#1136 - Hamilton Morris

June 26, 2018

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

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Hello friends what's happening this weekend Tucson on Friday and Boise on Saturday I think Tucson is basically sold out there's a small handful of tickets and there's some tickets left for Boise but they're going fast it's a big spot boys he's a giant fucking Arena I've never been and I'm very excited to go I've never been to Idaho I'm fuckin pumped oh I keep hearing great things I'm excited I got new dates coming out I'm going to be tomorrow actually they go on sale tomorrow for Columbus Ohio that's where your dad is in September that September 14th and the night before that the 13th I'm in Philly at the Tower Theater

so the 13th and 14th those tickets are going on sale tomorrow June 27th and they're only going on sale through

it's all those presale jammies password is strange that all be at Joe Rogan. Com for all that good stuff and I'll take a day to end Toronto selling out quick it's almost gone that is September 29th don't sleep this episode of the podcast is brought to you by new sponsor Black Rifle coffee I've been drinking the shift for a while and it's fucking awesome I got it sent to me by me good pal John Dudley who has a knock on roast over there founded by former Special Operations vets who combined their love of coffee with the Great Outdoors and Black Rifle coffee delivers bad Astros to order coffee right to your doorstep this guarantees you getting fresh premium quality coffee with every order in addition to great coffee and gear Black Rifle has a coffee club that makes things very easy no lines no running out just great coffee shipped right to your door every month bullshit free plus when you join there

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mastic and brilliant man please give it up for Hamilton Morris

The Joe Rogan Experience

pink and we're live Hamilton Morris sober as fuck how about you absolutely this time so we did a podcast 7 years ago and most people apparently didn't know how far. We were but I figured am we're here was Hamilton Mars we should go deep and we just kept hitting that joint till I lost most of my grasp on reality while we're talking if it's just a very slippery conversation I was just too high to form coherent thoughts it was just whatever I pieced together was just so you know it was almost like mining a conversation new place in the early days we did it at my house yeah that was way way way back in the day I had no idea really I knew you were of course but I didn't know about your podcast entirely I'd seen clips of you on YouTube and it wasn't until I was driving home from that recording in my phone just

hundreds of emails that I realize how about this is a serious phenomenon that I was not aware of and now I see it's just become huge it's a weird thing dude it's it's got the wheel I just sorta have to show up it's a very strange I didn't it sounds like false modesty or something like that but I'm just being totally honest like this thing does itself I think a lot of it might have to do with the long form people are so used to seeing people's opinions condensed and filtered into the sound bites and Snippets and to hear an extended conversation with someone where they can actually tell stories and articulate their opinions and a nuanced careful ways so rare I agree it's one of the reasons why I don't do those shows anymore like panel shows and things like that is so frustrating I very little experience with that sort of thing I did dr. Oz last year and

person could function in that serve environment I mean I have a TV show so arguably I'm well trained for that sort of thing but unless you're an actor who's prepared a line to say as soon as they Point At You there's no way that you could function because it's not a genuine conversation it's just not opportunity to launch $0.01 and Sound Bites in an audience Applause and also the audience is such a strange element to add to a conversation and if you and I were having this conversation exactly in this this room but to the left of us is an enormous group of people who feel weird we would have to address them we have to turn to them it would be odd falling illuminated weirdest when they come back from break and they hold up the sign applause applause applause and everything goes crazy in the environment I was on this discussion about Cortana

yeah I just took something like that fuck my knee up the other day I did something and it's been stiff and painful it so I stood before I came here and then I just took a took six of them see what happens at 10 wants proof 10 what is a bag that sitting on the sink I'll tell you exactly what's in it but now I get why people might think it's a drug what is the truck yeah for sure but when I took for I was like what's up to for the first time I took it I took two and a couple times I took it like a mild stimulant but then when you get to the range of 8 to 10 pills it's like oh this is so fuck you up the stuff

the stuff I take is Urban Ice Organics and

see it says it says take two it doesn't say the amount of material in the capsule

750 mg not quite a grandma Ryan seems like a reasonable amount but they always construct these things in these ridiculous traumatic opposition's like it was me versus a woman whose son had died of some Kratom Associated overdose and you know it it turns into a thing like what do you have to say to this woman whose son. It's like I don't know either people that died from caffeine overdoses as well it's tragic that this happened have people died from this yes they have to take I think a lot of people set up these unrealistic expectations with these drugs were they if they like a drug they want to say it's impossible no possible way that is your standard you'll always fail because people will die doing absolutely everything running having sex defecating aspirin aspirin absolutely there's nothing in this world that can't find it

into a human death so if people want to say and even know cannabis obviously people say you can't overdose on cannabis and essential you can't but if you look in the medical literature there are a number of these cannabis Associated fatalities you know if you can debate them endlessly but the point is once a drug enters a large enough population will be a number of sensitive individuals and someone will die doesn't mean that the drug is dangerous it means that it's unrealistic to set a standard or if anything bad happens to anyone we have to decide that the drug is dangerous and should be banned I agree I mean look water kills people there's a lot of these hazing things for the fraternity kids will be asked to drink a shit ton of water and people have died from a woman died in San Jose a few years back from a contest to drink water to get her son like an Xbox or something like that yeah yeah I mean there's a lot of things that are lethal but the ld50 for cannabis what you literally have to smoke your body

waiter something right it's something crazy be very difficult yeah but doesn't mean that you couldn't get so high that you did something really stupid one of dying right especially depending upon the person and The Logical variability some right right exactly and it's just I think it's also just assertive a bad road to go down people always want to emphasize the safety of things but in my opinion it doesn't ultimately matter to me whether or not something you safe I think we should have the freedom to do dangerous things if we choose or allowed to ride motorcycles were allowed to shoot guns you're allowed to go skydiving and bungee jumping all those things carry risks but it's assumed that any adult that does them is aware of those risks I couldn't agree more I mean it's it's also who is the society that we live in was just you and I we were the only two people alive who are you to tell me what I can do or me to tell you what you can do it's ridiculous and so when you have grown adults telling a grown adult whose informed what they can and can't do

question children well then it becomes an education issue and it becomes a parental issue mean it's just we can't lie to your children about the effects of certain drugs cuz then you're not going to believe you about the real the actual the actual Dangerous Ones. And this is of course reflected in this so-called opioid epidemic culprit it's behind all of it and the easiest person to blame of course are pharmaceutical companies because everybody hates pharmaceutical companies so why not blame that Brian but you know and I'm not pro pharmaceutical by any stretch of the imagination but I'm also not Auntie pharmaceutical you there and when you look at the way for example the New York Times is covering the opioid epidemic is always in this town is like documents were uncovered the show that Executives of Purdue Pharma were aware that morphine was addictive as early as 1999 it's like

of course of course they were where people known that morphine is addictive for hundreds of years this is old news and it's how idea that doctors were convinced by some letter in the New England Journal of Medicine that said that Oxycontin isn't addictive is absurd these are all morphine derivatives any adult especially medically trained adult should know that no matter what little variation you make on that molecule if it's structural and pharmacological and qualitatively similar to Morphine course it's going to be addictive and that in and of itself isn't even a bad thing it should be okay to give people addictive drugs as well as long as everyone is aware of the risks of protocol to get off of it you know there's so many people that get on these things and then wind up taking them far longer than they're supposed to because it's easy to get it booked and we need at least have some sort of responsible

direction of these people need to go to to get off of them once they're on them cuz people that get back operations any anything where they prescribe you high doses of opiates it's a huge problem I know many many people have gotten hooked because of end in fact that she tell you that my good friend Justin Wren his wife found out about Kratom because of you because of your show he a problem with shoulder that shoulder shoulder surgery they put him on oxycontin's he was fucked up on them and he was having a really hard time getting off and having the shakes really bad and Kratom is the only thing that got him off of it and that's not surprising I mean this is been known for a very long time in Thailand and that was actually the reason that it was originally prohibited I don't know if you're aware of that but because the government tax opium and people started using for Tom then they made for Tommy leaves out of a kratom

people in the US called Kratom it's also they have vino is so but I feel as you know I'm crazy right and so the reason why was made illegal was because of the fact that it was pinching some of the profits off of the opium trade yes wow yeah that's fucked up and so this is been known for a long time that it helps people get off more addictive opioids and how does it do that well it's an opioid itself in a lot of people don't want to admit or acknowledge that but I think we need to get Beyond this idea that drugs are inherently bad are opioids are inherently bad just because the ones that were aware of have a lot of problems you know in some sense Medicinal Chemistry and pharmacology and all this are still in a very primitive State and there's so much to be

and so we're mostly getting people these derivatives of morphine that have been around for a hundred years and there are better things we're going to continuously discover less addictive treatments for pain and I think that the alkaloids in Kratom are a step in that direction in which is so tragic that they're trying to know make it illegal because this is something that as far as I can tell as genuinely helped an enormous number of people reduce their intake of more addictive and more dangerous opioids things that I felt I mean in the gym my dose was not extremely high but when I was on it I was very coherent I was clear it was clear to me that was affected by something but it felt kind of good it didn't feel bad it felt a little a little uneasy like a little but it did not feel like I was impaired like

no lot of people who take it an exercise like I have a friend he'll take 10 pills and exercise

just just seemed kind of fucking crazy but he says he has a great workout right you're taking that stuff before he works out a lot of different applications he's almost exclusively for that sort of purpose in the South it's a drug that labor is used so they can you know collected the latex from rubber trees and just get their job done that's what it's about I mean that's what opioids are bad for a lot of the world both in the United States and in Africa and Thailand is you know people live Hard lives and Ben manual labor is painful and repetitive and difficult and anything that makes that a little bit more manageable is very important tool for humans I always felt like people that did heroin or opiates or something like that we're on a very short road to death that that was my perception when I was a kid and then I had a friend who is a longshoreman they worked on the docks bring they would bring fish in and fillet the fish

the market and he worked with a guy that everyday at lunch the guy would go cop he would get his heroin he would shoot it up in his car and then you go back to work and I was like you go back to work he worked everyday like everyday shot up and every day he worked like yeah he's never late no just did his work wow well I didn't think you could do that I thought you did heroin the next thing you know you just be on the floor in a fetal position in your own urine and you just would fall apart and I write yeah there's this idea that people sometimes referred to as pharmacological determinism that a certain drug has to do a certain thing so alcohol has to sedate and disinhibit you heroin has to a dick to you and make you a slave to it and kill you cocaine has to be at you for axing that's done at parties it's also very addictive PCP has to make you strip nude and run around and fighting cops and punching holes in wooden fence

but when you look at this you know Anthropologist have looked at certain drugs are used cross-culturally like alcohol and what you find is this whole idea of pharmacological determinism is fundamentally flawed drugs behave differently in different cultures depending on the set and setting of the user and so

you find all sorts of instances that are major exception to these rules so we've set up for these various drugs for example PCP which is arguably one of the most ubiquitously maligned drugs in the world that you know when to imagine the PCP is medicinal but even to this day pcp's and schedule to not schedule one like cannabis and LSD Schedule II can still be prescribed actually and that's because it had a history of medicinal use there was even PCP Psychotherapy in the UK in the in the fifties so this is something that most people wouldn't believe but to those patients or taking it then there was none of this Cultural Association with PCP being a drug that causes psychosis or makes you strip nude who is simply another tool for a psychiatrist to use and help people release repressed memories or traumas that they were afraid to talk about when sober we're seeing that now with MDMA right I mean and also cat

ketamine used being used as an actual tool for Psychotherapy protector for people with depressions having really good results my my friend who's a hilarious comedian who said struggles of depression he had he got great relief from from taking ketamine right and what I think is really interesting is you know this is all packages assertive psychedelic Renaissance but I think the larger context it's a drug facilitating Psychotherapy Renaissance because this was not just limited to psychedelics people did something called Narco analysis where they would give people sedatives like propofol the drug that killed Michael Jackson or various barbiturates or various other drugs and the relaxing effect would allow people to talk more openly to a therapist it was considered very effective now this idea of a psychiatrist injecting you with a drug in order to help you talk about your problems is it's on her

think anyone does it anymore but it used to be very common and I think a return to that is going to be really beneficial yeah I agree with you I think the right drugs with the right cases in the right people and I think we've got to get past the schedules that when you have things like marijuana and so sorry I've been and especially DMT what your own body produces is a schedule 1 drug in the famous Terence McKenna line we're all holding hand out with when it comes to DMT it's just stupid it's just it's stupid that these things are schedule 1 when you're saying there's no medical benefit whatsoever medical application for cannabis is fucking crazy when something it didn't mean you want to have something then

really actively promote a distrust in law enforcement the scheduling of drugs one of the best ones because when you look at something like marijuana and you see that that's a schedule 1 drug that. That's infuriating to people that gained she was benefits from Cannabis mean people that have going through chemotherapy people that have you know it's the interocular pressure from glaucoma mean you can go down the list over and over and over again. The kids that have epilepsy is so many people that have had great benefit particular from edible cannabis people that have seizures when you can keep going on and on and on it's just it's an amazing plant and they have that demonized because of some ridiculous propaganda from the 19 thirties that still somehow or another Klingon in 2018 through all the information we have now with the internet and the fact that cannabis is still scheduled one you have assholes

