Program Notes
Guest speakers: Ann & Sasha Shulgin
This program features Ann and Sasha Shulgin in their 2006 appearance at Burning Man where they participated in the Palenque Norte lecture series with their ever-popular “Ask the Shulgins” question and answer session. Questions that the Shulgins answered that day included such diverse issues as:
* What is your favorite drug?
* What do you think about using drugs with psychotherapy
* How do you feel about chronic drug use
* How do you know that the psychedelic path is one you should go down
* What advice do you have for couples who are on a psychedelic path
* What do you think about polydrug use
Also, Sasha describes how his first mescaline experience led to his future experiments with various compounds … and he warns about the unpredictability of these substances.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
Since today’s program is a bit longer than usual, I’ll dispense with my usual witty remarks and begin instead by trying to paint a verbal picture of what it was like on the playa at Burning Man this year
00:00:38 ►
when Ann and Sasha Shulgin gave their presentation in the big tent in Theon Village.
00:00:46 ►
Shulgin gave their presentation in the big tent in Theon Village. It was only a couple of hours before they were scheduled to talk when I discovered that the village had run
00:00:50 ►
out of biodiesel fuel and the generators had quit running. But before I even had a chance
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to become concerned, good old Darren, Mark, Michael, and the rest of the sound crew were
00:01:01 ►
already busy setting up a portable generator to provide
00:01:05 ►
enough backup power to operate our amplifier.
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Unfortunately, the little generator didn’t provide enough power to also run the big exhaust
00:01:13 ►
fans that had helped to cool the inside of the tent on previous days.
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And so by the time the Shulguns began their question and answer session, it was hot, as in really hot inside what the
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satellite photos now show to be the largest structure at this year’s festival. And it
00:01:32 ►
wasn’t just the desert heat that made it so hot. The tent was packed. The front row of
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the audience was only a couple of feet away from where the Shulguns were sitting, and
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the crowd spilled way out into the esplanade. I don’t think there was a single space left to sit or stand anywhere near the huge tent
00:01:50 ►
that afternoon.
00:01:52 ►
So I have no idea how many people were there but it was certainly our week’s largest crowd
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and that’s really saying something because we had overflow crowds for several of the
00:02:01 ►
other speakers as well.
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So that’s a little idea of what the conditions were like, but you don’t have to take my word
00:02:08 ►
for it.
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Just go to matrixmasters.com and click on the Burning Man photo link where you can see
00:02:15 ►
a few pictures that I took during the talk that you’re about to hear, which is the Planque
00:02:20 ►
Norte 2006 edition of Ask the Shulgins.
00:02:39 ►
I’d like to say something about the questions, by the way.
00:02:54 ►
There are some people who would love to ask something that they are afraid might sound a little bit confrontational or, you know, disrespectful or something like that.
00:02:57 ►
Please don’t think that way.
00:03:03 ►
Confrontational questions are more fun for us than anything else, actually.
00:03:05 ►
So don’t hesitate, okay?
00:03:09 ►
And I would like to make one request on questions.
00:03:11 ►
Don’t bring up questions such as
00:03:13 ►
how much phosphoryl chloride
00:03:16 ►
do you add to silice to make
00:03:17 ►
psilocybin?
00:03:20 ►
No, not today.
00:03:25 ►
And don’t be shy.
00:03:27 ►
There are only 2 million people watching you.
00:03:29 ►
I’m not shy.
00:03:30 ►
I actually have no voice left,
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but I just want to ask a very general question.
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What do you think the future of psychedelics is?
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What’s in the making now?
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What’s the future of this? What’s the future of this?
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What’s the next level?
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Well, I think much of the future
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is being seen in England and Europe now.
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And I’m very much afraid that with our current enthusiasm
00:03:59 ►
on war on drugs
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and the enthusiasm of using that war as a political device to get power in Washington and funds in Washington,
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that I think in the United States is going to be quite a while before we become rational in the war.
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I don’t think the future is very bright in this country.
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The tendency to – let me give an example. The word is used by the DEA
00:04:28 ►
quite often of something that is not illegal. And this was in
00:04:32 ►
one of their brochures on Salvia Debenorum.
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Salvinorum A as a compound and Salvinorum
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the actual plant
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was Salvia Debenorum. the actual plant was
00:04:47 ►
an illicit plant
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or an illicit compound.
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I’m not certain what they mean by illicit.
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It does not mean illegal.
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But they refer to anything that is in the psychedelic area
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as being illicit.
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So I don’t think they are going to relax their enthusiasm
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to make more things illegal.
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I guess I’m the optimist in this case.
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There are so many…
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Oops, is this working?
00:05:16 ►
Can you hear with back?
00:05:18 ►
Okay.
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There are so many people, especially in Europe,
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but not only in Europe, who are making things and even writing little pamphlets and exploring.
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I mean, there are a lot of people who love chemistry, like the altered state.
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And they are all over the place being pretty discreet.
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If they’re not discreet, they get into trouble.
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And the laws in England, thanks to Amanda, a great deal of the work has been done by her Beckley Foundation.
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The laws are being looked at for probable revision.
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And the laws in the other countries of Europe are beginning
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to change. And I think that even if the United States stays in its hardened position for
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quite a while, it will eventually be left alone in that position. So I think things
00:06:23 ►
are going to change.
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Katie, somebody over here?
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Sure.
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I’d like to know what each of your favorite chemicals are that you’ve developed and a little bit of why.
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If you had one to take to heaven with you, which would be… Well, I tend not to try…
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I try not to get favorites
00:06:50 ►
because I like to keep my liver fairly clear for new materials.
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And you don’t want to get into habits of drug use.
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I refuse to become a chronic drug user.
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Well, in the sense of known drugs.
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refused to become a chronic drug user. Well, in a sense known drugs.
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But I think probably of the materials that I have explored and
00:07:12 ►
looked around, I think 2CB ranks very high on my list.
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And for me, I think of
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the great legendary ones, mescaline is one of the truly most fantastic drugs.
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Oh, actually, it’s the peyote, which is a visionary plant.
00:07:49 ►
But of Sasha’s and Dave Nichols’ productions, I think 2CB Fly.
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And I’m not going to explain what that is because I don’t know chemistry at all.
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But the fly is probably the best.
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Yeah, going to heaven drug.
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Well, heaven on earth drugs.
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We have somebody over this way.
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Come on up so at least I can get you the mic.
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You don’t have to come all the way up.
00:08:14 ►
Make a path for these venturesome people if we could.
00:08:18 ►
And those of you that want to ask questions,
00:08:20 ►
if you start kind of coming up this way,
00:08:23 ►
we can’t stand right in front of that amp, that mic.
00:08:23 ►
Thank you.
00:08:24 ►
Hello. This is kind of a personal question. I just finished my bachelor’s in botany.
00:08:31 ►
I just finished a bachelor’s in botany in England, bachelor’s degree.
00:08:37 ►
And I was wondering if you would know names of people who are carrying out
00:08:40 ►
ethnobotanical expeditions now on interesting psychoactive plants
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because it’s kind of hard to find out.
00:08:48 ►
Botanical expeditions?
00:08:50 ►
Yeah. Oh, gosh.
00:08:52 ►
No, but I think
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you can find them listed in
00:08:55 ►
what are
00:08:57 ►
the little magazines
00:08:59 ►
that list
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trips to the Amazon and things
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like that.
00:09:05 ►
In Theogen Review, maybe one.
