Ask Dr. Drew - Hamilton Morris (Hamilton's Pharmacopeia) on Psychedelics & Hallucinogenics – Ask Dr. Drew – Episode 75

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

[12/30/21] In Hamilton's Pharmacopeia (VICE TV), Hamilton Morris interviews PCP chemists, explores DMT, and investigates hallucinogenic fish. He joins Ask Dr. Drew to share what he's learned about psychedelics & drug usage around the world. Hamilton Morris is an American journalist, documentarian, and scientific researcher. He is the creator and director of the television series Hamilton's Pharmacopeia, in which he investigates the chemistry, history, and cultural impact of various psychoactive drugs. Follow Hamilton Morris:  https://twitter.com/hamiltonmorris  https://instagram.com/hamiltonmorris [This episode originally aired on December 30, 2021] Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation ( https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/FirstLadyOfLove). SPONSORS • REFRAME – Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly 1 in 5 Americans has reported consuming an unhealthy amount of alcohol, but only 10% of them are actually getting the help they need. Reframe is a neuroscience-based smartphone app that helps users cut back or quit drinking alcohol. Use the code DRDREW for 25% off your first month or annual subscription at https://drdrew.com/reframe • BLUE MICS – After more than 30 years in broadcasting, Dr. Drew’s iconic voice has reached pristine clarity through Blue Microphones. But you don’t need a fancy studio to sound great with Blue’s lineup: ranging from high-quality USB mics like the Yeti, to studio-grade XLR mics like Dr. Drew’s Blueberry. Find your best sound at https://drdrew.com/blue  • HYDRALYTE – “In my opinion, the best oral rehydration product on the market.” Dr. Drew recommends Hydralyte’s easy-to-use packets of fast-absorbing electrolytes. Learn more about Hydralyte and use DRDREW25 at checkout for a special discount at https://drdrew.com/hydralyte  • ELGATO – Every week, Dr. Drew broadcasts live shows from his home studio under soft, clean lighting from Elgato’s Key Lights. From the control room, the producers manage Dr. Drew’s streams with a Stream Deck XL, and ingest HD video with a Camlink 4K. Add a professional touch to your streams or Zoom calls with Elgato. See how Elgato’s lights transformed Dr. Drew’s set: https://drdrew.com/sponsors/elgato/  THE SHOW: For over 30 years, Dr. Drew Pinsky has taken calls from all corners of the globe, answering thousands of questions from teens and young adults. To millions, he is a beacon of truth, integrity, fairness, and common sense. Now, after decades of hosting Loveline and multiple hit TV shows – including Celebrity Rehab, Teen Mom OG, Lifechangers, and more – Dr. Drew is opening his phone lines to the world by streaming LIVE from his home studio in California. On Ask Dr. Drew, no question is too extreme or embarrassing because the Dr. has heard it all. Don’t hold in your deepest, darkest questions any longer. Ask Dr. Drew and get real answers today. This show is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. All information exchanged during participation in this program, including interactions with DrDrew.com and any affiliated websites, are intended for educational and/or entertainment purposes only. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. We're coming to you today from New York City. We have a very interesting guest. We're going to get right to it. We could not quite pull off the clubhouse connection with this system we have, though we should be able to soon enough. Just we thought too many things could go wrong if we did that.

So let me introduce the guest. It is Hamilton Morris. He's an American journalist, documentarian, a scientist. He is creator and director of the Hamilton's Pharmacopoeia, looking at the chemistry, history, and culture of psychoactive substances. Our laws as it pertains to substances are draconian and bizarre. The psychopath started this. He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin.

Ridiculous. I'm a doctor for f***ing sake. Where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time.

Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help. I got a lot to say. I got a lot more to say. Since the beginning of the pandemic, nearly one in five Americans has reported consuming an unhealthy amount of alcohol. Could be you, but only 10% of them are actually getting the help they need. Reframe is a neuroscience-based smartphone app that helps users cut back or quit drinking alcohol altogether. Using evidence-based tools, techniques, and content, Reframe guides users through a personalized program to help them reach their goals. Comprised of daily tasks, a comprehensive toolkit, a community forum, and accountability

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Let me please welcome Hamilton to the show. Hamilton, welcome. Thank you for having me, Dr. Drew. I've been listening since I was a child. I'm not so sure you should have been listening, but I'll take that as a compliment. I'll address it with your parents at a future date. But thank you for that. I am very interested in this topic. I think anybody that knows me knows that I've been looking at this for a while. I had the opportunity to interview Rick Doblin and get to know him a

little bit. And then I've seen what MAPS has been up to. Why don't we, there's so many different directions we could go. Why don't you first address what got you interested in this, uh, topic and a little bit about your scientific training, which I've read about, but I'm give you a chance to tell everybody. And then I'd be interested to know what you think about the research that has been going on so far with organizations like maps. Yeah, I've always found it fascinating. Even since I was a young, I remember watching news

reports of people overdosing on drugs, and thinking amazing about the possibility that such a thing could even happen, not just, you know, the tragedy or the superficial elements, but the very fact that combining alcohol and a sleeping pill could result in death, almost like, you know, the touch of death in a karate movie or something. The very idea that they had such power went to me. And I remember telling other children about it on the playground in kindergarten because I thought it was just amazing that such a thing could even happen. And that fascination has existed throughout my life. I then went on to study the subject and started working in a lab

synthesizing various psychoactive drugs and also traveled around the world visiting different cultures to learn about how they interact with psychoactive substances. So I've had this interdisciplinary understanding of the subject and I think it's been a really valuable thing to yeah there's there's no doubt that uh humans and mammals and our relationship with uh with um i don't want to say necessarily just strictly conscious altering but altering substances uh exist throughout the mammalian kingdom mammals do thatals do that. We alter ourselves. There's a tendency to sort of go back to the bush that gives us a strange kick of one type or another, at least particularly, you know, this is a whole other topic, but there are genetic subsets of different mammals where they're more prone to do that and they're more prone to go back even more frequently.

