TrueLife - Dr. Erika Dyck - Among the Most Fascinating, in the World of Psychedelics

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/Erika Ellen Dyck is a Canadian historian. She is a professor of history and Canada Research Chair in the History of Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan. In 2014, Dyck was inducted to the New College of Scholars, Artists and Scientists at the Royal Society of [e-mail]://linkedin.com/in/erika-dyck-a9010430 One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark. fumbling, furious through ruins

maze, lights my war cry Born from the blaze The poem is Angels with Rifles The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini Check out the entire song at the end of the cast Ladies and gentlemen

Welcome back to True Life podcast I hope everybody's having a beautiful day I have such an incredible show With such an incredible scholar and guest an amazing human being. Prepare to embark, ladies and gentlemen, on a mind-bending journey into the realm of psychedelics and the complex history of eugenics

with the renowned scholar and explorer Dr. Erica Dick. Known for her groundbreaking work in books like psychedelic psychiatry, LSD from clinic to campus, has not only illuminated the path through the intricate tapestry of altered states of consciousness, but also shed light on the historical context, including eugenics in which these substances have been studied and used. As we journey together, we will explore the profound insights Dr. Erica has uncovered,

not only into the mystical and transformative aspects of psychedelics, but also the connection to broader societal and ethical discussions, including these surrounding eugenics. Get ready to expand your horizons, challenge your perceptions, and engage in a thought-provoking conversation as we delve into the fascinating world of psychedelics and the historical nuances expertly guided by the one and only Dr. Eric. Dr. Erica, thank you so much for being here today. How are you? I'm great. Thanks for that extremely generous interaction.

Well, it's easy to do when I get to speak to somebody with whom I'm really excited to talk to. So for those that may not know, Dr. Erica, maybe you can give a little bit more of a background about who you are and why these times are exciting and what you're doing up there in the Saskatchewan area. Thanks so much. Yeah, I'm a historian here in Canada, and I grew up in Saskatchewan and had no idea that there was this treasure trove of psychedelic experiments that had taken place in my home province. In fact, it took me going away and exploring other parts of Canada to sort of rediscover what can happen in a windswept place that is kind of a bit of an incubator of knowledge and experimentation. And it led me into this wonderful world of psychedelics. I encountered the work of people like Humphrey Osmond who coined the word psychedelic. Also his relationship with Aldous Huxley, who definitely furnished us with lots of language and exciting stories.

And a whole variety of others who passed through the space. And I moved on from that to eugenics and psychiatry. And I keep coming back to psychedelics. That's a wonderful, wonderful explanation of it. It seems that in my world, too, I always come back to psychedelics. This is this wonderful relationship, and it's so beautiful in so many ways. Let me start off with an interesting question that I kind of tailored to begin this conversation. How is your scholarly journey and personal experiences shaped your perspective on the philosophical implications of psychedelics?

Oh, good question. Thank you. You know, in my scholarly journey, I worked in government for a lot. while, I was really interested in things like how policies are made or, you know, how the loudest voices sometimes make policies more than most robust evidence. So those things were kind of hovering around in my mind, maybe informing some of my philosophy going forward. And I, when I embarked, I, you know, left government, I dabbled with the idea of going to law school, worked at a law firm, didn't like that. I thought, you know, history was the place that really nourished my curiosity

for thinking about different ways that laws and power and people come together to explore, in this case, non-altered states of consciousness or non-ordinary states of consciousness. I was so fascinated by, like, what kinds of people are drawn to this? And it's not something that fits neatly into one section in the library, or, you know, one kind of silo discipline, or even sort of cosmology, if you will. There's so many different civilizations, different ethnic groups, different religious ways of imagining how to insert or sort of how to enter into this conversation, that it kind of blew my mind.

And I was trying to put some kind of container on it and try to understand, okay, so how do we think about this historically as an idea? Where do we start sort of putting some edges on this context or this concept? Understand this. And, you know, a PhD should not be a lifetime adventure. You have to make some hard decisions. My container ended up being a bit of a trapezoid, that is the province of Saskatchewan, which is neatly marked out as a rectangle. And I was looking at the people and ideas that flowed in and out of this space that gave rise to what I have later called sort of like one of the first generations of biomedical fascination with psychedelics.

Of course, there's, I don't want to suggest this is the beginning of psychedelics. It is the coining word and a coherence that's given to some of this work in the 1950s. And that's where I kind of focused my attention for the next five to ten years. I don't even know if I got to philosophy on that. It's a wonderful answer. And I think it paints a beautiful background. And I must compliment you on your vocabulary and the pictures you can paint with the trapezoid and the containers. It's so beautiful.

I love it. Really well done. It helps that I live in a rectangle. So, you know. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting, have you ever heard that book Flatland before? Gosh, it's really, it's this book by Edward Abbott.

For those who are just listening, there's a really great book called Flatland. And it was written by Edward Abbott, like in the late 1800s. And it's like this science fiction book based on algebra. It's so, like, it's so trippy. And it talks about being a line in a circle, but interesting book. A little fun fact for everybody out there. In your research, have you encountered any ethical dilemma? related to the use of psychedelics and therapy or for personal exploration?

