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
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“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
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“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.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle sit down for a discussion spanning spiritual emergence, the concept of the transpersonal, and a simple but huge question: What is healing?
They dissect the concept of healing and how it relates to psychedelics and inner work: Is the psychedelic experience always healing? What needs to be done to turn traumatic experiences into catalysts? Is it fair to relate the psychedelic experience and post-experience integration work to surgery and the body healing on its own? Can we create a realistic and affordable model for retreat centers with built-in, long-term, communal support systems? How do we know when to trust the radical insights psychedelics may steer us toward? And how do we prepare for the changes in relationships they may create as well?
And they discuss plenty more as it relates to these topics: The difference between spiritual emergence and spiritual emergency, Ben Sessa’s idea of MDMA as an antibiotic for psychiatry, Ram Dass’ idea of not starting down a spiritual journey unless one intends on finishing it, the work of Ken Wilber, Erik Davis and the mysticism in Grateful Dead lyrics, the challenge of earthly expectations, consensus and compromise, decadent mysticism, and the concept of a spiritual quest itself as healing.
Notable Quotes
“Maybe that’s a good way of looking at it: You’re having a massive intervention and then you heal afterwards. My tendons were so thrashed before a lot of my surgeries that I needed the surgery and then I needed to heal. The surgery wasn’t the thing that triggered the healing, but it set up the initial conditions from which I could then heal.” -Joe “Is there something about a spiritual quest that heals? I think, on a somewhat occasional basis, yes. …I think there’s something there. Intentionality and deep focus and reverence in the mystical experience; as we’ve seen at the Hopkins trials: the higher the mystical experience on the MEQ, the more healing. So there seems to be some sort of correlation there.” -Joe
“It’s normal, I think, to maybe not always feel healed even though a lot of the mainstream articles are kind of portraying it as that. And I think that’s the danger around not being honest about our own experiences and our own process, [and just] putting out the highlights of the experience [instead of] really just trying to be real and say there’s some challenging stuff that comes up. …People really just want to highlight the peaks. But there’s a lot of juice in the valleys.” -Kyle “A friend I was talking about earlier talked about all these other changes that happened in clinical trials and found a researcher attached to a major university that said, ‘Well, you know, I have seen some pretty dramatic relationship changes (outside of healing) in these folks that have gone through the trial.’ …What does that mean? And how do we prep people for that? Like, are you going to be able to stay with your wife after you’ve seen God two or three times in session?” -Joe
In this episode, Joe interviews Dr. Tiago Reis Marques: senior fellow at Imperial College, lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital, and CEO of Pasithea; a biotech company developing new drugs for the treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Although Pasithea is creating new drugs, Marques talks a lot about the importance of repurposing existing ones. Due to the insane complexity of the human brain and the myriad of possible problems one can experience; until we have new drugs to address everything, we need to use what we have. And he discusses how this repurposing process comes about: how companies have to run big, expensive trials to prove efficacy and do so while they still have the patent (because once they lose the patent, there’s no financial incentive to continue).
And as Pasithea is also offering at-home ketamine infusions (first in New York and California, but soon, all across the US), he talks a lot about ketamine: How it covers a wide range of disorders, the pros and cons of intramuscular ketamine and IV infusions, drug interactions, its similarities with other psychedelics, and the (maybe surprising) lack of side effects.
He also discusses how making a pharmacoeconomic analysis can show how a few expensive ketamine infusions could create incredible savings, why new drug development is a very high-risk, high-reward industry, what “responded” means in clinical trials, how Covid-related spikes in PTSD relate to the pandemic timeline, the importance of talking about mental health more, and what we can do with historical and outdated (but important) data.
Notable Quotes
“What you’ve seen in this revolution that is happening in psychiatry is [this] renaissance of substances that we consider …as bad [or] toxic and we’re actually using them again. We have laughing gas for treatment-resistant depression, we have MDMA for PTSD, you have ketamine for treatment-resistant depression, PTSD. …We’ve been rediscovering these drugs that we thought were lost [to] the dark side and we’re using them again.”
“If you look across the spectrum, the majority of disorders are rising in the field of psychiatry and that’s due to environmental conditions [and] now Covid. We see an exponential rise in psychiatric diagnosis and we see that a large majority of patients; either they do not receive the treatment (in this case, drug treatment, pharmacological treatment) or if they receive it, they experience side-effects, or they don’t like [it], or these treatments don’t show efficacy. So we need to create new drugs.”
“There’s always a problem with ketamine. Some of these patients end up relapsing after a period of approximately one month. But if you meet someone who has experienced PTSD symptoms, even one month of relief of symptoms is tremendously helpful. They make them live again. So, we’ll see a space for ketamine in the treatment of PTSD, for sure. Let’s hope the medical community embraces this.” “There’s people out there in the past that have tried things and there’s reports and so on, that any researcher that is reading them should read them in a way that’s at least [to] increase their curiosity for why, 50 years ago, someone tried this and experienced this. That’s a bit how psychedelics were rediscovered, because there were all these trials in the seventies that were completely forgotten until someone read them again and saw that they’d been used and they show efficacy. …So maybe a lot of research is just redoing it again using new methods, new drugs, new delivery ways (using brain imaging as a biomarker or response) and trying to improve our knowledge, just trying to not only replicate it but also adding something.”
Tiago Reis Marques is a senior fellow at Imperial College, a lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London and a psychiatrist at the prestigious Maudsley Hospital. The Maudsley Hospital and the Institute of Psychiatry constitute the largest psychiatry center in Europe and ranks among the 3 best in the world. During his research career, he has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, the Research Award from the Royal Society of Medicine’s psychiatry section and the Young Investigator Award of the International Congress on Schizophrenia Research. He is also a co-funder and CEO of Pasithea, a biotech company developing new drugs for the treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders.
In this episode, Joe and Kyle reflect back, revisit some drama, and talk about the future.
They first discuss how they started doing these Solidarity Friday episodes at the beginning of lockdowns and the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement, and how they felt that putting out more personal material in a time of upheaval and unprecedented uncertainty was the best contribution they could make.
Then they discuss the Instagram comments from Decriminalize Nature over the last few weeks and wonder why social justice movements often include such non-productive behavior (and why DN’s leaders maybe even encourage it). And they look at possession limits from the “decriminalization with possession limits is an oxymoron” perspective, imagine what a utopian, communal society that grew and provided mushrooms for each other would look like, and analyze why Scott Wiener seems to have willingly paused the movement on SB-519 until next year.
And they talk about a lot more: the lesser-known 9/20 holiday and our upcoming huge giveaway (stay tuned), the concept of naturalistic fallacy and the problem of determining what is natural, how there are great aspects to religion but people are often turned off by the religious parts, the scalability of drugs and its effect on the environment, Robert Anton Wilson’s idea of reality tunnels, the importance of taking a multi-context approach to psychedelics, and Rick Doblin’s recent op-ed about how not enough doctors are prepared for the psychedelic wave we’re currently being swept up in (which we’ve been saying since we created our Navigating Psychedelics course to address that very need- thanks for the support, Rick!).
Notable Quotes
“I get DN’s point here. I don’t want government getting in the way of my religion. But when I say I don’t want government getting in the way of me healing, that’s a different thing. …It’s not always the case that religion heals. I spent a lot of time and have a lot of family in the Catholic church. They don’t look healed at all.” -Joe
“There’s a lot of complexity here, and having simple answers is nice and probably comforting, but I don’t see them. I don’t see them as abounding. So, we need to come up with: What are our values, why are we doing this stuff, and what do we want to see created? …I’d like to see a post-prohibition future: No more drug war, people are safe, they’re educated on how to use all of these things, there’s real deal experts with centers globally where you can access all this stuff. I can be legal going to a Phish show, other folks can be legal going to Wu-Tang Clan shows, smoking tons of weed in front of the stage, sharing blunts with Method Man.” -Joe
“Legalize being human. People want to alter their consciousness. This is a human trait: Anything from spinning in circles to boozing to smoking cigarettes to whatever- we want to alter our consciousness, and it seems universal.” -Joe
“I think about all those people that put stuff out- the ideas. That’s the stuff that kept me going through some of those dark periods or this or that, just hearing Terence talk about things, just these folks that have been around for a while just spouting their visions for the future and how psychedelics could play a role in it. Some days where I was just deep in existential dread from what I was going through, those things kept me alive, just hearing these people’s visions and ideas of the future of how this could radically shift humanity. I’m like, ‘Whoa. Yes. Thank you. Thank you.’” -Kyle
In this episode, Michelle and Kyle interview Ph.D. candidate and return guest, Benjamin Mudge.
You may remember Benjamin Mudge from Solidarity Fridays episode 59, where he talked about the controversial topic of bipolar people taking psychedelics: something he knows a lot about as someone who has been managing his own bipolar disorder with ayahuasca for 12 years (to the point where he now considers himself “post-bipolar”).
In this “Part 2” episode, he discusses what his options are as a Ph.D. candidate who is certain he’s figured out a way to help save countless lives but doesn’t have a ton of expendable money, a massive team behind him, or a clearly defined path: What are the requirements necessary for creating a protocol for bipolar people? How can you prove efficacy and appease ethics departments the fastest? How do you actually begin a research study?
And he talks about a lot more surrounding bipolar disorder and ayahuasca: why people with bipolar shouldn’t have other reactionary substances with ayahuasca, why THC can amplify brain destabilization, the work of Dr. Leanna Standish and Dr. Victoria Hale, how clinical methods too often strip away spirituality in favor of reductionism and results, how “micro ceremonies” have helped save his life, the idea of “pharmahuasca” and maintenance medications, the importance of sacred reciprocity, and why the best path toward affordable access may be a combination of the efforts of nonprofits and for-profits.
Notable Quotes
“All I can say in truth is it’s a theory, but I honestly believe that I’ve worked out something that the community as a whole does not get yet, and that’s about how the other ingredients (harmaline and tetrahydroharmine) play a crucial role in the brew. And I’m aware that that’s a very arrogant thing for a guy without a PhD …to talk about, but this is what I believe I’ve figured out.”
“Every psychiatrist says to every bipolar person: ‘You need to take pills for the rest of your life.’ And actually, I agree with them. But I’m saying these could be freeze-dried ayahuasca or it could be pharmahuasca pills. It doesn’t have to be Seroquel. It doesn’t have to be something that numbs your creativity and your spirituality and your libido.”
“In a lot of ways, I would prefer to work with someone who’s going to make millions of dollars out of this if it’s going to get the medicine to my people quicker than working with [a] University or working with a not-for-profit like MAPS, who are going to take 20 years to do it.”
“This whole concept of pharmahuasca is really, really controversial. And quite frankly, it is, effectively, biopiracy in the sense of: it is taking an Indigenous, traditional medicine, turning it into a pill, and selling it in the Western market. There is a lot inherently wrong with that unless a huge amount of the profits from that goes back to the Amazon.”
Benjamin Mudge has a background in music, art and political activism, and is now a PhD candidate in the Psychiatry Department at Flinders University, as well as Director of Bipolar Disorder CIC. He taught himself the science of bipolar disorder, while working at Neuroscience laboratories and GlaxoSmithKline, to be able to manage his own personal experience of manic depression. After psychiatrists prescribed him 17 different pharmaceuticals (all of which were problematic), he gave up on pharmaceutical psychiatry and decided to find his own solution to living with manic depression. He has been managing his bipolar disorder with ayahuasca for 14 years – without any need of pharmaceuticals – and was awarded a PhD scholarship to research whether his personal protocol could assist other bipolar people. His future vision is to make ayahuasca ceremonies available to bipolar people as an alternative treatment to pharmaceutical drugs.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle do something a little different.
If you’re a regular listener of the podcast, you probably know a few things about the team by now: they try to feature lesser-known voices in the space, they believe there is no one-size-fits-all model for psychedelic-assisted therapy, and they’re open to multiple different possible pathways towards access to psychedelics. And while they recognize the dangers of over-medicalization as well as the corruption and massive profits seen so often in commercialization and big pharma, they also recognize that many lives have been saved as a result.
We were all pumped to have someone on the podcast from such a well-known and pioneering group as MAPS to break down SB-519 from an insider’s perspective and offer explanations for actions that may have seemed suspect (PTSF73, with Ismail L. Ali from MAPS). We thought it was pretty in line with what listeners have come to expect from the podcast. So imagine our surprise when what we thought was a harmless Instagram post promoting the episode was met with a bombardment of comments from Decriminalize Nature and their supporters, most of which were saying that we weren’t giving a voice to DN, with some even saying we were somehow in cahoots with MAPS and being paid to push a false narrative.
Rather than reply to every comment or feel bullied into immediately inviting representatives from Decriminalize Nature onto the podcast, Joe and Kyle decided to instead respond here in this episode. Enjoy!
Notable Quotes
“It seems to me to be an immature understanding of how politics in America works. It seems like these would be the people taking pitchforks and guns to the statehouse to do a revolution, but instead, they’re doing Instagram comments. And I get it- it’s probably not a good idea to do violence. But this is the vibe I’m getting: They’re really, really angry, they want total revolution. Do you get total revolution through Instagram activism? Probably not.” -Joe
“I’m more philosophically aligned with Carl Hart, which is calling out Decriminalize Nature as doing mental gymnastics to support their drugs of choice. And I want to see Black men and women out of prison. I want to see people of color no longer victims of the drug war. …I also see that we want people to be healed. Psychedelics can help people improve their lives and get better relationships (certainly has helped me). So what’s the way to do that? Is it total anarchy? Is it like, ‘Lets usurp the medical system’? It seems like DN wants to play outside the scope of the medical infrastructure. Fine, let them do that. It’s just, I’m on a different track.” -Joe “I want DN to win. I want DN to be successful. I also want DN (and I’ve said this many times on the show) to figure out how to have better relationships in this space. Because I hear that’s one of their fundamental issues, is they don’t have any great relationships in this space, and the excuse is that everybody’s in a cabal and out to get them. Perhaps you’re not compromising. Perhaps you’re not able to have reasonable conversations.” -Joe
“In a field that is sometimes boundaryless and ego-dissolving, it’s really important to have boundaries.” -Kyle
In this episode, Kyle interviews Dr. Devon Christie: Vancouver-based counsellor, instructor, and Therapeutic Services Director for Numinous Wellness Inc., and Will Siu, MD, DPhil: Los Angeles-based Psychiatrist. Both are MAPS-trained in MDMA-assisted psychotherapy and are currently co-investigators on a study investigating MDMA-assisted therapy for fibromyalgia.
They talk about chronic pain: how it overlaps strongly with PTSD, why MDMA is the best candidate for success in treating it, and how we can retrain the brain and shift our relationship in how we experience pain. And they talk about how psychedelics are great tools but also a risk for retraumatization: If the movement for access to these medicines outpaces both the science and the amount of people trained in helping someone work through an experience, could we be creating even more trauma?
And they discuss the mind-body connection: how implicit memories and lack of touch and reciprocal engagement can lead to a developing brain not learning how to manage pain; the concept of learned response looping, how to complete a survival impulse in an organized way, and the optimal arousal zone; how oppression and religious or cultural judgement changes one’s relationship with their body; and how learning more about the fascia could be the key toward understanding how the body’s different systems influence each other.
Notable Quotes
“Even in modern medicine, when people get sick, you can almost see this philosophical orientation of: ‘The body is not to be trusted; I’ve been betrayed by my body.’ There’s a lot of fear people have towards their bodies, which I think is perpetuated in how Western medicine holds things in general (not necessarily intentionally, but through the legacy of time), whereas in my post-graduate learnings and forays into somatics and trauma and functional medicine, it’s like: Actually, the mind-body split is false, and every single moment, my felt experience is informing my cognitive processes and my thoughts and vice-versa. And so I think where this then brings us, in terms of pain management, is needing to really acknowledge this as true and start to really empower people back into trusting the wisdom of their bodies.” -Devon “In my first intramuscular ketamine experience, I sat in my Doctor’s office and I was doing all these different movements, which, at the time I didn’t know what they were, but they were different yoga poses (yoga is nothing I’ve ever been into). But I was able to do [them] and flex and be more supple in so many different ways during my ketamine session, and that made very little sense to me at the time. …I wonder if ketamine- it’s so physically dissociative and it’s so unique compared to the other psychedelics- is it almost like opening up and loosening the unconscious of the fascia itself, and is that why we’re able to move and dance and flow from a physical nature much more differently than with other psychedelics?” -Will
“One of the things that we know in healing chronic pain is that we need to help people reconceptualize pain, and perhaps pain, instead of being this big, bad, awful thing that’s happened that I have to live with; well, what if pain had a voice? What would it be saying? If our body-mind is intelligent, then what is this manifestation of physical pain about? And to get curious about that and to then be able to explore it and with the help of psychedelics …there’s tremendous opportunity to really shift our internal relationship, not only in how we think about it, but truly in how we experience ourselves.” -Devon
“When we really shift our attitude and we have a very powerful emotional experience in terms of maybe reconceptualizing who we think we are [or] our relationship to our pain, and that has a very positive emotional valence, then there’s this opportunity that that’s really going to stay with us. If a traumatic experience can have such a lasting impact on us, well, why not also an extremely positive experience, and one that’s shared relationally, where we’re witnessed and there’s connection?” -Devon
Dr. Devon Christie, MD, is a clinical instructor with the UBC Department of Medicine and has a focused practice in chronic pain. She is a Registered Counsellor emphasizing Relational Somatic Therapy for trauma, and a certified Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction teacher (UCSD) and Interpersonal Mindfulness teacher (UMass). She is trained to deliver both MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD (MAPS USA) and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. She is passionate about educating future psychedelic therapists on trauma-informed, relational somatic skills and is co-founder of the Psychedelic Somatic Psychotherapy training program. She also teaches for the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) Certificate Program in Psychedelic Therapy and Research, the Integrative Psychiatry Institute Certificate Program in Psychedelic Assisted Therapy, and the ONCA Foundation Psychedelic Therapy program. She is currently Principal Investigator and study therapist for a Canadian MAPS-sponsored open-label compassionate access study investigating MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, co-investigator on a study investigating MDMA-assisted therapy for fibromyalgia, and is the Medical and Therapeutic Services Director with Numinus Wellness Inc.
