The Dr. Hyman Show - How Do Psychedelics Help You Reach Enlightenment or At Least Happiness? with Michael Pollan

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

As we see the amount of information and technology we have access to growing, we also gain a stronger view of universal human tendencies that are overarching in time and culture. One of those that is particularly fascinating is our desire to change consciousness, to alter our brain and our mood, whether it’s with drugs, food, or even activities like meditation and breathwork.  That’s one of the many reasons the emerging research on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy is so interesting, especially considering it was completely written-off for decades after getting a bad rap in the 60s, despite having shown therapeutic promise in the 50s. Today on The Doctor’s Farmacy, I’m joined by world-renowned author Michael Pollan to talk about the exciting reemergence of psychedelic therapy and the possibilities it holds for the future of healthcare. Michael Pollan is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, and his latest book How to Change Your Mind, which is all about the new science of psychedelics. 

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. We used to think these drugs made you crazy. Yeah. But now they make you sane, right? Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. This is Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy with an F-F-A-R-M-A-C-Y, a place for conversations that matter. Today's guest is Michael Pollan.

You all know very well from his work on food, which we're not going to talk much about today. But he is the author of a book that really changed my thinking about the food and food system called The Almond World's Dilemma. He wrote Botany of Desire. He's gotten lots of New York Times bestsellers. His new book called How to Change Your Mind, What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence is an extraordinary book.

It's like a journey through history and a journey through the mind in a way that I think will change our thinking forever about how to use plant substances and various kinds of compounds in novel ways to treat things that we're not very good at treating in medicine. So I'm so glad to have you here, Michael.

You've been named Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World. You certainly influenced me. You've got named Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World. You certainly influenced me. You've got a great book called Cooked, too, which I read, great Netflix special people should watch called Cooked. So we're going to talk about your journey through your trip, so to speak, through the world of psychedelics and the research.

So your book is an extraordinary narrative about how we started on the journey of exploring psychedelics and psychiatry, how we stopped, and now there's a resurgence of interest in treating all these recalcitrant conditions that conventional medication just doesn't really work very well with. Depression, anxiety. Addiction. Addiction, cigarette smoking, alcohol, and even death even death so um what inspired you to start writing about psychedelics as opposed to food yeah so it seems like a kind of radical

shift and in some ways it is um but they're continuities too i've always been interested in our relationship to plants that That's been my obsession. I've been a gardener since I was a little kid. And in Botany of Desire, which you mentioned, I was looking at how plants advance themselves by gratifying our desires. And one of them is for food, obviously, another is for beauty.

But another, and a kind of idiosyncratic one, is our apparently universal desire to change consciousness yeah and in botany desire i looked at cannabis i've written on opium um and always trying to alter our brain and our mood right why you know and why why is that adaptive caffeine alcohol exactly sugar every culture every culture has some with one one exception, the Inuit, where nothing good grows. Every culture has some plant or fungus they use, mushroom, to change consciousness. And it could be in a very mild way, like caffeine,

although I think caffeine is a pretty profound drug in its own way. Or it could be to relieve pain, as we do with opium and opiates. And then you've got these more radical ones that give us really disruptive psychedelic experiences. So that's been a longstanding interest and it's part of my wider interest in nature

and our engagement with the natural world. And then I came across this research that was going on at NYU and at Johns Hopkins. And then- Yeah, we had Tony Boss on the show here. Oh, great. Tony's great. He's a good friend. I just saw him a couple weeks ago in Portland.

And this was such a striking study, and we have so little to offer people who have a cancer diagnosis. I mean, we have oncology obviously, but to help them deal with their fear and anxiety, and morphine doesn't help with that, and it just dulls people. And they were administering psilocybin in a guided

session so it's very different than the way you might use it recreationally I'm going to great dig for grateful day a therapist prepares you very carefully for what to expect sits with you the whole time helps you integrate the experience later and and they were getting these remarkable results you know something like 80 percent of the uh the volunteers had uh statistically significant reductions in depression and anxiety and i started talking to them and they had the most amazing stories of personal transformation of spiritual um insight and uh and and many of them lost their fear of death or of recurrence.

And I got really curious about this and so decided that there was a book to do. I was also, you wrote. You wrote the Trip Doctor in the New York Magazine. Which was a great. Yeah, for the trip treatment. And that was my introduction to the subject. And that's when I decided,

oh God, I just barely scratched the surface. But as you suggested, one of the big surprises was that this uh this research had been going on and it had been very productive all through the 50s and into the 60s yeah you wrote there's like a thousand studies on 40,000 subjects subjects yeah and six international conferences on lsd in that 15 year period so it was a a really- The Cary Grant took like- Cary Grant had like 56 guided trips. Unbelievable. Yeah. And a great many people on the West Coast,

especially were getting psychedelic therapy. Psychiatrists were giving people moderate doses of LSD. It was called psycholytic therapy to just kind of loosen them up and make their unconscious material more available and make them less defensive. The original micro dosing? In a way it was.

It was somewhere between micro and macro. It was like 75 micrograms. And so this was news to me, because like a lot of people, I thought psychedelics were a creature of the 60s. And in fact, they're really a creature of the 50s that went awry in the 60s. And we had this backlash, essentially, beginning in the mid 60s, and we had this backlash, essentially,

beginning in the mid-60s, and the research was stopped. And it's just resumed. Yeah, it was the whole turn on, tune in, drop out, Timothy Leary advice that kind of derailed it. Yeah, I mean, the drugs had gotten into the counterculture. They were very disruptive. Nixon thought that they were sapping the will of american boys to fight in vietnam and he may well have been right and he was like timothy

leary's the most dangerous man in america yeah which is amazing although he had two most dangerous men in america he said daniel ellsberg was also the most dangerous guy in america yeah pentagon papers yeah exactly so um this so i started writing about this renaissance and looking at it from several different perspectives. I mean the therapeutic perspective, the neuroscientific perspective, trying to figure out how it works, and then a personal perspective.

I decided there was no way to write about this work without having my own psychedelic experiences, which believe it or not, I hadn't had until I was in my late 50s. That's hard to believe as a guy who grew up in the late 60s and 70s. Like how did you escape that? I missed the party.