00:09:07 ►
In Theogen Review, and there was a…
00:09:11 ►
Shaman’s Drum, that’s the one I was trying to remember.
00:09:15 ►
Shaman’s Drum, and there’s at least one other one, isn’t there?
00:09:20 ►
Oh, those are the main ones.
00:09:22 ►
They have ads in those magazines which tell you what’s going on.
00:09:31 ►
Hi.
00:09:32 ►
Could you tell me what your thoughts are on using psychedelics in psychotherapy?
00:09:52 ►
Well, I did use psychedelics and MDMA, which is not, strictly speaking, a psychedelic,
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before it became illegal in psychotherapy,
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as a lay therapist.
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therapy as a lay therapist. And I think MDMA is the greatest possible drug for that. It’s a good drug for people who are naive in the psychedelic area because strictly speaking it doesn’t give you psychedelic effects
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some people get psychedelic effects on anything
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but MDMA
00:10:32 ►
MDMA is an insight drug
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it may be used for raves
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but it’s greatest use is
00:10:43 ►
for personal insight without fear.
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And I’ve heard several psychotherapists say that with using MDMA,
00:10:57 ►
the patient and the therapist save around six months’ worth of time and money.
00:11:05 ►
And there are other drugs, 2C-B is also very good,
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but 2C-B is a full blown psychedelic.
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And you’d want to do MDMA work for at least six months
00:11:22 ►
to a year before you start with the MDMA. There
00:11:27 ►
probably are other very good drugs but the drawback of some of them is that
00:11:32 ►
they last too long. Too long in the sense that you can only do have one patient a day. therapists have to make a living too.
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So that’s the answer I have.
00:11:53 ►
Actually, one of the concepts
00:11:55 ►
with the use of MDMA in therapy is the
00:11:59 ►
dropping of the personal barrier. Very often
00:12:03 ►
from what I understand in therapeutic psychotherapy,
00:12:07 ►
sometimes it takes six months of visits every week to open yourself up, drop your own barrier
00:12:14 ►
to be able to address your own problems. The therapist has to be patient to put up with
00:12:20 ►
that. The MDMA can make it occur in an hour, hour and a half. And hence the entire
00:12:25 ►
therapeutic repair can start on the day of visit rather than six months after the day
00:12:31 ►
of visit.
00:12:32 ►
This is mainly because the first thing that has to be established in a therapeutic relationship
00:12:39 ►
is trust. And for somebody who is really damaged and hurting, it’s very difficult to trust anyone, and the therapist is included.
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With MDMA, somehow it manages to allow the trust right away or very quickly.
00:13:00 ►
We don’t know how it does it, but it does.
00:13:06 ►
Yeah, hi.
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I think drugs are a wonderful way of exploring different realms of consciousness,
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but that the repeated use of them to attain those states of consciousness
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is hopelessly materialistic and dangerous to the individuated self
00:13:22 ►
that Western evolution of consciousness had worked so hard to achieve?
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Do you have any thoughts on your creations as potential contributions
00:13:29 ►
towards subrational states of consciousness
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and that people lose themselves to the being of the drug
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and become consumed by the lie?
00:13:40 ►
Well, one of the words I very much dislike when I hear it used, because it’s often used to avoid the real problem, is the word of addiction.
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I don’t like the term of drug addiction because it implies a – let me say what I do like, and that is the dependency.
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You can be physically dependent or you can be psychologically dependent on a drug, or both.
00:14:07 ►
And I think the idea of any drug dependency has taken and taken from your choice,
00:14:13 ►
from your choosing the route you want to take, having given up that freedom of choice.
00:14:18 ►
So I’m very strongly against the chronic use and reuse of any drug.
00:14:22 ►
against the chronic use and reuse of any drug.
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And this applies to not just psychedelics,
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but to stimulants or sedatives or things that are actually required to be used again and again.
00:14:33 ►
I think they should be changed around to other alternatives.
00:14:38 ►
The idea of being totally dependent upon a drug,
00:14:40 ►
I find a very uncomfortable feeling.
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on a drug, I find it a very uncomfortable feeling.
00:14:49 ►
Almost every one of the spiritual traditions
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and religions warn against
00:14:58 ►
using drugs.
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I think that my hunch is that that is because they are talking to the majority of people,
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and it’s a very tempting path, and the people who wrote the books for the various religious traditions
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probably knew the effects of visionary plants.
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And I think that they wanted to avoid or have their followers avoid habituation or dependency.
00:15:50 ►
tendency. But also because once you realize that you can make contact with whatever you want to call it, God or the source or the ground of being by yourself without an intermediary, it’s liable to put some of the gurus out of business.
00:16:11 ►
I think that what some of the psychedelics do is they tell you that there is a someplace else
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or another reality or many other realities.
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or many other realities.
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And it can confirm your hope that there is a spiritual realm inside yourself
00:16:35 ►
and that there is something,
00:16:41 ►
an intelligence, a consciousness
00:16:43 ►
that drives the universe.
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The rest of it, I think, cannot be done with drugs all the time.
00:16:53 ►
You have to do some kind of spiritual practice
00:16:58 ►
so that you can take the lessons of the psychedelic experience into your daily life.
00:17:06 ►
Otherwise, the whole thing is pretty much wasted.
00:17:19 ►
Dorian Sagan, the love child of Carl Sagan and Lynn Margulis, has written of drugs as, and this is his term,
00:17:30 ►
exogenous hormones, that is hormones that lie outside of our bodies.
00:17:36 ►
And in that there’s the implication that we need these exogenous hormones in order to develop a fully mature form as human beings.
00:17:44 ►
Could you comment on that, please?
00:17:47 ►
I think one of my comments that came into mind was my first mescaline experience.
00:17:54 ►
Yes, and maybe an exogenous hormone.
00:17:57 ►
I’ve been exploring very psychoactive drugs for quite a while.
00:18:01 ►
This is well-known here, Different things. Different compounds. Different
00:18:05 ►
plants. And it was in the
00:18:08 ►
I guess 1950s that I
00:18:09 ►
actually took my first mescaline experience.
00:18:12 ►
And I suddenly realized that there was
00:18:14 ►
a great deal of
00:18:14 ►
I learned not
00:18:17 ►
from the mescaline was not
00:18:20 ►
doing it. The mescaline was allowing me
00:18:22 ►
to do it. And I
00:18:24 ►
would see something and I would
00:18:26 ►
interpret something, but the colors I saw I had never seen before, but they were not
00:18:31 ►
in this white crystal, they were in me. I was aware of them, but I had never acknowledged
00:18:36 ►
them. So this is a sense of a hormonal thing, and indeed exogenous would be a good word
00:18:43 ►
for it, because it came from outside of me. But once it allowed me to understand
00:18:48 ►
why, as a child, I would sit and look up
00:18:52 ►
into the flower beds above me and see things that I could not see
00:18:56 ►
in a normal way, I relived all that and I began understanding why
00:19:00 ►
I did that. And the relationship of me and other people was
00:19:03 ►
obvious to me because I was
00:19:06 ►
avoiding other people in some ways by going into the flower bed and looking at the flowers.
00:19:11 ►
And I just never quite thought of it. I see a bee gathering honey or whatever a bee gathers
00:19:16 ►
from a bunch of pollen. Pollen, I guess, yeah. And to see the point of view of the flower
00:19:23 ►
from the bee’s point of view.
00:19:28 ►
At the end of that very, very life-changing experience,
00:19:30 ►
my first medicine experience,
00:19:33 ►
it changed the whole direction of my research and my interests.