But that's a whole concept of you know repetitive use the the issue i want to get into today is more the the potential therapeutic use for hallucinogens the sort of misguided laws we've had around these things forever and the the history uh maybe we should start with the history. And I want you to answer that MAPS question too. But the history of hallucinogens, I mean, some people say that the Bhagavad Gita was written under the influence of a substance. And certainly, there's lots of perhaps apocryphal stories about Alice in Wonderland having been written under these sorts of influences. A, I'm going to ask you first, what do you think about the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies?

And B, address that history a little bit. Well, I guess I could even start with the history. And there are many histories. There's not one single history of psychedelics or psychoactive drugs. If you go into the archeological history, there is evidence dating back thousands of years for use of some type. The specifics of exactly what was happening and why people were using these

things is a bit speculative. There are peyote effigies that have been found close to the Rio Grande River that date back thousands of years. The same is true of various pipes and snuff apparatuses that are used for the consumption of psychedelic tryptamines in South America. So there's no question that in some cultures, people have been using psychedelics for thousands of years. But there's also all sorts of speculative histories, like the Sig Veda, or the Kaikian of the Eleusinian mysteries. And in those instances, I think it becomes a little bit more difficult to say exactly what people were doing or why they were doing it because there

isn't that kind of archaeological evidence that can be chemically analyzed to provide some kind of definitive understanding of what exactly was being used, although there is an enormous amount of speculation. And then, of course, you have a 20th century history of R. Gordon Wasson visiting Oaxaca and reporting on the traditional use of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, and Albert Hoffman discovering LSD in Switzerland, and these parallel histories around the world as people started to recognize the power of these substances outside of the indigenous communities that had been using them for thousands of years and maps is an organization that was founded by Rick Doblin who's a brilliant and wonderful guy and this largely came as a response to Prohibition because

one thing that's often forgotten about the history of psychedelics is that it's very much a medical history when you look at LSD and psilocybin there were immediate efforts to Commercialize and medicalize those substances. They were patented. It was all done under the auspices of a pharmaceutical research lab Sandoz in Switzerland and it wasn't until the commercial interest in these things started to dry up that prohibition really started to take hold. It was like after there was a loss of commercial medical interest, then people said, all right, these things are more trouble than they're worth.

Let's make them all legal. And of course, it's not that simple. There are all sorts of other motivations that have gone into prohibition in terms of its power to control people in order to use the almost ubiquitous consumption of drugs. There's a lot packed into it. But Rick Doblin came in specifically around the time that there was an increased medical interest in MDMA and an interest in prohibiting it. And initially, a lot of these researchers sort of wanted to play nice with the government. They wanted to figure out a system where the government could control it, but scientists could still research

it and physicians could still use it as a psychotherapeutic adjunct. But then they just made it schedule one and Rick Doblin and MAPS came in as a way of combating this prohibition so that people could still use these things as medicines in the future. I would also argue that what I like about Rick is he's a careful clinical scientist. He's very cautious about claims. He's very cautious about adverse outcomes. I mean, really, when I spoke to him, I talked to him last about, I guess, a year ago. And he had just, he was about, he had a few months away from publishing the MDMA study

that came out probably now six months ago on complex PTSD. And at the time, he was saying, this is really the only thing I can say right now about psychedelics. Don't say anything else. We can't say it yet. He wants to be able to be sure we do the science properly before we make claims. Very important is the pendulum of public opinion tends to swing toward extremes where something is either responsible for all of society's ills or the cure to those ills. And the problem is both extremes are detrimental to scientific and medical research and to society as a whole.

So, you know, if the future of these things is to be better than the past, which I think it will be and hopefully one important component of that is to be extremely careful about what claims are made and to neither exaggerate nor minimize the benefits they might have. Right, right. I totally agree with you. You know, this opening little sequence of this program, we have a quote from me back on cnn saying you know our drug laws are draconian and bizarre they're just bizarre they're truly they're not based in science they're not based in anything they are just wild and and and capricious and arbitrary and excessive and bizarre um and then when we go the other way it's nuts and now we've gone the other way where we've lost the the carrot and stick notion that i that was so

important to get people with opioid addictions into treatment and the where it just there's i don't know i don't know how to get away from the moralizing and all the nonsense and into just what's you know human beings have a relationship with a chemical the chemical is nearly good neither good nor bad it's just as that relationship evolves there's things we can maybe do to help the human condition and there are things that can go bad and we can help them with that. And that's it. That's the relationship with substances. But it has been used, or it's currently in some settings, been used for other sorts of, I guess we have to put it in the sort of spiritual plane. And I'm not quite sure what to do with that.

I mean, there's areas of, let's just get into some areas of concern for mine. For instance, you know, people are running down to various countries and getting ayahuasca treatments. And occasionally that really helps somebody. But I don't know how to select the right patient for that. And I don't know what the dosing conditions are. And I don't know what the time course of recovery is or whether it wears off. We just don't have that kind of data. So I worry about it, though, when I see people, like people have recalcitrant drug addiction and severe personality disorders sometimes really respond to this stuff and have not responded to anything else maybe you just comment on that

yeah and it goes again in both directions so you have instances where there is uh what could be called malpractice of one kind or another abuses even in one notable instance a shaman that murdered somebody who had come to the clinic a teenager named kyle nolan and on the other side you have people that have these miraculous transformative experiences and one problem is assuming the best assuming that somebody has an absolutely extraordinary experience that helps them well how can that information then be used to help other people when you don't know what the dose of the chemical was you don't know the exact methodology of the therapeutic process and so uh whether it will sustain whether it will keep you sustained or how long it will sustain that kind of thing yeah so you know there's issues with monitoring

issues with reproduced results avoiding negative outcomes and a lot of this emerged simply because our culture has no framework for doing this so we've turned to other cultures because we the only thing you can really say about what we've done is we've done it in the worst way you could possibly imagine we've tried to solve the problem that's really good and so almost anything is better than what we've done yeah it's out of desperation that people run to other other sources but here's here's my concern for people that want to do it as part of a spiritual process some of these medicines uh let's let's mute i don't mind i've made a problem calling the medicines but sometimes um when people i've dealt with lots and lots of patients that have done these things

and either done them recreationally and things have turned out not so great or have tried to use things therapeutically in other countries and i've seen things that worried me whether it was even therapeutic or not just a spiritual quest but the main thing that one of the first and foremost things that worry me and i'd be interested in just getting your thoughts on how to frame this is that some oftentimes not sometimes oftentimes people come back and their personality has literally changed in sort of clear but sort of ineffable ways. And as part of that change, they're often a little more sort of less negative and more delightful.

