#511: Hamilton Morris on Iboga, 5-MeO-DMT, The Power of Ritual, New Frontiers in Psychedelics, Excellent Problems to Solve, and More

I actually think that one of the best ways to reduce problematic relationships with drugs is to have people make their own drugs and grow their own plants. And I think the same is also true of food, by the way. I think if more people grew their own food and prepared their own food, they'd have much, much healthier diets. No one would be eating gummy worms. There would be a lot less obesity.

Anesthesiologists that have examined xenon clinically, they've concluded that it has a number of attributes that make it, essentially, the perfect anesthetic. It is not metabolized in any way. It can be recycled indefinitely. It's extremely potent—more potent than nitrous oxide. When it's given to a patient, they recover, very, very rapidly after the xenon gas is removed within seconds ... It has no known toxicity. So, it is, arguably, the perfect anesthetic and maybe even the perfect drug. It's incredibly incredibly euphoric.

I think one of the unfortunate things about 5-MeO-DMT is its name. So, people think '5-MeO-DMT—that must be a version of DMT. It must be similar to DMT.' But it's more distant from DMT than psilocin and psilocybin.

It's funny that these drug laws were ostensibly drafted to protect us from drugs but may have actually had the only benefit of protecting drugs from us.

It's sort of like when people say 'Well how could you possibly do cocaine? You're supporting the cartels.' And I understand the point, but the issue isn't doing cocaine; the issue is the prohibition of cocaine that makes it a black market commodity that has to be sold by cartels. It could just as easily be a regulated market like anything else, like aspirin.

It's a very widespread idea that if you have personal experience with a psychoactive drug, this biases you in such a way that the research that you do is not trustworthy. But this is something that we don't evenly apply to other disciplines. No one would ever say that an ethnomusicologist is biased because they've listened to music or because they enjoy music themselves ... Instead, we would say that this is something that makes them an expert who is qualified to discuss the subject.