TrueLife - The Psychedelic Roundtable - The Problem with Legalised Psychedelics: Prop 122

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

Legalised drugs? What could possibly go wrong? Famous last words. Today we talk about the recent approval of Prop: 122 in Colorado. This decriminalised magic mushrooms and paves the way for treatment centres across the state. Will big pharma take over? Will they push out the Maria Sabinas for the Elon Musks? Or will the people in Colorado end up in some strange Philllip K. Dick novel? We’re going to figure it out.

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, fear. Fearist 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 Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Sunday. It's the psychedelic roundtable. We're here with all the usual suspects. We'll have some more coming in as the night progresses. Thanks for being here.

Well, gentlemen, should we just go around the horn for everybody who may not know who people are? Ben, I want to start with you, my friend. How's it going? Tell people about you just in case they don't know. Benjamin C.George.com is where you can find me. A host of the No Absolutes podcast, a writer of some books, and just happy to be at another Sunday. Yeah, absolutely. We're stoked to have you.

Jason. How's it going, my friend? It's going great. Yeah, Jason with experience integration.com. I've been doing our thing. We've been talking masculinity on the podcast with my partners called Telling Secrets. And getting ready to launch another one, got my first two guest booked. So feeling pretty stoked about that.

So some pretty cool stuff coming down the pipeline on that front. Yeah, man, I'm excited to check it out. Paul, how are things in Maui? Good. I'm telling a tiny house. nice best intro ever you can't one up that

like got the right picture for it that's for sure yeah totally right so I don't know how long I'm going to be able to hang with you guys today but I'll give it a shot all right well let's pick up where we were man for those just tuning in right now

we were kind of getting into out here in Hawaii like we should be the number one place that legalizes drugs, cannabis, mushrooms, but we're not. Why do you think that is, Paul? I think there's too much money being made on the black market. I think they're trying to protect, you know, black market growers and producers. You know, there's a lot of rural spaces around here, especially like on Maui County, where people have been making money, growing weed, and selling it for a very long time.

And I think they are, you know, in some ways doing the right things by trying to protect those guys. And in other ways, it's kind of a detriment to our community over here by not having, you know, psychedelics and, like, marijuana more accessible. Out of curiosity, what do they charge for an ounce in Maui? Of what? Of cannabis. Like at a like a like a well there's only two just two two two dispensaries here. Mm-hmm. And I want to say it's like 300.

Wow. But yeah, it's like an 100 black market 150 depends on who you get it from. Interesting. That's, you know, I mean, I see routinely in Colorado, especially up in Denver, you know, people will be selling ounces for 60, 70 bucks sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, well, I mean, from what I understand, the flood gates have been opened in Colorado.

Like, people are just, you know, growing. Yeah, but it's all, so it's happening in Colorado. I've heard it's happening in California. I know it's definitely happening down to, like, New Mexico, because I know a couple growers in those places. And, yeah, what's happening is a lot of people, people are growing, but the regulations that they're putting in place, you know, the testing requirements. And then, you know, people who are trying to grow who aren't like a big corporation who, you know,

submit all of this paperwork and all these things. They're delayed, you know, weeks, months sometimes. You know, they have to get their crops tested four or five times before they can actually bring it to market. There's all sorts of labeling requirements. There's all this overhead that they're attaching to those players. So it's kind of pushing out the small guy. Why do you think that is? It seems like an overreach of regulation. I got some friends that are in the game in California, and they're saying the same thing.

Where it's supposed to be something that would give people more accessibility and drive down the prices, the black market is still alive and well over there because of all of those regulations. I'm not curious why that's happening. Well, I think it's multi-folded, but I think one of the aspects to it is because you know, it's a big business now. And just like all the other industries, when big business comes in,

you know, they find a way to usually through regulations and governing bodies to kind of, you know, push out their competition. And because they have the capital to go ahead and afford all this overhead, and they can do so where the small guy, you know, they know that that small guy can't. And eventually they get pushed out. All of a sudden, you know, those crops, those fields, They get bought up on pennies on the dollar. I think it's money driven more than anything if I were to have to take a guess at it. Well, think about this. It goes the way of freaking milk, right?

Like, oh, you can drink this milk, but you can't drink the natural milk. You can smoke our weed, but you can't smoke the weed you bought from your friend down the street. Like, again, yeah, it's funneling into that element of control and ultimately giving us the ability to say, yes, now we can smoke weed as long as it's their weed. so then it becomes illegal to smoke again? I don't know. It's kind of a weird concept. Yeah. That's a good point.

Yeah, I want to say welcome to Cole. Thanks for joining us, Cole. For those who may not know, man, can you tell people who you are? Maybe introduce yourself? Yeah, hey everybody. Sorry, I'm late. I didn't see the link. Yeah, Cole Butler, living here in Fort Collins, Colorado,

do a few things. Work is a dosing session monitor and study coordinator on an LSD for anxiety clinical trial. do some ketamine therapy work, a few other things here and there, but I'll keep it for you. That's who I am. Hi. Welcome. Nice, man.

Yeah, stoked to be here. Yeah, so, I mean, I kind of, I guess this kind of gets us into everything with Prop 122, right? Like, do what do you guys think is going to happen? Are we going to see the, like, we've just been covering this? Are we going to see the Maria Sabina's pushed out for the Elon Musk's. Is that what's going to happen? You see if the small guys pushed out of here and big pharma come in and take things over. What do you think, Cole?

Yeah, well, I'd like to think that that's not going to happen, but it feels like it's already sort of happening. And that's just in my personal interactions. You know, my boss, Scott Shannon, he's a psychiatrist, and he's very involved in the space. And he's told me, you know, there will be probably thousands of centers opening up with anywhere from the mom and pop shop type places to the $50,000 experience in bail. But, you know, there's at least one part of the regulations that says you can't have more than any financial interests in more than five centers. How that plays out, I don't know.

