Program Notes
Guest speaker: Dr. Preet Chopra
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
02:56 Preet describes the study he is working on at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center where he and Dr. Charles Grob are giving psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) to end-stage cancer patients who are also suffering from anxiety.
05:17 A description of the inclusion and exclusion criteria for the study.
11:01 Preet takes us through a typical session with a study participant.
12:04 “According to some of the research that was done before prohibition, it was found that people who had more internal experiences were more likely to get the psychological intervention we’re going for with this.”
24:03 “In my treatments as a psychiatrist I’ve never treated a psychedelic addiction. I’ve treated a lot of addicts who are addicted to a lot of stuff and who also used psychedelics, but that [psychedelic addiction] has never come into my emergency room or office.”
29:39 “I think it’s kind of ridiculous to be a scientist and a doctor and not investigate and try to understand how we can use these tools in a Western culture safely.”
36:11 “I think that ultimately the true wisdom about these plants comes from shamanic tradition, however, in today’s Western society people will often come to a psychiatrist to address the issue that in a different tribal kind of society they would seek out the shaman.”
Mentioned in this podcast
“Counter-Transference Issues in Psychedelic Psychotherapy” by Gary Fisher, PH.D
Additional papers by Gary Fisher, Ph.D.
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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.
00:00:25 ►
How are you today, huh?
00:00:28 ►
So much has happened since last week that it seems like months since we were last together here in the salon.
00:00:35 ►
Here in the States, we had a one-day experience of the kind of horror that the citizens of Iraq have to endure on a daily basis.
00:00:43 ►
that the citizens of Iraq have to endure on a daily basis.
00:00:49 ►
And I don’t mean in any way to imply that what the families and friends of the people killed at Virginia Tech are going through
00:00:52 ►
isn’t almost beyond human endurance.
00:00:56 ►
It’s just hard to imagine that any human being could blow himself or herself up
00:01:01 ►
in the middle of a crowded market or commit mass murder
00:01:04 ►
on the scale we witnessed this week.
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But that’s the dark side of life these days.
00:01:11 ►
And on the light side of life, for me,
00:01:13 ►
well, I’ve just returned from spending a few days
00:01:17 ►
visiting with Gene and Myron Stolaroff at their home in the high desert
00:01:21 ►
where we experienced weather that ranged from rain to near hurricane force winds.
00:01:28 ►
And we even had snow one afternoon, and then an afternoon as beautiful as you could wish for.
00:01:34 ►
It was really a spectacular time for me, and I’ll tell you more about it in a future podcast
00:01:40 ►
where I’ll play a recording of another conversation with Myron in which, among other
00:01:46 ►
things, he tells a delightful story about Alan Watts.
00:01:50 ►
But today we’re going to travel back to the big tent on the playa at last year’s Burning
00:01:55 ►
Man Festival, where Dr. Preet Chopra began his 2006 Planque Norte lecture by telling
00:02:02 ►
us about the study being conducted at Harbor
00:02:05 ►
UCLA in which he and another psychiatrist are giving psilocybin to end-stage cancer
00:02:11 ►
patients.
00:02:13 ►
So we’ll pick up where last week’s podcast left off, just after George Greer and Requa
00:02:17 ►
Tolbert described their earlier work with MDMA, and where I began to introduce Preet.
00:02:24 ►
with MDMA, and where I began to introduce Preet.
00:02:34 ►
But he is going to talk about the study that’s going on at Harbor UCLA Medical Center for their treating stage 4 cancer patients with anxiety with psilocybin, the active ingredient
00:02:41 ►
in magic mushrooms.
00:02:42 ►
So without further ado, if Soren will let you come, Preet,
00:02:45 ►
please help me welcome Dr. Preet Chopra.
00:02:54 ►
Well, the study we’re currently doing down in Los Angeles
00:02:58 ►
is a study investigating the use of psilocybin to treat anxiety.
00:03:03 ►
We’re also looking at depression and pain in kind of end-stage cancer patients.
00:03:09 ►
So I’ll just tell you a little bit about the protocol, what we do.
00:03:12 ►
And I really enjoy doing Q&A, so we can do some of that towards the end.
00:03:17 ►
This study is funded by the Hefter Research Organization,
00:03:21 ►
which George Greer is a major part of.
00:03:25 ►
So we have government approval.
00:03:28 ►
This is something that Charles Grove had obtained over many years,
00:03:32 ►
government approval to use psilocybin to treat 12 participants in this study.
00:03:39 ►
Each participant will receive two treatment sessions,
00:03:43 ►
and they serve as their own placebo,
00:03:45 ►
meaning that one of the sessions they will be given psilocybin at 0.2 milligrams per kilogram,
00:03:53 ►
and the other session will be niacin, which is considered an active placebo,
00:03:58 ►
though it’s fairly apparent whether someone receives the placebo or not.
00:04:04 ►
apparent whether someone receives the placebo or not.
00:04:08 ►
Before this study, the participants are admitted into a hospital. This is at
00:04:11 ►
an L.A. County hospital in Torrance. We’re lucky because
00:04:15 ►
the research unit in this hospital had done a lot
00:04:20 ►
of sleep studies in the past, so we have access to a room that’s got a double door
00:04:23 ►
and is fairly insulated from the rest of the hospital, because as you know, there’s a lot of noise,
00:04:29 ►
overhead pages, and things like that in the hospital.
00:04:32 ►
So we have a pretty good spot, considering we’re in a hospital.
00:04:35 ►
Also, really largely in part thanks to Mary C. Haggerty, who was our first research coordinator
00:04:41 ►
until she moved out of the area to care for her little granddaughter.
00:04:45 ►
She has set up this really nice method of decorating this room where we kind of convert
00:04:50 ►
it more into kind of like a little kind of chill-out pad with some nice colored tapestries
00:04:57 ►
and overhanging above the bed.
00:05:00 ►
And she was also pivotal in setting up kind of our music system, which we use during the experience,
00:05:06 ►
but also the people in the study are free to kind of use this stuff the night before
00:05:12 ►
to get acclimated a little bit to the hospital.
00:05:16 ►
Before I go into the treatment session,
00:05:18 ►
I’ll tell you a little bit about the kind of inclusion and exclusion criteria.
00:05:23 ►
By the way, we are in need of more participants.
00:05:26 ►
So if any of you know someone who’s unfortunate enough to have end-stage cancer
00:05:30 ►
who might be interested, particularly if you’re in the Los Angeles area,
00:05:34 ►
we need five more participants.
00:05:37 ►
People have to be between the age of 18 and 70.
00:05:40 ►
It can be either men or women.
00:05:43 ►
They can’t have any major organ involvement with their cancer.
00:05:48 ►
The only absolute exclusion is a primary cancer of the brain
00:05:51 ►
or someone with cancer that has had some metastasis to the brain.
00:05:57 ►
That was something we had to accept to receive regulatory approval for this.
00:06:03 ►
Though I know there was research done with cancer patients earlier in the 60s
00:06:07 ►
where they even treated people with brain cancer,
00:06:09 ►
so I’m not sure if that’s a medical contraindication or not, really.
00:06:14 ►
They also can’t have severe diabetes or uncontrolled hypertension.
00:06:18 ►
They can’t have any major cardiac problems.
