in awe of what is happening. Feel it. Let your heart break. Let yourself be held. Do this work with others, and learn to become a person that way.”
Gibrán Rivera is a teacher, coach, guide, and Master Facilitator. He is devoted to the development of leaders and leadership networks. He works to help figure out how to thrive in times of VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity). Gibrán is the originator of the Evolutionary Leadership Workshop, host of the Better Men Project, and one of the teachers of What Should White People Do? His work brings close attention to dynamics of power, equity, and inclusion. He has designed and facilitated the coming together of some of the most prestigious fellowships in the country, and he specializes in transformational offsite retreats. His work is based on the understanding that our next evolutionary leap depends on trust and the currency of love, and he is devoting his life to defining better ways of being together in this world.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down and tackle a question we are often asked at Psychedelics Today: “How do I get involved in the psychedelic field?”
While Kyle wrote apretty helpful blog about this a few years back, they dig in deeper this time, really highlighting the various paths one could take, from the more obvious roles we typically see (therapists, clinicians, guides, trip-sitters, scientists, researchers, and journalists) to the less-discussed (politicians, marketers, artists, accountants, SEO experts, social media consultants, and more). It’s really about figuring out what skills you have and what you could bring to the emerging field, what solutions you could find answers to, and what’s realistic based on your experience, age, geography, willingness to learn, and degree to which psychedelics are involved. And would you still want to take that path if they weren’t? Could your path simply be doing what you’re good at for a company involved in psychedelics?
They discuss the benefits of volunteering, attending any event you can (to both learn and network), and even just starting a club and letting the power of community steer your direction. And they touch on a bit more: how some educational programs don’t allow the underground to participate, how body shame affects the body, and how somatic energy and bodywork can be enhanced by psychedelics. Hopefully this podcast helps you take your first step down a new and exciting journey!
Notable Quotes
“Models should improve over time, and you can contribute to us collectively evolving our models. And what is this relationship, long-term, that we’re trying to culture here between psychedelics and the human race? I think there’s a lot. How do we go ahead and manifest that mindset that might save the world from ecological collapse, [and] re-enable families to be healthy systems again? …There’s plenty of issues out there. You’ve just got to pick a couple or one or two and just really go for it. There’s no way any of us as individuals are going to take on every issue out there. Revel a little bit in your limited scope.” -Joe
“There are going to be limits to primate knowledge. This kind of brain is going to only go so far, so when we’re dealing with these really strange frontiers like psychedelics, we should just respect that. The mystery might just keep on going.” -Joe
“You can get involved in the psychedelic space. There’s plenty of room for everybody. This is going to be a really, really big space as things come more online, more states have legal access, more countries have legal access, [and] things are approved by the FDA. There’s going to be room for probably everybody who’s listening to this podcast today and more. So stay tuned, figure out where you want to go, get a nice foundation, and see if you can make some progress.” -Joe
In this episode, Joe and Kyle decided to celebrate 9/20 by sitting down with friend, writer, Editor in Chief of the blog, and past Solidarity Friday member, Michelle Janikian.
Before Michelle was part of the PT team, she was one of our more popular podcast guests (in a very mushroom-heavy episode), and the writer of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion, a safety-focused and informative guidebook highlighting the many ways mushrooms can be used. So it made perfect sense to spend the mushroom holiday episode checking in with her and talking some psilocybin. She talks about what inspired her to write the book, the importance of learning how to trip and fostering a relationship with mushrooms, how using mushrooms solely for personal healing feels self-centered and a bit boring, the common opinion of many psychonauts that you need to do a large dose for your first time, the concept of mushrooms as tricksters who may be trying to hurt you, the joy of foraging, how much we all tend to romanticize Indigenous culture and perceived wisdom, and the value of being honest with yourself about what you want out of a psychedelic experience and developing your own rituals. And she talks about what’s been biggest in her life recently: the time she spent living in the house she was raised in as her parents prepared it to be sold, and how doing mushrooms there after all these years not only made her feel reconnected to the house and its surrounding woods in a special way, but also gave her a ton of new gratitude for what her parents did to provide that for her. She feels much closer to her parents now and wants to have a mushroom or MDMA session with them- something many of us could benefit greatly from. If you want to win a free signed copy of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion and a whole host of other great mushroom and psychedelic-themed stuff, make sure to enter our huge 920 giveaway before it ends tonight at midnight! Happy Holidays!