Absolutely. Tons. I'll start with this. When I started doing this research, I started actually working for a historian of science, and he sent me off to a library in Toronto and I was scouring through medical texts there. I came back, you know, a couple of years later, I ended up taking this on as a project of my own. So now I had to apply for research ethics to do this. kind of historical research. One of my goals was to talk with people who had either been part of

the experiments in the 1950s, that is, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, nurses, whomever, who we might think of as kind of on the control side of things. They were in control. They had some authority. And also patients or subjects who had volunteered for the experience. I quickly abandoned this and realized that these were people, those roles are interchangeable in the world of psychedelics. However, I had to map out a plan. One of the things I was required to do was inform my university if anybody revealed that they had engaged in illegal activity. This is a really awkward thing for someone who's trying to get people to talk about something. So I took my own sort of ethical stance and said, well,

it wasn't illegal at the time. And I might have forgotten if they mentioned it, if they did it after, you know, whichever, the time that their jurisdiction had to change the rules on psychedelics. This became a really important, not just a semantic issue of, you know, wondering whether or not my university was going to grant me my PhD if I crossed some kind of arbitrary line. Oh, and I also had to say that I definitely had not taken psychedelics and I would never take them. And, you know, they caused brain damage. I didn't have to sign off on that, but that was the implication. But interestingly, as I got into this world and interviewed people, one of the questions they asked me was, well, we tried a psychedelic. And of course, the logic and the

social capital associated with that was completely reversed to what the university wanted. If I hadn't taken a psychedelic, how could I possibly understand what we were about to talk about? How could I follow the logic of these conversations if I hadn't entered into this space or accepted a kind of risk or taken off some kind of shroud of a veneer of scientific authority? And this was fascinating to me. So, you know, trying to walk a fine line, get my PhD and make sure I don't, you know, lose my tuition money. But also respect the authentic perspective of those who had been involved. Many of these were men and women in their 80s and 90s. You know, they didn't have, they weren't as concerned about, you know, who found out about

this necessarily. Their reputations were already in their past. Although for some of them, the idea that a historian was going to capture their stories was something, that gave them pause. More so their kids were concerned that I might write something about dear old, whoever, dad or grandma that might reveal that they had taken psychedelics, which was interesting because sometimes dad or grandma was really excited to tell me about this. And it was the next generation who had been raised on the sort of mantra of just say no who are concerned that this might poorly affect them.

Now, I don't want to say that's eugenics and that there was a concern that there was some kind of genetic thing going on here. But it was a really fascinating kind of ethical space to be working in. What was my responsibility as a narrator of this history to tell the truth according to those as they remembered it, as opposed to those who wanted to protect a reputation or the sort of dignity and integrity of those from the past? And that continues to this day, I think, not only in how we capture this history, but we certainly see these debates taking place, whether we're looking at the FDA approvals or who should be trusted to administer psychedelics in a safe way. Those with expert perspectives, that is, they've read all the textbooks, they can describe all the things, they know all the words that I don't know about pharmacokinetics and whatever, pharmacogenetics. or those who have logged this many hours on their own voyages or have sat with others and have accumulated a kind of experience that doesn't fit neatly into medical schools. Long answer, sorry.

No, are you kidding me? The longer, the more intricate, the better. It's sort of like a trip in itself. You know what I mean? I like to see it unfolding in front of me. So thank you for it. If we see that history, if we look at past relevant behavior, as the best predictor of future behavior.

What might be playing out nowadays if we look back to the past? And I think you touched on it really well. Like we do see the same echo happening in front of us right now. What if we look at the history, what might the future hold for us? I know it's speculation. But what do you think? Yeah, I mean, two things kind of pop to mind as you asked that question. I mean, one is how we measure evidence in this space.

Yes. Whether that's, you know, experience driven evidence or even like what evidence. counts. I mean, are we measuring a pharmacological effect of a substance and its interaction with our bodies and minds? Or, you know, does that pharmacological effect also interact with the lighting and the music and the ambient space that we are in, you know, psychedelic people, and I'm going to say it that way, you know, researchers, ceremonial attendees, you know, underground, grateful dead lovers, whatever, you know, I'll cast a wide net here. Recognize that there's an interaction between the set and the setting.

So your mindset, the substance itself, and the setting, and even pieces outside of that. So what are you thinking about as you enter into this space or into this idea even? And how do you make sense of it afterwards? What meaning do you ascribe to it? And it may be from nothing to something massive. And all of those things are very difficult to put in a checklist that satisfies some of our quantified markers of success or risk. And those kinds of assessments are out of sync, I think,

with the way that psychedelics have been studied in the past. And again, I'll say that and be inclusive of studied or worshipped even in the past. So if you're sitting in a peyote ceremony, again, you're not going through a DSM checklist of the reasons why you're sitting there or a DSA or whatever other kind of checklist of these are the things I felt. So, you know, oh, no, I saw, you know, a Pentagon, not an octagon. Well, that, you know, these desire to sort of manage and then ultimately scale up those experiences so that we can have repeatable, consistent experiences is just not part of the

psychedelic space. And there's that, I think, an inherent tension then in how we measure the, you. the veracity of those experiences or are there therapeutic perhaps benefits and how we measure success. So it might not even be felt in the first eight to 38 hours. Success in even if we're just talking about therapy was often captured, you know, a couple of years later. I'm like, you know what? That experience that I thought was really hard was so important for me.

