Welcome to another episode of the TDC podcast in this episode. I spoke with Hamilton Morris a scientific researcher in journalist whose most known for his series on Vice land. Hamilton's, pharmacopoeia in that series, he goes into the science and the history of drugs in a way that is pretty rare and ends up covering them in a more scientific and factual way than you typically see, which is really great before getting into the episode. This is a listener funded project, both the podcast and all the videos and the
cite material. So if you want to support and you feel like this project is worth continuing and growing then donations are the best way to help out you can donate through patreon PayPal or Bitcoin there's information about how to do so in the description or you can just head over to the drug classroom.com support. And another way to help out without donating is to leave a review, especially a positive review if you like the show on iTunes because that does help out the podcast. And of course, thank you to everybody who has
He supported and continues to help out with TTC.
I'm here with Hamilton Morris Hamilton. Welcome to the show, thanks for having me. So I think a good place to start is you are clearly very interested in drugs but also in a way that departs from how Society tends to view them, how did you end up? So interested in this topic and in that way, I think that
I grew up at a time when a lot of the vestiges of the golden age of prohibition.
We're still very much present in the media and in the classroom. So, you know, I went through dare, I was exposed to a lot of kind of the most ridiculous propaganda to have emerged in the 20th century. I saw all of the Absurd journalism, that was being produced in the 90s and still produce to this day. And I think that anyone that went through, that had a certain perspective, almost a privileged perspective on the way things were.
Work and how much misrepresentation appears and how much manipulation is part of the way drugs are discussed in American culture. And once you take a step outside of that indoctrination, you realize that there's a lot more going on is a really rich history and I think that, you know, that was the case for a lot of people especially with cannabis but with psychedelics as well. And even with stimulants you begin to realize that there's a basic desire to
Help people to prevent people from hurting themselves with drugs and out of a misguided but positive aim of helping people. All of this misinformation is spread. And so you start to think, okay, well, maybe the best tactic would be to actually be as honest as possible. And what might that achieve? And that's sort of the goal that I've had is to try to not swing the pendulum too far in One Direction or the other in terms of scaring, people were trying to convince people that
At psychoactive drugs or a cure for all of society's ills, but to say somewhere in the middle so that people can trust. What you're
saying, what was your initial point of contact with a more accurate view on drugs? Was it through personal experience, you began to realize that what you were hearing was not true, or did you get into the science and see that with the science was saying, was different from what I had a dare teacher. Would
tell you what I had a number of kind of had a very unusual childhood and I grew up in Cambridge a lot of my parents friends.
For intellectuals and I remember as a very young child. There is this a psychiatrist at Harvard named John Mack, who was sort of the foremost expert on alien abduction phenomenon. And if you're familiar with him, do you know about this guy? No, I'm not, he's really interesting person. And he wrote a great book called abduction in the 90s that sort of contextualized alien abduction, phenomena in the same realm as religious experience, and shamanic transformations.
And kind of positioned it as part of this, Continuum of Altered States Of Consciousness in humans. It's a very and it's not about whether it exists or doesn't exist. His tactic was to sort of say that that was an irrelevant diversion from the reality that people were having these experiences and that they should be acknowledged whether or not they truly happen anyway. So this guy was simultaneously, a highly credentialed academic, but a pretty weird guy in a family friend and I remember him telling me as a young child that
When I grew up, I would have to take LSD, and listen to Glenn Gould, play The Goldberg Variations. And I didn't know what either thing where I didn't know what either of them were. And but I remember thinking, wow, this guy really respects both of these things and, you know, it just kept coming up again and again throughout my childhood. And then I you know, read a number of these more balanced books about psychoactive drugs that came out in the 90s there's one called buzzed and then at the same time as exposed to like I said, dare and things like that and then
By the time I was in high school, the internet was accessible enough that I could look at Erowid. And that, that was a really interesting way of seeing things where the literature is not being written by these sort of detached academics, but it's being written by the people who have direct experience with what they're describing and of course that entirely changes the
tone. And it's not starting with the goal of we're writing this to describe drugs in a way that will yield and outcome saying, here's what they do which is somehow a completely unheard
Way of approaching this, at least in the
typical settings, right? I mean, things like the DXM fac by William white. I don't know if you're familiar with that, I am. Yeah, so that's, that's like, I remember reading that maybe when I was a freshman and high school or maybe a sophomore, something like that. And just thinking, wow, this is so interesting. There's somebody who wrote this enormous document about Robo tripping, and it's so detailed and they're looking at the chemistry and the pharmacology and the culture and the history of this.
Whole thing. And and it's not judgmental. It's actually pretty clear that the person writing it has a very personal interest and involvement with this subject matter. And, you know, nothing like that would have ever been published in a book. So, it felt like, okay, this is I guess it was harm reduction may be the first time that I'd been exposed to this sort of harm reduction. That's now routinely encountered on the internet where the intention isn't to prevent people from doing something or to inform them in a sort of sterile manner, but to inform them with the
Sumption that they may actually be using these things and that it might not be bad.
That kind of comprehensive view of drugs, were you taking in the history and the science and the subjective effects is something that really does carry over into your show. And is one thing that I've always really liked about it both in the newer iteration and the older Vice videos and you're making something for a large audience. How do you keep focus on these interesting true aspects of drugs without going into either the
dark stuff is obviously not an issue for you, but then more often people go into our way of talking about drugs to keep it. Interesting is to go way into overstating the benefits or focusing too much on kind of pseudoscience, how do you keep that factual desire straight?
Well, I try to do two things, you know, I've always loved storytelling. I've always loved great stories and I try to look beyond the drug and find a story of one kind or another, that allows me,
To say something truthful about the drug but also contextualizes it in a narrative and that makes it easier because if you're talking about one person's experience, then it's clear that you're not making any kind of generalization about the drug you're saying this was this guy's experience with DMT. This was, this person's experience with to CP or DMT as opposed to saying, users users of DMT experience that or users of experience, DMT experience, aliens and make it sound like, it's some kind of thing that always happens for.
Every person. But the other thing that I do is I just decided that I would be very technical and wouldn't concern myself with explaining what everything meant and would assume that if people were interested, they would look it up themselves or they wouldn't pay attention and it would be over soon enough. And I, you know, I think that that's been a good tactic. I think it's much better to get into the weeds to say something a little bit Technical and risk. Boring people, then to repeat this,
Same basic information over and over again without ever, really addressing, you know, what are these things, chemically specifically. What are they, what are they pharmacologically? What is their exact history? Like, I really like to get into the specifics?
Yeah, that's a good tactic because I think a lot of people walk around. If you were to ask them, they, they know that drugs are chemicals and they have some, you could view it through a medical lens, but the way that they are typically discussed is at a very different level and
really devoid of Science. And if you were to just approach it through a scientific lens, you would be thinking, okay, well the chemical enters the body what does it actually do when you would start getting into pharmacology and toxicology and you would come to different conclusions? The seem like a really good way to break through that spell of almost treating drugs, as some special thing that are simultaneously, devoid of Science and yet are chemicals. That do something to the
body. Yeah. And it's damaging the way that people have talked about the
Three of those say oh methamphetamine is made from drain cleaner, and cold medicine. And in some sense, maybe it's true on some very loose sense, but they're neglecting to acknowledge the exact function of those substances and, and they don't recognize that just because something is used in a synthesis, or in a reduction or whatever doesn't mean that it's necessarily in the final product. So, it's sort of uninformed scaremongering, that doesn't help
anyone. Oh, and I've had the best comments on some of my videos.
With me, people say has a Benzene ring and they'll start attaching the qualities of benzene to everything that has it or do it has a fluoro substitution. Well, you don't want to, you know, be putting that in your body. Meanwhile bunch of medications have it and of course, medicinal chemists to knows not to view it that way. A lot of the people that you are showing this stuff to, they're not chemists, they probably just have maybe a high school level of chemistry and biology. So, how do you say things? Without it? Being too complicated. I mean, you don't have enough time
I'm in an hour to explain the concepts, underlying concepts of chemistry and pharmacology, that would allow somebody to know. So do you just kind of go with what you were saying, where some people will get it and other people, it'll be over soon enough. I mean, it's unfortunate that people couldn't grasp this better because there's so many people interested in drugs but don't have the prerequisite knowledge to fully understand them.
But I think that, you know, with what's really great about it is that this can serve as a motivator for people to learn that information, I can't even
Until you, how many emails I've received from people saying, oh, I was in a high school chemistry class and I thought, chemistry was boring, but now I'm getting an A or I've switched my major now, I'm studying chemistry, you made me interested in chemistry. It gets to the point that I almost feel as if there's been some sort of conspiracy against making chemistry interesting and it's a shame because it's one of the most fascinating subjects in the world, and there's no reason everyone shouldn't know at least a little bit about it, but it's such a powerful.
Realm of knowledge that it's been sterilized in both high school and college education. Because the fact of the matter is that it's dangerous knowledge, if you know too much or, you know, the wrong things about chemistry, you're capable of making all sorts of drugs or capable of making all sorts of weapons explosives, nerve agents, and on, and on, and on. And so those things are D emphasize partially because the point of a college chemistry class should necessarily be how to make a nerve agent. But it's there's so much emphasis on mechanisms and the more sterile components that
that I think the rich history and the drama of chemistry. It's one of the most dramatic Sciences is lost and people think of it as this very boring area.
Yeah, I would imagine it's a bit like mathematics coming across as incredibly boring because it's so abstract, it's not applied. So you're learning rules of how this system works. But you can't see. How is this even relevant? But if you put it in the context, this is how medicine comes into the world. This is how we understand, natural.
So natural syntheses. Well that can be a bit more intriguing. It gives some reason for learning all this stuff.
Yeah, absolutely. So I think the other thing is that people had this fear for a long time. That if you talk about it, that you're committing a crime that somehow illegal to talk about chemistry, when that is absolutely, not the case, it is not illegal to interview. Someone about this sort of chemistry, there was an issue where they said, they didn't want me saying exactly how to synthesize the drugs and they wanted me to present.
The syntheses out of order which I was unwilling to do so. And when I say they, I mean, the legal department advice. And so my compromise was to focus on the mechanisms to focus on the electron flow as opposed to the exact quantities of reagents and reaction times and reaction temperatures, and things like that. Although, you know, I think it should be relatively. Well, I think most people could figure it out based on the diagrams that are
And it probably won't be a legal issue, but would it be like an issue with whatever networks of Iceland is associated with that? Maybe they don't want to be showing the full steps of a
synthesis. I mean, I think the real thing is that people are afraid. It's not even really an issue. It's an Optics issue. It's a problem that people just don't want to deal with it, and I had to come up against that. A number of times, I was, when I was advertising, my TV show, I wanted to do a print campaign in the New York Subway system that showed diagrams.
