In this episode of Sober as Fucking Fucking Sobriety, we're joined by Hamilton Morris, host of the long-running podcast "Sober AS Fucking SOBRIET" and host of "Dr. Oz" on Dr. Phil's show "The View From The Top". We talk about Kratom and how it's become such a big deal in the modern era, and how to deal with it. We also talk about how to talk to your friends about it, and what it's like to be on the other end of a Kratom-fuelled, high-functioning version of the drug. And, of course, we talk about our own experiences with Kratom, and why we think it's one of the most powerful drugs in the world. We hope you enjoy this episode, and that it makes you think about how important it is to have a healthy relationship with your friends and family when dealing with drugs and alcohol, especially when it comes to mental health. This episode is sponsored by Urban Ice Organics, the company that makes the stuff we use to make this podcast. You can get 20% off your first pack by going to UrbanIce.co.nz/soberasfuckingfuckingcuff and get 10% off for the rest of the year. You can't ask for much more than that, and we're not going to judge you, but we're going to give you the best we can give you everything you need to make the most out of it. We'll see you next week, so you can have the best experience you can get from this podcast you can possibly ask for. of the best podcast in the best of your day to be the most sober as F& sober as fuck you can be the best one you're going out and get the best possible experience you'll ever get. Thanks for listening and we'll be back next week! Thank you so much for listening, we really appreciate it. xoxo, Sarah, Sarah and the crew at Sober As Fucked Up! Sarah and Hamilton. Sarah & Hamilton Sarah: Hamilton: Sober ASFucking Sobber, SOBER, SWEARING, SOOF, SONGSUY, SOKO'S, SODAR, SORRY, SOTF, PODCASTING, PASTOR, PLEASER, LOUD, SOWNSY, POTTER, LUCKY, LIVED, LOSER, VOCAL, MALAYTER, GAY, PUNISHED, TALKING ABOUT IT.
00:00:56.000I knew who you were, of course, but I didn't know about your podcast entirely I'd seen clips of you on YouTube and it wasn't until I was driving home from that recording and my phone just filled with hundreds of emails that I realized oh wow this is a serious phenomenon that I was not aware of and now I see it's just become huge.
00:01:31.000I think a lot of it might have to do with the long form because people are so used to seeing people's opinions condensed and filtered into these sound bites and snippets and to hear an extended conversation with someone where they can actually tell stories and articulate their opinions in a nuanced,
00:04:43.000I mean, I think a lot of people set up these unrealistic expectations with these drugs where if they like a drug, they want to say, it's impossible for it to kill anyone.
00:05:04.000There's nothing in this world that can't find its way into a human death.
00:05:09.000So if people want to say, and even, you know, cannabis, obviously, people say you can't overdose on cannabis, and essentially you can't.
00:05:15.000But if you look in the medical literature, there are a number of these cannabis associated fatalities, you know, you can debate them endlessly.
00:05:21.000But the point is, once a drug It doesn't mean that the drug is dangerous.
00:05:30.000It means that it's unrealistic to set a standard where if anything bad happens to anyone, we have to decide that the drug is dangerous and should be banned.
00:06:50.000I mean, it's also who is – if the society that we live in was just you and I, we were the only two people alive, who are you to tell me what I can do or me to tell you what you can do?
00:07:01.000And so when you have grown adults, telling a grown adult who's informed what they can and can't do, then it becomes a question of children.
00:07:08.000Well, then it becomes an education issue and it becomes a parental issue.
00:07:13.000I mean, it's just – You can't lie to your children about the effects of certain drugs because then they're not going to believe you about the really actual, the actual dangerous ones.
00:07:29.000Everyone wants to find a culprit that's behind all of it.
00:07:32.000And the easiest person to blame, of course, are pharmaceutical companies because everybody hates pharmaceutical companies, so why not blame them?
00:07:40.000And I'm not pro-pharmaceutical by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm also not anti-pharmaceutical either.
00:07:47.000And when you look at the way, for example, the New York Times is covering the opioid epidemic, it's always in this tone of, like, documents were uncovered that show that executives at Purdue Pharma were aware that morphine was addictive as early as 1999. It's like...
00:08:12.000And this whole idea that doctors were convinced by some letter in the New England Journal of Medicine that said that oxycontin isn't addictive is absurd.
00:08:22.000Any adult, especially a medically trained adult, should know that no matter what little variation you make on that molecule, if it's structurally and pharmacologically and qualitatively similar to morphine, of course it's going to be addictive.
00:08:33.000And that in and of itself isn't even a bad thing.
00:08:35.000It should be okay to give people addictive drugs as well as long as everyone's aware of the risks.
00:08:40.000As long as they understand a protocol to get off of it.
00:08:43.000There's so many people that get on these things and then wind up taking them far longer than they're supposed to because it's easy to get hooked.
00:08:52.000We need to at least have some sort of responsible Direction that these people need to go to to get off of them once they're on them because people that get back operations any anything where they prescribe you High doses of opiates.
00:09:10.000I know many many people have gotten hooked because of it and in fact I should tell you that my good friend Justin Wren His wife found out about kratom because of you because of your show He had a problem with his shoulder, got shoulder surgery.
00:09:26.000He was fucked up on them and he was having a really hard time getting off and having the shakes really bad and kratom is the only thing that got him off of it.
00:09:36.000I mean, this has been known for a very long time in Thailand and that was actually the reason that it was originally prohibited.
00:09:42.000I don't know if you're aware of that, but because the government taxed opium and people started using kratom Then they made kratom illegal.
00:10:37.000Well, it's an opioid itself, and a lot of people don't want to admit or acknowledge that, but I think we need to get beyond this idea that drugs are inherently bad or opioids are inherently bad just because the ones that we're aware of have a lot of problems.
00:10:49.000You know, in some sense, medicinal chemistry and pharmacology and all this are still in a very primitive state, and there's so much to be learned.
00:10:57.000So we're mostly giving people these derivatives of morphine that have been around for a hundred years.
00:11:05.000We're going to continuously discover less addictive, Treatments for pain and I think that the alkaloids in Kratom are a step in that direction and which is so tragic that they're trying to now make it illegal because this is something that as far as I can tell has genuinely helped an enormous number of people reduce their intake of more addictive and more dangerous opioids.
00:11:29.000Well one of the things that I felt I mean and again my dose was not extremely high but When I was on it, I was very coherent.
00:11:38.000It was clear to me that I was affected by something.
00:12:28.000I mean, that's what opioids are about for a lot of the world, both in the United States and in Africa and in Thailand is, you know, people live hard lives and manual labor is painful and repetitive and difficult and anything that makes that a little bit more manageable is a very important tool for humans.
00:12:46.000I always felt like people that did heroin or opiates or something like that were on a very short road to death.
00:12:53.000That was my perception when I was a kid.
00:12:55.000And then I had a friend who was a longshoreman.
00:13:00.000They would bring fish in and fillet the fish for the market.
00:13:06.000And he worked with a guy that every day at lunch, the guy would go cop, he would get his heroin, he would shoot it up in his car, and then he'd go back to work.
00:13:34.000Yeah, there's this idea that people sometimes refer to as pharmacological determinism, that a certain drug has to do a certain thing.
00:13:42.000So alcohol has to sedate and disinhibit you.
00:13:45.000Heroin has to addict you and make you a slave to it and kill you.
00:13:50.000Cocaine has to be a euphoric thing that's done at parties that's also very addictive.
00:13:55.000PCP has to make you strip nude and run around fighting cops and punching holes in wooden fences.
00:14:05.000But when you look at this, you know, anthropologists have looked at certain drugs that are used cross-culturally, like alcohol.
00:14:11.000And what you find is this whole idea of pharmacological determinism is fundamentally flawed.
00:14:17.000Drugs behave differently in different cultures, depending on the set and setting of the user.
00:14:25.000You find all sorts of instances that are major exceptions to these rules that we've set up for these various drugs.
00:14:32.000For example, PCP, which is arguably one of the most ubiquitously maligned drugs in the world.
00:14:38.000I mean, no one can imagine that PCP is medicinal, but even to this day, PCP is in Schedule II. Not Schedule 1, like cannabis and LSD Schedule 2. It can still be prescribed, actually.
00:14:48.000And that's because it had a history of medicinal use.
00:14:52.000There was even PCP psychotherapy in the UK in the 50s.
00:14:58.000So this is something that most people wouldn't believe, but to those patients that were taking it then, there was none of this cultural association with PCP being a drug that causes psychosis or makes you strip nude.
00:15:10.000It was simply another tool for a psychiatrist to use and help people release repressed memories or traumas that they were afraid to talk about when sober.
00:15:21.000Well, we're seeing that now with MDMA, right?
00:15:46.000And what I think is really interesting is, you know, this is often packaged as a sort of psychedelic renaissance, but I think in a larger context, it's a drug-facilitated psychotherapy renaissance because...
00:15:57.000This was not just limited to psychedelics.
00:16:00.000People did something called narcoanalysis, where they would give people sedatives like propofol, the drug that killed Michael Jackson, or various barbiturates, or various other drugs, and the relaxing effect would allow people to talk more openly to a therapist,
00:16:33.000I think the right drugs with the right cases and the right people, and I think we've got to get past these schedules.
00:16:39.000When you have things like marijuana and psilocybin and especially DMT, which your own body produces, is a Schedule I drug in the famous Terence McKenna line, we're all holding.
00:16:51.000You know, when it comes to DMT, it's just stupid.
00:16:54.000It's stupid that these things are Schedule 1. When you're saying there's no medical benefit whatsoever or medical application for cannabis, it's fucking crazy.
00:17:03.000I mean, you want to have something that...
00:17:07.000Really actively promotes a distrust in law enforcement.
00:17:11.000The scheduling of drugs is one of the best ones.
00:17:13.000Because when you look at something like marijuana and you see that that's a schedule one drug, that's infuriating to people that gain huge benefits from cannabis.
00:17:25.000I mean, people that have going through chemotherapy, people that have, you know...
00:17:50.000And to have that Demonized because of some ridiculous propaganda from the 1930s that still somehow or another clung on in 2018. We think about all the information we have now with the internet and the fact that cannabis is still schedule one.
00:18:05.000You have assholes like Jeff Sessions still saying things like good people don't smoke marijuana.
00:18:13.000It's crazy, but keep in mind, it was just about 100 years ago that alcohol was prohibited in the United States, and it took 13 years to reverse that.