Will Siu, MD, DPhil, completed medical and graduate school at UCLA and the University of Oxford, respectively, before training as a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School. He remained on the faculty at Harvard for two years prior to moving to New York City to further pursue his interest in psychedelic medicine as a practitioner and public advocate. Will is an advisor to Bexson Biomedical and People Science. He, along with Devon Christie, MD, and People Science, is preparing a pilot research study for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for fibromyalgia. Will has been trained by MAPS to provide MDMA-assisted therapy and maintains a private practice in Los Angeles. He teaches and supervises therapists and psychiatrists as part of his clinical practice.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, we’re back to the old school crew of Joe and Kyle again, this time with no news but plenty of conversation.
They first talk about the origin of Psychedelics Today and the first version of Navigating Psychedelics: how they found themselves wanting more and more to talk about transpersonal experiences and realizing they were living in a culture where professors didn’t want to talk about any kind of depth work, nobody at conferences seemed to know much about Stan Grof or Holotropic Breathwork, the drug war was raging on, and even Rick Strassman was telling Kyle that science doesn’t want to hear about the transpersonal.
From there, they discuss a lot more: How the limitations of humanistic psychology led to the creation of transpersonal psychology, what the term “transpersonal” entails, how different ecosystems demand different rules, the concept of negentropy, William James, the logistics of reincarnation, why it’s wrong to dismiss archetypal astrology, the idea of healing as a side effect of exploration, and the difficulty of creating a training manual for something as relational and process-oriented as Holotropic Breathwork or psychedelic therapy.
And they talk about their goals with Psychedelics Today: Learn to work with the nuance and wild complexity that lives in all parts of this psychedelic renaissance, take small steps to achieve small goals, remember to live passionately and not fall into a capitalistic rat race, and most importantly; to do their best to work together with everyone else in this space to make this more of a community.
Notable Quotes
“Thinking about psychedelics in general and psychedelic therapy, do we create these highly detailed protocols around the therapy, or do we understand the art of it and leave space open for more of a process-oriented approach and understanding that there’s a lot of nuance and it’s really hard to proceduralize some of this stuff?” -Kyle
“Study a particular science far enough and you’ll see that the science ends at a certain point.” -Joe “It doesn’t make sense. All of this stuff doesn’t make sense. We’re paying tax dollars to incarcerate people for not hurting other people …when we could be spending those dollars to help us survive the next 50 years better by spending on climate projects. Why is it better to lock families up for generations than to save countless lives in the future and preserve biodiversity on the planet?” -Joe
“What is existence other than chaos with a little bit of rhyming with the past?” -Joe
In this episode, Kyle and Michelle interviewreturn guest, Manesh Girn: Ph.D. candidate in Neuroscience at McGill University and co-author of over a dozen scientific publications, most recently on the neurocognitive processes behind creative thinking and the potentiality for psychedelics to enhance creativity.
Girn explains neuroplasticity and how it relates to the default-mode, salience, and other networks; how his paper maps the similarities between psychedelic mind states, dream states, and different types of thought; the distinctions between objective, subjective, spontaneous, and deliberate creativity; the difference between psychological and cognitive flexibility; how it’s an oversimplification to so strongly attribute ego dissolution to default-mode network interconnectivity, and how psilocybin affected people’s creativity and perceived insightfulness in a recent study inspired by his paper.
He also looks at some philosophical concepts from a scientific perspective: Do we really understand what ego dissolution is? Do ego death and a mystical experience always have to go hand-in-hand? Could a crazy idea that science wouldn’t qualify as “novel and useful” actually lead to both (after integrating the experience)? And is the true benefit from psychedelics in learning how to use the biological benefits of neuroplasticity in harmony with self-analysis and taking consistent steps toward lasting change?
Notable Quotes
“People are just thinking that psilocybin and LSD might be similar, but the thing with ketamine is that usually, you have to take repeated dosing. The effects maybe last a week, 2 weeks if you’re lucky, and then you [have] to do it again. And that’s because, I believe, in that context, you’re not working through the psychological content that emerged, you’re not making real, lasting change. You’re just getting this little push for a bit, and then you fall back into your patterns. And you get a push and you fall back. And if you want to be cynical, pharmaceutical companies will like that model because that means you’re a returning customer, indefinitely.” “We’re not just brains that are just disconnected from the external environment, just floating around in our heads. We’re deeply intertwined with the collective, with society, with people around us, with our nutrition, with everything going on. So therefore, taking all of these things into account [is] important, not just: ‘Forget the whole systemic cause for your issue; take this drug and maybe you’ll feel better’ in almost a Brave New World-type way. And that’s the standard way of approaching it a lot of times. So it irks me when they try to put psychedelics into this box too with these different things, which I think often, are just based [on] a fear of altered states and a fear of facing your inner demons a lot of the times. It’s like, why do that when you can take a drug and feel better, artificially?” “Obviously psychedelics aren’t a panacea that are going to work for everybody and solve everything, but I think what they do do is they draw attention to the need for inner work and the possibility of radical change, of personal transformation. Because a lot of people in their 30s, 40s, and above, perhaps, are like, ‘Oh this is who I am now. This anxiety, this depression, these bad habits: that’s just me. That’s just who I am’, which is a profoundly limiting narrative to take on, but a lot of people have that. And I think not even going through a psychedelic experience themselves, but it’s seeing other people in the media or their friends being able to change; they’re like, ‘Oh, there’s hope for changing and there’s hope for transformation.’”
Manesh is a Ph.D. candidate in Neuroscience at McGill University and has been lead or co-author on over a dozen scientific publications and book chapters on topics including psychedelics, meditation, mind-wandering, and the default-mode network. His Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the default-mode network and he is also conducting research on the brain mechanisms underlying LSD, psilocybin, and DMT in collaboration with Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris and others from the Imperial College London Center for Psychedelic Research. In his free time, he also runs a YouTube channel, The Psychedelic Scientist, where he discusses the latest findings in psychedelic science in an easy to understand, but non-superficial form.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe and Kyle are joined by lawyer and lead Policy Council at MAPS, Ismail L. Ali.
In the teams’ past coverage of Scott Wiener’s Senate Bill 519, there has admittedly been some confusion about what exactly it entails, as well as judgments made without hearing from someone on the inside. So we felt it was time to have someone on the podcast who could explain it to all of us better, and Ali was the perfect candidate, having just been a witness at the California State Assembly Health Committee hearing on SB-519 and a member of MAPS (who has been working with Wiener’s team).
And he goes into SB-519 in depth: how it sets the groundwork for future reforms, why they went a different direction than Oregon, how MAPS has been involved, why the bill has changed (concerning expungement, ketamine, and possession limits), what lawmakers are most concerned about, Decriminalize Nature’s issues with the bill, and what he hopes comes next. He also talks about his path towards psychedelics and his family history with ayahuasca and facilitation, his concerns over monopolies and repeating the mistakes of the cannabis industry, what he’d like to see replace D.A.R.E., drug exceptionalism, and the importance of recognizing celebratory drug use as a legitimate healing tool.
Notable Quotes
“A lot of the media attention it’s gotten has been focused on it as a psychedelic decriminalization bill, but one thing that I just want to acknowledge is that it’s a little bit broader than that, in the sense that it also sets what I believe to be some really critical groundwork for future drug decriminalization or even regulated, adult-use legalization.” “The idea that not having named limits means unlimited possession is not real. What that means is that it’s unknown until there is an arrest and a case that determines [it], in which case it’s going to be the judge [or] the prosecution determining what that limit is, as opposed to the people who are actually advocating in support of the bill.”
“What if we decriminalized some of these psychedelic substances based on the premise that they’re safer, or based on the premise that they’re good for you in certain cases, in certain situations? I feel that that could really undermine efforts to be decriminalizing on criminal, legal, or human rights grounds- where it doesn’t matter if the drug is good for you or not, people shouldn’t be thrown in jail for ingesting it. I think that’s another sticky point that I think we, as a movement, really need to be talking about so we’re not leaving behind users of other drugs.”
“If we know that a drug is more likely to be adulterated, is more likely to be a risk, why are we keeping it in the underground, where there’s no accountability for people who adulterate it with substances that are significantly more harmful?”
Ismail L. Ali is Policy & Advocacy Counsel for MAPS, where he advocates to eliminate barriers to psychedelic therapy and research, develops and implements legal and policy strategy, and coordinates support for clinical research in Latin America. Ismail is licensed to practice law in the state of California and also serves as Vice-Chair of the Students for Sensible Drug Policy Board of Directors. Ismail earned his J.D. at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law in 2016, after receiving his Bachelor’s in Philosophy from California State University, Fresno, in 2012, where he also studied writing and Spanish-language literature. As a law student, Ismail served as co-lead of Berkeley Law’s chapter of Students for Sensible Drug Policy and worked for the ACLU of Northern California’s Criminal Justice and Drug Policy Project, and the International Human Rights Law Clinic at Berkeley Law. To first support his work at MAPS, Ismail received Berkeley Law’s Public Interest Fellowship. Ismail believes that psychedelic consciousness is a crucial piece of challenging oppression in all of its forms, and that legal access to psychedelics is an essential part of a progressive drug policy paradigm. He hopes to help develop and advocate for just, equitable, and creative alternatives to the failed war on drugs.
In this episode, Michelle and Joe interview writer, psychedelic advocate, and creator of the online community and non-profit, Black People Trip: Robin Divine.
Divine talks about her path from pandemic depression and knowing nothing about psychedelics to becoming a figurehead, mentor, and people-connector through her Black People Trip Instagram account. She talks about how psychedelics are not seen as options in the Black community partly due to a fear of being arrested, but also because so few Black people are open about therapy, and even fewer talk about psychedelic use. She discusses ways to destigmatize psychedelics in the Black community, the challenges of quickly becoming a representative for others in a new field, the difficulties of living paycheck-to-paycheck and trying to take time to integrate an experience, the extra work and small pieces of “fuckery” BIPOC people have to deal with that so many people don’t think about, “The Gods Must Be Crazy”, Carl Hart, drug exceptionalism and privilege, and the racism of the drug war.
And she talks about all she hopes to do with Black People Trip: a 4-week course on the basics of psychedelics, safety, and trip-sitting, a psychedelic equity fund for Black women, a BIPOC-centered conference, and the continued encouragement of more Black people getting involved in this space. If you follow Black People Trip on Instagram, you know that her last few months have been, in her own words, “hot trash,” and she could use some help. Donate via herGoFundMe or Venmo (@divinerobin) to help her get back to helping others.
Notable Quotes
“I think it’s going to be on Black people to actually get out into neighborhoods and share their own stories and teach each other, because honestly, for me, it helps for me to learn from someone that has a shared history and that looks like me and that I can relate to. I don’t want to go to a conference and hear from a white woman that has a different life story than me. I just can’t relate to that. I can’t relate. It’s all love, but I can’t relate. …I did a very brief ad campaign on my own page just to share Black folks’ stories. People were like, “Oh yes, I want to see more of that.” And it was really so simple, but just seeing someone’s face that they can connect with made a huge difference.”
“I’ve had so many women tell me that they’ll go to a group and they’re the only one. And they’re like, ‘Yeah, it was fine, but I wanted somebody else there.’ So I really want to create spaces where we aren’t the only– we’re it.” “We’re big on church. We love our church. I don’t, but a lot of Black folks do. And so the answer is supposed to be [that] if something is wrong, go to church. Pray it away, go repent or whatever we do, and mental health is not for us. Again, it’s something that white folks do. ‘We shouldn’t need that.’ So when people do go to therapy in the Black community, we’re seen as crazy, we’re labeled as weak, and who wants that? So we avoid it, and if we do go, we don’t talk about it. Me? I love therapy. I go twice a week. I tell everybody about it.”
“I’m in full support of Black-only spaces, the same way I’m in full support of queer-only spaces and women-only spaces. Sometimes you just don’t want to be on guard.” “I think about my own family and our own history of trauma and how I can literally visibly see it just being passed down. And I think if we had been able to sit together, Grandmother, Mother, and me, and just do mushrooms or have MDMA, how different would our lives be right now?”
Robin Divine is a writer, psychedelic advocate, and the creator of Black People Trip: an online community with a mission to raise awareness and create safe spaces for Black women interested in psychedelics.
Robin discovered psychedelics last year as she searched for relief from the symptoms of chronic depression. As she became more involved in the community, she noticed a definite lack of diversity. As a result, she started Black People Trip. Her goal is to raise awareness about psychedelics in marginalized communities. She is also in the process of establishing the Entheogenic Equity Fund, a non-profit which will raise funds to help make psychedelic therapy more financially accessible and available to Black women. Donations accepted via Vemno: @divinerobin
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, we’re back to the original team of Joe and Kyle, who start with some good PT news: the successful launch of our first Australian edition of Navigating Psychedelics, a “partnership of sorts” with Fruiting Bodies Collective, and a few teases of more big things to come…
They first discuss psychedelic research company, Numinus, being granted approval by Health Canada (essentially Canada’s FDA) to study MDMA-assisted therapy, and later discuss Michael Pollan’s newest book, This Is Your Mind On Plants and his previous works. And they report on the launch of The Psychae Institute, a $40m psychedelic medicine institute in Melbourne that will be studying MDMA and likely DMT (which would somehow only be the second study?!).
But most of this episode centers around two topics that keep coming up. First, sexual ethics and power dynamics within the facilitator-experiencer relationship: When is touch ok? What’s the real purpose behind it? Is the facilitator aware of what their actions could be doing? Can you trust them? How do you fully establish consent, and how do you trust someone’s consent when they’re in a non-ordinary state? Is it possible to have a psychedelic session without sexual energy coming up? And when is it ok for a facilitator and experiencer to have a relationship?
And the second big conversation is a classic, but pondered from a slightly different angle: Why do we mistrust big corporations and big pharma so much, when many of us can thank them for saving our lives? And this leads down many roads: Peter Thiel, Fauci, SB-519 possession limits, the social contract, and why lying is sometimes necessary.
Notable Quotes
“The question is, if you are in that position of power: What’s your intention for touching or doing any sort of bodywork? Do you feel that it would be beneficial, or is the person actually asking for it?” -Kyle “[A friend asked me:] Is it possible to have a psychedelic session without sexual energy coming up? And I think his point was no, you can’t, and it’s kind of just something that you have to deal with. And are you mature enough to be able to have that restraint in sessions? A lot of people aren’t. I’ve certainly felt plenty of that. Breathwork, psychedelic sessions, festivals, concerts, the works. It’s everywhere. As soon as people are amplified, sexuality’s amplified and it can throw a big wrench in things.” -Joe
“What does the FDA tell us we should eat? What does science in 2021 tell us we should eat? What are doctors telling their patients [about] how to eat? Is it based on industry-manipulated science from 20, 30, 40 years ago? Or is it based on 2021 data? When doctors are suggesting a Mediterranean diet, that’s based on data. When they’re suggesting FDA-approved food pyramid stuff, that’s just an industry scam, and that’s pretty well documented. These are problems. When your profession has been manipulated more than once by industry, there’s going to be a reason why people don’t want to believe you.” -Joe “What is the agenda here with some of these companies? Do they just want to come in and make billions of dollars and they don’t give two shits about us? It’s all about the money? Or, are some of these companies actually really wanting to help and it just takes a massive amount of capital to do research and to produce these molecules and medicines to get out to the public and to create the systems that we need to properly support people moving forward?” -Kyle
In this episode, Joe interviews philosopher, author, and assistant professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco: Matthew D. Segall, Ph.D.
Segall discusses the relationship between consciousness and neuroscience: how science is helpful, but ultimately amounts to just one of many different tools towards describing consciousness (not truly understanding it), and how science, philosophy, and religion need to focus on their specialties but also work together towards better defining the human experience. And he talks about the importance of philosophy in trying to make sense of non-ordinary states of consciousness.
As this is a very back-and-forth, philosophically-based conversation, they talk about a lot more: William James, David Ray Griffin’s concept of “hardcore common sense presuppositions,” Richard Dawkins, scientism, positivism, how we’re slowly thinning the line between technology and humanity, Timothy Leary and whether or not anyone really “dropped out,” German idealism, how capitalism co-opts everything, John Cobb, Alfred North Whitehead, Universal Basic Income, the death denial in capitalist life, and how to use the relationship between the internet and capitalism to improve society.
Notable Quotes
“The thing about capitalism is that it lives inside each of us at the level of our desires and our drives because we’ve been shaped by it. So we can’t pretend like it’s this big, bad monster out there that other people believe in. The problem with capitalism is that it’s not just a worldview you decide to believe in or not; it is the very structure, again, of your desires and your sense of identity. It’s inside of you.”
“They say cannabis causes problems with motivation. Well yea, once you see through the value structure of our society, you lose motivation to participate because it’s no longer appetizing to you to engage in the rat race.”
“Fifty years later, after Leary was saying ‘Turn on, tune in, and drop out’, a lot of people thought that they followed his instructions, but again, capitalism co-opted the whole hippie movement, and by the 90s, they were selling Che Guevera t-shirts at the shopping mall and Apple was using the Beatles to sell computers.”
“The way that liberals tend to think about these questions [is that] they get really mad at Facebook for being biased in what ads they allow and not censoring certain things and selling ads to Russians and stuff. …A publicly traded corporation has one purpose: to maximize shareholder profits. And that’s the business model for Facebook, and so they’ll take money from anyone who wants to sell ads. They’re a private company. They’re not a public utility that has anywhere in its corporate charter as part of its mission: ‘improving civil society’ or ‘helping America maintain its democracy.’ Why would we expect a private corporation to do that? There’s no incentive in capitalism for that. And yet we get mad and blame Mark Zuckerberg. Why aren’t we blaming capitalism? That’s where the source code for this problem is.”