00:06:21 ►
I think that’s the major exclusion criteria. Inclusion criteria is stage four
00:06:28 ►
end stage cancer and they have to have anxiety. So it’s pretty easy to meet the inclusion
00:06:34 ►
criteria if someone has anxiety. We do have a website with information. It’s called
00:06:42 ►
canceranxietystudy.org if you know somebody who might be interested in meeting the criteria.
00:06:48 ►
So when we receive a call, either from a family member or a friend
00:06:52 ►
or a potential participant, there’s kind of a screening process that goes on.
00:06:57 ►
We’re not going to treat anybody who has major preexisting mental illness.
00:07:01 ►
We’re really looking for somebody whose anxiety has really kind of
00:07:06 ►
really been, I guess, stirred up by this kind of situation of being told that someone has cancer
00:07:14 ►
and not much time to live. First, we’ll meet with these people, do some kind of introductory
00:07:21 ►
sessions. There’s three members of the kind of co-therapy team,
00:07:26 ►
if you want to call that.
00:07:27 ►
That’s myself.
00:07:28 ►
I’m a co-investigator.
00:07:30 ►
My teacher and mentor, Charles Grove, is the lead investigator.
00:07:33 ►
He’s the lead therapist.
00:07:34 ►
And since we’re both men, we try to have a third therapist who is a woman.
00:07:42 ►
So for most of the study up to this point, that’s been Mary C. Haggerty,
00:07:46 ►
who’s quite a really, really good person to have
00:07:49 ►
sitting with someone in an altered level of consciousness.
00:07:53 ►
Once we’ve decided that somebody kind of meets that basic criteria
00:07:57 ►
and it sounds like somebody who wants to work with us,
00:07:59 ►
we start working on intention.
00:08:00 ►
Why are they coming into this study?
00:08:02 ►
How do they want to utilize this kind of chemical analog of, you know, one of the plant medicines.
00:08:10 ►
And they’re required to have an MRI prior to the study just to document that they have
00:08:15 ►
no brain mets.
00:08:17 ►
And luckily everyone who’s come in so far that we’ve entered in the study, we haven’t
00:08:21 ►
discovered any brain mets, which would kind of be a bad thing to find out right then.
00:08:29 ►
After that, once we explained to them that, you know,
00:08:31 ►
they were taking an experimental compound that has very, very strong psychoactive properties
00:08:37 ►
that’s in the family of psychedelics,
00:08:40 ►
we kind of talked to them about, you know, some of the potential side effects of psilocybin,
00:08:44 ►
We kind of talked to them about, you know, some of the potential side effects of psilocybin,
00:08:53 ►
which can be, you know, some mild nausea, some agitation, some anxiety, some restlessness, some insomnia, things like that.
00:08:58 ►
And we also talk about the kind of potential benefits of going into this treatment.
00:09:08 ►
I mean, the real, real profound contribution, number one, of participating in research as a human subject to kind of further this cause along the way.
00:09:10 ►
But also hopefully that they’ll get some benefit out of this,
00:09:12 ►
that maybe they can utilize this psychedelic treatment experience
00:09:17 ►
to kind of maybe get another frame of reference or do a life review
00:09:20 ►
or even have a mystical experience that will help them place into context
00:09:25 ►
whatever their particular set of circumstances are that they want to work on
00:09:30 ►
when they come in with their intention.
00:09:34 ►
So, you know, Charlie and I have a pretty busy schedule during the week,
00:09:39 ►
so we generally do these sessions on Saturdays since they can last anywhere from six to eight hours.
00:09:44 ►
One of the reasons Charlie chose psilocybin versus LSD was because of the length of session,
00:09:50 ►
just how to do this.
00:09:51 ►
And also with many people with end-stage cancer, fatigue is an issue,
00:09:56 ►
so we don’t want to give them too long of an experience.
00:09:58 ►
So that’s one of the reasons why we picked psilocybin.
00:10:01 ►
So generally on Friday they’ll be admitted up to this, it’s called a GCRC research unit.
00:10:06 ►
They will be placed on cardiac monitoring
00:10:08 ►
because we’re looking at, we want to measure an EKG
00:10:11 ►
just to document if there’s any kind of rate
00:10:15 ►
or rhythm changes from psilocybin,
00:10:17 ►
which so far we haven’t seen.
00:10:19 ►
And we’ll meet with them again, the whole therapy team.
00:10:21 ►
We’ll introduce them to the nurses on the unit.
00:10:24 ►
We’re the favorite study of all the nurses on this research
00:10:27 ►
unit. I mean, they love us. They really enjoy our patients,
00:10:31 ►
us, and what’s going on. Generally, they’re doing very kind of
00:10:35 ►
boring studies, so this is pretty cool for them. So they’ve really learned
00:10:39 ►
a lot about, I think, psychedelic psychotherapy and are very much
00:10:44 ►
a part of this team and
00:10:45 ►
really kind of co-facilitate the participants’ whole experience.
00:10:50 ►
Every time we set up the room, they’re like, hey, we’ve got to hire you guys to decorate
00:10:53 ►
all the hospital beds in this hospital.
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This is really what hospitals should look like, you know, a nice sanctuary kind of feeling.
00:11:00 ►
So they’re admitted generally around 2 or 3 p.m.
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We’ll go up there and chat, work on attention again, get them cozy
00:11:06 ►
comfortable, you know if they bring in some
00:11:08 ►
of their own music they can kind of relax
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listen to headphones, put on an eye shade
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and hopefully sleep well that night
00:11:14 ►
we’ll then meet again Saturday morning
00:11:16 ►
usually at 8, work on intention
00:11:18 ►
try to generally
00:11:20 ►
call in the spirits, make it kind of
00:11:22 ►
ritualistic, so that it’s not in our treatment
00:11:24 ►
protocol and then about an hour later the research pharmacist will bring up The tribogen will call in the spirits, kind of make it kind of ritualistic, though that’s not in our treatment protocol.
00:11:25 ►
And then about an hour later, the research pharmacist will bring up the experimental medication.
00:11:32 ►
This will arrive in a little kind of pharmacy bottle, which is kind of interesting,
00:11:36 ►
and it says, you know, participant’s name, Dr. Charles Grove,
00:11:40 ►
and then it’ll say, you know, psilocybin X milligrams or niacin,
00:11:45 ►
which is kind of a nice souvenir for the participants.
00:11:48 ►
So then we’ll take a baseline blood pressure and pulse, and then we’ll start the session.
00:11:53 ►
We encourage the participants to go very deep within.
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This isn’t kind of a sightseeing journey or something like that,
00:12:02 ►
but, you know, really according to some of the research that was done before Prohibition,
00:12:07 ►
it was found that people who had more internal experiences
00:12:10 ►
were more likely to get the kind of psychological or mental intervention
00:12:14 ►
that we’re really going for with this.
00:12:17 ►
Though feeling good is also a really, really nice way to get a new perspective
00:12:22 ►
from anxiety and depression, by the way.
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That’s not the real aim of this.
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We have pre-selected music, which is intended to kind of bring them up into the journey,
00:12:31 ►
up to a peak, and then help them kind of come down.
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That’s something we’re working on.
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We ask them to lay down, put on the eye shades,
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and really if they want to speak to us, we’re okay to be there in a supportive role,
00:12:43 ►
but we generally encourage them, as we’ve worked on in the weeks and months before,
00:12:47 ►
why don’t we, for them to really have their own experience, we’ll kind of facilitate that.
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And during the come down and after the experience and the kind of days and weeks after,
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we’ll work to kind of integrate this experience along with their intention.