I mean, it feels kind of baked into where it's not going to get out. out of control. I've already personally experienced a lot of pressure and sort of Game of Thrones feeling about trying to do something with this and kind of being pushed out or who makes it in, who doesn't, you know, it just feels very kind of, yeah, uncomfortable in terms of, you know, just trying to help people, trying to use this to heal people. And then it becomes, a big business. So that's where some of my hesitation lies. I mean, I guess we'll see what happens, but it's hard not to see people rushing in to get the goal, just like, you know, the biotech companies right now. There's a new biotech company doing clinical trials every single

day. I mean, it seems like overkill and I don't know. But yeah, we'll see what happens. Yeah, you know, I think that the cap on five institutions, you know, I read the language on that. I can start up a different business called holistic healing part three and I have another five and part four and part six. And yeah, I mean, there's there's actually no like, didn't seem like there was any hard restrictions in the language there. So I imagine it gets abused pretty readily. Yeah. It's crazy to think about like, you know, If we look at what happened to cannabis and we see the licensing nightmares and we see some of the things we were talking about people getting pushed out, you know, whenever there's big money at stake, there's big egos at stake and there's long-term market share at stake.

Ben, what do you see as as the next shoe to drop? I mean, is it going to be, is it going to be like just regulation is going to be licensing that comes in as pushing people out? Or do you see that is it possible that maybe there's some sort of, you know, silver lining for the small guy? I think there's silver lining for the small guy just in the sense that now we, you know, at an individual level, you have the ability to grow your own mushrooms. I think that's probably the greatest silver lining one could hope from from this. You know, I've already seen where there's multiple patents filed for, you know, they take psilocybin or psilicin or something like that, and they add a methyl group or they're adding some hydrogen in there. And then, you know, all of a sudden it's this new patentable product. and they're already running trials with those those chemical constituents.

So I think there will be some lack time. But ultimately, I could definitely see this going the route of, hey, you know, yeah, you guys can have your mushrooms over here. But this is actually, you know, we've done clinical trials with all of, you know, this patented product that we have. And then I can see regulation flowing from that because they can claim, you know, greater efficacy. they can claim greater safety because, you know, they have these, you know, the paper trail to back it up. Yeah, that's interesting to think about. I wonder, so let me ask you this. Cole, you do a lot in the field right there.

And this question's for everybody, but I wanted to start with Cole. Like, if they're able to patent a certain analog, does that mean that just that analog is patent? Or does it affect the other types of, you know, analogs that are out there? there. I think it just pertains to that one, but the concern of the question, I guess, is with intellectual property. So, you know, there's not very much I can say about mind met, but it's out there on clinical trials.gov. What they're using is LSD detartrate, which is basically just a salt form of LSD, right? It's the exact same chemical agent just delivered in a different form but then you know they file those patents they have exclusive intellectual property rights um so it

becomes a whole thing of you know they get to sell it they get to manufacture it um and then it doesn't open the door for free base lSD to be under the same uh uh sort of access or it doesn't go through the whole fda process just the detar trade salt went through the whole fda um process. So I imagine it's a similar sort of thing going on with those. And I know with the MDMA trials, MAPs has not exactly a patent. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but nobody else can do research on MDMA for a certain amount of time. But you see these other companies doing the same thing. You know, they modify it slightly. There's R slash MDMA, not Reddit R slash MDMA, but R dash DMA. So yeah, I don't know. I think that's the idea is to push their drug through the

FTA process. And it's like if you want LSD, well, we manufacture it, we sell it, but you can't just buy the free base version. Right. Yeah. And, you know, thanks to people like the likes of Disney, those patents last, you know, 75 years now. Yeah. What, Jason, like, Are there's questions for everybody? Like, what role does the individual play? Like, it seems to me, like, there's going to be people out there that don't want the Aspen experience with the Taj Mahal and, like, the red carpet and, like, there's going to people that want that and that will pay for that.

But what about the teacher next door who's just got divorced or is going through some psychological problems that might some of these laws be up to us, like people like us choosing where we want to go to get treatment? Yeah. I mean, I think in a lot of ways, one of the beautiful parts about it is the power of the people being able to go figure this out and being able to grow and being able to do that.

And through that, being able to provide maybe certain experiences to people that aren't connected to the business side of things and spending lots of money and just trusting that, you know, again, at the end of the day, this medicine, for the people that are looking for that healing, they're going to find it. And they'll, they'll kind of, again, I really do trust that thing at the end of the day. I think one of the more kind of, again, dark sides of this whole thing is going to be how much they're going to be able to manipulate the experiences so that you don't have to go through the hard stuff.

Right. Because of the fear, they're going to create fear around like a bad trip or a negative experience or purging or all these different things. I think they're going to try to make the experiences as high as they can be without dealing with sometimes the difficult. stuff, which we know sometimes is where the work needs to be done. That's, you know, the healing nature of the medicine. So it'll be interesting to see if they're able to remove some of those healing elements of the medicine and then be able, because again, how they do anything is how they do everything, right? So you just, it's just kind of like, we don't have to look that far and without it being conspiracy. You're like, this is literally the pattern. And we know this pattern will apply.

So again, for what people are looking for, I think they're going to be able to go find it. If people are really wanting healing. They're going to go to the underground mom and pop shop that's like the weird hippies, you know, that society is like, oh, they do the weird natural mushrooms, right? Like, we want to do organic mushrooms over here and none of the pain, right? Like, we have all the fun without the hurt. Um, so I don't know, there's going to, like anything, they're going to demonize the spirituality, the things that they can't control and they're going to find the ways to have some control around that and then be able to say you're going to receive the same benefits. Well, you know, I think it's I think it's interesting too because, you know, big pharma is kind of based on treatment, right?

You know, they're not really in the business of cures. And, you know, I think we all have experience in this is that this actually is a pretty profound cure at certain levels for certain people at the right times, which is really shitty for repeat business. So, you know, to your point, Jason, I. I think they will start to extract pieces of the experience out to where it becomes more of a treatment-based thing than actually, you know, the search for a cure for, you know, true medicine. Just on. Yeah. One of the things I, you know, was thinking about, I went on a hike here in Colorado and I bought my national parks pass to Rocky Mountain National Park. And if you go to Rocky Mountain, it's just like a Disney world, you know, it just feels that.

way it feels very commercialized. And I thought, well, I spent $70 on this pass. I've only been once in the past year. Let me go out there. So I start driving towards Estes Park and I pull up on my GPS and I see a 13 minute delay at the entrance. And I'm like, oh, my God, it's another one of those days. You know, it's Saturday. I'm going to sit here for 15 minutes with a line like eight lanes wide of cars waiting to get in to do, you know, these trails where I'm, you know, I'm I'm just on top of people the whole time. And I said, you know what? No, I pulled up my app and I found Mount Olympus.