Jeff sessions still saying things like good people don't smoke marijuana I like this crazy talk is crazy but keep in mind it was just about a hundred years ago that alcohol was prohibited in 13 years to reverse that and it was alcohol there's no drug more integrated into our culture than alcohol on that took 13 years to reverse what was it like back then. Most of the madness when alcohol was illegal in the cops would come in and Jack booted thugs with knock over gin Mills and bust open kegs of whiskey and spill it all out like what the fuck was that like it was it was disastrous but I think what's interesting about that is it was a worthwhile experiment to give him the benefit of the doubt it was worthwhile to see because on some sends you could say the prohibition has a certain logic to it you could say drugs cause problems so if we just make all the drugs illegal then maybe those problems will disappear but it didn't work the experiment failed

and there's nothing wrong with a failed experiment but it's a problem if you keep repeating it over and over and over again for a hundred years looking for a different result and then go to other drugs and go well this one let's try this one just make this one illegal and it's a terrible PR situation for the police as well if I were a police officer I'd be the biggest opponent of the war on drugs and of anyone in the government because we think about why does the average person in New York City love a firefighter they love firefighters but they hate cops why is that it's because of the drug war because a firefighter isn't going to hurt you for something that wasn't really a crime to begin with it's for some kind of victimless crime a firefighter is just there to help you to save you if you're in trouble in the same would be true of police officers if it weren't for the drug war ideally there's a little more complexity and certainly more complexity when it comes to shootings and dance along those lines lie but I mean the stop-and-frisk that I read something about stop

and frisk in New York when they had when they had that instituted the most of it was drugs most of it was like catching people with marijuana which is just fucking insane it just started you look like you might be StreetWise get over here and that's the way these laws of function from the very beginning I mean if you look at Drug law in the UK it tends to be very black and white something is legal or illegal if it's legal it can be sold in stores because it's legal if it's illegal it can't be sold anywhere in the US they instead created this nebulous far-reaching gray area what is all sorts of things that are may be illegal kind of illegal do it but don't get caught and and it's created an ability for the government to selectively prosecute people whatever they want if they want

well that seems to be lessening I mean when you have some like Jeff sessions in office it's very disturbing but then Trump says seems like he's very strong on states rights to pass marijuana laws and things along those lines you do you know what could be a very Craigslist Trump doing anything good but front of you told him that people love him more if you did things good he would do things good that's probably true I save someone that he trusted said we got to get somebody in deep we got to get a mole in the better get somebody who is good at back rubs and okay on the podcast I doubt it I mean I don't know what is the thing that will help is also the separation between the drug users and the policymakers yes and and wanting that I am certainly will help and it's sort of trash

did this is the case but it's capitalism it's the corporate ization of these drugs with cannabis you know when it was hippies and the counterculture having you know marshes down the streets of New York holding up for 20 signs it doesn't I suppose have all that much cloud in the eyes of lawmakers when you have some guy from Yale business school he's never smoked weed who says none of this is serious business opportunity you know we're going to make it big and get investors invest millions and millions of dollars into it hires lobbyists plays the game like a capitalist then the laws do change and I wish that weren't the case but it is it's tragic for the people that did fight and did go to prison and did sacrifice that Sandy's business school guys come along and reap all the benefits but that's the way it works yeah that is the way it works and that's okay I mean it's just a weird path it's a

your path that as long as we can get to legalization I'm I'm a hundred percent for that path I just think

that might be the only way in this weird country this country is so enamored with money I mean we're so enamored with money and Prophets and even for dying people even Old Warren Buffett invested shit tons of money in warehouses to sell cat to grow cannabis in Colorado when the laws are passed me and that guy's a hundred fifty thousand years old he's worth billions of dollars and he's like who gives a shit I'm making more money now and more and more and more I mean even when they're really old there they're massively motivated by profit yes psychedelics it'll probably be true for all of these things because you need to have lobbyists to have the sort of typical white collar support to push things forward I just I don't see any other way around it right now I mean the the real hope is that cannabis not that it will get rid of capitalism but that will figure out hard

girl sings with glasses on right yes he's talking about the glasses in your head that cannabis will

did not use cannabis but Candice will open the door to all these different substances that allow people to have to gain a greater perspective this is the ultimate goal in my opinion is to give people the opportunity to step outside the momentum of their lives and look at things with fresh eyes and make clear decisions does that one of the best things that I think that drugs provide is that the Psychedelic drugs in particular provide an escape from the momentum of this life that you created or that you found yourself a part of it's very difficult for people to stop Behavior patterns to stop and just look at themselves objectively and sort of rethink regroup and reassess and this is one of the best things about cannabis and about suicide in a lot of these other psychedelic drugs is that it gives you this newfound perspective that allows you to reconsider things yes absolutely and I think with the treatment of depression it's a similar idea because depressed people become

used to be very ingrained patterns of thinking and anything that can break you out of that they can shake it up for a minute and maybe give you a different perspective I think it's inherently therapeutic yeah I think so as well and I think

I'm hoping that what I see in this is what I believe I say is that we're changing our perceptions of it I had a conversation with a friend of mine the other day about marijuana where we were talking about how you used to hide whether or not you did it from certain people and now that group of people that you have to hide it from a smaller and smaller and that it seems like everyone casually smoke marijuana now in in our circles is so many people to do cuz if you don't sober people in whatever but it's way more common where is 1015 years ago this was something you hit if you had a good job if you had a family that's not something you wanted people to know about and I think it's really interesting is that in and of itself changes the nature of the Cannabis experience so I think if somebody uses cannabis in a culture that supports it that approves of it their experience will be better by virtue of that fact so there's

certain shame that a lot of people feel when using any drug eye for whatever crazy reason feel it a little bit with cannabis it's you know it live just a hair of I should be you know I should be studying should be reading my should be you no more Focus this is a little hedonistic Total Comfort oriented I should be working harder but that's I think just the vestiges of this propaganda that I've been fed or something like that or maybe it's true but I understand from one perspective why the Cannabis culture drums the benefits of cannabis so hard and it cures all disease it it's good for you that cures cancer all the stuff because if you have that in your mind at the very least it's going to reduce that sort of internal shame that you might feel it makes the entire experience healthier more beneficial who's we do constructive limitations we construct these experiences to some extent so if you decide the Cannabis is a dissociative drug that's hedonistic and comfort oriented and will take you away from your responsibilities

that's what it will become but if you decide like Terence McKenna did it is an intellectual Catalyst that it will facilitate your ability to read and learn and think and write then it will become that as well yeah it's it's a weird one right cuz people that are people that take it that are prone to paranoia or they're dealing with like some difficult issues in their life right now that they're perhaps trying to avoid it becomes an uncomfortable experience where is people that are happy and having a good time in a good place the marijuana will sort of enhance that he was loving warm feeling of Comfort Inn of like the sort of acceptance of your existence and it's going to be okay

right but I think even the paranoia is like a sort of

I sort of me and you could say is sort of Vestige of this propaganda that makes people afraid in the same I do vein is the bad trip I think the concept of a bad trip is a very damaging concept because I know from personal experience I never really use psychedelics in high school with the exception of salvia because I was terrified of a bad trip talk to friends who described bad trips and you tell if it's a bad bad trip it's really bad it's scary and I would think all that's terrible I could I would never want a bad trip I'm never going to touch these things because a bad trip would be too much for me to tolerate and then I started using psychedelics and I realized there's no such thing as a bad trip anymore there's a bad meal or a bad relationship or a bad day having an occasional bad thing in life doesn't stop you from doing things like eating or having relationships are living typically so what do you mean by are you saying there's no such thing as a bad trip yes it is no such thing as a bad meal

that there is such thing as a bad meal but it wouldn't prevent you from tripping and I think that even the bad or wooden train from eating other sorry about that but but I think even these bad trips can be difficult are beneficial in our learning experience in the same way that a bad meal could be you learn not to go to that restaurant or maybe learn something about what makes you sick or what to be careful of in the future you know if you are approaching life from a non fearful perspective where your intention is to learn then you can extract benefit from almost any experience and these difficult psychedelic experiences I genuinely believe in this is what is maybe the hardest thing to communicate about psychedelics is that it's the difficult ones that are often the best those are the ones that really teach you something and when you were trying to talk about psychedelics with people I've never used them it's not a great selling point to say oh you know the best thing that can happen is you're going to think you're going to die but that is arguably the best thing that can happen to think that you're going to die

is that a confrontation with the overarching fear the fear that generates all other fears and if you conquer that fear then your life will almost certainly improve what is one thing that's genuinely genuinely universally accepted as a beneficial experience is a near-death experience universally accepted as a transformative moment in people's lives near death experience I realize wow I got to get my shit together after that heart attack I realized that life is a gift and I change the way I think about things and I started calling people that I loved and telling them that I love them this is the same you can get a near-death experience from Cannabis you just don't ever die I mean it's the death of so many perceptions and so many things about your life especially from edible cannabis which I think is probably one of the least understood and most potent things that people are consuming on a daily basis I I can't tell you how many times I've given someone edible

marijuana and their fucking convinced that it's been laced with something awful and that they're going to die but then afterwards they come out of it and they're like I just got some work to do the only way I would disagree with you is people that are prone to psychotic breaks absolute genuine connection between people who have a slippery hold on reality and some experiences with psychedelics that lead them down a bad Road that's true it can it's a stressor and like all stressor is it can precipitate a psychotic break they've done pretty large-scale epidemiological analysis of psychedelic drug users versus the non psychedelic drug using population and the incidence of mental illness isn't any higher so I don't think that you can argue that psychedelics cause mental illness but you can and some measures it seems taxi reduce it in terms of things like alcoholism substance abuse

but

but it can be a stressor that would precipitate such an episode in a susceptible individual and I had a very traumatic informative experience myself for my best friend had a psychotic break while I was tripping so I've seen this first-hand that I know exactly what it looks like yeah I've had friends have real bad experiences to wear the screaming and yelling and then disassociative and then afterwards become very strange and have a really hard time with reality for a bit yet I've never seen someone have a complete psychotic break it says that he never recovered never you never recovered he was my best friend at the time and he never had he was fine before the Psychedelic yes Jesus Christ but again you know it's the end that happened to early so now he's still fucked yes but again I typically don't tell that story in public because it's could be misinterpreted as a scary story you know I don't it's impossible to prove the counterfactual

without psychedelics almost certainly I can't say all I know is that he took a very high dose of a sillas and Esther and had this episode he was hospitalized and he was not the same afterwards so I'm aware that this is something that happens but it also typically happens in the early twenties late teens the same time that people typically have psychotic breaks in developing schizophrenia yeah the instances of schizophrenia in people who use cannabis are cannabis in particular but I don't know about other psychedelics but I would imagine a very similar there exactly the same as the incidences of schizophrenia and non using populations it's like 1% 1% across the board seem to have issues with schizophrenia and they're the real question is how many of those people could mean is it a boy to like if your friend had never done that and instead

had had been all become a marathon runner or something and you know found some other outlets for his energy would have never gone down that road we don't know and possibly had a possible say I think it's very important to talk about that though and with further research perhaps we could isolate jeans you know like they have for CTE now they have they can do an analysis of your jeans and then determine whether or not something like football be a dangerous path for you because you have a higher probability of developing CTE it would be wonderful if they figured out a way to do that with Scylla syban or with cannabis or with the anything else and be able to recognize the potential links to psychotic break send it to you know the host of different mental disorders that could possibly be triggered by high doses yes this is one of so many things that needs to be done and that's you know he's very excited about all this clinical research

what's happening right now I'm excited about it as well but on one level it is very politically oriented research you know the things that they're looking at actually typically been done before not all of them but the aim is to firmly establish these things have been known for a long time silicide been occasions mystical type experience or MDMA is useful for treating PTSD your Soleus Ivan has an auntie addictive a fact these are things that people have known for a little while but now it's about proving it but I'm really looking forward to getting deeper into these serious questions about

you know exactly how these drugs interact with various subtypes of Serotonin receptors because I think that they're going to be very important tools for understanding Consciousness as a whole interesting knowing how they react to different diets you know when people are

you know when you're eating certain types of foods that are bad for your body I would really be curious to see what kind of effect that has mean when when you have real large-scale research that goes over really important variables in terms of a human health and then you add in these different substances with Rich Hill SCI Benner cannabis or whatever it is it's it's going to be interesting to see how the body reacts to these various perturbing says he's various changes of your state and regions groups the diet plays a big role in the way that the drug is administered and I think we're slowly rediscovering a lot of things have been known for

and maybe hundreds maybe thousands of years in some of these indigenous groups

have you had a chance to see if any of my new show me know I'm sure you know I had the opportunity to look at the way Salvia is used in the mountains of Oaxaca and you know Native American peyote use and all these different things and you had to do so much to be learned from all these Traditions that are not reflected in the current clinical climate because they can't eat but I think that's going to be a part of it is slowly integrating these other alkaloids are present in the plan to see what role they play in the same way that you know the initial medicalization of cannabis was Marinol which is just THC and sesame oil but now there's an increased understanding of the way these accessory cannabinoids modulate the THC experience or whether thcz been the primary therapeutic agent for certain disorders and I imagine the same thing will be true for peyote and for the egg

alkaloids and probably even for some of the chemicals found in mushrooms

so when you're doing the show have you had any problems have you had any push back against what you're doing or any any issues with it being on Vice

I've had an enormous amount of Freedom you know the ultimately I have very very little to complain about when it comes to censorship there was the way to show got started the actual TV show is heard of an interesting story where they were starting at viceland and a producer has now gone I gave you the stack of drug stories they're going to do and they're all kind of terrible scare stories like the new drug bromo-dragonfly it's killing teens in new drug bromo-dragonfly brother found it that these confirmation Ali constrained benzo Fury an amphetamine derivative zarb like very high potency. Derivatives anyway it's too it's a super potent psychedelic amphetamine the pool tricyclic structure the molecule looks like it's got a very high it's super super potent

very very long lasting so if it's lent itself to scare stories you know people it's a potent vasoconstrictor so people take for high doses of it and occasionally dude have to amputate fingers something like that but again you know this isn't because the drug is bad it's because people use it responsibly and this is how many people have so much difficulty understanding for so eager to blame drugs for all of our problems drugs have never hurt anyone there just inanimate constellations carbon and hydrogen nitrogen oxygen they don't jump out of their bags and files an attack your serotonin receptors are dopamine transporter or anything like that so this is just a weird pattern that we've done repeatedly over time and I don't know if you read the new Michael calling right now it's great but one thing that I thought was interesting about it is that he put a lot of emphasis on the

prohibition of psychedelics on Leary and Leary almost certainly played a role but I think it's slightly ironic that he's a journalist and didn't really go that deep into the role did journalists played in all this which is humongous and journalists are sculptures of public opinion and if it came the standard way of reporting on any of these things to say that they're bad to sensationalize it and do not have any consideration for what that would do because anytime of journalist writes and scary story they can really mess with drug policy in a serious way might seem like nothing like always a bunch of people in Brooklyn in the overdosed on some obscure synthetic cannabinoid amb-fubinaca who cares about amb-fubinaca no big deal say that it turns people into zombies and gets thrown to schedule one who cares not a big deal well that's a very short-sighted way of thinking about all of this because that's exactly what happened with psychedelics and then we're not learning from the mistakes of the

that's just because something it's fun to sensationalize and talk about how dangerous it is at this moment does it mean to 10 years from now we're going to recognize it as serious therapeutic potential we made a big mistake outlawing it and I think a lot of that also comes from the sort of US versus them mentality that people have where it's cannabis is good synthetic cannabinoids are bad synthetic cannabinoids don't have to be bad for cannabis to be good cannabis can be good without something else being bad to counterbalance that you don't need to hate something to justify your love of cannabis and this whole hatred of synthetic cannabinoids I think is totally misdirected because these are products of prohibition that most people wouldn't even want to use in the first place and when they do use them they don't know what they're taking they don't know what dose they're consuming and so of course they're having bad experiences that would happen with almost any drug caffeine included if people just consume in normous unmeasured doses without having any idea what they were getting into and so they're thrown into schedule 1 What hap