With the complete synthesis of MDMA starting from Sassafras, root bark, oil and staff role and going all the way to MDMA hydrochloride. And you know, at first, they said, oh, you can't do that or no one will understand, or it's going to cause a problem and then it didn't cause a problem. The MTA approved. It posters were written up and add week. It was really just completely fine, but there was a fear attached to it. And I think that that's something that you find all the time with psychoactive drugs, is its people are self
Answering their policing themselves. They're so afraid to talk about this subject that they are unconsciously promoting a prohibitionist Agenda. One
thing I've noticed is, do you get the sense that people just love to think that drugs negative or positive or just capable of way more than they are. You have the normal Scare Tactics about drugs but then you have people blaming the Nazis on methamphetamine or saying, Isis Fighters. The reason that they're crazy is because of captagon
On or or things about PCP, for example it's always drugs are usually doing in reality, less than people think, but it's so fun to talk about them as these magical powerful,
chemicals, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's really remarkable to me. I mean there's a there was a sort of crazed that I noticed this year where everyone was talking about the two enantiomers of ketamine and this is not in a clinical
Sitting there talking about the ketamine that they're getting on the street and they would say, oh yeah, yeah this is do. This is some s heavy ketamine, I can feel it, I can feel that this is predominantly, s, enantiomer ketamine. And of course these people did not have polarimeters, they were not doing any kind of actual analysis to determine the stereochemistry of the ketamine that they were consuming, but they were projecting their own experiences onto this imagined stereochemistry, and it was so strange.
To me because it seemed as if all these people were completely unwilling to acknowledge the fact that they had any role in The Experience. So if they if if the ketamine had a more stimulating effect, maybe it was because of their mood or their attitude or their what meals they'd had or you know, any number of factors having to do with them and not the drug but they're immediately willing to project. Everything that happens exclusively into the drug. It's as if the concept of set and setting which are absolutely foundational and understanding psycho,
The drugs have disappeared from people's interpretation of these drug experiences. I see the same thing with the sort of mystical projection onto imagined polymorphs of drugs. So, people will say, like, oh, this LSD, is this poem more for that polymorph and this or that polymorph accounts for this sort of experience, or your people talking about different types of LSD, Crystal having different types of effects. And first of all, this is always happening in this sort of analytical, vacuum known.
Is ever providing any sort of objective evidence for these claims, but they're also never acknowledging that they play a role. That maybe the experience is different because they are different. Not because of some imagined minut difference in the stereochemistry or salt or Crystal Pony, more for whatever. How
much do you think people bring the drug experience to the table on their own with their expectations or what they believe? They're getting. If you had to put a percentage on it, how much is it? You know just pure from a college you versus the psychology of
Person going in. Well, if you count the placebo effect, sometimes it's 100%, sometimes it's all that. And the placebo effect is very strong. And I think that when people talk about Placebo, they talk about it as a sort of binary all-or-nothing proposition where you either have a placebo, or you don't. But what you need to understand about the placebo effect, is that the same sort of expectation that allows the placebo effect to exist in the first place, still exist. Even when you take an active drug, there's still those sorts of projections, you know? That there's also a notion.
Tebow effect where you have a negative experience based on nothing at all. So these things can happen in the absence of any pharmacological agent, but they can also those same forces can be applied to active
drugs as well. Because you've covered so many different substances including things that people would typically classify as quote, unquote, hard drugs. What is your view on that distinction? It's loved in. There's some people in the US who talked about in that way, and we're kind of seeing these lines emerge between the Cannabis and psilocybin.
Ben's of the world in the methamphetamine and heroin of the world and then in places like the Netherlands, it seems like the drug policy is is pretty much based around. You have hard, drugs, and you have soft drugs. What are your feelings on this concept of hard and soft
substances? Oh, I think it's a really foolish dichotomy. That should be abandoned because it's just another type of this sort of prohibitionist mindset that there are certain drugs that are okay, there are good drugs and there are bad, drugs are good ways to use its drugs in there are bad.
Ways to use drugs and that's ultimately not a productive mode of thought because it just creates different types of prohibition and different types of structures where people can be persecuted or prosecuted for their drug use. And really, when you look at the reality of most of these distinctions, they're pretty blurry. So you most people would agree that cocaine should be categorized as a hard drug. Well, does that include coca tea? When it's used traditionally in the Andes, it's this exact same drug.
Just used at a lower dose and taken orally instead of being snorted. So what then? And the same is true for, you know what about smoking opium. That's morphine. I think most people would agree that morphine is a hard drug, but when you look at the medical literature, I struggle to find many instances at all of people. Fatally overdosing on smoked opium. So then, what is it still a hard drug? If it doesn't kill anyone and it's potentially less addictive, you know, it's there's really so many variables that have to be considered.
Sidered and I don't think it really helps anyone to begin with also because the, you know, the inverse is true. With if you're saying something as a soft drug, you might create the illusion that there is no harm at all in it. And I think that's one of the biggest problems with the Contemporary cannabis Community. Is there a complete unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility that there might be anything bad about being stoned every waking moment of your life? You know? It's, I'll be the first to acknowledge that.
This has benefits and I have enjoyed cannabis many times throughout my life. I think it's a fantastic plant but I think that sometimes people become a little bit overzealous just because it's relatively good, you know just because something is better than alcohol doesn't necessarily mean that you should be using it. Every waking moment of your
life. Yeah. Suddenly everything in the soft category is getting false equivalence to T just using Kratom or cannabis or psychedelics. Well, it's basically the same as having some chocolate or tea or
something that basically is has a negligible impact on your bodily health and rights. Just not that you have to evaluate every drug on its own terms of, in this idea of of categorizing. And whether it's schedule 1 through 5, or if it's hard and soft, like you were saying it seemed like this all stems from prohibition and ends up. If you look back at the history, it's more of a selective picking of what we're just going to call hard or soft. It's not really based on characteristics of the substances to
An extent addictiveness kind of plays a role because that doesn't apply for the schedule 1 through 5 because you have psychedelics and cannabis higher up and they're not the most concerning in terms of addiction. But speaking about addiction, how do you factor that in? When it is, such a personal quality, more than an impact of the drug, when you have people who are just not really likely at all to become addicted, even to supposedly, very addictive substances and then you have other people who have never met
a drug that they can control their use of. So when trying to attach addictiveness to the substance, how do you view that?
Yeah, it's very complicated. You know, that's that's the problem is that there are so many factors that play into what makes a drug addiction. Addictive, you know, price accessibility legality, of course, the pharmacology and chemistry of the drug and you can go on and on and on and I think you brought up car Tom earlier. I think that's a
The interesting example where again, there's this sort of opposition an oppositional relationship that has been built, where Kratom is the solution to the problems associated with fentanyl and Oxycodone and drugs like that. So people justifiably say, hey, this is a much better thing. This should be legal. Don't control it. It is the answer to our problems with opioid addiction. It helps us get off at this is the solution to the opioid epidemic, and on, and on, and on. And there's certainly a truth to all of those claims and all and I absolutely do.
Not think it should be controlled. But also in everyone's Zeal and everyone's enthusiasm and desire to save this plant, they're not acknowledging. Certain fundamental aspects of its pharmacology and are often neglecting to admit that some people do become dependent on this stuff and there's a whole subreddit that I believe is called quitting career. Tom do you know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, I'm familiar with it
and it's full of these people that are so angry at the media who feel almost betrayed by the media.
They're saying, you know, the opposite of they're saying, everyone is saying, this stuff is so great and I became addicted to it because I never hear anything, but how it's this solution for all of, you know, Mankind's, opioid related problems and then I became addicted to it myself. Why didn't anyone tell me that this stuff is so addictive. And I remember looking at that and thinking that's it. We're in a complicated situation because there's a political element to all of this. It has to be acknowledged. You know, I of course was aware that people became addicted to / Tom when I made my documentary about it but there was
Part of me that really felt that tension of is that the priority to get into that right now or is the priority to emphasize what's positive about this plan, because it's in a very precarious, political situation. And that's not an easy decision to make because it's like I said at the beginning of the podcast, I want to be as honest as possible. I don't want to neglect to say something negative about a plant because it would be politically unfavorable in the same way that I wouldn't want to neglect to say something positive about a plant, or a drug or a chemical. So, so it
It's a very complicated situation and I feel for those people and I think maybe one reason that they did become addicted to, it might have been this image that it was entirely innocuous. It was entirely benign and that they may have gone into it and not understanding that what they were using was. In fact, an opioid and did have that potential although I believe that its addictiveness is is relatively low compared to something like
oxycodone and the chance of fatal overdoses substantially
lower. Oh yeah, dramatic.
Really dramatically lower,
yes, which is an interesting area for pharmacology. To go into a, I believe there's a few companies that are now really actively exploring trying to exploit, what those substances do with this concept, of biased, agonism and targeting the things that are great about morphine type opioids, while minimizing the constipation and the respiratory, depression are all these things. So create them can be an opioid. And in fact, it might be a great source of
It's or a unique source of opioids, but you're trying to communicate to say politicians, who do not understand Nuance in this area that a drug can be, should be deserving of legal status, while recognizing? Yeah, there are some harms you start feeling like if you if you give any ground and say there's any downsides or any addictiveness that's enough to just, you know, seal the fate of Kratom and it will be illicit which is really unfortunate.
Fortunate because like you were saying it even as somebody trying to present just the facts, you start realizing that what you say can have a political impact and you're not talking to people who read scientific
studies. Yeah, it's really it's very complicated. It's a very complicated situation. And, of course, you know, we shouldn't even be in a place where another one person overdosing. Or one journalists saying something positive or negative about a drug could have such enormous implications for drug policy. I mean, that in and of
Self is a huge problem that that everything has become so precarious and I don't know exactly what the remedy for. That precariousness would be I guess that real remedy would be education would be having a society where people have an understanding of medicine and care enough about it that they don't only get involved. And they think something is a Panacea or is going to be the destroyer of our
nation's youth. Yeah, for waiting for the culture to become really
Scientifically literate. I guess we can hope for good drug policy change in the next 200 years or so. Haha, very encouraging to hear from you. One thing that you did Cover take a while ago, this point was the issue and it's become a less of an issue of 25 INB. Owe me and there's, it's not the only psychedelic where you see this, also bromo-dragonfly comes to mind. Why do you think drugs, Which is far as we know are primarily functioning like other psychedelics can have such
Abysmal safety profiles in comparison to well, you can take 50 times the active dose of LSD and you don't you can see a couple case reports through the literature. Mainly from so many decades ago that they may not be legitimate, they could have been just misunderstood but for the most part of look so you can take 50 times the dose of LSD and not run into losing a limb from ischemia. Whereas, you take three times the dose of 25i and you might be having seizures, or from a
Fly. You might be having you know your foot is no longer receiving good, blood flow. What is going on here? If you have any
clue, right? And again, I think it would be a mistake to reduce this to Pure pharmacology or pure chemistry because one of the, the real question is, why are people using so much of these potent drugs? Yes, it's absolutely true. That the and benzyl fin Ethel amines and some of these die benzo, fearon type or been, so dive here. And if
Refer type compounds are potent. Vasoconstrictor is and are more likely to produce serotonin syndrome and have various negative effects for the user. But with neither bromo-dragonfly, nor any of the end pentalpha Nathalie means you encounter those sorts of effects at low doses or medium, doses or reasonable doses. You really only start to see that in overdose. And so the question is, I agree with you that these are less safe and overdose. That's pretty clear. But the bigger question is, why are people overdosing on them?
And that has to do with drug misrepresentation, the major bromo-dragonfly deaths occurred because it was accidentally sold as to see, be fly, which is a far less potent compounds. So a number of people bought 2, CP fly from a now, defunct research chemical supplier called helped our see. I actually was one of them and then they took too much and died and so these are drugs that are very potent and they have a very short history of human use.