00:19:38 ►
One of the things I was telling someone a couple of days ago,
00:19:42 ►
I had a flower that I had growing in the house,
00:19:44 ►
living in Berkeley at that time.
00:19:47 ►
And I could not pick the flower in the field.
00:19:48 ►
It would destroy the flower.
00:19:51 ►
It’s undoable under the influence of mescaline.
00:19:54 ►
And I looked at that flower in the house,
00:19:59 ►
and I looked down inside of it and see beautiful colors toward the center of it,
00:20:01 ►
which I had never seen before.
00:20:06 ►
The next experiment I made, one of my first synthetic variations on this,
00:20:08 ►
was to make a methyl group into an ethyl group and see if it would do the same sort of thing.
00:20:11 ►
I had a slightly more potent compound.
00:20:14 ►
It was the ethoxy counterpart.
00:20:16 ►
And I was curious if it was the same type of action.
00:20:20 ►
It was not.
00:20:21 ►
In fact, I had a flower in the living room, and I looked in the flower to see if I could see the peculiar strange colors and I didn’t have any hesitation tearing the flower apart to look.
00:20:33 ►
And I looked inside but the flower fragmented the flower. Something I could not have done on meslin. Something I did casually on the ethoxy compound. So I began then to realize slight changes in the molecule may change potency,
00:20:46 ►
but may change the quality of the experience
00:20:48 ►
and might make some things apparent that were not apparent under the other ones
00:20:53 ►
or the other way about.
00:20:54 ►
Be unable to find some aspect of your own personality
00:20:57 ►
that you would like to investigate, which you could with one compound and not with another.
00:21:05 ►
Each drug opens a different door inside you.
00:21:10 ►
But to confirm what Sasha is saying,
00:21:16 ►
what you get out of a psychedelic experience
00:21:20 ►
has to be within you.
00:21:23 ►
And it’s just that in our hurry
00:21:26 ►
and our everyday life,
00:21:30 ►
the way we live it now especially,
00:21:33 ►
we don’t take the time
00:21:35 ►
to try to explore the insides of ourselves.
00:21:40 ►
A great deal of information
00:21:42 ►
about these other parts of yourself
00:21:44 ►
come through in dreams.
00:21:47 ►
But the learning you can do from that is a little bit more limited.
00:21:56 ►
And some people just cannot remember their dreams.
00:21:59 ►
But dreams are a very, very good way of getting messages from your own unconscious.
00:22:06 ►
But again, the experience is not in the drug.
00:22:10 ►
It’s in you.
00:22:16 ►
What do you think about the difference between low dosages and high dosages of, say, MDMA
00:22:22 ►
in terms of getting the best results for therapy?
00:22:26 ►
I notice a lot of people take large, large amounts,
00:22:28 ►
which seems to me to cause more distractions,
00:22:32 ►
both physical, like too much energy rolling through it,
00:22:34 ►
and sometimes low dosages are actually better for just inner work.
00:22:38 ►
That depends a great deal.
00:22:41 ►
First of all, the first experience with MDMA,
00:22:46 ►
I think among all the people, all the therapists I met,
00:22:50 ►
lay and otherwise, who had used MDMA in therapy,
00:22:55 ►
I think most of them would not use more than 125 milligrams
00:23:00 ►
the first time. There are some people for whom 100 is enough.
00:23:08 ►
And when I was doing therapy, I would start with 100 milligrams, no more,
00:23:17 ►
because some people are very sensitive to it.
00:23:20 ►
But also, apparently if you weigh more than the average, you need a little bit more than a skinny person.
00:23:36 ►
I really didn’t believe that.
00:23:38 ►
But there was one very, very nice lady who wanted a first experience with MDMA and she weighed about
00:23:47 ►
well, quite a few pounds overweight.
00:23:52 ►
And she couldn’t really get the
00:23:55 ►
effect until we tried her on 150
00:23:59 ►
milligrams, which is really quite a lot.
00:24:03 ►
As far as, you asked specifically about MDMA,
00:24:08 ►
I think that with most psychedelics,
00:24:13 ►
it is much, much better to be modest in your dosage.
00:24:19 ►
I think that if you overdose,
00:24:24 ►
you’re going to lose any of the learning that you got.
00:24:27 ►
You’re just going to be stoned.
00:24:29 ►
And being stoned might appeal to some people, but you don’t learn much.
00:24:33 ►
So I think lower is not always better, but usually it is.
00:24:40 ►
I hate to make generalizations like that because there are always exceptions, but I think it’s safer to go with lower.
00:24:51 ►
At least until you have had enough experience with that particular drug to know what your reaction is.
00:24:58 ►
It can be quite individual.
00:25:00 ►
individual.
00:25:06 ►
First of all, I’d like to bless you for the work you’ve done and the courage you’ve had
00:25:08 ►
in bringing this out to the world.
00:25:19 ►
I’m sorry.
00:25:20 ►
I haven’t had too many psychedelic
00:25:22 ►
experiences, but I’m wondering how you can tell
00:25:24 ►
whether it’s a path that you should go down
00:25:27 ►
or whether it’s a path you should avoid, because I’ve had very mixed experiences.
00:25:32 ►
Thank you.
00:25:34 ►
Whoa.
00:25:35 ►
Is it a path you should avoid or a path you should go down?
00:25:39 ►
I don’t know how you can answer the question until you start down the path.
00:25:42 ►
I really don’t.
00:25:43 ►
you can answer the question until you start down the path. I really don’t.
00:25:47 ►
You know, I’ve really
00:25:50 ►
had a very good friend who wanted very much to try MDMA.
00:25:56 ►
He had never taken any psychedelic, but he wanted to try MDMA.
00:26:01 ►
He lived right across the street from a bar
00:26:03 ►
and every evening after he came home from work he would be in the bar until it closed at 2 o’clock.
00:26:10 ►
And then stagger across the street and go to bed and go to work the next day.
00:26:15 ►
But he wanted to try MDMA and I was always avoiding giving it to him because of two reasons.
00:26:21 ►
One, he is a chronic alcohol user, therefore he may be a chronic drug user if he got into drugs.
00:26:27 ►
But secondly, he could not tolerate homosexuals.
00:26:31 ►
He actually became almost vigorously, actively voicing
00:26:37 ►
the disgust of people who are homosexual.
00:26:40 ►
And I had the feeling if we were to open that door in him with MDMA, he may find that in his inner self he believes he may be one.
00:26:50 ►
At which point, he being larger and heavier than me, I might get pounded into the floor.
00:26:56 ►
So there’s an example of an area in which I think good judgment would tend to avoid having him get down this path.
00:27:06 ►
But in general, my feeling is the path, the doors down the hallway,
00:27:10 ►
to say should you go through them or not can’t really be answered
00:27:14 ►
until you know what’s on the other side of that door.
00:27:19 ►
I would come up with an exception to that, and that is if you really are, for reasons you can’t understand,
00:27:30 ►
if you’re really scared to try psychedelic, and especially if all your buddies are telling you you really should have this experience,
00:27:42 ►
you really should have this experience.
00:27:46 ►
I would go with your instincts because there are some people who are extremely sensitive
00:27:51 ►
who do not need to open those doors with psychedelics
00:27:56 ►
because they open rather easily without them.
00:28:00 ►
And they should not use psychedelics.
00:28:04 ►
People who are a little off balance,
00:28:08 ►
who are not very strong in their core self,
00:28:14 ►
and people who are young enough
00:28:18 ►
so that they haven’t really coalesced that feeling of I-ness.