30 years from now once the therapeutic potential of cannabinoids is being really seriously explored we find out that and be for benica that everyone was saying turned homeless people into zombies in Brooklyn in 2017 turns out to activate a certain subtype of the CB1 receptor that's especially useful for Parkinson's Disease or something like that then we're going to regret having done that so I think people have to be very careful anytime you say anything negative about a drug gets me very very careful because implications can be enormous I think that the best stance and all this is to not speak ill of drug is a drug that break also with this what journalism is it's like asking a comedian to talk about something but not make fun of it that's what their job in in certain sentences to get people excited about things and I don't know whether you'd say the lazy way out or the the common approach is to say something scares people mean that's that's what clickbait

mostly about either outrage or fear that's true but there's a lot of richness in truth I agree but it's hard to sell try to sell that rich people are lazy prizes idea that a lot of people have that you know journalism is organized by some malevolent Rupert Murdoch type Puppeteer who's telling everyone to you go off and you say the Cannabis cause car accidents when you go off and you say this evil thing about this and say the alcohol is good did you see when the Alex Jones is on my podcast and got high with me when it came up in his trial for his divorce he said that George Soros puts he test marijuana every year to see how much George soros's influencing the levels of THC

Health assist excuse that people love these idea because he denies individual agency but the reality and I see this as a journalist who's worked at many different Publications not just Vice is in this is a difficult reality to swallow is a people are free to say whatever they want most of the time and the journalist choose to report on things this way if that is true but that's also true that they like I've been apart of stories that when I talk to the author of it and they said well this was manipulated by the editor the editor manipulated at a great excuse yeah I look perspective but the right it's true Like a Rolling Stone article about me and they called me a psychedelic Warrior and I I said the guy wrote down what the fuck is that I was laughing he goes to what I did not write that yeah editor gets a hold of it tries to make it more salacious it becomes something that's more more likely for people to buyer

bright especially with deadlines that is true and the real problem is that this sort of outrage culture and common culture that has emerged provides no incentive for truth because I suppose someone were to write an article about this conversation we're having right now and it could say Hamilton Morris says core Tom should be illegal or something like that then that will get some more engagement because fuck Hamilton should be illegal that it didn't watch it any other people arguing those people singing listen to the interview hey hey yeah she never said anything about that listen carefully to what you saying the wrong thing then you get for doing the right thing true but the initial statement is much stickier the initial statement of Hamilton Morris is a bad guy because he think Kratom should be illegal or khatam should be illegal that is what more people are going to pay attention to far less people read the retreat

then read the initial R Us this is true purposely that people do do things that are untrue with the caveat that they could just print a retraction that maybe 30% of the people to read the original article going to read that the initial imprint is what's going to stick with people even if you someone calls you a rapist okay and then it turns out the person who called your rapist was lying the people they still have that never had his head so somebody write some article saying that you are against the legalization of certain drugs and they start looking at you as being compromised it's the influence of people have today can't be understated because the reach is so powerful the reach of any article any video any it's it's so significantly greater than any other

sort of distribution of information in the history of human beings did the potential for an impacted large groups of people is so huge now yes and this is the result of that is also that the viewers have a lot of power and I think that in some sense they don't quite recognize the nature of that power it's like the voting with your dollar if you spend all of your time commenting hatefully on things you don't like you are actively encouraging the production of more of that thing that you don't like if you like something you need to engage with what you approve of me because every time you engaged something you just like advertisements are sold and it has been incentivize to do that bad thing that's a really sticky thing when we have this culture where everyone loves to outfielder outrage and virtue signal and show that they are on the right side and all the stuff constantly to say hey step back you're just feeding the problem I think there's also a problem with

a lot of what people are doing during the day it's something they don't want to do a lot of people are doing some job that they don't enjoy and during that job they have freedom to go online and in this state of feeling like shit about what are there doing things enjoy complaining about stuff and so the deal read things and type things and get engaged and there's some sort of a sport getting pissed off about stop instead of just spending your time doing things you actually enjoy it seems so simple it sounds like a simple solution but if you could figure out a way to actively ignore things are going to piss you off and seek out things are going to excite you and Intrigue you you're going to be a healthier happier person and does not is that all to mately what everybody wants I want to be happier don't you want to be happier so why do we seek out shit that pisses us off

because it becomes a sort of addiction drug like in and of itself I mean I see it these arguments these people are frittering away their five night time on Earth engage in these endless comment that said no one reads and it's a very dark reality but it is also sending the driving the current culture of Journalism that where the truth doesn't matter as much all that matters is engagement right it's just clicks it's just clicks a money it's interesting that you were saying something about drugs being an adamant objects drugs and actually kill people it's so funny how drug Enthusiast parallel gun enthusiast with their arguments it's really the same Freedom argument and it's really and I'm in an interesting perspective because I live in New York I'm like whatever just did a nerdy guy that doesn't matter just do live in Williamsburg I do

big surprise left for the office that I want it would close the office at work but but but you know I have no interest in guns so it's really easy for me to say I will look there was this the shooting and all these people died in this other guy got shot and things are really causing a lot of problems let's get rid of because it doesn't impact me and that's where you have to be the most careful because that the worst thing you can possibly do is make judgments about how other people should conduct their lives based on your own preferences which people do all the time so you hear someone see why I don't like Hannah I don't like it I don't smoke it why should it be legal because people go to prison for it because it ruins people's lives who aren't your own and you have to think about people that aren't you and so it's very difficult when it comes to gun control issues because this I'm faced with that exact same issue where it would be so easy for me to say get rid of them all he doesn't impact me I don't like guns but I don't want to fall into that same trap

yeah it is a trap and it's it also sort of highlights how slippery life is in general that these apps was that we look for these ones and zeros it don't necessarily exist in a lot of subjects you know there's there's a lot of people that have done bad things that have also done great things and that gets weird to you know it's just human beings in general where we're not work we're complex

preachers and I will end it just categorize something is negative or positive it's the did there's a lot of positive things that you could find with drugs there's a lot of negative things you can find the trucks to and the mirror human behavior there's a lot of positive and negatives in human behavior yes and back to the journalistic issue in the coverage of drugs I mean one thing that worries me about the way cannabis and Kratom and psychedelics are presented is that it's always couched in there safe their therapeutic their spiritual their historical but that isn't the point even if all those things are true and there's some debate eventually someone will find a chink in that armor someone will die maybe they're not haven't been used as long as you thought they were used maybe they don't always work therapeutically so then what do you go back to probation now that's why I think you need to emphasize cognitive Liberty you need to emphasize people's right to explore these alternate states of consciousness

regardless of whether or not they're therapeutic or say for traditional or spiritual the point isn't that it's safe or any of these other things the point is that if you want to live in a free Society you have to be allowed to take a certain amount of risk yeah that's such a big point it's a very big point and I think it really fits well with your description of the things that people are allowed to do that are legal that are very dangerous like race car driving bungee jumping all these things that we just allow them to do we don't think twice about it using a parachute all that crazy shit we just open the apps and nobody sang hey we should ban skydiving there's no one saying that the fucking a lot of people die skydiving man and it said to fucking dangerous Pursuit we don't seem to care we seem to care about drugs because we think that somehow or another either our children or someone we know is going to be insidiously infected with these things they're going to get into their lives

and fuck them up in all I think the real problem with that is education that's the real problem with that I was extremely fortunate in a weird way to see someone with a cocaine addiction when I was in high school as a good friend's cousin who got really fucked up on cocaine when he was a couple years older than me and I watched his life fall apart and I remember thinking when I was little like wow I don't want to touch that shit like cocaine's fucking terrible and then from then on it never done cocaine but it's because of that education because of this and I think real education is something it's a fucking tough thing because you don't really just get it from knowing information you have to see things have to talk to people you have to experience things in your own you someone talks about psychedelic someone teaches about psychedelics but they have no experience in actual psychedelic States personally it's a very Hollow conversation to a certain amount of education has to be from real life experience

absolutely and against this idea of pharmacological determinism like I had a friend that was very very very seriously addicted to cocaine and had the resources to do in men's quantities every single day and you always say well you know if I try heroin I know it's all over for me I know that will be available last straw so I'm never touching that stuff and he didn't but my own perspective you know I've essentially tried everything and if you really just think about these things you can actually learn for example I've tried heroin once I didn't think was that interested you do it injecting know you snort it was boring if I were to be totally honest I think the Cannabis is more euphoric and has so few side effects you it was horrible constipation that caused all kinds of weird sweating Pro

I don't think they're especially Pleasant drugs similar to romanticize so much on a culture that people think that's it heroin the ultimate high or maybe it isn't maybe it's not even that great at all maybe it's a garbage and it doesn't even matter that's the same way I feel about snorting cocaine I don't think it's a good drug it's not an issue of it's so addictive you got to stay away from it cuz it's so damn good it's not good it's not even enjoyable High it has a short duration you didn't feel bad almost immediately afterwards it's a flawed substance same is true of alcohol I think is well alcohol is a crazily flawed molecule is terrible no other drug that I can think of causes a hangover of that type where there's a toxic metabolite that poisons you the following day. Heart was trying to explain to me what that is in essentially he was saying that when you are getting a hangover it's your body reacting to the addictive properties of alcohol that you're getting addicted to alcohol almost

immediately that your body is compensating for that and then these this this this hangover is not just you being dehydrated it's also your body withdrawing from alcohol I would I am not familiar with any evidence for that dr. Garcia I'd have to look at its source for that look at the other way I described it cuz I probably butchered it okay but there's an alternate explanation it's even simpler which is simply that alcohol is metabolized into the chemical acetaldehyde the toxic so and would alcohol it's a very very weak drug by weight you're consuming insane amounts in terms of the number of molecules during consuming insane quantity of the drug so all this acetaldehyde accumulates in your body and it has it directly Toxic effect is there a way to counteract on the mitigate the effects DS there are proposed ways to do it

haven't experimented with any of them myself because I don't really like alcohol that much to begin with is in a glutathione that's a that's something that allows your body to process it more easily it would have to be something that prevents the specific conversion of I don't know off the top of my head what about crocodile you ever fuck with that stuff this is another perfect example and it's it sounds horrible the internet's drug fear drug yet people are behind every scary story there's nothing explain what that is Moscow somewhere in Russia in and around 2000

4 mm

and something like that I don't know and and the idea was that this is the worst. It's all true addictive you inject it and then you lose a limb and you have profound necrosis all around the injection site and this is the worst drug most addictive drug of all time won't the drug itself is called deza morphine and it's been used medicinally there's nothing especially addictive or dangerous at all. Doesn't morphine the problem is that people are injecting completely in pure reaction mixtures that had all of the components from the synthesis that hadn't been removed including phosphorus which is immensely toxic so you have people basically reporting on IV phosphorus toxicity as if it were a result of this drug when it's a completely separate issue and this is what you see when you look at all of these things it's never the drug any drugs Gare story it's never the drug you always have to look for the root cause because it's never the drug there's never

drug in history and that is why if you look at the DA's list of Controlled Substances it's not dangerous drugs that are controlled it's enjoyable drugs something like Tetra toxin the chemical and puffer fish that's not a controlled substance through some regulations in terms of how much you can purchase but is not controlled substance see who talks in the most potent known neurotoxin so I controlled substance

that isn't a controlled substance Mercury is a controlled substance mercuric chloride is in a controlled substance all of the deadly poisons cyanide is a controlled substance it's not about what's safe and what's dangerous it's about what people like to use was enjoyable what is the root of that

I think it's see Noah puritanical idea that that

any sort of euphoria is bad for ya is listed as a side effect in some medications weed weed assume that is it a bad thing to deal with diarrhea Euphoria diarrhea yeah yeah that is a strange thing like that's going to it's going to cut back productivity and make you a lazy near do well and just become a burden on society lets that's a common common way of describing people use drugs Shore and this fundamental idea that sobriety is good Instagram people post a selfie and say 6 months sober guys thank you so much and tons of congratulations Christopher chew something you're not using drugs or as in other cultures that would not be the case so you've decided not to work with a a certain medicine. It's an interesting choice not an accomplishment that it wasn't saying was it Kyle Kingsbury that was saying that how much he hates Saturn plant medicine or