00:13:01 ►
And I think that’s, at least in this model we’re doing, where more of the kind of psychotherapy goes on.
00:13:05 ►
So actually for the actual experience really is kind of let’s make this experience happen.
00:13:12 ►
Now we don’t know which is going to be the placebo or the active medication, as I said.
00:13:21 ►
We do check in once per hour to check a blood pressure and pulse.
00:13:24 ►
I don’t know if I just said that.
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Just so we can document if there’s any kind of heart rate changes.
00:13:28 ►
Now we generally have noticed that we haven’t crunched the data yet since we haven’t finished
00:13:32 ►
this study, that there’s a slight blood pressure and pulse bump right at the come on.
00:13:38 ►
That’ll generally be as early as one hour, maybe two hours into the experience.
00:13:44 ►
But nothing that’s required any kind of intervention on our part.
00:13:46 ►
It’s just been a slight rise in that.
00:13:50 ►
After the experience, we’ve asked people who have family members to come in and meet them.
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No one drives themselves home.
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We do a little jam session to see how they’re going.
00:14:00 ►
And then they’re kind of sent off their way.
00:14:02 ►
We will meet with them periodically, though that’s not really structured.
00:14:06 ►
However, we have a set of kind of questionnaires looking at depression, pain, anxiety,
00:14:11 ►
some kind of scale of mysticism where we kind of do follow-up work to try to obtain some data
00:14:17 ►
which we can use to kind of document what these experiences are like.
00:14:31 ►
experiences are like. So I think that covers the basics of what this study is about. Like I said, we’re looking for some more participants. We actually have treated six people so far.
00:14:37 ►
It’s been pretty, pretty powerful work. It’s probably the most gratifying work I’ve done in my career as a physician, absolutely.
00:14:47 ►
Since our dose is based on milligrams per kilogram, and some people with end-stage cancer
00:14:55 ►
are quite cachectic or kind of wasted away, some people are not probably having doses
00:15:00 ►
that we would probably use if this was something we could administer just as psychiatry at large.
00:15:08 ►
So just some observations.
00:15:11 ►
Again, we haven’t looked at any of the data.
00:15:13 ►
Two of our kind of heavier, relatively heavier participants had higher doses,
00:15:18 ►
more in the range of 19, 20 milligrams, which is kind of a moderate dose.
00:15:22 ►
And they probably had the most profound kind of just psychedelic experience.
00:15:27 ►
And the one participant who had kind of less than a really powerful experience
00:15:32 ►
that was still helpful only received a dose of about 12 milligrams
00:15:37 ►
because she was quite wasted away, unfortunately.
00:15:41 ►
So that’s kind of another interesting, some interesting information we’ve already obtained.
00:15:46 ►
We hope to apply to the FDA and DEA maybe to go for a higher dose
00:15:52 ►
and also to provide a booster session if possible
00:15:55 ►
because every single participant has wished they’d be able to do another session
00:16:00 ►
or have a session at a higher dose.
00:16:04 ►
Another thing that’s interesting, many, many of the participants, again, there’s only been
00:16:07 ►
six, but I’d say about five out of the six felt that even the placebo session, kind of
00:16:12 ►
working with us, sitting with them together, you know, for six to eight hours was quite
00:16:17 ►
helpful in their own growth process at this kind of boundary situation where they’re heading.
00:16:24 ►
So, again, often if we, you know we kind of realize it’s the placebo session,
00:16:28 ►
people try to go with it, nothing’s going on,
00:16:30 ►
we will kind of do some work on their intention,
00:16:33 ►
get to know them even more and stuff like that.
00:16:35 ►
So it’s a pretty intense situation we have,
00:16:38 ►
kind of three co-therapists all working with the intention
00:16:41 ►
to kind of catalyze some healing for an individual.
00:16:44 ►
So it’s a really, really powerful transform to kind of catalyze some healing for an individual.
00:16:49 ►
So it’s a really, really powerful transformational kind of experience. I think even with the placebo session, I can’t remember if it was either George or Rico who said,
00:16:54 ►
you know, the drug is just a drug.
00:16:57 ►
It’s like a key.
00:16:57 ►
It’s a door.
00:16:58 ►
It’s what you do with it, what your intention is, set setting, using ritual.
00:17:02 ►
I think these are important ingredients that make this study really kind of a worthwhile thing to do.
00:17:09 ►
We’re not just here psilocybin and checking on them the next day.
00:17:15 ►
Yeah, so it’s really nice to be here.
00:17:17 ►
Like I said, I enjoy answering questions so I can speak to what people are interested in.
00:17:22 ►
So if it’s okay, I’ll take some questions.
00:17:25 ►
Yeah. So it might be anecdotal I’ll take some questions. Yeah.
00:17:27 ►
So it might be anecdotal, but what are your thoughts on that?
00:17:30 ►
Okay, so the question is, you know, what is this exclusion criteria,
00:17:33 ►
you know, kind of major mental illness or specifically a psychotic disorder,
00:17:37 ►
you know, and basically is that fair?
00:17:39 ►
Well, that’s a big kind of like question, you know, I think at large.
00:17:44 ►
Speaking about our study, we’re really looking to treat
00:17:48 ►
kind of, quote, psychologically healthy people
00:17:52 ►
who are having a kind of existential crisis
00:17:55 ►
dealing with the imminent death
00:18:00 ►
that a stage four cancer diagnosis labels them with.
00:18:04 ►
So that’s what we’re specifically doing in this study.
00:18:06 ►
I have met some psychedelic elders who used, I think, LSD with autistic children,
00:18:13 ►
which is a pretty severe mental disorder,
00:18:16 ►
and has also used LSD with schizophrenic patients in Southern California.
00:18:23 ►
There’s a psychologist by the name of Gary Fisher who did some of that work,
00:18:27 ►
and his papers are available.
00:18:29 ►
One or two things he’s written is even available on the MAP site.
00:18:32 ►
He has an excellent article.
00:18:34 ►
If anyone’s interested in psychedelic therapy,
00:18:36 ►
either as a participant or future doctors and therapists out there,
00:18:41 ►
he has an excellent article on that webpage
00:18:43 ►
talking about countertransference and psychedelics,
00:18:47 ►
which is a really, really beautiful read.
00:18:49 ►
He doesn’t really do any of this work anymore.
00:18:51 ►
He’s an artist now.
00:18:52 ►
But I think that’s a really important kind of question
00:18:55 ►
that maybe in time,
00:18:57 ►
as psychedelic treatment becomes more available,
00:19:01 ►
right now it’s only done at a very, very few
00:19:04 ►
kind of really highly regulated
00:19:06 ►
kind of research spots right now. As it would become available as a mainstream treatment,
00:19:11 ►
then I think it would be investigated into the use for a variety of other psychological
00:19:16 ►
disorders. That’s just not what the intention of our study is. It’s very basic. Another,
00:19:23 ►
I guess, intention of the study is to kind of replicate some of the work that was done earlier,
00:19:29 ►
particularly by Stan Groff and his kind of colleagues in kind of like the Washington, D.C., Johns Hopkins area.
00:19:37 ►
They were using LSD with cancer patients and had really, really good results.
00:19:42 ►
But unfortunately, just like any of the kind of medical research of that area,
00:19:45 ►
it doesn’t kind of satisfy these kind of stringent research
00:19:51 ►
and methodology standards that are required now.