00:18:32.000When alcohol was illegal, when the cops would come in and jackbooted thugs would knock over gin mills and bust open kegs of whiskey and spill it all out.
00:19:06.000And there's nothing wrong with a failed experiment, but it's a problem if you keep repeating it over and over and over again for a hundred years looking for a different result.
00:20:31.000If it's legal, it can be sold in stores because it's legal.
00:20:34.000If it's illegal, it can't be sold anywhere.
00:20:37.000In the US, they've instead created this nebulous, far-reaching gray area where there's all sorts of things that are maybe illegal, kind of illegal, do it but don't get caught.
00:23:38.000And I think the same will be true for psychedelics and will probably be true for all of these things because you need to have lobbyists and you need to have this sort of typical white collar support to push things forward.
00:24:17.000Not just cannabis, but cannabis will open the door to all these different substances that will allow people to gain a greater perspective.
00:24:24.000This is the ultimate goal, in my opinion, is to give people the opportunity to step outside the momentum of their lives and look at things with fresh eyes and make clear decisions.
00:24:33.000This is one of the best things that I think that drugs provide.
00:24:37.000is that the psychedelic drugs in particular provide an escape from the momentum of this life that you've created or that you've found yourself a part of it's very difficult for people to stop behavior patterns to stop and just look at themselves objectively and sort of rethink regroup and reassess and this is one of the best things about cannabis and about psilocybin and a lot of these other psychedelic drugs is that it gives you this newfound perspective that allows you to reconsider things Yes,
00:25:08.000And I think with, you know, ketamine and the treatment of depression, it's a similar idea because depressed people become used to these very ingrained patterns of thinking and anything that can break you out of that, that can shake it up for a minute and maybe give you a different perspective,
00:25:29.000And I think I'm hoping That what I see, and this is what I believe I see, is that we're changing our perceptions of it.
00:25:38.000I had a conversation with a friend of mine the other day about marijuana, where we were talking about how you used to hide whether or not you did it from certain people, and now that group of people that you have to hide it from is smaller and smaller,
00:25:54.000and that it seems like everyone casually smokes marijuana now in our circles.
00:26:02.000There's a few that don't, sober people and whatever.
00:26:04.000But it's way more common, whereas 10, 15 years ago, this was something you hid.
00:26:09.000If you had a good job, if you had a family, this is not something you wanted people to know about.
00:26:13.000And what I think is really interesting is that, in and of itself, changes the nature of the cannabis experience.
00:26:19.000So I think if somebody uses cannabis in a culture that supports it, that approves of it, their experience will be better by virtue of that fact.
00:26:29.000So, there's a certain shame that a lot of people feel when using any drug.
00:26:33.000I, for whatever crazy reason, feel it a little bit with cannabis.
00:26:36.000It's just a hair of, I should be studying, I should be reading, I should be more focused, this is a little hedonistic, it's a little comfort-oriented, I should be working harder.
00:26:49.000But that's, I think, just the vestiges of this Propaganda that I've been fed or something like that or maybe it's true but I understand from one perspective why the cannabis culture drums the benefits of cannabis so hard you know that it cures all disease that it's good for you that it cures cancer all the stuff because if you have that in your mind I think?
00:27:32.000like Terence McKenna did that it's an intellectual catalyst that it will facilitate your ability to read and learn and think and write then it will become that as well yeah it's it's a weird one right because people that are people that take it that are prone to paranoia or that are dealing with like some difficult issues in their life right now that they're perhaps trying to avoid it becomes an uncomfortable experience Whereas people that are happy and having a good time and in
00:28:02.000a good place, the marijuana will sort of enhance that.
00:28:05.000It'll give you this loving, warm feeling of comfort and of, like, sort of acceptance of your existence.
00:28:15.000But I think even the paranoia is like a sort of...
00:28:19.000A sort of meme, you could say, a sort of vestige of this propaganda that makes people afraid in the same vein as the bad trip.
00:28:28.000I think the concept of a bad trip is a very damaging concept because, and I know from personal experience, I never really used psychedelics in high school, with the exception of salvia, because I was terrified of a bad trip.
00:28:41.000Talk to friends who'd describe bad trips and they'd say, oh, it's a bad trip.
00:28:51.000I'm never going to touch these things because a bad trip would be too much for me to tolerate.
00:28:56.000And then I started using psychedelics and I realized there's no such thing as a bad trip any more than there's a bad meal or a bad relationship or a bad day.
00:29:05.000Having an occasional bad thing in life doesn't stop you from doing things like eating or having relationships or living, typically.
00:29:12.000What do you mean by, are you saying there's no such thing as a bad trip?
00:29:28.000But I think even these bad trips, although they can be difficult, are beneficial in our learning experience in the same way that a bad meal could be.
00:29:36.000You learn not to go to that restaurant, or maybe you learn something about what makes you sick or what to be careful of in the future.
00:29:40.000You know, if you are approaching life from a non-fearful perspective where your intention is to learn, then you can extract benefit from almost any experience.
00:29:50.000And these difficult psychedelic experiences.
00:29:53.000I genuinely believe, and this is what is maybe the hardest thing to communicate about psychedelics, is that it's the difficult ones that are often the best.
00:30:00.000Those are the ones that really teach you something.
00:30:04.000And when you're trying to talk about psychedelics with people who've never used them, it's not a great selling point to say, oh, you know, the best thing that can happen is you're going to think you're going to die.
00:30:13.000But that is arguably the best thing that can happen, is to think that you're going to die.
00:30:19.000Because that's a confrontation with the overarching fear, the fear that generates all other fears.
00:30:24.000And if you conquer that fear, then Your life will almost certainly improve.
00:30:29.000Well, what is one thing that's sort of genuinely, universally accepted as a beneficial experience is a near-death experience.
00:30:38.000Sort of universally accepted as a transformative moment in people's lives.
00:30:42.000Like, I had this near-death experience and I realized, wow, I gotta get my shit together.
00:30:46.000After that heart attack, I realized that life is a gift and I changed the way I think about things and I started calling people that I loved and telling them that I loved them.
00:30:55.000You can get a near-death experience from cannabis, you just don't ever die.
00:31:01.000I mean, it's the death of so many perceptions and so many things about your life, especially from edible cannabis, which I think is probably one of the least understood and most potent things that people are consuming on a daily basis.
00:31:15.000I can't tell you how many times I've given someone edible marijuana and they're fucking convinced that it's been laced with something awful and that they're going to die.
00:31:24.000But then afterwards, they come out of it and they're like...
00:31:37.000Because there's an absolute genuine connection between people who have a slippery hold on reality and some experiences with psychedelics that lead them down a bad road.
00:31:53.000And like all stressors, it can precipitate a psychotic Break.
00:31:57.000They've done pretty large-scale epidemiological analyses of psychedelic drug users versus the non-psychedelic drug-using population, and the incidence of mental illness isn't any higher.
00:32:08.000So I don't think that you can argue that psychedelics cause mental illness, but you can, and in some measures it seems to actually reduce it in terms of things like alcoholism, substance abuse disorders.
00:32:22.000But it can be a stressor that would precipitate such an episode in a susceptible individual.
00:32:26.000And I had a very traumatic and formative experience myself where my best friend had a psychotic break while I was with him, tripping.
00:32:37.000Yeah, I've had friends have real bad experiences, too, where they're screaming and yelling and then disassociative and then afterwards become very strange and have a really hard time with reality for a bit.
00:34:18.000Like, if your friend had never done that and instead had, you know, become a Marathon runner or something and found some other outlets for his energy.
00:34:28.000Would he have never gone down that road?
00:34:32.000I think it's very important to talk about that, though.
00:34:36.000And with further research, perhaps we could isolate genes, like they have for CTE. Now they can do an analysis of your genes.
00:34:47.000And then determine whether or not something like football would be a dangerous path for you because you have a higher probability of developing CTE. It would be wonderful if they figured out a way to do that with psilocybin or with cannabis or with anything else and be able to recognize the potential links to psychotic breaks and to,
00:35:08.000you know, a host of different mental disorders that could possibly be triggered by high doses.
00:35:24.000But on one level, it is very politically oriented research.
00:35:28.000You know, the things that they're looking at have actually typically been done before, not all of it.
00:35:34.000But the aim is to firmly establish these things that have been known for a long time.
00:35:39.000Psilocybin occasions mystical type experience, or MDMA is useful for treating PTSD, or psilocybin has an anti-addictive effect.
00:35:48.000These are things that people have I've known for a little while, but now it's about proving it.
00:35:53.000But I'm really looking forward to getting deeper into these serious questions about, you know, exactly how these drugs interact with various subtypes of serotonin receptors, because I think that they're going to be very important tools for understanding consciousness as a whole.
00:36:11.000Yeah, it would also be interesting knowing how they react to different diets.
00:36:15.000You know, when people are, you know, when you're eating certain types of foods that are bad for your body, I would really be curious to see what kind of effect that has.
00:36:27.000I mean, when you have real large-scale research that goes over really important variables in terms of, like, human health, and then you add in These different substances, whether it's psilocybin or cannabis or whatever it is,
00:36:43.000it's going to be interesting to see how the body reacts to these various perturbances, these various changes of your state.
00:36:53.000And that's, you know, traditionally in a lot of these indigenous groups, the diet plays a big role in the way that the drug is administered.
00:37:00.000And I think we're slowly rediscovering a lot of things that have been known for tens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of years in some of these indigenous groups.
00:37:11.000Have you had a chance to see any of my new show?
00:37:22.000But I had the opportunity to look at the way salvia is used in the mountains of Oaxaca and Native American peyote use and all these different things.
00:37:34.000And yeah, there's so much to be learned from all these traditions that...
00:37:42.000I think that's going to be a part of it is slowly integrating these other alkaloids that are present in the plants to see what role they play in the same way that, you know, the initial medicalization of cannabis was Marinol, which is just THC and sesame oil.
00:37:55.000But now there's increased understanding of the way these accessory cannabinoids work.
00:38:00.000Modulate the THC experience or whether THC is even the primary therapeutic agent for certain disorders.
00:38:07.000And I imagine the same thing will be true for peyote and for the iboga alkaloids and probably even for some of the chemicals found in mushrooms.
00:38:16.000So when you're doing this show, have you had any problems?
00:38:21.000Have you had any pushback against what you're doing or any issues with it being on vice?