And I turned around and I literally parked on the side of the road. And I just started trekking up the side of this mountain. And I was like, I mean, it was hard. It was difficult. If I didn't have my GPS, I would have got lost. And anyway, don't want to harp on it too much. But moral of the story, most people want the thing that's already built for them. You know, they want the easy.

Everybody's going kind of Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado mushroom experience. And then there's a specialty, you know, small kind of let's do it organically. Let's do this the way it's meant to be done. Let's incorporate some ceremony, not turn it into this big whitewashed corporate process. But, you know, I think ultimately people like people that don't know are going to want to go for what's safe and what's popular, but I think there's a lot of beauty in this sort of small, organic type experience. And that part excites me. It's the corporate trying to shut out the small mom and pop shops because they think they're a threat that scares me.

Yeah, I had an idea. Like, I was thinking about, you know, psilocybin as a Trojan horse. Like, it seems to me that regardless where you had an experience, if you have a really profound experience, even if you find yourself as like a corporate type, might a profound experience start getting you to ask the question, like, what the hell am I doing? Like, I'm just trying to profit off this. It seems to me, at least for me, when I take socialized. I begin thinking to myself, like, okay, taking advantage of people is wrong, you know, doing this for this. reason is wrong. And I'm wondering what you guys think about psilocybin as a Trojan horse. Might it be that, you know, some of the big corporations start dosing people, even their own executives and their own executives, like, wait a minute, we're doing this all wrong, man.

We should be trying to help out the people sort of profit off of it. Is that just pie in the sky or what? I think there'll be cases where it certainly happens. I mean, you know, I've encountered people on my travels who, you know, they fit that bill. And then all of a sudden they do wake up one day and they're like, oh, what the hell am I doing? At the same time, I think the vast majority is going to fall to the safety, like Cole was saying. And it's going to be a mechanism of marketing. You know, all these big pharma companies are going to have the money to put out the marketing. They're going to be able to pay for the FDA trials.

They're going to be able to do all these things where now they'll be able to go out into the marketplace and make all these safety claims and efficacy claims. And then, you know, that's where. the majority of people are going to go. We're already hardwired for consumerism. And I think that's going to be kind of the thing. I don't know that you're going to get the Trojan horse effect where all of a sudden, you know, the system's going to come crashing down because this got let in. But I do see it happening in small scale. But I don't think you're going to have like, you know, the board of Pfizer all of a sudden realize there are a whole bunch of, you know, deplorable people

overnight. Well, I think too, like it's interesting and it's something that's always, I think, been a bit debated, at least from what I've seen of the movement in the last, you know, 70 years or so, that how much impact does set in setting really have on the intent and what experience you want to have. And Michael Pollan even addresses this in his book and how to change your mind of like being a, I think he called himself a materialist and not one that really believed in spiritual things. that is there this kind of like preconception sentence setting that when you have these medicine experiences, you're going to experience some sort of spiritual thing. And, you know, is that, are we almost conditioned to associate these two things, right?

And it's interesting because he has his experience and he's like, well, I did experience something. I don't know what it was. But, you know, he begins to change his mind. But it'll be interesting to see how much influence and conditioning they can do on someone before they go into that experience and how they can kind of manipulate that. I don't know. Like that's that's one part that feels like it's a vulnerability of the medicine is that it can be manipulative or manipulated. I don't know. Or can it? What do you guys think?

Like is that can can the medicine be manipulated? I got I got a um I want to I recently talk to Rick Strassman on this idea. I want to read this email that that he sent to me. Yeah. I it was just some some you know some hey how's it going and then I had mentioned to him you know are you worried about about exactly what we talked about. Are you worried about the Maria Sabina's being pushed out for Elon Musk? Here's what he says. What scares me more than the possibility of pushing out Maria Sabina for Elon Musk is pushing her out for P.K. Dick. Have you read his book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge? If so, it provides an interesting and terrifying perspective on the psychedelic boom. For those that haven't read that book, it's just about

the corporate takeover of the mind. Like, people are all dosed up and all you do is, is see like this corporate world. And when went like, I didn't even think about that, but that is incredibly terrifying. And especially when you start looking at what Jason just said right there about what kind of propaganda goes into the treatment center. How would they, in fact, it's not that they would separate the spirituality from the Joe's.

They would replace the spirituality with the company. The company would take the place of the spiritual nature. That would become the God head there. And if you just pan back, like, you can see it. Like, you know, people talk about the Holy Man syndrome. And all of us have probably felt it at some point in time. Like we've become evangelist for mushrooms. We're like, at some point in times, like, I felt like, oh, my God, I got all the answers, even though I don't.

But like, you know, it's easy to slip into that idea right there. Imagine on a high corporate level at like a church-like setting, because that's what these places will be. They won't be churches. But the corporate structure will be a church-like setting where you go. to almost worship to have your experience. It's replacing the very foundation of spirituality with consumerism and this drug. So I could see this weird twisting happen there. Like, what do you guys think about that?

Well, I mean, I've already observed the, I don't know, the church of corporatism being rolled out in full force, you know, just through my startup ventures. You know, I won't name names or anything, but it was very much all of a sudden we're sitting there. And I was like, wow, this is like an evangelical church service. People are putting their hands up. People are expressing all these things. But it's very corporate-centric, you know, all about, you know, getting, you know, where they were essentially replacing that void of spiritualism with, you know, some sort of corporate version of it to try to, you know, create better workers and foster

better businesses and create better investments. And so that's already in full force. So when you add the ability of a psychoactive substance on top of all of that, I think you do, you can have a recipe where, you know, people are going to end up in some pretty existential, interestingly, interesting places. And I have a feeling there'll be a lot of existential crises. Now, I don't think that those will be in the sense that, oh, they're going to wake up and realize everything they're doing is bad. I think it's not, I think we're a little bit further along those paths, right? we've been banging on these walls for years and years and years and years. I think we often forget what it's like to just start on the path.