And it's a combination of things that leads people to sort of reflect back. and see those and I that was impressed upon me when I was interviewing patients and subjects I say subjects because there's a question of volunteer and not coercive but people had options of different therapy they could go through and this was in some cases it was 40 and up to 44 years after their their single dose LSD experience and people spoke to me with incredible emotions sometimes weeping as they explained how important that intervention was for them. One man told me that he thinks it saved his life. And yet, reading his case file from that experience, it's like, it was good. It's kind of like

my 12-year-old son, right? How is cool? It's fun. You know, so it sort of accumulates these sense of meaning. And I think our capacity to capture that and then instrumentalize it into our modern world of medicine, there's an inherent tension there. So it's so true. You could even broaden it out to say that our idea of success is humans, you know, let alone what a success is in a trial. But our definition of success is humans is, it's kept in this small trapezoid container of like, of what you can measure.

You know, it's like, okay, it's only Euclidean. You know, we're not going to remember this. Clidian space over it because we can't measure it so it doesn't matter. Maybe the results of success should be measured in the thankful, pleasurable tears of the family members who see the progress of the people, right? Maybe that's a better barometer. Interesting you raised that because one of the plans or protocols, and somehow I'm using a bit of modern language that they didn't use.

When folks here in Saskatchewan we're first investing in those alcohol trials. So using LSD and masculine in the first instances to treat alcoholism, which I can explain if you want, but the idea was that you were going to like take people through this sort of really condensed psychotherapeutic experience. It was in for some cases, it was going to help people sort of glimpse what hitting rock bottom might feel like. You know, it was a peek into that space and almost to frighten someone into recognizing the dramatic need to change their behavior. And for others, the experience, although that was the intention, for others the experience was not sort of that

fear factor or that glimpse into this, you know, future reality, but instead it shifted people into a spiritual space and put them in conversation with a different kind of spiritual reality that they felt they had been ignoring or that they had, you know, they stated that they had been ignoring. In either case, people came away and there's room only mostly men who were treated this way, these men came away from it with a deeper appreciation for who they were and what their worth was, that value, which was not, again, like, quantified and, you know, I can make this much money, but, like, I need to pay attention to my kids. My wife has been putting up with my shitty behavior, and I quote, you know, this kind of thing. And so as one of the protocols for measuring success,

there were two-year follow-ups. They started working really closely with alcohol. Alcoholics Anonymous, who was very much on board with this specific program in some parts of North America, not everywhere. But Alcoholics Anonymous was great because they have regular follow-ups. They also interviewed wives. So I mentioned it was mostly men. It was these wives who were like, okay, so he says he's better, but, and one of the checkmark things was, is he less of an asshole? Explain. And I do not.

So there was an attempt to really measure that in a different way and use these sort of subjective responses. And you can imagine the handwritten notes that explain answers to that. You know, again, this is not something you can run through a computer and spit out an answer and say, okay, our rates are this. They did ultimately quantify things in an effort to try to get some funding to support this program. But initially, the masses of case studies and the subjective information that was solicited was really quite impressive. And how to measure this. Like, are you a good member of society? All right.

Well, what does that mean? Are you good to your neighbors? You know, things like this and what is good? You can see how it kind of, you go on a rabbit trail trying to determine this. But I think the desire to capture that kind of information. was in itself a kind of, that's part of the ethos of that early generation of psychedelic researchers, I think is kind of blowing open the field and reimagining what is important, what is valuable as evidence. And I think it's, that's too bad that that kind of got thrown out with the bathwater, if you will.

But there are possibilities going forward to rethink what we, what evidence we collect, or what is meaningful or valuable as we understand, you know, wellness or how does this contribute to better? Yeah, that's a wonderful answer. And I, that should be that same question, is your husband less of an asshole? Or are you less of an asshole? We could probably be, you know, like, that should be on every single one. And if you are getting better, you should have to answer that question to be like, yes, here's how I was an asshole. Here's the things that I was doing.

Here's the things I'm working on. Here's what my wife said about what I did. Look, it's not nice, you know. It's so true. I mean, I think that some of that language got, you know, chafed away. Some of that might have been a bit, you know, in the, in the hallways. Questions of ego really kind of come into this space. Now, in the 1950s, a lot of the psychiatric profession in the United States and in Canada, even,

and certainly in parts of Western Europe, were trained in psychoanalysis. So some of this terminology and some of these, approaches were sort of part and parcel of the training at that time as that shifted away and we move more into a psychopharmaceutical paradigm we lose some of that some of the language and vocabulary that's associated with measuring talk therapy or it changes it shifts and you know there's there are complaints about the sort of dominance of psychoanalysis but i think there's also something maybe lost in like okay let's let's talk about ego and whether you want to go full Freud or or you want to back off and Young was a little more hip to psychedelics so we can go there.

But there's, you know, there's something there that I think is not just a remnant of the past, but actually something that could be resurrected going forward as we think about how do we manage subjective information and harness it for, you know, measuring these outcomes as well. Yeah, it really gives us an opportunity to redefine the future moving forward, right? And it reminds me of a, there's a great book called Metaphores in the Mind. And in that book, they talk about how the only way we can learn new knowledge is by using metaphors, comparing things to the old. And in some ways, maybe we're at this vista.

Maybe we're at this, you know, maybe we're at Dr. King's mountaintop, getting a quick, peek look down and saying like, okay, let's, oh, look where we were over there. Let's, let's rewind it and take that path again or something like that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's anything linear about this. Right. And that's exciting to me.