00:38:31.000I've had an enormous amount of freedom.
00:38:34.000Ultimately, I have very, very little to complain about when it comes to censorship.
00:38:40.000The way the show got started, the actual TV show, was sort of an interesting story where they were starting up Viceland and a producer who's now gone gave me this deck of drug stories they were going to do.
00:38:52.000And they were all kind of terrible scare stories like the new drug, Bromo Dragonfly.
00:39:01.000It's a really fascinating compound developed by this chemist, David E. Nichols, who found that these confirmationally constrained benzofuran amphetamine derivatives are very high-potency DOB derivatives.
00:39:16.000Anyway, it's a super potent psychedelic amphetamine that has a cool tricyclic structure.
00:39:36.000You know, people, it's a potent vasoconstrictor, so people would take very high doses of it, and occasionally they would have to amputate a finger or something like that.
00:39:46.000But again, you know, this isn't because the drug is bad, it's because people used it irresponsibly, and this is something that people have so much difficulty understanding.
00:39:54.000We're so eager to blame drugs for all of our problems.
00:40:25.000But one thing that I thought was interesting about it is that he put a lot of the emphasis on the prohibition of psychedelics on Leary.
00:40:34.000And Leary almost certainly played a role, but I think it's slightly ironic that he's a journalist and It didn't really go that deep into the role that journalists played in all of this, which was humongous.
00:40:46.000You know, journalists are sculptors of public opinion, and it became the standard way of reporting on any of these things to say that they're bad, to sensationalize it, and to not I don't have any consideration for what that would do.
00:40:59.000Because anytime a journalist writes some scare story, they can really mess with drug policy in a serious way.
00:41:23.000That's a very short-sighted way of thinking about all of this because that's exactly what happened with psychedelics and then we're not learning from the mistakes of the past that just because something it's fun to sensationalize and talk about how dangerous it is at this moment doesn't mean that 10 years from now we're going to recognize that it has serious therapeutic potential.
00:41:42.000And we made a big mistake outlawing it.
00:41:45.000And I think a lot of that also comes from this sort of us-versus-them mentality that people have, where it's cannabis is good, synthetic cannabinoids are bad.
00:41:54.000Well, synthetic cannabinoids don't have to be bad for cannabis to be good.
00:41:58.000Cannabis can be good without something else being bad to counterbalance it.
00:42:01.000You don't need to hate something to justify your love of cannabis.
00:42:04.000And this whole hatred of synthetic cannabinoids I think is totally misdirected because these are products of prohibition that most people wouldn't even want to use in the first place.
00:42:14.000And when they do use them, they don't know what they're taking.
00:42:17.000They don't know what dose they're consuming.
00:42:18.000And so of course they're having bad experiences.
00:42:20.000That would happen with almost any drug, caffeine included.
00:42:23.000If people just consumed enormous, unmeasured doses without having any idea what they were getting into.
00:42:29.000And so they're thrown into Schedule 1. Well, what happens if 30 years from now, once the therapeutic potential of cannabinoids is being really seriously explored, we find out that that AMB fubinica that everyone was saying turned homeless people into zombies in Brooklyn in 2017 turns out to activate a certain subtype of the CB1 receptor that's especially useful for Parkinson's disease or something like that.
00:42:51.000Then we're going to regret having done that.
00:42:53.000So I think people have to be very careful.
00:42:55.000Anytime you say anything negative about a drug, you have to be very, very careful because the implications can be enormous.
00:43:01.000I think that the best stance in all of this is to not speak ill of drugs, of any drug.
00:43:43.000There's this idea that a lot of people have that journalism is organized by some malevolent Rupert Murdoch-type puppeteer who's telling everyone to, you go off and you say that cannabis causes car accidents, and you go off and you say this evil thing about this and say that alcohol is good.
00:44:01.000Did you see when Alex Jones was on my podcast and got high with me?
00:44:06.000We got him drunk and high, and when it came up in his trial for his divorce, he said that George Soros puts, he tests marijuana every year to see how much George Soros is influencing the levels of THC. That was his excuse.
00:44:29.000They love the ideas of the puppeteer, the malevolent puppeteer, because it denies individual agency.
00:44:35.000But the reality, and I say this as a journalist who's worked at many different publications, not just Vice, and this is a difficult reality to swallow, is that people are free to say whatever they want most of the time.
00:44:46.000And that journalists choose to report on things this way.
00:44:50.000Yeah, that is true, but it's also true that they, like, I've been a part of stories that I've talked to the author of it, and they said, well, this was manipulated by the editor.
00:44:58.000The editor manipulated the title, the change.
00:45:34.000Provides no incentive for truth because suppose someone were to write an article about this conversation we're having right now and it could say Hamilton Morris says Kratom should be illegal or something like that then that will get so much more engagement because then you'll have all these people saying Fuck Hamilton.
00:48:57.000But if you could figure out a way to actively ignore things that are going to piss you off and seek out things that are going to excite you and intrigue you, you're going to be a healthier, happier person.
00:49:09.000And isn't that ultimately what everybody wants?
00:49:22.000I mean, I see it, these arguments, these people are frittering away their finite time on earth, engaged in these endless comment battles that no one reads.
00:49:32.000And it's a very dark reality, but it is also something that's driving the current culture of journalism where truth doesn't matter as much.
00:50:16.000I live close to the office that I work at.
00:50:18.000But, you know, I have no interest in guns.
00:50:23.000So it's really easy for me to say, well, look, there was this shooting, and all these people died, and this other guy got shot, and These things are really causing a lot of problems.
00:50:34.000Let's get rid of them because it doesn't impact me.
00:50:35.000And that's where you have to be the most careful.
00:50:37.000Because the worst thing you can possibly do is make judgments about how other people should conduct their lives based on your own preferences, which people do all the time.
00:50:47.000So you hear someone say, well, I don't like cannabis.
00:50:54.000Because it ruins people's lives who aren't your own.
00:50:56.000And you have to think about people that aren't you.
00:50:58.000And so it's very difficult when it comes to gun control issues because I'm faced with that exact same issue where it would be so easy for me to say, get rid of them all.
00:51:38.000Creatures, you know, and to just categorize something as negative or positive, there's a lot of positive things that you could find with drugs.
00:51:49.000There's a lot of negative things you could find with drugs, too.
00:51:58.000And back to this journalistic issue and the coverage of drugs, I mean, one thing that worries me about the way cannabis and Kratom And psychedelics are presented is that it's always couched in they're safe, they're therapeutic, they're spiritual, they're historical.
00:52:29.000That's why I think you need to emphasize cognitive liberty.
00:52:32.000You need to Emphasize people's right to explore these alternate states of consciousness regardless of whether or not they're therapeutic or safe or traditional or spiritual.
00:52:41.000The point isn't that it's safe or any of these other things.
00:52:44.000The point is that if you want to live in a free society, you have to be allowed to take a certain amount of risk.
00:52:54.000And I think it really fits well with your description of the things that people are allowed to do that are legal, that are very dangerous, like race car driving, bungee jumping, all these things that we just allow them to do.
00:53:27.000We seem to care about drugs because we think that somehow or another, either our children or someone we know is going to be insidiously infected with these things.
00:53:36.000They're going to get into their lives and fuck them up.
00:53:39.000You know, and I think the real problem with that is education.
00:53:43.000I was extremely fortunate in a weird way to see someone with a cocaine addiction when I was in high school.
00:53:49.000It was a good friend's cousin who got really fucked up on cocaine when he was a couple years older than me, and I watched his life fall apart.
00:53:58.000And I remember thinking when I was little, like, wow, I don't want to touch that shit.
00:54:22.000You have to experience things on your own.
00:54:23.000If someone talks about psychedelics, someone teaches about psychedelics, but they have no experience in actual psychedelic states personally, it's a very hollow conversation.
00:54:32.000It's like a certain amount of education has to be from real life experience.
00:54:39.000And the other thing is just, again, this idea of pharmacological determinism.
00:54:44.000Like, I had a friend that was very, very, very seriously addicted to cocaine and had the resources to do immense quantities every single day.
00:54:52.000And he'd always say, well, you know, if I try heroin, I know it's all over for me.
00:54:58.000I know that will be the last straw, so I'm never touching that stuff.
00:56:13.000No other drug that I can think of causes a hangover of that type, where there's a toxic metabolite that poisons you the following day.
00:56:23.000Dr. Carl Hart was trying to explain to me what that is, and essentially he was saying that when you're getting a hangover, it's your body reacting to the addictive properties of alcohol, that you're getting addicted to alcohol almost immediately,
00:56:38.000that your body is compensating for that, and then this hangover is not just you being dehydrated, it's also your body withdrawing from alcohol.
00:57:01.000I'd have to look at his source for that.
00:57:03.000You'd have to also look at the way I described it, because I probably butchered it.
00:57:07.000Okay, but there's an alternate explanation that's even simpler, which is simply that alcohol is metabolized into a chemical acetaldehyde that's toxic.
00:57:16.000And with alcohol, it's a very, very weak drug by weight.
00:57:19.000You're consuming insane amounts in terms of the number of molecules.
00:57:23.000You're consuming insane quantities of the drug.
00:57:26.000So all of this acetaldehyde accumulates in your body and it has a directly toxic effect.
00:57:32.000Is there a way to counteract that and mitigate the effects?
00:57:35.000Yes, there are proposed ways to do it.
00:57:37.000I haven't experimented with any of them myself because I don't really like alcohol that much to begin with.
00:57:42.000Isn't glutathione, that's something that allows your body to process it more easily?
00:57:49.000It would have to be something that prevents this specific conversion.
00:58:32.000You inject it, and then you lose a limb, and you have profound necrosis all around the injection site, and this is the worst drug, most addictive drug of all time.
00:58:41.000Well, the drug itself is called desomorphine, and it's been used medicinally.
00:58:46.000There's nothing especially addictive or dangerous at all about desomorphine.
00:58:49.000The problem is that people were injecting completely impure reaction mixtures that had all All of the components from the synthesis that hadn't been removed, including phosphorus, which is immensely toxic.
00:59:03.000So you have people basically reporting on IV phosphorus toxicity as if it were a result of this drug when it's a completely separate issue.
00:59:13.000And this is what you see when you look at all of these things.