And then on top of that they're being used irresponsibly and you could probably find instances of this within any pharmacological class. So it's, you know, I hesitate to say anything bad about these drugs, and I think it's unfortunate that these, you know, Envy ome compounds have gotten such a bad reputation because I think that they're very useful tools for scientific research, and that synthetically, they're much more approachable than a life. Surge amide. They're cheaper to make their faster to make, they're easier to make. They have a lot of
Desirable features pharmacologically. Some of them are pretty darn selective for 5-ht to a, you know, David Nicholls is done quite a lot of work on that. I've made a number of them, along with Jason Wallach. Who's the chemist that I work with? And, you know, they're valuable compounds. So it's just, it's a question. Again, of Education of people recognizing that these things are potent and that they have to be dosed with extreme precision, and a sort of cultural education that these things are not the same as LSD. A lot of the negative experiences came from.
For ordering these things from China, where they're very inexpensive, then laying them on blotter and presenting them as LSD and because LSD is so safe. It makes other things less safe because it raises the bar. It gives people this impression that all psychedelics must be safe at 50 times. The desirable dose. Well I guess in that case it's almost unfortunate that LSD is so safe because it creates a standard where that almost no other drug can live up to like we have these handful of drugs like THC and LSD that
Whatever reason are insanely potent drugs that are very bad at killing people, they just don't get the job done. When it comes to killing people and you don't encounter that all very often in Pharmacology. I mean I suppose some of the benzodiazepines are that way as well, there are other instances but yeah so it's it's not so much that I think that bromo-dragonfly is especially dangerous or that 2/5 be NPO. Me is especially dangerous, it's that LSD is so safe that it created a standard where people
Delta, they could behave recklessly with a class that doesn't have that sort of intrinsic safety that's present in some of the most well-known
members. So at a personal level, you would be probably fine with say 25. I, if it was you knew you were taking 750 micrograms or something. I mean, I, that's kind of the stands I've taken with it that if people, I've never seen evidence so far, that if you knew you were getting under a milligram that there was really any chance of a fatal.
Ponce. How do you feel if you knew that you had a certain dose of these
substances? Oh, I would feel absolutely fine about it.
I don't know that I've seen you talk much about deliriant since. What are your thoughts on if a psychological experience like that is ever healthy or interesting? Or if it's ever if it ever makes sense, to take something that is inducing that
state, right? Yeah, I mean if you, if you read the reports of various deliriant plan,
Some chemicals. I think it's some of the Most Interesting Drug writing that you'll ever encounter. So in these reports are hilarious and frightening and bizarre. And on that level it's pretty clear that yes, psychologically, these things can can do amazing things, of course, is, you know, reports of people doing things like cutting off their tongue and their penis or doing extremely dangerous
things. So not a good Sunday afternoon
not I mean yeah, most for most people that would not be desirable. I don't, I guess it depends on what you're into but you know like all of these things, it depends.
Sort of boils down to how curious you are and how risk-averse you are and how, how interested you are in all of this. You know, because there's an potentially infinite number of drugs, to try and they large number of different pharmacological classes and some are riskier than others and we all have to draw the line somewhere or most people do. And so, I would say for the, the average person using Scopolamine or atropine or high doses of diphenhydramine,
Or trihex offended ill or whatever is simply not worth it, you know it's a it's something that tends to cause long-lasting dysfunction, often multiple days of cognitive dysfunction, which is more than most people can afford. You know, I think a lot of people have trouble even fitting in a typical psychedelic experience, which arguably leaves you more functional afterwards, but this is just it's a bit much, I would say for most people. But that said, you know,
I think that there's a there's obviously a long shamanic history of using these plants and there was a one-time a great military interest in them as well. James Ketchum, wrote a great book about the exploration of different Delirious if he was attempting to weaponize. So I think they're fascinating substances. It's a class that I have very little experience with other than you know occasionally taking low doses of diphenhydramine to sleep or you know on one occasion. I took a medium actually that have to look.
Notes to find the exact amount that I took. I took a medium dose of trihex offended lll, not enough to have hallucinations, but just to kind of dip a toe in that water. And I remember thinking, yeah, this is, this is going to disable me for a little while. And for that reason, it's sort of undesirable, but, and, and most people simply don't gravitate toward that experience if they have any other options. You know, I believe that trihex offended ill is a pretty prominent drug of abuse in Iraq. And maybe a couple of
Love other places but the pattern seems to be that if you have access to anything else, it's very low on the list of things that the people want to use.
Yeah, I get the sense. The only reason people delve into diphenhydramine is because it's an incredibly cheap and easily accessible substance to take, you know, 600 milligrams of and have an interesting day but it's I rarely occasionally I see people report Insight because you have these true hallucinations
That you typically do not get from other dissociatives or from, I mean, internal true hallucinations from dissociative. So that's kind of a different thing. But like these waking dream state Saint, John Deloreans, do you know what the shamanic intention was? I mean, they obviously were finding some psychological benefit to the state, but my cursory understanding is that they also typically shied away and do not. They treated it with a different level of respect than say an Ayahuasca or
psilocybin will do the
Two are not necessarily mutually exclusive and there's a lot of different ways that delirium plants have been used, shamanic Ali. So you actually often will find them being used in Ayahuasca preparations. And there are two different interpretations that one is that it's because it will enhance the psychoactivity of the tryptamines and beta-carbolines that our president. But the other is that, it's acting as an antiemetic and that it might, you know, reduce some of the nausea because that is one of the primary uses of diphenhydramine is to prevent see
Sickness. So, those are people getting high on Trends. Derm scop, the preparation of Scopolamine seems to be used for that as well,
right? Right. Of course, yeah. So, so yeah, so that's, that's a pretty clear benefit, or potential benefit of adding Scopolamine to a brew. Wade, Davis has written quite a lot about the use of deliriant plants and Haiti and how they play into the voodoo religion. It also seems pretty clear that there's a history in medieval Europe of using.
These sorts of plants. They I mean they even something that sounds like henbane, but I believe it's called Heaven on is used in Hamlet Shakespeare wrote about it. So I mean there's a long history of of these plants because they grow around the planet. You know, there's delirium plans growing on the sidewalk outside my apartment there. They grow all over New York they grow almost everywhere you go and the really, really strong, so cultures all over the world. Have in
Greeted them into their medicinal plant practices. Even though it seems clear that when better options are available, people typically tend to gravitate toward
those. Do you find it hard to figure out what the history of these plants is, especially in Europe. Because so much of it has been tainted by descriptions of witches, and we know practices like that were real, but could have been so distorted by outside observers or the same applies to people.
People going to South America from Europe and, you know, hundreds of years ago and describing these ceremonies. But perhaps giving a false impression of them is it kind of hard? I don't know how much primary literature there is from the people who were actually taking them for us to know that. I also haven't looked into it a ton. Yeah, it's
extremely hard. And, you know, most of my research is focused on the 20th century and when I recognize how difficult it is to learn about relatively recent drug phenomena, for example, you know,
Were
the first people to synthesize DMT in the United States or what's the history of clandestine LS D synthesis in the 1960s or you know, what is the history of the commercial 2cb distribution in the United States, or who is the first person to smoke the Venom of bufo alvarius? These sorts of questions that are fall within the lifetimes of many people in the Psychedelic Community are incredibly difficult to answer. I mean, I dedicated
an episode of my show last season to answering this question, who is the first person to smoke toad Venom? I thought, okay, if I can't answer this question, what can I answer? I've got to get to the bottom of this, and I did this very intensive investigation, and I actually made a mistake, the person who was presenting themselves to me, as the first person who smoke toad Venom had was an imposter. He was, I had corroborated his story with two people and he was
Think himself in a way that was completely unexpected. And the only reason that I know this is one of the interesting aspects of Journalism to sometimes, you have to make a mistake to know what's, right? So there is no way. I would have found out who the real person is, if I hadn't made that mistake, it was only because I made that mistake that then I got first an email from a woman who said, you know, I watched your documentary, I liked it, I liked what you do but I have to tell you, you made a mistake and I know this because I knew the real Albert.
Most, I knew the real first person to smoke toad Venom and I can tell you his name and I can tell you where he lives and I thought. Okay wow that's interesting and then another person contacted me and said the same thing and then the real Albert most himself contacted me and all these people had a lot of evidence for their claim. They had the original Church of the toad light t-shirts and the original pamphlets and and it all made a lot more sense the way they told the story. So I do know, the real story now and I hope to
Back to that error in the third season of my show, if that if I ever am able to finish the negotiating, the contracts on that. But you know the bottom line is that history is very very hard. Recent history is really hard to iron out you know, the history of PCP. So then when people start talking about the history of medieval psilocybin, mushroom use so these highly speculative areas or what was the Soma of the rig Veda or yeah. Is there some kind of traditional European use of solicitous? Emma lanceolata.
Or the chi chi on or all these things. I kind of tend to just step aside because I feel that those areas are so speculative that there will never or it's very unlikely that there will be any sort of satisfying enclosure to the
issues. Yeah. It's a little bit annoying when I hear people who are good on this topic and they do have a lot of positive things to share just jumping to. We know that chi chi on was psilocybin, like this is what they were doing in that part of the world, every
Often they were, they were tripping. That's, you're describing difficulties with dealing with the primary sources yet. People are trying to definitively say something about thousands of years ago. That just seems a little, it might be interesting to investigate, but this idea of your going to know, unless somebody like drew the plant and said, this is the thing that we're taking, which is rarely the case. Usually, it's like extrapolating from vague descriptions of the ceremony. And I mean, that just seems
Seems like a Fool's errand
almost. Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And and, you know, I think people are uncomfortable with the fact that the evidence for ancient use of a lot of these things is a little bit more sparse than they would hope because people love the idea of the ancient, they love the idea that the things they about you humans have valued since time immemorial and it's actually a really good argument. I don't know that it necessarily should be because there's a lot of bad things that are ancient.
That are that. I think, you know, rape is ancient murder is ancient. War is ancient. I don't think any of those things are good. But there's something that that people feel is is convincing about saying, hey, you know, these psilocybin containing mushrooms people have been using them for thousands of years and you're telling me, I can't do it now. Like, it's, it's one reason actually outside of just fighting the anthropological elements of an interesting. It's one reason I often
emphasize indigenous cultures is because I think there's a sort of rhetorical value on my TV show with, because I note that this is very convincing, it's a fact, people find it very convincing when they see that a traditional society that has some perceived history is interested in these things. They take it more seriously than they do. If it's just some guy in California who says LSD means a lot to me, that's not enough but if you see someone who comes from a different culture and its perceived to be
Ancient then people really listen. It's a it's a I don't know exactly why but it seems to be a psychological fact. I mean, I've observed it countless
times there is a Mystique and power that comes with knowing that this is a core part of a culture and has been proven useful for hundreds of years as opposed to. This is a thing that you know Merck synthesized 20 years ago and you know in a laboratory it's a different thing even as somebody
Scientifically
inclined. Right. Well, I mean, I think when it if the question is one of long-term safety than history does become a valid concern because although again there's also instances of people having done dangerous things for long periods of time. So even that argument is a little bit flimsy but I kind of get it. If the primary concern is is this safe then saying okay people did it a long time ago and have done it for a long time. At least shows that it's probably not immediately.
Fatally dangerous to engage with. But but yeah, I mean when you look at the history of the, you know, the written history of these things, it's often a couple hundred years. You know what? I think it's about a hundred years for Salvia, maybe 400 or 500 for Ayahuasca and have to look at the literature. I don't want to just pull Nate numbers out of nowhere. But it's, you know, the idea that thousands of years, once you get to those thousands of years, then you're typically interpreting various hieroglyphic.
