The Joe Rogan Experience - #1615 - Hamilton Morris

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

Hamilton Morris is the creator and host of the Vice TV documentary series "Hamilton's Pharmacopeia," now in its third season.

the Joe Rogan experience hello hey Joe good to see you man good to see you what's happening this is uh our third podcast but not really I only count two of them because of the first one. We were literally so stoned we couldn't communicate. Remember that one? I remember it well. I like it. I feel like I'm getting the tour.

First it was your home, then the LA location, and now this new intermediate red tube. Yeah, the red tube. Some folks call it the red pill, but that also has a lot of negative connotations. The red tube then. Yeah folks call it the red pill, but that also has a lot of negative connotations. The RedTube, then. Yeah, the whatever it is. This is podcast studio number one, two, three, four, five? It's number five? It's the third one I've been.

I think it's number five. It might be number six. Yeah, well, number seven or number six, whichever is right next door. And it's going to be all I've learned from constructing podcast studios. This one was very haphazardly constructed last minute because we made the decision to get the fuck out of L.A. and we had five weeks. And my friend Matt alvarez put this place together in five weeks set it all up and then five weeks later we were broadcasting

from texas it looks good it's not bad it's okay it's odd what is the optimal arrangement going to be the optimal arrangement is probably less weird on the eyes like the thing about this is like you're looking around you're like why are there back lights behind those sound panels why is everything red and black why is it why is it like like tube shaped and it's just it's an odd room man it's odd but i like it i just don't i just think we could do better we can make it weird plus i'm bored. Get bored easy. I've been here for six months. I want to mix it up.

Yeah. Mix it up. Yeah. How's Brooklyn? It's grim. Is it? It's grim right now. I've lived in New York for the majority of my life.

I love New York City, and this is by far the grimmest I have ever seen it. Really? I mean, this winter, because it's everything that the entire country is facing, but it's the worst for COVID. It's also extremely cold. A lot of city services seem to have been impaired in one way or another. The streets are covered in garbage and ice and dog shit. And you can't, pretty much the only thing that I can do to maintain my sanity is run,

but everything, including the outdoor running track, is covered in ice and shit. And so it's just this dystopian, frozen, pandemic landscape where every local business that I loved is closing down.

It's a dark time. Yeah. I hear that about Los Angeles. I saw a lot of it, but I got out early. I saw the writing on the wall, and I was looking to move in May. Once the lockdown got extended, once they're like, we're just going to lock down for two weeks to flatten the curve, I was like, that makes sense.

And then here we are in April, all the way through April, here we are in May, and then I'm like, oh, they're never going to let us out of this. And then the crime started happening, and then here we are in April all the way through April here we are in May and then I'm like oh they're never gonna let us out of this I was like and then the crime started happening and the you know it started it started getting dark and I was like oh we gotta get the fuck out of here homeless the homeless thing was like flowers blooming out of rocks like out of cracks in the concrete it's like more tents tents tents tents tents tents. Los Angeles is filled with tents. You can't believe it.

When I tell people about it and then they go there, they're like, I thought you were exaggerating. No, I was understating. Los Angeles is overwhelmed with tents. It's fucking crazy. You can't believe that on La Brea they just allow people to set up tents everywhere. It's nuts. Well, yeah, what are people going to do? That's the question.

What are people going to do? Yeah, where are you going to put them? Do you have hospitals available for them? And a lot of those, the problem is a lot of those shelters, they won't let them do drugs. Yeah. And a lot of these people are like, I would rather be in a fucking tent outside by the beach

than be under your thumb. Because Los Angeles doesn't get cold you know i mean a cold day is 50 you know it's a big deal right just sleeping bag you're outside it's nice yeah it's really emphasized a lot of these economic divides you know because everyone in new york just orders everything on amazon. So every apartment building in every nice part of New York receives a daily shipment of every tenant's stuff from Amazon. And then there's like a secondary economy of people just going into all the buildings and stealing all the packages. I've seen a lot of that.

Yeah. I've seen a lot of Ring videos, doorbell camera videos of people stealing shit. Oh, yeah. It's almost comical i mean i had one where i was loading my car with bags at two in the morning on a tuesday and in the lobby of my building for maybe 15 minutes somebody just as soon as i walk around the corner someone goes and scoops everything up yeah it's it's a it's a wild time and i hope we're coming out of it i mean right when i came to austin this is the first time i've

you know been on an airplane since the beginning of the pandemic you're the first person i've spoken to without a mask no really the first face did you feel weird coming in here but you you knew everyone was tested no no yeah no i yeah. No, I felt fine. You did? I've just been very careful. And because it's also cold in New York, it just promotes this prison cell-like lifestyle where I'm just sitting in my apartment reading and doing push-ups all day. Oh, God. Yeah. Oh. Yeah.

The dog shit thing is like, so people just don't clean up anymore? They just gave up? You know how it is. There's this kind of tumbling character where things just start to accumulate and then no one shovels the streets and then it gets easier probably it's harder to pick it up because there's just like mounting layers of garbage everywhere and it just starts to look increasingly disgusting i mean maybe we'll we'll just uh get out of this in a couple weeks and everything will be oh yeah the problem that I don't think the people that shut everything down for a fucking year ever take into consideration is that people don't have the resources to bounce back.

Things don't bounce back on their own, right? If you want to start a business, it takes money. It takes quite a bit of money to get a lease, to stock the shelves, to hire employees. And when you've been out of business for a year, you don't have any money. So you've probably used up all savings if you had any savings. Try getting a loan when you don't have anything. There's no real logical path forward for a lot of these businesses. In Los Angeles, 75% of the restaurants

are gone. Oh, yeah. I'm so worried about the restaurants in New York. Yeah, it's terrible. It doesn't seem like it's even talked about sufficiently. No. Because in New York in the wintertime, I mean, they're really trying. They're doing things that I would have never, like truly extraordinary things like making these little heated space gazebos that are covered in mylar on the inside and they're and you know ultimately most people don't even really want to do that so then there's this weird conflict of is it moral to support these businesses because you want them to stay in business or are you feeding into a system where people are subjecting themselves to unsafe working conditions and is it actually immoral to go to restaurants and of course people endlessly argue about that

well personal choices are not immoral right so if the people decide that they're willing to work there and they're masked up and they feel safe working there isn't that better than not having a choice to work there i guess the idea idea is that instead of people going on unemployment, they feel pressured to put themselves at risk when they really should be at home, not potentially spreading coronavirus and ideally receiving some sort of government assistance. Well, it's also like when does the government assistance run out

because it has run out for a lot of people there is no more unemployment for a lot of folks and then on top of that the way everything's been mismanaged is so terrible in so many ways like why is it okay to be at target on top of people why is it okay to be at walgreens on top of people but it's not okay to have these mom and pop stores open or retail stores oh yeah or you know like i said i haven't been on an airplane until i came to see you but of course i see all these stories in the news that are like this guy went on an airplane and he took off his mask and they had to do an emergency landing and they kicked him off the plane and everyone cheered and if you haven't been on a plane you just kind of read that and you think oh yeah that guy sounds like quite an asshole good that they kicked him off the plane but then on the plane i then i hadn't

even considered this like what what is done with snacks what are the snack provisions are there no more peanuts is there no water and if it is served then everyone has to take off their masks so this is all just sort of like security theater because they still serve food and everyone unmasks simultaneously to eat. So there's a period of at least 15 minutes where everyone on the plane is unmasked by the doing of the actual airline.

Yeah, it's nonsense. It's full nonsense across the board. Well, I think people just don't know what to do. It's, you know, they're aware that all these things are contradictory everyone is trying to do their best they're confused they don't understand it even to this day um people are trying not to be an asshole you know when you wear a mask which you're basically saying is i'm not an asshole you know i'm gonna go around and i want you to feel like I care. And I want, you know, I want you to feel all right. So I'm going to wear a mask.

But it's not. I mean, maybe it's protecting somewhat. It's not certainly not 100% safe. You know, like it's protecting you against droplets. Someone sneezes. But you're breathing. Oh, yeah. The masking is definitely good.

I think that's pretty well established. But I guess what I don't understand is the hypocrisy like if we have established that masking is good then we also have to not have snacks on the flight or water or water but yeah so then what do you do you're on top of each other sitting three people next to each other i mean it's like literally the opposite of social distancing it's incredibly intimate you don't even know these people you're touching elbows with them yeah it's crazy yeah i mean and this is why when it started It's like literally the opposite of social distancing. It's incredibly intimate. You don't even know these people. You're touching elbows with them. Yeah.

It's crazy. Yeah. I mean, and this is why when it started, I was one of these people that, you know, I was thinking, well, you know, I work in media. I know the way the media blows everything out of proportion. I remember swine flu. I know that they sell newspapers by making everyone terrified. This can't possibly be as bad as people think it is. And I was sort of in COVID denial. And I was also in the middle of filming the third season of my TV show.

So I was just sort of seduced by the momentum of production and didn't want it to end. And people were saying, you know, I don't think we can film anymore. I think we have to stop. And I thought, what, is the world going to shut down yeah i remember that is the like this is unprecedented yeah the the world isn't going to shut down we're not going to be kept in our apartments it's just not conceivable that such a thing could happen cut to one year later but it's not everywhere that's what's interesting and here's the big thing there's been no emphasis whatsoever on steps that you should take to make yourself healthier there's been no discussion of reducing obesity you got to lose weight you've got to take vitamins

you've got to do something to make sure that your immune system is strong like here are the steps that you can take. Here's what we know about vitamin D. There's multiple studies that show that people in the ICU for COVID, 84% of them have insufficient levels of vitamin D. There's a significant correlation between low levels of vitamin D and weakened immune system. They found only 4% of people in the ICU with COVID

have sufficient levels of vitamin D. That's just one thing. They know about zinc and ionophores like quercetin. That quercetin allows zinc to get in the cell much more readily. It's much more bioavailable, and it protects you against viruses. They know that vitamin C is also excellent for your immune system. They know that water is excellent for your immune system. There's peer-reviewed studies on this stuff. Yeah, no, I know. I know. But it's really hard to make those claims because even if they do confer

some kind of therapeutic benefit, it doesn't seemingly prevent coronavirus infection. And I think there has been some emphasis on obesity as a contributing factor. It's one of the biggest comorbidity factors yeah it's huge yeah the thing about it is though it does protect you somewhat from viruses it does keep your immune system strong i'll send you some studies i'll send you there's some interesting stuff on on zinc and quercetin that my doctor dr gordon who is a specialist on this stuff, has sent me and, you know, recognizing there's significant steps that you can take with nutrients

to boost your immune system. Yeah. I mean, the pace of medicine is just too slow, usually, to immediately address things like this in a really meaningful way. Well, also, medicine is divorced from nutrients. The thing about medicine is people are looking for a pharmaceutical cure. They're looking for things that we know are going to work, whatever the medication is, whether it's a treatment or whether it's a vaccine or whatever

it is, we're looking for some sort of a medicine. But there's a lot of things that you can do to strengthen your immune system with nutrients and with exercise and with healthy diet. And it's just not emphasized enough. It's not discussed enough. Yeah, because I think, you know, you need really strong evidence. And I've gone through all these different cycles. Like I went first through the denial cycle where I was like, it can't possibly be this bad. It's got to be a hype thing. Then I went through the, okay, well, maybe there's some antiviral agent that's in circulation right now, because everyone knew that there was no way that a vaccine would be

developed immediately, that it would take a year, which it did. And so the only hope at that time was a small molecule antiviral therapy of one kind or another. So everyone who knew anything about medicinal chemistry or pharmacology was hoping that we'd find something. And that's why there was so much interest in chloroquine. You know, it became like everything today, totally politicized. That's the problem, right? I think it's a huge problem because, you know, like a molecule shouldn't be politicized. It should have efficacy or not, but it shouldn't be a Republican molecule or a Democrat molecule.

Anything attached to Trump becomes poison. That's like if you were an evil person and you wanted the world to be fucked, what you would do is get Trump to promote everything good for you. Yeah. And I can provide maybe a little bit of insight into that because I saw, so when all this was happening, there were, you know, a few antiviral therapies that people were talking about, like remdesivir and favipiravir. Ivermectin. Yeah.

And ivermectin. And the problem with remdesivir is it had never been approved by the FDA at that time. It's kind of difficult to synthesize, and it was very expensive, and it's administered IV. And so all those things kind of weighed against it just being made in some gray market lab in India or China and being mass distributed as like a potential intervention. I remember, you know, when this started happening, the first thing I did was think, okay, I should, you know, start contacting various labs that I know and see if I can get interesting experimental antiviral treatments, if only to maybe write a scientific paper about the purity of antiviral drugs that are being sold in the context of a pandemic. That was my

justification. But I also just thought it would be cool to get all these things. of a pandemic. That was my justification. But I also just thought it would be cool to get all these things. And I remember I was ordering remdesivir early on, probably in March. And one of these labs said, oh, well, you know, it's very expensive. It's $2,000 a gram or something. But there's this other drug that we're using in China right now called chloroquine. Very, very cheap. It works just as well. Would you like to try that? And I thought, hmm, that's interesting. That was the first that I'd heard about it. Then there was this huge buzz surrounding it. Everyone was talking about chloroquine.

And there were a small number of studies that had been published that provided a little bit of support for it potentially being useful. But then it became so politicized that people couldn't talk about it rationally anymore. And it was a total, total mess. I think that's, you know, the worst thing that could possibly happen in medicine. My friend got COVID and the doctor literally asked him what his political leanings are. And he said, why? He goes, well, I just want to tell you that in the early stages of infection, there's some evidence that hydroxychloroquine has a positive effect he was i don't give a fuck about politics he was give me what works he's like how are we having this conversation the doctor started laughing because i know it's just when i

bring that up some people are so anti-trump that they didn't don't even want to hear it oh yeah and this was like you know mayish june-ish somewhere around there And people were afraid to acknowledge the fact that they were using it. I knew physicians who had used it themselves, but they would never publicly acknowledge it. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. It's so weird. Yeah. Even one physician who had publicly spoken out against it, I knew that they had privately gotten a prescription for it.

Yes. Some people were using it as a prophylactic. Yeah. That seems odd, right? Some people were using it as a prophylactic. That seems odd, right? It seems odd, and I also think that as of today, the evidence seems to point against it having a therapeutic effect.

But there was a lot published. It's going to be years before we unpack all of this stuff. When I was saying earlier that the pace of medicine isn't suited to all this, it's been remarkable what people have achieved in this short period of time. And I don't mean to say that people haven know, people haven't been working very hard. Of course they have been. But you need meta-analyses. You often need years of work to really begin to understand the intricacies of how these drugs act in a context like this.

Have you considered moving somewhere other than Brooklyn? Well, I was still making my show in brooklyn so i couldn't move and now it seems to be there's light at the end of the tunnel it seems like it's on its way out so and i and i like brooklyn yeah i know you do yeah did you read uh james altucher's piece about new york is uh gone it's never coming back did you read that. It was a very controversial piece. Altucher is, I think he's a stockbroker, but he's also one of the owners of The Stand, which is a famous comedy club in New York. And is that what he owns?

Yeah, I think that's it. And he wrote this piece about New York in this very detailed step-by-step analysis of all the things that are wrong that you just can't resolve, that are not going to be resolved very quickly, including the crime, including the number of people that are moving out, including the number of businesses that have failed, including just across the board.

It's more dystopian. Oh, yeah, and actually I am probably moving out of New York as well. Where are you going? I think I'm going to move to Philadelphia. Philadelphia is nice. I love Philly. Why Philly? Why did you choose that?

A lab that I work at is in Philadelphia, and I think I'm going to start doing chemistry full time. Really? You're going to stop doing your show? Yeah. Why? It's immensely difficult to make. And it's not, I like challenges.

I like difficult things, but it's not just difficult for me. It's difficult for, you know, 10 other people that are really suffering to make it possible. And there wasn't enough money for it. You know, I was working 13 hours a day, seven days a week. I was working 13 hours a day, seven days a week. Because of the pandemic, I worked for something like four months without pay to finish it. It was not a good experience. I'm proud of what we created.