And then if you were to imagine just starting on the path and then having this massive corporate entity, basically controlling every single aspect of that, telling you what to say, when to say it, where to go, when to show up, how to take this, what to do, what not to do, all of these things, all of a sudden, exactly like you said, it replaces the godhead. It fills that spiritual void, but not with something of substance. substance, but, you know, of consumerism of, you know, let's, you know, we do this for X, Y, and Z, not for healing, not for the benefit of society, not for anything like that. It takes a different angle, I think.

I think it reminds me of our conversation last week when we were talking about the, I think it was in, you know, 1884 and the concept of new speak, right? And I was thinking a lot about this over this last week. And thinking first on how we've shifted our culture into that of what they're calling a second orality culture. Right. So like before we had, you know, this literature and the book of the printing press, you know, we lived in an oral culture. And especially when you go back, you can see oral tradition. And there is this almost shift of what's happened over the last 25, 30 years of where we've shifted from really gaining the majority of our knowledge through the written word and actually through listening to it.

by podcasting, videos, like everything. Like, we really now are functioning more like an oral society than we are one that is driven by the written word. And so how we communicate, there's been these shifts. And so when you think about the idea of new speak, what is the best way that you can begin to like really infuse a culture is by the language that you use, which you can and cannot say? And it almost is like this shift into a second orality became easier to control some element of, and again, we can see the control and the printing and whatnot. But I was thinking about that,

just how we're so dependent now on listening to people and listening to our, even using our voice, right? And in the car, like, we don't, we can speak things and they happen. We don't have to write stuff down anymore. These vocal assistants that are coming into our lives. And so this news speaks coming in. And so you start watching, like, how is this happening within the psychedelic movement? And it's interesting because so much of the language is PTSD, depression, anxiety, mental health. That's how they're talking about the healing of this stuff. And right now, we're like at a, you know, grassroots enough method that we all are like, yes, we've seen the impact of that. But you don't have to get too much out of the grassroots where all of a sudden those things start to mean other stuff.

And what does it mean to be depressed or what does it mean to have anxiety or what does it mean to have PTSD? And they're going to be able to manipulate that, I think, in so. in ways that they're going to be new speak that we're going to watch develop right before our eyes. I agree with that a lot. You know, and just kind of an example of that when it first began, look how many people gave their children riddlin, Adderall, all of these things, just drugging up kids. And it was all on the, you know, the word of a doctor or a psychologist or something like that. You know, and you're not allowed to question the authority structure, but if everybody else is doing it, it must be good for my kid. They give it to 20 other kids in the school. And so I think, you know,

we've already started to see these cycles, these patterns kind of play out in society. And I think, I think we'll a lot, what we'll see, especially from the corporate side of things, is exactly that. Well, I think the way to address, you know, the broad corporate takeover, and we're not going to be able to drug all these executives and change their minds, unfortunately, but as much as I'd like that, I mean, I think it just has to start with the individual, you know, and we have to be each our own proponents of how the healing is supposed to look like and just bring awareness to what that corporate structure looks like. And we're doing it now by talking about it and sort of bringing to light what it looks like for big money, big corporations,

just step into this space and take on this sort of form or figure in place of the true, you know, spiritual nature of medicine and sort of start to try to just rip out the value and sell it and make a bunch of money. But yeah, I think the way to hopefully try and prevent that is just to, you know, each of us, ourselves be voices for what this should look like, what it could look like, how to do it correctly and keep talking about it. Certainly the corporate sort of big money model has been what's been scaring me about this thing passing in the past few weeks because there's no stopping it. You know, it's just like this big tidal wave of big money rushing in and just trying to get a cash grab on this. And that seems so antithetical. And, you know, to the medicine, it makes me so uncomfortable. But in terms of shifts in consciousness, you know, it's got to happen little by little.

And I think taking the medicine is helpful in that direction. Yeah, that's all I said. I, you know, I think that the weird hippie couples giving organic mushrooms have a different way of applying it that is more effective. And I want to share what I think that is. We talked about the corporate structure and they seem to be based on repeat customers. They're going to want people to coming in. And you can see the pattern of PTSD. You got to come in once every three months for your treatment.

It's going to help. And with that kind of language like Jason was saying begins the pattern. of use where what I think the proper way is, and I'm curious if you guys agree with this, is that you could take it one or two times and learn how to solve that problem for yourself and then move on to the next problem. Like if you have depression, you should be able to take it once or twice, figure out what your problem is, and then solve that problem, and then the depression goes away. The depression isn't a long-lasting thing.

The depression is a roadblock that got stuck in your way back here. So you sit down with a practitioner, someone that knows what they're doing. You remove that roadblock, then they can move forward. they might not need it again. They might need it one time. You know, if they wanted to do it again to solve something else, then I think that's the difference between, and I think that that's going to be the difference between small groups

and people that really care about the individual and solving problems versus the corporate model. There's going to be the corporate structure is probably going to have some sort of incentive structure for the doctors, an incentive structure to push more medicine, you know. And like that, to me might be enough of a downfall for, for, for the smaller people to at least get a foothold. What do you guys think? I mean, honestly, again, this is where I trust the medicine.

Like, I trust that, like, it has been healing people for millennia. It has popped up. It's disappeared from societies. It's reemerged. It's had this, this, again, bigger thing. And again, I think for people that are truly looking for the healing, they're going to, they're going to break out. But that's going to be the interesting thing is they're going to have to break out of a lot of new speak and they're going to have to be like, I'm going to go trust someone in their basement and do this

versus the nice, clean, you know, experience of what I would have at this beautiful facility. Like, they're going to have to, they're going to have to be willing to break out. And I think those that are, there's going to be, there's going to be a lot of us that are going to be ready to welcome them with open arms. And I, and I just trust that's going to be the process at the end of the day, that those that are, that are there that want it, will be able to find it. Otherwise, yeah, it's inevitable that the corporatocracy is doing this. It's not like on some of the levels, I think it can stop.

No, I don't think it stops. And if we look at, you know, just the underlying structure of everything, everything in our society is built for it to just continue to plow down the road unhindered. You know, this is the whole reason this got passed is because there was $5 million invested in getting it passed. There was only, there was one, I think there was one group who took up a stand. against it and they managed to raise a grand total of 22 26,000 dollars right and do you know where that money came from uh not off the top of my head but I did look into it a little bit

I was I was that public information uh most of it came from a group in Washington DC it'd have to double check the name but I know three million of it probably the initial funding was from the group that was behind campaigning for the initiative and then A lot of it was donations, and I actually hopped on a call like a week before the bill was passed that said they were up to almost $9 million in funding. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, not to interrupt. No, no, no, chime in whatever. Yeah, so $9 million is a big number, right?