00:19:55 ►
So that’s another.
00:19:56 ►
So we’re just trying to do something that, you know, we’ve read.
00:19:59 ►
There’s these published reports.
00:20:00 ►
It works really well.
00:20:01 ►
Let’s try to, like, let to bring that into the mainstream modern scientific
00:20:06 ►
literature, which is
00:20:08 ►
the step to
00:20:09 ►
transforming a treatment from an experimental
00:20:12 ►
model into
00:20:13 ►
an actual treatment. But again, this
00:20:16 ►
is considered a stage one trial.
00:20:18 ►
This is basically like, is this
00:20:20 ►
safe in humans?
00:20:22 ►
That’s how early this is.
00:20:29 ►
Alright, so her her her club her statement basically is a nice and gives you this rush that’s pretty
00:20:33 ►
obvious what it is right away yeah you know that’s that’s a very good point not
00:20:38 ►
everybody gets the niacin flush some people do so I don’t perhaps in the next study if we can do it
00:20:46 ►
we may kind of steal something
00:20:48 ►
from that psilocybin Hopkins study
00:20:50 ►
that people may have heard about
00:20:51 ►
they actually use Ritalin as their placebo
00:20:54 ►
which provides
00:20:56 ►
blood pressure and a pulse bump
00:20:57 ►
and kind of gets people talking and jittery
00:20:59 ►
and a little bit more of an activation
00:21:01 ►
so particularly in a psychedelic naive person
00:21:04 ►
I don’t think they would be able to tell the difference, perhaps.
00:21:08 ►
And it’s interesting, I’m referring to a study by Roland Griffiths out of Johns Hopkins
00:21:12 ►
that was published in Psychopharmacology in July.
00:21:15 ►
They treated healthy volunteers who had some sort of spiritual inclination,
00:21:19 ►
no mental illness, really no psychological problem with 30 milligrams of psilocybin.
00:21:25 ►
And the beautiful thing about that study, they actually interviewed sitters and participants
00:21:30 ►
and tried to see, hey, how likely were these people to predict what they were on or not.
00:21:34 ►
And they had a very, very low prediction of what they were on.
00:21:37 ►
Many sitters confused psilocybin, ferritin, and vice versa, and same with the participants.
00:21:44 ►
But very good observation, yes.
00:21:48 ►
Yeah, please.
00:21:51 ►
Okay, so the question is, number one, have any of the participants passed?
00:21:55 ►
And is there a difference regarding maybe a person’s personal age or maturity
00:22:01 ►
and how they passed and what happens?
00:22:02 ►
So, so far, none of our participants have passed away, which is really kind of cool.
00:22:08 ►
One person we worked with is doing very, very poorly right now and is really, really struggling.
00:22:14 ►
She had a very late diagnosis of breast cancer.
00:22:18 ►
It was metastatic to her bones and spine and was diagnosed after she had fallen and had a hip fracture,
00:22:26 ►
and they picked her up in a hospital.
00:22:28 ►
So she is struggling with every kind of living moment
00:22:31 ►
with a lot of pain, anxiety, guilt,
00:22:35 ►
that not maybe noticing what was going on and things like that.
00:22:41 ►
But in terms of the age range,
00:22:43 ►
we haven’t treated people with in such as
00:22:47 ►
the range that is our criterion I would say the youngest participant was maybe
00:22:55 ►
about mid 40s to mid 60s has been the range we’ve treated and again it’s not
00:22:59 ►
17 to 80 the the the age range is 18 to 70.
00:23:05 ►
Yeah, that’s okay, I mean that’s an arbitrary number.
00:23:08 ►
You know, Charlie was negotiating for many years
00:23:10 ►
with the DEA and the FDA to do this study.
00:23:13 ►
So what actually we’re doing is the result of leeway
00:23:17 ►
from kind of both sides.
00:23:18 ►
I mean, the ideal thing to do would be to do a study
00:23:22 ►
using psychedelics in facilitating accepting a diagnosis of cancer
00:23:30 ►
in any age and anybody to really kind of work through that really terrible process in my
00:23:35 ►
mind, but that’s not what we’re doing.
00:23:39 ►
Yes, you know, several of our patients have had experience with psychedelics.
00:23:44 ►
Some have had no experience.
00:23:46 ►
Some participants had experiences maybe many years ago when they were younger,
00:23:51 ►
and there was one participant who had maybe something not too distant.
00:23:56 ►
But another exclusion criteria is kind of severe addictive disorders too, by the way, I should say.
00:24:02 ►
But, you know, in my treatment as a a psychiatrist I have never treated a psychedelic addiction I’ve treated a lot
00:24:08 ►
of you know addicts who are addicted to a lot of stuff and also use psychedelics
00:24:13 ►
but I have not I have not that has never come into my emergency room or office
00:24:19 ►
question have you designed assuming that the phase one study proves that it’s not
00:24:24 ►
toxic and you can move to phase two have you designed the protocol for phase two
00:24:28 ►
yet well I think the idea is to loosen up the the exclusion criteria or the
00:24:34 ►
exclusion criteria maybe hopefully drop it to any diagnosis of cancer to drop
00:24:39 ►
some of the organ system contraindications I think going after
00:24:43 ►
dropping the kind of brain issues,
00:24:48 ►
we have no good evidence to kind of argue with that one.
00:24:50 ►
So the idea would be to kind of expand that.
00:24:54 ►
I know Charlie’s been talking to a group in NYU who want to duplicate the study.
00:24:59 ►
So if they are going to do that, it would actually be a multi-site study,
00:25:01 ►
which is really, really, you know, cool. You know, one of the limitations of this kind of work really is just
00:25:06 ►
professional
00:25:07 ►
medical, psychological establishments
00:25:11 ►
interest in the use of psychedelics.
00:25:13 ►
I mean, in my experience
00:25:14 ►
working here, I don’t feel like there
00:25:16 ►
is a concentrated effort to prevent
00:25:19 ►
this. I mean, it’s just a
00:25:21 ►
question of, you know, there’s nobody interested
00:25:23 ►
in doing this kind of work.
00:25:25 ►
And that’s why it was so easy for me to participate.
00:25:28 ►
When I met Charlie, he gave us a lecture about psychedelics,
00:25:32 ►
and I said, hey, I want to help out.
00:25:33 ►
And he’s like, wow, that’d be great.
00:25:35 ►
You’re one of the few doctors I’ve ever met who’s interested in this.
00:25:38 ►
So getting word out there is one thing.
00:25:41 ►
The other thing, obviously, is funding,
00:25:42 ►
because most medical research today is sponsored by Big Pharma. These are huge, multinational, corporate giants. You don’t
00:25:50 ►
have a lot of interest in this right now, but they do kind of follow what’s going on.
00:25:54 ►
I mean, we’re talking transformational treatments here, not take this pill every day and see
00:26:00 ►
me once a month. So I think the question, kind of
00:26:05 ►
making it a little bit more basic,
00:26:08 ►
is in my
00:26:10 ►
experience working with these psychedelics,
00:26:12 ►
can I kind of imagine
00:26:13 ►
how a psychedelic process
00:26:16 ►
could facilitate
00:26:17 ►
a physical cure of a cancer?
00:26:20 ►
I can definitely imagine
00:26:22 ►
that. Unfortunately,
00:26:24 ►
the people we are treating are so riddled with this cancer,
00:26:29 ►
I think we’re beyond the point of preventive kind of care.