Engravings and things in ways that are not. They're not quite as clear as I would hope. You know, if you have an ancient engraving of someone holding a cactus, what does that mean? What means it's an image of someone holding a cactus and anything that you say beyond that is a projection of your own values onto the image. You have to be very careful about
that. It doesn't mean the cactus was their
God is it mean the cactus was? They're gone. Does it mean that? I mean it could mean a number of things. I mean it you know if I had to guess, yeah, probably in Buddha.
Sense to me that they would that ancient people would value masculine. It makes a lot of sense and it's clear that at least in terms of some of the archaeological evidence that has been found around the Rio Grande river. That there is there are in certain areas, very old traditions. You just have to be careful here with the, you know, with having evidence-based thinking that's all that I'm saying. I'm not suggesting that people haven't. I'm just saying the evidence that these are globally, distributed, ancient religions and the people all over, we're using Ayahuasca for thousands of years.
Years that the evidence isn't quite as strong as you might hope or even that, you know, Native American peyote uses ancient. That's another misconception that a lot of people have where if you're talking about the area, around the Rio Grande River, yes, it probably is very old, but as soon as you start going north, you're talking about things that, you know, the Native American Church, wasn't founded until 1918. And for it to have spread further, north, I mean, I think that that's often didn't emerge until maybe in the 50s or 60s. So it's me.
You were Than People recognize, but that doesn't mean that it's any more or less valid, that's sort of. The other reason that I want to step away from this idea that ancient has to equal good. You know, if a, if a group in on the up north, in the United States of Native Americans finds benefit and peyote, and it finds it helps them reduce problematic drinking then it doesn't matter to me if they have a tradition doing it or not, it's still having a benefit and that's what's important. And yeah, so,
You know, I just want people to be reasonable and they talk about these things. If the issue is, is just a toxicological one than sure. Yeah, tradition is important, but if it's a moral one, I don't think tradition is half as important as people think it is.
The idea that if something is old, then it has a greater validity. Seems it's practically enshrined in law like with religious freedom stuff. If you in theory you know could invent my church of methamphetamine today and I don't think I'm going to get exemption but
You can couch Ayahuasca in some lineage of a blend of shamanism from another country. Mixed with Christianity. That everybody agrees is a legitimate religion then it becomes a legitimate thing but there probably is no true religion that's going to come out of methamphetamine, but this this idea that ancient equals real seems very common, it does just seemed like picking and choosing what you want to call real or legitimate.
At least in the case of religious uses of these
drugs. Right? And and you know, I the one reason that I even care about this is I recently been spending a lot of time reading about it, Arthur claps and the Neo American church and a number of these other psychedelic religions that were started in the 1960s in the United States. And I've been going through the court transcripts of some of these cases and it's really absurd and bizarre to see these, you know,
Isn't he a saying, you know, how do I know this is real? How do I know this is sincere? How do I know that you're not just trying to get high? Well, it's a standard that I don't know. Other religions could bear. I don't know. You know, if you put a Christian on trial and say, how do I know this is real? How do I know you're not just doing this that it's real spirituality that it's really about your religion and it's not just about this or that. Whatever would be considered a lesser motivation for participating in Christianity.
You'd almost think that this is the kind of thing that doesn't need to be justified. And once you put it on trial, literally, it becomes really hard to defend. A lot of these things against people that don't understand it. This
is crazy to have a law set up, where drugs are illicit, but if you care about them enough in just the right way, then we'll let you use them, right? And it's good. I'm glad that there are. There are exemptions it's better than they're not being for ayahuasca.
Churches, but that makes no sense.
No, it's really, it's crazy. I was thinking about it. That that if you value a cactus, if you value the Peyote Cactus, you think it's beautiful. You're a criminal from possessing it. But if you have Supernatural beliefs about the cactus, then that is legal under certain conditions depending on your race. That's like, that is the literal State of Affairs in the United States. Right now very bizarre, only certain races who have Supernatural beliefs about
out a cactus are allowed to possess it.
Since there are still cultures that have historically taken psychoactive substances especially psychedelics. Have you do you know of any instances where Modern psychedelics have been adopted by those cultures? The only thing that comes to mind for me? And I think I saw a comment from you that cast doubt on it though, I might be wrong, is in South Africa with to see be there was a story of to see being adopted by people had what kind of moved into the City and away from their traditional.
No culture and we're no longer using whatever traditional drug and had switched to CB is that story legit, if, you know, and is there any example of that taking place
that story is not legit? And I know that it's not legit, because I actually traveled to King William's Town, South Africa, specifically to investigate it and track down the Anthropologist who's name is Manton, Hurst who is responsible for propagating that story went to his house spent an evening.
With him, talking to him about it. And it was a basic I like Manton Hearst a lot, but that was a cynical misrepresentation of the facts. It was a company was selling to CB and again, back to what I was saying earlier. They knew that if there was a traditional connection to this drug that it would be easier to sell it legally. You know. This is the case in a lot of different countries. If you can show that there's a drug that has a
Use among indigenous population, then the people are less likely to criminalize it because they don't want to be perceived as openly persecuting people, who they probably persecuted endlessly and continue to persecute, but I guess they try to, you know, at least for the sake of Optics, politically, try to minimize it. So the idea was, yeah, it was that. If we can, if we can make an argument, the 2cb has a traditional use among Cosa, healers in South Africa, then maybe we can sell this stuff legal.
Lee. So they hired this Anthropologist to make a fake case that Cosa healers were using 2cv and created this sort of fake pseudo anthropological analysis that ultimately did not work to CB was made illegal in South Africa and the whole thing disintegrated. And the reason that I was so interested in this is because I love that I you know, I'm very interested in the synthetic natural dichotomy and how important it is to people even though it as far as I'm concerned, it's basically a loser e but
And I thought this was such an interesting instance of a traditional group of healers, who are using a synthetic drug, and I wanted to learn more about it. I was very disappointed to find that the whole thing was fake. So in answer to your question, there are not many examples that I'm aware of it all, you know, there's the of course, there's the classic example of Albert, Hoffman, giving María Sabina synthetic psilocybin that he had synthesized and her saying that the effect was essentially indistinguishable from that of the mushrooms that she used in her.
Ceremonies. But other than that, yeah, there's really not a lot. And I think part of it has to do with the fact that it could be considered anthropological irresponsible to introduce an indigenous group, to new drugs of any kind. I think that's just something that most anthropologists would shy away from. And that
period of having a company in a Europe that was selling a psychoactive drug in the way and marketing to see be like it was that does not occur very often and would not occur in 2018. I can't think of a country where
That kind of marketing would exist for, you know, a bisexual enhancer that, you know, take two doses and then you'll have second Delia that does not tend to come up frequently. So even the ability to manufacture these drugs and introduce them, you know, it doesn't that's a unique context. I couldn't think of a time when a drug that would easily get adopted, unless, you know, just happened to be popular in the local recreational community. And somehow there were some blending, but the 2cv example was was pretty unique for
A few reasons. And I feel duped. I mean, I repeated that claim when I cover
to see be so, of course everyone does. Yeah, no, everyone does. And really the only reason that I know is because I went to King William's town to interview this Anthropologist. Otherwise, I would think the same thing everyone else thinks because that's what the record suggests and that's why again it's so important to really do your best to investigate these claims and not just repeat. What is available on the
Epic, is that it can result in the propagation of a lot of misinformation, not that I'm accusing you of doing that. Because it's that was, you know, that required an immense amount of work on my part to even and most people just don't care enough about the history of 2cb to look to go go that deep into it. But yeah I mean I think what's also interesting about that is that that was a period when people sold drugs as drugs. So there is very open sale of psychoactive drugs, but even during the height of the method Roan craze and the UK
Okay, or the height of the methoxide of mean krays are all these different, you know, very popular synthetic drugs. People weren't making these medical claims that they were making in the 90s. They wouldn't say hey this is an aphrodisiac or anything like that. It was typically still this is just a chemical or the or sometimes this is you know plant food or some other kind of ridiculous
misrepresentation. What is your take on? There's a weird hallucinogenic potential that from gabaergic drugs like Zolpidem and some people.
Take them specifically for that purpose, that say, 8 times the sleeping dose, what do you have? You had any experience with this? And what do you think about that state? It's a weird mix of like, deliriant and psychedelic effects, and you wouldn't from the pharmacology, expect a gabaergic to do what it's doing.
Yeah. And if you look through the literature, there isn't really a good explanation for Gabba Gabba, mediated, hallucinations or gabaergic, neuron mediated hallucinations.
There are a number of drugs that exhibit. This effect is open em. Like you said, is one Muska moles. Another cab oxydol is 1/3. And then there's also scattered reports of Halcyon and some other benzodiazepines also inducing hallucinations or midazolam would be another example. But it seems that the most prominent examples are Zolpidem muscimol and GAP box at all. Three of which are capable of producing, very profound states of hallucinogenic, or Sue.
Hallucinogenic delirium. And it's hard to make any generalizations because Zolpidem and muscimol are even though they both act at the Gaba, a receptor 1 is a positive, allosteric. Modulator, the other is a direct Agonist and and so there are pharmacological differences. Some people have suggested that it might be pharmacokinetic and might have to do with the fast onset of these drugs, as far as I'm concerned, I am not aware of a strong pharmacological explanation, for why it is that
At certain gabaergic drugs and not others cause hallucinations. But I find it very interesting because, with some of them, I mean, specifically Gap box at all. I mean, all three of the ones, gab oxydol Zolpidem and muscle are capable of producing really dramatic hallucinations. They are hallucinogens. I mean, I think that ended when were hallucinogenic Delirious or, you know, they, they kind of fall into their own category. But yeah, I mean, I've had very, very traumatic experiences after using Gaba oxydol the
You know, I would say that are on par with Ayahuasca in terms of their psychological intensity and a sort of sense that you're confronting something much something great something you know, as big as your own
mortality or their strong qualitative differences from a psychedelic like Ayahuasca. Yes,
absolutely. They're far less visual in my experience, although I am aware of reports of high-dose get box at all that are extremely visual. I've never had that for both Zolpidem and
A camel and a box at all my experience is that the visual hallucinations or pseudo hallucinations tend to be more of a sort of Rippling waving type effects or blurring or bleeding type effects as opposed to droop, you know, geometric patterns or color enhancement or that sort of thing. That's more closely associated with the classical serotonergic psychedelics.
If I'm not mistaken, your first significant psychoactive drug was Salvia, is that
Yeah. Absolutely.
For me, I've only had a one full experience and stuff and I've had kind of a number of smaller experiences, but the one full experience was one of the most psychologically, interesting things I've experienced and especially this quality that a lot of people report of a transference of Consciousness, to, I guess an imagined other person or an inanimate. Object, did you ever experience that in a what do you make of that very unique quality?
Because there's some just like Ayahuasca experiences often have or DMT experiences often have some similar qualities Salvia does as well, and you have things like the transference of Consciousness or there's a quality of becoming something else. I don't know if you ever experienced that, I don't know that I've
experienced that specifically. I've certainly experienced these sort of proprioceptive changes, these sorts of, I guess, you could say grab a Septa changes where you feel, as if you're stretching and your
His poll door, you're flowing or moving through walls or multiplying in a sort of infinite mirror type situation but the transference of my personality into something else is not something that I recall ever having experienced.