You know, we couldn't come up with $9 million if, you know, if they held our family at gunpoint probably. And so I think we're going to see, you know, it's just like what happens in D.C. these days. Lobbyists from big corporate interests get a whole bunch of money. They write these bills. These bills get presented to senators who are going or in Congress people who are going to vote a certain way based upon the donations that they received from these same people. And that's just kind of the system that we have at a regulatory and legal level in this country. And to suspect that it would change for this, I just don't see it happening. I don't want to, sorry, George, you can go ahead.

No, please. Yeah, I just had one point, I guess, I want to bring up, which is sort of relevant here, which I've been reading about. And I think I don't know the guy's name 100%. I think it was Mason Marks, but he was like MD, J.D., like Harvard School of Law. I mean, he wrote this just intense article about data privacy. which, you know, for me is a pretty big issue. And it seems like the state of Colorado or I don't know who, I think these funding groups

are going to have sort of exclusive access to the data. And there's a big concern around PHA, public health, private health information, who has access to that. And then this sort of gold mine of data that's going to come from all of this. And there's really no provisions for people to opt out of their data being collected or legal protections if it's not considered PHI. And that's really a big, big concern of mine. Moving forward, it seems like these interest groups, you know, are not donating money to the cause, but investing money in the cause. Exactly.

to get access to a bunch of very, very valuable data that's very hard and very expensive to obtain if you're doing it in the clinical trials route. And big data is a big business. You control the information. You can control where everything goes, right? You can control what's happening, what's not happening. That brings me to another part. I was reading through the, through the, and it talks about the natural medicine advisory board. You know, when you start getting boards together, you got like a little gang, right? You got 15 people up there. How do you get a board seat? Well, it's probably not going to be me or you.

You know, it's probably not going to be the small guy out there. Right. Yeah, I know a little bit about this. You can make recommendations for who's going to sit on it. But one of the individuals behind passing the act, Kevin Matthews, had told my boss, or my boss told me by him, I guess, that he's probably going to be making, recommendations on who sits on the board and then dora will decide they're going to be like who's the experts here you know who do you think we should put on this board and then they get to decide and then

they make the decisions but you can sort of advocate for who you'd like to sit there and you can apply to have that done sure but you know you know what board is going to elect the the shaman the crazy bearded shaman who's up in the mountains when you know you know you know what board is going to elect the shaman you know, they're being set up against some guy who's ran 17 clinical trials. It becomes just an echo chamber at some level, I think. Yeah, for sure. It's not in the interest of the board to put crazy shamans. Not crazy, but, you know, you know, shaman's. You never know. Yeah, who knows? Shaman's in political seats.

You know, it's weird how sometimes the world we live in echoes, literature. And when I think about that, I think about Brave New World and the Island. In both those books, they use Soma, you know, or the Moksha medicine, but it seems similar to me. And in one hand, like, I almost think that these are the two clinical, these are the two settings, right? Like Brave New World, where you use Soma to get through the stress times, seems to be the road in which big pharma is using it, where on the island, the Mokshah medicine, you have kids taking it, going through trials and tribulations and rituals. and using it to better themselves and have a form of self-optimization in a positive way.

You know, it's just, it's weird how it could be written so long ago the paths that are out there. Cole, I know you're a fan of both of those books. What do you think is, though, like, how do we get more to the island from Brave New World? Well, it's been a couple years since I read Ireland, maybe more than a couple. But if I remember correctly, they say explicitly it's actually psilocybin that they're using. And there's a whole beautiful, I want to say chapter, at least section where, yeah, they're 16-year-olds basically go through an initiation ceremony with psilocybin. And, you know, they're raised rock climbing and close to nature and doing these kinds of things.

But there is the contrast in Brave New World between the sort of soma-controlled society and the sort of rash tribalism and kind of like seeing the positives and negatives of both of those. But, you know, I think Island does a good job of painting that picture of not just the medicine, but the broader societal sort of set up of how do we set up our society's policies to be better. kids get to go to other people's houses and they run around freely and they're always around parents and these kinds of things and just kind of like integrating society more. And so for me, that's a very big element like the society has to, you know, be in alignment with the medicine. And right now our Western society is very corporate capitalistic. and this medicine sort of doesn't fit in with our other medicines, and we're trying to fit into that system, and it's not working,

but we need to make the societal level changes, really, to see the healing that we want. I think, you know, we talked about this in plenty of times on the roundtable, but the rise of parallel economies, parallel systems, parallel societies, I think that's probably where we'll actually see these things thrive. You know, because we do exist at a time where we can define, you know, a framework for a society, for a community. And, you know, we can run these experiments. And I think, you know, there's already a lot of interest to do so. I know a lot of people are working on it besides me.

And I think probably over the next couple years, you know, you'll have these centers. you'll have the corporate side of it, but we'll start to see rises of more, you know, kind of like throwback to your hippie communes, but very different, much more structured, much more organized, you know, different types of societal merit systems, you know, things based on meritocracies, you know, you're going to have, you know, big city centers probably rolling out experiments with universal basic incomes coming down the pike here pretty quick. And so I think we'll start to see a lot of these. And I bet you that's, where, you know, the medicine thrives is in those types of environments.

Yeah. I wanted to add to, I think that there's a different aspect as far as, like, we've been talking about the psychedelic effects of psilocybin and the psychedelic effects of treatment and what it can treat. But I want to talk about something you can learn just not just by taking it, but by watching it. Like, if you grow mushrooms, like, let's think about the terminology. You're going to colonize a jar of seeds.

You're going to colonize like something. Like that's, this is kind of what Ben is talking about. When you say us starting new systems, I say let's look at the way the fungus grows, and then we can apply that to the way we could build a society. And I know colonization gets a bad, it's kind of a bad tangent to it, but just think about us as the first inoculation going out, and now we're beginning to colonize. It's me meeting Cole.