00:26:34 ►
I would imagine maybe at an earlier stage,
00:26:37 ►
which in some ways might be earlier than what we can detect in the medical profession, sure. But again, I don’t know, I don’t have the ability to discuss that right now.
00:26:50 ►
It just would be a fantasy.
00:26:52 ►
So…
00:26:52 ►
Okay, so this question is, hey, I used the word transformational up there.
00:27:01 ►
Can I kind of talk about the phenomenology of that?
00:27:03 ►
What is that?
00:27:01 ►
the word transformational up there.
00:27:03 ►
Can I talk about the phenomenology of that?
00:27:04 ►
What is that?
00:27:09 ►
That is something I’m really kind of exploring.
00:27:11 ►
The reason I became a psychiatrist and do psychedelic research
00:27:13 ►
is to try to understand what is transformation.
00:27:17 ►
Not everyone in our study
00:27:19 ►
has had a transformational experience.
00:27:21 ►
Some people had kind of more of a big personal review, went over their
00:27:26 ►
life history, family relationships, relationships with others, and self. So it was really more of
00:27:31 ►
kind of, I think in the older literature they used the word psycholytic, okay? Because again,
00:27:38 ►
like I shared with you guys earlier, the dose we’re using isn’t as high as I believe could be safely administered.
00:27:45 ►
Charlie had originally, I believe, applied for 0.4 milligrams per kilogram.
00:27:51 ►
And after going back and forth, it came to 0.2.
00:27:55 ►
But there is like this move among science right now to understand the mystical experience,
00:28:03 ►
which I think is tied into the transformational experience.
00:28:06 ►
And people are looking at all kinds of measures to try to understand that,
00:28:09 ►
since we’re humans and we try to figure this out.
00:28:12 ►
But I think it’s something to be experienced.
00:28:17 ►
The question is, can I talk about the politics of the study?
00:28:20 ►
I’m relatively a new kid on the block here.
00:28:22 ►
I came to Burning Man in 2000. I was a medical student.
00:28:25 ►
You know, now I’m a psychiatrist doing this kind of work.
00:28:27 ►
So from my own personal perspective and my own kind of life, I think it’s incredible.
00:28:32 ►
You know, I can’t believe that I’m here talking to you guys about this right now.
00:28:37 ►
When I hear kind of elders in the community, it’s like there’s been this long, hard battle, hurdles, and things like that.
00:28:42 ►
So I don’t feel I have the perspective right now to make a statement about that,
00:28:47 ►
but I’m very, very optimistic, you know, about it.
00:28:51 ►
I mean, after I spoke yesterday on this really cool panel with some other people in this work, you know,
00:28:55 ►
people are talking to me about, hey, we may need an MD to help us with our treatment up here right now.
00:29:02 ►
We’re expanding.
00:29:03 ►
Stuff like that is really cool.
00:29:10 ►
I mean, I think this thing could explode nuclear or not.
00:29:14 ►
But my real personal goal of going into psychiatry was to really try to help people in their own transformation and growth.
00:29:18 ►
So it’s not super vital to me to have psychedelics as one of my treatments
00:29:23 ►
because I don’t believe they are right for everybody, actually.
00:29:26 ►
I mean, however, it’s an incredible technology that I think has been used for millennia by
00:29:32 ►
humans, maybe when we were transforming from animal to human.
00:29:38 ►
So I say, you know, I think it’s kind of ridiculous to be a scientist and a doctor and not investigate and try to understand
00:29:46 ►
how we can use these tools in a Western culture safely.
00:29:55 ►
Yeah, so this question is, hey, do I know about any studies in Peru about ayahuasca?
00:29:58 ►
I don’t know about any studies in Peru, but, you know, my teacher, Charlie, spent some
00:30:03 ►
time, I believe, in Brazil.
00:30:06 ►
Is that where the UDV is?
00:30:08 ►
So I don’t know this really personally really well,
00:30:10 ►
but they did some work just studying the kind of phenomena of members of this kind of syncretic religion
00:30:18 ►
who use ayahuasca ceremonially for rites of passage and for their kind of religious sacraments. And they found, you know, from a variety of psychological battery,
00:30:28 ►
that the actual, you know, juveniles and adults who were in this church
00:30:32 ►
had much lower rates of criminality and substance abuse and antisocial behavior
00:30:37 ►
than kind of matched controls.
00:30:39 ►
I think this is Brazil.
00:30:40 ►
And that was kind of instrumental in the kind of decriminalization
00:30:45 ►
or the lack of the criminalization of ayahuasca,
00:30:48 ►
if you’re a member of one of these churches that uses it.
00:30:52 ►
It’s kind of analogous to, you know, maybe peyote.
00:30:57 ►
So the question is, hey, how have the anxieties
00:31:02 ►
and the kind of six participants been relieved?
00:31:04 ►
You know, everyone, it’s quite different.
00:31:06 ►
I can speak about maybe one person who I know pretty well,
00:31:10 ►
who I’ve also been seeing weekly since then.
00:31:13 ►
She probably finished the actual protocol, I’m not quite sure, for some time.
00:31:19 ►
But when she came into the study, her big kind of metaphor for herself
00:31:24 ►
was that I have a cage around my heart.
00:31:27 ►
And this is something that kept her from connecting to herself and others.
00:31:30 ►
She had a lot of kind of family trauma that was passed down to her from her mother.
00:31:35 ►
Her mother was a concentration camp survivor, had lost all her relatives.
00:31:41 ►
They were in the Ukraine, but had all been kind of shipped off to the camps.
00:31:46 ►
And though this participant had never had that experience, she was really kind of raised
00:31:50 ►
with this worldview that everyone’s out to get you. It’s quite dangerous. So she had
00:31:54 ►
a lot of trouble connecting with others. Now, that has vastly improved since the psychedelic
00:32:02 ►
experience, where really she expressed a lot of love and grief for her parents,
00:32:06 ►
versus before, I know she had been through traditional psychotherapies,
00:32:10 ►
it had been a lot about talking about how bad her mom and dad were,
00:32:13 ►
and things like that, kind of standard loops we all can get stuck into.
00:32:16 ►
I think we all go through that.
00:32:18 ►
And really, in the last year, just working with her, really just in a traditional kind of psychotherapy,
00:32:24 ►
meeting with her weekly.
00:32:25 ►
It’s just been amazing watching her open up to me
00:32:27 ►
and then relating incidents where she is connecting with coworkers, old friends,
00:32:32 ►
you know, strained family relationships.
00:32:35 ►
So for her, it was a real kind of inner transformation,
00:32:38 ►
but also an interpersonal transformation.
00:32:41 ►
And before, she just wanted to spend a lot of time alone
00:32:44 ►
and felt people were wanted to spend a lot of time alone and
00:32:45 ►
felt people were out to get her and was really stuck in this world of kind of
00:32:48 ►
projecting you know just fear which I think is what yeah instead of hope yeah
00:32:58 ►
I’d have to say probably the one participant again I haven’t looked at
00:33:01 ►
the scales they have this mystical scale I think only one of the participants really
00:33:06 ►
got up there or very close
00:33:08 ►
to it because again I don’t think our dose
00:33:10 ►
was high enough
00:33:11 ►
the question was
00:33:13 ►
what was the kind of mystical experience
00:33:16 ►
I was kind of referring to this before
00:33:18 ►
there are consciousness researchers out there
00:33:20 ►
trying to document and understand the mystical experience
00:33:22 ►
it’s not something I
00:33:23 ►
I’m not really super up on that.