And people go, look, it's bad. They're better. See, they're a happier person. And there's actually literature from the 60s and 70s, documenting these personality changes and then passing judgment on the personality changes as good because the person seemed happier. And here's my problem. We are talking about changing who the person is at a fundamental level. They're very personality characteristics.

That is a profound phenomenology, is profound to say, oh, I'm going to do. It's one thing to try to open up some neural pathways and put the patient in control in the therapeutic context of the changes that they're going through. It's another to say, I dropped something in and now they're a different person. What do we do with that? Yeah, that's a really interesting point. And I think it also comes down to very precisely how you define personality because one of the components. And let me interrupt you.

I got to interrupt you. I think maybe personhood or fundamental characteristics of the person, like, like they're just there. I mean, I'm sure it can be measured, but, but it's not, I wouldn't barely recognize the person sometimes that comes back and it's like, okay, yeah, but it's not, I wouldn't barely recognize the person sometimes that comes back. And it's like, okay, yeah, they are smiling more and yeah, they're less negative, but that's not the same dude anymore. And that's what, that's when I was like, whoa. Yeah.

It's a really interesting point. And of course, you know, personality, one of the defining features of personality is that at least in adulthood, it tends to be unchanging. It is who you are. And when there was a new research being done at Johns Hopkins, one of the most interesting things that was found is that psychologists have a five-factor model of personality with these different attributes, openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. And what they found was that there was an increase in openness. So that would be a change in personality,

something that in and of itself is extraordinary in any direction. This actually happened to be one of the findings that came out of Johns Hopkins that was not replicated. So in larger scale studies, they did not find that there was a personality difference. They found that the openness increase that was initially observed was not reproducible. There was not an increase in openness. So in terms of the five factor model has not been an observed change in human personality for better or worse. But in a looser sense of the word personality, absolutely. There is a non-clinical definition of the word there

definitely are change that's kind of the one of the reasons that people pursue these experiences is because for every person out there that will do anything not to change who's almost addicted to control people that want to change they they're holding on to bitterness or resentment or fears of some kind and they want to change. And that change in their personality is something that they are seeking this experience explicitly to produce. I get what you're saying. control over the degrees of change and the anticipated changes. I just am, I come from the school of thought that the patient's got to be in control of the changes. And when it's a chemical that's in control, like I have no problem with people, there's a whole world I'm sure you've

gotten into of hallucinogenic or plant medicine therapeutics, psychotherapy, where people are in the hands of a psychotherapist who uses plant medicines. And I've seen some extraordinary things with that, but I still feel like in those cases, the patient is in control of the process, as opposed to, boom, something hits you over the head or gets into your bloodstream or whatever it is, and boom, you've changed. Eth get my i can't get my head around that so i i'm cool with people wanting to change i just want them to be i i don't know how to how to quite process this piece because it's really bothered me for a long time like like i said the people that i've seen who were psycho sociopathic maybe even

psychopathic with recalcitrant addiction who really changed like massively changed who they are in a very positive way i gotta say um that's one thing that's one thing if somebody's like desperately ill and destroying their life it's another when you know i just want to be a little more open to experiences or whatever it is it just i don't know i i maybe i'm too old-fashioned i don't know have you have you talked i think go ahead i mean i think that it can go both ways because i understand what you're saying of course but think of a normal depressed person they're prescribed an ssri and in some sense they are under no control whatsoever. No one is saying

like every day when you take this, think happy thoughts, plan to get happier. The idea is the chemical goes into your central nervous system and it alters serotonin activity and you're just going to get better. Whereas when you look at the psychotherapeutic processes that are used both clinically and in traditional indigenous environments, there often is an emphasis on intention and what you want to achieve. If you are, for example, dying of cancer, maybe you want to achieve a state of peace where you accept your own mortality so that you can leave the world and your loved ones in a way that they don't suffer knowing that you have suffered

and this is something that has actually been observed and i think that this would actually be aligned with the sorts of changes that somebody would want to achieve as opposed to some kind of um you know random shuffling of the deck of consciousness yeah yeah yeah yeah so that's a that's a different thing which is you know end of life dread. This is treatment of end-of-life dread. If I had a terminal diagnosis and it was winding down, I think I'm fairly certain I would do this. I would either do psilocybin or LSD. If it can only be done under a protocol, fine, I'll do it under a protocol, whatever. But it works. Doblin hinted at me. I'm not going to put words in his mouth, but I think he

hinted that he's looking to that research as the next, you know, sort of definable, uh, clinical domain for, for therapeutic process. And, you know, I, you've seen it, I've seen it, it works like a son of a bitch. And why should people have end of life dread and who cares what the risks are? Who cares? You're going to die in a few months anyway, that whatever the risks are, are absolutely worth it. So in that situation, if somebody has massive personality changes, no problem, because that personality is not going to be there in three months anyway. So good. If the person, if suffering

is diminished and meaning is made of the life process through the use of chemicals, man, that is genius. And I know palliative care specialists and whatnot are looking forward to being able to do this kind of thing have you have you gone to any of the research centers that are doing this work so there's a researcher named bill richards um who is really the expert on this subject i can't recommend his book sacred knowledge enough and there was a 60 minutes documentary that was made you can watch it on my youtube channel I just uploaded it because it's hard to find and he is administering a drug called DPT to somebody who's dying of cancer and you eat how profound this is for them and for their family to achieve

this sense of peace at the end of their life and I remember when I first heard about this therapy I didn't fully get it I thought wait at the end of their life. And I remember when I first heard about this therapy, I didn't fully get it. I thought, well, wait a second, end of life? Isn't it more important to people who are life? Isn't it more important to treat somebody who's depressed because they might have decades of life ahead of them? But when you see this, when you see it in the eyes