01:01:39.000You know, I think people like you are very important and I'm a big fan But I think one of the reasons why you're important is you are a cognoscente of Real drugs like you you understand what they actually do you could explain them to the layman or you could debate them with someone who was a doctor perhaps that wanted to You know to talk about the dangers of them and you understand all the various aspects of it I think There's a tremendous amount of ignorance when
01:02:09.000it comes to drugs, drug consumption, what is a drug?
01:02:13.000I mean, how many times have you seen a person with a beer in their hand smoking a cigarette saying they don't do drugs?
01:02:17.000It is so fucking stupid, but it's so common.
01:02:20.000There is this very, very, very common aspect of being a person, which is this desire to change your mental state.
01:02:30.000And we've done it throughout history with various substances.
01:02:33.000But there's so much stigma attached to it.
01:02:36.000And one of the things I've been doing lately on stage, I'll ask people, how many people get pissed tested at work?
01:02:44.000It's like more than 10% of the audience will raise their hand.
01:02:46.000Like one out of 10 people gets their body tested to make sure that while they're not working there, they're not putting anything in their body that's prohibited.
01:02:56.000Which is such a horrible invasion of privacy that, you know, It became so popular that in the 80s during one presidential election, all the candidates voluntarily had their urine tested to prove that they were sober.
01:03:07.000I mean, this is like truly considered a virtue.
01:03:59.000And so they've incentivized people that just wanted to smoke weed using completely untested synthetic cannabinoids instead as a direct result of these urine tests.
01:04:11.000Well, it's also just a complete misunderstanding when it comes to the actual effects and how long they last.
01:04:17.000You're not even testing a person's conscious state.
01:04:20.000You're testing whether or not a person has altered their state of consciousness outside of their working time.
01:04:26.000It's not like you show up and they could scan your hand and realize that you're high on marijuana right now.
01:04:35.000What they're doing is they're testing you for something that could linger in your body for weeks after these psychoactive effects have long since gone.
01:04:42.000Oh yeah, or even be the result of passive exposure.
01:04:45.000There was a great scientific article that came out a couple of years ago where they found that just passive exposure to cannabis smoke contaminates your hair with THC. So that all these people who had hair tests who actually had not smoked cannabis, but it sounds like an excuse.
01:04:59.000I was just in the room, someone else was doing it, just being in contact with someone who'd smoked Cannabis could then deposit THC in your hair and cause you to test positive.
01:05:08.000So these tests aren't even necessarily reliable.
01:05:12.000There was a kind of trend a little while ago, I don't know if you saw about this, where people would get their urine tested to quantify the levels of neurotransmitter metabolites in their urine.
01:05:21.000And this was supposed to be like a fingerprint of your mood.
01:05:23.000So they'd quantify the level of serotonin, dopamine, GABA, whatever, whatever, whatever.
01:05:28.000And then they'd say, oh, you're a little low on serotonin.
01:06:52.000I think that it's a very interesting issue because it's amazing when you look at the history of all these things, how these issues repeat themselves over and over and over again.
01:07:02.000So it was a problem in the 50s, and it's a problem in the 60s, and it's a problem in the 70s.
01:07:26.000Meth is one carbon away from Adderall.
01:07:29.000So this whole idea that meth, again, back to pharmacological determinism, that Meth is a drug that turns you into a toothless, insane, white trash guy who's stabbing the walls with a cleaver looking for people that are hiding and whispering secret messages or something like that.
01:07:45.000Like, this is just a stereotype that we have created.
01:07:49.000Of course, there are people like that.
01:07:51.000But the reality is that These stimulants have an ambiguous potential for all sorts of things.
01:07:58.000Some people use low doses of methamphetamine.
01:08:00.000In fact, methamphetamine is scheduled to because to this day it can be and is prescribed as a treatment for ADHD in addition to amphetamine, which is Adderall.
01:08:08.000What do they call it when they prescribe it?
01:08:10.000Desoxin is the brand name for methamphetamine and Adderall is the brand name for amphetamine.
01:08:18.000And I've tried both drugs, both amphetamine and methamphetamine, and they're very, very similar drugs.
01:08:23.000And that's not to say that either are good or bad.
01:08:26.000It's just a factual statement that if in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, or not even placebo-controlled, just a double-blind trial, I don't think that I could differentiate them.
01:08:35.000It could treat ADHD. It could also help obese patients lose weight.
01:09:59.000Well, the idea is that he might have been experiencing a fucked up state of mind because of some drug that made him make a poor choice and take his own life.
01:10:14.000It wouldn't explain anything, really, because you still wouldn't know his internal state.
01:10:18.000It would just be you're projecting an assumption.
01:10:20.000So what if there were a small amount of heroin in his blood at the time of his death?
01:10:24.000Then you would We assume that he had relapsed, was so ashamed of his relapse that he then decided to kill himself.
01:10:31.000But the reality is we can't make those sorts of assessments.
01:10:34.000We don't know other people's internal states.
01:10:36.000We don't even know what these things do to other people.
01:10:38.000We don't, but we do know that some things like Abilify and some other SSRIs and even some anti-anxiety medication have been strongly linked to suicidal thoughts.
01:10:50.000In fact, they're actually listed as some side effects for a lot of these drugs, right?
01:10:55.000Don't you think that—I mean, I know correlation does not equal causation, but don't you think that that's worth considering and it's something to be discussed?
01:11:01.000It's worth considering, but I would be careful about assigning too much value to it, which is what people tend to do.
01:11:42.000The speed thing is curious to me because one of the side effects of these drugs is impulsive, irrational behavior and extreme confidence in oneself.
01:11:54.000This is what we always think of people that are hopped up on speed.
01:12:36.000He's been like this for so long, though.
01:12:38.000I mean, this is a long history of this sort of behavior.
01:12:41.000Well, this was what the journalist had talked about, that he had been on this stuff for a long time, and that there was an actual Duane Reade pharmacy in New York where he described where he got the prescription filled.
01:12:51.000People were doing the same thing with this finasteride as well, though, and I found that particularly obnoxious.
01:12:59.000So they were saying, oh, he's on finasteride, and that explains his affair, or that explains this, because it does this or that to your libido.
01:13:12.000Or let's give him some credit for being a human being with free will that makes choices on his own that aren't entirely mediated by what pharmaceuticals he uses.
01:13:21.000Well, finasteride also has side effects of depression.
01:13:24.000We went over this yesterday with my friend Ari, who was really depressed at one point in time, and it coincided with his use of finasteride.
01:14:07.000You probably have read about it and forgotten about it.
01:14:09.000It was a big thing in maybe 1970, but he was this military doctor who was credentialed, the perfect man, did everything right, perfect family, everything beautiful.
01:14:20.000And then one night he goes to sleep and claims that, is right after the Manson murders, claims that These hippies walk into the house saying, kill the pigs, acid is groovy, kill the pigs, acid is groovy, and then just brutally massacre his entire family.
01:15:52.000And the more limitations we put on research and the more stigma we put on the use of these things, the more murky these waters are going to be.
01:17:07.000They can simply say that it has abuse potential and make it illegal, and if no one opposes it, then it becomes illegal.
01:17:13.000That's how this list has gotten so long.
01:17:14.000You have all these people fighting for the legality of cannabis and these other substances that are known to have therapeutic potential, but these other more obscure substances that are really only of concern to scientists who are Right.
01:17:41.000So scientists are dramatically limited by the prohibition of these substances, and it's the obscure ones that end up actually making a big difference, not so much clinically, but in terms of actually understanding the mechanism of these substances, the structure-activity relationships,
01:17:58.000Yeah, the stigma on psychedelic use and even studying them has led so many doctors or scientists, researchers that would be inclined to want to do research on these particular things.
01:18:14.000They avoid them because it could be incredibly damaging to their careers.
01:18:20.000I mean, there was a group at Columbia that was doing really fascinating research on the drug Ibogaine and Parkinson's disease.
01:18:26.000And I was speaking with the head of this study, and he was saying how obnoxious it was to have the government come and weigh his vial of Ibogaine every day.
01:18:59.000These are the last people to abuse the substances, and they are the ones that are hurt the most severely, except for of course the people that go to prison.
01:19:06.000They're the ones that are hurt the most severely.
01:19:08.000Yeah, it's a crazy thing to think that people are going to recreationally use Ibogaine.
01:19:18.000And Ibogaine is a drug with so much potential.
01:19:21.000For those people that are aware of Ibogaine, it's typically only discussed as a drug that treats addiction to opioids, which is very, very important, especially now.
01:19:30.000But that's the tip of the iceberg with Ibogaine.
01:19:32.000It has one of the most complex pharmacologies of any drug I've ever studied.
01:19:36.000There's almost nothing it does not do.
01:19:38.000I mean, it's, you know, you have the alpha-3, beta-4 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, which is also the target of Welbutrin and has a kind of smoking cessation, anti-addictive effect.
01:19:49.000Really high affinity relative to the other receptors for the NMDA receptor.
01:19:52.000So it has a ketamine type effect and has a classical psychedelic effect of the 5-HT2A receptor.
01:19:58.000Then it's a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, serotonin reuptake inhibitor.
01:20:01.000It just goes on and then it releases this protein GDNF, which is considered one of the most important proteins in treatment of Parkinson's disease.
01:20:08.000It's one of the only things that is able to cause a regrowth of dopaminergic neurons in people that have Parkinson's.
01:20:13.000So this is, like, really fascinating stuff that's just in Schedule 1, scientists can't work with it.
01:20:25.000I know so many people that have gone to Mexico and gone to these clinics and done one Ibogaine session for 24 hours and come out of it a totally different person.
01:20:35.000Come out of it with a complete new perspective on even why they were using whatever they were using in the first place in a way that they didn't...
01:20:43.000Not only does it help eliminate the addictive properties and the connection that your body has to those substances, But it also allows you to re-examine why you went down that road in the first place.
01:20:54.000And there was a sort of pharmaceutical push to develop non-psychedelic derivatives of Ibogaine that would retain the anti-addictive properties, which sounds like a good idea in theory.
01:21:06.000So they created this drug called 18MC, and it wasn't psychedelic, but then it also lacked some of these neurotrophic factor-releasing properties of Ibogaine.
01:21:16.000But really the bottom line is that we shouldn't deny the fact that the psychedelic activity of these substances is therapeutic, psychotherapeutic in and of itself.
01:21:26.000You know, I had a friend who was severely, severely addicted to heroin and he traveled to the Netherlands to take Ibogaine and, you know, took the drug, was going into the experience and then started feeling this intense craving for heroin.