00:28:30 ►
They are still not fully formed.
00:28:34 ►
I hope I’m not sounding too exotic.
00:28:37 ►
By the time you’ve reached 30, you have a real sense of the I am, I exist.
00:28:47 ►
But sometimes it takes quite a while into your late 20s before that is really strong and firm.
00:28:56 ►
And before that, it can be quite risky for some people to take the psychedelic journey.
00:29:04 ►
are quite risky for some people to take the psychedelic journey.
00:29:11 ►
So especially if they’re quite young people whose pals are telling him he really ought to try so-and-so and whatever, he shouldn’t do it.
00:29:17 ►
He should stick to his guns and say, no, I’m not ready for it.
00:29:22 ►
I don’t really want to try it right now.
00:29:25 ►
Go with your instincts.
00:29:29 ►
Thank you. I want to also thank you for your work.
00:29:34 ►
So I’m a social worker and my question is actually related to the last question.
00:29:39 ►
I’m curious about using psychedelics in therapy with clients who are maybe mandated to treatment
00:29:49 ►
or are in extremely high trauma ongoing situations, very poor populations, abused, neglected, et cetera,
00:29:57 ►
and just curious about the applications there.
00:30:07 ►
I found since I worked during the two and a half or so years
00:30:11 ►
that I did some psychedelic therapy
00:30:15 ►
I worked with a hypnotherapist
00:30:17 ►
I would say this may sound like heresy
00:30:23 ►
but I think that the hypnotic trance will open the same doors that psychedelics do.
00:30:30 ►
And I think that I really would strongly urge anyone who is going to become a therapist
00:30:36 ►
to learn hypnotherapy, especially from what they call Erickson training.
00:30:43 ►
especially from what they call Erickson training.
00:30:50 ►
And, of course, you have to find the right teacher, the right hypnotherapist,
00:30:55 ►
but that is a very valuable tool, and you’re not breaking the law.
00:31:03 ►
But even when the laws do change, hypnotherapy might be far better.
00:31:05 ►
I also would like to thank you for all your work.
00:31:10 ►
If you could share something about the quality of your experience with
00:31:15 ►
Pachyceria springuli, maybe using San Pedro or peyote experience as a baseline
00:31:20 ►
for us? Well I my first actually we had had four experiences I believe with the
00:31:33 ►
extract of the pack of Sir Springley I yeah our experiences at least from my
00:31:39 ►
point of view on the on this this was up in the north of Sacramento. You remember? Yeah.
00:31:49 ►
The second, one was in the evening,
00:31:51 ►
and the next, I believe, was the next day.
00:31:57 ►
On the second round, the third and fourth experiences,
00:31:59 ►
the person who prepared the extract,
00:32:01 ►
which is prepared in Baja, California, and brought up to us, and friends of his, and friends of ours.
00:32:06 ►
The second experience, the third and fourth experience were extremely difficult for me.
00:32:13 ►
I found myself, in fact, the batches we had were four different collections from the same extract,
00:32:22 ►
but it was brought in four different vials. And there were 12 of us, and one vial went to three, the next vial went to the next three,
00:32:30 ►
the next vial was the third, and the fourth group had the remainder of this.
00:32:35 ►
Two of the vials produced in the six people who took it, extreme nausea and illness. The other two vials produced a very good visual experience
00:32:47 ►
on the part of the six who used it.
00:32:51 ►
And so one person there was a biochemist.
00:32:56 ►
And he took a sample of the good and the bad,
00:32:59 ►
the residues from the good and the bad,
00:33:01 ►
to see if there was something growing in there,
00:33:05 ►
perhaps some mold or something that produced the illness.
00:33:10 ►
I took it for GCMS and a quadrupole study of what may be present in these two
00:33:18 ►
that were not present in the third and fourth.
00:33:20 ►
And neither of us found a single thing to explain this.
00:33:23 ►
and neither of us found a single thing to explain this.
00:33:26 ►
This gave me some great hesitation on exploring the psychological aspects of the cactus itself.
00:33:32 ►
I’ve had a great deal of pleasure looking at it by mass spec
00:33:35 ►
and there’s no trace of mescaline in it,
00:33:38 ►
but there are a number of isoquinolones
00:33:40 ►
and a number of phenethylamines
00:33:44 ►
that are not active by themselves,
00:33:47 ►
but maybe in the presence of the isoquinoline as a monominoxidase inhibitor,
00:33:52 ►
they may be active if you eat the cactus.
00:33:54 ►
It’s sort of a counterpart of ayahuasca, where each component in itself is not active,
00:33:59 ►
but in combination they are, and I think the same may be true with the compounds inside of the perineum.
00:34:11 ►
I have two questions for you.
00:34:13 ►
The first, I was wondering if you know anything about the use of 5-HTP to rebalance serotonin
00:34:19 ►
depletion from MDMA or related molecules, especially in terms of dosage and timing.
00:34:24 ►
MDMA or related molecules, especially in terms of dosage and timing.
00:34:29 ►
And the other question, I was wondering if you had done any research or experimentation with the use of nitrous oxide in combination with other psychedelics
00:34:35 ►
to open deeply spiritual altered realities of consciousness.
00:34:40 ►
Actually, these questions are rather simple for me to answer, namely, no, no.
00:34:47 ►
I know of the, a lot of work has been done with hydroxy tryptophan as a serotonin replacement thing,
00:34:54 ►
but I have not any experience of it personally, and the literature is pretty much supports its use in that direction.
00:35:02 ►
So in the literature, I believe it is supported.
00:35:04 ►
I have no personal experience whatsoever.
00:35:07 ►
On the second point, what was the second one?
00:35:10 ►
Nitrous oxide.
00:35:11 ►
Nitrous oxide.
00:35:13 ►
Nitrous oxide, I still have to,
00:35:15 ►
I always offered it when I go to the dentist.
00:35:19 ►
And I always declined it,
00:35:20 ►
because for me it has almost no effect.
00:35:23 ►
And has quite a bit of effect from it and uses it and the combination of it with other materials I am not
00:35:29 ►
familiar with and uses nitrous oxide only at the dentist one the only
00:35:41 ►
experience I’ve had with that was not a particularly happy one.
00:35:46 ►
I had a patient for a while who loved nitrous oxide and who used it all the time.
00:35:55 ►
And we worked very hard on certain aspects of his problems.
00:36:01 ►
He had quite a lot of depression, which is probably why
00:36:06 ►
he was using the nitrous. And he considered himself pretty much an expert on nitrous.
00:36:12 ►
He knew all the dangers and how to avoid them. But then about six or eight months after we’d start at work, he took the nitrous container, whatever you call it, and got himself into
00:36:31 ►
bed, and to make sure that he didn’t waste any, he pulled the sheet over his head and
00:36:37 ►
over himself, and of course, he died.
00:36:40 ►
He died.
00:36:47 ►
So my feelings about nitrous, it’s dangerous.
00:36:52 ►
And, of course, it doesn’t have to be dangerous.
00:37:02 ►
But if you find yourself wanting to take any particular drug continuously,
00:37:06 ►
ketamine is the other example of something that is really dangerous from our point of view.
00:37:09 ►
If you
00:37:10 ►
find yourself wanting to be
00:37:12 ►
in that world
00:37:13 ►
preferably all the time
00:37:16 ►
and you just don’t like
00:37:18 ►
the ordinary world as much,
00:37:21 ►
do some
00:37:22 ►
work on yourself
00:37:24 ►
and find out what’s going on
00:37:26 ►
because that’s not good.