It's a very good show. Thank you. It really is. I've enjoyed it long before we ever met, when you were doing the other version of it. Yeah. Did you get a chance to see any of the new season? I haven't. yeah well it's i mean making something like that during the pandemic was uh challenging it was an amazing challenge it was really you know it was in retrospect i am actually grateful because i learned so many things that i wouldn't have learned otherwise you know typically

these productions are so compartmentalized where there's somebody that records sound and someone that holds a camera and someone that does color correction. And there still was that, but it sort of broke down so that everyone had to do everything and learn each other's roles in order to actually get it done. Is this a temporary shift into going back and working for a lab,

or do you think that you're going to abandon media? Well, this is a really extraordinary time right now. And for the last decade or so, when I've done this chemistry work with this brilliant chemist named Jason Wallach, there's been no funding whatsoever for this work. The university pays for a little bit of it. Tim Ferriss once was really nice

and gave me a few thousand dollars to synthesize a radioactive psychedelic for an experiment, but there was no funding. Radioactive psychedelic? Yeah. What are you doing, man? You got some Spider-Man shit going on? What's happening? It's an old technique called autoradiography, where you can chart the migration of a molecule and its distribution in tissue by looking at the distribution of the radioactivity. But there was no funding for it. And the idea of ever getting money to research psychedelics, it would always have to be sort of distorted into research on schizophrenia, or you couldn't just say, I'm studying psychedelics.

And what if you go to Oregon? You couldn't just say, I'm studying psychedelics. What if you go to Oregon? Well, that might have some legal advantages, but this is just a funding thing. And I wasn't, it just didn't seem like it was, I wasn't in it for that reason anyway. And, you know, it didn't cost all that money, all that much money to begin with. And so I would pay for little bits of things and you can stretch a few thousand dollars a long way in a chemistry lab but now things are changing and there's a lot of support for research on psychedelics you know there's actually a psychedelic program with the UFC I did not know that

yeah John Hopkins is doing studies with former fighters and current fighters on CTE. One of the things about psilocybin that we know is that psilocybin actually helps regrow neurons. It's one of the few things that really helps fighters with brain damage. And so they're conducting some studies right now. That's amazing. Yeah, it's really amazing. And they're doing some therapies, and I hope to get these guys on soon and talk to them about what they've done and what they're doing.

But, you know, lion's mane is good for, for, for the brain and there's several other different mushrooms, but psychedelics in general, particularly psilocybin. What do you know about psilocybin and the growth of neurons and, and people with brain damage? Do you know anything? Yeah. I mean, this is a hot area of research. There's someone named David Olson, who's been publishing a lot of papers recently on psychedelic-induced neurogenesis, although most of his papers are oriented toward neurogenesis-inducing psychedelic derivatives that aren't actually psychedelic. But yeah, this is... Which is a great way to start it off, right? So then people are not experiencing psychoactive effects, doesn't change their state of consciousness, they're sober. Arguably it is, yeah. I do wonder, because, you know, there have been a number of compounds, one notable one called NSI-189, that are very potent neurogenesis-inducing agents that do not have an impressive therapeutic effect that failed in clinical trials. So it's not as simple as just neurogenesis equals good.

There needs to be something else, it seems. And the literature is contradictory. I think all these things are in their infancy, and we're just now starting to realize even a small fraction of their potential. And I think that there's an idea, a widely believed idea that the reason that there's no medical scientific research on psychedelics, or at least there wasn't for a very long time, is because the government shut it all down, right? The government said, these are evil drugs, no scientist is allowed to use them. And that was part of it. But that

wasn't the whole picture. And what was, you know, there was a group in Maryland, called the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. And they were the last group doing psychedelic research up until 1977. And then there was a big gap until Rick Strassman started his DMT studies in the late 80s, early 90s. So at the time that they were doing that psychedelic research that ended in 1977, they were just running out of funding. There wasn't a lot of interest in what they were doing. There was no pharmaceutical future for the therapy. No pharmaceutical companies were trying to commercialize any of it. They weren't seeing clients and making money off of it.

any of it. They weren't seeing clients and making money off of it. And the university and the funding bodies weren't all that interested in it. And it just kind of died a sad, slow death of deprivation of funds and lack of public interest and enthusiasm. It wasn't like everyone was behind this and then the hammer of the government destroyed it. And I think that's a really important thing to remember, because pharmaceutical companies are extremely controversial. Like, everyone hates pharmaceuticals. They're pretty much ubiquitously despised by all people. But when you think about these times of really fertile, amazing psychedelic research in the 1960s, one reason that there was so much funding and one reason

that there was so much interest is because these were being paid for by pharmaceutical companies, and there was hope that they could actually be developed and sold as medicines, which is the end goal in our medical system, right? And so I think that as controversial as it is, the pharmaceutical interest in these substances is going to provide support that has been entirely absent until recently and is going to really have the potential to push things forward. Yeah, I think soldiers, athletes, and, you know, anything that's in the public realm where, you know, people are really aware of brain damage aware of PTSD aware of a lot of different things that psychedelics can be used to help I think

that's gonna really sort of motivate the public to be more enthusiastic about it or be more open-minded about it because I think for the longest time people had this idea of psychedelics as being just people that want to escape reality. And if there's more peer-reviewed studies, there's more accredited, whether it's universities or research centers, there's someone that people respect that's doing work on these things where you can see it in the New York Times, see it in Washington Post, see it in some newspaper that you respect, see it on CNN, wherever it is, See it in some newspaper that you respect. See it on CNN, wherever it is. And sort of slowly shift public perception that these things, they're not just for hippies. And if they're medicines that work, that's probably the most convincing thing of all.

Yeah. Because it doesn't matter how much you hate psychedelics or you hate drugs. If you're suffering from cluster headaches and somebody gives you psilocybin and you're free of pain yeah you will be sold yeah yeah that's that's what i'm hoping you know and uh i just think i mean my god imagine if we could get people to microdose as much as we get them to drink coffee just imagine if we can get them to microdose as much as we get people to take adderall i don't know there was a study that i think was just published that kind of shines some doubt on microdosing, but it was self-reported. And this is with Cilicin. What kind of study? What'd they say? The author just emailed me. I think it was like a 5,000 person self-reported self-blinding study with microdosing LSD,

if I remember correctly. But again, we're talking about microdosing LSD, if I remember correctly. But again, we're talking about microdosing as if it is one thing. But what was the negative aspects of the study? Oh, that it just wasn't different from placebo. There was no negative. It just was not different from placebo. But that is one of those weird, in terms of like the subjective experience of the people that reported, that they didn't find any difference in placebo? reported that they didn't find any difference in placebo?

They, what, when they compared the results of the placebo and the results of the microdose, there was no difference between the two. There's so many variables when it comes to people and how they view the world, how they interface with society. To, you know, to say there's no difference between one person taking microdose versus another person taking a placebo. It's so hard to make that study accurate. Because, like, what are you looking for? Like, what's changed? And what's going on in your life while this is going down?

Are you breaking up with your girlfriend? Have you lost your job? Is this all taking place during the pandemic when you have no hope? Like, what's going on and versus what's going on with the other person that's taking the microdose or the other person is taking the placebo there's just so many variables when it comes to human beings it's almost like the only way to do it correctly is to have clones of the same person living the same life and give one of them microdose and give another one placebo. That would be better. That would be ideal. You know what I'm saying, though? But these people, they self-randomized, so they would have some capsules that contain

placebo, some that contain a microdose. And this is not the end of it. People will continue talking about this. It also depends on, you know, dose is so important in microdosing, but no one really knows the dose they're taking. That's a pretty big limitation as far as I'm concerned. microdosing, but no one really knows the dose they're taking. That's a pretty big limitation as far as I'm concerned. I've microdosed LSD and I've microdosed psilocybin, and I particularly find that psilocybin microdosing makes me very happy. It does something real nice. It just gives

you a nice feeling, and I think it's real. I think if you feel nice and you feel happy, I think that influences the way you interact with people, which influences your whole life. Yeah. I mean, I haven't done it a lot, but I've done it enough to know that it's legitimately effective. And anecdotally, I have a lot of friends that do it all the time. And one in particular, he goes, this is my medicine. He goes, this has changed my life. He was depressed.

He was bummed out about all sorts of things in his life, getting a divorce. All sorts of shit was going this changed my life he's like he was depressed he was you know bummed out about all sorts of things in his life getting a divorce all sorts of shit was going down in his life started microdosing and just every time you see him got a big smile hugging everybody and what dose do you use when you microdose um with psilocybin see the problem is i was getting it ground up and put into capsules so we're taking two of these capsules a day. It's a very small amount, but enough to, it gives you like this, uh, like that's what it gives you, like, uh, like nothing crazy. Um, but, uh. Well, this is one of the problems I think is just even defining microdosing.

Right. Because for some people it might be a low, a very subtle trip and that could be, and for some people they define it as a sub-psychedelic experience. Right. And so there's going to be a lot of work that's to be done on optimizing those sorts of effects. I mean, the other thing is when we talk about microdosing, we're just talking about microdosing these two common psychedelics, psilocybin and LSD. But Alexander Shulgin, you know, he was doing a lot of research on maybe there's psychedelics

that just are less psychedelic in general that have a little bit of that sort of effect that people are looking for with a microdose of LSD, where it's maybe a mild stimulant, maybe produces a small amount of empathy or just a small change of one kind or another. I mean, this has even been approved medicinally in the past, both with when Ibogaine was a pharmaceutical product under the name Lamber with when Ibogaine was a pharmaceutical product under the name Lamberine in France. Really? Yeah, and it was essentially

pharmaceutical Ibogaine microdosing. No shit. It wasn't psychedelic Ibogaine that they were prescribing. When were they doing this? This was in the 50s, I believe. Wow. When did they stop? I think they stopped in this.

No, no, you can find find there's like french adventure novels that are like as i ascended the volcano i took two lambourine to give myself the strength to reach the summit you know it was just it was just a stimulant that people took there was no discussion whatsoever of ibogaine as a psychedelic have you microddosed ibogaine? I have, yes. What did it do for you? I think that it is at 20 milligrams, 20 to 25 milligrams, it exerts no psychedelic effect whatsoever and feels almost like a mild stimulant

and maybe almost like a mild antidepressant. And it's called Lamberine? That's what they called it? Lamberine was the french brand name for ibogaine what would two lamborines be in terms of milligrams you were seven milligram tablets so around the same range 14 ish yeah interesting that's uh that's it's weird that they stopped i wonder why they stopped and another one is there used to be an mdma type compound called alpha ethyl tryptamine now a schedule one controlled substance in the united states that was approved in the united states as an antidepressant under the brand name

monase and it was a basically like a microdose of mdma this was done pharmaceutically in our country but it's totally forgotten about when was that this was in i think the 60s as well see what stops these things that's what understand. It seems like that would be at least Look, we know that MDMA is great for soldiers with PTSD. That's one of the map studies, right? Well in this case, it was a condition called a granulocytosis That was toxic and and I've been in potentially deadly in at least one instance. So there was a good reason for discontinuing that,

but it had nothing to do with the fact that it exerted an MDMA-like effect. There it is, Monase. Yeah. I want some. Does it come from that plant? They used a hyacinth as the symbol of Monase for reasons that are unclear to me. I was watching this documentary, and I forget where it is, where they were chopping these trees down, where they were using them to synthesize MDMA.

Do you know what I'm talking about? I do know what you're talking about. What is the tree? It's a Cambodian tree that doesn't have a common English name. And it's a source of saffron, which is a precursor for MDMA. And yeah. They're just hacking that forest down so people can trip. And this is what happens

in an unregulated market. This is, I think, one of the really unfortunate things about the way people talk about drugs is they're like, your drug use is destroying the forest. Your drug use is killing people in Latin America.

And it's not people's drug use exactly that's causing those problems. It's a totally unregulated market where because it's all illegal, people can do whatever they want. It's done by criminals. There's no oversight whatsoever. So if somebody wants saffron, why not deforest Cambodia to get all the saffron? And there are other ways to do it. That just happens to be a cheap way that proliferates in a black market with no regulation. Interesting. So there's better ways to do it

that don't involve hacking down the forest. Oh, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, and it's just the problem is that's the best way to do it if that forest is right there. Yeah, and if no one cares. You could make MDMA from hundreds, if not thousands, of different starting materials. You can make it starting from black pepper if you want to.

Black pepper? Yes, black pepper. Yes. How the fuck do they do that? It's a multi-step process, but you isolate a chemical called piperine from the black pepper and then do some chemical modifications. So if someone goes to the grocery store and buys the whole shelf of black pepper keep an eye on that fucker yes yeah because he's gonna be spending a lot keep an eye on him because he's gonna be wasting a lot of time to produce like one granule of mdma oh really it's not it's not an efficient

way to do it i mean it covered it up neil young had something recently about black pepper i had heard and i was wondering now that this is a great time to bring it up, that if you're too high, it takes away the paranoia feelings. You can take like two or three... Tablespoons? No, just the granules. Really? The seed or whatever it's called.

The pepper, I guess. Neil Young. How black pepper sedates marijuana paranoia, according to Neil Young in science. He said it on the Tonight Show or something? According to Neil Young and science he said it on the Tonight Show or something to Neil Young and science they say that to the tonight show there's a terpene in it that does something to do and I thought maybe it's the same chemical you don't know this did we just stop Hamilton Morris this outrageous. This is clearly outrageous. It doesn't say exactly.

Medical extract, basically terpene. It doesn't say the exact one in here. Oh, there it is. Oh, that's mango. Mercian, yeah. You know about that? I do know about it, yeah. Did you know that it was in black pepper seeds?

I didn't know that it's in black pepper seeds, but it's in cannabis. I don't think that Mercian... We should try it. We should get super high as fuck and see if we freak out and then chew on some pepper seeds tried once did you i mean it wasn't that high but i was like i'm a little too like there's you know pepper jamie's one of the rare individuals that edibles don't work on him he can take him off here i want to see what he said he can take a thousand milligrams and just sit there and i go how you doing he's like fine interesting i mean i imagine you have a sizable tolerance yeah 1350 was the highest i've done that's a lot yeah that's a lot yeah that's a lot is there

something i should try to take that would help that uh do you know of maybe a period of abstinence oh okay. Fuck that. But he doesn't do that much. You're not tripping on edibles all the time. No, no, no. No, you smoke more. Yeah. He's not, you know, it's edibles.

He gets high off smoking it. I don't know. I mean, maybe some idiosyncratic absorption. I don't know. I'd have to, you know, we'd have to talk about this a little bit. What would prevent someone from getting high off of eating it? Oh, there's a lot. I mean, there's lots of CB1 antagonists or inverse agonists that will actually, like, myrcene maybe has some mild modulatory effect. I would not want to depend on myrcene to actually reverse the effect of a cannabis high i would be amazed if it were but is there any unusual bio diversity issues like some weird

things about your own chemical like your your chemistry that would stop thc edibles or marijuana edibles from working on you um sure you could think of a million you know have you heard of that before that someone can take you that much know have you heard of that before that someone can take you that much i have not heard of that before no it's so weird like i'll take 200 and i'll be gripping the chair like i'm in space we brought it up before i've gotten a lot of messages from people i'm like what did what did you figure out to take finally can you help me out i'm dying to know i'm like oh so other people don't get it either i'm not the only one yeah huh yeah that's the problem with things being illegal you know we don't really know there's like so much people don't get it either yeah huh yeah that's the problem with things being illegal

you know we don't really know there's like so much we don't know yeah i mean it might be some kind of metabolic quirk obviously when you consume as you have talked about many times when you consume 11 hydroxy yeah 11 hydroxy but that's but thc itself of course is active without conversion to 11 hydro, so that wouldn't explain it. Maybe you have some rapid metabolizer in terms of producing some kind of inactive form of THC. There's variables in terms of how well people sober up from things, right?