Dennis thing was Kyle you don't like the term plant medicine do I don't eat well do bought this so weird so pretentious yes yes I know OK Google Iowa school of medicine or like that I mean I wouldn't you don't hate it I got a lot of these like more flour returns again to you and I just don't use them myself but I don't need it would your you know I think people like you are very important and I'm a big fan but I think one of the reasons why you're important it's you are a cognoscenti of real drugs like you you understand what they actually do you could explain them to the Layman or you could debate them with someone who was a doctor perhaps that wanted to a note to talk about the dangers of them and you understand all the various aspects of it I think

there's a tremendous amount of ignorance when it comes to drugs drug consumption what is a drug I mean how many times have you seen a person with a beer in their hand smoking a cigarettes and they don't do drugs it is so fucking stupid but it's so common there's this very very very common aspect of being a person which is the desire to change your mental state and we've done throughout history with various substances but there's so much stigma attached to it and you want things have been doing lately on stage I'll ask people how many people get piss tested at work it's fucking stunning it's stunning it's like more than 10% of the audience to raise my hand like 1 out of 10 people get served their body tested to make sure that while they're not working there they're not putting anything in their body is prohibited would you such a horrible invasion of privacy they became so popular in the 80s are in one presidential election all the candidates voluntarily had their urine tested to prove that they were sober

this is like truly considered a virtue and it's immensely in days I say to someone whose analyze my own urine in a laboratory before and it's like a strange portal into your own life you're showing to a stranger everything that you consumed is then a parent there is a huge invasion of privacy that we just decided is accepted when you have to be very careful about these things yeah I agree it's and of course the synthetic cannabinoid epidemic if you want to call it that I actually don't want to call it that because I hate you and I do have a drug epidemic the popularity driven by the fact that they didn't show up on these urine tests so initially was in the military then it was people who are on parole or probation people who were living hard lives want to get high couldn't get high this is a way that they could do it and so did they incentivize people that just wanted to smoke weed using completely untested synthetic cannabinoids instead as a direct result

what is urine test

it's also just a complete misunderstanding when it comes to the actual effects and how long they last year did not even testing a person's conscious State your testing mother not a person's alter their state of consciousness outside of their they're working time you know it's not like you show up and they could scan your hand and realize that you're high on marijuana right now that's not what they're doing what they're doing is there they're testing you for something that could linger in your body for weeks after the psychoactive effects of long since gone oh yeah or even be the result of passive exposure there is a great scientific article that came out a couple of years ago but they found it just passive exposure to cannabis smoke contaminates your hair with THC so that all these people have red hair test who actually had not smoked cannabis but it sounds like an excuse I was just in the room someone else is doing it just being in contact with someone who could then deposit THC in your hair and cause you to test positive for these tests aren't even necessary

reliable this is the same problem there was a kind of trend a little while ago. If you saw about this for people would get their urine tested for a different to quantify two levels of neurotransmitter metabolites in their urine in the supposed to be like a fingerprint of your mood so they'd quantify the level of Serotonin and dopamine Gabba whatever whatever whatever and then they tell you a little low on serotonin you're pretty depressed actually you need to supplement with some 5-HTP or something like that is very productive way of thinking about Consciousness the main issue is that you're not testing in your brain you're testing your urine in a lot of these neurotransmitters are bio synthesized in the periphery so just because you have these neurotransmitters in your urine doesn't mean they were ever in your brain doesn't say anything about anything

so it's just it's so juvenile on the way it says it's it's it's such a piss poor way of maintaining order

checking people's Consciousness and making me what you should do is

Judge People based on the productivity if I have some guy and he shows up working he kicks ass everyday I'm like dude what's your secret and I get high before work great I feel good having a good time at work Dippity Doo Dah Zippity day I'm putting everything in order and it's just feels good like keep doing what you're doing that's how it should be we should be judged based on whether or not whatever we're doing is I mean I guess the real caveat to bet would be people that do speed oh yeah I mean you get pretty productive for short. Of time doing speed but I think the downside of that there's so many people are on Adderall today right feelings on that I think that it's a very interesting issue because it's amazing when you look at the history of all these things have these issues repeat themselves over and over and over again so is a problem in the fifties and it's a problem in the $0.60 a problem in the 70s now it's a problem now is always a problem that we're treating as if it

new things with people been using amphetamines have stimulants verb

the better part of a hundred years and people will now the kind of popular thing to say is you know didn't you know adderal is one carbon atom away from meth but here's the flip side meth is one carbon away from Adderall so this whole idea that math again back to pharmacological determinism it messed is a drug that turns you into a toothless insane White Trash Guys stabbed in the walls of the cleaver looking for people that are hiding and Whispering secret messages or something like that like this is just a stereotype that we have created of course there are people like that but the reality is that he stimulants have an ambiguous potential for all sorts of things some people use low doses of methamphetamine inject methamphetamine a schedule to because to this day it can be and is prescribed as a treatment for ADHD in addition to amphetamines is adderal what do they call it when they prescribe it that's oxen is the brand name for

methamphetamine and Adderall is the brand name for amphetamine end of both drugs with amphetamine and methamphetamine and they're very very similar drugs and that's not to say that either good or bad it's just a factual statement that if in a double-blind placebo-controlled or not even Placebo control just the double-blind trial I don't think that I could get the treatment you can also help obese patients lose weight did you know that there's a lot of people think Trump is on diet pills oh yeah yeah one of the one of the elements fan fan fan fan Temp and learn Ya Head Up messages about that journalists so you might be on or fenfluramine or Phentermine

atrazine or any of these substances so what you know the question is is his judgment compromise because he's hopped up on speed with judgement seems compromised regardless it is that why no problem but it could be why he gets so much shit done I mean remember when during the year you just want to compliment but I understand that that's not why I did it again it's this idea there's a certain exculpatory value of the drugs have people make the same argument about Hitler like Hitler he was just high on speed that explains that the Nazis are just high on speed that explain what value does it really have to send it with Anthony Bourdain to say no drugs are found in the system post-mortem so what what if they had been then what

well the ideas that he might have been experiencing a fucked-up state of mind because of some drug that made him make a poor choice and take his own life

we would know you would know why you did it so you're saying it wouldn't explain anything really because you still wouldn't know his internal stay it would just be you're projecting an assumption so what if there were a small amount of heroin in his blood at the time of his death then you would assume that she had relapsed was so ashamed of his relapse that he then decided to kill himself but the reality is we can't make those sorts of Assessments we don't know other people's internal States if you don't even know what these things do to other people we don't but we do know that some things like Abilify and some other ssris and even some anti-anxiety medication have been strongly linked to suicidal thoughts and in the fact they're actually listed as some side effects for a lot of these drugs rest don't you think that I mean I know correlation does not equal causation but don't you think that's worth considering and it's something to be discussed it's worth considering but I would be careful about assigning too much value to it which is what people tend to do the same thing was Columbine will say oh he was on right antidepressant

that's why is it why does it really explain it because there's a hell of a lot of people to take the same drugs and don't kill all the classmates right right for sure for sure but it also could be a factor and this is not something I think we should avoid considering I think it should be discussed but yes I agree with you and I but I think we're trying to look at things binary right we're looking at things in terms of black is on or off black or white one or zero and I I just don't think drugs work that way now and I think you look great yeah the speed things curious to me because one of the side effects of these drugs impulsive irrational behavior and extreme confidence in oneself on speed people that have a Coke confidence you know Coke confidence is a real phenomenon what people do cocaine they feel very confident about themselves and they do they say ridiculous shit to people

the question is is that really what's happening if they have I give Coke to you would you start acting irrationally and feeling extremely confident yourself or is it just accentuating a problem that already exist in the person's personality both probably a combination of the two but the other thing is even if he has been using this stuff for decades probably taller into it and it's not I don't think it would explain his behavior is giving him energy he's been like this for so long. Oh this this is that a long history of this sort of behavior this was what the journalist a talked about that he had been on this stuff for a long time and that there was actual Duane Reade Pharmacy in New York we describe where he got the prescription filled people doing the same thing with his finasteride as well though and I found that particularly obnoxious Pro Keisha Keisha Affair that explains this because it does this or that your libido and again it's like

I don't know or not at all or let's give him some credit for being a human being with free will that makes choices on it is owned that aren't entirely mediated by what Pharmaceuticals he is Wilfred asteroid also has side effects of depression and we went over this yesterday with my friend re who was really depressed at one point time and it coincided with his use of finasteride right yeah I've seen but it's not very common it does occur but it's not uncommon right but for the person that does get those side effects saying that it's not, doesn't really offer any comfort

no not at all why I'm one of the lucky ones off a bridge to get my hair to grow back but it needed about this particular issue is because you see it time and time again with the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case no I'm not for fast and he probably read about it and forgot about it was a big thing and maybe 1970s but he was this military Doctor Who's credentialed the perfect man did everything right perfect family everything beautiful and then one night goes to sleep and claims that is right after the Manson Murders claims that these hippies walk into the house saying kill the pigs acid is groovy kill the pigs acid is groovy now and then brutally Massacre his entire family and out of nowhere out of nowhere yes and

and it's a long complicated story but he went to prison

I don't think that she is guilty but people had to find an explanation for why I don't think he's guilty he had no motive and there were an investigation was botched and I think someone came into his house and did that but because he had no motive people had to construct a motive educated concoct a reason that this doctor would have murdered his entire family and so what's a good reason open in phetamine he's been using this data mean containing diet pills that explains it all right but it doesn't it's a terrible exclamation people use in phetamine all the time without killing your family so I just want to be very careful about it you know do these things play a role in human behavior of course they do but do they determine human behavior know that's a very good point there's a lot of factors does just it's messy being a person is messing very complicated me you're a different person at noon and you are at 7 p.m. course yeah I mean

it's just

it's so complicated and the more limitations we put on research and more stigma we put on the use of these things the more murky these Waters going to be yeah and I think people don't even appreciate the extent to which all these drugs have been made illegal core Sirens where cannabis is schedule on LSD suicide and MDMA but the list is long it's hundreds and hundreds of chemicals and a lot of these chemicals are chemicals with no supporters no one's fighting for them is a substance called to CNY Sheldon's creation they just threw in schedule 1 no one uses it if you scour the internet I'd be surprised if you could find three reports of people using to CN totally unheard of but it is throat and schedule one because why the hell not no one can stand up for it that's the end of 2 cm but they miss a lot of shit to write like they Miss V methoxy dimethyltryptamine to miss that no that was made illegal in 2011 right but after 1970 when everything else

run to the Mexi made it illegal I bought that shit I used to be able to buy it online yesterday was crazy the whole city High online so they make it illegal how do they how do they do that they don't need any reason they can simply say that it has abuse potential and make it illegal and if no one opposes it then it becomes illegal that's how this list is gone so long you have all these people fighting for the legality of cannabis in these other substances that are known to have therapeutic potential but these other more obscure substances that are really only a concern to scientists who are very seriously disinclined to break the law for the sake of the research drug users don't care about scientists are very unlikely because the whole purpose of science it's a published you can't published if you committed a crime in the context of your research so scientists are dramatically limited by the provision of these substances and it's the Obscure ones that end up actually making a big difference not so much cleaner

in terms of actually understanding the mechanism of these substances the structure activity relationships the neuropharmacology he have the the the stigma on psychedelic use and it didn't end even studying them has led so many doctors are scientists researchers that would be inclined to want to do research on these particular things they avoid them because it could be incredibly damaging to their careers and it's bureaucratic I mean there is a group of Columbia and the I was speaking with the head of the study and he was saying how obnoxious it was to have the government common way his vial of ibogaine everyday and monitors logs and you guys are really serious research or he's not going to if you were to get high he's not going to get high off this tiny supply of government-mandated or government-sanctioned ibogaine that was

fly to him but but they give these people are really hard time everything by very expensive safe they do all this stuff that these are the last people to have use the substances it's and they are the ones that are hurt the most severely except of course the people to go to prison they're the ones that are hurt the most of your early yet so crazy thing to think the people going to recreational use ibogaine that's that's one of the weird ones so it's totally bizarre yeah and and I began is a drug with so much potential employer for those people that are where to buy the game it's typically only discussed as a drug that treats addiction to opioids which is very very important especially now but that's the tip of the iceberg was ibogaine it has one of the most complex form colleges of any drug I've ever studied there's almost nothing it does not do I mean it's you know you have the alpha 3 beta for nicotine acetylcholine receptor which is also the target of Wellbutrin and has it kind of smoking cessation and The Addictive effect then you have really high affinity

together receptors me nmda receptor Chavez Academy and type affect another classical psychedelic effect of the 5-ht to a receptor and it's a dopamine reuptake inhibitor serotonin reuptake inhibitor this protein gdnf which is considered one of the most important proteins in treatment of Parkinson's disease it's one of the only things that is able to cause a regrowth of dopaminergic neurons and people that have Parkinson so this is like really fascinating stuff it's just in schedule 1 scientist can't work with it is a tragedy

it is a tragedy and it's also so effective I know so many people have gone to Mexico and going to these clinics and done one ibogaine session for 24 hours and come out of it a totally different person come out of wood with a complete New Perspective on even why they're using whatever they're using in the first place in a way that they did not always it help eliminate the addictive properties in the connection that your body has those substances but it also allows you to reexamine why you went down that road in the first place oh yeah and pushed to develop non psychedelic derivatives of ibogaine that would retain the anti addictive properties which sounds like a good idea in theory but so they created this drug called 18 MC and it wasn't psychedelic but then it also lacked some of these neuro trophic Factor releasing properties of ibogaine but the really the bottom line is that we shouldn't deny the fact that the

activity of these substances is therapeutic psychotherapeutic in and of itself no I had a friend who was severely severely addicted to heroin and he traveled to the Netherlands to take ibogaine and you know I took the drug was going into the experience and then started feeling this intense craving for heroin and it started looking through his bags to see if he somehow put a little had forgotten about a little bit of heroin that could just get him through the day and then he goes into his bag and then finds of the small bag of heroin and snorts it and then is like I traveled all the way to the Netherlands to do this this was I'm a failure I'm relapsing after all this money all this work I have no self-control and the terrible terrible person why can't I just stop and then realize that the whole thing is always nice and there was no heroin hallucinated his own relapse

wow what was your experience will I regain I've never taking high doses the most I've ever taken is 15 mg of listen effective dose really depends how do you say assertive move toward microdosing ibogaine because it actually does have a cardio Toxic effect especially at higher doses so people are looking into ways of reducing a cardio toxicity by using it at lower doses for longer periods of time again this is something that has to do with prohibition because this prohibition Market if you are addicted to heroin you go to Mexico you go to Canada and you go to an ibogaine Clinic you need to get as much bang for your buck as quickly as possible you're not going to stay there for 2 months of treatment because most people have lives and can't afford to do that so what are you do they give you what it's called a flood dose it's a massive dose off in a multi gram dose of ibogaine because it's just like a sledgehammer that knocks you down and allows you to get out of it but is that the best

but the fastest way that's the most appetizing way for someone that had to travel to do it but is it the best probably not because we know that it high doses it has this potential to induce cardiac arrhythmias and that can kill and has killed so people are you at now looking at lower doses over longer periods of time which would be ideal if it were legal in the United States I believe yeah that's up it's a really interesting one to me it's a it's a really interesting one because it's got such a long history of use and so many people have had these very good experiences with getting off of addictive drugs from it so relatively unknown as well it's it's it's something that you talk to someone like you and you of course you know about it but I'm at work I bet if we walk down the street and has 200 people I'd be shocked if one of them knew about it yeah

and sometimes talk about Scylla syban as an invention of mushrooms or is technology yours being synthetic and I don't really agree with that idea of an indention of mushroom feel like this is a synthetic as a Coca-Cola bottle this is like alien technology that's how you would describe Scylla syban but in my opinion it's you know it's a pretty simple derivative of tryptophan you just decarboxylate methylate the nitrogen twice and then had this phosphate ester but but ibogaine that a crazy molecule that so I got three dimensional thing that no medicinal chemist would have ever discovered that if it's you know not to sound mystical but that strikes me as some sort of plant technology I mean it's an amazingly complicated structure it's so complicated it is almost impossible to synthesize and I can't be synthesized commercially all the IB game that people use has to be extracted from Plants because that's the only way to get it