You must have been like that really anxious kid who didn't ever want to take any drugs, was afraid he was gonna go crazy, right? That was me. Because of all the bad press. I had read all the scare stories and I would have, you know, I internalized this. Yeah, bad trips, psychotic breaks,

people thinking they could fly and jumping off buildings, staring at the sun till they went blind there was a lot of disinformation out there and uh yeah i was uh i didn't think i was sturdy enough for it so it's it's something that that has been in existence across cultures thousands of thousands of years whether it's ayahuasca ceremonies or the mushrooms in Mexico and the curanderos who did it there. I mean, there was so much of this across cultures. I read a fascinating book called The Cosmic Serpent,

which you might have read, which talks about ayahuasca and the biology of how it affects our perception and actually, I don't know if it's true or not, and you came across this, but everywhere in these cultures there's this image of a double helix, like the DNA. And he suggested maybe. Yeah, this is Michael Harner. Yeah, that we're actually seeing the DNA.

Seeing the photons, perceiving the photons of light that get emitted from the DNA through this liberating of our neurotransmitters that affect us. So that some of this happens at birth and death, we release these sort of endogenous molecules that help us sort of see the light, so to speak. But this is a way of sort of getting a bypass there.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know if that's true or not. It's very provocative. There is a school of thought that the brain produces its own DMT in the pineal gland. Dymethyltryptamine right and um it's been found in very small amounts in rats you know you can't sample the living brain uh easily for chemicals and um uh and there has been though some recent research where they asphyxiate rats um and induce cardiac arrest and there are these flushes of neurotransmitters that

are released I think they found serotonin dopamine I don't know that they found EMT though so it might explain there's a lot of likeness between the DMT experience and the near-death experience the people report this sense of leaving your body and being able to observe yourself from another perspective happens in both cases. So all that's very provocative. I mean I think that we're really just on the threshold of learning what these drugs have to teach us about

the brain and the mind. And I think the next 10 years are gonna be amazing in psychedelic research. Well you said something very provocative. You said, we used to think these drugs made you crazy. But now they make you sane, right? And that psychiatry went from brainless to mindless. Right.

Meaning we didn't really focus much on the brain in psychiatry with Freud. It was all about your mother. Right. And then we started focusing only on the brain through neurochemistry and drugs that alter your brain chemistry. And we left the mind out. The mind out, right?

So behaviorism. Yeah. Yeah. And it's true. And what's what what psychedelic research will lead to, I think, is a reintegration of brain and mind. You really need both. This is obviously a chemical effect, but it's also a psychological effect. You're you're when you're using this therapeutically you're not just administering a drug per se you're administering a kind of experience and the best predictor for success whether you're treating depression anxiety

addiction is that people have this so-called mystical experience uh which is characterized by a sense of your ego dissolving a sense of merging into something larger your your defenses are completely down and you're you feel very connected to nature or the universe or other people and this uh sense of well-being this transcendence of space and time it's a very specific well-defined phenomenon that is you know throughout religious history but can be induced by a high dose of psilocybin or or it's like a spiritual bypass a little bit in a way it is it is it's i mean you know it's interesting the american researchers all talk about it in spiritual terms the english researchers are a little more allergic to that vocabulary yeah they talk about it more in psychodynamic terms.

But I think they're talking about the same thing. Well, what's interesting, I heard you speak at South by Southwest and you were talking about this part of the brain called the default mode network. And you said something that sort of just caught my attention, which is that in very experienced meditators, like Tibetan monks who've been in a cave for nine years, they are able to have the same effect on their brain,

on functional MRIs, as those people who take psilocybin or LSD. It suppresses this part of the brain that's sort of our ego. Can you talk about that? Yeah. Well, this is one of the most interesting findings in the kind of basic science around psychedelics. They began putting people into MRI machines and administering LSD and psilocybin, and they wanted to see what was going on in their brains, what was activated, what was deactivated. Their expectation was that there would be general activation

because there's such fireworks, right, that people report in the experience. The big surprise was there was a deactivation of this default mode network, which is a group of tightly linked structures, connects the prefrontal cortex to the posterior singular cortex to a deeper, older structures involved in memory and emotion.

Pretty impressive for a journalist to know all those brain parts. I still struggle with brain anatomy frankly it's like their anatomy that's not easy it's not easy at all and um there's like a big mush of like this jello thing but there's so much anatomy in it it's like so specific and you know our thinking now about the brain is it is very networked it's not about individual parts do very specific things. They're all linked in very interesting ways. And the linkages are just as important. So the default mode network is involved in self-reflection, theory of mind, the ability to impute mental states

to others, time travel, the ability to think about the future and the past, which you really need to construct an identity, right? I mean, Oliver Sacks showed us, if you don't have a memory, you don't have an identity. And the so-called autobiographical self, which is the function of kind of building the story of who we are out of what happens to us.

And that appears to happen in the posterior cingulate cortex. So yeah, to the extent that the ego has an address, it would be in the default mode network. And this is basically, it's not completely turned off, but it's downregulated. And when they also did similar fMRIs of meditators, long-term meditators with 10,000 hours of experience,

they found the same pattern, the deactivation of the default mode network, which makes sense in that both involve ego dissolution Yeah, right. I mean you're you're transcending your ego and meditation if you're very experienced And quieting the part of the self chatter I mean because it because the default mode network is where you you go to mind wander worry all that well That's it. I mean it's exactly I think you're hitting on something. That's so key. Which is that? suffering comes from

identifying with your ego and that the liberation of suffering according to the Buddhist tradition is realizing that that's just an illusion and that you're not really separate and that the meditation is a technique to help you actually realize that. And break that attachment to your worries or everything really.

And that attachment is the basis of suffering. Yeah, I mean the Buddhists figured this out a really long time ago. And now neuroscience is moving in a very similar direction. So we've got this new idea that you proposed in the Washington Post and in your book about this grand unified theory of mental illness. That how does this one drug or this one actually

plant compound affect all these disparate disorders like depression, anxiety, addiction, and alcoholism, obsession? I was very skeptical about that. I said, you know, this sounds like a panacea. Why does it work on so many different things? And I mentioned this to Tom Insel, the psychiatrist who used to be head of the National Institute of Mental Health. He's a great guy.