“Psychedelics aren’t necessarily going to wake us up, but I think that’s why we need philosophy. These substances and these experiences need to be contained within a meaningful story and a meaningful theory of reality so that we can make sense of what we’re experiencing and integrate it, and not only come out of those experiences with a profound sense of what’s wrong with our society, but with at least a good idea for what we’d like instead.”
Matthew D. Segall, PhD, is assistant professor in the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness program at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, where he teaches courses primarily on German Idealism and Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy. He is the author of Physics of the World-Soul: Whitehead’s Adventure in Cosmology (2021) and has published journal articles and book chapters on a wide range of topics including panpsychist metaphysics, media theory, the philosophy of biology, the evolution of religion, and psychedelics. He blogs regularly at footnotes2plato.com. His current research focuses on the panpsychist turn in contemporary philosophy of mind and its implications for the scientific study of the origins of life and consciousness.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, it’s a crew of two again, but this week, it’s the “Jersey Boys”: Kyle and David.
They first have an in-depth conversation about depth psychology (yes, I meant to do that), discussing James Hillman, the idea of soul existing in everything, the different ways one can connect more with their mind, the difference between dark and golden shadows, and how psychiatry is thankfully moving more towards an emotional-based, transdisciplinary model. And they ask some great questions: How could science explain synchronicity? How does one interact with an archetype? How do you measure the soul? When you hear a song and are instantly taken back to a memory and feeling (and even a smell) from the past: How on earth do you measure that?
They then discuss the DEA and its reach: What should the DEA’s power and focus be and how does it relate to both the Right to Try Act, seen through attorney Kathryn L. Tucker and two patients requesting end-of-life psilocybin, and in the DEA’s denial of Soul Quest’s religious freedom exemption application? In an era when classic, mainstream religion is slowly being replaced by more freeform spirituality, what authority does the DEA have to decide what is religious or not, and why do they still use their antiquated exemption policy?
And they also discuss more progress in law, particularly in the Northeast: Massachusetts lawmakers discussing a bill to create a psychedelic legalization task force (that will also look at pardons for past convictions), and Pennsylvania working on legislation to authorize the clinical study of psilocybin, with a focus on something which massive corporations and the DEA pay very little attention: cost-benefit optimization.
Notable Quotes
“[It’s] become too analytical and too cognitive. We’re trying to always make sense of the image or the archetype vs. what does it feel like to feel that image? What does it feel like to embody that archetype?” -Kyle
“I love that you’re using the word ‘love’ as an important emotional energy to give to those dark parts of our shadow, hopefully to transform it into a more golden shade of our shadow. Because we’ve become so starved of love inside and we have, I think, just so much blame and stuckness from our past.” -David
“It’s great that we’re bringing attention, because it does kind of act as a catalyst. I think we’ve spoken about Right to Try, we’ve spoken about religious liberty, we’re speaking here about state-level and DEA and FDA- each of these [are] different pathways of changing the law and of giving accessibility. There’s going to be a range of options when it actually does settle down, and it’s great that there’s just more and more of this happening. …We’re seeing this really overwhelming, powerful message that this has to happen soon and that it will happen soon.” -David
In this episode, Joe interviews freelance writer Jasmine Virdi, who, in addition to writing for Chacruna and Lucid News, has been writing for us for the last year and a half.
She tells the story of her path toward becoming a psychedelic-focused writer: An early interest in mysticism to a high-dose solo psilocybin experience, to volunteering with David Luke at a retreat in Wales, to eventually interning at the Institute of Ecotechnics, which led her to Synergetic Press. They talk about peyote conservation and the IPCI, 5-MeO-DMT and the protection of toads, how ayahuasca churches and facilitators have dealt with Covid, and the concept of plant medicines protecting people from Covid and other diseases.
They also talk about neurodivergence and how psychedelics could help autistic individuals, the environmental impact of having kids, panpsychism, Hamilton’s Pharmacopeia, how language has changed us, the concept of “slow is smooth,” perennialism, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, and more.
Notable Quotes
“Culture moves so fast nowadays. …We need to move at the pace of nature in order to align ourselves with its values.”
“A general trend among facilitators is that they had noticed [that] throughout Covid, they actually felt the demand for ayahuasca ceremonies increasing as opposed to decreasing. …I think it kind of speaks to the fact that the world is in dire need of healing, and also, maybe people are connected with a sense of what they really value and want to move towards when they’re confronted with their own mortality. And building community is now more important than ever, and I think a lot of people find community in plant medicine circles.” “I don’t think that psychedelics are the only answer or even the answer, but for me, I feel so passionate about them because they have been tools in turning me onto what I feel are greater parts of this reality.”
Jasmine Virdi is a freelance writer in the psychedelic space. Since 2018, she has been working for the independent publishing company Synergetic Press, where her passions for ecology, ethnobotany, and psychoactive substances converge. Jasmine has written for Psychedelics Today, Chacruna Institute for Plant Medicines, Lucid News, Cosmic Sister, Psychable, and Microdosing Guru. She is currently pursuing an MSc in Spirituality, Consciousness, and Transpersonal Psychology at the Alef Trust with the future aim of working as a psychedelic practitioner. Jasmine’s goal as an advocate for psychoactive substances is to raise awareness of the socio-historical context in which these substances emerged in order to help integrate them into our modern-day lives in a safe, culturally sensitive, ethically-integral, and meaningful way.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, the crew of five from last week has been whittled to two, with Joe and the new guy (David) getting into a discussion about cynicism, mysticism, and well-being.
They first look at Senate Bill 519 again, after a listener wrote in to correct them about their understanding of social-sharing and to suggest that they were too critical in last week’s episode. And they wonder: Have we, as a subculture, become so cynical that we can’t see any progress as good enough? Has the perfect too often become the enemy of the good?
They then discuss an article stressing the need to acknowledge and attempt to study the mystical (weird) part of psychedelics that can’t be measured by changes in neuroscience, with David telling us the story of his path to Psychedelics Today involving a near-death experience with a space heater, witnessing an exorcism, and a mushroom-inspired “experience of madness.”
And they talk about a lot more: A study that measured improvements in well-being and the difficulty in defining such an open concept (the word of the day is “eudaimonia”), the star-studded panel Joe moderated this week, Kabbalah, permaculture, and the idea of thinking outside of financial terms with different forms of capital.
Notable Quotes
“We have a choice. Do I stand my ground and do I insist on getting everything that I deserve, on insisting on the change that is right, on the change that is needed that we all know is what we deserve? Or do we make these political deals and compromises and concessions and sacrifices, again, just because it’s a step in the right direction?” -David
“How do we have faith in all these various institutions that have done so much really gross stuff, and continue to participate in this democracy that doesn’t feel that way sometimes? And that’s the cynicism that I feel regularly, but then I go, “Okay, I can feel cynical, but the only way to make good change is to be involved.’” -Joe
“If capitalism can be used (and its meeting point with psychedelics) to create a model that enables mass scaling, and safe, responsible use, and accessibility to psychedelics, because of the mass scale of mental illness and ontological crisis and desperation; well, okay, then maybe that’s a pill worth taking. Because boy, do we need something right now that’s not just a Xanax or a Prozac or a 45-minute talk session. We need more than that on an individual and societal level. So I’d be willing to kind of dance with the devil of hyper-capitalism if it actually enables that kind of merging of minds to happen.” -David
In this episode, Joe interviews Daniel Moler: author, artist, comic book creator, and sanctioned teacher of the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition (a form of Peruvian shamanism).
Moler talks about the Psychonaut Presents comic series he writes and illustrates, which delves into his experiences with consciousness exploration, most notably in his first ayahuasca experience and the subsequent experiences he’s had through his shamanic training. And he talks about his pathway to shamanism, the attention shamanism places on the act of service and bringing wisdom from the experience back into the world, and the importance of finding your flow and aligning with its current.
He discusses San Pedro: how much he loves it, how he uses it in conjunction with Singado, and how it enhances his facilitation work. And he talks about Alan Moore, the Kamasqa Curanderismo Tradition, Terence McKenna, Aleister Crowley, Chaos Magick, Rick Strassman, how Christian and Catholic-based iconography became a part of Indigenous traditions, and how the worlds of science and traditional Indigenous culture could learn from each other for the betterment of all.
Notable Quotes
“There are Christian shamans. There are Islamic shamans. There’s shamans from various types of pagan traditions. So it doesn’t have to be locked into this framework of: ‘Oh, it’s only Indigenous tribal peoples that have a shamanic framework.’ Because shamanism is just about having that direct experience with the world of soul and then expressing that, bringing that out into the world in a way that helps benefit the planet. There’s a lot of controversy around the word, but I’ve, over the years, just learned to kind of shun that. It’s the word we have right now. It’s what we’re using.”
“When you have found your soul’s purpose, you have found a way to operate in the universe where the universe works along with you to help align your life in the direction that you would like it to lead.”
“A vital component of shamanism is that everything has a consciousness. Everything is alive, and especially these medicines. They’re not tools. Some people refer to these as shamanic tools. That would be like referring to my wife as a tool, or to you as a tool in this conversation. You’re a consciousness and I’m a consciousness and we’re two people participating together.” “Don’t just follow some kind of ritual paradigm, because it may not work. You’ve got to do what works for you, so find a method and a formula that works. And you know it’s going to work and that it’s going to be valid for you because every time you do it, it works. You have repeated, repeatable results.”
Daniel Moler is an author, artist, and astral entrepreneur. He is writer, artist, and creator of the hit comic seriesPsychonaut Presents, the author ofShamanic Qabalah: A Mystical Path to Uniting the Tree of Life & the Great Work from Llewellyn Worldwide, as well as the psychedelic urban fantasyRED Mass, and the Terence McKenna guidebookMachine Elves 101. He has also made contributions in Ross Heaven’s bookCactus of Mystery: The Shamanic Powers of the Peruvian San Pedro Cactus andLlewellyn’s 2020, 2021, and 2022 Magical Almanacs, among numerous other articles in journals and magazines around the world. In April 2019, he was noted asAuthor of the Month by best-selling author and researcher Graham Hancock. Daniel is a sanctioned teacher of the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition, a form of Peruvian shamanism brought to the U.S. by respected curandero don Oscar Miro-Quesada. Visit Daniel online atdanielmolerweb.com.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Joe, Michelle, Kyle, and David are joined by pastNavigating Psychedelics student and Ph.D. candidate in Neuroscience at McGill University, Manesh Girn.
Everyone was excited but also extremely confused about last week’s story on psilocybin inducing “rapid and persistent” growth in the dendritic spines of mice, so we thought it made a lot of sense to bring a friend on the show who understands this stuff and can explain it to those of us who don’t regularly study neuroscience. What are dendritic spines? What does “learned helplessness” mean? How about elevated excitatory neurotransmission? What is a “head twitch response”? Ketanserin? Girn thankfully explains it all and stays with the team for this week’s news.
They first review Michael Pollan’s recent op-ed in the New York Times titled, “How Should We Do Drugs Now?”, which unfortunately focused on medical and Indigenous-use as the only reasonable paths forward, and gets everyone questioning why drug use for pleasure isn’t viewed as therapeutic, where our responsibility lies as members of the media when it comes to drug safety, and how harm reduction and safety measures can increase stigma around drug use. They also talk about Senate Bill 519’s progress and the wrong turn its committee recently took in removing social-sharing from the bill, the normalization of DMT use (and the idea of “needing an escape”), and how Michelle is trying to meet aliens.
Notable Quotes
“In humans, how I think about it, is that the neuroplasticity just gives your brain more resources to encode the insights and the experiences that you go through. So you have this radical experience where you might have insight into your patterns, into your traumas, etc., but then in order to last in a lasting way in your brain, you need some degree of neuroplasticity and it’s kind of giving you the push there. I think they both synergize with each other. I think if you have this boost in neuroplasticity, you can really exploit and leverage it with conscious intention.” -Manesh
“I think a lot of folks are creating their own rituals which do ground them, and they don’t have to be appropriations of Indigenous culture or appropriations of the medical model. I think, for most folks, they’re kind of somewhere in the middle. I know my rituals look nothing like either of those approaches. …I just feel like this conversation is often forgetting what real people in real time are doing.” -Michelle
“People go to festivals or concerts and use these substances or use them in situations where there’s more social bonding happening, and doing it for that more pleasure [purpose]; why is that wrong? I’m just even thinking in terms of therapy. It’s like, ‘Oh, if we’re not digging into your biographical history or trauma, then what are we doing here?’ Can we bring pleasure into our human experience at times without feeling so guilty or some sort of shame around it?” -Kyle “I think 1/7th of the world’s population in 20 to 40 years will be a permanent migrant class with no real home. We’ve got some work to do. Do we really want to keep locking people up for cocaine when we could be solving real problems here? …How dangerous is MDMA? It’s about as dangerous as riding a horse. Why do we care so much? LSD and psilocybin? Safest drugs ever, according to David Nutt. What are we doing?” -Joe
Manesh is a Ph.D. candidate in Neuroscience at McGill University and has been lead or co-author on over a dozen scientific publications and book chapters on topics including psychedelics, meditation, mind-wandering, and the default-mode network. His PhD dissertation focuses on the default-mode network and he is also conducting research on the brain mechanisms underlying LSD, psilocybin, and DMT in collaboration with Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris and others from the Imperial College London Center for Psychedelic Research. In his free time, he also runs a YouTube channel, The Psychedelic Scientist, where he discusses the latest findings in psychedelic science in an easy to understand, but non-superficial form.
In this episode, Joe interviews psychologist and adjunct professor at Capella University, Dr. Sean Hinton.
Hinton talks about his early days at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (now Sophia University) and his realization of how common numinous experiences are and how seldom people talked about them at the time. And he talks about how so many research studies just reinforce what we already know or want to further prove, existentialism and existential psychologist Rollo May, and Timothy Leary and his cultural, non-medicalized approach to research.
And he talks about a lot more in this very free-ranging conversation: Portugal and their model for legalization, James Fadiman, James Hillman, addiction, heroin, Norman Rockwell, LSD, John Quincy Adams, microbreweries, William James, gun control, monotheism, and more!
But his main focus is what we do next if we get these substances rescheduled: How do we view integration outside the medical model? How do we view these tools anthropologically and sociologically and keep them from being solely medicalized? And how do we handle regulation as the “price we pay for civilization” without becoming progress-blocking bureaucrats?
Notable Quotes
“Consider the field a table. Now consider your half of the table as your half of the table and then divide that into quarters, and then divide that again, and when you get down to something that’s too small to put your plate on; that’s what you want to do your research on. It’s always a very, very small area of what is already known but hasn’t been illuminated sufficiently.”
“That’s the question: What kind of world are we going to live in? It’s fun to talk about trip stories and it’s fun to talk about the latest and greatest synthetic drugs and neuroscience, but what’s it really mean to the lives of those people who would like to have a more expansive, happier, content, paradisal life, as opposed to struggling through tyranny?” “That’s where the thinking went. It’s typical American privatism at its best. ‘You can’t show me the usefulness of it, [so] why should we pursue it?’ And usefulness means it makes money. American pragmatism is just a branch of capitalism.” “When you start confusing the roadmap to what the reality is, they’re two different things. It’s great to think of myself as a bunch of neurons and stuff like that. Well, that’s a great roadmap, but I’m sorry, what I’m experiencing is something that needs understanding, as Hillman would say. So how do we integrate this understanding part of ourselves with a society that’s cohesive enough to allow for those understandings, or open and unafraid? All the good stuff comes from places that are open and unafraid.”
Sean Hinton is a psychologist counseling individuals in their personal and spiritual growth, an executive consultant to business leaders, and a lecturer and graduate school instructor in psychology.
He often works with professionals in organizations to grow into their leadership roles in ways that both satisfies them in spirit and produces positive results in their organizational and personal life. He works with women and men in transition, stage of life challenges, and existential crisis of loss, life purpose or changing relationships.
He earned his PhD at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, and received an MBA in management from Pepperdine Graziadio School of Business and Management, an MA in education, and a MACP in clinical psychology.
In this week’s Solidarity Friday episode, Joe, Michelle, and Kyle talk psilocybin, the DEA, patents, IP, and more, and are joined by newest Psychedelics Today team member, Psychotherapist and now Director of Operations and Strategic Growth, David Drapkin.
They first review a recent study in which mice showed a long-term elevation in neurotransmission and improved stress reactions after receiving psilocybin, and they talk about post-experience glow, the REBUS model, and the best timing to focus on integration after an experience.
Then things turn a bit sour, with a story on the DEA asking a court to throw out a case against them filed by two cancer patients claiming the Right to Try Act should allow them to use psilocybin, on the basis that their end-of-life care would lead to more black market activity. That, combined with a Vice article pointing out that companies can patent products or techniques based solely on theories (and this is already happening) and Sha’Carri Richardson being banned from competing in the Olympics due to testing positive for cannabis in a legal state sends the team down a familiar rabbit hole on the evils of the drug war, the annoyance of patents, the race for lawyers, and the many concerns around IP, capitalism, and even climate change.
But they end on a higher note, with a Johns Hopkins study asking for participants to share their experiences with psilocybin and SSRIs, discussions on Francis Bacon, the renaissance, and eye-gazing, and a beautiful photo essay highlighting the traditions and rites of passage of the Huichol people and their relationship with peyote.