00:33:26 ►
I don’t have a great vocabulary to kind of discuss that, unfortunately.
00:33:30 ►
What did the patients feel like they were in contact with, like, an entity?
00:33:34 ►
Okay, so the question is, yeah, did any of the participants have a feeling of being in contact with an enemy?
00:33:39 ►
I’m sorry, an entity or an enemy or a higher power?
00:33:43 ►
You know, no one phrased it in that words.
00:33:46 ►
But the one person I was talking about really felt quite a kind of connection with her dad and mother particularly.
00:33:53 ►
A lot of empathy for what they were going through.
00:33:55 ►
And an understanding of why their relationship was the way with each other and with the kids.
00:34:03 ►
But no, there wasn’t anything like that so far.
00:34:05 ►
But I know that, I believe,
00:34:07 ►
a phenomenon like that was described
00:34:09 ►
in the study at Hopkins,
00:34:10 ►
which was at a higher dose.
00:34:17 ►
So the question is, hey,
00:34:19 ►
what about the dark side?
00:34:20 ►
And he mentioned, I guess, going to dark places
00:34:23 ►
and also stomach problems.
00:34:24 ►
And the second part was, hey hey what about putting them in a group
00:34:26 ►
we don’t have any approval to do group
00:34:28 ►
treatment this is an individual treatment we’re
00:34:30 ►
investigating right now
00:34:31 ►
in terms of the dark side I mean I think that’s like
00:34:34 ►
maybe
00:34:35 ►
kind of limited way of kind of understanding
00:34:38 ►
the psychedelic space
00:34:39 ►
people have had
00:34:41 ►
I wouldn’t call it joyful
00:34:43 ►
experiences but they’ve been very very needed places to go people have had, I wouldn’t call it joyful experiences,
00:34:45 ►
but they’ve been very, very needed places to go.
00:34:52 ►
And, you know, we’re there providing a lot of support.
00:34:54 ►
There’s three of us.
00:34:56 ►
So, for example, the participant who I was talking about
00:34:59 ►
had a major, major catharsis,
00:35:02 ►
and our research coordinator, Mary C.,
00:35:04 ►
went there and hugged her and held her
00:35:05 ►
when she cried maybe for 45 50 minutes and this is a woman who also said hey i never cry i don’t
00:35:12 ►
know how to cry i don’t know how to get to my emotions i can’t let it out i don’t know who i am
00:35:17 ►
i don’t feel love but uh she felt it there and we felt it there too. Another thing I guess I could say,
00:35:25 ►
I’m just kind of freelancing on this right now,
00:35:27 ►
in some essence it is a group experience
00:35:29 ►
because there’s four of us there.
00:35:32 ►
The only one person has an altered level of consciousness
00:35:35 ►
that is induced by a psychoactive substance.
00:35:41 ►
How do you see that relationship?
00:35:44 ►
Oh, so did everyone hear that question? He’s basically asking how do you see that relationship? oh so did everyone hear that question
00:35:45 ►
he’s basically asking how do I see myself
00:35:47 ►
in this game of life right now
00:35:50 ►
administering a kind of
00:35:52 ►
a medicine that has been traditionally a shamanic
00:35:54 ►
comes from a shamanic tradition
00:35:55 ►
in a kind of a western medical model
00:35:58 ►
right now
00:35:59 ►
that’s a great question
00:36:00 ►
that’s something
00:36:01 ►
that came together for me by participating in this study.
00:36:09 ►
I think ultimately probably the true wisdom about these plants comes from shamanic tradition.
00:36:17 ►
However, in today’s Western society, people will often come to a psychiatrist
00:36:23 ►
to address the issues that in a different
00:36:28 ►
tribal kind of society they would seek out the shaman.
00:36:33 ►
I don’t know what else I can say.
00:36:34 ►
I’d like to plug our camp right now.
00:36:36 ►
We’re at 830 and Eager.
00:36:38 ►
It’s the Daisy Diner.
00:36:40 ►
So I’m happy to discuss things like that over there over a cup of coffee.
00:36:44 ►
That’s something I can give a quick response to a microphone to.
00:36:47 ►
But that’s a very, very important question that you asked me that I’m exploring.
00:36:52 ►
I appreciate that.
00:36:56 ►
Yeah, so the question is, hey, I think it’s kind of odd that you’re tying dosage to body weight with psychedelics.
00:37:02 ►
So I think that’s part of the kind of medical kind of tradition
00:37:05 ►
of looking at an experimental medicine.
00:37:08 ►
Some medications are effective in terms of milligrams per kilogram.
00:37:12 ►
Some medications just require a certain effective dose.
00:37:15 ►
Now, I probably suspect that psilocybin just requires a certain effective dose,
00:37:20 ►
and it does not need to be dosed milligrams per kilogram.
00:37:24 ►
But I think that’s part of just being a phase one
00:37:25 ►
study and that’s kind of I think
00:37:27 ►
what Charlie went for
00:37:29 ►
looking as a kind of a safety study
00:37:31 ►
but I do agree with you
00:37:32 ►
I don’t know of any information that I’ve ever read
00:37:36 ►
or no one’s ever spoken to me saying
00:37:37 ►
hey we have to give this by body weight
00:37:40 ►
yeah
00:37:41 ►
so the question is we have a very limited number of sessions with the
00:37:47 ►
participant well I guess we’re doing a placebo control study of actually when
00:37:58 ►
when we administer the the treatment medicine so since it would be kind of really cruel and unfair
00:38:06 ►
to do one group of treatment participants
00:38:09 ►
who are really going way out of their way,
00:38:12 ►
I mean, people agree to go off their pain medications,
00:38:14 ►
they agree to go off their antidepressants and muscle relaxers
00:38:17 ►
if they’re on them for this.
00:38:19 ►
They’re spending a night in a hospital
00:38:20 ►
when they’re often quite medically frail.
00:38:23 ►
It wouldn’t be fair or ethical to do a group like that.
00:38:26 ►
So because of that, every single participant serves as their own placebo control,
00:38:31 ►
meaning that everyone comes in for a treatment session and a placebo session.
00:38:35 ►
And again, I feel it would be beneficial for the participants to do more sessions
00:38:42 ►
than just one active session and better just to understand
00:38:46 ►
how we can integrate this kind of treatment into our Western culture right now.
00:38:52 ►
But I think part of that has to do with regulations and this is kind of like this huge baby step,
00:39:00 ►
I think, this study along with some other studies that are going on. The amount of sessions that you did with free related to health science?
00:39:09 ►
That’s actually, you know, when you do a research study, you apply,
00:39:12 ►
and you have to kind of say what you’re doing and things like that.
00:39:15 ►
I do believe Charlie has the intention to say, hey, can we do booster sessions,
00:39:19 ►
which wouldn’t be a placebo.
00:39:20 ►
We’d say, hey, now that we know that it’s safe, it’s safe with these participants,
00:39:24 ►
there’s no major adverse effect that’s happened. placebo and say, hey, now that we know that it’s safe, it’s safe with these participants,
00:39:32 ►
there’s no major adverse effect that’s happened, why don’t we take the opportunity to give some more benefit to the people who say it helped them?
00:39:38 ►
Okay, last question.
00:39:43 ►
So the question is, hey, are we like, what are we doing in the room during this session?