Some people, particularly alcohol, I'm a quick sober quick sober upper when it comes to alcohol for whatever reason i can get drunk and like an hour later i'm totally sober yeah in the weirdest way yeah quickly because we're different we're metabolically different organisms depending on where your ancestors are from depending on a number of different factors also depending on the history of things that you've subjected yourself to can upregulate or downregulate certain enzymes yeah that's the weirdest thing is watching someone who has a low tolerance to alcohol just drink a little bit and get blasted and you're like what is going on what happened where are you where'd you go oh yeah you know oh yeah yeah i mean i don't drink so if i were to have even like two drinks i would be blitzed i'd be pretty that's

kind of interesting that you don't drink yeah i mean i'll drink in the way of your acid no i mean i'll drink you know every now and then i'm not it's not like i don't drink i just don't really enjoy drinking and i feel um very sensitive to hangovers so i just it's just not and i i do think it's kind of a weird bad drug oh yeah not bad drug in the sense that it's a bad drug like that it should be illegal think it's kind of a weird, bad drug. Not bad drug in the sense that it's a bad drug, like it should be illegal or it's evil or something like that. I just think that all things considered, there's a lot better things out there, especially compared to cannabis or something,

which is, I think, vastly superior. Well, that's Dr. Carl Hart's argument as well. He prefers heroin. Yes, yeah. Have you been paying attention to all the controversy about his new book of course

really interesting it is really interesting I mean I read it cover to cover it's great I love that guy me too he's so brave like the way he talks about things

for the guy to be a professor at Columbia and to just be openly stating I enjoy heroin and it makes me feel good it makes me compassionate you know and he uses pure heroin he likes to sniff it just be openly stating, I enjoy heroin, and it makes me feel good. It makes me compassionate.

You know, and he uses pure heroin. He likes to sniff it. It's tremendously brave. And I, you know, I was working on my show for such a long time, and you're doing it in isolation. And then it comes out, you're wondering what people think of it. So I was name searching myself and saw some Reddit thread of all these people kind of insulting Carl Hart. And I just felt like, I think the average person doesn't get it. I don't think they understand exactly how brave Carl Hart is. Because I have traveled around the world. I have interviewed countless academics. I've been in academic circles throughout my life.

Drug use of the sort that he describes is extremely common. It's extremely common. But being honest about it is incredibly rare and is extremely common. It's extremely common. But being honest about it is incredibly rare and is commendable. And if more people were like him, I think a lot of these stigmas would be reduced. And I've even heard people say, well, how dare he reduce the stigmas associated with these things? That's cruel. If you reduce the stigmas, you're hurting people. They should be stigmatized. No, they should not be stigmatized maybe they shouldn't be encouraged but if you find yourself in that sort of situation you shouldn't be ashamed you should see it as if

anything a medical problem or a social problem not something that you need to be hated for right because we're not we don't hate people for being alcoholics right we praise them for their sobriety like when they get their 90-day chip or whatever they get you know people say they don't they look at you like you know you're you're some sort of a fool because you couldn't handle alcohol they go oh he was an alcoholic but he sobered himself up good for him oh yeah yeah you know the heroin use is just so stigmatized and I'm not a heroin user I haven't used heroin but I did have a morphine drip once when I had a surgery it was awesome oh my god I kept hammering that thing you press a

button to give you a morphine drip I had knee surgery and I was in the hospital and I was on this perpetual motion machine you ever seen one of those because I had an acl reconstruction arterial cruciate ligament it's a big injury they take a piece of your patella tendon a piece of your shin bone and a piece of your knee and they open you up and screw them and drill them in place pretty fucking painful and so while you're lying in bed my knee is on this thing and it's going like bending and straightening my knee over and over and over again. And I'm lying in there and they give you a drip.

And anytime you want, just press that button and you get a little drip of morphine. And I'm going bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And it's just, ah, I felt so good. I felt so good. I was like, oh, now I get it. Now I know why people like this shit and morphine's basically heroin right pretty close extremely close yeah yeah i get it morphine i get it yeah it's probably awesome but for him you know he's he's talking about pure heroin small amounts he understands

it he's a chemist and i mean he he really gets it no he, he's a research scientist. You understand? You know, he was a complete straight laced guy. Wasn't doing anything till he was in his 30s. Yeah, I know. Pretty crazy story. It is a crazy story. And what I really appreciate about what he does is I think there's a lot of perhaps justified insecurity in the world of drugs. So people have been oppressed for such a long time that they need a justification of some kind. I'm using psychedelics because it's religious. I'm using psychedelics because it's medical. It's a therapy. I'm using psychedelics because it's traditional. It's part

of my religion. I'm using psychedelics for this reason or that reason. It's very rare that people will just stand up and say, I'm using these things because that's my freedom. I don't need to justify it. I don't need to say that I have chronic back pain and it's treating it and I should be allowed to treat my pain. It doesn't matter. It's just my choice as an adult. Even if it's bad for me, it's my choice as an adult. And it needs no justification.

Like whiskey. Yeah. I mean, whiskey's celebrated, and it's on television. You can watch ads for whiskey during TV shows. It's like, celebrate it. Have a glass of whiskey. And I like whiskey. But you drink a lot of whiskey, it will fuck you up.

And we don't care. We're just accustomed to it. It's become a part of our culture. So it's a traditional use. It's sanctioned by the government. You get a nice tax stamp on it. And so we're okay with it. It's become a part of our culture. So it's traditional use. It's sanctioned by the government. You get a nice tax stamp on it, and so we're okay with it. But all these patterns that I just described emerged during

Prohibition as well. Yeah. So alcohol is prohibited, so you have medical whiskey. You get a prescription from the doctor for whiskey, because it's good for your nerves. One of our sponsors, Buffalo Trace, they've been around longer than the United States. They've been around since 1773. And they made whiskey during Prohibition. They're still running. They're the longest running distillery in America. And they

made whiskey for medicinal purposes during Prohibition, which is kind of hilarious. And of course, we see it with cannabis as well. And I get it. I understand why people are doing this, because it remains very controversial. And so you want some kind of justification. But you should remember, at the end of the day, that no justification should be required. And if you get too lost in the justification, you might forget why you're doing it in the first place. Like, an analogy that I've been thinking about for years, like, this is kind of like a long analogy, so it's gonna be like a one minute analogy, but like, it would be, it would be like if in the 60s, people started listening to music for the first time, and they decided that it was associated with the counterculture, anti-war movement. Some people were listening to music too loud and causing irreversible damage to their hearing. And so medical doctors said, okay, this is clearly a problem. This person is deaf as a result of listening to music. We've got to regulate it. We've got to prohibit it to protect people because it's a problem. And then on top of that, there's an added advantage that because everyone is going to continue listening to music, we can selectively prosecute the people that we want to, because it's a little crime that everyone is committing. And then that keeps going for years, and people

continue listening to music and playing music, and they create their own biases where they say, it's okay to listen to music. It's just, as long as you don't perform it or record it, it's all right, as long as you're just a listener. And then eventually, some scientists get together, and they all say that they've never listened to music before because if they had, it would somehow bias their understanding and that would be terrible. So they've never listened to music before, but they've looked at old pre-prohibition information on music and they've decided scientifically that it is in fact very good and can be used as a medicine. And then everyone embraces it as a medicine and says, oh, I just listened to music today. It was so wonderful for my anxiety. It was really fantastic.

And that would be great. And that would be good. And that would be a way to make music legal again. But it also would entirely miss the point that music doesn't have to be a medicine. And to be clear, you could do these studies with music. Music is a medicine. There is music therapy. I'm sure you could design a study where music treats

neurodegenerative diseases or music treats depression. I guarantee it. And you could get positive results. And you could then say that music is a medicine. But so what? It doesn't need to be a medicine. And I just want people to, as much as I enjoy this new medicalization and the decriminalization that's taking place, I just hope people remember that it doesn't need to be any of those things. And this history of justification is ultimately something that we are doing because we're afraid. Afraid to acknowledge the fact that we should be free to do whatever we want, regardless of whether or not it's good. Yes. Yeah. Well said.

So, I mean, you could use that for anything, right? You could say that about exercise. You could say that about running. You like to run. Well, there's been medical studies that show that running is bad for your knees. You should stop running. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. What the fuck? Like, we should outlaw CrossFit. You know how many people fuck up their back and tear shoulders for CrossFit? Well, we need to stop CrossFit. You can say that about anything. And the problem is a lot of what you get when you have people telling people to not do things is people that don't have any experience in those things telling people not to do them.

And whether they're drugs or whether they're physical activity or whether they're... There's a lot of different things that people do that you could – racing cars, you could deem them detrimental. And I am a proponent of freedom. And I don't think there's any all-knowing, all-seeing being that's wiser that understands the correct way for all human beings to move forward in life and the correct decisions to make. There's no father figure. There's no godlike human being out there that in life and the correct decisions to make. There's no father figure. There's no godlike human being out there that can guide us the correct way. There's pros and cons to everything. You could abuse almost everything you do.

If you show that people, if they jog a little bit every day, it actually turns out to be good for you. But ultra marathons, we have to outlaw because these people are they're getting rhabdomyosis they're they're they're pissing out diet coke and they look terrible and they're dying you're like no like you got to be able to do whatever you want to do you're a human being and you are finite no matter what it's not like if you die the uh entire world suffers some irreversible loss and and millions of people starve to death because you decided to run 100 miles that's no it's you and your life do what you want whether it's smoking marijuana or running 100 miles or doing whatever the fuck you want and unless we embrace that

we're going to see more of this nanny state nonsense that we've been dealing with since prohibition in this country. And we're dealing with it right now. There's a lot of things that will never kill you that are illegal. Cannabis being one of the big ones, because that's the most preposterous one. Yes. Yeah. And of course, I agree with you completely.

And I think that the one thing that people have to be very careful about and remember is that it always seems like a good idea to make something illegal that's why it happens it seems like a good idea so in the time since we last spoke uh over 70 drugs have been scheduled over 60 of them are in schedule one really no yes like what well they're bad drugs, so don't worry about it. They're all the bad ones. None of the good ones. It's just fentanyl derivatives.

They're the bad ones. So, of course, they're Schedule 1. Who would want to defend some new fentanyl derivative? Fentanyl kills people. We've got to make them all illegal. And they're synthetic cannabinoids. Those are horrible. Make them all illegal.

Those are the bad drugs. And some stimulants as well. Those are terrible. Make those illegal too. Well, it's very hard to undo these things. And it seems like the right thing to do when you do it. But then think of how hard it is to put the toothpaste back in the tube afterwards. It doesn't go very well. And people are not good at acknowledging mistakes, at acknowledging when they've done something wrong. It took the church, like, 350 years to apologize to Galileo.

Like, it doesn't—it takes a while to acknowledge that you make these mistakes. And so I think that when we're caught up in a hysteria— this is another thing that I really appreciate about Carl Hart— is when we're caught up in a hysteria, it always seems like the right thing to do to crack down. Because of course, of course, opioids are bad. Of course, of course, of course, we've got to make them illegal. They kill people. We have to make them all illegal. People are dying as a result. But that's always been the way that we thought. That's what we thought with psychedelics in the 60s. That's what we thought with PCP derivatives in the 70s,

and then we realized that we'd actually made a mistake, that maybe the science was flawed, that maybe we hadn't fully interrogated the therapeutic benefits that these substances have. Yeah, but the biggest argument against all that thinking is cigarettes. I mean, there's very little benefit other than a cognitive boost that you get from cigarettes. Oh, yeah. It's the leading preventable cause of death. Yeah. I mean, and it kills a half a million people every year in this country.

I mean, we're freaking out about heart attacks and strokes, and rightly so. And then we somehow or another skirt right over cigarettes. You know, imagine if cannabis was killing a half a million people every year jesus christ could you imagine and people like hey man just don't smoke so much you know like leave me my freedom that would really be a crazy argument yeah it's tricky it's tricky because i also don't want to be a drug elitist and say that, you know, of course, I don't smoke uh i started smoking i did a show with my friend tony hinchcliffe back when he used to smoke now he just sucks on that jewel thing which is probably 100 times worse but uh when he was smoking cigarettes i'm like why why do you smoke that

thing he goes there get a nice rush before i go give me one of those fucking things he's like no you're gonna get addicted like i'm not gonna get addicted just give me a fucking cigarette and i smoked i was like oh this is a nice head rush. And I went on stage and I was like, I feel great. I got this nice head rush. It's like it's good right before you perform, right before you go on stage. Dave, well, Dave smokes a lot, but he smokes them before he goes on. But he smokes those native, what are those things called? American spirits.

Those are fine for you. They've got an Indian on it. It's all natural. Don't worry. But there's a rush that you get when you smoke a cigarette before you go on stage that's really nice. And I have zero fear about getting addicted to them. I smoked two of them the last time I did a show with him.

I haven't smoked one since. But they're nice right before a show. I've never brought myself to buy. I can't bring myself to buy them, though. I've never gone into a store and said, give me a pack of cigarettes. Yeah. I think it's a bad example for my kids, too, if they got in my car. They go, Daddy, what the fuck is this?

Is that a pack of cigarettes? Oh, no. Yeah. It's a bad example. And it's tough. I've never smoked cigarettes, but I have been on and off a user of nicotine gum. Ah, that stuff's good. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's addictive. Chew, too. Yeah, my friend Donald Cerrone brought in some chew once, and I chewed. And you get a nice little pick-me-up for that. But I swallowed it. I swallowed the chew. I didn't know what I was doing.

Was it dip yeah got in there wound up swallowing it i've done that as well yeah do you ever smoke cigars i have do you like those yeah i think they're all right they're all right yeah not much i mean i'm very conflicted about nicotine because i really like it a lot but i cigar right now got one right over there i'm sort of tempted okay let's have one okay one. Okay, all right, let's do it. That's all I need to hear. I'm the devil. This is pure pressure.

No, no, no. This is all good. No, no, it is good. Get some good ones here. Here we go. There we go. Hamilton. I know I'm going to enjoy some nicotine like Americans.

We can do what we want. They can't stop us. Was it supposed to be bad for you? You're not scared, are you, Hamilton? No, I'm a lover of tobacco. I think it's an amazing plant. Here you go. Here's a torch.

There's a cigar. And here's a torch. Hit that bad boy. You know how to use that? There we go. Here's a torch. There's a cigar. And here's a torch. Hit that bad boy. You know how to use that? Here we go. Yes, sir. Yeah, it is an amazing plant. Well, have you ever done an ayahuasca ceremony where they blow the tobacco on you? I have not.

It's a big part of the ceremony for some reason that the shaman dances around you and blows tobacco on you. I think he's just taking advantage of the fact that you're out of your fucking mind. Well, it has a clarifying effect on the mind, and ayahuasca can be disorienting, especially the beta-carbolines, I think, can have a kind of stoning, unpleasant effect. And anything that clarifies the mind, I think, can be very useful in a psychedelic experience

to sort of focus the trajectory of your thoughts. I'm sure I'm just kidding about that part. It's all fucking round. Oh, okay. I think this needs to be trimmed more on both sides. Yeah, the tobacco thing is fascinating when you think about how many people it kills. Ha! Isn't it? Yeah, the tobacco thing is fascinating when you think about how many people it kills. Ha!

Isn't it? Yeah, it's fascinating, but it's also not entirely surprising because life is difficult, and it promotes a little bit of joy and a little bit of focus and a little bit of relaxation in a very difficult existence. I like it i enjoy cigars but uh i feel reluctant to admit like every time i admit that i like cigarettes before shows i hesitate i've talked about on the podcast before but every time i say it i'm like yee like i'm ashamed you know like i'm a pretty healthy person i work out a lot i eat well. Take vitamins. But I like cigarettes.

You know what I'm saying? This one doesn't want to work. What is this? This is a... I don't know. It's from Foundation Cigars. Shout out to Foundation Cigars. They sent me some good stuff.