Notable Quotes
“This is not surprising from the DEA. …It does feel like we have a really big shift in drug policy and the culture around drug use in the US, and so I think the DEA’s kind of putting its foot down to be like, ‘Not so fast, psychonauts.’” -Michelle
“We’re talking about people here that are terminally ill. So this is not recreational use, this is not decrim. This is people that are terminally ill, so this is palliative care. And having worked in hospitals, I’ve specialized in addiction as well, so I know about medications that are legal. They’re not on that Schedule I, and they caused 90,000 deaths in America last year, and they’re called opioids; they’re not called psilocybin. So the whole idea of this scheduling system really doesn’t make sense anymore when we think about it from just an objective, empirical sense.” -David
“Where’s the leadership? ‘Saint’ Joe Biden said recently, ‘The rules are the rules’ in regards to this case, and it’s disgusting. I just can’t really get over his resistance on cannabis policy and his unseeing of the race issues.” -Joe “One of my favorite questions around IP: How many lives have been saved by IP and how many lives have been lost by IP? Fascinating. I don’t have any answer, I haven’t really spent the time to really think that through, but just on the face of it, you know that there’s some stuff going on there, because people die all the time from not being able to afford meds, and the meds are only expensive due to IP.” -Joe
“At the age of 21, I was electrocuted and nearly died, and literally, the next day, I went on a spiritual adventure that hasn’t finished yet.” -David
In this episode, Joe interviews former Navy SEAL and BUD/S instructor turned actor and star of two of his own TV shows (“Manhunt” on Discovery and “Predators Up Close” on Animal Planet), Joel Lambert.
Lambert talks about his 10 years as a Navy SEAL and the toll it took on his brain, from the microtraumas from repeated gunfire and other weaponry causing his memory, mood, and cognition to deteriorate, to the difficulty of adjusting back to normal civilian life after a decade of living at a speed and intensity normal people don’t understand- a transition for which we, as a society, don’t provide enough time and space. And with detailed description and humor, he tells the story of what saved his brain and brought him back to the person he once was: a trip to Mexico and amazing experiences with ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT.
He also talks about his more recent psychedelic experiences and how he no longer feels he needs psychedelics, how his meditation has become one of the biggest parts of his life, his “Manhunt” show, the future and scalability of psychedelic-assisted treatment, and his appreciation for Dr. Martin Polanco, Amber and Marcus of VETS, and the donor who made it possible for his life to completely change.
Notable Quotes
“When you look at warrior cultures throughout history, in almost every society that has a warrior tradition, there is some sort of ritual or acknowledgement of these warriors coming back from whatever it is they do and the medicine man or the shaman or the religious persona or function in the tribe would do something to isolate [them]. …Even the acknowledgement of a ritual purification; whether it is something specific and material and effective or not- just that acknowledgement is huge. And we don’t do that.” “We connect back to the myth, we connect back to the ritual. We connect back to the power of the collective unconscious in whatever way that it is we can bring that forward. And there’s a reason that it’s there and there’s a reason why we flounder when we are not connected to it.” “It started off with this buzzing. This nightmare buzzing started happening all around me. And then the visions. Boom. I had never seen, Joe, anything with my physical eyes with the clarity and distinction and reality that these visions were playing in my mind. And it’s a nightmare. It is a literal nightmare. ….It was an alien machine hell of fractals and a consciousness that was like nothing I could conceive of before experiencing this in this alien machine hell.”
“What’s crazy is I think I’m actually moving past the psychedelics now. It’s been amazing, it’s been incredible, and I’m a huge psychedelic proponent and fan and I want to bring this to people as much as possible, but what’s amazing is that with the meditation and with the practice and with, I think, the integration that the group has provided for me and my own integration and my own practices, it’s gotten to where my consciousness and the springboard that psychedelics provided has taken me to a place where I feel like I don’t need them.”
Originally from the Pacific Northwest and raised in a little logging town on the Columbia River, Joel Lambert grew up performing on stage and in commercials before selling all he had and running off to join the armed forces, where he served as a Navy SEAL for ten years, earning distinction and experiencing combat in places like Kosovo and Afghanistan. Returning home decorated and serving as a lead Instructor at BUD/S, the screening and selection school for men aspiring to join the elite Navy SEALs, he was drawn back into the world of film and television.
In this week’s Solidarity Friday episode, Joe, Michelle, and Kyle talk about the importance of critiquing established systems, give several legalization updates, and discuss inclusivity in therapy and research.
They first review an email from a listener who took issue with some of the points in Matt Ball’s episode and much of Joe’s continued open discussion of his illegal drug use. This leads to a discussion on ethics (professional vs. virtue-based and why there’s even a difference), how psychedelics are challenging perceptions, how psychology is used as a weapon, privilege, the need for more frameworks, the concept of licensure equating to knowledge, the need to be open about drug use, and more. And Joe has learned to not read email right before going to bed.
They then discuss updates on legalization: Mexico decriminalizing cannabis, Scott Weiner’s Senate Bill 519 making more progress in California, the Oregon psilocybin board being right on track for their legalization timeline, and Connecticut becoming the 18th state to legalize cannabis (with records expunged and, among other things, the ability to have 1.5 ounces in public and another 5 at home!). They also discuss the Canadian government funding Toronto-based Braxia Scientific in a ketamine trial for bipolar depression, and an article talking about the need to include more queer and non-binary people in clinical trials (and encourage people who aren’t straight and white to enter into therapeutic fields for the comfort of people like them).
Notable Quotes
“Helping decrease stigma through storytelling, I believe, is crucial. And I think that’s a big portion of why we’re here doing this show. How many of my drug experiences have been legal? I don’t know, I don’t think very many. I’m not going to go ahead and pretend that I went to the Amazon. I’m not going to lie to you. I just think it’s important to show that hey, these laws are unjust, I’m justified in breaking these laws, and I’m going to continue to do it.” -Joe
“I think maybe folks who think they identify as hetero; when they go into psychedelic experiences, they might realize that they’re suppressing some attraction to the same gender, [or] maybe they don’t identify as the gender they were born in. Stuff like that happens. And do we have the training and the sensitivity to help folks deal with that? I think the answer is: Not yet.” -Michelle
“There’s a lot of people who the medical system is not appropriate for, unfortunately. And is it their fault? Not necessarily. It could be racial trauma, it could be a lot of other factors going on. If you understand the history of medicine and a lot of the abuses in psychiatry, you will begin to understand why many folks have reticence of using the system.” -Joe
“Coming back to this topic that we’ve talked about over and over again about a mad society or sick society; ok, we’ve had these really powerful experiences so we go back and try to fit it into this mold that doesn’t seem to be working, or do we take this and try to do something else with it? Why do we always have to integrate back into society to some degree? If society is sick, why do I want to go back to that sick environment?” -Kyle
“I saw John Mayer wearing a peyote t-shirt on his Instagram the other day. That can’t be a good sign.” -Joe
In this episode, released on Stan Grof’s 90th birthday, Joe interviews Kristina Soriano & Jonas Di Gregorio of the Psychedelic Literacy Fund, a donor-advised fund focused on educating the world about psychedelic therapies by financing the translation of classic books into different languages. Their first big project has been to publish new translations of Grof’s classic, The Way of the Psychonaut.
Kristina and Jonas first told us about their project back in December, and they’re back to update us on their fundraising progress: new translations, future projects, a new volunteer, and a generous grant through HalfmyDAF. They talk about experiences with ayahuasca and virtual reality, audiobooks and the joy of reading, how the translation process works, and the birth perinatal matrices.
And they talk a lot about Stan Grof, with Joe discussing how much his work has meant to him and the formation of Psychedelics Today, which was created largely to promote Grof’s work and the power of Holotropic Breathwork. If you want to donate to the furthering of Grof’s knowledge in honor of his birthday, please do so at Psychedelicliteracy.org.
Notable Quotes
“It’s so fortunate that we chose The Way of the Psychonaut as our first book because Stan is turning 90 years old this year and it’s a wonderful way to celebrate his dedication to this field of psychedelic psychotherapy. He’s devoted 60 years of his life to this, to pioneering this way, and it’s really an homage to his fierce courage and curiosity in bringing this message forward. And the receptivity that we’ve had from our project just really shows how much people have been affected and positively influenced by his work.” -Kristina
“When we speak about books about psychedelics, especially in countries where there is a different understanding of what they are, etc., [a] publisher can be very much reluctant and hesitant in translating them. And so that’s why, especially now, where clinical trials are showing these incredible results in the United States and a few more countries, it makes sense for philanthropy to think strategically [about] how these books can catalyze clinical trials and research in other countries.” -Jonas
“Stan is so positive. It’s so beautiful how he accepts this is the 9th decade of his life and [he’s taking] all of the pieces and putting them all in a row, so that way, the passing is smooth. And it’s such a beautiful acceptance of this reality. But also, we want to assure the people of this generation that it’s being passed on to a generation that respects and honors the pioneering efforts that they’ve done, and we’ll make good on that promise so that we will learn from the past and bring it forward in a way that’s holistic and healing for everyone. That’s my hope.” -Kristina
Husband-and-wife team, Jonas Di Gregorio and Kristina Soriano, established the Psychedelic Literacy Fund in May of 2020 as a donor-advised fund managed by RSF Social Finance in San Francisco. The vision of this fund is to educate the public about psychedelic therapies by financing the translation of books into different languages.
Kristina Soriano holds a Masters’s Degree in Healthcare Administration from Trinity University. A classically trained pianist and multi-instrumentalist, she is the Executive Director for the Women’s Visionary Congress.
Jonas Di Gregorio comes from an Italian family of publishers, Il Libraio Delle Stelle. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy from La Sapienza University of Rome.
In this episode, Joe interviews Australia-based psychiatric nurse practitioner andNavigating Psychedelics graduate, Matt.
He tells the story of his first experience with psychosis and his eventual diagnosis of schizophrenia, followed by the realization years later as to what he may have been trying to express through that break. He digs into different frameworks for considering what the mind is doing when it dissociates or when suicide feels like the right decision, and what we can learn from the stories of people going through such tribulations. Through hisJust Listening community, he is exploring the idea of facilitating environments where people can feel safe enough to not have to resort to these extreme states.
He also discusses his concepts of “dissociadelic” and “dissociachotic,” the Power Threat Meaning Framework, targeted individuals, the Hearing Voices movement, his Suicide Narrative approach, how schizophrenia has never been clearly defined, how the DSM isn’t based on science, how spiritual experiences and receiving messages are celebrated in psychedelic experience but considered a disorder in mental health, and how dissociation happens regularly in our daily lives.
Notable Quotes
“A lot of the story around suicide is how we have to get rid of people’s experience of considering ending their own life, and my interest is in about understanding the meaningful human narratives that manifest in the experience of feeling like we need to escape this life. And so that leads into this idea of mind manifesting realities, which is of course, so central to psychedelics.”
“When we say, ‘You have a chemical imbalance which is depression,’ that’s a bit like saying, as I’m talking to you, I have a chemical imbalance because I’m a little bit nervous, [and] I’ve got a lot of points to make so the energy in my body has gone up. Well there’s a change in chemicals, right? But I don’t need bloody medication for it, I need to be able to be in relationship with you about it.”
“That’s what I’m talking about: the courage to allow the other person to have another reality to mine, and [to] not, at some point, undermine it by saying we’re ‘accepting’ their reality. You’re not accepting their reality, their reality is their reality. I’m accepting my reality and they’re accepting theirs. I don’t need to accept somebody else’s reality, I need to stop trying to impress my reality on somebody else.”
“The problem with complex PTSD is the D at the end of PTSD. ‘It’s a disorder.’ Well, it’s not a disorder to respond to threats in the way you’re responding to them. That’s normal.”
Matt previously led the training of 250 staff in the Maastricht approach to hearing voices in the public mental health system in South Australia. He was also a co-convener of ReAwaken Australia and released a single series ReAwaken podcast through Humane Clinic.
Matt continues to pursue the reality of a mental health system that does not medicalize human distress. He is committed to understanding common human experiences as best being approached by seeking to provide justice to the story of any individual through deep and intentional listening and human connection.
In this week’s Solidarity Friday episode, Joe, Michelle, and Kyle switched things up a bit by broadcasting the recording of this episode onInstagram live, as well as dedicating much of the discussion to our oft-mentioned but not properly dissectedNavigating Psychedelics for Clinicians and Therapists course.
The course is always mentioned briefly, but based on the number of questions we receive, (and with the latest cohort of the live edition beginning in a month on July 22nd), we felt it was time for Michelle to interview Joe and Kyle about the course: what it really entails, who it’s for, what a “Grofian, transpersonal framework” means, what people who have taken it have gone on to do, and what Joe and Kyle’s favorite parts of the course are. They talk about the course’s humble beginnings, they both try to define “process” with varying degrees of success, and Joe compares teaching the class to Yoda teaching Luke Skywalker the ways of the force after he crashed on Dagobah.
They then discuss two interesting news stories. First, they look at a new trial studying the use of nitrous oxide as a treatment for depression, which is exciting due to the clean and quick application of nitrous, as well as simply the hopeful option for a different treatment other than SSRIs or benzodiazepines. And along the lines of hopeful new treatments, they then review a press release from Cybin, a company working on a proprietary psilocybin-esque compound specifically to treat anxiety disorder indications. This gets everyone reflecting on their own process, their own work, and the need to critique psychiatry and medicine while also accepting they have their place, along with every other framework.
Notable Quotes
“[Stan Grof] went through, had all the training, was doing Freudian analysis and clinics and working at a hospital and he was not very impressed with the results coming from Freudian therapy. And all of a sudden, LSD came on the scene. …And [he] had this really crazy LSD experience. …Just a really massive experience: a light a million times brighter than the sun, all this fun, classical, mystical experience stuff. [He] went in a materialistic, mechanistic Freudian, [and] came out a devotee of Shiva. And what does that mean, that in 14 hours (or whatever- however long that was), that that kind of a change can happen?” -Joe
“Just thinking about psychedelics and education, psychedelics are pretty weird. And to teach it and think that it’s so streamlined and these are the things that we have to talk about in this way, and we’ve had it all figured out; I think if psychedelics taught me one thing, it’s [that] we know nothing. And I think this is where the curiosity comes back. Our teacher Lenny was talking to Stan [Grof] (I think it was back in the 80s, at Esalen), and Lenny was sharing a story with him, and Stan just looked at him and said, ‘Many strange things happen on LSD.’” -Kyle
“We can critique psychiatry and we’re not saying, ‘Defund psychiatry.’ We’re not saying, ‘Get rid of it.’ A critique can lead to growth. That’s why you take workshops as an art student. Critiques lead to learning and they can lead to change in a positive way. That’s all we’re asking for: just thinking about things critically, and then perhaps we can find little things to upgrade a little, in a way, or just be a little better.” -Michelle
“Science is a series of provisional truths and we want to keep updating our knowledge map. And science is the best tool we have for understanding reality, but there are other ways of knowing. So that’s kind of where we live; in this weird, hybrid landscape of traditional ways of knowing, and then also the scientific method being the one that gets us the most certainty.” -Joe
In this episode, Joe interviews Hadas Alterman, Serena Wu, and Adriana Kertzer: three lawyers who came together to form Plant Medicine Law Group, a law firm serving the cannabis and psychedelic space.
They discuss their individual paths towards psychedelics and each other, who they hope to serve and work with through the firm, adversarial relationships within the psychedelic ecosystem, and what they’re most excited about in the future, ranging from bringing psychedelic knowledge to traditional Chinese frameworks to working on a Measure 110-inspired decriminalization plan for New York.
They also talk about the problems with “manels” and “wanels” dominating the event circuit, Tina Fey, law accepting the concept of emotional harm, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the idea of using psychedelics for dispute resolution cases, and the issues with bringing new religious exercises and concepts to judges who came from traditions and viewpoints based only on the three major religions.
Notable Quotes
“For me, being Chinese American, I don’t see a lot of Asians in the psychedelic space, and it was hard for me to come forward and be public about coming out with this law firm as well as coming out with my own story about my experiences. But the thing is, I thought: If I’m not saying something and I’m waiting for someone else to say it, then I can wait a very long time. So instead of waiting, why don’t I become that person that I’m hoping to model after or look up to?” -Serena
“If we’re not all here exchanging value within the market, for goodness sake, what are we doing?” -Hadas
“I really hope to see, one day, for certain types of disputes, psychedelic-assisted dispute resolution. I can see this working really well with certain types of family law. I would be very interested to see this in corporate settings, although I think we’re a ways off. I just feel like this basic underlying concept of oneness is inherently at odds with the traditional Western legal system because when it’s you against someone else, that’s bifurcated- that’s two. So what would the law look like if we weren’t two; if we were really treating each other as one?” -Hadas
“I’ve been compiling a list of references to psychedelics in contemporary television shows, movies, music, and fashion, and I think that we’re really seeing a moment in which, on the negative side, you have a mental health care crisis and real proof that the current medical system is failing us and that SSRIs are not the only answer; and on the other hand, you’re seeing cultural production that is normalizing or creating curiosity around psychedelics, such that a book like Michael Pollan’s [is] not landing on an empty table of cultural production. There’s a lot that’s happening, even in music videos, that makes it so that a book like that creates a tipping point (but it’s not the only thing that creates a tipping point) that then creates a kind of momentum that, in my opinion, creates legal change.” -Adrianna
About Hadas Alterman, Adriana Kertzer, and Serena Wu
Hadas Alterman is an Israeli-American attorney, born in Jerusalem and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has a J.D. from Berkeley Law and a B.A. in Community Studies/Agriculture & Social Justice from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Prior to founding Plant Medicine Law Group, she worked with a leading cannabis law firm in San Francisco. Hadas was the Policy Director of NYMHA, an organization that she co-founded that successfully lobbied for the introduction of a New York bill to decriminalize psilocybin by statute, and is a Board Member of the Psychedelic Bar Association. She also serves on the Equity Subcommittee of the Oregon Psilocybin Advisory Board.