00:39:47 ►
Are we focusing our energy and intention on this experience,
00:39:53 ►
or are we sitting there reading a book?
00:39:55 ►
So we get grounded at first, do a little kind of call on the spirits.
00:40:00 ►
I tend to kind of do my own personal meditation, get very grounded.
00:40:04 ►
I tend to kind of do my own personal meditation, get very grounded. I visualize filling up my heart with enough love so then it will explode and I can cover myself and I can share that with the other person.
00:40:13 ►
So I imagine that’s just some kind of fantasy.
00:40:16 ►
This work has been transformational for me as well.
00:40:19 ►
But again, I mean, we have an incredible, incredible team. First, Charlie, you know, who’s my teacher and mentor and just an incredible, incredible doctor.
00:40:30 ►
And Mary C., who’s Lorenzo’s wife, who’s just a beautiful, incredible person.
00:40:36 ►
And then I was brought on board, and these guys were my teachers.
00:40:42 ►
And I agree with Preet that Charlie and Mary C. are two of the most incredible teachers around.
00:40:49 ►
And I suspect that the participants in the study will agree that the entire team of people,
00:40:54 ►
including the hospital staff, are some of the best health care providers that we have in this state.
00:41:00 ►
And let’s not forget the participants in this important research study.
00:41:04 ►
And let’s not forget the participants in this important research study.
00:41:11 ►
As Preet just said, these brave souls have volunteered a large chunk of their very precious time to further our scientific understanding of these powerful medicines.
00:41:16 ►
It isn’t a simple or easy thing for them to take part in this study,
00:41:20 ►
and we all owe them a huge debt of gratitude, I believe.
00:41:24 ►
By the way, when Preet was
00:41:26 ►
talking about how Mary C. decorated the hospital room, I remembered that I have a couple of
00:41:32 ►
pictures of that room, and so I’ll post them along with the program notes for this podcast, which
00:41:37 ►
you can find most directly by typing psychedelicsalon.org into your browser. Or you can also get there from buttons on our main matrixmasters.com
00:41:49 ►
and matrixmasters.com slash podcast pages.
00:41:53 ►
The pictures don’t really do the scene justice
00:41:56 ►
because it was impossible to stand back far enough to get a good photo.
00:42:01 ►
And at the time the pictures were taken,
00:42:03 ►
the flowers and other decorations they
00:42:06 ►
used for the sessions weren’t yet in place. But at least you can get an idea of what lengths the
00:42:11 ►
team goes to to make the experience as non-hospital-like as possible. I had planned on doing a
00:42:18 ►
short phone interview with Preet this morning to get an update on their progress since last summer,
00:42:24 ►
but I ran into a slight
00:42:25 ►
technological glitch and wasn’t able to record our conversation. Preet did tell me, however, that this
00:42:32 ►
weekend they will be working with the 10th participant in the study and that the next-to-last
00:42:37 ►
participant is now in the evaluation stage. What this means is that by summer they hope to turn over the results to a statistician
00:42:46 ►
in preparation for the final report of the study, which in turn they hope will lead to
00:42:52 ►
further approvals by the FDA to expand this important research. And as Preet explained,
00:42:59 ►
a phase one study is primarily intended to prove to the government that even very medically vulnerable
00:43:05 ►
patients will not be harmed by ingesting a normal dose of psilocybin. And as you would expect,
00:43:13 ►
so far they’ve had no adverse events take place with any of the participants.
00:43:18 ►
Of course, the many shamans who come from the tradition of using these medicines for thousands of years could have also told us that.
00:43:26 ►
But we Westerners only seem to learn things the hard way.
00:43:31 ►
At least that’s the case with me.
00:43:33 ►
Moving on, here’s an interesting email I received the other day
00:43:38 ►
from Jay from the Motor City,
00:43:41 ►
which I believe is Detroit for any of our listeners who aren’t up on American
00:43:46 ►
slang.
00:43:47 ►
Anyway, Jay writes, among other things, that back in 1997, he and two friends did a large
00:43:54 ►
dose of LSD, and here’s what took place.
00:43:58 ►
He said, during peak time, my two friends, a man and a woman, were getting a bit paranoid and requested to go sit
00:44:06 ►
in the car to listen to music. This was way less than ideal to me, but I agreed, and on our hike
00:44:13 ►
back, I noticed they weren’t next to me and looked and found them on their hands and knees combing
00:44:19 ►
the tall grass. I asked what they were doing and learned that my friend’s girl lost her ring
00:44:24 ►
somewhere along the way.
00:44:26 ►
It was dark and there was a full moon right above to give some light, but not enough.
00:44:30 ►
I just stood there looking at them with a negative outlook on my personal experience and how they were really bumming me out.
00:44:39 ►
We’ve all been there, Jay.
00:44:41 ►
We’ve all been there, Jay.
00:44:47 ►
All of a sudden, I remember getting messages as if I were a radio tuner that I was selfish and this is not a part of me that I want to keep around.
00:44:50 ►
I sort of came back to the scenario feeling a deep sense of empathy for my friends
00:44:55 ►
who obviously cared about this cheap, though sentimental ring.
00:45:00 ►
And this is where something amazing happens.
00:45:02 ►
I go back into this trance radio tun tutor mode and begin to walk in a straight line until I stop.
00:45:10 ►
I put my hand down to the ground with fingers extended and the ring goes right on my finger,
00:45:17 ►
right on the ring finger of my left hand.
00:45:19 ►
I will never forget this experience.
00:45:22 ►
As Terrence said in his last days, it’s all about love. I came to the
00:45:26 ►
same realization that day. I’ve not taken LSD since then, but maybe someday. Well, Jay, that’s the
00:45:34 ►
kind of story I just love to hear, and as for that radio tuner mode you were in, I’ve experienced
00:45:40 ►
similar things myself, and for years I thought that I’d made up that radio receiver concept on my own,
00:45:47 ►
and then I heard Terrence McKenna mention the same thing and say that Aldous Huxley also played around with that theory.
00:45:55 ►
So if there are any other psychonauts out there who have had a radio receiver experience, I’d sure like to know about it.
00:46:02 ►
Who knows, maybe one day we’ll even see a formal study along those lines.
00:46:08 ►
Another interesting email came from James, who said, among quite a few other things,
00:46:14 ►
he said, for the interview with Siebert, I mostly just wish to express my own experiences with the sage.
00:46:22 ►
Salvia is the most threatening thing I have experienced,
00:46:25 ►
though this is likely due to my using it in an extracted, smoked form
00:46:30 ►
and not in the traditional manner.
00:46:33 ►
I’ve met many people who are quite the losers
00:46:35 ►
and see SD as something to get a kick out of while drunk, however,
00:46:39 ►
believe it or not.
00:46:40 ►
I can’t really understand such people, but they exist,
00:46:44 ►
and threaten the ability of more
00:46:46 ►
responsible individuals like myself to use such a valuable teacher. He goes on to say,
00:46:53 ►
for the interviews with Myron Stolaroff, I wanted to chime in with my own experience of
00:46:58 ►
the parade of humanity, or whatever it was called. I’ve had similar experiences to Myron’s
00:47:05 ►
concerning seeing a universal quality in images of Christ.
00:47:09 ►
It has also occurred looking at people I love
00:47:11 ►
or myself in a mirror.
00:47:13 ►
I found it interesting to connect this experience
00:47:15 ►
with the idea of seeing those you love
00:47:18 ►
during near-death experiences.