This is the one thing that worries me about the move to Spotify is on YouTube, I could just fast forward over a moment like this. But are there people that are going to be listening? You can fast forward on Spotify. Oh, you can? Yeah. Oh, or like you could change the speed of playback. Oh, I know they don't have that they have a little 15 second skip button too okay all right let's get past that spotify slowly but surely getting its shit together okay when it

comes to like video playback and stuff but yeah this was a boring section section of the podcast and i apologize for anybody who's freaking the fuck out right now screaming in their car are you you guys were having a really interesting conversation and Rogan, you fucked it up. You fucked it up with the cigar. You fucking junkie. That's nice. Well,

feels good, right? Yeah. Nice. I mean, I remember when I was in high school, I went to a very progressive high school. And at that time in the early 2000s, there was a magazine called Ad Busters. It was very popular. Do you remember this? And it was kind of like...

No, I don't. All these ideas about the way advertising affects people were being talked about constantly. Advertising causes eating disorders. Advertising of junk food and soft drinks causes obesity. We need to regulate advertisements so that women don't have a negative self-image and people aren't obese. And I remember thinking that it was a complicated scenario because, of course, I do believe that advertisements have these effects on people. But I also believe that advertising has become a totally ubiquitous part of our culture that is inescapable. And no amount of censorship will ever protect us from the advertising that pervades every dimension of our existence. And

so it is our responsibility to protect ourselves as much as possible, because we'll never truly be free. You know, so you get rid of Joe Camel, and you regulate the way tobacco can be advertised, and it's probably the right thing to do i'm not entirely sure it seems intuitively like it's not a bad idea not to advertise cigarettes to children yeah um but then you get jewel is jewel better probably it is i imagine that it is but i don't think it is you don't think it is no i don't think it is oh i, I don't think it is. Oh, I think it... There's a lot of lung damage that comes, particularly with just unregulated vaping, right? There's a lot of vaping where you don't really know how they're making this oil, like what they're using to put together the... Whatever the nicotine they're using.

You know, like when you go to vape stores, like you're just getting some vape shit. And some of it causes serious lung damage oh yeah i'm talking about a regulated product like jewel but yeah buying just like a jug of e-juice from a gas station is something i think that's what they call it is that what they call it you dump into your rig i don't vape i don't know fuck some people a friend of mine had one the other day, and it was like he was holding a cell phone from the 90s. I go, what is that thing? Do you remember when I bought you some,

or I had to go get some for you? That's right. We were like, I don't know what the fuck we were even doing with it. Someone gave it to us. Yeah. Oh, yeah, and I had to get the pieces for it. That's right. It was a robot dick.

I was sucking on a robot dick. It was a ridiculous one. This cigar does not want to stay lit. Right? It's almost like maybe it's too moist in that humidor. Yeah, there's been a lot of people that vape a lot that have had some serious lung issues. Like real heavy-duty lung issues. I think most likely it's that e-juice that you're talking about,

some unregulated bullshit. You know, you're making some fucking weird mist with heat, and you're sucking it into your lungs. Yeah, inhaling yeah many milliliters of propylene glycol right it's i mean yes it's i if i had to bet on vaping at least a regulated product assuming that there isn't some type of you know heavy metal contamination or vitamin e acetate or something like that in it versus smoking tobacco i would bet that vaping is safer but that said nicotine gum is probably the best though right seems like it's the best to me

but the other thing and this is something that carl hart doesn't talk about very much and he probably would this is maybe one thing that we would disagree on, is I do think that dependence in and of itself is undesirable and is disempowering. And I'm not talking about addiction. I'm not talking about, you know, destroying your life, destroying your family, professional ruin. I'm just talking about being dependent on anything, habits. Having a habit is undesirable and should be avoided.

Yeah, that's a good call. Yeah. He's a good call. Yeah. He's talked about it, but I think what he's trying to do is downplay the effects of withdrawals and a lot of the things that people associate with opioid addiction, a lot of other things. The way he describes it, I mean, I don't know if he's right because I've never gone through it, but he describes it as going through the flu know he's right because i've never gone through it but he describes it as like going through the flu it's like it's not that big a deal yeah i haven't experienced it either and i think it's funny how it's often the things that i haven't experienced that i'm

most likely to disagree with somebody on and you must be american so that that gives me pause i don't want to just say like i, I don't know about that. But I certainly have known many, many people. I've lived with someone who struggled very severely with opioid addiction. And it's just context dependent. So Carl Hart has a section in his book where he describes intentionally becoming dependent on opioids and then almost as a stunt withdrawing immediately before giving a talk on opioid addiction. And yeah, and I think that's a, you know, an interesting idea. And I don't doubt that he was able to do that. But there's a big difference between doing something

for three weeks, three months, three years, depends on the dose, depends on the support network, depends on pre-existing psychological and medical conditions that may be contributing to the user's choice to use this stuff in the first place. You know, for a lot of people, it might start with back pain or something like that. And you start taking the opioid and it helps you become dependent. And then at the time that you have to stop, you haven't done anything to address the root cause of the back pain. So if you stop, you have all the back pain that you started with, which may even be worse than it started. And you've got to deal with opioid withdrawal. And it makes it very hard for people. So I do have, you know, a lot of compassion for the people that get mixed up in that. That

said, and I got into trouble for saying this last time I was on the podcast, I made a point that I felt the way that opioids were discussed, everyone acted like it was a big surprise that they were addictive. Like, we found evidence that Purdue knew oxycodone is addictive, and they knew this all along. And this is the thing that I find a little bit difficult to stomach. People have known that opioids produce dependence of one kind or another for hundreds of years, if not thousands. The first medically reported cases of oxycodone addiction that I'm aware of are from 1914. In 1914, there was a medical term for oxycodone addiction called eucalyptism,

because the brand name for oxycodone at that time was eucalypt. And this was something that has been known about for over a century. Now, I'm not suggesting that every medical doctor has read whatever obscure literature that I'm aware of. I know that they haven't, and that's fine. But what I find a little bit off-putting is how could I, as a high school student in Massachusetts, have had an intuitive awareness that Percocet was a recreational drug, that Percocet was a drug that if you get a prescription for it, that's going to be fun. That's going to be an enjoyable one.

And then somehow these people that studied medicine were so unaware. And almost all of the blame has been placed on the pharmaceutical companies who, make no mistake, behaved very badly. They did what pharmaceutical companies do. They tried to sell their product and they manipulated, I mean, they infiltrated medical education. They changed the very way that pain was conceptualized and went from saying that it was something

that you had to deal with to something that should be treated compassionately. And it caused a fundamental philosophical shift in the medical community. That's an impressive maneuver for them to have pulled off. But still, at what point are doctors responsible for not recognizing that their patients have become dependent? And at what point are people responsible for recognizing their own dependence? If we put all of the blame on pharmaceutical companies, it's ultimately a very disempowering position that won't protect

us in the future, because there will always be somebody trying to sell us something that's bad for our health. And to some extent, for better or worse, it will always be our responsibility to protect ourselves. So do you think the responsibility falls on the doctors? Do you think the responsibility falls on the patients, a combination of both? Combination of both. And it falls on the pharmaceutical company as well, make no mistake. But here's the thing. There's nothing mysterious about oxycodone addiction. This should not have been a curveball for anyone. This is a simple derivative of morphine.

You have morphine, you have heroin, you have oxycodone, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, oxymorphone, and so on. They're all in this chemical class called morphinans. And they're all basically similar. I'm sure there's some opiophile listening to me say this who's going to do a spit take, but they're pretty similar. Opiophiles. Is there a magazine like Audiophile? Opiophile magazine? A dude on a couch like this? Oh, but they're very similar drugs that are very, very well characterized medically. This is not some newfangled thing that no one, this is not some, you know, RNA therapy that just was invented a year ago that no one had ever known about, that no one could have anticipated. These are simple derivatives of morphine that have been known about medically for thousands of years. And so the idea that no one could have

predicted this is something that I find a little bit hard to stomach. And I think that it's a dangerous oversimplification of the phenomenon that will ultimately harm people. Because if you don't take, if you don't, if you just point a finger at a bad guy and say it's, oh, it's the bad guy's fault. And then it's easier for you because you don't, if you just point a finger at a bad guy and say, oh, it's the bad guy's fault, and then it's easier for you because you don't have to assume any personal responsibility. You don't have to think that your physician was maybe complicit in something that was damaging to your mental and physical health. And so it was all Mortimer Sackler cackling and counting his blood money at Purdue Pharmaceuticals. But, you know, I don't buy that narrative as being as simple as it is. Yeah, there is an infantilization of our society that we've kind of like, you know, we didn't even know that cigarettes were bad for you.

People have known cigarettes are bad for you for a long time. We didn't even know that this could, like, people don't take responsibility for what they put into their body. And they assume that these people that are taking it had no knowledge whatsoever. We don't put any oneness on them to do any research, especially today with the Internet. You know, you can kind of research basically anything while you're waiting to go into the doctor's office or while you're sitting in the doctor's office. You know, Johnny, I'm going to give you Vicodin. You're like, Vicodinin hold on a second doctor and you can just google that and go hmm seems like vicodin could be an issue like what about this constipation thing what about that i was watching

this uh show the other day one thing that does disturb me is uh commercials that cigar might suck i feel like i want to give you another one something about these 10 minutes cigar they're not uh they're not for whatever reason they're not staying lit intermission oh this one's okay i got it going now i was watching a show the other day and there was this commercial for some migraine medicine and then they do the thing where they play the music you know they got this kind of upbeat cheery music you know that this might you know you take one of these a month and it's going to keep you from getting migraines and then it goes over the list of all the stuff that could happen to you if you take this stuff

it's the weirdest thing that they sort of kind of like gloss oh and then say it while the cheery music's going on you might die you might get a constipation to the point where you got to go to the doctor you know like there's all these different things that they and they say ask your doctor about this stuff like it seems really weird that they can advertise that like you have a problem well yeah they're legally required to disclose these side effects no i understand that that they can advertise that. Like, you have a problem. Yeah, they're legally required to disclose these side effects. No, I understand that. That's not my issue. My issue is the fact that there's only two countries in the world

that allow you to advertise pharmaceutical drugs on television. Yes. The United States and New Zealand. That's it. It's weird. It's weird, and it shouldn't be done. No. Because we're easily influenced.

Human beings are very malleable you know we're well although that's totally critical for me to say that because i was just talking about how we have to have personal responsibility and not be endlessly seduced by the pervasive advertisements that surround us but i i'm conflicted about it because that also seems like a little bit weird because they're medical interventions. It could maybe be advertised to doctors, but it's really complicated. Here's a good example that is not widely known that I think is a useful point of contrast between what happened with oxycodone in the United States and what happened in France with a far less known story. So in France, there was an antidepressant called amineptine that, unlike most antidepressants it had a mild stimulant action i've actually used it myself it's pleasant it's not highly stimulating

at the therapeutic dose what's the mechanism what is it i believe it's a low potency dopamine reuptake inhibitor but it's been a while since i've looked at the literature and as i'm about to get to this pharmaceutical company has a history of misrepresenting the pharmacology of the substances that they sell so amineptine comes out it's well received by people with depression because it produces a little bit of a stimulant effect in the united states we have a drug called wellbutrin which is also a stimulant antidepressant and many people like that aspect of it because it doesn't just treat the depression. It gives you a little bit of energy to maybe tackle the tasks before you. Okay, fine. The problem is that people start using extremely, extremely large doses of MNF teen and they're addicted to it. That's maybe a problem in and of itself, arguably depends on your position on that matter, but it's also hepatotoxic.

So they're damaging their liver and it produces this monstrous dermatological toxicity where people have these kind of grotesque lesions on their body, on their genitals and face as a result of taking this antidepressant. So that's not good. Aminaptine is removed from the market and replaced with a non-addictive alternative. An old story. There's a, you know, and this new drug is called TNAPTIN. TNAPTIN is interesting because the stated mechanism of action is that it is a serotonin reuptake enhancer, not inhibitor, enhancer.

It has the opposite mechanism of Prozac in every conventional SSRI antidepressant. Interesting. Strange. I even wrote a little article for Playboy years ago about like, gee whiz, the mind sure is strange that you can have these two antidepressants with opposing pharmacologies that both exert a therapeutic effect. As it turns out, the pharmaceutical company Servier had not disclosed that TNF-TN also was a full agonist at the mu opioid receptor, that it basically shared a pharmacology with morphine and heroin. And this was a really important thing because there were all these people taking this antidepressant and they were saying, yeah, this stuff works really well. But, you know, I used to be used to use heroin. And like, I swear, this stuff feels it feels kind of

like heroin to me and uh and people on you know different forums would say like oh sure sure sure it feels like heroin but you know it's just it's serotonin reuptake and answer that's that and this went on and on there were people that would take huge huge quantities saying like i don't know what it is about this stuff but my i'm itchy, my pupils are pinpoints, and I'm extremely, extremely high when I take this serotonergic antidepressant. Eventually, somebody overdosed on the stuff, which is actually pretty safe in high doses. And a physician injected them with naloxone or Narcan, the opioid antagonist, and it reversed the effect. So I remember reading that case report and thinking huh wow this serotonergic drug produces an intoxication that is reversed by an opioid

antagonist curious very strange then an acquaintance at columbia started actually looking at the pharmacology of this stuff and this guy's name is Andrew Krugel. And he found that it is primarily exerting its effect via the mu opioid receptor and that the pharmaceutical company had not told people that. So all these people taking what they thought was a serotonergic antidepressant were actually taking an opioid. This was never approved in the United States. But that is an instance, I think, of, you know, really unacceptable pharmaceutical deception, where you're telling someone that a drug does one thing, and in fact, it does something

entirely different. With oxycodone, I feel like it's a little bit harder to make that argument because it had been used for over 100 years. And because people already knew that it was addictive, they were making an argument that it was less addictive because it was a time release formulation which is also a complicated thing because in many instances uh slow release of a compound does reduce its potential for abuse so yeah that narcan stuff is the stuff that emts use when they find someone who's a suffering from uh an overdose yes But is it injectable? Yeah.

There's also a nasal spray formulation as well. Oh, so they find you spazzing and they just up your nose and you're all right? Yep. How does that work? It works because it's a very high affinity antagonist at the same receptor that heroin binds to. So it has a greater attraction to that receptor

than heroin does and it's able to displace it and reverse the effect. Will it also sober people up? Immediately, yes. So not only does it sober you up, it precipitates instantaneous withdrawal. So it's actually very uncomfortable for many people that use it because it's not just you take it and you're fine. It's you take it and you withdraw,

and then there's actually a problem that's not talked about very much. Sometimes people overdose, receive Nar narcan go into withdrawal and then use again because they're in horrible pain from the withdrawal and the half-life of the narcan can be shorter than some opioids so then by the time it wears off you have the original opioid in your system that caused the overdose in addition to the new opioid that you ingested to reverse the withdrawal that was precipitated by the Narcan. And you overdose again? And you can, yeah. Oh, Jesus. Yeah.

Is there anything that mitigates withdrawal effects? Is there some sort of a chemical that you can take? Oh, yeah. Yeah. There's all sorts of things. I mean, the most common, I mean, there's a brilliant, brilliant drug that was designed

at Janssen Pharmaceuticals called Liparamide, brand name Imodium. I'm sure you've heard of it. Yeah, I've heard of Imodium. So what most people don't know about Imodium is that it's a super potent opioid.

And it's an opioid that was designed so that it never enters the brain. So it exerts all the effects of an opioid on your peripheral system, but not any of the CNS effects that cause euphoria. At extremely high doses, it can actually enter the brain, but that's a separate. Does it work as a pain reliever for people? No, unless you take extraordinarily high doses. Its main effect is on intestinal motility.

unless you take extraordinarily high doses, its main effect is on intestinal motility. And so it causes the constipation of an opioid without any of the psychological euphoria-inducing effects. It's a beautiful piece of drug design and medicinal chemistry. And so that can mitigate the gastrointestinal symptoms of opioid withdrawal. There's also a number of sedatives, benzodiazepines, different things that people will take to address this of opioid withdrawal. There's also a number of sedatives, benzodiazepines, different things that people will take to address this or that concern. There's also tapering. There's also ibogaine. There are definitely treatment strategies out there.