Serena Wu is a Chinese-American lawyer, born in Hainan and raised in Los Angeles. She has a J.D. from Harvard University Law School and a B.A. in Media Studies from University of California, Berkeley. Serena began her legal career at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP in New York City as a litigation associate, and is deeply committed to increasing equitable access to alternative healing, including psychedelic plant medicines. She is the founder of @womeninpsychedelics, an Instagram account that showcases the contributions, voices, and experiences of women in the psychedelics space, and Asian Psychedelics Society (“APS”), a group dedicated to discussions about psychedelics and mental health in the AAPI community. Adriana Kertzer is a Brazilian-American attorney, born and raised in São Paulo. Adriana has a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center, a B.A. from Brown University in Judaic Studies and International Relations, and an M.A. from Parsons The New School for Design. She began her legal career as a corporate associate on Simpson Thacher & Bartlett’s Latin American capital markets team. She was Senior Advisor to the Senior Deputy Chairman at the National Endowment for the Arts under President Obama, is on the board of Doctors for Cannabis Regulation, and is the author of the book Favelization: The Imaginary Brazil in Contemporary Film, Fashion and Design. She is passionate about Jewish psychedelic culture, leads the interfaith working group Faith+Psychedelics, and founded @jewwhotokes, an Instagram account that explores relationships with cannabis and psychedelics in the Jewish community.
In this week’s Solidarity Friday episode, Michelle, Kyle, and Joe review the most interesting articles and recent news in the world of psychedelia.
They first talk about Chacruna’s article highlighting not only the world’s first trip-sitter, but also the first woman to take LSD, Albert Hofman’s assistant, Susi Ramstein. They then look into the new Pill-iD app coming out in the UK, which will match user-submitted pictures of MDMA with pictures from their database, using machine learning to determine purity and strength. While this is good (especially in a post-quarantine environment of people very eager to chemically celebrate their ability to be together again), how much can we really know without any chemical analysis? And how much should we trust their database?
They then revisit their discussion on California’s Senate Bill 519 (turns out it does mean legalization after all, but if so, why is “decriminalization” used in the bill’s title?), excitedly discuss the first all-drug decriminalization bill being submitted to Congress (the Drug Policy Reform Act, or DPRA), talk about psilocybin being studied for anti-inflammatory effects and Robin-Carhart Harris’ recent interview with Court Wing, and finally, get into the very real and often not-talked-about importance of ancient and Indigenous language and the danger of losing it: Are we going to lose more knowledge from the loss of language than from the destruction of habitat?
Notable Quotes
“The argument here is not only the human cost, [but] the real financial cost of an overdose is extreme, relative to getting ahead of this. So cities and governments can save money by offering this. Less dead bodies to pick up with your EMTs, less situations of overdose to respond to. …If we can do harm reduction [and] say, ‘Hey, these are people too,’ we also save money, and we save lives, and we get those lives back into society in a hopefully meaningful way.” -Joe
“The bill is damning of the drug war, of criminalization, [and it] talks about how criminalization and the drug war have added more harm to consumption. And the fact that it passed the California Senate means that these politicians are starting to catch on to how brutal this has been. And in this post-BLM, post-George Floyd and Breonna Taylor era; hey, you guys have got to clean your act up, otherwise, you’re going to have riots on your hands.” -Joe
“If this bill does pass, I feel like that’s sending a message to the whole world that we can be rational again. This wasn’t rational, this wasn’t based on science, and a lot of people mistrust us now because of that. …What would we be showing young people if we did this? …Not that we need more respect for authority, but we could respect authority at all if they could show us that they could rule or govern us in a rational, science-based way.” -Michelle
“If we ever get to the point in human civilization where things start to collapse and we need to understand the environment [and the plants] a little bit more, we’re going to be very lost. Just going outside and looking around you, what plants do you know? What stories do you know about the plants around you? Do you know what’s edible? Do you know what’s medicinal? All these things that you call weeds are actually edible plants or have really great medicinal value. Do you know the story of the landscape in which you live in?” -Kyle
In this episode, Kyle interviews licensed professional counselor specializing in somatics and ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, regular contributor toNavigating Psychedelics, and vinyl DJ (who DJed our 5th-anniversary party), Pierre Bouchard.
Bouchard digs into the art of somatics and the importance of adding it as another tool to the data set of one’s healing practice, and discusses how many people don’t yet understand how to interpret (or even define) these sensations, how learning to tune in to bodily sensations can often reveal what needs to be worked on before other therapeutic modalities can, and how physical touch and working with the body create an ethical dilemma. And he breaks down the polyvagal theory and how different types of trauma affect the nervous system and its go-to “fight, flight, or freeze” actions.
They also talk about the top-down and bottom-up approach, Holotropic Breathwork and Stan Grof, dissociation and ketamine, what they’d like to see in the future of therapy, and more. This is a conversation between two counselors, so if you’re behind on therapeutic modalities and concepts, this episode is for you.
Notable Quotes
“When we’re talking about learning to tune into body sensations, we’re really helping somebody develop a new language, a new way of understanding themselves. …It’s not that things weren’t happening and now they are, it’s that they’re learning how to tune into it.”
“Before our conscious mind catches something, often, our body catches it. And we might have a belief about ourselves that then, when we actually tune into body sensations, we find out there’s actually something different going on here. To me, that’s the deep beauty of this; is that you can be intellectually cut off from an experience or belief or just something about yourself, but the body doesn’t lie. The body has no stake in negotiating. The body’s just interested in the truth.”
“There’s a way in which so much of our wounding is about what did or didn’t happen and getting a chance to have some reparative experience around that. Finding out that you’re God and that everyone else is God; it might help that journey, but it’s not going to heal that knot in your nervous system.” “We’re learning to be more interested in our own experience. I think this is something that psychedelics are so fantastic at. We start to have a much greater range of who we are and what’s possible. I can be screaming and raging, I can be crying, I can be in ecstatic bliss. …The psychedelic life, in this way, is about continuing to learn to be a more rich meal.”
Pierre Bouchard is a Licensed Professional Counselor with a private practice in Boulder and Denver, CO. He specializes in blending somatics, embodiment, attachment theory, and trauma therapy with ketamine-assisted psychotherapy. A graduate of Naropa University (in Contemplative Psychotherapy), he has trained in several somatic psychotherapy modalities, most recently the Hakomi Method under Melissa Grace, and currently, in Ido Portal’s movement system at Boulder Movement Collective. He has maintained a meditation practice for 19 years, is working on opening a ketamine clinic, and in his spare time, works as a vinyl DJ.
In this week’s Solidarity Friday episode, Joe, Kyle, and Michelle analyze the most interesting stories of the week, this time a bit differently (and maybe a first for PT), with Kyle and Michelle recording together in the same room.
They first revisit last week’s Senate Bill 519 news from the angle of how the media keeps misrepresenting the clear distinction between ‘legal’ and ‘decriminalized,’ spawned from a PR email Michelle received and two different articles with opposing language between their titles and the articles themselves. Is this disconnect coming from confusion about what decriminalization actually means, or is it purposefully done for more attention-grabbing headlines, which serves to only put more people in danger? Or are these media sources in bed with the feds and doing it exactly for that reason? (Always nice to get a visit from Joe’s Paranoid Update.)
They then discuss the absurdity of cannabis still being federally illegal and sending people to prison while Washington State and Arizona use federal funds to buy joints for people getting the Covid vaccination, which leads to a discussion of Covid, vaccinations, trusting the government, and the possible threat of a new bird flu.
And lastly, they look at what happened to a man who took an estimated 40,000 ecstasy pills over the course of 9 years, and why a huge focus of harm reduction should be on moderation and how overuse can negatively impact your life, the importance of honestly reflecting on your relationship with drugs, how you’re growing (or not) from huge insights, and how realistic or fulfilling your intentions are to begin with.
Notable Quotes
“Let’s just move cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule IV or de-schedule it, because we’re already at this point where the government is buying people joints to get vaccinated, yet it’s still federally a Schedule I substance. It kind of blows my mind. What is happening?” -Michelle
“When science gets politicized, things get ugly, and this isn’t the first time science has been politicized. So let’s be on Team Human. Be on Team Psychedelic, Harm Reduction, Legalize and Regulate (if you want to jump on my boat), but let’s just get on the right path here towards a future that’s better for all of us. That should be apolitical. And yes, there’s plenty to complain about, but let’s survive first.” -Joe
“We need to talk about moderation when we talk about harm reduction. I think that when we just talk about psychedelics for medical use and we ignore all the folks that are using them outside of a clinician’s office, we just ignore all the circumstances that they need to be educated on, like [that they] can harm people. I think, for me anyway, part of harm reduction for psychedelics is really teaching folks that yea, they’re safe, but if you use them sparingly. It doesn’t matter what it is- MDMA, acid, mushrooms- I think that even when you start using them once a week (in fuller doses), shit can get a little complicated.” -Michelle
“Sometimes I think what we want is unrealistic, like: ‘I want to be totally healed, I want to be a totally different person, and I’m just going to keep going in until I find it.’ You’re never going to find that because that’s just not how it works.” -Michelle
“Is there guilt and shame around taking breaks if you’re really embedded in these psychedelic communities? I know I felt that at one point. Somebody was like, ‘Wait, you haven’t done that in a while?’ I’m like, ‘No, I’ve been really focused on a lot of integration and family relationship-type stuff, and it feels like a psychedelic experience to begin with and I need to kind of focus on that right now.’ And it was like, ‘Oh, then you’re not doing the work.’ And it’s like, ‘Actually, I feel like I am doing the work. This is the work I don’t want to be doing, but I’m trying to show up for it.’ It’s like, do you always need to keep peeling the onion layer back?” -Kyle
While they start on the magic side of things with Aleister Crowley and early mescaline trip reports, they mostly discuss prohibition and new models for legalization, with Vayne giving us a nice window into how Britain has historically handled the drug war, culminating in the era of Spice bringing them to the point where essentially, anything that stimulates your nervous system has become illegal (when there is a clear intention to get high).
Vayne tells his Crowley-mirroring story about being banned from giving a presentation at the Oxford Psychedelic Society for admitting he has used drugs, poses an interesting way to consider drugs and their legality, and ponders how we can get our prohibition-obsessed authorities to not only empower people to make their own decisions, but to also accept that people do these things for fun (and that’s ok). And lastly, he talks about how psychedelics, set and setting, and practiced rituals and traditions all work together as technologies to enhance and inspire a magical experience.
Notable Quotes
“Once we use terms like ‘illegal drugs’ very frequently, it’s quite important, I think, to unpick some of that language. Drugs, in and of themselves- these chemical compounds, are not and can never be legal or illegal. What’s legal or illegal is whether or not you or I are allowed to possess those things, whether we can manufacture those things, whether we can supply or exchange those things to others. So it’s our behavior that’s about whether it’s licit or illicit, and the substances themselves are ‘controlled substances.’ So there are no illegal drugs. That betrays a misunderstanding of the way these substances are in culture.”
“We say to people: ‘You can smoke weed if you’re feeling really suicidal or if you’re feeling really very ill,’ and moving from that to a point where we can say, ‘Actually, you can smoke weed because you might like it’- that’s a radical thing for Protestant and post-Protestant cultures to go through because our relationship with joy, fun, the body, [and] material substance is deeply wounded.” “We do have to find a way to intelligently deal with the fact that we live on a planet with all of these substances, all of these medicines of various descriptions and people want to engage with those for all kinds of different reasons. We can’t simply say: ‘This is forbidden.’”
“They don’t need, necessarily, some dude in a crazy hat with feathers on it to tell them what to do, because they know that the mushrooms and the relationship between the mushrooms and their psyche and their evolutionary pathway- that’s where the power lies. …They don’t need to know what the traditional songs of their ancestors are, because this is the traditional song of them, in that moment. And it’s about feeding the flame of the tradition rather than worshipping the ashes of it. And we’re just surrounded by these broken forms and these tiny cultural clues, but with the help of other communities who’ve been less disconnected from this medicine, and also with our own guides and spirits and perhaps a good dose of good fortune, for us to recreate, re-find these things, and to make those fresh and new in every moment and every encounter- that’s the way we’ve got to go with this.”
Julian Vayne is widely recognized as one of Britain’s leading occultists. He is an independent scholar and author with over three decades of experience within esoteric culture: from Druidry to Chaos Magic, from indigenous Shamanism through to Freemasonry and Witchcraft. He is a senior member of the Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros, a co-organizer of the psychedelic conference, Breaking Convention, a Trustee of The Psychedelic Museum Project, a founding member of the post-prohibition think-tank, Transform, sits on the academic board of The Journal of Psychedelic Studies, and has been a visiting lecturer at several British universities. He is an advocate of post-prohibition culture and supporter of psychedelic prisoners through the Scales project. Julian facilitates psychedelic ceremony, as well as providing one-to-one psychedelic integration sessions and support. He is the author of Getting Higher: The Manual of Psychedelic Ceremony, and since 2011, he has been sharing his work through his blog, The Blog of Baphomet.
In this week’s Solidarity Friday episode, Joe, Michelle, and Kyle reconvene to talk about the biggest (and one of the weirdest) news stories.
They first discuss the California Senate passing Senate Bill 519, which, if enacted into law, would be the first state-wide decriminalization bill, removing criminal penalties for possession (and sharing) of psilocybin, ibogaine, LSD, and MDMA for adults. They talk about what the emerging market could look like, why harm reduction tips aren’t typically on cannabis packaging, and an interesting poll that showed that 35% of Americans now believe in the therapeutic potential of psilocybin (most surprisingly illustrated by a former sheriff in Florida publically stating his support).
They then discuss the recent news of the federal government ending a 50-year contract with the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) that only allowed researchers to use cannabis from one approved facility (and the absurdity of this roadblock impeding research into such a commonly-used drug for so long), a New York Times opinion piece on the life-saving potential of ketamine and all the unmentioned variables that can affect its efficacy, and last but certainly not least: An article about cicadas being infected and zombified into decomposing, sex-crazed maniacs by a fungus that produces cathinone (which we know synthetically as “bath salts”), and even more interestingly, psilocybin. And if you’re thinking it, we feel it must be said that it’s likely not wise to attempt to trip off of discarded cicada butts.
Notable Quotes
“What’s the point of cicadas spreading a psilocybin-containing fungus all over the East coast right now? It feels a little intentional on nature’s part.” -Michelle “[There was a] $2.1 billion merger in Florida of two grows recently. How do we square these things? We can do capitalism, but we can’t do research.” -Joe “All these states legalizing for recreational/medical, and it’s like, as a country and people/society, don’t you want good data around products that you’re selling? And if the research isn’t there, how are we making good decisions? It just seems really counterintuitive that you’re just letting it run wild to some degree, but then also being like, ‘Well, we can’t study this because it’s a Schedule I and we still have to follow all of this.” Like, no wait, people are doing this. Don’t you want good data and [to] keep people safe?” -Kyle
“Are we short-changing humanity in the progress of science by only accepting randomized controlled trials as the gold standard of data? Are there things that are more cost-effective and quicker? Like, let’s test 20 drugs and skip placebos so we have data on 20 drugs, as opposed to like, how much more data do we need on placebo as part of RCTs? While RCTs are amazing, there’s a lot of drugs left to test.” -Joe
“These are articles being published, and so, how honest are we being about our own process, and what actually gets published? I could sit there and present you a really great story about my near-death experience and how it really changed my life and how it motivated me to do all this stuff and my psychedelic experience helped me to process my trauma and I went to school, and I could show you all the highlights, but how many of us are actually showing the trenches of our reality, and the descent into those valleys?” -Kyle
In this episode, Joe interviews co-founders of the charity, Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions (VETS): Executive Director, Amber, and Chair of the board and former Navy SEAL, Marcus Capone.
They talk about Marcus’ transition back to normal life after 13 years in the service, and his “fizzling out,” depression, cognitive decline, and uneventful trips to brain clinics, followed by a life-changing experience with ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT in a ceremony outside the US- something that, at the time, was very new and very scary but seen as a last resort. They talk about what he learned from his experience, the improvements they’ve seen in the people they’ve helped, why they call their grants “foundational healing grants,” and how the current psychedelic renaissance is missing a key element in the power of psychedelics: that maybe the issues we are working to try and heal (and their solutions) may be more physiological than we realize.
VETS has raised the money to provide grants to 300 veterans (and some spouses as well), and aims to do more, as they are currently working with the Stanford Brian Simulation Lab on a brain imaging study to investigate the potential physiological improvements from ibogaine.
Notable Quotes
“I was spending a lot of quiet time, just praying and thinking, and I remembered that one of our friends had gone outside of the US. And I didn’t even know what it was- I didn’t know anything about psychedelics, I didn’t know anything about ibogaine. I didn’t know anything other than someone we trusted was having a similar set of challenges and found relief through something crazy.” -Amber “I don’t think you can explain psychedelics, what it does. You’re opening your brain, really. You’re tapping into higher levels of consciousness that you just can’t explain to others unless you do it. And then the majority of people that do it [and] do it the correct way, they’re changed forever.” -Marcus
“It just creates this happiness that’s contagious, and it makes everyone else around them want to perform at that level as well. I know that I can say that for myself, and the shift in our family dynamic, and whether it’s our relationship with our kids, to our kids also setting goals and attaining them- that’s a real thing. There’s so much healing happening beyond just the veteran that we’re supporting.” -Amber “What we’ve come to realize, and what I personally feel, is that vulnerability is actually the greatest show of strength.” -Amber
“I feel like if we can really put our heads down and add to the body of research so that we can advocate for these therapies to be available inside the borders of the country that these veterans chose to defend, then we can not only help them in a more meaningful way, we can end the veteran suicide epidemic, and hopefully these therapies will be available to all Americans in due time, because they really are saving lives.” -Amber
When he was medically retired after 13 years and multiple combat deployments as a US Navy SEAL, Marcus Capone started experiencing an escalating myriad of challenges, including depression, isolation, cognitive impairment, excessive alcohol use, headaches, insomnia, and impulsivity. Marcus was diagnosed with PTSD, and later, TBI. When all hope seemed lost, his wife, Amber, learned of a new kind of treatment, and Marcus traveled outside of the US to receive treatment with Ibogaine and 5-MeO-DMT, to tremendous results.