of the people and their family, you realize exactly how important this research is and how much comfort it can of the people and their family you realize exactly how important this research is and how much comfort it can provide to people and their families i 100 i can't wait for that to become a standard of care and you know how we deal with death in this country is fucked up it's just so fucked up you know we just pretend it's not going to happen like we can we're going to fight it we're going to fight it off as opposed to making the process of dying as dignified and as potentially the way I'm sure Dr. Richards is making it as glorious as living itself. It should be part of the process. I'm wondering as you look at other cultures, if have uh you know often scriptures or things to

help us with that that they include that in in things they left behind these cultures yeah it is not well documented i've looked into this i haven't seen uh strong evidence i've heard some sort of anecdotal reports of indigenous groups that do use psychedelics in that uh in for that purpose in oaxaca but i haven't seen it or haven't really i'm not sure how common something like that is in fact when you look at the indigenous tradition surrounding these things they can be totally different from what we're doing right now um for example it's not uncommon when you look at the anthropological literature for people to be using psychedelics to find lost objects this is something that would of course not even exist in our medical system in addition to

Basically a fundamentally religious use of these substances more than anything else in Gabon where there's a long tradition of using a psychedelic shrub called iboga the purpose of Iboga is a religion called Bwiti. An entire religion is built around the history and consumption of this plant, which they conceptualize as the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It's a syncretic religion that incorporates this as well. So in the United States, when people talk about Ibogaine, it's almost exclusively in the context of treatment of addiction. But in Gabon, where there's actually a history of using this it is only now only very recently

being used for that purpose historically it was exclusively religious and and medical as well but in a different sense that had nothing to do with addiction partially because there was no opioid use until somewhat recently in central west africa and and be fair, some of the addictive drive for other substances is diminished by things like Ibogaine. But let's leave the clinical topic for a second. Let's go into real speculative territory. Okay, you ready? So we're both scientists. Okay, here we go. And I'm not going to ask you to speculate about what people should or shouldn't be doing i'm going to ask you to speculate we're going to be sort of philosophical for a second so so um you and i can't you know you have extensive chemistry training i

have extensive clinical training we understand physiology but by the way for you know i always give people a lot of crap when they uh they tell physiological stories that just i said just write down the chemical equation the stoichiometry for me first just do that first let's just start there no one ever can do that ever ever in anything that story they're trying to tell so i appreciate you're always starting from the chemistry and then building up to the physiology but but let's build up even further into the metaphysical okay uh we're gonna go we're gonna we let's and let's uh and you if i say anything you disagree with interrupt me so so let's posit that we have these instruments that developed across evolutionary time they are very

limited in terms of their what what we what we can and can't do. We don't know what we don't know. It's extraordinary that we've been able to use this instrument to do as much as we have been able to. Most of it is really because of how we interact socially and how we build on each other's knowledge base and how we as social teams are able to solve problems. But this is a very limited instrument in terms of perceptions. A lot we don't see. I just, you know, it's easy to point at things like infrared or x-rays or gamma rays. There's all kinds of things in our environment we don't see, including time

itself. I would, I would argue that temporality is something that the human brain does not deal with very well, but I'll pause at all that. Is that okay? Am I? Am I okay with you so far? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm on. Okay. So what is it about, you know, inhibiting monoamines or opening a synaptic transmission in sort of a kind of a soupy uncontrolled sort of a way in certain regions of the brain again, and I might, and I'm going to speculate now that a lot of this goes on in the sort of posterior parietal region because we don't know a lot of what's going on there but we knew we do know a lot of self-function or sense of self and being uh does sort of sit

back there that's all what's destroyed during alzheimer's that's why people lose their being hood uh that region dr dimasio was very pushing me on that topic at one point what is it we're getting so when we open up these the soup and we stir it with a special chemical and the synaptic transmission are we are we seeing a reality are we distorting the evolutionary purpose of the instrument are we i what is your metaphysical sense I mean obviously I could ask that question a million ways but I'll let you let you struggle with it yeah well I can say what we're not getting and one thing that we're not getting is something from the molecule I think that there is an idea that is sort of an animist or vitalist concept that the drug itself contains information. But you can look at a drug

all day. It doesn't contain information. It's an inanimate constellation of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen or whatever else. And so when we introduce these substances into our body, whatever occurs, it is coming from within us. It is something that is generated by our own consciousness, not by the drug. And both you and I could come up with 50 different mechanisms based on research literature on how exactly this is operating, whether it's disruption of the default mode network or glutamate release in cortical pyramidal cells or whatever, or any number of anything. So, and ultimately that doesn't really have all that much explanatory value and well it does in in certain contexts but from an experiential

standpoint it doesn't have all that much explanatory value because if somebody says oh it's disruption of the default mode network or it's uh agonism of 5ht2a receptors or whatever what does that really say about experience so in that sense by the way all true all accurate all accurate and and maybe one day lead us into a deeper understanding what's happening but not right now now that's all just sort of epiphenomenon that may or may not have something to do with the experience and for that reason i almost think that the stories that we tell and our own qualitative assessment of these things is the highest resolution tool that we have for studying these things at this time. There was a scientist who I really admire named Alexander Shulgin, and he did an enormous amount of research on chemistry and did an enormous amount of

research on his own experience taking the drugs. But he almost felt that everything in between those two points was so speculative that it didn't, it didn't, it couldn't be studied satisfactorily scientifically. And he's a chemist. What was his role? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Alexander Shulgin, brilliant chemist, possibly best known for popularizing MDMA. But at the time that he was doing this research, pharmacological techniques were not as advanced as they are today. And I think that ultimately that was for the best, because if he had been doing pharmacology, all that work would be obsolete and useless. But because he focused on chemistry, which is timeless, and experience, which is timeless, his work will never be obsolete. And in that sense, I think that our experiences are one of the best ways to characterize it. So you say, what do I think is going on? Well, in some sense what do I think is going on? Well,

in some sense, whatever I think is going on is what's going on. And that's what matters. So if somebody in an indigenous culture thinks that there is a spirit escaping from their body, and in the escape of that demonic spirit, they have been cleansed, and that's why they feel better, then that experience is, you know, whatever interpretive framework that best explains what has just occurred. But, you know, that's a purely psychological phenomenon. That's something that happens, not the brain. When it comes to the brain, there's a disconnect that we haven't bridged in a satisfactory way. And we may never bridge it because you have to go from agonizing 5-ht2a receptors to uh you know a sense that you are at peace with your own mortality it's it's a hard thing to bridge these two extremes

so so i agree with you and i'm gonna i'm gonna force you to follow me further down this rabbit hole which is uh that um uh i had a bunch of thoughts that just escaped me and that's uh that's my brain since kovitz i don't know about yours but i i once an hour i have to announce to my audience that i'll block and about that honey what's that keep blaming it on that well it's it well when it's aging it doesn't't come back. But from COVID, about two minutes later, my thought comes back. So that's what's unusual about it. What was I talking about? But I am, oh, here I am.