He is a great guy, and he was very helpful to me in understanding this. And he said, you to me in understanding this. And he said, you have to understand that these separate diagnoses are really a artifact of the insurance industry. The fact that we need a different diagnosis for all these things. He said, all those things, depression, anxiety, addiction,

obsession, may be manifestations, different manifestations of a similar brain malfunction. And the thinking on the part of the psychedelic researchers is that all these are products of a stuck brain, of a brain that is caught in loops of rumination and the repetition of destructive patterns of thought. And if you think about it, they're all habits of one kind or another.

It's telling yourself the same destructive story over and over again you know I'm unworthy of love I I can't get through the day without a cigarette you know I'm worthless whatever it is and what the drugs seem to do it's like if you had a steel structure they introduce heat and they allow it to become more flexible they help you anneal it and um they're really good at getting people to break out of the grooves of destructive patterns of thought and and that's why i say in the book at some point that maybe psychedelics are wasted on the young because it's as we get older it's as we get older that we get stuck in these patterns. You know, we all develop these algorithms for dealing with life and they may be efficient, but they can also be quite destructive.

Well, a lot of mental illness also is connected to a sense of isolation and loneliness and separateness and loneliness and uh in in a way these drugs often will give you a sense of deep connection with life with others with meaning with purpose in ways that other drugs just don't do and what's interesting is that these drugs don't work by ongoing effects because you take one dose and you got six months of benefit yeah and it doesn't make sense from a medical point of view, except for the fact that it links to this change in perception. Yeah, no, that's why. It really is the experience.

And we know that experiences change brains. I mean, look at trauma, right? Trauma changes brains. Yes. All experience is learning, and learning changes the brain. And you can think of it, as Roland Griffith has proposed, as a reverse

trauma a powerful positive experience that can reset the brain in the way a trauma does too it is you know i think it's i i just think it opens up a whole new way of thinking about behavior change yeah and i think that that is something we really really struggle with adults have a lot of trouble changing how i mean we know from the food area getting adults to change their habits around food is really hard they really get locked in and um and you know the disconnection that you're talking about i think is key but what disconnects us it's the ego the ego builds walls the ego defends us and as it gets overactive, look, egos are great. They do a lot of very positive things.

You need it. It's to survive. They're very adaptive. There's a reason evolution gave us an ego. But they also cut us off. They also cause us to objectify the other. And in depression, you have an overactive default mode network and ego that is turned

inward is punishing you and um to be relieved of that that dictator yeah um sometimes is exactly what people need you know i i first sort of started learning about this when i took this class at cornell called plants and humans It was kind of a fluff class, but it was fascinating across agriculture, but also across this whole place and the intersection of consciousness and plant medicines and ritual and ceremony. And I became fascinated and I read Doors of Perception,

Val Huxley about his journey with mescaline. And I started experimenting with these in a very sort of ritualistic setting, usually in nature with a couple of close friends where we really sort of dropped in. It wasn't like taking mushrooms and going to Grateful Dead concert. And it was profound.

It really, it gave me that sort of quick, like view of a world that I hadn't really seen before you know I'd read about thought about but never directly experienced and it I think it really impacted my view of humanity my view of my place in the world my view of death my my fear of you know success or not success it really really helped dissolve that ego separation in a way that kind of was a profound shift for me. And I studied Buddhism, that was my major in college. So I was studying the psychology of consciousness

at the same time, and I took my 10-day meditation retreats. And I remember after one 10-day meditation retreat where you're meditating like 12 hours a day i came out and i literally felt like i was tripping yeah i like i literally everything was like sparkling all my senses were alive in i felt connected to everything in nature everything was moving it was like it was really the same experience but who has 10 days to sit for 12 well you know i think you're right i think part of what psychedelics are is a shortcut. And, you know, and some people think for that reason it's cheating in some ways.

And you have to work harder to get to the same place with meditation. But it's a very similar place. I mean, I've heard other people, I've never done a long meditation retreat. I'd be really curious to try. But I've heard that people get to that kind of state. And I don't think it's.

But you get a sore back and sore knees and it's like. Yeah, all that too. But I don't think it's an accident that all the prominent American Buddhists, the people who brought Buddhism to America beginning in the 70s, the Jack Kornfelds, Joan Halifax, Jon Kabat-Zinn,

they all started with psychedelics. And they were. That's where Richard Alpert, who was Ram Dass, started. Oh yeah, no, the links are strong. And we know the links are are in the brain also um uh judson brewer who's a really interesting psychiatrist at brown who's who uh runs john cabot's in his mind mindfulness institute uh at the medical school there he he was the one who saw the similarity between these brain scans of the default mode network. And he really believes that someday we might use psychedelics to kickstart a meditation practice. That it kind of primes the brain for that kind of consciousness.

And I know in my own case, having had these psychedelic experiences, I became a much more successful or happy meditator I could I was just much better at kind of going to that place where I could quiet my thoughts than I was before so I I think the I think the links are really interesting and what's so important is that this is an area of medicine which we really suck at you know like it's I mean mental illness is I don't know if you know this, but it's the number one driver of indirect and direct costs in the healthcare system.

Even more than heart disease and cancer. When you add in all the years of disability and loss of productivity, because it happens throughout people's lives, whereas heart disease and cancer may happen later, in terms of loss of quality of life years and the total loss of productivity and engagement in society, it's the biggest cost driver.

And it creates so much suffering. And there's nothing that really works for you. And it's getting worse. It's getting worse. There's an epidemic now. Opioid epidemic, all these things. And these drugs seem to be, or I don't even want to call them drugs,

they're plant medicines, seem to be able to be a solution and it feels like we can't get there fast enough yeah look we do have a crisis in mental health care and if you compare mental health care to any other branch of medicine it's achieved much less i mean you know when you think about oncology cardiology infectious disease we have we have extended lifespans reduced suffering in significant ways. And you can't say that about mental health care. And we treat symptoms by and large with the psychiatric drugs we have.

The drugs we have have often terrible side effects. People don't like taking them. They have to take them every day for the rest of their lives. And in many cases they don't work. Make you gain weight and become impotent. Yeah, no, they have, oh, they're just, you know. That'll make you depressed. Yeah, and they're hard to get off too yeah um they're you

know getting off an ssri puts you at enormous risk for for suicide yeah so we need new tools we need innovation there hasn't been much innovation in this space and and since the 90s um and uh and and along comes this new slash old treatment. These are all public domain chemicals and plants that appears. I mean, I think there's more work to be done to prove it. They still need to do the big phase three trials. But based on the pilot studies in the phase two trials, there's a really strong signal here that we've got something important.