This experience inspired them to co-found the non-profit, Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions (VETS) in 2019, which has since provided grants for hundreds of US Special Forces veterans to receive psychedelic-assisted therapy treatment, as well as preparation and integration coaching. VETS believes that psychedelic therapy can lay the foundation for further healing. This “foundational healing” enables continued progress across a range of therapeutic modalities, and is supported by a robust coaching program, providing a holistic treatment solution for veterans.
This week’s Solidarity Friday episode is a combination of an interview and the news, with Joe, Michelle, and Kyle being joined by author and holotropic breathwork facilitator, Renn Butler.
Butler talks about what has been referred to as the “gold standard of superstition,” the often misunderstood world of astrology, and more specifically, what he calls holotropic, or archetypal astrology: the way alignments between planets correspond to archetypes and experiences that emerge within psychedelic exploration and other non-ordinary states of consciousness. While not a perfect model, he uses these synchronicities to predict the best timing for exploration and the most probable outcomes, which will be featured in an upcoming monthly “Cosmic Weather Report” YouTube series (watch our page). He also discusses the concept of the inner healer, Stan Grof, how to be the best sitter, his upcoming online course on archetypal astrology, and The Beatles.
And with everyone back together again, some news is covered as well: California’s psychedelics decriminalization bill 519 heading to the Senate, the FDA allowing therapists being trained in psychedelic-assisted therapy to try MDMA, and in the “This Mainstream Website is Reporting This?!” Department, People Magazine reporting on Kristen Bell’s psilocybin use for depression.
Notable Quotes
“[Archetypal astrology] seems to be the only system that can successfully predict the content and timing of experiences in non-ordinary states- like a range of possibilities. We can’t predict exactly what is going to happen, but it’s very useful to have a map when we go on a journey.” “Stan had to laugh, that after years of unsuccessfully trying to find some kind of diagnostic technique (like the MMPI and the Rorschach test and the DSM categories), when they finally found a technique that could broadly predict the content of people’s experiences in sessions, it turned out to be something that was even further beyond the pale than psychedelics.”
“It’s all about human contact and trust. You just sit back quietly. If the journeyer needs something, then you respond. Otherwise, you stay out of the way.”
“[Bill Burr] just became a dad to his second child, so he’s really trying to work out some of his shit so he can be a good dad, and I thought that was also such a touching story and such a good example of healing these, I don’t know if you want to call it intergenerational trauma, but just healing family situations so you don’t repeat the same mistakes as your parents and you can be a better parent and you can see yourself a little bit more clearly. If this is how we’re going to be talking about mushrooms from now on, I’m here for it. It’s beautiful.” -Michelle
Following a B.A. in English and Religious Studies from the University of Alberta, Butler lived at the Esalen Institute in California for 2 and a half years, where he became deeply immersed in the transpersonal psychology of Stanislav Grof and the emerging archetypal astrology of Richard Tarnas. He completed training as a Holotropic Breathwork facilitator with Stan and Christina Grof in 1989, and has facilitated many workshops in Victoria, Canada. His research includes over three decades of archetypal-astrology consultations and Holotropic Breathwork workshops, and thirty-five years of Jungian-Grofian dreamwork. He has also worked in health care for three decades with physically, mentally, and emotionally challenged adults.
In this episode, Michelle and Kyle interview head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London, Founding Director of the new Neuroscape Psychedelics Division at UCSF, and psychedelic research legend, Robin Carhart-Harris.
He discusses what inspired his milestone entropic brain/REBUS model research and how psychedelics drop the assuredness we’ve established through our “prediction machine” brains, contemplates how science hasn’t really answered the question of why we fall ill, and dives into plasticity, trauma, germ theory, and the sensitivity of orchids vs. dandelions. He also talks about HPPD, the need to concretize abstract experiences, DMT, how being somewhat of a psychedelic celebrity has affected him, and his thoughts on Compass Pathways and the recent “land grab” and patenting stories that have been making the rounds recently.
Carhart-Harris and his team are currently researching anorexia, psychedelic sub-states (like looping), group ayahuasca use, nature connectedness, and conflict resolution (with MAPS).
Notable Quotes
“New [drugs] will come out but they’re not really different than the previous ones, and typically, with the exception of ketamine coming on the scene, they’re drugs that you take every day, and they decrease symptom severity but they don’t do that much more, really. And they don’t do that much more than placebo as well. So drugs aren’t very good and clinicians recognize that and patients recognize that, and I think it’s come about because of our failure to answer that question: Why do we fall ill?”
“If the brain is fundamentally a model of its environment, then you can’t understand the brain without understanding the environment and the context that it exists in. So I think any human neuroscientist needs to be, in equal measure, a psychologist.”
“I think it would be useful for people to understand that plasticity, in and of itself, isn’t an intrinsically healing force.”
“[In] the domain of spiritual practice [or] meditation, then maybe a wise teacher might say something along the lines of, ‘Let it be uncertain. You don’t need to hurry an explanation here. Sit with the uncertainty, explore it.’ I think maybe that would be good advice in the psychedelic space because sometimes, there can be an eagerness to explain that can create explanations that are really tenuous, rather than just to say, “Fascinating, mysterious.” You don’t have to concretize it. The classic one, maybe is the DMT experience, where it’s so far out, you’re just thinking, ‘What the hell was that? How does that happen? Where do I start?’ It’s so compelling that the natural thing to think is: ‘I did leave. I went somewhere else. It’s another place.’”
Robin Carhart-Harris is the head of the Psychedelic Research Centre at Imperial College London, focusing on functional brain imaging studies with psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, and DMT. He has over 100 published papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, including the groundbreaking “Entropic Brain” paper, which explored images of people’s brains while under the influence of psychedelics. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol, and is the Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at UCSF. In July, he is coming to San Francisco to head up UCSF’s new Neuroscape Psychedelics Division.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, the news is once again skipped, with Michelle and Kyle instead speaking with Elan Hagens and Rebecca Martinez, co-founders of Portland, Oregon-based Fruiting Bodies Collective: an advocacy group, podcast, and multimedia platform with a focus on uplifting marginalized communities and shrinking the gap between industry insiders and the rest of us. Martinez is a regular contributor to the Psychedelics Today blog and was the Event and Volunteer Coordinator for Oregon’s groundbreaking Measure 109 campaign, and both serve on its Health Equity subcommittee.
They talk about their paths to creating their group and why education, access, and proper representation for everyone in the community is so important toward their next project: creating a facilitator training program that works for everyone, and is infused with justice and equity throughout.
They break down what exactly Measure 109 means to the people of Oregon, the misconceptions about decriminalization and confusion about how to access psilocybin therapy, the idea of creating different therapeutic paths for people based on their different circumstances, what risk really means to so many of us (and especially to people of color), and the problem American society has with trusting a Doctorate over thousands of years of Indigenous wisdom.
Notable Quotes
“When we’re doing this kind of work, we need to come back and realize that this stuff came from soil; it’s not just a pill. It can be a pill, and everybody can have medicine in their own way, but we need to acknowledge all these variables within it, and especially, especially Indigenous healing and Indigenous medicine- giving reverence to that and acknowledging that every chance it comes up in your mind, talk about it. Don’t be like, ‘Oh, we’ve talked about it too much.’ Every time it comes in your mind, let’s talk about it more.” -Elan “There is a privilege in being able to go to school and having a Doctorate. There is a privilege in having a parent who can support you in elementary school and have enough money to get you into college. But that does not mean that there are people who have not had all these degrees and stuff [who] do not have the same type of knowledge. So especially with psychedelic medicine, I’m always going to come back to the Indigenous wisdom- there are no Doctorates in there. There’s no titles in there.” -Elan
“We want to come out with the first batch of leaders and trainers to say, ‘Hey, here are some other options’ straight out of the gate so that the tone that has been set is one of equity and access. And it creates healthy peer pressure so that folks are like, ‘Wait, do you have a BIPOC scholarship fund? Do you have an Indigenous reciprocity fund? If not, why not? You all are talking about scale, which means you’re talking about big numbers, and we see these little groups that are putting x% of their profits, so why aren’t you guys?’” -Rebecca “We have this really sick thing here which is like this tree that is rotting from the roots and we’re clipping at the leaves and trying to make it better, but what we really need to do is compost it and grow something else here. But what is that vision? I think even if you look globally, we have so few examples of what a safe supply market would look like, and that’s so far down the road of so many conversations, culturally, that need to be had, and so many assumptions and ideas and stigmas that need to be peeled back layer by layer, that to say something to an average American voter like, ‘Imagine if we had a place where people who do use drugs could get a safe supply and know that they’re not going to overdose,’ you’re speaking a different language at that point.” -Rebecca
Elan Hagens and Rebecca Martinez are the co-founders of Fruiting Bodies Collective, a mission-based podcast, advocacy group, and multimedia platform in Portland, Oregon, serving the growing psychedelic healing community. They exist to bridge the gap between industry insiders and the eager-to-learn general public, with a focus on uplifting marginalized communities toward liberation for all. Their current project is the creation of a collectively owned, justice-centered psychedelic peer support training program for Oregon’s legal psilocybin facilitators.
In this episode, Joe and Kyle interview Mark Haberstroh: mushroom enthusiast, contributor to our Navigating Psychedelics course, and in Joe’s words, the “person who has worked at more psychedelic retreats than anyone I know.”
Haberstroh talks about his journey from a liter-of-vodka-a-day “drinking career” to rehab, to finding his calling and spiritual path through a combination of using psilocybin for the first time at a retreat center and later, someone at a festival asking him if he used mushrooms intentionally. He talks about what he’s learned from working at so many retreat centers, from issues he’s had with unwelcome surprises and miscommunication, to ways retreat centers can improve to become more people-focused with more attention paid to the very necessary (and all too often neglected) aftercare piece.
He also talks about the importance of researching retreat centers, how different retreats could be geared towards different intentions, the power of the Lakota Sun Dance, Stan Grof’s theory of perinatal matrices, how integral community is to the healing experience, and the complicated aspects surrounding our collective focus on safety.
Notable Quotes
“It’s unfortunate, but when people don’t know about these substances, they compare them to the substances they do know, and if I told them I was doing mushrooms, they equated it to heroin and alcohol and other drugs. These things are so different, and people are so set in their ways, not only would they not listen to me, but they wouldn’t even see me. I lost a hundred pounds, I became active and healthy and happy. …Nobody saw that. All they saw or heard was that I was using mushrooms, and to them, that was bad.” “People ask me about [microdosing] and I’m like, ‘I don’t know. Personally, I don’t get anything out of it.’ We don’t have any data, the placebo effect is really, really strong. But like, whatever. Same thing about spirituality: If you’re happier, healthier, and it’s working for you? Fuck yea.”
“These things have been around forever. We just kind of forgot about them or became afraid of them.”
“I grew up playing video games. And at one of these retreats, I was walking through the woods and was like, ‘Oh my god, I grew up having nature pre-packaged and sold to me for 60 bucks. An ‘adventure,’ and I’ve been ignoring actual adventure in my own life. I need to sell my PlayStation.’”
“It’s a chaotic time right now, but I think we’re also witnessing a real paradigm shift and it’s what we need societally. We need to think about, reevaluate, and revamp the education system, the prison system, [and] the medical model that likes to put band-aids on things rather than getting to the root cause of the issues.”
Mark Haberstroh is a self-educated entheogenic specialist and amateur mycologist, working with mushrooms of all varieties for the last 6 years. He has traveled the world, visiting and working for different psilocybin retreats, educating himself on the different models currently being offered in countries where this work is legal. Originally from Alabama, he now lives in Oregon and is attending the School of Consciousness Medicine.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Michelle, Kyle, and Joe welcome Benjamin Mudge to talk about psychedelics and bipolar disorder, and although there was an intention to also cover some news, the bipolar topic turned out to be quite interesting- so much so that there will need to be a part 2 of this episode in the future.
Mudge, a Ph.D. candidate and Director of the Bipolar Disorder CIC, talks about his own journey of living with bipolar disorder, and how it was ayahuasca that got him off pharmaceutical drugs and to a place of self-awareness and balance he never experienced before. He discusses the taboo against bipolar people and how keeping them out of research studies out of fear for their safety is actually more dangerous to them, and how ayahuasca on its own (and in the correct setting and proportion) could actually be a very safe solution. He talks about how ayahuasca has been a scapegoat, the many factors that come into play to determine its strength and efficacy, institutional ethics, mania triggers, the effects of antidepressants, and how bipolar people are “quantificationly challenged.”
Mudge is working to become an ayahuasca facilitator, collaborating with researchers to determine the best ayahuasca component ratio, pushing to get more bipolar people in more studies, and his biggest project: creating a safe protocol for bipolar people to engage in ayahuasca ceremonies so that they can experience the peace he has.
Notable Quotes
“I was prescribed the wrong antidepressant and became manic psychotic, got locked in a hospital, and went on a journey through the mainstream psychiatric system, tried 17 different prescription pharmaceutical drugs, …I left psychiatry, tried to figure out my own way, tried a bunch of herbs from herbalists and Chinese doctors- they didn’t work. And then 15 years ago, I discovered ayahuasca, and I’ve been off psychiatric pharmaceutical drugs ever since then.” “The contraindication status is not logical, and it’s functioning more like a cultural taboo in our community than it is an evidence-based medical fact. And by the contraindication and the exclusion of bipolar people from the clinical trials, from the ayahuasca retreat centers and so on and so on- that is an attempt to ‘do no harm,’ but doing nothing when you’ve got a suicidal population does not equal ‘no harm.’” “Excuse me, but can anyone actually give me a logical reason why one peer of one minority group who has superior understanding than the rest of the population about what this other bipolar person is going through, knows how to help them, and actually has some experimental treatment medicine- can anyone actually give me a logical, ethical reason why those bipolar people can’t get together and help each other out?” “There is a role for mainstream psychiatric pharmaceutical drugs. They can definitely play a role in stabilizing someone, [but] the question is, does that really have to go on for their whole life? Or once they’ve got their life together and done some therapy, can they have a lower dose or have them less often, or come off them, or use a psychedelic or whatever? That’s not something that the profit margin and that big pharma wants to consider at this point. But I think the humans deserve it.”
Benjamin Mudge has a background in music, art and political activism, and is now a PhD candidate in the Psychiatry Department at Flinders University, as well as Director of Bipolar Disorder CIC. He taught himself the science of bipolar disorder, while working at Neuroscience laboratories and GlaxoSmithKline, to be able to manage his own personal experience of manic depression. After psychiatrists prescribed him 17 different pharmaceuticals (all of which were problematic), he gave up on pharmaceutical psychiatry and decided to find his own solution to living with manic depression. He has been managing his bipolar disorder with ayahuasca for 14 years – without any need of pharmaceuticals – and was awarded a PhD scholarship to research whether his personal protocol could assist other bipolar people. His future vision is to make ayahuasca ceremonies available to bipolar people as an alternative treatment to pharmaceutical drugs.
In this episode, Joe interviews Dr. Fernando Espi Forcen and Dr. Franklin King from Mass General Hospital’s new Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics.
They talk about how Jerry Rosenbaum, Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, and Compass Pathways led to the creation of the Center, and they talk about their plans, including a study involving imaging, a study looking at ketamine use with and without psychotherapy, and their first: a study on rumination inspired by Rosenbaum’s work.
They discuss people’s “good or bad” binary opinions on drugs and the fear so many still have of psychedelics, the mystery of consciousness and how more studies can lead to a better understanding of it (and therefore better psychiatry), spiritual emergence vs. spiritual emergency, what could hurt our collective progress, and their vision of the future as a very multidisciplinary world with a lot of cross-collaboration between different fields of psychiatry and science- a future they’re already starting to see with some of the excitement coming from their neighbors at MIT.
Notable Quotes
“One of the major issues, I think, facing psychedelic research right now is that all the money is private money. …We don’t have any federal funding for psychedelic research at this point, which essentially means that people with deep pockets are able to dictate what studies get funded and that private companies get to decide what gets studied. …It’s definitely true that political bias and some of the scars of the 1960s and the Nixon laws and the Reagan era are continuing to suppress research.” -Franklin “If we’re going to hold psychedelics to this super high standard, I think we also need to hold all of our other treatments to a super high standard. So I do see within that, there’s kind of a bias where people are willing to look the other way about something like ECT or the criticism that SSRIs might not be super effective for mild to moderate depression. We look the other way for that, whereas psychedelics need to jump through so many hurdles to prove that they’re worth pursuing.” -Franklin “The amazing thing about consciousness is that we still don’t have a good model for the mind of consciousness. And as a psychiatrist, [that’s] tremendously intriguing.” -Fernando “Another piece of this is really preparing not just patients, but psychiatrists, physicians, the world, for how this works, because it’s really a completely different model of treatment than pretty much anything else. Whether you see a psychiatrist or you see another kind of physician, you’re going in and sort of asking for a treatment to be given to you as kind of a passive recipient. Psychedelics are not like that.” -Franklin “Nixon’s ghost is in my apartment, probably.” -Joe
About Dr. Fernando Espi Forcen and Dr. Franklin King
Fernando Espi Forcen, MD, PhD, works at the Department of Psychiatry of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, taking care of patients at the inpatient psychiatry unit and urgent care clinic. Before moving to Boston, he worked at Rush University in Chicago as a consult liaison psychiatrist with a particular focus on patients in need of liver and kidney transplants. He was born and raised in Spain and graduated from Medical School at the University of Murcia. He has more than 20 peer-reviewed publications in a variety of aspects of psychiatry, such as akathisia due to drugs, metabolic syndrome, inflammation, dissociative symptoms, history of psychiatry, and cinema. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychiatry and the author of the book, Monsters, Demons and Psychopaths: Psychiatry and Horror Film.