You know, the idea that we can actually, you know, learn from the past, not simply to improve upon a linear path. But, you know, maybe some of this was like a heavy-handed response. I mean, I think we, I think a lot of people agree that, you know, the prohibition on drugs, the war on drugs was a heavy-handed response to a lot of things. And so as we peel back layers of that and deal with the consequences of it, you know, what parts, I don't think, I'm not going to advocate for like, you know, drugs everywhere, put them in the water. applies, no problem, you know. I might have said that before, but now as a mother, like, whoa, whoa, actually, like, you know, we need to have, you know, I talked about this with somebody in the, recently, you know, there are, you know, we used to have green lights on drugs and red lights on drugs. And like, we can proceed with caution in a few cases. And, but as we do that,

instead of accumulating evidence through one particular metric, what if we widen that? and imagine, you know, who do we listen to, who do we trust, and where are people getting information about choices that they make about taking these substances in the first place? You know, it might be school, it might be parents, and it's probably a lot of peers. And we don't typically use those measures as we think about developing curricula for drug information or informing the FDA or Health Canada for that matter. So I think, you know, taking stock of the ways in which people engage with drug information is perhaps a first step to also or a step towards thinking, how do we build effective drug information? Because, I mean, the pandemic affected us all in interesting

ways, but there were real splits and I think real fissures in this idea that we should trust science. Now, some people did, some people didn't, but it created. these real tensions and I think that same thing is playing out in other aspects and psychologists are one of them. Yeah. I think I think there's a wedge between science and company science. You know, yeah, for sure. It's the similar wedge. It's between Brave New World and the island. You know, in some ways, like, there's two real realities by one great thinker that could be emerging right now. You have any thoughts on that? Oh, that. That's a great question.

All this Huckley is so cool. So Island was written after he'd had mescaline and LSD, and Brave New World was not. So we can go there. Imagine that. Yeah, you know, I'm going to answer this in a probably unsatisfying way. But, you know, I think that I worked on a book project recovering these letters between Aldous Huxley and Humphrey-Ozman.

Huxley's house had burnt down and he lost, you know, not only a lot of his letters, but his library. It's just a real loss to all of us that much of this information was gone. But Humphrey Osman, for whatever reasons, kept copies of his own outgoing letters and Huxley's incoming letters. So we have this rare opportunity to sort of, you know, get into the minds of these two men who, you know, grew up in this part of England, but were separated by 20 years, and became fast friends in a masculine experience that they had in 1953 together. I mean, Osmond was the one who brought a masculine in the first place. And these candid letters as they kind of work through some of these questions, not not breaking world versus island, but the question of like, are we headed

into a dystopic future? Are we headed in something a little bit more promising? An island, I think, has shades of both. You know, it, we kind of could oscillate on this. And, you know, I think Huxley was really fascinated with some of these ideas that, you know, there are these, the intrinsic power of these substances to change our minds, both in evolutionary ways, hearkening back to the long legacy of biologists and his family and including his brother, head of the eugenics society. And, and also like, you know, the philosophical existential angst that accompanies some of these movements. And, I mean, he's delightful read, even when you feel sad reading it because you takes you to dark places.

But his interest and, you know, his just desire to articulate some of these complicated ideas in ways that pull you in and I think grip you is just, it's a fascinating contribution to this to this entire conversation. Yeah. That's me answering your question. It's beautiful. It's well done. I love the way it was done. I'm often drawn to the scene in the island where children at the age of 13, they go with a mentor and climb this mountain and sit in front of a church and have this first experience where they learn.

I mean, there's a lot more going on than I knew. And what a beautiful idea. And it seems on some level the idea of rituals or rites of passage have been cheapened in a lot of the ways. And, you know, there almost seems to be an absence of the true richness of those rituals and stuff in today's society. I'm hopeful to kind of see some of that coming back. Wouldn't that be beautiful? Yeah, it's interesting.

You're reminding me that, so he sat in a number of ceremonies as a curious observer of these, of all kinds of, you know, psychedelics or phanarathimes or all these different words they played with. And he sat with his wife as she succumbed to her final stages of cancer, his first wife, Maria. And he wrote really tenderly, man, these letters are actually included in an appendix because they're a little bit different. But he wrote very tenderly about, you know, talking her through as she was losing consciousness, as she was, you know, succumbing to the last hours of her of her life. He talked about sitting in ceremony and spoke to her in, he describes, you know, he spoke to her in calm tones, trying to like mimic the, the rhythm of the drums that had accompanied

their experiences on a reservation in California. Forgive me, I can't remember the name of it off my head. I think it's a Navajo reservation, though. In any event, he reflects in this moment upon these different transitions and how psychedelics might be valuable in easing the anxiety associated with the death transition. And of course, he famously asks for LSD on his own deathbed, which his then-wife Laura injected. And he talks about releasing these mortal strands and ushering someone gently into this other reality. And of course, he gives us beautiful words. But that idea of transition, I think,

is something not only, you know, he captures it, but sitting in those ceremonies, those indigenous ceremonies had a much, much longer tradition of using ceremony around ideas of transition, whether there's life transitions, coming into the world, transitioning into adulthood, transitioning as you prepare for some upcoming event, might be war, seeking, wisdom in the face of Crammon. So different kinds of transitions. And I don't think he clearly and explicitly says, I learned this from them. But you can see it creeping into his work, especially after he starts sitting in those spaces. Osmond also sat in ceremony in Saskatchewan. I've recently been in touch with some of the grandchildren of the ceremony that had hosted him. And we've been talking a little bit

about this and what's fascinating to me is the the way that children are incorporated into these conversations not just acknowledging them but they sit with their elders and they learn about these things and that not only kind of wholesome conversation or these wholesome ways but it's a form of we'll say today harm reduction in learning about suspecting the ceremony and the substance that accompany them. And it struck me that, you know, there's something really fascinating that we can learn from, you know, certainly going past these guys who tripped in Tweed, but, you know, move out to other realms.