You're not hopeless if you find yourself in the midst of this. There's also just different opioids, right? We talk about opioids as this monolithic entity, like opioids are bad. Opioids do this. There's also, you know, just different opioids, right? We talk about opioids as this monolithic entity, like opioids are bad, opioids do this. Well, they're a pharmacological class that have, you know, a very diverse potential in all sorts of different directions. The same chemist at Columbia was doing research on this antidepressant opioid that I was describing. And what was funny about it is that even though the pharmacology was to some extent misrepresented by the pharmaceutical company,

it did exert an antidepressant effect. Hmm. And he was even able to show that it had certain spinogenesis-inducing effects as well, so it causes growth of dendritic spines on neurons. Cool. But when he was trying to get investors interested in some derivatives of TNF team that he made, he found

that the opiophobia has become so great in our culture that people were not interested in it, even if it is a potentially valuable antidepressant. So this is why it's important to have a balanced perspective on these things. Because if we're not careful, and we're not balanced, the pendulum will continuously swing to different extremes of one point, we decide, okay, it's all right for everyone to use opioids as much as they want. And that's that, which was kind of what happened at the beginning of the so called opioid crisis, right? And then there's a compensatory backswing, where you say, wait a second, look, all these people died. There are all these problems with dependence. We can't do this. We've got to regulate them. Then the chronic pain community will come out and say, wait a second, we need this stuff to

function. You can't cut us off from opioids just because of this epidemic of people that were misusing it. And it goes back and forth endlessly. And it's really, there is no answer. Like I'm sure I would like to think what I've just said to you right now is a pretty balanced perspective. But I'm sure that there'll be enormous numbers of people that are angry at me about this, because they think they're evil, or they think that I was too hard on them. It's a really polarizing issue, like absolutely everything these days. Well, this, what you just said, this rant is one of the reasons why you must stay in media. Ha! You have to, because there's not a lot of people that can articulate the pharmacological effects and just the pros and cons and the negative and positive in a balanced way, like you just did.

Because you're being very objective about these things, and just fact-based, science-based analysis of the pros and cons and the realities of the use and the efficacy of these drugs. This is important, Hamilton. There's not a lot of people that know what you know. It is important. That can express themselves the way you do. Well, thank you.

That's nice of you to say. But I just hope that as many people as possible will remember the lessons of the past. They won't. Hope away. Because these hysterias have never helped anyone and they've caused incalculable human suffering. Yeah. You know, we can talk about the tragedies of the so-called crack epidemic, but then that's what generated the sentencing disparity. Yes. but then that's what generated the sentencing disparity. Yes, yes. And that is, and I think it's safe to say

that the number of people that have been imprisoned and have had their lives destroyed, have had their families torn apart, have had their employment opportunities dashed to pieces because they had a small nugget of alkaloidal material from a South African plant, or South American plant, rather. It's just, it's nuts, and it didn't help anyone. Same thing with PCP.

Oh, here's a good story. Here's a really good one. So, do you know about Charles Innes? Have you heard about this guy? No. Charles Innes is the quintessential drug scare story character. He's the man who smoked angel dust and tore out both of his eyes and went completely insane. He's the poster child for the horrors of PCP. Hunter S.

Thompson wrote about Charles Innes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, talking, and it's kind of in a few different sections. It's like in the news. It was happening in 1971 at the same time that he was writing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. So this was a topical story about the horrors of drugs in America, right? And this is talked about endlessly. It's got a lot of media at the time. Don't smoke PCP. You could end up like Charles Innes, the man who tore out his eyes. So one dark and stormy night, I get an email from Charles Innes.

And I think, there's no way. First of all, this was maybe a decade ago, and I didn't know anything about even how blind people use computers. So I thought, Charles Innes, the man who tore out both of his eyes, is watching my TV show and is writing me an email? This has got to be a troll. There's no way. This is the same be a troll. There's no way this is the same Charles Innes. So we start talking. Eventually, we talk on the phone. And I realized that this is indeed the real Charles Innes. How old was he at the time? I think he was in his early 20s. I think

he was a Johns Hopkins University student. Oh, when he in the 1970s 1970s, when he's emailing you. Oh, now he's, I think probably in his 70s or 80s. Yeah. Oh, wow. And, and, and so he starts telling me his story and surprise, surprise, the story is completely, completely different from what was described in the media. What really happened to him isn't a story about the horrors of PCP at all. It's a story about the horrors of police brutality. And it is something that I don't think has ever even been publicly discussed. He was kind of, I think, a low-level weed dealer in Baltimore in the 60s. And he got set up by some cops. They wanted to trap him in a buy.

So they said, listen, we've got this amazing hash and we want to sell it to you. We've got the best price. But to make sure that you're not a cop, you have to bring a little cocaine with you. And if you bring the cocaine, we'll know that you're legit. So he has no idea that he's being set up. He goes to this buy. He looks at the hash and he decides that it is of inferior quality and he doesn't want to buy it. And he says, yeah, sorry, I'm not interested.

I don't want this stuff. So he leaves the room and gets tackled and arrested. And they search him and find the cocaine and say well you've still got cocaine on you even though you didn't buy this cannabis and he says well you can't do that that's entrapment the only reason i had this cocaine is that you insisted that i bring it so he gets a lawyer and he succeeds in defending himself the charges are dropped but he pisses off the baltimore police department in doing this because he's just embarrassed them. So some local guy who he thinks is a police informant calls him up and says, you know, listen, man, like, I am sorry about what happened to you, but I've got a gift for you.

It's this this drug. It's like acid and it's sprayed onto parsley. And I'm going to I've got a lot of it. So I want to give some to you. And he said, is this angel dust? If it is, I'm not interested. I said, no, it's sprayed onto parsley and I'm gonna I've got a lot of it so I want to give some to you and he said is this angel dust if it is I'm not interested I don't he said no it's not angel dust it's not PCP this is some some amazing new psychedelic and it's gonna blow your mind so like take it it's good so he takes this canister of plant material and puts it on his shelf or something then an hour later, the police raid his apartment. He realizes that he's been set up again. He runs to the canister and eats all of the

contents of it, knowing that they're going to arrest him for it. And PCP is a powerful dissociative anesthetic. So he loses consciousness. He blacks out out entirely they lock him up without any kind of medical supervision and in his delirious state he doesn't tear out his own eyes but he damages his eyes severely enough that he has never recovered his vision he scratches his eyes in some way and um and and this is the sort of story that will be brought up as a don't smoke PCP story. Someone who is entrapped, neglected, abused, has nothing to do whatsoever with PCP. Oh, God. That's horrible. And this happens all the time. This is not, that's not an extraordinary story drugs are such an

amazing scapegoat they're so good as tools to diminish people to show that they're weak that they're bad that they're of low moral character of one kind or another and the moment that we abandon all those stigmas the moment they can't be used as a tool against us anymore. God, that's fucking horrible. It is horrible. You know, it goes back to one of the main arguments against criminalizing drugs is that you're just going to prop up organized crime and you are you're definitely going to prop up organized crime i mean that's that's literally what's going on with the mexican cartels it's gone on with pablo escobar and el chapo and so on and

so forth down the line but it's also it goes on with cops using them to arrest people and you know planting drugs on people you know it's a tiny little baggie planted on a person you can get away with a lot of shit and then there's a lot of bad cops it's like like anything else oh yeah and and i think that not only are there you know it's not even about good and bad cops it's i think that they will have a corrupting influence on law enforcement. I think that it could make a good cop into a bad cop because it breaks down the idea of protecting people. There's an implicit hypocrisy in the enforcement of these laws. We are arresting people for victimless crimes that will distort your thinking inevitably. It has to.

There's no way it couldn't. And there's only two people, two types of people in our culture that we allow to talk about the world in terms of good guys and bad guys, and that's cops and children. With children, it's because they're not developed sufficiently to have a complex understanding of human behavior, and so they're bad guys, and the bad guys do bad things, and they're good guys, and the good guys do bad things and they're good guys and the good guys save people and they do good things with cops there's it's psychologically necessary for them to have those moral binaries because if you don't how would you ever do your job how would you ever arrest someone for stealing like an ipad or something like that, if you thought, well, wait a second, this guy has no money. This guy grew up in a part of the country with a broken public education system. He has no

opportunities. He has no role models in his life. He has nothing to look forward to. He maybe need this. Maybe this could help him out. Is this really a bad guy? Of course not. It's not a bad person at all. But if you think that, then you would never be able to arrest anyone, because you'd only be thinking about the fact that no one really knowingly does wrong. I mean, this is like an important philosophical idea that I don't think is discussed enough. This is really this good guy, bad guy mentality is permeating our culture. And, you know, there's a an interesting socratic dialogue that isn't talked about all that much called gorgias and uh in it socrates is just articulating this basic idea that no man knowingly does wrong that there aren't bad guys there aren't bad guys and i know

that that's a slippery slope, because if you go down that road too far, then you never punish anyone for everything, because you understand that every action is justifiable in the mind of the perpetrator, right? But I think it is important to remember that when you're talking about these things. Yeah. It's the argument of determinism, right? Sapolsky, you know, Robert Sapolsky? I do, yeah. We had a conversation and he said that he believes that in the future, one of the main things that we're going to look back on when we look at this culture and we're going to feel like we made a tremendous mistake is punishing people

for things that they've done and that, know the concept of determinism like that you really don't have free will and that you're what you think of as free will is your what all the accumulation of experiences and education and genetics and all the different things that have happened to you that led you to this point and the idea that you're responsible for all of them and especially if you've been abused especially if you've been harmed and damaged and programmed in a terrible way that you know he as a psychologist as someone who understands the mechanisms of the mind said that he thinks that that's going i mean and again this is you know if we're going to have a polite society in a safe society we can't just allow people to run around murdering people and raping people and mugging people, right?

We have to do something about it. But he, and it's, again, like many things that have to do with human beings, it's very complicated. So what do you do? He doesn't have an answer as to what you do. And I don't think anybody can because there's so many variables and so many people in so many different situations. But he believes that that is going to be the one thing that we look back on. And much like, you know, we look back on some of the barbaric treatment of people in the past, and the long, long ago past, that we're going to look back on people today, this idea that you're responsible for all of your actions,

particularly if like you're talking about someone who grew up in a poor poor uh environment crime-ridden drug-riddled neighborhood filled with gangs abused and then they go on to commit a crime is that really their fault it's slippery yeah it's slippery and it's also it's like you know bill cosby had that kind of like bootstrapping argument of like you know the real issue is a cultural ben shapiro does this as well it drives me crazy that's like the real issue is a cultural issue we gotta bootstrap we gotta get rid of all the rap music and if we can just get rid of rap music ben say that we gotta get rid of he says that he says that like inner city crime is a cultural problem, basically.

Well, in some ways he's right. And in some ways that is so simplifying a super complex issue. And you're also dealing with a system that literally evolved out of slavery. So you have a lot of these communities that have never recovered from slavery. They went from slavery in the 1800s to the Jim Crow era to the civil rights era and still in many places, whether it's Baltimore or whether it's Detroit or south side of Chicago, you have these situations that exist in the same state in terms of like constant crime constant violence decade after decade after decade with no intervention there's no you know think about

what we did and this is one of the things that kind of drove me crazy in the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic where they um they decided that they needed to spend trillions of dollars to relieve businesses because these businesses had lost a lot of money during the pandemic and to relieve them. But what about these really super impoverished communities that have been fucked forever? Like the idea that these people growing up in these communities that are filled with gangs and violence, that they have the same shot at someone who's growing up in the suburbs of massachusetts like that's nonsense that's crazy it's a crazy thought and there's no emphasis at all in terms of like a national dialogue of like look here's our number this is our number one problem too many people are fucked from birth too many people are literally they're born into horrible environments where you have a very slim

chance of ever overcoming all the influences of your environment and the people around you to get out and the idea that you're just gonna just figure this out on your own is crazy yeah so few people do you look at the numbers of people that do figure it out, whether they're athletes or entertainers or whoever makes it out of the hood. The idea that you should be able to just figure it out. That's fucking crazy. It's crazy.

This is the argument that I always had about this whole idea of making America great again. It sounds great to make America great. Why would that be bad? Well, here's how to make America great. Why would that be bad? Well, here's how you make America great. Less losers. How do you have less losers? You've got to fix these places.

You've got to put massive resources and emphasis into figuring out how you fix these crime-ridden, impoverished communities. Until we do that, blaming them the same way you would blame someone who grows up in a you know two-parent household where everyone's loving and caring it's a totally different world totally different programming totally different environment yeah and of course we have laws that are explicitly designed to oppress certain people sure like. Like the crack sentencing. Yes. And I remember the New York Times published this article that I found very annoying where

they said, like, new evidence suggests that, like, one of the early arrests of George Floyd for crack preceding his murder may have been done by a corrupt police officer and maybe he didn't actually have crack after all. And it's like, it doesn't matter whether he had crack or not it doesn't matter he should have never been arrested for it in the first place it doesn't the the this is corruption regardless of whether or not he had crack well it's also the narrative of crack versus cocaine it's hilarious narrative you say crack everybody's like oh my god you're smoking crack we feel like oh he was doing coke well it's just you know getting crazy he, oh, he was doing coke. Well, he was just, you know, getting crazy.

He was getting crazy. He was doing coke, you know. It's the same thing. It's like pharmacologically, right? Basically, according to Carl Hart. I haven't done either one of them. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's just cocaine-free base.

Yeah. Ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, you look at the sentencing. In many places, it's still the same, right? Like, there's still a disparity. Ohiculous. Yeah. When you look at the sentencing, in many places it's still the same, right? Like, there's still a disparity. Oh, yeah. Obama reduced it to something like 18 to 1

instead of 100 to 1. Oh, how generous. Why any disparity at all? Yeah, it's crazy. How did this possibly happen? That's like the difference between, you know, like if they catch you with a bong, you piece of shit, what are you doing?

You're getting too high. You got a bong? No, I can't take that. A joint's fine, but a bong, you're getting radical. What are you doing? You're getting too high. You got a bong? No, I can't take that. A joint's fine, but a bong, you're getting radical. What are you using, wax? You fucking animal. What are you doing? Lock him up.

We caught your son with a bong. No one would think that that's ridiculous. But the bong hits that you get, when you get a big, deep bong hit, that's probably a more potent version of what you're going to get if you're just going to take a hit off a joint and the reason that i spend so much time talking about this and the social aspects of it is because i genuinely do believe that this is one of the most pernicious and yet fixable things in our society yeah there's a when you know when everyone is saying end white supremacy it's like of course yeah i agree end white supremacy that would be fantastic let's end white supremacy when everyone is saying end white supremacy, it's like, of course, yeah, I agree. End white supremacy. That would be fantastic. Let's end white supremacy.

But how, how is that going to happen? It's like saying end badness and meanness. I'm in favor of ending both badness and meanness and white supremacy. But those are nebulous concepts that can't be addressed with any single intervention. Whereas there are specific problems associated with prohibition, healthcare, and sentencing, I mean, you know, public education, teachers unions, all sorts of things, which I know is a controversial issue, that have created an environment where it's very, very difficult to succeed and it's very easy to have your life totally derailed by some little thing. Yeah, well, this is why I think you need to stay in media.

Because I think there's many people that really, truly do not understand the difference between cocaine and crack. They really don't understand that there is no difference. They really don't get it. So when they do hear this from someone like you who clearly understands what he's talking about, and then you realize that there still is this massive disparity in sentencing between having crack and having coke and then you go well why is that well because poor people have crack like that's literally why like it doesn't make any there's no logic to it at all it's crazy and that's just

that that is almost more than anything emblematic of a much larger issue, which is that people with money have ways to get every single drug that a poor person uses legally. Every single one. Maybe not heroin, but you can get oxycodone. How do you get coke legally? Well, cocaine is actually scheduled to. You can get a prescription for it under some circumstances. What?

Yeah. What circumstances? I'm asking for a friend haha my grandfather was an optic surgeon he had cocaine that he would use as a topical anesthetic and okay but that's but also it is sometimes used off-label for treatment of cluster headaches I knew someone that had cluster headaches that had a prescription for cocaine whoa that's very uncommon though that's one, too, because you can't really prove it. Bro, they keep coming, I can't stop them. What do you do when they give you coke for cluster headaches?