Franklin King IV, MD, is the director of training and education at the Mass General Center for the Neuroscience of Psychedelics and a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. His primary clinical and research interest is in the utilization of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy to treat a variety of chronic psychiatric conditions, including depression and anxiety disorders, and in strategies to optimize these interventions for different patient populations. In addition, Dr. King teaches and supervises residents and fellows at Mass General, and practices clinically as a staff psychiatrist at the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders as well as on the Acute Psychiatry Service in the Emergency Department.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Michelle is back, Joe is in Phoenix, news is covered, and rants are made.
They first cover Maine’s recent proposal to legalize psilocybin therapy, and how interesting it is that a diagnosis wouldn’t be needed, but a “licensed psilocybin service facilitator” would: Is this a move towards liberation or far away from it? They then discuss the excellent results finally coming out of MAPS’ Phase 3 Trial for MDMA-Assisted Therapy, which leads to a huge sidebar about the efficacy of therapy, what a diagnosis can mean, how we define “sick” and “healthy,” and how we trust “evidence-based” studies and the DSM when maybe we shouldn’t so much.
They then talk about a CEO of a $2 billion startup getting fired for using LSD at work in a microdosing experiment, the FDA proposing a ban on menthol-flavored cigarettes and flavored cigars (which Michelle refers to as what a lot of us know them as, “blunt wraps”), and the list that sparked a lot of controversy in the community, Psychedelic Invest’s “100 Most Influential People in Psychedelics” list, which, despite Joe’s inclusion at #85 (Yay Joe! Sorry Kyle!), Michelle did not entirely agree with.
Notable Quotes
“I understand that maybe totally regulating and legalizing psilocybin for sale without the facilitator component is a little radical for the mainstream to handle, but …I do hope that this is a first step toward that. Maybe we can show how safe and gentle psilocybin can be, and that the facilitator aspect should be a choice among people and not a necessity.” -Michelle
“You don’t need a clinical diagnosis to know you have shit to work on.” -Joe “Talking about diagnosis and the medicalization of therapy, I think it’s this double-edged sword where some people really find relief in having a diagnosis, and go, ‘oh, it gives me some sort of language that this is what’s going on with me and I have a path forward to treat it,’ but that also limits people from wanting to seek out therapy.” -Kyle “The establishment wants us to think that they’re keeping us safe so that they can continue to justify their existence. That’s one of my reads. I understand how that’s pretty cynical, but it’s kind of the way it’s been: ‘Oh, you’re smoking cannabis? We’re going to put you in jail and take your kids away, because it’s what’s best.’ That sounds like a nightmare, first off. And then secondly, where’s your data? Where’s your data that prohibition has ever worked? Ever, ever, ever?” -Joe
In this episode, Joe interviews Professor of American Religious History and Cultures at Emory University, podcaster, and author of Don’t Think About Death: A Memoir on Mortality, Gary Laderman.
He talks about challenging our notion of what “religious” means: how “religious” doesn’t have to be linked to traditional dogmatic structures and how conventional conceptualizations around religion can actually close people off from possibly deeply meaningful experiences. He talks about the “rise of the nones”- his term for the growing demographic of “spiritual but not religious” people who combine aspects of different religions to create their own, or don’t consider themselves to have a religion at all, and use the rituals, myths, lessons, and transcendence attached to experiences to create the same effects that our ancestors achieved from traditional religious structures.
They also discuss how psychedelics work in our lives outside of the mystical, Esalen, Lady Gaga, the culture built around medicine and the religious authority we see in doctors, how religion has affected our language and how we learn, and the various ways it seeps into our understanding of sex, our bodies, and death.
Notable Quotes
“[I’m] just really asking people to consider the possibility that religious life extends far beyond how we normally see it in the media or think about it. It’s more than going to the church or reading The Bible.”
“Back in the day, going to Grateful Dead concerts or maybe now, Phish, Burning Man- these are all obvious examples of tying some of this stuff together. You can’t avoid the religious connotations of these kinds of activities, just in how people describe them who go and attend and what they bring back from those commitments and experiences.” “You want to talk about what ultimately matters in our lives in how we bring order and meaning and stave off chaos and suffering? We should talk about pharmaceutical companies and prescription drugs.” “What’s interesting about studying the sacred is that nobody agrees upon it.”
Gary Laderman, Goodrich C. White Professor of American Religious History and Cultures, is the author of the new book, Don’t Think About Death: A Memoir on Mortality (Deeds Publishing, 2020), and hosts the podcast, Sacrilegious.
Laderman was also a founder of the online religion magazines, Religion Dispatches (created and initially directed with Sheila Davaney in the early 2000s), and started Sacred Matters on his own. He is continuing to research, write, and teach on the sacred in American life generally, and is currently working on a book project exploring religion and drugs, the focus of a new course first taught in 2017, “Sacred Drugs.”
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, a power outage keeps Michelle from joining in, but Joe and Kyle pick up the slack, going old-school SF style for the week.
They talk about new drugs: Cybin investigating using their proprietary psychedelic compound “CYB003” for alcohol use disorder, and scientists using a technology called psychLight to identify when a compound activates the brain’s serotonin 2A receptor (in hopes of activating the biological benefits of psychedelics without their traditional hallucinogenic effects).
They also give a legalization update, with new cannabis and psychedelic reform bills in Texas and legalization bills in Louisiana, talk about non-profit Porta Sophia’s new Psychedelic Prior Art Library and the importance of establishing a public domain, and discuss Johns Hopkins’ new study on psilocybin for Alzheimer’s-related depression (and ways to possibly combat the effects of Alzheimer’s). They also cover climate change, Leonard Pickard, the tragedy of the commons, 2C-B, the importance of looking at fringe cases, and the intelligence of millennials.
Notable Quotes
“How could we shift to more cooperative actions vs. competition all the time?” -Kyle “Our map of reality is minimized inappropriately when we exclude these fringe cases. …What does it mean that somebody can present as psychic, or present as a spirit, or meet these spirits, or go to the [afterlife] and come back (in your case) and then get set on an interesting trajectory via psychedelics? This is not what doctors can deal with, but this is what those of us outside of medicine can deal with, as a philosophical endeavor.” -Joe
“Some of these new compounds- I guess it’s exciting, and you always say we need new drugs, but …why is there a race for new drugs when we’re not even using the ones to the full potential that are not even on the market right now? ..Just thinking about all the new companies coming online trying to find new drugs for patents and development, when it’s like, have we really explored the potential of the ones that have been around for a while?” -Kyle
In this episode, Joe interviews Nick Meyers and Tyler Chandler, the makers of the documentary that has made a lot of waves over the last year (and been praised on this podcast): “Dosed.”
They first visited the podcast last year, a few months after the film’s release, and are back to talk about the response it’s received and their progress on “Dosed 2: Psilocybin and the Art Of Living,” which will follow the journey of one of the patients granted legal palliative psilocybin therapy by TheraPsil last year. And although it’s not mentioned, they’re actually planning a “Dosed” trilogy.
They talk about their early psychedelic experiences, the accusations that some of Adrianne’s scenes in the film are fake, the risk profile of iboga and how age can be a factor in its efficacy, the strength and passion of the iboga community, the complications of methadone in our opioid crisis, “The Pharmacist” docuseries, pill mills, the absurdity of the drug war, and the argument for treating someone for a year vs. a lifetime. They also talk about how many people have been inspired to change their lives after watching “Dosed.”
“The way we did it was, as I said earlier, maybe not exactly correct, but she still had the profoundly beneficial experience, and I think that’s because her intentions were there. She was ready to make a change in her life. And anybody that’s looking to get past depression, anxiety, and/or addiction, you need to have that shift and realize it’s time to make a change and move forward.” -Tyler
On criticisms of the film: “I find it actually a little frustrating, but I can just go back just a few years in time and if I had heard about a film like this, not knowing what I know now, I would probably be like, ‘Yeah, right. That sounds hokey or kind of like, bullshit.’” -Tyler
“A better judge of what it’s doing and the impact that it’s making is not a negative comment here or there; it’s the fact that we have emails in our inbox every single day from people that are expressing to us that the film changed their lives, [and] it set them on a different path, away from their struggles and towards potential solutions. It’s a very, very good feeling to be a part of something like that.” -Nick
“Mental health is a problem that is actually getting worse and worse over the last few decades even though the pharmaceutical industry is supposed to have all the answers. But ‘Why is it still getting worse and worse?’ is the question.” -Tyler
Nicholas Meyers is a Canadian producer, writer and cinematographer, known for the multi-award winning feature documentary, DOSED. He’s currently in production on DOSED 2.
Tyler Chandler is a Canadian documentary director, writer, and producer. His directorial debut is the award winning feature documentary, DOSED, about the therapeutic use of psychedelics like magic mushrooms and iboga to help people overcome mental health issues including depression, anxiety, and opioid addiction. Prior to DOSED Tyler produced two other features, winning three awards, and he’s currently in production on DOSED 2.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle are joined by Tim Cools of PsychedelicExperience.net, a not-for-profit website that aims to be both an open data source for researchers, as well as a Trip Advisor/Yelp-style review site for retreat centers and facilitators that will actually allow negative reviews (something that’s oddly rare in similar sites). While the site is live now, they are having are-launch event on Saturday, streaming the documentary, “Psychedelia,” followed by a live panel discussion with “Psychedelia” director Pat Murphy, Cools, and David Luke.
The team first discusses a recent Forbes article that reported Beckley Psytech teaming up with Fluence (a psychedelic education organization that trains mental health providers) for the first 5-MeO-DMT training program, and how it felt like a press release that was both pushing 5-MeO-DMT while also ignoring many of its more important aspects.
They then move on to The New England Journal of Medicine’s recent “Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression” study and the way it was reported, highlighted in a reaction blog by one of its authors: Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris. This leads to a discussion on how these studies (whether intentionally or not) so often bury important information deep within these papers, including study-related deaths. And they review responses from Katherine MacLean and Rosalind Watts that perfectly illustrate the importance of community, the efficacy of in-depth therapy, and the shortsightedness (and danger) of treating psychedelics as miracle cures.
Notable Quotes
“Learn to be aware of what you’re thinking. Learn to be aware of what your emotions are, what is in your body. This is more important because this is your real life. The psychedelic or the mystical experience is life-changing and it’s good to have once in a while, but you’re living in this moment. You’re living right now, and so it’s more important for [you] to be aware of what you have now than to chase the other psychedelic experience, one after each other.” -Tim Cools “We should have this open science to try to prove these things, but maybe the clinical model isn’t really where we need to be proving that this works. Maybe in the community model, we’re going to see more effective results. And we won’t be able to have that until it’s legal and therefore safe for everyone to participate in.” -Michelle
“I’m not totally against these capitalist groups, I’m just kind of against their fuckery and manipulation and hiding data, kind of lying in a way- selling us things but having a lot of lies hidden in the closet.” -Joe
“I think that tripping is a skill …and that you should practice that skill- build those muscles, and then maybe it can happen for you. But we shouldn’t sell it as: ‘You take a psychedelic, you have a mystical experience, you’re never depressed again.’ That doesn’t sit right. That doesn’t usually happen.” -Michelle
Tim is a conscious entrepreneur and psychedelic coach. After experiencing the profound transformational power of Ayahuasca in 2015, he realized his purpose is to advocate safe and responsible use of psychedelic plants and medicines: this is how Psychedelic Experience was born! He has over two decades of professional experience developing industrial-grade software in various industries, including smart homes, energy, payroll and logistics. In 2018, Tim re-trained himself as a psychedelic integration coach and guide, hosting legal psychedelic sessions and retreats in the Netherlands. Tim’s interests are software architecture, psychedelics and plant medicine, non-dualism, mindfulness, and helping people to reduce their suffering and improve their well-being.
In this episode, Michelle and Joe interview Ralph Blumenthal, 45-year New York Times contributor and author of The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack (which inspired one of ourmore popular recent blogs, and you can win a copy of!).
They talk about John Mack: legendary Harvard professor who did breathwork with Stan Grof at Esalen and became interested in the mystery of alien abduction, which led him to write 2 bestselling books, appear on Oprah (who is probably an alien*), become a pioneer in the world of alien abductions, and die while immersed in afterlife studies, only to reportedly visit friends later on. Mack’s notoriety came from trusting the stories he was hearing, trying to help people make sense of it all, and taking a big interest in how these experiences seemed to transform so many of the abductees. Sounds a lot like powerful psychedelic experiences and integration work leading towards growth, doesn’t it?
So sit back, pause that X-Files episode, light one up on this high holiday, and get really deep into the world of aliens. Learn about the government’s secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, the Ariel school incident, Avi Loeb’s Oumuamua theory, out-of-body experiences, shapeshifters, and more! Ponder how Blumenthal “accidentally” leaves questions unanswered about the government experimenting with DMT as a way of communicating with aliens. Contemplate why the government is suddenly so forthcoming with UFO data. Think about how today is 420 and this is episode 240…
The truth is out there, folks.
*This viewpoint is not that of Psychedelics Today, but merely of this high Show Notes writer.
Notable Quotes
On Mack doing breathwork with Stan Grof: “He was awakened to a different world, a spiritual world, a world of other realities than the one he was familiar with, and as I say in my book, he said, ‘Stan Grof opened up my psyche and the UFOs flew in.’”
“It’s no spoiler to say that my book does not provide the answer to the mystery of alien abduction, and I acknowledge that. I shed some light on it, perhaps, and what I like to say is that at least I’m comfortable saying that I know what it isn’t. It’s not mental illness, it’s not hoaxes (by and large), it’s not fabrication, it’s not the delusion of crowds. It’s something else. It’s something that is very real to a lot of people from different walks of life [and] different ages, and there really is no good explanation for what has happened to these people.”
“What do you say about the 2-year old children who tell these stories? You know, ‘Little man fly me up in the sky.’ ‘I go up in the sky.’ These 2-year-old kids: have they read UFO books? Are they influenced by UFO movies?”
“Skeptics have not taken the time to read the literature. They don’t know the cases. So all they can do is say, ‘Ah, that’s ridiculous.’ Of course it’s ridiculous! We all agree it’s ridiculous. We all agree it’s not possible. …We all agree that these stories that people are telling are not possible in our reality. They’re completely crazy. And yet, there’s no easy way to explain them away.”
Ralph Blumenthal was a reporter for The New York Times from 1964 to 2009, and has written seven books based on investigative crime reporting and cultural history. His latest book The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack was published by High Road Books of the University of New Mexico Press on March 15, 2021. It’s the first biography of Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard Psychiatrist John E. Mack (1929-2004) who risked an esteemed career to investigate stupefying accounts of human abductions by aliens. Vanity Fairexcerpted the work-in-progress in 2013.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle start out with what’s turning out to be a weekly legalization update (what a time to be alive!), this week highlighting New Mexico and Virginia’s recent legalization of cannabis and Maine representative Anne Perry filing a bill to decriminalize the possession of all drugs. Vacationland, indeed!
They then talk about a recent study that proved scientifically that psilocybin increases creativity, and another that analyzed changes in personality after ceremonial group ayahuasca use, which, based on self-report assessments filled out by both participants and informants alike, showed a reduction in neuroticism among participants. This leads to a conversation about the benefits of group work and the importance of more research being done on ceremonial ayahuasca use.
They then discuss Vice’s recent recovering of the long-lost page 25 from the CIA’s report on astral projection, why this was something conspiracy theorists have been clamoring for, and how the self-knowledge aspects of the report relate to psychedelics (other than astral projection being really freaking trippy, man). And they talk about Navigating Psychedelics (which has its next round coming up on May 20th) and remind us that although that’s the one they talk about the most, there are actually several other courses at psychedeliceducationcenter.com worth checking out. Maybe there’ll be one about astral projection soon? This guy sure hopes so.
Notable Quotes
“It’s nice to see that Virginia is authorizing home grow (up to 4 plants per household) beginning July 1st. I see all these other states being able to offer this besides New Jersey, so… F. U., New Jersey.” -Kyle, who lives in New Jersey
“Human creativity kind of got us here. Human creativity can get us out, and psychedelics can play a huge role in that, if we figure out how to leverage it properly. Let’s not use this stuff to help us get more oil out of the ground or pump more freshwater into single-use plastic bottles. Let’s use it to solve this crisis.” -Joe
“Our culture is set up in this weird way that it’s constantly making us feel bad and that we’re not doing enough. So when we can all be really vulnerable and honest and open in a group, whether it’s with psychedelics or not, it’s so important.” -Michelle “We can take an analytic approach and tear it apart and try to get to the core of ‘What is this?’ but all humans have this access to this other realm through breathwork, through meditation, through psychedelics, through near-death experiences. And if you’ve ever had that experience, how do you deny it?” -Kyle
In this episode, Joe interviews returning guest Richie Ogulnick, a facilitator/guide who has been helping clients through ibogaine experiences for 26 years.
Ogulnick talks about how ibogaine works, why he prefers working with the whole plant (iboga), why the flood doses he used to recommend weren’t as effective, and the importance of allowing his clients to spend as much time as they want on intention-setting before their session. And of course, he talks about the session itself, which usually tends to be a gradual slide into a 15 to 30-hour waking dream state of deep exploration, followed by the slow process of coming out of it, making sense of it, and starting to work towards integrating what was learned.
He also talks about LSD, the work of Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh (Osho), an instance of someone who had no experience with iboga (and why), methodologies and experience, and tells a story of a time in NYC, watching someone shoot up heroin while explaining their experience to him as a way for him to better understand addiction and an addict’s search for a feeling of peace.
Notable Quotes
“Very often, people ask me if they should bring a tape recorder with them, and I say, ‘Well, just make sure that it’s a voice-activated tape recorder, because you may say a few words and then 15 hours later, you may finish the sentence.’” “Unlike other psychoactives, it’s interesting- it’s almost like you’re introduced to a new language, and 6 months, 8 months later, people are sharing with me that their intentions have finally all been worked through and they’re maybe considering doing another session in 6 months or a year. Whereas, with other psychoactives, you can very comfortably do ayahuasca once a week, once a month, for months or years. People tend to do iboga maybe 2 to 4 times in a lifetime.”