I see we're funny. They did. They totally did. But, you know, looking at some of these other, even more ancient practices of thinking about not psychedelics, but thinking about transitions and where psychedelics fit in. into that. So kind of rearranging the priorities, I guess, if you think about describing the ceremony, I think that my friends, I don't know, my, my, the new folks I've met in this ceremonial context, would say that this isn't about the drug. They certainly wouldn't call it that. This isn't about the medicine. This isn't even about peyote. This is about, you know, a learning. This is a we're searching for something. You know, the description actually changes and the prioritizing. is rearranged. It's that kind of knowledge that leaves giant holes in the ideas of spirituality of the West.

And when I look at, sometimes there's another great book called The Fourth Turning, and it talks about like the generational trauma and the different generations we're going through. And especially when we see so much of this, if we just look at all of us as one organism, like the boomer class throughout the world is this giant class of people. And a lot of them are knocking on the door. of transition of the mortality experience right now. And with that comes the unrealized dreams that may or may not have been achieved. And talk about a transition.

No wonder there's so much going on. No wonder psychedelics or mushrooms or these medicines are being brought to the forefront right now. It's like we need this more than ever. I see it in people's lives that I love that are so frightened right now. And I think about the way they've been conditioned their whole life to we don't need the family anymore. You drop the kids out there, send mom and dad to this place, and you guys go to work, and we tried this thing.

And it had radical ramifications that maybe unrealized consequences that we didn't know. But here we are, and we have this time to reflect. And it seems looking back to a sort of renaissance. I guess renaissance is a pretty good word for it, you know, but maybe we need to look back at the time of ceremony. another time of ceremony to understand how to to under to reintegrate the idea of death it seems like death in the West is something we're so fearful of maybe these people you've been speaking with are the light on the path well maybe you can explain more about the relationship you've

been talking to with it with the grandchildren and the children yeah I mean and I can't go to to too much detail there because it's not you know we're just we're just building a relationship Sure. But I mean, I think I'll answer it in a different way. Yeah, please. I think there's a reason why psychedelics emerged in the late 1940s, 1950s, and sort of captivated the energy and, you know, the passion of a number of different kinds of researchers and thinkers, you know, that they gave it some coherence. They gave it language. They like, you know, it had it's, it had a kind of momentum, made an imprint. It's not surprising to me that it's re-emerging now.

Again, I'll try to be a historian here and be like, oh, yeah, there's these big trends, and I'm not going to talk about specifics. But during the Cold War, I think there were legitimate, like legitimate anxieties. This was not, you know, the rise of anxieties because there was something in the water supply that was causing a physiological response.

I think it was legitimate to be concerned about nuclear war. It was legitimate to be concerned about you know, population bomb, if you will, now not in every part of the world here in Canada, you know, there's still some space left, but, you know, despite that, these concerns about food supply, concerns about, you know, rampant poverty and disparity in the world. And you see, you know, efforts to try to ameliorate that, whether it's, you know, green revolution that has some kind of boomerang effects. But there were these, you know, efforts to try to like think about the world in a different way. Start seeing pictures of the world.

you know, at this time. Also, you know, that was inspired by an acid trip. So, you know, we thank psychedelics for that. I think it's reasonable that today we have existential angst, ricketing through our lives. And it is not all, you know, I don't think we can sort of pinpoint the root causes as, again, like something that if we just tamper with our physiology in this way, we'll fix it. or something like that. This is real. I mean, this is, I think these are things that can't be solved with a pill. I'm coughing a little bit today. And if you were walking around my city, it's, I'm choking on smoke. The wildfire smoke has been causing my kids to have to have recesses inside. They can't, you know, play sports outside. And people with any kind of breathing problems

or people of a certain age are encouraged to stay inside and avoid, you know, outside has become toxic. This should make us anxious. This should make us sad and angry and we should feel the full sort of range of emotions that, and it's bigger than us, right? Yep. So me turning off my lights or, you know, whatever individual act I might do isn't going to solve that just like a pill isn't going to make me okay with what I see and experience

outside. But I think that kind of the sort of huge problems that, you know, we kind of throw our hands up sometimes and especially yes in the West, you know, like, you know, I'm just going to stick my head down, wait for this to pass, find the pill to make it go away, either so I forget about it or I don't think about it. It should make us uncomfortable. And I love or I feel optimistic about how psychedelics can help to bring different ideas and different minds together to also recognize like what actually is the problem here so that we can get out of, we talk about psychedelics being good for changing our minds by Borough Michael Pollan's phrasing and, you know, gets us out of those rutted, rudded thinking. So that's good if you have post-traumatic

stress disorder, if you have a number of different pathological conditions. But I think it's also good for our culture and our evolution, if you know, as humans to, get out of our rutted ideas about maybe we can't fix it by doing the same things we've been doing maybe we think differently and i'm picking on the environment because it's i'm choking on it right now yeah but i mean there are real opportunities here i think to think with psychedelics whether metaphorically or literally um to reimagine what we want this future to look like that's really well said it i've been toying with this idea that the world talks to us through us and the same way that for me i've been i've been playing a lot with like ethlad lately and it's

the the uncompromising clarity of what a dummy i am is so beautiful but it's one of the ways it's so beautiful is that i see the things happening in my life and then i can see them in my garden and then i can see them in my garden and then then I can see them in the world. I can see the same patterns. And it's like, oh, maybe the way we fix this is by each one of us becoming the best version of ourselves. You know, and you start to see these patterns.