It's Ben meeting Jason. It's us reaching through the airwaves right now and talking to, to Colorado, talking to people in Switzerland, reaching out to people in Alaska. Like we're actually beginning to colonize and form the same way the mycelium branches out and moves ideas and moves nutrients to other parts. So too are we acting like the mycelium. We're acting like the medicine. And pretty soon you're going to see these fruits grow.

And I think that, you know, I can tell you, my podcast alone is just, I don't even know how this happened, but it's when I began seriously taking. when I really began looking at my life through the idea of you don't come into this world, you come out of it. And I think about mushrooms all the time like that. Like, do we are growing as a network? And I think if more people understood that we move like that, we grow like that. I think if we can get away from the language of mine and switch it up to ours, like it's

the second you say it's mine or it's his, you have erased the fact that we work together. And I think that's kind of what mushroom shows us. If you look the way it grows, it has to reach a certain level before it fruits. And that's what we have to do is a network. So I'm just trying to make the point that you can learn a lot about the world and the environment you live in, not necessarily by taking mushrooms, but just like watching mushrooms. Have you guys ever thought about it from that perspective? Well, I think so I was going to say, the one thing I think is interesting about that is also remembering that this beautiful mycelium network supports lots of mushrooms,

not just the ones that make us give us magic. They also support the mushrooms that freaking, you know, take over the ants and invade entire colonies and wipe out ants through its seed. And it's the kind of mushrooms that can, you know, like in the film Fantastic Fungi where they're talking about the ability to use mycelium and mushrooms to like break down oil and the evils. Like so I think on some levels like the answer is yes. Like the mushroom like so like it shows us this beautiful network.

but it's also going to do a lot of different things for us besides just give us the magic and the connection to something bigger than ourselves. The best systems that I've ever observed designed and operating are systems that reflect nature. Yeah, and I think there's a lot to be said about that. Yeah, I think about mushrooms a lot too, you know, used to read a lot about them, still do sometimes actually I've got a soup going right now got three different kinds of mushrooms nice I found those little I know they're grown in China but I don't even know what they're called but it's a bunch of little tiny ones and oysters oh no no I wish um anyway yeah and then as jason was speaking I was also thinking about how mushrooms uh you know and mycelium integrates underneath

the ground with other organisms and supports other systems and organisms and there's a whole interconnected deeper nature between the mushrooms and the rest of life certainly between our brains and psilocybin which is just completely mind-blowing in and of itself but the mushrooms you know can give us nutrients you know if we eat the right ones and they also give you know nutrients to the trees and the root systems and they feed back and forth and I think that's really beautiful as well you know I I mean, we're in, you know, where mushrooms are really interesting in the fact that they inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide similar to us, right? We have a fungal system in our body, you know, and very neglected fungal system for most people, as we were.

And I think that's why, you know, the advent of, you know, not just the medicinal mushrooms, but also, you know, the healthy mushrooms. And, you know, Paul Stamond's has done fantastic work on things like turkey tail. fly agaricon you know rashi cordyceps you know and there's you know lions main and you know we found awesome properties from these because they engage something that's inherent in us uh and i think that's a very you know it's a nice fundamental aspect just like a cannabinoid system you know we have all these systems in our body and the more that we can nurture them uh and then you know as above so below which we talk about a lot on this show uh these are things that we can then take from the internal to the external.

And there's lessons to be learned. There's metaphors to be had. And there's a lot of good times with it as well, I think. Ben, you had mentioned a while back, something about ionophers, but I don't know that we fully got into that. And could you maybe explain that again? Sure. Ionophores are basically, they're the charge carrier in the body.

So when your cell produces a charge, the ionophores take that charge. and propagate it to the surrounding tissue. The more ionophor content that you have, the greater that charge density can be. And from the literature, it says that ionophores are generated mainly via fungus and bacteria in the human body. So the idea, and, you know, this gets into like the bioelectric field,

which is getting a lot of interest now as kind of, you know, we have biochemistry and then bioelectric because there's different bioelectric states that seem to have an effect. And we kind of know this from the literature, right? We used to shock people, and we still do. You know, you hook up people to electric shock therapy. That still happens.

You're basically manipulating the bioelectric field to create some sort of physical response at either the biochemical level, the neuronal level, or, you know, just the physical level in terms of like healing. And so there's a lot of active research on this, and I think we'll see a lot more in the coming years. But to me, it seems that magic mushrooms,

especially really kind of upregulate this bioelectric activity via the cyanophore channel. At least that's kind of what I've put together. It's still active research, but yeah. Yeah, it's amazing to think about. You know, as I was thinking about our previous conversation a little bit earlier, what can we try to steal, let's try to steal man the pharmaceutical end of it. Like what are some good things that could come out of these guys?

Like having the money get in there and then maybe finding some new analogs or what can you think of some really good things, Cole, that could come out of pharma bringing big money into this area? Yeah, I mean, probably the biggest one is safety data. and accessibility via insurance coverage. And I mean, I'm, you know, I'm very much the hippie guy in many senses, but I also work on these psychedelic clinical trials, you know, and it's a very laborious process to do it and to do it safely. I mean, it's a lot of the times it feels like overkill,

but it's like, hey, we're going to give LSD to people. Like, we're going to take a lot of safeguards if we're going to do this above board, way too many in my opinion, but you know, you set it up very carefully and cleanly so that you can get good clean data. And a lot of what the FDA cares about is safety. You know, so you have your primary outcome measures, which are very scientific, did it work, how much did it work, how strong was it kind of thing, and to follow up. And then you've got, what are the adverse events, you know, are there serious adverse events as somebody committing suicide? And you record every single adverse event, whether somebody stubs their toe in their own home while they're enrolled in the trial.