00:37:29 ►
One additional point on nitrous oxide
00:37:32 ►
and a very severe warning.
00:37:35 ►
Never use industrial-grade nitrous oxide.
00:37:39 ►
Always use medical-grade nitrous oxide.
00:37:42 ►
Industrial-grade nitrous oxide contains small
00:37:44 ►
but detectable amounts of nitric acid and this is very, very
00:37:47 ►
damaging to breathe.
00:37:53 ►
Oh, that would be food quality. That should be fine.
00:38:11 ►
I have a two-part question.
00:38:16 ►
I’m very familiar with the deep insights and healing and blessing that come from these medicines,
00:38:19 ►
and I thank you both and all the architects and artists of this space.
00:38:22 ►
But also as a health-conscious Libra,
00:38:24 ►
I’m wondering if you could speak a bit about any knowledge on, like,
00:38:28 ►
toxicity or overload or something,
00:38:31 ►
whether brain or kidney metabolism or endocrine,
00:38:34 ►
and just speaking on, you know, moderate doses,
00:38:38 ►
several times a season sort of thing.
00:38:40 ►
And the second part of the question is,
00:38:44 ►
I feel like many environments encourage us to use
00:38:46 ►
these medicines in a sort of a passive way like to taking in the music taking in the art taking in
00:38:52 ►
the fluorescent everything around and I feel very called to use them in more of a creative active
00:38:58 ►
way yet my brain doesn’t seem to be catching up with my purpose. Wondering if there’s, I feel like things I’ve done before would be redundant.
00:39:07 ►
Is there anything that, say, does to the brain what MDMA does to the heart?
00:39:14 ►
Oh, my God.
00:39:18 ►
Simple questions.
00:39:18 ►
Yeah.
00:39:22 ►
Let’s see.
00:39:23 ►
let’s see toxicity and
00:39:26 ►
brain versus heart
00:39:30 ►
gosh
00:39:33 ►
yeah okay I’ll give that one to
00:39:35 ►
one thing on toxicity
00:39:40 ►
we used to have a research group
00:39:44 ►
we’d meet every time there’s a new drug to be explored, about 10 or 12 of us.
00:39:48 ►
All of us quite experienced. All of us knowing I’m quite sensitive and I’ll take a little bit less than what appears to be the amount.
00:39:55 ►
I’m quite insensitive, hard head, and I’ll take a little bit more.
00:39:59 ►
And so each person had his own way of titrating the amount of a new material based on what Ann and I would find out as the probable range in which he’d be active.
00:40:08 ►
One time I had one compound, it was one of the sulfur compounds, and we were exploring
00:40:12 ►
it and one of our group went into a very strange place.
00:40:17 ►
He disappeared, for one thing, out of the living room.
00:40:20 ►
And we finally found him.
00:40:22 ►
Not that way.
00:40:23 ►
He didn’t just…
00:40:24 ►
No, you noticed he wasn’t with our group.
00:40:29 ►
Anyway, we snooped around, and he had gone to bed
00:40:32 ►
and pulled the blankets up around him.
00:40:34 ►
So he was really getting quite, quite warm.
00:40:36 ►
We got him out of bed, and he was not with us.
00:40:41 ►
He’s equally experienced to all of us,
00:40:43 ►
but in this particular compound, he
00:40:46 ►
had apparently a very strong hypersensitivity. And no way of predicting that, he spent quite
00:40:53 ►
a bit of effort to walk out of the stairway that went down to the living room where we
00:40:58 ►
were. He couldn’t make it down those stairs in any way whatsoever. So one person got on
00:41:04 ►
each side of him, and he put his hand around the shoulders of each of us and went down a step at a time. Went
00:41:09 ►
over to sit on the sofa near the window. He was in a strange place, yet he’s fully experienced
00:41:16 ►
as any of us with these materials. This particular compound was for him a very, it triggered
00:41:23 ►
stuff that we totally unexpected and cannot explain.
00:41:27 ►
So it was about an hour perhaps he came out of this, more than that. And when he came
00:41:33 ►
out he said, I’ve never been on a more beautiful beach in my life.
00:41:39 ►
The complete visual hallucination. So I was very, very curious
00:41:45 ►
because I think it was a thioprop or something on the fore position.
00:41:48 ►
And so what I did, I thought maybe he had a sense
00:41:51 ►
that sulfur is interestingly metabolized and differently by different people.
00:41:55 ►
I made up a series of compounds of sulfur
00:41:57 ►
that had different degrees of oxidation state,
00:42:00 ►
methyl thiobenzene,
00:42:02 ►
and then made the sulfoxide and sulfone.
00:42:05 ►
And my idea, I tried it up to 100 milligrams with no action,
00:42:08 ►
which made it fine for me.
00:42:10 ►
And I felt that then I would look in my urine for metabolites,
00:42:14 ►
and perhaps I metabolize it this way,
00:42:16 ►
and all of us would metabolize this way,
00:42:18 ►
except he might metabolize it that way.
00:42:21 ►
So it may be a biochemical approach to the disposition of the compound that made it more toxic
00:42:27 ►
or more strange to him. And if you find that, then you can pursue it as a new form
00:42:32 ►
of direction for research. And I took
00:42:35 ►
I think 100 milligrams of the compound and could find no trace of any of it
00:42:40 ►
in my urine by GCMS. So I abandoned the whole
00:42:44 ►
research project.
00:42:46 ►
That is an
00:42:47 ►
example of hypersensitivity. It’s not a
00:42:49 ►
predictable thing. You have no way of
00:42:51 ►
knowing that in your group that that person
00:42:53 ►
over there, if you’re going to share
00:42:55 ►
a new drug, might be extremely
00:42:57 ►
responsive to it and maybe negatively
00:43:00 ►
responsive to it. I don’t know
00:43:01 ►
a way of predicting it. Here’s a person
00:43:03 ►
who is thoroughly familiar with this entire area of chemistry and it was
00:43:09 ►
unpredictable and a little scary. Well it was scary for us. For him it was
00:43:17 ►
apparently a lovely experience. But another thing that happened is that he
00:43:23 ►
began forgetting.
00:43:25 ►
Amnesia took over.
00:43:27 ►
He could not remember anything that had happened before,
00:43:32 ►
but he remembered the beach and the feelings just enough to be able to tell us
00:43:39 ►
that it had been a lovely experience.
00:43:42 ►
and it had been a lovely experience.
00:43:49 ►
But again, that’s one of the arguments for taking very low or giving very low dosages for a first time.
00:43:53 ►
But in this case, that wouldn’t have helped the situation.
00:43:58 ►
One other material that can be very tricky to some people,
00:44:01 ►
and yet to a large measure it is predictable,
00:44:04 ►
is not really a psychedelic
00:44:06 ►
but more of a true hallucinogenic
00:44:08 ►
named scopolamine.
00:44:10 ►
About one person in 50 or 100 or 150
00:44:13 ►
is very sensitive to it
00:44:15 ►
and anyone who does take it
00:44:17 ►
should always try a tenth of the dose first
00:44:20 ►
to make sure that he’s not one who is sensitive.
00:44:24 ►
We had one person, a psychiatrist, who was visiting and
00:44:27 ►
we were putting, he wanted to try scopolamine. I said sure.
00:44:32 ►
And he took, the person
00:44:36 ►
who is in our early experiences with mescaline, but that’s
00:44:40 ►
not part of this. He took
00:44:44 ►
the small dosage, had no effect at all, so he took a normal dosage.