Like you look at the medical system we currently have with addiction. It seems to be a conveyor belt of, okay, get off this, take this pill and get back on here, go to this therapy. You know, the same way that Xerox sells me toner. Hey, buy the machine for free. And then I get to buy this all the time. And it's like, this company just borrowed this model of. sickness from here. So maybe the world of psychedelics is showing us like, okay, this whole model

has permeated our being. We need to get rid of that. Yeah, we should be furious about this smoke. We should be furious about these people, like this, maybe it's not these people. Maybe it's us. Like when we start looking at us, we can change it because you don't have that. It's not that either or it's the both and, right? Like, hey, we're doing it. Hey, I'm responsible for it. I got to fix this, you know, in my own way. Yeah, I do think that, you know, avoiding that kind of, binary logic of like awesome yeah that's something we can learn from the cold war like they cold war people did it really well like bad guys good guys totally drugs bad drugs you know like really this is really clear right um but we could do better we could probably learn from that and recognize

that you know putting people into categories and fairly placed people into conditions that they you know where they had nowhere to go um that didn't actually help us to be better humans um It helps some people be better humans maybe or be more successful or whatever. We can come back to that. But the circular conversation from before. But I think we can do better and recognize that grayness or blurriness complexity is actually a strength. And we might be more sustainable people going forward if, and I don't mean just through the environment, but we might be able to think about integrating psychedelics into our world in a more sustainable

away if we accept and maybe even embrace that complexity that it isn't no it's all or nothing we need some caution and here again i think back to some of the indigenous approaches and i don't mean to put them all in the same basket there diverse approaches but one of the things that keeps coming back to me as i explore this or read other people's work that's exploring this and which is more true the deference to the plants, the deference to the substance, the respect that is so high on the list is really, really important. It's very different from, you know, I have a cough. I'm going to go take some medication. I'm not really going to think about it. I'm certainly not going to make a prayer. I'm just going to hope that it works. And if not, I'm going to be upset, right? But giving deference,

paying attention, reflecting on, you know, what does it mean to have this relationship with this substance or plant? Those elements, You know, we've really moved away from that, I think, in a kind of Western model. They might have real meaning as we think about bringing this back into a conversation that's a little more holistic, a little bit more sustainable. Yeah. Just the disrespect we have for relationship to all of us. Like that's one of the things that's so mind-blowing. We don't even respect relationship anymore.

It's more of like, I always think of Guy to Board's book. spectacle of society. And when we talk about being, like, it seems that we've moved from being into having and from having into the appearance of having. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, it's accumulation. It's just, well, I've got books accumulating behind me and there's some more in front of me here. I love it. Okay. This is so much fun. I, I, I only like, asked, like, two questions on here, but you're such an awesome person to talk to. Let me find, like, a really good one in here that I, Cool, and I got to plug my power cord in. I just realize, I apologize.

Yeah, of course. Do it. Hopefully it's worse. Yeah. So your work often highlights the role of gender in the history of psychedelics. How might feminist philosophies intersect with the study of psychedelics and their impact on society? Oh, great question that I will blunder because my sense of feminist philosophy is borrowed from my friends who talk to me about it. Fantastic.

But you know, I was sort of almost dared by a friend. Like, you know, why this actually comes back to an answer I was thinking about for one of your other questions about things we can learn from. So I'll back up for a second. Sure. I think the other thing we might learn from is, you know, the power of communication and information. And if we compare the 1950s to the 2020s, you know, our capacity for generating information and, you know,

for me to talk to a guy in Hawaii today is tremendously different. And to broadcast that, too, I mean, it's tremendously different from what was happening in the 1950s when, you know, I'd write you a letter. Maybe you'd write back. It would take a while. I'd be thinking about it or I might not. You know, but just that kind of pace of communication and the, but there's also a kind of overload or overwhelming amount of information now. So now we have to like relearn how to sift through that information. and rethink how we trust, you know, who am I going to trust? How are we going to determine the rules of engagement in this kind of wild west of media overload?

I think one of the things in the past is there are historical avatars or characters who carried a message. And sometimes the history kind of collapses around them. So, you know, everybody knows about Timothy Leary or, you know, lots of people know about Aldous Huxley, maybe everybody knows about them. And they become sort of carriers of certain stories that are embedded in this history. history. And I think we'll probably see that in the future, even with all of the kind of noise in this space, and you know, you can find your favorite platform and pick your favorite avatar. But there are dominant voices in this space that are crafting the narrative of today, but also that will, I think, create that legacy going forward. I'd like to see us learn from the past and recognize that there were other voices that were muted out or drowned out. And those perspectives are perhaps equally, if not even more important as our previous conversation just highlighted, that maybe we need to, you know, build a different kind of sound stage. And sorry, that's an Owsley-Stanley joke that's forming my mind about like, he amplified the Grateful Dead like no other while distributing acid on the side. I mean, who's our Owsley-Stanley who's going to build the modern sort of amplifier for the 21st century, who's also thinking about how do we, you know, harness the power of. technology and, you know, hark in the ghost of Marshall McLuhan to think about, you know,

how, like, broadcast different messages and learn to appreciate different voices, not by pushing them off the platform or not letting them get up there in the first place. That's my, like, preamble to saying, I was sort of dared by a friend, you know, why don't we, you know, get past the narcissists with, they're not all narcissists, But like there's a lot of stories that are written by these like guys who left a big, thick trail of records. Cool. What about the people who like cleaned up their barf when they were going through some of

these harrowing experiences? What about the people who like took care of them when they kind of lost their way or wrote the notes down while they were coherently trying to make sense? And I don't mean to pick on them, but these are real things that happen. Yeah. And we know that, you know, you know, There were people around. These are not solo ventures, you know, as psychonautical as they might have been.