01:21:40.000And, um, and started looking through his bags to see if he'd somehow had forgotten about a little bit of heroin that could just get him through the day.
01:21:48.000And then he goes into his bag and then finds a small bag of heroin and snorts it.
01:21:54.000And then is like, I traveled all the way to the Netherlands to do this.
01:22:29.000There's a sort of move toward microdosing Ibogaine because it actually does have a cardiotoxic effect, especially at higher doses.
01:22:37.000So people are looking into ways of reducing that cardiotoxicity by using it at lower doses for longer periods of time.
01:22:46.000Again, this is something that has to do with prohibition because in this prohibition market, if you are addicted to heroin, you go to Mexico or you go to Canada and you go to an Ibogaine clinic, you need to get as much bang for your buck as quickly as possible.
01:22:59.000You're not going to stay there for two months of treatment because most people have lives and can't afford to do that.
01:23:34.000So people are now looking at lower doses over longer periods of time, which would be ideal if it were legal in the United States, I believe.
01:23:42.000Yeah, it's a really interesting one to me.
01:23:47.000It's a really interesting one because it's got such a long history of use and so many people have had these very good experiences with getting off of addictive drugs from it.
01:24:00.000And it's so relatively unknown as well.
01:24:03.000It's something that, you know, I talked to someone like you, and of course you know about it, but I bet if we walked down the street and asked a hundred people, I'd be shocked if one of them knew about it.
01:25:11.000I first found out about it when Hunter S. Thompson accused Ed Muskie of being on it during the presidential race of, what was it, 1970 or whatever it was?
01:25:40.000Well, it's also, it was hilarious when he was on the Dick Cavett show and they asked him about spreading those rumors and he's like, well, there was a rumor that he was doing this Ibogaine and I know because I started the rumor.
01:26:02.000There's a lot of these drugs that get put into various categories, and Ibogaine is one of the very few that really isn't in any category in terms of modern culture, like the way we discuss and We're good to
01:26:39.000It could save tens of thousands of lives and could be a treatment for Parkinson's disease.
01:26:44.000You know, this is the responsibility that journalists have.
01:26:47.000It's more responsibility than I think they'd like to have often, but that's the truth.
01:26:50.000You make a joke about Ibogaine, next thing you know, it's in Schedule 1. Maybe he made the joke afterwards, but if he didn't, you have to wonder, because that was one of the first major mentions of Ibogaine in the popular press.
01:27:03.000And the same is true of, you know, there was a Rolling Stone scare article that came out a while ago.
01:27:12.000And this 2CT7, it can kill you with just a, you know, little pile of powder or whatever.
01:27:17.000And then the drug is made Schedule 1. Shulgin worked on psychedelics.
01:27:24.000Alexander Shulgin, great medicinal chemist who spent his entire life studying psychedelics, considered this one of the six greatest creations of his entire career.
01:27:33.000Squashed by a single stupid story in Rolling Stone.
01:28:45.000The problem is people taking it, and the problem is lack of access to safer opioids and lack of education surrounding fentanyl, because it doesn't even really have...
01:29:47.000Whereas fentanyl can be made by one guy somewhere, and the profit margin on the fentanyl is so much greater that there's an enormous economic incentive.
01:29:57.000And the first chemist, this guy that was sort of a friend of mine that died to do it, considered it a good thing to do.
01:30:03.000That's the complexity that you have to recognize.
01:30:06.000It's so easy to say that all these people are so bad, but Often you don't know what's going to happen until it happens.
01:30:12.000His idea was that one of the major burdens of being addicted to heroin is that you can't afford it.
01:31:24.000And it's also one of the things that I find most interesting in perhaps a silver lining in this whole synthetic cannabinoid narrative that's been playing out over the last decade is you could say, oh, it's terrible.
01:31:36.000But we're learning so much about what cannabinoid receptor agonists can do that we would have never learned if it weren't for the widespread use of synthetic cannabinoids.
01:31:46.000I mean, Just for instance, that it is possible for high-potency cannabinoid receptor agonists to kill you.
01:32:00.000It's an impressively diverse array of chemicals.
01:32:04.000You know, it started out with a drug called CP55940, then it was CP... They call it cannabicyclohexanol now, and then JWH-18, JWH-73, JWH-210, on and on and on and on.
01:32:20.000And then it just branched like a giant cannabinoid fractal in every imaginable direction.
01:32:26.000And a lot of these compounds, they were patented by various pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer for therapeutic purposes.
01:32:33.000Again, this wasn't some malevolent chemist who was cackling and saying, Ha ha ha, I figured out the most addictive thing possible.
01:32:38.000They were just looking to see what's legal, what looks pretty potent and reasonably safe.
01:32:54.000Typically, people don't want to hurt other people.
01:32:58.000Genuine villainous people are pretty rare in my experience.
01:33:02.000Most people believe that what they're doing has a justification that is good.
01:33:06.000And again, with the synthetic cannabinoid ideas, one is that, although you won't hear this in the popular press, and it's rarely said, they can be very enjoyable.
01:33:16.000And it would be dishonest to say otherwise.
01:33:18.000Some of them are very euphoric and compare favorably to cannabis, and in certain measures might even be superior.
01:34:00.000You know, this bizarre pattern that certain people that smoke all day every day, it started showing up in the medical literature about a decade ago.
01:34:09.000People smoke all day every day, and they start getting very, very nauseous and start vomiting, and the only thing that can relieve the vomiting is a hot shower.
01:34:18.000So all these people are showing up in emergency rooms when they run out of hot water, saying, like, I need some kind of, I need some help or something.
01:35:07.000And it wasn't until people using synthetic cannabinoids began to experience the same constellation of symptoms that they realized that this is an intrinsic property of certain cannabinoid receptor agonists.
01:35:17.000So that's something that you can learn from all of this, that it wasn't pesticides and it wasn't some kind of fungus or something like that growing on the plant, but this is something that happens from prolonged high dose use of cannabinoids.
01:35:28.000And there's all sorts of other lessons that can be learned.
01:35:31.000Is that an issue with cannabis use, pesticides?
01:35:34.000Have you ever heard of people having real problems?
01:35:42.000Paraquat was, you know, in one of many misguided attempts to prevent people from using drugs.
01:35:48.000They started spraying all of the cannabis that was grown in Mexico with this ultra-toxic herbicide.
01:35:55.000called Paraquat and this is a drug that induces Parkinson's disease when you're exposed to it like really seriously nasty stuff no joke and so the idea was if we poison all the cannabis and create this widespread fear that whatever you're smoking might contain Paraquat maybe people will use it less and Luckily,
01:36:17.000Paraquat doesn't have a lot of thermostability.
01:36:20.000It's sort of denatured by the heat of smoking.
01:36:23.000So it's argued that people were not actually exposed to it who smoked it.
01:36:26.000But still, this is a horrendous thing for the government to have done.
01:36:30.000They did the same thing during alcohol prohibition, by the way.
01:36:43.000But now, there's obviously a move toward organic gardening, people using neem oil and things like that, so I wouldn't know.
01:36:53.000Oh, and there was actually a big controversy in Colorado with a pesticide called microbutanil, I believe, that was used and potentially could release cyanide when smoked.
01:37:42.000I did a piece in this last season of my TV show where I trace the history of psychedelic toad venom, of 5-MeO-DMT containing toad venom, because people have this idea that all psychedelics have been used for thousands of years, that every psychedelic has an ancient history.
01:37:56.000But when you look at the history of 5-MeO-DMT, There is no evidence, really, no convincing evidence that I'm aware of.
01:38:03.000Maybe you can point to a ceramic toad.
01:38:05.000Is that evidence that people smoke toad venom?
01:39:03.000And is it a pure form of 5-MeO-DMT? No, and there's actually very little chemical analysis that's been done in the 21st century.
01:39:12.000I analyzed a sample that I collected when I was in Sonora, and it contained, in addition to 5-MeO-DMT, it contained some interesting...
01:39:20.000Serotonin derivatives, including serotonin O-sulfate.
01:39:24.000And nobody knows how these different tryptamine components as well as these steroidal lactones that are sometimes called bufotoxin contribute to the experience.
01:39:33.000If I had to guess, probably not that much, but maybe there's a little bit of that sort of entourage effect that you get with almost any plant that has a variety of different alkaloids that might inhibit certain enzymes or do this or that.
01:39:45.000But it's about 15%, according to the older literature.
01:39:49.000The analysis that I did wasn't quantitative, so I don't know exactly what the concentration was.
01:39:54.000But it's somewhere in that region, and I'm sure it depends on whether the toad has been milked previously and all these other variables.
01:40:00.000Does the experience mirror taking synthetic 5-MeO DMT? I haven't tried...
01:40:05.000I've tried synthetic 5-MeO-DMT a couple times.
01:40:08.000I've tried Bufol Various Venom once at a low dose, once at a high dose.
01:40:13.000They were all different, but then everything is different.
01:40:15.000Mushrooms are different every time I take them.
01:40:17.000You know, it's really hard once you start.
01:40:21.000Explaining a different experience based on the composition of the material, because how do you assign it to the dose or the minute number of different tryptamines that are also present?
01:40:35.000But, you know, I think that there is a strong argument to be made for using the synthetic as opposed to the toad-derived material simply because you don't have to harm or hurt.
01:40:43.000Not that it necessarily does harm toads, but you don't even have to risk it.
01:41:02.000One of the more interesting stories out of the last decade or so was this story that I read about these scholars in Jerusalem.
01:41:11.000That we're connecting the story of Moses and the burning bush to the acacia bush and the acacia tree which is rich in DMT and they believe that you know when you're talking about a story that was told through oral traditions for who knows how many years and then written down in ancient Hebrew and then transcribed and you know Maybe.
01:43:15.000Maybe there's some acacias stronger, but that's certainly comparable.
01:43:18.000And that's something people are using to cook food all the time, and they're not aware that it's psychoactive.
01:43:22.000So, was there a way, or is there a way, for a person living thousands of years ago to somehow or another extract DMT from something like the acacia tree?
01:43:35.000I actually spent some time thinking about that a while ago.
01:43:42.000First of all, it depends on how you define extraction.
01:43:44.000If it were to, in like an ayahuasca sense, like a tea, of course, yes, but then they would need some sort of enzyme inhibitor to create the ayahuasca.