I know what it was. Which is that, you know, our frontal lobes and our cognitive systems are always trying to make sense of what's happening to us. I mean, that's all they're doing. Things happen to us in our bodies and in our regular in our emotional systems and then our our conscious brain goes i know what that was you're you know a leopard escaped from your you know your ear canal and you feel better now because of that or whatever we or we think of we start thinking in psychological terms we start making sense of things whatever it might be it's us trying to make sense of things that are kind of we may not be able to explain and we certainly aren't in control of i i have a sense

and and by the way by the way i have no problem with people using concepts that are culturally meaningful to them to explain their experiences that to me makes perfect sense and as long as they're internally consistent and they're logical, I would never take that away from somebody. But I want you and I to go a little more in the physiological realm, or at least in the, I think I'm going to go metaphysical off physiology. But my sense is, let me just turn over the cards. My sense is that there is in a lot of these experiences one of the one of the common experiences is some sort of either awareness of or a dissolution of some people describe it as ego again trying to make sense of things the the self itself and it's um and the fact that it's a fabricated you know as as demasio says it's a repeatedly reconstructed neurological unit that endows me meaning with

subjectivity and that's it and you sometimes you pull away from it or it dissolves or something go ahead your thoughts on dissolution of the the ego well I you know yeah or or seeing it more transparently yeah I mean one one thing that has happened somewhat reliably for me that psychedelics can do and this is one of the hardest selling points when it comes to psychedelics or the hardest things to communicate to people that haven't used them is that during what I find the most constructive psychedelic experiences, there's often a period where I think that I'm going to die. And you tell a normal person that you took a drug and you thought you were going to die. They think that sounds terrible. That's something I would like to avoid at all costs. And the reason is because it is terrible.

It's extremely, extremely uncomfortable to think that you're going to die. But that is the entire value of this experience. You have a moment where you think, I'm going to die. And in that moment, you confront your own mortality or you confront the reality of your own eventual death and you come out of it feeling stronger and grateful for the life that

you still have but i think that's one one component of it is that they can through these subtle manipulations have a very strengthening effect the same applies to the anti-addictive effect of ibogaine or iboga where um i think when people typically talk about it, they make it seem like it's just, oh, it's a non-competitive antagonist at alpha-3, beta-4, nicotinic acetylcholine receptors or whatever, and that's what it's doing. But there's also a psychological dimension to it. And at least in my experience, the psychological dimension was a feeling of self-sufficiency. Because in Gabon, these ceremonies are incredibly grueling physically, incredibly grueling. People go for days without food or water or sleep and just keep dancing.

And the entire time you're suffering. And when you're suffering, you want to end the suffering. You're tired. You want to sit down. You're thirsty. You want a drink of water. You're hungry. You want some food. But what I found with the Iboga was a sense that yes, I do want those things. And yes, those things will decrease my suffering, but I can do it. I'm okay. I'm not going to die. I'm thirsty, but I can go longer without water. I'm hungry, but I can keep going without food. I'm tired, but I can keep dancing. It's going to be okay. And I think that that sense of internal strength and self-sufficiency is extremely empowering because it gives you the strength to endure suffering. I think this is also why the symbol of Christ on the cross is so powerful to people in so

many different cultures, because it's a sign of divinity in suffering that there is strength to be derived from enduring pain um you know that's of course not like a technically christian reading exactly but it's i think that's one reason that this has such powerful symbolic value and and i i would argue that you're zeroing in on something that we could use a big dose of in this country right now as a matter of fact so that's interesting to me. Back to your experience of I'm dying or I'm going to die. I have heard multiple different flavors of that that people experience under these drugs, including I'm dead, I'm gone, I don't exist. And what exists is the universe and it's okay a sense of purposeful beingness outside of the self did that kind of have you heard of that kind of stuff and that kind of thing happened to you

yes yeah i mean it with some of these substances and they can all be very different in terms of their chemistry and pharmacology but something like 5-meo-DMT, what's so interesting about it is the absence of content in the experience, at least for me. So you might take something like LSD and have this massive explosion of memories and visions and sensations and impressions and reverberating metaphorical interpretations of your existence. And it's like your consciousness is this you know giant fractal of ideas whereas with something like 5meo dmt it was a complete absence of anything there was nothing to report i didn't come out of it with anything to say i whited out there was whiteness and a loss of consciousness for about 15 minutes and yet when i came out of it i had this same sense of gratitude for life

and felt rejuvenated by the process so yeah there's all sorts of strange things right it's just it's just a stronger dmt right well it's it's you know it's more chemically different from dmt than even psilocin from mushrooms so it's it's a you know it's only the addition of an oxygen and a carbon, but it changes the pharmacology and the pharmacokinetics quite a bit. So it is like a different substance despite having DMT in its name. DMT is hyper-visual, hyper-classically psychedelic, whereas 5-MeO-DMT, for many people, myself included, produces no visual distortions whatsoever.