I first found out about it when when Hunter S Thompson accused Ed Muskie of being on it during the presidential race of was it 1970 or whatever it was that was a hilarious moment in a lot of people I think we're introduced to what ibogaine was by that when he said a Brazilian witch doctor been flown in yeah. The president doesn't even grow in Brazil about spreading those rumors and he's like well there was a rumor he was doing this ibogaine and I know because I started the rumor I just reported factually there's a rumor

yeah there's there's a lot of these drugs that get put into various categories and I began is one of the very few that really isn't any category in terms of like modern culture like the way we discuss and consider these things sold because it's very different stuff than female logically but that sounds really interesting because it's Charming funny story and I'd have to know exactly when it happened relative to the scheduling of ibogaine but I might be an example of how would you know for the list joke the most people enjoy told in the wrong on climate can result in the loss of a chemical that could be good could save tens of thousands of lives and could be a treatment for Parkinson's Disease do you know this is the responsibility that journalist have it's more responsibilities and I think I'd like to have often but that's the truth you make a joke about I began next thing you know it's in schedule 1 maybe you made a joke afterwards but if you didn't have to wonder because I was one of the first major

mentions of ibogaine in the popular press and the same is true of you know there was a rolling stone scare article that came out a while ago and it's same deal this drug to see t7 and they do a whole story all this teenager you took too much in his to ct7 it can kill you with just a in a little pile of powder or whatever and and then

the drug is made schedule 1 Shelgon works on psychedelics Alexander shulgin Great medicinal chemist to spend his entire life studying psychedelics consider this one of the 6 greatest creations of his entire career squashed by a single stupid story in Rolling Stone that's how easily it happens no was a story stupid mean did it have any basis in fact

an editor at Rolling Stone told me that there were factual errors in it and there's something weird about it but yes people did die because yes people died from using drugs occasionally to deny that would be to lie but that doesn't mean that they don't have therapeutic activity and it doesn't mean that they should be illegal one of the ones that disturbs me the most is fentanyl fentanyl just I don't even understand why anybody would want to make that it seems to me that we have no money of opiates as it is why make one that's a thousand times stronger than heroin yeah I've known for fentanyl including the one that introduced fentanyl the United States initially died recently did he die from it no Tom Petty David Bowie

not sure

Prince yeah there's quite a few great people that we've lost to the stuff yeah it's really it's unfortunate but again fentanyl is not the problem the problem will take you in problems people taking it and the problem is lack of access to safer opioids and lack of Education surrounding fentanyl because it doesn't even really have desirable properties you know one thing that we talked about the potency of fence that they don't often talk about is the duration it's a very very short duration opioid which necessitates compulsive constant redosing if your addicted to fentanyl unless you're doing a transdermal patch or something like that you typically can't make it through a single night without having to Ruidoso is the duration so sure that's why it's always done in news for long and release formulations like a lollipop that you suck right now but anyway it's yeah it's it's not a drug that's well suited to Street use it to the therapeutic index is too narrow its duration is

do short has a medical purpose that it works very well for it shouldn't be used as a heroin replacement but the economic reality is that you have to make heroin from opium opium come from the place where poppies are growing as a whole process where is fentanyl can be made by one guy somewhere and the profit margin on the fentanyl is so much greater is enormous economic incentive and the first chemist this guy that was sort of a friend of mine that died to do it considered it a good thing to do that's the complexity we have to recognize it so easy to say but all these people are so bad but often you don't know what's going to happen until it happen his idea was that one of the major burdens of being addicted to heroin is that you can't afford it it's really expensive to buy substituting this relatively inexpensive material the price of heroin would go down this financial burden associated with opioid addiction would be reduced it would actually improve the quality of life of the

could even be a more pure Pantry safer material if you look at certain literature of course that's not what happened and many people died and he went to prison as a result of it did it really yes why do you go to prison for it because people died and it was traced back to him wow yeah

so he wasn't doing this in any sanctioned know you went clandestine chemist his name is George Marquardt weird guy yeah I guess yeah but anyway you know you just don't know you don't know what's going to happen until it happens you know of course if the legendary Story the heroin was introduced by bear as a non-addictive alternative to Morphine they probably did you think that was the case of the beginning but history has shown that that is not the case that's one of the problems of introducing any drug to a large population you simply don't know it's and it's also one of the things that I find most interesting in and perhaps a silver lining in this whole synthetic cannabinoids narrative the 10 playing out over the last decade is you could say I was terrible people should you smoke cannabis for learning so much about what cannabinoid receptor Agonist can do that we would have never learned if it weren't for the widespread use of synthetic cannabinoids I mean just for instance that it is possible for hypo

cannabinoid receptor Agonist to kill you that's a big one we didn't know that until recently that they can be addictive we didn't know that what are they using what is it it's so it's an impressively diverse array of chemicals into it started out with the drug called cp55 9:40 then it was CT what did they call it a can of bicycling tax and all now and then jwh 18 jwh 73 jwh-210 on and on and on and on and Branch like a giant cannabinoid fractal in every imaginable imaginable Direction and in a lot of these compounds and they were patented by various pharmaceutical companies like visor for therapeutic purposes against was at symbol Evelyn chemist who is cackling and think hahaha I figured out the most addictive thing possible they were just looking to see what's legal what looks pretty potent and reasonably safe okay we'll make that will sell it and and I've spoken with the chemist it actually we're behind a lot of the Opera

again not bad guys necessarily they they you know typically people don't want to hurt other people you have a genuine villainous people are pretty rare in my experience most people believe that what they're doing has a justification that is good and again with the synthetic cannabinoid ideas one is that although you won't hear this in the popular press and it's rarely said they can be very enjoyable and it would be dishonest to say otherwise some of them are very euphoric and compare favorably to cannabis and in certain measures might even be superior that doesn't mean they're safer it just means that there's something very desirable. Them and If you deny that and you neglect to understand why people use in the first place which is that they make you feel good

so that's part of it but then the other thing is that urine testing people wanting to be able to get high without breaking the law low cost and it is a lot of motivations for doing this and as a played-out people died people became addicted and random things no one would have ever expected occurred we we learned another Silver Lining I'm sure you're familiar with cannabis hyperemesis syndrome no I'm not yeah this is our pattern that certain people that smoke all day everyday it start showing up in the medical literature about a decade ago people smoke all day everyday and they start getting very very nauseous and start vomiting in the only thing that can relieve the vomiting is a hot shower

so really weird all these people aren't showing up in emergency rooms when they like run out of hot water saying like I need some kind of I need some help or something like I don't know what's going on condition resolves itself very rapidly as soon as you stop smoking cannabis so it's it's not hard to treat to you can't smoke weed anymore but no one knew what caused it and why was happening now after thousands of years of human cannabis interaction wine now for the first time in history and the answer is that people are smoking more weed now than ever before the other levels of THC ingestion was dabbing and high potency strains of tire for some people much higher than it's ever been in the past but with any questions what is causing it is it the Cannabis itself as a fertilizer is the pesticide what is responsible for this and it wasn't until people with using synthetic cannabinoids began to experience the same constellation of symptoms that they realize that this is an intrinsic property starting cannabinoid

Sceptre Agonist set something you can learn from all of this that it wasn't pesticides and it wasn't some kind of fungus or something like that grow on the plant this is going to happen from prolonged high doses of cannabinoids it is all sorts of other lessons that can be learned is that an issue with the cannabis use pesticides as if you ever heard of people having real problems from dorkly it was certainly no paraquat pot paraquat Lauzon misguided attempts to prevent people from using drugs they started spraying all the Cannabis was grown in Mexico with his Ultra toxic herbicide called paraquat and this is a drug that induces Parkinson's disease when you're exposed to it like really seriously nasty stuff no joke and so the idea was if we poison all the Cannabis and create this widespread fear that whatever your smoking might contain paraquat maybe people use it last and

luckily paraquat is doesn't have a lot of thermostability assertive denatured by the heat of smoking so it's argued that people are not actually exposed who smoked it but still this is a horrendous thing for the government to have done did the same thing during alcohol prohibition by the way they would poison alcohol I mean that's the extent of poison people to prevent them from getting high but that's a real butt

but now in tourney of it there's obviously a move toward organic gardening people using you know

neem oil and things like that so I wouldn't know when there was the other was actually at a big controversy in Colorado with the pesticide called Mike klobe you to know I believe that was used and potentially could really cyanide when smoked so why would worry about that with large-scale production Things become commercially viable the point where someone like RJ Reynolds gets into the mix and starts growing enormous marijuana plantations

oh yeah I mean it's a concern with all the food that we eat as well course what is interesting to you now like it what is there anything that's coming up or some new thing that people aren't might not be aware of that might be fascinating to you everything you know I love history I love you know I did a piece in this last season of my TV show or I trace the history of psychedelic toad Venom of 5 Meo DMT containing toad Venom because people have this idea that all psychedelics have been used for thousands of years that every psychedelic has an ancient history look at the history of 5 Meo DMT there is no evidence really no convincing evidence and I'm aware of maybe you can point to it you know ceramic toad is that evidence of people smoke toad Venom not in my opinion it might be some indication that maybe they did but it's certainly not hard evidence even if it was a guy sitting on his back smoking a pipe it wouldn't be hard evidence but anyway so there isn't condensing out

as far as I'm concerned of ancient told them you sit in the question is when did it start who was the first person to do this and I I love these little historical investigations to get to the bottom who is the first person to synthesize this drug what were their intentions who's the first person to smoke toad Venom because this is a bizarre misconception that you lick the Toads most likely produced by cartoons as well to some extent that a yes so the way you do it is you have to get the toad to excrete whatever this is and you put it on glass and then you try it out is at the idea. Yes and then you scrape it off with razor blade and then smoke it that's it and does it come is it a pure form of 5 Meo DMT little chemical analysis it's been done in the 21st century I analyze the sample that I collected when I was in Sonora and it contained in addition to 5 Meo DMT it contains some interesting

toning derivatives including serotonin o sulfate and nobody knows how these different tryptamine components as well as these steroidal lactones their synonyms called bufotoxin contribute to the experience if I had to guess probably not that much but maybe there's a little bit of that through the Entourage effect that you get with almost any plan that has a a variety of different alkaloids it might inhibit certain enzymes or do this or that but it's about 15% according to the older literature the analysis that I did wasn't quantitative so I don't know exactly what the concentration was but it's somewhere in that region and I'm sure depends on whether the toad milk to previously and all these other variables does the experience mirror taking synthetic 5 Meo DMT I haven't tried I tried synthetic 5 Meo DMT a couple times I've tried bufo alvarius Venom once a low dose once at a high dose they're all different but then everything is different mushrooms are different every time I take them you know it's really hard once you start

explaining the different experience based on the composition of the material because how do you assign it to the dose or mynute number of different tryptamines are also present it's really hard to say but you know I think that there is a strong argument to be made for using the synthetic as opposed to the toad Drive material simply because you don't have to harm or hurt enough that it necessarily does horned toads but you don't have to risk it and it's easy to synthesize you know I'm sure toes aren't into getting rubbed on windshields yeah for a toad yeah yeah they want to eat insects whatever the fuck they do one of them more interesting stories out of the last decade or so was this story that I read about the scholars in Jerusalem that we're connecting the story of Moses and the burning bush to The Acacia Bush and the acacia tree which is rich in D

empty and they believe that you know when you're talking about a story that was told through oral traditions for who knows how many years and then written down in ancient Hebrew and then transcribed and you know

and translated to Greek and Latin and all these days there's a lot lost in the mix and they believe that what that story might have been about of Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the other tablets and having the experience with meeting God in the burning bush that what this is in fact was a dimethyltryptamine experience maybe the big maybe it's a big Navy I can say that if you go to the south of Mexico and she office there's a tree that grows there is a weed called Mimosa hostilis maybe you're familiar with it and this is so abundant that it's used to make fence posts all the fences on the side of the road are made of mimosa hostilis its uses firewood to cook meals the air smells like DMT because people are using it as fuel all over the place not a single person that I spoke with was aware that it was psychoactive these are people that are burning it all

do they get high from it is there like if you were in a tent or something like that and you were doing a hot box or the scenario would you get high from him at about 2% DMT so you probably have to get so sick from coughing and yeah it would be a very uneven just smoking pure Crystal DMT can be very difficult for some yeah so my guess not to be like a wet blanket but my guess is not really and that's a very strong source as strong as let me just some Acacia stronger but it certainly comprable and that's in people using to cook food all the time they're not aware that it psychoactive so was there a way or is there a way for a person living thousands of years ago to somehow or another extract DMT from something like the acacia tree

that's actually spend some time thinking about that a while ago it would be

the first of all depends on how you define extraction if it were to in like an Ayahuasca Cincinnati of course yes but then they would need some sort of enzyme inhibitor to create the Ayahuasca if it were to create it and isolated smokable form again you know you could just do like an aqueous infusion and then try that out and maybe smoke that but in terms of like a real extraction would produce crystals of DMT I don't know what the nonpolar solvents they would be using to extract to freebase would be like butter or something and then how would you get rid of the butter what is the process like if you're going to take a tree that's rich and DMT and extract DMT from it what what do you have to use

you're done it before no I've never done it okay well it's it's a very generalizable and simple process that applies to almost everything in chemistry it's easier sometimes it's called an acid base extraction most people that are in the DMT Community go swimming they call straight to base and you know the idea is that the side chain of the DMT molecule contains a basic nitrogen that if it's protonated in an acidic solution than its water soluble and if it's deprotonated then it's only soluble in a non-polar solvent so what you do is you just deprotonate nitrogen with a base potassium hydroxide or sodium hydroxide typically and then treat that aqueous basic solution with a non-polar solvent like NASA and isolate the NASA dry it out and you have your material and that applies to everything that's not a DMT specific process but that's what people do everything with the basic nitrogen

know what's the earliest history of extraction do we need the first wave of DMT use in the United States was all synthetic in fact DMT was discovered synthetically before it was ever found in nature of the same is true of 5 Meo DMT there was a Canadian tennis name Richard Hellmuth manski who I believe is looking at different alkaloids and strawberry plants and he was synthesizing references for these potential strawberry alkaloids inmate DMT so you didn't know what he'd made other than a potential natural product on and strawberries and and then it wasn't until Sarah much later to conduct itself experiments with injected EMT the people that came fully aware of its cycle activity and then people started finding it in plants and in the 1950s and early 60s were of course a fascinating time in psychedelic research convergences of these Amazing Ideas first you have discovery of Serotonin which is like you know we take this for granted now it's until