And boy, do we need it. Yeah, it's so critical. So you, as part of your research for your book, um, having been a scared hippie in the sixties and the seventies decided to take a dive and take a trip, several, multiple trips, uh, using many of these compounds. Um, how was that for you? What did you learn? How are you different different and what did it do to help you understand this landscape well i did it out of you know deep curiosity because i was talking to these people and they were having these transformative and spiritual experiences and i was like kind of jealous uh and um and curious as to what that was like but i also it's kind of like what i like to do as a writer i put my you know

when i wrote about the cattle industry i bought a cow yeah i built a house to write about architecture yeah and so i like putting myself in in that place where i can write about an experience that i'm having for the first time there's a quality of wonder you can capture the first time you do something that you can never capture again so even though they're more experienced psychonauts than me they've done it they've been there they've done that it's just not as uh i'm hoping i capture something unique by writing about it first time kind of late in life um so but i was very reluctant to do it at the same time i was very nervous about it um i didn't know what i would discover i thought you know some crazy dude in there yeah some crazy dude in there i mean it was just like it just you know my life is wasn't

broken things were settled and here i'm gonna blow things up my wife judith was like very nervous about it you know she was like i don't want you to change um it didn't enter her consciousness that i might change well you're writing a book on how to change your mind yeah i know i know that i think that put her off in the end she became incredibly supportive but she had this initial reluctance i mean you know you're you're in a long-term relationship i let her speak for herself on that um you're in a long-term relationship and suddenly someone's going to have a big experience on their own and you're not and it so potentially it's drives a wedge um but her thinking changed about that um the experiences were all fascinating several of them were

incredibly useful and transformative in in terms of my understanding of myself and uh and nature especially um one of them was terrifying um and i wouldn't wish on anyone although even that ended with a profound sense of gratitude um so that it was over or yes that was over um but uh and then i still existed yeah i i had this um well i can tell you about it later but um the the really good experiences were about relationships i had an lsd trip guided lsd trip with an underground guide who was a wonderful man who i had great trust in and it wasn't a particularly high dose lsd experience was like 150 micrograms and um it was all about people in my life one after another kind of presented themselves to me and i was thinking about my son and i was thinking about

my wife and my parents and feeling this surge of love and and just you know we don't stop we we take our relationships for granted and and it was just this afternoon of of uh connection feeling this very strong connection with it was wonderful um and you know i had the classic lsd insight that love is the most important thing in the universe pretty much it's true but it is true at the same time it's a hallmark sentiment but it's also true and and that i think that's part of our lives that we we develop this this uh you know code of irony and um we're afraid of strong sentiment and especially as a journalist it's objective right and we're very cynical and ironic and so you know and i i wrote about the struggle of writing about that um how do you convey the

power of that feeling when it sounds so banal and but the line between profanity and banality sometimes is very fine. On a psilocybin trip I had without a guide in a very safe place like yours in nature, I understood my relationship to plants in a way I hadn't before. I wrote a book whose subtitle was A Plant's Eye View of the World. I had this idea, and it was more of an intellectual conceit,

that plants have their own subjectivity. We shouldn't think of them as mute objects. They're working on us at the same time as we work on them, which is true in a coevolutionary sense. But it suddenly became true in a direct emotional felt sense, and that the plants in my garden were returning my gaze. They were all conscious in some sense not like us um but i shouldn't just

treat them as mute objects yeah and i felt profoundly i've never felt more a part of nature i think most humans feel a little distance even when we're having a positive nature experience that we're different that we have a relationship to nature which is a bizarre idea that we're not part of it yeah yeah and um i i felt completely part of it for the first time in my life and that was a profound feeling i was just one species among among many um and then i had a guided psychedelic trip that really changed my understanding of my ego um i had uh i was in a i was working with a guide on the east coast who uh created an environment where i felt safe enough to really let go and it was a pretty high dose uh psilocybin trip and

um i saw my ego just burst into a little cloud of post-it notes and then and then was spread out on the ground like a coat of paint and it was like me and i was fine with it but i don't know who this new i was that was fine with it and that it remains a real mystery that this this new perspective emerged on my life that wasn't ego right it was perfectly objective it was untroubled um perfect equanimity I don't know what it was to this day I mean Aldous Huxley would have said it was the mind at large it was some kind of collective consciousness I don't know what it was to this day. I mean, Aldous Huxley would have said it was the mind at large. It was some kind of collective consciousness. I don't know. But I learned during that experience that not to be afraid about the death of the ego,

that there is another ground on which we can stand, that the ego is part of our mind, but it's not the only part, and we're not identical to it. Now, 10 years of psychotherapy, you could probably get to that perspective on your ego, but this was one afternoon. It was pretty cheap. Yeah, it was really cheap. When you think about the amount of money

we spent on psychiatry, this is a cheap solution. You know, you're talking, it really made me think of my learnings in the Buddhist psychology, which is really about understanding that you're not your thoughts, you're not your mind, that there's a level of pure consciousness that's outside of that.

That you can witness it. And everything plays within that arena. And that's freedom. And you don't have to, yeah. Because if you're identified with your physical being and your body, you suffer, it's painful, it's fear. I remember a couple years ago,

I got very sick. I had mold in my house and I had an antibiotic for root canal that gave me C. diff and I lost 30 pounds. I was in bed for five months. I literally couldn't function. And I...