It's almost more like uh an anesthetic or something you take it you lose consciousness well but that's what i actually wanted to say it's it but no one has experiences like that from anesthetics anesthetics you cease to exist and things happen to you and you exist again as though that period of time was cut out you don't feel better after anesthesia typically that's for sure well what about ketamine is different in some well ketamine ketamine is more of what we call waking you know twilight anesthesia uh and that you know waking the you know general and when i say anesthesia i mean general anesthesia where you're you're out you're gone you cease to you know cease

to exist uh in much the same way you did from the you know the methoxy dmt but uh but it's a different experience it is ketamine is another interesting drug and we can get into that in a second i tell you what i got to take a quick break we have a couple of uh ads we're going to play here um give us your website again hamilton well you can listen to my podcast at patreon.com slash hamilton morris or follow me on twitter instagram at hamilton morris those are the best places to find me or if you want to watch my show it's available on hulu when we get back talk to talk to us about what's really fascinating you now what is most you know what are you thinking about?

What are you preoccupied about? And we'll go forward from there. Take a little break. Be right back. Let's talk about our friends at Hydrolyte. I can't say enough about Hydrolyte. You hear me talk about them all the time. It gets me through workouts and medical procedures and colonoscopies.

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hydrolite.com slash dr drew that is h-y-d-r-a-l-Y-T-E.com slash Dr. Drew. And be sure to use that code DrDrew25 at checkout for a special discount. Thankfully, we are supported by products that actually have changed my life. Hydrolyte, this recent illness I had, it bailed me out. Also, the reason we can do this from New York is thankfully a blue mic. This blueberry is my favorite mic by far. What is that one, the 300? The E-Core 300? This is something that Susan is using for ecore 300 that's uh this is something that susan is using

for her mic it's an amazing and i we tested a ton of mics and it's just blue mics just blow everything else away so thank you to blue mic for helping us yes it's on yes uh so you can follow hamilton morris at on twitter and and instagram at hamilton mor Of course, Hamilton Pharmacopia. Will there be a fourth season? Not anytime right now because I am working in a lab. I just do chemistry now. I've spent the last. What are you doing?

Fantastic. I'm creating new psychedelics. Organic chemistry. Essentially. Yeah. Yeah. Medicinal chemistry. Interesting. Yeah. Fantastic. Where do you do the sciences? so organic chemistry essentially yeah yeah medicinal chemistry interesting yeah

yeah fantastic where do you do the sciences yeah it's at uh the oldest pharmacy school yeah it's the oldest pharmacy school in the country the university of the sciences formerly the philadelphia college of pharmacy but they changed the name and uh it has been a great place. They have a program for research on psychedelic drugs. And one aspect of Rick Doblin has admirably done, where he has been able to get funding from various groups, but extremely difficult. And one reason is that people didn't want to fund this work, or if you were doing the work, it had to be done under the context of some kind of research on their toxicity or something like that. So it's been a great time to actually start doing basic scientific research. This is just, you know, pure chemistry and creating a lot of new compounds. Yeah.

Yeah. Incredible. I mean, who knows what you guys will discover that? Thank God. Finally, you know, rationality prevails where you can move science forward without a moral blanket putting it out completely. Yeah, and I hope that, you know, it's of course one of the great ironies of the liberalization of cannabis law in the country was. Oh, I lost I've lost Hamilton's audio. Hamilton, I know if you hear me.

Did you hit a mute button or something? Is it? No, because we're not frozen. We're still here. No, Drew, you're still there. He must have hit a mute button by accident. Oops. It looked like he hit a mute button because it just...

I don't know if you can hear me, Hamilton, but I think you hit mute somehow or pulled your cord out or something. Um, so give you a chance to set up here and you can pick up. No, don't have you yet. I mean, you can pick up where we left off about the liberalization of weed laws. You're about to say something interesting. He's still there and connected. I see him. Uh, let me look at the restream see what you guys are doing

uh yeah i know yes the dea has disconnected us uh people are saying that uh hamilton your series is the best one on vice which i think is probably smart. Mind bloom. Let's see. What is Hamilton's angle? Angry bear. I don't know what you're talking about. He is interested in the, this particular relationship with chemicals that humans have. Let's see what else you guys are saying here.

You guys have any other questions on restream while we try to get Hamilton hooked back in in again maybe you can uh yeah joe rogan should be here that's really funny uh okay i'm looking all your guys comments thank you david uh i'm looking at your now i'm looking in real time at your guys restream if there's any questions any anybody have any confusion about COVID? I'm sure lots of people have a lot of weird confusion these days. Cause it's the press is almost, almost intentionally trying to make it as, as they're trying to stay with the panic and because they can't,

they're getting desperate and they're using confusion instead of panic techniques. So it's interesting. Yes, I'm sure he is looking at NMDA and antidepressant properties. I'm certain of that, or even glutamate pathways. That's a very common area of research. We can ask him that when he gets back. Studying the health impact of long-term microdosing. Yeah. We didn't really talk about this yet, but I personally have seen so much bad outcome from exposure to over, over particularly over time to hallucinogenic strong ones like LSD is no way it could be a good thing long-term. It is it's just, this just

doesn't fit my clinical experience at all. So I'm very concerned about people doing that. Hamilton, I hear him. I hear hamilton you back okay all right refreshing refreshing the window virus uh dawson i assure you i'm seeing both vaccinated and unvaccinated and the vaccine vaccinated are doing much much much better trust me much uh in fact the omicron has been almost a nothing. Let's see. Staff public in hospitals being overloaded and staff not being available. Yes. When people say hospitals are filling up,

what they're saying is that they can't get the staff. Nobody is overloaded. There's an uncoupling now between the incidence of illness and hospitalizations. Hospitalization is maybe taking a little bit, cases way up. And if you're an old person and you get something like a virus, it can kill you. That's just the way it is. Any virus can do that to you. So we're going to be left with that kind of risk, of course, for older folks. But we will begin to treat them with geriatric care, as we have always done with viral illnesses in the in the advanced age. But do not think for a second that the hospital, in fact, and I'll just get him back.

