The Joe Rogan Experience - #1136 - Hamilton Morris

Episode Date: June 26, 2018

Hamilton Morris is a writer, documentarian, psychonaut and scientific researcher. His show "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia" is available on VICELAND.

I try so hard. Boom. And we're live, Hamilton Morris. Sober as fuck. How about you? Absolutely sober. Yes, this time. So we did a podcast seven years ago,

and most people apparently didn't know how fucked up we were. But I figured, damn, we're here with Hamilton Morris. We should go deep. And we just kept hitting that joint until I lost most of my grasp on reality while we're talking. It was just a very slippery conversation. I was just too high to form coherent thoughts. It was just whatever I pieced together was just, you know, it was almost like miming a conversation. But now seven years later and you have a new place.

Yeah. It's beautiful. Yeah, well, you were at the early days. We did it at my house. Yeah. That was way, way, way back in the day. I had no idea, really. I knew who you were, of course, but I didn't know about your podcast entirely.

I'd seen clips of you on YouTube, and it wasn't until I was driving home from that recording and my phone just filled with hundreds of emails that I realized, oh, wow, this is a serious phenomenon that I was not aware of. And now I see it's just become huge. It's a weird thing, dude. It's got the wheel. I just sort of have to show up. It's a very strange, and it sounds like false modesty or something like that, but I'm just being totally honest. Like this thing does itself.

I think a lot of it might have to do with the long form because people are so used to seeing people's opinions condensed and filtered into these sound bites and snippets and to hear an extended conversation with someone where they can actually tell stories and articulate their opinions in a nuanced, careful way is so rare. I agree. It's one of the reasons why I don't do those shows anymore, like panel shows and things like that. It's just so frustrating. Oh, it's insane. I have very little

experience with that sort of thing, but I did Dr. Oz last year. One of the worst ones. Yes. And I don't know how any normal person could function in that sort of environment. I mean, I have a TV show, so arguably I'm well-trained for that sort of thing. But unless you're an actor who's prepared a line to say as soon as they point at you, there's no way that you could function because it's not a genuine conversation. It's just an opportunity to launch one sentence sound bites and then audience applause. Yeah.

And also the audience is such a strange element to add to a conversation. I mean, if you and I were having this conversation exactly in this room, but to the left of us is an enormous group of people. We'd feel weird. We would have to address them. We'd have to turn to them. It be odd following illuminated applause and laughter signs God Those are the weirdest when there's always the warm-up guy is like okay Everybody we're coming back from break coming back from break and they hold up the sign

Applause applause applause and everybody goes crazy and they create the worst environment. I was on this Discussion about Kratom are you familiar with this? I'm on it discussion about Kratom. Are you familiar with this? I'm on it right now. Oh, wow. Yeah, I just took some. I fucked my knee up the other day. I did something. And it's been stiff and painful.

So I iced it before I came here. And then I just took six of them. See what happens. Wow. I took 10 once. Oof. 10 one-gram capsules? Yeah.

I don't know how much that's worth. I don't know. Can you grab that bag? There's a bag that's sitting right on the sink. I'll tell you exactly what's in it. But now I get why people might think it's a drug. What is a drug? Yeah, for sure.

But when I took four, I was like, well, I took two for the first time I took it, I took two. And a couple of times I took two and it was like a mild stimulant. The first time I took it, I took two. And a couple times I took two. And this is like a mild stimulant. But then when you get into the range of eight to ten pills, it's like, oh, this will fuck you up. This stuff.

The stuff I take is Urban Ice Organics. And see, it says take two. It doesn't say the amount of material in the capsule. What does it say there? 750 milligrams. Okay. So not quite a gram. Not quite a gram.

All right. That seems like a reasonable amount. But they always construct these things in these ridiculous, dramatic oppositions. Like it was me versus a woman whose son had died of some Kratom-associated overdose. And, you know, it turns into a thing like, well, what do you have to say to this woman whose son died? It's like, I don't know. You know, there are people that die from caffeine overdoses as well. It's tragic that this happens. Have people died from this?

Yes. How much do you have to take? An enormous amount. I mean, I think a lot of people set up these unrealistic expectations with these drugs where if they like a drug, they want to say, it's impossible for it to kill anyone. It's impossible. There's no possible way. If you set that as your standard, you'll always fail because people will die doing absolutely everything, running, having sex, defecating.

Aspirin. Aspirin, absolutely. There's nothing in this world that can't find its way into a human death. So if people want to say, and even, you know, cannabis, obviously, people say you can't overdose on cannabis, and essentially you can't. But if you look in the medical literature, there are a number of these cannabis-associated fatalities. You know, you can debate them endlessly, but the point is once a drug enters a large enough

population, there'll be a number of sensitive individuals and someone will die. It doesn't mean that the drug is dangerous. It means that it's unrealistic to set a standard where if anything bad happens to anyone, we have to decide that the drug is dangerous and should be banned. water kills people there's a lot of these hazing things where the fraternity kids will be asked to drink a shit ton of water and oh yeah people have died from it a woman died in san jose a few years back from a uh contest to drink water to get her son like an xbox or something like that yeah yeah i mean there's a lot of things that are lethal but the ld50 for cannabis is like, I mean, you literally have to smoke your body weight or something, right? It's something crazy. It would be very difficult. Yeah. But it doesn't mean that you couldn't get so high that you did something really stupid and wind up dying.

Right. Yeah. Especially dependent upon the person and the, you know, biological variabilities. Right. Right. Exactly. And it's just, I think it's also just a sort of a bad road to go down. People always want to emphasize the safety of things. But in my

opinion, safety isn't the point. It doesn't ultimately matter to me whether or not something is safe. I think we should have the freedom to do dangerous things if we choose. We're allowed to ride motorcycles. We're allowed to shoot guns. You're allowed to go skydiving and bungee jumping. All those things carry risks, but it's assumed that any adult that does them is aware of those risks. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I mean, it's also who is if the society that we live in was just you and I. We were the only two people alive. Who are you to tell me what I can do or me to tell you what you can do?

It's ridiculous. And so when you have grown adults, telling a grown adult who's informed what they can and can't do, then it becomes a question of children. Well, then it becomes an education issue and it becomes a parental issue. I mean, it's just, you can't lie to your children about the effects of certain drugs because then they're not going to believe you about the really actual, the actual dangerous ones. Right. And this is of course, reflected in the so-called opioid epidemic. Yes. Right now. Yes. There's endless finger pointing. Everyone wants to find a culprit that's behind all of it. And the easiest person to blame, of course, are pharmaceutical companies,

because everybody hates pharmaceutical companies. So why not blame them? Right. But, you know, and I'm not pro pharmaceutical by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm also not anti-pharmaceutical either. And when you look at the way, for example, the New York Times is covering the opioid epidemic, it's always in this tone of like documents were uncovered that show that executives at Purdue Pharma were aware that morphine was addictive as early as 1999. It's like, well, of course, of course they were aware. People have known that morphine was addictive as early as 1999. And it's like, well, of course. Of course they were aware. People have known that morphine is addictive for hundreds of years.

This is old news. And this whole idea that doctors were convinced by some letter in the New England Journal of Medicine that said that OxyContin isn't addictive is absurd. These are all morphine derivatives. Any adult, especially a medically trained adult, should know that no matter what little variation you make on that molecule, if it's structurally and pharmacologically and qualitatively similar to morphine,

of course it's going to be addictive. And that in and of itself isn't even a bad thing. It should be okay to give people addictive drugs as well, as long as everyone's aware of the risks. As long as they understand a protocol to get off of it. There's so many people that get on these things and then wind up taking them far longer than they're supposed to because it's easy to get hooked. We need to at least have some sort of responsible direction that these people need to go to to get off of them once they're on them. Because people that get back operations, anything where they prescribe you high doses of opiates, it's a huge problem. I know many, many people that have gotten hooked because of it. And in fact, I should tell you that my good friend Justin Wren,

his wife found out about Kratom because of you. Because of your show, he had a problem with his shoulder, got shoulder surgery. They put him on Oxycontins. He was fucked up on them and he was having a really hard time getting off and having the shakes really bad. And kratom is the only thing that got him off of it. Right. And that's not surprising. I mean, this has been known for a very long time in Thailand. And that was actually the reason that it was originally prohibited.

I don't know if you're aware of that, but because the government taxed opium and people started using Kratom, then they made Kratom illegal. Is that the right way to say it? Because people say Kratom. You're the only one I've heard say Kratom. It's a Thai word. People in Thailand call it Kratom. So people in the US call it Kratom. It's also they have, you know, maybe it's like Cratom, something like that, but I'm not going to go that far. Right, right, right. But Cratom is closer. If you did, it would be weird. Yeah, yeah.

But I feel, you know, yeah. Like American people that say Ecuador, Argentina. But it is Cratom. Yeah. Cratom. Okay. So we'll try to call it Cratom. Or something close to that.

It's closer to that than Kratom. Right. And so the reason why it was made illegal was because of the fact that it was pinching some of the profits off of the opium trade. Yes. Wow. Yeah. That's fucked up. And so this has been known for a long time that it helps people get off more addictive opioids. And how does it do that? Well, it's an opioid itself. And a lot of people don't want to admit or acknowledge that. But I think we need to get beyond this idea that drugs are inherently bad or opioids are inherently bad just because the ones that we're aware of have a lot of problems. You know, in some sense, medicinal chemistry and pharmacology and all this are still in a very

primitive state, and there's so much to be learned. So we're mostly giving people these derivatives of morphine that have been around for 100 years. And there are better things. We're going to continuously discover less addictive treatments for pain. And I think that the alkaloids in Kratom are a step in that direction, which is so tragic that they're trying to now make it illegal because this is something that, as far as I can tell, has genuinely helped an enormous number of people reduce their intake of more addictive and more dangerous opioids. Well, one of the things that I felt, I mean, and again, my dose was not extremely high.

But when I was on it, I was very coherent. It was clear to me that I was affected by something. But it felt kind of good. It didn't feel bad. something but uh it felt kind of good it didn't feel bad it felt uh a little uh a little uneasy like a little like whoa this the world feels a little weird right now but it did not feel like uh i was impaired like i know a lot of people who take it in exercise like i have a friend he'll take 10 pills and exercise it just just seems kind of fucking crazy. Yes.

But he says he has a great workout by taking that stuff before he works out. Yeah, I mean, it seems to lend itself to a lot of different applications. In Thailand, it's used almost exclusively for that sort of purpose. In the South, it's a drug that laborers use so they can, you know, collect the latex from rubber trees and just get their job done. That's what it's about. I mean, that's what opioids are about for a lot of the world, both in the United States and in Africa and Thailand is, you know, people live hard lives and manual labor is painful and repetitive and difficult. And anything that makes that a little bit more manageable is a very important tool for humans.

I always felt like people that did heroin or opiates or something like that were on a very short road to death. That was my perception when I was a kid. And then I had a friend who was a longshoreman. They worked on the docks. They would bring fish in and fillet the fish for the market. And he worked with a guy that every day at lunch, the guy would go cop. He would get his heroin. He would shoot it up in his car, and then he'd go back to work.

And I was like, he'd go back to work? And he's like, yep, he worked every day. Like every day he shot up and every day he worked. Like, yeah. He was never late. Nope. Just did his work. Like, wow. Well, I didn't think

you could do that. I thought you did heroin. The next thing you know, you'd just be on the floor in a fetal position in your own urine and you just would fall apart and die. Right. Yeah. There's this idea that people sometimes refer to as pharmacological determinism, that a certain drug has to do a certain thing. So alcohol has to sedate and disinhibit you. Heroin has to addict you and make you a slave to it and kill you. Cocaine has to be a euphoric thing that's done at parties. It's also very addictive. PCP has to make you strip nude and run around fighting cops and punching holes in wooden fences. But when you look at this, you know, anthropologists have looked at certain drugs that are used cross-culturally like alcohol.

And what you find is this whole idea of pharmacological determinism is fundamentally flawed. Drugs behave differently in different cultures depending on the set and setting of the user. And so you find all sorts of instances that are major exceptions to these rules that we've set up for these various drugs, for example, PCP, which is arguably one of the most ubiquitously maligned drugs in the world. I mean, no one can imagine that PCP is medicinal. But even to this day, PCP is in Schedule 2, not Schedule 1, like cannabis and LSD Schedule 2. It can still be prescribed, actually. And that's because it had a history of medicinal use. There was even PCP psychotherapy in the UK in the 50s. So this is something that most people wouldn't believe. But to those patients that were taking it then, there was none of this cultural association with PCP being a drug that causes psychosis or makes

you strip nude. It was simply another tool for a psychiatrist to use and help people release repressed memories or traumas that they were afraid to talk about when sober. Well, we're seeing that now with MDMA, right? I mean, and also ketamine. Ketamine being used as an actual tool for psychotherapy, particularly for people with depression, it's having really good results. My friend, excuse me, Neil Brennan, who's a hilarious comedian, he's had struggles with depression. he got great relief from taking ketamine. Right. And what I think is really interesting is, you know, this is often packaged as a sort of psychedelic renaissance. But I think in a larger context, it's a drug facilitated

psychotherapy renaissance, because this was not just limited to psychedelics, people did something called narco analysis, where they would give people sedatives like propofol, the drug that killed Michael Jackson, or various barbiturates or various other drugs. And the relaxing effect would allow people to talk more openly to a therapist. And it was considered very effective. Now, this idea of a psychiatrist injecting you with a drug in order to help you talk about your problems is unheard of. I don't think anyone does it anymore, but it used to be very common. And I think a return to that is going to be really beneficial. Yeah, I agree with you. I think the right drugs with the right cases and the right people. And I think we've got to get past these schedules that when you have things like marijuana and psilocybin and especially DMT, which your own body produces, is a Schedule I drug.

And the famous Terrence McKenna line we're all holding when it comes to DMT. It's just stupid. It's stupid that these things are Schedule I. When you're saying there's no medical benefit whatsoever or medical application for cannabis, it's fucking crazy. application for cannabis is fucking crazy. I mean, you want to have something that really actively promotes a distrust in law enforcement. The scheduling of drugs is one of the best ones. Because when you look at something like marijuana, and you see that that's a schedule one drug, that's infuriating to people that gain huge benefits from cannabis. I mean, people that have going through chemotherapy, people that have, you know, interocular pressure from glaucoma.

I mean, you can go down the list over and over and over again. Kids that have epilepsy. There's so many people that have had great benefit, particularly from edible cannabis, from people that have seizures. I mean, you could keep going on and on and on. It's just, it's an amazing plant. And to have that demonized because of some ridiculous propaganda from the 1930s that still somehow or another clung on in 2018. When you think about all the information we have now with the internet

and the fact that cannabis is still Schedule 1. You have assholes like Jeff Sessions still saying things like good people don't smoke marijuana. Like this is crazy talk. It's crazy. But keep in mind, it was just about 100 years ago that alcohol was prohibited in the United States. And it took 13 years to reverse that. And that was alcohol. There's no drug more integrated into our culture than alcohol. And that took 13 years to reverse that. And that was alcohol. There's no drug more integrated into our culture than

alcohol. And that took 13 years to reverse. What was that like back then? That must have been madness. When alcohol was illegal, when the cops would come in and jackbooted thugs would knock over gin mills and bust open kegs of whiskey and spill it all out. Like, what the fuck was that like? It was disastrous. But I think what's interesting about that is it was a worthwhile experiment. To give them the benefit of the doubt, it was worthwhile to see. Because on some sense,

you could say that prohibition has a certain logic to it. You could say drugs cause problems. So if we just make all the drugs illegal, then maybe those problems will disappear. But it didn't work. The experiment failed. And there's nothing wrong with a failed experiment, but it's a problem if you keep repeating it over and over and over again for 100 years, looking for a different result.

Right. And then go to other drugs and go, well, this one, let's try this one. Let's make this one illegal. And it's a terrible PR situation for the police as well. If I were a police officer, I would be the biggest opponent of the war on drugs and of anyone in the government. Because when you think about why does the average person in New York City love a firefighter? They love firefighters, but they hate cops. Why is that? It's because of the drug war, because a firefighter isn't going to hurt you for something that wasn't really a crime to begin with for some kind of victimless crime. A firefighter is just there to help you to save you if you're in trouble. And the same would be true of police officers if it weren't for the

drug war. Ideally, there's a little more complexity to it. Sure, there's certainly more complexity when it comes to shootings and things along those lines. But I mean, the stop and frisk, I read something about stop and frisk in New York when they had that instituted, that most of it was drugs. Most of it was catching people with marijuana. Yeah. Which is just fucking insane.