Notable Quotes
“I feel like when folks only make their psychedelic work about healing, it seems a bit self-centered. It does feel a bit like if you make it all about yourself and healing your problems, …to the plant and the rest of the universe, [that] kind of seems a bit petty, perhaps. Not to be rude- we all deserve to heal ourselves, but I think that when we go in with just an intention to do that, we’re putting blinders on, …and we are not going to be able to see the rest of what’s going on here. It’s bigger than you.”
“Mushrooms are tricksters. We have to be a bit careful as a culture, welcoming mushrooms in. I mean, sure, let’s do it, they’re fun- they’re the life of the party. They should absolutely be part of our culture. But giving them so much responsibility, like healing mental illness of the world, for me, I don’t know if that’s actually the best idea, as someone who communicates and listens to them quite often.”
“People who use mushrooms are quite smart, and I think a lot of them are being ignored or not part of this new conversation, and that’s a shame. It shouldn’t be like that. I think a lot of them want nothing to do with this new clinical world either. They’re like, ‘Ehh, you can have that. I have my ritual, and it works for me.’ And I just want people to develop their own rituals and find out what works for them. That’s why I collected so many in one place, so you can kind of pick and choose what’s right to you. Everyone’s different. And in the true ‘think for yourself and question authority’ manner, Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion: It’ll help you figure it out. I don’t know if you really need everyone else telling you what to do. I think you know what you want to do, you’ve just got to listen.”
Michelle Janikian is a journalist and the author of Your Psilocybin Mushroom Companion (Ulysses Press, 2019), the down-to-earth guide that details everything you need to know about taking magic mushrooms safely and mindfully. Michelle actively covers psychedelic and cannabis education, harm reduction, and research in her work, which has been featured in Playboy, Rolling Stone, High Times, DoubleBlind Mag and others. Currently, she’s the editor-in-chief of Psychedelics Today and an occasional co-host of their podcast. She’s passionate about the healing potential of psychedelic plants and substances, and the legalization and de-stigmatization of all drugs. Find out more about her work on her website michellejanikian.com or follow her on Instagram (@michelle.janikian), Twitter (@m00shian) and Facebook (@Michelle.Janikian).
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle are joined by return guest Jesse Gould: Founder and President of the Heroic Hearts Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit helping military veterans find healing through psychedelic-assisted therapy.
Gould discusses the acceleration of the Heroic Hearts Project over the last few years and the need for UK and Canadian divisions, SB-519’s progress and how its pause can be seen as a good thing, Oregon’s trajectory and how what happens there will be a model to build on, how the container around a drug experience can make all the difference, how silly it is to put psilocybin through the same research ringer we put new drugs through, and his feelings on leaving Afghanistan and the trauma soldiers are already experiencing as a result.
And he talks about new allies and the many projects they’re involved in, how we need to look at what models haven’t worked and create ones that do, and the biggest challenges he sees right now: 1) creating more long-term, multidisciplinary, integration and community-based models of care, and 2) making sure that if these drugs go the medical, insurance-based route, we take care of the people who often fall through the cracks of those traditional systems. And he reminds us that while small failures are frustrating, it’s important to put things in context: Not every measure will be perfect and not every bill will pass, but slowly, many politicians are changing their minds, and every small step is just that- a stepping stone in the right direction.
It costs about $4,000 to drastically change 1 veteran’s life through the Heroic Hearts Project, so pleasedonate.
Notable Quotes
“They have the initial reaction, they have the stigma of ‘those are bad, those are for crazy hippies.’ But when they see what’s going on right now (the science, the people that are actually being helped, especially veteran communities), for politicians; it’s hard for them to ignore. And to their credit, a lot of them will listen to the evidence, listen to what people are saying, listen to their constituents (which is the point of the public servant) and change their mind.”
“A lot of enthusiasm around psychedelics is that they do a lot of the heavy lifting and they have all the fireworks and all the things that grab our attention, which can oftentimes overshadow all the small details before, after, and throughout that are absolutely essential.”