In fact, Fauci just was in an interview where he was saying that even the pediatric reports are false. That's this is fauci's words he is saying that was being reported is children being admitted with covid not because of covid so that even the hospitalization in the pediatric group which is a concern um is not going up according to dr fauci so hamilton the weed laws how did that change things yes oh no i was just saying that there's a an unfortunate irony in this commercialization of cannabis where you have people becoming millionaires at the same time that there are other people who are still in prison for cannabis crimes and i would hope that something analogous

does not happen with psychedelics i hope that this increased pharmaceutical and commercial interest will be coupled with strong efforts for decriminalization to prevent all of the damage that's done by people going to prison for possession of psychedelics using these things draconian and bizarre draconian and bizarre i mean just bizarre how we have treated how the law and moralizing has has uh come down on these things i think it's what people don't understand is it's primarily because people on drugs and alcohol a lot a lot of them over time will do awful things that's not because the drugs are bad that's not because the

people are bad that's part of a specific condition that people get into where they can't stop and need help with that but let's go back uh let's see we were heading down a a path where were we going we were talking about your research we were talking about what you're up to now and what it is that you're preoccupied with and what is it is it the your research in the lab that's that's you're excited about now are there other things that you're looking into that uh you hope to get into deeper in the future or that preoccupy you yeah it's right now it is the lab work because i've been working in this lab for 12 years and for the vast majority of that time there has been no support for the research and i used to always think wow and i was also on top of that doing it as a part-time thing on

the weekends. I was primarily making a documentary series, but then I would go and do chemistry when I had time to do it. And I would always think, if I could do this much on a weekend, what could I do if there were real resources to get this research done? And I think I'm not alone in feeling that way. There are a lot of people, a lot of scientists who've had a passion for this for a long time, who never had the resources to seriously pursue it. And now that that is happening, I think we're going to see a lot of important new discoveries, a lot of breakthroughs in our understanding of these substances. Because when you look at it, I mean, this is something that...

Amazing. Yeah. It's interesting. It kind of surreal um when you think about just how stigmatized this has been for so long to then suddenly see it's really happening there's there's people whose full-time job is making new psychedelic drugs do you have a sense of sort of what you might find are you certain to see signals of things ahead yeah yeah i think that there's there's i think there's all sorts of things that people are looking for you know a lot of one big research question is uh not just the precise mechanism of certain therapeutic effects but can they be uncoupled from the psychedelic psychedelic effects in such a way that it might be possible for larger numbers of

people to benefit my suspicion is that it will not be possible but this is a question that a lot of people are looking at for me uh one of the things that interests me most is simply the possibility of discovering something unexpected because when you look at the history of medicine uh so many great discoveries have not been some kind of uh directed hypothesis driven pursuit but something that was discovered entirely accidentally whether you're talking about uh viagra or rogan or or penicillin or uh aspartame or uh a lot of things were were discovered accidentally and that sort of thing is not uncommon in science in fact it's extremely common that you find something or kevlar or anything like you're doing something and you think um that oh that's interesting this chemical is sweet and then

you realize you've discovered a new artificial sweetener. And I've been seeing that in my own work, these totally unanticipated properties of certain things. And I think that just by virtue of this being an area that many people could not study until recently, the fact that more people are thinking about this more carefully and studying it right now means that it's inevitable that new and unexpected things will be discovered outside of the things that are expected, like refinement of the therapeutic properties of the known psychedelics. Are we going to come up with a different nomenclature? I've always felt the nomenclature was just sort of primitive. What do you mean?

Like what nomenclature? It's just the whole calling something a psychedelic and versus not. And it's just, I don't know. just it's it's not satisfying to me it feels like it needs it needs to be a little more based on the chemistry and i i don't know i you know when we i you know we're i don't know many class i mean we you know we'll call something an antihypertensive but the you know the class we have is an angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor we have classes based on their chemistry uh with within the general category of antihypertensive say but no one's talking about that really yeah i mean it's in that sense i guess it's closer to something like an antidepressant where you have a diverse array of pharmacologically and chemically different

substances that are all related in this single uh outcome of treating depression right you have uh opioid antidepressants like t-enaptine right but again but see the antidepressants right how do we categorize them well we have ssris we have mao inhibitors we categorize them by their mechanism right uh yeah it's so interesting i just just something i was wondering about yeah but listen i hats off to you godspeed with your work godspeed with your work my friend i because i've been i've been if just sort of uh you know with with uh i've not been in this with both feet i've seen lots of things clinically uh i've been an observer more

than anything than an active participant and i'm i'm with you i get this feeling that something is really going to come out of this and but in the meantime we have to be really cautious and really careful about claims and who uses it and when it's just like anything else you know it has great potential uh and hopefully that will you and your whoever else you're working with will unlock that. Yeah, no, I'm very excited as well. And it's,

are we drawing to a close here? We are drawing to a close. Anything else you want to say? Well, no, it's nice to talk to you. Even though last time we spoke, evidently you were seven and a half or eight and your parents didn't know it.

And I'm, and I apologize to them now publicly, but you turned out. Okay, that's good. We didn't hurt anything. And that's always important. Hopefully we helped even,

but again, give us the, give them the PayPal and the website and everything where they should go. Dot com slash Hamilton Morris to listen to my podcast, again, give them the PayPal and the website and everything where they should go..com slash Hamilton Morris to listen to my podcast, which is all about chemistry. PayPal. My PayPal.

He has a... What do you call it? The Patreon. Your Patreon. Patreon. PayPal, Patreon. Everyone knew what I was talking about. Yeah. That's it. If knew what I was talking about. Yeah. So yeah, that's it.

If you're interested in learning more about psychedelic chemistry, that's the place to do it. Yep. Beautiful. Alright, Hamilton Morris, thank you for spending a little time with us. Appreciate it so very much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a pleasure. Talk to you later. Okay. Take care. Susan, you were saying what?