01:43:51.000If it were to create an isolated, smokable form, again, you know, you could just do like an aqueous infusion and then dry that out and maybe smoke that.
01:44:00.000But in terms of like a real extraction that would produce crystals of DMT, I don't know what the nonpolar solvent they would be using to extract the freebase would be, like butter or something, and then how would you get rid of the So what is the process?
01:44:12.000Like if you're gonna take a tree that's rich in DMT and extract DMT from it, what do you have to use?
01:44:43.000That if it's protonated in an acidic solution, then it's water-soluble, and if it's deprotonated, then it's only soluble in a nonpolar solvent.
01:44:53.000So what you do is you just deprotonate the nitrogen with a base, potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide typically, and then treat that aqueous basic solution with a nonpolar solvent like naphtha, And isolate the naphtha,
01:45:09.000dry it out, and you have your material.
01:45:19.000Now, what's the earliest history of extraction?
01:45:23.000Well, you know, the first wave of DMT use in the United States was all synthetic.
01:45:28.000In fact, DMT was discovered synthetically before it was ever found in nature.
01:45:32.000The same is true of 5-MeO DMT. How did they do that?
01:45:34.000There was a Canadian chemist named Richard Helmuth Mansky, who I believe was looking at different alkaloids in strawberry plants, and he was synthesizing references for these potential strawberry alkaloids and made DMT. So he didn't know what he had made,
01:45:51.000other than a potential natural product found in strawberries.
01:45:54.000And then it wasn't until Zara, much later, conducted self-experiments with injected DMT that people became I mean, the 1950s and early 60s were, of course, a fascinating time in psychedelic research because you have these convergences of these amazing ideas.
01:46:13.000First, you have the discovery of serotonin, which is like, you know, we take this for granted.
01:46:30.000Then they're finding it in the human intestine.
01:46:32.000Then they're also finding that all these plants that people worshipped in various indigenous societies also contain serotonin-like molecules.
01:46:40.000Then they discover LSD and find that that's maybe the most potent known pharmacological agent at that time.
01:46:59.000Super potent, amazing compound LSD is discovered.
01:47:02.000Serotonin is discovered in all these different organisms, and there's a pharmacological convergence between the two of them.
01:47:07.000And then you have all these people worshipping serotonin-like molecules.
01:47:10.000So there was a lot of enthusiasm at that time to figure all of this out.
01:47:17.000So in terms of history, so we're talking about like somewhere in the 1950s, they started extracting DMT. The use of it orally dates back far longer than that because of use of MAO inhibitors and creating ayahuasca.
01:47:31.000But in terms of the first extraction, we can kind of isolate...
01:47:55.000Do you think that maybe the understanding of synthesis from, you know, synthesizing this from these scholars, maybe they don't have enough of an understanding of chemistry?
01:48:07.000What would be really interesting is to do an experiment to see what were the materials that were available.
01:48:31.000Maybe it's just one of those things that sort of gets conflated, right?
01:48:33.000Because you have people today that are very aware that people smoke DMT and have these incredibly intense religious psychedelic experiences.
01:48:42.000And then maybe they looked at the acacia bush and said, oh, the acacia bush is rich in DMT. That's probably where the Moses story came from.
01:48:51.000Well, what's really interesting is, you know, DMT has never been found in the human brain, even though Rick Strassman says that it has been.
01:48:58.000So, a lot of people are constantly assigning altered states of consciousness to DMT, but we can have these states without DMT. I mean, maybe it's never been found in the human brain, but also there's ethical and experimental issues with sampling fluid from a living human's brain.
01:49:14.000Right, but they have found it in living rats, right?
01:49:18.000This is the Cottonwood Research Foundation.
01:49:20.000That's Their attempt is to try to prove that the pineal gland is a source for DMT. We know that DMT exists in the human body, we know that the liver produces it, and we know that the lungs produce it.
01:49:32.000We're not totally aware of whether or not...
01:49:36.000There's anecdotal evidence that points to the pineal gland.
01:49:39.000Based on the rat idea and based on the presence of certain enzymes that could be responsible for it.
01:49:56.000Necessary as an explanation for altered states of consciousness, because there are other things in the brain other than DMT. DMT has never even been found in the brain, but there are other things.
01:50:04.000You know, you have endogenous proteins that bind to the kappa opioid receptor, the same receptor that is responsible for the effect of salvia, things like that.
01:50:52.000In an early LSD psychotherapy, one of the things that they would do before giving someone LSD is they'd give them something called carbogen, which was a gas that contained carbon dioxide, and they would look at their response to the carbon dioxide inhalation, and if it induced a panic response, they would say, maybe you're not psychologically ready for this LSD experience.
01:51:11.000So that was, you're talking about a test?
01:51:32.000I can't remember off the top of my head what it's...
01:51:35.000If you look up endogenous ligand for kappa opioid receptor, it will come up.
01:51:40.000David Nichols recently wrote a paper that actually goes into alternate mechanisms of how the DMT type near-death experience could be produced by non-DMT compounds.
01:51:52.000But I mean, you know, there was a lot of work also on endogenous NMDA receptor.
01:52:29.000That was like one of the major motivations for a lot of this research in the 60s, finding the endogenous psychotogen that is responsible for schizophrenia.
01:52:48.000I mean, Shulgin was very interested in it, about the metabolic production of various psychedelics that account for altered states of consciousness.
01:52:55.000It just hasn't been supported by evidence in a very strong way, even though people really find the idea compelling.
01:53:01.000And there was also the 5-MeO-DMT in schizophrenic people's urine.
01:54:08.000So we know there's a host of different psychoactive substances that are absolutely produced by the body and in the brain and that there's different ways that human beings have been able to achieve psychedelic states outside of consuming drugs.
01:54:33.000The kundalini one is the one I'm most interested in because I have someone who's a friend of mine that It got really into it.
01:54:38.000And he was saying that he can achieve very DMT-like states.
01:54:44.000You know, there's a really interesting aspect of all this that isn't often discussed, which is the ability to have these states and still interact with your environment.
01:54:53.000Because, of course, there's something very physically taxing about breath of fire or these kundalini breathing techniques.
01:54:58.000If you induce an altered state of consciousness, you need to be focused and you need to be in a specific place sitting down.
01:55:04.000Where psychedelics have this amazing ability to allow you to have that experience, but walk around.
01:55:09.000And I think that's not to be underestimated, the walking around, because then you can really re-examine your environment.
01:55:46.000I think it has the most applicability to your own existence in terms of the music you listen to, your friends, your environment, your life.
01:55:53.000You're confronted by the books that you read, the photos of the people that you know, all the things that matter to you, not a jungle, although jungles are very beautiful and visually stimulating and are, I know, an amazing place to use psychedelics.
01:56:06.000I think that we underestimate the value these things have when integrated into a more normal type of experience, and that's something you can't do as easily with...
01:56:30.000Yeah, which is, you know, because I think that we also tend to get into these very angry, oh, the subway is annoying, the guy is taking up too much room, I have to stand, it's taking forever, it smells weird, whatever.
01:56:44.000Everyone is looking at their phones all the time, which is a little bit dark.
01:56:49.000And then, you know, if you're on a low dose of a psychedelic or even a higher one, sometimes I'll look at everyone on their phones and I'll just feel compassion and love and think like, what a strange situation we've all gotten ourselves into.
01:57:55.000You'd get online, and it was really slow and terrible.
01:57:59.000So most of the time, you just text message it.
01:58:01.000But now, with all the apps and social media and constant, constant updates of information and new things and new events and new trends, it's always calling you.
01:58:13.000I better check, make sure anything's done.
01:58:15.000We've been on this podcast for two hours.
01:58:23.000Actually, I have this vivid memory of standing at your front door and you selling Twitter to me, saying like, oh, you've got to use Twitter.
01:58:36.000It's really amazing, because I only had one tweet at that time, and now it's like 2,500 tweets later and hundreds of hours of my life I'll never get back.
01:59:20.000either gossip or nonsense or not interesting but there's still a shit ton of really useful information that you can get out of Twitter on a daily basis there's always something new that's coming out and I try to retweet those things as much as possible when I see something that someone sends me and then that becomes people know hey if you send Joe something really cool And he reads it.
01:59:43.000If I get a chance to read it, I'll retweet it and people get a kick out of that so they'll send me more cool stuff.
01:59:48.000And so then it sort of becomes like a little ecosystem almost for disseminating interesting ideas.
02:00:26.000Well, they're doing the same thing that journalists do, which is that you get more attention for doing the wrong thing than you do for saying the right thing.
02:00:33.000And we all know that feeling where someone says something about you that's unfair and wrong, and you want to say, hey, wait a second about that.
02:00:52.000I would love to accentuate the trend of kindness.
02:00:56.000I really think that that is one thing.
02:00:58.000If there's any one trend, and to lean towards kindness, just to be nicer to people.
02:01:06.000And if we could all sort of agree that this is a virtue worth pursuing, I think we could change the way human beings interact with each other.
02:01:13.000These shifts, like the shift of looking at your phone.
02:01:16.000If we could figure out a shift, and one of the more disturbing things to me that comes from the left, which I've always associated myself as being a left-leaning person, There's a lot of meanness coming from the left now.
02:01:28.000A lot of, by any means necessary, a lot of feeling the need to squash people and humiliate people and insult people because they don't agree with what you believe.
02:01:42.000I think this is a terrible path to go down because then it sort of justifies people who think the opposite of that to be mean to you.
02:01:51.000So now no one's getting anything done because this side's being insulting and that side's being insulting and people are getting kicked out of restaurants and people are protesting in front of people's houses because they disagree with things and it's just a lot of cruelty.
02:02:03.000A lot of like meanness and cruelty which is the enemy of discourse.
02:02:08.000As soon as that stuff gets Yeah, we've all bought into a game and it's a bad game to play.
02:02:27.000It's the worst possible game and it's very transparent.
02:02:31.000I mean, you look at what shows up on the first page of Twitter and it's things that are perfectly designed to generate opinions.
02:02:37.000So Teacher says that now classrooms will be equipped with a bucket of stones to throw at a school shooter.
02:02:55.000And you're making it bigger by paying attention to it.
02:02:57.000I mean, there's an amazing book that I recommend anyone listening to this read called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, which he wrote in 1985 before computers, before social media, before any of this.
02:03:07.000He predicts all of it perfectly without even knowing the faintest hint of what was going to happen.