What you were alluding to the bodily effects that are just the gravity thing has occurred for me every single time. If I part way through try to walk around, I will reliably feel like
Something has pulled me back and I actually have to catch myself to avoid falling why I'm effectively making myself fall, which is what my brain is doing. At that moment is a an odd
phenomenon. Oh yeah, it's very strange. And it gives you, you know, just a basic appreciation of all these factors that go into our daily experience that we don't consider, you know, like the experience of gravity's downward Pole, or yeah, the experience of discontinuity between
Ourselves in the objects that we engage with in our daily lives. All these things are somewhat mutable and and with the appropriate form of The Logical changes can dissolve. And, and then it's only once they've dissolved that you realize that this was a you taken them all for granted, of course, you take the sense of gravity's pull for granted, but as soon as it's changed, you realize. Wow. That was a that was a big force in my life that I never even thought about
it. Based on your some of the things you've covered.
Videos and also published. And I think you published with Jason Wallach about dissociative, are they the classroom most interested in or do you just have a particular fondness for them?
I have a fondness for them parsley because they're misunderstood parsley because they are Jason wallach's, focus of study and his lab is very much oriented toward research on those compounds. So that's a mutual interest that we have, but, yeah, I think that
Are a drug that even especially PCP is a drug that even among drug users is Malaya. And even people that accept that most of the information that is propagated about psychoactive drugs is one form of propaganda or another. Those people will still often believe that PCP is some intrinsically, maddening, dangerous evil substance that must be avoided at all costs and it even reached the point that it was an explanation.
For any negative experience, people had with any drug. So if they got high and they didn't have a good time, they'd say, oh there was PCP in this.
Oh, I'll get that common at least once a day. Yeah, I don't know if that has ever occurred, but there are so many people that believe it.
But that's again, it's almost like that thing that I was talking about earlier, where people project their experience on to assault, or a polymorph or an enantiomer. It's the same kind of idea, instead of saying I didn't enjoy this, they say, I didn't enjoy the PCP that I am.
Jetting into the joint that I smoked and that is what's responsible for my negative experience. So it's yeah. It reached the point where it was an explanation. It was so it was maligned so completely that. Yeah, that you could just use it as a catch-all explanation for bad drug experiences. That was PCP that did that. And I think it's amazing that it reached that point when this is a drug that when used responsibly doesn't seem to do that at all for most people when
You actually measure the dose and use it in an appropriate environment. No, it doesn't seem to have an increased propensity for violence or anything like that, and there's even have been scientific studies published where they really look at PCP to see if it is responsible for an increased number of violent crimes and it isn't alcohol, might be, but PCP isn't. And then once a certain bias becomes widespread enough in a culture, then people aren't even giving the
A fair chance in the first place, it's like the nocebo, or it's like what I was saying earlier that people talk about the placebo effect and active psychoactive substances is, if they're there is no interplay between these two types of experiences. But if somebody tells you that something is poisonous and makes you psychotic and murderous and cannibalistic and filled with Delirious rage and then you use it. I suppose you're going to be that much more inclined to have a negative experience.
Do you think those crazy experiences, whether it's PCP or
Or or more recently, some of the substituted cathinones, do you think those crazy? You know the guy was shot or tased and was unaffected or was, you know, assaulting people or clawing at somebody else's face, these kinds of crazy things? Do you think? They are just totally misunderstood in, might just be some psychological problem with the person is having, or they they're clearly, not the common response to substances. But do you think substances there are certain ones that ever some?
Times lead to these psychotic effectively psychotic breaks that are Outburst like and violent.
Oh, absolutely, it does happen. But again, I think there's a degree of misinterpretation that is responsible for this. So, suppose there's a guy. He's taken too much PCP. He's stripped naked, and he's walking down the street. This person is Delirious, they're confused and they're immune to pain. And then people respond to this, by shooting them with tasers, spraying them with pepper.
Pepper spray maybe even shooting them with a gun and they conclude this guy is superhuman. He's got so much strength that nothing can stop him. Well the reality of the situation is that he's consumed very powerful anesthetic and indeed he cannot feel pain that is correct but it's not because he's superhuman. It's because he's taken an anesthetic that blocks pain sensation and so you can't attempt to subdue them with pain based interventions very effectively
You know, it's much more, probably a more effective tactic to try to calm them down and not shoot them, not tase them. They actually, there is a very famous case, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but the chemist named Ronald Burkholder. Do you know the story? No, no, is it? There's a great documentary made about him that I can't remember the name of it off. The top of my head, it's a name, like lethal Justice, or something like that. If you, if you type in Ronald Burkholder,
Comentary I think you'll be able to find it but he was a chemist who was synthesizing the parola. Dean derivative of PCP that's PCP are rather PCP. Why? Excuse me and he took too much freaked out stripped nude. As people tend to do for reasons that are not fully understood and walked into traffic and Allah and was fatally shot by police officers. And this guy was by all accounts, a very nerdy thin.
Kind of chemist type. Not a threatening muscle-bound monster who is going to hurt anyone and this was so widely debated in the media that it is considered one of the events that's responsible for police officers carrying non-lethal incapacitating agents, like tasers and pepper spray so it actually this played like a big big role in the way that policing functioned in the United States and I think
Like police were really afraid. You know, you also have to think about this from the from a an empathetic perspective with police officers and everyone loves to hate the police and they you know, they have caused a lot of problems in the world of drugs, but they're human beings. And they were afraid their hearing all these reports that there's a drug that people are using that causes superhuman strength immunity to pain psychosis and they are Terra. And then, you know, on top of that they're propagating these dubious claims
People on PCP or capable of tearing handcuffs open or ripping police car doors off their hinges and things like that. And you know, they were they were even selling specialized nets for catching people who had used
PCP? He sued peanuts. Yeah, that's
great. Yes, yes, there's a great book at the last name of the author he's Oglesby that that contains a lot of that information that I just described and it's called p as a very generic name like Angel.
Dust something, or other angel dust drug of craziness, something that. But, um, so anyway, you know, people were really afraid and they didn't know what to do. And and so they would kill someone. If they saw that they were on PCP because they really thought that their lives are in danger and it was the only responsible thing to do. It's a very complicated situation
well and at the very least you are a police officer. You're not a therapist and you're looking at somebody who is naked.
Is Dan incoherent? That is a bit discomforting. Regardless of, even the myths surrounding the drug that you think they may be on, that is a hard thing to control. And you were saying it, might be more useful to talk them down, but I was wondering, do you think it's as amenable? Those dissociative states to talking down because we know we're psychedelics, people can be really out there and be brought back through talking, but to social lives from personal experience. And from a lot of research, the state, your
Rin can be a lot harder to control your more disconnected in some ways from reality. Do you think it works to yes, slowly bring some of that
problem and maybe the PCP user net that I just made fun of isn't as bad, an idea as it sounds maybe. Maybe the best solution is to. Just throw a fishing, net over someone and let them calm down for a little while or, you know, just so you can either know what the,
I don't know what the appropriate. Yeah, we just got a corn.
Them. He really let them work it out on their own and eight hours. They'll be fun
or, you know, yeah, it's a tricky situation and I think that on both sides, people don't have a lot of empathy. So in the drug Community, people don't have a lot of empathy for law enforcement because they have done such a bad job. In law. Enforcement doesn't have a lot of empathy for the drug Community because in many instances they have been irresponsible and have caused enormous numbers of problems and you really have to try your best to see it from each side.
It's perspective. The ideal situation is that people behave responsibly so that law enforcement don't have to be afraid of drug-induced psychosis. And it's not as big, an issue, as people think it is, but it would also be dishonest to say that it never
occurs in the way that it's typically confronted. You can just at least I know what psychedelics from reading some of these cases. It's so clear that the confrontation even though it's not really the police officers fall is the thing that is making it way worse, because somebody's confused then.
Here in a commanding way, telling somebody to put their hands behind their back, or you're trying to handcuff them. If you're on a psychedelic and you're confused or dissociative in your confused, that's going to get pretty tricky, pretty fast. And there's the situations that it's just people that are initially. Confronting the scene are not equipped to understand what's going on. And I saw a lot of concern like this, with the excited, delirium thing from
Um, cathinones, it's probably died down. At this point, it was more of a topic with Alpha PVP when that was still popular. I don't know that it's still talked about as much, but it's a similar thing. I mean, if you are having stimulant psychosis, you're not necessarily going to be violent. But if you have police officers trying to control you, then it just goes, you know, all over the place especially with. I think a lot of these drug experiences when they go bad, are partially affected by the
Culture mean people get they get confused and because there's some latent part of them that is or dormant part of them that has grown up in a culture, where drugs are illicit. They are something you're not supposed to be doing, they are potentially dangerous. I think some of that. And then you have the legal aspect people getting freaked out about, I might get a color for this, which is huge. I think that, that contributes to the psychological State more than, if you're in South America and you're taking ayahuasca.
In a traditional setting is a psychoactive drug but I don't know that that your mind goes to concerns about police or goes to concerns about physical safety because it's just not how drugs are talked about around you
unlike the US. And that's huge. That is really huge because I have actually three different friends who have called the police while they were freaking out on a psychedelic. And that's a really weird and scary situation to be and where your you perceived at least you.
Think that you're in the midst of a medical emergency, that's one of the powerful things about psychedelics is that they're even though they're typically quite safe. They're very good at giving you the impression that you're dying. That's one of the things that makes them. So powerful is that they really at high doses can reliably give you a sensation that you're dying. And it's often that very Sensation that in my experience is responsible for their therapeutic. Effect is is feeling that moment of confrontation with the sensation of
of approaching death and coming to terms with it and then being stronger in the wake of it. But anyway, sometimes that feeling is too strong and lasts too long and also sometimes you really might be dying. So for three of my friends over the years, they have called the police on themselves in the midst of a psychedelic experience. And in one of the instances, they happen to be operating a drug lab and the police were called to their drug lab and it caused an enormous.
Mass for them. But, you know, this is the last thing that you should be thinking about. Is, am I going to be criminally charged when I'm in the midst of a medical emergency? He happened to live in another country that has more civilized laws and how to an amnesty law that prevented him from being prosecuted for the materials that they found during the call for an ambulance. But still, that's the last thing you should be thinking about when you're in trouble. Is I'm in medical trouble or I, at least think that I'm in medical trouble. Am I going to go to prison as a result of seeking treatment? That's a
A horrible
thought probably not going to make her situation number better when you get the police involved in your negative drug experience. That that's not a great thing. But yeah that does speak to this underlying feeling of and I've experienced it occasionally on psychedelics where I can tell there's some even though I'm I've never had the anti-drug position that was being taught. It is still somewhere in there in the back of my mind that oh my God I could die from this even though the chances are
Are incredibly low. And I'm practically convinced that I've often worn a heart rate monitor. If I'm, if I'm on a substance and I'm convinced that with psychedelics, that can be a big issue because I have freaked myself out by looking at it. And saying, oh my God, it's a hundred and five, there's something wrong. There's no reason to be concerned about a hundred five heart rate, but that psychedelic state is somehow turning a simple thing into a massive problem. And that seems to be how a lot of bad.
Trips or so-called bad trips. Start is a bit of confusion about a little thing and it just falls apart. That's part of why it's probably such a different experience. When you have some kind of guide that you trust, who is there to help you as opposed to navigating this on your own because sometimes you need, sometimes all you need to practically ensure, okay? Drug experiences or psychedelic experiences is just reassurance and it's hard to reassure yourself.