00:44:48 ►
And he went into a true hallucinogenic
00:44:52 ►
state. By here, hallucinogenic in the sense, you see things that no one else
00:44:56 ►
can see. You are truly hallucinating. He walked across the living room
00:44:59 ►
and into a closed door and came back
00:45:04 ►
a little bit shaken up
00:45:05 ►
and I said, what’s going on?
00:45:07 ►
Well, she was a beautiful girl and she went into that room
00:45:09 ►
and the door had never been opened
00:45:13 ►
and we didn’t see her at all.
00:45:15 ►
And finally after a couple, three, four hours
00:45:17 ►
he said, I think I’d like to just lie down and sleep it off for a little bit.
00:45:21 ►
So we went into the bedroom and lay down for a while.
00:45:25 ►
And then he got up, because the fire engine
00:45:27 ►
went by outside,
00:45:29 ►
and he wanted to go out and help direct the traffic
00:45:31 ►
around the fire truck.
00:45:33 ►
We said, don’t, just stay in the house.
00:45:37 ►
And all this
00:45:37 ►
went on and on.
00:45:38 ►
And finally, I think
00:45:39 ►
I didn’t quite know when he would be
00:45:42 ►
safe to go, because he
00:45:44 ►
could not really tell fact from fiction
00:45:47 ►
and finally he responded in a very sane
00:45:51 ►
solid way and let him drive back into town
00:45:56 ►
which was a mistake. He was driving
00:45:59 ►
and he had a buddy from his medical school who was sitting
00:46:03 ►
alongside him talking with him
00:46:05 ►
going across the bridge into San Francisco.
00:46:08 ►
And he turned to look at his buddy, and the buddy popped into the back seat.
00:46:11 ►
And he looked in the back seat, and there was no buddy there.
00:46:14 ►
So what he did, he turned on, the radio was going in his car.
00:46:19 ►
I forget the name of the singer, but a very favorite singer of his.
00:46:22 ►
Betsy Smith?
00:46:23 ►
Yeah.
00:46:27 ►
And he did not have that record of hers.
00:46:30 ►
And so toward the end of the record he turned the volume up a little bit so he could
00:46:31 ►
hear the name
00:46:34 ►
of the record, and the radio had not
00:46:35 ►
been on.
00:46:37 ►
So he got off the bridge safely.
00:46:40 ►
He parked his car,
00:46:42 ►
got a taxi, and went home in a taxi.
00:46:44 ►
I now know not if a person’s on a true hallucinogenic,
00:46:49 ►
give him an extra few hours.
00:46:53 ►
But the interesting thing, I saw him about a week, week and a half later,
00:46:55 ►
and he told me all this adventure of the radio on the car.
00:47:00 ►
I said, how long did it take you to get back to normal?
00:47:03 ►
And he looked at me with a funny look and says, how do you tell?
00:47:12 ►
The main question I’d like to ask is,
00:47:15 ►
many cultures have used these entheogenic substances
00:47:19 ►
to gain direct information and knowledge from the other side?
00:47:25 ►
Do you think it’s credible and possible for people in our culture today
00:47:29 ►
to actually gain direct inspiration and direction
00:47:33 ►
to where we need to go in the future?
00:47:39 ►
I don’t see why there should be any difference.
00:47:44 ►
I don’t see why there should be any difference.
00:47:50 ►
Human beings have been pretty much the same for tens of thousands of years.
00:47:54 ►
And I think you’ll find in different countries in the world now
00:48:00 ►
that the spiritual world and the spiritual path is, you know, part going after those
00:48:10 ►
particular truths is as much a part of their life as eating and drinking.
00:48:17 ►
It’s just in the Western technologically developed part of the world
00:48:25 ►
that we’re in a period now
00:48:29 ►
of skepticism
00:48:30 ►
and what you might call materialistic thinking
00:48:35 ►
but I think the
00:48:37 ►
tendency to
00:48:40 ►
feel that the only reality
00:48:44 ►
is what the five senses can touch.
00:48:49 ►
I think it’s because of fear.
00:48:52 ►
People are very much afraid of their own unconscious.
00:48:56 ►
I think that is one of the main reasons that so many laws have been developed against psychedelic,
00:49:05 ►
use of psychedelic drugs or visionary plants.
00:49:10 ►
It’s because people are projecting their own fears
00:49:14 ►
of what the unconscious contains onto everyone else.
00:49:18 ►
And when you grow up in a family, particularly,
00:49:22 ►
that never discusses dreams
00:49:23 ►
and doesn’t discuss the reasons
00:49:27 ►
people do, they call it psychologizing and dismiss it out of hand, then you’re unfamiliar
00:49:37 ►
with the workings of the human psyche. And then it becomes a fearful thing. So that when
00:49:49 ►
psyche and then it becomes a fearful thing so that when people hear those kinds of people hear about somebody taking a drug that that opens up the
00:49:55 ►
unconscious they think immediately of axe murderer you know that all of us
00:50:00 ►
have a potential axe murderer down deep inside.
00:50:05 ►
And there is a great fear that that may emerge and that you’ll have no control over it.
00:50:14 ►
In fact, I would suspect that everybody before their first psychedelic experience has a fear
00:50:22 ►
of that kind, either the murderer or the beast,
00:50:25 ►
which is the shadow part of ourselves.
00:50:29 ►
And how am I going to retain control over something like that if it takes me over?
00:50:36 ►
I don’t know any of us who haven’t had thoughts along that line.
00:50:41 ►
And I think very gradually with more publications and with more research like the Johns Hopkins one that was just published,
00:50:52 ►
very gradually people are going to think, well, maybe we can take more of a look at these things.
00:51:00 ►
Maybe they aren’t so very dangerous or, you know, if we use them the right way, et cetera.
00:51:06 ►
It’s going to take a long time, but I think it’ll happen.
00:51:10 ►
And I think human beings are just as capable of doing this kind of inner work and seeking
00:51:18 ►
out the answers as they ever were.
00:51:22 ►
as they ever were.
00:51:29 ►
I was curious about, with more people using ethnogenic and psychedelic substances that are traditionally used in a ceremonial setting or with a ceremonial setting,
00:51:35 ►
what your feelings are about them being used without that or the role of ceremony.
00:51:41 ►
You mean without ritual or a ceremony?
00:51:44 ►
Correct. Do’s interesting. Somebody
00:51:51 ►
talked about that yesterday. In my own experience, everybody who uses a psychedelic drug with other people will sort of intuitively
00:52:08 ►
say certain words before
00:52:12 ►
they embark. It’s usually something like
00:52:15 ►
blessings on our journey. But that comes naturally.
00:52:20 ►
I believe that if you want to do
00:52:24 ►
a classic Native American ceremony, that’s wonderful.
00:52:30 ►
I think that’s good.
00:52:32 ►
But it’s not necessary for a good experience.
00:52:37 ►
It just makes you feel better.
00:52:42 ►
And the small ritual like blessings on our
00:52:46 ►
journey does the same thing
00:52:47 ►
there is
00:52:50 ►
no danger in not
00:52:52 ►
having ritual it just eases
00:52:54 ►
the soul a little bit when you’re
00:52:56 ►
embarking on something that’s unknown
00:52:58 ►
I’d like to thank you
00:53:02 ►
on behalf of everybody here for changing our
00:53:04 ►
lives one way or another, indirectly or directly.