00:47:20 ►
If death really is a final DMT trip
00:47:23 ►
and the borders of space and time are broken,
00:47:26 ►
then heaven truly does contain all of those loved ones you lost.
00:47:30 ►
They’re not quite in the way the popular mind considers it.
00:47:34 ►
And James also had some comments about the person who wrote and asked about
00:47:38 ►
which substances lend themselves to a good experience for someone’s first time using a psychedelic.
00:47:45 ►
And here’s what he had to say.
00:47:47 ►
However, I was surprised you did not mention mushrooms or perhaps some research chemicals.
00:47:53 ►
But mushrooms seem to be a good option as they can be found easily enough
00:47:57 ►
and tend to give a good first experience.
00:47:59 ►
Or at least they did for me.
00:48:01 ►
Low dose produced some quite profound thoughts I still carry with me.
00:48:05 ►
And research chemicals are at least legal and would appeal to a first-timer concerned about
00:48:10 ►
exact dosages and times. I realize there are risks with those as well, but sometimes it seems more
00:48:17 ►
appealing than risking a pill full of meth and caffeine posing as ecstasy. Anyway, I hope all’s
00:48:24 ►
well with you and my thoughts are appreciated.
00:48:26 ►
Thanks for the program once again.
00:48:28 ►
Now I must return to writing my final papers.
00:48:31 ►
Namaste, James.
00:48:34 ►
Thanks for your thoughts on that, James,
00:48:36 ►
and I think your suggestions are also worth considering.
00:48:39 ►
In fact, I received a number of other suggestions
00:48:41 ►
for someone who is considering using psychedelics
00:48:44 ►
for the first time, and the range of suggestions is all over the place, which means, I guess, that
00:48:51 ►
options for somebody’s first psychedelic experience are as wide and varied as someone’s options for
00:48:58 ►
their first sexual experience. And while it’s kind of a gray area for me to be encouraging the use of any illegal psychoactive plants and chemicals,
00:49:07 ►
I think it’s still safe for me to repeat Terence McKenna’s famous thought about the subject
00:49:12 ►
when he said that he believed it was as big a tragedy for a human to go to his or her grave
00:49:18 ►
without having had a psychedelic experience
00:49:20 ►
as it would be for that person to go to their grave without ever having had
00:49:25 ►
an orgasm.
00:49:26 ►
Now that should certainly give you something to think about.
00:49:30 ►
Something I think about every day is how absolutely incredible it is that just out of the blue
00:49:36 ►
some of you have made donations to help offset the expenses of producing the psychedelic
00:49:41 ►
salon each week.
00:49:43 ►
Just in the past week we’ve received donations from Greta and from Samuel,
00:49:48 ►
both of whom live outside the U.S., and from William here in the States.
00:49:53 ►
I haven’t had a chance to thank you personally by email yet,
00:49:56 ►
but I plan on doing so as soon as this podcast is online.
00:50:00 ►
So, for now, thank you all so very much.
00:50:03 ►
It’s really kind of you to help out in this way.
00:50:06 ►
And thanks to all of our donors so far this year.
00:50:09 ►
Not only have we covered our anticipated 2007 hosting and bandwidth,
00:50:14 ►
on top of that, I’ve now started building a little equipment fund
00:50:18 ►
so that I can eventually get a new iMac computer.
00:50:22 ►
From all of the recommendations I’ve been getting,
00:50:25 ►
that’s the best platform I can find right now for
00:50:27 ►
producing these podcasts.
00:50:29 ►
At least if I want to add some new features
00:50:31 ►
that are difficult to implement without
00:50:34 ►
GarageBand. And what
00:50:36 ►
that will also do is allow me
00:50:38 ►
to turn my old laptop into a
00:50:40 ►
BitTorrent machine and
00:50:41 ►
put all of these podcasts into
00:50:43 ►
torrent format also, which should be a big
00:50:46 ►
help to anyone who only has a dial-up connection to the net. I guess that was just a long-winded
00:50:52 ►
way of saying, hey, thank you very much to everybody who’s made a donation to the Psychedelic
00:50:57 ►
Salon. And even if that donation is simply in the form of telling a friend about these podcasts or
00:51:03 ►
helping somebody figure out how to subscribe to the salon
00:51:07 ►
through iTunes or one of the other aggregators.
00:51:10 ►
All of that helps us.
00:51:11 ►
It all helps us expand this worldwide community of people
00:51:14 ►
who are interested in the evolution of consciousness.
00:51:18 ►
And, of course, we also like to have fun and tell good stories, too.
00:51:23 ►
And speaking of good storytellers,
00:51:25 ►
the other principal investigator on the psilocybin study that Preet just talked about
00:51:30 ►
is Dr. Charles Grobe, or Charlie as he prefers to be called.
00:51:36 ►
And in Podcast 39, the MindStates 2005 SoundBite program,
00:51:42 ►
you can hear part of Charlie’s presentation about this same study,
00:51:45 ►
along with some additional soundbites from Dr. Julie Holland, Ann and Sasha Shulgin, and Alex
00:51:50 ►
Gray. And that program also includes a talk that I gave at Kathleen’s Salon in Venice Beach the
00:51:56 ►
same year. If his schedule permits, Charlie is going to stop by here sometime in the next couple
00:52:02 ►
of weeks and answer some of your questions about ayahuasca.
00:52:06 ►
As you know, Charlie, along with Jace Calloway and Dennis McKenna,
00:52:11 ►
conducted what remains the most extensive in-depth study so far conducted of the psychological effects of ayahuasca on humans.
00:52:20 ►
And I plan on podcasting that interview on my first program after he stops by.
00:52:26 ►
And speaking of interesting characters,
00:52:28 ►
I did get in another interview with Matt Palomary just before I left to go visit the Stolaroffs.
00:52:33 ►
And in that interview, all we talked about was ayahuasca.
00:52:37 ►
So unless some gremlins ate that recording,
00:52:40 ►
next week you’ll be able to join Mateo and me for that conversation.
00:52:44 ►
next week you’ll be able to join Mateo and me for that conversation before I go I should mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
00:52:50 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareLike 2.5 license
00:52:55 ►
if you have any questions about that you can click on the link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage
00:53:00 ►
which may be found at matrixmasters.com slash podcast.
00:53:06 ►
And if you have any questions about that, just send them to me in an email.
00:53:10 ►
The address is lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.
00:53:14 ►
Thanks again to Shatul Hayuk for the use of your music here in the salon, and to Dr. Preet
00:53:20 ►
Chopra for giving a Planque Norte lecture at Burning Man this year and sharing some of the information about the study he’s working on.
00:53:28 ►
And thanks again to you for being here.
00:53:30 ►
I really appreciate you being with us in the salon each week.
00:53:34 ►
Now, right after I sign off, I’m going to leave you with a little musical treat from our fellow saloners,
00:53:41 ►
Chiba and his brother, Aja West, and the rest of the group known as the Chiba Cabra.
00:53:47 ►
I’ve been listening to their music the past couple of mornings on my walks,
00:53:51 ►
and I’ve really been enjoying it.
00:53:53 ►
So, with their permission, I’m going to play a cut from their latest CD,
00:53:57 ►
which is titled Exile in the Woods,
00:54:00 ►
and this track’s called Chatter.
00:54:02 ►
I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.
00:54:05 ►
And until next time, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:54:10 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.