02:03:13.000And, you know, his solution, if there is one, is, you know, partially to disengage from all of this, but to Try to appreciate long, nuanced, careful things, which is very hard to achieve on Twitter or television or most places,
02:03:30.000Well, I think that's one of the reasons why podcasts, especially ones like this, that are these long-form conversations, Are becoming popular because people are hungry for actual communication.
02:03:42.000They're hungry for people that are just, even if we disagree on things, I want to know why you think the way you think.
02:05:05.000Because of the fact that people are so addicted to their phones and addicted to media and this constant influx of this loop of information.
02:05:14.000I mean, if you watch the news, they can't just give you the fucking news.
02:05:16.000You have to get that scroll on the bottom of other shit that you should be freaking out about.
02:05:20.000It's like the news itself is not enough.
02:05:22.000No, you have to know about terrorist attacks and fucking ISIS and some new flu that can't be cured.
02:05:29.000And it's all scrolling on the bottom while you're watching other shit.
02:05:34.000This is not how human beings are designed.
02:05:56.000It's way more common for someone to look at their phone for 10 hours a day than it is for someone to have a one-on-one uninterrupted conversation with someone for an hour.
02:06:10.000With lovers and occasionally if you have polite dinner companions that put their phone down and just drink a glass of wine and talk to you about stuff.
02:06:26.000They don't listen to each other when the other person's talking.
02:06:28.000They're just waiting their turn to talk.
02:06:31.000We're going down weird roads, these roads where we're sort of distancing ourselves from compassion and understanding and real communication.
02:06:54.000I think if we had, like, real centers where you could go and just like you could go to a place where you can get a licensed therapist to massage you, you know, hey, I've got this back pull and,
02:07:09.000you know, the only thing that works is...
02:07:41.000Of the experience of getting a massage.
02:07:43.000If we could have something like that and have these things common for the use of psychedelics where you could go to an actual, some sort of therapist that's trained in both psychotherapy and the use of psychedelics.
02:07:59.000So they could talk to you and find out if you're stable.
02:08:01.000Ask you questions about your medical history.
02:09:12.000And then, of course, the whole history of DPT-facilitated end-of-life therapy, LSD psychotherapy, on and on, everything Shulgin's group did using 2CB, MMDA, Ibogaine.
02:09:26.000This was along with Claudio Naranjo in order to facilitate psychotherapy.
02:09:30.000I mean, people not only were doing it, they were exploring all the different ways to do it, which compounds are best for which applications.
02:10:00.000He was saying that in large doses that raw cacao has some sort of a mild MDMA-like effect.
02:10:08.000I've heard people say that, and people will sometimes say that the presence of phenethylamine in cacao could account for that, but it's such a small amount.
02:10:17.000Trace quantities, less than a milligram, and the active dose of phenethylamine is hundreds of milligrams or grams in order to achieve a psychoactive effect.
02:10:24.000So I think the effect that people do experience is probably mediated by theobromine, which is present in relatively high quantities.
02:11:21.000And I liked the flavor of it, but I have never had an experience beyond, at most, a low-level stimulant experience.
02:11:30.000And I've also taken pure theobromine, and it is stimulating, but it requires like 500 milligrams to achieve an effect, if I remember correctly.
02:11:46.000Of course, you know, prisoners historically did it, Malcolm X did it, and the essential oil of nutmeg contains meristosin, which is a precursor for the psychedelic amphetamine MMDA, not MDMA, but it's methoxy-MDA. And as well as Elemesin,
02:12:06.000which is another psychedelic precursor, as well as, there's I think one other, maybe even Saffril, actually.
02:12:14.000I think it's Saffril, Elemesin, and Maristocin.
02:12:18.000Again, Shulgin was actually, by training, a biochemist, not an organic chemist, although he spent his career doing organic chemistry.
02:12:24.000So he was very interested in these ideas of the body creating psychedelics.
02:12:28.000So he thought, when you consume nutmeg oil, that your body is aminating this double bond and creating a series of different amphetamines, and that's what accounts for the high.
02:12:40.000But in reality, people don't actually know.
02:12:47.000So, what kind of history of use does it have in terms of people taking it for the psychoactive benefits?
02:12:54.000I'm sure there is some ancient, or I would assume there is some ancient use of it, but it's mostly a thing for teenagers and people in prison these days.
02:13:27.000Now, history of use is also so fascinating to me when you talk about history of use because there are certain cultures that really don't have a written history.
02:13:46.000Because I remember reading something that kind of stunned me that said that there's only like a couple hundred years of known use of peyote.
02:13:55.000Well, okay, so there's different histories because peyote is used, it grows naturally over a relatively broad region stretching from the southern United States into, I believe, mostly northern Mexico.
02:14:07.000And so in the United States, the history is...
02:14:13.000About a hundred years old of the Native American church.
02:15:49.000And I vomited so much that my nose started bleeding.
02:15:54.000You know, it was some serious vomiting.
02:15:58.000And it's physically very, very punishing.
02:16:00.000More so than almost anything I've ever done.
02:16:03.000In terms of the after effects or while you're doing it?
02:16:05.000While you're doing it, it's a heavy load on the body.
02:16:11.000People always say this is not recreational or whatever, but it truly isn't.
02:16:15.000This is really a punishing experience.
02:16:18.000And on top of that, the Native American...
02:16:21.000Ceremonies often accentuate some of those punishing aspects of it, like water is conserved.
02:16:27.000You don't get to drink as much water as you want, but to emphasize the importance of water.
02:16:33.000In Mazatec salvia ceremonies, there's no water at all, which I think actually increases the absorption of the leaf into your mouth, because the natural reaction when you eat something disgusting is to wash it down with water.
02:16:45.000These are little things that people do impulsively without thinking that are going to change the nature of the experience.
02:17:25.000The conservation of peyote is an even bigger issue than the conservation of toads.
02:17:29.000I mean, peyote, all these psychedelic plants have major conservation issues that need to be addressed, but peyote is arguably the biggest of them all because this is a slow-growing plant.
02:17:39.000If you want to learn patience, grow peyote.
02:17:50.000So when you're eating something that's, you know, that's As big as the rim of a coffee mug or something like that, it might be 20, 30 years old.
02:18:02.000So there's a lot of history in these plants.
02:18:05.000They call them grandfather peyote, and I think the reason is that by the time that they're ready to be consumed, they often are grandfathers or grandmothers.
02:18:13.000They have produced seeds and have offspring and all of this Because it takes that long.
02:18:24.000It's not a sustainable practice, the way that it's being done.
02:18:28.000But there's also even bigger threats to the environment in the form of root plowing all the territory to build Walmarts and subdivisions and different things in South Texas, because most of that land is privately owned.
02:18:43.000It's difficult because there's a belief in the Native American church that it has to be outdoor, natural grown.
02:18:48.000It can't be a greenhouse-cultivated plant because part of the potency and the value is from its interaction with nature.
02:18:56.000So if it's sustainably harvested where only the crown of the cactus is removed but this long carrot-like taproot is left in the soil, it can regenerate new heads.
02:19:05.000But if people don't have proper harvesting techniques, it can decimate the population very quickly, especially because it's not a very potent plant.
02:19:36.000The people that care most about it outside of the Native American church are, interestingly, cactophiles in Thailand and Japan who grow it for purely aesthetic purposes because it's so beautiful.
02:19:47.000And they would never even consider it because to them it's this prized ornamental plant that produces amazing fruit and flowers and lives seemingly forever.
02:19:56.000And if you take care of it, it can just look amazing.
02:20:00.000So those There's a huge peyote scene in Thailand of people that never would dream of consuming it, that just grow it ornamentally.
02:20:21.000With some varieties of San Pedro, they actually contain comparable quantities of mescaline to peyote, and it's a much more sustainable source of mescaline for that reason.
02:20:31.000Unlike peyote, it grows very, very quickly and can be propagated by cutting easily.
02:20:40.000But traditionally, if you go to Peru, they'll take a length of the cactus and they'll cut it like a loaf of bread into slices.
02:20:47.000Then they boil those slices and create a sort of low-potency aqueous infusion that they drink.
02:20:55.000And what's interesting about the way they do it is that It seems that it's almost designed to create a lower potency drink.
02:21:01.000The way they do it, they drink every night, the shamans, every night of their entire life.
02:21:05.000And many people come back and do it repeatedly.
02:21:08.000And for them, it's like a traditional form of microdosing, you could say.
02:21:12.000It's not about blasting yourself into the cosmos the way people do when they smoke DMT. This is about fortifying your body, giving yourself strength, cleansing yourself, balancing yourself.
02:21:26.000And are there people that consume it raw as well?
02:21:43.000But again, it gets very hard because of these variations with natural products in terms of the potency of the cactus and that point in your life.
02:21:51.000People always come up to me and say, what's the deal with MDMA? It used to be like this, and now it's like this.
02:24:14.000Regularly takes it every night to go to sleep, and I tried to explain to her the fact that you're not getting real sleep when you're on that.
02:24:23.000This is not something you should take and rely on on a daily basis.
02:24:26.000They even tell you to get off of it, and it's difficult to get off of it.
02:24:32.000But people want to dismiss the idea that she could have said something that's completely out of character or done something that's completely out of character.
02:24:43.000While under the influence of this stuff, that it could have contributed to that.
02:24:46.000They want to dismiss it because they want a villain.
02:25:34.000I think that intoxication can explain all sorts of inappropriate behavior and to pretend otherwise is again dishonest.
02:25:42.000I know Sanofi, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures Ambien, had this widely shared tweet saying that racism isn't a side effect of Ambien.
02:25:52.000It's a little bit ridiculous for them to have done that, especially to someone who's mentally ill, because, you know, if you look at the medical literature, the fact of the matter is that Ambien is associated with all sorts of absurd behaviors, command hallucinations,
02:26:08.000where people stab themselves, jump out windows, people that, you know, butter their cigarettes and smoke them, people that paint their houses in the middle of the night with no memory whatsoever, and it's a profoundly, profoundly disinhibiting drug.
02:26:22.000So, you know, here's maybe a somewhat analogous example from my own life.
02:26:26.000I never take Ambient on planes for this reason because I'm around strangers.
02:26:30.000I don't know what I'm going to say or what I'm going to do, let alone use Twitter, but it's uncomfortable because it's so disinhibiting.