It started with the mold? It started with the mold. Yeah, it was just a whole litany of things. I broke my arm and my system just collapsed. And I was in bed for five months and couldn't do anything thank god my wife was there taking care of me but it was i was i could get that i was not my emotions i was not my mind because i wasn't working anymore i wasn't my body because i wasn't working anymore but there was this other thing going on and it was it was a very mystical experience even though it was miserable yeah

you know i was nauseous but you were able to detach for a lot of this yeah and i think it was a very mystical experience, even though it was miserable. I was nauseous 24-7. But you were able to detach for a lot of this. Yeah, and I think it was those experiences. Could you meditate during this period? I couldn't meditate, I was just completely gone. But I had this awareness, they call it this pure mind bodhicitta in the Buddhist tradition. It's like you have this consciousness

that you don't identify with this bag of flesh and bones that we are and you you're connected in a way to something bigger and more meaningful and i think that's it's very similar and it's very interesting it does it does show you another space in which to exist mentally yeah has it changed your life in any way after like in terms of in some ways i feel like i mean i'm back to baseline in a lot of ways um and it's been several years since i've had one of these experiences um but i do feel i have a little more perspective and that i can catch i can catch out my ego and just realize oh i can turn down the volume on that i don't have to listen to that yeah and that's that's one character in my mind it's

not the only one and that's really useful i think and you know if you ask my wife this question she she feels that i've changed in subtle but meaningful ways that i'm more patient more open the example she cited that was interesting because a lot of people ask me the question you just did is so how have you changed and of course your partner knows better than anybody else it's hard to judge yourself yeah but she said um that uh the death of my father which happened a year ago january um he she thought i handled that very differently than i would have before and that i was i was very present i came to new york and moved into the apartment for the last 10 days and i was with him every day and i wanted to be there i really wanted

to be present and you know death is one of the things we defend ourselves against. It's one of the things our ego is busy like shutting us off from. But I felt like I could say everything I needed to say. I was as available to him as I possibly could be for this very difficult, but also very moving period of time.

And my guess is before I'd had these experiences and spent so much time interviewing these cancer patients perhaps i would have found ways to not be there quite that much and and to kind of protect myself from the emotional pain of that um so i think she's right i mean that that feels intuitively correct and and i do credit the psychedelic experiences for that yeah i haven't seen you since you wrote the book and and you're there's some difference in the quality of your energy i can't really describe it but it is a sense of like openness and connection and it's great it's awesome so i you know there are moments when i i've been like uh feeling uh you feeling being interviewed

or criticized for my work or something. And I remember there was somebody, somebody got up at a conference and was giving me a lot of grief for not enough women in my book. We're in that moment and that comes up. And I'm listening to her talk and I'm in front of a group of people at Esalen

and I'm like, wow. Where it all started. Where it all started. Where it all started. The room where it happened. Yeah, and I'm thinking, God, I'm not being defensive. I don't feel defensive. I'm gonna let her talk and I'm gonna answer it and I'm not gonna get defensive.

That's awesome. Okay, that's helpful. Yeah, so let's talk about some of this research because it's not just about getting at peace with death. It's not just about depression, anxiety, but other things that are super hard to treat, like addiction. And even post-traumatic stress disorder,

which is so rampant. And things we haven't tried yet. Like, I think there is enormous potential to treat eating disorders. And eating disorders are one of the toughest psychiatric indications. It has the lowest rate of success with therapy the highest mortality of any psychiatric illness um and we have very we have really poor tools and it is another form of a rigid mind that needs to be loosened a habit of

thought um getting trapped in loops and and false stories yourself, about your body image. So I think the addiction work is really exciting. It's been done so far with cigarette smokers at Johns Hopkins. It's in process now, a second study. Alcoholics at NYU, big study, I think 200 and some odd patients. And hard cases, this is Bellevue. These are street alcoholics

and people who are really tough cases, and cocaine addicts at University of Alabama that had terrific success. The thinking on addiction is that, well there's two, didn't the founder of AA actually have a psychedelic experience? Yeah, Bill W. And then wanted to actually include it in AA and LSD.

And the board said, i don't think this it goes with our brand um yeah he uh bill w had gotten sober on it wasn't technically a psychedelic it was belladonna which is a deliriant another plant medicine but then he had lsd therapy in the 50s and he thought this could really help people get sober and he was right and there was a lot of research one of the most exciting areas of research in the 50s was alcoholism and there was a meta-analysis done a couple years ago and it looked like they were having success in about 50 percent of cases which is really impressive considering it's about 10 percent to 15 percent that's right no it was very impressive and so that's an important indication that is

being worked on right now what seems to happen is that um addicts acquire this new perspective on their life and people talk to me about like the camera was pulled back further on the scene of my life than it ever had before and i looked and i saw what i was doing smoking drinking and i realized i'm killing myself and how stupid that is. And even though that's a pretty banal insight, it has a kind of stickiness during the psychedelic experience. Whatever insights people have feel more like revealed truths

than opinions. And that makes them really sturdy. And this is something William James talked about in describing the mystic experience. He said. The varieties of religious experience. Yes, yeah, the first American psychologist toward the end of the 1800s.

He said that there was a quality to mystic experience called the noetic quality. And that was this idea that this is this is absolute knowledge this is a state of knowledge not just of thought and um and that seems right um the people you know who i interviewed just kind of came to these conclusions and then could actually live by them and you know many of us have insights that we're eating poorly we have these bad habits and they want to break them and maybe tomorrow or the next day we manage to put it off and we just bracket the insight here it just kind of takes hold um so that's very interesting the other the other way to look at it too and uh steve ross

who's the uh the doc at uh nyu who's involved with the alcoholism study is that in alcoholism you or or addiction your connection to people atrophies as your connection to the substance dominates your life that's right and you're more connected to the bottle than you are to your family um you will do you know you will let that you'll sacrifice them for that that new relationship and that it re it restores the human connection in a way that allows you to break the connection with the inanimate thing or the dopamine charge you're getting, whatever it is. So I don't know that we know the whole

psychological mechanism at work, but it seems to be having high rates of success. It's often combined with cognitive behavioral therapy to help with the cravings. Because that's- Is it a biological phenomena too where it resets the brain? I don't know.