You snort it? In his case, he did, I believe. Hilarious. Yeah. Hilarious. Well, of course, of course it is hilarious, because, you know, 10 years ago, if you'd said, you know, listen, doctor, I'm really, really depressed. And I snort ketamine three times a week. And it's just amazing.

You know, it's working. It's helping me not be depressed anymore. They would say, you're insane. That's crazy. You've got a problem. You've got an issue. You have to go to a treatment center. This is dangerous.

You can't be snorting drugs. You can't be using ketamine three times a week. This is going to kill you. Now, using ketamine snorted three times a week is an FDA-approved treatment for depression that is sold by Johnson & Johnson. It's nuts. I have a friend who's a veteran who was just telling me on the phone yesterday about his use of ketamine, therapeutic use of ketamine through a physician, IV, and how much it benefited him. He goes, you know, in the beginning, it's just like alleviating your shitty feelings and depression.

He's like, that's the initial effects of it. He said, but then it gets into this thing where he's sorting out his life. And he's like recognizing problems that he has in his life and then identifying fairly clear solutions that he can take action to fix those problems. He's like, it gives me a clarity in terms of how to organize my life. And it was a really interesting conversation because I never had anybody put it to me that way. And it was very illuminating. I know quite a few friends who have used ketamine

over the last six or seven years or so from doctors, like doctors prescribing them ketamine with varied effects. Like some of them, it was like it could really help them a lot. Like my friend Neil Brennan had a great take on it. He was like, because he was one of the first person I ever heard do it, and he's tried a bunch of different things for depression.

And he said, you know, I go to the doctor and, you know, he puts me in a chair and gives me an IV drip of ketamine. He's like, and I am fucking tripping balls. He goes, I can't even believe this is legal. Like, I can't believe this is happening. I'm going to a doctor and I'm tripping my fucking brains out.

I'm like, wow. Like, is that helping you? He's like, a lot. Yes. It's helping me.

But the fact that you can go to a doctor and have a full-blown psychedelic experience as you should be able to i mean it's it this is another sad thing is that for so long we've tried to strip these effects out of drugs as much as possible because we've decided that it's an unacceptable side effect well is it unacceptable if it actually helps you not want to die isn't it worth it to feel a small amount of intoxication? I mean, for many people, obviously, it's also desirable. But because we're so afraid of these altered states, we've tried to promote the creation of these sort of SSRI type drugs that don't really do all that much to your consciousness. They have very subtle

effects that, you know, maybe make you a little bit high have you used them i have yeah what are your uh experiences on ssris i've never taken them for long periods of time i've taken ssr i've taken prozac for maybe three or you actually have to take it for weeks to exert a therapeutic effect and i wasn't taking it as a treatment for depression i was taking it out of curiosity because i wanted to know what it felt like and um but you weren't depressed i was not depressed when i took prozac i've had friends As a treatment for depression, I was taking it out of curiosity because I wanted to know what it felt like. But you weren't depressed? I was not depressed when I took Prozac.

I've had friends that take it for depression, not Prozac, but other SSRIs, and have had positive effects. But I've also had friends that take it and they felt like they were numb. And a car could just crash right in front of them. They'd be like, oh, a car crash. Just keep walking. Like nothing would phase them and they'd rather feel shitty and feel things than feel numb. But I think it varies widely, right? Of course.

And depression is not one disorder. order and we're going to increasingly in the future appreciate that many of these things that we use with one term are probably many very ultimately dissimilar clinical entities so if you look at depression you wonder well wait a second why does this work for some people and not for other people well because they're different people and they probably have different things that we're calling depression yes there are different symptoms that we can agree in tandem constitute depression but that doesn't mean that depression is the same thing is caused by the same thing is treated with the same chemicals which is another reason that i think it's really important to have a wide array of things available because you never know what thing is going to be the thing that helps you is ketamine schedule one no it's not no ketamine is similar to pcp very similar yes like what is the difference um where ketamine has an n-methyl group pcp is a piperidine ring

and then on the aromatic ring ketamine has a chlorine atom and then on the cyclohexane ring ketamine has a ketone so there's like three points of modification it's modified on and on every ring, but the major experiential difference is that ketamine has a shorter duration than PCP. Ketamine is kind of more psychedelic than PCP, arguably. It's dose dependent, so I don't think you can say that absolutely. And ketamine has a sedative effect where it becomes very difficult to move. You're not inclined to move at high doses at all. In fact, you basically can't walk at all at a high dose, which is funny because people talk about it as like a dance drug or a social drug.

I find it to be a profoundly antisocial drug. Well, that's the K-hole. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that's actually where ketamine becomes most interesting because at a lower dose, ketamine has a kind of alcohol-like effect. It basically feels more or less like you've had a couple of drinks. And then as the dose increases, you start to recede into yourself and enter something that's sort of similar to a lucid dream where the imagery becomes increasingly abstract. Unlike classical psychedelics, it doesn't tend to have the same

sort of, like there are many archetypal classical psychedelic experiences, like you've described smoking DMT and seeing Buddhas made of electricity. Often people will see religious imagery, M.C. Escher-like imagery, geometric imagery, things that feel beautiful, that feel connected to humanity and nature. There's something about the dissociative anesthetics that tends to be a bit more random, a bit weirder. It doesn't feel like you're entering a numinous holy realm as much as like a different channel of consciousness that is bizarre and otherwise inaccessible. Terrence McKenna described it like being in a brand new office building, but no one's in the building. Yes. Yeah, I know. I just think it's weird. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, he had a certain bias there. Everyone has their biases, but his bias was, of course, toward plants because he saw them as a sort of... Well, he also had a perception, and I don't know if you would agree with this or not. This is kind of a crazy thought. It's very unprovable. But he believed that not only are you dealing with the psychoactive effects of these psychedelics, are you dealing with the psychoactive effects of these psychedelics, but you are also dealing with all of the people's experiences

that have ever taken these psychedelics somehow or another. He had this feeling that when you're tripping, you're not just tripping like you alone tripping, but that you're somehow or another interfacing with all the various trips that all the people have done with whatever these drugs are. And that was one of the things that I think he was referring to when he was talking about ketamine, because a relatively small amount of people, at least when he was alive, had experienced ketamine. Of course, Lilly was famous for his love of ketamine, and Lilly liked to use ketamine in conjunction with the isolation tank.

That was his thing, apparently. He liked intramuscular ketamine and sensory deprivation tanks. Yeah, and like so many things that Terrence McKenna said, it's both true and untrue. I think it's untrue in a literal sense, but very true in a poetic sense, I think it's untrue in a literal sense, but very true in a poetic sense, because the historical cultural context of a drug is part of what you bring to that drug experience. The molecule does not contain information. The ketamine molecule does not bring an experience to you.

That is something that is generated in your brain by your consciousness. in your brain by your consciousness. And so if you have a new substance that has no cultural associations, then maybe it was like that for him. So you don't have expectations. You don't have expectations. Right. That's a big part of it, isn't it?

It's a huge part of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I made a piece in the new season of my show about 5-MeO DMT containing toad venom. And there's a big controversy in the toad venom community, which, believe it or not, is a community. And they are purists. Are they friends with the opiophiles?

Oh, definitely not. No, no, they don't like the opiophiles. So what does the venom community think? They think that this venom has some spiritual component derived from its association with the toad that makes it better than synthetic 5-MeO-DMT. Now, I've analyzed several samples of toad venom before 5-MeO-DMT was made illegal in the United States. And in terms of what you find if you inject it into a mass spectrometer, 5-MeO-DMT is the only psychedelic that's present. In some samples, there might be trace quantities of another psychedelic called bufotinine,

but it's a minuscule amount of a less potent molecule. but it's a minuscule amount of a less potent molecule. So predominantly you have 5-amiodmt, which is likely the strongest naturally occurring serotonergic psychedelic. And for conservation purposes, it's necessary that people stop milking toads because it's become too popular. Mike Tyson's talking about it all the time. I mean, it sounds ridiculous. Like, Mike Tyson could have an effect on conservation.

But if a celebrity says they like something, that can have a tangible effect on the environment. I know people who have toads for that very reason. Because Mike Tyson talked about those toads. Now they have toads. And they milk these toads. Oh, yeah. Me too. I talked to a billionaire who flew a private jet full of toads to Greece

to create a private toad sanctuary. Wow. And I saw photos of it. Wow. How many toads has he got? In the photos, it didn't look like that many. It didn't look like a jet full. 5-MeO DMT does not strike me as something that you'd want to do a lot.

It's so terrifying. That's probably the most terrifying experience I've ever had on psychedelics because I ceased to exist. It's the one drug where I feel like when I took it, I wasn't there anymore. I was gone until I came back. I felt like I didn't have thoughts i didn't have i i knew i knew i was experiencing the 5meo dmt realm or whatever it was but i didn't there was no context in terms of i didn't realize i'm on my couch sitting at home. Like, I was gone.

I was gone. There's no visuals. It was just this white, sort of pixelated, like grayish white gone world. You know? And it was terrifying because it felt like death. It was the one thing that felt the most like, oh my god. Like, now I'm not here anymore. But coming back from it, I think it was very valuable. Like as I was returning, I remember thinking so much about, so much about the, the bullshit way in which I talk. I remember thinking that like, God,

he's like so much of the way I would communicate was not just me trying to get my thoughts across but me trying to say things in a way that would be impressive or in a way that would be flowery or you know try to make it look like i was more intelligent than i was or whatever but i remember like remembering that like really clearly like i gotta clean up the way i talk so i'm full of shit like thinking that as i was as i was trying to figure out how i was going to describe this experience i was realizing as i was thinking like god i gotta figure out how to describe this like boy i talk like i'm full of shit like like so there was value in that. But I did it a few times. I think I did it three times. But it was terrifying every time.

Terrifying. Like, while you're gone, like, while you slip away, I remember just thinking, like, whoa, this is not good. This is not good. Like, you feel like, oh, my God, I fucked up. Like, I really died. I really stopped being here. And it also makes you think, like, maybe this is going to the light.

Maybe this is what they talk about when they talk about going to the light when you die. Like, maybe you're having this kind of experience because it's really disturbing. But then pretty peaceful when it's over. Like, I felt pretty good when I came back. But the concept of giving away all of my control of reality like that for some reason nn dmt doesn't scare me as much it's a totally different drug yeah yeah experientially chemically it's you know psilocin is closer to dmt than 5-meo dmt is mushrooms are closer chemically speaking yeah and yeah i think that it defies description in a different way than other psychedelic experiences do.

With something like DMT, it's difficult to describe because there is such an abundance of imagery and thoughts and associations that it's extremely difficult to communicate that to someone. With 5-MeO-DMT, there's nothing. And that's also difficult to communicate, that you white out and there is an absence of everything completely. Do you find it terrifying?

I have found it terrifying, yes. It's very, you know, I had a very profound experience with it in 2017 and I have no real desire to use it again. Yeah, that's my thought too. It's like, I'm not going back there. I'll go back to NN DM back there i'll go back to nn dmt i'll go back to that oh me too because it's just a different drug entirely and i think that dmt can be integrated into a normal life much more easily than 5-meo dmt actually i i credit dmt with

like sort of i talked about the sort of COVID denial that I had at the beginning of the pandemic where I was, you know, I can't stop making my TV show. We're all going to get it anyway. We can't just stop working. We can't shut down the world. We can't stop flying. And then I smoked DMT and had this image of MC Escher's Angels and Demons, but instead of Angels and Demons, it was pangolins and horseshoe bats. Oh, whoa. And came out of it and thought, of course I feel horrible. Of course this is depressing and confusing.

This is actually one of the worst things that has happened in my lifetime, and I just have to accept it now. And I felt so much more at peace it just stripped away the denial and and i could just say all right this is happening and so you were just wrestling with the reality of having to shut down yeah and kind of i resented some other people on my team who in retrospect were behaving in a way that was completely rational where i was thinking like oh come on we're not going to go on this shoot really but but they were right and i was wrong and i had to stop what is the difference between psilocybin when it's uh metabolized that and and and dmt there's it's they're very close, right? Extremely close, yeah. Well, when you take psilocybin,

there's a phosphate ester that's metabolically cleaved, and that produces psilocin. Psilocin is the active metabolite, and psilocin is for hydroxy DMT. So very, very similar. The hydroxy group confers some protection from the enzyme MAO that degrades dmt and um you know the duration is obviously much longer but they're very similar drugs and and experientially speaking and chemically and the peak of a psilocin experience is very similar to dmt as well it's dmt is almost like isolating the highest point of a mushroom trip and confining it to a very short 10 to 15 minute period has anybody ever figured out a way to freebase that the same way you freebase dmt you can but it would have the same long duration so it would have a faster onset but it would still last for two to three hours really

yeah why because in smoking it you wouldn't cleave the hydroxy group that confers this resistance to MAO. So it would allow it to enter the bloodstream in the brain more rapidly. But the metabolic degradation wouldn't be accelerated in any way. You brought up something earlier that I really want to discuss. Because I remember when you were bringing this up that I had to ask you about this. Benzodiazepine. And I'm sure you're aware of what happened with Jordan Peterson. Yes, I am, yeah.

What did you think about that? He had to tell people what happened so that you... Yeah, well, I mean, again, this is like when we talk about addiction as a monolithic entity, we neglect to identify all the individual components. I mean, Jordan Peterson is not an average person. Jordan Peterson is an extraordinarily unusual, weird person who had a very stressful life situation. He had pre-existing depression, right? Then he went from being relatively unknown to being a household name and one of the most controversial people in the world,

someone who is hated by countless people, became very fashionable to treat him as if he was the devil incarnate for many liberal people. And he, I mean, imagine what that would feel like. I think people don't have a lot of empathy for public figures. And, you know, for example, if a politician is stumbling over their words, they'll say, oh, what an idiot that guy is. What a fool. But they're not remembering the pressure of knowing that every single word that you speak is going to be dissected by angry people who are going to go out of their way to try to demonstrate that you're an idiot and that you don't know what you're talking about. And that everything that you say will be misinterpreted in order to prove that you're some type of bad person. And it stunts people's ability to communicate effectively. It's very difficult. So, you know, without having spoken with Jordan Peterson personally, but I've talked with his daughter

about it a couple of times, you know, I can totally understand why you would start using benzodiazepines. You're giving talks all the time to enormous audiences. You're extremely controversial. You can assume that every single thing you do is going to be eviscerated in the press. And you need to relax a little bit. And then you have these chemicals, I believe it was Klonopin that he was taking, that will just help you sleep at night at the very least, right? And the problem, which is the case with most psychoactive drugs, it's sort of the irony of pharmacology, is that you often end up with whatever it was that you were trying to treat worse than when you started out. So he has all these problems.

They still exist. He has a drug. It temporarily relieves the stresses associated with it. But then he becomes dependent on it, which is completely understandable because the stresses don't go away. And so when you try to stop, you have all those stresses that drove you to use the drug in the first place. Plus, you have withdrawal, which is exacerbating those stresses. And it becomes very tricky. In addition to that, it sounds like he has some pre-existing psychological conditions that he's publicly spoken about. So it's very common, and I think benzodiazepines are some of the most insidiously addictive substances that are used in our culture. Again, don't get me wrong.

I'm not saying that we need to ban them or that no one should ever use them or that they don't have medical value, that we need to ban them or that no one should ever use them or that they don't have medical value, but simply that they should be used with tremendous caution because it's very easy to get into trouble with them. You know, like I said, I have never been a fan of opioids. I don't really like them at all. But when I was a teenager, I was prescribed Klonopin, and I experienced that as well. And it's very, very difficult to stop even after a short period of use. So you have to keep that in mind. And physicians don't tell you that

they say, and they say, you know, oh, you've got anxiety here, take this, and you take it. And then you realize when you stop that you can't sleep anymore. And you have something to do the next day. You can't go at night without sleep, you're doing a talk. You have to sleep. And so it becomes very difficult for people to disentangle themselves. Again, there are ways out of it. You're not doomed if you find yourself dependent on benzodiazepines. You can, you know, use cannabis for sleep, or you could use something else in the transitional period, and you can taper off. And there are treatment strategies, and i've known lots of people that were dependent on benzodiazepines that now live normal lives myself included and um and so it's it's not a death sentence by any means but it's something that people should recognize and treat with caution is there as you take benzodiazepines is there a point where where you take it for a

longer period of time it's more difficult to get off of it? Yes, there is. And one thing that people often, myself included, are pharmacological reductionists when they talk about this. So they say like, oh, you know, you have some kind of neuronal change or some change in receptor density or something that accounts for this. But what also is changing is there's a psychological change where you're not developing healthy coping strategies.