02:26:41.000Who's to predict what you're going to do when you have no inhibitions whatsoever?
02:26:45.000So I remember Once I was on the plane to Berlin, and I did take Ambien, and I start in a sort of delusional state, thinking that the cabin crew and the person that's announcing over the intercom is saying various Nazi things.
02:26:59.000That's like an unfair stereotype that all Germans are Nazis.
02:27:07.000Just because they're German talking in German doesn't mean that this is like a Nazi airship, because you're just completely out of your mind.
02:28:27.000What level of disinhibition is required to do something that insane?
02:28:31.000Luckily, I had to spend the rest of the day tracing, finding out who that person was, getting my keys, and these people happened to be very courteous people and actually did go to my apartment, did take the small amount of ketamine that I had, and then just locked the door after themselves and didn't make a mess.
02:28:47.000But again, this is a profoundly disinhibiting substance.
02:28:53.000And also, I think the idea that a drug couldn't modulate Racist activity is interesting as well, because there's a study that you can look up where they use the beta blocker propranolol, and they found that it actually seems to block implicit racial bias in people in certain tests.
02:29:12.000What they're suggesting is that there's an adrenergic component to implicit racial bias.
02:29:18.000There's a certain maybe heart rate or fear response, and once that's physiologically blocked, you become less...
02:29:32.000I mean, these are, like, really complicated, higher-level questions about how drugs impact cognitive functioning.
02:29:40.000And the bottom line, I think, is be careful being certain about anything about what drugs can or can't do.
02:30:37.000Here's this woman, she's got, you know, she's like a waitress and Jack Nicholson is this old racist asshole and she's relying on him for some real reason because she can't find anyone who's nice to her and he's racist.
02:32:45.000Increases consolidation of negative memories, causes just total hallucinatory insanity at higher doses.
02:32:52.000Maybe the most powerful disinhibiting agent I'm aware of and is able to restore cognitive and motor functioning in people with traumatic brain injuries.
02:33:29.000Yes, the withdrawal is total insomnia.
02:33:36.000So most people just go right back to it.
02:33:38.000Or you can transition onto different types of hypnotics, like taking an anticholinergic Benadryl to sleep, or cannabinoids, cannabis, things like that.
02:33:49.000You know, just things that don't bind to the GABA-A receptor in order to try to reduce tolerance.
02:34:25.000I mean, it wouldn't surprise me hugely.
02:34:29.000There's still debate about what the most restful part of sleep is.
02:34:35.000I think most literature points to actually non-REM sleep, slow-wave sleep being the most restful type, and that's actually supported or promoted by chemicals like muscimole from the Amanita muscaria mushroom.
02:34:48.000And there was one pharmaceutical derivative called Gabox et al that I did an episode about on the most recent season of my show.
02:34:57.000That really does produce incredibly restful sleep that is superior to Ambien.
02:35:01.000But like Ambien, it was also psychedelic, even more psychedelic, probably.
02:36:43.000I mean, there's a great book called Shroom that argues that this was all some kind of cynical attack on the Christian religion and that he didn't even believe it himself.
02:36:52.000The issue is that in order to carefully examine his claims, you need to speak, what is it, ancient Aramaic or something?
02:37:00.000So it's like, I'm not in a position reading his book, which is all having to do with the etymology of these words, their origins in different languages.
02:37:59.000It's the same deal I encounter this sometimes on like really fringe aspects of physics and chemistry where someone will make some kind of wacky argument about the way atoms bond or something like that and it's like it gets hard because you only have like a small handful of people that are capable of seriously evaluating the claims able to weigh in and then it doesn't really get vetted in a serious way so things just linger around as maybe it's true maybe it's not.
02:38:24.000But the bottom line is that most people don't get a valuable experience from these mushrooms, but some do.
02:38:31.000Some people have figured out how to make it work, and the experience is, again, it's its own thing.
02:39:27.000Well, drugs aside, you have to acknowledge that it's a specter.
02:39:30.000It's a spectacularly beautiful mushroom.
02:39:33.000I've gone mushroom hunting all over the world, and there is no question that when you see that mushroom in habitat, that it's completely spectacular.
02:40:36.000And then there's people that argue that urine drinking is somehow required to concentrate the muscamole in one way or another.
02:40:45.000You know, if you want to learn about it, I think the best way to do it is actually through this other related drug, gaboxidol, which was...
02:40:53.000Almost developed by Merck as a competitor for Ambien And there's some high-dose reports of gaboxidol that give you a much clearer example, and from my own experience as well, of what the potential of that class is.
02:41:15.000All these things are hard to articulate, but it's something that's been experienced by relatively few people so that you don't even have this spiritual or metaphorical vocabulary for it.
02:41:23.000The way that I had it most powerfully was once I... I was doing a shoot for Vice on HBO, and they told me I had to go to Tokyo with less than 24 hours' notice, and that I had to start filming as soon as the plane landed.
02:41:37.000Couldn't go to the hotel room, so I thought, alright, this is serious.
02:41:40.000No messing around, no time for jet lag.
02:41:58.000So I took a high dose, I believe it was 45 milligrams, but don't quote me on that, of this muscamole derivative that's about the same potency.
02:42:07.000And at the equivalent of what would have been maybe 2 p.m.
02:42:10.000New York time, which I think was crucial because these things are hypnotic.
02:42:22.000I mean, I couldn't fathom the intensity of what I experienced.
02:42:28.000It was just this rushing sense of becoming a passive person observer in my own consciousness and seeing all of my thoughts produced by someone else that were racing at a speed that was so fast that I found it physically dizzying and had to lay down and I felt as if like the acceleration was pushing me toward an ultimate state that was sleep and that sleep and death represented the ultimate
02:43:21.000Did you ever recreate that kind of experience?
02:43:23.000No, because it was a bit much, I would say.
02:43:26.000And I know people that have taken even more, and it turns into just your entire visual field transforming into rotating cubes, where each face of the cube represents a different aspect of your life, your future, your past, your present.
02:43:42.000So I think that potential exists with high-dose muscimole.
02:43:45.000It's just hard for people to ingest it because of all the other material in the mushroom and the disgustingness of consuming it.
02:43:53.000So is it possible that we've just, much like people have sort of altered many different things like wheat and tomatoes and what have you, that at one point in time the mushroom was somehow different?
02:44:11.000Yeah, I mean, the evolutionary chemical history of all these different plants is a fascinating subject that's pretty much lost to history.
02:44:19.000You know, there's no, like, archaeological alkaloid analysis that I'm aware of, but it would be so fascinating to know because all of these...
02:44:27.000Natural products evolved just like the plants that contain them.
02:44:53.000You know, the black market encouraged everyone to produce THC dominant strains because it was the most potent, most stoning, most bang for your buck.
02:45:02.000Now we have the ability to change the evolutionary direction of the plant and to encourage the production of CBN or CBG or THCV or CBD or whatever.
02:45:15.000So when you talk about a plant like The peyote cactus that grows so incredibly slow.
02:45:24.000And, you know, if that became something that was highly sought after and very, very valuable, it could conceivably be wiped out.
02:45:56.000Psychoactive plants that are present today tend to be less addictive is because all the addictive ones were harvested to extinction thousands of years ago, maybe.
02:46:20.000Yeah and I had read some theories that it's conceivable that the Amanita muscaria varies seasonably so you have to figure out like when is the right time to harvest it because there are some plants although of course fungus isn't really a plant it's kind of the opposite of a plant the way it ingests oxygen it takes in carbon it takes in oxygen and breathes out carbon dioxide like a like an animal does but That it's possible that these things vary seasonably,
02:46:49.000that you have to catch them within a window of time, and that they also vary geographically, like some places they might be more potent, like, you know, Cuban cigars grown on specific land have a distinctly more, you know, more potent taste to them.
02:47:05.000Oh yeah, absolutely, because the biosynthetic precursors for all these natural products come from the soil typically, you know, amino acids and things like that, and it's all going to There was an amazing experiment that was done where they started doping the substrate of psilocybin-containing mushrooms with other tryptamines.
02:47:24.000So they used DET and DIPT, put it in the substrate, and they found that the mushroom would take that completely synthetic chemical that does not occur in nature, it would then 4-hydroxylate, the indole ring, just like it were a silicin derivative, and create natural product derivatives of these synthetic materials,
02:47:42.000creating these semi-synthetic hybrids between man and mushroom creations.
02:47:55.000It's a constant interplay between human and plant and fungus.
02:47:58.000You know, after we're all gone, all of our plastic bottles are going to be consumed by some...
02:48:05.000Bacterium that evolves to degrade all of these, you know, polymers and that will create natural products from them and will those natural products be natural products because they were derived from substrate that we created?
02:48:19.000You know, it turns into like a very...
02:48:21.000Complicated issue, which is why I don't believe in the idea of natural and synthetic.
02:48:25.000Everything is simultaneously natural and simultaneously synthetic.
02:49:37.000There's something along those lines, but Jan Erwin republished it Fairly recently with the blessings of the Allegro family.
02:49:45.000But just the whole connection to Santa Claus and the whole connection to Christmas with that mushroom, there's so much attached to that mushroom.
02:49:55.000People want that mushroom to be Jesus.
02:50:51.000Well, isn't there, there are some psychedelic substances that have been discovered that have no history of human use, like, isn't Hawaiian baby woodrose, is that how you say it?
02:51:08.000There's, maybe not with Hawaiian baby woodrose, but with morning glory seeds, there does seem to be some Mesoamerican history, although it's not as well-founded.
02:51:18.000And morning glory seeds will put you on the moon, right?
02:51:21.000Well, yeah, they contain LSA. And again, LSA is actually...
02:51:26.000Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSA, did an experiment where he injected himself with small quantities of LSA, but there aren't many evaluations of the pure material.
02:51:36.000The exact nature of the different components in those seeds remains a little bit mysterious as far as I'm concerned.
02:51:43.000Some people will suggest that it's the strongest naturally occurring psychedelic.
02:51:47.000Other people will say that it's not even psychedelic at all, that it's just a hypnotic, it just has a sort of sedating quality.
02:51:55.000I've used Hawaiian baby woodroves many many years ago and it's certainly psychoactive.
02:52:00.000Whether I'd call it classically psychedelic Is a complicated issue.
02:52:05.000It's kind of like a dreamy, unpleasant delirium.
02:52:13.000Any other ones that we could go over that are weird?