Of when you're in those states, that the things will probably be, okay. There's like one death that's ever been reported, and you're probably not going to be the second. Yes. Yeah, when you're in it, you're always going to be the second and that that can be a, that can be a problem with this rise of research chemicals over the past decade or two. Do you think it's been a net positive or a net negative? You know, all things considered and and kind of embedded within that question, are there any substances that have come a long?
NG which look like May one day, be preferred drugs to two substances, people have classically taken. Yeah, because they're often kind of just reviewed as like crude replacements for what people really want. But from my experience, there are some that have come a long and their improvements and might have some great
uses. Yeah. This is a question that I think about a lot because I think that the gray Market is again even among drug users often considered a bad thing and if only, we could decriminalize the
Traditional drugs. Then people wouldn't be fooling around with 5m APB or jwh 18 or to 5 cm be ome or whatever and there is something to be said for that claim and I actually fundamentally agree with it. I think that most of these more unusual emerging compounds are undesirable to most users. With the exception of a small Fringe of you could call them Psychonauts people, that are very interested.
Arrested in exploring unknown or relatively Known Unknown, psychoactive drugs. That said I think that we've learned a huge amount, a huge amount specifically with the synthetic cannabinoids again. This is viewed as something very very negative. Well I think it's amazing what we've learned. I mean you could you could write okay here's that here's a way of thinking about it. Like how much does it cost for a pharmaceutical company to introduce a new drug to the
Market, I've heard estimates that it's somewhere around 2.7 billion dollars to introduce a new drug. So
partly because there's so many failures and
of course of course yeah there's a lot of factors to consider but let's just say 2.7 billion is maybe that the average cost, According to some estimates introduced a new drug. How much does it cost to get a drug to the point that one human being is trying it and you're just learning anything about what this does in humans. Let's say conservatively a million dollars conservatively
Then when you look at all these reports on Reddit, or on blue light or on various drug forums, you know, this is often looked at dismissively as oh, this guy, he's using Alpha PVP and he's or this derivative of alpha PVP or whatever substance. You know, this is unfortunate, people shouldn't be exploring the stuff. Well, if you look at it a different way, that's a million-dollar data point that has immense value. I mean, the unfortunate fact of it is that often people don't know exactly what they're using, which is why it's so important to me.
One thing that I really try to communicate to people is to do anything in their power, to have the substances that they use analytically characterized. And I'm not talking about, you know, just using the reagents that you can get online, you know, really do anything, you can to get gcms and ammar lcms, you know, some real analysis behind it because if you know the identity of what you're using and you know, the dose of what you're using that data. Point can be immensely useful? If it's reported responsibly and carefully. And I think that just the
Is basic information about the dose, the duration, the qualitative effects it has emerged about these substances is really cool from a psychopharmacological perspective. Well, that's that's gold. That's amazing information that we're kind of just because it's presented in a non rigorous way. Unfortunately, we dismiss it entirely but you really have to think about what that information is. It's really, really fascinating, you know, like one example would be, there is a synthetic.
You know, it was an 3344, I believe it was a right. I think that's what it was. It was an iodine, containing synthetic cannabinoid that was originally synthesized in the murky honest lab because it could be radio labeled and used to trace the distribution and a rodent brain. But it also induces tinnitus, you know, that's something we would have never known if human beings had tried it. Again, that's something you could say. It's bad. Oh it's horrible.
Well, why don't they just use cannabis? Now, they're using this weird halogenated synthetic cannabinoid. That causes tinnitus is a nightmare. Okay, sure. There's, there's some validity to that perspective but also how cool how fascinating that we discovered a drug that we thought was just another. One of the hundreds of CB1 agonists that has his totally unexpected off-target effect in the end. We could explore that and learn so much or you know again that the story of mptp is often
Presented as a, you don't want to be the next Barry Kidston because he gave himself Parkinson's disease and and you don't know, maybe this this next benzo fear an MDMA derivative could be the next MTP mptp. Well sure. Okay, fair enough. But the flip side is that mptp is immensely valuable for scientific research. You know, if it Barry kids in the head had a straight scientific career had finished his PhD.
HD and had dedicated his entire life to studying Parkinson's disease. I doubt you could have made one tenth, the contribution that he did with that accidental
overdose true. When you have, when you have enough substances that are that are being used, who knows if you're gonna suddenly spot a, a mechanism that you could exploit, in normal, pathophysiology of various conditions, whether it's tinnitus or whatever else. I mean, it could be any range of things were sometimes finding the substances that up here, too.
Rigger. The thing that normal people are being affected by, I mean, this is a lot of what we think about how schizophrenia and psychotic disorders function come from psychedelics and from psychotic like substances or things that you could view, as causing psychotic like effects. And there's still paper is being written about what we can learn from these dopamine, agonists, or serotonin Agonist, say about how various conditions are
And you don't get that. If you are, you know, like you were talking about taking 10 years and a billion dollars to try a single substance. It's just it takes too long and then it's important that you have to be a, you know, effectively a human guinea pig to or lab rat to be helping science. It is potentially useful how given what you know about the chemistry of these and then the Medicinal Chemistry aspect when you look at a new derivative
Of saying intact gin or any class. How much do you think we can accurately predict about the safety? So, is it likely that a 6ap be like substances suddenly going to be found to be a causing Parkinson's? If you use it 30 times or can we be pretty sure because of its similarity to an MDMA or to FMA being almost the same as methamphetamine. Structurally, that it probably is not going to do something crazy. I don't know how much
We can predict, and I don't know
if, you know, I think we can say very little about these new drugs, but I think we can also say very little about the old ones. I mean, I think that's one thing that people have a lot of discomfort. They'll say, how could you use this or that synthetic cannabinoid? There's no history of human use. How could you use this MV major of dip? There's no history of human use. Well, how long is the history of human? Use of Prozac? How long is the history of human use of Strattera? That it's pretty clear that the acute toxicity of these drugs is very, very low but I think that
We'd be extremely naive to assume that just because something has been through clinical trials that it's absolutely safe.
Yeah, the studies were for 30 days and you're giving it to somebody for three years. There might get
a really I mean I have a psychopharmacology textbook in the Cannabis chapter as you know it's cites. A number of studies that that suggests that long-term use of cannabis decreases IQ. That's still a hotly debated in the scientific literature, but the fact that you have cannabis this is an
Ostensibly studied substance with an extremely long history of human use. No matter how you go about estimating its goes back, thousands of years and there's still debate about whether this makes you less intelligent decreases your IQ. I mean that's that's pretty remarkable. So that just goes to show that. Just because something is new, does it mean that it's alone and having some uncertainty about its long-term effects and, you know, and routinely things are approved and taken off the market. And
It's just it's complicated. I think it's best to assume that you can't know and it's probably better to not use any drugs routinely unless it's absolutely medically necessary for that reason because you don't really know. I mean that's my own my own personal perspective on this is that if you can avoid it it's probably better not to use a drug everyday and in terms of, you know, estimating the toxicity of these new drugs. Yeah, you can make these basic assumptions that are rooted in our understanding of what is toxic. So you could
Say okay. Well MMD a to might be metabolized to Alpha methyl six hydroxy dopamine. And we know that six hydroxy dopamine is neurotoxic and so maybe it could be metabolized into six hydroxy, dopamine, like compound that could be neurotoxic maybe it's better to avoid it or the same can be said of tma-2 or to CEO or you know the argument was made with a number of the para halogenated cathinones that their relationship to parekura amphetamine could be that they were
Toxic, you can bounce around on those issues endlessly, but the bottom line is that each compound is its own entity that needs to be independently evaluated. And these sorts of inferences are often uninformed for here's another example. Is there are a number of articles that will suggest that Alpha, methyl dopamine is at least partially responsible for the neurotoxicity of MDMA. Well, if you look at the way Parkinson's is treated its L do,
Oppa combined with another drug called Carbidopa that is intended to prevent the peripheral metabolism of the l-dopa and to dopamine until it enters the brain. Well, if you look at the metabolism of Carbidopa that produces Alpha methyl dopamine as one of its metabolites, but I guess in that case, it's not an issue. I don't know. I mean, this is, I genuinely don't know, but you have a drug that's used daily for treatment of Parkinson's disease that produces as a metabolite at least in vitro a drug that is considered at least.
Some literature responsible for the neurotoxicity of MDMA and no one is talking about it. I mean these are complicated questions and it's really hard to just point to this or that neurotoxin because sometimes you don't even know. If those neurotoxins will be neurotoxic and humans be based on the weird ways that they're used in these animal studies. I think that's a problem with ibotenic acid and Amanita muscaria is most of the literature on that neurotoxicity, if not, all of it has to do with direct injection into the brain. Well, there's a lot of things that are neurotoxic when they're directed inject Loop weather.
Directly injected into the
brain. It's a different class, but one of the areas where we've seen the most debate about neurotoxicity is with dissociative. 'S, what is your take? I've seen the older claim of these only'. Lesions doesn't seem to be very well supported but there are some other reports I've seen. Like I researched DXM a bit recently for a video and there was some evidence mainly in vitro the end and some animal studies that perhaps at relevant doses, it can have some
Toxicity in the brain. Do you think dissociative 's carry that concern? I mean you can't of course say for all of them but for the ketamine's in the pcps and then DX M.
Yeah I mean I think that it's hard to evaluate especially when you know, there is some neuroimaging work that has been done suggests. Pretty dramatic degradation of certain regions of the brain in response to Chronic ketamine and when it, when you're looking at that kind of neuroimaging data for drug addicts, it's complicated because
There is an issue of causality and assigning. What is responsible for the biggest? What sort of person uses ketamine every day? For two years, for example, might there might there be something neurologically different about them before the two-year-long ketamine binge begins that would lead them to do that because most people don't do that, most people wouldn't want to do that. So it's a bit of a complicated thing to evaluate, unless you have some neuroimaging work, that was done before.
Or any drug use had begun that would demonstrate that the drug use exclusively is responsible for this or that degeneration. You know, I wouldn't be hugely surprised if long-term high dose ketamine. Use did have a neurotoxic effect and it's also pretty clear that it can result in psychosis that's not to say that it shouldn't be used medicinally. It's very clear that it has an extremely powerful antidepressant effect and is very promising as a treatment and there's a lot of pharmaceutical companies that are interested in that right now.
But I think that again, I want to be balanced. I want to be aware of the potential dangers while acknowledging the potential benefits. And I think the best way to walk down the middle in this is to say, yeah, you know, maybe using these things occasionally can enrich your life and can broaden your psychological understanding of yourself, but if at all possible you should really probably avoid using them all the time and probably you know minimize your use as much as possible and try to elevate the use that you do have, you know,
Like the ketamine experience I think is so dramatic that I don't know. I don't even necessarily understand the benefit of doing it repeatedly because it's not something it, you know, with with the classical psychedelics, I think each time you use them, you gain new insight into your life, and your circumstances based on that moment in time, whereas, the dissociative, specifically ketamine at anesthetic doses, it's not even really about you.
Really it's something else. It's very abstract. And so, I do think there's some truth to that, that Alan Watts claim that, once you get the message, hang up, the phone, you know, I don't know that I've learned anything about ketamine that I didn't learn the very first time I used it. And that's not to say that there's anything, you know, seriously wrong with using it a few times to remind yourself, but I think that more so than the classical psychedelics, there are some problems associated with long-term, high-dose ketamine
use out of curiosity. What did you learn? What was the message from?