Asian commercials but this was of course I'm in no one knew about insulator funding this and all kinds of different animals initially it was in the salivary glands of squid and and different animals in their finding it in the human intestine then there are also finding that all these plans that people worshipped in various indigenous societies also contain serotonin like molecules and they discover LSD and find that may be snow in farm collision at that time and it finds to serotonin receptors it activates a serotonin type response and isolated tissue so if there's like this weird triple convergence of information super potent amazing compound LSU's discovered serotonin is discovering all these different organisms and their pharmacological conversion between the two of them when you have all these people worshipping serotonin like molecules so there is it you know a lot of enthusiasm at that time to figure all this out

so in terms of History so we're talking about like somewhere in the 1950s they started extracting DMT the use of it orally dates back far longer than that because of use of MAO inhibitors and creating Ayahuasca but in terms of the first extraction we can kind of I just land yeah I smoke yeah it might have been even later so the idea that people thousands of years ago

we're able to do something along those lines is probably probably not accurate is it cuz they're talking about a burning bush that's why it's appealing to people write the idea of Moses T do you think that maybe the understanding of synthesis from the dinosa synthesizing this from the scholars maybe they don't have enough of an understanding of chemistry is to do an experiment to see what were the materials that were available how would this have been done would you have to use butter as your non-polar solvent how well would that work what would your butter preparation be done we would you take it rectally then is that how it would work I mean you have to kind of hold your base have been why I think they were talking about it being something from a burning right a burning bush maybe it's just one of those things that sort of gets conflated right cuz you have people today that are very aware that people smoke DMT and have these incredibly intense religious psychedelic experiences and then maybe they looked at the acacia Bush and said oh

Acacia Butch's rich and DMT that's probably where the Moses story came from right it's really interesting as you know. She's never been found in the human brain even though Rick Strassman says that it has been so a lot of people are constantly assigning Altered States Of Consciousness to DMT but we can have these states without DMT I mean maybe it's never been found in the human brain but also there's a physical and experimental issues with sampling fluid from a living humans brain in living rats rats necessarily recently their attempt is to try to prove that the pineal gland is a source for DMT we know the DMT exist in the human body you know that the liver produces it we know that the lungs produce it or not totally aware of whether or not there's anecdotal evidence that points to the pineal gland

based on the rat idea and based on the presence of certain enzymes that could be responsible for it but even if it is even if it is then what is there still a whole question of it how is it released how is it distributed what receptors does it activate and is it even necessary as an explanation for Altered States Of Consciousness because there are other things in the brain other than DMT the other things that you have and dodging is proteins that bind to the Kappa opioid receptor the same receptor that is responsible for the effective Salvia things like that they responsible carbon dioxide itself can induce a pretty strong altered state of consciousness which is why people like those psychedelic breathing exercises hypoxic is that what it is what are they doing when they they have those the what it what is it called there's a type of breathing exercise that induces psychedelic States all the traffic

breathwork yeah and that is the idea behind that right it increases the amount of carbon dioxide in your blood I haven't seen it in that cannastick explanation. I think that was what it would make sense it in early LSD Psychotherapy one of the things to do a do before giving someone else uses Givens in the cold carbogen which is a gas that contains carbon dioxide and they would look at their response to the carbon dioxide inhalation if it induced a panic response it would say maybe you're not psychologically ready for this LSD experience

primitive early test that was used by psychiatrist to see if people were had the psychological fortitude to withstand the experience that's so tell me more about whatever is in the brain that mirrors the effects of salvia

it's a a protein I can't remember off the top of my head what it it's it if you look up and Dodge Nest ligand for Kappa opioid receptor will come up David Nichols recently wrote a paper that actually goes into alternate mechanisms of how the DMT type on near-death experience could be produced by non DMT compounds a lot of work also on endogenously nmda receptor antagonists it was a protein is called Alpha endocytosis in or Angel Dustin named Asher angel dust but the name researcher died in a car accident look right at you is making some kind of brakes for a breakthrough and supposedly but to spooky music but you know this is been a long-standing question in Psychiatry is you know what causes psychosis what causes Altered States Of Consciousness is there an endogenous psychedelic that was like one of the major

motivations for a lot of This research in the 60s finding the endogenous Thai Cottage in that is responsible for schizophrenia now it doesn't seem to be the case but it's still a question that comes up what is dopamine is methylated in certain way to create dimethoxyethane F1 me in or what about this what about that I didn't show him is very interested in it but the metabolic production of various psychedelics that account for altered state of consciousness it just hasn't been supported by evidence in a very strong way even though people really find idea compelling and there's also did 5 Meo DMT and schizophrenic people Sierra and that's also the thing right and we know that the body does produce 5 Meo DMT we just don't know where yet because it's what I was saying earlier about the depression test where you look at your urine so you find 5 Meo DMT in your urine and your first assumption might be okay there's 5 Meo DMT in my body it was in my brain but you don't know that Ryan could have been by a synthesized in your intestine and it could have been excreted without ever entering your brain

Brian this is the whole idea of monoamine oxidase write the idea that when we're eating things that are rich in DMT monoamine oxidase is breaking it down into got ya so you can if you're consuming something so if something is so how did he know that this this Salvia like substance exist in the mind or in the brain rather because this this peptide or protein has been isolated Define the name of it

Ocala caught four of those words you said okay so we know there's a host of different psychoactive substance that are absolutely produced by the body and in the end in the mall in the brain and that there's different ways that human beings have been able to achieve psychedelic States outside of consuming drugs have you done that I've done lucid dreaming things I've done and Kundalini Yoga most interested in because I have someone who's a friend of mine that got really into it and he was saying that he can achieve very DMT like States is a really interesting aspect evolve this said isn't often discuss which is the ability to have the states and still interact with your environment because of course there's something very physically taxing about Breath of Fire these Kundalini breathing techniques if you induce an altered state

Consciousness you need to be focused and you need to be in a specific Place sitting down or psychedelics have this amazing ability to allow you to have that experience but walk around and I think that's not to be underestimated the walking around because then you can really reexamine your environment that's a big part of it for me a big part of the Psychedelic experience is seeing what is New York like what do I like or not like about New York what do I like or not like about my apartment because it matters engines better this year environment do you want to hear that you don't like if you don't get rid of it is my other issue is going to Peruvian Amazon to have a psychedelic experience because if you do it in this place that is superficially inappropriate like your apartment

I think it has the most applicability to your own existence in terms of the music you listen to your friends your environment your life you're confronted by the books that you read the photos of the people that you know all the things that matter to you not a Jungle 2 Jungle they're very beautiful and Visually stimulating and I'm sure then or I know an amazing place you psychedelics I think that we underestimate the value of these things have been integrated into a more normal type of experience in that something you can't do as easily with Kundalini make sense so when you're using psychedelics you will use them and walk around New York City yes what is that like a lot of love for Barilla yet which is you know because I think that we all tend to get into these very

angry all the Subways annoying to the guys taking up too much room I have to stand taking forever it smells weird whatever everyone is looking at their phones all the time which is a little bit dark and then you know if your on a low dose of a psychedelic Raven Ohio and sometimes I'll look at everyone on their phones and I'll just feel compassion and love and think like what a strange situation we've all gotten ourselves into I love all these people and it's like I don't know what to say about it but I understand completely and I don't know where we're going from here and he suddenly feel connected to something that's very real which is people on the subway not looking at each other anymore let me this is in my own life something has changed dramatically when I moved to New York no one looked at phones now people only looking for everyone is looking at phones the entire time they're on the subway is it total change in human behavior and you really start thinking about things like that and it matters because it's not in the Amazon it's your life and these are

choices that you make are you going to be a person that looks at their phone all the time as well yeah it's fascinating I quickly that took old yeah you look at human history when the iPhone is 10 years old I know that's really when it started so 10 years ago people's and even then the beginning of the iPhone but they were fucking useless right now you get online and it was really slow and terrible and it's almost time you just text message it but now with all the apps and social media and constant constant updates of information and new things new events new trends and it's always call me I better check make sure anything's different we've been on this podcast for 2 hours let me see what's going on I'll look at that all these messages he actually I just did this of vivid memory of standing at your front door and you selling Twitter to me saying like how you got it you got to use Twitter it's amazing people send all send you all these articles and it's so useful

learn so I got you I got you it is that way still for me in many ways I learned a lot about what's going on in the world in terms I follow a lot of science tweets Twitter accounts and a lot of really interesting people that post interesting stuff but you got to know how to abandon a tweet several words in like this bullshit not reading that I'm not reading. What can I do now this is crazy. Just knowing that it's going to be horseshit this is going to be just either gossip or nonsense or not interesting but there still a shit ton of really useful information that you can get out of Twitter on a daily basis there's always something new that's coming out and I try to retweet those things as much as possible when I

see something that someone sends me and then that becomes people know hey if you send Joe something really cool and he reads it if I get a chance to read it I'll retweet it and people get a kick out of that so they'll send me more. And so then sort of its sort of becomes like a little ecosystem almost for disseminating interesting ideas yeah that's a lot of arguing which I don't do I just don't argue I think it's a very ineffective way to communicate with people with you no going back and forth with stuff like that online it just doesn't work well it's 10:00 it becomes I think more like idea Sport with a lot of folks like they just trying to win these little battles and final the the Whittier nasty thing to say and it's just it's not productive it's not healthy I don't like it they're doing the same thing the journalist do which is that you get more attention for doing the wrong thing then you do for saying the right thing and we all know that feeling

someone says something about you that's unfair and wrong and you want to say hey wait a second about that that is totally incorrect I'm going to set the record straight and that's what gets engagement not the kind thoughtful considerate thing that somebody says yes yes I would love to accentuate the trend of kindness I really think that that is one thing if there's anyone Trend in to lean towards kindness to just to just to be nicer to people and if we could all sort of agree that this is a virtue worth pursuing I think it would change the way a human beings interact with each other these ships like the shift of looking at your phone if we could figure out a shift one of the more disturbing things to me that comes from the left which I've always Associated myself being a left-wing cleaning person that there's a lot of meanness coming from the left now and so it lot a lot of what if by any means necessary a lot of feeling the need to squash people

humiliate people and insult people because they don't agree with what you believe and that this this is a I think this is a terrible path to go down because then it sort of justifies people think the opposite of that to be mean to you so now no one's getting anything done cuz this side being insulting and that's how it's being insulting and people getting kicked out of restaurants and people are protesting in front of people's houses do they disagree with things in this is a lot of Cruelty a lot of like meanness and cruelty which is the enemy of discourse as soon as that stuff gets thrown about as soon as it becomes a war and idea war or an idea sport people are just trying to win the trying to get back at you for what you said and you get back at them for that and it becomes just terrible stall out situation yeah we both bought into a game and it's a bad game to play it's the worst possible game and it's very transparent I mean you look at what shows up on the first page of Twitter and it's things that are perfect

designed to generate opinions so teacher says that now classrooms will be equipped with a bucket of stones to throw at a school shooter and what do you feel all that stupid or hey that's actually kind of good idea it's better than nothing and everyone's engaging with it and you're buying into it you're supporting it and you're promoting it you're making it bigger by paying attention to it and there's an amazing book that I recommend anyone listening to this Reed called him using ourselves to death by Neil Postman wish you were in 1985 before computers before social media before any of this he predicts all of it perfectly without even knowing being dissed him what was going to happen and you know his solution if there is one is you know parsley to disengage from all this but to try to appreciate long nuanced careful things which is very hard to achieve on Twitter or television and most places we can try our best well I think that's one of the reasons why podcasts like especially ones like this

they're all these long form conversations are becoming popular because people are hungry for actual communication they're hungry for people that are just even if we disagree on things I want to know why you think the way you think and I want to hear it all I want to hear all of your reasoning I want to hear the thought process that led you to that I want to hear that and I want to be able to talk to you about how I think and why I think the way I think and maybe we can come to some middle ground or at least understand each other I go all I see where you went or I see why you do I see what's happening inside your your mind or the way you feel or how it relates to your life this is absent in most discourse on television it's absent in all talk shows it's like we were talking about the oddness of a panel show me there so bizarre doesn't make any sense that the none of it it's not how human beings interact with each other you match of every conversation you had in your life there was an audience clapping

gluing at everything you said you would it mean it it creates this sort of fake way of communication that has become so commonplace with us receiving the way they sit sitting next to each other like this like we're not looking at each other I would be sitting over here and you'd be at the desk and I've oh well Hamilton 20 bring that up but you know and then look at the crowd it's just it's it's alien it's really weird and I think

because of the fact that people are so addicted to their phones and addicted to media and the constant influx of this Loop of information mean if you watch the news they can't just give you the fucking news yet to get that screw on the bottom of other shit you should be freaking out about that's like the new that sells not enough no you have to know about terrorist attacks and fucking Isis and did some new flu that can't be cured and it's all scrolling on the bottom while you're watching other shed

we do this is not how human beings are designed were designed to talk or designed to communicate with each other person to person this is what we're good at this is what we're lost in the one thing that is probably lead to more people understanding more about each other the actual conversations is rare which is really weird your it's way more common for someone to look at their phone for 10 hours a day that it is for someone to have a one-on-one uninterrupted conversation with someone for an hour those don't exist they don't exist with lover that's it with lovers and occasionally with if you have polite dinner companions that put their phone down and just drink a glass of wine and talk to you about stuff but even then people suck at it people it's almost like people forgot how to do it they talk over each other they don't listen to each other when the other person is talking to just waiting their turn and talk it's where we're going down weird Road

that these roads where we are sort of distancing ourselves from compassion and understanding and real communication absolutely