Susan is very excited about hamilton's appearance today isn't paulina a huge fan of his oh i don't know everyone we were gonna book him before and she's like oh my god oh yeah she did say she wanted to hear what he had to say i want to hear me talking to him that's that's true uh be interesting she might experience a little differently from this point yeah uh very interesting uh well hamilton mores appreciate and what will happen i'm gonna break the name just rang in my head what i think will happen is him and his type will unlock some sort of a molecule that will get very very specifically at some of the things that hallucinogens do that are specifically positive like some some single targeted you know if it is the dissolution

of self that's a little too much it's going to be some experience of that, some version of that, that leaves behind, in particular, the diminishment of the dread associated with end of life, things like that, or the diminishment of depression and suffering. There's going to be, there could be a lot of stuff that comes out of this because that whole, all these different chemicals that clearly have massive effect on the brain have been just locked away. And now'll slowly you know when this research starts to get done they just get narrower and narrower and narrower more and more specific in where they go and what they do and and and they become safer typically as that happens so we will say we will see um it'll take years though let's be fair margaret campbell likes our painting oh good excellent uh henry bunkel look it up let's see

yeah uh cb i wish you could see more of it um jeremy saying we have more natural psychedelics inside our body that can be unlocked sober without any drugs um yes uh but again the you know the things in our brain that are natural are receptor systems, typically, on the surface of cells, and therefore can be stimulated or activated by other chemicals as well. I think that's what you're talking about. Let's see. What else, you guys? Please tell me. Say again what Fauci said, Midge. What he said today in an interview that I heard was that there's been a slight uptick in hospitalizations from Omicron in pediatric cases.

And that was seen in South Africa as well. And that has been one of the areas of concern is not due to omicron because the kids that were being admitted are being admitted with omicron not because of omicron meaning they must have other serious medical conditions and they get omicron and that makes it need it makes the increase the problem of needing hospitalization so it's not the Omicron per se. They're not going in because they just got the virus. And I can tell you, exactly. Aaron Carter, I've not had any contact with him. And in terms of Omicron, I'm seeing just dozens and dozens of cases. And people that are vaccinated are doing extremely well with it. People that are not vaccinated,

it's been a little hard for them. It's hard to tell between Delta and Omicron and the unvaccinated population. And yeah, I'm actually, I have to report on this. I am extremely disappointed that it has become increasingly difficult to get monoclonal antibodies, particularly in Orange County, California. They have like a shortage there. It's frankly, I'm sort of disgusted slash mortified that that is the case. And where is the Pax Levit and where

is the Molnupiravir? Where's the strikes back, Susan? The Molnupiravir and the Pax Levit would be, oh he's got it, thank you would be so helpful in this setting because if somebody is getting sick or hasn't been vaccinated might have Delta, Pax Levit

would take care of it in a second and we can't get it and I don't know what of it in a second and we can't get it and i don't know what's wrong with our system that we can't distribute it i've talked to wholesalers i've talked to pharmacists i cannot get those medications and it's disgusting to me so uh the gauntlet is down for those of you in pharmacology and pharmacotherapeutics or in pharmacy distribution get on the case of these companies or the federal government they're the ones that are hoarding it why they haven't distributed these things is disgusting people are getting hurt because they're not distributing them it could be really easily helped we still have we still have fluvoxamine we still have decadron uh for some patients you know

we have you know uh budesonide and you, we can do other things, but, but not nearly as powerful as the monoclonal antibodies and the Paxlipid. We need access to these things. All right. Anyway, uh, thank you so much. Uh, we are in New York this week. We are going to have a show tomorrow. What time, Susan?

Sorry about the wifi thing. I have to go reset the router. What time again tomorrow do you think? Um, I think it's at, I think you need to get closer to that mic. I can't quite hear you. It's 5.30 here. So 2.30 Pacific time. 5.30 Eastern, 2.30 Pacific.

We have a couple of guests, we hope. We've got Mia St. John, who's a recovering person, a boxer. We don't have Kat. We don't have her. No, unless we start at 5 and she leaves maybe. I don't know. Mia St. John. Okay.

We're trying to talk Kat Timp to getting in here. Maybe some clubhouse calls as well. And Susan and Caleb, great. Our virginal voyage. Yeah. You don't realize you were out here for three hours working on this thing. You were out here for a long time. And you guys pulled it together very, very well.

And so here we are. The quality is good. Well, I unplugged the ethernet because we were plugging and unplugging and i forgot to plug the ethernet oh well at least we know what happened i know so that's that but our but our wi-fi our wi-fi is weird it like when i go to look stuff up could you hear caleb he's like ah hallelujah eureka well we did we haven't been here for a while because no it wasn't your fault it wasn't your fault any of the time we got the mix minus fixed on our little instrument here i know we have a new thing we we bought a zoom pod track before and

we're trying that out for the first time so we could use our blue mics fantastic and the mic sounds great as always do i sound froggy like like Juneau? Yeah, you do. I know, huh? But this blueberry is my favorite thing. It's ridiculous. I knew you were going to. Well, it's still possibly COVID. Another thing about Omicron is the testing is all over the place. There's some data that came out today that shows that the home tests are not good. If they're negative for Omicron, if they're positive, you have it.

But they're not detecting a lot of the Omicron. And I'm going to tell you something I'm observing that I bet's gonna come out that's gonna come out in the press later is that even with PCR people have very narrow windows of viral productivity I really think that's happening I'm like a 12 to 24 hour window in some people when you can detect this thing and if you miss it you just don't get it and okay and they're out of quarantine in five days and not producing virus so that's appropriate uh so everyone who's panicking about that uh about that five day thing don't panic when at least when it comes to omicron when it comes to delta i mean i mean i had a rough night last night so did douglas sweaty and achy and stuff yeah but it wasn't any worse than

going through menopause so uh, COVID is like menopause. You wake up tired, sweating, sweating and tired. But the only good thing about having something that they think is COVID, you get to sleep in. Yes. When you have menopause,

they don't let you sleep in. They, they, that's a shot directly at her family. So, okay. Well, thank you,

Susan. Thank you, Caleb. Thank you all for being here. I see you guys on the restream. We thank you for being around. I don't want to be around you. And tomorrow again, it is a Susan. Thank you, Caleb. Thank you all for being here. I see you guys on the restream. We thank you for being around. They don't want to be around you. And tomorrow again, it is 2.30 Pacific, 5.30 Eastern.

We might be as early as 5 Eastern to 2 Pacific. And we will get the Ethernet under control here. Yeah, it's pissing me off. And Caleb, well done. We'll see you all tomorrow afternoon. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only.

I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me. Call 911.

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