You just say, hey, you look like you might be streetwise. Get over here. And that's the way these laws have functioned from the very beginning. I mean, if you look at drug law in the UK, it tends to be very black and white. Something is legal or illegal. If it's legal, it can be sold in stores because it's legal. If it's illegal, it can't be sold anywhere. In the US, they've instead created this nebulous, far reaching gray area where there's all sorts of things that are maybe illegal,

kind of illegal, do it but don't get caught. And it's created an ability for the government to selectively prosecute people whenever they want, if they want. Yeah. Well, that seems to be lessening. I mean, when you have someone like Jeff Sessions in office, it's very disturbing. But then Trump says things like he's very strong on states' rights to pass marijuana laws and things along those lines. You're very incredulous.

I don't know. I mean, I suppose I am a bit incredulous when it comes to Trump doing anything good. But I think if you told him that people love him more, if he did things good, he would do things good. That's probably true. I think that's... If someone that he trusted said it, yeah. I think that's his...

I think we've got to get somebody in deep. We've got to get a mole in there. We've got to get somebody who's good at back rubs. Get Ivanka on the podcast and get her high. I don't think that'll help. I doubt it'll help. I mean, I just don't know what is't think that'll help. I doubt it'll help. I mean, I just don't know what is the thing that'll help. There's also the separation between the drug users and the policymakers.

Yes. And one thing that I am certain will help, and it's sort of tragic that this is the case, but it's capitalism. It's the corporatization of these drugs. Because with cannabis, It's the corporatization of these drugs because with cannabis, you know, when it was hippies and the counterculture having, you know, marches down the streets of New York're going to make it big and get investors, invest millions and millions of dollars into it, hires lobbyists, plays the game like a capitalist. Then the laws do change. And I wish that weren't the case, but it is. And it's tragic for the people that did fight and did go to prison and did sacrifice that then these business school guys come along and reap all the benefits. But that's the way it works. Yeah, that is the way it works. And that's okay. I mean, it's just a weird path.

It's a weird path. But as long as we can get to legalization, I'm 100% for that path. I just think that might be the only way. In this weird country, this country is so enamored with money. I mean, we're so enamored with money and profits and even for dying people, even old people. Like Warren Buffett invested shit tons of money in warehouses to grow cannabis in Colorado when the laws were passed. I mean, that guy's 150,000 years old. He's worth billions of dollars. And he's like, who gives a shit? I'm making more money now and more and more

and more. I mean, even when they're really old, they're massively motivated by profit. Yes. And I think the same will be true for psychedelics and will probably be true for all of these things because you need to have lobbyists you need to have this sort of typical white collar support to push things forward i agree i just i don't see any other way around it right now i mean the the real hope is that cannabis not that it will get rid of capitalism but that we'll figure out it's hard to wear those things with glasses on, right? Yes. Ari's talking about it.

The glasses dig in your head. That cannabis will, not just cannabis, but cannabis will open the door to all these different substances that will allow people to gain a greater perspective. This is the ultimate goal, in my opinion, is to give people the opportunity to step outside the momentum of their lives and look at things with fresh eyes and make clear decisions. This is one of the best things that I think that drugs provide, is that these psychedelic drugs in particular provide

an escape from the momentum of this life that you've created or that you've found yourself a part of. It's very difficult for people to stop behavior patterns, to stop and to just look at themselves objectively and sort of rethink, regroup and reassess. And this is one of the best things about cannabis and about psilocybin and a lot of these other psychedelic drugs is that it gives you this newfound perspective that allows you to reconsider things. Yes, absolutely. And I think with, you know, ketamine and the treatment of depression, it's a similar idea because depressed people become used to these very ingrained patterns of thinking and anything that can break you out of that, that can shake it up for a minute

and maybe give you a different perspective, I think is inherently therapeutic. Yeah, I think so as well. And I think I'm hoping that what I see, and this is what I believe I see, is that we're changing our perceptions of it. with a friend of mine the other day about marijuana, where we were talking about how you used to hide whether or not you did it from certain people. And now that group of people that you have to hide it from is smaller and smaller. And that it seems like everyone casually smokes marijuana now in our circles.

There's so many people that do. There's a few that don't, sober people and whatever. But it's way more common. Whereas 10, 15 years ago, this was something you hid. If you had a good job, if you had a family, this is not something you wanted people to know about. And what I think is really interesting is that in and of itself changes the nature of the cannabis experience. So I think if somebody uses cannabis in a culture that supports it, that approves of it, their experience will be better by virtue of that fact. Right. So there's a certain shame that a lot of people feel when using any drug.

I, for whatever crazy reason, feel it a little bit with cannabis. It's, you know, just a hair of I should be, you know, I should be studying. I should be reading. I should be, you know, more focused. This is a little hedonistic. It's a little comfort oriented, I should be working harder. But that's, I think, just the vestiges of this propaganda that I've been fed or something like that. Or maybe it's true. But I understand from one perspective, why the cannabis culture drums the benefits of cannabis so hard, you know, that it cures all disease, that it's good for you, that it cures cancer, all this stuff.

Because if you have that in your mind, at the very least, it's going to reduce that sort of internal shame that you might feel and makes the entire experience healthier and more beneficial. Because we do construct these limitations. We construct these experiences to some extent. So if you decide that cannabis is a dissociative drug that's hedonistic and comfort oriented and will take you away from your responsibilities, then that's what it will become. But if you decide, like Terrence McKenna did, that it's an intellectual catalyst, that it will facilitate your ability to read and learn and think and write, then it will become that as well. Yeah, it's a weird one, right? Because people that are, people that take it that are prone to paranoia or that are dealing with like some difficult

issues in their life right now that they're perhaps trying to avoid, it becomes an uncomfortable experience. Whereas people that are happy and having a good time and in a good place, the marijuana will sort of enhance that. It'll give you this loving, warm feeling of comfort and of like, sort of acceptance of your existence, and it's going to be okay. Right. But I think even the paranoia is like a sort of meme, you could say, a sort of vestige of this propaganda that makes people afraid in the same vein as the bad trip. I think the concept of a bad trip is a very damaging concept because, and I know from personal experience, I never really used psychedelics in high school with

the exception of salvia because I was terrified of a bad trip. I'd talk to friends who'd describe bad trips and they'd say, oh, it's a bad trip. It's really bad. It's scary. And I would think, oh, that's terrible. I would never want a bad trip. I'm never going to touch these things because a bad trip would be too much for me to tolerate. And then I started using psychedelics and I realized there's no such thing as a bad trip any more than there's a bad meal or a bad relationship or a bad day. I mean, having an occasional bad thing in life doesn't stop you from doing things like eating or having relationships or living, typically. What do you mean by, are you saying there's no such thing as a bad trip? Yes.

Are you saying there's no such thing as a bad meal? I'm saying that there is such thing as a bad meal, but it wouldn't prevent you from tripping. And I think that even the bad, or wouldn't prevent you from eating, rather. Sorry about that. But I think even these bad trips, although they can be difficult, are beneficial in our learning experience in the same way that a bad meal could be. You'd learn not to go to that restaurant, or maybe you'd learn something about what makes you sick

or what to be careful of in the future. If you are approaching life from a non-fearful perspective where your intention is to learn, then you are approaching life from a non fearful perspective, where your intention is to learn, then you can extract benefit from almost any experience. And these difficult psychedelic experiences, I genuinely believe, and this is what is maybe the hardest thing to communicate about psychedelics, is that it's the difficult ones that are often the best. Those are the ones that really teach you something and when you're trying to talk about psychedelics with people who've never used them it's not a great selling point to say oh you know

the best thing that can happen is you're going to think you're going to die but that is arguably the best thing that can happen is to think that you're going to die because that's a confrontation with the overarching fear the fear that generates all other fears. And if you conquer that fear, then your life will almost certainly improve. Well, what is one thing that's sort of genuine, genuinely universally accepted as a beneficial experience is a near death experience, sort of universally accepted as a transformative moment in people's lives. Like I had this near death experience and I realized, wow, I got to get my shit together. After that heart attack, I realized that life is a gift and I changed the way I think about

things and I started calling people that I loved and telling them that I loved them. This is the same. You can get a near-death experience from cannabis. You just don't ever die. But you really do. I mean, it's the death of so many perceptions and so many things about your life, especially from edible cannabis, which I think is probably one of the least understood and most potent things that people are consuming on a daily basis. I can't tell you how many times I've given someone edible marijuana,

and they're fucking convinced that it's been laced with something awful and that they're going to die. But then afterwards, they come out of it, they're like i guess i got some work to do the only way i would disagree with you is people that are prone to psychotic breaks yes yeah because that there there's a absolute genuine connection between people who have a slippery hold on reality and some experiences with psychedelics that lead them down a bad road. That's true. It's a stressor. And like all stressors, it can precipitate a psychotic break. They've done pretty large scale epidemiological analyses of psychedelic drug users versus the non-psychedelic drug using population and the incidence of mental illness isn't any higher. So I don't think that you can

argue that psychedelics cause mental illness, but you can, and in some measures, it seems to actually reduce it in terms of things like alcoholism, substance abuse disorders. But it can be a stressor that would precipitate such an episode in a susceptible individual. And I had a very traumatic and formative experience myself where my best friend had a psychotic break while I was with him tripping. So I've seen this firsthand. I know exactly what it looks like. Yeah, I've had friends have real bad experiences too where they're screaming and yelling and then disassociative and then afterwards become very strange and have a really hard time with reality for a bit yeah i've never

seen someone have a complete psychotic break this was that he never recovered never he never recovered he was my best friend at the time and he never recovered so he was fine before the psychedelics yes jesus christ but again you know it's and that happened early so now he's still fucked yes damn but again you know i i typically don't tell that story in public because it's it could be misinterpreted as a scare story you know i don't it's impossible to prove the counterfactual would it have happened without psychedelics? Almost certainly. I can't say. All I know is that he took a very high dose of a psilocin ester and had this episode. He was hospitalized and he was not the same afterwards. So I'm aware that this is something that happens, but it also

typically happens in the early 20s, late teens, the same time that people typically have psychotic breaks and develop schizophrenia. Yeah, the instances of schizophrenia in people who use cannabis are, cannabis in particular, but I don't know about other psychedelics, but I would imagine they're very similar. They're exactly the same as the incidences of schizophrenia in non-using populations. It's like 1%. 1% across the board seem to have issues with schizophrenia. And the real question is, how many of those people could, I mean, is it avoidable? If your friend had never done that and instead had you know become a marathon runner or something and you know found

some other outlets for his energy would he have never gone down that road we don't know it's impossible yeah it's impossible to say i think it's very important to talk about that though and with further research perhaps we could isolate genes you know like they have for cte now they have um they can do an analysis of your genes and then determine whether or not something like football would be a dangerous path for you because you have a higher probability of developing CTE it would be wonderful if they figured out a way to do that with psilocybin or with cannabis or with anything else and be able to recognize the potential links to psychotic breaks and to, you know, a host of different mental disorders that could possibly be triggered

by high doses. Yes. I mean, this is one of so many things that needs to be done. And that's, you know, everyone's very excited about all this clinical research that's happening right now. I'm excited about it as well. But on one level, it is very politically oriented research. You know, the things that they're

looking at have actually typically been done before, not all of it. But the aim is to firmly establish these things that have been known for a long time. Psilocybin occasions mystical type experience or MDMA is useful for treating PTSD or psilocybin has an anti-addictive effect. These are things that people have known for a little while, but now it's about proving it. But I'm really looking forward to getting deeper into these serious questions about, you know, exactly how these drugs interact with various subtypes of serotonin receptors, because I think that they're going to be very important tools for understanding consciousness as a whole. Yeah, it would also be interesting knowing how they react to different diets.

You know, when people are, you know, when you're eating certain types of foods that are bad for your body, I would really be curious to see what kind of effect that has. I mean, when you have real large-scale research that goes over really important variables in terms of, like, human health, and then you add in these different substances, whether it's psilocybin or cannabis or whatever it is, whether it's psilocybin or cannabis or whatever it is. It's going to be interesting to see how the body reacts to these various perturbances, these various changes of your state.

Yeah. And that's, you know, traditionally in a lot of these indigenous groups, the diet plays a big role in the way that the drug is administered. And I think we're slowly rediscovering a lot of things that have been known for tens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands of years in some of these indigenous groups. Have you had a chance to see any of my new show? No, no, I haven't. Oh, I think you'd like it. I'm sure I'd like it.

I like your old show. Yeah, I think it's a lot better than the old show. Awesome. Yeah. But I, you know, I had the opportunity to look at the way salvia is used in the mountains of Oaxaca and, you know, Native American peyote use and all these different things. And, yeah, there's so much to be learned from all these traditions that are not reflected in the current clinical climate because they can't be. clinical climate, because they can't be. But I think that that's going to be a part of it is slowly integrating these other alkaloids that are present in the plants to see what role they play in the same way that, you know, the initial medicalization of cannabis was Marinol, which is just THC and sesame oil. But now there's increased understanding of the way these accessory cannabinoids modulate the THC experience or whether THC is even the primary therapeutic agent for certain disorders. And I imagine the same thing will be true for peyote and for the iboga alkaloids

and probably even for some of the chemicals found in mushrooms. So when you're doing this show, have you had any problems? Have you had any pushback against what you're doing or any issues with it being on Vice? I've had an enormous amount of freedom. Ultimately, I have very, very little to complain about when it comes to censorship. The way the show got started, the actual TV show, was sort of an interesting story where they were starting up Viceland and a producer who's now gone gave me this deck of drug stories they were going to do, and they were all kind of terrible scare stories, like the new drug, Bromo Dragonfly.

It's killing teens, a new drug. Bromo Dragonfly? Is that real? Yeah, yeah. What is that? It's a really fascinating compound developed by this chemist, David E. Nichols, who found that these conformationally constrained benzothuran amphetamine derivatives are very high-potency DOB derivatives. Anyway, it's a super-potent psychedelic amphetamine that has a cool tricyclic structure.

Huh. And it looks like a dragonfly. The molecule looks like a dragonfly, kind of. And it's got a very high... Yes, it's super, super potent and very, very long-lasting. So it lent itself to scare stories. You know, people... It's a potent vasoconstrictor,

so people would take very high doses of it, and occasionally they would have to amputate a finger or something like that. But again, you know, this isn't because the drug is bad. It's because people used it irresponsibly. And this is something that people have so much difficulty understanding. We're so eager to blame drugs for all of our problems. Drugs have never hurt anyone. They're just inanimate constellations of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and oxygen.

They don't jump out of their bags and vials and attack your serotonin or receptors or dopamine transport or anything like that. So this is just a weird pattern that we've done repeatedly over time. And I don't know if you read the new Michael Pollan book. I know he was on the podcast. I'm in it right now. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, it is great.

But one thing that I thought was interesting about it is that he put a lot of the emphasis on the prohibition of psychedelics on Leary. And Leary almost certainly played a role. But I think it's slightly ironic that he's a journalist and didn't really go that deep into the role that journalists played in all of this, which was humongous. You know, journalists are sculptors of public opinion. And it became the standard way of reporting on any of these things to say that they're bad, to sensationalize it and to not have any consideration for what that would do. Because anytime a journalist writes some scare story, they can really mess with drug policy in a serious way. It might seem like nothing, like, oh, there's a bunch of people in Brooklyn and they overdosed on some obscure

synthetic cannabinoid, AMB Fubinica. Who cares about AMB Fubinica? No big deal. Say that it turns people into zombies. And if it gets thrown into Schedule 1, who cares? Not a big deal. Well, that's a very short sighted way of thinking about all of this, because that's exactly what happened with psychedelics. And then we're not learning from the mistakes of the past that just because something it's fun to sensationalize and talk about how dangerous it is at this moment, doesn't mean that 10 years from now, we're going to recognize that it has serious therapeutic potential. And we made a big mistake outlawing it. And I think a lot of that also comes from this sort of us versus them mentality that people have

where it's cannabis is good, synthetic cannabinoids are bad. Well, synthetic cannabinoids don't have to be bad for cannabis to be good. Cannabis can be good without something else being bad to counterbalance it. You don't need to hate something to justify your love of cannabis. And this whole hatred of synthetic cannabinoids, I think, is totally misdirected, because these are products of prohibition that most people wouldn't even want to use in the first place. And when they do use them, they don't know what they're taking. They don't know what dose they're consuming. And so, of course, they're having bad experiences. That would happen with almost any drug, caffeine included, if people just consumed enormous, unmeasured doses without having any idea what they were getting into.

And so they're thrown into Schedule 1. Well, what happens if 30 years from now, once the therapeutic potential of cannabinoids is being really seriously explored, we find out that that AMB-fubinica that everyone was saying turned homeless people into zombies in Brooklyn in 2017 turns out to activate a certain subtype of the CB1 receptor that's especially useful for Parkinson's disease or something like that, then we're going to regret having done that. So I think people have to be very careful. Anytime you say anything negative about a drug, you have to be very, very careful because the implications can be enormous. I think that the best stance in all of this is to not speak ill of drugs, of any drug. Give the drugs a break. Spoken like a true drug enthusiast. But isn't that a problem also with just what journalism is? It's like asking a comedian to

talk about something but not make fun of it. It's what their job in a certain sense is to get people excited about things. And I don't know whether you'd say the lazy way out or the common approach is to say something that scares people. I mean, that's what clickbait is mostly about, either outrage or fear. That's true. But there's a lot of richness in truth. I agree. But it's hard to sell. It's hard to sell that richness.