Leader one very simple lesson that you learned from both ketamine and from Salvia is that this is possible just oh that's possible. This is a thing my brain can do that I would have never known otherwise I would have never known that. I could enter this abstract world of tunnels and strange sort of digital visions and sort of waking dream reality. Just the fact that that is possible that you can administer this small molecule that
that blocks a certain protein channel in your brain and suddenly your reality is completely changed that it's an amazing little lesson. I think just knowing what it does is important in and of itself, even if you don't learn a lesson like for example, it sometimes with with cannabis, or with psychedelics, all often have these, you know, very basic thoughts. Like I really love my parents and I should be grateful for what great parents I have and I'll tell them that. I love them because I'm so happy that they
Zest and I understand that they won't always be alive, and I need to tell them that they're great, something like that. And that's a nice good Revelation and that will improve your life. Or, you know, be kind to your friends and should tell your friends that you love them because one day, they'll be dead things like that. But with ketamine, it's not necessarily a lesson like that. It's more of a, at least in my experience it's typically more of a, this is possible psychologically, there is a very bizarre dream like Realm that you can enter with a certain type of drug and just be aware of this.
This and and then you have also additional understanding of other people, it's almost like having visited a country and you and anyone else you can say, oh you've been to Madagascar. Yeah, Antananarivo yeah, that's interesting. Would you do there? Where did you stay? You know, it's just it's like it's added to your psychological vocabulary that this is a state that exists and again for that reason, I think it's amazing that some of the psychiatrist and anesthesiologist to do ketamine Psychotherapy, haven't used it themselves because they really don't know what they're paying.
Kids are going through and that is not good. In my opinion,
there's a benefit when you're even if it's not and sometimes it's psychedelic assisted Psychotherapy that and then I can really see where the psychiatrist. Having had the experience has useful, but you also think it's useful for when it's kind of just the drug doing its thing with say the ketamine antidepressant therapy because there's not, I don't know that. That's maybe it's done along with talk therapy but often it shows you're going to a clinic to receive a drug. So it's a little less.
Yes. I don't think it's useful from the perspective of
having empathy and understanding for the patients. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that that's one of the major problems with the way the Psychiatry is practiced. Today is that a lot of psychiatrists simply don't know what they're doing to the consciousness of their patients. I know lots of people that will just get these Seroquel prescriptions and they won't know what the drug is. And presumably their psychiatrist has never used Seroquel themselves and and I would think do they recognize how dramatic.
Or even an Adderall prescription or a Klonopin prescription, you think? Do they recognize how dramatically they're altering? The consciousness of their patients with these prescriptions and if they had personal experience with these things, would they make the same
Choice? It's unfortunate that the best just as a general rule I guess the best therapists and psychiatrists and prescribers of these things or people who've had they've gone through depression, or they've been prescribed these medications and you get some respect for the weight that they can have it.
Somebody's life that if they're just a pill that you learned about from the marketing from the company that told you about them. That's, that's not really telling you a whole lot. And when you read studies on saying anti-depression, or I cut you brought up Seroquel, I covered Quetiapine recently, when you read the studies, there's tons of literature about just this basic, you know, reducing some bipolar symptoms or improving depression, or helping people sleep, and reducing psychotic symptoms. But even after reading, dozens of those
Assuming a doctor even did before prescribing, it you don't really get any sense for what it feels like to be on the drug. You just see this graph of OC the score on this this you know, clinical scale went from 21 points to 18 points. That's that's a great Improvement. That doesn't tell you anything about what's going on. It tells you there's some efficacy perhaps but as to what 500 milligrams of of an anti-psychotic feels like every day well that's a different thing and maybe people would be more inclined to
Try to work through somebody's issues, a little bit slower and introduced drugs in a different fashion if they realize the impact that they can have, or especially I've seen a lot of talk about just appreciating the difficulty of withdrawal from these substances, which is often never discussed before a patient starts, a medication that they never hear about. Here's the plan for if you need to get off, this is what you you should expect. You should be aware of this before you agree, to take it because sometimes getting off of you,
Five years of Prozac, it's not going to be easy. And you might have six months after that of being worse than you are. Now that's an important thing to understand and I don't know that patients almost ever have a way of appreciating, what they're what they're going to take on. It doesn't mean that the drug is bad but they don't have that
knowledge, right? I think that's it. What David? Your link poet talks about a lot with opioids is that, you know, I think if patients were aware, there's this kind of US versus them mentality.
Ality where the doctors are trying to keep away, the things that we want, and they're the enemy, and they're trying to prevent us from having the drugs, it will solve my problems because they're conservative and moralistic, and they just don't want me to have Oxycodone. But what if you were to really tell those patients, you know, listen if you're dealing with serious, chronic pain. The long-term effect of using opioids is going to be that the pain will be worse. You're actually going to end up in a worse position than you were before the opioids.
Don't work anymore and then you'll be dependent on them and do you still want to use them? Knowing that? I mean I think most reasonable people would recognize okay, maybe it's better to try to look into physical therapy or some other more sustainable
intervention as I'm conscious of your time just one or two more questions. One thing is do you have any I take it that your you probably tend to view reality in a very science-based rational way? Not a not a super spiritual way. At least. I haven't gotten that sense but
yesterday you were right? Okay
fair. So
On the same page there. But drugs can sometimes or sometimes non-drug experiences, if you want to go, there can make you question some of these feelings and people, especially get that with five Meo DMT or Ayahuasca, or DMT, or Salvia. They have an experience that they can't quite fit into the rational box. Even though you can come away from them thinking, that is really strange, but most likely that a scientific explanation. I just can't comprehend right now. Have you had
Any experiences that were made you at least for you know a few hours kind of question how you've viewed reality,
absolutely question how I viewed. It, none that have made me feel that a supernatural framework for interpreting reality. It has any explanatory value? That's the bottom line, you know, after smoking a very high dose of 5, m, EO, D, Mt last year, there was a period where I completely without Lon.
Decor reason suddenly had a sense of God. This is something that is very alien to me normally. It wasn't that I logically believed in it or even that I strongly believed in. I just had this nebulous sense of God and in a diminished over about two weeks and then I went back to normal and no longer had this nebulous God sense anymore and some people might say oh that's a supernatural experience. Well I don't know, I mean it's pretty clear that our experiences are physically mediated
You know, there's all sorts of not to compare my, my God, like experience to something like this. But you know, these instances of people that have a orbitofrontal tumor and suddenly become pedophiles, and then they removed the tumor and then they're not pedophiles anymore. And that's like a totally dramatic change in their personality caused by a physical change in their brain. It's pretty clear that these physical and chemical changes can change who we are and what we believe in what we gravitate toward. So, you know, I just don't see the explanatory value of any Supernatural.
Natural explanation, but I don't doubt for a moment that these experiences are amazing. And if anything, they they just increase my curiosity, in this materialist naturalist framework because how fantastic that, these experiences exist in are chemically mediated and and let's figure out how it happens. I find it. Very
exciting. Have you had the classic DMT entity encounter type experiences that that often get people to start calling it a spiritual or Spirit?
No.
Had very, very, very powerful experiences with Pharma laska one time. With 300 milligrams of i fasted for 24 hours and took 300 milligrams of the clove amide and then an hour later, 75 milligrams of synthetic DMT Freebase. And that experience was, as deep as I would ever want to go. And you know, I didn't know who I was, I didn't know what year it was. I didn't know where I was, I had lost all sense of myself and it was very
Very deep and profound and strange but there were no machine else or entities of any
sort was that experience liberating or was it terrifying when it
was going as terrifying? And it also gave me some empathy for for religious people I guess because it was maybe one of the only times that I really thought jeez, it would be nice to have a framework to explain this because I just had everything.
Dropped at everything. And the fact that I have this sort of, you know, at least at that, it is sort of existentialist view that there is an absurdity to life that there isn't an explanation, the time, disintegrated that my sense of self disintegrated the time may not exist in anything, resembling, the way that I psychologically perceive it, and all these, you know, sort of strange components of existence, that there will be no one to explain it. For me, that it's my own responsibility, and it's a heavy responsibility, to make sense of existence. And at that moment,
I really thought well yeah, it might be nice to have a guy, you know, blow tobacco smoke on my face and say, you know, you just cleanse yourself, you're stronger now, everything's going to be okay but there wasn't that I was alone. So yeah, I understand why these these interpretive conceptual Frameworks are so valuable to people why religion is valuable to people, because existence is really confusing, and scary, and painful and it's nice to have someone tell you how to interpret it, but I'd prefer not to myself, do it that much?
Thought is usually that, like, you were just saying it is. It's difficult to be a human. There's a lot of questions that are not. There's a lot of things that occur that if you were to view it in a religious way or give meaning to it, maybe a larger meaning to it. It would make things potentially easier to understand easier to deal with. And even if you're not religious because I think it's very common now for people to grow up, its kind of a overall a Christian culture, but people
I'll usually are growing up kind of without religion, but that doesn't mean that the impulse to try to explain things in some spiritual or Supernatural way is not still there and psychedelics, may Just Awaken that. So, people are reporting going from, I was an atheist to now, I'm a Believer because of this, but maybe it's just unless you are, you're probably a typical if you are able to get along without any framework of it does make the
Work, right? But any framework of a supernatural explanation for things or they're being other dimensions that you can go to when you die or can contact. Now, in this stuff is is powerful, just doesn't make it true. Then again we both have not had the maybe the problem is we just haven't had enough smoked DMT, and sometime in the future Hamilton. You will be a strong believer in entering other dimensions. There are definitely some people who would
Argue that that you can't stay until you have been there and denounced the entities that you are contacting as not being representative of reality. You mentioned James Ketchum earlier and I've had kind of an interest in bz the DeLorean and also just sure any attempt to do military activities Warfare, with psychological agents that are meant to just incapacitate, but not hurt somebody. I don't know. Not that we would necessarily
If This research was very common anymore but what do you think of that research? What you think of that gold to use drugs and that way and and do you have any any specific thoughts on bz? Because it does seem like a very to long-lasting deliriant. And the fact that the government was giving it to soldiers, is a crazy thing of the past. When you look back, I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but it's been kind of a side interest of mine for.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of hypocrisy when people talk about these different.
Current military interventions, you'll say, oh, you know, blowing someone up with a bomb or shooting them with the machine gun. That's okay. Stabbing them, the knife, that's okay. But using any form of chemical weapon, that's totally unacceptable. There's no way. That's that is not. That is a war crime. It should never even be considered. And, you know, people kind of tie themselves in these moral and conceptual knots about what sort of warfare is Humane, when the whole thing, sort of human Warfare seems like an oxymoron. And, and I do,
We understand, you know, I wouldn't want any of these things. I don't want to be shot. I don't want to have my limbs blown off with any sort of explosive, and I would also prefer not to be drugged with a high potency deliriant against my will, they're all really unpleasant, but I suppose, if I had to choose a transient drug experience, seems more Humane than any lasting damage to my physical body, assuming that I could withstand the psychological difficulties associated with the drug experience. And I think it's an interesting idea, you know, there was a, there was a great profile.