It has nothing to do with the drugs. And they come in and they say, I stub my toe. Well, then you say, okay, well, that probably wasn't related to the drug. It was moderate or mild, you know. And, you know, the thing that you get with that is a lot of very valuable data on safety. And then, you know, without the insurance companies having, that safety data, they can't say what the risk profile is to make it more accessible. And I'm sure we could get deep down a rabbit hole of the health care system and the insurance model

and how that plays into pharmaceuticals. I certainly could. But anyway, you know, these treatments are extremely expensive. Provider's time is very expensive. obviously we want, well, I don't know if it's obvious, but male-female therapy pair seems to be the best kind of model for like full-day NDMA sessions and probably others as well. That's kind of how we're doing it in the LSD trial and paying for providers time, you know,

nurse practitioners, 250 an hour, psychiatrist, 300 an hour, LPC therapist, 150 an hour, and, you know, you're talking about 80s, hour days and then you're talking about preparation integration work so pretty soon in facility fees you know pretty soon you get into the tens of thousands of dollars range for treatment and that's just only accessible to a small slice of the population you know so in terms of accessibility to the you know

lay public the general public we need insurance reimbursement but we're not going to have that without having a lot of data on safety Wow. That's deep. I mean, I agree with that if we're steel manning the argument. I disagree with that from the perspective of, you know, what's the LD-50 on psilocybin? There isn't one recording to my knowledge, right? You know, same likewise for LSD. I don't think there's an LD.

But, you know, so we have these substances that are very much proven from other types of data. to be very, very safe. But I know where you're coming from from the insurance perspective and the alternative risk, the suicides, the things like that, that has to be there for insurance to take part of this. And that gets into, you know, the rabbit hole of that model. But, you know, to counter the steel man argument, you know, I think these things have been growing on this planet for millennia. and they've potentially have, you know, influenced society multiple times over.

And I think they're going to do it again. And I think, you know, having the ability to, for everybody to grow mushrooms is probably, you know, that first step of that evolution of things. You know, we're steel manning it, so I don't want to push back on it too much. But, you know, it's just, yeah, it's hard for me to steal man this one. medicine for money medicine for profit is something that just grates me the very wrong way yeah Jason you got any thoughts on that I just appreciated that deep dive Cole took us on and thinking about just the costs and how they're kind of creating this infrastructure of that it has to be done these

certain ways and it'll also be interesting to say you know maybe again for insurance to take this stuff, we're still years out from any of this really coming into the mainstream. I mean, still, even just looking at the path of marijuana, you know, I think it feels like this is going to move a little bit faster possibly because marijuana has kind of been laying the groundwork over the last decade. And so it's like if we were able to get marijuana working on a federal level, that conversation is now coming into the mainstream, this kind of feels like it won't be too, it won't take maybe as long. But we're still, as to say, a decade out from this really coming into the to the mainstream. And so there's, it'll be interesting to see societyally how on some levels

do the upper echelon, you know, the bigger divide between the haves and the have-nots, the haves have this piece to their life because they're having these experiences and they have access to it and they're getting this healing and we see kind of the further separation from those that maybe can't get access to it. And that's where I think that will be really, again, trusting the power of people to be able to facilitate it in, in, smaller, more mom and pop shops and hoping that that can be a faster movement on some levels. Once this stuff gets all kind of legalized, like, great. Now, you know, again, looking at the measure, I can apply for a license. I have a healing center. I don't have to maybe do all the same

pieces for the scientific testing and whatnot. And I can start just being able to work with people and provide healing. The faster we can get there, the better. So again, we know the other side's going to happen. So how do we then just look at the positives? Like, great. This will give us the access in the mainstream, like more and more people talking about it. And now we can start being able to just the people that want it, be able to provide it for them. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, it gets me thinking, too, like Cole and Cole, Ben and Jason, I don't have any clinical trial experience, but I'm speaking to maybe you guys that do.

Like, how do you, like, let's just say a generic clinical trial for LSD. Like, how do you, how do you create a trial to tell? how strong something is. How do you measure the strength of something in like that, Cole? Well, if I understand your question correctly, I mean, that's kind of the trial I'm working on. So it's a dose-finding study. So they're testing of placebo 25 micrograms, 50, 100, and 200.

And then randomizing any one of those five treatment arms, you get one dose. And then you see what happens with anxiety. and you plot it on a dose response curve. So the primary outcome measure for us is the Hamilton A anxiety measure. So basically have a random blinded person assess their anxiety with a semi-structured diagnostic interview and then you give them the LSD and come back and see what happens. And then yeah, once you have that data, you can plot it on the curve. curve. I don't know about like how strong the medicine is as much as like how much it works.

I guess that's more pharmacokinetic kind of stuff unless you're just talking about subjective effects. Yeah, it's interesting. I just, I was curious how what a clinical trial looks like from that angle. It's, you know, it seems interesting on attempting to measure some things that subjective and it sounds like there's ways to kind of kind of get around you know i was reading in the story about they would look at rats and watch their head twitch but you know like that doesn't seem to be a real good measurement yeah and i think you know a lot of these scales are kind of subjective scales and the idea you know kind of the underlying philosophy is if you've repeated enough you'll get kind of a correlation to the data so then you can you can you know get some takeaways from that that

kind of give you the idea that, hey, you know, in 80% of subjects it was reported, you know, that they weren't on the placebo, that they had this subjective experience. And then you can take away pieces of data like that. So you kind of use the masses to pull out, you know, kind of more explicit information. And I mean, you could get deep into the whole question of whether or not subjective reporting is a valid way to, measure anxiety. There's a lot argument about that. Yeah. But, you know, that's pretty much the basis of the field of psychology is just like asking people questions about what they think or feel. And, you know, I mean, I guess you just kind of have to trust that. And it seems like that's a fairly

reliable measure. Just to be able to say, how anxious are you feeling? What's it feel like in your chest? I don't know, things like that. And, you know, if you have, you have, you have a blinded person do it that has no idea who they are. You hand them a laptop and then they're zoomed in with some PhD somewhere that's doing the assessment. It's like they shouldn't have any idea of what treatment arm they got. They care a lot about that in clinical trials for sure the blinding and expectancy effects and placebo response reduction.

Yeah, it's interesting. Gentlemen, I've been a little bit under the weather. I'm going to start landing the plane here, man. But before we go, I just wanted to maybe start with Ben here and give me your thoughts on what do you think is the best case scenario for Prop 122? And what do you think is the worst case scenario for 122, Ben? Well, I'm pretty sure we covered the worst case scenario. Yeah, I agree.

You know, and we'll go back into that. I think the best case scenario, we kind of touched on it to. And I think, you know, Jason really touched on it. I think we have the opportunity now to have a grassroots movement outrun the slow, laborious, and cumbersome corporate entity structure and insurance models and all these things that have to be accounted for and, you know, upheld. So I think that's the best case scenario is we do have people on the ground. we have, you know, three of us here in Colorado. You know, we have people on the ground who are already years and years and years into this effort. And I think that there is a window of opportunity for, you know, and I think it will arise in kind of those parallel society, parallel community type situations.