And if you magnify that over months or years, those are months or years where you haven't figured out how to relax before bed, how to unwind, right? Because you didn't have to. You had a pill, and that pill was how you unwound before bed. And a normal person, and it allows you to cultivate bad habits, right? So you can, maybe if you have a prescription for Ambien, it's not a big deal to have a cup of tea with dinner, 9pm, whatever, you're gonna take an Ambien that night, you'll go to sleep, doesn't matter if you have the tea. Well, when you take Ambien out of the equation, you might have to be a little bit more careful about the choices that you make. And you have to have a little bit of additional

discipline. So long term, you also have, like I said, you have psychological changes in your coping strategies. And that I think can be very hard for people. And I think that when people talk about long term problems as a result of drug abuse, they often assume that it's because the drug is neurotoxic and it damaged your brain. But I think just as much, it can be an issue of not adequately developing certain coping strategies as a result of using that drug use. Like if you always used a benzodiazepine when you were anxious, you may have never learned how to appropriately take a breath and relax and figure out your anxiety psychologically.

Now, when he tried to get off these benzodiazepine, the Klonopin, is that the only thing he took? As far as I, well, I, his daughter told me that during the detox, he was also inhaling xenon gas, which is an interest.

Yeah. Do you know about xenon? No. You would find xenon very, very interesting. Yeah. What's that? I mean,

could I pee? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Go pee. Go pee. Okay.

We're going to talk about xenon gas when Hamilton Morris comes back. Have you heard about xenon gas? I mean, I know the word. You're on it right now, aren't you, you son of a bitch? Xenon gas, that doesn't sound like you're supposed to be inhaling that.

That sounds like some shit they find in your basement and they have to clear your house out, right? Well,on right remember that yeah i googled it and weirdly a temperature screening unit is popping up so i don't know what that has to do with the temperature screening unit yeah general aesthetic that's used in lamps i'm so glad i talked to him about this how much does this motherfucker know about drugs i should just point, for anybody who's just listening to this, Hamilton Morris does not have a single note in front of him. I'm sure of that.

This is all popping right off the top of his head. And this dude thinks he's just going to go off and be a chemist. Get the fuck out of here. You better get back on YouTube. Maybe I'm live on YouTube every day. Yeah, he should be doing this every day, right? This guy's a national treasure. He knows so much,

and he's so good at expressing it. It makes me sad that someone like this is not more popular. I'm doing my best. He also gave me a book, The Psychedelic Toad of the Sonoran Desert. This is apparently a very old book that's been republished.

It says it's by Ken Nelson, but apparently this is like this unknown person. And it said, forward and updated edition by Hamilton Morris. And I think he's publishing this. But this is a small book about the Toad. isn't it hilarious that

mike tyson is affecting ecology with his toad use we're just singing your praises sir welcome back i'm glad i'm glad that it's his wandering dude we're saying you can't quit we're not allowing you to quit there's your book book. Oh, nice. Thank you. That's a story as well. Yes. I want to get to that story. We're going to go to that story in a moment. But please, Xenon Gas.

Okay. Xenon Gas is where we left. Okay. So you know the periodic table of elements, right? Yes. So most of the elements are not drugs. In fact, none of the elements are really... You have lithium, which as like a carbonate salt is used to treat bipolar, and rubidium is used to treat depression in Italy. But for the

most part, drugs are compounds that are made from different elements joined together. There are very few single elements that will exert a pharmacological effect and the exception is xenon so on the rightmost column of the periodic table you have the noble gases the lightest is helium then you have neon then you have um then you have argon then you have krypton and then you have xenon and nice there it is all right and then below that you have radon as well but radon is unstable so xenon is the heaviest stable noble gas and it's a trace component of our atmosphere it's in every breath that we take it's point zero zero zero zero zero eight seven percent of the atmosphere and if you distill hundreds or really more like millions of liters of air into, you compress it into a liquid under cryogenic conditions, and then you distill off all the different gases, all the nitrogen, all the oxygen, you're left with a small fraction of this very heavy gas called xenon. It's so heavy that if you, you can almost pour it like a liquid and float a foil boat into it if you pour it into a terrarium.

Yeah, very weird stuff. And it has you pour it into a terrarium. Very weird stuff. And it has the opposite effect of helium on your voice. So if you inhale helium, your voice becomes... It's like a demon. Yeah. You get this demonic, ultra-low voice. Yeah. Very interesting stuff.

But it's also a drug. And when you inhale xenon, it produces amazing euphoric anesthetic effect that is considered by some anesthesiologists to make it the perfect drug because many drugs are biotransformed in one way or another this is a single atom that is not altered in any way by the body you inhale it you exhale it unchanged and it's even used as a performance-enhancing drug in Russia, supposedly. For what? They'll put people in xenon tents,

like oxygen deprivation tents, but then you have the added sort of euphoric anesthetic properties of the xenon that supposedly allow athletes to work even harder. Really? Yeah. Breathe it in. The obscured gas improves athletes' performance.

Xenon is one of the shyest members of the periodic table of the elements. Chemically, it's almost inert. And physically, and there it goes. Naturally occurring elements. Okay, notably in Russia, it's used as an anesthetic. It's also known to protect body tissues from the effect of low temperatures, lack of oxygen, and even physical trauma. In particular, it increases the level of, how do you say that word? Erythropoietin.

Erythropoietin, also known as EPO, a hormone that encourages the formation of red blood cells. Oh, okay. So it works like EPO. I wonder if you take it if you'll test positive for EPO. It's been banned in some places, I think, as a performance enhancing drug. Interesting. Very interesting stuff. I made a whole piece sounds makes sense that he's it's russian because he he had to go through his detox in russia right or did go through his detox in russia and you know i know that he tried

that i know that he tried a number of different things i don't want to like go into his medical history without his permission or he's talked about it pretty openly. And his daughter has talked about it pretty openly. All right, well, then I'll say it. It was a whole year that he was suffering from this. Yeah. I mean, it can be rough. It can be really, really rough,

especially if you... I imagine, especially if you're a public figure, because your life is already anxiety-inducing enough, then you had this coping strategy. The rug has been pulled from under you, and you have to now exist publicly without that. It would be very, very hard. And I don't know exactly what dose he was using, and I don't know how long he'd been using it. I would say that the severity of his response seems a little bit unusual But again, I don't know enough about his medical history to say but the severity would increase depending upon the length and the duration And in the social environmental psychological factors as well. Yeah

That's why when people make statements like heroin withdrawal is really really bad or heroin withdrawal is just like the flu it's like well they're both true for different people probably it just depends okay that makes sense that makes sense but colonopin particularly difficult to get off um or benzodiazepines are i would say it's not so much that they're they are very difficult but i think more than they are difficult is that we don't treat them like they're difficult. We treat heroin like it's difficult. It's dramatized constantly. You know, we grow up on Trainspotting, Requiem for a Dream, Permanent Midnight, Christian F. All these movies that dramatize the horrors of opioid addiction and opioid withdrawal. It's a part of our cultural diet that we have learned that this is horrible and is to be avoided at all costs the same is not true of benzodiazepines which are just kind of stuff right you have rappers talking about

xanax and it's not about so xanax is a benzodiazepine as well yes it is yeah okay i know people that have a real problem with xanax. So that's what the problem is. And as bad as these things are, and I don't want to call them bad to begin with, but... Too late. They really are a vast improvement over the drugs we have. We're very spoiled right now. Most of our complaints revolve around things that are too good as opposed to too bad. You go not to say that they are without danger, but they represent a pretty substantial medical advance, and that's the reason that they're so widely prescribed.

Like, it's very important to physicians not to prescribe drugs that will accidentally kill people. That's another reason that SSRIs are so widely prescribed is because, you know, problems aside, they're very bad at causing fatal overdoses. Yeah. So that's kind of the idea is when they came out, this chemist Leo Sternbach invented the benzodiazepines. And this was amazing. This was unbelievable. Because finally, you could have a drug that treated anxiety that didn't have this horrible risk of killing people that used it. You know, this was when Jimi Hendrix died, Marilyn Monroe.

These were all barbiturate associated deaths. So this was actually considered like a huge boon to science. And their liberal prescribing reflects their relative safety. But there isn't enough of a discussion about the problems associated with cessation and withdrawal for long-term users. So what is the mechanism? How do they reduce anxiety? What's going on?

Yeah, so they're positive allosteric modulators of something called the GABA-A receptor. And what it really means is that you have the neuron. It's kind of, it's actually kind of somewhat intuitive. Like you have the neuron and the neuron is like an electric it's an electrically mediated uh signal transducer and so this in order for it to have enough charge for it to transmit a signal um it needs to cross a certain threshold and the charge is mediated by ions that are present in the brain so the more negative ions enter the cell, the lower the charge, the less likely it is to fire. The more positive ions enter the cell, the higher the

charge, the more likely it is to fire. It will have an excitatory effect. So when a benzodiazepine binds to the GABA-A receptor, it promotes the opening of a channel that allows chloride ions to enter the cell. The chloride ion carries a negative charge, and it reduces the charge of the neuron, making it less likely to fire. So that's, in a nutshell, how a benzodiazepine works. Now, what is this thing that they talk about when you get off of Xanax in particular? They say it has sort of like a slingshot effect. And the way they describe it, this is people that take Xanax. They say that it reduces your anxiety, but then when you get off them,

it actually increases the amount of anxiety you have as a base level. Yeah. Yeah, because, I mean, like I was saying earlier, you have both a tolerance effect so that your compensatory mechanisms within the body have adjusted to respond to this newfound increased introduction of then cause a more severe, a more severe excitatory response that can ultimately cause seizures and death in some instances. Yeah, but that's not

common. That does happen. That does happen, but that's not reflective of the normal. That's, you know, very high dose, long-term use, and even then it's not necessarily something that will happen. high dose, long term use. And even then, it's not necessarily something that will happen. That's also with very abrupt cessation. A more responsible strategy is to taper the dose to avoid those sorts of effects as much as possible. Is that the only way to mitigate the negative response of getting off of the drug? Is there anything else that someone can take while they're? Yeah, there are tons of things. Yeah, you could, you know, you could take a muscle relaxer, like tizanidine that has a different pharmacology, or you could use cannabinoids, or you could use any number of things depending on, you know, what treatment is most appropriate for that person. It just really

depends. So and I don't want to, you know, make any claims that there's a magic bullet that will treat people. I mean, the main thing that you have to do, I think, is psychological work to try to cultivate habits where you're able to sleep better at night through exercise and you have better strategies for psychologically dealing with stress in your environment. Those two things combined

will, I think, do a lot more long-term to prevent you from using them again in the future. But again, you know, these problems mostly emerge with long-term high-dose use. There's a lot of people that can use a benzodiazepine as a one-off thing on an airplane or before some other stressful event, and it doesn't cause those problems. There's a big difference between taking something once or twice and taking something every single day for years.

That's the problem, right? It's that people get accustomed to the effects the anxiety relieving effects and they start taking it a lot and then next thing you know you have a physical issue yeah yeah it's it's really you know it's really and that's why um i think it's good to be as familiar with these things as possible and it's good to be as familiar with these things as possible. And it's good to understand them and their potential. But I also think it's good to try to not have a habit of using any one of them regularly. And I get very alarmed by the ones that I like, even if they're innocuous, like cannabis. You know, I, I remember when I was in my 20s, I'd hear all these people saying,

oh, yeah, when I was in my 20s, I loved cannabis. But the day I turned 30, I started getting panic attacks every single time I smoked it. And I had to stop. And I think, wow, well, I look forward to that day because it's just not happening for me. I'm just enjoying it. And it's only joyous and pleasant. So is it ever going to get bad? And the answer is no, it never got bad. But at some point, I decided, all right, it's not going to get bad for me. So it's just my decision now, because it has, you know, I was never like smoking all day, I would just smoke a tiny bit before bed. But still, I didn't like the fact that it was a habit that if I, if I was traveling somewhere, I, you know, would think like, oh, maybe I won't sleep well that night. And that's no good. I like that feeling and so i stopped completely for years and um and i think that that's a really useful exercise even if nothing bad has happened

even if you enjoy it it's good to experimentally deprive yourself of things that are good and that you like just to see how you change i observed something that i didn't even really know which was that cannabis was more than anything not even sleep It was a way of mitigating the anger that I felt, you know, because like there's so much reflecting anger in our society. It's just endless. Like you look at Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, any of these social media things, they're machines fed on human opinions and rage. And people have almost optimized their communication to ensure this kind of agitated engagement at all times. And it's very psychologically difficult. I mean, I think people need to try to avoid that kind of behavior

as much as they possibly can, because not only are you volunteering your finite time on earth to feed a social media machine and advertisements with your own misery, you are preventing yourself from doing anything nice in the world, which will ultimately make you feel better. Like, forget what effect it has on the subject of the bullying. It's not good to be a bully. It's not good for the bully. It's not going to be a bully. It's not good for the bully. It's not going to make you happy.

Yeah, it's far too prevalent that this is the only way that people communicate. They communicate all day like that. And it's devoid of social cues, devoid of compassion. You're not looking at someone, you don't have any empathy, you don't see them. You could say something online, say mean shit all day day it changes the way you communicate it changes the way you interface with humans yeah i think it's real bad i don't do it i don't do it anymore i just post things i call it post and ghost i post and i run away i don't read anything yeah you know if i if i if i look at anything it's on instagram and and I don't read comments, but sometimes people post interesting shit, interesting shit about their life, cool pictures. I look at that, but I don't read any of mine.

It's just I don't think it's healthy. And then Facebook, I think, is the least healthy of them because people go on these long rants, and then people below those long rants respond to those long rants and they get addicted to it and they're constantly checking it and battling back and forth with people on opinions and issues and politics and religion and social problems and it's just it's a piss poor way of working things out with people and it's the opposite of a podcast in my my opinion one of the best things about a podcast is the fact that we're locked in. Like when you and I are having this conversation, we're wearing headphones. So I hear your voice at the same volume that I hear my voice, which makes it much harder to talk over people because

you're too aware that you're being rude. And you don't hear anything from the outside world. And we're looking at each other eye to eye. We're staring at each other across the table. No electronics. We're not looking at our phone. We're not, we're not being distracted by anything. It's the, to me,

it's the best way to sort things out and to figure out how a person really, you get to know a person for real this way, you know, without the, the bullshit that comes from social media interactions, which I think is the worst way to communicate with people. Yeah. And it's a shame because I actually love talking to people.

Like some of the most interesting stories I've ever told, some of the most interesting experiences I've ever had have come from strangers contacting me. And we have the internet, which is the greatest educational tool ever devised by humans. And it's being used as a machine for competitively angry remarks it's just natural when you when it's so easy to be angry at someone it's so easy when they're not there it's so easy when you're not in their presence and you it's a shit way to communicate. Like you say something in a text and they say something in a text.

It's not good. The best way to communicate is physically being in the same room with the person, looking them in the eyes, and using words. And you get a much better sense of what the person's trying to communicate. It's just such a filtered down...

Alan Levinowitz calls it processed information. The same way processed food is bad for you, but processed information is bad for you. And so many people are on a processed food diet, and it's just terrible for their health. Well, processed information is terrible for your mental health. I think he's dead right, and I think it's an excellent way to describe it. But it is also a cultural thing. It doesn't have to be this way. The internet could be any way that people wanted it to be,

and you could hold yourself to a different standard. Sometimes I'll see people posting things like, I don't know, I don't have time to look it up, but I think it's this. It's like, well, you're writing this on the greatest information gathering machine ever devised by man. Why don't you just look it up? And not post yet. And not post. And, you know, this really is a remarkable time. Like, do you know about Sci-Hub? Have you ever heard about that? No. Oh, man. I'm glad to be able to talk about this even briefly with you because it's crazy.