00:53:12 ►
My question is really quick.
00:53:14 ►
It’s just kind of a factual question.
00:53:16 ►
I’ve had a couple of phenethylamines for about a year and a half, 2CT7, 2CP, and 2CT21.
00:53:23 ►
And I was wondering what their shelf life was like,
00:53:26 ►
whether they were still safe to eat or they’ve been around too long.
00:53:34 ►
In general, sulfur compounds have an intrinsic instability.
00:53:40 ►
And many of these compounds are quite sensitive to hydrolysis or to change.
00:53:46 ►
I think the general rule would be to keep things dry, keep things out of light, and keep things cold.
00:53:55 ►
Refrigerated or in the freezer.
00:53:57 ►
Refrigerated, but don’t let moisture get in and don’t let light get in.
00:54:01 ►
And I think the shelf life should be indefinite.
00:54:04 ►
I see no reason there would be a decomposition, unless the material is
00:54:08 ►
intrinsically unstable. But then that speaks against
00:54:11 ►
its being used at all, because you don’t know what you’re getting. No, I think
00:54:15 ►
the stability is intrinsic the way it is there, if you store
00:54:19 ►
it in ways it is not exposed to air or to light or to heat.
00:54:24 ►
Thank you very much.
00:54:25 ►
I want to add something. in ways it is not exposed to air or to light or to heat. Thank you very much. Good.
00:54:27 ►
I want to add something.
00:54:30 ►
It’s very nice for us to be thanked a lot,
00:54:33 ►
but we didn’t change your life.
00:54:35 ►
You made the decision to use certain things
00:54:40 ►
and to learn from them.
00:54:42 ►
and to learn from them.
00:54:51 ►
As a couple in a psychedelic path,
00:54:56 ►
what advice or knowledge or wisdom would you give to other couples embarking on the same journey,
00:54:58 ►
and what substances would you recommend for a couple,
00:55:01 ►
like MDMA, LSD, or 2CB, or whatnot?
00:55:05 ►
would you recommend for a couple like MDMA, LSD, or 2CB or whatnot?
00:55:11 ►
Well, people who are having trouble in their relationships and maybe before they get married or after they get married,
00:55:19 ►
the MDMA has always been the magical thing that allowed them to open up
00:55:24 ►
and get those initial love feelings back.
00:55:32 ►
Otherwise, I don’t think you can give advice except respect each other and take care of each other.
00:55:41 ►
That’s all.
00:55:43 ►
This brings up one point I think should be emphasized here. When other people are considering an experience, I think one of the risks that has to be thought through and followed with care is things like LSD and MDMA and 2CB are felonies to possess and to use. So you must reinforce the fact that these
00:56:07 ►
materials are illegal and that you cannot brag about it or run around downtown down
00:56:13 ►
the sidewalk screaming, hey, LSE relief is a neat thing to try. That precaution cannot
00:56:19 ►
be under-emphasized. Another point in, pardon?
00:56:23 ►
Over-emphasized. Another point in, pardon? Oh, cannot be over-emphasized.
00:56:26 ►
Under, over, yeah, great. Another thing that has to be kept in mind is that studies have
00:56:33 ►
been made, for example, on how much MDMA is in an MDMA tablet, and sometimes there is
00:56:39 ►
none. These materials, since they are illegal illegal are put together under mysterious
00:56:47 ►
circumstances and they can put any label on anything they wish from caffeine to
00:56:52 ►
who knows phenobarb and call it ecstasy so you have this as an added problem you
00:56:59 ►
have no way of identifying what it is not, what it is you’re taking. If you take it into a company that does work with GCMS and can tell you what it is,
00:57:11 ►
they’re also obliged to inform the authorities that they have been given a Schedule I drug for analysis.
00:57:17 ►
So this cannot be casually done.
00:57:19 ►
This, I think, is one of the strongest arguments for legalization,
00:57:23 ►
is to put these materials where they can be obtained, say through a pharmacy or through some form of a legal arrangement that allows their purity to be established and even more so their identity to be verified.
00:57:44 ►
Ann in Saatchi.
00:57:47 ►
My question is about MDMA and harm reduction. There is some controversy about neurotoxicity and possible prevention of that by SSRIs.
00:57:55 ►
I was wondering whether you thought that that was scientifically valid,
00:57:59 ►
and if so, whether there were certain drugs that were better than others for this purpose.
00:58:05 ►
Well, I can address the neurotoxicity fairly straightforward.
00:58:09 ►
Most of the work has been done in animals and with monstrous overdoses.
00:58:14 ►
And indeed, there are damages that can be shown.
00:58:17 ►
There is no really consistent evidence of neurotoxicity in human that I am aware of.
00:58:24 ►
There are accidents. There are things that can occur. I was reading a paper
00:58:28 ►
not long ago in Nature. No, it was in some British
00:58:31 ►
pharmacological magazine in which it talked about the
00:58:35 ►
dangers of the human dangers of MDMA.
00:58:40 ►
And the only place that MDMA was used in the paper was in the abstract
00:58:44 ►
and in the title.
00:58:47 ►
In the paper, they’re talking about MDA,
00:58:51 ►
but obviously you don’t get published as readily if you talk about something that’s not as notoriously popular as MDMA,
00:58:54 ►
so they put the one word in the title and the other chemical,
00:58:57 ►
what they were looking at,
00:58:59 ►
and one of the damages that came was a broken bone,
00:59:03 ►
and it turned out the person had stumbled at the top of a staircase and had fallen downstairs
00:59:08 ►
but the person had had MDA in him
00:59:11 ►
and hence they blamed MDA as a damaging thing.
00:59:22 ►
Hi. First of all I’d just like to say how great it’s been camping with you guys at Entheon Village.
00:59:27 ►
I will never forget it.
00:59:28 ►
Somebody answered my question while I was waiting in line, but I came up with another one.
00:59:33 ►
I was just wondering what you think about poly drug use, whereas it pertains to 2C-B and 2C-I,
00:59:39 ►
an experience I had, whereas I took 2C-B and then in the comedown I took MDMA,
00:59:45 ►
and the crossover between those two was actually rather terrifying.
00:59:49 ►
I was just wondering if you have anything to say on that subject.
00:59:55 ►
I will add one thing.
00:59:57 ►
I have nothing here to add to.
00:59:58 ►
I’ll make one comment that comes immediately to mind,
01:00:02 ►
is the idea of mixing drugs.
01:00:04 ►
You mentioned this
01:00:05 ►
following up with that. A mixture of two drugs is a new drug in my mind and if
01:00:11 ►
you want to make a combination of MDMA let’s say and and 2C, 2CT whatever it was
01:00:20 ►
you have to start as I from my point of view as a brand new drug and start with
01:00:24 ►
very small amounts and work yourself up over time with that combination.
01:00:28 ►
Because two drugs that are different in their action could very well have a combined action that is not predictable from either one.
01:00:36 ►
So it is a new drug and cannot casually be used as a follow-up.
01:00:42 ►
This was a very nice trip. I think I’ll follow it up with some of that.
01:00:47 ►
And it’s getting kind of late. I just broke a little pot and finished up the day.
01:00:52 ►
You’re mixing drugs and you cannot predict from their individual activity what their combined activity will be.
01:00:58 ►
That’s very interesting.
01:01:00 ►
Where are you?
01:01:04 ►
It’s very interesting that you had a 2C-B followed by MDMA.
01:01:09 ►
Then MDMA, yeah.
01:01:14 ►
Because one combination that does work is MDMA followed by 2C-B.