They had friends, wives, daughters, sons who were carrying some of this burden for them. So we started by like, okay, let's just like start doing a series on this. We did a little blog posts. So I said, I'm going to do one a week until we run out of people or ideas. And after 75, I was like, okay, I need a break. It's like so much material. It's amazing. But I just don't have the bandwidth to keep that up.

So we started working on a couple of books in this. And part of it is it's fascinating to see not only people who are now, we're trying to honor as pioneers, as pioneers sort of behind the scenes, the women who typed up things, the women who changed the music, you know, before some of the more famous guys got noted for it. But also women who don't want to be named and don't want their practices to be revealed, but we wanted to think about how to honor them in respectful ways. So midwives who had been chastised and banished in some cases from the Middle Ages onwards

for using different sacred medicines to control fertility. Some of these medicines have since come to be known as psychedelic. Ergot, of course, is sort of, you know, moves through this and it's synthesized. into LSD. So we wanted to honor those stories without undermining the desire and even the sort of like moral or ethical practice of also protecting them. So making things generic, but, you know, drawing attention to some of the, some of the tensions that continue to exist in naming some of these people who don't want to be named or carry a very important space. So kind of delving into the underground, but even in a like gendered twist on that. So it's been really fun. It makes me excited to,

you know, think about sort of working in this space and drawing out these perspectives. And we picked women. There are other, you know, there are other ways that we could also approach this. And I hope that other people do because I think it really helps to furnish us with that kind of landscape of evidence that we need to add into the soup, if you will, as we think about that sustainable move forward. It's beautiful. It's really well said. A soup is nothing without all the ingredients in there.

And for so long, it's like we've just had meat. We've only had this one kind of soup. It's sort of like our language. It's so linear in some way. It's a beautiful project. And I think everybody should be checking out. It's wonderful. I have a question from the audience in here that they are wondering, going back to,

here's our friend Hank. Hink asks us, he says, how do you feel about such deference to the plant and in respect, such as with indigenous people and peyote? I've been on the mind that it's just a molecule. So don't be tripping about how people take it, but some think that only their way or the highway. Yeah, you know, this is going to be really interesting as we see different jurisdictions approaching psychedelics in different ways. We see Oregon and California, Colorado, and I will run out of American examples. Alberta here in Canada has just, well, in January, authorized psychiatrists to administer ketamine and psilocybin as they deem necessary. Now, they still have to go through a bunch of applications in order to do that.

But we're seeing jurisdictions and the law kind of, if I interpret your question as like creating that highway or creating different kinds of highways. So maybe we can all move to Oregon because, you know, they seem to have a really great and open idea. California seems to be following suits as far as I can follow that debate up to just last week, I think. But there are also other alternatives. So we know the Native American Church, if we think about peyote, has gone different route in securing legal access through religious rights. And part of that is sort of claiming back some of the spiritual territory from a colonial regime saying like, no, no, this is an old practice and we are going to reclaim that. That's a really different practice than going through the Oregon model, for example, of decriminalizing nature. So I'm going to take an optimistic route here and say that more of this, you know, we're sort of test driving different.

highways. I'll keep your driving metaphor here. I'm not sure it's bad to see these different, these different policies playing out right now. And I don't think there's any consensus yet. I was maybe some of you on the call here have, were at the conference in Denver recently, this massive 13,000 people, I think is what they claimed. Colorado made a lot of money off of cannabis. And the mayor of Denver was at, of Denver was at the conference and proudly, you know, saying like, hey, this was great, you know, like, I, you know, and I, to me, this is where I want the yellow light. I'm like, oh, maybe I'm going to put the brakes on on this one.

I don't know if that's the best path for psychedelics, but it is interesting to see, you know, some people are sort of exploring this as maybe this is, you know, we'll just go the same way of can as cannabis. We see examples of that in more municipalities. So Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Ottawa, I can only name my Canadian examples right now. These cities have all decided to essentially turn a blind eye on small possession of psilocybin mushrooms. Now they haven't extended that to other psychedelics as far as I can tell because it's not a law. It's a practice.

And so we're starting to see like this, I don't know, maybe is that driving in the ditch? I'm not sure. Or a widening of the highway. There are these different kinds of examples that are starting to come around. And in the past, there was a little bit of that. And then, you know, Richard Nixon was like, okay, one law. Now we're going to token this, you know, none. But and the UN sort of picked up on that and brought this into an international moment of, you know, most Cold War.