I love catch him in the New York or written by Rafi, katchadourian. And he gets into the moral implications of This research and the conclusion is that it was misguided or the as I recall it. I remember feeling the conclusion was that the research was unethical and misguided. I mean, I really wonder. Is it worse to get someone really stoned with a synthetic cannabinoid? Then bomb them with the Drone. They I would definitely prefer the synthetic cannabinoid over the Drone bombing, but I'm not the one making those sorts of military decisions and it is
Is admittedly a very complicated moral question, you know, there's also a history of the apartheid government, exploring psychoactive drugs, its chemical weapons. I made a documentary about it for the first season of my show. Did you see that?
Yeah, I was there's a great that's not the activities but, you know, if you do not get the coverage of, it was was a great. It's yeah. I'm in a weird part of any attempt like that. And the fact that it was a couple decades ago is even it's one thing if it's 1959. But start hearing about
About attempts to, you know, do population, control in the 1990s and I forget the main guy's name who was leading that program, but the fact that characters voter beside, every the fact that people like this exist and have power and he could do what he did is at least attempt to do what he did. Is
just yeah, I mean, it's really it's bizarre. But again, you know, if the question is first of all, I think I have some serious doubts that they ever were really doing the sort of
Up in research that they claim to have been doing at their laboratory, Delta G scientific. You know, it seems to me more likely that this was all kind of an elaborate front for a drug-dealing operation. That was run by the government, but
it's an interesting way to hide yourself from scrutiny. We're making chemical weapons. We're not dealing
drugs. Yes, yes. We're only doing it to hurt people, we swear. Yeah. But yeah, I guess it's back to the, it's okay to possess a cactus if you have Supernatural beliefs, but if you just think it's a cactus, and it's a crime.
I'm but yeah, it's a it's an interesting idea. You know, the movie Jacob's Ladder is also right around this idea. Yeah. And the if you can buy it online, the original screenplay even has a clandestine LSD, chemist as a character, and it went even deeper into this idea of weaponizing, psychedelic drugs, but they kind of reduce the influence of that in the final shooting script. But yeah, I mean, I don't really know what to say about it, other than yeah.
If I were in that situation which thankfully I am not, I would certainly prefer to be hit with a cannabinoid spray, then a spray of
bullets. Do you think the stories? I think it's been a while since I looked at the there were complaints about these experiments from veterans. But also there's reports from other, Deloreans, mainly natural Delirious in South America of people having or even in North America, using some deter has of people just permanently
Lee or effectively permanently being changed by these powerful, psychological drugs. Do you think those stories are ever true? It's yes, it's hard to imagine. They think they are true. Yeah, yeah.
Because I'd there's a really big difference between doing something voluntarily and consensually with understanding and having something forced on you. It's a big enough difference that yes, I do think that someone might experience a really high level of Terror. That's hard to even comprehend, especially when you think about
How scared people were of LSD in the 60s and how effective a lot of that propaganda was at convincing people that it really did damage, chromosomes or damage the brain or cause permanent psychosis. And that idea in and of itself, I think was very effective in causing a lot of negative experiences. And then, if you're in a Warfare scenario, which is probably in terms of set and setting the worst you could possibly imagine even if it's experimental, e done at a military base in the United.
States. Still with that understanding that. These are weapons. I mean,
yeah. I don't want to do bz in the hospital of Edgewood Arsenal. That doesn't know that sounds bad.
No, definitely not, because they were even with things like LSD, they were giving people really dangerously. I mean, it'd be dangerous psychologically, dangerous doses. I think there may be misremembering this, but I'm pretty sure that there's a recorded instance of them, giving five and maybe even 10 milligrams of LSD to people experimenting.
Toy, you know, just enormous overdoses to see what
happened. They gave too much MDA to one person and there was a death after your what it was was like 500 milligrams or something about MDA. Yeah, I don't know what they were Harold flower. Yeah. No, that's the name. I mean there is just like you were saying you would obviously prefer to be on bz than than a shot if somebody's really trying to mess you up, but doing stuff like intentionally overdosing people, kind of as a hey what?
Does this do is there, is there a potential use to possibly killing somebody even worse when it was often not well, it was often barely voluntary with the military people because it was kind of misleading what you were signing up for to my understanding. But other times, it was mental patients, that were being given these substances instead or even unsuspecting people with LSD, and being a doctor in that setting. Yeah, that is really questionable on the, on the ethics. But then again, if
Start from the foundation of it would be useful if you could like the Russian situation where you had a fentanyl supposedly being used to knock a bunch of people out, if you could create a substance that did that and you could defuse a huge problem with spraying and aerosol of some opioid or delirium or whatever that would be useful. Well, to get to that point. You have to give it to some people and just see what it does in a
Ettore setting. It's interesting. I hadn't seen the article with with catch them, but it's interesting to hear that his final conclusion was kind of the whole thing was
misguided. Oh, he doesn't, he doesn't think that. That's what contemporary analysis. I think that he actually stood behind and you know, I interviewed him years ago and he was going through a little bit of an odd time where I guess his well, I suppose it's he was having some confusion with his medication at the time and and didn't really want to go into a lot of
Tells about his work, but I think that he stands behind it and maybe he should, you know, in terms of the intention maybe the outcome wasn't what he wanted to, you know, fight a war without killing. But, you know, there certainly have been crazier things that have been done worse. Things that have been done in the realm of warfare. I mean, during Vietnam agent, orange and Napalm. I think are far worse.
Luckily, it's not true. Well, it could have been better if it was true. There was a forget the name of the place or the people in the
UK recently, there was that, that poisoning linked to Russia. And that was some report that came out from the Russian government saying it was bz had been found even though the Swiss lab that was doing the analysis, then never showed that. But it was just a way to kind of point the finger to the US because we're the ones that have most been known to have researched busy. So, to see it come up again, 40 or 50 years later is curious and
The tactic to try to blame it on the US as say bz. I mean the the Americans are poisoning British people would deliriant since that's an interesting story. So luckily were I hope we're not there, still scattered reports of. I think the Iraqi old Iraqi government had looked into or was using some of these psychoactive weapons. But overall, I don't know if they've been used. Do you think this research is still going on anywhere? Or is it just
Just, you know, they moved on kind of as a global thing past. This couple decade period of wanting to find, like you said, a way to wage war without killing.
I don't know. I mean, the bottom line is, I don't know, I wouldn't be surprised given how much money the military has. And, and given that there are these sort of perennial hopes that, yes, you'll find the perfect incapacitating agent or you will find the perfect wakefulness promoting agent or the perfect cognitive enhancer or the perfect drug. Yeah, that will strengthen
And the abilities of our military while weakening the opposing military in the most Humane and effective way possible. I think that's, you know, that is the basic military hope and I would be surprised if there weren't some resources, dedicated to
that, as a final question, is there any drug for which you had your view changed significantly, by doing the show or, you know, otherwise researching it and interacting with people who
Who are just learning more about it, where you really did a 180 in came to a different conclusion. If there's any substances that you suddenly became really fond of or concerned about where as you initially were not, that's a good
question. I think. Well, I will say that interviewing an enormous number of advocates in certain areas has had the opposing effect on me in some instances. I've done not so much for my show, but for
Other shows have done a decent bit of cannabis coverage and there's something about anytime there's money behind something. Where you realize that people their interpretations, their perspective has been poisoned by the potential for profit and their advocacy is not based entirely and what's right, but what is right for them and I would say that I've grown a little bit in a little bit
Just repulsed is a strong word but a little bit less, happy about the sorts of advocacy that you see sometimes in the croteau more cannabis industry. And that's not to say that I think either of those are bad plants or should be prohibited. I absolutely do not believe that. I think both of them have very important medical value, but I think that sometimes in people's Zeal to prevent the prohibition or to make money off of these things, they start to misrepresent the plans for substances that
Are there are fighting to defend. And so, yeah, I would say probably the Cannabis world is where I've seen the most behaviors that, that I find slightly off-putting. And I'm coming at this from a very open-minded perspective. So, I would imagine for other people, like other people that work on my show, the editors and the camera people, they, I know have had their minds changed about a lot of basic things because, you know, most people don't acknowledge the possibility that somebody making amphetamine in a
Destin lab could be a good guy or that academic organic chemistry could be really really fascinating or people that are living in impoverished exist in smoking Quaalude, in South Africa. Might be really fun non-threatening people to hang around, and might actually be really interesting to talk to you. So, I guess, I, I already am approaching this from this perspective of like non-judgment. Typically, like I'm very open to almost anything and it takes a lot to convince me that
Is bad. So, maybe for me the, the changes in perspective, haven't been as dramatic, but I know from the people that I work with, who are less immersed in this world of psychoactive substances, that they've learned an enormous
amount this encouraging that they did have their position changed. I can imagine being a camera person filming somebody use PCP, maybe a an an unusual thing in the doing, probably not something that they've been, they've been documenting much and the past so that could be a good learning.
My experience, it's not really even a pinion on a drug that changed, but just more of a view. Sounds like towards the Cannabis culture that surrounds it, which, which I would have to agree, is a bit and out there at times hear about people giving their baby, some THC to calm down and because it's what you're doing is, you know, giving them than to psychoactive drug, what are you doing? And they're they're five months old. I mean, you
Anyways, I think we're on the same page. Yeah, and I can see, I can see where you're coming from with with the Cannabis Community. Well, it was really great having you on and a great discussion and thank you for making the time to come on.
Yeah, yeah, thanks for having me. There's
a lot that goes into pharmacopoeia and everything else that you do is there likely to be a third
season? Yeah, there's I spent most of this year trying to make a movie the turn into a real legal Nightmare and and so that I was so focused on that.
That and a couple of other projects that there have been these ongoing negotiations. For the third season of pharmacopoeia, it is probably going to happen in some capacity, although it's nothing is confirmed at the moment because there's, yeah, there's so many variables to consider, but I'm starting a website and I'll post all the kind of updates on that Hamilton Morris.com should be up in a month or so, and anyone who's interested in following my work can check it.
They're even in this for quite a while, and have done a lot of content, is there anything if people wanted to get introduced to your approach to these drugs or just anything that you really found interesting? Any, any content you would recommend people go to whether it's pharmacopoeia episodes or articles.
Yeah. I mean I would check out the The Hamiltons pharmacopoeia TV show which unfortunately you do have to pay to watch but it's available on iTunes and Amazon and Hulu. You don't have to pay if you have Hulu and you know see that because there's some old stuff freely available
On YouTube but I'm not as fond of that material and I think that there's a couple of episodes about clandestine chemistry that appeared in both the first and second season that are good representatives of the sort of work that I do. And then, you know, if you're interested in the science side, I've got a good number of peer-reviewed scientific Publications that have co-authored that you can find by searching my name and Google Scholar. And or if you're interested in the written side, you know, Britain a few Harper's articles and I have a new one.
Should be coming out in the spring that go into other psychoactive drug related topic. So yeah, I produced a lot of stuff and I hope people enjoy.
I'll share some links to your Twitter and it's great that you're setting up a website and I'll put the Hamiltons, pharmacopoeia in the descriptions. People can easily find it not that it's too hard to search. Your name and find a slew of content, which is great. So yeah, thank you again for coming on and it was nice talking to you. Okay, talk to you later.
Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed that episode. Just a quick reminder, if you want to support, you can find ways to do. So in the description or at the drug, classroom.com support and leaving reviews, and iTunes is also very helpful CDC has a ton of additional content on drugs and harm reduction found on the drug classroom.com and on the YouTube channel at the drug classroom. So if you want to see more and read more than head over there, and thank you again to all of tdcs supporters. I really appreciate it.