01:01:27 ►
That was used a lot in therapy, again, before either of them became illegal,
01:01:34 ►
in which case you have a reasonable – I thought that was a cat, but it’s probably a baby.
01:01:42 ►
Oh, gosh. No, it’s probably a baby.
01:01:46 ►
Oh, gosh.
01:01:47 ►
No, it’s just too hot.
01:01:57 ►
If you take the MDMA first, then about two hours later you can take the 2C-B,
01:02:05 ►
but you go way down in dosage on the 2C-B because the MDMA makes the 2C-B effect stronger.
01:02:11 ►
But in general, I would go along with Sasha.
01:02:15 ►
Of course, we’re used to thinking in terms of research and you never mix drugs if you’re doing research
01:02:19 ►
because you come out with no effect that you can depend on.
01:02:29 ►
you know you you come out with no effect that you can depend on and I’ve met an awful lot of people who mix drugs all the time and I think it get pretty
01:02:35 ►
messed up I think it becomes really toxic to your body and to your mind I
01:02:44 ►
thank you for coming out to Black Rock City
01:02:47 ►
and bearing the heat with us all.
01:02:49 ►
Could you talk a little bit about your experience with ayahuasca,
01:02:53 ►
what your experience has been,
01:02:55 ►
and how you see it benefiting us?
01:03:19 ►
Let me say first that I have a young relative who believes and feels that ayahuasca is the best teacher that there is for somebody who’s on a spiritual path.
01:03:23 ►
And a lot of the people we know feel that way.
01:03:31 ►
For Sasha and me, again, people are very different, and the chemistry of each body is a little different.
01:03:35 ►
Neither of us can really tolerate marijuana, believe it or not.
01:03:41 ►
Marijuana gives me a full-fledged psychedelic experience
01:03:47 ►
and a pretty paranoid one.
01:03:49 ►
And I’ve tried it many times over, and it still is not my ally.
01:03:55 ►
And Sasha feels that he just doesn’t learn anything from that.
01:04:00 ►
So we don’t try pot.
01:04:04 ►
So we don’t try pot.
01:04:10 ►
The ayahuasca, we had four experiences.
01:04:18 ►
And usually when you go to some special place to undergo the ayahuasca,
01:04:25 ►
they give you a nighttime experience first and then a daytime experience over the weekend.
01:04:31 ►
And the first time we tried it, it was a very low level because we are cautious, fraidy cats.
01:04:36 ►
And it was perfectly pleasant that I remember.
01:04:41 ►
It was pleasant, not the greatest experience in the world, but pleasant
01:04:47 ►
enough so that when we were invited six months later to have another try at it, we didn’t
01:04:55 ►
hesitate. The second time, however, was very interesting. We, again, took very low level.
01:05:04 ►
Very interesting. We again took very low level.
01:05:13 ►
And Sasha underwent a very difficult experience, which is entirely different than mine.
01:05:21 ►
Mine was a bit like trying not to get run over by a fast-moving train.
01:05:26 ►
There was no way to learn anything except just how to stay alive. That’s the way it felt. But an interesting thing happened. This is
01:05:33 ►
during the first experience at night. A voice said to me very clearly, don’t come
01:05:41 ►
here again. It didn’t mean the place of met the drug
01:05:45 ►
and i said
01:05:46 ►
okay
01:05:49 ►
then uh…
01:05:50 ►
the next day we
01:05:52 ►
compared notes and discovered we both
01:05:54 ►
both had a rough time
01:05:56 ►
so we were going to for the next experience uh…
01:06:00 ►
be very very very very cautious and taking the lower
01:06:03 ►
so that it wouldn’t last long and surely it couldn’t do any damage.
01:06:09 ►
And for me it was a repeat of the fast freight train which wanted to run over my head.
01:06:18 ►
It didn’t last as long.
01:06:20 ►
Then the voice came back and said, didn’t you hear me the first time?
01:06:27 ►
So
01:06:28 ►
that was it.
01:06:31 ►
I remember
01:06:32 ►
that, the latter experience.
01:06:34 ►
I had totally different effects from it.
01:06:36 ►
I was sitting back
01:06:38 ►
and letting my eyes stay closed
01:06:40 ►
so I’d maybe get some visual
01:06:41 ►
input. And in the back of
01:06:44 ►
my eyes, there was the development of a very dull red color
01:06:48 ►
I was seeing that was filling my field of vision.
01:06:52 ►
And as I watched, it got brighter and brighter red,
01:06:55 ►
then it became bright orange,
01:06:56 ►
then it became really, really brilliantly yellow,
01:07:00 ►
and then it was brilliantly white,
01:07:02 ►
actually blinding, almost painfully white.
01:07:04 ►
So I opened my eyes
01:07:05 ►
to become rational again and I’d vomit
01:07:08 ►
and I’d sit back
01:07:10 ►
and thank goodness that little tub
01:07:12 ►
was staying right there
01:07:13 ►
because it had this dull red color again
01:07:15 ►
and the whole process was repeated again
01:07:18 ►
the tub began filling
01:07:19 ►
with what I had left in my tummy
01:07:22 ►
and
01:07:23 ►
I didn’t find this to be particularly enlightening.
01:07:28 ►
So that was my…
01:07:30 ►
I know the source, but I did not do an analysis
01:07:34 ►
on the actual combination.
01:07:35 ►
I didn’t know really what all was in there.
01:07:39 ►
I’m sorry to report that at this point
01:07:42 ►
our mini-disc reached its capacity,
01:07:44 ►
and so we’re going to have to stop here for now.
01:07:48 ►
There may be a few more questions and answers that I captured on my cassette tape recorder,
01:07:53 ►
but I haven’t had a chance to go through all of those tapes yet.
01:07:56 ►
And if it turns out that I did get a decent recording of the end of this session,
01:08:01 ►
I’ll be sure to include it with some of the other Planque Norte talks in
01:08:05 ►
a future podcast. I would like to thank all of you who showed up for this presentation and
01:08:11 ►
again I want to offer my apologies to all of you who were in line to ask a question but didn’t
01:08:16 ►
have the chance. From the collective groan that I heard when I announced that we’d run out of time,
01:08:23 ►
I believe that we probably could still be there
01:08:26 ►
peppering Ann and Sasha with a continuous barrage of questions
01:08:30 ►
that would probably last until next year’s burn.
01:08:34 ►
In any event, it was an historic event,
01:08:37 ►
as this was the Shulgin’s first time to attend a Burning Man festival.
01:08:42 ►
And I’m sure that they deeply appreciated the
01:08:45 ►
outpouring of love and affection that was so evident in the big tent that day. And to
01:08:51 ►
Ann and Sasha, well, there really is no better way for me to say it than to simply say thank
01:08:57 ►
you. Thank you from the entire Burning Man community for braving the conditions on the playa to bring your unique blend of energy
01:09:06 ►
to this year’s event. I know that for me, the 2006 burn will always be remembered as the year
01:09:13 ►
the Shoguns were there. And my thanks again go out to Darren, Mark, Michael, Brian, and the rest of
01:09:20 ►
the Entheon Village crew and supporters who rose to the occasion and magically provided our sound system for this talk.
01:09:27 ►
It simply wouldn’t have taken place without you guys.
01:09:31 ►
And my thanks also to Chateau Hayouk
01:09:33 ►
for the use of your music here in the Psychedelic Salon.
01:09:37 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo,
01:09:40 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:09:43 ►
Be well, my friends.