I don't know the answer. It may, I mean, it does, you know, a lot of people talk about rebooting the brain and that this is like unplugging your computer and plugging it back in and that things- Wipes the hard drive. Wipes the hard drive, yeah. I mean, one of the things that happens

is when the default mode network, which is also a communications hub in the brain, when that goes offline, the brain gets temporarily rewired. And there's an image in the book that shows the wiring in a sober brain and the wiring in a psychedelic brain. And it's radically different. In the psychedelic brain, brain networks that don't ordinarily talk to one another start talking to one another. So dots are being connected in completely new ways temporarily and this may be the kind of resetting that allows people to break out of these destructive patterns do those trials look at people who are acutely addicted and with whether

it stops withdrawal you know that it doesn't well let's see with alcoholism i have to go back and check i forget whether i don't know they don't get dry before they do the um because if you stop drinking you can see her yeah if you're an alcoholic yeah right so i'm not sure how they're dealing with that in the case of the opiate addicts they're using something called ibogaine i was gonna just ask which is an african shrub and uh that work is not going on in this country there's a lot of it going on in mexico right now yeah ibogaine is there research or just clinical it's clinical i don't know of any research project now there are people who are proposing it the problem with ibogaine is it's a really heavy drug it

implicates your heart in way you have to be on a heart monitor the whole time you're doing it uh it lasts like 36 hours but it has the advantage of not only giving you the powerful mystical experience but it something about the chemical uh deals with the cravings you you lose your cravings well not only that you lose withdrawal so yes that's right you you don't go from being a heroin addict and having to go through withdrawal, you literally stop that process. Which is fascinating from a brain chemistry point of view, what's actually happening. What happens to the neuroreceptors, brain chemistry. Yeah, no, we don't know.

And how is the dopamine system getting reset that it has what it needs? And so anyway, there's a lot more to be learned here. It's very promising given the opiate crisis that we have. Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't we look at that here? If 70,000 people a year are dying, and how many millions are actually using? Oh, yeah.

Why wouldn't we want to look at that? It's a good question. I don't know. I mean, I think there are people proposing it. I think so many of the resources, well, one thing it's important to keep in mind that there is no federal money for this research. It's all privately funded.

And this is, I think this is a scandal. I mean, I think there's a strong enough signal here that we've got powerful medicines to help with a crisis we have in mental health. And the government is- It's like Thomas Insull would be on this game. You would think. And he is now, but he's no longer head

of the National Institute of Mental Health. Sure he he knows a few people yeah but but as you know the budget for all psychiatric research is tiny compared to the medical budget in general but and i think the government probably thinks it's still too controversial but so anyway there's not quite enough resources to do everything we need to do. And I agree, I think given the opiate crisis, Ibogaine is really important to look at. I think it scares everybody because it's such an intense drug. And-

You're in a medical setting and you're wired up. And Mexico, they have clinics with anesthesiologists and cardiologists and they hook up Tyvees. Look, withdrawal is a medical crisis too. And so anyway, I haven't really delved into ibogaine and most of the work is in yeah is in mexico but there are clinics doing it and they often combine it with 5me on dmt the toad the toad and uh which apparently helps people at the end of the experience to kind of consolidate what they've learned i find that hard to believe because i had because you had a terrifying experience on the toad yeah um that was my least happy experience um

so this is the smoked venom of the sonoran desert toad how would anybody figure that out you know i am so impressed with this yes and and yes the venom is toxic but if i smoke it it'll be fine um and no toads are harmed in the making of the psychedelic they're you know you gently you can And yes, the venom is toxic, but if I smoke it, it'll be fine. And no toads are harmed in the making of the psychedelic. You know, you gently, you can milk them essentially, this venom, and then they produce more of it. It's very- Moking a toad, okay. Yeah, so you're smoking these crystals,

the dried venom, and you smoke the crystals, and you have only one puff, and you are just shot out of a cannon, and the sensation is so destabilizing. Not only do you have a loss of sense of ego, but you have a loss of a sense of space, and time, and matter. It's all gone.

It's just this pure storm of energy that is your brain, but it's the whole world, and it was just absolutely terrifying. But the best thing about it is it only lasts about 10 minutes, although it felt like an eternity. And then you gradually reassemble and you see reality reassemble and it's like,

ah, there's time, there's space, there's matter. Isn't life great? And I have a body. That was the sense of gratitude I got from it. So the best part of it was that it was over yeah but i mean you know as terrifying experiences do they give us an appreciation for normal experience and i felt you know most of us have expressed gratitude for being alive i felt gratitude that there was anything yeah that there is not nothing yeah interesting now

you also write about um a different category of mental illness which is trauma yeah and post-traumatic stress and the use of some of these substances mdma which is ecstasy yeah and it's a very different drug some people consider it a psychedelic some don't it doesn't work on the same receptor networks uh it does implicate serotonin but also it seems oxytocin. Which is the hormone that mothers produce. Right, it's about the attachment hormone, right, when they're nursing. Like after you make love with someone, your oxytocin levels go up.

Your levels rise, yeah. And the thinking here is, it's already in phase three trials, it's pretty far along for treating. Those are human clinical trials, basically. Yes, oh yeah, and big, big groups groups and this is to treat people with PTSD either from war or from sexual abuse of whatever cause and which is one in four people it's an astonishing number and that that's why I think it's a very exciting area of

therapy so it works a little different You're guided in the same way. The drug doesn't give you a radically altered state of consciousness in that you're not seeing things that aren't there. But it seems to disarm the amygdala and your fear, your fight or flight response in a way that allows you to take out very difficult memories

and be very kind of clinical about them and i've seen tapes of these soldiers um they'll kind of go under for a long time and be thinking and then suddenly they'll start talking to the therapist and um and they'll describe this horrible scene uh that that traumatized them and they'll do it in an absolutely affectless way and it seems this the episode seems to lose some of its charge in being told being taken out told that way and then reconsolidated as a memory and you do this a couple times and it seems to um uh take the edge off of it uh in a way that allows people to go on with their lives. Because what happens with a traumatic memory is you can't control it. It pops up in your mind.