I don't think it's even hard to sell. I think the people are lazy. It's hard to sell that richness. I don't think it's even hard to sell. I think the people are lazy. There's this idea that a lot of people have that journalism is organized by some malevolent Rupert Murdoch type puppeteer who's telling everyone to, you go off and you say that cannabis causes car accidents. And you go off and you say this evil thing about this and say that alcohol is good. Did you see when Alex Jones was on my podcast and got high with me? We got him drunk and high.

And when it came up in his trial for his divorce, he said that George Soros puts, he tests marijuana every year to see how much George Soros is influencing the levels of THC. That was his excuse. But people love these ideas. They love the ideas of the puppeteer, the malevolent puppeteer, because it denies individual agency. But the reality, and I say this as a journalist who's worked at many different publications, not just Vice, and this is a difficult reality to swallow, is that people are free to say

whatever they want most of the time. Most of the time. And that journalists choose to report on things this way. Yeah, that is true. But it's also true that they, like, I've been a part of stories that, where I've talked to the author of it, and they said, well, this was manipulated by the editor. The editor manipulated the title, the change.

That's a great excuse from the perspective of the writer. But it's true. Like, Rolling Stone did an article about me me and they called me a psychedelic warrior and i i said to the guy who wrote the what the fuck is that i was laughing and he goes dude i did not write that yeah the editor gets a hold of it tries to make it more salacious it becomes something that's more it's more likely for people to buy or click. Right, especially with headlines. That is true. And the real problem is that this sort of outrage culture

and comment culture that has emerged provides no incentive for truth because suppose someone were to write an article about this conversation we're having right now and it could say Hamilton Morris says Kratom should be illegal or something like that, then that will get so much more engagement, because then you'll have all these people saying, fuck Hamilton. He's a he's a traitor. How dare he say that it should be illegal, that it didn't watch it. And then you'll have other people arguing with those people saying, well, listen to the interview. Hey, he actually never said anything about that. Listen carefully to what he was saying. And then you create this whole engagement, a bigger engagement for doing the

wrong thing than you'd get for doing the right thing. True, but the initial statement is much stickier. The initial statement of Hamilton Morris is a bad guy because he thinks Kratom should be illegal or Kratom should be illegal. That is what more people are going to pay attention to. Far less people read the retraction than read the initial. Of course. This is one of the more insidious things about printing things that are patently untrue purposely. That people do do things that are untrue with the caveat that they could just print a retraction that maybe 30% of the people that read the original article are going to read. The initial imprint is what's going to stick with people.

Even if you, someone calls you a rapist, okay? And then it turns out that the person who called you a rapist was lying. The people who heard you were a rapist first, they still have that in their head. Oh, he's a rapist. I heard he's a rapist. Right. It's just, it's very difficult to get slippery ideas out of people's heads. So if somebody writes some article saying that you're against the legalization of certain drugs and they start looking at you as being compromised, the influence that people have today can't be understated because the reach is so powerful. The reach of any article, any video, it's so significantly greater than any other sort of distribution of information in the history of human beings.

The potential for it impacting large groups of people is so huge now. Yes. And the result of that is also that the viewers have a lot of power. And I think that in some sense they don't quite recognize the nature of that power. It's like voting with your dollar. If you spend all of your time commenting hatefully on things you don't like, you are actively encouraging the production of more of that thing that you don't like. If you like something, you need to engage with what you approve of more. Because every time you engage with something you dislike, advertisements are sold and it has

been incentivized to do that bad thing. And that's a really sticky thing when we have this culture where everyone loves to show their outrage and virtue signal and show that they're on the right side and all this stuff constantly to say, hey, step back. You're just feeding the problem. Yeah. I think there's also a problem with a lot of what people are doing during the day is something they don't want to do. A lot of what people are doing is some job that they don't enjoy. And during that job, they have freedom to go online. And in this state of feeling like shit about whatever they're doing, they enjoy complaining about stuff. And so they'll read things and type things and get engaged in things. And there's some sort of a sport to getting pissed off about stuff. And so they'll read things and type things and get engaged in

things. And there's some sort of a sport to getting pissed off about stuff. Instead of just spending your time doing things you actually enjoy. It seems so simple. It sounds like a simple solution. But if you could figure out a way to actively ignore things that are going to piss you off and seek out things that are going to excite you and intrigue you, you're going to be a healthier, happier person. And isn't that ultimately what everybody wants? I want to be happier. Don't you want to be happier? Of course. But why do we seek out shit that pisses us off?

Because it becomes a sort of addiction. It's drug-like in and of itself. I mean, I see it, these arguments, these people are frittering away their finite time on earth, engaged in these endless comment battles that no one reads. And it's a very dark reality, but it is also something that's driving the current culture of journalism that where the truth doesn't matter as much. All that matters is engagement. Right, right. It's just clicks. It's just clicks and money.

It's interesting that you were saying something about drugs being inanimate objects and drugs don't actually kill people. It's so funny how drug enthusiasts parallel gun enthusiasts with their arguments. It's really the same freedom argument. And it's really, I'm in an interesting perspective

because I live in New York. I'm like a whatever, just a nerdy guy that doesn't let me guess you live in williamsburg i do yes yeah big surprise well that's where the office i live close to the office that i work at but uh but you know i have no interest in guns i'm not so it's really easy for me to say, well, look, there was this shooting and all these people died and this other guy got shot. And these things are really causing a lot of problems. Let's get rid of them because it doesn't impact me. And that's where you have to be the most careful because the worst thing you can possibly do is make judgments about how other people should conduct their lives based on your own preferences, which people do all the time. So you hear someone say, well, I don't like cannabis. I don't like it. I don't smoke it. Why should it be legal? Because people go to prison for it,

because it ruins people's lives who aren't your own. And you have to think about people that aren't you. And so it's very difficult when it comes to gun control issues, because this I'm faced with that exact same issue, where it would be so easy for me to say, get rid of them all. It doesn't impact me. I don't like guns, but I don't want to fall into that same trap. Yeah, it is a trap. And it also sort of highlights how slippery life is in general, that these absolutes that we look for, these ones and zeros, they don't necessarily exist in a lot of subjects. You know, there's a lot of people that have done bad things that have also done great things. And that gets weird too. You know, just human beings in general, we're complex

creatures, you know, and to just categorize something as negative or positive, to just categorize something as negative or positive. There's a lot of positive things that you could find with drugs. There's a lot of negative things you could find with drugs, too. And they mirror human behavior. There's a lot of positive and negatives in human behavior. Yes. And back to this journalistic issue and the coverage of drugs,

I mean, one thing that worries me about the way cannabis and Kratom and psychedelics are presented is that it's always couched in they're safe, they're therapeutic, they're spiritual, they're historical. But that isn't the point. Even if all those things are true and there's some debate, eventually someone will find a chink in that armor. Someone will die. Maybe they haven't been used as long as you thought they were used. Maybe they don't always work therapeutically. So then what? Do you go back to prohibition? No,

that's why I think you need to emphasize cognitive liberty. You need to emphasize people's right to explore these alternate states of consciousness, regardless of whether or not they're therapeutic or safe or traditional or spiritual. The point isn't that it's safe or any of these other things. The point is that if you want to live in a free society, you have to be allowed to take a certain amount of risk. Yeah, that's a big point. That's a very big point. And I think it really fits well with your description of the things that people are allowed to do that are legal, that are very dangerous, like race car driving, bungee jumping, all these things that we just allow them to do. We don't think twice about it. Using a parachute, all that crazy shit.

We just openly. And nobody's saying, hey, we should ban skydiving. There's no one saying that. Fucking a lot of people die skydiving, man. I mean, it's a fucking dangerous pursuit. We don't seem to care. We seem to care about drugs because we think that somehow or another, either our children or someone we know is going to be insidiously infected with these things.

They're going to get into their lives and fuck them up. You know, and I think the real problem with that is education. That's the real problem with that. I was extremely fortunate in a weird way to see someone with a cocaine addiction when I was in high school. It was a good friend's cousin who got really fucked up on cocaine when he was a couple years older than me. And I watched his life fall apart. And I remember thinking when I was little, like, wow, I don't want to touch that shit. Like, cocaine's fucking terrible.

And then from then on i've never done cocaine but it's because of that education because of and i think real education is something it's a fucking tough thing because you don't really just get it from knowing information you have to see things you have to talk to people you have to experience things in your own if someone talks about psychedelics, someone teaches about psychedelics, but they have no experience in actual psychedelic states personally, it's a very hollow conversation. It's like a certain amount of education has to be from real-life experience. Oh, yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is just, again, this idea of pharmacological determinism.

The other thing is just, again, this idea of pharmacological determinism. Like I had a friend that was very, very, very seriously addicted to cocaine and had the resources to do immense quantities every single day. And he'd always say, well, you know, if I try heroin, I know it's all over for me. I know that will be the last straw, so I'm never touching that stuff. And he didn't. But my own perspective, you know, I've essentially tried everything. And if you really just think about these things, you can actually learn, for example, I've tried heroin once. I didn't think it was that interesting. Did you do it injecting?

No. You snorted it? I snorted it, yeah. Yeah. What was it like? It was boring, I think. Boring? Yeah. I don't think opiates are very interesting drugs psychologically. You know, if I were to be totally honest, I think that cannabis is more euphoric and has so few side effects.

You know, opiates cause horrible constipation. They cause all kinds of weird sweating problems. I don't think they're especially pleasant drugs, but they're romanticized so much in our culture that people think that's it, heroin, the ultimate high. Well, maybe it isn't. Maybe it's not even that great at all. Maybe it's garbage and it doesn't even matter. And that's the same way I feel about snorted cocaine. I don't even think it's a good drug.

It's not an issue of it's so addictive you've got to stay away from it because it's so damn good. It's not good. It's not even an enjoyable high. It has a short duration. You then feel bad almost immediately afterwards. It has a short duration. You then feel bad almost immediately afterwards. It's a flawed substance. Same is true of alcohol, I think as well. Alcohol is a crazily flawed molecule. It's terrible. No other drug that I can think of causes a hangover of that type, where there's a toxic metabolite that poisons you the following day.

Dr. Carl Hart was trying to explain to me what that is, and essentially he was saying that when you're getting a hangover, it's your body reacting to the addictive properties of alcohol, that you're getting addicted to alcohol almost immediately, that your body is compensating for that, and then this hangover is not just you being dehydrated it's also your body withdrawing from alcohol i would i am not familiar with any evidence for that you know who he is dr of course yeah i actually tried to intern for him when i first

moved to love that guy yeah he i have a lot of respect for him but i mean there's a i'd have to look at his source for that you'd have to also look at the way I described it, because I probably butchered it. Okay, but there's an alternate explanation that's even simpler, which is simply that alcohol is metabolized into a chemical acetaldehyde that's toxic. So and with alcohol, it's a very, very weak drug by weight, you're consuming insane amounts in terms of the number of molecules, you're consuming insane quantities of the drug. So all of this acetaldehyde accumulates in your body and it has a directly toxic effect. Is there a way to counteract that and mitigate the effects?

Yes, there are proposed ways to do it. I haven't experimented with any of them myself because I don't really like alcohol that much to begin with. Isn't glutathione, that's something that allows your body to process it more easily? It would have to be something that prevents this specific conversion. I don't know off the top of my head. What about crocodile? You ever fuck with that stuff? Well, this is another perfect example.

So you take a drug like crocodile and it sounds horrible. It's the internet's drug. Yeah. Fear drug. Yeah, people are. But behind and it's, it sounds horrible. It's the internet's drug. Yeah. Fear drug. Yeah. People are, but behind every scare story, there's nothing. Explain what that is. Okay.

So there's a scare story that I believe it was in Moscow, somewhere in Russia in, and this was hitting the news around 2004. No, no, no, no. Much later, 2010, something like that. I don't know. And the idea was that this is the worst stuff. It's ultra addictive, you inject it, and then you lose a limb and you have profound necrosis all around the injection site. And this is the worst drug, most addictive drug of all time. Well, the drug itself is called desomorphine, and it's been used medicinally. There's nothing especially addictive or dangerous at all about desomorphine.

The problem is that people were injecting completely impure reaction mixtures that had all of the components from the synthesis that hadn't been removed, including phosphorus, which is immensely toxic. So you have people basically reporting on IV phosphorus toxicity as if it were a result of this drug when it's a completely separate issue. And this is what you see when you look at all of these things. It's never the drug. Any drug scare story, it's never the drug. You always have to look for the root cause because it's never the drug.

There's never been a drug in history. And that is why if you look at the DEA's list of controlled substances, it's not dangerous drugs that are controlled. It's enjoyable drugs. Something like tetrodotoxin, the chemical in pufferfish, that's not a controlled substance. There's some regulations in terms of how much you can purchase, but it's not a controlled substance. Ciguatoxin, the most potent known neurotoxin, it's not a controlled substance. Lead isn't a controlled substance. Mercury isn't a controlled substance. Mercuric chloride isn't a controlled substance. All of the deadly poisons, cyanide isn't a controlled substance. It's not about what's safe and what's dangerous. It's about what people like to use, what's enjoyable. What is the root of that? I think it's, you know, a puritanical idea that any sort of euphoria is bad. I mean, euphoria is listed as a side effect in some medications. We

assume that it's a bad thing to feel good. Right there with diarrhea. Yeah, it's like euphoria, diarrhea. Yeah, that is a strange thing. It's going to cut back productivity and make you a lazy ne'er-do-well and just become a burden on society. That's a common way of describing people who use drugs. Sure, and this fundamental idea that sobriety is good. Yes. You know, you look on Instagram, people post a selfie and say, six months sober guys, thank you so much. And tons of congratulations because it's a virtue

because you accomplish something. You're not using drugs. Yeah. Whereas in other cultures, that would not be the case. People would just say, oh, you've decided not to work with a certain medicine. That's an interesting choice, not an accomplishment necessarily. not be the case people would just say oh you've decided not to work with a certain medicine that it's an interesting choice not an accomplishment who was saying was it kyle kingsbury that was saying that how much he hates the term plant medicine or was it dennis i think it was kyle uh you don't like the term plant medicine do i don't you well do you buy there's a it's a weird sort of pretentious yes yes i know what people call ayahuasca the medicine or things like that. Yeah.

Or toad medicine. I mean, I wouldn't. You don't hate it. I, a lot of these like more flowery terms like entheogen, I just don't use them myself, but I don't hate it. Well, you're, you know, I think people like you are very important and I'm a big fan. You know, I think people like you are very important and I'm a big fan. But I think one of the reasons why you're important is you are a cognoscente of real drugs. Like you understand what they actually do.

You could explain them to the layman or you could debate them with someone who was a doctor perhaps that wanted to, you know, to talk about the dangers of them. And you understand all the various aspects of it i think there's a tremendous amount of ignorance when it comes to drugs drug consumption what is a drug i mean how many times have you seen a person with a beer in their hand smoking a cigarette saying they don't do drugs it is so fucking stupid but it's it's so common there's this very very very common aspect of being a person which is these desire to change your mental state and we've done it throughout history with various substances but there's so much stigma attached to it and and one of the things i've been doing lately uh on stage i'll ask people how many people get piss tested at work it It's fucking stunning. It's stunning. It's like more than 10% of the audience will raise their hand.