“Psychedelics or iboga or meditation- methods won’t get us to that beneficence. What methods tend to do is allow us to crawl back to ourselves and say, ‘I’ve accumulated all of these experiences through this methodology, but I can’t go any further. I have to let go of this method’ and then the beneficence really happens. So it’s running at the arrogance of adulthood until you crawl back to yourself and you say, ‘I surrender.’” “The cool thing about setting intentions is not so much the content but the impetus. You create the pilgrimage to go deep within, irrespective of what you really explore.”
Richie Ogulnick is a long time Ibogaine provider and enthusiast Over the course of fifteen and a half years, he conducted about 750 sessions, including addiction-interruption treatments. He spent the next several years referring close to 1,000 more people to other ibogaine providers. During that time, he also trained doctors and ex-addicts who opened ibogaine centers throughout the world. Richie feels a pull to focus again on the more therapeutic and psycho-spiritual treatments where he is able to offer his expertise in ibogaine treatment along with his knowledge of reintegration with individuals who are looking to deepen and enrich their life experience.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, everyone’s back and so is the news.
They cover California Senator Scott Wiener’s SB 519 bill to decriminalize psychedelics statewide (which is the first time a decriminalize bill has been put through and passed by lawmakers instead of ballot initiatives), a 3rd Massachusetts city decriminalizing psychedelics, an article pointing out how the various flaws in our capitalistic world also thrive in the psychedelic world, and a TIME magazine article on ibogaine and Marcus and Amber Capone’s VETS organization (that curiously didn’t mention Marcus’ 5-MeO-DMT use or iboga’s endangered status).
But there are 2 big articles that lead to the most discussion this week: first, Psymposia’s article about Third Wave’s Paul Austin stealing provider information (possibly including Kyle’s) from Psychedelic.support and MAPS and the ethics of doing something like this, and second, Vice’s article examining patents and ethics within the psychedelic world. How can companies be profitable while also being ethical? How can a company grow within a capitalistic society without falling into the greed traps of our Western ways?
And although he doesn’t call it out, this episode features the return of this show notes writer’s favorite PT segment, Joe’s Paranoid Update- this time about the chaos that could ensue if the Colorado River dries up.
Notable Quotes
“We can work on ourselves, but does that ultimately heal the society when these systemic issues are at play which continue to make us sick? It just feels like this endless feedback loop. …If we’re just focused on our individuation and not actually engaging and participating in the community, in the society, then what are we doing the work for? Are we just doing it for our individual selves?” -Kyle
“Representation matters so much and it affects people’s self-esteem and self-worth when they don’t have it there, because they don’t think that that’s ever going to be a possibility for them. It just felt so good to be able to put that article out there and to represent some different types of people in this space and highlight their really important and often overlooked work. And we’re going to continue to do it.” -Michelle
“It really is just this cool new therapy for the affluent class [that] Compass [Pathways] wants, and that’s how you make the most money. But I think that if you were an ethical psychedelic company, that wouldn’t be the goal. That wouldn’t be the mission, and you wouldn’t dress it up all in this B.S. language.” -Michelle
“I do feel like we’re in the middle of something really powerful and it can either really change everything or… not. I just hope that we, as a community, keep our eye on the prize, which is like- it’s more than psychedelics. It’s cultural change, societal change.” -Michelle
In this episode, Joe and Kyle interview Palo Alto-based Ph.D., author, clinical psychologist, and “integration specialist,” Kile Ortigo.
From what he’s learned at his time at the Grady Trauma Project, the National Center for PTSD, VA work, hospice work, and his own practice, he talks about the flaws of active intervention models of therapy and why what can be most healing for someone is often just letting them be and bearing witness to their experience. And he talks about burnout in healthcare, secondary trauma, common factors that help in all therapy techniques, Jung, “Altered States,” and what we might derive from the popularity of Marvel movies.
And he talks about his book,Beyond the Narrow Life: A Guide For Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration, and integration: what it actually means, the basics of how he works with clients, if it’d be possible to create some sort of integration measurement, the importance of being flexible when intention-setting, how the psychedelic journey relates to Campbells’ idea of the hero’s journey, and the importance of movies like “Joker.”
Notable Quotes
“I think that’s one of the downsides of working in any sort of big, large, complex system- is that the metrics that you’re being evaluated on are how many patients you’re seeing a day or a week, not necessarily: are they improving?”
“We need to loosen our attachments on active interventions sometimes and realize that just bearing witness- being present in a mental way can be what’s most healing.”
“Mythology is being created, I would say, at a very rapid pace these days, and it’s being communicated in a much higher scale. And that’s primarily through our science fiction, I think, because it’s previewing some of these challenges that are here right now and we knew they were coming, but we haven’t been paying attention to them and we need to. ‘Black Mirror’ is important.”
“There have always been multiple stories that need to be told, including counter stories to our dominant narratives (our hero’s journey). And that’s why a film like ‘Joker’ from last year was so incredibly important. We needed to hear the story of the shadow and why we need to pay attention to the shadow, and not from a place of judgment or antagonism, but of compassion.”
Kile M. Ortigo, Ph.D., is an award-winning clinical psychologist and founder of the Center for Existential Exploration, which supports people exploring profound questions about identity, meaning, life transitions, and psychospiritual development. He also serves on advisory boards of Psychedelic Support, an online training and clinician directory for legal, psychedelic-informed care, and Project New Day, a non-profit organization providing harm reduction resources for people using psychedelics in their addiction recovery process. He received his PhD from Emory University and is a certified psychedelic therapist trained at CIIS and mentored by Dr. Bill Richards (who wrote the foreword to his second book, Beyond the Narrow Life). For several years, Dr. Ortigo worked at the National Center for PTSD (NC-PTSD) where he collaborated on technology development and implementation projects, ranging from apps like Mindfulness Coach to online programs like webSTAIR. With colleagues at NC-PTSD, NYU, and Harvard, Dr. Ortigo coauthored Treating Survivors of Child Abuse & Interpersonal Trauma: STAIR Narrative Therapy (2nd Edition), which was released in June 2020.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, technical difficulties lead to a week off from the gang reviewing the news, and instead, Joe interviews microdose & mindset mentor, entrepreneur, author, public speaker, retreat leader, and voice of the Psychedelic Leadership podcast, Laura Dawn.
Dawn talks about her path from Montreal to building a retreat center by a volcanic hot spring in Hawaii, only to see that dream end with the volcano’s eruption. But due to an ayahuasca experience that fed her a song and the lyrics, “Trust in the great unknown,” she did exactly that and followed her heart towards coming out of the psychedelic closet and beginning teaching people the ways of microdosing and ways to inspire creative thinking.
They talk a lot about creativity: how to define it, misconceptions about learning and practicing creativity, the 4 Ps of creativity, the concept of convergent/divergent thinking and cognitive fluidity, the 5 stages of creativity, flow state, peak performance, and her framework of preparation, practice, and psychedelics towards a more open and creative mind.
Notable Quotes
“When we think about creativity and creative thinking, we can start to understand this as a range of cognitive processes that can best be described as a dynamic fluid movement between multiple states of mind, and of course that’s where psychedelics really come in.”
“By creating a conceptual framework, we can teach ourselves. It’s almost like uploading a neurological program in the mind, which then allows you to perceive reality differently, and you can train yourself how to perceive in that way by taking that framework and that understanding into the psychedelic space.” “Think about creativity and creating not for the thing in and of itself. …It’s not about the thing. When people are afraid to create, take the leap for the act of flying through the air, not because you think you’re going to stick the landing.” “I think everything comes down to intention. There is very much so this quality of focusing on peak performance from a place of like, the drill sergeant and the whip, and ‘I’m not good enough, I need to get over there and be better,’ and I think it’s easy to fall down that road. But then there’s also another aspect that we can choose to relate to it differently, of like: how much can I expand what I believe is possible to create with my life on this planet while I’m alive?”
In this episode, Joe interviews Dena Justice, who uses her unprecedented 4th appearance on Psychedelics Today to not talk a whole lot about neuro-linguistic programming or ways to beat anxiety. Instead, she blasts out of the psychedelic closet and opens up like few guests have before, taking us on the harrowing and life-changing journey of the last 6 years of her growth.
She talks about how her first MDMA experience made her realize how many limiting beliefs, insecurities, and issues with never feeling safe all came from childhood abuse and could be traced back to one specific morning. She discusses the “ages and stages of Dena,” and getting to know her childhood self, Little Dena, and how Little Dena, her 15-year-old self, and her future self influence her today. And she talks about the breakthroughs and realizations from each subsequent experience (MDMA, LSD, and ayahuasca), and how each was just another step leading to her year of “energy and life cleanup,” culminating in the most profound psychedelic experience of her life, where she found the frequency of safety she’d been seeking her whole life.
The first few minutes of this episode feel tense and you may be cautious to continue, but stick with it- like many beneficial psychedelic experiences, you may have to go through some rough stuff to get to the gold, but in the end, it’s worth it. This one’s pretty powerful.
Notable Quotes
“This whole morning as a 4-year-old is ingrained in my memory. I remember what I was wearing, I remember the way my Mom looked, I remember the sunlight streaming into the living room through our front windows. …And I’m standing at the top of the flight of the stairs, screaming at her and sobbing because she’s not hearing me. And in that moment, I created an entire set of beliefs that literally ran my show until 3 months ago.”
“I look at what I’ve done since I started really utilizing psychedelics intentionally, and my whole life changed. In the last 5 years, my whole life is completely different than where I was in November of 2015, and I don’t look at the person in the mirror and recognize her anymore the way I was familiar with myself before. I’m like, ‘Where did this woman come from? She’s pretty amazing.’”
“I literally saw all of this energy moving and I traveled up one thread of this energy to a point of light, and I articulated it so clearly- I said, ‘Wow. I found the frequency of safety. I can see it and I can feel it in my entire being, and this is what I’ve been seeking my entire life.‘”
“Everybody who has trauma should be able to experience this kind of healing. Everybody should get to feel this free from the past that has tormented them.”
Dena’s training as a facilitator, educator, trainer, mentor, and coach started at age 7 when she took her first social-emotional training program. That started years of training in conflict management and mediation, leadership, communication, facilitation, and more. By 15, she was facilitating personal development courses.
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle start out by reflecting on the awesome conversation with Dr. Carl Hart from earlier in the week and everything it made them think about concerning the drug war, society’s framing of addiction, how different drugs have been vilified in different eras, privilege, and how greed is keeping the truth from us.
They then launch into the articles, which really run the gamut: Nebraska’s governor saying cannabis will kill your children, the Biden administration asking staffers to resign over past cannabis use (What? A politician LIED TO US?!), a study from 2008 showing no statistical difference between SSRI and placebo effects (notable because it mirrors findings from the recent microdosing study they keep discussing), and an opinion piece on the healing power of mushrooms. They then talk about an interesting study where researchers are looking to predict who will do best with psychedelic-assisted therapy, and who might have a really challenging experience. Could you always predict that? Or is it just about getting to know a patient, supporting them, and titrating the dose, hence the title?
“Why are we only concerned about someone’s psychological well-being when it has to do with drugs?” -Michelle
“Heroin was killing a lot of Black men in the 70s and no one cared. And now that it’s killing all these white people with opioids and all this middle-class stuff, all of a sudden, we care. And we want harm-reduction and we want laws and we want drug-checking. But no one gave a fuck 40 years ago.” -Michelle
“So we had the war on drugs and ‘drugs are bad.’ ‘Weed, psychedelics- they’ll make you go crazy.’ And now we have that part of the drug war sort of ending and we’re legalizing them and we’re making money off of them, so all of a sudden, we’ve gone from one untruth which is ‘all drugs are bad’ to this kind of other untruth which is like, ‘Weed and psychedelics: they’ll save your life, they’re great, everyone should use them!’ It’s like, fuck, dude, where was the middle? Where was the neutral? Where was the actual truth?” -Michelle
“How do we catch medicine up to the state of science? Medicine seems to be 10 to 30 years behind science, often. …Sorry doctors- I don’t mean to insult you, but it’s your field, it’s not you as an individual. If you’re listening to this show, clearly you’re ahead of the curve.” -Joe “Just thinking about how transpersonal came out of the humanistic movement because they needed something new, we’re at a new point where like, how do we incorporate and integrate a lot of this neuroscience, the somatics, the transpersonal, the depth, and what could a new field look like? …What would that look like to create a new branch of psychology that really incorporates and integrates a lot of this stuff, and the impact that psychedelics have had on this? What type of theories and frameworks do we need, moving forward, as psychedelics become more integrated into the culture and into the medical realm? Do we need to bring psyche back a little bit with the psychedelics, to really help give a framework or some context to some of these transpersonal and numinous experiences?” -Kyle
If you’re a regular listener of Psychedelics Today, you know how much Joe loved Dr. Carl Hart’s newest book and testament to responsible, out-of-the-closet drug use:Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear. In this episode, Joe and Kyle get to sit down and talk with the man himself for nearly 2 hours. This one’s in the “can’t miss” department, folks.
Hart’s main points echo many of ours: that the drug war is doing exactly what those in power created it for, that drug exceptionalism is wrong and only seeing one path towards progress is limiting, that our job is to use facts and logic to battle inaccuracies and people clearly pushing a false narrative, and that drugs can be fun and coming out of the closet about responsible drug use only opens up the dialogue more (and in the interest of that, this show notes writer is high right now).
They also discuss how scientists rationalize their work within the drug war, the frustrating inaction from drug policy organizations around coming out of the drug closet, opinion-makers and their relationship to the rest of society, what needs to be done to help Brazil, how decriminalization doesn’t stop problematic policy and police, the treatment industry’s misaligned focus on drugs over environment, incorrect assumptions about heroin, the importance of safe supplies and testing your drugs, and Hart’s desire to change “harm-reduction” to “health and happiness.”
Notable Quotes
“I’m always thinking that all I have to do is make this argument logically, and then people will fall in line. That’s naive as fuck, as I’m discovering. But that’s the world in which I live, and I love that world because I can’t live in an illogical world.”
“If the treatment provider is focused on the so-called drug of the person who’s having a problem …they’ve already lost.” “High Price was a book that was kind of comfortable for progressives and conservatives as well- it’s an up-from-slavery book, you know? A poor, Black boy from the hood done well, ‘We feel good about ourselves and our society. See? It can happen to you!’ kind of story. Whereas this book is like, ‘Fuck that. We want our rights.’”
“When these people say that they are worried about drug addiction or what I’m saying might increase drug addiction, that’s some bullshit distraction. If you’re really worried about the negative effects of drug addiction, you would make sure everybody in your society is working. You’d make sure they all have health care. You’d make sure that basic needs were handled. Because if you did those things, you don’t have to worry about drug addiction.”
“The way they portray heroin in the movies sometimes, it’s upsetting because they portray it like people are deadening their emotions and feelings. It’s like, no, shit, you take heroin to feel.”
“When politicians or whoever are out here saying that they care about the opioid crises and they’re not talking about drug-checking, you can stop listening to them because those people are idiots or they think you are an idiot, but in any case, there’s no reason to listen to those people.”
In this week’s Solidarity Fridays episode, Kyle, Joe, and Michelle first discuss an article from Salon.com that illustrates the flaws behind psychedelics being continually hailed as a miracle cure: has everyone just replaced the oft-criticized model of selling a “miracle” pill with selling the narrative that a few psychedelic sessions can cure anything? And inspired by Lenny Gibson, they point out that this rabid focus on medicalization is a direct result of these substances being made illegal in the first place. What would things look like if that had never happened?
They then cover the developing drama between Compass Pathways and seemingly anyone compassionate and not making money from Compass Pathways’ seedy behavior, represented this week by Tim Ferriss and David Bronner. The latest update includes Compass co-founder Christian Angermayer calling Ferriss’ millions in donations a “drop in the ocean” in an odd donations-measuring contest, an email sent to investors saying competitors will never be able to bring a product to market due to the (absurd) patents they’ve filed (which Angermayer actually defended), and co-founder and CEO George Goldsmith mobilizing opposition to Oregon’s Measure 109.
This, not surprisingly, leads to a discussion about the competition between corporations, the race for patents, the drug war, how companies overestimate costs of drug-research and potential loss, how so little of the money being made is going to the Indigenous cultures we got all of this knowledge from, and more fun stuff in the endless mire of bullshit we have to wade through as a result of the drug war and greed.
Notable Quotes
“The only reason why we need to get this medicalized is because we made it illegal and we put it on a scheduling system. So, to make it official and legit and to deschedule it to make it into a medicine, we have to go through FDA-approval. …What if it was never made illegal to begin with?” -Kyle (inspired by Lenny Gibson)
“I really don’t believe in the antibiotic of psychiatry. You really have to actively work on changing the way you think and behave and react and all these things, and it’s a lot of hard work. Mushrooms make it more fun, but it’s a lot of hard work.” -Michelle
“We’re not trying to be the enemy, but please be open to critique and understand where we’re coming from. In the same way a white male in America needs to understand American history and Imperialism and the crazy shit we’ve done, medicine should also try to own that a little bit. Like, why don’t certain communities trust you? Why don’t you get the results that the data says you should?” -Joe “This is not just about decrim. This is about restoring our rights as citizens of the world, regaining autonomy over our bodies, [and] improving science.” -Joe
Manesh is a Ph.D. candidate in Neuroscience at McGill University and has been lead or co-author on over a dozen scientific publications and book chapters on topics including psychedelics, meditation, mind-wandering, and the default-mode network. His Ph.D. dissertation focuses on the default-mode network and he is also conducting research on the brain mechanisms underlying LSD, psilocybin, and DMT in collaboration with Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris and others from the Imperial College London Center for Psychedelic Research. In his free time, he also runs a YouTube channel, 