And when it pops up, all the associated emotions come up too. And you're re-traumatized. To have the memory without the emotions allows you to kind of get some perspective on it. At least that's how I understand it. And I've talked to a lot of people who've had this this it helps them get through it yeah it helps them get through it and they they many of them are no longer they on the there's a scale for you know a ptsd and they're off the scale yeah i have a friend who's was in war zones in africa and you know just the worst places you can imagine and every night

he suffers from night terrors and it's just you know it's such a debilitating condition well the vaa the vaa is spending you know a huge amount of money treating ptsd it's so common especially are they interested in this they're nervous about it they're starting to kind of dip their toes in and rick doblan at maps which is the organization that's been um conducting the trials is in conversations with people and i think they're just a little nervous about the politics but what's interesting is that the people on the far right have been supportive of this research because it can help the soldiers people like rebecca mercer who's a big trump supporter steve bannon has spoken very positively about mdma therapy so this may create the kind of political cover

that allow the VA to really step in. We need to, like at the next G20 summit meeting, have all the leaders take some MDMA or maybe psilocybin and hang out. That was actually Rick Doblin's idea in the 80s. He actually arranged to send, I don't know how many ecstasy pills to the arms negotiators in the soviet union well i mean in your book you tell a funny story of how uh timothy leary gave alan

ginsburg his first psilocybin trip and he tried to get on the phone with kennedy and khrushchev and mazatang and yeah he said he had he was going to solve world peace all right well there is this sense and you know the and many of the researchers feel that like this isn't just to treat individuals this could treat a sick civilization and if enough people had access to this we could repair our relationship to the natural world we could reconnect with people not like ourselves and transcend our tribalism so much divisiveness right yeah and that's a you know that's an appealing idea i think how you put it into effect is really challenging i mean you're not going to give these drugs to everybody you're

not going to put it in the water supply um when you think about it you know we spend so much money on psychiatric care and illness you know this is a thing that is non-patentable that doesn't cause very much yeah that almost eliminates or reduces the need for psychotherapy, it's not like you can do psychoanalysis four days a week for 25 years like Woody Allen. And it's a threat in a sense to the establishment because it's like, well who's gonna make money from it? Yeah, no the business model is a real challenge because from the pharmaceutical side, as you suggest,

you have these public domain chemicals and mushrooms that anybody could grow. So, and you're only gonna need one or two pills. And so the pharmaceutical industry is only interested in drugs you take every day. And so how are they gonna make money? And then on the psychotherapy side, it's intense amount of psychotherapy for the period

of the preparation, the session, and after, it's days of psychotherapy, the period of the preparation, the session, and after, it's days of psychotherapy, but then it's over. So it's gonna force everybody to rethink. It's also important to understand, it's not a drug therapy, it's this package. It should not be called psychedelic medicine, it should be called psychedelic assisted psychotherapy.

And you need the whole package. And we don't have anything else like that. And, uh. You mentioned there's a company that's putting all that together right there is there's a compass pathways yes is a is a english pharmaceutical company they're doing trials of treatment resistant depression with psilocybin both in this country and in europe in like eight countries in europe and they're trying to sell a package that they will uh offer to clinics and to national health services that comes with training training modules for the therapists the drug and um and they think they can make it more economical especially where you've got national health um where you don't have to worry about how much money the pharmaceutical companies are making.

And we'll see. We'll see if they can do it. I mean, they've got to get through these phase three trials. But they've raised a lot of capital, and it's a small company. My guess is as soon as they prove they can do it, they'll be gobbled up by a big pharmaceutical company. That's what passes for innovation in that field. But it's important to know that you know we have this crisis and if you talk to people in pharmaceuticals they're not even researching psychiatric medicines they have they're disinvesting in cns drugs central nervous system drugs and they're and

and they're among the most prescribed drugs yeah that we, in the top two or three usually every year. And so I don't understand why they would not be intensely interested in coming up with some new drugs for this. But, you know, this is a different paradigm. And it could revolutionize things. And it's gonna take some new thinking on how to make it work, you know,

to the extent it needs to make profits. Have you talked to the folks at the NIH or FDA? What is their perspective on this? I've talked to people at FDA and I've been struck by how supportive they've been. No obstacles have been put in the way of these researchers yet. In fact, the FDA has encouraged them to go big. When they came and presented the phase two trials for the cancer anxiety studies thinking they wanted to get approval for phase three to treat more cancer

patients for depression and anxiety the fda said wait a minute you've got a signal here that this is going to be effective with depression why don't you go ahead and do your cancer anxiety but why don't you do another trial for major depression? So that apparently was the FDA's idea. So they're not resisting. And I think they feel the desperate need for new tools also and I think that may be encouraging them. But I thought there'd be a lot of political resistance. The FDA's policy is that they're gonna treat psychedelics

like any other drug. If you've got a good proposal, you can study it. And. Well, it's interesting, probably a lot of people now in leadership positions in business. Have had experience. Right, because they're all children of the 60s and the 70s. Well, that's where now.

And leaders are like, wait a minute, I did that. It wasn't so bad. I think you do have people in charge of our major institutions. Look, I've talked to two former heads of the American Psychiatric Association who've talked to me about their own psychedelic experiences and how they how it influenced their you know their interest in the mind um so there are a lot of people coming out of the closet too and talking about this openly and um yeah i mean weren't you worried

about publicly writing about doing that stuff i'm like yeah he's gonna knock on my door or what well the book is very carefully lawyered i mean i had two lawyers read it and um i was i was you know i was less nervous about myself i knew that if i changed the time and the place the jurisdiction of these experiences that it was not a usable confession because there's a statute of limitations it's not that long so so basically if i say you tried it in college. Yeah, you're so fine after me. So fine. And so I'm vague about where it happens and I'm vague about when it happens. I was more concerned about my guides.

You know, there are these underground therapists. They're very devoted people. Now you're angels, but the no. And they and many of them are there are some mds doing this work and there are some trained uh therapists and they're doing this at great risk to their own freedom and and their medical licenses or therapeutic licenses um so i i it was very important i protect them and disguise just enough details about them um that they were safe and uh knock on wood, so far none of them have had problems and they're all very pleased to have been part of the,

you know, to be written about. It seems like there's a sea change because Colorado just, you know, decriminalized mushrooms, right? Something's going on, yeah. And Oakland is gonna have a vote June 4th in the city council about doing the same thing, which is amazing.