Like one out of 10 people gets their body tested to make sure that while they're not working there, they're not putting anything in their body that's prohibited. Which is such a horrible invasion of privacy that became so popular that in the 80s during one presidential election, all the candidates voluntarily had their urine tested to prove that they were sober. I mean, this is like truly considered a virtue. And it's immensely invasive. I say this as someone who's analyzed my own urine in a laboratory before, and it's like a strange portal into your own life

that you're showing to a stranger. Everything that you've consumed is then apparent there. And it's incredibly, it's a huge invasion of privacy that we've just decided is acceptable. And you have to be very careful about these things. Yeah. No, I agree. And of course,

the synthetic cannabinoid epidemic, if you want to call it that, I actually don't want to call it that because I hate even the idea of a drug epidemic. But the popularity of synthetic cannabinoids is largely driven by the fact that they didn't show up on these urine tests. So initially it was in the military. Then it was people who are on parole or probation, people who were living hard lives, wanted to get high,

couldn't get high. This was a way that they could do it. And so they've incentivized people that just wanted to smoke weed using completely untested synthetic cannabinoids instead as a direct result of these urine tests. Well, it's also just a complete misunderstanding when it comes to the actual effects and how long they last. You're not even testing a person's conscious state. You're testing whether or not a person has altered their state of consciousness outside of their working time. You know, it's not like you show up and they could scan your hand and realize that you're high on marijuana right now. That's not what they're doing. What they're doing is they're testing you for something that could linger in your body for weeks after these psychoactive

effects have long since gone. Oh, yeah. Or even be the result of passive exposure. There was a great scientific article that came out a couple of years ago, where they found that just passive exposure to cannabis smoke contaminates your hair with THC, so that all these people who had hair tests who actually had not smoked cannabis, but it sounds like an excuse, I was just in the room, someone else is doing it, just being in contact with someone who'd smoked cannabis could then deposit THC in your hair and cause you to test positive. So these tests aren't even room, someone else is doing it, just being in contact with someone who'd smoked cannabis could then deposit THC in your hair and cause you to test positive. So these tests aren't even necessarily reliable. This is the same problem. There was a kind of trend a little while ago, I don't know

if you saw about this, where people would get their urine tested for different, to quantify the levels of neurotransmitter metabolites in their urine. And this was supposed to be like a fingerprint of your mood. So they'd quantify the level of serotonin, dopamine, GABA, whatever, whatever, whatever. And then they'd say, oh, you're a little low on serotonin. You're pretty depressed. Actually, you need to supplement with some 5-HTP or something like that. It's a very reductive way of thinking about consciousness. But the main issue is that you're not testing in your brain, you're testing your urine. And a lot of these neurotransmitters are biosynthesized in the periphery. So just because you have these neurotransmitters in your urine doesn't mean they were ever in your brain it

doesn't say anything about anything so it's just it's so juvenile in a way it's just such a it's such a piss poor way of maintaining order checking people's consciousness. What you should do is judge people based on their productivity. If I have some guy and he shows up for work and he kicks ass every day, I'm like, dude, what's your secret? He's like, I get high. I get high before work. It's great.

I feel good having a good time at work. Zippity-doo-dah, zippity-day. I'm putting everything in order, and it just feels good. I'm like, keep doing what you're doing. I mean, that's how it should be. We should be judged based on whether or not whatever we're doing is, I mean, I guess the real caveat to that would be people that do speed. Yeah, I mean, you would get pretty productive for a short period of time doing speed.

But I think the downside of that, there's so many people that are on Adderall today, right? What are your feelings on that? I think that it's a very interesting issue because it's amazing when you look at the history of all these things, how these issues repeat themselves over and over and over again. So it was a problem in the 50s, and it's a problem in the 60s, and it's a problem in the 70s. Now it's a problem now. It's always a problem that we're treating as if it were a new thing. But people have been using amphetamine-type stimulants for the better part of 100 years.

And people will now, the kind of popular thing to say is, you know, didn't you know Adderall is one carbon atom away from meth? But here's the flip side. Meth is one carbon away from Adderall. So this whole idea that meth, again, back to pharmacological determinism, that meth is a drug that turns you into a toothless, insane, white trash guy who's stabbing the walls with a cleaver looking for people that are hiding and whispering secret messages or something like that. Like, this is just a stereotype that we have created. Of course, there are people like that. But the reality is that these stimulants have an ambiguous potential for all sorts of things. Some people use low doses of methamphetamine. In fact, methamphetamine is scheduled to because to this day, it can be and is prescribed as a treatment for ADHD in addition to amphetamine, which is Adderall.

What do they call it when they prescribe it? Desoxan is the brand name for methamphetamine, and Adderall is the brand name for amphetamine. And I've tried both drugs, both amphetamine and methamphetamine, and they're very, very similar drugs. And that's not to say that either are good or bad. It's just a factual statement that if in a double-blind, placebo-controlled, or not even placebo-controlled, just a double-blind trial, I don't think that I could differentiate them. It could treat ADHD. It could also help obese patients lose weight. Yeah. Did you know that there's a lot of people that think Trump is on diet pills? Oh, yeah, yeah. On on diethylpropion.

Yeah, yeah, and that he used to be on one of the elements of fen-fen, fen-fen? Fen-fenfluramine, maybe? Yeah, yeah. Phentermine? Well, there was some journalist that even talked about the—we saved this. We have it on a folder now. What did you say, Jamie? I've been—hit up messages about that journalist that he might be compromised or sketchy or something like that.

But even if he were on diethylpropion or fenfluramine or fentermine or fenmetrazine or any of these substances, so what? Well, the question is, is his judgment compromised because he's hopped up on speed? His judgment seems compromised regardless. But is that why? probably not uh but it could be why he gets so much shit done i mean remember when during the you're you're you just don't want to compliment him and i understand that no no that's not why

it's again it's this idea there's a certain exculpatory value that drugs have people make the same arguments about hitler like hit, he was just high on speed. That explains it. The Nazis, they were just high on speed. That explains it. But what value does it really have? Same thing with Anthony Bourdain. They'll say, oh, no drugs were found in his system post-mortem. So what? What if they had been? Then what?

Well, the idea is that he might have been experiencing a fucked up state of mind because of some drug that made him make a poor choice and take his own life. But you wouldn't know. You wouldn't know why he did it. Is that what you're saying? It wouldn't explain anything really, because you still wouldn't know his internal state. It would just be you're projecting an assumption. So what if there were a small amount of heroin in his blood at the time of his death? Then you would assume that he had relapsed, was so ashamed of his relapse that he then decided

to kill himself. But the reality is we can't make those sorts of assessments. We don't know other people's internal states. We don't even know what these things do to other people. We don't, but we do know that some things like Abilify and some other SSRIs and even some anti-anxiety medication have been strongly linked to suicidal thoughts. And in fact, they're actually listed as some side effects for a lot of these drugs, right? Don't you think that, I mean, I know correlation does not equal causation, but don't you think that that's worth considering and it's something to be discussed? It's worth considering, but I would be careful about assigning too much value to it, which is what people tend to do. The same thing with Columbine. They'll say, oh, he was on this or that antidepressant. That's why. Is it why? Does it

really explain it? Because there's a hell of a lot of people that take those same drugs and don't kill all of their classmates. Right, right. For sure. For sure. But it also could be a factor. And this is not something that I think we should avoid considering. I think it should be discussed. Responsibly. Yes, I agree with you. But I think we're trying to look at things binary, right? We're looking at things in terms of like on or off, black or white, one or zero.

And I just don't think drugs work that way. No. And I think you agree. Yeah. The speed thing is curious to me because one of the side effects of these drugs is impulsive, irrational behavior and extreme confidence in oneself. This is what we always think of people that are hopped up on speed. People that have coke confidence. Coke confidence is a real phenomenon.

When people do cocaine they feel very confident about themselves and they they say ridiculous shit to people so the question is is that really what's happening if they if i gave coke to you would you start acting irrationally and feeling extremely confident in yourself or is it just accentuating a problem that already exists in the person's personality? Both, probably. Yeah. A combination of the two. But the other thing is, even if he has been using this stuff for decades, he's probably tolerant to it.

And it's not, I don't think it would explain his behavior. Well, I think it's giving him energy. He's been like this for so long, though. I mean, this is a long history of this sort of behavior. Well, this was what the journalists had talked about, that he had been on this stuff for a long time and that there was an actual Duane Reade pharmacy in New York where he described where he got the prescription filled. People were doing the same thing with his finasteride as well, though,

and I found that particularly obnoxious. Finasteride is... Propecia. Propecia. So they were saying, oh, he's on finasteride, and that explains his affair, or that explains this, because it does this or that to your libido. And again, it's like, I don't know or not at all. Or let's give him some credit for being a human being with free will that makes choices on his own that aren't entirely mediated by what pharmaceuticals he uses.

Well, finasteride also has side effects of depression. by what pharmaceuticals he uses. Well, finasteride also has side effects of depression. We went over this yesterday with my friend Ari, who was really depressed at one point in time, and it coincided with his use of finasteride. Right. Yeah, I've seen. But it's not very common.

It does occur, but it's not common. Right. But for the person that does get those side effects, saying that it's not common doesn't really offer any comfort. No. No, it doesn't. Like, oh, well, I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm one of the lucky ones, ones that jump off a bridge to get my hair to grow back. But, you know, the reason that I'm so opinionated about this particular issue is because you see it time and time again.

It never stops. You know, I don't know if you're familiar with the Jeffrey McDonald murder case. No, I'm not. Super fascinating. You probably have read about it and forgotten about it. It was a big thing in maybe 1970, but he was this military doctor who was credentialed, the perfect man, did everything right, perfect family, everything beautiful. And then one night he goes to sleep and claims that is right after the Manson murders claims that these hippies walk into the house saying, kill the pigs. Acid is groovy.

Kill the pigs. Acid is groovy. And then just brutally massacre his entire family. And out of nowhere, out of nowhere. Yes. And, um,

and it's a long and complicated story, but he went to prison. I don't think that he is guilty, but people had to find an explanation for what you don't think he's guilty. I don't think he's guilty. He had no motive and there were an investigation was botched. And so you think someone came into his house and did that and he was accused of it? Yes. But, but because he had no motive, people had to construct a motive. They had to concoct a reason that this doctor would have murdered his entire family. And so what's a good reason? Oh, amphetamine. He'd been using this amphetamine-containing diet pill. So that explains it all, right? But it doesn't. It's a terrible explanation. People use amphetamine all the time without killing their family. So I just want to be very careful about, you know, do these things play a role in human behavior? Of course they do. But do they

determine human behavior? No. That's a very good point. There's a lot of factors. There's just, it's messy. Being a person is messy. It's very complicated. put on the use of these things, the more murky these waters are going to be. Yeah. And I think people don't even appreciate the extent to which all these drugs have been made illegal. Of course, everyone's aware cannabis is scheduled on LSD, psilocybin, MDMA. But the list is long. It's hundreds and hundreds of chemicals. And a lot of these chemicals are chemicals with no supporters. No one's fighting for them. There's a substance called 2CN, one of Shulgin's creations. They just threw it in Schedule 1. No one uses it. If you scour the internet, I'd be surprised if you could find three reports of people using 2CN.

Totally unheard of. But they just throw it in Schedule 1 because why the hell not? No one's going to stand up for it. That's the end of 2CN. But they miss a lot of shit too, right? Like they miss 5-methoxy-methyltryptamine. They miss that. No, that was made illegal in 2011. Right. But they missed a lot of shit too, right? Like they missed 5-methoxy-dimethyltryptamine. They missed that.

No, that was made illegal in 2011. Right. But for 1970, when everything else got thrown into the mix, they made it illegal. I bought that shit. I used to be able to buy it online. Yeah, so did I. Yeah, it was crazy. You could buy a fucking jug of it. They can get the whole city high.

You could buy it online. Yeah, because it was never popular. So how did they make it illegal? How do they do that? They don't need any reason. They can simply say that it has abuse potential and make it illegal, and if no one opposes it, then it becomes illegal. That's how this list has gotten so long. You have all these people fighting for the legality of cannabis and these other substances that are known to have therapeutic potential, but these other more obscure substances that are really only of concern to scientists who are very seriously disinclined to break the law for the sake of their research.

Drug users don't care about breaking the law. Scientists are very unlikely because the whole purpose of science is to publish, and you can't publish if you committed a crime in the context of your research. So scientists are dramatically limited by the prohibition of these substances, and it's the obscure ones that end up actually making a big difference, not so much clinically, but in terms of actually understanding the mechanism of these substances, the structure activity relationships, the neuropharmacology. The stigma on psychedelic use and even studying them has led so many doctors or scientists, researchers that would be inclined to want to do research on these particular things. They avoid them because it could be incredibly damaging to their careers. And it's bureaucratic. I mean, there was a group at Columbia that was doing really fascinating research on the drug Ibogaine and Parkinson's disease. And I was speaking with the head of the study, and he was saying how obnoxious it was to have the government come and weigh his vial of Ibogaine every day and monitor his logs. And this guy is a really serious researcher. He's not going to,

if you were to get high, he's not going to get high off this tiny supply of government mandated or government sanctioned Ibogaine that was supplied to him. But they give these people a really hard time. They make them buy a very expensive safe. They do all this stuff that these are the last people to abuse the substances. And they are the ones that are hurt the most severely, except for, of course, the people that go to prison. They're the ones that are hurt the most severely. Yeah, it's a crazy thing to think that people are going to recreationally use ibogaine. That's one of the weirder ones. Oh, it's totally bizarre. Yeah. And ibogaine is a drug with so much potential. For those people that are aware of ibogaine, it's typically only discussed as a drug that treats addiction to opioids, which is very, very important, especially now. But that's the tip of the iceberg with ibogaine. It has one of the most complex pharmacologies of

any drug I've ever studied. There's almost nothing it does not do. I mean, it's, you know, you have the alpha-3, beta-4 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor, which is also the target of Welbutrin and has a kind of smoking cessation anti-addictive effect. Then you have really high affinity relative to the other receptors for the NMDA receptor. So it has a ketamine-type effect and has a classical psychedelic effect at the 5-HT2A receptor. Then it's a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, serotonin reuptake inhibitor. It just goes on, and then it releases this protein, GDNFf which is considered one of the most important proteins in treatment of parkinson's disease it's one of the

only things that is able to cause a regrowth of dopaminergic neurons in people that have parkinson's so this is like really fascinating stuff that's just in schedule one scientists can't work with it it's a tragedy it is a tragedy and it's also so effective. I know so many people that have gone to Mexico and gone to these clinics and done one Ibogaine session for 24 hours and come out of it a totally different person. Come out of it with a complete new perspective on even why they were using whatever they were using in the first place in a way that they didn't. whatever they were using in the first place in a way that they didn't. Not only does it help eliminate the addictive properties and the connection that your body has to those substances, but it also allows you to re-examine why you went down that road in the first place.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. And there was a sort of pharmaceutical push to develop non-psychedelic derivatives of ibogaine that would retain the anti-addictive properties, which sounds like a good idea in theory. But so they created this drug called 18MC, and it wasn't psychedelic, but then it also lacked some of these neurotrophic factor-releasing properties of ibogaine. But really, the bottom line is that we shouldn't deny the fact that the psychedelic activity of these substances is therapeutic, psychotherapeutic

in and of itself. You know, I had a friend who was severely, severely addicted to heroin, and he traveled to the Netherlands to take Ibogaine and, you know, took the drug, was going into the experience and then started feeling this intense craving for heroin and started looking through his bags to see if he'd somehow put a little, had forgotten about a little bit of heroin that could just get him through the day. And then he goes into his bag and then finds a small bag of heroin and snorts it. And then he's like, I traveled all the way to the Netherlands to do this. This was, I'm a failure. I'm relapsing after all this money, all this work. I have no self-control. I'm a terrible, terrible person.

Why can't I just stop and then realize that the whole thing was a hallucination? There was no heroin. He hallucinated his own relapse. Whoa. Wow. What was your experience with Ibogaine? I've never taken high doses. The most I've ever taken is 50 milligrams.

What's an effective dose? It really depends. There's a sort of move toward microdosing ibogaine because it actually does have a cardiotoxic effect, especially at higher doses. So people are looking into ways of reducing that cardiotoxicity by using it at lower doses for longer periods of time. Again, this is something that has to do with prohibition because in this prohibition market, if you are addicted to heroin, you go to Mexico or you go to Canada and you go to an Ibogaine

clinic, you need to get as much bang for your buck as quickly as possible. You're not going to stay there for two months of treatment because most people have lives and can't afford to do that. So what do you do? They give you what is called a flood dose. It's a massive dose, often a multigram dose of Ibogaine because it's just like a sledgehammer that knocks you down and allows you to get out of it. But is that the best way? That's the fastest way. That's the most appetizing way for someone that had to travel to do it. But is it the best? Probably not, because we know that at high doses, it has this potential to induce cardiac arrhythmias, and that can kill and has killed. So people are, yeah, now looking at lower doses over longer

periods of time, which would be ideal if it were legal in the United States, I believe. Hmm. Yeah, that's a, it's a really interesting one to me. It's Yeah, that's a really interesting one to me. It's a really interesting one because it's got such a long history of use, and so many people have had these very good experiences with getting off of addictive drugs from it. Oh, yeah. And it's so relatively unknown as well. It's something that, you know, I talked to someone like you, and of course you know about it,

but I bet if we walked down the street and asked 100 people, I'd be shocked if one of them knew about it. Yeah. And, you know, Terrence McKenna would sometimes talk about psilocybin as an invention of mushrooms or as technology or as being synthetic, and I don't really agree with that idea. An invention of mushrooms? Or he would sort of say like, this is as synthetic as a Coca-Cola bottle. This is like alien technology.

That's how he would describe psilocybin. But in my opinion, it's a pretty simple derivative of tryptophan. You just decarboxylate, methylate the nitrogen twice and then add this phosphate ester. But ibogaine, that's a crazy molecule. That's like a three-dimensional thing that no medicinal chemist would have ever discovered.

That, if there's, you know, not to sound mystical, but that strikes me as some sort of plant technology. I mean, it's an amazingly complicated structure. It's so complicated that it's almost impossible to synthesize. In fact, it can't be synthesized commercially. All the ibogaine that people use has to be extracted from plants because that's the only way to getize. In fact, it can't be synthesized commercially. All the Ibogaine that people use has to be extracted from plants because that's the only way to get it. Wow. I first found out about it when Hunter S. Thompson accused Ed Muskie of being on it during the

presidential race of, what was it, 1970 or whatever it was um that was a hilarious moment and a lot of people i think were introduced to what ibogaine was by that when he said a brazilian witch doctor had been flown in yeah of course it doesn't even grow in brazil no it doesn't even make sense well it's also it was hilarious when he was on the dick Cavett show and they asked him about spreading those rumors. And he's like, well, there was a rumor that he was doing this Ibogaine. And I know because I started the rumor. I just reported factually. There was a rumor.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of these drugs that get put into various categories. And Ibogaine is one of the very few that really isn't in any category in terms of like modern culture, like the way we discuss and consider these things. Oh, because it's very different structurally and pharmacologically. But that Hunter S. Thompson story is really interesting because it's obviously a very charming, funny story. And I'd have to know exactly when it happened relative to the scheduling of Ibogaine. But that might be an example of how what's a frivolous joke that most people enjoy told in the wrong climate can result in the loss of a chemical that could save tens of thousands of lives and could be a treatment for Parkinson's disease. This is the responsibility that journalists have.

It's more responsibility than I think they'd like to have often. But that's the truth. You make a joke about Ibogaine, next thing you know, it's in Schedule 1. Maybe he made the joke afterwards, but if he didn't, you have to wonder. Because that was one of the first major mentions of Ibogaine in the popular press. And the same is true of, you know, there was a Rolling Stone scare article that came out a while ago, and it's same deal, this drug 2-CT-7, and they do a whole story, oh, this teenager, he took too much, and this 2-CT-7, it can kill you with just a,

you know, little pile of powder or whatever. And then the drug is made schedule one. Shulgin worked on psychedelics, Alexander Shulgin, great medicinal chemist who spent his entire life studying psychedelics, considered this one of the six greatest creations of his entire career, squashed by a single stupid story in Rolling Stone. That's how easily it happens. Now, was the story stupid? I mean, did it have any basis in fact? An editor at Rolling Stone told me that there were factual errors in it and there's

something weird about it. But yes, people did die because yes, people die from using drugs occasionally. To deny that would be to lie, but that doesn't mean that they don't have therapeutic activity and it doesn't mean that they should be illegal. One of the ones that disturbs me the most is fentanyl. Fentanyl just, I don't even understand why anybody would want to make that. It seems to me that we have plenty of opiates as it is. Why make one that's a thousand times stronger than heroin? Yeah. I've known four fentanyl chemists, including the one that introduced fentanyl to the United States initially.

He died recently. Did he die from it? No. He died of old age. He's killed so many people. Yeah. Tom Pet bowie was bowie one i'm not sure prince yeah i mean there's quite a few great people that we've lost to this stuff yeah it's really it's unfortunate but again fentanyl is not the problem the problem is people. The problem is people taking it. The problem is people taking it, and the problem is lack of access to safer opioids

and lack of education surrounding fentanyl, because it doesn't even really have desirable properties. One thing that people always talk about the potency of fentanyl, but one thing that they don't often talk about is the duration. It's a very, very short-duration opioid, which necessitates compulsive, constant redosing. If you're addicted to fentanyl, unless you're doing a transdermal patch or something like that, you typically can't make it through a single night without having to redose because the duration is so short. That's why it's always done in these prolonged release formulations, like a lollipop

that you suck or a patch. But anyway, it's not a drug that's well-suited to street use. The therapeutic index is too narrow. Its duration is too short. It has a medical purpose that it works very well for. It shouldn't be used as a heroin replacement. But the economic reality is that you have to make heroin from opium. Opium has to come from a place where poppies are grown. That's a whole process,

whereas fentanyl can be made by one guy somewhere. And the profit margin on the fentanyl is so much greater that there's an enormous economic incentive. And the first chemist, this guy that was sort of a friend of mine that died to do it, considered it a good thing to do. That's the complexity that you have to recognize. It's so easy to say that all these people are so bad, but often you don't know

what's going to happen until it happens. His idea was that one of the major burdens of being addicted to heroin is that you can't afford it. It's really expensive. So by substituting this relatively inexpensive material, the price of heroin would go down. This financial burden associated with opioid addiction would be reduced. It would actually improve the quality of life of the users. And it could even be a more pure, potentially safer material if you look at certain literature. Of course, that's not what happened. And many people died and he went to prison as a result of it.

Did he really? Yes. Why did he go to prison for it? Because people died and it was traced back to him. Wow. Yeah. So he wasn't doing this in any sanctioned way? No, he was a clandestine chemist.

His name was George Marquart. Weird guy. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. But anyway, you know, you just don't know. You don't know what's going to happen until it happens. You know, of course, the legendary story that heroin was introduced by Bayer as a non-addictive alternative to morphine.

They probably did think that was the case at the beginning, but history has shown that that is not the case. That's one of the problems with introducing any drug to a large population. You simply don't know. And it's also one of the things that I find most interesting and perhaps a silver lining in this whole synthetic cannabinoid narrative that's been playing out over the last decade is you could say, oh, it's terrible. People should just smoke cannabis. But we're learning so much about what cannabinoid receptor agonists can do that we would have never learned if it weren't for the widespread use of synthetic cannabinoids. I mean, just for instance, that it is possible for high potency cannabinoid

receptor agonists to kill you. That's a big one. We didn't know that until recently, that they can be addictive. We didn't know that. What are they using? What is it? It's so, it's an impressively diverse array of chemicals. You know, it started out with a drug called CP 55 940. Then it was CP. They call it cannabicyclohexanol now and then JWH 18, JWH 73, JWH 210, on and on and on and on. And then it just branched like a giant cannabinoid fractal in every imaginable direction. And a lot of these compounds, they were patented by various pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer for therapeutic purposes. Again, this wasn't some malevolent chemist who was cackling and saying, ha, ha, ha, I figured out the most addictive thing possible. They were just looking to see what's legal, what looks pretty potent and reasonably safe. OK, we'll make that. We'll sell it.

And I've spoken with the chemists that actually were behind a lot of these operations. Again, not bad guys necessarily. They, you know, typically people don't want to hurt other people. You know, genuine villainous people are pretty rare in my experience. Most people believe that what they're doing has a justification that is good. And again, with the synthetic cannabinoid ideas, one is that, although you won't hear this in the popular press, and it's rarely said,

they can be very enjoyable. And it would be dishonest to say otherwise. Some of them are very euphoric and compare favorably to cannabis, and in certain measures might even be superior. That doesn't mean they're safer. It just means that there's something very desirable about them. And if you deny that, then you neglect to understand why people use them in the first place, which is

that they make you feel good. So that's part of it. But then the other thing is the urine testing, people wanting to be able to get high without breaking the law, low cost. I mean, there's a lot of motivations for doing this. And as it played out, people died, people became addicted, and random things that no one would have ever expected occurred. We learned, here's another silver lining. I'm sure you're familiar with cannabis hypermesis syndrome. No, I'm not.

You know, this bizarre pattern that certain people that smoke all day, every day, it started showing up in the medical literature about a decade ago. People smoke all day, every day, and they start getting very, very nauseous and start vomiting. And the only thing that can relieve the vomiting is a hot shower. Huh. So really weird. So all these people are showing up in emergency rooms when they, like, run out of hot water saying, like, I need some kind of, I need some help or something like, I don't know what's going on. The condition resolves itself very rapidly as soon as you stop smoking cannabis.

So it's not hard to treat. You just can't smoke weed anymore. But no one knew what caused it and why it was happening now after thousands of years of human cannabis interaction. Why now for the first time in history? And the answer is that people are smoking more weed now than ever before. You know, the levels of THC ingestion with dabbing and high potency strains are just higher for some people. It's much higher than has ever been in the past. But then the question is, what is causing it?

Is it the cannabis itself? Is it a fertilizer? Is it a pesticide? What is responsible for this? And it wasn't until people using synthetic cannabinoids began to experience the same constellation of symptoms that they realized that this is an intrinsic property of certain cannabinoid receptor agonists. So that's something that you can learn from all of this, that it wasn't pesticides,

and it wasn't some kind of fungus or something like that growing on the plant. This is something that happens from prolonged high-dose use of cannabinoids. And there's all sorts of other lessons that can be learned. Is that an issue with cannabis use, pesticides? Have you ever heard of people having real problems? Well, historically it was, certainly. You know, Paraquat Pot, did you ever hear about that?

No, what's that? Paraquat was in one of many misguided attempts to prevent people from using drugs. They started spraying all of the cannabis that was grown in Mexico with this ultra toxic herbicide called paraquat. And this is a drug that induces Parkinson's disease when you're exposed to it, like really seriously nasty stuff. No joke. And so the idea was if we poison all the cannabis and create this widespread fear that whatever you're smoking might contain paraquat, maybe people will use it less. And luckily, paraquat doesn't have a lot of thermostability. It's sort of denatured by the heat of smoking. So it's argued that people were

not actually exposed to it who smoked it. But still, this is a horrendous thing for the government to have done. They did the same thing during alcohol prohibition, by the way, they would poison alcohol. I mean, that's the extent they'll poison people to prevent them from getting high. But that's a reality. But now, there's obviously a move toward organic gardening people using you know neem oil and things like that so i wouldn't know oh and there was yeah there was actually a big controversy in colorado with a pesticide called microbutanil i believe that was used and potentially could release cyanide when smoked. So, yes. Yeah.

Well, I would worry about that with large-scale production. Things become commercially viable. The point where someone like R.J. Reynolds gets into the mix and starts growing enormous marijuana plantations. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a concern with all the food that we eat as well. Yeah, of course. Yeah. What is interesting to you now?

Like, is there anything that's coming up or some new thing that people might not be aware of that might be fascinating to you? Yeah. I mean, I'm interested in everything. You know, I love the history. I love, you know, I did a piece in this last season of my TV show where I traced the history of psychedelic toad venom, of 5-MeO-DMT containing toad venom, because people have this idea that all psychedelics have been used for thousands of years, that every psychedelic has an ancient history. But when you look at the history of 5-MeO-DMT,

there is no evidence, really, no convincing evidence that I'm aware of. Maybe you can point to a ceramic toad. Is that evidence that people smoked toad venom? Not in my opinion. It might be some indication that maybe they did, but it's certainly not hard evidence. Even if there were a guy sitting on his back smoking a pipe, it wouldn't be hard evidence. But anyway, so there isn't convincing evidence, as far as I'm concerned, of ancient toad venom use. So then the question is, when did it start?

Who was the first person to do this? And I love these little historical investigations to get to the bottom. Who is the first person to synthesize this drug? What were their intentions? Who is the first person to smoke toad venom? And the toad venom is a weird one too, because it's this bizarre misconception that you lick the toads. Right. Which again, bizarre misconception that you lick the toads. Right. Which again, journalistically produced, or maybe it was inspired by cartoons as well to some extent, but yes. So the way you do it is you have to get the toad to excrete whatever this is and you put it on glass and then you dry it out. Is that the idea? That's the idea. Yes. And then you scrape it off with a razor blade and then smoke it.

That's it. And does it come, is it a pure form of 5-MeO-DMT? No, and there's actually very little chemical analysis that's been done in the 21st century. I analyzed a sample that I collected when I was in Sonora, and it contained, in addition to 5-MeO-DMT, it contained some interesting serotonin derivatives, including serotonin O-sulfate. serotonin derivatives, including serotonin O sulfate. And nobody knows how these different tryptamine components as well as these steroidal lactones that are sometimes called bufotoxin contribute to the experience. If I had to guess, probably not that much, but maybe there's a little bit of that sort of entourage effect that you get with almost any plant that has a variety of different alkaloids that might inhibit certain enzymes or do this or that. But it's about 15%, according to the older literature.

The analysis that I did wasn't quantitative, so I don't know exactly what the concentration was. But it's somewhere in that region, and I'm sure it depends on whether the toad has been milked previously and all these other variables. Does the experience mirror taking synthetic 5-MeO DMT? I haven't tried. I've tried synthetic 5-MeO DMT? I haven't tried. I've tried synthetic 5-MeO DMT a couple times. I've tried Bufol, various venom, once at a low dose, once at a high dose. They were all different, but then everything is different. Mushrooms are different every time I take them. It's really hard once you start explaining a different experience based on the composition of the material, because how do you

assign it to the dose or the minute number of different tryptamines that are also present? It's really hard to say. But, you know, I think that there is a strong argument to be made for using the synthetic as opposed to the toad-derived material simply because you don't have to harm or hurt, not that it necessarily does harm toads, but you don't even have to risk it. Right, right. And it's easy to synthesize. Yeah, I'm sure toads aren't into getting rubbed on windshields. Yeah.

Seems like an annoying day for a toad. Yeah, they want to eat insects. Yeah, whatever the fuck they do. One of the more interesting stories out of the last decade or so was this story that I read about these scholars in Jerusalem that were connecting the story of Moses and the burning bush to the acacia bush and the acacia tree, which is rich in DMT. And they believe that, you know, when you're talking about a story that was told through oral traditions for who knows how many years and then written down in ancient

Hebrew and then transcribed and, you know, and translated to Greek and Latin and all these, there's a lot lost in the mix. to Greek and Latin and all these, there's a lot lost in the mix. And they believe that what that story might have been about of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the tablets and having the experience with meeting God in a burning bush, that this is in fact was a dimethyltryptamine experience. Maybe. Yeah. It's a big maybe. It's a big maybe. I can say that if you go to the south

of Mexico in Chiapas, there's a tree that grows there as a weed called Mimosa Hostilis. Maybe you're familiar with it. And this is so abundant that it's used to make fence posts. All the fences on the side of the road are made of Mimosa Hostilis. It's used as firewood to cook meals. The air smells like DMT because people are using it as fuel all over the place. Not a single person that I spoke with was aware that it was psychoactive. And these are people that are burning it all the time. Do they get high from it? Is there, like, if you were in a tent or something like that,

and you were doing a hot box sort of scenario, would you get high from it? there like if you were in a tent or something like that you were doing a a hot box sort of scenario would you get high from it no i i saw no would you it may be it's about two percent dmt so you'd probably have to get so sick from you'd be coughing and yeah it would be a very i mean even just smoking pure crystal dmt can be very difficult for some people. So my guess, not to be like a wet blanket, but my guess is not really. And that's a very strong source, as strong as maybe there's some acacia is stronger, but that's certainly comparable. And that's something people are using to cook food all the time

and they're not aware that it's psychoactive. So was there a way or is there a way for a person living thousands of years ago to somehow or another extract DMT from something like the acacia tree? I actually spent some time thinking about that a while ago. It would be, first of all, it depends on how you define extraction. If it were in like an ayahuasca sense, like a tea, of course, yes. But then they would need some sort of enzyme inhibitor to create the ayahuasca. If it were to create an isolated smokable form, again, you know, you could just do like

an aqueous infusion and then dry that out and maybe smoke that. But in terms of like a real extraction that would produce crystals of DMT, I don't know what the nonpolar solvent they would be using to extract the freebase would be like butter or something. And then how would you get rid of the butter? So what is the process? Like if you're going to take a tree that's rich in DMT and extract DMT from it, what do you have to use? Have you ever done it before? No, I've never done it.

Oh, okay. Well, it's a very generalizable and simple process that applies to almost everything in chemistry. Sometimes it's called an acid-base extraction. Most people that are in the DMT community go something they call straight-to-base. And the idea is that the side chain of the DMT molecule contains a basic nitrogen that if it's protonated in an acidic solution, then it's water soluble. And if it's deprotonated, then it's only soluble in a nonpolar solvent. So what you do is you just deprotonate the nitrogen with a base, potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide typically, and then treat that aqueous basic solution with a nonpolar solvent like NAFTA and isolate the NAFTA, dry it out, and you have your material. And that applies to everything.

That's not a DMT specific process, but that's what people do. Everything with a basic nitrogen. Now, what's the earliest history of extraction? Well, you know, the first wave of DMT use in the United States was all synthetic. In fact, DMT was discovered synthetically before it was ever found in nature. The same is true of 5-MeO DMT. How did they do that? There was a Canadian chemist named Richard Helmuth-Mansky, who I believe was looking at different alkaloids in strawberry plants. I believe was looking at different alkaloids in strawberry plants.

And he was synthesizing references for these potential strawberry alkaloids and made DMT. So he didn't know what he had made other than a potential natural product found in strawberries. And then it wasn't until Zara much later conducted self-experiments with injected DMT that people became fully aware of its psychoactivity. And then people started finding it in plants. I mean, the 1950s were like, in early 60s, were, of course, a fascinating time in psychedelic research, because you have these convergences of these amazing ideas. First, you have the discovery of serotonin, which is like, you know, we take this for granted. Now it's in television commercials. But this was, of course, something that no one knew about. And suddenly, they're finding this in all kinds of different animals. Initially, it was in the salivary glands of squid and in different animals, and then they're finding it in the human intestine. Then they're also

finding that all these plants that people worshipped in various indigenous societies also contain serotonin-like molecules. Then they discover LSD and find that that's maybe the most potent known pharmacological agent at that time. And it binds to serotonin receptors. It activates a serotonin type response in isolated tissue. So there's like this weird triple convergence of information, super potent, amazing compound LSD is discovered. Serotonin is discovered in all these different organisms. And there's a pharmacological convergence between the two of them. And then you have all these people worshipping serotonin-like molecules. So there was a lot of enthusiasm at that time to figure all of this out. So in terms of history, so we're talking about somewhere in the 1950s,

they started extracting DMT. The use of it orally dates back far longer than that because of use of MAO inhibitors and creating ayahuasca. But in terms of the first extraction, we can kind of isolate. From plants to smoke? Yeah. It might have been even later. It might have been the 80s.

Okay. So the idea that people thousands of years ago were able to do something along those lines is probably not accurate. Because they're talking about a burning bush. That's why it's appealing to people, right? The idea of Moses. Do you think that maybe the understanding of synthesis from, you know, synthesizing this from these scholars, Maybe they don't have enough of an understanding of chemistry. Well, what would be really interesting is to do an experiment to see what were the materials that were available? How would this have been done?

Would you have to use butter as your nonpolar solvent? How well would that work? What would your butter preparation be done? Would you take it rectally then? Is that how it would work? I mean, you have to kind of, what would your base have been? Well, I think they were talking about it being something, I mean, burning, right? A burning bush.

Maybe it's just one of those things that sort of gets conflated, right? Because you have people today that are very aware that people smoke DMT and have these incredibly intense religious psychedelic experiences. And then maybe they looked at the Acacia Bush and said, oh, the Acacia Bush is rich in DMT. That's probably where the Moses story came from. Right. Well, what's really interesting is, you know, DMT has never been found in the human brain, even though Rick Strassman says that it has been. So a lot of people are constantly assigning altered states of consciousness to DMT. But we can have these

states without DMT. I mean, maybe it's never been found in the human brain, but also there's ethical and experimental issues with sampling fluid from a living human's brain. Right. But they have found it in living rats, right? Yes, they have. This is fairly recently. This is the Cottonwood Research Foundation. Their attempt is to try to prove that the pineal gland is a source for DMT. We know that DMT exists in the human body. We know that the liver produces it. We know that the lungs produce it. We're not totally aware of whether or not... There's anecdotal evidence that points to the pineal gland. Based on the rat idea and based on the presence of certain

enzymes that could be responsible for it but even if it is even if it is then what there's still a whole question of how is it released how is it distributed what receptors does it activate and is it even necessary as an explanation for altered states of consciousness because there are other things in the brain other than dmt dmt has never even been found in the brain but there are are other things. You know, you have endogenous proteins that bind to the kappa opioid receptor, the same receptor that is responsible for the effect of salvia, things like that.

They could be responsible. I mean, even carbon dioxide itself can induce a pretty strong altered state of consciousness. Right, which is why people like those psychedelic breathing exercises. Yeah. They're sort of, is it like hypoxic? Is that what it is? What are they doing when they, they have those, um, the, what, what is it called? There's a type of breathing exercise that induces psychedelic states. Holotropic. Holotropic. Breathwork. Yeah. And that is the

idea behind that, right? It increases the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood? I haven't seen a mechanistic explanation. Hmm. Yeah, I think that was... But it would make sense. In an early LSD psychotherapy, one of the things that they would do before giving someone LSD is they'd give them something called carbogen, which was a gas that contained carbon dioxide,

and they would look at their response to the carbon dioxide inhalation and if it induced a panic response they would say maybe you're not psychologically ready for this lsd experience so that was you're talking about a test i mean that was a very primitive early test that was used by psychiatrists to see if people were had the psychological fortitude to withstand the experience that That's fascinating. So tell me more about whatever is in the brain that mirrors the effects of salvia. It's a protein. I can't remember off the top of my head what it is.

If you look up endogenous ligand for kappa opioid receptor, it will come up. David Nichols recently wrote a paper that actually goes into alternate mechanisms of how the DMT type near-death experience could be produced by non-DMT compounds. But I mean, you know, there was a lot of work also on endogenous NMDA receptor antagonists. There was a protein that was called alpha-endopsychosin or angel dustin, named after angel dust. But the main researcher died in a car accident, like right as he was making some kind of breakthrough, supposedly. Cue spooky music. Yes, yes. But, you know, this has been a longstanding question in psychiatry is, you know, what causes psychosis? What causes altered states of consciousness? Is there an endogenous psychedelic? That was like one of the major

motivations for a lot of this research in the 60s, finding the endogenous psychotogen that is responsible for schizophrenia. Now it doesn't seem to be the case, but it's still a question that comes up. What if dopamine is methylated in a certain way to create dimethoxy, phenethylamine, or what about this? What about that? I mean, Shulgin was very interested in it, about the metabolic production of various psychedelics that account for altered states of consciousness. It just hasn't been supported by evidence in a very strong way, even though people really find the idea compelling. And there was also the 5-MeO-DMT in schizophrenic people's urine. That's also a thing. Right. And we know that the body does produce 5-MeO-DMT. We just don't know where. Yeah. Because again, it's like what I was saying earlier about the depression

tests where you look at your urine. So you find 5-MeO-DMT in your urine and your first assumption might be, okay, there's 5-MeO-DMT in my body. It was in my brain. But you don't know that. Right. It could have been biosynthesized in your intestine, and it could have been excreted without ever entering your brain. Right. And this is the whole idea of monoamine oxidase, right? The idea that when we're eating things that are rich in DMT, monoamine oxidase is breaking it down in the gut. Yeah.

So even if you're consuming something so if something is so how do they know that this this uh salvia like substance exists in the mind or in the brain rather because this um this peptide or protein has been isolated do you find the name of it oh okay i only caught four of those words you said okay and, okay. And I lost what I was supposed to be getting. No, it's not important. So we know there's a host of different psychoactive substances that are absolutely produced by the body and in the brain, and that there's different ways that human beings have been able

to achieve psychedelic states outside of consuming drugs. Have you done that? I've done lucid dreaming things. I've done kundalini yoga. The kundalini one is the one I'm most interested in because I have someone who's a friend of mine that got really into it. And he was saying that he can achieve very DMT-like states. that he can achieve very DMT-like states. You know, there's a really interesting aspect of all this that isn't often discussed,

which is the ability to have these states and still interact with your environment. Because, of course, there's something very physically taxing about breath of fire or these Kundalini breathing techniques. If you induce an altered state of consciousness, you need to be focused and you need to be in a specific place sitting down, where psychedelics have this amazing ability to allow you to have that experience, but walk around. And I think that's not to be underestimated, the walking around, because then you can really re-examine your environment. That's a big part of it for me. A big part of the psychedelic experience is seeing what is New York like? What do I like or not like about New York? What do I like or not like about my apartment?

Because it matters. These things matter. This is your environment. Do you want to be surrounded by clutter that you don't like? If you don't, get rid of it. These are the sorts of thoughts you have. And this is my other issue with going to the Peruvian Amazon to have a psychedelic experience.

Because if you do it in this place that is superficially inappropriate, like your apartment, I think it has the most applicability to your own existence in terms of the music you listen to, your friends, your environment, your life. You're confronted by the books that you read, the photos of the people that you know, all the things that matter to you, not a jungle, although jungles are very beautiful and visually stimulating and I'm sure, and are, I know, an amazing place to use psychedelics. I think that we underestimate the value these things have when integrated into a more normal type of experience. And that's something you can't do as easily with Kundalini. Right, right. That makes sense. So when you're using psychedelics, you will use them and walk around New York City? Yes.

What is that like? I often feel a lot of love for people. Yeah, which is, you know, because I think that we also tend to get into these very angry, oh, the subway is annoying, the guy is taking up too much room, I have to stand, it's taking forever, it smells weird, whatever. Everyone is looking at their phones all the time, which is a little bit dark. And then, you know, if you're on a low dose of a psychedelic or even a higher one, sometimes I'll look at everyone on their phones and I'll just feel compassion and love and think like, what a strange situation we've all gotten ourselves into. I love all these people. And it's like, I don't know what to say about it, but I understand it completely. And I don't know

where we're going from here. And you suddenly feel connected to something that's very real, which is people on the subway, not looking at each other anymore. Yeah, I mean, this is in my own life, something that has changed dramatically. When I moved to New York, no one looked at phones. Now people only look at phones, everyone is looking at phones the entire time they're on the subway. This is a total change in human behavior. And you really start thinking about things like that. And it matters because it's not in the Amazon, it's your life. And these are the things, the choices that you make. Are you going to be a person that looks at their phone all the time as well? Yeah, it's fascinating how quickly that took hold. Yeah. If you look at human history,

I mean, the iPhone is 10 years old. I know. And that's really when it started. So 10 years ago, people, and even then, in the beginning of the iPhone, they were fucking useless. Right. You get online, it was really slow and terrible. And so most of the time, you just text message it. But now, with all the apps and social media and constant, constant updates of information and new things and new events and new trends, it's just – it's always calling you. I better check, make sure anything's – we've been on this podcast for two hours. Let me see what's going on. Oh, look at that, all these messages. Oh.

It's weird. You did it to me. messages. It's weird. You did it to me. Actually, I have this vivid memory of standing at your front door and you selling Twitter to me, saying like, oh, you've got to use Twitter. It's amazing. People send you

all these articles and it's so useful. You learn so much. It's really amazing because I only had one tweet at that time and now it's like 2,500 tweets later and hundreds of hours of my life I'll never get back. I'm sorry. I got you.

I got you. It is that way still for me in many ways. I learn a lot about what's going on in the world. I follow a lot of science tweets, Twitter accounts, and a lot of really interesting people that post interesting stuff. But you got to know how to abandon a tweet several words in like, this is bullshit. I'm not reading that. No, I'm not reading that. Oh, what can they do now? The tweets are too long. This is crazy. No, it's not even that. It's just knowing that it's going to be horseshit. This is going to be just either gossip or nonsense or not interesting,

but there's still a shit ton of really useful information that you can get out of Twitter on a daily basis. There's always something new that's coming out. And I try to retweet those things as much as possible. When I see something that someone sends me and then that becomes people know, Hey, if you send Joe something really cool and he reads it, if I get a chance to read it,

I'll retweet it and people get a kick out of that so they'll send me more cool stuff and so then it's sort of it's it's it sort of becomes a like a little ecosystem almost for disseminating interesting ideas yeah but it's also bullshit too there's a lot of bullshit in there a lot of a lot of arguing which i don't do i just't argue. I think it's a very ineffective way to communicate with people with, you know, going back and forth with stuff like that online. It just doesn't work well. It's, and it becomes, I think more like idea sport with a lot of folks, like they're just trying to win these little battles and find the witty or nasty thing to say. And it's just, it's not productive. It's not healthy.

I don't like it. Well, they're doing the same thing that journalists do, which is that you get more attention for doing the wrong thing than you do for saying the right thing. Right. So, and we all know that feeling where someone says something about you

that's unfair and wrong. And you want to say, hey, wait a second about that. That is totally incorrect. I'm going to set the record straight. Yeah. And that's what gets the engagement, not the kind, thoughtful, considerate thing that somebody says. Yes. Yes. I would love to accentuate the trend of kindness. I really think that that is one thing. If there's any one trend and to lean towards kindness, just to just to be nicer to people and if we could all

sort of agree that this is a virtue worth pursuing i think we could change the way human beings interact with each other these shifts like the shift of looking at your phone if we could figure out a shift and one of the more disturbing things to me that comes from the left which i've always associated myself with being a left-leaning person that there's a lot of meanness coming from the left, which I've always associated myself with being a left-leaning person, that there's a lot of meanness coming from the left now. And it's a lot of, by any means necessary, a lot of feeling the need to squash people and humiliate people and insult people because they don't agree with what you believe. And that this is a, I think this is a terrible path to go down because then it sort of justifies people who think the opposite of that

to be mean to you. So now no one's getting anything done because this side's being insulting and that side's being insulting and people are getting kicked out of restaurants and people are protesting in front of people's houses because they disagree with things. It's just a lot of cruelty, a lot of meanness and cruelty, which is the enemy of discourse. As soon as that stuff gets thrown about, as soon as it becomes a war, an idea war or an idea sport, people are just trying

to win and they're trying to get back at you for what you said and you get back at them for that. And it becomes this terrible stall out situation. Yeah. We've all bought into a game and it's a bad game to play. It's the worst possible game and it's very transparent. I mean, you look at what shows up on the first page of Twitter and it's things that are perfectly designed to generate opinions. So teacher says that now classrooms will be equipped with a bucket of stones to throw at a school shooter. And what do you feel? Oh, that's stupid. Or hey, that's actually kind of a good idea. It's better

than nothing. And everyone's engaging with it. And you're buying into it, you're supporting it, and you're promoting it, and you're making it bigger by paying attention to it. I mean, there's an amazing book that I recommend anyone listening to this read called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, which he wrote in 1985 before computers, before social media, before any of this. He predicts all of it perfectly without even knowing the faintest hint of what was going to happen. And, you know, his solution, if there is one, is, you know, partially to disengage from all of this, but to try to appreciate long, nuanced, But to try to appreciate long, nuanced, careful things, which is very hard to achieve on Twitter or television or most places.

We try our best. Well, I think that's one of the reasons why podcasts, especially ones like this, that are these long form conversations, are becoming popular. Because people are hungry for actual communication. They're hungry for people that are just, even if we disagree on things, I want to know why you think the way you think. And I want to hear it all. I want to hear all of your reasoning. I want to hear the thought process that led you to that. I want to hear that. And I want to be able to talk to you about how I think and why I think the way I think. And maybe we can come to some middle ground or at least understand each other and go, oh, I see where you went. Or I see why you do. I see what's happening inside your mind or the way you feel or how it relates to your life. This is absent in most discourse on

television. It's absent in all talk shows. It's like what we're talking about, the oddness of a panel show. I mean, they're so bizarre. It doesn't make any sense. None of it. It's not how human beings interact with each other. Can you imagine if every conversation you had in your life, there was an audience clapping or wooing at everything you said? I mean, it creates this sort of fake way of communication that has become so commonplace with us. Just even the way they sit, sitting next to each other like this, like we're not looking at each other. I would be sitting over here and you'd be at the desk.

And I'd be like, well, Hamilton, funny you bring that up. But, you know, and then look at the crowd. It's just, it's alien. I mean, it's really weird. And I think because of the fact that people are so addicted to their phones and addicted to media and this constant influx of this loop of information,

I mean, if you watch the news, they can't just give you the fucking news. You have to get that scroll on the bottom of other shit that you should be freaking out about. It's like the news itself's not enough. No, you have to know about terrorist attacks and fucking Isis and there's some new flu that can't be cured and it's all scrolling on the bottom while you're watching other shit we this is not how human beings are designed we're designed to talk we're designed to

communicate with each other person to person this This is what we're good at. This is what we've lost. And the one thing that has probably led to more people understanding more about each other, actual conversations, is rare, which is really weird. It's way more common for someone to look at their phone for 10 hours a day than it is for someone to have a one-on-one uninterrupted conversation with someone for an hour. Those don't exist. They exist with lovers. That's it. With lovers

and occasionally if you have polite dinner companions that put their phone down and just drink a glass of wine and talk to you about stuff. But even then people suck at it. It's almost like people forgot how to do it. They talk over each other. They don't listen to each other when the other person's talking. They're just waiting their turn to talk. We're going down weird roads, these roads where we're sort of distancing ourselves from compassion and understanding and real communication.

Absolutely. I don't know what to do about it either. Psychedelics might help. That's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. I think they would help. I think if we had like real centers where you could go and just like you could go to a place

where you can get a licensed therapist to massage you. You know, hey, I've got this back pole. And you know, the only thing that works is deep tissue massage, you go to a place, they give you a robe, they play nice music, they give you team and they're setting the set and the setting and the the the ambience of the room, it enhances the experience of getting the massage. When you go into the room, the lights are down. They might have a candle lit. You know, there's some fucking hot rocks in the place and they're playing beautiful harp music in the background. The set and setting is a part of the experience of getting a massage.

is a part of the experience of getting a massage. If we could have something like that and have these things common for the use of psychedelics where you could go to an actual, some sort of therapist that's trained in both psychotherapy and the use of psychedelics. So they could talk to you and find out if you're stable, ask you questions about your medical history, what kind of medications are you on, how are you feeling, what are you trying to achieve

through this, and then work you through an experience. I mean, I think this could be enormously beneficial. It already has been. Sure. It already has been. I mean, we keep talking about psychedelic medicine all the time, but so much of this has been done. That's the really crazy thing.