You know who Aaron Schwartz was? Yes. so you know that when aaron schwartz died what happened he was trying to collect all the scientific scholarly literature and make it freely available right what's not widely known is that someone else tried to do the same thing and they succeeded and there is this website called scihub.se the dot suffix changes periodically and this is a woman in um i believe she's in kazakhstan i'm going to mispronounce her name i think it's alexandra elkbakian and she successfully created a website that allows you to access every scientific article ever published in the history of mankind whoa in the In the history of, yes. It is, like, to, you can't overestimate the significance of what this is. How long ago did she do this?

This has been around for years. And I think people do need to know about it because it's one of the most important, I mean, she should win a Nobel Prize for this. It is truly one of the greatest things that has ever happened to science. Because when people talk about science, I think they don't really know, like, what is science? Is it the sum knowledge of every living scientist? Is it the opinion of the greatest expert? What is science?

But what science really is is a series of thousands and thousands and thousands of short papers. When people talk about the body of scientific knowledge, they're talking about these short papers that up until recently have been paywalled. So if you wanted to read even a two-page article, you'd have to pay $40 to do it. And she figured out a system where she could use the electronic resources of every major university to automatically download their entire catalogs of scientific literature and make it freely available to everyone in the world. So it doesn't matter if you are in Kenya or Ethiopia or wherever, you have access to the full digital resources of Oxford and Harvard and Yale. And it is, it's going to change. I mean, it already has changed the world. And like, I guarantee 20 years from now, there will be people winning nobel prizes who will attribute the knowledge that they have to that website it is huge and so you think about something like this this is like inestimable greatness from this website and everybody uses it every scientist uses it right now and like we are in the presence of this extraordinary creation and

then people are just like spending their entire life insulting trump on twitter or whatever like it's just like we have to recognize what an amazing time it is even though there are of course horrible horrible things happening all around us like there are things like that that are so incredibly useful is this in danger at all? Oh, of course. Yeah. Yes, it is. That's why she changes the address.

Yeah. Yes, it is in danger. And I don't even know if it's, you know, I think it's worth talking about publicly because I think more people, I think even there are some scientists even that don't know about it. But yeah, it's in danger because there was money to be made. But it's really unfortunate because scientists aren't paid to write scientific articles. So if you write a peer-reviewed scientific article, that's something that you do. You send it off to the publisher, and then no one can read it unless they are also a scientist with either academic or institutional affiliations that allow them to access that journal. And now that's not the case anymore. It's huge. Wow. And has there ever been an effort to do something other than Aaron Schwartz?

Has there been an argument? And Aaron Schwartz wound up killing himself because he faced a lengthy jail sentence, right? Yeah. And it's horrific. People are furious about it to this day that he was prosecuted the way he was. Is there any effort amongst intellectuals to say that this is wrong and that all these papers should be released and that something like Sci-Hub should be readily available? Oh, yeah, everybody. Everyone that isn't a publisher of scientific literature supports Sci-Hub. Wow. everyone that isn't a publisher of scientific literature supports sci-hub wow the major publishers like elsevier have come out against the creator and i think she may even be in hiding

as a result of that because yeah um i'm sure they would throw the book at her if they could but she succeeded she really succeeded and this has been around for years and you know this is a life-changing amazing contribution to to science. So there's some good stuff out there. There's definitely some good stuff out there. To go back to benzodiazepines, you were explaining the xenon gas. Yeah. And what is the psychoactive effect of it? Like, what does it do to you that would help you get off of benzodiazepines? Like, why would Jordan Peterson use that as a therapy? Oh, I just heard that was one of many things that he was trying. I mean,

I think that he was in a somewhat, you know, I think he was, you know, really, really seriously struggling and was trying a lot of different things to see what would stick. And what xenon does when you inhale it is you exit reality and enter a state of pure bliss. Sounds pretty good. It's like nitrous oxide, if you've ever tried that. But nitrous oxide actually has some associated toxicity, kind of unusual toxicity, where it interferes with the metabolism of vitamin B12. None of that is present with xenon. So if you inhale nitrous oxide continuously for a long period of time,

eventually it will actually kill you. Whippets. Whippets, yeah. Yeah, when I was a kid, I worked at Newport Creamery. It was an ice cream place, and we had tanks of nitrous oxide that they used for whipped cream.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Dudes that I worked with would do whippets and get blasted. of nitrous oxide that they use for whipped cream. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dudes that I worked with would do whippets and get blasted. It's fun. It's a... Beneficial effects of xenon inhalation on behavioral changes in a valproic. Is that right? Yep.

Valproic acid-induced model of autism in rats. Whoa. Whoa. model of autism in rats. Whoa. Whoa. Behavioral modulatory effects of xenon are probably

related to its generalized action on excitatory inhibitory balance within the central nervous system. Our data suggests that sub-anesthetic short-term exposure to xenon have beneficial effect on several behavioral modalities

and deserves further investigation. So, yeah, I'm not making any kind of medical claims about xenon being, you know, the cure for benzodiazepine addiction. I want to be very clear about that. I actually just made a documentary for my new season about xenon. And I think it's really interesting because this is, you know, another one of these things that I don't think can ever be regulated. It's in every breath that we take. It shows the pervasiveness of these psychoactive drugs. You can talk about drugs as if they're over there. They're this thing we've got to get rid of. There will always be drugs, no matter

what we do. We can arrest everyone associated with Purdue. We can do whatever we want. This is just part of our environment. I mean, nitrous oxide, I didn't even know this until I started working on this piece. I always assumed that nitrous oxide was a purely synthetic chemical. And I always thought it was weird that nitrous oxide interacts with B12. It just seemed random to me. But it's one of these things you read in a textbook and you just think, all right, nitrous oxide interferes with B12. It just seemed random to me, but it's one of these things you read in a textbook

and you just think, all right, nitrous oxide interferes with B12 metabolism. Fine, that's a thing that happens. And then I started thinking like, but wait a second, why? Why would nitrous oxide of all things, not oxygen, not hydroxide, not some other oxidizing agent that would potentially be stronger in vivo?

Why nitrous oxide? Why would that interact with vitamin B12? And then I realized that both nitrous oxide and B12 are produced by bacteria, and that there's probably ancient bacterial interactions. And this has been researched a little bit as well, that these might be part of ancient bacterial signaling cascades that you can use nitrous oxide as a sort of biocide to shift a bacterium to a b12 independent metabolic route and compete with other bacteria and that the majority of the nitrous oxide in our atmosphere isn't from human activity it's from bacteria so like all these things are are constantly happening around us and when we have some kind of weird toxic reaction to

a drug that might be some recapitulation of an ancient interaction that evolved in bacteria whoa yeah whoa yeah now why did to go back to jordan peterson and his withdrawal because this is fascinating to me why did he have to go to russia i don't understand that like he's saying that that was the only place that we could do a medical rehabilitation or detoxification. Well, I mean, again, I think that like using Jordan Peterson as an example of like a typical benzodiazepine dependent person is probably not the right way to think about it because, you know, I don't know what social factors he was facing as well. The last thing you want if you're so the withdrawal is going to increase anxiety the last thing you want is to be in a clinic surrounded by people that know who you

are that are like oh you're jordan peterson you're that all right uh men's activist guy how dare you how dare you sir you know or whatever you know maybe he just wanted to get away from people that had opinions about his work maybe he felt like he was drowning in an abundance of misrepresentation. Yeah. I mean, if I were him, I would not want to be in LA at a detox center. I would want to get as far away as possible. Right, where TMZ could find you. Yeah. That's a good point. That's a good point. Is there anything that does what benzodiazepine does, but does it in a safer way or a less addictive way? Like anything that alleviates anxiety that doesn't come with this sort of slingshot effect? are i would be somewhat hesitant to make any sort of recommendations but there are other you know these drugs like pregabalin and gabapentin that also exert some kind of mild anxiolytic effect that some people uh consider less habituating than benzodiazepines it seems that they are in fact better tolerated but it's not the same you know it's like it's saying oh you could use cannabis

but cannabis isn't the same now um ibogaine has some sort of a corrective effect on addiction, right? Yes. Is that a good way to describe it? It does for some people, yes. Would that be effective in the withdrawal of benzodiazepine? I don't think that it would be effective specifically for the GABAergic mechanism of benzodiazepine withdrawal, but I think that it may be psychologically effective because that's a big component of Iboga and Ibogaine. I actually, for the first time, went to an Iboga ceremony in Gabon

in December of 2019, and it was incredible. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my entire life and I felt like I fully not fully not even close to fully but I began to understand aboga in a way that I certainly didn't when I last spoke to you and a big part of those ceremonies you know we again we often talk about these things in a pharmacologically reductionist terms which is fine I do it myself all the time. But a big part of the ceremony is fasting, sleep deprivation, various feats of endurance, dancing for 12 straight hours, continuous extremely loud music, continuous socializing. continuous socializing. And so if you're somebody that is struggling with an addiction of some kind, suddenly you're surrounded by people who are watching you all the time, right? They have a sort of recessed period, like almost like a, I hate to call it a dungeon, but it had a dungeon-like

character, where the people who are struggling with addiction all lay side by side. And there's, it's like laying down and withdrawing in the middle of the loudest imaginable party, on one hand, sounds kind of horrible. But they're also surrounded by a supportive community that genuinely cares about them. And they're giving them iboga to anesthetize them. Because iboga is also like ketamine and like xenon an nmda antagonist at very high doses it it produces a pseudo anesthetic effect and they even at very high doses will prick you with a thorn to make sure you're still responsive and if you don't respond to the prick then they realize that you've had enough and it's time to let you come down a little bit so they put

you into this state you don't eat any food. All of the water that you drink is iboga tea. So every sip of water has ibogaine in it. Your body is inundated with ibogaine, with no food, for five straight days. Jesus! So five straight days of dancing, drum playing, very little sleep. Children are doing it. Children?

Babies are doing it. Babies? The elderly are doing it. The whole community does it. It's the most amazing celebration you could possibly imagine. And, again, I'm not going to make any claims about the safety of this because I don't know, but I certainly met several people who had been doing it since they were an infant who were college students who were doing completely fine who seemed socially

functional and happy to be there and what i learned about iboga i think a big part of it is like you're familiar with breatharianism do you know this idea um yeah yeah people think they can live off of just breathing air yeah so this is a widely mocked pseudoscientific idea that if you're spiritually enlightened enough you don't need food nutrients or water you just extract it from the ether and enrich yourself with the power of the prana or whatever um and it's very easy to make fun of something like that because of course you need food of course you need food but i think whenever there's something like that that seems really stupid superficially it's useful to think like psychologically why would somebody do that why would anyone subject themselves

to a period days of fasting and this delusional idea that they don't need food people have died this way why would they do this because it's a tremendouslyional idea that they don't need food. People have died this way. Why would they do this? Because it's a tremendously empowering idea that everything that you need is within you, that you don't need anything else, that you can harvest vast sources of energy inside yourself and use that to sustain your every action. And people are drawn to that concept even though it's completely fraudulent.

And in the aboga ceremony, there is a component of that, where you strip everything away, everything that you don't need water, you don't need to pee, you don't need food, you don't need sleep, you just keep going, because everything that you need is within you. And it emphasizes self reliance and strength in a way that I think is tremendously beneficial for all people that have any kind of dependence, not just opioids, not just any, it doesn't matter. It's not about a pharmacological class. It's about this substance that teaches you a lesson through also

this cultural context that you have everything that you need within yourself. Wow. So during these five days, does it vary at all? I mean, do you ever get sleep? Do you eat any, you don't eat any food for five days? They did not eat any food. Did you eat any food? I did, yeah. I didn't go all the way with it because, you know, it's amazing.

I've never really fasted. I did just at the very end. And even that was amazing. It's like, you know, getting a second wind when you're running, where you go through a period where you think, oh, this is insane. I can't. I'm going to die.

I can't do this. And then you keep going, and suddenly there's this tremendous exhilaration in realizing that you're not going to die, and that, in fact, there are additional reserves within you and that you can keep going and keep going. And I think that by tapping into that ceremonially, people leave with a sense of strength that empowers them and allows them to live life without the dependencies that they had previously. So how many days did you do it for? I did low doses every night. And then on the final night, I did what was probably a medium dose. And it was

utterly extraordinary. What did you get out of it? I would say, and it's pharmacologically and chemically quite different from other psychedelics. I would say that it was the most logical I have ever felt in my entire life. I truly felt that I was seeing myself like an outside observer without any kind of emotional attachments. And I could understand the way that I had distorted various things. And I could understand frameworks of justifications and delusions in such a way as to understand my own behavior, forgive myself for it and correct it in the future. And in the wake of that experience, I did make changes to my life, and I do feel better as a result of it. Wow.

Why does it help people with addictions? What's going on? Because there's an actual change in the way the brain interfaces with whatever compound you're addicted to, right? Yeah. There's a lot of proposed mechanisms. Kind of the prevailing concept is that you have a subtype of nicotinic acetylcholine receptor called the alpha-3-beta-4 acetylcholine receptor that it acts as an antagonist at. And this is a pharmacology that's shared by some other

anti-addictive medications like Welbutrin. So there's an idea that simply by binding to that receptor, it is exerting a pharmacological anti-addictive effect. That's one hypothesis. Then there's an idea that it's working via release of neurotrophic factors like BDNF and GDNF, which is glial-derived neurotrophic factor. Then there's an idea that it's working via the NMDA receptor, or that it may be exerting a classical serotonergic effect via the 5-HT2A receptor, or that its metabolite, noreibogaine, is exerting an opioid effect that lessens withdrawal.

It has a very complicated pharmacology and binds to a wide variety of different receptors, both of the ibogaine and its metabolite, noribogaine. And so to pinpoint any one effect is difficult. Same thing happens with ketamine. People argue endlessly about the mechanism of ketamine. And I don't think anyone agrees on a single mechanism. I don't think we know. But I can say that what I learned from that ceremony was that it's not about opioids. It doesn't matter. It's about these compulsions that almost every person has. And it's sort of

like when people talk about drugs as if drugs are just one thing. It's like we create these artificial boundaries where oxycodone is a drug, but Instagram isn't a drug. Air conditioning isn't a drug. Having compulsive sex with people isn't a drug. Gambling isn't a drug, right? But they're all, at least neurologically, they're probably operating on similar circuits. They're all compulsions of one kind. They're all drives to lessen suffering and increase comfort in one way or another. And we gear our life to reduce suffering. And the only way that we can live a healthy life is to develop a mature attitude towards suffering and to find benefit in it.

I mean, I think that's even, there's a lot of Christian iconography in these ceremonies, even though this is in Central West Africa. And part of me thinks like, well, why do you want the like colonists imagery in your beautiful tradition? Why do you, why do I have to bow down to Christ as a part of this? But then I realized that for many cultures, like the words of the Bible aren't important. What's important is that the image of Christ symbolizes divinity in suffering, that there is strength in suffering,

and that you can see that image and find strength in your own suffering. And that out of that suffering, you get wisdom and growth. Yeah. Hmm. That's a good way to end this, bitch. you get wisdom and growth. Yeah. That's a good way to end this, bitch. Dude, you really need to keep doing this. Please, don't just become a chemist. You're so good at this.

You're so good at explaining these things, and I think your perspective is so valuable. Please, don't stop. I'll keep doing it. I have a podcast. You can patreon.com slash Hamilton Morris. And you're never going to stop that? I'll do it.

Yeah. It's mostly chemistry oriented, but you can listen to that. And I'm also publishing this book as well. You need to do more of this. If I need to have you on once every now and again or whenever to keep letting people understand. I love talking to you. I'd love to come back. I love talking to you too.

Let's do it more often then. Okay. Thank you very much. I really love to come back. I love talking to you, too. Let's do it more often, then. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. I really appreciate you, man. Hamilton Morris, ladies and gentlemen. Goodbye. Goodbye.

Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.