But I think this is a wonderful opportunity at the end of the day for just the actual aspect of the application of medicine. and what this actually means to society at a larger whole. Yeah, that's well said. Jason, what are your final thoughts on this whole situation? Yeah, I think the positive, again, when I was reading over the actual act, I wanted to read like the first parks. I thought this is actually the best part of the whole thing. And it says that the voters of the state of Colorado find and declare

that Colorado's current approach to mental health has failed to fulfill its promise. Coloradoans deserve more tools to address mental health issues, including approaches such as natural medicines that are grounded in treatment, recovery, health, and wellness rather than criminalization, stigma, suffering, and punishment. I mean, come on. That's like, I think that's a statement we can all agree with, right? Yeah. That's the good news, right? And so I think, yeah, we've talked a lot of doom and gloom and we can definitely see some of the negative. But to echo Ben's point, if we can outrun this thing and enough people begin waking up and enough people begin to start to see that the system has not been supportive to them, then we will see this as maybe the mycelium network to

birth the next thing that's going to be coming because we know a lot of structures are about to come down on some levels. And so maybe this is the groundwork that's needed of getting the right people awake so that when the shift happens, we have the right army ready to go and fight that battle. So that to me is the best case scenario of what we can be working on in the short term next three to five years is just building that army of people that are awake to Gaia. Move another people. I like it. I like it. Cole, what would you say in summary to the situation?

Yeah, that's a hard one to follow. I know, man. Yeah, I don't know. I guess I don't see like it's hard to say like best case, worst case, because I feel like the picture we've kind of painted. is like the worst case is this big corporatization, and the best case is just kind of like access to natural healing, and there's no way that the corporatization isn't gonna show up.

So it's really just kind of like what happens, I guess, and hopefully the direction it moves in, and I think all of that just rests on the accessibility piece, you know, and the doors are open. So I mean, I guess best case scenario is the corporate doesn't squash out everybody else. you know and and hopefully it opens the doors to like people with good intentions that like

really want to practice this work for the right reasons that aren't overly hyped or money crazy or just excited to catch the newest hot wave to like step in and really do the work because you know there's people you know like myself who have really been doing this work for a long time and I was sitting in a group ketamine session the other day and I was like, you know what, this is kind of boring, you know, sitting here. There's three people with their eyeshades on and, you know, we're sitting here for an hour, but I'm here and I'm doing the work. And, you know, I mean, granted, it's good to hold space for them and a lot of the exciting stuff comes afterwards when they tell you what the hell they saw. But, you know, it was just like, well, there's no reason

to get like overly rushed or overly excited. I mean, sometimes it's scary in there. Sometimes it's boring, but it's just like, okay, I'm right here with somebody that's going through it right now. You know, I'm doing it. You know, it's not this big crazy thing. It's not my life is amazing. It's not, wow, my God, I can't believe I'm doing this work.

I'm just super aligned and focused right now. It's just, you know, work and it's important work, and it's good work, and it's gratifying. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's just like the people that are in it for the right reasons are just going to keep showing up no matter how much hype there is. And hopefully that that is a stable enough thing to, yeah, to keep us going, to keep us alive, to move us in the right direction. Man, that's really well said. And I believe, like, I've met so many people with their hearts in the right spot that actually care about what happens to other people. think that there's a lot more of us than there are of them. And I know you shouldn't use us and them or whatever. Ultimately, we're probably all the same. But there's so many good people,

and I'm sitting next to three of them right here. Cole, you've recently started kind of a new venture. Why don't you tell people about that? Oh, yeah. Thanks, man. Yeah, I have a small coaching and consulting business. So I've been coaching people around recovery from problematic cannabis use. Not all cannabis use is problematic, I understand, but for some people like myself, it is and has been. So started doing that and also can do some psychedelic integration coaching or sort of career alignment stuff. Yeah, and the consulting is kind of around if you have a career and you're looking to be more involved with psychedelics, I can help guide people in that direction. And, you know, mostly for me, it's been a more traditional research environment

and do a psychedelic research environment. So that's kind of my wheelhouse. But, you know, I'm open to exploring kind of other shifts in the psychedelic careers and what that might look like, whether that's in therapy. I also do that. So, yeah, just kind of like a side project to help get more people in the space, help people out. where can people find you at it's lionheartwellness.net or cole butler on lincoln nice i would recommend everybody check out cole he's an amazing individual he genuinely cares about making the world better

and he's if you just read some of his post you'll have to stop for a minute and be like it's amazing how come i didn't think of that you know what i mean but he's really awesome ben what do you got going on my friend i've seen the podcast blowing up over there, and I'm surprised you haven't mentioned no absolutes the book once yet. Well, you know, I try to not to plug it all the time. Why not? Plug it. Come on. No, yeah, I've been taken care of my little one-year-old nephew recently, so I've been a little behind the scenes more than anything.

Yeah, I'm working on a lot of automation to kind of help build this network and put it to the next level. More podcasts should be coming out here pretty soon. I just need to find the time. So that should be in the next week or so. But yeah, check me out at Benjamin C.George.com for the book, the podcast, and anything else that might be coming down the pike. Yeah, and for those listening, there's a reason they call him Mr. Wizard.

The more that I spend time with Ben, the more I realize how much of a Wizard he is, man. Thank you, Ben, for everything. Jason, what's going? on man i know you've got some things in the works yeah just uh continuing uh my podcast called telling secrets with my partner that we have an episode coming out pretty much every week on that which is always a lot of fun and then i've been working on kind of starting a solo podcast focusing on masculinity and fatherhood that uh should be coming out with this first couple episodes in the next few weeks so looking forward to seeing that kind of come online yeah me too man i i've i've had a real great time

getting hang out with you a little bit and I'm impressed with the work you're doing and I think you're one hell of a communicator man so thanks for being part of it thanks man so that's what I got for today ladies and gentlemen this is an epic show thank you to every one of you for spending some time with me today usually we do two hours but I'm a little down and out right now so uh you'll feel better you're better yeah yeah all right guys I will talk to you next week thank you so much buddy Aloha. Thank you. See you.