So yeah, something's happening. The culture has moved more in the last year than I ever thought possible and um you know i don't take credit for that i think that what we do as journalists is kind of like hopefully have pretty good antenna about where the culture is moving and we ride these waves and but i feel a way of building around this and that uh that in five years it's going to look the landscapes look very different and that these will be accepted medicines. And people will be talking about these transformative experiences

in a way they now are closeted. That's amazing. And we're just beginning really, right? It's really early days. And there's so much basic science to be done. There's so many more indications to be trialed. Andrew Weil believes they can help with psychosomatic illness things like allergy which is really interesting um you know he's very

strong on the mind uh body connection and uh he he thinks there's a whole area of of uh autoimmune uh disease that needs to be looked at with this so yeah exciting possibilities that's how he that's how he became what he was he was a harvard med student who like got interested in mushrooms and psychedelics and went to south america and took a lot of drugs and wrote about his first book was actually from chocolate to morphine actually his first book was the natural mind chocolate chocolate to morphine came later the natural mind is a book about drugs oh yeah it's really interesting i read it um and andy you know hasn't been talking very much about psychedelics in the last 30 years or so, but he is now. We just did an event together.

Amazing. He mocked my mere seven trips and went on about his dozens and dozens of trips. And claims he was cured of sunburn by psychedelics. Wow. That he was very fair and could not go in the sun without getting a really bad sunburn and uh but after psychedelics no problem and now he lives in the desert and and some of the take-homes of this is like it's not a panacea um no it's not a panacea and there's a but there is a group of ailments that are on one end of the spectrum

this of mental rigidity, of mental stuckness. And everything in that area seems to be susceptible to this intervention. At the other end of the spectrum, you have things like personality disorder and schizophrenia. That's probably not gonna help because these drugs introduce a certain amount of entropy into a stuck mind.

And at that end of the spectrum, the mind has enough entropy it needs more order yeah but this is the end where there's too much order yeah so not a panacea but very good for these products of the stuck brain and and you talk about it as um disabusing us of the luxury of mindlessness. Which is the way we mostly live, which is not really present. And it sort of forces you to have an experience that can shift your quality of life, really. You know, I think that as valuable as this,

that these medicines may be for people who are suffering with serious mental illness, they have a value for all of us. We're all dealing with mortality. We're all dealing with disconnection. We're all dealing with some kind of addiction. It's a spectrum, right? It is a spectrum. Yeah. We're not, you know, we're not different from those people. We're just on a different point in the spectrum. So, and I think that's a huge challenge. How do you make these medicines available to well people?

And do you legalize them? I'm not sure. It's not like cannabis. It's a much stronger experience. It does have psychological risks. And you talk about set and setting being important. So important. Which is where you do it, who you do it with.

And the mindset you have, the intention you have going into it. All these things matter. So I really believe the safest way to approach it is with a guide. And because also some people need to be disqualified from taking it. If you have any risk of schizophrenia in your family, you really shouldn't take it.

Certain psychiatric meds, you know, you shouldn't be on. If you're on SSRIs, the psychedelics, they won't hurt you, but they don't work. Because it's occupying the same receptor. So it's much less casual than cannabis. I mean, it really takes. It's not a party drug. It's definitely not a party drug.

What's fascinating is that it's safe. It's not toxic and there's no side effects. There's no lethal dose. I mean, you can go buy a bottle of Tylenol in the CVS and take it and you're dead. Yeah, that's right. Whereas you can swallow 400 mushrooms and it's not gonna kill you. They have not found a lethal dose, which is amazing.

And it's also not addictive. So these are not drugs of abuse. It's safe. There's no toxic dose. Yeah, no, the risks are- I think that was too good to be true. It does. I mean, you know, they're so targeted and there's so toxic dose yeah no the the the risks are almost good too good to be true it does i mean you know they're so targeted and there's so few molecules involved you know lsd doses it's like i don't know of another drug that you take micrograms micrograms um but the risks are

practical you could do something stupid because you're impaired and you could walk out into traffic uh and there there are psychological people do have bad trips and bad trips are terrifying and in a recent survey of people who've had bad trips eight percent of them sought psychiatric help within the first year after um so that's you know that's not nothing and uh so i think people have to approach it with a sense of deliberateness reverence for the power of these these medicines and and not treated as a as a casual experience i mean historically i've always been used in ritual and ceremony as a right of passage as a and always with an elder of some kind a shaman or a uh corandera uh who knows the

territory and can help people but you're're right, it's always with ceremony, it's with intention, and on special occasions, not done regularly. Not like, hey, that's a Ben's over on Saturday, let's get some, yeah. So you quote Denis Upgraf, who is a psychedelic psychiatrist at Esalen, and he said what the telescope was for astronomy

and the microscope for biology psychedelics will be for the understanding of the human mind yeah when i first read that i thought it's kind of overstating it don't you think um but i'm i don't think it's so crazy anymore i do think these are powerful tools for understanding the mind and we have so few consciousness you know is beyond the reach of science as we know it has been you can't measure it i mean you can measure the lack of it but you can't measure it really and and so you depend on people's reporting uh on phenomenology um but here we have a tool that by altering consciousness brings it into this observable space um you know one way to to

understand any complex system is to disrupt it and like a particle accelerator right just disrupts the the particle and forces it to reveal its secrets yeah something similar is is possible with psychedelics yeah it's an exciting moment uh sort of this resurgence of research and interest and it almost seems to me that it's the medicine for our times because we have so much disconnection and also we have so much strife and division and separation. Well, look, I see so much of our crises politically and also environmentally and climate change.

They're all connected. So what they're all connected, we should put in the water. And it's not fluoride. And somebody told me last night the chlorine would ruin the lsd so bad idea um but you know i think a lot of what ails us is the result of ego egoistic thinking the kind of thinking that allows us to both objectify nature and objectify other people tribalism is kind of collective egotism right right? And that we're different, we're better, and they're mere objects.

And LSD and psilocybin reminds you that you're more like other people than unlike, that we are all in this together, and that we are also in this together with the natural world. And it's exactly the lesson that we need to hear right now. So true. Thank you, Michael, for bringing this to our attention.

How to Change Your Mind with the New Science of Psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence. Remember that, transcendence? Yeah, very important. It's a great book. Everybody should pick it up. It's like a gripping adventure novel through the landscape of the mind and the history of psychedelics

and the future of where we're going. So thank you Michael Pollan for joining us. Oh thank you Mark, always a pleasure to talk to you. Yeah, you've been listening to The Doctors Pharmacy. I hope you've enjoyed the conversation with Michael Pollan. If you liked this conversation, please share with your friends and family on social media. We'd love to hear from you.

Please leave a comment and you can subscribe anywhere you get your podcasts. And we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy.