Program Notes
Guest speaker: Gary Fisher
The description of Gary Fisher’s work with the amazing little girl, Nancy, is what the title of this podcast refers to. However, the conversation also covers a wide range of other topics, including: an amazing cancer cure involving ayahuasca, early psychedelic research, and the first scientific paper to discuss what is now called poly-drugging.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:22 ►
I’m Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:27 ►
I’ve been reading this book the last couple of days.
00:00:29 ►
It’s edited by Charlie Grove and Roger Walsh, and it’s called Higher Wisdom.
00:00:34 ►
Eminent Elders Explore the Continuing Impact of Psychedelics.
00:00:39 ►
It’s a series of interviews with people like Ram Dass, Gary Fisher, Michael Harner, Albert Hoffman, Laura Huxley.
00:00:50 ►
It’s really, really an interesting book.
00:00:52 ►
And when I got to the interview they did with Gary Fisher,
00:00:56 ►
I remembered a tape recording I made of a conversation Gary and I had last summer.
00:01:02 ►
Gary and I had last summer.
00:01:09 ►
Actually, it was one that we did as a test to see if we could pull some stories together for a psychedelic salon recording.
00:01:13 ►
Unfortunately, I made the recording on my old 10-year-old cassette tape recorder
00:01:18 ►
and then moved it into MP3 over this little $12 Radio Shack mic I’m using here.
00:01:24 ►
So obviously, the quality leads a lot to be desired. Moved it into MP3 over this little $12 Radio Shack mic I’m using here.
00:01:28 ►
So obviously the quality leads a lot to be desired.
00:01:33 ►
I’m working on that, and your suggestions, of course, are appreciated.
00:01:35 ►
They are coming in, and I thank you.
00:01:40 ►
Anyway, after reading Charlie Groves’ interview with Gary, I took another listen to it.
00:01:43 ►
Sometimes when people are friends of yours, and you get to know them on a different level than just reading their books,
00:01:50 ►
you tend to forget some of the great work that they really did.
00:01:55 ►
So I took another listen to this tape because the stories and the information that Gary puts out is, I think, pretty important.
00:02:04 ►
As I said, pretty important.
00:02:07 ►
As I said, the sound quality is not too great.
00:02:12 ►
It was a hot day, and we had to have the sliding glass doors and windows open.
00:02:14 ►
But the content, I think, is really excellent.
00:02:18 ►
And for those of you who aren’t familiar with Gary’s story,
00:02:22 ►
I’ve put up a web page about him with some links to his papers,
00:02:24 ►
to some of his papers that are online. And just click on Gary’s name on our podcast page at matrixmasters.com.
00:02:30 ►
And as you’ll see, a few people have played such a wide-ranging role in the research of psychedelic substances as Gary has.
00:02:39 ►
His research not only included testing schizophrenic and autistic children with LSD and other psychedelic medicines.
00:02:50 ►
Gary also was with Tim Leary in Mexico, the Caribbean, and finally at Millbrook.
00:02:56 ►
And hopefully I’ll get him to share some of these experiences with this crowd and also with the Huxleys
00:03:02 ►
and some of the other bright lights of early psychedelic research.
00:03:07 ►
I think you actually might be pretty surprised
00:03:10 ►
by some of his observations about that period in our tribe’s history.
00:03:15 ►
Now, let’s get to the tape at hand.
00:03:17 ►
And as I said, the sound quality isn’t great,
00:03:20 ►
but I can promise that Gary’s stories will soon have you laughing and crying and laughing at the same time.
00:03:28 ►
I’m going to pick up here in the conversation just after I’d mentioned to Gary that Harvard has started a new study
00:03:35 ►
involving cluster headaches and the possible use of LSD to ease some of that pain.
00:03:43 ►
Here we are with a conversation with Gary Fisher.
00:03:48 ►
It’s interesting about the cluster headaches that you had said about LSD.
00:03:54 ►
For that phenomenon, and this must have been in the 60s,
00:04:00 ►
that when Sandoz basically stopped making LSD for distribution,
00:04:09 ►
that they came up with a drug called Sancert, S-A-N-C-E-R-T,
00:04:14 ►
which was in the LSD family.
00:04:17 ►
And it was for headaches.
00:04:18 ►
It was for migraines.
00:04:20 ►
Really?
00:04:20 ►
So they were already starting that work back in the 60s.
00:04:24 ►
Wow.
00:04:26 ►
Isn’t it amazing how much…
00:04:28 ►
Yeah, how things recycle.
00:04:30 ►
And how much time has been lost.
00:04:34 ►
How did you get approval to do your stuff?
00:04:36 ►
What was the process back then?
00:04:40 ►
Oh, that’s a funny approval.
00:04:44 ►
My approval when I came back from Canada Canada after having my first LSD experience,
00:04:50 ►
and I thought, well, if it worked for me, it would work for anybody.
00:04:53 ►
And so I had been working with the schizophrenic children at this hospital.
00:04:58 ►
You’d already been involved in that work?
00:05:00 ►
Yeah, working with them, but getting nowhere because they’re extremely very difficult
00:05:06 ►
to work with. What age group did you work with? I think the youngest one we had maybe
00:05:12 ►
was four years old, up to about 11, I would say. Really young. And so the psychiatrist who ran the ward,
00:05:29 ►
he and I got along real well.
00:05:33 ►
And he thought I was like Looney Tunes and all,
00:05:35 ►
so I got interested in him.
00:05:37 ►
What hospital was this in?
00:05:39 ►
I’m going to put that down.
00:05:41 ►
Oh, okay.
00:05:41 ►
Okay.
00:05:44 ►
But it was a state hospital in California run by the Department of Mental Health.
00:05:51 ►
And so I told Dan, you know, what my experiences was.
00:05:55 ►
And, well, you know, nobody had heard of it.
00:05:58 ►
What year was this?
00:06:00 ►
00:06:01 ►
Wow.
00:06:02 ►
00:06:04 ►
Because I had my first experience, I guess, in 59.
00:06:09 ►
Who administered it the first time?
00:06:11 ►
My brother-in-law, Nick Chawalas,
00:06:14 ►
who was taught by Hubbard, Al Hubbard,
00:06:20 ►
who was, you know…
00:06:22 ►
He was the real Johnny Appleseed.
00:06:24 ►
Yeah, he was the fountainhead.
00:06:25 ►
Yeah.
00:06:26 ►
And, of course, he taught the people in Menlo Park, too.
00:06:31 ►
Right.
00:06:32 ►
He was the…
00:06:33 ►
He was the guru there.
00:06:34 ►
…that got Myron really off and going.
00:06:36 ►
I think he took Myron on his first experience.
00:06:39 ►
Yeah, right, right.
00:06:41 ►
And he was a character.
00:06:45 ►
Did you actually meet Hubbard?
00:06:46 ►
No, never met Hubbard.
00:06:48 ►
You were there for the fresh reputation.
00:06:51 ►
Yeah, he was still around, of course,
00:06:53 ►
but I never physically met him.
00:07:00 ►
So I told the psychiatrist, his name was Dan,
00:07:04 ►
I said,
00:07:05 ►
I’d really like to try these with the kids because we have nothing to lose.
00:07:12 ►
And he said, fine.
00:07:14 ►
Were these kids so sick they were actually hospitalized?
00:07:16 ►
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
00:07:17 ►
They were in what was called in those days a back ward.
00:07:21 ►
High security.
00:07:23 ►
A lot of the kids were in straitjackets because they were so violent.
00:07:27 ►
And, you know, very self-destructive, destructive to others. It was like the picture of back
00:07:42 ►
ward’s asylums. You know, people were violent.
00:07:44 ►
Like what the movie showed? Yeah, like what the movie showed. Wow. of back wards asylums. You know, people were violent.
00:07:45 ►
Like what the movies showed?
00:07:46 ►
Yeah, like what the movies showed.
00:07:47 ►
Wow.
00:07:48 ►
These were all kids.
00:07:50 ►
And they would, you know,
00:07:51 ►
bite each other and hit each other.
00:07:54 ►
I mean, they were uncontrollable.
00:07:57 ►
They were all on different kinds of drugs
00:08:00 ►
to calm them down.
00:08:01 ►
But in those days, you know,
00:08:04 ►
there weren’t
00:08:05 ►
even tranquilizers.
00:08:07 ►
You know, that was pre-tranquilizer days.
00:08:09 ►
We didn’t even have Thorazine back then.
00:08:12 ►
And
00:08:13 ►
so he said, well, yeah, let’s
00:08:15 ►
try it. And
00:08:17 ►
so he
00:08:19 ►
said, well, we’ll start with Nancy
00:08:21 ►
because she’s dying anyway.
00:08:24 ►
And so…
00:08:25 ►
How old was she?
00:08:27 ►
Nancy was probably 11.
00:08:30 ►
Wow.
00:08:31 ►
And she was in what’s called a camisole, which is a wrap now, where they’re tied, you know,
00:08:37 ►
legs and feet.
00:08:38 ►
Just a fancy straitjacket name.
00:08:39 ►
Yeah, a fancy straitjacket name.
00:08:42 ►
And tied to a bed,
00:08:46 ►
tied down to a bed.
00:08:48 ►
Because if you let her loose,
00:08:50 ►
she would try to gouge her eyes out or bite her fingers off.
00:08:53 ►
You said she was dying?
00:08:55 ►
Yes, she had a thing called
00:08:57 ►
what’s known as merasmus.
00:09:01 ►
And it’s where children
00:09:03 ►
just simply die
00:09:04 ►
because they’re committed to dying.
00:09:07 ►
Really?
00:09:08 ►
And even if they feed them intravenously nutrients, the body doesn’t absorb it.
00:09:14 ►
I’ve never heard of that.
00:09:15 ►
So, yeah, and it comes from children who are terribly isolated and, you know,
00:09:22 ►
non-communicative, totally in a world
00:09:26 ►
of their own.
00:09:27 ►
They just don’t want to be here.
00:09:29 ►
They don’t want to be here. It’s called Merasmus.
00:09:33 ►
He said,
00:09:34 ►
she’s dying anyway
00:09:35 ►
and
00:09:36 ►
so let’s try it with her.
00:09:39 ►
I thought, oh good,
00:09:40 ►
what are we going to do with her?
00:09:42 ►
I might kill her, so that will be the end
00:09:44 ►
of this project.
00:09:45 ►
If we kill the first person, we can try it on.
00:09:49 ►
And I always remember Dan’s grin and so forth.
00:09:54 ►
And he said, well, that’s the safest one to try it on
00:09:58 ►
because she’s going to be dead anyway, so nothing to lose.
00:10:01 ►
So you didn’t have to go through an IRB and things like that.
00:10:05 ►
No.
00:10:06 ►
I thought, you know, this will be rambling,
00:10:09 ►
but it’ll probably be okay.
00:10:11 ►
One of the funny things is that people hadn’t heard of LSD.
00:10:16 ►
And so I was telling somebody one day
00:10:18 ►
that we were trying LSD with these psychotic children,
00:10:22 ►
and he said,
00:10:23 ►
Why would you try to convert children
00:10:26 ►
to Mormonism to cure their insanity?
00:10:30 ►
He says, that sounds really bizarre
00:10:32 ►
because Mormons are known as
00:10:34 ►
Latter Day Saints, as LDS.
00:10:37 ►
So he thought that we were
00:10:38 ►
converting them to Mormonism.
00:10:42 ►
That’s how popular LSD was.
00:10:44 ►
We’ve been hearing about it.
00:10:46 ►
Sandoz was sending it out in the mail
00:10:49 ►
to physicians
00:10:50 ►
to try it on different disorders
00:10:53 ►
to see if it would work.
00:10:54 ►
And all a physician had to do
00:10:55 ►
was write and ask for it?
00:10:56 ►
Oh no, they were sending them up free
00:10:58 ►
in the mail.
00:10:59 ►
Wow.
00:11:01 ►
One guy wrote back and said
00:11:03 ►
it doesn’t work as a sedative.
00:11:07 ►
He said he tried it with patients at bedtime and he said
00:11:09 ►
they were up all night with the most
00:11:11 ►
incredibly described
00:11:13 ►
dreams I’ve ever heard in my life
00:11:15 ►
so they didn’t get any sleep
00:11:17 ►
and so it’s not a sedative
00:11:19 ►
this was the state of
00:11:22 ►
well you know I shouldn’t laugh
00:11:23 ►
I mean how do you learn this is the state of quote Well, you know, I shouldn’t laugh. I mean, how do you learn, you know?
00:11:25 ►
This is the state of, quote, approval.
00:11:28 ►
We’ve never heard of, you know, approving,
00:11:30 ►
getting drugs approved for anything on that era.
00:11:33 ►
Wow.
00:11:33 ►
That’s as recently as 1960.
00:11:38 ►
But, yeah, Sandals was just sending them out
00:11:41 ►
for people to try to see what it might work for.
00:11:46 ►
They didn’t know.
00:11:48 ►
And so we tried it with her,
00:11:50 ►
and I even have pictures of her.
00:11:54 ►
I’ve got to find somebody
00:11:56 ►
to give things to
00:11:59 ►
before I pass on
00:12:03 ►
and my children won’t know what to do with it
00:12:05 ►
or they’d probably get all thrown away.
00:12:07 ►
But I actually have photographs of some of these kids.
00:12:11 ►
You know, it’d be nice if you also, you know,
00:12:13 ►
as you’re getting it in a pile to give to somebody,
00:12:16 ►
if you turn on a tape recorder to kind of describe them as you’re doing that
00:12:19 ►
because we’re not going to know who the kids are
00:12:22 ►
if we look at the pictures without a description.
00:12:24 ►
It’d be a lot of work.
00:12:26 ►
No, that’s a good idea.
00:12:29 ►
And Nancy was skin and bones.
00:12:32 ►
I mean, really skin and bones.
00:12:34 ►
I mean, she looked like somebody from a prison camp
00:12:39 ►
who had never been fed because she was wasting away.
00:12:48 ►
Maybe these days it would be called the wasting syndrome because her body was just disintegrating. Her eyes were all sunken in her head. She
00:12:59 ►
was black and blue from hitting herself and not in communication with anybody, totally withdrawn. And so we
00:13:09 ►
started with her. And at that time, we were giving her intramuscularly because we couldn’t
00:13:18 ►
give it to her orally. And so we gave, and you know, she had no muscle, so it was awful.
00:13:25 ►
It was really tragic.
00:13:28 ►
But anyway, she was the first one.
00:13:31 ►
You were giving Nancy her first…
00:13:33 ►
So you injected it, what dose?
00:13:37 ►
Well, I was going to say, I don’t know how much we gave her.
00:13:39 ►
I suspect we probably maybe gave her 200 mics or maybe 400 mics. And she probably weighed
00:13:45 ►
I don’t know, maybe
00:13:47 ►
55 pounds or something.
00:13:50 ►
She was a skeleton.
00:13:50 ►
She was a skeleton.
00:13:53 ►
Because that was
00:13:54 ►
Hubbard’s
00:13:56 ►
what was called the psychedelic model
00:13:58 ►
as it came to be known.
00:14:01 ►
To give them a big enough dosage so that
00:14:02 ►
they can’t fight it.
00:14:04 ►
They can’t resist it. It over’t resist. They can’t resist it.
00:14:05 ►
It overpowers any ego trying to fight it off.
00:14:09 ►
So that was the model.
00:14:11 ►
This other model, of course, that they were using in England was called Psycholytic,
00:14:16 ►
where they were giving smaller dosages and doing psychotherapy
00:14:20 ►
after the person had taken it.
00:14:23 ►
My friend Joyce Martin and all the English people
00:14:27 ►
were using that model.
00:14:28 ►
They hadn’t heard about the psychedelic model.
00:14:31 ►
There wasn’t any communication
00:14:33 ►
really between people.
00:14:34 ►
There was just regular mail at the time
00:14:36 ►
and journals, I guess.
00:14:38 ►
Well, things really weren’t published then
00:14:41 ►
because there was nothing to publish.
00:14:41 ►
things really weren’t published then because there was nothing to publish.
00:14:45 ►
And so she was quiet and uncommunicative.
00:14:53 ►
She would mutter.
00:14:54 ►
I mean, she would mumble to herself.
00:14:58 ►
And most of her mumbling was just cursing, just cursing.
00:15:04 ►
And so finally, since she, we decided to take
00:15:08 ►
her out of the camel show, and then, because there were about four of us there, and hold
00:15:12 ►
her down in, she started,
00:15:27 ►
I don’t know,
00:15:28 ►
what would be the term,
00:15:30 ►
like a wounded animal in despair.
00:15:32 ►
Do you think we could maybe
00:15:33 ►
shut this window
00:15:34 ►
while he’s doing his yard work there?
00:15:38 ►
Absolutely.
00:15:39 ►
It sounded like an animal in distress.
00:15:42 ►
That’s the best way
00:15:43 ►
that I can describe that. It was
00:15:45 ►
this howling and just terrible distress. And then it got louder and louder and louder.
00:15:57 ►
And here is this little piece of protoplasm making all this noise. And it went on and
00:16:04 ►
on and on and on
00:16:05 ►
and got louder and louder.
00:16:08 ►
I imagine you were all getting kind of
00:16:09 ►
concerned then.
00:16:11 ►
Well, it was a change,
00:16:14 ►
you know, something different was
00:16:16 ►
happening, so it was encouraging.
00:16:18 ►
Oh, okay.
00:16:19 ►
And so it went
00:16:22 ►
on and on and
00:16:23 ►
just howling.
00:16:25 ►
And so finally after about four hours,
00:16:28 ►
I mean, I don’t know how she had the energy to do that,
00:16:33 ►
but after about four hours,
00:16:35 ►
and we would try to talk to her, you know, during this,
00:16:38 ►
you know, ask her what was she howling about
00:16:40 ►
and what was wrong and so forth.
00:16:42 ►
Nothing, no response whatsoever.
00:16:44 ►
It’s just as though we didn’t exist. But she never responded to anybody anyway. She never talked to anybody
00:16:49 ►
anyway. But then we kept doing that. So finally we just gave that up after about three hours
00:16:54 ►
and just sat and looked at each other. And so finally, in my desperation, I just yelled
00:17:02 ►
at her. I said, Nancy, for God’s sake, stop this racket.
00:17:06 ►
I can’t stand it anymore.
00:17:08 ►
You’re driving me crazy.
00:17:11 ►
I expected an answer.
00:17:13 ►
And she stopped and she said,
00:17:17 ►
and this is her first communication that we’d ever heard from her,
00:17:20 ►
leave me alone.
00:17:23 ►
I have a long way to go
00:17:25 ►
and then she went right back to screaming
00:17:28 ►
and howling
00:17:29 ►
and we just went holy
00:17:32 ►
shit
00:17:33 ►
there’s somebody in there
00:17:35 ►
there’s a person
00:17:37 ►
there’s a live person in there
00:17:39 ►
and that was the first session we did
00:17:43 ►
and of course we had many, many, many sessions with her.
00:17:49 ►
I don’t know how many.
00:17:50 ►
I have records of it, but many, probably 25 or 30.
00:17:56 ►
And boy, she was a handful.
00:18:00 ►
Did she howl every time? Well, no, no.
00:18:10 ►
She went through all kinds of stages.
00:18:17 ►
And the stages were long.
00:18:18 ►
I mean, we were six, seven, eight hours with each kid that took it. And we would be worn
00:18:27 ►
out because it was so intensive. But she would go through tremendous amounts of living through.
00:18:41 ►
One of the things that she lived through, which was very clear to us, was being raped by her
00:18:47 ►
grandfather.
00:18:48 ►
That was very, very clear.
00:18:49 ►
Pleading with him to stop.
00:18:50 ►
That it hurt her.
00:18:51 ►
She would have this sound of, ow, ow, ow.
00:18:52 ►
That hurts, that hurts.
00:18:53 ►
She would have this sound of, ow, ow, ow.
00:18:54 ►
That hurts, that hurts.
00:18:55 ►
She would have this sound of, ow, ow, ow.
00:18:56 ►
That hurts, that hurts.
00:18:57 ►
She would have this sound of, ow, ow, ow.
00:18:58 ►
That hurts, that hurts.
00:18:59 ►
She would have this sound of, ow, ow, ow.
00:19:00 ►
That hurts, that hurts.
00:19:01 ►
She would have this sound of, ow, ow, ow.
00:19:02 ►
That hurts, that hurts.
00:19:03 ►
She would have this sound of, ow, ow, ow.
00:19:04 ►
That hurts, that hurts. She would have this sound of, ow, ow, ow. That hurts, that hurts. She would have this sound of,
00:19:05 ►
Ow! Ow! Ow!
00:19:08 ►
That hurts! That hurts!
00:19:10 ►
You know, just screaming.
00:19:13 ►
It was blood-curdling.
00:19:14 ►
I guess.
00:19:15 ►
And this was her grandfather raping her.
00:19:19 ►
And so that went on for hours during different sessions.
00:19:25 ►
So it was…
00:19:26 ►
Poor little girl had a lot to work through, didn’t she?
00:19:28 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:19:29 ►
She was…
00:19:30 ►
Even though she was 11 or 12,
00:19:33 ►
she looked like an old woman of maybe 80.
00:19:37 ►
Wow.
00:19:37 ►
Because she was all sunken.
00:19:38 ►
Her eyes were sunken.
00:19:40 ►
Her cheeks were sunken.
00:19:41 ►
She was all sallow, youallow, yellowish-colored skin.
00:19:47 ►
But she was an old, old soul of sorts.
00:19:56 ►
But to make a very long story short,
00:20:02 ►
she was a tough one to deal with
00:20:06 ►
because she was so smart
00:20:10 ►
and turned out to be very,
00:20:14 ►
you know, as she got better,
00:20:15 ►
very manipulative
00:20:16 ►
and wanting her own way about everything.
00:20:19 ►
So she started communicating a little bit.
00:20:21 ►
Oh, yes.
00:20:22 ►
Oh, yes.
00:20:22 ►
She started communicating.
00:20:24 ►
After the sessions, too, or only during them? After. Really? Oh, yeah. So this opens her up then. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. She started communicating. After the sessions, too, or only during them?
00:20:26 ►
After. Really?
00:20:28 ►
Oh, yeah. So this opens her up then.
00:20:29 ►
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
00:20:31 ►
And
00:20:32 ►
she was
00:20:36 ►
so funny.
00:20:37 ►
One time we were bringing her back
00:20:39 ►
from the
00:20:41 ►
visitor’s room, which is where we did the
00:20:43 ►
sessions, because these kids never had any visitors
00:20:46 ►
because they were basically all abandoned.
00:20:50 ►
Their family never came to visit them or anything,
00:20:52 ►
these kids.
00:20:54 ►
And so we used to quote the visitor’s room.
00:20:57 ►
And so one day somebody was there
00:21:00 ►
and they were looking for somebody.
00:21:03 ►
And so Nancy loved when people came to the ward
00:21:06 ►
because she always went to them and wanted to talk to them
00:21:09 ►
and find out all about them and so forth and so forth.
00:21:12 ►
So she became kind of outpouring.
00:21:14 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:21:15 ►
She really did.
00:21:16 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:21:17 ►
She became very outpouring.
00:21:19 ►
And they were asking for someone.
00:21:23 ►
And so she said, oh, yeah, I know where they are.
00:21:25 ►
She knew everything that went on in the ward.
00:21:27 ►
And she said, I’ll take you down there.
00:21:30 ►
That’s the visitor’s room.
00:21:32 ►
You know, that’s the room where you get to see God.
00:21:37 ►
And the visitor, of course, thought,
00:21:39 ►
well, this is their psychotic band plane, you know.
00:21:42 ►
This is where you get to see God.
00:21:44 ►
So that’s how we used to call it.
00:21:47 ►
That way.
00:21:48 ►
And then what she would try to do,
00:21:50 ►
if it was another kid’s turn,
00:21:53 ►
she would try to say,
00:21:56 ►
well, I’ll give you candy
00:21:57 ►
if you’ll let me take your turn today.
00:21:59 ►
Really?
00:22:00 ►
Yeah.
00:22:00 ►
I’ll find some food for you that you like
00:22:02 ►
and I’ll steal something for you
00:22:04 ►
and give it to you.
00:22:06 ►
But I want your turn today.
00:22:08 ►
You don’t need a turn.
00:22:10 ►
You’re fine.
00:22:11 ►
I should tell them all kinds of things.
00:22:14 ►
So she recognized that the LSD was the medicine that was going on.
00:22:17 ►
Oh, yes.
00:22:18 ►
Oh, yes.
00:22:19 ►
That’s right.
00:22:21 ►
But she was a handful.
00:22:23 ►
Oh, my God.
00:22:25 ►
One day we were coming back from the session.
00:22:28 ►
We were coming by the dining room.
00:22:33 ►
And it was just pandemonium.
00:22:35 ►
These kids, you know, trying to feed them
00:22:37 ►
because they’d throw food all over each other, you know.
00:22:41 ►
It was just, oh, what a mess it was.
00:22:43 ►
Constantly.
00:22:47 ►
And so it was a blast in the room, and with wires in the blast so they wouldn’t break, shatter. And so she was
00:22:55 ►
standing there looking at them. Here is this little girl who’s like skin and bones, black eyes, bruises all over her body. And one of the attendants, whose name was
00:23:08 ►
Van, who was a sweetheart, and she said, Van, look at them. Just look at them. Isn’t
00:23:16 ►
that wonderful? They’re eating. She said, and she made this gesture like the queen,
00:23:22 ►
let them eat all they want.
00:23:27 ►
Like the prima donna, you know,
00:23:29 ►
who was in charge of the world.
00:23:31 ►
Let them eat all they want, you know.
00:23:35 ►
And we just, it was hysterical laughing at her.
00:23:37 ►
She didn’t like to be laughed at. You have to be sort of careful.
00:23:40 ►
But she was, she was a tough one.
00:23:44 ►
Now you said in the beginning that she was actually wasting away.
00:23:46 ►
Did she ever start eating again?
00:23:48 ►
Oh, yes.
00:23:49 ►
Oh, yeah.
00:23:49 ►
She did?
00:23:50 ►
Yeah, she started eating right away.
00:23:53 ►
Really?
00:23:53 ►
She started eating right away.
00:23:55 ►
Did the 20 or so sessions over, what period of time did you treat her?
00:24:00 ►
I would think about maybe 18 months.
00:24:04 ►
And then what happened to her in the future?
00:24:08 ►
Well, let me tell you a little bit more about her since I’m remembering it.
00:24:17 ►
She was very much into controlling things. She was a real control freak.
00:24:23 ►
And if she didn’t get her way, then
00:24:26 ►
what she would do is that she would take her fist and she would hit herself in the eyes
00:24:31 ►
to hurt herself. And so we didn’t know exactly, you know, how to deal with, we didn’t know
00:24:41 ►
how to deal with any of this stuff, you was all experimental. We were learning day by day.
00:24:49 ►
But we wanted to get to the point, of course,
00:24:52 ►
where she would abandon her self-destructiveness,
00:24:56 ►
but that was so tied to her wanting things her way,
00:25:00 ►
and her control, that if she didn’t get her way,
00:25:03 ►
then that’s what she would do.
00:25:04 ►
in her control that if she didn’t get her way, then that’s what she would do.
00:25:13 ►
So the last vestige of this control thing, we would take her out of the camisole.
00:25:19 ►
We would put gloves on her hands, heavy gloves.
00:25:24 ►
So if she started to sock herself, it wouldn’t hurt her so much. And then she would try to bite the gloves off.
00:25:27 ►
It was a constant, constant struggle working with this kid
00:25:31 ►
because she was so powerful.
00:25:36 ►
It sounds like she was pretty smart, too.
00:25:37 ►
Oh, she was incredibly smart.
00:25:40 ►
And one time I had heard her say,
00:25:44 ►
she was talking to one of the other kids,
00:25:46 ►
and she said, well, I can’t handle the day staff anymore.
00:25:53 ►
They’re on to me.
00:25:54 ►
But I’ve got the night staff pretty still.
00:25:57 ►
I’ve got them still under my thumb.
00:25:59 ►
They’re doing what I want them to do because they haven’t caught on, you know,
00:26:03 ►
how to deal,
00:26:05 ►
you know, with me because I’m too smart for them. I overheard this and I said, oh, that’s
00:26:11 ►
an interesting thing, Nancy. I’ll have to talk to the night staff. She turned around
00:26:17 ►
and said, Gowie, God damn you fucking asshole, you know. She said, you’ve just blown it,
00:26:25 ►
haven’t you?
00:26:26 ►
Now I won’t have control
00:26:27 ►
over anybody.
00:26:28 ►
And I said,
00:26:28 ►
isn’t that going to be a shame?
00:26:30 ►
You know,
00:26:31 ►
so we had that kind of,
00:26:32 ►
you know,
00:26:33 ►
exchange.
00:26:35 ►
Gary,
00:26:35 ►
God damn you,
00:26:36 ►
asshole.
00:26:38 ►
Coming from a little girl
00:26:40 ►
would be strange.
00:26:41 ►
Yeah.
00:26:43 ►
But,
00:26:44 ►
oh,
00:26:44 ►
she was a tough one.
00:26:45 ►
So the final thing, I always
00:26:48 ►
remember that what we did,
00:26:50 ►
she got into this magic
00:26:52 ►
that if she had a piece of Kleenex
00:26:54 ►
and on her hands
00:26:55 ►
that the Kleenex would
00:26:57 ►
stop her from hitting herself
00:26:59 ►
because she denied that she
00:27:01 ►
had control over hitting herself.
00:27:04 ►
That was part of that phase that she went through,
00:27:07 ►
that she couldn’t control it.
00:27:10 ►
And we kept telling her, yes, you can control it.
00:27:13 ►
And so we’d get into big fights about that.
00:27:16 ►
So then she would take the gloves off, take everything off,
00:27:21 ►
and then she would have pieces of Kleenex on her hand, and that
00:27:26 ►
would control her. And so, fine, as long as you know that’s what you’re going to do. And
00:27:35 ►
then, if something happened that she wasn’t getting her way, and we couldn’t let her run
00:27:40 ►
the whole world, it was quite impossible, I think there were 45 kids on the ward. And
00:27:46 ►
so she would take the piece of Kleenex off and then smash herself again. And so then
00:27:52 ►
of course we would tie her hands up again. But that was the last thing that she actually I actually gave up during a session one time. I said, I want you to know how powerful you are
00:28:09 ►
to use your power in a good way, not in a bad way.
00:28:13 ►
That’s what we kept working on.
00:28:14 ►
Use your power in a good way.
00:28:16 ►
And so I’m going to take these Kleenex off your hands
00:28:19 ►
and you watch.
00:28:21 ►
And you have total control over not to hit yourself
00:28:24 ►
because you’re not bad. You control over not to hit yourself.
00:28:26 ►
Because you’re not bad.
00:28:28 ►
You don’t need to be punished.
00:28:31 ►
You know, we did the whole psychoanalytic thing.
00:28:33 ►
And I said, now you watch.
00:28:35 ►
And so she took him off and looked and she said,
00:28:39 ►
well, God damn, you’re right.
00:28:44 ►
And that was the end of all her self-destructiveness.
00:28:44 ►
Really? Like a switch?
00:28:47 ►
Well, it was a long, long, long time coming.
00:28:52 ►
But it finally just ended like that.
00:28:55 ►
But she was amazing.
00:28:57 ►
And then, of course, what she wanted to do
00:28:59 ►
was that she wanted to come in and sit in on sessions
00:29:02 ►
with other kids, you know, to teach them
00:29:04 ►
how this stuff worked.
00:29:09 ►
And she was.
00:29:12 ►
I mean, she was very helpful with other kids.
00:29:14 ►
She would look after them, talk to them.
00:29:19 ►
She was one of the group of the people,
00:29:24 ►
the girls that we were working with. We had boys, too. I think
00:29:28 ►
we had more girls than boys. And she became very much part of the staff. And she started
00:29:37 ►
identifying with the staff and treating the other patients like she was part of the staff.
00:29:46 ►
And, of course, we really encouraged that.
00:29:49 ►
We gave her a great deal of praise for how helpful she was.
00:29:56 ►
And she loved that.
00:29:57 ►
Well, you know, what’s fascinating to me about that story is that,
00:30:01 ►
in my personal experience, both myself and other people have seen that
00:30:04 ►
when they first find these medicines,
00:30:06 ►
one of the first things they want to do is to help other people with them.
00:30:09 ►
And it’s interesting to see how intrinsic that is down to such a young person
00:30:15 ►
and such a disturbed person still having that human impulse to help.
00:30:22 ►
Oh, yes. She was very much into it.
00:30:25 ►
Did you ever get to oral doses or did she always
00:30:27 ►
have to have an injection?
00:30:30 ►
It didn’t come in oral
00:30:31 ►
doses. Oh, really?
00:30:33 ►
It just came in injectable doses.
00:30:36 ►
Huh.
00:30:37 ►
I didn’t realize that.
00:30:40 ►
Psilocybin came
00:30:41 ►
in pill form.
00:30:43 ►
And, of course, we experimented with all kinds of combinations.
00:30:47 ►
We would sometimes give them 30 milligrams of psilocybin
00:30:51 ►
and then LSD later.
00:30:54 ►
I mean, we experimented with all kinds of doses.
00:30:58 ►
Now, this is something that I’m just now hearing about
00:31:01 ►
and Myron has been talking about.
00:31:03 ►
Menlo Park. They combined several
00:31:05 ►
medicines. And there’s a lot of poly drug use going on out among young people experimenting
00:31:12 ►
right now. And to me, it’s kind of fascinating that within essentially a research setting,
00:31:18 ►
you were starting to even look at the combinations of these drugs. And so apparently that’s been, since the beginning of time,
00:31:27 ►
that that’s been happening. Is that true?
00:31:28 ►
I published a paper on that in a magazine called
00:31:32 ►
The Psychedelic Review on the use of different dosages
00:31:37 ►
and combination of psychedelics.
00:31:40 ►
You know, like 1960 or 61 or whatever it was.
00:31:45 ►
So it was published 45 years ago.
00:31:49 ►
That’s got to be one of the first papers on that.
00:31:53 ►
It seems to have come kind of full circle.
00:31:56 ►
I know Aldous was, and I don’t want to use the word elitist,
00:32:00 ►
but he thought these medicines should be used in a more educated way
00:32:07 ►
where people would know what they’re doing,
00:32:09 ►
not just in the hands of the party crowd that Tim Leary was approximating.
00:32:16 ►
And a recent editorial in a magazine, a guy named James Kent wrote a really great editorial
00:32:22 ►
in his magazine, Just Port One Under, about maybe we ought to revisit some of this thought
00:32:28 ►
about these medicines aren’t for everybody.
00:32:34 ►
They shouldn’t just be out on the street.
00:32:36 ►
They should be accessible, but after you know what you’re doing
00:32:40 ►
and you have a guide and things like that.
00:32:42 ►
And it seems like Huxley and Leary had
00:32:45 ►
two different approaches to that problem. I think Leary sort of thought it would be
00:32:49 ►
for the masses, and Aldous thought it should be more for people who were trained first.
00:32:55 ►
I don’t know. Is that accurate of how they were approaching the whole issue, psychedelic
00:33:01 ►
usage? Well, you couldn’t find two people who were more
00:33:06 ►
opposite than
00:33:08 ►
Leary and Aldous Huxley.
00:33:10 ►
I mean, they didn’t even
00:33:12 ►
inhabit the same planet.
00:33:17 ►
No.
00:33:21 ►
I would hope that people know
00:33:23 ►
about a book that Aldous wrote called Island
00:33:26 ►
because that’s a very, very good look
00:33:31 ►
at how he thought
00:33:33 ►
these medicines should be used
00:33:36 ►
right from childhood.
00:33:41 ►
And Island is all about, of course,
00:33:43 ►
the ideal society
00:33:44 ►
and the ideal way of raising children
00:33:47 ►
have you read Island?
00:33:51 ►
Mary C. and I each have a copy
00:33:53 ►
I’ve read it probably three times
00:33:54 ►
and the last time I read it
00:33:56 ►
was just after I met Laura
00:33:58 ►
for the first time
00:33:59 ►
when she said
00:34:00 ►
all is believed
00:34:02 ►
that was his most important book
00:34:03 ►
and so I went back and re-read it again.
00:34:06 ►
And I haven’t read it since hearing…
00:34:10 ►
I’ve heard you say this once before about sort of how to raise children.
00:34:14 ►
I haven’t read it with that view in mind,
00:34:18 ►
and so I should probably re-read it again with that.
00:34:21 ►
The thing about Island that I think disturbs everybody is the
00:34:25 ►
truth of it at
00:34:26 ►
the end when
00:34:27 ►
the rumbles of
00:34:28 ►
war are coming
00:34:29 ►
to the island
00:34:30 ►
too, that you
00:34:30 ►
can’t escape
00:34:31 ►
society as
00:34:34 ►
well.
00:34:35 ►
And I think
00:34:36 ►
part of his
00:34:36 ►
message was
00:34:37 ►
how do we
00:34:38 ►
integrate this
00:34:39 ►
consciousness into
00:34:40 ►
the warlike
00:34:41 ►
society that
00:34:42 ►
we’re in.
00:34:43 ►
Yes, it’s a
00:34:45 ►
I suppose you would
00:34:48 ►
it’s both complicated and simple at the same time.
00:34:54 ►
I would have to reread the end of
00:34:57 ►
Iowac.
00:35:04 ►
One of the ways that I’m so turned on to
00:35:10 ►
is that children have intuitive knowledge.
00:35:18 ►
Of course, my point of view is that we’ve all lived thousands of lives
00:35:23 ►
and each lifetime we come in, we
00:35:26 ►
bring all of the residue of all these hundreds and thousands of lives that we’ve had. I remember
00:35:34 ►
in one of the sessions that I had, I got back to the point where what existed in terms of, quote, life on the universe was a single cell.
00:35:51 ►
And I experienced myself as a single cell.
00:35:56 ►
Now, the language, of course, is impossible to describe how I would have reflective consciousness,
00:35:59 ►
which I didn’t have reflective consciousness,
00:36:02 ►
being a one-cell organism, but I had consciousness.
00:36:06 ►
And I know what it’s like to have consciousness
00:36:08 ►
when you’re a one-celled being.
00:36:15 ►
You know, this is kind of an off-the-wall question,
00:36:18 ►
but was it more comfortable and enjoyable
00:36:20 ►
than being a multi-celled being?
00:36:23 ►
I mean, you had your act together all in one cell.
00:36:25 ►
You didn’t have to worry about these parts.
00:36:27 ►
It was ecstatic simplicity.
00:36:33 ►
That’s a nice picture, actually.
00:36:34 ►
But also limited.
00:36:38 ►
It wasn’t the same as, for instance, nirvana.
00:36:42 ►
Like under LSD or through meditation or what have you,
00:36:45 ►
when you reach the state of nirvana or bliss or satori,
00:36:52 ►
whatever you want to call it.
00:36:53 ►
Different religions call it different things.
00:36:55 ►
That’s a different kind of consciousness. the apex of the consciousness of being, which encompasses the whole…
00:37:16 ►
See, the language just goes. There’s no language for any of this stuff.
00:37:20 ►
But anyway, the consciousness of nirvana is very, very, very different.
00:37:25 ►
It’s also very simple, but it’s also exceedingly complex
00:37:29 ►
in the sense of the completeness of it.
00:37:33 ►
But, you know, this language is all irrelevant.
00:37:38 ►
I think it’s really irrelevant.
00:37:39 ►
I think that’s why they say it’s ineffable, you know,
00:37:41 ►
that these experiences are…
00:37:43 ►
And there’s the difficulty of how we bring this back
00:37:46 ►
into the world.
00:37:46 ►
So what all this was saying,
00:37:49 ►
I get sidetracked,
00:37:52 ►
but I sometimes remember
00:37:53 ►
where I was going.
00:37:54 ►
And with children,
00:37:56 ►
they come in
00:37:57 ►
with a lot of intuitive knowledge.
00:38:01 ►
My middle child,
00:38:03 ►
her name is Bess,
00:38:05 ►
and I will, my middle child her name is Bess and if we have time
00:38:09 ►
I’ll tell you
00:38:10 ►
the circumstances under which she was born
00:38:13 ►
which were very very unique
00:38:15 ►
anyway she just knew a lot
00:38:18 ►
we used to call her
00:38:20 ►
the Buddha baby
00:38:21 ►
she was sort of round
00:38:23 ►
and
00:38:24 ►
incredible wonderful temperament.
00:38:27 ►
Everybody wanted to be around her.
00:38:30 ►
If the lady next door was having
00:38:32 ►
a bad day, she’d call over and ask
00:38:33 ►
if Bess could come over for an hour.
00:38:36 ►
So she was a
00:38:37 ►
social worker in the neighborhood.
00:38:40 ►
But she was.
00:38:41 ►
She just had amazing
00:38:43 ►
compassion and acceptance of people.
00:38:48 ►
And she would come up with things that were just amazing.
00:38:52 ►
Like one time, we were sitting in the car and she said,
00:38:57 ►
I love you to infinity.
00:39:00 ►
And I said, I understand what infinity is,
00:39:05 ►
but if you’re going to tell somebody what infinity was,
00:39:12 ►
how would you describe what infinity is?
00:39:15 ►
So she thought and she thought and she thought.
00:39:18 ►
She said, well, she said, if we got out of the car right now
00:39:21 ►
and we started walking right in a straight line in front of us,
00:39:27 ►
and we walked forever and forever,
00:39:31 ►
we would still never get there.
00:39:34 ►
And that’s what infinity is.
00:39:35 ►
How old was she?
00:39:36 ►
Three.
00:39:38 ►
So I said,
00:39:39 ►
and I get chills when I think about it,
00:39:42 ►
I said, well, Bess,
00:39:43 ►
how do you know that?
00:39:45 ►
And so she thought, and she about it. I said, well, Beth, how do you know that? And so she thought and she thought and she said,
00:39:48 ►
I just knowed it.
00:39:55 ►
And that’s a wonderful story
00:39:58 ►
because she just knew things
00:40:00 ►
and she had no idea how she knew it.
00:40:02 ►
And my understanding of that,
00:40:04 ►
being so horribly intellectual,
00:40:08 ►
is that there’s an accumulation of wisdom
00:40:10 ►
that somehow you bring in,
00:40:15 ►
that children bring in,
00:40:17 ►
and what Altus’s point was,
00:40:21 ►
that you start giving them the psychedelics
00:40:25 ►
when they start moving away from that intuitive knowledge,
00:40:31 ►
so that you constantly nurture the intuitive wisdom
00:40:35 ►
that people come in with.
00:40:38 ►
After my first LSD session,
00:40:41 ►
I went back to my mentor’s house,
00:40:43 ►
as I say, with my brother-in-law. And they
00:40:46 ►
had young twins, and they were probably maybe nine or ten months old or eleven months old,
00:40:53 ►
something like that. And there was a boy and a girl. And so I was immediately just fascinated with them. Went down and sat.
00:41:05 ►
They were in sort of a, what do you call them?
00:41:09 ►
Not cribs, but the playpen.
00:41:11 ►
Playpen.
00:41:11 ►
And so I got on the outside and laid down and just was looking at them.
00:41:16 ►
Looking at them all.
00:41:16 ►
So you were probably still somewhat altered from your experience?
00:41:19 ►
Completely.
00:41:20 ►
And continued to be for about six months.
00:41:25 ►
And so I was just looking and looking and looking at him
00:41:29 ►
and having, of course, this nonverbal communication.
00:41:33 ►
And then he gave a message to his sister
00:41:37 ►
who was across on the other side of the playpen.
00:41:40 ►
Come over here, there’s somebody here.
00:41:47 ►
Come here, there’s somebody here come here, there’s somebody here and she crawled over
00:41:51 ►
and so the three of us had a
00:41:53 ►
you know
00:41:54 ►
a thing together
00:41:56 ►
but he immediately recognized
00:41:59 ►
that I was there
00:42:00 ►
interesting
00:42:02 ►
the most important document that I’ve seen in years
00:42:08 ►
is Donald Hopping’s article in Max
00:42:14 ►
where he describes his experience
00:42:18 ►
in getting rid of his cancer
00:42:21 ►
through the ayahuasca experience.
00:42:24 ►
The man in Hawaii?
00:42:25 ►
Yeah.
00:42:26 ►
And that, to me,
00:42:31 ►
any people who are interested
00:42:35 ►
in research about how these medicines work,
00:42:40 ►
that’s a goldmine
00:42:42 ►
because he got such incredible results.
00:42:44 ►
He was entirely cancer free
00:42:47 ►
in three ayahuasca sessions
00:42:49 ►
and he lived another 10 or 11 years
00:42:52 ►
after that
00:42:53 ►
cancer free
00:42:54 ►
I had written to Donald
00:42:56 ►
I knew Donald when I lived in Hawaii
00:42:58 ►
I mean it’s a small world
00:42:59 ►
when I worked for the University of Hawaii
00:43:02 ►
he was a language
00:43:04 ►
he was a for Peace Corps he was a language, he was a, for Peace Corps,
00:43:06 ►
he was a linguistics specialist.
00:43:10 ►
And here, 40 years later, you know, we run into each other again.
00:43:16 ►
Because when I wrote him, he said, aren’t you the guy that was giving LSD to children?
00:43:21 ►
You told me all these amazing things that happened.
00:43:23 ►
He said, and then that’s when, you know,
00:43:25 ►
then after that he got cancer.
00:43:26 ►
And that’s how he got to ayahuasca.
00:43:28 ►
That’s right.
00:43:28 ►
So, you know, talk about stitching together over time.
00:43:34 ►
Talk about lives that have been intertwined
00:43:35 ►
without even knowing it for years to come.
00:43:37 ►
Yes, yes, yes.
00:43:38 ►
And I said, Donald, you’ve got to write down
00:43:43 ►
how you think that happens.
00:43:46 ►
How you think that ayahuasca works.
00:43:50 ►
Because, you know, I was trained as a scientist.
00:43:53 ►
I have a Ph.D. in research psychology and research methodology.
00:43:57 ►
So that’s just part of my bones, you know, looking at the world that way.
00:44:02 ►
And so he did write it.
00:44:04 ►
And he wrote
00:44:05 ►
that’s exactly what I thought
00:44:07 ►
but I didn’t want to tell him what I thought
00:44:09 ►
but what he said, how he thought it worked
00:44:11 ►
was exactly what I thought it would work too
00:44:14 ►
so it was very interesting
00:44:15 ►
now that’s just a gold mine
00:44:17 ►
this one guy writing this one article
00:44:19 ►
but
00:44:21 ►
I don’t know if anybody pays any attention to it
00:44:24 ►
that article is I’ve had dozens pays any attention to it that article is
00:44:26 ►
I’ve had dozens of people
00:44:28 ►
tell me about that article just out of the blue
00:44:30 ►
that one has stuck in a lot of minds
00:44:33 ►
good
00:44:33 ►
because you know you wrote the follow up
00:44:35 ►
to it
00:44:35 ►
but I know
00:44:39 ►
I mean I was in academia
00:44:40 ►
I was never stuck in academia
00:44:42 ►
I never was stuck in anything
00:44:44 ►
because I was always just
00:44:47 ►
visiting different parts of my life. Rather than having the same thing in a lifetime,
00:44:52 ►
I’ve had ten or twelve lifetimes.
00:44:54 ►
You didn’t come here to stay, you just came here to visit.
00:44:56 ►
I just came here.
00:44:58 ►
Just to kind of close the loop on Nancy, what became of Nancy, the young woman? Well, one of the most difficult things that I’ve ever had to do in my life
00:45:11 ►
was to tell them that we couldn’t do it anymore.
00:45:14 ►
And, you know, that I was basically out of a job.
00:45:19 ►
Did they stop you before LSD got scheduled, or was it part of the whole scheduling thing?
00:45:23 ►
It was part of the whole scheduling thing? It was part of the whole scheduling.
00:45:25 ►
Everything happened very, very quickly.
00:45:28 ►
And it happened quickly almost everywhere,
00:45:30 ►
in England and the Netherlands and Switzerland.
00:45:34 ►
It all happened sort of in a rather short time period
00:45:39 ►
where everything got shut down.
00:45:44 ►
And so it was heartbreaking meeting those kids. And I think one of the
00:45:52 ►
papers I wrote about one of the other girls, who was just an amazing, amazing story about
00:45:58 ►
this type of girl, about telling her and her response to me telling her.
00:46:09 ►
So, yeah, it was very, very difficult meeting them.
00:46:12 ►
But she was attending.
00:46:15 ►
They had a school within the hospital,
00:46:20 ►
and she got to the point that she would go to the school in the hospital,
00:46:25 ►
and she was a worker on the ward, you know, with the other kids. She was part of the staff.
00:46:27 ►
Well, you know, is there anybody you know of right now doing work with children in LSD?
00:46:33 ►
I mean, has that just totally ended when you were stopped? Did anybody else work with children
00:46:44 ►
that you know of? Well, Loretta Bender,
00:46:46 ►
who was a neurologist
00:46:47 ►
at Theatristic Chicago,
00:46:51 ►
she was into doing
00:46:53 ►
a lot of experimentation.
00:46:56 ►
And she gave some autistic children
00:46:59 ►
LSD,
00:47:01 ►
but she didn’t work with it therapeutically.
00:47:03 ►
She gave it as a drug.
00:47:05 ►
And they just prescribed it and didn’t work with it therapeutically. She gave it as a drug, and they just prescribed it
00:47:07 ►
and didn’t do anything for kids.
00:47:09 ►
And, I mean, nothing, you know,
00:47:12 ►
because we use it as a tool
00:47:16 ►
for doing psychotherapy,
00:47:19 ►
but she didn’t,
00:47:20 ►
and she didn’t get any results.
00:47:22 ►
Well, yeah, it’s very difficult to expect these medicines
00:47:26 ►
to do it on their own.
00:47:27 ►
Let’s go back and wrap up one thing and then we’ll finish.
00:47:31 ►
But the thing
00:47:32 ►
about where would it
00:47:34 ►
be in an ideal culture?
00:47:37 ►
Definitely,
00:47:38 ►
you know,
00:47:39 ►
my experience telling me
00:47:42 ►
it shouldn’t be on the streets.
00:47:43 ►
It shouldn’t be passed out to uninformed people.
00:47:50 ►
That somehow people need to be trained in how to use it
00:47:55 ►
and train other people in how to use it.
00:48:03 ►
So to have sort of like psychedelic therapists available in the
00:48:09 ►
concert, that would be quite an accomplishment. But they would have to be trained by people,
00:48:18 ►
some of us who are still alive, but we’re all dead.
00:48:22 ►
They’d better hurry up. Yeah, they better hurry up.
00:48:32 ►
And then using island, of course, as a model, too,
00:48:36 ►
to use it with children when children reach certain ages. Yes, I remember island.
00:48:38 ►
There were two or three, four or five plateaus
00:48:41 ►
when children and adults, early adults,
00:48:43 ►
there were certain times in their life where it was like a therapeutic session, a guided session.
00:48:49 ►
I recently heard a talk Terrence McKenna gave talking about psychedelics and culture and
00:48:58 ►
how they’re really against one another because cultures like to preserve the status quo and psychedelic medicines
00:49:06 ►
break barriers, break boundaries
00:49:08 ►
and so that is very
00:49:10 ►
difficult to introduce
00:49:12 ►
or to instill
00:49:14 ►
psychedelic
00:49:17 ►
sensibility
00:49:18 ►
into a culture without totally
00:49:20 ►
unraveling the culture
00:49:22 ►
at least is his
00:49:23 ►
take on it.
00:49:25 ►
I think there are many aspects to that,
00:49:28 ►
and one of them is that it’s been used in Indian cultures
00:49:32 ►
for many, many, many years,
00:49:34 ►
and it’s a part of the Indian culture.
00:49:37 ►
But the Indian culture basically has never been a materialistic culture.
00:49:42 ►
It’s been a spiritual culture,
00:49:44 ►
that the medicines
00:49:45 ►
determined what the culture was,
00:49:49 ►
which was a spiritual quest
00:49:51 ►
and to be at one with nature.
00:49:54 ►
So there was no conflict.
00:49:56 ►
It was complete harmony.
00:49:57 ►
But introducing that to Manhattan real estate
00:50:00 ►
developers
00:50:02 ►
might be a stretch for some of those chaps.
00:50:06 ►
It might be.
00:50:08 ►
Yeah, I think that’s a point well
00:50:09 ►
taken about the, both
00:50:11 ►
the green
00:50:13 ►
feeling and the closeness
00:50:15 ►
with nature that you feel and the
00:50:17 ►
non-materiality
00:50:18 ►
really work against the culture that we’re
00:50:21 ►
Yeah, because our culture
00:50:23 ►
is based on there’s a scarcity,
00:50:26 ►
there’s a limited supply of everything,
00:50:28 ►
and you have to work like hell
00:50:30 ►
to get your share.
00:50:32 ►
That whole thing is a delusional system.
00:50:35 ►
There is abundance in the planet.
00:50:38 ►
But our system, our economic system,
00:50:42 ►
the Western economic system,
00:50:44 ►
won’t work if people thought that there was abundance
00:50:47 ►
because then they would start running like rats, like crazy in a cage,
00:50:51 ►
trying to get their color out of the slot.
00:50:55 ►
So it depends on the culture.
00:50:59 ►
And in Brazil, the use of ayahuasquero is done within a religious or spiritual setting.
00:51:09 ►
And it’s not at all at odds with the Indian culture there.
00:51:13 ►
Because they’re trying to preserve nature.
00:51:16 ►
Right.
00:51:20 ►
So, there you have eminent elder Gary Fisher in his own words.
00:51:26 ►
Isn’t it amazing how far ahead the medical community was in psychedelic research
00:51:30 ►
before the war on drugs brought all of that promising work to an end?
00:51:35 ►
Just thinking about Gary’s story about that poor little girl Nancy
00:51:39 ►
and then thinking about how many thousands of seriously ill other children
00:51:43 ►
there were like her
00:51:45 ►
that could have been saved from a hellish life if only they’d let this research go forward.
00:51:52 ►
Now, if you want to read more about Gary’s work, by the way,
00:51:54 ►
you’ll find links to many of his papers on our website.
00:51:58 ►
Just go to matrixmasters.com and click on Podcasts,
00:52:02 ►
and there you’ll find the link from this podcast to gary’s
00:52:06 ►
page that we put up or actually you can go directly to the albert hoffman foundation website
00:52:12 ►
that’s where we’re linking most of the papers from that’s www.hoffman.org and that’s H-O-F-M-A-N-N.org.
00:52:31 ►
And by the way, there is one paper that we put up on our website in a print-friendly version,
00:52:35 ►
and that’s the one that Gary referred to from the Psychedelic Review.
00:52:42 ►
I think it’s probably the world’s first paper on polydrugging and provides a dosage table that I think also you’re going to find quite useful and interesting.
00:52:46 ►
And also on the page we put up there for Gary,
00:52:50 ►
you’ll find the link to the ayahuasca paper by Donald Topping.
00:52:54 ►
That’s the man that Gary mentioned in his conversation earlier.
00:52:58 ►
That paper, by the way, is on the MAPS website.
00:53:01 ►
So again, www.maps.org it’s always a good place to go to see what’s current in
00:53:08 ►
psychedelic research right now and of course your first stop on the internet for all questions
00:53:14 ►
relating to these issues is arrowid.org and for legal issues i’d go first of all i think to
00:53:23 ►
cognitive liberty all one word cognitive libertyognitiveLiberty.org.
00:53:27 ►
And all those sites, by the way, have a lot of crossover.
00:53:30 ►
I think you’ll find them all interesting.
00:53:33 ►
And while you’re out there surfing, by the way,
00:53:36 ►
why don’t you surf on over to the Entheogen Review.
00:53:39 ►
That’s E-N-T-H-E-O-G-E-N-R-E-V-I-E-W.org.
00:53:44 ►
N-T-H-E-O-G-E-N-R-E-V-I-E-W.org.
00:53:53 ►
In Theory of Gen Review, it bills itself as the Journal of Unauthorized Research on Visionary Plants and Drugs.
00:53:58 ►
I’ll be talking more about that little jewel of a publication in the next podcast. But if you’re not already a subscriber, you’re missing out on some of the probably best windows there is into the work that’s now being done in this area, at least by the underground.
00:54:10 ►
And before I go, I want to be sure to thank Jacques and Cordell and Wells of Chateau Hayouk
00:54:17 ►
for the use of their music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:54:20 ►
And of course, a big thanks to Gary for putting up with my continuing attempts to get a
00:54:27 ►
decent recording of our conversations. I’ll get it right one day, Gary, I promise. And just so I
00:54:34 ►
don’t leave you with the impression that Gary Fisher thinks these powerful medicines are
00:54:38 ►
best left to the medical field to use, I’d like to read a few lines from Charlie Groves’ interview with Gary
00:54:46 ►
in his new book, Higher Wisdom.
00:54:49 ►
Charlie had, or maybe Roger Walsh did this,
00:54:53 ►
I’m not sure which one of them did the interview,
00:54:54 ►
but the question posed to Gary was,
00:54:56 ►
if psychedelics were sanctioned and people had access to settings
00:55:00 ►
where they could be used optimally,
00:55:03 ►
what might they accomplish?
00:55:05 ►
And here was Gary’s answer to this question.
00:55:08 ►
I don’t know how you could institutionalize psychedelics in the culture as it exists.
00:55:13 ►
I think that idea may be an oxymoron.
00:55:16 ►
The functional way is in a very informal manner, through one human to another,
00:55:21 ►
just as one might read a wonderful, insightful book and then want to share it with a friend.
00:55:26 ►
I think maybe that’s the way the psychedelic experience will spread in an optimal fashion.
00:55:31 ►
I don’t think I would start with trying to train psychiatrists or psychologists in the
00:55:35 ►
use of psychedelics.
00:55:36 ►
I can’t see how putting them into a medical school or psychology department would work.
00:55:42 ►
I would just go around looking for people who are naturally kind. Who can disagree with that? What great advice, huh? Well, again
00:55:52 ►
thanks to all of you for listening here today. I guess that’s about it for now.
00:55:56 ►
This is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.