So there are a few that didn't. But, you know, many, many jurisdictions signed on to the UN declaration. And put psychedelics into that Schedule 1 category. You know, these are not medically useful and they have high potential for addiction. And as that language is pulled up. part and now we have lots of neuroscience and psychiatric studies showing that that language just doesn't actually line up jurisdictions are playing with you know is this a cultural issue a medical issue a political issue and economic issue i i don't know where the highway is going to lead us

just yet but i guess i'm glad there are multiple roads or multiple paths to perhaps the same end all all roads lead to rome it's it's a it's a wonderful idea to think about. And it's an exciting time we live in. And I have, do you have any thoughts on Captain Al Hubbard? So many thoughts on Captain Al Hubbard. My friend Jesse Donaldson, who was a writer in Vancouver and I, we started writing a book having never met each other, which was really a fun and daunting experience. But it ended up well. We went down into the rabbit hole of Al Hubbard as we tried to write this book about Hollywood

hospital. We did end up writing the book, but as we were trying to, this is an enigma. Captain Trips, Al Hubbard, the Johnny Appleseed of acid of LSD, is this fascinating character who was a double agent during the alcohol prohibition. He works for both sides in Seattle, who gets in trouble, but somehow charms his way out of all sorts of trouble. Not so much with his ex-wives, as I learned from granddaughters, but a charming character, I don't know if anything he said was ever true. And the records on him are just as difficult and fun to play with. He faked a PhD. He started calling himself doctor at some point after purchasing a diploma.

In fact, for the first little while, he would put quotation marks around PhD and doctor as he signed off. Like he recognized this was fake. He had a lot of money or he had a lot of contact. with money. So he ended up registering and at one point being the official distributor of LSD from Sandoz. He traveled around and dosed people. He often was known for not only having a side pistol, but also a carbon tank, so a combination of carbon dioxide and oxygen, I believe. And he would give this to people to sort of prepare them for this experience. He was fascinated with the idea that the Catholic Church should really get turned on by psychedelics.

And I think on this, he was more or less alone. His friends did not support him in this. And even some of the Catholic priest, he eventually convinced to come into a psychedelic session bailed. One got scared and left before they even started. He's this fascinating character who, like, you know, is kind of a bull in a China shop in some respects. And he's, like, forcing some of these things.

Like, we must, you know, get Catholicism in here. And he wasn't entirely wrong in the sense that there were these spiritual and even religious components. And I mean religious and theological context. He was interested in music. How do we change the tempo of the experience by choreographing it with different music? And his wife actually did quite a bit of that work as well, unnamed and un-you know, she's not published, but, you know, that's part of my other project. But he's this character who actually kind of puts a, bunch of people in the same room that we might not otherwise have had.

So he is one of those avatars who I think, you know, carries, kind of creates a thick line in this history. And also he's so full of shit. Sorry, is that okay to say? Yeah, of course. Of course. It's so fascinating. We are coming up on our hour here, Dr. Erica.

And I feel like we just barely scratched the surface right here. This is so much fun. And I want to point people to as much of your work as possible. What's the best way to do that? Where can people find everything that you're doing and keep up to date with you? If anybody wants to update my website for me, that would be super awesome. No, my website at the University of Saskatchewan is as updated as I am able to keep it. I will say there's a fantastic collection.

I'm the editor of this collection, but honestly, really the labor and the work is, an amazing group of up-and-coming scholars and voices who haven't necessarily been loud in this space. It's called Expanding Mindscapes coming out in November with MIT Press. And, you know, we're trying to, the call was basically like, tell me a story about psychedelics and its history that is not centered in the United States. With all due respect, there are books on that and now they're people and we can point to them. But we wanted to sort of bring together these other voices. So we hired translators and we worked with a bunch of different people.

And I think it is certainly not comprehensive, but it is a wonderful first step into sort of opening up, you know, what happens in a Brazilian dictatorship, a military dictatorship, where being a countercultural, you know, radical has different kinds of consequences than going down to Hayd Ashbury and like, you know, hanging out with Jerry Garcia and the authors make that connection. So I'm ventriloquizing them here. What happens in Czechoslovakia before the Soviets come in where research on alcoholism is not allowed to be anonymous because they're in a socialist space and as it moves into a Sovietized space, the pressure to curb alcoholism

without anonymizing people because that's considered cult-like changes the dynamics of how psychedelic. psychiatry operates in that space and persists beyond what we see in the West, in part, because of that. You know, there was a, you know, a desire to persist in the East for longer to prove that they were superior. There's these fascinating stories, I think, that'll be, that'll draw on some familiar themes, but push us in different directions. And I hope sort of stimulate this conversation to continue looking elsewhere. Yeah, that's fantastic. I want to talk to every one of those people. Like if anybody, if anybody connected, I'll talk to you afterward, but like,

these are the conversations that should be amplified, especially going into the direction we're going now. It's sort of like, it kind of brings into the idea of this idea of time. Like, you know, I'm a big fan of Marseilleotti, and he talks about sacred time versus profane time. And in some ways, we can experience the exact same time as other people. that gets us back to the idea of ceremony and setting. And I think we're doing that right now with the stream of consciousness.

And I want to continue to do it because it's so much fun. And you're so fun to talk to you and you've researched so much. And it's really beautiful. I'll talk to you briefly afterwards. But ladies and gentlemen, if you're as blown away as I am, please go check out everything she's written. It'll blow your mind. It'll take you a long time to get through stuff.

There's so much information she's researched. But it's beautiful. And if you want to know what's happening now, the best place, and one of the best resources is Dr. Erica right here. So thank you so much for your time today. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you had a fantastic day. I hope that you understand that tomorrow is going to be even better and that the world is full of abundance.

That's all we have for today. Ladies and gentlemen, aloha.