I don't want to buy deer

psychedelics might help that's what I'm saying that's what I'm saying they I think they would help I think if we had like real centers where you could go and just like you could go to a place where you can get a licensed therapist to massage you you know hey I've got this back pole and you know that the only thing that works is deep tissue massage go to a place that give you a robe that played nice music they give you team in there and they're setting the set and the setting and the the Ambiance of the room it enhance is the experience of getting the massage when you go into the room the lights are down they might have a candlelit you know there's some fucking hot rocks in the place and they're playing beautiful harp music in the background the set and setting is a part of the experience of getting a massage if we can have something like that and have these things common

for the use of psychedelics where you could go to an actual some sort of therapist that strained in both Cycle Therapy and the use of psychedelics so they can talk to you find out if your stable ask you questions about your medical history what kind of medications are your on your how you feeling what it what are you trying to achieve through this and then work you through an experience I think this could be enormously beneficial I would be nice to be a pharmaceutical in France all those use at lower doses weren't psychedelic 3C + MDMA as like a tonic

to stimulate people is called lamberene 8 mg tablets effective dose to brush hold cycle activity in my experience is about 20 milligram hydrochloride salt butter they were microdosing many microdosing ibogaine historical literature relating to I began to have a little bit of it but there isn't much I mean again they used to use a psychedelic called the end of hand as an antidepressant in the Soviet Union in the United States was a drug called Monet's depressing isn't MDMA type serotonin releaser and then of course the whole history of DPT facilitated end-of-life therapy LSD Psychotherapy on and on it everything shogun's group did using 2cb mmda I began this was a long with Claudio naranjo in order to facilitate Psychotherapy I mean people not only were doing it

they were exploring all the different ways to do it which compounds are best for which applications experience with cacao yes what is your experience in terms of the Psychedelic effects are psychoactive effects it's mildly stimulating because of the theobromine content but does it mirror a small dose of MDMA or not in my experience this is what was it was Kyle that was talking about that right call Kingsburg he was saying that in large doses that rock cow has some sort of a mild MDMA like a fact I've heard people say that and people will sometimes say that the presence of the Nephilim in in cacao could account for that but it's such a small amount race wanted Less in a milligram and the active Joseph NF1 is 102 milligrams of grams in order to achieve a psychoactive effect so I think the effective people do experience is probably mediated by theobromine which is present in relatively High

one of these that's how you know it's named after the genus theobroma and seal bromine does what how does it make you feel as if it's a caffeine type simulant laughing but they are really referring to theobromine and is that why it's deadly to dogs yes it is

so still bro me and it's doing it yep fascinated so it's not actually caffeine no it's just a caffeine like substance it less potent than caffeine what was your experience like physically how did you feel when you took this this cacao how large does I mean what bra out of the powder that you did everyday and yogurt and just as a health thing as a health thing and I liked it the flavor of it but I have never had it and experience Beyond at most a low-level stimulant experience I've also taken pure theobromine and it is stimulating but it requires like 500 mg to achieving effect if I remember correctly

what are the what about your fuck with nutmeg

nobody that means a fascinating area of course you know prisoners historically did Malcolm X did it essential oil of nutmeg contains Marissa to send which is a precursor for the Psychedelic amphetamine mmda not MDMA but it's methoxy MDI and as well as elements in which is another psychedelic precursor as well as I think one other maybe even safrole actually I think it's a felony sending Marines dissing and Shogun had a hypothesis again Shogun was actually by training a biochemist not the organic chemist although these fat is queer doing organic chemistry so he's very interesting these ideas of the body creating psychedelics so he thought when you consume nutmeg oil that your body is is emanating this double bond in creating it a series of different amphetamines and that's what accounts for the high but in reality people don't actually know

well yeah

so what kind of history of use does it have in terms of like but people taking it for the psychoactive benefits I'm sure there is some ancient right would be over soon there is some ancient use of it but you know it's mostly like a thing for teenagers and people in prison these days it's kind of oil is it illegal hi it's one of these things that you do when you don't have access to anything else it's and most of the reports make it sound more like an anticholinergic deliriants type experience more like taking a lot of drama me and then that's like a classical psychedelic oil to make a lot of psychedelics in a laboratory

no history of uses of all so fascinating to me when you talk about history of use because there's certain cultures that really don't have a written history they have oral history was very difficult to determine when people started what about peyote what is the history of use of peyote because I remember reading something that kind of stunned me that said that there's only like a couple hundred years of known use of peyote grow over a relatively broad region stretching from the Southern United States into I believe most of northern Mexico and so in the United States that history is about 100 years old of the Native American church is his recent crazy so 1918 something like that yes it was a Comanche chief Quanah Parker

who spread the Peyote religion across the United States and it caught on because it's fantastic of course it caught on never experienced it what is it again it's another one of these plans that has masculine of course but then it has these other accessory alcholism modular the experience it was really interesting about peyote as it contains a chemical called peyote and I have some Pharmacy trade journals from like 1890 or something like that and they talked about like your Pharmacy must have morphine cocaine and peyote in the three substances every pharmacist needs and and peyote in was used as a hypnotic is used to induce sleep but there's been no

very little research on it none of the 21st century I mean this is like I was once considered a really valuable medicine issues that it's a little bit tricky to synthesize and it has to be extracted from this rare Cactus Lafave for a few sucks but but that modulates experience you have so many different alkaloids and and it is very long lasting and causes dramatic pupil dilation it's extremely nauseated vomited episode about peyote in the most recent season of my show and I vomited so much that my nose started bleeding you know it was some serious vomiting and it's physically very very punishing more so than almost anything I've ever done I would be terms of the after effects or while you're doing it you're doing it it's it's a heavy load on the body so it's

people always say this is not Recreation or whatever but it truly isn't so you know this is really young a punishing experienced and on top of that the Native American ceremonies often accentuate some of those punishing aspects of it like water is conserved you don't get to drink as much water as you want to emphasize the importance of water in Mars Attacks Alba ceremonies there's no water at all which I think is actually increases the absorption of the leaf into your mouth because the natural reaction to eat something disgusting is to wash it down with water these are little things that people do in possibly without thinking that are can I change the nature of the experience so anyway you eat this Cactus it's incredibly nauseated and better and then you have maybe a 12-hour hallucinatory euphoric State that's very beautiful and strange but you see the cactus raw some people grind

is a dumpling Cactus it's a very small somewhat spherical cactus that produces beautiful white and pink flowers and it's incredibly slow growing which is why the conservation of peyote is an even bigger issue than the conservation of toads in the Peyote all the Psychedelic plants have major conservation issues that need to be addressed peyote's arguably the biggest of the mall because this is a slow growing plant if you want to learn patience grow peyote that is how you learn from this this bottle cap who takes 5 years before it's the size of a dime grow from seed to when you're eating something that's you know that's

as big as the volume of a coffee mug or something like that maybe 20-30 years old Jesus Christ so there's a lot of history in these plants they called him grandfather peyote and I think the reason is that by the time that they're ready to be consumed the often are

grandfather's our grandmothers they have produce seeds and have Offspring in all this stuff because it takes that long so yes it's very slow growing it's not a sustainable practice the way that it's being done but there's also even bigger threats to the environment in the form of root plowing all the territory to build Walmart in subdivisions in different things in South Texas because most of that land is privately owned and and

it's difficult because he was a belief in the Native American church that has to be an outdoor natural growing it can't be a greenhouse cultivated plant is part of the potency in the value is from its interaction of nature so it's it's if it's the same blee harvested where only the crown of the cactus is removed but it's long carrot like Taproot is left in the soil it can regenerate new heads but if people don't have proper harvesting techniques it can definitely the population very quickly especially because it's not a very potent substance requires many of these Ultra Ultra Ultra slow-growing plants wow so what is the natural Territorial and how wide is the natural territory of these plans I can't tell you exactly but it's not very large so if it got very popular to be a real problem probably won't the people that care most about it outside of the Native American church are interesting late um kacta files in Thailand and Japan who grow up

for purely aesthetic purposes because it's so beautiful they and they would never even consider because to them it's the prized ornamental plant that produces amazing fruit and flowers and lives seemingly forever and if you take care of it I can just look amazing so those there's a huge peyote scene in Thailand of people that never would dream of consuming it just growing ornamental wow now San Pedro cactus does that have psychoactive properties absolutely yes and did you have to extract in a different way like peyote a candy you can draw with some prices of San Pedro they actually contain comprable quantities of mescaline to peyote and it's a much more sustainable source of mask on for that reason it grows on my period grows very very quickly and and can be propagated by cutting easily and you know it seems much easier to work with but traditionally if you go to Peru will take a lie

the cactus and will cut it like a loaf of bread into slices then they boil those slices and create assertive low potency of aqueous and fusion that they drink and it was interesting about the way they do it is that it seems that it's almost designed to create a lower potency drink the way they do it they drink every night the shamans every night of their entire life and many people come back and do it repeatedly and for them it's sort of it's like a traditional form of microdosing you could say it's not about blasting yourself into the cosmos the way people do when they smoke DMT this is about fortifying your body giving yourself Strength Cleansing yourself balancing yourself

and other people to consume at Roswell

not that I saw there now though but people do what people do I have and what is the effect is it comprable to the Peyote affect its comfortable but it's yeah it's comfortable but again it gets very hard because of these variations with natural products in terms of the potency of the cactus and that point in your life and know people always come up to me and say what's the deal with MDMA used to be like this and now it's like this what accounts for that it's like we'll don't underestimate your own changes over time I when I was 21 I could drink alcohol. They did very often but I could and not want to kill myself the next day now if I try to drink more than three drinks I'm going to feel horrible the next day emotionally ruined and that's me not alcohol now you brought up the term hypnotic in which made me really reminded reminded me of our conversation that we had to email

about Roseanne Barr oh yeah in about Ambien and about the effects of Ambien she came on the show she still hasn't she can't she's having a really hard time with this she feels terrible about what she said she feels like the whole world hates her she feels like she's lost everything in her life is destroyed and she's distraught and she she was going to fly out here but we had a conversation and we kind of decided to be probably better if she waited just let let some of this pass by it's still in the news because I've decided to move the show on without her there they're going to kill her off or something man yeah and she's just devastated and you know she was also devastated health-wise physically she's an older woman and

not to be named different shoes older man older person and this grueling schedule of doing a television show was horrible on her it just it was really really tough to do she got bronchitis she felt like she was almost dying she was completely exhausted and she felt like the schedule of it all just was just way too taxing on a physically then on top of that she's on a host of different things she's at me show with we ever do wind up sitting down and talk on the podcast all get her to to list the various things she's on but she's on various antidepressants States change as a mop mixes and mop she was one of them she said to me she's she needs to get her doses readjusted she drinks alcohol regularly she smokes marijuana regularly she's also an Ambien regulate exid every night to go to sleep and I tried to explain to her the fact that you're not getting real sleep when you're on that this is not something you should take and rely on a daily basis they even tell you

get off of it and it's it's and it's difficult to get off of it but

people want to dismiss the idea that she could have said something that's completely out of character or done something is completely out of character while under the influence of the stuff that I could have contributed to that they want to dismiss it because they want a villain they want you know what no she's bad they want this like this child-like simplistic reasoning and rationalization for what she's done and this is a prime example of this trip schizophrenic nature of the way drugs are depicted in our society if it's if it's something like bath salts or K2 they're responsible for everything One Toke of that stuff in your eating your best friend's face under a bridge but then in Roseanne's case they have no explanation whatsoever no Excel Batory value they can't be used to explain anything is it an excuse no is an explanation I think yes

I think that intoxication can explain all sorts of inappropriate behavior and to pretend otherwise is it again dishonest I know a sonography the pharmaceutical company that manufactures and Ian had this widely shared tweet saying that racism isn't a side effect of Ambien but it's a little bit ridiculous for them to have done that so she could someone who is mentally ill because you know if you look at the medical literature the fact of the matter is that Ambien is associated with all sorts of absurd behaviors command hallucinations where people stab themselves jump out windows people that you know butter their cigarettes and smoke them people that paint their houses in the middle of the night with no memory whatsoever and it's a profoundly profoundly disinhibiting drug so you know your ears may be a somewhat analogous example for my own life I never take Ambien on plans for this reason because I'm around strangers I don't know what I'm going to say or what I'm going to do let alone use Twitter

but I don't like so uncomfortable because it's so disinhibiting I might do something weird I don't know take off my shirt I have no idea whatsoever so I remember once I was on the plane to Berlin and I did take Ambien and I start it is her delusional State thinking that the cabin crew and the person that's announcing over the intercom is saying various Nazi things that's like an unfair stereotype it all Germans are Nazis that's offencive but I had no control over this like just because they're German talking in German does it mean that this is like a Nazi are shipped because you're just completely out of your mind wow but again I mean I'll act like another story I used to be friends with a girl whose dad is a psychiatrist prescribe for men's quantities of Ambien and she would snort it there's no reason to start its water soluble has a fast onset of action but no benefit and snorting it's fine or early if you're going to take it at all there's no reason to take high doses it sorry

delirium at the therapeutic dose you don't need to take more than 5 milligrams induces delirium but but I remember at I was at some party and someone was saying that they wanted Academy in do they run at the party Academy in and just a complete stranger and I said oh I actually have a little bit of ketamine but it's at my apartment here the keys and here's my address and I just run over to my apartment and protect and help yourself talk to you later and and then I've never lost my phone never lost my keys I don't lose things that you wake up the next morning go to my apartment recent my pocket my keys are gone and then it hits me this flash of oh my God I gave my keys away to a complete stranger to go to my apartment and take ketamine from me what on Earth was I thinking well at what level of dissing Edition is required to do something that insane luckily I was going to have to spend the rest of the day tracing find

that person was getting my keys in these people happen to be very courteous people and actually did go to my apartment did take the small amount of time that I had and then just lock the door after themselves and didn't make a mess but again I mean this is like Seasons this is a profound Lee disinhibiting substance and also I think the idea that a drug couldn't modulate racist activities in because there's a study that you can look up where they use the beta blocker Propranolol and they found it it actually seems to block racial implicit racial bias in certain tasks that what they're suggesting is that there's an adrenergic component to implicit racial bias but lose a certain baby heart rate of fear response and once that's physiologically blocked you become less

racist in a sentence implicitly it's not a conscious decision conscious racism is introduced but an implicit racial bias is I mean these are like really complicated higher-level questions about how drugs impact cognitive functioning and and the bottom line I think it is be careful is being certain about anything that what drugs can or can't do

what is this name of the blood pressure drug reduces in-built what is that word in-built racism

common heart disease drug may have the unusual side effect of combating racism those that stupid movie with Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt As Good As It Gets he was a racist and they gave him a pill they gave him some medication at reduced racism it stopped him from being racist well I completely forgot I remember because I was angry because a bunch of people from the I was working on a television show that I'm Bunch we were talking about how great a movie it was cuz it was just weird dark sort of film and I was like that movie fucking sucked it was so depressing here this woman she's got you know she's like a waitress and Jack Nicholson as his old racist asshole and she's relying on him for some real reason cuz you can't find a new one it was nice to her and and he's racist but the the resolve the film was that he just was sick and they gave him some medication he wasn't race anymore like at the fuck out of here this isn't