Ibogaine used to be a pharmaceutical in France, although it was used at lower doses that weren't psychedelic. There used to be an MDMA. What were they using it for? As like a tonic to stimulate people. It was called Lamberine, eight milligram tablets. What is an effective dose? Threshold psychoactivity, in my experience, is about 20 milligrams of the hydrochloride salt. So they were microdosing? They were mini-microdosing. Mini-microdosing Ibogaine. They may have used multiple tablets. I don't know. If anyone is familiar with French historical literature relating to Ibogaine, I have a little bit of it, but there isn't much. I mean, again, they used to use a psychedelic called Indopan as an antidepressant in the Soviet

Union. In the United States, there was a drug called Monase, alpha ethyl tryptamine was used as an antidepressant. It's an MDMA type serotonin releaser. And then, of course, the whole history of DPT facilitated end of life therapy, LSD psychotherapy, on and on. Everything Shulgin's group did using 2C-B, MMDA, Ibogaine. This was along with Claudio Naranjo in order to facilitate psychotherapy. I mean, people not only were doing it, they were exploring all the different ways to do it, which compounds are best for which applications.

Do you have any experience with cacao? Yes. What is your experience in terms of the psychedelic effects or psychoactive effects? It's mildly stimulating because of the theobromine content. But does it mirror a small dose of MDMA? Not in my experience, no. No, it was Kyle that was talking about that, right? Kyle Kingsbury.

He was saying that in large doses that raw cacao has some sort of a mild MDMA-like effect. I've heard people say that, and people will sometimes say that the presence of phenethylamine in cacao could account for that, but it's such a small amount, trace quantities, less than a milligram, and the active dose of phenethylamine is hundreds of milligrams or grams in order to achieve a psychoactive effect. So I think the effect that people do experience is probably mediated by theobromine, which is present in relatively high quantities. That's how it's named after the gene as theobroma. And theobromine does what? How does it make you feel? It's a caffeine-type stimulant.

So when people say that chocolate contains caffeine, but they're really referring to theobromine. And is that why it's deadly to dogs? Yes, it is. Huh. So it's theobromine that's doing it. Yep. Fascinating. So it's not actually caffeine. No. It's just a caffeine like substance. It's less potent than caffeine. What was your experience like physically? How did you feel when you took this uh this cacao and what what how large dose i mean i used to eat it every day like raw yeah like powder powder yeah i used to eat it every day and yogurt and um just as a health thing yeah as a health thing and i liked the the flavor of it. But I have never had an experience beyond at most a low level stimulant experience. And I've also taken pure theobromine and it is stimulating, but it requires like 500 milligrams to achieve an effect if I remember correctly. Hmm. What are the, what about, you ever fuck with nutmeg?

What about, do you ever fuck with nutmeg? No, but I mean, it's a fascinating area. Of course, you know, prisoners historically did it. Malcolm X did it. And the essential oil of nutmeg contains meristisin, which is a precursor for the psychedelic amphetamine MMDA, not MDMA, but it's methoxy-MDA. not MDMA, but it's methoxy-MDA, as well as elemesin, which is another psychedelic precursor, as well as, there's I think one other, maybe even safral, actually. I think it's safral, elemesin, and myristicin. And Shulgin had a hypothesis.

Again, Shulgin was actually by training a biochemist, not an organic chemist, although he spent his career doing organic chemistry. So he was very interested in these ideas of the body creating psychedelics. So he thought when you consume nutmeg oil, that your body is aminating this double bond and creating a series of different amphetamines, and that's what accounts for the high. But in reality, people don't actually know. Whoa.

Yeah. Hmm. So what kind of history of use does it have in terms of people taking it for the psychoactive benefits? I'm sure there is some ancient, or I would assume there is some ancient use of it, but it's mostly a thing for teenagers and people in prison these days. It's kind of, it's illegal high. It's one of these things that you do when you don't have access to

anything else. And most of the reports make it sound more like an anti-cholinergic deliriant type experience, more like taking a lot of Dramamine than like a classical psychedelic experience. But you can use that oil to make a lot of psychedelics in a laboratory. classical psychedelic experience, but you can use that oil to make a lot of psychedelics in a laboratory. Wow. Now, history of use is also so fascinating to me when you talk about history of use, because there are certain cultures that really don't have a written history. They have oral history. So it's very difficult to determine when people started. What about peyote? What is the history of use of peyote? Because I remember reading something that kind of stunned me that said that there's only like a couple

hundred years of known use of peyote. Yeah. Well, okay. So there's different histories because peyote is used, it grows naturally over a relatively broad region stretching from the southern United States into, I believe, mostly northern Mexico. And so in the United States, the history is about 100 years old of the Native American church. It's recent. That's crazy. So 1918. Something like that. Yes.

1918. Something like that. Yes. It was a Comanche chief named Quanah Parker who spread the peyote religion across the United States. And it caught on because it's fantastic. Of course it caught on. I've never experienced it. What is it like?

Well, again, it's another one of these plants that has mescaline, of course, but then it has these other accessory alkaloids that modulate the experience so what's really interesting about peyote is it contains this chemical called peyotein and peyotein i have some uh pharmacy trade journals from like 1890 or something like that no it must be later than that it must be maybe like 1915 or something like that sometime around there and they talk about like your pharmacy must have morphine cocaine and peyote the three substances every pharmacist needs and uh and peyote was used as a hypnotic it was used to induce sleep but there's been no very little research on it none in the 21st century i mean this is like uh was once considered a really valuable medicine The issue is that it's a little bit tricky to synthesize and it has to be extracted from this rare cactus, Lephophora diffusa. But that modulates the experience. You have so many

different alkaloids and it's very long lasting. It causes dramatic pupil dilation. It's extremely nauseating. I made an episode about peyote in the most recent season of my show. And I vomited so much that my nose started bleeding. You know, it was some serious vomiting. And it's physically very, very punishing, more so than almost anything I've ever done. In terms of the after effects or while you're doing it? While you're doing it, it's a heavy load on the body. So people always say this is not recreational or whatever, but it truly isn't. This is really a punishing experience.

And on top of that, the Native American ceremonies often accentuate some of those punishing aspects of it, like water is conserved. You don't get to drink as much water as you want, but to emphasize the importance of water. In Mazatec salvia ceremonies, there's no water at all, which I think actually increases the absorption of the leaf into your mouth. Because the natural reaction when you eat something disgusting is to wash it down with water. because the natural reaction when you eat something disgusting is to wash it down with water. These are little things that people do impulsively without thinking that are going to change the nature of the experience. So anyway, you eat this cactus. It's incredibly nauseating and bitter.

And then you have maybe a 12-hour hallucinatory euphoric state that's very beautiful and strange. And you just eat the cactus raw? Yeah. Some people grind it. Some people cook it. With cactus, you could get that shit at Home Depot. You can get San Pedro at Home Depot. It's not the same?

No, no. Peyote is a dumpling cactus. It's a very small, somewhat spherical cactus that produces beautiful white and pink flowers. And it's incredibly slow growing, which is why the conservation of peyote is an even bigger issue than the conservation of toads. I mean, peyote, all these psychedelic plants have major conservation issues that need to be addressed. But peyote is arguably the biggest of them all, because this is a slow growing plant. If you want to learn patience, grow peyote. That is how you learn. I mean, this, this bottle cap, I mean,

it would take five years before it's the size of a dime if you grow it from seed. Yes. So when you're eating something that's, you know, um, that's as big as the rim of a coffee mug or something like that, it might be 20, 30 years old. Jesus Christ. So there's a lot of history in these plants. They call them grandfather peyote. And I think the reason is that by the time that they're ready to be consumed, they often are grandfathers or grandmothers. They have produced seeds and have offspring and all this stuff because it takes that long. So yes, it's very slow growing. It's not a sustainable practice the way that it's being done. But there's also even bigger threats to the environment in the form of root plowing all the territory to build Walmarts and subdivisions and different things in South Texas, because most of that land is privately owned. And it's difficult because there's a belief in the Native American church that it has to be outdoor, natural grown.

It can't be a greenhouse cultivated plant because part of the potency and the value is from its interaction with nature. So if it's sustainably harvested where only the crown of the cactus is removed, but this long carrot-like taproot is left in the soil, it can regenerate new heads. But if people don't have proper harvesting techniques, it can decimate the population very quickly, especially because it's not a very potent substance. It requires many of these ultra, ultra, ultra slow growing plants. Wow. So what is the natural territory of it? How wide is the natural territory of these plants? I can't tell you exactly, but it's not very large. So if it got very popular, there'd be a real problem. Yeah, it probably won't. I mean, you know, the people that care most about it outside of the Native American church are, interestingly, cactophiles in Thailand and Japan who grow it for purely aesthetic purposes because

it's so beautiful. And they would never even consider it because to them it's this prized ornamental plant that produces amazing fruit and flowers and lives seemingly forever. And if you take care of it, it can just look amazing. So there's a huge peyote scene in Thailand of people that never would dream of consuming it, that just grow it ornamentally. Wow. Now, San Pedro cactus, does that have psychoactive properties? Absolutely, yes. And do you have to extract it in a different way? Like peyote, it can be consumed raw. With some varieties of San Pedro, they actually contain comparable quantities of mescaline

to peyote, and it's a much more sustainable source of mescaline for that reason. It grows, unlike peyote, it grows very, very quickly and can be propagated by cutting easily. And it, you know, it's much easier to work with. But traditionally, if you go to Peru, they'll take a length of the cactus and they'll cut it like a loaf of bread into slices. Then they boil those slices and create a sort of low potency aqueous infusion that they drink. And what's interesting about the way they do it is that it seems that it's almost designed to create a lower potency drink. The way they do it, they drink every night, the shamans, every night of their entire life. And many people come back and do it repeatedly. And for them, it's sort of, it's like a traditional form of microdosing, you could say. It's not about blasting yourself into

the cosmos the way people do when they smoke DMT. This is about fortifying your body, giving yourself strength, cleansing yourself, balancing yourself. And are there people that consume it raw as well? Not that I saw there, no. Hmm. Oh, but people do. But people do. I have.

And what is the effect? Is it comparable to the peyote effect? It's comparable, but it's, yeah, it's comparable. But again, it gets very hard because of these variations with natural products in terms of the potency of the cactus and that point in your life and you know people always come up to me and say what's the deal with mdma it used to be like this and now it's like this what accounts for that it's like well don't underestimate your own changes over time when i was 21 i could alcohol, not that I did very often,

but I could and not want to kill myself the next day. Now, if I try to drink more than three drinks, I'm going to feel horrible the next day, like just emotionally ruined. And that's me, not alcohol. Now you brought up the term hypnotic, which made me, reminded me of our conversation that we had through email about Roseanne Barr. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Right. Oh, yes, of course. Yes.

And about Ambien. Yeah. And about the effects of Ambien. She came on the show? She still hasn't. Oh. She can't. She's having a really hard time with this.

She feels terrible about what she said. She feels like the whole world hates her. She feels like she's lost everything and her life is destroyed and she's distraught. She was going to fly out here, but we had a conversation and we kind of decided it'd be probably better if she waited. Just let some of this pass by.

It's still in the news because they've decided to move the show on without her. They're going to kill her off or something. Oh, man. Yeah. And she's just devastated. And, you know, she was also devastated health-wise, physically. She's an older woman. And not that it would be any different. She was an devastated health-wise, physically. She's an older woman. Not that it would be any different.

She was an older man. She's an older person. And this grueling schedule of doing a television show was horrible on her. It was really, really tough to do. She got bronchitis. She felt like she was almost dying. She was completely exhausted. And she felt like the schedule of it

all just was just way too taxing on her physically. Then on top of that, she's on a host of different things. She's, I mean, she'll, if we ever do wind up sitting down and talking on the podcast, I'll get her to list the various things she's on, but she's on various antidepressants that she changes them up, mixes them up. She was one of the things she said to me, she's, she needs to get her doses readjusted. She drinks alcohol regularly. She smokes marijuana regularly. She's also on Ambien regularly, takes it every night to go to sleep. And, um, I tried to explain to her the fact that you're not getting real sleep when you're on that. This is not something you should take and rely on on a daily basis. They even tell you to get off of it.

And it's difficult to get off of it. But people want to dismiss the idea that she could have said something that's completely out of character or done something that's completely out of character while under the influence of this stuff, that it could have contributed to that. They want to dismiss it because they want a villain. They want, you know, no, she's bad. They want this like this childlike, simplistic reasoning and rationalization for what she's done. Right. And this is, you know, a prime example of the sort of schizophrenic nature of the way drugs are depicted in our society.

If it's something like bath salts or K2, they're responsible for everything. One toke of that stuff and you're eating your best friend's face under a bridge. But then in Roseanne's case, they have no explanation whatsoever, no exculpatory value. They can't be used to explain anything. Is it an excuse? No. Is it an explanation? I think yes. I think that intoxication can explain all sorts of inappropriate behavior. And to pretend otherwise is, again, dishonest. I know Sanofi, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures Ambien, had this widely shared tweet saying that racism isn't a side all sorts of absurd behaviors, command hallucinations, where people stab themselves, jump out windows, people that, you know, butter their cigarettes and smoke them, people that paint their houses in the middle of the night with no memory whatsoever. And it's a profoundly, profoundly

disinhibiting drug. So, you know, here's maybe a somewhat analogous example from my own life. I never take Ambien on planes for this reason, because I'm around strangers. I don't know what I'm going to say or what I'm going to do, let alone use Twitter. But I don't, it's uncomfortable because it's so disinhibiting. I might do something weird. I don't know, take off my shirt. I have no idea. Who's to predict what you're going to do when you have no inhibitions whatsoever? So I remember once I was on the plane to Berlin and I did take Ambien and I start in a sort of delusional state thinking that the cabin crew and the person that's announcing over the intercom is saying various Nazi things. That's like an unfair stereotype that all Germans are Nazis.

That's offensive. But I had no control over this. Like just because they're German talking in German doesn't mean that this is like a Nazi airship because you're just completely out of your mind. Wow. But again, I mean, I'll like another story. I used to be friends with a girl whose dad was a psychiatrist prescribed her

immense quantities of Ambien and she would snort it. There's no reason to snort it. It's water-soluble. It has a fast onset of action. There's no benefit in snorting it. It's fine orally if you're going to take it at all. And there's no reason to take high doses. It's already a delirium at the therapeutic dose. You don't need to take more. Even five milligrams induces delirium. remember at, I was at some party and someone was saying that they wanted ketamine. Did anyone at the party have ketamine? And, uh, just a complete stranger. And I said, oh, I actually have a little bit of ketamine, but it's at my apartment. Here are the keys and here's my address.

And, uh, just run over to my apartment and help yourself. Talk to you later. And, uh, and then, um then I'm one of these people, I've never lost my phone, never lost my keys, I don't lose things. So then I wake up the next morning, go to my apartment, reach into my pocket, my keys are gone.

And then it hits me, this flash of, oh my God, I gave my keys away to a complete stranger to go to my apartment and take ketamine from me. What on earth was I thinking? What level of disinhibition is required to do something that insane? Luckily, I had to spend the rest of the day tracing, finding out who that person was, getting my keys, and these people happened to be very courteous people

and actually did go to my apartment, did take the small amount of ketamine that I had, and then just locked the door after themselves and didn't make a mess. But again, I mean, this is like, this is a profoundly disinhibiting substance. And also, I think the idea that a drug couldn't modulate racist activity is interesting as well, because there's a study that you can look up where they use the beta blocker propranolol, and they found that it actually seems to block implicit racial bias in people in certain tests. What they're suggesting is that there's an adrenergic component to implicit racial bias. There's a certain maybe heart rate or fear response,

and once that's physiologically blocked, you become less racist, in a sense, implicitly. It's not a conscious decision. Conscious racism isn't reduced, but an implicit racial bias is. I mean, these are like really complicated, higher level questions about how drugs impact cognitive functioning. And the bottom line, line i think is be careful being certain about anything about what drugs can or can't do what is this jamie oh this is the story blood pressure drug reduces inbuilt what is that word inbuilt racism common heart disease drug may have an unusual side effect of combating racism wasn't that a fucking there, that stupid movie with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt, As Good As It Gets? He was a racist, and they gave him a pill.

They gave him some medication, and it reduced racism. It stopped him from being racist. Whoa, I completely forgot about that part. I remember it because I was angry. Because a bunch of people from the, I was working on a television show at the time. A bunch of people were talking about how great a movie it was. Because it was this weird, dark sort of film. And I was like, that movie fucking sucked.

It was so depressing. Here's this woman. She's got, you know, she's like a waitress. And Jack Nicholson is this old racist asshole. And she's relying on him for some real reason. because she can't find anyone who's nice to her and he's racist. But the resolve of the film was that he just was sick and they gave him some medication. He wasn't racist anymore. I'm like, get the fuck out of here.

That doesn't make any sense. Meanwhile, maybe it does. I mean, Ambien is an amazing, amazing substance. I made a piece about it called The Ambien Effect years ago. I don't know if you're familiar. There are people who are paralyzed who can take Ambien and start walking again. It has the power to regenerate activity in regions of the brain that look dead on fMRI. It is a wacky drug.