“The way to really empower voices and the way to make change, I think, is you have to heal trauma first. For people to actually come back, learn from their story, and help others, they need to be helped first. So that’s the first step that we’re trying to help out, because there’s nothing more powerful than a veteran that’s gone through a program, that’s been completely reaffirmed in their life.” “A lot of the people you see that are dedicating their lives or are advocates, or changing, about-facing on this; it’s because they’ve had personal healing or healing within their family. You’re starting to get other groups (the ones that are looking to make money and all this other kind of stuff) but the core group and the ones that continue to be the loudest voices are still those that saw the light, that saw healing. And so I think that comes with sincerity of trying to push it forward.”
Jesse Gould is Founder and President of the Heroic Hearts Project, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit pioneering psychedelic therapies for military veterans. After being deployed as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan three times, he founded the Heroic Hearts Project in 2017 to spearhead the acceptance and use of ayahuasca therapy as a means of addressing the current mental health crisis among veterans. The Heroic Hearts Project has raised over $350,000 in scholarships from donors including Dr. Bronner’s and partnered with the world’s leading ayahuasca treatment centers, as well as sponsoring psychiatric applications with the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Georgia. Jesse helps shape treatment programs and spreads awareness of plant medicine as a therapeutic method. He has spoken globally about psychedelics and mental health, and received accolades including being recognized as one of the Social Entrepreneurs To Watch For In 2020 by Cause Artist. Driven by a mission to help military veterans struggling with mental trauma, he is best known for his own inspiring battle with PTSD and his recovery through ayahuasca therapy.
In this episode, Kyle interviews psychiatrist, co-founder/CEO of Brooklyn Minds, and co-host of the Clubhouse show, New Frontiers: Carlene MacMillan, M.D.
MacMillan talks about the importance of systems: how there is a ton of work between FDA approval and actually getting drugs into the hands of the people who need them, and how we too often talk about the life-changing effects of psychedelics but not the importance of insurance companies being able to cover them (and having the infrastructure in place to handle it all). She talks about how many clinicians don’t want to offer ketamine because of costs but will offer Spravato due to insurance covering it, and how a colder, more clinical model of healthcare is exactly what many people are looking for.
And she discusses a lot more: How medicine needs to move from the procedure-based, fee-for-service model toward value-based care, why self-insured employers can be more flexible around mental health care, how the intentions of good people at insurance companies are halted by bureaucracy, the notion of nonprofits all being good (and for-profits all being bad), why public benefit companies are better for the future, why she’s worried we might see what we saw in medical cannabis again, and how we need to apply the same multidisciplinary approach we take in medicine toward our ideal vision of legal psychedelic care.
Notable Quotes
“Either it does nothing like it’s a bust, or it’s dramatic. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of: ‘Well, maybe it worked, I’m not sure.’ It’s really: ‘No, like, wow. I feel completely different. That suicidal voice in my head is just gone now.’ It’s just remarkable when it works.”
“I hear more about the interesting science and trials, and I hear stuff about accessibility in terms of scholarships and nonprofits and grants and things like that, and I think that’s all very important. But I think if we really want this to be mainstream and widely part of the mental health toolkit, we need to also really focus in on this insurance piece.”
“I’m very much for decriminalization and regulation. I think if you look at the dangers of most of these drugs compared to alcohol, they are far safer than alcohol. And I don’t think that they should be for children and I think they should be regulated and in moderation, but I don’t find a criminal approach is at all productive. It doesn’t fit with how we think about any of this.”
“People can’t ignore that system part of the equation and we really do need to think about how payment models and clinic models are going to be ready. I think of it like: people are building the planes and we need to build the runways. And so I would encourage people to get in touch to start to build those runways and airports so that we’re ready. Because the planes are coming.”
Carlene MacMillan, M.D. is the co-founder/CEO of Brooklyn Minds. She is a Harvard-trained adult and child psychiatrist who pioneers team-based and tech-enabled mental health care that helps individuals with complex psychiatric concerns live meaningful lives. She collaborates with stakeholders to build novel value-based (as opposed to volume-based) care models. Dr.MacMillan is also known for her role as the co-host of New Frontiers, an award-winning show on Clubhouse where mental health experts weigh in on aspects of our culture. She is an internationally recognized leader in Mentalization Based Treatment, collaborating with leaders at the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families. She is on the Clinical Advisory board of Osmind and a member of the Ketamine Taskforce for Access to Safe Care and Insurance Coverage. She is on the Clinical TMS Society Insurance Committee and is the co-Chair of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Consumer Issues Committee.
Jon Dennis, Esq. is a lawyer and activist in the psychedelics ecosystem and a consultant at the firm, 