meanwhile maybe does Ambien is an amazing amazing substance I need a piece of medical the Ambien Effect 2 years ago I don't know if you're familiar people who are paralyzed you can take Ambien and start walking in power to regenerate regions of the to regenerate activity in regions of the brain that look dead on fmri it is a wacky drug is also chemically very similar to 5 Bethel DMT it's it's not it's not like a benzodiazepine like Valium it has its own bizarre structure I mean it's a weird drug so when these people are paralyzed by the paralyzer. What was wrong with them Strokes traumatic brain injury various reasons is it a book about it called The Hope and brain damage I believe the title of it is and Ambien somehow or another temporarily fixes it for the duration of the drug effects of those people that are in a Uno persistent vegetative state they take Ambien and suddenly they wake up

the fuck yes yeah it's pretty it's well-documented and it's a really bizarre of fact that is exclusively present an Ambien and maybe slightly in baclofen well yeah I thought that the the statement that the pharmaceutical company made about racism not being side-effect was kind of cute kind of witty is very snarky but the problem with that shit is well what are the side effects and then you go into the actual side effects like holy shit how is this legal and then you go to the side effects of like what is this doing to people like oh yeah here's another one it's supposedly increases consolidation of negative memories whoa It's just Total hallucinatory Insanity at higher doses maybe the most powerful disinhibiting agent I'm aware of and is able to restore cognitive and motor function

can people with traumatic brain injuries what a weird drug

very weird and not not something people should be taking everyday just not it's certainly addictive vines that you know it's not a benzodiazepine itself it binds to the benzodiazepine site on the Gaba a receptor but yes no it's it's addictive it's super addictive so for that reason alone people shouldn't be taking it everyday because you'll become horrendously dependent on it and withdraw all is ruthless total insomnia

so most people just go right back to it or you know you can then translate you can transition on two different types of hypnotics like taking an anticholinergic like Benadryl to sleep or cannabinoids cannabis things like that or you know just things that don't buy into the cab of a receptor in order to try to reduce tolerance there's ways around it you're not doomed if you start taking it but it's it's certainly habit forming and something that's best to avoid if you don't require it and it doesn't give you real sleep correct I mean you are you're missing some part of the Sleep Cycle dr. Matthew Walker was on yours a sleep specialist and he wanted to death about it but I really don't remember his exact description but he was talking about how it bypasses certain cycles and you're you're not getting a real nice sleep I am not aware of that I mean there's three wouldn't surprise me he usually you know they still debate about what the most stressful part of sleep is

think most literature points actually non-rem sleep slow-wave sleep being the most restful type in that actually supported or promoted by chemicals like muscimol from the Amanita muscaria mushroom and there was one pharmaceutical derivative called Skybox at all that I did an episode about on the most recent season of my show and that really does producing credibly restful sleep that is superior to Ambien but like Ambien it was also psychedelic even more psychedelic probably so this is an issue it seems that for whatever reason a lot of these drugs that really promote sleep if actively also happens to be hallucinogenic and nobody knows exactly why but it's been a pharmaceutical barrier because

we don't live in a culture that allows people to go nuts at night yeah no kidding. I'm glad you brought up the Amanita muscaria because that's another one that is

almost like a drug of lore more than a drug of application you don't really hear too much about people getting real good experiences know you don't but it's also connected to any of the Sacred mushroom and the cross the cover of it from John Marco Allegro has an M Amanita muscaria he thought that the Amanita muscaria was probably link to psychedelic States in prehistoric Christianity we don't know right he's such a salacious wacky guy he was getting off on it he loved it he will love getting off on freaking people out about Christian you can't underestimate all of Christianity is the sex cult that worships a fungal Fallas in the semen of that Fallas are the spores doll Christianity is an ancient fertility called that's a big claim from a Siri

Oxford educated Dead Sea scroll scholar who was respected up until that point who is also an ordained minister yeah I mean you said this is all some kind of cynical attack on the Christian religion and that he didn't even believe it himself the issue is that in order to carefully examine his claims you need to speak what is an ancient Aramaic or something so it's like it doesn't I'm not in a position reading his book which is all having to do with the etymology of these words their origins in different languages I just don't know enough about the ancient languages to make an informed assessment of his claims but which is I think one reason that they kind of hung around in this Laura for such a long time because it's hard for people to say with certainty if they're true or not although I lean to them for them probably not feeling well supported

why is that just seems to Wacky because they're not I haven't seen them integrated into any serious work since not that that's necessarily a good argument to take a lot of Education to be able to even understand whether or not. Debate is cogent right right is it the same deal you encounter the sometimes I'm like really Fringe aspects of physics and chemistry were so it'll make some kind of wacky arguing about the way atoms bond or something like that and it's like it's it's hard because you only have like a small handful of people that are capable of seriously evaluating the claims able to weigh in and then it doesn't really get vetted in a serious way something's just linger around is maybe it's true maybe it's not but but the bottom line is that most people don't get it valuable experience from these mushrooms but some do some people figured out how to make it work and the experiences again it's you

don't think it's a gabaergic deliriant it takes you into a dreamy drunk Zone it's in many ways a toxin right it's toxic and some forms well it contains it another chemical a Botanica acid that is potentially very toxic although it hasn't really been examined in fact it also contains a complex of his element Vanadium that could potentially be toxic as well so there are some legitimate toxicity concerns that I think anyone who's consuming it should be aware of he has the ideal situation would be isolated muscimol that's hard to extract and but yet it's connected in so much artwork and so so much ancient depictions of particularly of Christmas cards is always elves in these little Amanita muscaria caps

all over the world and there is no question and when you see that Mushroom in habitat that it's completely spectacular there's nothing else like it is magical experience just looking yeah I ran across it only once in Colorado in the woods and it was amazing thank you it was a big one too so it's big beautiful red with white dots on its like one of those gorgeous things you never see growing yeah yeah and it's legal right you your it's legal to possess is it possible that we just are doing it wrong and that the information has been lost as to how to cuz a lot of people felt like it might have been a part of Soma which has it really been defined as to what Soma is bright yeah those those debates are not really my my cup of tea and it's like tons of guys pushing this or that are you at without like a lot of evidence one way or the other

so I don't know any of those people to argue that urine drinking somehow wired to concentrate the muscimol in one way or another if you want to learn about it I think the best way to do it is actually through this other related drug a box at all which is almost developed by Merck as a competitor for Ambien and there's some hydros report cigar box all the give you the much Clear example and for my own experience as well of what the potential of that class is and it's very different is every bit as powerful as Ayahuasca or something like that but completely different and it's hard to articulate all these things are hard to articulate but it's something that's been experienced by relatively few people so you don't even have this spiritual or metaphorical vocabulary for is it the way that I had it most powerful he was once I was doing a shoot for Vice on HBO and they told me I had to go to Tokyo with it less than 24 hours notice and that I had

start filming as soon as the plane landed couldn't go to the hotel room so I thought all right this is serious no messing around no time for jet lag like I've got to fall asleep at ten p m. Night wake up at 8 a.m. that morning and got to be awake all day so enough pharmacologically Force this a little bit I'm going to take a really high dose of this muscimol derivative at night to induce sleep and I'll take out at all during the day that was the plan so I took a high dose and believe it was 45 milligrams but don't quote me on that of this muscimol derivatives it's about the same potency and at the equivalent of what would have been maybe 2 p.m. New York time which I think was crucial because these things are are hypnotic to induce sleep so if you take it during the day or less likely to sleep through the whole experience and it was unbelievable I mean I I I I I couldn't

bad of the intensity of what I experienced it was you no justice rushing sense of becoming a passive

observer in my own Consciousness and seeing all of my thoughts

produced by someone else that were racing at a speed that was so fast that I found it physically busy and had to lay down and I felt as if like the acceleration was pushing me toward an ultimate state that was sleep and its sleep in death represented the ultimate state of consciousness

well so it was it was and then in a nice way Clayton work the next day and if you will see how do you sleep and sleep well actually had this transformative existential trip accidentally but tried it since just purposely for a couple of times did you ever recreate that kind of experience no because it was it was a bit much I would say and I know people that have taken even more and it turns into just your entire visual field transforming into rotating cubes or each face of the cube represents a different aspect of your life your future your past your present you know really dramatic stop so I think that potential exists with high-dose muscimol it's hard for people to ingest it because of all the other material in the mushroom and the disgusting incident consuming it so is it possible that we've just did much like people have sort of a altered

many different things like weed and tomatoes and what have you that it one point time the mushrooms somehow different evolutionary chemical history of all these different plants is a fascinating subjected pretty much lost to history you know there's no like archaeological alkaloid analysis that I'm aware of so fascinating to know because all these natural products evolve just like the plants that contain them what were the intermediate materials what drugs have gone extinct have did our ancestors Drive certain psychoactive plants to Extinction as a plant called silphium that some people have argued that may have happened with those of fennel derivative fennel related but yeah I mean it's it's really and it we've seen it with cannabis you know the black market encouraged everyone to produce

THC dominant strains because it was the most potent most stoning most bang for your buck now now we have the ability to change the evolutionary direction of the plantain to encourage the production of CBN or 6:40 or whatever

so when you talk about a plant like

the Peyote cactus that grows so incredibly slow and you know if if that became something that was highly sought-after and very very valuable it could conceivably be wiped out yes especially something really slow so there could have been substances like that they were very geographically local is very small area they're just gone yeah I thought I just had totally not an evidence-based but if a lot of the reason

psychoactive plants are present today tend to be less addictive is because all the addictive ones were harvested to Extinction thousands of years ago maybe something like that I mean these things do happen if you would know we really wouldn't have anyway of knowing but it's a fossilized plants right right it's really didn't happen with cocoa contain cocaine or yeah and I dread some theories that it's conceivable that the Amanita muscaria very seasonably so you have to figure out like when is the right time to harvest it cuz if there are some plans although courts fungus isn't really a plant is kind of the opposite of a plan the way it in jest oxygen it takes in carbon it takes in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide like a like an animal. But that it's possible that these things are very seasonably that you have to catch him within a window of time and that they also very geographically like

some places they might be more potent like you know Cuban cigars grow nonspecific land have a distinctly more you know more potent taste to them oh yeah absolutely precursors for all these natural products come from the soil typically get amino acids and things like that and it it's all going to to change there was an amazing experiment that was done where they started doping the substrate of psilocybin containing mushrooms with other tryptamines so they used instead of the D E T & D i p t put it in the substrate and they found it the mushroom would take that completely synthetic chemical what does not occur in nature it was in for hydraulic slave Danville ring just like it worse tillison drove it and create natural product derivatives of the synthetic materials creating the semi-synthetic hybrids between man and mushroom creations

Jesus yeah yeah I mean this is like why the synthetic natural dichotomy doesn't make sense everything is evolving as a constant interplay between human and plant and fungus and you know after we're all gone all of our plastic bottles are going to be consumed by some bacterium that involves to degrade all of these you know polymers and that will create natural products from them and will those natural products be natural products because they were derived from substrate that we created it turns into like a very complicated issue which is why I don't believe in the idea of natural synthetic everything is simultaneously natural and simultaneously synthetic everything comes from Earth yes so even the most unnatural things that human beings are created or innocence natural Creations like a bee creative beehive of bee hives and natural creation right

yeah to mind fuck so to get back to Amanita muscaria do you know of anyone who's effectively regularly used it as a psychedelic yes but not people who I bet wacky people

yeah I would imagine not attached to it specifically because the Christian mean the books by Allegro were aboard bag right one of them was the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Christian myth that was one of his books that was the second book to be published after the sacred mushroom and the cross I think he did that because they took the sacred mushroom and the cross off the market right like what did the Catholic Church by out the rights for that or was that a mess as well I can remember something along those lines but you're on Irvin republished it fairly recently with the the blessings of the Allegro family but the the just that the whole connection to Santa Claus and the whole connection to Christmas with that mushroom it's there's so much attached to that mushroom

people want that mushroom to be Jesus that that's the one you know that's the way it's the prettiest it's like it grows it's got a Michael Riser relationship of coniferous trees so you find it underneath pine trees just like the shiny presents underneath the Christmas tree do people get so excited about that mushroom yes they do but yet no one gets off on it that's why I keep people located situation and you know just because something's convenient isn't a good reason to say that it's the truth like there are other psychoactive mushrooms that may have been used in the past their ones that we've discovered recently visit species called Road Oakley the Immaculata as far as I know there's no information about humans consuming this mushroom big contains a salvinorin a type Kappa opioid Agonist this could be a completely different type of psychedelic mushroom no information on it exists maybe someone used it somewhere in the past I don't know

well isn't there there are some psychedelic substances that have been discovered that have no history of human use like isn't Hawaiian Baby Woodrose as I would have sent you doesn't have LSU Lake Properties but no history of human use a complicated question yeah there's maybe not with Hawaiian Baby Woodrose but with morning glory seeds there does seem to be some Mesoamerican history although it's not as well founded in morning glory seeds will put you on the moon right will they get it contain LSA and often did is the inventor of LSU did an experiment where he checked himself with small quantities of LSA but there aren't many evaluations at the pier material so the exact nature of the different components in those seeds remains a little bit mysterious as far as I'm concerned some people suggested it's the strongest naturally occurring psychedelic other people will say that it's not even psychedelic at all that

just a hypnotic it just has heard of sedating quality I've used Hawaiian Baby Woodrose many many years ago and it certainly psychoactive whether I'd call it classically psychedelic is it a complicated issue it's kind of like a creamy unpleasant delirium

any other ones that we could go over that are weird

watch my show I think you'd really like it I'm sure I'd like it I like all your stuff okay because he goes into lots of enough time that's one of the problems with Netflix and HBO and YouTube and just too much cool stuff

but it will be cool I will definitely watch it okay that was 3 hours man just flew by like crazy over here so why listen this is way better than the first time we did it we were here I think got a lot of cool information out and I really appreciate you coming back man thanks for asking I do this again but not in 7 years to quicker on Twitter and Instagram is Hamilton Morris and your show is Hamilton's pharmacopeia it's is it available online can people watch it online on and screaming on iTunes and it's on Vice land as well thanks man that was awesome

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