It's also chemically very similar to 5-methyl DMT. It's not like a benzodiazepine like Valium. It has its own bizarre structure. I mean, it's a weird drug. So when these people are paralyzed, why are they paralyzed? What is wrong with them? Strokes, traumatic brain injury, various reasons. There's a book about it called Hope in Brain Damage, I believe the title of it is. And Ambien somehow or another temporarily fixes it? Yes, only for the duration of the drug effect. So there's people that are in a persistent vegetative state, they take Ambien, and suddenly they wake up.

What the fuck? Yes, yeah. It's pretty, it's well documented and it's a really bizarre effect that is exclusively present in Ambien and maybe slightly in Baclofen as well. Yeah. I thought that the statement that the pharmaceutical company made about racism not being a side effect was kind of cute. It was kind of witty. Yeah.

It was very snarky. Yes. But the problem with that shit is well what are the side effects and then you go into the actual side effects you're like holy shit how is this legal and then you go into the side effects of like what is this doing to people like well yeah here's another one it supposedly increases consolidation of negative memories whoa yeah there's a lot of weird stuff. Negative memories. Increases consolidation

of negative memories, causes just total hallucinatory insanity at higher doses. Maybe the most powerful disinhibiting agent I'm aware of and is able to restore

cognitive and motor functioning in people with traumatic brain injuries. What a weird drug. Very weird. And not something people should be taking every day. Just not. It's certainly addictive. I mean, it binds to, even though it's not a benzodiazepine itself, it binds to the benzodiazepine site on the GABA-A receptor. But yes, no, it's addictive. It's super addictive. So for that reason alone,

people shouldn't be taking it every day because you'll become horrendously dependent on it. And withdrawal is ruthless. Yeah, see, withdrawal is total insomnia. So most people just go right back to it. Or, you know, you can transition onto different types of hypnotics, like taking an anticholinergic Benadryl to sleep, or cannabinoids, cannabis, things like that, or just things that don't bind to the GABA-A receptor in order to try to reduce tolerance. There's ways around it. You're not doomed if you start taking it, but it's certainly habit-forming and something that's best to avoid if you don't require it. And it doesn't give you real sleep, correct? I mean, you're missing some part of the sleep cycle.

Dr. Matthew Walker was on here as a sleep specialist, and he went into depth about it, but I really don't remember his exact description. But he was talking about how it bypasses certain cycles, and you're not getting a real night's sleep. I'm not aware of that. I mean, there's, it wouldn't surprise me hugely. You know, there's still debate about what the most restful part of sleep is. I think most literature points to actually non-REM sleep, slow wave sleep being the most restful type. And that's actually supported or promoted by chemicals like muscimol from the Amanita muscaria mushroom. And there was one pharmaceutical derivative called

gaboxetol that I did an episode about on the most recent season of my show, and that really does produce incredibly restful sleep that is superior to Ambien. But like Ambien, it was also psychedelic, even more psychedelic probably. So this is an issue. It, but like Ambien, it was also psychedelic, even more psychedelic, probably. So this is an issue. It seems that for whatever reason, a lot of these drugs that really promote sleep effectively also happen to be hallucinogenic, and nobody knows exactly why. But it's been a pharmaceutical barrier because we don't live in a culture that allows people to go nuts at night. Yeah. No kidding. I'm glad you brought up the Amidita Muscaria because that's another one that is almost like a drug of lore more than a drug of application.

You don't really hear too much about people getting real good experiences. No, you don't really hear too much about people getting real good experiences. No, you don't. But it's also connected to the sacred mushroom in the cross. The cover of it from John Marco Allegro has the name Amanita Muscaria. He thought that the Amanita Muscaria was probably linked to psychedelic states and prehistoric Christianity. We don't know, right? Oh, he's such a salacious, wacky guy. Was he? Oh, yes.

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, he was getting off on it. He loved it. He would love getting off on freaking people out about- On freaking out Christians. I mean, that was a- you can't underestimate what he was saying. He was saying all of Christianity is a sex cult that worships a fungal phallus,

and the semen of that phallus are the spores. That all of Christianity is an ancient fertility cult. That's a big claim from a serious Oxford-educated Dead Sea Scroll scholar who was respected up until that point. Yeah, who was also an ordained minister. Yeah. I mean, there's a great book called Shroom that argues that this was all some kind of cynical attack on the Christian religion and that he didn't even believe it himself. The issue is that in order to carefully examine his claims, you need to speak, what is it, ancient Aramaic or something? So it's't, I'm not in a position reading his book, which is all having to do with the etymology of these words, their origins in different languages. I just don't

know enough about these ancient languages to make an informed assessment of his claims. But, which is, I think, one reason that they've kind of hung around in this lore for such a long time, because it's hard for people to say with certainty if they're true or not, although I lean toward them probably not being well-supported. Big pause. Why is that? It just seems too wacky.

Yeah, because I haven't seen them integrated into any serious work since. Not that that's necessarily a good argument. It would take a lot of education to be able to even understand whether or not that debate is cogent. Right. Right. It's the same deal I encounter this sometimes on like really fringe aspects of physics and chemistry where someone will make some kind of wacky argument about the way atoms bond or something like that. And it's like it gets hard because you only have like a small handful of people that are capable of seriously evaluating the claims able to weigh in.

And then it doesn't really get vetted in a serious way. So things just linger around as maybe it's true, maybe it's not. get vetted in a serious way so things just linger around as maybe it's true, maybe it's not. But the bottom line is that most people don't get a valuable experience from these mushrooms, but some do. Some people have figured out how to make it work. And the experience is, again, it's its own thing. It's a GABAergic delirium that takes you into a dreamy, drunk zone. Yeah. And it's in many ways a toxin, right? It's toxic in some forms. Well, it contains another chemical, ibotenic acid, that is potentially very toxic, although it hasn't really been examined. In fact, it also contains a complex of this element, vanadium,

that could potentially be toxic as well. So there are some legitimate toxicity concerns that I think anyone who's consuming it should be aware of. You know, the ideal situation would be isolated muskamal, but it's hard to extract. But yet it's connected in so much artwork and so much ancient depictions of particularly of Christmas cards. There's always elves in these little Amanita muscaria caps. Right. Well, drugs aside, you have to acknowledge that it's a spectacularly beautiful mushroom. I mean, if you, I've gone mushroom hunting all over the world and there is no question that when you see that mushroom in habitat, that it's completely spectacular.

There's nothing else like it. It is magical experience just looking at it. Yeah, I ran across it only once in Colorado in the woods, and it was amazing. It was a big one, too. It was this big, beautiful red with white dots on it. It's like one of the most gorgeous things you could ever see growing. Yeah. Yeah, and it's legal, right?

It's legal to possess. Again, yes, it's legal because it's not that enjoyable for most people. But is it possible that we just are doing it wrong and that the information has been lost as to how to, because a lot of people felt like it might have been a part of SOMA, which hasn't really been defined as to what SOMA is. Right. Yeah, those debates are not really my cup of tea. Right. Because it's like just tons of guys pushing this or that argument without like a lot of evidence one way or the other.

And so I don't know. And then there's people that argue that urine drinking is somehow required to concentrate the musk of mole in one way or another. You know, if you want to learn about it, I think the best way to do it is actually through this other related drug, gaboxadol, which was almost developed by Merck as a competitor for Ambien. And there's some high-dose reports of gaboxadol that give you a much clearer example, and from my own experience as well, of what the potential of that class is. And it's very different. It's every bit as powerful as ayahuasca or something like that,

but completely different. And it's hard to articulate. All these things are hard to articulate, but it's something that's been experienced by relatively few people, so you don't even have this spiritual or metaphorical vocabulary for it. The way that I had it most powerfully was once I was doing a shoot for Vice on HBO, and they told me I had to go to Tokyo with less than 24 hours notice, and that I had to start filming as soon as the plane landed, couldn't go to the hotel room. So I thought, all right, this is serious. No messing around, no time for jet lag. Like I've got to fall asleep at 10pm that night, wake up at 8am that morning, i've gotta fall asleep at 10 p.m that night wake up at 8 a.m that morning i've got to be awake all day so i'm going to pharmacologically force this a

little bit i'm going to take a really high dose of this muscimol derivative at night to induce sleep and i'll take adderall during the day that was the plan so i took a high dose i believe it was 45 milligrams but don't quote me on that of this muscimol derivative that's about the same potency. And at the equivalent of what would have been maybe 2 p.m. New York time, which I think was crucial because these things are hypnotic. They induce sleep. So if you take it during the day, you're less likely to sleep through the whole experience. And it was unbelievable. I mean, I couldn't fathom the intensity of what I experienced. It was,

you know, just this rushing sense of becoming a passive observer in my own consciousness and seeing all of my thoughts produced by someone else that were racing at a speed that was so fast that I found it physically dizzying and had to lay down. And I felt as if the acceleration was pushing me toward an ultimate state that was sleep and that sleep and death represented the ultimate state of consciousness. Whoa. So it was, and then I had to wake up at 8 and work the next day.

And people say, how did you sleep? And it's like, well, I actually had this, uh, uh, transformative existential trip accidentally,

but, uh, but, but have you tried it since just purposely for, I mean, a couple of times. Yeah. Did you ever recreate that kind of experience?

No, because it was, it was a bit much, I would say. And I know people that have taken even more, and it turns into just your entire visual field transforming into rotating cubes where each face of the cube represents a different aspect of your life, your future, your past, your present, you know, really dramatic stuff. So I think that potential exists with high-dose muscimol.

It's just hard for people to ingest it because of all the other material in the mushroom and the disgustingness of consuming it. So is it possible that we've just, much like people have sort of altered many different things like wheat and tomatoes and what have you that at one point in time, the mushroom was somehow different? Oh, yeah. Well, yes, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, the evolutionary chemical history of all these different plants is a fascinating subject that's pretty much lost to history. You know, there's no like archaeological alkaloid analysis that I'm aware of, but it would be so fascinating to know because all of these natural products evolved just like the plants that contain them. What were the intermediate materials?

What drugs have gone extinct? Did our ancestors drive certain psychoactive plants to extinction? There's a plant called silphium that some people have argued that may have happened with, it was a fennel derivative or like a fennel related plant. But yeah, I mean, it's really, and we've seen it with cannabis. You know, the black market encouraged everyone to produce THC dominant strains because it was the most potent, most stoning, most bang for your buck. Now we have the ability to change the evolutionary direction of the plant and to encourage the production of CBN or CBG or THCV or CBD or whatever.

So when you talk about a plant like the peyote cactus that grows so incredibly slow, the peyote cactus that grows so incredibly slow. And, you know, if that became something that was highly sought after and very, very valuable, it could conceivably be wiped out. Yes. Yeah. Especially something really slow. So there could have been substances like that, that were very geographically local and very small area that are just gone yeah it's just a thought i just had totally non-evidence based but it wouldn't be crazy if a lot of the reason that a lot of these um psychoactive plants that are present today tend to be less addictive is because all the addictive ones were harvested to extinction thousands of years ago, maybe.

Something like that. I mean, these things do happen. We really wouldn't know. We really wouldn't have any way of knowing. But there's no fossilized plants, right? Right. It certainly didn't happen with coca, which contains cocaine, or with cats. So it probably didn't happen that way.

But, you know, you just don't know. Yeah. And I had read some theories that it's conceivable that the Amanita muscaria varies seasonably. So you have to figure out when is the right time to harvest it. Because there are some plants, although of course fungus isn't really a plant. It's kind of the opposite of a plant in the way it ingests oxygen. It takes in oxygen and breathes out carbon dioxide like an animal does. But it's possible that these things vary seasonably, that you have to catch them within a window of time, and that they also vary geographically.

Like some places, they might be more potent, like Cuban cigars grown on specific land have a distinctly more potent taste to them? Oh, yeah, absolutely, because the biosynthetic precursors for all of these natural products come from the soil, typically, amino acids and things like that, and it's all going to change. There was an amazing experiment that was done where they started doping the substrate of psilocybin-containing mushrooms with other tryptamines. So they used, instead of these DET and DIPT,

put it in the substrate, and they found that the mushroom would take that completely synthetic chemical that does not occur in nature. It would then 4-hydroxylate the indole ring, just like it were a psilocin derivative, and create natural product derivatives of these synthetic materials, creating these semi-synthetic hybrids between man and mushroom creations.

Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is like why the synthetic natural dichotomy doesn't make sense. Everything's evolving. It's a constant interplay between human and plant and fungus. You know, after we're all gone, all of our plastic bottles are going to be consumed by some bacterium that evolves to degrade all of these, you know, polymers, and that will create natural products from them. And will those

natural products be natural products because they were derived from a substrate that we created? You know, it turns into like a very complicated issue, which is why I don't believe in the idea of natural and synthetic. Everything is simultaneously natural and simultaneously synthetic. Well, everything comes from earth. Yes. So even the most unnatural things

that human beings have created are in a sense natural creations, like a bee creates a beehive. A beehive is a natural creation. Right. Yeah, it's a mindfuck. So to get back to Amanita Muscaria, do you know of anyone who's effectively regularly used it as a psychedelic?

Yes, I've met, but not people who I, wacky people. Yeah, I would imagine. Yeah, not people where it's like, oh, that guy's a professor and he uses Amanita every night to go to sleep. He's doing really well. But yes, wacky people. There's so much lore, again, attached to it, specifically because the Christian, I mean, the books by Allegro were big, right? One of them was The Dead Sea Scrolls and The Christian Myth.

That was one of his books. And that was the second book that he published after the Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. And I think he did that because they took the Sacred Mushroom and the Cross off the market, right? Didn't the Catholic Church buy out the rights for that? Or was that a myth as well? I can't remember. There's something along those lines, but Jan Ervin republished it fairly recently with the blessings of the Allegro family. But just the whole connection to Santa Claus and the whole connection to Christmas with that mushroom, there's so much attached to that mushroom. People want that mushroom to be Jesus. That's the one.

You know, that's the way. It's the prettiest. It's like it grows. It's got a mycorrhizal relationship with coniferous trees. So you find it underneath pine trees, just like the shiny presents underneath a Christmas tree. So people get so excited about that mushroom. Yes, they do. But yet no one gets off on it, except wacky people.

Yeah, it's a complicated situation. And just because something's convenient isn't a good reason to say that it's the truth. Like there are other psychoactive mushrooms that may have been used in the past. They're ones that we've discovered recently. There's a species called Rhodocalybia maculata. As far as I know, there's no information about humans consuming this mushroom, but it contains a salvinorin A type kappa opioid agonist. This could be a completely different type of psychedelic mushroom. No information on it exists. Maybe someone used it somewhere in the past. I don't know. Whoa. Well, isn't there, there are some psychedelic substances that have been discovered that have no history of human use. Like isn't Hawaiian baby wood rose. Is that what, how you

say it? Yeah. Doesn't have LSD-like properties, but no history of human use? That's a complicated question. Yeah, maybe not with Hawaiian baby wood rose, but with morning glory seeds, there does seem to be some Mesoamerican history, although it's not as well-founded. And morning glory seeds will put you on the moon, right? Well, yeah, they contain LSA. And again, LSA is actually, Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSA, did an experiment where he injected himself with small quantities of LSA,

but there aren't many evaluations of the pure material. So the exact nature of the different components in those seeds remains a little bit mysterious as far as I'm concerned. Some people will suggest that it's the strongest naturally occurring psychedelic. Other people will say that it's not even psychedelic at all, that it's just a hypnotic. It just has a sort of sedating quality. I've used Hawaiian baby wood rose many, many years ago, and it's certainly psychoactive. Whether I'd call it classically psychedelic, is a complicated issue. It's kind of like a dreamy, unpleasant delirium. Any other ones that we could go over that are weird? Watch my show. I think you'd really like it. I'm sure I'd like it. I like all your stuff.

Okay. Because it goes into lots of weird stuff. I just don't have enough time. I know. I can't imagine. There like all your stuff. Okay. Because it goes into lots of weird stuff. I just don't have enough time. I know. I can't imagine. There's too many things that are cool now. Yeah. It's one of the problems with Netflix and HBO and YouTube and just too much cool stuff. Yeah. But this will be cool.

I will definitely watch it. Okay. That was three hours, man. It just flew by. Wow. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. We. That was three hours, man. It just flew by. Wow. Isn't that crazy? That is crazy. We're going to time warp over here.

So listen, this was way better than the first time we did it. We were here. I think we got a lot of cool information out, and I really appreciate you coming back, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. Let's try to do this again, but not in seven years. Quicker. Yes, I hope so. For sure.

Thank you. And on Twitter and Instagram, it's Hamilton Morris. And your show is Hamilton's Pharmacopia. Is it available online? Because people watch it online. Yes, it's on Hulu and streaming on Amazon and streaming on iTunes. And it's on Viceland as well. Beautiful.

Yeah. It's easy to find. Thanks, man. That was awesome. Appreciate it. Thank you.